Meaningful Absence Across Arts and Media: The Significance of Missing Signifiers 900439172X, 9789004391727

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Meaningful Absence Across Arts and Media

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004394520_001

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Studies in Intermediality Series Editor Walter Bernhart (Graz) Editorial Board Lawrence Kramer (New York) Hans Lund (Lund) Ansgar Nünning (Gießen) Werner Wolf (Graz)

VOLUME 11

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/siim





Meaningful Absence Across Arts and Media The Significance of Missing Signifiers Edited by

Werner Wolf Nassim Balestrini Walter Bernhart

LEIDEN | BOSTON

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Cover illustration: idea: Werner Wolf, realization: Pieter Kers The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1871-8787 isbn 978-90-04-39172-7 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-39452-0 (e-book) Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Contents

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Contents

Preface vii

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Introduction: Meaningful Absence across Media. The Potential Significance of Missing Signifiers 1 Werner Wolf

2 Absent Signifiers in Contemporary American Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction 32 Nassim Winnie Balestrini 3 A Sentence is a Half-Formed Thing: Observations on Iconic and Indexical (Morpho)Syntactic Blanks Inspired by Eimear McBride’s Debut Novel 59 Olga Fischer 4 On the Impact of Voids: Musical Silence and Visual Absence in Film 87 Saskia Jaszoltowski 5 Significant Absence in Narrative Fiction Film 101 Klaus Rieser 6 Gaps as Significant Absences: The Case of Serial Comics 126 Daniel Stein 7 Dramaturgy of Silence: Absence as a Means of Structural Tension in Joseph Haydn’s String Quartets 156 Peter Revers 8 Absence of Words and Absence of Music in Opera 173 Walter Bernhart 9 “Où est l’art? perdu, disparu!”: Meaningful Absence in 19th- to 21st-Century Painting 193 Henry Keazor

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10 Silent Spaces: Absent Signifiers in Modernist Architecture 217 Anselm Wagner

List of Figures 245 Notes on Contributors 247



Index 251

PrefacePreface

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Preface In the study of literature and other media we are used to focusing on what is presented by the works under scrutiny – i.e., on visual and/or acoustic presence. However, since meaning is generally based on difference, it is worthwhile investigating to what extent the opposite of presence, namely absence, can also contribute to meaning and thus become an important focus of interpretation. In a similar way in which one may insert a meaningful pause into one‘s oral discourse, music may suddenly stop in general rests, paintings may confront us with a seemingly empty (or monochrome) canvas, literary texts may sport textual lacunae, and dramatic characters may freeze in a tableau or may suddenly stop talking in a meaningful (indexical or iconic) way, as in the catalectic verse taken from Macbeth’s well-known soliloquy in the fifth act of Shakespeare’s last great tragedy: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / [...] / Signifying nothing.” The aim of the present volume is to concentrate on the manifold forms and (historical) functions of such absences predominantly on the level (or in chains) of signifiers rather than on absences on the level of the signified. In other words, in representational media, the main focus is here placed on absences, silences, lacunae etc. in the representation itself rather than on what is represented (although the latter aspect is also dealt with in some contributions). The scope of the media under scrutiny includes language (investigated from a linguistic as well as a literary perspective), film, comics, opera and instrumental music, architecture and the visual arts and is thus considerably broader than the arts investigated in a parallel volume published in the book series Word and Music Studies (WMS), Silence and Absence in Literature and Music, 2016, in relation to which the present volume may be considered both a complement and an extension. Meaningful absence is here discussed from the following double perspective: from a systematic, media-comparative point of view, as well as from a historical perspective. In both respects the volume, the eleventh in the book series Studies in Intermediality (SIM), continues the focus on ‘transmediality’ (media comparison), which has informed several volumes published in the past and which has at the same time been a hallmark of the kind of intermediality research carried on in Graz, in particular at the Centre for Intermediality Studies (CIMIG). Except for the essay on art, all of the essays presented here are revised versions of contributions to a cycle of lectures held at the University of Graz in the winter term 2015/2016 under the auspices of CIMIG.

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As with former volumes in the series, the editors are well aware of the fact that the publication of an interdisciplinary volume such as the present book would not have been possible without the cooperation of the expertise of scholars from various fields. The editors would therefore like to express their gratitude to the participants of the aforementioned cycle of lectures as well as to the additional contributor of the present volume for their efforts, and in some cases remarkable patience, during the editing process. In addition, we would like to thank all members of staff involved, including Jutta KlobasekLadler, Silke Jandl, Juliann Knaus, and Michaela Lang for their much appreciated help in the editing process. I am also profoundly thankful to my co-editors, CIMIG director Nassim Balestrini and Walter Bernhart, who helped me to realise my original ideas on a transmedial project dedicated to absence and to give them substance in the present volume by their invaluable support in matters of organization and editorial issues as well as of scholarly content. Werner Wolf

Graz, autumn 2018



Reference

Werner Wolf, Walter Bernhart, eds. (2016). Silence and Absence in Literature and Music. Word and Music Studies 15. Leiden/Boston, MA: Brill/Rodopi.

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Introduction

Chapter 1

Introduction: Meaningful Absence across Media. The Potential Significance of Missing Signifiers1  Werner Wolf schweigen schweigen schweigen schweigen schweigen schweigen schweigen     schweigen schweigen schweigen schweigen schweigen schweigen schweigen Eugen Gomringer

⸪ This introduction clarifies the dominant focus of the present volume: among the manifold possible forms of absence across (artistic) media, most of the contributions concentrate on non-accidental, avoidable, intentional, relatively unconventional and thus potentially significant missing signifiers in medial works and works of art (or on their immediate ‘outside’ or ‘margins’) rather than on missing signifieds. The essay also discusses preconditions for eliciting an awareness of such potentially meaningful absences, including absence markers and what are termed ‘significance triggers’. In addition, some general forms of meaningful absence in missing medial signifiers are outlined (marked vs. unmarked, supplemented vs. non-supplemented, peripheral or framing vs. internal absences), before media specificities in terms of absences are discussed (symbolic, indexical and iconic; moreover visual, aural and kinetic). In conclusion, some perspectives for further research in the field are adumbrated.

1 As so frequently, my thanks are once again due to Jutta Klobasek-Ladler and Cecilia Servatius for their invaluable help with the manuscript.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004394520_002

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Preliminary Remarks and Questions

‘Absence’ as the leading concept of a scholarly volume (and of a series of university lectures, on which the present publication is based) – what a strange subject! Indeed, at first glance the relevance of this topic may appear to be questionable: after all, are we humans not cognitively hard-wired to perceive what is there, what sticks out as a ‘figure’ from a ‘ground’ rather than to perceive, let alone discuss what is not there? However, there are numerous phrases such as ‘conspicuous absence’ or, in German, beredtes Schweigen (‘tell-tale silence’) which indicate that, under certain circumstances, we not only become aware of absence but even give it meaning. This raises numerous preliminary questions, which should be answered by way of an introduction to the present volume. A lecture course audience, for instance, may not become aware of the fact that the lecturer’s dog is not present in the lecture hall (if the audience does not know that the lecturer sometimes brings his dog along). On the other hand, the audience may notice it when the lecturer (e.g., for the sake of illustrating mechanisms of absence perception) stops talking for a prolonged period of time. As one can see in these examples, there seems to be perceptible and nonperceptible absence, and hence the first question arises: under what conditions do we actually become aware of absence? The absence of the dog may have purely practical reasons, which have nothing to do with the lecture as such; so its absence is non-significant. On the other hand, if on a given date one has agreed to come to a party of a friend with whom one subsequently had an argument, not appearing at that party may take on significance: it may be indicative of a feeling of alienation from the friend, of being cross, etc. So there appears to be non-significant and significant absence – but under what circumstances can significance arise? Absence raises even further questions. Arguably, presence appears to come in infinite forms, while there seems to be only one kind of absence with only one form. However, this would be a reductive perspective. There are many kinds of absences, but not all of them are relevant to what is under discussion in this volume. Moreover, absences can relate to various kinds of perception (visual, aural, tactile, and so on), they can happen spontaneously or be intentionally calculated, they can be short or long, and can have negligible or momentous effects and functions. All of this leads to the following questions: what kind of absence is in focus in the present volume as opposed to other kinds? how and by what means do the kinds of absence discussed here come into being? and finally: what are their possible forms and functions? Enough questions – it is time to start with answers.

Introduction

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Kinds of Absence (I), According to Fields of Occurrence, and the Dominant Focus of the Present Volume: Non-Accidental, Avoidable, Intentional, Relatively Unconventional and Hence Potentially Meaningful Missing Signifiers in (or around) Medial Works

First, the predominant focus of the present volume should be clarified, or more precisely, the kind of absence under discussion. As adumbrated above, there are many kinds of absences in numerous fields of occurrence. Everyday experience is one of them. In our lives we may experience the loss of a wallet or of a loved one, we may feel the absence of pain after illness with relief or enjoy the silence of forests after the noise of big cities. Or we may think of technology and information management. In this latter field, contemporary life is shaped by the interplay of absence and presence to a hitherto unknown degree through the digital revolution, which technically stems from the electronic exploitation of precisely this basic binary opposition in ‘bits’ (binary digits). In addition, over the past century, there has been a fascination with silence and absence in a specific cultural discourse, namely philosophy: from Wittgenstein2 to Derrida, absence looms large in recent thought. With regard to Derrida, one may, for instance, point out his critique of the “history of metaphysics”, in which “Being” has been – allegedly in an erroneous way – always been equated with “presence in all senses of this word” (1966/1978/1990: 279), an observation which has prompted Derrida and fellow deconstructivists to emphasize the “absence of a centre” and moreover the absence “of a subject and […] of an author” (ibid.: 287), in short, the absence of stable meaning both in individual texts and culture at large. Moreover, from the perspective of critical cultural theory in particular, absence can assume the quality of ‘silencing’ – meaning the repression of unwanted aspects of discourse, forms of existence, cultural practices or attitudes, but it can also become a strategy of covert resistance (see Herdina 1996, and Dhawan online). Finally, absence of sound can be regarded as a cultural practice with manifold functions, ranging from silence in meditation and prayer to day-dreaming, as recently investigated from the perspective of the history of mentalities by Alain Corbin (see 2016). All of these examples are only samples of a much broader field in which absences may occur. Nevertheless, while some of the facets of absence mentioned 2 See his attempted silencing of metaphysical speculation in his well-known dictum from the preface to his Tractatus logico-philosophicus: “[…] wovon man nicht reden kann, darüber muß man schweigen” (Wittgenstein 1921/1984: 9; ‘whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent’).

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will play a role in the following, the reader will have intuited that most of what has been enumerated so far will probably not form the centre of the present volume. As its title indicates, it is only meaningful absence occurring in the field of media (including – one should add – language and the arts) which is in focus. The focus on media will hardly come as a surprise, since the present volume is part of the book series Studies in Intermediality. Yet this particular emphasis requires two further clarifications: the first concerns the meaning of the term ‘medium’ applied here, and the second refers to the relevance of ‘intermediality’ in this context. The concept of medium is a notoriously fuzzy notion. Following MarieLaure Ryan’s lucid discussion, in which she includes technical, semiotic, and cultural aspects as constitutive of the term ‘medium’ when it is used in contexts such as the present study (cf. 2005: 288–290), I conceive of a medium as follows (cf. also Wolf 2009: 13f.): it is a means of communication that is conventionally perceived as distinct (cf. Rajewsky 2010: 61) and is used as such in cultural practice; it is thus specified by cultural conventions but also by particular technical or institutional channels (or one channel) and the use of one or more semiotic systems in the public transmission of content that includes, but is not restricted to, referential ‘messages’. Generally, media “make […] a difference as to what kind of […] content can be evoked […], how these contents are presented […], and how they are experienced […]” (Ryan 2005: 290). ‘Medium’ in this sense includes the traditional arts (and extends to literature as verbal art) as well as more recent means of representation or communication such as photography, film, and digital media. As for intermediality, I use the term in the following broad sense (cf. Wolf 2005a: 252): it applies to any transgression of boundaries between conventionally distinct media of communication, transgressions that occur in medial reality or in interpretive approaches; intermediality is thus concerned with ‘heteromedial’ relations between different semiotic complexes or between different parts of one semiotic complex. There are a variety of typological subforms of intermediality. The one which concerns us most in this volume is what I term, following Rajewsky (cf. 2002: 13), transmediality, that is, phenomena that appear in more than one medium, yet are non-specific to individual media or which are considered without paying attention to a possible origin in one specific medium. Although Rajewsky considers transmediality to be distinct from intermediality (cf. 2002: 12f.), I regard it as belonging to the field of intermediality since it encompasses phenom­ ena that emerge from an intermedial perspective or approach. Transmediality constitutes relations of similarity, but also of differences between media and, in essence, forms the basis of intermedial comparisons. Clearly, absence

Introduction

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belongs to this form, considering that the title of the present volume promises a study of absence “across arts and media”. Being a transmedial phenomenon, absence covers a vast area, described by several disciplines in their respective ways, and it is thus one of those phenomena that encourage an interdisciplinary approach. Interdisciplinarity also underlies the structure of the present volume, which assembles perspectives from linguistics, literary, cultural, and film studies, as well as from comics (or graphic novel) studies, art history, including the history of architecture, and musicology.3 In the face of this vast area, further restrictions of our object of discussion are requisite. From a semiotic perspective, which alongside a cognitive perspective is particularly apt for research on media of communication including the arts, absences can occur in both basic dimensions of signs: on the level of the signifieds and on the level of the signifiers. In literature, an example of the former variant would be the lacuna which most detective fiction in the tradition of E.A. Poe, Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie sport until the very end of the text, namely the missing identification of the murderer – a structural generic feature which even gave the genre one of its names, namely ‘whodunit’. This form of absence as a semantic gap corresponds to what Wolfgang Iser termed “Leerstelle” (1970/1975: 235),4 but it is not what is principally in focus here. Neither are “disnarrated elements” (Prince 1996: 98) in narratives, that is, unrealized alternative developments of a storyline which nevertheless have been taken into consideration in the story (e.g., in a character’s deliberations before coming to a decision) and thus are marked; nor will unmarked “shadow stories” be dealt with, i.e., possibilities of plot developments which “occur solely in the consciousness of the reader” (Abbott 2015: 105) – for all of these forms concern the signifieds. Rather, most contributors concentrate on missing signifiers (although occasionally, as in the contributions by Rieser and Stein, absences on the level of signifieds will be dealt with as well). It is in fact this combination of a transmedial perspective with a focus on missing signifiers which gives the present volume its innovative profile. Missing signifiers can again be of different kinds, as the following examples will show. The first page of the only remaining manuscript of Beowulf (see Figure 1.1) shows two gaps in the hand-written verbal signifiers: in the third line, the letter ‘n’ is missing on the right margin (it should read “ellen”, that is, courage, rather

3 See also Grabher/Jessner, eds. 1996, and Jaworski, ed. 1997. 4 An ‘empty space’ or ‘blank’ in the semantic cohesion of a text (the concept, which originally was coined for narratives only, has, however, a wider relevance).

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Figure 1.1 Beowulf (c. 1000): first page of the only remaining manuscript From: Fletcher 2003: 17

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Introduction

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than “elle”),5 and in the following line, in the phrase “sceaþena þreatum” (“enemy hosts”) the letters “na” at the end of “sceaþena” are absent. We know that these missing letters are a consequence of an accident which luckily did not destroy the entirety of this priceless manuscript, “when the library of its owner, Sir Robert Cotton, caught fire at Ashburnam” in 1731 (Fletcher 2003: 16). At best, these lacunae are indicative of old age and of an accident, but as unintentional gaps they are not otherwise significant for our understanding of Beowulf. Such gaps are a challenge for editors but do not concern the contributors to the present volume: absence in this example is accidental, therefore hardly significant and thus outside our focus, which is on the significance of non-accidental absences. If we disregard accidental absences, it follows that the unavoidable areas of uncertainty left in all media, phenomena which Roman Ingarden termed “Unbestimmtheitsstellen” (1931/1965: 261–265), will not be in focus either. These ‘areas of indeterminacy’ exist in all media and can best be illustrated by referring to the number of pixels in digital photography: if you ‘blow up’ a digital photograph over and above a certain degree, it will visibly become pixelated and show that technically reproduced pictorial information has limitations and therefore can produce uncertainties (a phenomenon on which, in the predigital age, Michelangelo Antonioni based a whole film: Blow Up [U.S.A., 1966]). Again, since these gaps in media are inevitable as a consequence of the accidental (technical) conditions of individual media and therefore non-significant, they will not be of concern to the present volume, which only deals with avoidable absences. Yet even these come in different kinds. For instance, in spoken discourse, pauses can involuntarily occur when a speaker is in the grip of an overwhelming emotion. Such pauses may be avoidable but are unintentional and may be significant (for the interlocutors they can serve an indexical emotive function). As significant absence in chains of, in this case, verbal signifiers, such pauses may therefore fall into the ambit of the present volume. Examples will be found in particular in the linguistic section (see also Mair 1996; Kurzon 1998; Ephratt 2008, 2012). Yet the predominant focus will be on intentionally created absences and “‘made’ silences” (Clifton 1976: 163), for these have the greatest potential of significance.6 Outside the pragmatic context of everyday language use, artists may also consciously employ perceptual impressions of absence (or 5 “hu ða æþelingas elle[n] fremedon” (“How those nobles performed courageous deeds”; Beowulf, v. 3, online). 6 This, of course, includes the representation of discursive pauses in drama. See, for instance, Marc Anthony’s rhetorical pause in the great forum scene of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar 3.2.108–110, where he stops his allegedly artless public discourse, thus indicating his emotional

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a lack of clarity) produced by technological limits or failures (such as foregrounding pixels) for the sake of meaning production. There is a further possibility of distinguishing between different kinds of non-accidental absences. Consider, for instance, printed texts such as handouts distributed during a university lecture: there are white margins framing the text and blank lines after the title, moreover, blank spaces follow the end of paragraphs and occur between words and after punctuation and so forth. All of these absences in printed verbal signifiers are non-accidental and indeed have been produced intentionally, yet one, as a rule, does not pay attention to these absences in more than a cursory way. While they serve certain functions and thus are in a way meaningful (blank lines serve to set off chunks of text from one another, blank spaces serve to mark word divisions and so on), they are highly conventionalized and therefore of pragmatic rather than content-oriented significance.7 As a consequence, such absences will not be further discussed in the present introduction, which will rather concentrate – like most of the contributions to the present volume – on relatively unconventional absences (although one should be aware of the fact that conventionality is a matter of degree and therefore this typological differentiation is fraught with grey areas).8 In short, the focus of the present volume will be on non-accidental, avoidable and intentional, relatively unconventional and, because of all of this, potentially meaningful missing signifiers in medial works (‘work’ here and elsewhere is meant to include all kinds of media and of artistic media in particular: literary texts, the visual arts, music scores, etc. together with related forms of performance). ʻMeaningfulʼ here means that absences will be considered which may contribute to the effect, signification, and functions of the work in question. A graphic literary case in point is the short poem by Eugen Gomringer “Schweigen”, which has been chosen as the epigraph to this essay. Another – non-literary – illustration of the same issue would result from the following (iconic) element which one could produce by slightly changing the allegiance to the murdered Caesar: “Bear with me. / My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, / And I must pause till it come back to me” (Shakespeare 1997: 1566). 7 Conventions may, however, contribute to the understanding of absences and thus function as a trigger of meaningfulness (see Wolf 2016, section 4); thus, it is a conventional exception in English plural formation that, depending on the context, the form ‘sheep’ can be both singular and plural (with a zero or null morpheme, replacing the otherwise conventional s-ending). 8 At any rate, the exclusion of highly conventionalized absences will also refer to what cultural media practice traditionally excludes or ‘silences’, e.g., quarter-tones in Western music, whose smallest tonic interval is a semitone, or certain ‘noises’ that are not considered to pertain to music (cf. Edgar 1997: 314f.).

Introduction

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spacing in the subtitle of the present essay: “The Potential Significance of   Missing Signifiers”. 3

Preconditions for Eliciting an Awareness of Potentially Meaningful Absence: ‘Significance Triggers’ and Absence Markers9

All of this, however, still does not answer the crucial question mentioned before: under what conditions do we become aware of absence in the first place? There is a first, simple answer: we become aware of absence when we expect presence. Meaningful absence is thus never absolute but always relative. It always takes place within a system or given context, and this is what raises expectations. The question thus remains: what contexts may constitute such expectations? When talking of language and the media, which are both forms of communication, an obvious answer to this question is what Katrin Meise mentioned in an essay on silence in conversation and literature: “it is at least necessary to presuppose a communicative situation” (1996: 47). In other words: what is required is the presence of the cognitive frame ‘communication’. In fact, it is the presence of a communicative situation which creates the necessary framework in which absence can be perceived in the first place and be regarded as a meaningful part of a ‘message’, which normally relies on the presence of signs. As a rule, the establishment of a communicative frame, as with any other cognitive frame, requires signals, markers or ‘framings’.10 As these framings, in the context of communication, may elicit attention and refer to communicative significance, they can also be termed significance triggers. As such, they work for communication both through the presence and the absence of signs. In everyday communication, a plurality of such framings or significance triggers is available, from indexical physiognomic or gestural signs indicating that one wants to express something, to strong verbal metalingual markers such as ‘listen, I have something important to tell you’. Once such a communicative system is established, meaning, as structuralism argues, emerges from difference, and this also includes the difference and interplay between present and absent signifiers. Indeed, as Paul Watzlawick et al. have famously claimed,

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For a more detailed discussion of this issue with reference to literature and music, see Wolf 2016. For the frame-theoretical distinction of ‘cognitive frame’ vs. ‘framing’ as a marker of such a frame, see Wolf 2006.

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“one cannot not communicate. Activity or inactivity, words or silence all have message value” (Watzlawick/Beavin/Jackson 1967: 49). While the requirement of signalling a communication is already true of everyday communication, this is also relevant to the arts and media. The frame ‘art’ in particular is especially important here as a significance trigger, since the premise of art is that it is a non-accidental, intentional, and meaningful aesthetic communication in all its parts. We have learnt to apply this premise to art by default, with the consequence that it makes us alert to, and anticipate, significance even where none is apparent at first glance, and that applies also to cases where this non-appearance is due to the fact that no signs can be perceived. In non-aesthetic cases, for instance, the absence of words in a prolonged silence occurring before the beginning of a lecture may be ambiguous as to its meaningfulness, for the communicative frame ‘lecture’ is just about to be established by means of certain ‘framings’. On the one hand, the physical framings of the lecture room, the presence of an audience and a speaker standing behind a lectern may be read as such markers. On the other hand, a lecture conventionally begins with an opening formula of address, and everything that precedes it would not normally be seen as part of the lecture proper. Yet even if we disregard the position of the absence outside the frame defined by the beginning markers, the absence of the frame ‘art’ in a lecture may also induce parts of the audience not to consider an initial silence as meaningful (they may, for example, attribute it to the speaker trying to concentrate or fiddling with his/her papers). It is indeed the frame ‘art’ which most readily induces us to read almost everything happening in a corresponding communicative situation derived from a text or a performance – and perhaps also in its immediate context – as meaningful. Inside the frame ‘art’, as a special case of the more general frame ‘communication’, a variety of significance triggers may make us aware that absence is potentially meaningful. One – weak – trigger may be found in absence-related conventions (actually individual sub-frames of the frame ‘art’). Thus, convention has it that in anthologies of lyric poetry, if possible, one poem only is printed on one page. This is even true of so-called prose poems, as, for instance, Seamus Heaney’s “Incertus”:   Incertus I went disguised in it, pronouncing it with a soft church-Latin c, tagging it under my efforts like a damp fuse. Uncertain. A shy soul fretting and all that. Expert obeisance.

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  Oh yes, I crept before I walked, the old pseudonym lies here like a mouldering tegument. (Heaney 1990: 48; line layout as in the original)

As this is a prose poem, the conventional large frame of white paper surrounding metrical poems is more or less conspicuously absent (depending on the font used). Indeed, the text which is left justified and only comprises the title and (in the edition quoted) six lines, looks like a sequence of two prose paragraphs. However, these seven lines form the only print text on an entire page. The unusually large blank space on this page (and perhaps also the missing right justification) addresses our knowledge about the printing convention of poetry and will lead readers to become aware of the generic frame ‘poetry’ rather than attributing the non-printed space to some perhaps accidental mistake on the part of the printer even in this extraordinary case. The blank space after the text here is a conventional generic marker in the form of an intratextual framing and would function even if the page had been torn from the volume entitled New Selected Poems and if thus the paratextual (or, more precisely, peritextual)11 framing (which otherwise would also strongly influence our reading) were absent. More powerful as a significance trigger for absences – and, as a rule, more pregnant with meaning – than absence-related conventions themselves are, however, deviations from conventions. Like conventions, this type of significance trigger, which takes habitual expectations as a basis for meaningful nonfulfilment (often leading to the foregrounding of the respective convention itself), is of a very general nature and is not limited to the reception of art. For instance, it operated some years ago in London, on April 17, 2013, when Big Ben was silent during the funeral of Ex-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. In music, general rests in unexpected and therefore surprising places are a good illustration to the point. Thus, in most baroque music one could expect the last few bars of a composition to lead to the final chord without interruption. Not so in Georg Friedrich Händel’s “Hallelujah” from his oratorio The Messiah. Here, a general rest, the complete absence of music for a prolonged period of time, is especially conspicuous, as the repeated tonic and dominant chords immediately preceding the rest make us strongly expect the final chord – which then does not come: instead there is silence, an absence of sound which is highly significant in the sense of ‘functionally loaded’: it increases the 11

For the differentiation between ‘peritextual’ (text-internal) and ‘epitextual’ (text-external or contextual) paratexts, cf. Genette 1987: 10f.

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tension of the concluding section enormously, a tension which is then released in the final slow cadence, which in turn leads to the long postponed, glorious final chord. A more radical example of making the recipient aware of a potential meaningfulness of absence through deviations from conventions and related expectations is, still in the medium of music, John Cage’s well-known ‘anti-composition’ 4′33″, a performance complete with pianist, score and piano in which the pianist is made to ‘play’ absent music, that is, to perform almost five minutes of silence. Clearly, this is a most radical deviation from the simple fact that we expect to hear music – organized sound – at a concert. In literature, significance triggers in the form of foregrounded deviations from expectations can be found in metrical texts in particular, in which expected metrical feet are missing in so-called catalectic verses. An example of this is Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et decorum est” – a critical World War I poem in the form of two sonnets, the second of which is stood on its head – in itself a powerful iconic gesture, illustrating a perverted world upside down. The last few lines of the poem, which would, in a regular sonnet, form the first quatrain, read as follows: My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. (Levin, ed. 2001: 192)

The entire poem consists mostly of verses with five stresses such as the iambic pentameter in verse 15, the opening line of the second sonnet (“In áll my dréams, befóre my hélpless síght”). At the poem’s end, however, we are confronted with a line of only two icti, and “the rest is silence” (Hamlet 5.2.356): clearly, the missing three metrical feet are here replete with meaning, more precisely, with an iconic illustration of the absence of life which also equals the absence of all sound following the word “mori” – ‘dying’. This is what I once termed “iconicity of absence” (Wolf 2005b)12, which here obviously has a highly critical function: as opposed to the phoney jingoist discourse of ‘glory’ the poem illustrates the horrors of trench warfare, including poison gas attacks, in gruesome detail. All of this belies the Latin phrase, ‘it is sweet and respectable to die for one’s fatherland’, which the anonymous teacher should no longer use in class, for it is an “old Lie” (deserving a critical capital L), a ‘tall story’ glossing over the horror of inglorious death in a terrible war. Another, particularly 12

For more examples of this form of iconicity, see also Nänny 2001.

Introduction

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graphic example of an ‘iconicity of absence’, where deviation also operates as a significance trigger, is the missing centre of the poem “Schweigen” by Gomringer used as an epigraph to this contribution: here the absence of one word (expectedly yet another repetition of the word “schweigen”) imitates the signified ‘silence’ through iconic similarity on the level of the signifiers. All of the devices and triggers of significance mentioned so far operate more or less implicitly, that is, without clear absence markers, a fact which may create problems of awareness. Implicit triggers are therefore frequently used in combination with more or less explicit triggers: specific absence markers. They are especially important where the mere existence of nonspecific implicit significance triggers is not considered clear enough or where absences are in danger of being overlooked or misinterpreted. Yet absence markers may also be used independently of such cases of potential doubt and are an important category of triggers of their own, operating both on the para- as well as on the intratextual level. As far as (peritextual) paratexts are concerned, examples of explicit marking would be titles, such as used for Schubert’s ‘incomplete’ eighth symphony, which in German is generally known as Die Unvollendete (announcing the lack of a third and a fourth movement in a symphony, which, according to generic conventions, would make one expect four movements). Further examples are designations such as one can find on the relevant Wikipedia entry “List of silent musical compositions”,13 for instance “A Lot of Nothing”, “Two Minutes Silence”, or “Pregnant Pause … Intermission”. Paratexts in a wider (epitextual) sense also include comments on absences in the context of respective works – to the extent that the recipient is aware of them. Such contextual paratexts may be an author’s or composer’s self-interpretation or aesthetics (e.g., John Cage’s 1959 “Lecture on Nothing”; see Cage 1959/1961) but also art-historical interpretations dealing with the significance of what is not to be seen or heard in aesthetic communication. As for the marking of meaningful absences on the intratextual level (or, in non-verbal media, its intracompositional equivalent), there is the possibility of signalling absence explicitly by using words denoting absence or, somewhat less explicitly, by providing supplements. By way of illustrating absence supplementation as a covert means of marking missing signifiers, we may turn to Laurence Sterne’s humorous metafictional novel Tristram Shandy (1759–1767), one 13

Sometimes apocryphal titles serve to prepare the recipient for an unusual amount of absences, such as the title Pausensymphonie (‘symphony of rests’) applied to Bruckner’s symphony no. 2 in C minor, but these cannot be counted as true ‘compositional’ (or intended) significance markers.

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of the most fertile mines of examples when it comes to significant absences in fiction, and marked ones in particular (see Schulze 1977/1980 and also Olga Fischer’s contribution to the present volume). The eponymous hero and autodiegetic narrator recounts his life under the auspices of real or imaginary “misfortunes” (Sterne 1759–1767/1967: 37). One of them happens when an ill-fitting sash-window almost castrates little Tristram, a delicate affair, which he describes as follows […] The chamber-maid had left no ******* *** under the bed: – Cannot you contrive, master, quoth Susannah, lifting up the sash with one hand, as she spoke, and helping me up into the window-seat with the other, – cannot you manage, my dear, for a single time, to **** *** ** *** ******?  I was five years old. – Susannah did not consider that nothing was well hung in our family, – so slap came the sash down like lightning upon us; —Nothing is left, – cried Susannah, – nothing is left – for me, but to run my country. – My uncle Toby’s house was a much kinder sanctuary, and so Susannah fled to it. (Ibid.: 369f.)

The conventional sequence of verbal print signs is here unconventionally interrupted several times, and each time the absent letters are replaced by either asterisks or dashes. The number of asterisks is the exact equivalent of the missing letters and thus they not only serve as a marker of absence but also function as a powerful incentive for the reader to reconstruct what the narrator, in seeming decency, humorously does not dare to write down. In fact, the absent words are not difficult to reconstruct in the given situation, and thus the absence markers produce the paradoxical effect of drawing the reader’s attention to both the “chamber pot” and the “piss[ing] out of the window”, although this is not directly expressed in words. As for the dashes, they may in one respect be read as speech markers (surrounding Susannah’s direct speech) and in this function would not concern us here, but at the same time – and this is typical of Sterne’s humorous ambivalences – they can also be read as markers of discursive pauses or hesitations (all the more so, as this novel combines the imitation of orality with a frequent foregrounding of the materiality of a print text).14 Some of the dramatic discursive pauses thus marked also serve the function of creating the impression of a highly suggestive aposiopesis, a rhetorical figure in 14

For Tristram Shandy as a “visual text that problematizes the conventions of oral delivery” see Fanning 1998; for the several functions of dashes in Sterne and other 17th- and 18thcentury authors, see Michelsen 1993.

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which a sentence is left incomplete in order to suggest that the speaker is emotionally upset, unwilling or unable to say what was intended.15 Once the readers have understood what has happened (in particular after having become aware of the double entendre of “well hung” [ll. 5f.]), they will be tempted to complete this sentence in a way that would leave little Tristram himself a genuinely incomplete man. However, and this is part of the carnivalesque humour here, the incident may not have been quite so disastrous for Tristram after all, as the second rhetorical figure, involved here, namely a zeugma,16 shows: for rather than the suggested “of his penis” we actually read that “nothing is left” for Susannah but to flee. In the various modes of marking absences as potentially meaningful, supplementation is one step in advance of non-supplemented and also otherwise unmarked absences. Still one step further we find explicit intratextual marking, which is the easiest and most obvious way of making the recipient aware of the fact that something is missing in verbal media. Henry Mackenzie’s sentimental novel The Man of Feeling (1771) provides an illustration to the point. Mackenzie does not merely start his seemingly fragmentary sentimental novel with chapter 11 but also explains the fragmentary nature of the text. The reason for the ten missing opening chapters at the beginning, and indeed for many other similar absences, becomes clear in a framing “Introduction”, in which the origin and fate of the allegedly reprinted manuscript is narrated (it was used by a curate with apparently little literary sensitivity as “excellent wadding”; Mackenzie 1771/1970: 5). As if this were not enough, a footnote attached to the first chapter number also explicitly warns the readers that they will be confronted with “scattered chapters, and fragments of chapters” (ibid.: 7). Similar metatextual thematizations of absences can also be found in Tristram Shandy, for instance, following the missing ten pages (the actual absence of the pages may easily be overlooked): “– No doubt, Sir, – there is a whole chapter wanting here – and a chasm of ten pages made in the book by it […]” (Sterne 1759–1767/1967: 311).17 15 16 17

For the use of aposiopesis in Tristram Shandy, see Holtz 1971. Zeugma is a rhetorical figure in which one word is incongruously combined with two words or phrases, thus conflating two meanings. Sadly, the pagination continues uninterrupted in the otherwise authoritative Norton edition (cf. Sterne 1759–1767/1980: 219). The whole episode is yet another metafictional and tongue-in-cheek discussion of the merits and nature of the text we are reading, for we learn that Tristram himself tore out the respective pages because the journey of his father, Uncle Toby, and Obadiah which they contained (and of which we nevertheless get a summary!) was allegedly “so much above the stile [sic] and manner of anything else I have been able to paint in this book, that it could not have remained in it, without deprecating every other scene […]” (ibid.: 313).

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In all of these possibilities of eliciting an awareness of something potentially meaningful that is not there, we must, of course, not only consider the framings and the textual or compositional clues but also take the interplay between work or performance, cultural context, and recipient into account. The recipients are here of particular importance, for it is ultimately in their consciousness or imagination that the absences in medial systems of signifiers are realized and endowed with meaning. The prominence of cognitive frames, cultural knowledge, and expectations in what I have enumerated as significance markers testifies to this pre-eminent role of the recipient. 4

Forms of Potentially Meaningful Missing Signifiers in Medial Works: Marked vs. Unmarked, Supplemented vs. Non-Supplemented, Peripheral (or Framing) vs. Internal Absences

Let us now come back to the typology of absences. So far, different kinds of absence have been explained, namely non-accidental vs. accidental ones, intentional vs. unintentional ones, unconventional vs. relatively conventional ones, potentially significant vs. non-significant absences, and absences on the level of signifiers vs. absences on the level of signifieds. In all aforementioned pairs of oppositions, the first term is the one most in focus in the present volume. Yet even when restricting this focus to non-accidental, relatively unconventional, potentially meaningful missing signifiers in medial works, a variety of different forms emerge, all of which merit equal attention. The foregoing discussion of significance triggers yields a first distinction, namely relatively unmarked recte marked absences. This opposition, like the entire question of perceptibility and the aforementioned opposition between potentially significant vs. non-significant absence, is, of course, in reality more of a continuum operating between two poles than a clear-cut opposition. Indeed, both the perceptibility (including the marking) and the significance of absent signifiers is a matter of degree. Oppositions are more clear-cut in the following typological differentiations: there is, first, an opposition which has already been introduced in the context of answering the question of how to make the recipients aware of a potentially meaningful absence, namely the differentiation between marked and unmarked and the one between supplemented and non-supplemented absences. Besides the criteria of markedness and supplementation, the position of ­absences also yields some important distinctions: for absences can not only ­occur within a medial communication proper but also, so to speak, at its margins. We may therefore distinguish between peripheral or framing absences

Introduction

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and internal absences. Internal absences are easier to spot, because the frame ‘medial communication’ has already been established by the medial signs surrounding the blank, either spatially or temporally. A brief literary example from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy may suffice to illustrate this form. In volume VII, Tristram is on a tour through France. He has problems with his coach or ‘chaise’ and sells it absentmindedly, forgetting to retrieve his notebook. Sometime later, he becomes aware of his error and recounts the episode as follows […] it occurred to me, that I had left my remarks in the pocket of the chaise – and that by selling my chaise, I had sold my remarks along with it, to the chaise-vamper. I leave this void space that the reader may swear into it any oath that he is most accustomed to – (Sterne 1759–1767/1967: 504)

This is an explicitly marked internal absence in print (a blank space followed by its thematization: “this void”), producing several effects: it is a humorous absence, playing with literary respectability; in the manner of an Iserian ‘Leerstelle’, it involves and activates the reader, who thus participates in the production of the discourse; and moreover, as a so-called ‘typographical device’, it is one of a plethora of metafictional elements in this novel which make the reader aware of literary conventions – in this case, of the materiality of the print medium. As opposed to such internal absences, the peripheral or framing variant may present more difficulties in discernibility, for the problem here is: where or when does the communicative situation begin? In texts, if one disregards the fact that, as a rule, they are taken from some already framing contexts (e.g., certain bookshop sections and their designation – as epitextual paratexts), the communication starts with the peritextual paratexts (which have already been mentioned with reference to music) and includes the physical nature of the work at hand. In performances, the performative situation and pertinent conventions must be taken into account. In concerts, the frame ‘art’ is, for instance, established through the combination of architectural framing (the concert hall) and the performative situation, which, as a rule, follows a ritualistic pattern (an audience, sometimes specially dressed, assembles to hear an orchestral performance and witnesses the entry of the musicians). When the conductor enters, as a rule, the applause which may greet him or her dies down and gives way to a prolonged ‘pregnant’ silence before the first note is played, that is, while the conductor prepares for the performance and raises the baton. This silence, although conventional and belonging to the performance rather than the composition at hand, is functionally loaded: it is full of suspense and,

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perhaps, anticipation.18 It could also include – after the music begins – the pianissimo openings of some musical compositions, such as the hardly perceptible D-minor chord at the beginning of Anton Bruckner’s ninth symphony, or Richard Wagner’s prelude to Rheingold, where the initial ‘Ur-Es’ (the primeval E flat) is barely audible at the beginning, before swelling to mezzoforte. In these cases, music emerges, as it were, out of a framing silence, as one may hear in the almost inaudible beginning of Bruckner’s ninth symphony, which is also a good illustration of the fact that meaning is based on difference, and music on the surrounding silence (or non-musical noise for that matter; see Edgar 1997).19 The aforementioned question as to where an aesthetic communication may be assumed to begin has its counterpart at the end of a text or performance. Here, a previously established frame ‘art’ can also have an effect for the time or space immediately outside the actual textual or compositional limits (that is, after the last full stop or last written bar, or after the last heard word or chord). Conductors may, for instance, produce a terminal silence after particularly sublime endings by ‘freezing’, thus permitting the music, as it were, to be carried over into the framing world, before gesturally releasing the applause. One may, in this context, also think of the terminal silence that used to conclude (concert-hall) performances such as J. S. Bach’s Passion according to St Matthew, where the conspicuous absence of applause becomes meaningful as a marker and an acknowledgement of the religious content and solemnity of the composition which has just come to an end.20 18

19 20

See Edgar, who speaks here of “contemplative silence” (1997: 316), and Vainiomäki, who discusses “silence as a means of transition” with reference to “concert situation[s]”, after, interestingly, having mentioned “[r]itual behaviour”, where silence “change[s] profane into sacred” (2004: 355). For some further examples of silences whose “boundaries” are not “hard-edged” but create a sort of “‘sfumato’ effect” through “minimalization”, see Clifton 1976: 166 and 175. Gardiner discusses a particularly “brilliant use of” highly significant “silence” (2013/2014: 149) of the end-framing kind, when, in the cantata BWV 106 (“Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit”, aka “Actus tragicus”) Bach “notates a blank bar with a pause over it” at the end of the central movement (“Es ist der alte Bund”): here, the soprano is given the New Testamentrelated text, “Ja, komm, Herr Jesu”, and at the end of its last entry “Bach ensures that all other voices and instruments drop out one by one (in itself a form of progressive internal to peripheral silencing), leaving her unsupported voice to trail away in a fragile arabesque” (ibid.). What is more, “to illustrate the believer’s crisis of faith and overwhelming need of divine help” Bach, in Gardiner’s reading, “leave[s] the soprano’s immediately preceding notes tonally ambiguous”, relegating the tonal interpretation of the “final oscillation between A and Bb” to the listener – with important consequences according to the choice made: either as the adumbration of the tonic of the movement’s key F minor (which would be the equivalent of “death as a kind of full stop”) or as a leading note to the following part in B flat minor (in which case the ‘message’ “would be ‘one of hope’”; ibid.: 151f.).

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Another example to the point, this time taken not from music but from literature, and not from a performance but from a text of fiction, is the ending of James Joyce’s short story “The Dead”. There is something about this conclusion which arguably only becomes remarkable owing to the existence of the frame ‘verbal art’: in a negative epiphany, which shattered his entire married life, the story’s protagonist, Gabriel Conroy, has just learnt that his beloved wife Gretta had a lover, Michael Furey, before she was married to Gabriel, and that she apparently still loves this Michael in spite of his having passed away. In the last paragraph of the text, which also concludes the story cycle Dubliners, the reader gains access to the following stream of consciousness in Gabriel’s mind: A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. ( Joyce 1914/1993: 203f.)

This being the ending of the story – and at the same time the conclusion of the fictional text of the entire book – the last words “the dead” and the full stop are followed by the white space of the (in most editions) not fully printed last page. In a non-aesthetic context, the absence of words on this white space would hardly be noticeable. This being literature, however, it may elicit an awareness of a meaningful absence, and this has indeed been the case. In a comparison between Joyce’s text and John Huston’s film version, the critic Eric Paul Meljac observes The reader of an edition of Dubliners sees the final words ‘upon all the living and the dead,’ followed very often by a blank page or the ominous wall of white page after the final period, and is compelled to stop, reflect, consider what is now the absence of words, and falls into a physical and mental silence. […] Joyce’s text forces the reader to stop. A period

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followed by nothing, by wordlessness, forces the reader to cease reading, to complete the mental and visual exercise, and be faced with very real silence, a silence of sound, of vision, of mental processes, and of the heart. This is an effect not even the brilliant Huston can recreate. (Meljac 2009: 295)21 The correspondence (if perceived) between the white snow thematized in the text, the atmosphere of ‘paralysis’ typical of Dubliners, and, indeed, emotional as well as physical death on the one hand and, on the other hand, the textual materiality of nothingness on a white page, is here an instance of the ‘iconicity of absence’ already mentioned in the context of Owen’s poem “Dulce et decorum est”. This is a common way of giving meaning to blanks in works of art. Yet, in this liminal position, it is a questionable blank; for one could argue that all texts must end somewhere and are consequently followed by white space without print. It is only owing to the aforementioned premiss of a potential ubiquity of meaning which frames our reception of artworks, including their immediate context or periphery, that a reading such as Meljac’s can be ex­pected. 5

Kinds of Absence (II): Potentially Meaningful Missing Signifiers According to Individual Arts and Media

The last important typological differentiation in the field of absence has already been partly introduced and concerns again (as in section 2) the kinds of absence under discussion, this time with reference to their semiotic nature according to individual media: drawing on Charles Sanders Peirce’s well-known typology of signs, one can say that absences can be symbolic, indexical, or iconic (with double or triple classifications being possible in individual cases).22 Unsurprisingly, most of our literary examples have illustrated absences in symbolic chains of signifiers, sometimes in combination with an indexical function (as in a pause indicating that one is puzzled), or with an iconic function (as discussed in the previous section). This semiotic differentiation leads us to a crucial field for the present volume, namely the context of different media – and genres. As with all intermedial phenomena, including transmedial ones, the conditions, potentials, and 21 22

I am grateful to Maximilian Feldner for drawing my attention to this reading by Meljac. For the frequent coupling of iconic and indexical functions, see Fischer’s contribution to the present volume.

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limitations of a given medium play a crucial role when it comes to identifying and interpreting meaningful absences, and absences may take on quite different forms according to the respective medium. This already concerns the banal difference between drama script and theatrical performance. By way of illustration, one may consider Beckett’s plays – which, next to Tristram Shandy, present particularly fertile literary mines of various forms and kinds of meaningful absence.23 When reading Beckett’s drama texts, the stage directions “pause” or “silence” are frequent symbolic visual markers of absence, supplementing and indicating what one can only imagine as a gap in the chain of verbal signifiers. In a performance, this written marker disappears, and we are instead confronted with an actual aural gap in the verbal discourse of the character in question, mostly in a non-supplemented form, unless the discursive silence is ‘filled’ by pantomime or a bodily freeze. As this difference in the reception of absences between drama as script and drama as performance shows, meaningful absence can occur in a variety of media-specific forms, most frequently in aural or visual form but also, occasionally, in kinetic form as in, for instance, freezes in film or ballet.  Aural absence (silence or pause) is generally the typical kind of absence in performed music, but also in spoken language, (musical) theatre, and sometimes also in sound film. In spoken discourse, both in life and drama, aural absence may, for instance, occur in the form of rhetorical pauses, indicating overwhelming emotions or that something important will follow. The sound film may, in addition, make use of aural absence in its various aural components: aside from pauses in the characters’ speech and the surprising cessation of previously present sound effects, film music may also conspicuously stop, thus foregrounding the non-musical sound track or other elements of the film. Moreover, both modes, sound and music, may concomitantly produce a shocking silence (see Wolf 2016). In music, the most frequent and conspicuous form of aural absence is the general rest, as exemplified above with Händel’s “Hallelujah” (see also Revers’s contribution to the present volume). The general rest in music corresponds with the absence of speech, as so frequently found in Beckett’s plays, or the absence of film music and/or sound in sound film. In rare examples of performances, including musical ones, the bodies of the performers (actors or musicians), which are normally perceived visually, can also go missing and thus form visual absences in media or contexts where one would not readily expect them. In concert-hall performances of music, the 23

For absence (as silence and/or nothingness) in Beckett, see Branigan 2008 (with reference to Beckett’s radio plays), and Caselli, ed. 2010 (I am grateful to Catherine Laws for pointing out this latter book to me), see moreover Bryden 1998 and Schäfer/Kröger, eds. 2016.

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ending of Joseph Haydn’s symphony no. 45 in F sharp minor, entitled “Farewell”, is a case in point. Here, the gradual silencing of the various instrumental voices caused by the dwindling number of instrumentalists playing corresponded, in the original performance, with an increasing number of musicians leaving the stage.24 In theatre, Beckett’s 35-second miniature play Breath (1970) is, in its entirety, characterized by most radical absences: no actors are actually on stage, and the only sounds audible are a “cry”, transmitted as a “recorded vagitus” and the eponymous breath, which is produced on the basis of “amplified recording” (Beckett 1971: 11).25 In the visual arts and media, including architecture, visual (and iconic) absences are, of course, more typical than in performed music. A visitor of the Pantheon in Rome who admires the impressive cupola from the inside will, for instance, see the remarkable hole at the zenith (the opaion): it is remarkable since one expects a roof to serve the function of protecting the interior from the rain, which here evidently is not the case (arguably with the function of creating a visible contact between the interior of the temple and the heaven as the seat of certain [planetary?] godheads). In paintings, to single out one visual art, meaningful absences can concern both the frame and the framed picture. In both respects, the most radical examples of absence have been devised since the early 20th century. Kazimir Malevich’s “Suprematist Composition: White on White” (1918, see Figure 1.2) or Robert Rauschenberg’s white paintings (produced in 1951), which apparently influenced Cage’s 4’33”,26 are examples of ‘empty paintings’ showing (almost) nothing and thus addressing – through extreme deviation – the traditional (pre-modernist) expectation of seeing representational forms and colours on canvas.27 24

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This is arguably an extreme case of silence as an “embodied […] activity” (Clifton 1976: 163); for the successive silencing of the instruments culminating in nothingness (“das sukzessive Aussetzen der Instrumente im Nichts”) in the concluding movement, which does not end with the sound of the last two remaining violins but rather with two general quaver rests, cf. Walter 2007: 50. The radicality of Beckett’s Breath can be seen in the fact that “the absence of actors is also an absence of characters and thus of dialogue and – by extension – the absence or at least extreme reduction of all the other conventional constituents of a theatre play. Only the technical apparatus remains (the lighting, and recorded sound). This is simultaneously a foregrounding of what are usually only supplemental special effects and a foregrounding of the absence of everything they would usually complement.” (I am grateful to Cecilia Servatius for this pertinent remark, which I take the liberty to quote here with slight alterations.) See 4’33” online. Along the same lines, one may also mention Giulio Paolini’s arte povera work “Eclisse II” (1976, an ‘empty’ painting), but one need not refer to 20th-century art only, for

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Figure 1.2 Kazimir Malevich, “Suprematist Composition: White on White” (1918) Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

Malevich is also noteworthy in pointedly having exhibited his paintings without frames, as the photograph of his 1915 exhibition “0,10” in Petrograd documents (see Fig. 1.3). In both examples, the meaning of the absence emerges from the metareferential interplay with a tradition in which presence was the rule. In the first case, it is the expected presence of concrete representations in paintings, which is here both highlighted and partially denied, since the tilted white square within a larger white square, which fills the entire painting, deviates experimentation with painterly ‘nothing’ can already be seen in a 17th-century painting by Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrecht, The Reverse of a Framed Painting (c. 1670–1675), cf. Stoichita 1993/1997: 308f.

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Figure 1.3 Photograph of works by Kazimir Malevich exhibited in the 1915 exhibition “0,10” in Petrograd (Mendgen, ed. 1995: 232f.)

from such representationality. It does so through the reduction of what is painted to a barely perceptible abstract form. Rauschenberg’s white paintings are even more radical in that they do not even contain adumbrations of forms but are completely white and thus resemble a virgin canvas. As for the missing frames in the aforementioned exhibition, this device also presupposes and addresses a convention, namely surrounding paintings by often elaborate frames, in part as an aesthetic value marker and halo, but also as a means of creating a distance between ‘mere’ reality and art. In both cases, missing frames and missing representations, absences function as critical implicitly meta-aesthetic comments on conventions of traditional painterly representation and concepts of art from which the artefacts in question conspicuously deviate. Missing text in literature, silence and absent wings on a theatrical stage, general rests and surrounding silence as parts of a composition, or completely absent music as a form of (anti-)composition, absent painterly frames or the lack of concrete representation, colour, or form of any kind on a canvas – these are only some media-specific examples of the individual forms absence on the level of medial and artistic signifiers can take. The range of examples from the

Introduction

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media and arts could, of course, be expanded, but these cases may suffice at present; more illustrations will be found in the contributions to the present volume. The transmedial nature of the present volume requires a word on terminology. In principle, the actual occurrence of what is under discussion here would require media-specific terms such as ‘gap’, ‘blank’, ‘silence’, ‘pause’, ‘rest’, ‘nothingness’, ‘ellipsis’, ‘lacuna’, ‘light/whiteness’ or ‘darkness/blackness’, etc. However, it is important to note that all of the phenomena thus designated have one feature in common, namely ‘absence’,28 and this enables us to use this term as an umbrella term for the various media-specific realizations of missing signifiers. 6

Research Perspectives: Systematic and Historical Aspects and the Emergence of a Functional Profile of Meaningful Absence across Media

Meaningful absence is, understandably, as yet an underresearched phenomenon, in particular when it comes to absence on the level of medial signifiers.29 This permits me to conclude by adumbrating some research perspectives. These concern both systematic and historical aspects of absences. As for the systematic facet, much remains to be said on the individual forms absences may take with reference to both signifiers and signifieds. Indeed, most of what has been excluded above for the sake of complexity reduction has, of course, only provisionally been bracketed off and would form interesting fields of further research. This is particularly true of what Porter Abbott recently presented as “shadow stories” surrounding given narratives (see 2015). In addition, the focus of relevant media should be broadened. While I have concentrated on traditional arts, such as literature, music, and painting, there is much still to be said about absence, e.g., in film, comics, and digital media (as some of the ensuing contributions show). An aspect which could hardly be dealt with in the present introduction is the historical dimension of absences across media. It would indeed be rewarding to set the various forms of creating medial and artistic interplays between presence and absence in historical perspective and consider, for instance, to 28 29

For a similar procedure, see Walsh 1998 (with a plethora of literary examples from the fields of absences on the level of the signifieds and of the signifiers). As a noteworthy exception Lotman’s remarks on meaningful zero-elements (minus priëm [1970/1977: 50–51]) should be mentioned (I am grateful to Ingeborg Jandl for having drawn my attention to this).

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what extent avant-garde movements, from Dadaism and modernism to postmodernism and the present, show a noteworthy density of experiments with nothingness and absence as opposed to more traditional trends such as, in literature, Victorian realism. Although individual phenomena in specific media are well-known, a transmedial, media-comparative perspective, which has not yet been adopted, could yield new insights into the cluster of emerging absences in various fields and arts in, for instance, the early 20th century, a period of radical breaks with tradition and traditional centredness and presence in what one may call the Modernist Revolution in the Arts: this would include the absence of all traditional forms on the level of signifiers in Dadaist poetry, the absence of rhyme in poetry, the absence of authorial narrators in fiction, the absence of ornament in Bauhaus architecture, the absence of representationality in abstract painting, or the absence of tonal centredness in atonal and dodecaphonic music. In any case, be it from a systematic or a historical perspective, the discussion of possible functions of absences is crucial. As we could already see in the examples given above, these are manifold. If regarded from a transmedial perspective, perhaps a certain functional profile of absences may emerge, some functions that tend to come up more frequently than others across the ages and across media. On the basis of what I have explored in the present introduction, potential candidates for such relatively pervading functions are (note: the functions adduced may occur individually or in combination with each other): ‒ ‒ Mimetic function: There is, first, in representational media the option of using silence or absence as a mimesis of absence and silence in real life – with all its possible meanings (and further functions), from being clueless to indicating inhibition and thus, possibly, cultural oppression,30 from dissent or hostility to being overpowered by emotions. ‒ ‒ Iconic experiential function: Moreover, there is the tendency of iconically illustrating and permitting recipients to experience what absence can actually mean or with what aspects of life (or death) it is frequently combined; this facet could be seen, e.g., in Owen’s double sonnet “Dulce et decorum est”, in which textual absence illustrates death, the ultimate absence. ‒ ‒ Indexical function: As also illustrated above, absence can moreover fulfil the function of indicating something, such as an overwhelming emotion, which prevents a dramatic character from speaking. ‒ ‒ Humorous function: Then there is – in all media – the use of absence for humorous playfulness (the combination of the interplay between presence and absence and humour in Tristram Shandy testifies to this); another 30

See, e.g., the lacuna in the excerpt from Tristram Shandy, where the narrator angrily wants to use swear words but refrains from doing so and falls silent.

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Figure 1.4 “Stille Nacht” – iconic score

example is the score of a well-known Christmas hymn (see Fig. 1.4), which one of my friends sent me as an epigraph to his end-of-the-year letter, a score which incidentally does not require much musical training to decipher: ‒ ‒ Experimental, in particular metareferential function: Further, only a small step separates humorous playfulness from experimental explorations of the limits of a given art or medium; such explorations would then result in a metareferential function; this can be seen, for instance, when absences are used to foreground textual materiality or narrative conventions in literature as is the case with Sterne, musical conventions as in Cage’s 4’33”, or painterly materiality and conventions as with Malevich. ‒ ‒ Structural function: In addition, absence often serves as a structuring effect; this applies, for instance, to the conventional pauses between movements of a symphony or to the absence of a prominent bass voice (as played by the pedal) segmenting parts of organ fugues. ‒ ‒ Worldview function: Finally, absent signifiers can also be correlative of absences on the level of the worldview implied in a given work. For instance, they could indicate a lack of signification or meaning at large; this function is to be found most conspicuously in Beckett’s multifold absurdist explorations of his belief “that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express”, as he once (in 1949) said in a conversation with Georges Duthuit (Beckett 1965: 103). Clearly, to use absences in chains of signifiers (such as Beckett’s frequent dramatic pauses) in this sense is a radical functionalization, which need not necessarily apply to

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other authors, artists or composers.31 At any rate, the ‘worldview function’ of absences is a rich field which also awaits further investigation. As should have become clear from the foregoing remarks, there is still much to be explored and much to be done before we can see the outlines of what one may term, borrowing a phrase from Susan Sontag and simultaneously expanding its relevance, an “Aesthetics of Silence” (see 1967/1969). The present volume, which makes a decisive step in this direction, is hopefully also an incentive to continue research on this rewarding path.

References

 4’33” (online). [01/09/ 2015]. Abbott, H. Porter (2015). “How Do We Read What Isn’t There to be Read? Shadow Stories and Permanent Gaps”. Lisa Zunshine, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies. Oxford: OUP. 104–119. Beckett, Samuel (1965). Proust. Three Dialogues. Samuel Beckett & Georges Duthuit. London: Calder & Boyars. Beckett, Samuel (1971). “Breath”. Samuel Beckett. Breath and Other Shorts. London: faber & faber. 11.  Beowulf (online). Diacritically-marked Text and Facing Translation. Ed. Benjamin Slade. [04/04/2018]. Branigan, Kevin (2008). Radio Beckett: Musicality in the Radio Plays of Samuel Beckett. Frankfurt am Main et al.: Lang. Bryden, Mary (1998). “Beckett and the Sound of Silence”. Mary Bryden, ed. Samuel Beckett and Music. Oxford: Clarendon. 21–46. Cage, John (1959/1961). “Lecture on Nothing”. John Cage. Silence. Middleton, CT: Wes­ leyan Univ. Press. 109–124. Caselli, Daniela, ed. (2010). Beckett and Nothing: Trying to Understand Beckett. Man­ chester: Manchester Univ. Press. Clifton, Thomas (1976). “The Poetics of Musical Silence”. The Musical Quarterly 62/2: 163–181. Corbin, Alain (2016). Histoire du silence de la renaissance à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel. 31

For an overview of some functions of musical silence (humour, eliciting surprise, anticipation, or the feeling of loss, the building up and the release of tension, as well as metamusical functions, e.g., concerning the foregrounding of conventions of musical endings), cf. Clifton 1976: 171, 175f.

Introduction

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Derrida, Jacques (1966/1978/1990). “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”. Jacques Derrida. Writing and Difference. Trans. with an introduction and additional notes by Alan Bass. London: Routledge & Kegan, 1978, reprint 1990. 278–293, 339. Dhawan, Nikita (online). “The Power of Silence and the Silence of Power”. [16/06/2015]. Edgar, Andrew (1997). “Music and Silence”. Jaworski, ed. 311–328. Ephratt, Michal (2008). “The Functions of Silence”. Journal of Pragmatics 40: 1909– 1938. Ephratt, Michal (2012). “‘We try harder’: Silence and Grice’s Cooperative Principle, Maxims and Implications”. Language & Communication 32: 62–79. Fanning, Christopher (1998). “On Sterne’s Page: Spatial Layout, Spatial Form, and Social Spaces in Tristram Shandy”. Eighteenth-Century Fiction 10/4: 429–450. Fletcher, Chris (2003). A Thousand Years of English Literature: A Treasury of Literary Manuscripts. New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams. Gardiner, John Eliot (2013/2014). Music in the Castle of Heaven: A Portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Genette, Gérard (1987). Seuils. Collection ‘Poétique’. Paris: Seuil. Gomringer, Eugen (1972). “Schweigen”. Eugen Gomringer, ed. Konkrete Poesie: Deutsch­ sprachige Autoren. Stuttgart: Reclam. 58. Grabher, Gudrun, Ulrike Jessner, eds. (1996). The Semantics of Silences in Linguistics and Literature. Heidelberg: Winter. Heaney, Seamus (1990). New Selected Poems 1966–1987. London: faber & faber. Herdina, Philip (1996). “The Manufacture of Silence (or How to Stop People Doing Things with Words)”. Grabher/Jessner, eds. 29–44. Holtz, William (1971). “Typography, Tristram Shandy, the Aposiopesis, etc.”. Arthur H. Cash, John M. Stedmond, eds. The Winged Skull: Papers from the Laurence Sterne Bicentenary Conference. London: Methuen. 247–257. Ingarden, Roman (1931/1965). Das literarische Kunstwerk: Mit einem Anhang von den Funktionen der Sprache im Theaterschauspiel. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Iser, Wolfgang (1970/1975). “Die Appellstruktur der Texte: Unbestimmtheit als Wirkungsbedingung literarischer Prosa”. Konstanzer Universitätsreden 28. Konstanz 1970. Rpt. in Rainer Warning, ed. Rezeptionsästhetik: Theorie und Praxis. UTB 303. Munich: Fink. 228–252. Jaworski, Adam, ed. (1997). Silence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Berlin/New York, NY: Mouton de Gruyter. Joyce, James (1914/1993). “The Dead”. James Joyce. Dubliners. Eds. Hans Walter Gabler, Walter Hettche. New York, NY: Vintage. 159–204. Kurzon, Dennis (1998). Discourse of Silence: Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Levin, Phillis, ed. (2001). The Penguin Book the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lotman, Jurij (1970/1977). The Structure of the Artistic Text. Michigan Slavic Contribu­ tions 7. Transl. Gail Lenhoff, Ronald Vroon. Ann Arbor, MI: Univ. of Michigan Press. Mackenzie, Henry (1771/1970). The Man of Feeling. Ed. Brian Vickers. Oxford: OUP. Mair, Christian (1996). “The Semantics of Silence”. Grabher/Jessner, eds. 19–28. Meljac, Eric Paul (2009). “Dead Silence: James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ and John Huston’s Adaptation as Aesthetic Rivals”. Literature/Film Quarterly 37/4: 295–304. Meise, Katrin (1996). “On Talking about Silence in Conversation and Literature”. Grabher/Jessner, eds. 45–66. Mendgen, Eva, ed. (1995). In Perfect Harmony: Bild und Rahmen 1850–1920. Exh. cat. Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum/Zwolle: Waanders. Michelsen, Martina (1993). Weg vom Wort – zum Gedankenstrich: Zur stilistischen Funk­ tion eines Satzzeichens in der englischen Literatur des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts. Munich: Fink. Nänny, Max (2001). “Iconic Functions of Long and Short Lines”. Olga Fischer, Max Nänny, eds. The Motivated Sign. Iconicity in Language and Literature 2. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 157–188. Prince, Gerald (1996). “Remarks on Narrativity”. Claes Wahlin, ed. Perspectives on Narratology: Papers from the Stockholm Symposium on Narratology. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. 95–106. Rajewsky, Irina O. (2002). Intermedialität. UTB 2261. Tübingen: Francke. Rajewsky, Irina O. (2010). “Border Talks: The Problematic Status of Media Borders in the Current Debate about Intermediality”. Lars Elleström, ed. Media Borders, Multi­ modality and Intermediality. Houndmills/Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 51–68. Ryan, Marie-Laure (2005). “Media and Narrative”. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, MarieLaure Ryan, eds. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narra­tive Theory. London: Rout­ ledge. 288–292. Schäfer, Armin, Karin Kröger, eds. (2016). Null. Nichts und Negation: Becketts No-Thing. Bielefeld: transcript. Schulze, Martin (1977/1980). “Do You Know the Meaning of ***? Die markierte Aus­ sparung als Indiz für die planvolle Komposition des Tristram Shandy”. Gerd Roh­ mann, ed. Laurence Sterne. Wege der Forschung 167. Darmstadt: Wissen­schaft­liche Buchgesellschaft. 395–436. Shakespeare, William (1997). The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York, NY: Norton. Sontag, Susan (1967/1969). “The Aesthetics of Silence”. Susan Sontag. Styles of Radical Will. New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. 3–34. Sterne, Laurence (1759–1767/1967). The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentle­ man. Ed. Graham Petrie. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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Stoichita, Victor (1993/1997). Das selbstbewußte Bild: Vom Ursprung der Malerei. Bild und Text. Trans. of L’Instauration du tableau by Heinz Jatho. Munich: Fink. Vainiomäki, Tiina (2004). “Silence as a Cultural Sign”. Semiotica 150: 347–361. Walsh, Timothy (1998). The Dark Matter of Words: Absence, Unknowing and Emptiness in Literature. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Univ. Press. Walter, Michael (2007). Haydns Sinfonien: Ein musikalischer Werkführer. Beck’sche Reihe Wissen. Munich: Beck. Watzlawick, Paul, Janet Beavin, Don Jackson (1967). Pragmatics of Human Commu­ni­ cation: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies, and Paradoxes. New York, NY: Norton. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1921/1984). “Tractatus logico-philosophicus”. Ludwig Wittgen­ stein. Tractatus logico-philosophicus, Tagebücher 1914–1916, Philosophische Unter­su­ chungen. Werk­aus­gabe 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 9–85. Wolf, Werner (2005a). “Intermediality”. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, Marie-Laure Ryan, eds. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge. 252–256. Wolf, Werner (2005b). “Non-supplemented Blanks in Works of Literature as Forms of ‘Iconicity of Absence’”. Costantino Maeder et al., eds. Outside-In and Inside-Out. Iconicity in Language and Literature 4. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 115–132. Wolf, Werner (2006). “Introduction: Frames, Framings and Framing Borders in Litera­ ture and Other Media”. Werner Wolf, Walter Bernhart, eds. Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media. Studies in In­termediality 1. Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi. 1–40. Wolf, Werner (2009). “Metareference across Media: The Concept, its Transmedial Potentials and Problems, Main Forms and Functions”. Werner Wolf, ed., in collaboration with Katharina Bantleon and Jeff Thoss. Metareference across Media: Theory and Case Studies. Dedicated to Walter Bernhart on the Occasion of his Retirement. Studies in Intermediality 4. Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi. 1–85. Wolf, Werner (2016). “How Does Absence Become Significant in Literature and Music?” Werner Wolf, Walter Bernhart, eds. Silence and Absence in Literature and Music. Word and Music Studies 15. Leiden/Boston, MA: Brill/Rodopi. 5–22.

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Chapter 2

Absent Signifiers in Contemporary American Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction  Nassim Winnie Balestrini This contribution explains how Terry Tempest Williams’s When Women Were Birds (2012), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010), and Garth Risk Hallberg’s A Field Guide to the North American Family (2007) create meaningful gaps in chains of signifiers through evoking the materiality of the printed book. The fourth example transposes artistic notions of absence to a more abstract, philosophical level and to a more extensive scale: Richard Powers’s Orfeo (2014) addresses absence and presence as part of an ontological debate regarding the controversial relation between being and meaning in music. What connects the four texts is that they use significant absences to foreground artistic possibilities in their attempts to foster readers’ perception-based awareness of their own medium- and genre-specific expectations. As gaps in chains of signifiers also highlight specific perspectives on the world as well as thematic and ethical concerns, they indicate that unexpected features of both the book-medium and of specific literary, visual, and musical genres figure as prominent vehicles of signification. The act of assessing the cultural poetics of perceptually-conscious reading practices, thus, becomes a prerequisite for elucidating conceptualizations of meaning production through noticeably absent signifiers. Ultimately, these texts imply that notions of absence and presence may merge or even be reversed. 1

Introduction

The field of intermediality studies provided the conceptual germ of the lecture series whence this collection of essays evolved. The interdisciplinary array of weekly lectures yielded lively debates about what constitutes a signifier in a specific art form, genre, and medium of expression, about how to detect gaps in chains of signifiers, and about when such absences can be read as significant beyond implications of emptiness or nothingness. As Susan Sontag argues, “notions of silence, emptiness, and reduction” impact what we may expect from recipients of art because these notions “either promote a more © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004394520_003

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immediate, sensuous experience of art” or invite us to “confront the artwork in a more conscious, conceptual way” (1967/1969: 13). Through active engagement in meaning-making, recipients potentially recognize the hermeneutic validity of, as Werner Wolf points out in his introductory essay to this volume, “non-accidental”, “avoidable”, “intentional”, and “relatively unconventional” gaps both within chains of “signifiers” or “on their immediate ‘outside’ or ‘margins’” (this volume: 1). Regarding the functions of these absences, Wolf suggests that they may be “Mimetic”, “Iconic experiential”, “Indexical”, “Humorous”, “­Experimental”, “Structural”, or that they may fulfil a “Worldview” function (this volume: 26–27) in the sense that they, for instance, represent a general lack of meaning. All in all, the presentations, subsequent discussions, and resulting book chapters share a reasonable amount of consensus among scholars regarding the necessity to identify and contemplate both medium-specific typologies of absent signifiers and context-specific interpretative possibilities. In this chapter, I will discuss how several contemporary U.S.-American prose texts – all of which engage with the signifying potentialities of the material affordances inherent in three-dimensional analog books and of matter in the widest sense – use various types of absence and how these gaps produce readings of these texts that are rooted in the core thematic concerns of each respective work. This comparative analysis allows me to show the ways in which authors harness significant absences in order to encourage recipients to contemplate how cultural traditions impact the production, the expected medial characteristics, and the reading practices associated with specific arts and genres. Experimentation with mediality expands the “worldview function” from reading absence as a broadly conceived expression of nihilism to culturally nuanced thoughts on presence and absence. The corpus of primary texts includes essayist and environmental activist Terry Tempest Williams’s partially autobiographical volume When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice, in which she reflects on her own agency as a female Mormon writer. She does so by thinking about her mother, who seemingly followed the Mormon tradition of journal keeping by purchasing and collecting blank-page books, but who defied the same tradition by never entering a single word into these potential diaries. Williams’s work of creative non-fiction as well as the novels by Jonathan Safran Foer and Garth Risk Hallberg discussed here engage absence particularly through their intermedial techniques and make various kinds of gaps significant within the socio-political and psychological dimensions of their themes. In analyzing these authors’ approaches, I will focus on how their works raise awareness of the book as a material artefact with its concomitant medium-specific genre

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conventions and on how they foreground the impact of cultural traditions on the interpretation of absent signifiers. I will argue that their meta-commentary on absence represents gaps as an alternate form of presence which tends to cross the boundaries between verbal and non-verbal sign systems. The fourth text, Richard Powers’s novel Orfeo, thematizes absent signifiers rather than making their absence discernible in the material object of the book. I include this novel because it addresses the fraught relation between being and meaning: as the protagonist-composer eventually realizes, refusing to use traditional signifiers (in his case, a musical notation system) and instead using the genetic sequence within a bacterium to code a musical composition fails as a method of averting a situation in which others ascribe meaning to this sequence of signifiers. Even though Powers’s work differs from the others in the sense that entire chains of signifiers are transferred to an unconventional medium and are thus both absent (from known forms of music notation) and present (in genetic material not discernible by the naked eye or traditionally perceived aurally), the novel confirms the necessary focus on cultural contexts of writing, printing, distributing, performing, and reading practices found in the other three works. The protagonist’s futile attempt to remove his composition from the extensive sequence of innumerable sets of musical signifiers that has been evolving throughout history and to keep his piece private within a DNA-based chain of signifiers backfires in the post-9/11 United States, in which genetic signifiers contained in bacteria breathe panic and danger. Understanding signification in this novel is thus linked to media of discourse beyond the verbal, the visual, and the sonic. All of the texts under scrutiny in this essay display a decidedly ethical orientation that touches upon an assessment of the longevity, effectiveness, and cultural valences of the art forms that they employ, manipulate, and reconceptualize through intermediality and meaningful absence. Decoding and interpreting the significant absences in these contemporary works thus requires contextual cultural-historical knowledge. Williams, Foer, Hallberg, and Powers link the mental and emotional impact of such gaps in chains of signifiers to such knowledge and, thus, foster the recipients’ awareness of their mediumspecific expectations. The intermedial characteristics of these works, then, serve as constant reminders of the necessity to think and interpret across boundaries and conventions.

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Expected Materialities: Dimensions of Writing and Reading Books

For more than two decades, scholars and critics have been contemplating the implications of digitization, of digital books, and of the growth of Internet usage. Not infrequently, authors have diagnosed a crisis of the book as a material object.1 On the part of artists, one response to this perceived media crisis has been the creation of art that foregrounds its own materiality and mediality. Such meta-referential art lends a helping hand, as it were, to medially disoriented recipients by ensuring that meaning-making processes will demand more than considering the words on the page (cf. Starre 2015: 32f.; Pressman 2009: 465–467, 480). By attracting attention to the design and material characteristics of their books, Williams and Foer offer significant absences whose effect is rooted in specific expectations regarding what should be present for the sake of meaning-construction in the medium of the book. In particular, they make readers grapple with perceiving their writings as two- and/or three-dimensional artefacts that challenge practices of reading and interpreting, which, in turn, convey culturally ingrained attitudes towards writers and writing. 3

Terry Tempest Williams: Perceptions, Concepts, and Dissolved Dichotomies

In When Women Were Birds, Williams juxtaposes blank spaces and overdetermined spaces as absences with which she contemplates the phenomenon of ‘voice’ from opposite ends of the communicative situation, i.e., from the perspectives of the sender and the receiver. The first, seemingly innocuous, empty space which invites the reader’s engagement with the book’s materiality (and, as will become clear, with the book’s immaterial, philosophical contemplation) is the box-shaped space on the opening page. Above an empty line, the reader is invited to inscribe her/his name and claim ownership of the book (“This journal belongs to”, n. p.). At this point, the reader may not notice the unconventionality of the term “journal” for a book filled with print and purchased for reading what someone else wrote. Nevertheless, the ambiguous duality of reading versus writing – and of receiving and producing communicated content in the widest sense – subsequently becomes part of the central theme of creating and erasing, of activity and passivity, and of (un)conventional writing and reading practices. Simultaneously, the reader also cannot yet know 1 See, for instance, Freedman 2009; Hayles 1997; Pressman 2009; Starre 2015.

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that the reference to “This journal” will draw her/him into the shocking experience of confronting absence that Terry Tempest Williams went through after her mother, Diane, died of cancer in her early fifties: expecting to learn more about her mother’s interior world through the dozens of journals her mother bequeathed to her, Williams discovers that “shelf after shelf, all my mother’s journals were blank” (Williams 2012/2013: 2). By inserting twelve wordless pages after page 2, the book then simulates Williams’s haptic and visual expe­ rience of turning blank journal pages and taking in the absence of handwriting representing a person’s life and being.2 Having (possibly) written her/his name into the book and having thus performed an act of nullifying an absence by inserting a visually perceivable presence that denotes ownership, the experience of mentally processing the signifier-devoid pages draws the reader in ­further as a participant in meaning-creation according to medium- and genrespecific expectations. In the course of her reflections, Williams interrogates possible implications of absence and presence, and demonstrates how the dichotomy can transform into interchangeability. After overcoming her initial chagrin, she eventually decides to make sense of the empty pages by filling them with her own writing (cf. ibid.: 20) – which first may sound like an act of desecration but then figures as a positively connoted form of appropriation that possibly acknowledges the uniqueness of her individual voice and that offers a solution to the pain of facing and not being able to understand her mother’s blank journals. Nevertheless, Williams undermines this sense of security through what follows in the course of her text. Although she consistently engages in writing, she characterizes writing and selfhood as impermanent (cf. ibid.: 21) and implicitly questions the Mormon idea of “If I don’t write it down, it doesn’t exist” (ibid.: 46).3 Absence in When Women Were Birds bifurcates into invisibility and hypervisibility, both of which are strategies of transgression through denying legibility in a traditional sense. On the one hand, Williams proposes the option that, read in a Mormon context, her mother’s blank journals are a form of “parody of women’s journals, the wasted time we spend writing instead of living” (ibid.: 63). On the other hand, she goes beyond the immediate social context of her family and reads her mother’s decision as being in line with artistic experimentation with absence in works by – for instance – John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Kazimir Malevich (cf. ibid.: 61–63). This train of thought would cast her mother not simply as a rebellious Mormon woman but rather as a “concep2 Choosing to insert twelve blank pages gives this section a decidedly biblical feel, as it may be a symbolic reference to the twelve apostles. 3 Regarding the obligation of ‘record keeping’ in the Mormon faith, see Norton 1992 online.

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tual artist” (ibid.: 63), whose blank journal pages require interpretation as art. The context in which absence is produced and construed thus needs to be taken into consideration because it determines meaning-production and, even more prominently, evaluation. According to the latter perspective, Williams’s process of filling her mother’s journal pages with her own writing does not constitute an act of providing signifiers for a previously meaningless blankness, but it rather represents the creation of a transgenerational palimpsest, whose layers remain inaccessible to one another. This becomes clear in several instances. First, Williams depicts “furrows” as an inconclusive metaphor meant to undermine yet another binary opposition: “Can you be inside and outside at the same time?” (ibid.: 161); similarly, the wave pattern of furrows raises the issue of how empty in-between spaces may be potential locations for harvesting meaning: “What am I gleaning in the furrows of my Mother’s journals?” (ibid.: 163; emphasis added). Secondly, the daughter claims that her “[…] Mother’s Journals are written in code” (ibid.: 172; emphasis in the original), thus implying that the absent signifiers are significant but hard to decipher, that they require an exclusive and possibly superior kind of knowledge (i.e., the proper code), and that the code may have been used to shield the hidden signifiers from all-too-public view. Thirdly, Williams develops her own code of semantic indecipherability through overdetermination, which demonstrates how visual layering veils meaning that exists and persists within each two-dimensional and linear segment: “When I want to see the furthest into my soul, I will write a sentence by hand and then write another sentence over it, followed by another. An entire paragraph will live in one line, and no one else can read it. That is the point.” (Ibid.: 179) While signifiers are present in this self-produced superimposed form of writing (see Figure 2.1), their presence becomes absurd through illegibility. Without explaining the portmanteau word, which evokes Jacques Derrida’s neologism différance, Williams writes: “My name for this kind of writing is repetations” (ibid.: 180), which may possibly be a mixture of ‘repetition’ and ‘perpetration’, or of ‘repetition’ and ‘interpretation’. She claims that her “repetations” become pathways towards private truths and subsequently “turn into reimagined glyphs. Their meaning resides in the process of obfuscation.” (Ibid.: 182) In other words, the layered signifiers cannot be linked to any signifieds because the relation is not just arbitrary but even ephemeral and idiosyncratic. The conceptualization of the “glyph” as a symbolic icon that may be engraved into a material object, then, figures as a signifier that – similar to a palimpsest – assumes a decidedly three-dimensional character that transcends the conventional notion of the two-dimensional book page.

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Figure 2.1 Williams’s “repetations” (When Women Were Birds, 180)

Williams’s act of creating a palimpsest-like text that is meant to be unreadable for others, moreover, figures as a counterpoise to her mother’s blank journals because the hyper-presence of layered writing results in an absence of signification through illegibility. The absence of discernible meaning based on the semantics of written words – despite the physical and visibly discernible presence of what one assumes to be a mass of signifiers – encourages the perceiver to contemplate the relation between being and meaning.4 While a blank page and a page covered with multiple layers of words are opposites in the realm of perception (unseen versus seen words), they merge into one shared conceptual framework: disallowing access to interpretation by others besides the author/creator. In this sense, then, Williams foregrounds the conceptual power behind her mother’s and her own decisions as to what they decided not to reveal, and absence and presence achieve a comparable effect. The inaccessibility of absent signifiers transfers hermeneutic attempts at understanding from the intrinsic world of the text to extrinsic contexts, which will then – as shown with Williams’s characterization of her mother as a concept artist – result in assessments based on cultural values. Ultimately, Williams portrays the absence of signifiers in order to confirm the individual’s right to private thought; and she challenges herself and others to face the absence of signifiers on a regular basis. Thus, in section XLIX, a blank page (cf. ibid.: 185) follows the sentence “Here is what I will tell you.” (ibid.: 184) And the final sentence of the book reads: “Each day I begin with the empty page.” (Ibid.: 228) Although the ending of the book highlights Terry Tempest Williams’s individual strategy of interpreting the mystery of absence through self-inscription on surfaces that are meant to be filled with signifiers in accordance with specific cultural conventions, this is not the only possible option for voice formation in When Women Were Birds, as indicated by the subtitle, Fifty-four Variations on Voice. Another example, besides Williams’s and 4 This effect will again be relevant in the discussion of Richard Powers’s novel later in this contribution.

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her mother’s, that stems from a family context is Williams’s grandmother’s approach: she filled the margins of her field guides on birds by recording in each case “the date and place where she first saw this species” (ibid.: 29). While margins of books are not explicitly and traditionally coded as spaces to be filled with signifiers by readers, the act of adding signifiers to something that is deemed complete also indicates that – in turn – the presence of unexpected marginal remarks may make the remaining unfilled margins seem empty. The ambivalence of the im/possibility of meaning creation through visibly absent signifiers (empty pages) and through hyper-visible but illegible layers of signifiers (Williams’s repetations) heightens awareness of how, as Starre argues, “metamediality” allows “literary texts [to] enforce and make visible the structural coupling between their communicative operations and their carrier medium” (2015: 43). Foregrounding the function of the material book as a vehicle of communication can, as has been shown in Williams’s reflections on the functions of journals in her community, “complicate, or rather activate, the dichotomy between text and context, between art and the social” (ibid.: 65). In the same light, Starre interprets Jonathan Safran Foer’s novels Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005), and Tree of Codes (2010) as “a series of meditations on bibliography, memory, and the world-creating function of literature” because all of these texts demonstrate “that to preserve memories always entails making media” (219). As in the case of Williams’s mother’s journals, the presence of the material medium per se does not suffice when, in Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, nearly empty or completely empty pages potentially signify the refusal to communicate or the desire to cause pain (cf. ibid.: 237). 4

Jonathan Safran Foer: Sculptured (W)holes and (the) Book (of) Culture

In Foer’s Tree of Codes, the absence of signifiers persistently accompanies and informs the reading and, one might add, viewing experience – both on the two-dimensional, horizontal plane of each sheet of paper and in the three-dimensional ‘box’ shape of the entire book. The die-cut pages of the work take on the shape of “a bibliographic sculpture” (Starre 2015: 217).5 Using Bruno

5 See, for instance, the following photograph: .

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Schulz’s volume of short stories entitled Street of Crocodiles6 as a point of departure, Foer physically removed about 90% of Schulz’s words, leaving empty spaces that add up to variously sized holes in the book and that create a new chain of verbal signifiers (cf. Hayles 2013: 227). As a result, on the level of individual pages, the experience of reading Tree of Codes oscillates between trying to assemble a narrative by stringing together the visible words and wondering what narrative the now absent signifiers may have constructed. The overlapping pages and holes upset conventional page-by-page reading habits because they raise the question as to whether one should insert an empty sheet of paper underneath each book page in order to read the words printed on the same level in their linear sequence (see Figure 2.2), or whether one should try to read “page words” in conjunction with interspersed “hole words” that are discernible on lower levels within the book, thus disrupting the sequence in which they originally appeared in Schulz’s text (ibid.: 229). The latter reading mechanism only makes sense if Foer made each cut with the hole words emerging in lower levels in mind (cf. ibid.: 230), which would imply that only one specific typesetting of Schulz’s works could yield the desired combination of page words and hole words.7 It would also mean that hole words were made visible possibly at the cost of eradicating potentially important page words – which, to my mind, makes the intentionally strategic use of hole words rather implausible. This does not, however, preclude the enjoyment of discovering intriguing combinations of page words and hole words created by coincidence. Several of the systematic features of Foer’s die-cutting method evoke techniques and effects familiar from concrete poetry.8 Thus, some pages represent absence as mentioned in the narrative text through visual blanks on the page, thus fulfilling a mimetic function (cf. Wolf, this volume: 26). For instance, the word “lost” is seen as disconnected and as literally lost between large wordless gaps (Foer 2010/2011: 25). Some pages visually evoke location markers that are described verbally: the phrase “the corner of the room” is situated in the upper left-hand corner of a rectangular cut-out that takes up about one quarter of a page, which is then followed by the single word “spread” and a full stop in the next rectangle (ibid.: 26, 31). Similarly, the phrase “its corner” once occurs in 6 Schulz’s short story collection first appeared in its Polish original version in 1934 as Sklepy cynamonowe (‘Cinnamon Shops’) and was translated into English in 1963. 7 This goes against Berit Michel’s reading of Foer’s book sculpture as a representation of labyrinthine urban environments that supposedly offers as many die-cutting options as there are readers (cf. 2014: 181). 8 Bray speaks of “Concrete Poetry and Prose”, arguing that “visual experimentation tends to become heightened and more significant when generic boundaries are elided or brought into question, when the physical formats of prose and verse are combined” (2012: 298).

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Figure 2.2 Foer, The Tree of Codes (with a yellow sheet of paper inserted underneath p. 8) (Photo: by the author of this contribution)

the bottom-left corner of a page (ibid.: 66). Both of these examples are most likely the result of serendipity – unless Foer had Schulz’s text set in a specific way in order to achieve this effect. The placing of these words and phrases on their respective pages coheres with the narrative about the conflict between characters referred to as Mother and Father; the large gaps on a page that only contains 13 words can thus be interpreted as visual representations of the silence and the lack of communication between the estranged spouses. Once again stressing the text’s proximity to poetry, Foer heightens the impact of the combined fragments through assonances, alliterations, and other types of sound and word play, as in the phrase “Father’s groans / grown unfamiliar” (ibid.: 29). In addition to the strategic use of visual gaps for the sake of semantic emphasis, some gaps result in an enjambment-like effect, as when the narrator (the son of the above-mentioned parents) describes how, during a nocturnal stroll through the city, his sense of anxiety and apprehensiveness keeps growing. Subsequently, he recounts an unexpected and exhilarating

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epiphany. This experience, at first, seems to change his fear of being lost (“anxious / to lose my way”) into the certainty of experiencing the opposite (“I / found myself”; ibid.: 80). But the next word – “lost” (ibid.: 81) – reverses the reassuring implications of the former phrase. The narrator, in fact, remains confused as to his whereabouts at this point. The surprise element of enjambment recurs in the metaphors and conceits resulting from inserting gaps in Schulz’s chains of signifiers. Thus, Foer evokes snow and ice, which in turn symbolize silence and isolation in the sequence: “The / earth was covered with a / tablecloth of / winter / . / the hours of darkness / hardened with / boredom.” (Ibid.: 35) Similar imagery conveys a sense of tragedy regarding the father’s retreat into solitude (“My father would walk along / like a gardener / of / nothingness / , / outside / of / the surface of life / . / he / seemed to / scatter into fragments, / an enormous featherless / dignity”; ibid.: 37f.), which is emphasized through paradoxes like “sawdust / tears” (ibid.: 46) and “the / sadness of / comic / genius” (ibid.: 56). Foer also juxtaposes the reduction of human beings into inanimate dust with figuratively animated houses and trees (cf. ibid.: 104) that are personified through recombining subjects and verbs from distinct sentences. The narrator focuses on human frailty, suffering, and isolation, and on life being reduced to something insubstantial, which is neither preserved nor remembered.9 One of the descriptions of this attitude is encoded in a metamedial metaphor that includes the book’s title, which is composed of fragments from Schulz’s book title: “we / find ourselves / part of the / tree / of / cod / es /. Reality is as thin as paper.” (Ibid.: 92) A die-cut book, with its incomplete sheets of paper, materially foregrounds such actual and figurative thinness; thus, whoever holds this novel in her/his hands and turns the pages experiences the fragility of physical reality; moreover, the absent sections of paper as well as the signifiers scattered on the present segments of paper express a heightened sense of loss. Accordingly, further types of absence affect the reading experience: the immense gaps between words and punctuation impact the rhythm and flow of reading. On the first page on which one would traditionally expect to see the chapter heading and the beginning of the narrative text proper (cf. ibid.: 7), Foer confronts readers with a total absence of verbal signifiers: Schulz’s entire text has been replaced by several gaping rectangular holes. In tune with 9 Even after the narrator’s claim that he is happy (cf. Foer 2010/2011: 85), he returns to a rather negative characterization of the city and its inhabitants (cf. ibid.: 89–91). Later he even badmouths city dwellers as forming a “mob” (ibid.: 113–18, 124) and accuses his mother of being responsible for his father’s death (cf. ibid.: 97–101).

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depriving Schulz’s book title of its opening letter, the beginning of his narrative is truncated. Foer did not only consistently cut out all chapter headings, but the text also includes cuts that disfigure words into nonsense (cf. ibid.: 95).10 Following such an instance of gap-produced unreadability, the narrator claims that “nothing can ever reach a definite conclusion” (ibid.: 95). Thus, contrary to the physical reality of a book, which, if the book has a proper front and back, suggests a beginning and an ending, gaps in places perceived as beginnings and endings acquire particular poignancy and may be read as fulfilling the function of transporting a worldview characterized by fluidity and interminability. The metamedial awareness fostered in the narrative becomes a cornerstone in interpreting Foer’s conceptualization of Tree of Codes. Already in the narrative, time and organic growth are tied to the proverbial ‘book of life’ (cf. ibid.: 109f.). In his afterword, Foer then describes the prayers on small slips of paper that visitors deposit in the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem as “a kind of magical, unbound book” (ibid.: 137) and also characterizes Schulz’s work as being part of an “imagined larger book” (ibid.: 139) from which artists retrieve and construct their respective works the way Foer produced his work by mining Schulz’s book. Besides the obvious link between the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and Schulz’s murder by a Gestapo officer during the Third Reich, the author’s afterword encourages reading Tree of Codes as a work of art that enlists the material form of the book in order to reflect on specific features of the material world as a trope for the metaphysical realm. 5

A Cultural Poetics of Reading Absence

Williams’s and Foer’s texts demonstrate that interpreting their significant absences requires contextual knowledge of cultural history.11 When Women Were Birds must be discussed with Mormon beliefs in mind; additionally, Williams branches out and incorporates further cultural traditions into her contemplations about voice, about women’s clandestine forms of self-expression, and about restricting one’s audience through coding. For Foer, Jewish history and folklore, particularly the history of the Holocaust and its aftermath, inform the ways in which the three-dimensional architecture of a book, including the 10 11

A milder variant of confusing the reader is the impact that cut-outs exert on conventional perceptions of capitalization: lower-case letters at sentence beginnings, instances of the first-person pronoun as “i”, and capitalized words in the middle of a sentence. For a general discussion of “The Metamedium as Social Text”, cf. Starre 2015: 63–66.

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foregrounded gaps therein, allegorically represents the historical and cultural embeddedness of artistic works. While When Women Were Birds and Tree of Codes certainly employ – to repeat Wolf’s terms here – “non-accidental” and “intentional” gaps which assume significance because they occur both within chains of signifiers (particularly in Foer’s die-cut book) and within the “immediate margins of signifying systems” (as in empty sections following a chapter or segment in Williams’s text), both of the examples discussed above develop their specific variants of the “worldview function”. When Women Were Birds frequently specifies this function by thematizing it and by directing the reader’s attention to instances of consciously placed gaps. Choosing a different path, Tree of Codes proceeds in two central manners: first, the words and punctuation marks that precede and follow the gaps in an original chain of signifiers result in a new chain of signifiers that is syntactically and semantically a mostly coherent and conventionally understandable narrative of its own; second, the work stipulates a close relation between intentionally carved holes and their significance in the bigger picture of Jewish cultural history and of the human condition, which is then explicated and confirmed in the paratextual afterword. 6

Garth Risk Hallberg’s Meta-Generic Taxonomies

The third case study also fits this mold of requiring a context-specific poetics of reading that transcends the intrinsic features of the text. At the same time – and analogous to Foer’s book sculpture – it is a work that foregrounds its ‘bookish’ aesthetics and thus requires readers to regard paratexts as integral parts of the narrative.12 What distinguishes this work from the previous examples resides in a specific central feature which overshadows the reading experience: the consistently intermedial text employs conventions from non-fiction and fiction in a way that not only situates the entire work in limbo between conflicting reading practices but which also makes it more difficult to determine what constitutes a chain of signifiers. The repeated use of missing signifieds in the sense of Wolfgang Iser’s blanks or gaps, which incite readers to contemplate possible logical connections that will result in a narrative (cf. Iser 1976/1994: 266, 284), makes the cases of absent signifiers all the more striking. These missing signifiers let the reader experience a lack of coherence and, in turn, this experience of significant absence confirms readers’ expectation that books consist of chains of signifiers which create meaning. 12

On this functional integration of text and paratexts, cf. Starre 2015: 135.

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The title on the front cover of Garth Risk Hallberg’s A Field Guide to the North American Family: (An Illustrated Novella) (2007), with its reference to two text genres and with its parenthetical subtitle, confronts potential buyers and readers with a first impression of incongruity: why would anyone write a field guide about humans rather than about flora and fauna, and how do the informational, science-based genre of a field guide and the fictional genre of a novella go together? The longer subtitle provided on the inside title page corroborates the impression of mixed genres, as the families that provide empirical evidence for the guide book are described in the vocabulary of Linnaean classifications for birds: A Field Guide to the North American Family: Concerning Chiefly the Hungates and Harrisons, with Accounts of Their Habits, Nesting, Dispersion, etc., and Full Description of the Plumage of Both Adult and Young, Within a Taxonomic Survey of Several Aspects of Familial Life.13 Presumably, readers may not notice upon first perusal that Hallberg mentions ‘habits’ rather than ‘habitats’ and that the title plays with the figurative and literal meanings of ‘nesting’ and ‘plumage’. The subsequent pseudo-explanation as to “How to Use This Book” (n. p.) reads like a parody of the author’s “Notice” at the beginning of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), in which the author threatens to punish readers in search of a “moral” or a “plot” even though the novel denounces the havoc that race and class prejudice have been wreaking on society in the United States (Twain 1884/2007: 108). Similarly, Hallberg slyly claims: “The author sincerely hopes that this novella will prove to be of value for all readers. To that end, several methods have been provided for navigation” (n. p.), as if the book were a ship to be steered through stormy waters during an exploratory journey. Supposed orientation mechanisms include the “capitalized guideword […] at the top of each even-numbered page” as well as “[p]rimary cross-references” and “[s]econdary cross-references […] within the italicized photo captions” (n. p.). These instructions turn out not to be helpful at all because of the alphabetical order of entries and because of the competing systems of cross-references. Thus, Hallberg’s Field Guide goes against traditional fiction-reading practices based on the presumably logical sequence of numbered pages, as also suggested in the remark that “[s]ome bold readers may even wish to peruse the book at random, or to consult the table of contents as need dictates. No matter; a narrative will eventually emerge.” (n. p.) At the same time, Hallberg lets the scientific logic of a field guide’s internal struc-

13

Accordingly, the chart that shows the two couples and their sets of two children each is entitled “Two Representative Families” (n. p.).

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turing system disintegrate into a network of internal links that are not consistently conclusive. A text that undermines linearity in the narrative and in the reading method complicates the process of determining viable criteria for gaps in chains of signifiers: what are the criteria for any kind of sequence if the chain of signifiers can be (re-)composed at random? In a field guide or any other work that usually presents several paradigms of content (for instance, brief encyclopedic entries, images, captions, subject index terms) in conventional combinations and that invites an occasion-based selection of what is read at which point – rather than a necessarily sequential reading practice based on what is regarded (or at least presented) as the beginning, middle, and ending – the lack of a prescriptive sequence requires a different concept of when an absence can be perceived as an absence. As a remark on the back of the book emphasizes, Hallberg’s work foregrounds its metamedial features to an extent that the narrative content focused on the taxonomy of the early-twenty-first-century family recedes behind an “explor[ation of] the future of the book” (n. p.). Thus, the medium itself is at stake as much as the theme its contents address. Recurring blanks or gaps in Iser’s sense include missing linkages between an entry title and the subsequent narrative text on the verso page as well as a comparable lack of connectivity among the photograph, its caption, and the primary and secondary cross-references on the recto page. The experience of these absent transitions and connections is based on conventional expectations regarding the use of specific medial components of representation in the genre of the field guide: subject headings refer to representatives of a group of creatures; texts printed underneath an entry title are to explain the characteristics of the titular reference in a rational manner; a captioned photograph printed alongside the verbal entry should illustrate the described entity in order to facilitate an observer’s ability to recognize a specimen in its habitat outside the book; and cross-references should be factual and knowledge-enhancing rather than ironic and nebulous. Counteracting such generic expectations, most of the headings in Field Guide refer to feelings or other immaterial phenomena, whereas the narrative text pertains to how human relationships evolve in very practical terms within and between the two central families. While a narrative passage may concretize the subject heading by recounting individual experiences, the accompanying photograph often presents itself as a ‘document’ geared towards the recognizability of individuals, locations, and events. Instead, these images often provide a figurative take on the topic, while the language of the caption animates subject headings like “consensus”, “custody battle”, and “entertainment”

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as if these terms equaled fauna living in the American family’s habitat.14 For instance, the entry on “Divorce” includes Gabe Hungate’s third-person account of blaming himself for the demise of his parents’ marriage. The photograph displays folding chairs as well as pink and white party decorations scattered on a grassy surface, evoking the trail of devastation caused by a storm that dispersed what may have been an outside wedding ceremony. The implicitly disastrous event whose aftermath is pictured here may serve as a retrospective sense of foreboding. Nevertheless, the cause of the Hungates’ divorce (which could presumably neither be visualized nor reduced to one image) is as absent as any of the human beings involved. Conjecture and hints thus replace the explanations one may associate with a proper field guide. Besides the lack of transitions between these contrasting discourses within an entry, readers might conclude that individual entries are not to be regarded as chains of signifiers at all and that one needs to decide whether any such chain exists beyond the achronological and polyvocal puzzle pieces of the Harrisons’ and the Hungates’ interactions. Contrary to such a conclusion, however, some of the entries do evoke the impression of being close-knit units, although reading them as chains of signifiers requires a sense of irony that allows the recipient to decode incongruence. Central sources for establishing an underlying ironic code are terms and icons linked to cultural values that have been promoted in the United States at least since the eighteenth century. For instance, the entry titled “Freedom” features a covert narrator, in whom one can recognize the recently divorced Elizabeth, contemplating whether her post-divorce activities express the titular concept of this entry. The accompanying photograph displays a barn, a horse, and a tree, complete with a caption that designates “Freedom” and “Meaning” as endangered species. This parody of individual liberty as entrenched in a pastoral romanticization of farming can be read in light of American frontier and homesteading ideologies as well as in the context of the overall Hungate/Harrison narrative about disillusioned dwellers in twenty-first-century suburbia. Similar to the iconic use of farm-related visual elements, the entry on “Heirloom” features an adolescent character’s narrative of his own ridiculous behavior in a situation in which he tried to prove his manliness by threatening others with a firearm as if he were a frontiersman claiming his right to bear arms and right to defend himself. The accompanying photograph shows a decidedly unmanly stuffed hunting trophy wrapped in cellophane. The caption reads: “The reappearance of the Heirloom, which happens only once per generation, is not to be missed by connoisseurs of­ Meaning.” (Ibid.: 59) Both “Freedom” and “Heirloom” rely on a code that 14

Regarding interrelations between images and words in life writing, see Adams 2000.

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reductively represents and thus parodies elements of American social ideologies which are questioned through the combination of words and images. Furthermore, the cross-references within the volume develop their own code of reading the state of the American family through pseudo-biological language: in the entry “Habits, Bad”, Hallberg presents a photo caption that reads: “Depending on parent genotype, the crossbreeding of a Bad Habit and Boredom will result in either Chemistry [i.e., a euphemism for drug abuse] or Entertainment.” (Ibid.: 55) Strikingly, the entry “Habits, Bad” includes a grey page instead of a photograph, thus relying in its effect on an overt gap in the chain of signifiers established by the field-guide template, even in its ironic and enigmatic manifestation of incoherence. In this case, the absent visual image could imply that the entry’s topic either can or must not be represented, or that ‘bad habits’ such as drug abuse or hedonistic pleasure result in a loss of consciousness and perception – and, thus, a gap in yet another internal chain of signifiers. Analogous to the missing photograph as a significant absence, Hallberg drops both the caption and the cross-references in the section entitled “Vulnerability”. As this is the sixty-first of sixty-three entries, a person who has been reading the text linearly from one page to the next will certainly notice this gap because the page-spread breaks with the work’s established, genre-based sequence and combination of features. Rather than simply dropping the expected content provided by a verbal caption and verbal cross-references, Hallberg shifts these elements into a framework provided by elements of graphic design. The recto page thus does not feature a framed visual; instead, a full-page image provides non-verbal cross-references that contextualize “Vulnerability” within visual references to erasure, to the destruction of home and hearth, to pain and suffering, and to pairs/couples. Significantly, the full-page collage incorporates an instruction sheet for making a book, which ties together the entire novella’s paratextual reflection on the seemingly shared futures of the American family and of the book as a medium. Implicitly, the book as a coherent unit in itself requires an intact series of signifiers which, in Hallberg’s text, consistently teeters on the brink of disintegration. 7

A Failed Attempt at Redefining Being and Meaning

Richard Powers’s novel Orfeo focuses on Peter Els, a trained composer and chemist who dabbles in genetic engineering. Els manipulates the DNA sequence of a bacterium in order to create what he regards as a materially coded succession of pitches. He uses this soundless method of notation in an attempt to transcend what, to him, are the tyrannical regimes of taste-makers (such as

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the music industry, the academic world of teaching and composing music, and listeners in general) and, on a much larger scale, the relentlessness of time passing and of ephemeral existence. While Els has been yearning to move listeners throughout his life, he has basically given up on trying to do so with an audience of human listeners. Having been criticized as a conservative composer for his interest in the emotional impact of musical beauty and having experienced the politicized misinterpretation of his work as encouraging terrorist violence, Els imagines that the absence of traditional musical signifiers will protect him from rejection and misunderstanding. Due to a chain of unforeseen events, Els’s attempt to prevent others from attaching specific signifieds to his musical/biochemical composition is doomed because, in a post-9/11 climate of paranoia, his amateur genetic engineering for artistic purposes is misinterpreted as bioterrorism.15 To his chagrin, the hysteria surrounding the medium in which he has notated his composition precludes any interest in the music he encoded as well as the possibility of regarding his work as a private matter. The sonic possibilities of the genetic code remain silent and undisclosed, whereas the bacterial substance carrying it is imagined to be spreading virulently, with evil intent, and with lethal consequences. Even though Powers’s novel contains long segments in which sound-related and medium-specific features of musical works are described, Orfeo does not offer these merely as verbal representations of musical soundscapes in a printed book, that is, as attempts to approximate the aural features of a piece of music through verbal semantics or maybe even through the sounds of words readers may hear in their heads while reading. Rather, the novelist weaves these descriptions into characterizations both of specific characters and of social contexts of performance and reception so that the art of music is never disconnected from meaning construction, be it in private relations or in public settings.16 Despite this embeddedness of music in concrete psychological and social sensibilities in which the musical signifiers are linked to culturally and individually determined signifieds, the narrator introduces Peter Els as an idealistic composer, who desires “to break free of time and hear the future” (Powers 2014: 2). This feat, he assumes, can be accomplished through music because it

15 16

Also see Powers’s summary of the novel’s gist in an interview he gave while writing Orfeo (Sun 2013 online: 344). Powers explains his interest in combining “different kinds of categories and crash them together” and in “colliding it [the novel of ideas] with the fiction of psychological character development, the historical fiction, the political fiction.” (Ibid.: 335)

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“forecasts the past, recalls the future” (ibid.: 28).17 Els’s yearning partially stems from understanding that humans cannot correct mistakes made earlier in life by reversing time and undoing bad decisions, as Powers jokingly implies with the invented name of “Verrata College” (a portmanteau word composed of ‘verum’ and ‘errata’ that evokes Benjamin Franklin’s use of the analogy between printers’ errors and regrettable decisions)18 where Els taught musical composition. Els’s rejection of linearity as relentlessly moving forward in a space–time continuum foreshadows how he eventually imagines that his creation of a seemingly unreadable and thus, for regular music consumers, absent set of signifiers (i.e., his DNA-encoded song) will allow him to achieve two things: to correct an error in the chain of signifiers constituting his life and career as a composer (the error being that he left his family and abandoned beautiful, emotionally touching music) and to transcend time by creating a bacterium that will multiply endlessly without being subjected to the whims of musical taste. The protagonist’s central internal struggle focuses on the disconnect between the pure existence of musical beauty in the composer’s mind and the meaning imposed upon a piece of music by others. Having come to the conclusion that absent signifiers in the form of silences contain the deepest meaning (cf. ibid.: 32, 40, 142f., 193, 347) and that he needs to guard his compositions against listeners who misconstrue their meaning, the composer-scientist goes beyond significant rests in musical pieces. He reasons that genetic material consists of a seemingly “pointless overabundance” (ibid.: 42) of signs which supposedly surpasses human-made musical codes. Els hyperbolically claims that “there were, in a single cell, astonishing synchronizing sequences, plays of notes that made the Mass in B Minor sound like a jump-rope jingle” (ibid.). Read within the novel as a whole, his rhetorical dismissal of Johann Sebastian Bach’s highly acclaimed masterpiece coheres with his conclusion that Nature contains art that humans emulate but can never equal.19 Els confirms this by 17

18

19

Also see Els’s claim that, as found in some works by Gustav Mahler and Alban Berg, “music blurred the line between prophecy and recall” (Powers 2014: 38). Furthermore, he regards his project of composing in DNA as a method of fulfilling goals that Mahler (cf. ibid.: 333) ostensibly shared with Olivier Messiaen (cf. ibid.: 334). Franklin explains this analogy as follows: “[…] were it offer’d to my Choice, I should have no Objection to a Repetition of the same Life from its Beginnings, only asking the Advantage Authors have in a second Edition to correct some Faults of the first.” (Franklin 1791/2007: 481) Subsequently, he refers, for instance, to “the first Errata of my Life” (ibid.: 493). According to Els, certain features of music are “God-given” (Power 2014: 10) – a phenomenon he contrasts with human “taste”; he thinks that “[s]omething magnificent and enduring hid under music’s exhausted surface. Somewhere behind the familiar staff lay

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assuming that bird song represents the opposite of time (ibid.: 115f.). Simultaneously, Els does discern the same potential in human-made composition when he argues that works like Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps (1941) strive to achieve a related effect of overcoming the atrocities of war through music. As opposed to the French composer, however, Els retreats into a soundless system and focuses on notation.20 While he is on the run from the authorities, he resorts to distributing cryptic messages through Twitter (cf. ibid.: 350 and passim) using the handle “@Terrorchord” (ibid.: 350). The irony of using silent tweets (despite their avian name) and of entering the world of anything but private social media indicates his awareness of the fact that his signifiers will be linked to unsuitable signifieds: references to bacterium-based music will be read as threats to national security rather than as an artistic manifesto. Ultimately, Els’s notion of his music being in a state of purity untouched by interpretation21 comes to naught because the signifying system of any specific medium is subject to historical and cultural conditions that provide a basis for meaning-making – namely for arbitrarily associating signifieds with signifiers. Scrambling to dig up incriminating information about the accused composer-biochemist, journalists retrieve a recording of Els’s failed opera The Fowler’s Snare about sixteenth-century Anabaptists, which premiered during the violent climax of the 1993 confrontation between the F.B.I. and the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. As Els realizes upon hearing a snippet from an aria by a frenzied operatic character who rhapsodizes the ostensible beauty of terror, his opera is retrospectively read as a precursor of his supposed terrorist tendencies (cf. ibid.: 146), comparable to the unintended chaos produced by “the brooms of the sorcerer’s apprentice” in Goethe’s eponymous poem (ibid.:

20 21

constellations of notes, sequences of pitches that could bring the mind home.” (Ibid.) In the final analysis, he fails to acknowledge that he wants his music to affect listeners but that other music as well as the musical qualities of Nature can do so better than he can. Accordingly, the narrator’s claims that “Peter won’t realize until too late that all he ever wanted was to move a listener the way these [Mozart] variations moved him” (ibid.: 22, cf. also 57, 98, 100, 130). Interestingly, Terry Tempest Williams not only addresses the relation between Messiaen’s above-mentioned quartet and bird song, but also includes a quotation of Messiaen’s concept of evoking bird sounds as a juxtaposition to the prison of time (cf. 2012/2013: 68). The sonification of DNA gives Els the idea “to reverse the process, to inscribe a piece for safekeeping into the genetic material of a bacterium.” (Ibid.: 333) “Music, he’ll [Els will] tell anyone who asks over the next fifty years, doesn’t mean things. It is things.” (Ibid.: 69)

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151).22 This anachronistic reading of his opera – determined by the political self-positioning of AM talk radio on which the aria is aired – belies Els’s idealism regarding the desire to compose music that is not mired in the sociopolitical contexts of specific themes, circumstances of artistic production, and conditions of reception.23 Also, the advantages that Els hoped for in the absence of traditional musical signifiers are nullified by readings of the stand-in biological signifiers: such interpretations are subject to the political climate and thus comparable to the very politics of musical fashions Els encountered in graduate school and among classical music audiences. Although Els did not engage in producing physically hazardous bacteria, the material (albeit invisible) presence of his silent music creates outrage and panic. The absent signifiers of Els’s genetically encoded composition thus are not visibly represented within a printed chain of signifiers that constitutes the linearity of the novel the reader encounters. The extensive historical trajectory of Els’s contemplation of music history evokes a chain of signifiers in which each musical piece represents one link; on a smaller scale, rethinking his career as a composer also creates a time line in which Els’s compositions represent his perspective on music. Powers allows discursive modes and their sign systems to collide and to riff off of one another in order to foreground their methods of signification and historically embedded mechanisms of assigning meaning/ signifieds. Just as much as musical notation and actual sound are not part of the novel’s verbal medium, Els’s DNA sequence cannot be represented as such in the text. However, Powers simulates two features of how DNA has been visualized and, thus, illustrated in another medium. Sitting in a coffee shop, Peter Els is listening to Steve Reich’s 1995 piece “Proverb”, a setting of a Wittgenstein text (cf. ibid.: 245). Spread over several pages, the lyrics of the song setting are broken down into smaller and smaller fragments (cf. ibid.: 247–253) until they have turned into vertical strings of individual letters. These letters are not signifiers per se and only acquire language-based meaning when the novel’s reader consciously groups the letters into discernible English words; more importantly, their subdivision into the smallest graphic units (letters) evokes the visual 22 23

Els’s assumption that he destroyed all traces of the opera – which may be true for the score and sheet music (52f.) – and that “[t]he cryptic music now existed nowhere but in his ears” (ibid.: 53) is proven wrong. Eventually, Els acknowledges how his own life experience influences how he reads music (cf. ibid.: 247) and that he has been engaged in a classic hermeneutic circle. For instance, old compositional techniques suddenly strike him as new (cf. ibid.: 250). However, his understanding of ages as oscillating comes too late (cf. ibid.: 251) for him to reverse his flight from Homeland Security.

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equivalent of a genetic sequence and, thus, symbolically represents Els’s analysis of his environment, the people around him, and his own life, and how he perceives the possibility of synthesis. Towards the end of the piece, “[c]anon and organum at last merge. The two halves of this braid, across their eightcentury gap, weave together so seamlessly it’s clear now how they were shaped from the start solely for this reunion” (ibid.: 253). The metaphor of braided lines of sound evokes well-known images of DNA structure as a double helix, and Els reads them as transcending time and fulfilling an undefined kind of destiny which, again, links Els’s ideal of musical beauty to Nature and to a sense of wholeness. Powers’s novel encourages openness to adjusting the scale for assessing absence in chains of signifiers and to contemplating the impact of switching media. A life time, an individual’s œuvre, and the history of an art form constitute sequences consisting of entire musical compositions. If one reads each musical composition as an individual signifier within one of these immense sequences of works, then one may perceive a sequence as being characterized by an overall feature like progress, teleological development, regression, failure, and so on. Removing a component from this sequence by refusing to use the same semiotic system as in previous components cannot result in avoiding signification. Absence from one context through transferral to another context thus does not preclude meaning-construction. 8

The Poetics and Ethics of Absence and Presence

The primary works discussed in this essay include various types of gaps in chains of signifiers. At the same time, they emphasize the conceptual permeability of ‘absence’ versus ‘presence’. As a result, these four narratives engage with reading practices linked to the book as a physical medium and, beyond that, to specific art forms and genres. As I hope to have shown, hermeneutic interpretation presupposes that each type of absence be seen in relation to the perceptual or conceptual focus of the respective work. The perceptually oriented play with absence and presence is, in all four cases, tied into a culturalhistorical web of allusions and contexts – all of which inform the interpretation of physical, visual, and thematized gaps as part of grasping the worldview-related dimensions of these contemporary narratives. In Williams’s example, absence is discursively presented as an alternate kind of presence. As she writes in When Women Were Birds: “On the next full moon I found myself alone in the family home. I kept expecting Mother to appear. Her absence became her presence.” (2012/2013: 1) Williams experiences

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physical absence as spiritual presence; she thus conceptualizes absence as a paradoxical enigma which encourages a carpe diem approach to everyday life. The gaps in Williams’s running text and the foregrounding of wordlessness through pages of white paper without print visually simulate Williams’s experience of encountering her mother’s empty journals and convey how the interpretation of such absences depends on contextualization, which may be as contrastive as Mormon gender roles and experimentation in conceptual visual arts in the early twentieth century. Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, whose afterword introduces the ‘worldview’ component of the book-as-a-concept whose concentric circles widen from his book sculpture to Holy Scriptures to the universe, also stresses the metaphysical dimension of art and creativity so that the absences in Tree of Codes cannot simply be read as implying lack of meaning. Playing with a reversal of expected implications, cutting Schulz’s text by 90% comes across not as a reduction but as a retrieval of intrinsic structures. Carving out a new text by erasing parts of a pre-existing text turns the material object of the book into a sculpture. Not only the words printed on each page but also the holes in the material object serve as vehicles for the narrative and transform absence into presence by showing the physical edges of the cut-outs and by presenting a coherent verbal narrative. The oddly shaped work disrupts traditional reading experiences and emphasizes the material object that conveys the narrative. At the same time, the absences in this book may be said to paradoxically symbolize Schulz’s disembodied presence, just as the fragmentation of the original text and of the physical book pages do not imply disconnectedness or chaos. Rather, as Foer shows through his claim that the slips of paper inserted into the Wailing Wall result in a book (albeit one whose ongoing production defies being literally bound and thus confined to having a materially discernible beginning and ending), Tree of Codes designates art as the ultimate act of communication that strives towards the metaphysical (as implied by a sense of infinite processes) by transcending its own medial boundaries (i.e., the physical limits of an individual book). Thus, the intermedial perceptual approach to reading Tree of Codes and the conceptual approach to absence reinforce each other in Foer’s work. Both Williams and Foer employ visual blanks which disrupt habitual reading practices by exaggerating spatial distances between linguistic signifiers. Visual gaps become indices of absences in the sequence of verbal and graphic signifiers. Both authors play with how acts of denying visually readable verbal signifiers strive towards entering three-dimensional space: Williams does so through overdetermined, layered writing that obstructs legibility, while the three-dimensional holes in Foer’s book inhibit both the reading process on

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each page and the sense of necessarily making sense of a literary text with the help of a unidirectional, linear sequence. Williams’s and Foer’s books thus appeal to the reader’s interpretative faculty by intermedially intertwining verbal and visual, narrative and sculptural discourses in their representation of absent or overly present signifiers. Hallberg’s Field Guide to the North American Family engages with the concept of a necessarily intermedial chain of signification which is determined by the genres of the field guide and the novella. Within a field guide, entries follow a conventional sequence of verbal and visual components (title, descriptive text, visual image, caption, cross references). The entries in Hallberg’s text can, as stated early in the novella, be read in random order because even a chronological perusal requires the reader to piece together the plot like a polyvocal and intermedial puzzle. The absences on the level of signifieds – missing links within the matrix of the main narrative text of each entry, the accompanying visual image, its caption and its cross-references – go along with an overall lack of clarity, recognizability, and verisimilitude, all of which do not abide by the genre expectations connected to a field guide as providing an empirically-grounded and systematically presented grid of specifics and differentiations. While the genre marker ‘novella’ in the subtitle manoeuvers the reader into the liminal space between facticity and fictionality, the emphasis on abstraction, emotions, ideologies, and cultural values rather than on concrete physical and material features highlights the absence of logical connections and results in a bleak portrait of contemporary American suburbia. Prepared by the gaps and blanks among the plot-constituting signifieds, the absence of signifiers from specific sequences in individual entries late in the book emphasizes and literally represents the overall lack of explicability. Like Williams’s and Foer’s narratives, Hallberg’s text relies on the intermedial combination of the verbal and the visual within the medium of the book. In the works by Foer, Hallberg, and Williams, perceptual absences – of words, images, and parts of the physical book page – serve as bridges to thematic, conceptual concerns which revolve around competing interpretations of significant absences. Novels that thematize music or that imitate musical techniques through verbal means do not produce sounds that are conventionally understood as music. Numerous novels, among them Powers’s Orfeo, include extensive passages in which the characteristics and hearing experience of music are described verbally – analogous to the use of ekphrasis to evoke visual arts with verbal signifiers.24 But instead of representing rests in musical composition through visibly discernible gaps in verbal chains of signifiers, Powers develops 24

See Wolf 1999; Petermann 2014.

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a different perspective on what constitutes a signifier, a chain, and meaningful absence. Individual compositions become signifiers within a sequence of signifiers within Peter Els’s œuvre and within music history in the widest sense. Absence then occurs in two manners: by switching to a notation system that Els thinks will defy arbitrary acts of assigning a signified to a signifier and by opting for silence and thus privacy in order to transcend the expressive possibilities of rests within a composition or of entirely soundless pieces of music in the concert hall. The musical composition that Els chooses to encode is a simple song he wrote for his wife and young daughter shortly before he left his family (cf. Powers 2014: 208f.) in order to pursue what he mistakenly considered a once-in-alifetime opportunity to create amazing art for large audiences. This song was never performed or heard outside the family’s private domestic space. Els’s ­attempt at preserving a musically uncomplicated, yet emotionally fulfilling composition for the future (seemingly not peopled with anthropomorphic posterity) in a silent medium was meant to evade social constrictions on artistic creativity and notions of beauty. Ironically, in an atmosphere of constant fear, the inaudibility of bacterial genes is read as an inherent threat to society as a whole. The intermediality of Orfeo as a novel that thematizes and describes music history as being caught within cultural and political trends and predicaments thus sharpens the conceptual focus on music as discourse which – silent or not – cannot escape interpretation, and thus as discourse that people other than the composer will necessarily connect to contextually provided signifieds. The era of post-9/11 dread perceives the silence of a cell as – pardon the pun – a ‘sleeper cell’ that harbors a destructive force whose unknown potential impact enlarges its imagined destructive force. The social context of music ultimately exposes Els’s faulty dichotomy of being and meaning: while signification is certainly arbitrary and contingent, it remains unavoidable. Despite their obvious differences, the works discussed here share the impetus of questioning the ostensibly dichotomous and stable relation between absence and presence. Furthermore, these texts embed insights into how one can make sense of absent signifiers, particularly in light of genre- and mediumrelated expectations and in terms of culturally rooted processes of assigning meaning to missing signifiers. As expressed in Susan Sontag’s musings quoted at the beginning of this chapter, the distinction between traditions of perceiving and thus reading a work of art, and of considering conceptual notions expressed in such a work, is a helpful tool in the endeavor to assess when and how an absence of signifiers becomes significant.

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References

Adams, Timothy Dow (2000). Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobio­ graphy. Chapel Hill, NC/London: The Univ. of North Carolina Press. Baym, Nina, et al., eds. (2007). The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 7th ed. New York, NY: Norton. Bray, Joe (2012). “Concrete Poetry and Prose”. Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, Brian McHale, eds. The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. London: Routledge. 298–309. Foer, Jonathan Safran (2003). Everything is Illuminated. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foer, Jonathan Safran (2005). Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Foer, Jonathan Safran (2010/2011). Tree of Codes. London: Visual Edition. Franklin, Benjamin (1791/2007). “The Autobiography”. Baym et al., eds. Vol. A. 481–596. Freedman, Jonathan (2009). “bookishNess: A Brief Introduction”. Michigan Quarterly Review 48/4. Special Issue on: Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age. 461–464. Hallberg, Garth Risk (2007). A Field Guide to the North American Family: (An Illustrated Novella). New York, NY: Mark Batty Publisher. Hayles, N. Katherine (1997). “Corporeal Anxiety in the Dictionary of the Khazars: What Books Talk About in the Late Age of Print When They Talk about Losing Their Bodies”. Modern Fiction Studies 93/3: 800–820. Hayles, N. Katherine (2013). “Combining Close and Distant Reading: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes and the Aesthetic of Bookishness”. PMLA 128/1: 226–231. Iser, Wolfgang (1976/1994). Der Akt des Lesens: Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung. 4th ed. Munich: Fink. Mabee, Bethany Lynn (2013). “Portraiture and the Aesthetics of Absence in Early Modern British Literature”. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Virginia. Michel, Berit (2014). “‘PlastiCity’: Foer’s Tree of Codes as (Visual) Multilayered Urban Topography: Performing Space and Time in a Twenty-first-century Adaptation of Bruno Schulz’s Textual Labyrinths”. Critique 55: 166–186. Norton, Beverly J. (1992 online). “Record Keeping”. Daniel H. Ludlow, ed. Encyclopedia of Mormonism. New York, NY: Macmillan. 1194–1196. [31/07/2017]. Petermann, Emily (2014). The Musical Novel: Imitation of Musical Structure, Performance, and Reception in Contemporary Fiction. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Powers, Richard (2014). Orfeo. London: Atlantic Books. Pressman, Jessica (2009). “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Litera­ture”. Michigan Quarterly Review 48/4. Special Issue on: Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age. 465–482.

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Schulz, Bruno (1934/1963). The Street of Crocodiles. Trans. Celina Wieniewska. London: MacGibbon & Kee (Polish orig.: Sklepy cynamonowe [‘Cinnamon Shops’]). Sontag, Susan (1967/1969). “The Aesthetics of Silence”. Styles of Radical Will. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 3–34. Starre, Alexander (2015). Metamedia: American Book Fictions and Literary Print Culture after Digitization. Series ed. Matthew P. Brown. Impressions: Studies in the Art, Culture, and Future of Books. Iowa City, IA: Univ. of Iowa Press. Sun, Jian (2013 online). “Fictional Collisions: Richard Powers on Hybrid Narrative and the Art of Stereoscopic Storytelling”. Critique 54: 335–345. . Twain, Mark (pseud. Samuel L. Clemens) (1884/2007). “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”. Baym et al., eds. Vol. C. 108–294. Williams, Terry Tempest (2012/2013). When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice. London: Picador. Wolf, Werner (1999). The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality. Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi. Wolf, Werner (2019). “Introduction: Meaningful Absence across Media. The Potential Significance of Missing Signifiers”. Werner Wolf, Nassim Balestrini, Walter Bernhart, eds. Meaningful Absence across Arts and Media: The Significance of Missing Signifiers. Leiden/Boston, MA: Brill/Rodopi. 1–31.

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Chapter 3

A Sentence is a Half-Formed Thing: Observations on Iconic and Indexical (Morpho)Syntactic Blanks Inspired by Eimear McBride’s Debut Novel  Olga Fischer The novel A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride is permeated by absences of different kinds, whose purpose is often quite hard to fathom. What made the author write in this way; what is the function of these gaps? The paper examines the iconic potential of the novel’s gaps against the background of what is conventional in three different types of text: spoken vs. written language, adult vs. child language, and historical developments in prose. The most significant gaps in the novel are the use of null pronouns, the absence of function words, as well as the absence of nominal and verbal inflexions and obli­ gatory verbal arguments. The gaps all refer in an iconic-indexical way to characteristics of early child language representing the lack of linguistic-cognitive planning in a traumatized woman who was prevented from growing up into a normally functional adult. 1

Introduction: On Significant Absence in Syntax

Form and Function The focus of the present volume is on ‘significant absence’ at the level of signifiers. In other words, the absence should be clearly visible or audible for the viewer/reader/hearer, and presumably the absence should also be significant in the sense that the absence itself is not some performance error but has a definite function (see Wolf 2005 and the introduction to the present volume). Whether the absence indeed has a function depends, of course, on the interpreter. In order to make an interpretation more objective, we may consider a number of formal aspects concerning absence: (i) whether the absence is clearly noticeable because it flouts certain conventions; (ii) whether it is noticeable because it appears in a specific position in sentences (in the case of

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004394520_004

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syntax) or other parts of the text;1 (iii) whether the type of absence occurs only once or more frequently in the text as a whole. If the absence is likely to be functional, based as it is on (one or some of) these three formal characteristics, its function may frequently be iconic as well as indexical, and often indeed these two functions are combined (cf. Moser 2007: 338; see also Müller 2001, White 2007). In the following I propose to focus on these two functions. What would it mean for an absence to be iconic? Here again, there are various possibilities. One type of absence is more concrete; it involves the textual absence of a sign resembling the absence of the sign’s referent in the external world. We could treat this as an ‘imagic’ icon. A simple example would be a clause like ‘I wanted to throw a …’, where the speaker is looking for something to throw but cannot find anything and hence leaves out the word in the text. The other, less concrete type of absence is more schematic or secondary: it refers not directly to an absent referent but uses another route. I will call this the ‘indexical iconic’ absence because here a recognition of similarity emerges through a recognition connected with some form of bodily behaviour. This relation would constitute an ‘exophoric’ one because it refers to something in the external world (see Nöth 2001). It is also possible, however, for an absent sign to be linked to other similar absent signs in the world of the text (this gives it an ‘endophoric’ quality). Such a repetition of absences highlights the absence, which then becomes meaningful either in itself or because it forms a contrast with other parts of the text where similar absences do not occur. Since the topic of the present volume is ‘absence’, which as a negative ‘thing’ is difficult to make visual or audible, it is more likely that the iconic absence is at the same time indexical, that is, that it refers to rather than that it resembles an absence in the real world. As mentioned above, the indexical and iconic natures of signs in fact often merge. A well-known example is the footprint, which both resembles (icon) and is caused (index) by the presence of a foot (for the close relationship between ‘iconic’ and ‘indexical thinking’ see Deacon 1997, Anttila 2003, Hofstadter/Sander 2013). Similarity as well as causation, for instance, is present in articulatory phonetic icons, as Fónagy (2001) has shown in various studies. We intuitively ascribe meaning to sounds because their articulation is linked to movements of our body (this is clearly indexical because the sound is produced [‘caused’] by the speech organs) and we then see or feel a resemblance between those bodily movements and the meaning of the 1 I will use ‘text’ here in the widest possible sense since this volume includes many different media; in other words, it may be a verbal text meant to be read or heard, a musical score or its performance, a film script or the film itself, etc.

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sounds, which makes the indexical sign iconic. This is used with great effect by poets, in what we usually term sound symbolism or onomatopoeia, but the iconic effect may also be present in natural language. We can see it at work in language acquisition, in language evolution and change (e. g., when there is a choice between variants), and in folk etymology (see Fischer 2004). For example, because the front vowel [i] is produced in the front of the oral cavity with the tongue high up and forward and our lips close together, we tend to associate this sound with smallness and nearness (there are also acoustic correlatives, which make the sound ‘feel’ light and bright). Similarly the liquids [l] and [r], because of the way they are produced, are often associated with continuity and softness (there is no obstruction or friction in the mouth when they are produced), in contrast to plosives, which are said to have the opposite effect. Having established that certain forms of absence can be iconically/indexically motivated, and hence may be meaningful, the next question is what constitutes an absence in syntax. That syntax may work iconically is well-known; dislocation in word order is often mentioned, the use of transitive vs. intransitive verbs, animate vs. inanimate subjects, etc. (cf. Fónagy 2001: 58–86, Leech/ Short 1981/2007: 60–94, and see Müller 1999, Fischer 2014).2 In terms of syntactic absence, ellipsis may constitute an iconic sign, often used to convey emotion. It resembles a situation in which we are literally speechless because of anger, fear, or panic. Ellipsis is clear when it is typographically indicated in the text or by a notable pause, usually accompanied by either emotive vocal or bodily gestures in speech. This indicates formally that something is missing that should normally have been there. When a syntactic absence is not indicated in this concrete fashion, it is much more difficult to decide whether it constitutes a ‘real absence’. This will be the topic of the next section. 2

What Constitutes Syntactic Blanks?

What constitutes syntactic blanks is quite a difficult question to answer because the use of a ‘blank’, or rather the decision whether something is a blank or not, depends on a large number of factors. Syntax is different from phonology, for instance. A missing sound is easily noticeable since the morphonological-lexical system of a language is generally strict, i.e. each language has 2 For instance, a recurrence of intransitive verbs and inanimate subjects may depict the situation as passive, listless, stative (a good example of this can be found in T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men”), whereas animate subjects and transitive verbs make a situation more active. This would be an example of endophoric (text-internal) iconicity.

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definite rules as to how words are formed, which syllable structure is possible and which is not. Missing letters or sounds may have indexical value when they remind the reader/hearer of a particular geographical or social dialect. These may then be used in a meaningful way because they remind the reader that this is different from ‘standard’ speech and hence the characters using these sounds may also be seen as ‘different’. In contrast, even though there are clear rules in syntax, these rules are much more versatile so that more variation is possible. As in phonology, there are differences between spoken and written language in syntax, and indeed, the use of typically spoken forms in written language may carry meaning. Some syntactic blanks are simply symbolic (conventional). Thus, functionally transitive verbs like ‘to eat’ can and do occur without an object. Other blanks may be pragmatic or accidental in that they can easily be inferred from the context. On a higher, pragmatic level, they may even be due to a speaker’s “‘windowing’ of attention” (Talmy 2010: 268):3 when we describe a situation, we simply cannot describe all the details, so many are left out or not attended to. A writer could make use of this by leaving out details that we, as readers, would normally expect to be present and thus fill in automatically. We need to make a distinction, therefore, between different types of contexts and different types of situations before we can address the question as to what really constitutes a syntactic blank. We need to do this, too, when we consider what the role of blanks is in the novel A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride, which forms the central part of this study. In the next section, we will first have a look at what these different types of ‘contexts’ may involve. 2.1 Contexts: Spoken versus Written Language It is well-known that spoken and written language are two rather different modes. In our educated western society many people tend to think that the written variety is the norm (see, e. g., Elledge 1967), and they can be upset when oral forms of any sort are used in written language. Whether such typically spoken forms used in writing are meaningful depends on context. A spoken variant may be perfectly fine in a novel, especially where it concerns dialogue,

3 Talmy (2010: 266) writes: “[…] linguistic attention functions as a gradient, not as a dichotomous all-or-none phenomenon. The particular level of attention on a linguistic entity is set in terms of foregrounding or backgrounding relative to a baseline for the entity, rather than absolutely on a zero-based scale. And the linguistic aspects realized in the course of a discourse range along a gradient of ‘access to attention,’ from ones with ‘interruptive’ capacity, able to supplant whatever else is currently highest in attention, to ones that basically remain unconscious.”

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but the same form might well be unacceptable in an academic essay or in a newspaper report. We all intuitively know that written text is much more explicit and rulebound than spoken text. This is necessary for the simple reason that the immediate situational context is normally missing. In written text, for instance, an anaphor (e. g., a personal or demonstrative pronoun) has to refer to an entity that has been previously mentioned, preferably in the preceding clause, to make it fully accessible. This is not the case in spoken language because the entity may be physically present and hence can be referred to implicitly (i.e., without words) by a gesture or the direction of gaze. In a written text, however, such implicit use would be seen as a gap. It is of interest to look at a piece of spoken text which has been transcribed literally. The first impression is that it is almost unreadable or uninterpretable because sentences are often incomplete; there are lots of repetitions that break up the sequence – especially when the speakers interrupt each other – the prosody is missing, and sudden events taking place in the context (like a wasp suddenly buzzing around in the room) may totally destroy cohesion Ah. That’s, that’s going to be a problem but that’s, that’s three years off. And presumably [Ø] (Speaker 1) No but (Speaker 2) by that time you’ve got the personnel and you’ve ( Speaker 1) Oh I see. (Speaker 2) you’ve got much more information and, and, and you would [Ø] (unclear) ( Speaker 1) But er what information? I don’t see [Ø] (unclear) (Speaker 2) Well (unclear) presumably would go back in the village and if you asked other villagers look how much has X grown on that bit of land they will tell you. (pause) (Speaker 1) Tax [Ø] erm I can’t remember where it was that [Ø], I think it might have been one of you saying that [Ø] how that (pause) a peasant of subsistence level erm would still have to pay eighteen percent of its income (Speaker 2) Right. (Speaker 1) in taxation but that still the peasant was, even though this might seem like quite a bit, the peasant was still in a better position than (pause) he had been previous because rents were at least thirty percent. (Speaker 2) Yes. Yes. (Speaker 1) So (Speaker 2) (unclear) (Speaker 1) it’s a matter of ho [Ø] – I mean er greater equality was achieved, but they could’ve [Ø] erm (pause) I mean a hundred and fifty (unclear) was a very low threshold (unclear) (Speaker 2) (unclear) okay let’s just work around that. What, what you’re saying is that [Ø] (pause) I mean broadly this is, is quite an incentive based system, at least on the face of it (Speaker 1) Mm. (Speaker 2) er in, in that you, you are, you, you’re sort of fixing your taxes and then you’re allowing, anybody who increases

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their output will keep [Ø], will benefit from that. (from the BNC, 111993, Bristol University History Department; my emphases) Highlighted in bold and followed by a gap-sign [Ø] are the cases where a necessary syntactic element (mostly an object) is (temporarily) missing, either because the speaker is interrupted or because s/he is distracted for some other reason and thus is no longer able to complete the structure of the sentence (s)he has begun. The italicized elements represent instances where the speaker repeats him/herself because s/he was mentally interrupted so that the first instance of the repeated element is left, as it were, hanging in the air, i.e., the expected continuation of the clause does not occur (we could perhaps call these ‘temporary’ or ‘pseudo’-gaps or blanks). All this is normal for spoken language, and will indeed not be considered in any way problematic in the situation in which it occurs because the intonation contours, the bodily gestures and the visual information will most likely ensure the cohesion of the dialogue. In such a situation we are probably not even aware that there was an absence or a repetition. These are therefore not the type of blanks that can be considered iconically motivated because they are conventional in speech. However, it is quite clear that the above text looks completely different from the kind of dialogues we encounter in novels that follow a realist aesthetic of representing the characters’ speech acts. In other words, when similar blanks occur there, they may well be meaningful.4 For instance, because such blanks as illustrated above may occur in emotional speech, they can be used in written literature as an ‘indexical icon’ to convey the emotions of a character. I call this an ‘indexical icon’ because the fact that it resembles the reader’s own behaviour when emotional will enable the reader to recognize this emotion through an indexical link to their own bodily behaviour in similar circumstances. Müller (1999) and Henry (2001) show that most of the syntactic blanks (or ellipses) they discovered in older literature are of this specific emotional kind, and they also note that most were typographically indicated by a dash, or ‘…’, or other such marks. 2.2 Contexts: Children versus Adults A second type of context/situation that marks differences in language use concerns the stage of language development. Thus, syntactic blanks can be found in children’s early speech, which is still syntactically incomplete (cf., e. g., 4 Some modern(ist) texts also leave out the quotation marks that indicate who is speaking. This could be considered a syntactic blank, too, but here it is the prosody/differences in voice etc. that is missing rather than verbal elements.

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Fónagy 2001: 58–60; see Clark 2003). Children start with one-word ‘sentences’ or holistic phrases, later followed by two-word sentences (e. g., “where go” or “put book”; cf. Scott 2005: 9) before they begin to use proper grammar − in the sense that they begin to link the nominal and verbal elements into phrases and sentences by means of inflections and other functional elements. Again, it is important to note that such incomplete sentences are accompanied by all kinds of prosodic markers (intonation, stress, pauses) making them less difficult to understand in their proper context. However, if we only had written versions of these utterances, minus the (essential) situational contexts, these utterances would be very hard if not impossible to follow. Quite clearly these blanks are neither iconic nor in any way meaningful, but they are indexical of young children’s speech and as such can be made use of both indexically and iconically in all kinds of literary texts, as we will see below. 2.3 Contexts as Genre Differences: Poetry versus Prose Finally, we should consider genre differences, in particular differences between poetry and prose. David Lodge (see 1966/1984) devotes a large part of his essay to determining the essence of what poetry and prose are respectively. He first refers to Northrop Frye, who wrote Whenever we read anything, we find our attention moving in two directions at once. One direction is outward or centrifugal, in which we keep going outside our reading, from the individual words to the things they mean, or in practice to our memory of the conventional associations between them. The other direction is inward, or centripetal, in which we try to develop from the words a sense of the larger verbal pattern they make […]. In all literary structures the final direction of meaning is inward. (1957: 73f.; qtd. in Lodge 1966/1984: 7) A distinction is made here between emotive language and referential language, where one extreme can be said to be represented by lyric poetry and the other by scientific language. Lodge also refers to a metaphor once used by the French poet and critic Paul Valéry, who compared prose to walking and poetry to dancing (cf. 1958: 206). Prose is like walking because it has “a definite object” in mind. “The actual circumstances […] regulate the rhythm of walking, prescribe a direction, speed and termination.” Verse is like dancing, which is a system of arbitrary acts “whose end is in themselves. It goes nowhere.” (Qtd. in Lodge 1966/1984: 11) In modernist writing this difference between poetry and prose becomes blurred because, according to Lodge, modernist writers turned against the

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“accumulation of detail” as found in natural or narrative prose; they wanted to break out of the “conventions of the readerly plot” because this was “deprived of authentic life” (1977: 138). Here he quotes Virginia Woolf The writer seems constrained, not by his own free will, but by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole. … Is life like this? Must novels be like this? (1967: 106; qtd. in Lodge 1977: 138) Lodge adds The modernist enterprise, however, had its dangers and its problems. The logical terminus of their fictional realism was the plotless ‘slice of life’ or the plotless ‘stream of consciousness’, and plotlessness could easily become […] a cover for self-indulgent incoherence. (Ibid.) In other words, one needs something to replace the plot in order to hold the story together. Authors such as James Joyce and Ezra Pound took care of this through their use of the ‘mythical method’ and/or a strong use of metaphorical/metonymic thinking. This danger of plotlessness is also clearly present, as we will see, in McBride’s novel; here it is the timeless Irish coming-of-age plot that provides the necessary cohesion. It is not surprising that this difference between ‘walking’ and ‘dancing’ also has an effect on the syntax and, more particularly in our case, on the use of syntactic blanks. In prose writing, one expects enough details of time and place to enable us to follow the direction of the story being told. Furthermore, we expect cohesion not only in terms of ‘when’ and ‘where’ but also in term of ‘why’. Such locative and explanatory details are much less likely to occur in poetry. Hence, in order to establish whether the lack of such details counts as syntactic absences, we need to take the genre into account. Of course, it is possible to make further distinctions within each genre; for instance, epic poetry is more narrative than lyric poetry, and the prose used in novels differs widely from one subgenre to the next, while it is equally likely to be vastly different from that in academic essays and newspaper reports. But on the whole, as we will see below in section 3, most of these differences do not lead to a clear use of syntactic blanks. The blanks I noted above in terms of cohesion have to do with discourse rather than syntax proper. Apart from telegrams and texts with a tendency to use elliptical headlines such as newspaper articles, there is only one genre that could be said to have true syntactic blanks

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as a regular and conventional feature, and that is diary writing − which has more recently also emerged as a feature in text messages. It is quite usual in that context to have a blank where there should be a subject, as in: “Visited the castle yesterday. Wish you were here.” (Scott 2013: 69) Because the subject is always the same, however, this is only a formal blank without any further significance. But of course this feature can be used in an iconic-indexical way in other writings, as we will see. We may thus conclude that absences (or syntactic blanks) are only seen or felt as absences when they run against conventional expectations. This is true with respect to all three contexts discussed in this section, i.e., it pertains to differences between spoken and written modes, between child and adult language, and between genres. From this also follows that in order to decide what kind of syntactic blanks are used and potentially significant in McBride’s novel, we must consider the context in which this novel was written. In order to do this we must also look at the historical development of the use of syntactic blanks in prose, and of blanks in other art forms. 3

The Historical Context: the Use of Blanks in Literature and Other Media

We will first look at developments in literary prose. I am leaving poetry out of the discussion mainly because there are fewer changes here relevant to our topic, but also because the central concern of the present contribution is a novel. After a consideration of prose texts, I will take a brief look at other media, notably music and painting, in order to establish whether the use of blanks there has a historical connection with blanks in literary prose (see also other relevant essays in this volume). 3.1 Modernism and Postmodernism: The Development of New Styles The most notable innovations with respect to blanks, of both a discursive and syntactic kind, can be observed in modernist writing. This is not to say that there were no experiments with syntactic structure before that time, but these are far and few between. The famous exception is, of course, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which, not surprisingly, is often seen as the first ‘modernist’ or even ‘postmodernist’ novel “lauded for anticipating the later evolution of literary form (or lack thereof)” (Gioia 2013 online). The novelty is most obvious in the arrangement of the discourse, i.e., the lack of cohesion between clauses or scenes. Gioia, quoting the critic Ian Watt (see 1967), describes the work as “a parody of a novel” because it has “an indefinite theme, worked out by a verve

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that has not the slightest concern for order, unity or logic” (ibid.). Regarding syntax proper, the novel is hardly experimental. Clauses have normal word order (except for some “syntactic shuffling”; Lodge 1977: 131), but this is still within the bounds of what is possible in syntax. True syntactic blanks within clauses do not really occur. In fact, it could be said that many of the apparent blanks in Tristram Shandy are a result of the fact that Sterne often conveys dialogues in the most literal way. The blanks one finds therefore resemble the ones used in spoken language (as illustrated in section 2.1). No doubt this is part of the fun. The novel is very much a first-person narrative, with a narrator who not only tells us what is happening but also comments on what happens all the time, addressing the reader directly. His ‘butting in’ in this way continually disturbs the narrative plot. As Watt describes it: “The structure of Sterne’s larger compositional units […] is based on the rhetorical patterns arising out of the complex tripartite pattern of conversation between the narrator, his fictional characters, and his auditors” (1967: 319). Indeed Tristram himself tells us at the beginning of chapter 11: “[w] riting, when properly managed […], is but a different name for conversation.” (Qtd. ibid.: 320) We can see the resemblances between the text in section 2.1 and the following excerpt from the novel quite easily O Jonathan! ’Twould make a good-natured man’s heart bleed, to consider [pseudo Ø], continued the corporal (standing perpendicularly), how low many a brave and upright fellow has been laid since that time!—And trust me, Susy [pseudo Ø], added the corporal, turning to Susannah, whose eyes were swimming in water,—before that time comes round again,—many a bright eye will be dim.—Susannah placed it to the right side of the page—she wept—but she court’sied too.—Are we not [pseudo Ø], continued Trim, looking still at Susannah—are we not like a flower of the field—a tear of pride stole in betwixt every two tears of humiliation—else no tongue could have described Susannah’s affliction—is not all flesh grass?—Tis clay,—’tis dirt.—They all looked directly at the scullion,—the scullion had just been scouring a fish-kettle.—It was not fair.—  – What is the finest face that ever man looked at! – I could hear Trim talk so for ever, cried Susannah, – what is it [pseudo Ø]! (Susannah laid her hand upon Trim’s shoulder) – but corruption? – Susannah took it off. (from Tristram Shandy Chapter 3.9, qtd. Watt 1967: 329; my emphases) I have again indicated the repetitions in italics. The instances marked in the text by ‘[pseudo Ø]’, however, are not literal examples of syntactic blanks as

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they were in section 2.1. To keep the flow of the text understandable, Sterne does not use ‘true’ blanks but he inserts descriptive passages (without identifying them as such!) – these I have indicated in bold –, which disturb the flow of the syntax in the same way as syntactic blanks would. Thus, we do not immediately hear the object of “consider” (l. 1) or of “trust me” (l. 4) but have to wait a considerable amount of time, with five and twelve words getting in between verb and object respectively. I suppose we could again call these ‘pseudoblanks’. A lack of cohesion between clauses is typical of many modernist writers, even though it is used somewhat differently from the way Sterne used it, and with a different effect. To show what it looks like, I will compare a brief initial passage from a short story by Ernest Hemingway, with a more ‘conventional’ narrative, as illustrated with a passage from a recent novel by Ian McEwan.  The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went on to Madrid. (From “Hills Like White Elephants”; Hemingway 1987: 211, my emphases) The first thing to be noted is that we are confronted with many definite noun phrases (shown in italics) referring to places and characters that have not yet been mentioned, so that we are not properly introduced to the location where the story takes place nor to the characters. The past tense were in the very first sentence of the story also feels a little awkward because it presents a description of scenery that is in principle timeless: we are immediately thrown into the past but we do not know what past or whose past. The purpose of the “bamboo beads” (l. 4) is made clear through the use of the purpose marker “to” (l. 5), but we have no idea why the American and the girl are sitting where they are sitting. And we also do not know why the express train from Barcelona is mentioned. Are they waiting for it? We are not told. What is clear, however, is that there are no syntactic gaps within each separate sentence. Purely syntactically, nothing is missing. The gaps are in fact discourse gaps, and they are functional. The effect of this way of writing is that the details of the scene are very sharply put in front of our eyes, as loose, unconnected objects preventing the reader from building up a story; it causes a sense

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of estrangement.5 However, since humans are by nature inclined to interpret what they see as a coherent narrative (see Dawkins 1995),6 the looseness forces us to think harder about what may be happening. This focus on loose objects is also seen in ‘modernist’ paintings by Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky (e. g., in his Blaue Reiter period) or in collages by Henri Matisse. Again they cause us to think about the possible underlying meaning and hence function quite differently from the romanticist paintings of natural landscapes in the manner of, for instance, John Constable. Now compare Hemingway’s style to the following passage from Ian McEwan’s novel The Children Act She could have phoned one of three friends, but she could not bear to hear herself explain her situation and make it irreversibly real. Too soon for sympathy or advice, too soon to hear Jack damned by loyal chums. Instead, she passed the evening in an empty state, a condition of numbness. She ate bread, cheese and olives with a glass of white wine, and passed an interminable period at the piano. First, in a spirit of defiance, she played through her Bach partita. Occasionally, she and a barrister, Mark Berner, performed songs, and she had seen that afternoon that he was listed for tomorrow to represent the hospital in the Jehovah’s Witness case. The next concert was many months ahead, just before Christmas, in the Great Hall in Grey’s Inn, and they had yet to agree a programme. (2014: 58, my emphases) I have italicized all the logical, cohesive links, both in terms of time and place; the inner ‘logical’ reasoning of the main character (an eminent judge, whose husband has just walked out on her) I have given in bold. Note, in addition, that the barrister Mark Berner is properly introduced as a barrister, followed by his identification, since he is here mentioned for the first time in the narrative. In this text, in contrast to the Hemingway passage, the situation is completely clear; there is much less need for the reader to guess. When we look at some other modernist or postmodernist writers, we often find, as we saw in Hemingway, similar circumstances or discourse elements missing but, on the whole, not syntactic ones. For instance, in the 5 This way of writing in Hemingway, which is more typical of his short stories (and of short stories in general), is often referred to as his ‘iceberg technique’. 6 Dawkins writes: “We humans have purpose on the brain. We find it hard to look at anything without wondering what it is ‘for’, what the motive is for it or the purpose behind it […]. Show us any object or process and it is hard for us to resist the ‘Why’ question – that ‘What is it for?’ question.” (1995: 96)

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theatre of the absurd, represented among others by Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett, there is a minimum of plot, and absurd or menacing shifts in discourse, but not many incomplete sentences.7 Gavin discusses the techniques writers of the absurd use; they “deliberate[ly] violat[e] […] literary and dramatic norms, displaying features which can be seen to defy those conventions which had previously defined the qualitative boundaries of the literary canon” (2013: 20). The techniques Gavin illustrates have to do with disorder within the text-world and, as in Hemingway, do not involve disordered syntax. A staple diet with these writers is the fixed world in the head of the first-person narrator, through whose perception we see the world. Such a narrator cannot know more about other characters than what their actions reveal. Gavin provides many examples of such “unnatural story worlds” (ibid.: 93), where two realities are put against one another, and where the narrator no longer sees the boundaries between reality and fiction, as for example in: “The day came finally. Then again, perhaps it didn’t” (McCarthy 2005: 259). Note that the two sentences here are syntactically sound. Gavin also mentions ‘denarration’: a kind of “negative narration in which a narrator denies significant aspects of his or her narrative that has earlier been presented as given” (2013: 78). What makes the ‘absurd’ style different from the style used by Hemingway, however, is that narrative cohesion per se is usually upheld. Anaphors are in place, and there is information about spatial and temporal circumstances Lockett needs my mattress more than I need his cabinet. He has to have an oasis, a place to rest and hear what’s happening. I encourage him. I roll my sock into a ball and let it roll out. Over the past two days the mattress has become crowded. Someone just sat down and put his legs against the wall. Although my eyes have gotten used to the dark, I try not to notice anyone too closely. Another man sat down and put his legs against the wall. This has begun to happen lately. (From Rudolph Wurlitzer, Nog [1969/2009: 44], qtd. Gavin 2013: 101) Thus, ʽmyʼ and ʽhisʼ (l. 1) have clear antecedents, as is true also for all other pronouns; the ‘visitors’ on the mattress are properly announced, and events follow each other chronologically (“over the past two days”, “someone just sat down”, “another man sat down”, etc.). What is strange and emphasized instead is the

7 There are exceptions, as O’Toole (see 2014) mentions in his review of McBride’s novel; see section 4.3 below.

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‘unnatural’ reactions or actions of the protagonist:8 why does he roll his sock into a ball, why does he let other people sit down on his mattress? Finally, there is the syntax of the stream-of-consciousness style, which contains real gaps. In a way, this style is already visible in Sterne, but in his text it is syntactically not so deviant as it is, for instance, in Joyce’s Ulysses. A short excerpt from the Hades chapter will suffice as illustration  Mr Bloom entered and sat in the vacant place. He pulled the door to after him and slammed it tight till it shut tight. He passed an arm through the armstrap and looked seriously from the open carriage window at the lowered blinds of the avenue. One dragged aside: an old woman peeping. Nose whiteflattened against the pane. Thanking her stars she was passed over. Extraordinary the interest they take in a corpse. Glad to see us go we give them such trouble coming. Job seems to suit them. Huggermugger in corners. Slop about in slipper-slappers for fear he’d wake. Then getting it ready. Laying it out. Molly and Mrs Fleming making the bed. Pull it more to your side. Our windingsheet. Never know who will touch you dead. Wash and shampoo. I believe they clip the nails and the hair. Keep a bit in an envelope. Grow all the same after. Unclean job.   All waited. Nothing was said. Stowing in the wreaths probably. I am sitting on something hard. Ah, that soap in my hip pocket. Better shift it out of that. Wait for an opportunity. (1969: 88f., my emphases) The descriptive passages, which I have put in italics, are all syntactically sound. The stream-of-consciousness passages are not. Here many syntactic elements are missing. Almost always there is no finite verb in the main clause, while the subject is missing nearly every time it refers to Bloom, the I-figure in this passage, and also at times in other clauses as in “Glad to see us go” (l. 6). Note, however, that the antecedent of the missing subject, “they” (in l. 6), is still close enough to make sense. Still, “they” itself appears out of the blue; its antecedent is missing and can only be understood when one is familiar with Bloom’s world and his way of thinking about women. A somewhat similar case concerns the antecedent of the third “it” in l. 9 (in the first two instances “it” refers to the corpse). Again we have to guess what it refers to, it may still refer to the corpse, but more likely it is the winding-sheet mentioned in the next clause. What is also usually missing in the streams of thought are indicators of time and place, but the reason for this is different from what we saw in Hemingway. Here it is 8 ‘Unnatural’ for the reader in terms of what is conventional in the (text)world, but of course natural for the protagonist.

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done to imitate the directness of thought, to represent the loose way in which our memory works, functioning through metonymy and metaphor rather than logically (cf. Lodge 1977: 139–144). Interestingly, what is not missing are direct objects. This makes the clauses on the whole still quite easy to follow. 3.2 Comparison with Other Media I already briefly compared modernist writers with painters in that same period (section 3.1). Similar comparisons can be drawn with composers and musical performers. Referring to modernist and/or expressionist work, Butler writes: “In cutting itself [sic] off from previous conventions [these] works […] attempted to construct worlds of their own – even to be locked into an in­exo­rably personal experience” (1994: 72), making use of “simplificatory repre­sentation” and “reliance on instinct” (ibid.: 56). With reference to the composer Arnold Schoenberg, Butler notes that his œuvre reflects the idea that “music’s ultimate significance lies not in the effect it makes on an audience, but in the integrity with which it expresses the composer’s personal vision” so that “they ran the risk of composing only for trained listeners capable of an analytic response” (ibid.: 72). Similar remarks have been made with respect to some modernist writings, namely that they were too inward-looking or too fragmented to be easily understood by the average reader. Butler adds that “explicit syntax began to be replaced by an (unconsciously driven) associative juxtaposition […] relying on intuitions”, which is similar to Schoenberg’s wish for “‘mere juxtaposition’”, which can “supersede previously accepted logical and formal connections, and the audience can be left to fill in the gaps which result” (ibid.: 76). Thus, “[t]hey inevitably draw our attention to the language of the work” (ibid.); previous conventions are seen to limit self-expression, threatening the discursive nature of the works in painting, literature and music. In modernist works, the direction was mainly from objective to subjective representation. The idea is essentially to present reality without an interfering omniscient narrator, to bring emotion in a seemingly unadulterated form to the reader (viewer/listener). Backgrounding the author could be done in various ways in texts: either by presenting the (experience of the) world from an entirely personal point of view (the I-narrator, and the use of stream-of-consciousness, as we see, for instance, in Virginia Woolf’s 1927 To the Lighthouse), or by offering a totally multi-focal photographic and non-linear reality, as we see in Hemingway’s short stories, or indeed a mixture of both as in Ulysses. In later periods, it seems that the subjective actuality of the event became even more important: the idea of presenting the experience in as raw and spontaneous a manner as possible. According to Lee (see 2012), we see this in

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the poets of the so-called Beat Generation, represented by, among others, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, whose poetics were in turn influenced by new models in jazz and painting which were centred around improvisation (cf. Charlie Parker and Jackson Pollock respectively). This rawness comes to the fore clearly in the ‘Wiener Aktionismus’ of Günter Brus and Hermann Nitsch in the 1960s, with the activity itself rather than any static product representing the work of art. The action has to be shown directly in the act, on the canvas, on the page. Pure action, without context, without perspective, without depth. 4

Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013)

Having enumerated the types of gaps that can be found in texts of various kinds, and having taken into account the contexts in which these gaps occur, which may determine whether they are significant or not, I will now turn to the gaps found in McBride’s novel. It can be said that her writing is a mix of modernist and actionist tendencies. I see this in her use of the stream-of-con­ sciousness method. In her case, however, it is a method used in the extreme: protagonists are not identified, they have no name; as a result, we have to learn to follow and understand them through their actions. There are hardly any descriptive passages, almost all is action, and all action is represented in terms of pure acts and pure primitive thoughts. There is indeed no perspective, no spatial framing, hardly any indication of time and place. Because everything is presented as raw and immediate, the discourse blanks have widened, leading to many syntactic blanks and resulting in a narrative that is constituted “almost entirely in the fragments, words, and phrases of immediate and inarticulate sensations, impressions, and half-formed thoughts” (Swallow Prior 2014 online). In the words of another critic, who most appropriately compares her art to painting and music, [h]er prose is a visceral throb, and the sentences run meanings together to produce a kind of compression in which words, freed from the tedious march of sequence, seem to want to merge with one another, as paint and musical notes can. The results are thrilling, and also thrillingly efficient. The language plunges us into the center of experiences that are often raw, unpleasant, frightening, but also vital. (Wood 2014 online) In what follows, I first supply a general description of the novel (section 4.1), after which I consider the type of gaps that occur in the novel (section 4.2), and

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how they may be significant in the light of the different contexts and genres that have been discussed in section 2 above (section 4.3). 4.1 General Description In the words of the reviewer Fintan O’Toole: “The central event is the rape of the narrator as a needy, rebellious thirteen-year-old by the uncle who takes advantage of her as-yet indistinct desires. It is an event she is compelled to repeat again and again in crude encounters with strangers and with the uncle who abused her.” (2014 online) An important aspect of the story is the Roman Catholic background, the mother who turns to religion when her husband abandons the family, and the pious grandfather, who finds fault with his errant and blasphemous granddaughter. A crucial but passive role is played by the brother, who suffers from a brain tumour and is slow and awkward, making life difficult for his sister because he is constantly bullied by other children at their school, which makes her position vulnerable, too. When the brother’s illness returns in his teens, the girl seeks − as an antidote but also as a form of punishment for not helping her brother when he is abused by his school mates − “the self-abasement of random sexual encounters with boys in her school, with young men in her town, with strangers in the city or on trains, and with her uncle” (Swallow Prior 2014 online). The story is consistently told from the perspective of the girl, the homodiegetic narrator, “through means more visceral than logical, more intuitive than intellectual, more raw than processed” (ibid.). The novel itself is dedicated to McBride’s brother (who died of a brain tumour) in the same way as the story written by the protagonist is meant for her fictional brother. He represents the “you” addressed in the first paragraph of the novel For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say. Mammy me? Yes you. Bounce the bed, I’d say. I’d say that’s what you did. Then lay you down. They cut you round. Wait and hour and day. (McBride 2013/2014: 3) Here we already note the absence of an antecedent for “you”, “her”, “she” (l. 1), and “they” (l. 3); the absence of an infinitival phrase in the second sentence “You’ll soon”; the absence of a subject (and possibly a preposition) in “Bounce the bed”, and in “lay you down”, where it is likely but not clear that the “you” is the object rather than the subject. It is only after reading on through the next few chapters that we begin to understand what this text may convey. The following is my own tentative interpretation

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[This writing is] [f]or you [the brother]. You’ll soon [see it (the book)/see me (when I am born)?]. You’ll give her [the as-yet unborn sister, the I-figure, who writes this] [a] name [the brother will call the sister by her name after she is born, or this writing for the brother will make a name for the sister in the world?]. In the stitches of her skin [the sister as still inside the mother’s womb] she [the mother] [wi]ll wear [carries and will give birth to the sister who tells] your say [what will be said about/for you]. Mammy me? [says the brother about his having to be operated upon]. Yes you [says the mother]. Bounce the bed, I’d say. I’d say that’s what you did [the sister imagines that the brother bounces on his bed in the hospital with the mother visiting, or she wishes that he would bounce (bounce as imperative)]. Then [the doctors?] lay you down [or the sister advises the brother to lay himself down after the bouncing?]. They cut you round [the brother’s tumour is operated upon]. Wait and hour and day [long wait for the three of them before the operation, or a long wait for the brother to wake up after the operation, or a long wait before the I is born?]. The question thus inevitably arises: what is the nature of these gaps, and what do they convey? 4.2 Use of Blanks in McBride’s Novel: General Aspects It is clear that there are many absences or blanks in these first few lines of the novel making the events themselves become almost impossible to follow. The blanks do not only constitute the familiar discourse blanks that we have already seen in modernist writing, i.e., the absence of elements indicating time and place, the absence of antecedents for pronouns and the lack of logical cohesion, as well as the typographic marks that indicate who is speaking. We are also not surprised to see the syntactic blanks familiar from stream-of-consciousness literature: the total absence of the syntactic subject when it refers to the protagonist and the lack of finite verbs. But here, in addition, we find that other necessary arguments of the verb are left out, too: non-recoverable subjects, direct and prepositional objects, infinitival complements, etc. To make matters worse, we lack all kinds of morphosyntactic functional and inflexional markers normally present that make it clear whether we are dealing with a noun or a verb (or a gerund or present participle), or which indicate the relation between a subject and the predicate (by means of verbal agreement), or between the past and the present, the indicative and the imperative (by means of tense and mood inflexions).

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Let us have a look at one more paragraph on that same first page in order to find out more about missing morphosyntactic elements, elements that were never missing in the literature we have looked at so far Walking up corridors up the stairs. Are you alright? Will you sit, he says. No. I want she says. I want to see my son. Smell from dettol through her skin. Mops diamond floor tiles all as strong. All the burn your eyes out if you had some. Her heart going pat. Going dum dum dum. Don’t mind me she’s going to your room. See the. Jesus. What have they done? Jesus. Bile for. Tidals burn. Ssssh. All over. Mother. She cries. Oh no. Oh no no no. (McBride 2013/2014: 3) The two most obscure sentences in terms of structure are: “Mops diamond floor tiles all as strong. All the burn your eyes out if you had some.” We can guess the experience as a whole since we know what to expect in hospitals, but we wonder whether “mops” is a singular verb or a plural noun, whether someone “mops” the floor or “mops” are visible all around, or even whether the narrator wishes to indicate that the “mops”, the “floor” and the “tiles” “all” smell equally “strong” of Dettol. Maybe it is the latter, because that would make sense of “All the” in the next line, i.e., all those things that “burn your eyes out if you had some”. On the other hand “burn” need not be a verb; if we read “All the burn” as a noun phrase, “burn” could also represent a gerund (with the suffix missing) referring to a sense of burning. 4.3 Types of Morphosyntactic Blanks I will now first sum up the various types of syntactic blanks that I have uncovered and illustrate them, in so far as they did not yet appear in the two passages above. At the same time, I will point out their possible role as ‘indexical icons’ in the novel, based on the three conventional registers/situations described in section 2: i. Null-pronouns ii. Absence of nominal and verbal inflexions iii. Absence of determiners and other function words iv. Absence of obligatory verbal arguments v. Absence of finite verbs and even of non-finite verbs vi. Absence of logical connectors of time and place vii. Anaphors without clearly indicated or accessible antecedents

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4.3.1 Spoken vs. Written Language Many passages are difficult to follow because they present situations merely in terms of dialogues between characters, without any description of the situation or location, and without at first knowing who is speaking. These typically sound like spoken discourse, having all the hallmarks of the way language is used in actual dialogue. The sentences spoken are still complete because the protagonist simply records the conversation. The only absences here are of types (vi) and (vii), familiar from modernist literature. In the fragment below, I have indicated absences of type (vii) in brackets so that it becomes clear who is speaking, and who the antecedents of the personal pronouns used are (the reader will only understand who is who after going through the passage first). The two elements given in bold are the only elements that are not part of actual speech: the first one is put in to help the reader, and the second is probably a thought-comment of the girl-narrator (note that this is the only incomplete sentence). The passage itself is the beginning of chapter four. There is no indication of where we are and what the situation is. The grandfather is new on the scene and has not been mentioned before, and only with hindsight can we guess at the order of speakers and what the connections are between what they are saying (absences representing type (vi)) [The mother speaking:] Whose is that car? Do you [=the girl or the brother?] see it she said, parking at the gate. Oh God let it not be the PP and the state of the place. Who’s that now? Don’t pull the curtain back [command to girl or brother?]. No it isn’t. Well he’s coming up the path. Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph. Go wipe your nose you [= to girl or brother?].  Daddy [=father of the mother/grandfather], I didn’t recognise you [=grandfather]. You gave me the fright of my life. I didn’t know who it was at all. Is the car different? I thought that. Surely you didn’t do all that drive today? Sacred hour. It’s a terrible long old journey. Come in God and sit down. Anyways you’re looking well.  That’s it. Is Mammy [=mother of the mother/grandmother] with you? Ah no of course. Ach she’s [=grandmother] not able. She said that alright before. And can the doctor not give her something, just to relieve her a bit? You [=grandfather] must be worn out. Will you have a cup of tea?  Come in here [addressed to girl or brother or both?] and say hello to your Grandfather. He’s come all the way to see you, isn’t that right? Just slip on that kettle as you [=girl or brother?] come past. And can you [=grandfather] get any sleep? Desperate at your time of life. Come you [=the girl] in and say hello like your brother. [Grandfather speaking:] Oh God look at the face on that [=the state the house/the girl is in?]. Would

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you [=the mother] not think about getting some help in? [Mother speaking about the girl:] No she’s not a bit shy. [Grandfather speaking:] For a break in the morning even? [Mother speaking:] Will you have a sandwich with that [the cup of tea]?. (McBride 2013/2014: 11) The type of absences used here is significant first of all in the sense that these gaps point out that this is ‘dialogue’; stylistically, they form a contrast to highly incomplete clauses that are used elsewhere in the novel to express the inner thoughts and raw descriptions of the actions in which the protagonist is involved. Secondly, the ‘rough-and-tumble’ speech and the different You’s iconically reflect the nervous to and fro-ing of the mother, as well as the messy state of the household and of the situation that the protagonist is in. 4.3.2 Children vs. Adults Absences of types (i) to (v) are the most striking features of the novel and constitute the core meaning of the narrative. They are key to the novel, first of all, because they are unconventional as compared to the literary prose styles discussed in section 2.3 − this puts them in the limelight as it were −, and secondly because these absences show up most strongly in the passages that form the crudest scenes in the novel: the sexual abuse of the immature female ­narrator. Absences (i) to (v) are all typical of early speech development in children. Scott (see 2005 online) shows that children use ‘null-subjects’ or ‘subjectdrops’ between ages 20 to 25 months, and that they also typically omit inflections and function words such as determiners, prepositions, and auxiliaries. There are various reasons given in the literature for these omissions, of which Scott provides a convenient overview. Bloom categorizes children’s speech as “telegraphic” (1970: 139), which is due to a “cognitive limitation in handling structural complexity” (ibid.: 165), as well as the result of children’s reduced memory span. The more complex the sentence is, the more it will be reduced. Bloom also notes that the words that are retained are the content words, i.e., full lexical nouns and verbs, but without their inflexions. Olson stresses the fact that the young child is not yet able to “recode, encode, to plan and monitor, to integrate and unitize” (1973: 153). He further notes that the child’s “highly egocentric” view of the world also contributes to the frequency of abbreviated utterances (ibid.: 155). I think one can view these ‘absence’-types in McBride’s novel as indexical of child’s speech. As such they are iconically significant in that they reflect the mind and character of the narrator. It is interesting to observe, for instance, that O’Toole in his review of the novel writes that the narrator “cannot build a self because the foundations of her childhood have been undermined by

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sexual exploitation” (2014 online, my emphasis); similarly Wood notes that “McBride’s prose starts by mimicking the visceral, fractured comprehension of a child taking clumsy possession of an adult world” (2014 online). Anne Enright, who was the first to review the novel, describes the narrator as “affectless and highly transgressive” (2013 online), again typical of the egocentric phase that children go through. Thus, these blanks can be said to be iconic of a preconscious, not fully-formed mind, whose utterances are immediate and inarticulate, unplanned and unmonitored. They reflect the title, a half-formed girl struggling to come into being, a person whose identity is precarious and incomplete – and thus full of ‘gaps’. I will use three extracts to illustrate where these absences are most noticeable. These almost always reflect the most violent passages, mentally and physically, full of action or uncontrollable thoughts. What is clear is that there are few complete sentences here. I have italicized the ones that do occur. These are all descriptive so that we at least get some idea of what is happening. All the other main clauses have no clear finite verb. Subjects are often missing, and sometimes even direct and prepositional objects or adjuncts. Function words get lost, too, at times, such as the copula be or the indefinite article. Of special interest are the forms I have given in bold, where, if it is a verb, one would have expected an -s inflection to create agreement with the subject, in this case the mother. The lack of -s, again, makes the verbs more noun-like. Overall, a narrowing of Talmy’s “‘windowing’ of attention” (2010: 268) is noticeable.9 Only the most salient elements are left here, nouns rather than verbs, fully referential lexical items rather than function words or morphemes, main clauses rather than subordinate ones. 1.

Take one and two. Crack my eyes are bursting from my head with the wallop. Blood rising up my nose. Drips10 my head forward. Drip of that. She gets my hair. Listen. To me. Listen. What you’ve done. Shaking me smack and smack my head. Dirty brat. Shivering. Sharp with rage. Get away from me and push me over to the bannisters.  You. Panic. Mammy sorry that I sorry I didn’t know. Your hands can’t keep her off. She knows all the duck and weave we’ve done before. And hits you on your ear. On your cheek. That hard. Ah mammy sorry. Sorry. Sorry please, all you say. She have you by the jumper. Slap you harder. Slap and

9

Talmy’s description is useful here: “[…] one or more (discontinuous) portions of a referent scene are foregrounded in attention (or ‘windowed’) by the basic device of their explicit mention, while the remainder of the scene is backgrounded in attention (or ‘gapped’) by their omission from mention.” (2011: 631) In these raw passages, the most physical facts are ‘foregrounded’, the rest is ‘gapped’. This, too, could be a plural noun.

10

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2.

3.

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slap and slap. Push you in the corner. Mammy. Mammy. Getting red face. Getting sore face. Slap again she. Slap again. Screaming. You imbecile. You stupid. I cupping all my blood nose in jumper. Crouch. You. Bold. Boy. You. Stupid. Stupid. (McBride 2013/2014: 17) And you’re walking coming crossing. Grab me by the elbow. Is it true? Is it true? I know you’re stronger than me now. First time and push [?]11 me to the wall. Don’t you lie. You don’t lie here. Is it true? It is! I shouted pushing hands and might against I sticking fingers at your eyes. You choke me. I expel splode fight against. Kicking at. Struggle. Whack for I’ll be screaming in a minute. Push[?] me on the ground. It is disgusting whore sputter filthy disgusting wrong it’s wrong to. Do. Fucking bitch. I curl up miss [?] me kick [?] the floor. The stub of it. Rolling. (Ibid.: 73f.)12 Sloows. Hurts m. Jesus skreamtheway he. Doos the fuck the fuckink slatch in me. Scream. Kracks. Done fuk me open he dine done on me. Done done. Till he hye happy fucky shoves upo comes ui. Kom shitting ut h mith fking kmg I’m fking cmin up you. Retch I. Retch I. Dinneradntea I choke mny. Up my. Thrtoat I. He come hecomehe. More. Slash the fuck the rank the sick up me sick up he and sticks his fingers in my mouth […]. Soon I’n dead I’m sre. Loose. Ver the aIrWays. Here. mY nose my mOuth I. VOMit, Clear. CleaR. He stopS up gETs. Stands uP. Look. And I breath. (Ibid.: 193f.)

Passage (3) occurs at the end of the novel. Right after the narrator’s brother has died, she goes out towards the lake and lets herself be raped and abused by anyone who happens to be around. Here her feelings of utter loss and utter guilt combine to produce the most violent gaps in the entire novel. Not only syntax goes haywire, but syllables, sounds, letters, and spaces do so as well. All order disappears; her mind and her emotions are no longer there; in her own words: “I’m only here in my bones and flesh.” (Ibid.: 197) 4.3 Genre Differences I already explained that absences of types (i) to (v) are not common in literary prose, which marks them as significant in the sense that they flout the conventions of the genre (see section 1 (i)). It is true that some of these absences can be seen in earlier prose: O’Toole (see 2014 online), for instance, mentions in his 11 12

This may be a verb, which then has the correct ending since this refers to the You-character, the brother, or it could be a noun. The same applies to the other instances marked by [?]. Other sexually explicit and syntactically fragmented passages can be found all through the book, e. g., on pages 53f.; 107f., 116, 140f., 165-171, 174f.

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review of the novel that McBride’s prose resembles Beckett’s late prose, as represented by pieces like Fizzle 5 The lots still bright are square. [Ø] Appear square. Just room for the average sized body. [Ø] Stretched out diagonally. Bigger it has to curl up. Thus the width of the ditch is known. It would have been in any case. Sum the bright lots. The dark. Outnumbered the former by far. Here, too, some subjects are missing (indicated by Ø), but they are not missing all the time. McBride, however, goes much further in omitting almost all functional elements, which are still quite clearly present in Fizzle 5 (I have indicated them in bold). The passage even contains logical and temporal connectors, such as “still” (l. 1), “Thus” (l. 2), and “former” (l. 4). Null-pronouns are, of course, also present in the diary genre, as noted above in section 2.3. I do not think, however, that the diary style accounts for their presence in McBride’s novel. First of all, other functional elements are also missing, which are present in diary writing, but, more importantly, the story is not presented as a diary. Rather, we are given a description of the activities as they take place; we are, as it were, present at the scene. I would therefore interpret these null-subjects as iconic-indexical signs of the emotion present in the protagonist, one of the functions of null-subjects discussed by Scott. She calls this the “pressurized null” (2013: 77), which can be used by an author to introduce “a sense of panic and urgency“, to indicate that the speaker is “under pressure”. The reader is thus given “access to the feelings and emotions of the character at the time of the events, not at the time of the description” (ibid.: 81, emphasis added). 5

Conclusion: Frame and Function of Blanks in McBride’s Novel

It is clear that the use of syntactic blanks in McBride’s novel is highly significant according to all three criteria mentioned in section 1, i.e., the syntactic absences are frequent, unconventional, and occur in specific places. As to the last point, the position of the blanks in the novel, it was already noted that the absences are most strongly foregrounded in the sections of the text that describe physical and sexual abuse. For this reason, it is noteworthy that the passages that are the most regular ones from a syntactic point of view consist of prayers interspersed throughout the text (e. g., the ‘Lord’s prayer’; cf. McBride 2013/2014: 51). They represent the Roman Catholic world in the background, which is stable and does not change. It provides a moral counterpart, the vessel

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in the sea that can still save the shipwrecked protagonist from shame and complete fragmentation. It is significant that the prayer often follows a description of her sexual lust, her “mortal mortal sin” (ibid.). What makes the prayer sections stand out even more is the fact that the text is devoid of the punctuation marks and capital letters that normally indicate the beginning and end of sentences.13 This in turn forms a marked contrast with other emotionally loaded sentences, where the full stops and capitals abound, breaking up syntactically otherwise fully complete sentences, as in We’re. Moving. House. Because. That. Is. What. I’d. Like. To. Do. And. If. You. Don’t. Too. Bad. Because. I’m. The. Mother. And. You. Will. Do. What. I. Say. As. Long. As. You. Live. Under. My. Roof. You. Will. Always. Do. What. I. Say. O. Kay (ibid.: 33). The significance of the blanks has also become clear, in that they can be related as iconic indexical signs to the characteristics of early child language, and the representation of pure emotion. They mimic the preconscious thoughts, the raw emotional reactions of the I-narrator. Apart from their role in the sexual scenes, the blanks overall are also an icon of the fact that the girl has no name throughout the narrative, and they are an icon of the ‘message’ of the story: the fragmentation of a girl preventing her to develop into a fully functional adult. They are an emblem of the title of the story: A Girl as a Half-Formed Thing. Finally, since the contributions to this volume pay attention to the use and comparison of blanks in different media, it is interesting in this respect to quote a comment on McBride’s novel by Adam Mars-Jones. He likens the way the narrative is told to the way the camera tells a story in film A virtual first-person narration in fiction is like a video camera at the central character’s shoulder. A true first person is like a handheld camera, only this one is like a micro-camera attached to the narrator’s head, facing in new directions with every nod and nervous movement. (MarsJones 2013 online) I would even go one step further and see the narration as filmed through a camera chip placed deep inside the brain, filming events without them being 13

More examples involving prayers or psalms can be found on pages 75 and 111. It is interesting to observe that towards the end of the book, when the brother is dying and the girl is losing faith, the prayers are no longer represented with the same grammatical accuracy (see 180, 196).

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filtered through what Goldberg has termed the “executive brain” (see 2001). Goldberg compares the prefrontal cortex that organizes and plans with the conductor of a large orchestra, whose members represent all the different complex components that our brain consists of (cf. ibid.: 23). What is missing in the narrator of McBride’s novel is exactly that: organization and planning.

References

Anderson, Howard, John S. Shea, eds. (1967). Studies in Criticism and Aesthetics, 1660– 1800: Essays in Honor of Samuel Holt Monk. Minneapolis, MI: Univ. of Minnesota Press. Anttila, Raimo (2003). “Analogy: The Warp and Woof of Cognition”. Brian D. Joseph, Richard D. Janda, eds. The Handbook of Historical Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. 425−440. Bloom, Lois (1970). Language Development: Form and Function in Emerging Grammars. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Butler, Christopher (1994). Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe 1900–1916. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Clark, Eve V. (2003). First Language Acquisition. Cambridge: CUP. Dawkins, Richard (1995). River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life. New York, NY: Basic Books. Deacon, Terrence W. (1997). The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York, NY: Norton. Elledge, Scott (1967). “The Naked Science of Language, 1747–1786”. Anderson/Shea, eds. 266−295. Enright, Anne (2013 online). Review of McBride’s Novel in The Guardian, Sept. 20.

[05/04/2015]. Fischer, Olga (2004). “Evidence for Iconicity in Language”. Logos and Language: Journal of General Linguistics and Language Theory 5/1: 1−19. Fischer, Olga (2014). “Iconicity”. Peter Stockwell, Sarah Whiteley, eds. The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics. Cambridge: CUP. 377−392. Fischer, Olga, Max Nänny, eds. (2001). The Motivated Sign: Iconicity in Language and Literature 2. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Fónagy, Ivan (2001). Languages within Language: An Evolutive Approach. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Frye, Northrop (1957). Anatomy in Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press. Gavin, Joanna (2013). Reading the Absurd. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press.

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Gioia, Ted (2013 online). “The First Postmodern Novel? Tristram Shandy was ‘A Postmodern Classic before There was a Modernism to be Post About’”. [05/04/2015]. Goldberg, Elkhonon (2001). The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind. Oxford: OUP. Hemingway, Ernest (1987). The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York, NY: Scribner. Henry, Anne C. (2001). “Iconic Punctuation: Ellipsis Marks in a Historical Perspective”. Fischer/Nänny, eds. 135−156. Hofstadter, Douglas, Emmanuel Sander (2013). Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking. New York, NY: Basic Books. Joyce, James (1969). Ulysses. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lee, A. Robert (2012). “Tongues Untied: Beat Ethnicities, Beat Multiculture”.  Sharin N. Elkholy, ed. The Philosophy of the Beats. Lexington, KY: Univ. Press of Kentucky. 97–114. Leech, Geoffrey, Mick H. Short (1981/2007). Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose. 2nd ed. London: Longman Lodge, David (1966/1984). Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel. 2nd ed. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Lodge, David (1977). The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature. London: Arnold. Mars-Jones, Adam (2013 online). “All Your Walkmans Fizz in Tune”. Review of A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride. London Review of Books, Aug. 8. [05/04/ 2015]. McBride, Eimear (2013/2014). A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. London: Faber & Faber. McCarthy, Tom (2005). Remainder. New York, NY: Vintage. McEwan, Ian (2014). The Children Act. London: Jonathan Cape. Moser, Sibylle (2007). “Iconicity in Multimedia Performance: Laurie Anderson’s White Lily”. Tabakowska et al., eds. 323−345. Müller, Wolfgang G. (1999). “The Iconic Use of Syntax in British and American Fiction”. Nänny/Fischer, eds. 393−408. Müller, Wolfgang G. (2001). “Iconicity and Rhetoric: A Note on the Iconic Force of Rhetorical Figures in Shakespeare”. Fischer/Nänny, eds. 305−322. Nänny, Max, Olga Fischer, eds. (1999). Form Miming Meaning: Iconicity in Language and Literature. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Nöth, Winfried (2001). “Semiotic Foundations of Iconicity in Language and Literature”. Fischer/Nänny, eds. 17−28.

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Olson, Gary M. (1973). “Developmental Changes in Memory and Acquisition of Lan­ guage”. Timothy E. Moore, ed. Cognitive Development and the Acquisition of Lan­ guage. New York, NY: Academic Press. 145−158. O’Toole, Fintan (2014 online). “The Rape of the Narrator”. New York Review of Books, Nov. 20. [05/04/2015]. Scott, Kate (2005 online). “Child Null Subjects”. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics: 1−25. [05/04/2016]. Scott, Kate (2013). “Pragmatically Motivated Null Subjects in English: A Relevance Theory Perspective”. Journal of Pragmatics 53: 68−83. Swallow Prior, Karin (2014 online). “A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing: Haunting, Defiant, Demanding to Be Heard”. Books and Culture: A Christian Review, Sept. [05/04/2015]. Tabakowska, Elżbieta, Christina Ljungberg, Olga Fischer, eds. (2007). Insistent Images. Iconicity in Language and Literature 5. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Talmy, Leonard (2010). “Attention Phenomena”. Dirk Geeraerts, Hubert Cuykens, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford: OUP. 264−293. Talmy, Leonard (2011). “Cognitive Semantics: An Overview”. Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger, Paul Portner, eds. Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. 622−642. Valéry, Paul (1958). “Remarks on Poetry”. The Art of Poetry. Trans. Denise Folliot. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Watt, Ian (1967). “The Comic Syntax of Tristram Shandy”. Anderson/Shea, eds. 315−331. White, John (2007). “Forms of Restricted Iconicity in Modern Avant-Garde Poetry”. Tabakowska et al., eds. 129−154. Wolf, Werner (2005). “Non-supplemented Blanks in Works of Literature as Forms of ‘Iconicity of Absence”’. Costantino Maeder, Olga Fischer, William Herlofsky, eds. Outside-In and Inside-Out: Iconicity in Language and Literature 4. Amsterdam: Ben­ ja­mins. 113−132. Wood, James (2014 online). “Useless Prayers: Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing”. The New Yorker, Sept. 29. [05/04/2015]. Woolf, Virginia (1967) “Modern Fiction”. Collected Essays II. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and World. 103–110. Wurlitzer, Rudolph (1969/2009). Nog. Two Dollar Radio.

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Chapter 4

On the Impact of Voids: Musical Silence and Visual Absence in Film  Saskia Jaszoltowski In the silent film era music was supposed to accompany the moving images in a more or less uninterrupted manner providing a sustained flow of possible acoustic signifiers. With the advent of sound film, the musical accompaniment developed into a semiotic text deriving its meaning from the visual context and establishing a solid basis of expectations in the mind of the implied audience. Even though the soundtrack of a film necessarily contains parts of musical silence, they are rarely significant but functional. There are, however, exceptions. The present contribution focuses on these exceptions. Selected examples will illustrate to what extent absence in film music as well as in the visual parts of films can become significant. 1

Prologue

In his essay “The Poetics of Musical Silence”, Thomas Clifton remarks: “To focus on the phenomenon of musical silence is analogous to deliberately studying the space between trees in a forest.” (1976: 163) With a few words one can quite easily describe the growth of a tree, specify its type in botanical terms, and analyze its appearance. One can even draw an abstract depiction of it – a signifiant in semiotic terms that is understood as a visual representation of a real tree, or, depending on its design and context, as a symbol with a certain meaning. The tree of life would be an example for a symbolic depiction. Its signifié consists of a mythological or religious concept of the world and its living creatures. However, the space between trees in a forest cannot be described or represented as easily as the trees themselves. A visual depiction of the gaps in-between is rather challenging without the trees serving as a frame. Nevertheless, a forest is formed only by the combination of the un-representable gaps with the representable trees. In this respect, a musical composition can be compared with a forest because it consists of trees and spaces that are visually depicted as notes and rests in the written score. Moreover, the performance

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of a composition, its acoustic realization, is usually framed by and consequently separated from its dialectic counterpart: silence. Comparable to a botanist who neglects the empty spaces in a forest, a musicological analysis focuses on the sounding ‘trees’, to adhere to the metaphor, and rarely cares about the silent gaps in-between or surrounding a piece of music. It seems paradoxical to write about a phenomenon that cannot be heard – there seems to be nothing to interpret for a musicologist, if sound or its abstract depiction in the score is absent. Yet from the perspective of the listener, who is emotionally affected by music, it makes sense to wonder whether one could be musically moved without hearing anything. The discrepancy between these positions may, however, be promptly dispelled, if one considers the fact that music can only be truly appreciated and fulfil its emotional impact because of the surrounding silences. Moreover, silence may provoke an even stronger emotion than music itself in situations in which the listener is accustomed to hearing musical sounds, but where the expectations are then not fulfilled. From these observations two assumptions will be drawn: First, in order to be perceived as a meaningful nothing, absence needs a framing context.1 In the same way in which the empty spaces in a forest are perceptible only because of the trees, musical silence has to be framed by music or, alternatively, it has to be transferred into another medium to become significant. Indeed, without an acoustic or visual contextualization, silence is not discernible. Second, voids can only be perceived as significant, if they are expected to be filled with signifying content. When trees in a forest are chopped off, a hole becomes visible, and similarly the missed entrance of an instrument during a musical performance is recognized by the listener – the silence becomes audible because there is nothing to listen to where one expects to hear something. Consequently, the significance of musical silence depends on the expectations and on the conditioned hearing of the listener in respect to the given aesthetic situation. Meaning emerges from silence when music is avoided in a context that usually features musical sounds. 2

Composed Silence

Arguably one of the most famous pieces of music regarding musical silence is 4’33” composed by John Cage in 1952.2 In this three-movement composition, 1 For a discussion of the concept of framing regarding the significance of absence, see Wolf 2016. 2 Much writing has been done on Cage’s piece, its meaning, and the composer’s attitude towards silence. For a more recent consideration, see Katschthaler 2016.

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which in its title defines the duration of the performance, Cage did not write a single note but only gives the instruction for the performer to stay silent: tacet. A musical analysis of the score as the object of study ends before it has even properly started because there is nothing to analyze. For an aesthetic appreciation, reading the written music is as insufficient as listening to an audio recording of 4’33” because it is hardly possible to discern the beginning and ending of the piece or its separate movements. The composed silence may be visually perceived in the score, but it cannot be distinguished from the surrounding non-musical silence when listening to a recording. A distinction is perceptible only in a live or video-recorded performance because the body movement of the performer visually marks beginning and end. By attending or watching a concert performance of 4’33”, it becomes clear that the sound events may stay more or less the same throughout the performance, but they are perceived differently depending on the musician’s bodily expression. Hence, the acoustic indistinctiveness becomes distinct through visual framing, making the different silences rather visible than audible. If a musical performance is announced to an audience, one is accustomed to hearing some sort of organized sound – not only the coincidental environmental noise at the venue. Even if a recorded concert by a brass band in a forest is introduced, one does not expect to hear twittering birds but rather powerful sounds of trumpet, trombone, and tuba.3 With any performance of 4’33” the question arises whether the musical tacet parts can be at all discernible from the non-composed pauses between the movements. The answer depends on the staging of the concert. However, Edward Said simply rejects the question when he claims: “There is no opposition between music and silence, nor between art and the unintended.” (1997 online) Said’s statement refers to John Cage, but it also brings to mind Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades from the 1910s that depend on the objects’ contextualization in an exhibition space. Likewise, every performance of 4’33” sounds different because it consists of the surrounding acoustics of the concert venue. Cage’s piece challenges both his audience, which is forced to listen to the absence of music, and Western concert practice per se, in which music and silence are strictly separated. Generally, musical silence becomes significant because of the audiovisual framing and the expectations towards a performance. In the concert hall, the silence preceding the beginning of a composition is filled with tension and expectation just as the silence between the movements is pervaded by suspense, and the silence at the end of a piece provides the possibility to reflect on the music

3 See, for instance, the performance of 4’33” by the Berlin-based brass band Zentralkapelle, [04/09/2016].

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just heard. These conventions are, however, subverted by Cage – giving musical silence a new quality. 3

Interlude

In a certain way, the comprehension of music is comparable to listening to a speech being delivered. Short pauses between sentences and small gaps between their grammatical parts structure the verbal flow and enhance the understanding of the content. They are significant in syntactic terms rather than in a semantic or semiotic way, but they can nevertheless also provoke tension. When a voice suddenly falls silent, the resulting effect possibly conveys a certain meaning and eventually unsettles the listener. As stated above, Cage’s composed silence is intended to disturb conventional listening habits that have persisted in traditional performance practice. It is up to the listener to read a semantic or semiotic connotation into the musical silence. Furthermore, by presenting silence within a musical context, the view of music as a representational art or an art that draws on external meaning is questioned. Likewise, Cage’s avant-garde contemporaries of the early to mid-twentieth century strongly pursued the notion that art only existed for its own sake. These composers turned against the Romantic era, that is, against an emotionally driven perception of music. They devaluated program music with its extramusical narrative quality and denied any function to be attributed to their own music other than being listened to with full appreciation. At about the same time, composers in Hollywood wrote their scores in the musical language of late Romanticism exactly because of its inherent emotionalizing and narrative functions that the avant-garde aimed to avoid – film composers of the 1930s and 1940s used familiar expressive tonal music to complement or even compensate for the silence of the moving images. 4

Avoiding Silence

To comprehend the development of film music, one has to go back at least to the 1920s, when silent cinema had come of age. The live music accompanying film performances had been inspired by late Romantic and earlier nineteenth-century compositions. Taking a look at manuals for the musical accompaniment of the silently moving images (e. g., Sam Fox Moving Picture Music, published in three volumes 1913–1914; see Zamecnik), the semiotic basis of film music becomes quite clear: in those books, musical cues are suggested

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to convey the expressive character of diverse types of scenes. With the advent of sound film in 1927, the technology of synchronizing the moving images with the soundtrack spread quickly and led to a flourishing Hollywood film industry – including the requisite music departments – in the following two decades. During the 1930s and 1940s, a period frequently referred to as Hollywood’s Golden Age, Europe on the other side of the Atlantic faced the rise of fascism, the cruelties of the Nazi regime, and the Second World War. Some members of the persecuted and oppressed European cultural elite who had been able to flee and save their lives found refuge in the United States, where they eventually would be hired by the emerging Hollywood film industry. Consequently, musicians educated in a European musical tradition and familiar with the lateromantic musical style were involved in the development of film music in the 1930s. The composing technique of using thematic-motivic phrases in relation to a certain character or a recurring situation was adopted from nineteenthcentury art music, and the symphonic sound of the philharmonic concerts at that time seemed to be appropriate for the accompaniment of the fictive stories. Nowadays, after 90 years of sound film history, we are accustomed to and expect music to go along with two-dimensional moving images. Watching a silent film without musical accompaniment today might be irritating for the viewer. But this does not necessarily imply that audiences back then would have felt the same – in fact, it is very well possible that initially silent films were shown silently without music, as Rick Altman points out, depending on the facilities at the respective venue (cf. 1996: 648). Regardless of this historical detail, music for silent films provided coherence for the visually depicted story on the screen. Music was not only meant to bridge the short gaps caused by the separate frames of cinematography and by the inter-titles. It was also able to compensate for the actors’ lack of acoustic expression. With the advent of sound film, the employment of music’s expressiveness and ability to fill visual voids or narrative shifts lingered on. This eventually led to a close relationship between (musical) sound events and visual action on screen in classical Hollywood cinema and produced audiovisual signifiers that culminated in the soundtracks of animated cartoons. These short musical comedies, which formed a constituent part of movie theatre programs during Hollywood’s Golden Age – among them Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, and Tom and Jerry – are enlivened by the music. They are animated, brought to life, and filled with emotions by a music-and-sound-effect score that above all provides continuity (cf. Jaszoltowski 2013: 51–63). In sound film in general, the interrelation between music and visuals, that is, the repetition of certain audiovisual combinations, has acquired specific

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meanings, connotations, or associations, and has consequently established the inherent semiotic character of film music. Musical meaning in film, to draw on Zofia Lissa (cf. 1965: 65–71), depends on the visual depiction of the story, while the music at the same time influences the content of the moving images. To ensure narrative clarity, the work of a film composer in Hollywood’s Golden Age relied on the repetition of a set of audiovisual combinations. This approach resulted in the sedimentation of musical signifiers that are widely understood up until today and provoke a certain signified even without the visual depiction. Retrospectively, the wall-to-wall scoring practice in Hollywood films formed the expectations of its audience and accustomed them to listening and viewing habits that may be called redundant: one sees what one hears. Max Steiner, for instance, one of the most influential Hollywood composers of the 1930s, approached his work by ascribing musical themes to the protagonists and depicted situations with the effect that the story was not only visually communicated but became audible as well. Moreover, Steiner’s scores are an ideal example for music’s ability to bridge gaps in the narration, to provide continuity across changes of time and place, and to establish an overall coherence of the film as a work of art (cf. Jaszoltowski/Riethmüller 2009: 149–175). In search of musical silences, however, one has to listen carefully because Steiner’s film music steps in and out of the screen quite inconspicuously. Not at all meant to be listened to consciously but rather to be taken in unconsciously, the music was supposed to draw the audience into the film’s narration by providing a sense of immersion into the depicted story and blocking out the environment of the movie theatre. In particular the musical dimension of cinematic sound minimized the distance, so to say, between the viewers and the screen in front of them. Up to the present moment, cinemagoers have been accustomed to perceiving music in the movie theatre, even though this music might be called “unheard”, to quote from the title of Claudia Gorbman’s influential book, Unheard Melodies (1987). Interestingly, film music is, however, consciously listened to when there is nothing to hear: when musical accompaniment is avoided, the attention is drawn to the musical absence by a framing or contextualizing of silence, and the expectation to hear music is disappointed. 5

Film Openings: Two Examples

In the 1930s, a Hollywood movie usually opened with a pompous musical overture that was most likely to be consciously listened to while moving images were absent, that is, when the screen stayed black or only still pictures were

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shown with the word ‘overture’ or the credits appearing in the foreground. The opening of the film was the only moment when music was allowed enough space to work autonomously to the highest degree. Such a paradigmatic opening of a classical Hollywood movie occurs in Gone with the Wind (1939). The film features Max Steiner’s musical language, and the Academy Award winning epic presents Scarlett O’Hara’s commitment to saving the family estate, Tara, as well as her ambiguous attraction to Rhett Butler during the US Civil War. The first six and a half minutes comprise the thematic material for the score that subsequently accompanies almost four hours of filmic drama. The absence of moving images combined with the autonomous presence of the symphonic orchestral music, which introduces memorable melodies, was meant to withdraw the audience from reality, to prepare it for the upcoming fiction, and to enhance its emotional involvement in the story about to be presented. A musical introduction which not only served to calibrate or attune viewers to the make-believe of the depicted narrative but also established coherence was the common modus operandi for conventional Hollywood productions at that time. In the course of film history, the musical style diversified. Not only instrumental overtures but also theme songs written in various musical styles became signifiers for certain film genres. This signifying function even holds true as well when such a musical introduction or overture is avoided and the film opens up with silence. In contrast to such Hollywood blockbusters, a film without a musical opening foregoes the process of attuning listeners to the story; instead, it confronts the audience with the visually depicted diegetic world right from the start. Musical silence becomes significant because the viewer expects to hear music at the beginning of a film, and it augments the attention to other sound events or to the visual content. In respect to the genre-setting function of the musical introduction, its absence may as well hint at a specific type of film. The trademark of James Bond films, for example, is a musically silent beginning to provoke suspense, guiding the attention straight to the story, which usually shows the protagonist getting involved into some sort of dangerous situation before Monty Norman’s famous musical Bond theme is heard and followed by the films’ respective theme song. Such an opening sequence of musical silence followed by a pop song is also used by Lars von Trier for his film Nymph()maniac (2014), but in an acoustically more radical and less organic way, and hence, with a considerably different effect. Moreover, the first four minutes of the film are conspicuous not only because of the absence of music but also because the visuals lack a narrative. After having read the title, the audience is left in an audiovisual void, which provokes a troubling effect. With the backdrop of the black screen, the viewer’s

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attention is drawn to quiet, undistinguished noises, and then, with sharply edited cuts, exposed to scenes of falling snow, running water, and falling drops. The corresponding noises of quietness, a continuous flow, and disrupted sound events respectively are acoustically augmented and assembled according to the depicted visuals. Since coherence, which would usually be established by the acoustic dimension across the visual cuts, is avoided, the denial of music in the opening sequence unsettles the audience and becomes even more disturbing because of the sudden entrance of Rammstein’s dark metal song “Führe mich” (2009). With this sombre song, the built-up suspense of the quiet beginning is harshly resolved, and the expectation that something is about to happen is suddenly fulfilled. From then on, the following five hours of the film contrast with the silent opening and portray emotionally handicapped human beings who are subjects or objects of sexual abuse. The film centres on a nymphomaniac woman, who confesses her fate of psychopathic self-destruction shown in flashbacks in which music is rarely present but, in contrast, visual detail is omnipresent. In comparison to classical Hollywood films that rely heavily on music’s emotional impact, the musical silence in Nymph()maniac parallels the emotionless rendering of the story and may signify the protagonist’s inability to feel. Visually, the title’s spelling hints at this emotional void: the parenthetical ellipsis, that is, the framing of the absent letter ‘o’ banally indicates the anatomy of the female protagonist’s genitals that are devoid of sexual satisfaction. Interestingly, even though the lyrics of the song are hardly or (since they are in German) not at all understood, they underscore the film’s topic of sexual obedience and violence. Moreover, the repetition of the demand, “Führe mich!” (‘Lead me!’; my translation), may generate associations with the byname of Hitler, the ‘Führer’, vaguely enhanced by a peculiar contrast that arises between the song and a visual detail in the moving images without being explicitly stated: on the visual level, the depiction of a menorah in a shop window hints at the male protagonist’s religion; on the acoustic level, but without being contextualized in the story, the song gestures towards the provocation implied in Rammstein’s performances and music videos by the use of imagery that can easily be perceived as fascist. The music video for the song “Stripped” (1998) features, e. g., excerpts from Leni Riefenstahl’s film Olympia (1938), which was part of the Nazi propaganda machinery in the wake of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Without going into detail here, the premiere of von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) at the Film Festival in Cannes is worth mentioning in this context: at the press conference, he initially confessed to being a Nazi, only to modify this claim shortly thereafter by explaining that he admired fascist aesthetics such

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as the architecture of Albert Speer.4 In this context, von Trier’s musical choices and his intentions as a director have to be regarded as highly ambiguous and as provoking unsettling interpretations. 6

The Voice of the Uncanny

Music in film may be as unsettling as silence. In fact, the emotional impact of the former is emphasized when it is preceded by the latter. Particularly in the genre of horror film, silences are loaded with tension that explode with the entry of a loud sound event and the outburst of the uncanny. Beyond this, scoring practices for horror films are characterized by avoiding tonal harmony and regularly structured rhythmic patterns because both would provide orientation and comfort for the viewer, as the scores by composers like Max Steiner do. The absence of a tonal centre in much avant-garde music seems to be predestined for its employment on the soundtrack of horror films.5 Despite its emotionally disturbing effect on the audience, an avant-garde score provides coherence like any other film music by bridging gaps of time and place in the visual depiction of the narration. This is, for instance, the case with the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), which includes, among other pieces, an excerpt from György Ligeti’s Lontano (1967) as film music. The story deals with the growing insanity of a father who lives with his wife and son in an abandoned hotel that was once the crime scene for the triple murder of twin sisters and their mother. About half an hour into the film, a sequence starting with Ligeti’s Lontano leads to the first climax; at this turning point of the story, horror enters the narration for the first time. Silences, pauses, voices, natural sounds, and the avant-garde piece are carefully composed on the soundtrack in order to enhance tension and coherence for approximately three minutes, in which the male protagonist becomes slowly obsessed by madness, while mother and child become more and more secluded and exposed to an as yet vague danger. The beginning of the sequence depicts a quiet scene in the snow. A wide shot captures mother and child playing catch outside the house, barely visible because of the upcoming snowstorm. Accordingly, their laughing voices are just faintly audible, and soon a flickering high-pitched noise quietly but noticeably creeps into the soundscape. This is the above-mentioned excerpt from 4 Videos of the press conference can easily be found on the Internet. For a description of the reactions, see Higgins 2011 online. 5 For a comprehensive overview of music in horror films, see Hentschel 2011.

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Ligeti’s Lontano, in which violins play flageolets in a high register. If the music is mistaken for an electronically produced noise, the scene is consequently perceived as musically silent. But the score functions like a conventional Hollywood soundtrack: the Ligeti excerpt links the depiction of mother and son in the snow with the subsequent close-up of the father’s face. Connecting the two scenes via the music, it is suggested that the father is looking at his family from his position inside the hotel or that he, at least, has a picture of them in his mind. Except for the fireplace in the background, the close-up is almost devoid of motion because the protagonist’s facial expression appears strikingly frozen. While the quiet sound clusters of Ligeti’s music parallel the static, yet tension-filled countenance, a slight movement of the facial muscles finally becomes visible, which emphasizes the father’s strained grimace even more. The visual and especially musical intensification in this scene ‘narrates the psychological process’ of the protagonist’s rising insanity.6 On the visual level, this shot is suddenly blacked out, and the word “Saturday” appears on the screen, obviously indicating the time leap to the following day. On the acoustic level, the uninterrupted score supersedes the information about the change of date because the crescendo signifies the growing danger during the time leap, linking the protagonist’s growing madness overnight to the aggravation of the snowstorm, which results in the breakdown of the telephone line. When the female protagonist unsuccessfully tries to use the phone the next morning, the music lingers on to create suspense, and it accompanies her goal-driven motion through the hotel to another room until she manages to establish a connection with the outside world via radio. Up to this point, the score not only provides coherence between the separate scenes and generates suspense but also serves as an acoustic signifier of the hidden, visually still absent uncanny. The musical expressiveness of this cue, the ‘eerie quietness’7 of Ligeti’s Lontano, originates from its instrumentation of low-registered double bass clarinet, double bassoon, and double bass played sul ponticello in contrast to violins playing high-register flageolets, opening a wide and empty acoustic gap, which Zofia Lissa would classify as an illustrative ‘effect of emptiness’8. When the music suddenly stops during the radio communication between the female protagonist and the officer, it is not meant to facilitate a better understanding of the dialogue, as one could assume from traditional Hollywood 6 “Die Musik schildert die psychischen Vorgänge in Jacks Innerem […].” (Hentschel 2011: 25; my translation) 7 “[…] die unheimliche Ruhe” (Hentschel 2011: 27; my translation). 8 “Effekt der ‘Leere’ […] durch Pausieren der Mittelstimmen bei Aufrechterhaltung der Randregister” (Lissa 1969: 180. ‘Effect of emptiness through pauses in the inner voices and retaining the marginal registers’; my translation).

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scoring practice. Rather, the musical silence signifies the absence of the uncanny in this short moment and emphasizes the deceptively secure connection to the outer world. Musical silence in this scene may be interpreted as ‘real’, whereas Ligeti’s Lontano is retrospectively contextualized as ‘unreal’.9 Moreover, the silence prepares the audiovisual impact of the unreal in the following scene. The uncanny becomes visible for the first time when the son sees as well as hears the ghosts of the murdered twins. From now on, the horror moments are not only audible but visible as well. Here, an excerpt from Krzysztof Penderecki’s De Natura Sonoris No. 1 (1966) serves as the basis for editing the moving images. The dynamic and rhythmic accentuations inherent in the music are synchronized with the action on the screen and, as a result, the sudden impact of the depicted horror is emphasized. Visually, narratively, as well as acoustically, the dramaturgy of the film relies on the intensification of sounds and images of the unavoidable horror: in the course of the film, the musical cues on the soundtrack enter more frequently and become longer and richer in sound texture (cf. Hentschel 2011: 22). Musical silences that signified ‘reality’ at the beginning of the depicted story recede. Instead, musical quietness serves as a sign for the intrusion of the as yet invisible uncanny. The volume then increases until loud and dissonant excerpts finally stress the visual horror. In the context of the film narration, the excerpt from Ligeti’s Lontano functions as an “acousmêtre”, to borrow a term which Michel Chion (1990/2014: 112–115) defines as a protagonist who stays visually absent from the screen, but acts within the story, and whose voice is audible. The Shining features an acousmêtre, identified as the agent of horror, who is not visible in person but acoustically present on the soundtrack. The music thus serves as the voice of the uncanny and becomes significant only because of the silences that signify the absence of horror. 7

Emphasis on Audiovisual Restraint

While the genre of horror film adheres to traditional scoring practices and stresses the emotional impact of music and its absence by interrelating the two of them, the genre of independent film is defined by avoiding Hollywood conventions in respect to composing the soundtrack. Indie films like Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise (1984) may still rely on the audience’s aesthetic 9 In a different context, Lissa mentions this convergence of musical silence and reality, cf. Lissa 1965: 243.

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experience established by the Hollywood industry in its Golden Age, but only in order to refrain from fulfilling its expectations. Shot in black and white, Stranger Than Paradise is characterized by a laconic kind of storytelling. Accordingly, it seems that colors are absent from the soundtrack as well because the music is restricted in volume and timbre and is used sparingly. For most of the film, the sound color is mainly limited to a quietly and slowly playing small string ensemble, hence contrasting with the lush orchestral score of a conventional Hollywood movie. Whereas the films of the Golden Age produced strong emotions, particularly by musical means, the emotional output of the protagonists in Stranger Than Paradise remains confined and is audiovisually rendered in a subtle way. The story deals with the disappointment of the female protagonist who emigrated from her home country, Hungary, in order to start a new and prosperous life in the United States. Staying with her cousin, who had emigrated long before her, neither he nor the American culture which she encounters live up to her expectations. That is why she decides to leave her cousin in order to visit another relative who emigrated to the United States. While she is packing her bags, her cousin is watching her; both are silently expressing a mixture of disappointment and indifference. This silence and absence of music makes the emotionally restricted communication of the two cousins ‘audible’. When she finally leaves and says goodbye, a duet for two violas composed by Aaron Picht quietly stresses their silence, serving as a substitute for the absence of more cordial words. This piece is heard several times throughout the film when verbal communication fails: when words remain unspoken, music compensates for the lack of emotional expression. In a later scene of the film, the female protagonist’s disappointment is once again presented intermedially, this time by visualizing musical silence. All by herself, she is sitting on the beach with a tape recorder next to her, but without any sound playing. Throughout her journey, she listened to a song by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins on this device, namely: “I Put a Spell on You” (1956), symbolizing her expectations of a promising new life in the United States. By depicting the now mute machine in the scene at the beach, the absence of the song signifies her disappointed hopes. This can only be understood because one has become accustomed to linking the song with the visible audio device, even though this connection has not been explicitly stated. It is not until the closing credits of the film that the song is played again in full length, serving as a framing and summarizing coda. By employing music with restraint and placing it cautiously in scenes that are verbally silent, the musical silences and the quiet music exert great impact. Jarmusch negates the – at times redundant – unambiguous signifiers common

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in Hollywood filmic practice. He provides space for musical cues that tell their own story in addition to the visually and verbally presented narrative. Moreover, he relies on music’s ability to signify even when it stays silent, so to say. In the course of Strangers Than Paradise, the song, the viola duet, and the absence of music signify hope, the lack of expressive communication, and disappointment, respectively.

Epilogue

The discussion of these few but varied examples shows that musical silence, in order to be termed significant, relies on its dialectic relation to music – and vice versa. In film, musical silence is only perceptible and, hence, only becomes meaningful, if the moving images are expected to be accompanied by sound, and if the surrounding (visual and/or narrative) context stresses the absence of music. In order to interpret the signifié of musical silence, aspects of expectation and contextualization have to be taken into consideration. Likewise, visual absence in film, a narrative gap, the lack of words, or an emotional void may be compensated by music, and in this way made perceptible before the meaning of the missing signifiant can be deciphered. Generalizing the significance of visual absence or musical silence in film would be inappropriate. However, a tendency in its use regarding characteristics of genre or style can arguably be determined, as shown by the examined films, if one agrees with the representative function of their respective time period or categorization as performance, mainstream, horror, and independent film. Moreover, it can be confidently stated that music’s significance in general is fully appreciated only because it is framed by silence. Turned the other way around, neglecting the perspective of the audience or critic and instead arguing from a musician’s point of view, Sting wonders, “whether […] the most important thing we do is merely to provide a frame for silence. […] And is silence the most perfect music of all?” (1994 online) Cage would probably agree.

References

Altman, Rick (1996). “The Silence of the Silents”. The Musical Quarterly 80/4: 648–718. Chion, Michel (1990/2014). L’Audio-vision: Son et image au cinéma. 3rd ed. Paris: Armand Colin.

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Clifton, Thomas (1976). “The Poetics of Musical Silence”. The Musical Quarterly 62/2: 163–181. Gorbman, Claudia (1987). Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Bloomington, IN/ Indianapolis, IN: Indiana Univ. Press. Hentschel, Frank (2011). Töne der Angst: Die Musik im Horrorfilm. Berlin: Bertz und Fischer. Higgins, Charlotte (2011 online). “Lars von Trier Provokes Cannes with ‘I’m a Nazi’ Comments”. The Guardian, May 18. [03/10/2016]. Katschthaler, Karl (2016). “Absence, Presence and Potentiality: John Cage’s 4’33” Revisited”. Wolf/Bernhart, eds. 166–179. Jaszoltowski, Saskia, Albrecht Riethmüller (2009). “Musik im Film”. Holger Schramm, ed. Handbuch Musik und Medien. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag Konstanz. 149–175. Jaszoltowski, Saskia (2013). Animierte Musik – Beseelte Zeichen: Tonspuren anthropomor­ pher Tiere in Animated Cartoons. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner. Lissa, Zofia (1965). Ästhetik der Filmmusik. Berlin: Henschel. Lissa, Zofia (1969). Aufsätze zur Musikästhetik. Berlin: Henschel. Said, Edward (1997 online). “From Silence to Sound and Back Again: Music, Literature, and History”. [29/05/2018]. Sting (1994 online). “Commencement 1994: Sting Delivers Commencement Address”, May 15. [03/11/2015]. Wolf, Werner (2016). “How Does Absence Become Significant in Literature and Music?”. Wolf/Bernhart, eds. 5­–22. Wolf, Werner, Walter Bernhart, eds. (2016). Silence and Absence in Literature and Music. Word and Music Studies 15. Leiden/Boston, MA: Brill/Rodopi. Zamecnik, John Stepan (1913–1914). Sam Fox Moving Picture Music. 3 vols. Cleveland, OH: Sam Fox Publishing Co.

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Chapter 5

Significant Absence in Narrative Fiction Film  Klaus Rieser This contribution is concerned with a neglected field of inquiry, namely absences in film, specifically in narrative fiction film. Drawing on a number of historical as well as contemporary examples, the author argues that significant absences in narrative fiction films differ considerably from those in print fiction. Key aspects of film’s media properties, such as its multi-channel and pluricodal character as well as its reliance on codes rather than on a grammar, result in a remarkable variety of absences well beyond gaps and blanks. 1

Theoretical Discussion of Absence in Narrative Fiction Film

A screen goes black while the sound continues; music is interrupted in midsong; a fight takes place off-screen; movement is halted in a freeze frame; a character blocks our vision; peculiar framing relegates the head of a character off-screen – narrative fiction film exhibits a large variety of significant absences that merit closer analysis. Moreover, while narrative fiction in film has many similarities to its counterpart in print, it also has a number of medium-specific aspects that have far-reaching consequences for the functioning and meaning of absences.1 This article, therefore, first traces film-specific features of significant absence and then proceeds to concrete examples, ending with a discussion of two widely different films that comprise a large number of significant absences.2 1 Following Rimmon-Kenan (2002), this contribution considers narrative fiction film as a branch of narrative. Regarding the question of absence, narrative fiction film differs significantly from experimental as well as documentary film. For a discussion of classical and other forms of film narration see Bordwell/Thompson (1992/2004). 2 This article has to examine the very basic features of narrative film because absence in film is notably undertheorized. Classical texts on film form by Bordwell/Thompson, e. g., Film Art (1992/2004) as well as their Minding Movies (2011), Elsaesser/Buckland (2002), Hill/Gibson, eds. (1998), or Monaco (1977/2009) hardly touch upon the subject. A small number of academic articles such as Eisenstein (1988/2004), Serper (2000), and Yacavone (2012) do indeed discuss gaps and absences in film, but since they focus on particular aspects of absence, they were not particularly helpful for the task at hand. Texts on unreliable narration in film, such as Ferenz (2006) or Laass (2006), provide more insight but tend to concentrate on reception

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1.1 Film is a Composite of Many Channels and Codes To understand how significant absence functions in film, one first and foremost has to bear in mind that film is a composite of many channels and codes. In Language and Cinema, Christian Metz identifies five tracks or channels: moving photographic images, recorded phonetic sounds, recorded noises, recorded musical sounds, and writings (credits, intertitles, written materials in the shot) (cf. 1974: 227–235). Thus, regarding the distinction between story and discourse, Stam et al. argue that it is not “possible to consider a cinematic narrative as one unique story. Divided as it is between the visual and the verbal, a film always risks being torn in contradictory directions […]” (1993: 92). As a consequence, while in print fiction or painting the omission of an element from the medial surface creates a full gap, in film, an absence can occur in one channel while another one continues uninterrupted. Furthermore, it is necessary to emphasize that Metz here only refers to channels, not their further medial properties. For example, the first channel, the ‘moving photographic image’, has to be further defined through its properties such as framing, camera positioning, depth of field, or the edited succession of shots. After all, significant absence in this channel is not restricted to a total black-out on the screen. Even static images comprise a number of semiotic elements, each with its own codes. Rudolf Arnheim, in Art and Visual Perception, identifies ten elements – balance, shape, form, growth, space, light, color, movement, tension, and expression – arguing further that “vision is not a mechanical recording of elements but rather the apprehension of significant structural patterns” (1974: 6). If we take into account Metz’s channels and Arnheim’s elements of the static image, it becomes clear that a film is a conglomerate of many presences and hence possibilities for absences. An incomplete list of relatively frequent absences in film – some of which will be discussed in this article – may include: ‒ ‒ Absence of ‘recorded noises’: significant in sound film (when marked). ‒ ‒ Absence of music: significant when marked, e. g., when being turned off in the middle of a song. ‒ ‒ Complete absence of image: e. g., the tableau noir, long black screens utilized by Godard (Ici et Ailleurs, 1976) and other directors of the Nouvelle Vague. ‒ ‒ Partial absence of image: e. g., masking, internal framing, blocking of the screen, parts of the screen lie in the dark. effects. Finally, while some literature on intermediality, such as Brosch (2015), does touch upon absences, extant studies do not offer helpful arguments for a general discussion of significant absence in film.

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‒ ‒ Absence of actions and actants: relevant action or story elements are offscreen, but they are framed by a logical sequence of such elements before and after. ‒ ‒ Absence of movement: freeze-frame and tableau vivant. ‒ ‒ Absence of normal speed: slow motion or time-lapse photography. ‒ ‒ Absence of color in a color film: e. g., memory sequences that are presented in black-and-white or sepia. ‒ ‒ Absence of focus/depth of field: the whole shot or some of its elements are out of focus. ‒ ‒ Absence of transitions between two shots: e. g., jump cuts, montage sequences. As even such an incomplete list illuminates, film’s condition as a composite medium has major effects on an analysis of significant absences. First, significant absences in film are not reducible to (complete) gaps in the multi-channel chain of signification. Second, since each of the channels has forms of presence and absence peculiar to its mode, significant absences vary depending on the channel: the absence of music or environmental sound does not function in the same way as an absence of visual material. Third, since the channels are interrelated, absence on one channel can be masked or marked through a presence on another. Fourth, due to the diversity of forms, some absences are almost immediately significant, while others are more contingent on filmic conventions and audience expectations. These points will be further developed in the subsequent sections. 1.2 Film Does Not Have a Grammar, Only Conventions Numerous film theorists, whether starting from a formalist position or one of ideological critique, have stressed that film is not based on a ‘language’ in the manner that literature and literary fiction in particular is. For example, Pier Paolo Pasolini suggests that “[a] film is stylistic before it is grammatical” (qtd. Nichols 1975: 33). Alisa Lebow takes this further, claiming that film does not have a grammar at all As anyone who has ever attempted to ascribe a grammar to film knows, cinema is a somewhat recalcitrant object, refusing to cede to the rigid demands of the form: language has grammar; film – in its proliferating semiotics, its indeterminate syntax, its ultimate resistance to rules – does not. (2012: 2) Similarly, film theorist Bill Nichols asserts: “We cannot construct an ungrammatical sequence as we can write a nonsense sentence – unconventional

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perhaps but not ungrammatical.” (1975: 34) David Bordwell even claims that “[i]n principle, [ film] narrative is utterly opportunistic and promiscuous. […] It seizes anything that can serve its purpose, regardless of logical or ontological constraints, and slaps together all manner of disparate cues.” (2008: 126, original emphasis) Like Nichols, he sees the theoretically unlimited variety only circumscribed by conventions: “In practice, particular narrative traditions have made certain engineering principles more likely, or more motivated, than others.” (Ibid.) Many of these theorists hark back to Christian Metz, who, in Language and Cinema, claims cinema to be a “pluricodic medium” (1974: 61–68). According to Metz, these codes range from the purely cinematic to the cultural and depend on more specific subcodes. Stam et al. summarize his theory in the following manner Within each particular cinematic code, cinematic subcodes represent specific usages of the general code. […] The code, for Metz, is a logical calculus of possible permutations; the subcode is a specific and concrete use of these possibilities, which yet remains within a conventionalized system. […] Cinematic language, Metz acknowledges, has neither the same cohesion nor the same precision as a langue; it is not pre-given, furthermore, but rather a system to be forged by the analyst. (1993: 49) Based on these theorists’ insights we have to conclude that significant absences are to be determined in relation to specific subcodes, ultimately on a filmby-film basis. In other words, significant absences in film are not strictly bound to the individual text but rather to the text’s relation to convention. Moreover, since the codes vary historically and across genres, so do the absences. Indeed, some of the examples discussed below feature significant absences that are established in relation to conventions, in particular by deviating from them.3 1.3 Film is Characterized by Continuous Quantities In continuation of the remarks above, it has to be considered that most filmic codes are scalar: the screen is almost never completely black or white but is composed of darker and brighter elements and is only relatively dark or welllit; camera positions within a shot lie somewhere between an extreme long shot and an extreme close-up or glide along that scale; a scene may employ no music, barely noticeable mood-music or noticeable music and may vary in its loudness. As Bill Nichols already remarked in 1975, in a critique of theories that 3 See, for example, the discussion of out-of-frame in section 2.1 and of blocked vision in section 2.7.

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postulated an (unconscious) language of film, film is a merger of the digital (yes/no, on/off), and the analogue, which is characterized by continuous quantities: “There is no ‘not’ nor any question of ‘either/or’: everything is ‘more or less’.” (1975: 33) Consequently, absences in a shot or scene are not necessarily absolute but can be partial – less light, less focus, lower sound, partial visibility. Moreover, in addition to gaps, the scalar nature of film allows specific presences to create related absences. For example, a close-up, in addition to revealing a significant detail, may also hide one, and a long shot may provide an overview but deprive the viewer of access to detail. Thus, a close-up and a long shot can as proficiently hide another element as a black screen can (compare the examples in 2.2 and 2.7). In other words, in film, presence and absence of a significant signifier can co-occur. (Re)framing in Film Constitutes a Play between Presence and Absence The first projected films, such as the Lumière films La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon (1895), or L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895), were single shots from a fixed point of view, resembling a still photograph with internal motion or a scene on a theatre stage with the curtain and proscenium replaced by the frame. Very soon, however, filmmakers developed cinematic forms of representation that were distinct from the other media: by the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, film pioneers such as Georges Méliès, Edwin S. Porter, and D.W. Griffith developed basic cinematic techniques such as close-ups, point-of-view shots, cuts, dissolves, parallel editing, etc. Since then, almost all narrative films have been composed of a succession of shots from varying camera positions and in varying directions. Therefore, film narration is essentially constituted by a play between presence and absence: at any given moment, there are elements of the story world which are shown and elements which are absent – often to be revealed in other shots.4 Psychoanalytic film theory has made much of the double working of the filmic image, which provides both plenitude (the material present in the shot) and lack (that which is not visible, including the place from which the visible is seen), and has argued that this phenomenon, or rather its imaginary resolution through techniques such as the shot-counter-shot, lies at the heart of our enjoyment of 1.4

4 Literary texts, of course, are also defined by a play between presences and absences, e.g. of characters in parts of the narration. However, in film, the presences and absences are in relation to a specific location of the focalizer: The camera position and properties (framing, lens, etc.) determine specifically what is present and what is off-screen.

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film by providing a basis for audience identification, empathy, or desire, in short, for immersion or aesthetic illusion.5 Whether or not we follow the psychoanalytic interpretation, it is clear that this standard way of filmmaking continually works with non-present material as an essential element of its narration. Indeed, the codes of classical narrative cinema (establishing shots, point-of-view shots, 180-degree rule, eyeline match, shot-reverse shot, etc.) were developed to construct the illusion of a realistic narrated world by inviting the audience to gloss over the absences resulting from the constant reframing. In other words, narrative fiction film uses alternation between presence and absence both to extend the possibilities of visual narration (allowing for wide and narrow viewpoints, shifting viewpoints, use of the off-screen, etc.), and to fasten them down by immersing us into the narrated world. Film’s constant alternation of presence and absence through (re)framing creates some problems for an analysis of significant absences, in particular in comparison to literary absences. As Werner Wolf points out, “[t]he margins of most written and printed pages […] serve an exclusively practical purpose” (2005: 114) and thus constitute an insignificant absence: the absence of signs in this space generally bears no relation to the meaning of the text. A complication arises here because the border of a book’s page correlates both to the screen onto which the film is projected (the ‘canvas’ of film) and to the filmic frame, the border of the projected material. For the former, the screen proper, the analysis by Werner Wolf is directly applicable. However, the latter, the filmic frame, is both a universal, material aspect of film, as such serving the same function as the printed page’s margin, and a narrative device. This double function has a number of relevant effects for an analysis of the actually misnamed ‘off-screen’ material not present in a shot.6 First, because a shot regularly contains only a segment of the story world, what is outside the frame can be insignificant – for example, the continuation of the scenery – but can also be highly significant – for example, a monster lurking outside the frame.7 Therefore, the distinction between significant and insignificant absence can hardly be drawn without reference to genre, style, and the given story. Second, elements outside the frame, even if they are 5 For a discussion of immersion or, in filmology, ‘suture’, see Chaudhuri (2006), Silverman (1983/1986), Stam et al. (1993). 6 The overlap of functions is reflected in the terminological imprecision for material outside the film frame: it is generally referred to as ‘off-screen’ while technically it should be called ‘off-frame’ or ‘out-of-frame’. 7 Not being part of the story world, the film technology outside the frame, such as microphones and lighting, can be ignored for a discussion of significant absence. Thus, in the following, off-screen refers only to elements that are part of the possible world of the narration.

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significant, may not be considered significant absences in the sense of this essay collection if they have been shown in previous shots. It may be helpful to consider them non-present, rather than absent. However, these non-presences may at any moment turn into an absence. For example, in a shot-reverse-shot rendering of a dialogue the reverse shot could at any moment reveal an empty chair. In this case, the audience might assume that character B had suddenly left or that character A had only fantasized the conversation. Third, film sometimes reverses the above technique: rather than first showing something which is later off-screen (non-present), film can also conceal relevant material outside the frame and unveil it later to surprise the audience. Thereby, film can redefine the – presumably insignificant – off-screen as a willful omission, turning the merely non-present into a significant absence. This happens quite frequently in thrillers or horror films whose aim it is to surprise the audience, but also in other narrative films, for example when a pan or a new shot reveals the previous field of vision to have been from a character point-of-view. Plot twist movies, in the manner of Fight Club (1999), are characterized by the fact that they expand this common technique to withhold the unveiling of the significant absences until very late in the film.8 1.5 Significant Absence and Audience Expectation It has been argued above that the determination of an absence as a significant one can only be drawn by reference to filmic conventions, in particular when the absence is marked by a clear deviation from convention. This happens, for example, in cases where a non-presence that is common by convention is turned into a significant absence. The unusual cadrage in Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975, discussed in 2.1, is a case in point. Significant absence is created here because the audience realizes the unconventionality of a medium shot that only represents the torso, compared to the common medium shot from the waist up. Thus, ultimately, the distinction between insignificant and significant absences is played out in the spectator’s mind, where the coherence of the story is established. As a result, in some instances at least, an absence only becomes a significant one when it is registered by the viewer. For example, many Hitchcock films and plot-twist movies regularly use the indeterminacy of significance for their play with audience expectations. This is the case, for example, in À La Folie … Pas Du Tout (2002) where the viewers are invited to fill in a paraliptic gap: in one scene, the protagonist and what we take to be her illicit lover disappear into a bathroom. While the next shot suggests the passage of substantial time before the 8 For plot-twist movies see Steinke (2006) and Orth (2006).

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characters reappear, the film later reveals the affair to have been only a fantasy of the protagonist. The omitted encounter in the bathroom is now revealed to have been a short exchange of pleasantries rather than a lengthy sexual encounter. For this scene to function in the intended way, the audience has to read the omitted scene in the bathroom as a significant absence so as to be surprised by its insignificance later in the film (see Thoene 2006). 2

Examples of Significant Absences in Film

The discussion in section 1 has provided the basis for an analysis of significant absence in the plurimodal and pluricodal medium of film, concurrently demonstrating the difficulty of applying a primarily literature-derived concept of significant absence to narrative fiction film. The examples below are intended to both confirm a concept of significant absence in film and to engage with the boundaries and the complexity of such a concept. Thus, they illustrate both ‘obvious’ absences, such as relevant off-screen action, and more marginal ones, such as absence of movement in a freeze frame. 2.1 Absences through Framing Off-screen When one thinks of significant absence in film, elements outside the film’s field of vision are probably the first to come to mind – even though, as discussed in section 1.4, framing is a key example for the complexity of absence in film. For example, a scene in Hitchcock’s first sound film, Blackmail (1929), contains both simple and complex absences (see Figures 5.1a–d). In this crucial scene, the artist Mr. Crewe, having failed to seduce the protagonist, Alice White, is now violently pursuing his goal and in the resulting fight pulls her off-screen to the left. The next, downward-tilted shot presents a policeman walking alongside the street, oblivious to the fight in the upstairs apartment – in the sound version of the film accompanied from the off by Alice’s forceful exclamations of “Let me go!”9 Next, a lengthy shot merely displays the shadows of the two fighting characters. After a brief reappearance in the next shot, Mr. Crewe pulls Alice behind a curtain at the right border of the field of vision. There, he obviously tries to rape her, indicated by violent movement of the curtain (and her continuing shouts of “Let me go!”). At some point, her arm 9 The film was shot both as a silent movie and as a sound movie. For our purposes, the two versions are similar enough since the sound only reinforces what the visual already accomplishes.

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reaches into the scene, searching for something that we initially are not able to make out. The camera pulls in and we realize that she is trying to take hold of a knife that lies on a table near the curtain. Eventually, she is able to seize the knife and pulls it behind the curtain. For some seemingly prolonged seconds we only see the curtain moving (and hear the off-screen noises), indicating the continuation of the fight until, still in the same shot, the curtain stops moving (and the noises subside). After some moments, an arm of the assaulter drops into the frame and a little while later, the woman emerges, disheveled and in shock, from the screen’s right border. Amongst the many absences in this scene, significant absences clearly occur whenever the characters are off-screen, a fact that is reinforced when they move off-screen or when they are represented through their shadows or a moving curtain behind which they fight (see Figures 5.1a–b). A more complex example is constituted by the shot of the policeman: obviously, there is a presence on the screen, but only to stress the significant absence of the off-screen fight, which in the sound version is further marked by Alice’s audible protest. Another such example of complex significant absence occurs when Alice reaches into the field of vision from the right, groping for something that we cannot yet see. While the knife is already there, the audience cannot discern it until the camera tracks in (see Figure 5.1c). Thus, the knife is already present in the image and its presence is marked by the groping arm, but, for the viewers, it is by all means absent. Through these various veiling devices, Hitchcock is able to increase the suspense of the scene. Out-of-frame A very unusual mode of significant absence occurs in Chantal Ackerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). In one scene, a static shot first captures the whole body of Jeanne Dielman and her john emerging from the bedroom and moving towards the camera. Since the camera does not zoom out or pan up, it subsequently only shows Jeanne Dielman’s torso (see Figure 5.2a). Furthermore, she then moves out of the frame to the right, retrieving her customer’s coat, scarf and hat, which, after reemerging – still represented only from waist to throat – she hands to him into the off-right (see Figure 5.2b). In this example, a significant absence obviously occurs when the protagonist moves completely out of frame and when she passes the clothes into the off. But what happens, when only her torso is represented? Narrative film regularly puts only part of the body in view, be it in medium shot or close up. However, this cropping is conventionalized and normally motivated: a close-up of a face serves to signal emotion, a close-up of a fist serves to signal anger, a

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b

c d Figure 5.1a–d Alfred Hitchcock, Blackmail (1929)

close-up of a woman’s leg serves voyeuristic purposes. In Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the medium shot creates a significant absence because it differs from these conventions firstly in that it does not include the head and secondly in that the motivation for this framing is absent or at least left for the audience to muse upon. Amongst other possibilities, we may read it as a Brechtian distancing effect, as reinforcing the lack of emotion shown by the protagonist, as a sign of the ir/relevance of particular body parts in prostitution, as a representation of the protagonist’s feeling of enclosure, or as a sign that she is more than what her life (and the movie frame) offers. Masking and Internal Framing A technique rarely employed today but very common in early film is the masking of part of the screen. In lieu of a zoom lens, it often served to highlight an element within the frame, but it was also used to signify a particular gaze – through a periscope, binoculars, or a keyhole. Masking is interesting in that it creates significant absence in the narrow sense: parts of the signifying plane are rendered invisible, comparable to blocking out words in literature. However,

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a b Figure 5.2a–b Chantal Akerman, Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

Figure 5.3  Spike Jonze, Being John Malkovich (1999)

the aim of masking is almost universally the opposite: to stress the relevance of what is being shown. The above-noted interdependence of presence and absence in film is reversed here: while presence may mark something relevant that is absent, here absence focuses attention on what remains present. A relatively recent, playful example of masking can be found in Being John Malkovich (1999). In this film, characters are able to enter the head of John Malkovich through a small door in a building. Once inside, they, and we, see the world through his eyes, rendered by darkened screen corners that create a rotund field of vision (see Figure 5.3). This masking on the one hand simply signals a personalized point of view, and on the other hand it provides a postmodernist ironic commentary on filmic focalization. In contradistinction to masking, internal framing – using pillars, hallways, door-frames, windows, or darkness to mask part of the shot – is used frequently in film. As with masking, the blocked segment of the screen usually serves to focus attention on the framed presence. In these cases, however, remnants of information, such as the pattern of a door, remain on the medial surface, creating a partial absence only. What perhaps makes internal framing even more a

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borderline case of significant absence is the fact that it is often not registered consciously by the audience. While viewers may not apprehend even radical reductions of the field of vision in visual fare they are familiar with, they usually become aware of internal framings when these run counter to their viewing experience, for example, when in Japanese films “the doorways and sliding panels of the Japanese house […] create squarish frames within frames that hide and reveal figures on various planes” (Bordwell 2008: 382). 2.2 Presences Creating Absences (Veiling) As pointed out in section 1.3, the scalar nature of film may result in presences creating absences. For example, in Rosemary’s Baby (1968), the beginning of a new segment is often marked by an extreme close-up, which leaves the spectator wondering not only why that particular object is being depicted but also what object is being represented at all (cf. Stam et al. 1993: 57). Rather than revealing an essential detail, the extreme close-up here creates an enigma through its absenting qualities. Similarly, under the Hays Code, with its strict ban on the representation of sexual acts, it was a convention to cut or pan from a kiss to some object in the room and linger on it. The represented element thus signaled to the audience the omission of a sex scene. While not fully corresponding to a black screen (or its literary equivalents such as a blank or a dash), such close-up shots nonetheless supplement an absent scene. Thus, we have to conclude that in film not only a blank, but also a supplementary presence, particularly a marked one that indicates an obvious break within a sequence of signifiers whose linearity moves towards a discernible telos, can create significant absence. 2.3 The Freeze Frame The freeze frame can be considered a prime example of significant absence since it occurs on the level of the medium and eliminates an essential element of narrative film, namely movement.10 While almost a cliché in the late 1960s, outstanding examples occur in Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Color of Money (1986), and Goodfellas (1990). In Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959) we first see a prolonged tracking shot of the protagonist, Antoine, who escapes from a work camp and runs toward the sea. Finally, when he reaches the water, he turns around and faces the camera. At this point, the image freezes, the camera zooms in onto his face, and the shot continues for a couple of seconds before the end title “Fin” 10

A similar effect can be achieved with a tableau vivant in which movement in the field of vision comes to a standstill while the camera keeps rolling.

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appears over his face. In this as in other instances, the freeze frame intermedially references still photography, thus creating the feeling of a moment frozen in time. The narrative function of a freeze frame can vary from case to case and often also remain quite ambiguous. For example, the freeze frame at the end of Les Quatre Cents Coups may be interpreted as underlining the absence of narrative closure (the protagonist’s future fate remains in doubt), as indicating achievement under adverse circumstances (Antoine has always wished to see the ocean), or as signaling the end of Antoine’s childhood (the title of the film refers to a French figure of speech – “faire les quatre cents coups” – according to which one has to play 400 tricks on others before one becomes reasonable). 2.4 Absences between Shots   Fade to Black (Fade Out) A ‘fade to black’, or ‘fade out’, regularly signals the end of a sequence.11 Although the next scene may be temporarily or geographically detached from the previous one and provide a significantly altered situation for the characters, they are better understood as punctuation devices than as absences. However, the black screen may become a significant absence if it is textually marked. As will be discussed in 2.6, such cases occur frequently in Stranger than Paradise (1984), where black screens last unusually long and sometimes include a sound bridge. Alternatively, the fade to black may also be used to signal that a character loses consciousness or is dying. A famous example for this use occurs in Titanic (1997) when Rose lets go of Jack’s hands and he sinks into the ocean as the screen slowly fades to black. Since the fade to black does not represent Rose’s vision, it serves as a supplement for death itself. As Black claims: “The cinematic equivalent of the literary figure of the dash would seem to be the fade-out […] a nonsign that conceals […] without signifying […].” (2002: 42) Match Cut A ‘match cutʼ is a technical device intended to skip over transition material by forging a formal similarity between two otherwise disparate shots. The two shots may be linked by an analogous composition or by containing objects with matching shapes or trajectories. For example, a famous match cut at the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) leads from a spinning bone, thrown by a pre-human, to a spinning space station. While in a more traditional film the development of tools from bones to spacecrafts would likely be shown in a montage sequence, here, the formal and mobile similarities of the two objects 11

Crossfade is the technical term for a fade to black which is followed by a fade in. For the purpose at hand, this distinction is, however, irrelevant.

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a

b

c

d

Figure 5.4a–d George Méliès, L’illusionniste fin de siècle (1899)

draw attention to the huge time span that has been omitted in the representation. A humorous employment of match cuts was quite common in early films, most famously in George Méliès’s L’illusionniste fin de siècle (1899).12 Here, Méliès uses a specific form of the match cut, called ‘substitution splice’ or ‘stop trick’, in which two separate shots are carefully matched across a cut to appear seamless. Through the application of a number of such substitution splices, a female dancer and a magician (played by Méliès) go up in smoke (see Figures 5.4a–b), are shattered to pieces, vanish, and even morph into one another (see Figures 5.4c–d).

12

See also Sherlock Holmes Baffled (1900) by Arthur Marvin.

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Jump Cut In classical Hollywood cinema, a jump cut – a cut to a later moment in a scene – is used to shorten text or ‘discourse’ time in relation to story time. In general, the omitted material does not constitute a significant absence since it is filled in, or ignored as irrelevant, by the experienced viewer. Interestingly, for a jump cut to work seamlessly, the two shots have to be from camera positions differing by at least 30 degrees. Famously, Godard shocked his audience, for example in À bout de souffle (1960), with jump cuts between two shots that were from two spatially close or even the same camera position, thereby disrupting the flow of filmic narration. In addition, in his usage, the intervening time is usually much shorter than in classical film, defeating the purpose of saving plot time. In this multiply marked use that also runs counter to audience expectations, the usually unnoticed missing material between two shots is turned into a significant absence. Its purpose (and thus significance) is a metareferential one: to comment on the codes of cinema. As is well known, this technique of disruptive jump cuts has become more conventional, often used for rhythmic effects in music videos, advertisements and narrative films (cf. Vernallis 2004: 28–32; see Wood 2002). In these instances it has ceased to be a significant absence and rather becomes a visual effect. However, the jump cut may still be employed to work as absence. For example, in one scene of the horror film The Ring (2002), a decayed female corpse crawls out of a TV set and moves towards one of the protagonists, Noah. She is still shown in the background when suddenly, after a jump cut, she is depicted much closer to him (see Figures 5.5a–b). This comes as a shock to the viewer as well as to Noah, who stumbles backwards. The scene is interesting in that the omitted travel through space between the two shots is ‘naturalized’ – within the bounds of generic verisimilitude: what is in fact a significant absence is here attributed to the supernatural abilities of the monster. 2.5 Absence of Sound Absence of Music Countless films play with an alternation between or modulation of presence and absence of music. Therefore, if the absence of music is intended to be noticed by the audience, and thus to signify, it has to be marked. The filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, famous for the poignant selection of pop songs for his soundtracks, is also particularly creative in their application. For example in Pulp Fiction (1994), old pop songs not only stand in a dialogic relation to the visual narration but also noticeably fade in and out of scenes. A noteworthy example occurs when Vincent, a killer, picks up Mia, his boss’s girlfriend. The scene, cutting back and forth between Vincent waiting downstairs and Mia

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a

b

Figure 5.5a–b Gore Verbinski, The Ring (2002)

snorting cocaine upstairs, is accompanied by the song “Son of a Preacher Man” (1969, Dusty Springfield). Throughout the scene, the quality of the sound and the controlled sound level (higher when there is no communication) mark the music as extradiegetic. At the end of the scene, however, we first see Mia’s feet walking on a white carpet, followed by a close-up of the arm of a record player being lifted off the record. Here the music breaks off. After another cut, we see Mia’s feet again and hear her say “Let’s go!”. The absence of music at the end of the scene is multiply marked: first, it was dominant in the scene, which had barely any dialogue; second, it abruptly breaks off in mid-song; and third, although it was extradiegetic before, it is turned off on the diegetic level. The character Mia is here given control not only over Vincent but also over the audience.13 Absence of Words Silences in film are often hard to classify as significant absences because they tend to be strongly related to the level of signification. However, an unambiguous substitution of a word occurs in Pulp Fiction right after the scene described above. Vincent and Mia drive up to a restaurant, and when Vincent expresses his disapproval of this choice, Mia responds by saying: “Don’t be a –”. Here, she breaks off in mid-sentence, replacing the word “square” by drawing a square into the air. On top of that, her gesture is traced on the screen by a number of dashes (see Figures 5.6a–b). An even more radical case of supplemented absences can be seen in Being John Malkovich. In one scene, John Malkovich (the actor playing himself) enters a restaurant which is populated entirely by his clones, uttering nothing but “Malkovich”. Even the menu only offers Malkoviches (see Figure 5.7). In this case, people, spoken words, and written words are all substituted by a 13

Regarding such metaleptic uses of film music, see Wolf (forthcoming).

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a Figure 5.6a–b

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b Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction (1994)

Figure 5.7 Spike Jonze, Being John Malkovich (1999)

placeholder, corresponding to the replacement of words through asterisks in print literature. Both films, by substituting textual elements with placeholders, take the audience to the metalevel of the narration, but rather than using the absences to critique the conventionality of mainstream film, they merely/merrily exploit the possibilities of absences for a playful, postmodernist narrative. To understand the functioning of absences, it is important to regard them not only as individual occurrences but rather in context. Therefore, the next two subchapters will discuss absences in an art-house film and an action film. 2.6 Absences in an Art-house Film: Stranger than Paradise (1984) The œuvre of Jim Jarmusch is well known for its enigmas, ellipses, and absences. His films are “deliberately underplotted” and static since “much of what happens on camera could be described as ‘empty’ moments during which characters bide their time or mull over what to say or do next” (Hertzberg, ed.

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2001: 22). Characterization, too, is incomplete: “The characters are only partly known: their circumstances and motivations are incompletely rendered […].” (Ibid.: 199) In addition, Jarmusch likes to use ellipses on the level of the signifier. Frequently, for example, “[d]ramatic events take place off-camera” (ibid.: 24). To point out the functioning and functions of such textual absences, this section will take a detailed look at the first four sequence shots of Stranger than Paradise. The title sequence of Stranger than Paradise begins with the noise of an airplane over a black screen. Abruptly, we then see a woman (Eva) from behind, standing in a barren landscape with some airplanes in the background (see Figure 5.8a). After a while, Eva picks up her luggage, looks around, and then walks out of the image. The image lingers, showing an airplane beginning to taxi (see Figure 5.8b) before the screen abruptly turns black again. Thus, the film begins with the absence of visual material and refuses to provide introductory material such as an establishing shot, a close-up of a symbolic element, or a musical motif. As we would expect, the first prolonged shot of a character introduces a protagonist, but unexpectedly, it refuses to show her face. Furthermore, the static camera does not provide the conventional followup of a cut or pan to where Eva then is looking and moving. Finally, the abrupt cut to black again deprives us of vision altogether. The second sequence, again, begins with sound (this time of footsteps) over a long black screen shot,14 before it portrays the empty sidewalk of a somewhat dilapidated street, presumably in New York City. Eva slowly walks into the frame from the right, takes a cassette player out of her bag and hits the play button. A moment later, the music emerging from the device is heard in offscreen quality. Eva then walks off-screen left, trailed by a long shadow. The music continues throughout the following black screen. Absences here include the missing visual material during the black screen (how did Eva get from the airport to this area?), marked by the presence of the sound of footsteps, and the erstwhile absence of music, marked by its introduction in the middle of the shot and the discord between intradiegetic motivation and extradiegetic quality. Furthermore, the film still refrains from specifying the location and motivation of the depicted action. Finally, the disembodied presence of Eva through her long shadow on the sidewalk only makes her exit from the shot all the more noticeable. While the music continues, the third sequence depicts a different sidewalk in an area reminiscent of scene two. Eva walks in from the right, along a mostly 14

For some time, an intertitle appears on the black screen introducing the first of the three parts into which the film is divided: “The New World”, “One Year Later”, and “Paradise”.

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a Figure 5.8a–b

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b Jim Jarmusch, Stranger than Paradise (1984)

abandoned street, followed by a parallel-running tracking shot. Although the deserted street may still indicate early morning, Eva now throws no long shadow. It is thus unclear how much time has passed between the two shots. Absences in this sequence again include that of vision during the black screen, as well as that of Eva, who is off-screen at the beginning of the sequence. Between sequences three and four, the music fades out, while car noises fade in and continue throughout the sequence, although no cars are shown to be passing. We now get to see a street intersection in a different area of the city, characterized by lower houses and wider streets. From a distance, Eva walks towards the camera and turns around a corner. Significant absences here are the lack of vision during the black screen and the invisibility of the cars featured on the soundtrack. The latter is a highly unusual absence: while, conventionally, film may present elements on the visual channel but omit their sound (for example to foreground dialogue), here the absence of cars in the presence of their sound plays with the multi-channel aspect of film. These absences in Stranger than Paradise arguably serve both artistic and narrative purposes. Regarding the first, they metareferentially point towards the conventional constructions of narrative film. Regarding the second, the omissions constitute a fictional application of documentary discourse. Audiences are thus invited, as in postmodern writerly texts, to fill in missing elements and simultaneously to watch ‘common people in everyday circumstances’. 2.7 Absences in an Action Movie: The Bourne Supremacy (2004) At a considerable remove from the art-house cinema style of Stranger than Paradise, the action thriller The Bourne Supremacy, too, makes extensive use of significant absences. For example, the film uses extensive masking in many dialogue scenes. In one of these, CIA deputy director Pamela Landy meets CIA chief Ward Abbott, whom at this point she suspects to have stolen $ 20 million

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a Figure 5.9a–b

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b Paul Greengrass, The Bourne Supremacy (2004)

and to have framed the protagonist, Jason Bourne. Before she confronts Abbott in his Berlin hotel room, she passes through two doors and an unlit antechamber. During this section of the scene, most of the field of vision is reduced by the opening and closing doors and/or lies in darkness. At one point, the screen even goes completely dark. In her confrontation with Abbott, then, over the shoulder shots are applied in an unusual way. Conventionally, they represent a small fragment of the shoulder or head of a character to indicate his or her point of view, but here that character blocks much of the image, sometimes even obstructing our view of the other character, thereby generating mystery rather than identification (see Figure 5.9a). Such blockages of vision also occur when, later, Jason Bourne surprises Abbott in his hotel room. In this case, moreover, the remaining portion of the image is strongly out-of-focus (see Figure 5.9b). Both scenes also feature absences in the form of strong backlighting, which obliterates the facial feature of the characters, and of characters moving out of frame. Chase sequences in The Bourne Supremacy are characterized by other variants of significant absence. In these, next to screen blockages, our vision of the action is regularly impeded by jerky camera movement, rack pans, extreme out-of-focus close-ups of insignificant body parts, and time ellipses. Combined with fast cutting, abrupt changes of camera positions, and parallel cutting, these absences are part of a complex play between glimpses of action and recognizable characters intercut with short segments of visual absences. This form of narration disorients the audience and thereby heightens tension but also audience involvement since the spectators have to be constantly alert to understand the progression of the chase. Within milliseconds, the audience has to distinguish relevant shots from mere blockages and has to piece together the virtual space. When one watches the scene repeatedly in slow motion, it becomes even clearer that the obstructions of the audience’s vision are not motivated on the level of the signified, for they reproduce neither the vision of the protagonist nor of the pursuer. Thus, they do not signify the confusions of

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the eye of a character but serve as purely formal or perhaps metareferential devices. To select only one of these techniques, rack pans – fast horizontal movements of the camera, resulting in a blurred image – are mostly employed to ‘rediscover’ the protagonist and his pursuers, who are temporarily ‘lost’ in a crowd or obstructed from view. Some rack pans are, however, not motivated by such a ‘realist’ aim. For example, at one point, a rack pan starts from a close-up of the face of Jason Bourne in the middle of a grocery store and ends in a wide shot of him walking towards the back door, thus covering a time ellipsis. The next shot shows people leaving the front entrance of the store in panic. At this moment, a rather long rack pan leads to a close-up of Jason’s pursuer, pointing out that the pursuer has been able to catch up with Jason. In a different chase sequence, a rack pan even takes the audience to a completely different location. The scene is part of a larger segment of parallel editing between Bourne’s location and a CIA office that directs the pursuers and snipers. At one point, Jason and Nicky, a female CIA agent whom he has arranged to meet, descend the stairs into a subway station. A sudden rack pan to the left does not take us to a vision of something lying to the left, such as the street or the wall of the subway station, but instead ends in the CIA observation room. In this case, the rack pan is not a camera movement on location. Instead, its creation of absence through the rack pan functions as a transition to a different location. 3

Conclusion

The analysis in this contribution has revealed that significant absences in narrative fiction films differ considerably from those in literature and fiction in particular, where they are more clearly confined to textual gaps or blanks in the sequence of signifiers, i.e., blanks that are noticed as disruptions of the linear reading process. The medial properties of film (multi-channel, pluricodal structured by codes rather than a grammar), together with the resulting modes of filmic narration (e.g., the interplay of presences and absences) create medium-specific forms of absences. Thus, cinema shares specific forms of absence with some, but not with all media. For example, an absence on the visual channel (including complete blackness) can be accompanied by an auditory presence both in theater and cinema but not in literature. Other significant absences, for example, the “disappearance” of characters due to camera movement are peculiar to film. Regardless of the fact whether or not they are shared with other media, the filmic modes for creating significant absences are highly flexible. As has been shown, significant absences in film can occur

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simultaneously with presence on another channel, can be created through presence, can occur by degree, and usually appear in relation to conventions. In consequence, they are hard to circumscribe since their border to non-presences and to the level of the signified is porous. Beyond these theoretical arguments, the examples discussed have shown that significant absences in film take on a variety of forms – amongst them off-screen actions, temporal ellipses, obstructions of vision, and marked absence of sound – and have a variety of functions, such as creating tension and audience involvement, marking authorial breaks of convention, or metareferentiality.

References

Arnheim, Rudolph (1974). Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye – The New Version. Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press. Black, Joel (2002). The Reality Effect: Film Culture and the Graphic Imperative. New York, NY: Routledge. Bordwell, David (2008). Poetics of Cinema. New York, NY: Routledge. Bordwell, David, Kristin Thompson (1992/2004). Film Art: An Introduction. 7th ed. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Bordwell, David, Kristin Thompson (2011). Minding Movies: Observations on the Art, Craft, and Business of Filmmaking. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press. Brosch, Renate (2015). “Images in Narrative Literature: Cognitive Experience and Iconic Moments”. Gabriele Rippl, ed. Handbook of Intermediality: Literature – Image – Sound – Music. Berlin: de Gryuter. 343–360. Chaudhuri, Shohini (2006). Feminist Film Theorists: Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis, Barbara Creed. New York, NY: Routledge. Eisenstein, Sergei (1988/2004). “The Dramaturgy of Film Form: A Dialectic Approach to Film Form”. Selected Works: Vol. 1. Ed. and Trans. Richard Taylor. London: BFI Pub­ lishing. 161–180. (Rpt.: Leo Braudy, Marshall Cohen, eds. Film Theory and Criti­cism: Introductory Readings. New York, NY: OUP. 23–40). Elsaesser, Thomas, Warren Buckland (2002). Studying Contemporary American Film: A Guide to Movie Analysis. London et al.: Bloomsbury Academic. Ferenz, Volker (2006). “ʻDid you know I’m utterly insane?’: Formen, Funktionen und kulturelle Kontexte von unreliable narration in Mary Harrons Film American Psycho”. Helbig, ed. 5–41. Helbig, Jörg, ed. (2006). ‘Camera doesn’t lie’: Spielarten erzählerischer Unzuverlässigkeit im Film. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Hertzberg, Ludvig, ed. (2001). Jim Jarmusch: Interviews. Jackson, MS: Univ. Press of Mississippi.

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Hill, John, Pamela Church Gibson, eds. (1998). The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. Oxford: OUP. Laass, Eva (2006). “Krieg der Welten in Lynchville: Mulholland Drive und die Anwen­ dungs­möglichkeiten und -grenzen des Konzepts narrativer Unzuverlässigkeit”. Helbig, ed. 251–284. Lebow, Alisa, ed. (2012). The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First-person Documentary. London: Wallflower. Metz, Christian (1974). Language and Cinema. The Hague: Mouton. Monaco, James (1977/2009). How to Read a Film: Movies, Media and Beyond. 4th ed. Oxford: OUP. Nichols, Bill (1975). “Style, Grammar, and the Movies”. Film Quarterly 28/3: 33–49. Orth, Dominik (2006). “Der unbewusste Tod: Unzuverlässiges Erzählen in M. Night Shyamalans The Sixth Sense”. Helbig, ed. 285–307. Pasolini, Pier Paolo (1966). “The Cinema of Poetry”. Cahiers du Cinéma in English 6: 35–43. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith (1983/2002). Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Serper, Zvika (2000). “Blood Visibility/Invisibility in Kurosawa’s ‘Ran’”. Literature-Film Quarterly. 28/2: 149–154. Silverman, Kaja (1983/1986). “Suture”. The Subject of Semiotics. New York, NY: OUP. 194– 236. (Rpt.: Philip Rosen, ed. A Film Theory Reader: Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. New York, NY: Columbia Univ. Press. 219–235). Stam, Robert, et al. (1993). New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Poststructuralism and Beyond. London: Routledge. Steinke, Anthrin (2006). “‘It’s called the change-over: The movie goes on and nobody in the audience has any idea’: Filmische Irrwege und Unwahrheiten in David Finchers Fight Club”. Helbig, ed. 149–165. Thoene, Tina (2006). “Er liebt mich – er liebt mich nicht: Abweichende Wahrnehmung und erzählerische Irreführungen in Laetitia Colombanis A La Folie…Pas Du Tout”. Helbig, ed. 73–93. Vernallis, Carol (2004). Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context. New York, NY: Columbia Univ. Press. Wolf, Werner (2005). “Non-supplemented Blanks in Works of Literature as Forms of ‘Iconicity of Absence’”. Costantino Maeder, Olga Fischer, William J. Herlofsky, eds. Outside-In – Inside-Out: Iconicity in Language and Literature 4. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 113–132. Wolf, Werner (forthcoming). “Traditional and Non-traditional Uses of Film Music and Musical Metalepsis in The Truman Show”. Walter Bernhart, David Francis Urrows, eds. Music, Narrative, and the Moving Image. Word and Music Studies 17. Leiden/ Boston, MA: Brill-Rodopi.

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Wood, Aylish (2002). Technoscience in Contemporary Film: Beyond Science Fiction. Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press. Yacavone, Daniel (2012). “Spaces, Gaps, and Levels: From the Diegetic to the Aesthetic in Film Theory”. Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 6/1: 21–37.



Filmography

 2001: A Space Odyssey. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Performances by Keir, Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968.  À bout de souffle. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Performances by Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg, Daniel Boulanger. SNC, 1960.  Being John Malkovich. Dir. Spike Jonze. Performances by John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener, Orson Bean, Mary Kay Place, John Malkovich. USA Films, 1999.  Blackmail. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Performances by Anny Ondra, John Longden, Cyril Ritchard, Sara Allgood. British International Pictures, 1929.  Bourne Supremacy, The. Dir. Paul Greengrass. Performances by Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Brian Cox, Julia Stiles, Karl Urban, Gabriel Mann, Joan Allen. Universal Pictures, 2004.  Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Dir. George Roy Hill. Performances by Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Katharine Ross, Strother Martin, Jeff Corey, Henry Jones. 20th Century Fox, 1969.  Color of Money, The. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Performances by Paul Newman, Tom Cruise, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. Buena Vista Pictures, 1986.  Goodfellas. Dir. Martin Scorsese Performances by Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco, Paul Sorvino. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1990.  Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Dir. Chantal Akerman. Perfor­ mances by Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte, Henri Storck, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Yves Bical. Olympic Films, 1975.  L’illusionniste fin de siècle. Dir. Georges Méliès. Performance by Georges Méliès. Star Film Company, 1899.  Pulp Fiction. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Performances by John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson. Miramax Films, 1994.  Quatre Cents Coups, Les. Dir. François Truffaut. Performances by Jean-Pierre Léaud, Albert Rémy, Claire Maurier. Les Films du Carrosse, 1959.  Ring, The. Dir. Gore Verbinski. Performances by Naomi Watts, Martin Henderson, Brian Cox. DreamWorks Pictures, 2002.  Rosemary’s Baby. Dir. Roman Polanski. Performances by Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Sidney Blackmer, Maurice Evans, Ralph Bellamy, Angela Dorian. Paramount Pictures, 1968.  Sherlock Holmes Baffled. Dir. Arthur Marvin. Performances by Anonymous. American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1900.

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 Stranger Than Paradise. Dir. Jim Jarmusch. Performances by John Lurie, Eszter Balint, Richard Edson. The Samuel Goldwyn Company, 1984.  Titanic. Dir. James Cameron. Performances by Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane. 20th Century Fox, 1997.

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Chapter 6

Gaps as Significant Absences: The Case of Serial Comics  Daniel Stein This contribution considers the ways in which comics utilize the gaps between panels (sequentiality) and installments (seriality) to turn an absence into a meaningful presence. Rather than conceive of these gaps as essential flaws of comics storytelling, the contribution suggests that they have historically served as the basis for an intensely participatory culture that has driven the development of the medium. Moreover, instead of focusing exclusively on absent signifiers, the contribution illustrates the tendencies and means of superhero comics to trouble any neat separation between absent signifier and a signifying presence. 1

What’s (in) a Gap? Theoretical Considerations

From the self-reflexive and metamedial experiments of newspaper comic strips like George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (1913–1944), where characters metaleptically confront their maker about an absent panel frame (see Figure 6.1),1 to the countercultural recovery of an otherwise missing gender dimension in graphic narratives such as Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For (1983–2008) and Roberta Gregory’s Nasty Bits (1991–2004):2 gaps are central to how comics are drawn, narrated, and read. The online version of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defines “gap” as “a space between two things or in the middle of something, especially because there is a part missing”, and as “a period of time when something stops, or between two events” (“Gap” online). This draws our attention to the gap as something spatial, as an absence that only becomes recognizable and meaningful as an absence through the presence of at least two signifiers (or ‘things’) that frame it: as an absence that can signify only when it is triangulated with 1 On the seriality of comics, see Kelleter/Stein 2009; Uidhir 2016. On Krazy Kat’s modernist selfreflexivity and metamediality, see Stein 2012a; on metamediality in literature, see Starre 2015; on metareference across media, see Wolf 2009; Wolf 2011. 2 For analysis, see Chute 2010.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004394520_007

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Figure 6.1 George Herriman, Krazy Kat (Jan. 25, 1939)

the spatial signifiers that surround it. Moreover, the definition points to an absence that is temporal, to a gap in time that only becomes discernible as a gap through the time-based presence (a ‘before’ and ‘after’) of surrounding signifiers of the same or similar nature. This dictionary definition encapsulates the conventional narrative structure of comics as a spatio-temporal medium. As sequential narratives that generally unfold through a progression of framed static panels, comics do not merely represent time spatially but fracture time by surrounding the panels with a conventionally white space called the gutter (cf. McCloud 1993/1994: 67). Comics narrate through the constant interplay between what is shown, or presented, within the panels through (usually) drawn signifiers that encompass words and images, and what is not shown, or absented, in the gutters. The empty space surrounding the panels therefore has a fundamentally different ontological status than, say, the margins in a literary text or the spaces between individual words or lines. This space is not simply what Werner Wolf usefully calls a non-signifying, accidental, or pragmatic absence (cf. 2005: 114; see also the introduction to this volume), but a signifying absence indeed: an absence that is not merely a consequence of the coincidental formatting of a text but always already a crucial element of the narrative structure itself. Indeed, the meaning of each panel and of each panel sequence in a comic depends substantially on what is missing in the white gutter space, on what is not shown and thus not narrated, and what therefore must remain implied. If the reader of a novel or short story may figuratively read between the lines, readers of comics must do so literally: they must make sense of what is missing by connecting snapshots, or fragments, of an implied narrative continuity. This becomes especially pertinent when the absence of signification in the gutters diverges from conventional usage, e. g., when gutters change shape, size, or color and thus foreground their function as meaning-making units. Comics therefore trouble any neat separation between signifier and signified because the routine absence of signifiers in the space of the gutter always already produces a signified.

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Gaps in time appear in the split-second in which the reader’s eyes move from panel to panel, the oscillation between the focused viewing of a single panel and the broader glance at the whole mise-en-page, as well as the moment when the reader flips the page (a moment that is often exploited for maximum narrative effect in the form of a Binnen- or Mini-Cliffhanger).3 Moreover, in serial narratives, the gap in time appears in the temporal break between individual installments, emerging from the pragmatics of publication but becoming a crucial element of what Knut Hickethier has labeled “doppelte Formstruktur”, or “double formal structure” (1991: 10) in his analysis of serial television: the relation between the individual episode and the unfolding serial narrative at large. These installments are time-based ‘events’ whose episodic nature shapes narrative meaning (including the possibility of complete reversals of previously narrated material) but also impacts the reading patterns and often the personal lives of dedicated readers, as well as the work patterns of those involved in their creation.4 In addition, they are ‘objects’ that readers will buy, read, re-read, and, more often than not, store for later consultation or purposes of collection.5 Serial narratives are, in that sense, determined as much by the waiting period – and thus: the absence of signifiers that would add new material to the narration – between individual installments as they are shaped by what is narrated in the installments themselves. They thrive on this particular rhythm of presenting a new section of the story and abstaining from the narrative for a predetermined amount of time afterwards: a whole day in the case of newspaper comic strips, between two and four weeks for most superhero comics, and sometimes months or even years in some creatordriven alternative comics. I conceive of these gaps as incessant intervals (in a temporal sense) and spaces (in an obviously spatial sense) that open up the serially unfolding story to a reception that does not just comment on the story after its completion but can actually intervene in its ongoing construction. Moving away from the dictionary definition to conceptions of the gap from the field of narratology, we may turn to Wolfgang Iser’s notion of Leerstelle. Iser develops this concept in his publications devoted to literary reception 3 See Fröhlich 2015 on cliffhangers in serial narration. 4 On comics creators, see Gabilliet 2005/2010, chapters 10–12; for shop talk by industry professionals, see Eisner 2001. On comics readers (including fans), see Brown 1997; Pustz 1999; Gabilliet 2005/2010, chapter 13; Williams/Lyons, eds. 2010; Brown 2011; Gibson 2011. 5 Since their first appearance in the late 1930s, superhero comics have inspired highly dedicated collectors who seek to own every installment of a particular series or publisher and therefore strain to prevent any gaps in the serial continuity caused by rare out-of-print issues. On the cultures of comic book collecting, see Inge 1984; Sokolow 1997–1998; Gardner 2006; Woo 2012; Steirer 2014; Stein 2016a.

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aesthetics, where he builds on previous works by Roman Ingarden (Das literarische Kunstwerk [1931/1972] and Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerks [1968]), in particular the notion of places or spots of indeterminacy (Unbestimmtheitsstellen) as indicators of work-bound intentionality, which he supplants with a more reception-oriented model of text–reader interaction.6 While Iser focuses of signifieds rather than signifiers, he provides a useful language through which to process the particularities of gaps and the intrinsic connection between absent signifiers and signifying presences in serial comics. As I will suggest, the gutter differs substantially both in its frequency and its functions from Iser’s notion of gaps, or blanks, as systematic spaces (Systemstellen) in that its systematicity is always directly visible on the level of the signifier (a spatial absence) and inevitably meaningful on the level of the signified through the narrative progression from panel to panel as well as among panels across the entire narrative.7 When Iser speaks of gaps or blanks in a text, he does not simply refer to missing information or an absence of specific details concerning characters, setting, and plot, let alone the absence of particular signifiers. Instead, he conceives of these gaps as systematic spaces in the narrative whose function is to serve as points of entry for the reader. The reader’s task, however, is not so much to fill in the missing parts in order to complete the narrative as it is to negotiate different possibilities of combining the existing elements of a text (cf. Iser 1976/1994: 266, 284). Iser suggests further that literary texts inevitably sanction a range of possible interpretations (Auslegungsspielraum), partly because they must reveal their content – and thus the fictional world in which they are set, the characters acting in this world, and the consequences of these actions – gradually. This gradual unfolding of the narrative necessitates a process of concretizing a fictional world about which the reader is making assumptions by means of what has already been narrated (cf. 1971: 234–236). It also depends on a particular horizon of expectation (Erwartungshorizont), to reference Hans Robert Jauss’s influential concept (see 1982), that arises from personal dispositions, genre conventions (including genre-typical signifiers), the materiality of the medium, and widely held cultural codes. In this process, gaps inevitably emerge, as the reader must derive his or her interpretation of what has been read and his or her expectations of what is to come based on incomplete information.8 Iser finally maintains that these gaps should not be 6 7 8

For Iser’s discussion of these matters, see 1978/1980, chapter 8. Groensteen’s notions of braiding and arthrology capture the many ways in which panels across a whole work or series can relate to each other beyond the standard linear sequence (see 1999/2007). Transmedial narratology has developed various theories on how readers negotiate this situation, including frame theory and possible worlds theory. See Ryan 1991; Ryan 2006;

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viewed as failures of a literary text to provide a full representation of a fictional world and its characters but as an essential element of the text’s effect on, as well as its offerings to, the reader. These observations culminate in the insight that literary texts offer their readers a certain degree of participation (cf. 1971: 234–236). While comics are sometimes classified as a literary genre, and while the term ‘graphic novel’ has become quite fashionable these days, we must remain conscious of the fact that comics narrate in very peculiar ways.9 If we want to move from Iser’s literary reception aesthetics to the storytelling principles of serial comics, both in terms of their signifiers and signifieds, we must consider their spatio-temporal makeup – i.e., their sequentiality – as well as the implications of their serial publication and reception – i.e., their seriality. In that sense, the implicit gaps (Leerstellen) that Iser identifies as a central feature of literary texts become explicit, visible gaps, in comics, where stories also unfold gradually but where this gradualism is elevated to a formal principle, or key component, of the depiction: the constant movement from panel to panel, and thus the constant interchange of what is shown and what is not shown through the comic medium’s modes of signification and its signifying potential (Auslegungsspielraum) (cf. 1978/1980: 191).10 Here, too, readers are constantly filling in gaps in the narrative. Yet they do so in their double (and inextricably connected) roles as readers of the verbal strain of the narrative and as viewers of its visual strain who certainly ‘read’ the images but also gaze at them from the position of a spectator.

9 10

Ryan 2013 online; Herman 2002; Herman 2009; Wolf/Bernhart, eds. 2006; and several of the contributions to Ryan/Thon, eds. 2014. For recent discussions of the applicability of literary concepts to graphic narratives, see Miodrag 2016; Stein 2016b online; Stein 2018. For a definition and history of the graphic novel, see Baetens/Frey 2015. Iser includes remarks about the serial novel (Fortsetzungsroman), noting a heightened level of readerly participation und suggesting that Charles Dickens conceived of his readers as co-authors (cf. 1976/1994: 297). Considering the effects of the cliffhanger (Schnitttechnik) and the temporal breaks between installments, he concludes: “Der Leser wird gezwungen, durch die ihm verordneten Pausen sich immer etwas mehr vorzustellen, als dies bei fortlaufender Lektüre des identischen Textes der Fall wäre. Wenn daher ein Text als Fortsetzungsroman einen anderen Eindruck hinterläßt als in Buchform, so nicht zuletzt deshalb, weil er einen zusätzlichen Betrag an Leerstellen einführt bzw. durch die Pause bis zur nächsten Fortsetzung eine Leerstelle des Textes eigens akzentuiert” (ibid.: 298). (“The reader is forced by the pauses imposed on him to imagine more than he could have if his reading were continuous, and so, if the text of a serial makes a different impression from the text in book-form, this is principally because it introduces additional blanks, or alternatively accentuates existing blanks by means of a break until the next installment” [1978/1980: 192].)

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Especially significant in this context is Scott McCloud’s concept of closure, which deals specifically with the different ways in which comics predicate a heightened degree of reader participation. Writing from the perspective of a comics creator rather than that of an academically trained theoretician, McCloud defines closure as a process of “observing the parts but perceiving the whole” and of “completing that which is incomplete” (1993/1994: 63), claiming in a somewhat clichéd formulation that comics is “a medium of communication and expression which uses closure like no other, […] a medium where the audience is a willing and conscious collaborator and closure is the agent of change, time and motion” (ibid.: 65).11 McCloud develops these assumptions from the sequential principle of comics, viewing the gutter surrounding the panels as a space of limbo in which the reader’s imagination, bound by the visual and verbal clues provided by the surrounding panels and specific genre expectations, must turn an absence of signifiers into a signifying presence in order to activate the narrative. The gutter thus cannot help but serve as a “significance trigger” that compels “recipients […] to decode absences as meaningful or function-carrying parts of [the] work”, as Werner Wolf suggests in a different context (2016: 5). If Iser argues that texts offer their readers a limited degree of participation and interpretive possibilities (Auslegungsspielraum), McCloud views the reader as “an equal partner in crime” (1993/1994: 68) (his paradigmatic example of closure is a crime scene, hence the metaphorical language) and therefore as an actual co-producer of narrative meaning, which we could call, sensu Iser, Gestaltungsspielraum. According to McCloud, the reader must incessantly perform acts of closure in which he or she mentally supplies the missing signifiers in order to connect the “jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments” from panel to panel into a “continuous, unified reality” (ibid.: 67). I am wary of McCloud’s reference to the “reality” into which the readers allegedly transform a panel sequence (unless he means the reality of the fictional world) and would rather suggest that readers transform the succession of static single images into a continuous narrative. Yet McCloud has a point when he emphasizes the reader’s investment in narrative signification and conceives of comics creators and readers as partners, or co-producers, of the narrative, rather than as active producers and passive consumers of graphic narration – a point that certainly 11

Since Iser sees gaps as moments in a text when different segments (such as a switch in narrative perspective) collide and have to be meaningfully related to each other through the reader’s imaginary engagement, his reference to these gaps as “joints of the text” (Gelenke des Textes) makes sense (1978/1980: 183). In comics, gutters serve a related function, albeit one whose frequency in the progress of narration exceeds that of gaps in literary texts.

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applies to other forms of narrative but takes on specific functions in comics. According to this logic, the creator of a comic produces a presence of signifiers in the panels and absences within as well as in-between them. These absences are indeed significant because they must be filled with meaning if a sequence is to make sense.12 Suggesting that “nothing is seen between the […] panels, but […] something must be there” (ibid.), and speaking of an ongoing dialectic between invisibility and visibility (cf. ibid.: 92), McCloud points to a central procedure of comics storytelling. Comics scholar Thierry Groensteen calls this the narrative scheme of comics in his study Comics and Narration (see 2011/2013), and it is this scheme that is simultaneously foregrounded and undermined in French comics artist MarcAntoine Mathieu’s playful metareferential engagement with the materiality of the comic book-page and the narrative effects of absent signifiers in his graphic narrative L’Origine (1990). Toward the end of this narrative (cf. 1990: 37), the reader happens upon a missing panel whose absence is not merely symbolized through an empty space between the preceding and following panels but made manifest – and thus ‘marked’ as an absence, to pick up a term from the introduction to this volume – through a rectangular, panel-size hole in the page. Yet this absence of signifiers – there is nothing to be seen there, not even the blank page – does not translate into an absence of signification and thus questions the dichotomy between signifier and signified: what we see instead is the panel placed in the identical position on page 39.13 Here, the protagonist of the story, Julius Corentin Acquefacques, converses with the director of the ministry of research, Igor Ouffe, about the wish to transcend the flat, two-dimensional surface of the comic book-world and enter a three-dimensional world in which the spatio-temporal limitations of the page can be literally transcended. This three-dimensional world becomes real through the missing panel, which allows a glimpse of what is to come both in a temporal sense (events on later pages conventionally happen later in time according to the sequential logic of comics narration) and a spatial sense (the underlying later

12

13

Signifiers are also necessarily absent within each panel since every comic must, because of its medial limitations, reduce the complexity of the outer-textual world to certain levels of abstraction. These levels may range (according to McCloud’s second chapter in Understanding Comics) from the cartoony to the photorealistic and thus from a stark reduction of visual signifiers, such as a smiley representing a face, to an abundance of signifiers, as in the work of superhero artist Alex Ross (Superman, Batman). The same principle applies vice versa: the missing panel from page 37 is obviously also missing on page 38, but here we look backward, instead of forward, onto page 36.

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page traverses a three-dimensional axis by venturing more deeply into the artifact itself).14 According to Groensteen’s thoughts on the narrative scheme that Mathieu’s comic manipulates, a potential gap exists between ‘what can be read in the image’ [i.e. a panel] and ‘what can be seen’, which necessitates a comics-specific terminology: I will henceforth call what can be seen what has been shown; and I would suggest that the (relative) complexity of the language of comics arises out of the fact that what is read sometimes needs to be thought of in terms of what has intervened, and other times in terms of what has been signified. (2011/2013: 36f.) Groensteen’s notion of the ‘intervened’ constitutes a productive understanding of the gutter between panels as an absent signifier that implies a presence, the missing link, so to speak, between two or more panels that readers will usually construct as a temporal, spatial, or causal connection. It is generally assumed that time has passed between scenes and that during this time span, which can be very flexible, something has caused a transformation from a previous state to the current state of events depicted in the present panel. In Groensteen’s words: The notion of what has intervened only becomes meaningful if it supposed that time has passed [between panels]. We are teleported to the aftermath of events, and we have to link this aftermath to what we have read before. […] the operation of reading consists of inferring, from what we can see, what occurrence(s) must have intervened. (Ibid.: 38) Absence and presence are thus integrally linked through the logic of sequential storytelling. Groensteen reserves the term ‘signified’ for panel transitions in which “the category of the intervened is no longer sufficient to account for what is happening” and where “[t]he ‘deliberate act’ of reading has to become a work of interpretation in which the category of the signified comes into play” (ibid.: 40). Here, we are dealing with the shift from an ‘objective’ (i.e., chronological and causal) regime of narration to a ‘subjective regime’ in which the reader enters the consciousness of a particular character, for instance, in

14

For further analysis, cf. Packard 2006: 238–241; Lohse 2008: 33f.

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dream or stream-of-consciousness sequences, and must go beyond merely reconstructing what has intervened between panels.15 A fitting example is a passage in the first volume of Jeremy Love’s two-part graphic novel Bayou (2009/2010). Bayou depicts the black girl Lee Wagstaff’s search for justice in the American Jim Crow South and features a whipping scene in which Lee’s companion, the benevolent green giant and eponymous Bayou, associates the kidnapped Lee’s cry for help with his recollections of an earlier kidnapping of black children as he is being whipped by a posse of Southern racists (see Figure 6.2). This association can only be decoded when it is placed within the chain of signification produced by the sequence of panels in which it is embedded. It only makes sense once we switch from the standard process of interpreting panel transitions by way of assuming that something expectable has intervened between them to a recognition that this particular panel sequence moves from external to internal focalization, with Bayou as the internal focalizer, that is, once we assign the signifiers a different function and thus a different signified in representing Bayou’s personal memory of a past event.16 Perhaps we can think of this particular understanding of the signified in-between panels as a case in which the already significant absence of the gutter space transforms from a more or less unambiguous gap that readers will habitually fill in with the missing information (the intervened) to an ambiguous gap between different layers, or ontological states of narrative (the signified), whose decoding depends on the readers’ ability to “abandon the traditional mode of reading […] in favor of a different reading protocol that goes beyond the simple production of logical inferences based on linear chronology and positions itself […] against a much wider horizon of interpretation” (Groensteen 2011/2013: 39).17 Groensteen’s conceptions connect with comics scholar Jared Gardner’s notion of projection, according to which the space between the panels is not the only space where readers are summoned to take on an active role in filling in gaps. Of all narrative forms, comics are in many respects the most inefficient, a form that 15

16 17

In Iser’s terminology, Groensteen’s signified is an example of a de-pragmatized, or de-automated, relation between segments of a text as well as a moment in which the ‘good continuation’ of the communication between text and reader is interrupted (cf. 1976/1994: 286, 287, 288f.). See Stein 2016b online for an extended analysis of this scene. Groensteen’s observations essentially gauge the narrative potential and level of reader involvement of comics. For a transmedial perspective, see Wolf 2002; for an extended application to comics, see Rippl/Etter 2013.

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Figure 6.2 Jeremy Love, Bayou: Volume 1 (2009)

depends as much on what is left out as on what is included – and a form that depends on an active and imaginative reader capable of filling in gaps in time. As a form that works with traditionally incommensurate systems of meaning – text and image – to tell its story, it also requires its readers at every turn to make active decisions as to how to read the two in relationship to a larger narrative. […] [W]e might take the comics out of the cultural gutter, but we will never take the gutter out of comics – both the literal formal element that marks the gaps and ellipses between panels and […] the larger and less formally explicit gaps that everywhere define how comics tell stories. (2012: xi) By pointing our attention to the inherent intermediality of comics – the intimate interconnection, or “cross-discursivity” (Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven’s concept [2006: 768]),18 of text and image that retains the differences between these media yet also brings them together within a common framework – Gardner highlights another crucial element of comics storytelling. This element derives its power from an essential gap between what is narrated 18

On the intermediality of comics, see Rippl/Etter 2013; Stein 2015.

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Figures 6.3a–b Jason Lutes, Berlin: City of Smoke 91 and 26–27 (2008)

a

b

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visually and what is narrated verbally, including the multi-faceted ways in which text and image may strain against their alleged incommensurability.19 Comics have developed an array of techniques to bridge this intermedial gap between image and word while foregrounding it at the same time. Think of the speech balloon as a visual device, or signifier, that allots verbal expression a physical space in the panel, turning invisible sound into silent lines, granting speech a visual dimension, and thereby turning an absence (here: of sound) into a signifying presence (here: of sound textualized and visualized). Think also of Jason Lutes’s abdication of speech balloons in his Berlin series (City of Stones, published in book form in 2000, and City of Smoke, in 2008) whenever he renders sound visually present (see Figures 6.3a-b). Here, absent sonic signifiers such as a jazz musician’s improvisations to Johannes Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem (1868) attain a visual presence (through the signifiers of musical notation) that is unrestricted by the confining lines of a speech balloon on the page and thus mark the freedom from script inherent in the practice of jazz improvisation. Another segment in City of Smoke evokes the sound of jazz through the depiction of a clarinetist’s movements, substituting invisible sound through visible gestures and thus making the most of the comic’s restricted medial affordances (cf. Lutes 2008: 90–92, 26f.).20 2

Beyond the Borders of Text and Medium: Serialization in Superhero Comics

Pointing toward larger gaps beyond the formal procedures of the medium, Gardner compels us to move from text- or medium-intrinsic analysis to an analysis that reads comics in their cultural moments beyond the borders of text or medium. Granting the readers of comics more meaning-making agency than both Iser and McCloud, Gardner concludes that comics “will always depend on and privilege an audience not only projecting its own storytelling into the text but also always potentially picking up a pen […] and creating the story themselves” (2012: xiii). Gardner no longer speaks of the reader’s participation or complicity in interpreting the text but of a projection of the reader’s own storytelling into the narrative and outside of the narrative. Readers are neither merely participants nor simply partners in crime but always already potential 19 20

McCloud, for instance, suggests word-specific, picture-specific, duo-specific, additive, parallel, montage, and interdependent relations between images and words (cf. 1993/1994: 153f.). See also Cohn 2013. Cf. also Rippl/Etter 2013: 199.

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authors and narrators, a claim that is supported by the immense output of comic book fandom (including fan art) and the genre-typical trajectory from comics to fan to comics creator. The history of superhero comics is riddled with outward manifestations of such readerly projections, including letters to the editor that elaborate on particular plot points and request information about the storyworld but frequently also focus on superhero signifiers such as visual renditions of the superhero’s physique, costume, and insignia.21 Beyond such paratextual projections, we may also think of the prolific fan cultures with its fanzines, websites, blogs, and amateur comics that superhero comics have spawned. We can trace the emergence and heightened intensity of these fan cultures back to the significant absences of the gutter in sequential narratives, to the gap between visual and verbal representation in the comics themselves, to the waiting period between installments, the productive discrepancies between different series, and to the sometimes substantial gaps between the comic book continuity and the many media transpositions into other media (especially radio, TV, film, and computer games).22 In one way or another, all of these gaps are significant because they can, and indeed must, be filled with readerly projections. To paraphrase McCloud, even if nothing is seen or presented in these gaps, something must be inserted, and what is actually inserted depends to a substantial degree on the reader’s personal experience in addition to his or her level of comics literacy and genre awareness.23 Superhero comics frequently utilize absent signifiers. Mike Mignola’s Hellboy: Seed of Destruction (1994–2003), for instance, marks a switch from present to past and from the regular storyline to an embedded narrative told by an evil wizard by withdrawing all color from the panels except for a few occasional

21

22 23

According to Gérard Genette, paratexts function as a threshold between the world outside of the text, i. e., the world occupied by the historical reader, and the world inside of the text, i. e,. the fictional world this reader encounters as he or she reads a novel, short story, or comic book (see 1987/1997). I understand the paratext as a bridge that seeks to close the gap between the story proper and those who produce and receive it. For a more elaborate version of this argument, see Stein 2013; on the historical and narrative significances of the letter columns, see Pustz 2007; Stevens 2011. This is the basic argument of my forthcoming monograph, tentatively titled Authorizing Superhero Comics: The Serial Evolution of a Popular Genre. In long-running narratives, such as superhero comics that have accumulated many hundreds of issues over decades – Superman and Batman, for instance – authors must project themselves into the growing backlog of stories as well, finding gaps into which they can insert new content and having to become readers of previous generations of stories before they can become competent authors. See Kelleter/Stein 2012.

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b

Figures 6.4a–b Grant Morrison et al., Batman R.I.P. (2009)

splotches of red.24 The deluxe graphic novel edition of Grant Morrison and Tony S. Daniel’s Batman R.I.P. (2008/2009) features an unusually large number of splash pages that lack panel borders as drawn signifiers of spatio-temporal progression and that are only contained by the material bounds of the page size (see Figures 6.4a-b). Moreover, this comic does not contain a single white gutter, which in conjunction with its frequent close-ups and medium closeups, causes the depicted action to feel as if it were leaping off the page into the reader’s intimate personal space, disallowing any sense of a safe distance between reader and narrative by turning an absence into an almost overwhelming presence. Morrison’s Animal Man (1988–1990), an early exploration of postmodern and post-structural narration in superhero comics, has a field day deconstructing the storytelling apparatus of comics. At one point, it depicts the protagonist as he is confronting “a breach in the continuum” through a panel frame into the void of the blank page, where all signifiers are absent (Morrison et al. 2003: 157). Later in the story, panel frames disappear (cf. ibid.: 24

For an analysis of the narrative implications of Mignola’s style, see Bukatman 2016.

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224) in order to foreground Animal Man’s struggle with his metaleptic recognition that he is a character in a comic (see Figures 6.5a-b).25 Yet what distinguishes serial storytelling in these and other superhero comics from non-serial storytelling? And why is this difference significant for the analysis of the functions of gaps in these narratives? Most obviously, gaps occur between installments in a series, as I have already indicated. Such gaps in time take on narrative significance even if they do not technically, or at least not per se, narrate. In other words, while they lack specific signifiers, i.e., panels with content (unless you count the absence of signification as a signifier in and of itself), they certainly signify. For one, they enforce a specific structure on the story being told, a structure that has given rise to the convention of the cliffhanger (a form of “narrativus interruptus”, as Robert C. Allen [1991: 510] puts it) as a major means of enticing the reader to keep following the narrative despite the pause in publication. A break in the narrative transforms that which immediately precedes it into a provisional ending, at least of that particular individual episode, rather than merely being a random segment within the narrative. Similarly, it turns that which follows into a new beginning, a recommencement of a previously dormant narrative strain. Moreover, many readers do not simply wait for the story to continue with the next installment. They use the time between installments to intervene into the ongoing story through letters, critical appraisals, or disavowals of what has already been narrated, speculations about future storylines, and even competing, sometimes parodic, series.26 Such communication creates an imagined community of followers, and it also intensifies an already prevalent sense of intimacy with the narrative that comes from the serial publication and reception cycle by closing the gap – or at least simulating such closure – between the printed page and the world outside of the text. All of these endeavors can and regularly do occur while a series is working toward its indeterminate future. As serial stories unfold from installment to installment, they do so in a different way than the literary works that Iser has in mind. Instead of offering gaps for readerly participation in an already completed story, which would constitute a limited form of participation after the fact, serial stories offer the chance to change the narrative by intervening in its unfolding (see Kelleter 2012). In some cases, this practice appears on the level of the signifier, such as when fans of Batman comment on the revamping of the character, as was the case with the ʻnew lookʼ in the mid-1960s, which 25 26

On metalepsis in comics, see Kukkonen 2011; Thoss 2015. On the function of parodies for the development and maintenance of a serial genre, see Stein 2012b. On active audiences, see Hayward 1997.

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a

b

Figures 6.5a–b Grant Morrison et al., Animal Man: Deus Ex Machina 157 and 224 (2003)

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brought criticism and praise of changes in Batman’s costume and especially the insignia on his chest. On the level of the signified, this practice includes phenomena like the telephone poll initiated by DC Comics in the late 1980s about whether the readers wanted Batman’s sidekick, Robin, to die or not (they wanted him dead)27 – which also spelled the end of Robin as a signifier, an eradication of all visual and verbal instantiations of the character from the narrative present. Indeed, the temporal gap between installments is significant in terms of the readerly projections it encourages (turning receivers into active audiences, as Jennifer Hayward notes) and in terms of the authorial considerations it necessitates (anticipating and managing these activities and projections in order to steer them into profitable directions). Especially in popular media and genres rooted in myths of authorial accessibility and fan involvement, we see constant two-way traffic across the gap between producers and consumers (see Kelleter/Stein 2012; Stein 2013). Yet this is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg when it comes to gaps in superhero comics. Another type of gap appears in the specific production process that has shaped the majority of superhero comics since the inception of the genre in 1938, when Superman first appeared in Action Comics and spawned an explosion of comic book series starring superheroes such as Batman, Captain America, Wonder Woman, and hundreds of others. These narratives were often hastily put together in order to meet production deadlines and therefore frequently contained gaps in the construction of characters, settings, and plots that served no ulterior purpose but were simply oversights or mistakes. That mistakes would be noted and pointed out by avid readers, and that they could also come in the form of unexpected absences, becomes clear in a letter to the editor by Fred Scott printed in Batman #177 (Dec. 1965): “I couldn’t find a single mistake in this issue – unless it was the absence of the Letters to the Batcave column.” Oversights or mistakes could therefore be transformed from a non-signifying to a signifying status by readers and authors alike in a process of retroactive meaning-making that also generated possibilities for new stories. The relative brevity of superhero comics – traditionally thirty-two pages, with often fewer than twenty pages devoted to an ongoing story – and the fact that, at least early in the genre’s history, much of the story development was created on the fly, with very little long-term perspective, adds to the sense of significant absence. Frank Kelleter speaks of “fast narratives” in a related context (2017: 13), and I would add that these fast narratives eventually became the kinds of “vast narratives” discussed in Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s 27

For details, cf. Pearson and Uricchio’s interview with Batman editor Dennis O’Neil (2015: 23–25).

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essay collection of the same title (see eds. 2009) precisely because they left inadvertent as well as purposeful gaps for future stories and thus were able to fan into multi-authored and multi-generational narratives. Mistakes are thus significant because they serve as anchor points (or accidental Leerstellen) for readers of these stories, who can take them as a pretext to enter into a conversation with the official producers of the narrative. This conversation became publicized (though in a heavily edited and manipulated form) through the letter columns starting in the late 1950s and early 1960s and later morphed into fanzines and professional comics journalism. Such letter columns, in turn, transformed readers into critical commentators and collaborators in the retroactive construction of meaning and the proactive construction of future story developments, including elements of visual style and graphic enunciation that very much concerned the level of the individual signifier.28 3

Gaps in Superhero Storyworlds

What had started as a single story eventually became a single series about an alien creature that had landed on earth in order to escape the devastation of his home planet. Superman discovered his possession of superhuman powers that could be used to defend and protect the weak against the evil in the world, and his ongoing narrative quickly diversified into multiple series by multiple publishers, all of whom sought to get a slice of the superhero pie. When we read the initial installment of “Superman” in Action Comics #1 (June 1938), we notice how rudimentary the depiction of its superhuman protagonist is and that its essence is encapsulated by the soon-to-be iconic (and trademarked) insignia on his chest as the ultimate superhero signifier (with Batman coming in a close second). True, Superman already wears his signature costume, fights the good fight against crime and corruption, and disguises his identity through the public ruse of Clark Kent, but much of what today’s readers and moviegoers will associate with Superman is simply not there yet. There is no vulnerability to Kryptonite, no x-ray vision, no Lex Luthor. These gaps in Superman’s characterization – the sketchy information about his origins, the focus on a succession of action scenes at the expense of insights into Superman’s mental processes and psychological disposition, the mere rudiments of a setting, and so forth – have served at least five major functions in the course of the series’ 28

See Stein 2013. On visual style and graphic enunciation, see Baetens 2001; Gardner 2011. It remains unclear how exactly we are to conceive of the signifier or smallest signifying unit in comics. Gardner’s useful suggestion is to pay particular attention to the line.

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transmedial history. These functions foreground but ultimately also exceed the notion of the superhero as a “floating signifier” in contemporary popular culture: as an almost endlessly adaptable “set of key components” rather than a specific author, text, or medium, as William Uricchio and Roberta Pearson suggest in their analysis of Batman (2015: 205, 208).29 By considering these five functions, I will expand the perspective beyond single-work-inherent absences on the level of signifiers only to a general consideration of gaps in superhero storyworlds as part of the genre’s key narrative techniques and their impact on its participatory cultures (see Jenkins 2006) of production and reception. First, the gaps in characterization allowed its creators to build up a complex storyworld with complex characters over time, delivering a continuing demand for stories that could fill in these gaps. Frank Kelleter (2017) describes this phenomenon as an in-built logic and self-fulfilling promise of popular seriality: the ability of popular series to generate ever-new stories and provoke ever-more readerly projections and interventions into ongoing storylines. Superhero comics have developed a whole arsenal of techniques through which initially simple storyworlds could become increasingly complex. They also instituted techniques that enable the necessary reduction of complexity to prevent the emergence of narratives that become too dense and demanding for new readers. One of these techniques is the reboot, i.e., the artificial, story-extrinsic decision to start from scratch, to set the continuity back to zero, which allows for a resetting not just of story elements and character constellations but of drawing styles and authorial responsibilities as well. The initially self-contained storyworlds in which Superman saved lives in Metropolis and Batman combatted criminals in Gotham City evolved into a storytelling mode in which events in one series impacted events in other series and in which settings overlapped. Prominent examples are Superman and Batman’s first team-up story (Vol. 1, #76, June 1952). Here, these serial figures traverse the geographical and diegetic gap between their respective territories, and Superman and Spider-Man’s encounter, via lateral metalepsis (cf. Thoss 2015: 26), in a cross-company crossover story by DC and Marvel (1976), constituted a meeting of copyrighted and trademarked storyworlds, including particular in-house drawing styles, of two different publishers (see Figure 6.6). Other examples are Marv Wolfman and George Pérez’s Crisis of Infinite Earths (DC Comics, April 1985–March 1986) and Marvel’s Civil War (2006–2007). These series connect the major characters and storylines of their respective publishers into one single narrative universe and thus close the gaps among 29

On Superman as a transmedial serial figure, see Meier 2015. On serial figures more generally, see Denson 2011; Denson/Mayer 2012.

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Figure 6.6 Carmine Infantino et al., Cover of Superman vs. Spider-Man (1976)

concurrent series, with Crisis on Infinite Earths actually uniting these characters (and killing off many others) within a single series and Civil War representing an ‘event’ in the Marvel universe that spreads the action across all of the company’s major series. In the history of superhero comics, such intersecting series eventually conjoined into fictional universes (sometimes called multiverses) that consist of multiple worlds and, in conjunction with peritextual and epitextual commentary, constitute a publisher’s overarching metaverse.30 From the perspective of genre evolution, we can thus understand the initial gaps within singles series and the gaps emerging between parallel and/or com30

On the universe-multiverse-metaverse triad, see Kelleter/Stein 2012.

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peting series as niches waiting to be inhabited by mutations of existing narratives that manage to adapt to the changing conditions of the genre environment. Second, these gaps in superhero comics allowed readers to supply or speculate about missing details. In one of the first Batman letter columns (#126, Sept. 1959), a reader named William Tauriello writes In a recent story, entitled ‘THE SECRET of THE FANTASTIC WEAPONS’, you show BATMAN and ROBIN in a Mexican village, trying to arrest a criminal. According to International Law, no United States officer can arrest a criminal in Mexico because the officer has no authority in Mexico. The gap in this case is between the fictional world in which Batman’s actions are set and the world outside of the text inhabited by the reader, who complains about the incongruity between these two worlds. The editor’s answer goes beyond providing a plausible explanation; it retroactively adds elements to the story by supplying previously unknown information after the fact: “True, under the International Law, an officer of one country can’t make arrests in another country. However, BATMAN and ROBIN, being world-famous lawmen, have been deputized by the police forces of many nations, including Mexico.” In that sense, the letter columns afford comics creators and readers a second chance: an opportunity to smooth over unintended crevices and fill in the accidental gaps that often result from multi-authored and fast-paced serial entertainment, where narrative decisions are frequently made in haste and where commercial considerations may trump questions of narrative plausibility. In addition, the columns present a chance to retroactively accept reader suggestions and thus turn reception into production after the fact. Directly beneath this exchange follows a letter by a reader named Shirley Singer, who questions the plausibility of the Batman universe as a storyworld subject to the same causal logic as the extratextual world of her own experience. “Gotham City is such a big place”, she notes, “yet when the police need help, they flash the BAT-SIGNAL, and right away, BATMAN and ROBIN know where to go. How is this possible?” (Singer 1959) Like Tauriello’s inquiry about Batman’s international legitimization, this letter documents a comic-book readership that replicates Batman’s role as a master detective by devoting their own deduction skills to the story logic (or lack thereof) of the superhero’s fictional exploits.31 The response to this inquiry again specifies essential elements 31

It is possible to read these fan engagements with serial superhero narratives as prototypes of what Jason Mittell calls “forensic fandom” in the context of contemporary serial television (2015: 289).

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of the fictional universe, in this case elaborating on the technicalities involved with Batman and Robin’s communication system: “Both the BATMOBILE and the BAT-PLANE are equipped with police radios, which broadcast the details to BATMAN and ROBIN.” The result of this exchange, and of the serial logic from which it emerges, is a fictional world evolving into a tightly organized and more elaborately imagined one than that of the previous installment. This indicates that increasing diegetic complexity is not merely the result of artistic ambition or commercial concerns but of the paratextual interaction of letter writers and comics producers. Such increased complexity, however, also creates problems because it possesses an inherent binding function. While every storytelling decision enriches the fictional universe portrayed, it also delimits further narrative choices. One cannot easily undo what one has already narrated, and future installments will have to be plausible vis-à-vis already narrated plotlines, established character traits, or known iconographic features. Third, the significant absences that result from sketchy characterization and incomplete storyworlds leave room for competing series to adopt the basic formulas of the genre and retell a popular narrative without exactly repeating it.32 In the wake of Superman’s massive success, dozens of superhero comics were produced by DC Comics, the publisher of Action Comics and the owner of Superman, as well as many other publishers, who clad their superhero characters in slightly altered costumes, invented alternative superpowers (or imagined a superhero without supernatural powers, as in the case of Batman), and constructed new origin stories for their protagonists. Here, too, we may think of the discrepancies between the initial Superman series and its many spinoffs as objects related to each other through a gap, with the particular addition that each new superhero character functions as another signifier of an accumulating superhero signified. Again, this gap is productive, constituting an absence of yet untold stories and unrealized scenarios that is significant precisely because it delivers the space in which the commercial machine can launch future productions. Fourth, comic books have been particularly adept at developing sophisticated mechanisms through which they can manage the always accumulating information about the storyworld. Without such mechanisms, all gaps would eventually be filled, resulting in an endless repetition of already known material. Perhaps the most effective mechanism is a process called retroactive continuity, through which a new installment can retroactively change elements from the series’ past, erase them, or supply additional information sometimes 32

According to Umberto Eco, serial storytelling is determined by a dialectics of repetition and variation. See Eco 1990; Eco 1997.

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years or decades after the fact. Batman’s origin story, for instance, was initially covered in only a few panels, but it was retold again and again, with some retellings merely repeating the original version and others elaborating and revising it (see Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One, February–May 1987). An instructive example in this regard is Untold Tales of Spider-Man (Kurt Busiek et al.), which ran from September 1995 to October 1997 and presented stories set in the early history of Spider-Man that extend and elaborate on the character’s serial history. The first issue of Untold Tales inscribed itself into Spider-Man’s historical timeline and thus into the temporal and diegetic gap between Amazing Fantasy #15 (which marked Spider-Man’s first appearance, cover-dated August 1962) and Amazing Spider-Man #1 (which began the character’s own series, cover-dated March 1963): “Here now, for the first time, you will learn what happened in between those two landmark issues […] and experience the seminal events that shaped a guilt-ridden young man into a true hero” (Busiek et al. 2012: n. pag.).33 When reading the Untold Tales, we encounter two narratives in an intensely intertextual and interpictorial relationship: first, the original 1962 and 1963 narratives, into which the new stories insert themselves retroactively, and second, the mid-1990s narrative, from which the series looks back, in palimpsestic fashion, on its own history. Part of the pleasure in reading these stories is to witness them as they fill in some of the blanks in stories long considered classics, using the power of serial narrative to comment on as well as reshape its own history and reception. Another source of pleasure is the gap between the known official continuity of the characters’ histories and the retroactive revision (or re-signification) of these histories. A fifth and final mechanism are so-called What-If (Marvel) and Elseworld (DC) stories that are set in an imaginary universe outside of a series’ regular continuity and therefore have no direct impact on the ongoing series. Through such stories, narrative possibilities and alternative characterizations open up new gaps – here: between an established character and its non-canonical revision – that can be explored without altering the state of the ongoing series: “What If Spider-Man Had Joined the Fantastic Four” (What If #1, 1977) and “What If the Fantastic Four Had Not Gained Their Super-Powers?” (What If #36, 1982) are merely two examples of such stories from the Marvel canon. Superman: Red Son (Mark Millar 2003), surmising what might have happened if Superman had landed in communist Russia, is an example of DC’s Elseworld premise. Here, the setup is again a palimpsestic one in which the reader is invited to compare the state of affairs in the regular continuity of the series (i.e., 33

The numbering reflects this as well: the first three issues of the Untold Tales are numbered Amazing Fantasy #16–#18.

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in the ongoing narrative that perpetually actuates the accumulated ‘facts’ of the series’ history) and appreciate the gap between what the series’ history prescribes in terms of characterization and beyond and the narrative freedom from backstory and genre conventions the imaginary scenario allows. In addition, these What If and Elseworld formats enable yet another means of serial gap-filling: they can actualize all of those storylines resulting from readerly projections into the ongoing series that had, for one reason or another, not been realized. In that sense, these imaginary formats rein in overly active ­readerships whose projections into the serial narrative cannot be accommodated and whose potential frustrations are then turned into readerly pleasures. 4

Concluding Thoughts

Most striking about the concept of gaps in connection with the sequential and serial principles of comics is how compelling, and indeed obvious, this concept is as a tool for narratological analysis of the medium. It is therefore surprising that narratologists frequently speak of gaps but rarely make use of their potential as a theoretical concept (Ingarden, Iser, Wolf, and the comics scholars I have cited notwithstanding). True, several entries in the living handbook of narratology (published online and updated continually) reference different notions of the gap, but more often than not, it is not the notion of the gap itself that these references theorize but rather some other narratological concept. Take Fotis Jannidis’s observation that “descriptions of characters have gaps” (2012 online) in various types of stories, or Markus Kuhn and Johann N. Schmidt’s discussion of a “gap between story and discourse” (2014 online) in certain kinds of film as examples. Karin Kukkonen’s entry on “Plot” goes one step further by elaborating on three particularly powerful effects of plot construction on the reader that center around a gap: “surprise (when readers discover a gap in their hypothesis-building), curiosity (retrospection; when the gap lies in the antecedent story events) and suspense (prospection; when the gap lies in the story events to follow)” (2014 online). All of the gaps described here are possible in comics as well, as is the “lack of information [that] constitutes an ontological gap inherent to fictional worlds” in Marie-Laure Ryan’s (2013 online) reading of possible worlds theory, and the suggestion by Catherine Emmott and Marc Alexander that “[s]chemata and scripts supply the gaps in reader knowledge” (2014 online). What makes comics a special case even within an inter- or transmedial narratology, however, is that they tend to achieve their presence in the reader’s mind and in the culture at large through a narrative principle that Scott McCloud fittingly describes as “amplification

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through simplification” (1993/1994: 30): a principle that creates presence through absence and meaning through gaps.

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Denson, Shane, Ruth Mayer (2012). “Grenzgänger: Serielle Figuren im Medienwechsel”. Kelleter, ed. 185–203. Eco, Umberto (1990). The Limits of Interpretation. Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. Press. Eco, Umberto (1997). “Innovation and Repetition: Between Modern and Post-modern Aesthetics”. Rocco Capozzi, ed. Reading Eco: An Anthology. Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. Press. 14–33. Eisner, Will (2001). Will Eisner’s Shop Talk. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics. Emmott, Catherine, Marc Alexander (2014 online). “Schemata”. Hühn et al., eds. [18/10/2015]. Fröhlich, Vincent (2015). Der Cliffhanger und die serielle Narration: Analyse einer transmedialen Erzähltechnik. Bielefeld: transcript. Gabilliet, Jean-Paul (2005/2010). Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books. Trans. Bart Beaty, Nick Nguyen. Jackson, MS: Univ. Press of Mississippi. “Gap (in/between something)” (online). Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. [27/06/2017]. Gardner, Jared (2006). “Archives, Collectors, and the New Media Work of Comics”. Chute/DeKoven, eds. 787–806. Gardner, Jared (2011). “Storylines”. Jared Gardner, David Herman, eds. Graphic Narratives and Narrative Theory. Special Issue of SubStance 40/1: 53–69. Gardner, Jared (2012). Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-first-century Story­ telling. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press. Genette, Gérard (1987/1997). Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretations. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: CUP. Gibson, Mel (2011). “Cultural Studies: British Girls’ Comics, Readers and Memories”. Matthew J. Smith, Randy Duncan, eds. Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods. New York, NY: Routledge. 267–279. Gregory, Roberta (2005). Life’s a Bitch: The Complete Bitchy Bitch Stories. Vol 1. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Groensteen, Thierry (1999/2007). The System of Comics. Trans. Bart Beaty, Nick Nguyen. Jackson, MS: Univ. Press of Mississippi. Groensteen, Thierry (2011/2013). Comics and Narration. Trans. Anne Miller. Jackson, MS: Univ. Press of Mississippi. Harrigan, Pat, Noah Wardip-Fruin, eds. (2009). Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives. Boston, MA: MIT. Hayward, Jennifer (1997). Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera. Lexington, KT: Univ. Press of Kentucky. Herman, David (2002). Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln, NE: Univ. of Nebraska Press. Herman, David (2009). Basic Elements of Narrative. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Herriman, George (1986). “Krazy Kat. Jan. 25, 1939”. Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman. Eds. Patrick McDonnell, Karen O’Connell, G.R. De Havenon. New York, NY: Abrams. Hickethier, Knut (1991). Die Fernsehserie und das Serielle des Fernsehens. Lüneburg: Lüneburg Universitätsverlag. Hühn, Peter, et al., eds. (online). the living handbook of narratology. Hamburg: Hamburg University. . Ingarden, Roman (1931/1972). Das literarische Kunstwerk: Mit einem Anhang von den Funktionen der Sprache im Theaterschauspiel. 4th ed. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Ingarden, Roman (1968). Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerks. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Inge, M. Thomas (1984). “Collecting Comic Books”. American Book Collector 5/2: 1–13. Iser, Wolfgang (1971). Die Appellstruktur der Texte: Der Lesevorgang; Die Wirklichkeit der Fiktion. Elemente eines funktionsgeschichtlichen Textmodells. Constance: Univer· ­sitäts­verlag. Iser, Wolfgang (1976/1994). Der Akt des Lesens: Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung. 4th ed. Munich: Fink. Iser, Wolfgang (1978/1980). The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Balti­ more, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.  Jannidis, Fotis (2012 online). “Character”. Hühn et al., eds. [18/10/2015]. Jauss, Hans-Robert (1982). “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory”. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Trans. Timothy Bahti. Minneapolis, MI: Univ. of Minnesota Press. 3–45. Jenkins, Henry (2006). Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York, NY: New York Univ. Press. Kelleter, Frank (2012). “Populäre Serialität: Eine Einführung”. Kelleter, ed. 11–46. Kelleter, Frank (2017). “Five Ways of Looking at Popular Seriality”. Frank Kelleter, ed. Media of Serial Narrative. Columbus, OH: Ohio State Univ. Press. 7–34. Kelleter Frank, ed. (2012). Populäre Serialität: Narration–Evolution–Distinktion: Zum seriellen Erzählen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert. Bielefeld: transcript. Kelleter, Frank, Daniel Stein (2009). “Great, Mad, New: Populärkultur, serielle Ästhetik und der frühe amerikanische Zeitungscomic”. Stephan Ditschke, Katerina Krou­ cheva, Daniel Stein, eds. Comics: Zur Geschichte und Theorie eines populärkulturellen Mediums. Bielefeld: transcript. 81–117. Kelleter, Frank, Daniel Stein (2012). “Autorisierungspraktiken seriellen Erzählens: Zur Gattungsentwicklung von Superheldencomics”. Kelleter, ed. 259–290. Kuhn, Markus, Schmidt, Johann N. (2014 online). “Narration in Film”. Hühn et al., eds. [18/10/2015].

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Kukkonen, Karin (2011). “Metalepsis in Comics and Graphic Novels”. Karin Kukkonen, Sonja Klimek, eds. Metalepsis in Popular Culture. Berlin: De Gruyter. 213–231. Kukkonen, Karin (2014 online). “Plot”. Hühn et al., eds. [18/10/2015]. Lohse, Rolf (2008). Ingenieur der Träume: Medienreflexive Komik bei Marc-Antoine Mathieu. Bochum: Chr. A. Bachmann. Love, Jeremy, Patrick Morgan (2009): Bayou: Volume 1. New York, NY: DC Comics. Lutes, Jason (2000). Berlin: City of Stones. Montreal, QC: Drawn and Quarterly. Lutes, Jason (2008). Berlin: City of Smoke. Montreal, QC: Drawn and Quarterly. Mathieu, Marc-Antoine (1990). L’Origine. Paris: Guy Delcourt. McCloud, Scott (1993/1994). Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Meier, Stefan (2015). Superman transmedial: Eine Pop-Ikone im Spannungsfeld von Medienwandel und Serialität. Bielefeld: transcript. Mignola, Mike, John Byrne (2003). Hellboy Vol. 1: Seed of Destruction. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics. Miller, Frank, David Mazzucchelli, with Richmond Lewis (1987/2005). Batman: Year One. New York, NY: DC Comics. Millar, Mark, et al. (2003). Superman: Red Son. New York, NY: DC Comics. Miodrag, Hannah (2016). “Comics and Literature”. Frank Bramlett, Roy T. Cook, Aaron Meskin, eds. The Routledge Companion to Comics. London: Routledge. 390–398. Mittell, Jason (2015). Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York, NY: New York Univ. Press. Morrison, Grant, et al. (2003). Animal Man: Deus ex Machina. New York, NY: Vertigo/DC Comics. Morrison, Grant, et al. (2009). Batman R.I.P.: The Deluxe Edition. New York, NY: DC Comics. Mortimer, Win (1952). “The Mightiest Team on Earth”. Batman #76. June. New York, NY: DC Comics. Packard, Stephan (2006). Anatomie des Comics: Psychosemiotische Medienanalyse. Göttingen: Wallstein. Pearson, Roberta, William Uricchio (2015). “Notes from the Batcave: An Interview with Dennis O’Neil”. Roberta Pearson, William Uricchio, Will Brooker, eds. Many More Lives of the Batman. London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan. 21–32. Pustz, Matthew J. (1999). Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers. Jackson, MS: Univ. Press of Mississippi. Pustz, Matthew J. (2007). “‘Let’s Rap with Cap’: Fan Interaction in Comic Book Letter Pages”. Jeffery Klaehn, ed. Inside the World of Comic Books. Montreal, QC: Black Rose. 163–184.

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Rippl, Gabriele, Lukas Etter (2013). “Intermediality, Transmediality, and Graphic Narra­ tive”. Stein/Thon, eds. 191–217. Ryan, Marie-Laure (1991). Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Bloomington, IN: Univ. of Indiana Press. Ryan, Marie-Laure (2006). “From Parallel Universes to Possible Worlds: Ontological Pluralism in Physics, Narratology, and Narrative”. Poetics Today 27/4: 633–674. Ryan, Marie-Laure (2013 online). “Possible Worlds”. Hühn et al., eds. [18/10/2015]. Ryan, Marie-Laure, Jan-Noël Thon, eds. (2014). Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology. Lincoln, NE: Univ. of Nebraska Press. Scott, Fred (1965). Letter to the Editor. Batman #177. Dec. New York, NY: DC Comics. Shuster, Joe, Jerry Siegel (1938). “Superman”. June. Action Comics #1. Singer, Shirley (1959). Letter to the Editor. Batman #126. Sept. New York, NY: DC Comics. Sokolow, Michael (1997–1998). “‘More Often Than Not, It’s Put in a Bag’: Culture and the Comic Book Collector”. Reader: Essays in Reader-Oriented Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy 38–39: 63–82. Starre, Alexander (2015). Metamedia: American Book Fictions and Literary Print Culture after Digitization. Iowa City, IA: Univ. of Iowa Press. Stein, Daniel (2012a). “The Comic Modernism of George Herriman”. Jake Jakaitis, James F. Wurtz, eds. Crossing Boundaries in Graphic Narrative: Essays on Forms, Series and Genres. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. 40–70. Stein, Daniel (2012b). “Spoofin’ Spidey – Rebooting the Bat: Immersive Story Worlds and the Narrative Complexities of Video Spoofs in the Era of the Superhero Block­ buster”. Kathleen Loock, Constantine Verevis, eds. Film Remakes, Adaptations and Fan Productions: Remake|Remodel. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 231–247. Stein, Daniel (2013). “Superhero Comics and the Authorizing Functions of the Comic Book Paratext”. Stein/Thon, eds. 155–189. Stein, Daniel (2015). “Comics and Graphic Novels”. Gabriele Rippl, ed. Intermediality: Literature–Image–Sound–Music. Berlin: De Gruyter. 420–438. Stein, Daniel (2016a). “Mummified Objects: Superhero Comics in the Digital Age”. JanNoël Thon, Lukas Wilde, eds. Materiality and Mediality of Contemporary Comics. Special Issue of Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 7/3: 283–292. Stein, Daniel (2016b online). “Zu den Potentialen einer kulturwissenschaftlichen grafischen Literaturwissenschaft: Ein Analysevorschlag am Beispiel von Jeremy Loves Graphic Novel Bayou”. Closure: Kieler E-Journal für Comicforschung 3: 4–22. [5.12.2016]. Stein, Daniel (2018). “Unzuverlässiges Erzählen in Superheldencomics”. Christine Dallmann, Anja Hartung-Griemberg, eds. Comics: Reflexionen aus der Perspektive medienpädagogischer Theorie, Forschung und Praxis. Munich: Kopaed. 25–37 Stein, Daniel, Jan-Noël Thon, eds. (2013). From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contribu­ tions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative. Berlin: De Gruyter.

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Steirer, Gregory (2014). “No More Bags and Boards: Collecting Culture and the Digital Comics Marketplace”. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 5/4: 455–469. Stevens, J. Richard (2011). “‘Let’s Rap with Cap’: Redefining American Patriotism through Popular Discourse and Letters”. Journal of Popular Culture 44/4: 606–632. Tauriello, William (1959). Letter to the Editor. Batman #126. Sept. New York, NY: DC Comics. Thomas, Roy, et al. (1977). What If Spider-Man Had Joined the Fantastic Four. Vol 1/1. Feb. New York, NY: Marvel Comics. Thoss, Jeff (2015). When Storyworlds Collide: Metalepsis in Popular Fiction, Film and Comics. Leiden/Boston, MA: Brill/Rodopi. Uidhir, Christy Mag (2016). “Comics and Seriality”. Frank Bramlett, Roy T. Cook, Aaron Meskin, eds. The Routledge Companion to Comics. London: Routledge. 248–256. Uricchio, William, Roberta Pearson (2015). “I’m Not Fooled by That Cheap Disguise”. Roberta Pearson, William Uricchio, Will Brooker, eds. Many More Lives of the Batman. London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan. 205–236. Williams, Paul, James Lyons, eds. (2010). The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts. Jackson, MS: Univ. Press of Mississippi. Wolf, Werner (2002). “Das Problem der Narrativität in Literatur, bildender Kunst und Musik: Ein Beitrag zu einer intermedialen Erzähltheorie”. Ansgar Nünning, Vera Nünning, eds. Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär. Trier: Wis­ sen­schaftlicher Verlag Trier. 23–104. Wolf, Werner (2005). “Non-supplemented Blanks in Works of Literature as Forms of ‘Iconicity of Absence’”. Costantino Maeder et al., eds. Outside-In and Inside-Out. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 115–132. Wolf, Werner (2016). “How Does Absence Become Significant in Literature and Music?” Werner Wolf, Walter Bernhart, eds. Silence and Absence in Literature and Music. Word and Music Studies 15. Leiden/Boston, MA: Brill/Rodopi. 5–22. Wolf, Werner, ed. (2009). Ed. in collaboration with Katharina Bantleon and Jeff Thoss. Studies in Intermediality 4. Metareference across Media: Theory and Case Studies. Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi. Wolf, Werner, ed. (2011). Ed. in collaboration with Katharina Bantleon and Jeff Thoss. Studies in Intermediality 5. The Metareferential Turn in Contemporary Arts and Media: Forms, Functions, Attempts at Explanation. Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi. Wolf, Werner, Walter Bernhart, eds. (2006). Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media. Studies in Intermediality 1. Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi. Wolfman, Marv, George Pérez (1985/2000). Crisis in Infinite Earths. New York, NY: DC Comics. Woo, Benjamin (2012). “Understanding Understandings of Comics: Reading and Collecting as Media-Oriented Practices”. Participations 9/2: 180–199.

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Chapter 7

Dramaturgy of Silence: Absence as a Means of Structural Tension in Joseph Haydn’s String Quartets  Peter Revers Starting with general observations on rests and silence in music and music theory up to the 18th century, the contribution gives insight into the masterful use of these forms of musical absence in a selection of Joseph Haydn’s string quartets and discusses their various functions. The occurrence of meaningful absence in Haydn’s medium, instrumental music, is based on the newly emerging psychological interest in music aesthetics of the second half of the 18th century, but – as the conclusion makes clear – Haydn goes further and adds humorous as well as metamusical functions to his employment of often unexpected and highly ‘deviant’ rests and silences. String quartets discussed are: op. 33/2 in E-flat major; op. 76/5 in D major; op. 55/3 in F minor; and op. 20/3 in G minor. 1

Introduction: Pause, Rest, and Silence in Music until the 18th Century

“Pausa est taciturnitatis signum secundum quantitatem note cui appropriatur fiende.” (“A rest is the sign of a silence to be made according to the mensuration of the note to which it is appropriate.” [Tinctoris 1495/2014 online]) Johannes Tinctoris’s famous definition of the rest in music in his Terminorum musicae diffinitorium (Treviso 1495) illustrates, in a remarkable way, the close link between rest and silence in music theory. Although Tinctoris’s explanation of the rest in music is by far not the oldest one, its contextualisation with silence provides a new significant range of meaning. In St. Augustine’s treatise De musica rests are discussed as a means of rhetorical caesura or accentuation with two functions: on the one hand a rest regulates the physiologically necessary pause for breath; on the other hand it serves to clarify the grammatical structure of the text or even subdivides its contents. However, rests were not generally part of the system of measured time in music theory. Among the few authors who dealt with the issue besides the

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004394520_008

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aforementioned Tinctoris was late-thirteenth-century music theorist Franco von Köln, who had already mentioned the difference between ‘vox amissa’ (the absent voice) and ‘vox prolata’ (the reciting voice).1 Yet even in pre-mensural polyphony exact timekeeping for the rest was mainly a matter of performance practice, but not part of an exact measuring of time. And the use of “pausa” was for a long time exclusively relevant in connection with vocal music, whereas instrumental music was either not considered at all or its mention was limited to a few sources of organ music starting with the 15th century. In organ music, “pausa” had a completely different meaning at least until the time of Johann Sebastian Bach. It did not necessarily describe silence or a ‘vox amissa’, but rather a sound complex at rest within itself, often indicating a musical caesura or the retained fundamental tone (in analogy to a pedal point) at the end of a musical segment (“einem in sich ruhenden Klangkomplex, der am Schluß eines jeden Abschnitts steht”, Göllner 1968: 74; Aringer 1999: 9; see also Göllner 2009: 402). An important field of song rest or silence in music are rhetorical figures like aposiopesis – an unexpected silence as expression of a special emotional identification of the speaker or as a means to capture attention. Of course, those figures play a substantial role even in instrumental music, but their sources are rhetorical, having their roots mostly in vocal music. Although rest and silence are – as we have seen – closely connected with each other already in Tinctoris’s diffinitorium, silence was for a long time not considered a category of music theory or in musical dictionaries. As a musical term, silence became relevant mainly in the second half of the twentieth century, as a consequence of compositions such as John Cage’s 4’33”, Luigi Nono’s string quartet Fragment – Stille: An Diotima, or several works by Morton Feldman. Starting with Fragment – Stille (1980) silence and pausing assumed central relevance in Nono’s creative process. Silence here means a totality from which sound (or music) arises and then fades into the inaudible. Works like Tchaikovsky’s sixth symphony (Pathétique), which ends in an almost total disappearance of any sounding presence, the final 40 bars of Mahler’s Song of the Earth, or Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ Symphony, which gradually reduces musical activities (and perception) for a long time were considered more or less exceptions to the rule and not so much paradigms of a new understanding of the complex relation between sound and silence. Thus it is hardly surprising that the history of silence in music was claimed by many musicologists to have started as late as the dawn of musical modernism. Martin Zenck, for instance, concludes 1 “Tempus est mensura tam vocis prolatae quam eius contrarii, scilicet vocis amissae, quae pausa communiter appellatur.” (Franconis de Colonia c. 1280/1974: 25)

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that ‘as of the late nineteenth century, music has no longer been considered to originate from sound, but rather from the absence of sound, from different “silences” in their various manifestations’.2 One of the most detailed studies on the function of silence and rest in music was already published in the 1960s by the Polish musicologist Zofia Lissa (see 1962 and 1964). Lissa argues that “silence implies a much broader notion than a musical rest does” and describes the rest as “silenced time” Silence and rests are of special importance for a musical work and its ambience. Their substance and the functions they perform may vary depending on the phase of the work in which they make their appearance, between which sound structures and in which variety of works they appear. Moreover, the functions of rests are changing as new musical styles develop. Their significance for music stems from the manifold way in which they cooperate with the development of a musical work, from the bonds uniting them with the other elements operating within a work. (1964: 444) Generally it is difficult to strictly differentiate between the terms ‘silence’ and ‘rest’. For Lissa, silence “itself, in contrast to rests, is not measurable”, while she defines rest as “the inner variety of silence which is part of music’s temporal structure and takes a direct part in the work’s development” (ibid.). However, rests are “part of the musical terminology”, and in “the score they are signs used to designate ‘periods of silence’” (Danielewicz-Betz 1998: 87). Indeed a clear distinction between silence and rest is problematic. And although ‘silence’ in music represents a significantly greater spectrum of meaning than ‘rest’, there remain several unresolved questions. The attempt to define “silence” as an unmeasurable phenomenon, falling “outside the notational scope”, thus “in this form” not existing “in the ‘classical’ score”, while “rests” are “manifested in the written representation of a piece of music […] and in its performance” (ibid., 84f.), runs the risk of neglecting the immense diversity of musical interpretations. It would be hazardous to restrict rests to a purely measurable dimension and to disregard their temporally flexible duration within an essential rhetorical understanding of music. 2 “[Musik werde] seit dem späten neunzehnten und frühen zwanzigsten Jahrhundert […] nicht mehr vom Klang aus und auf den Klang hin entworfen, sondern von der Abwesenheit des Klangs, vom Schweigen, von der Stille, von den sogenannten ʻSilencesʼ in ihren verschiedenen Daseinsformen.” (Zenck 1994: 16. All translations from German to English are by Christina Levy, unless otherwise indicated.)

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In general we lack a consistent and extensive dramaturgy of silence in music before the 19th century, although theoretical treatises, in particular from the 18th century, to some extent discuss highly differentiated definitions of the category of ‘silence’ in the arts. In the chapter on “Pause (in music)” of his extensive General Theory of the Fine Arts (Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste, vol. 2, 1774), Johann Georg Sulzer explains three functional categories of silence in music (cf. Sulzer 1793/1967: 663): a. b. c.

pauses because of physiological needs (breath); pauses as subdivisions of speech (sound speech): they are inherent to “Klangrede” in a distinct syntactical sense; The position and length of the pause representing the inner content of the speech

‘For, in the same way as it would be inconsistent to rapidly direct the attention to something new, before a perfectly meaningful passage has come to an end, it would be unpleasant to create an interruption or make use of a rest in the middle of a coherent thought, before an idea is fully expressed.’3 In his treatise Gründliche Violinschule (1756), Leopold Mozart followed Sulzer’s distinction, but added a new category of pauses, the suspiro, which is a short break at the beginning of a beat. And he comments about the suspiro as follows: ‘It is of much consequence when the composer is able to enter a rest at the right place. Even a short Sospir at the right time can achieve a lot.’4 However, one (at first glance insignificant) difference between Sulzer’s and Leopold Mozart’s positions becomes evident: Leopold Mozart argues – much more than Sulzer – from a psychological perspective. Indeed, psychological considerations intruded into aesthetics in the second half of the 18th century significantly. And I hope I will be able to make clear that Joseph Haydn’s use of pauses and silence in music (the absence of the sounding surface) demonstrates, in an impressive way, as it were, the composer’s affinity to psychology. It might be a daring hypothesis, but I think that psychological aesthetics partly replaced the basics of philosophical aesthetics in the second half of the 18th 3 “Denn wie es ungereimt wäre, da, wo ein vollkommener Sinn aus ist, und wo man einige Zeit braucht ihn zu überdenken, die Aufmerksamkeit schnell auf etwas neues zu führen, so übel wäre es auch mitten in dem Zusammenhang, ehe ein Gedanke aus ist, eine Unterbrechung zu machen, oder eine Pause anzubringen.” (Sulzer 1793/1967: 663) 4 “Es liegt viel daran, wenn der Componist die Pause am rechten Orte anzubringen weis. Ja sogar eine kleine Sospir zur rechten Zeit gesetzet, kann vieles thun.” (Mozart 1789/1991: 33)

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century. And I furthermore would like to argue that Haydn’s instrumental music represents this tendency in a highly revealing manner. But turning to this, I would like to discuss some examples from Haydn’s string quartets. By doing so, I propose to give, at the same time, a short outline of psychological aesthetics in the second half of the 18th century, that is, in the decisive period of Haydn’s development as a composer. 2

Silence and Psychological Aesthetics in the Second Half of the 18th Century

In 1776, Johann August Eberhard, a contemporary of Haydn’s, published his Allgemeine Theorie des Denkens und Empfindens (General Theory of Thinking and Feeling). Eberhard was born in 1739 (seven years after Haydn), and (like Haydn) died in 1809. In his treatise, he often refers to examples in art which he interprets as ‘psychological’ in a way similar to Moses Mendelssohn (1729– 1786): ‘The first and most advantageous step forward which one has done due to the most recent efforts to pull down worldly wisdom from the heaven of [philosophical] schools to integrate it into human society has been undertaken insofar as one has started to explore the sentiments of the human soul, to make observations on it, and to fruitfully combine these observations with an uncomplicated and enlightening theory.’5 Clearly, Eberhard here emerges as one of the pioneers of the philosophy of the Enlightenment. In addition, we can link some of his central ideas to the specific use of silence in works by Haydn. Later in his treatise Eberhard describes the differences between thinking and feeling more precisely, which yields the following oppositions (cf. Eberhard 1776: 58f.):

5 “Der erste und vortheilhafteste Schritt, den man durch die neuen Bemühungen dazu gethan hat, die Weltweisheit aus dem Himmel der Schulen herabzuziehen, und in die menschliche Gesellschaft einzuführen, ist wohl allerdings dadurch geschehen, daß man angefangen hat, sich mit den Empfindungen der menschlichen Seele näher bekannt zu machen, über dieselben Beobachtungen anzustellen, und diese Beobachtungen durch die Verbindung mit einer unverwickelten und lichtvollen Theorie fruchtbar zu machen.” (Eberhard 1776: 4f.)

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Thinking: ‒ ‒ unity ‒ ‒ diversity will be imagined as ­integrated. ‒ ‒ diversities are characteristics of unity.

Feeling: ‒ ‒ diversity ‒ ‒ diversity will be imagined as paratactic. ‒ ‒ diversity is characterized by juxtaposition.

Although silence and stillness are not mentioned in Eberhard’s systematisation, which is of a more general nature and only partially addresses certain disciplines of art, the contrast between silence and sound can be easily integrated into the diversity of feeling. For Eberhard, the elementary difference between feeling and thinking lies in the fact that the former is characterised by a large number of smaller partial concepts which are condensed into a complete concept. These partial concepts cannot be completely contradictory in nature, but rather they must be such that they can be integrated into a complete concept without necessitating causality. In fact, it is the improbable, the unexpected, which is particularly capable of evoking pleasure, ‘for there would otherwise be no reason for it to be permitted in the fine arts and sciences’.6 Similar yet opposing sensations are particularly capable of mutual intensification ‘when they are put together’.7 To this extent, contrast is a highly effective aesthetic medium: ‘Black and white, red and green, side by side, dissonance and consonance, pain and pleasure when they follow each other they intensify each other.’8 The moments of silence and stillness, the manifestations of which are often quite unexpected in Haydn’s music, can be reconciled above all with Eberhard’s definition of the most intense feelings, which are characterised by a high degree of unpredictable variety The more confused and violent the sensation is, the harder it will be to explain its modifications and transitions. Since the most violent sensation contains the most manifold, the least and most inconsiderable degree of unity will take place with it, and that is the mere existence [of things] next to each other, whether it be in time or space.9 6 7 8 9

“[Es muß ferner dieses Unwahrscheinliche, Vergnügen erwecken, oder mit dem ganz zu erweckenden Vergnügen, nothwendig verbunden seyn;] denn sonst wäre kein Grund da, warum es in den schönen Künsten und Wissenschaften zuzulassen sey.” (Ibid.: 147) “[Die gleichartigen entgegengesetzten Empfindungen verstärken sich einander], wenn sie miteinander verbunden sind.” (Ibid.: 152) “Schwarz und Weiß, Roth und Grün, nebeneinander, Dissonanz und Consonanz, Schmerz und Vergnügen, wenn sie aufeinander folgen, verstärken sich gegenseitig.” (Ibid.) English version taken from Watkins, ed. 2009: 338. “Je verwirrter und heftiger die Empfindung ist, desto schwerer werden ihre Abänderungen und Uebergänge zu erklären seyn. Da die heftigste Empfindung das meiste Mannichfaltige enthält: so wird daher auch

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Another of Eberhard’s ideas which is important with reference to Haydn’s dramaturgy of silence is the aspect of ‘witty thought’, which requires ‘practiced thinking and dissecting’ and ultimately depends on the reader’s ‘clear and quick thinking’.10 Although in this context Eberhard actually refers to the writings of Leibniz, these important features can also be applied to Haydn. Eberhard concretely cites ‘the frequent darkness, mysteriousness/enigma, and paradox’11 as characteristics that require a higher degree of effort to find inner unity. And he points not least to the intellectual game between subject and object, according to which the effect of a witty thought ‘depends on the degree of its clarity, novelty, and the reasoning of the sentient subject’.12 Although there is no mention of the factors of silence and stillness as a possible constitutive element of ‘witty thought’ in Eberhard’s work, the example of the end of Haydn’s String Quartet op. 33/2 (Hob. III:38, see section 3 below) proves that it is particularly the moments of silence that realise the kind of humour that was widespread in the 18th century and actually meant a witty, often ‘metareferential’13 mind game. Another important philosopher, indeed much more influential than Eberhard, was Moses Mendelssohn, again a contemporary of Haydn’s. In his article “Gedanken vom Ausdrucke der Leidenschaften” (‘Thoughts on the Expression of Passions’) from 1762–1763 he distinguishes three stages of emotion: the sudden outbreak, apparent silence, and frenzy (cf. 1762–1763/1986: 205). Within this range of emotional states silence is by no means a slowdown or calming, but rather a kind of transition between emotionally charged states. However, it is remarkable that Mendelssohn attributes only the first and the third stages to the field of music. We can conclude that in the aesthetics of the late 18th century silence cannot be limited to a state characterized by the absence of tension (even musical tension), but that it is rather a transfer from one state of emotion to another one. Thus it has a distinctively dramatic impact: silence constitutes, so to speak, a lacuna which has to be filled by the listener. Thereby the listener becomes a creative co-author or co-composer, who has a particular role to play at moments where the dramatic impetus retreats to silence. Indeed

10 11 12 13

der geringste und unbeträchtlichste Grad der Einheit stattfinden, und diese ist das bloße Nebeneinanderseyn, es sey in der Zeit, oder dem Raume.” (Eberhard 1776: 99) The aspect “[eines] witzigen Gedankens”, which requires ”geübtes Denken und Zergliedern” and depends on the reader’s ability “[zu einem] deutlichen und geschwinden Denken” (ibid.: 87). “[…] die häufige Dunkelheit, Räthselhaftigkeit und Paradoxie” (ibid.). “[…] von dem Grade seiner Deutlichkeit, Neuheit, und des Verstandes des empfindenden Subjects [abhängt]” (ibid.: 88). For ʻmetareferenceʼ or ʻmetaizationʼ as a transmedial phenomenon which may also extend to music, see Wolf 2007.

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Haydn could be characterised as one of the first composers who developed a specific dramaturgy of lacunae as a central feature of his works. 3

The Dramatic Impact of Silence in Haydn’s String Quartets

Although Haydn’s instrumental music resumes the rich rhetorical tradition of the 17th and 18th centuries, his use of rhetorical figures – including those pertinent to silence – goes far beyond its traditional semantic implications. And it would not be an exaggeration to say that Haydn, and two decades earlier Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, established a radically new concept of silence in instrumental music. A striking example is the final movement of Haydn’s string quartet in E-flat major, op. 33/2 (Hob. III: 38). In this movement, “Haydn engages the listener in a game of second-guessing about when the piece will end, in the event, whether in fact it has. His ploy is to offer progressively less stable conclusions – and in the end no conclusion at all.” (Wheelock 1991: 5) In a detailed study on Haydn’s op. 33/2, Gretchen Wheelock describes the function of rests at the end of the quartet (referring to Ted Cohen’s article “Jokes”) as “play space”, making explicit “the role of the listener in this discovery, much as Wolfgang Iser’s theories of ‘gaps’ or ‘blanks’ [‘Leerstellen’] require responsive readers in the completion of literary texts” (ibid.: 10). A major point of reference for Iser is Roland Barthes’s monograph Le Plaisir du texte, in which he recognises two elements of central relevance: on the one hand the hole as “the site of a loss, the seam, the cut, the deflation, the dissolve which seizes the subject in the midst of a bliss” (Barthes 1973/1975: 7), and on the other hand the reader as ‘the subject thrown into the division’, which itself becomes the subject of the text insofar as everything playing in the text emerges from this rift.14 Barthes and Iser thus focus on a reading process in which particularly the tear – the break – invites the reading subject to ‘act out what the tear brings to life’.15 What Iser designs for the reading of the text seems to have no less relevance for the field of listening to music. In a quite comparable manner it applies here as well to engage in the voids, the segments of silence, of non-sounding, and to take part in the process of a possible sense of meaningfulness, as it were. The Coda of the final movement, beginning in m. 141 (see Figure 7.1), seems to be at first sight a further (and maybe) unexpected recurrence of the initial 14 15

“[Statt dessen wird] das Subjekt in die Spaltung hineingerissen, die insofern das Subjekt des Textes ist, als diesem Riß alles entsteigt, was im Text spielt.” (Iser 1991: 478) “[Deshalb gerät in einer solchen Lektüre das Subjekt immer dazwischen], um durchzuspielen, was der Riß verlebendigt.” (Ibid.)

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Figure 7.1 Joseph Haydn, String Quartet op. 33/2 (Hob. III: 38), Finale, mm. 128–172

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theme. At the beginning of the movement it represents a clear, one could say even exemplary, model of a symmetrical 8-bar period structure (4 + 4 bars). As such it provides reliable orientation, and it serves as a stable factor within the movement. The stabilising function becomes especially transparent in the middle of the movement, where the tonal development seems to derail for a moment (‘crisis’: mm. 68–71). Here the crisis of harmonic logic is combined with rests (more or less interrupting the musical flow). At the end of the movement the music seems to become entangled in repetitions of a two-note motif (mm. 133–140), followed again by a rest, which spans nearly two bars. Again the two-note motif returns, but now a major second lower, in a lower dynamic level (pp instead of p), and with substantially prolonged notes in mm. 139f., followed by a fermata rest. In fact, the music seems to come to a complete standstill, but the main theme starts anew like a ‘deus ex machina’, apparently totally unaffected by the preceding crisis. However, the stabilising function of the main theme, which was evident at the beginning of the movement, no longer works. Again a rest just before the Adagio evokes a moment of heightened tension. And the following Adagio is the complete and totally unexpected counterpart of everything which happened before in this movement. But that is not yet the end of the movement. The main theme loses its stabilising function and it becomes itself a victim of deconstruction, executed mainly by a distinct dramaturgy of rests. With the return of the Presto (m. 153) the main theme seems to be split into two-bar segments, each followed by two bars rest. Only the third segment is incomplete. This, however, has consequences for the further development insofar as the fourth and last but one segment is an irregular one: it is not the fourth two-bar segment of the theme, but a combination of its beginning and its end, now followed by a four-bar rest. The irritation concerning the sequence of the thematic segments causes a disturbance in the periodicity of the rests. In other words: the sequence of rests ultimately leads to silence, to the absence of music and to an intentional disorientation of the listener. As previously mentioned, the penultimate segment combines the first three and the four last notes of the main theme, its beginning and its end. The dramatic widening of the absence of music in the very last bars and the related disorientation of the listener enables Haydn to score a further ‘surprise coup’, because the very last two bars are exactly identical with the first two bars of the movement (see Figure 7.2). The movement ends, but it seems to start again. And indeed a more or less endlessly circular continuation of this music could now in principle follow, an impression which fundamentally counteracts the effect of a conclusion. The progressive undermining of the musical flow by a carefully calculated dramaturgy of rests and silence in music makes it quite clear to what extent

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Figure 7.2 Joseph Haydn, String Quartet op. 33/2 (Hob. III: 38), Finale, mm. 1–8, 162–172

Haydn’s music here opposes traditional audience expectations. Ludwig Finscher aptly pinpoints this strategy of Haydn’s as follows ‘The player, looking ahead towards the pianissimo bars, enjoys the graceful wit of the continually advanced deception. The listener – obviously the listener’s expectations have been included in the composition, although the string quartet has primarily been composed for players rather than for listeners before it entered the concert hall – is more and more bewildered by surprises outdoing one another, scantily adapts himself to the mechanic sequence of the four phrases of the theme with its rests, and is finally overwhelmed by the humour of the very last bars – a final gesture without end and with the possibility of an endless continuation.’16 16

“Der Spieler, vorausblickend auf die pianissimo-Takte, genießt den graziösen Witz der immer weitergetriebenen Täuschung. Der Hörer – und offensichtlich ist hier auch die Hör-Erwartung mitkomponiert, wenngleich das Streichquartett primär für Spieler, nicht für Hörer gedacht war, bevor es in den Konzertsaal wanderte – verstrickt sich immer ­tiefer in die einander übertrumpfenden Überraschungen, richtet sich notdürftig in der ­mechanischen, pausendurchbrochenen Abfolge der vier Phrasen des Themas ein und wird schließlich von der Komik der allerletzten Takte überwältigt – eines Schlusses, der kein Schluß ist und nach dem es »ad infintum« weitergehen könnte.” (Finscher 2000: 410)

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Figure 7.3 Joseph Haydn, String Quartet op. 76/5 (Hob. III: 79), Finale, mm. 1–20

In his string quartet in D major (op. 76/5, Hob. III: 79, see Figure 7.3), Haydn achieves a contrasting effect in the final movement, an effect which again involves rests. The movement clearly starts with a final gesture, which could be a fragment of the last bars of a string quartet that has been lost. The characteristics of this gesture are short tutti-beats, followed by rests which are twice as long as the musical events. Only by the repetition of the final gesture and its sequential repetition in the parallel minor key are further developments of a theme unfolded so that what appeared to be a closing gesture in the first bars, now becomes a distinct primary motif. A further example of the dramatic impact of rests and the absence of musical events is the imprévu (the unexpected event). The second movement of Haydn’s F minor quartet op. 55/2 (Hob. III: 61) seems to come to an end after only sixteen bars with a clear cadence in the tonic key, followed by a two-bar rest. The consequence of this extensive moment of silence is indeed striking: it provokes a chromatic tonal shift from F minor to G flat major. Six more times within this movement such isles of absence appear, each time causing the listener to feel insecure about what will follow. Several times the music seems to come to an end, each time followed by a surprising and unexpected continuation of the musical flow, albeit in another key. Indeed it would hardly be an exaggeration to describe this movement as a permanent oscillation of ‘stop

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Figure 7.4 Joseph Haydn, String Quartet op. 55/2 (Hob. III: 61), Allegro, mm. 1–25

and go’, crucially stimulated by Haydn’s ingenious use of the absence of musical events (see Figure 7.4). Musical silence as signifier of imprévu also characterizes a much earlier example, Haydn’s string quartet in G minor op. 20/3, the third of the so called “Sun Quartets” (Hob. III: 33), which is by far the most “eccentric” within this cycle of six quartets (Finscher 2000: 405). The disposition of silence in Haydn’s string quartet op. 20/3 seems to perform three important functions:

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Figure 7.5 Joseph Haydn, String Quartet op. 20/3 (Hob. III: 33), Allegro con spirito, mm. 206– 213

1. 2. 3.

4

creating uncertainty after a strong suggestion of caesura (like an extended cadenza, as before m. 197), and an unexpected continuation of music; the clear separation of a signifying structural element like the fanfare character in m. 212 (see Figure 7.5); the restoration of regular groups of measures after a segment of disorientation (starting in m. 218); actually, the first violins execute a 3/4 metre instead of the 2/4 metre indicated by the time signature, and it is only at m. 235 that the basic 2/4 metre is restored (see Figure 7.6). Conclusion

In the final discussion of the International Conference “Haydn & Das Streichquartett”, which was held in Eisenstadt in May 2002, American musicologist Gretchen Wheelock stated “that the use of silence is obviously one of the trademarks of Haydn’s style and a lot is going on when the music ‘stops’. It is not just empty space. It’s filled, it’s doubly filled with what has happened and what is going to happen.” (Feder/Reicher, eds. 2003: 198) The absence of sound (realized as silence) seems to bundle past and future events, and thus it takes place somewhere outside the realm of the course of time. Exactly this, however, establishes its dramaturgical and musical significance. The ‘psychologist’ Haydn opened up a new quality of experiencing musical time, a quality which “invites and, indeed, challenges listeners to become actively engaged in the music’s unfolding” (Wheelock 2003: 67). A particularly unique role is played by moments of absence in the final movements in which, due to the otherwise smooth progression, the unexpected interruptions become highly relevant to the aesthetic effects, as shown by the example of op.

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Figure 7.6 Joseph Haydn, String Quartet op. 20/3 (Hob. III: 33), Allegro con spirito, mm. 217– 226

33/2. Wheelock rightly recognises in this finale “the most outrageous example of extended silence” and concludes: “These enormous gaps grab the listener in a very broad way, suggesting a more popular style.” (Ibid.: 86) In fact, a metareferential plane is often articulated, namely, the compositional mode which is equally characterised by musical humour as well as by a deliberate provocation of musical conventions. The equally playful, humorous, as well as profound handling of expectations and their challenges creates per se (namely on the basis of the compositional disposition itself), a dialogue with the recipients, as it were, “addressing new listeners and thinking about attracting their attention” (ibid.: 196). This could be illustrated by way of the analysed examples of op. 33/2, op. 55/2, and op. 76/5 at aesthetically effective key points, namely the beginning or end of the movements. Finally, a specific kind of metareferentiality is exhibited in the examples mentioned. In op. 33/2 and op. 76/5, this is also to be understood, to be sure, in the sense of “self-deprecating detachments to one’s own composition” – specifically in terms of a “non-compliance with conventions” (Wolf 2007: 58), while in op. 55/2, the listener is subjected, as it were, to a whirlwind of surprising changes in tonality. In op. 20/3, metareferentiality is again articulated primarily in the contrasting of various musical vocabulary, such as the aforementioned unexpectedly interrupting fanfare-like configurations, a symbolic toll that announces or triggers a process of metric uncertainty. All of this becomes part of an extraordinarily complex, highly imaginative, and at any given moment well calculated game, a game with the elements of music itself, which presents the recipients with a truly

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inexhaustible abundance of always new and hardly foreseeable challenges, challenges in which absence and silence play a crucial role.17

References

Aringer, Klaus (1999). Die Funktion des Pausa- und Finalschlusses in den Klavier- und Orgel­werken von Johann Sebastian Bach. Münchner Veröffentlichungen zur Musik­ geschichte 52. Tutzing: Hans Schneider. Barthes, Roland (1973/1975). The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York, NY: Hill and Wang (French orig.: Le plaisir du texte. Paris: Èditions du Seuil). Cohen, Ted (1987). “Jokes”. Eva Schaper, ed. Preference and Value: Studies in Philosophical Aesthetics. Cambridge: CUP. 120–136. Danielewicz-Betz, Anna (1998). Silence and Pauses in Discourse and Music. Saarbrücken: Doctoral Thesis. Eberhard, Johann August (1776). Allgemeine Theorie des Denkens und Empfindens. Berlin: Christian Friedrich Voß. Feder, Georg, Walter Reicher, eds. (2003). Internationales Musikwissenschaftliches Symposium “Haydn & Das Streichquartett”. Eisenstädter Haydn-Berichte 2. Tutzing: Hans Schneider. Finscher, Ludwig (2000). Joseph Haydn und seine Zeit. Laaber: Laaber. Franconis de Colonia (c. 1280/1974). Ars Cantus Mensurabilis. Eds. Gilbert Reaney, André Gilles. Corpus Scriptorum de Musica 18. Rome: American Institute of Musicology. Göllner, Theodor (1968). “Eine Spielanweisung für Tasteninstrumente aus dem 15. Jahrhundert”. Hans Tischler, ed. Essays in Musicology: A Birthday Offering for Willi Apel. Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. School of Music. 69–81. Göllner, Theodor (2009). “‘Pausa’: Abschiedsvorlesung an der Universität München”. Claus Bockmaier, Berthold Schmid, eds. Musikgeschichte in Zusammenhängen. Schriften von Theodor Göllner (Münchner Veröffentlichungen zur Musikgeschichte 66). Tutzing: Hans Schneider. 401–410. Iser, Wolfgang (1991). Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre: Perspektiven literarischer Anthropologie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Lissa, Zofia (1962). “Die Ästhetische Funktion der Stille und Pause in der Musik”. Studien zur Musikwissenschaft 25 (Festschrift Erich Schenk). Graz et al.: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger. 315–346.

17

This contribution was translated from the German original by Christina Levy. Scores were prepared by Julia Fleck.

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Lissa, Zofia (1964). “Aesthetic Functions of Silence and Rests in Music”. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 22/4: 443–454. Mendelssohn, Moses (1762–1763/1986). “Gedanken vom Ausdrucke der Leidenschaften”. Otto F. Best, ed. Moses Mendelssohn: Ästhetische Schriften in Auswahl. Darmstadt: Wissen­schaftliche Buchgesellschaft. 202–206. Mozart, Leopold (1789/1991). Gründliche Violinschule. Faksimile-Nachdruck der 3. Auflage Augsburg. Wiesbaden et al.: Breitkopf & Härtel. Sulzer, Johann Georg (1793/1967). Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste. Vol. 3. Hildes­ heim: Olms. Tinctoris, Johannes. Terminorum musicae diffinitorium (Treviso 1495). Tinctoris, Johannes (1495/2014 online). “De pausis. Liber .II. Capitulum .I.”. Tractatus de notis et pausis. Complete Theoretical Works. Ed. Ronald Woodley (Engl. trans.: A Treatise on Notes and Rests. “On Rests: Book II Chapter 1”). [13/6/2018]. Watkins, Eric, ed. (2009). Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: Background Source Materials. Cambridge: CUP. Wheelock, Gretchen A. (1991). “Engaging Strategies in Haydn’s Opus 33 String Quartets”. Eighteenth-Century Studies 25/4: 1–30. Wheelock, Gretchen A. (2003). “The ‘Rhetorical Pause’ and Metaphors of Conversation in Haydn’s Quartets”. Feder/Reicher, eds. 67–88. Wolf, Werner (2007). “Metaisierung als transgenerisches und transmediales Phänomen: Ein Systematisierungsversuch metareferentieller Formen und Begriffe in Literatur und anderen Medien”. Janine Hauthal, Julijana Nadj, Ansgar Nünning, Henning Peters, eds. Metaisierung in Literatur und anderen Medien. Berlin et al.: de Gruyter. 25–64. Zenck, Martin (1994). “Dal niente – Vom Verlöschen der Musik: Zum Paradigmenwechsel von Klang und Stille in der Musik des neunzehnten und zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts”. MusikTexte 55: 15–21.

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Chapter 8

Absence of Words and Absence of Music in Opera  Walter Bernhart This essay discusses significant silence and absence in the plurimedial form of opera by focusing on the verbal and musical sides of the genre. The exclusion of the vital theatrical dimension is justified by the fact that absence in opera becomes most meaningful, in relation to the dramatic work, when it is essentially defined by the words and the music. A variety of passages taken from operas from different historical contexts are discussed as examples in which words, music, or both are missing. These examples not only show a wide range of ways to use gaps and silences effectively in opera but also give more general insight into the dramatic functions of verbal and musical forms of expression in this ‘absurd’ and ‘extravagant’ art form. 1

Introductory Remarks

It is the aim of this essay to discuss ‘significant absence’ in opera, that strangely hybrid, “preposterous” form (Abbate/Parker 2012: 35), that “extravagant art” (Lindenberger 1984) in which everyone constantly sings in a most unnatural manner. In Capriccio, Richard Strauss’s wonderful 1942 opera on opera, with its inherent perennial rivalry between ‘words and music’, the Count, who is a philosophically inclined champion of ‘words’ against the ardent defenders of the wondrous powers of ‘music’, calls opera “ein absurdes Ding”1 in which the poet and the composer constantly stand in each other’s way (cf. Strauss 1942: 150). However, it is, of course, the richness of all the various media that contribute to the plurimedial form of opera – theatrical and visual as well as verbal and musical means of communication – which account for the continuous fascination with the genre since its beginnings in the seventeenth century. Before beginning to discuss the specific topic chosen for this essay, I need to name and explain two restrictions regarding my topic.

1 Strauss 1942: 151 (‘[…] an absurd thing’; this and all further translations are mine unless indicated otherwise).

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One restriction – as the chosen title indicates – is that I will only deal with absence on the verbal and musical levels of opera, which implies that I will not discuss any of the other levels of this hybrid form; most importantly I will exclude ‘absence’ on the theatrical level, that is, the visual representations on the stage and the gestural activities of acting. This is indeed a severe restriction considering that opera is surely the most elaborate form of theatre, and the completeness of a performance and realization of an opera is only guaranteed by the full inclusion of its theatrical dimension. One can hold against this that opera traditionally has always been seen as a branch of music (also in academic discussions) where the main defining element is the singing voice and where even the textual side of the libretto often remains shamefully neglected. There is the well-known anecdote about Anton Bruckner at the opera attending a performance of Tristan und Isolde where he drew the curtain of his box because he did not want to be distracted from the impact of the music by having to see what was happening on stage. And even Wagner himself – who famously invented the invisible orchestra for his Bayreuth festival hall – at one point said that he should have invented the invisible stage as well. He said so in despair about the poor staging in the first production of Der Ring des Nibe­ lungen in 1876.2 Some justification for ignoring the stage dimension lies in the fact that today – despite the extensive online availability of opera productions – concert performances have become more and more popular, even at large opera houses, and the popularity of CDs (and more recently again of LPs) is equally undisputed. I am aware that leaving out the stage dimension – and the performance aspect of theatrical realizations in general – implies an essential restriction in discussing operas. Yet considering that the overall theme addressed in the present volume is significant absence on the level of the signifiers, such a restriction seems in place. After all, the fundamental signifiers of operas, which establish the dramatic context of the works, are found in the scores, and they overwhelmingly appear in the words of the libretto and the music for the voices and the orchestra. This is the place where absences become most conspicuously significant. 2 Pierre Boulez gives a German translation of an originally French entry into Cosima’s diary: “Die Erfahrungen von 1876 und die Trivialität der Realisierungen seiner Träume haben ihn so sehr ernüchtert, dass er, nachdem er schon das unsichtbare Orchester erfunden hat, seufzend die Möglichkeit erwägt, eine unsichtbare Bühne zu erschaffen” (Boulez 2005: 23; qtd. in Zenck 2010: 81f. ‘His experiences of 1876 and the triviality of the realization of his dreams have disillusioned him to such an extent that, after already having invented the invisible orchestra, he now, with a sigh, considers the possibility of creating an invisible stage’. Zenck’s comment suggests that Wagner was irritated by the ‘theatrically cluttered scenes’ of the production (“den theatral überladenen Szenen”; ibid.: 81).

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The second restriction is that I will concentrate on the traditional forms of opera and not discuss more recent developments in the world of musical theatre in which – very interestingly so – silence frequently plays an important role. This exclusion of course needs some explanation. A very important 2008 study by Regine Elzenheimer entitled Pause. Schweigen. Stille: Dramaturgien der Abwesenheit im postdramatischen Musik-Theater (‘Pause. Silentness. Stillness: Dramaturgies of Absence in Post-dramatic Musical Theatre’) discusses an important development in musical theatre starting at the end of the 19th century and culminating in what – following Hans-Thies Lehmann (see 1999) – has been called ‘post-dramatic theatre’. Elzenheimer talks about a paradigm change which brought about an ‘emancipation of pause and silence’ (cf. 2008: 17), and she quotes Ulrich Dibelius observing an ‘equality of pause, i. e. nonsound and sound’ (“Gleichstellung von Pause, also Nicht-Klang, und Klang”; 1994: 10) as an ‘essential innovation in 20th-century music’ (Elzenheimer 2008: 17). While, in traditional rhetoric, silence was expected to be ‘eloquent’ (“beredt”) and ‘deictic’ (Benthien 2002: 196) by referring to the ‘ineffability of experiences’ (“Unsagbarkeit von Erfahrungen”; ibid.), the omnipresence of silence and pauses in much contemporary music ‘undermines the temporal structure’ (cf. Elzenheimer 2008: 23) and thus becomes an ‘essentially autonomous category of aesthetic reflection’ (cf. ibid.: 26). Traditional pauses are defined by Elzenheimer as “die temporäre Unterbrechung einer Handlung, Tätigkeit oder Ereigniskette, der die Bedingung des zeitlichen Verlaufs und somit die Erwartungshaltung eines ‘Nachher’ innewohnt” (ibid.: 22; ‘the temporary interruption of a plot, activity, or chain of events, which implies the condition of a temporal sequence and therefore an expectation of an “afterwards”’). Thus, traditionally, pauses are part of the ‘dramatic development’ (ibid.: 24) and ‘mark moments of stopping (“Momente des Innehaltens”), moments of irritation, of escalation and intensification’ (ibid.). In post-dramatic works, however, pauses are no longer ‘functionally defined form elements’ and ‘representations of ineffability’ (cf. ibid.: 26) but have become elements of a ‘specifically theatrical presence as intensity of the present’ (“spezifisch theatrale Präsenz als Intensität von Gegenwart”; ibid.: 23) without any temporal embedding. Through this, pauses lose ‘meaning’ because a chain of signifiers, defined as a sequence of meaningful signs, has disappeared. Elzenheimer judiciously refers to a linguistic feature of the German language which the English language lacks in common parlance, namely the distinction between ‘Schweigen’ and ‘Stille’; both are ‘silence’ in English (yet there exists a rarely-used distinction between ‘silentness’ and ‘stillness’). The difference, as defined by Elzenheimer, is that ‘Schweigen’ is ‘meaningful’ (“bedeutungstragend”) while

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‘Stille’ is ‘placed outside the semiotic’ (“außerhalb des Semiotischen stehend”; ibid.: 20). The above observations provide a justification for excluding an essential recent development in musical theatre despite the fact that silence plays an important role in it. The chosen subject of the essays collected in the present volume is ‘significant absence’, not just ‘absence’, and because post-dramatic theatre denies such significance, as just explained, it is bound to remain outside our reflections. Furthermore, Elzenheimer makes clear that ‘post-dramatic musical theatre can no longer be adequately understood in the traditional categories of opera’ (cf. ibid.: 31). The cobbler should stick to his last; and thus I will remain within my chosen subject, opera. Nonetheless, the brief discussion of ‘non-significant’ silence in post-dramatic musical theatre may have sharpened our minds for clarifying to what extent using silence is an important method of establishing meaning in traditional opera. 2

Absence of Words and Music

2.1 Iconic Silence Motivated by the Dramatic Situation A first example to be discussed takes up the idea that significant pauses in traditional opera generally have a dramatic function by iconically reflecting a dramatic situation. Having already mentioned Richard Wagner, Parsifal (1882) may well serve as this first example. The chosen passage is from the first act, when the Knights of the Grail eagerly expect the Grail to be unveiled because only when uncovered can it bring them the spiritual energy they need for survival. Amfortas, their king, however, suffering from a wound that invariably starts bleeding when the Grail is unveiled, shrinks back from doing so to avoid the pain and since, as a cursed sinner, he only wants to die and not be forced to live on. So when Titurel, his ancient father, asks him to uncover the Grail (“Mein Sohn Amfortas, bist du am Amt? (langes Schweigen) Soll ich den Gral heut’ noch erschau’n und leben? (langes Schweigen) Muss ich sterben, vom Retter ungeleitet?”3), Amfortas is extremely reluctant to do so and, strongly resisting, hesitates. Amfortas’s painful hesitation and willful inaction are reflected in the music by a long series of rests, which are experienced as extreme strain.4 3 “Amfortas, my son, are you in your place? (long silence) Shall I again today look on the Grail and live? (long silence) Must I die without my Saviour’s guidance?” (Wagner [1882] online). 4 Christoph Schlingensief, preparing a production of Parsifal for the Bayreuth Festival, tells about his reaction to this general rest in the score: “[…] ich wollte, dass diese Pause vier, fünf, vielleicht sogar zehn Minuten dauert, eine Phase der Ruhe – bei viereinhalb Stunden müsste

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The next example is also from Wagner, Der fliegende Holländer (1843), second act. It is the moment of Senta’s first encounter with a mysterious stranger, who suddenly enters the room, after having just sung her famous ballad expressing her fascination with a pitiful Dutchman, whose portrait she has hung up. She feels it to be her unavoidable mission to redeem that man, who (again, like Amfortas) is cursed for some unforgivable sin and thus condemned to sail the seas forever. It is a magical moment when Senta now, unexpectedly, sees that stranger entering her home and, recognizing the resemblance between the portrait and the stranger, senses that this is the man, the Dutchman of her dreams, in bodily presence before her. “Sie stößt einen gewaltigen Schrei der Überraschung aus und bleibt wie festgebannt stehen” (‘she shouts out a powerful cry of surprise and remains standing as if spellbound’): this mesmerized moment is a moment of extreme dramatic significance, and we feel that the prolonged silence from the orchestra, which accompanies the scene, is a stunning mirror of Senta’s shock. What is typical of such extended moments of silence in operas is that, as in these examples, the orchestra often does not actually keep completely silent: in the Holländer passage we hear a subdued drum sound almost unnoticeably marking out the time – in fact, it does precisely what post-dramatic theatre does not do: the orchestral signals, by segmenting time, foreground the passing of time without jeopardizing the impression that the time passing is empty time and that, externally (only externally!), nothing happens and there is complete silence. A further particularly striking example, similarly structured but dramatically worlds apart from Senta and the Dutchman, is from Salome (1905). Salome, after having danced her famous Dance of the Seven Veils for Herod, is granted by the fascinated king any wish that she might have, and to his utter dismay her horrifying demand is the head of Jochanaan, the prophet John the Baptist, who is kept imprisoned in the castle. The relevant passage is the moment when the executioner descends into the cistern to fulfil the atrocious promise and Salome, squatting near the cistern, listens with keen fascination for Jochanaan’s anticipated outcry of mortal fear – which, to her shattering mortification, does not occur: Jochanaan remains totally silent. Reminiscent of das doch möglich sein, dachte ich. Ich war überzeugt davon, dass diese Stille eine metaphysische Kraft entfaltet hätte, auf der Bühne und beim Publikum. Denn gerade in der schlagartig einsetzenden öffentlichen Stille liegt der Hauptsprengstoff, glaube ich.” (2012: 145; ‘I wanted this pause to last for four, five, perhaps even ten minutes, a phase of silence – with four-anda-half hours this should be possible, I thought. I was convinced that this silence would have generated a metaphysical power, on the stage and in the audience. Because precisely in this abruptly established public stillness lies the main explosive, I believe.’)

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Milton’s ‘darkness made visible’, the frightening complete silence is here made audible by a series of strange orchestral sounds that sound like awkward interjections: we hear – on the grounding of a very soft drum roll – unusually high notes, like scratching noises, played on the double bass, while Salome says: “Es ist kein Laut zu vernehmen. Ich höre nichts. Warum schreit er nicht, der Mann?” (“There is no sound. I hear nothing. Wherefore cries he not, this man?”; Strauss c.1943 online: 176f.). 2.2 Iconicity on the Verbal Level So far, three cases of silence have been discussed which were motivated by dramatic situations, each very different but compositionally handled in strikingly similar ways. Clearly, these silences are iconic in semiotic terms as the silence on the level of the dramatic content is mirrored in the score of the opera. The next example to be discussed is even more classically iconic, as here iconicity works even more directly on the verbal level. The example is from Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (1911), from near the very end of the opera, just before the famous final trio starts. The Marschallin has just made it clear that she is giving up Octavian, her young lover, and generously hands Sophie, the beautiful young heiress, over to him. Octavian, deeply affected, does not know what to say, (“ich weiß gar nicht –”), and the Marschallin responds: “Ich weiß auch nix. Gar nix”, “(mit einem undefinierbaren Ausdruck) (leise) (ganz tonlos)”: OCTAVIAN (with deep feeling): […] I do not know PRINCESS (with an enigmatical expression, softly): And I know nothing. (Quite toneless.) Nothing. (Strauss [1911] online) We can admire here the poetic genius of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the librettist, and the subtlety with which he is able to suggest the poignancy of renunciation. And Strauss, the sensitive composer, follows suit – und sagt auch nix: ‘nothing’ in the words evokes ‘nothing’ in the music – a long pause. 2.3 Unexpected Gaps as ‘Teasers’ Striking cases of gaps in the sequence of signifiers in opera are entirely unexpected stops in unfolding melodies. They appear in the musical flow as sudden interruptions but, in contrast to the examples already given, they do not reflect an element of the story and thus are not dramatically motivated. They are purely musical in character and can mainly be found in Giuseppe Verdi’s popular operas of his middle period, striking cases being the duke’s famous aria, “La donna è mobile”, from Rigoletto (1851), and the equally famous brindisi (drinking song), “Libiamo ne’ lieti calici”, from La traviata (1853), or the

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cabaletta of Violetta’s great aria, “È strano”, from the same opera. In all these cases the orchestral prelude strikes up the catchy tune of the ensuing singing but suddenly stops, only to make a fresh start again after a significant pause. Such truncations of popular melodies in introductions of spirited songs seem to function like teasers, or traps, which on the one hand frustrate the immediate relish of the catchy tune, but on the other hand set the expectation of the prolonged experience of pleasure once the melody returns (again and again) in the main body of the song. To cut off the melody may also serve as another audience-related trick: the melody is first played only by the orchestra, but what audiences really want is to hear it sung by the singer. These very effective musical tricks are like stumbling blocks that exclaim: “Mind the step!” / “Mind the gap!” 3

Absence of Music

In the cases of silence in opera so far discussed both words and music show a momentary absence of signifiers in the score. Now, I will discuss cases where only one of these two media is absent, and will first concentrate on the temporary absence of music in opera.5 Speaking in Opera: Opéra Comique, Singspiel and Recitativo (Secco) Historically, before genuine opera emerged around 1600, so-called ‘intermedi’ were performed in Florence, a form of verbal/spoken theatre that was in­ terspersed, between the acts, by “dance, solo song and even complicated madrigals” and so-called “‘sinfonias’” (Abbate/Parker 2012: 39). This form of theatre can be seen as a precursor to the genre of opera, in the history of which the succession of exclusively spoken and exclusively musical passages, as already found in the intermedi, has a long tradition. It is a given fact that the throughcomposed form of opera, which produced the greatest number of the most well-known works of the genre in the 18th and 19th centuries, is by no means 3.1

5 My discussion deals with ‘proper opera’, as it were, where words and music are both constitutional elements of the work and form parts of performances. This leaves out those – fairly rare – cases where operas in performance are presented as spoken drama, examples being stagings of Hofmannsthal’s libretto of Der Rosenkavalier without Strauss’s music, or readings of libretti, as done even by Wagner himself of Der Ring des Nibelungen or Tristan und Isolde. And “[t]he question is moot in the case of Literaturopern, where the dramatic and the operatic text are identical, or nearly so” (Weisstein 1999: 159), see Salome, or Wozzeck, among others.

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the only form.6 Above all, the French opéra comique and the German Singspiel were popular forms of opera that had alternating passages of spoken dialogue on the one hand and musical passages with ensembles and arias on the other. This alternation is the defining characteristic of opéra comique, which has very little to do with the comic, with comedy or humour; serious opéras comiques also exist, with the most famous example being Carmen (1875). The outstanding example of a German-language opera in the Singspiel tradition with such an alternation of music and spoken dialogue is Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (1791); Beethoven’s Fidelio (1805) – stylistically a highly individual mixture of forms – also has strong Singspiel elements. In view of the distinction between purely verbal dialogue passages and the so-called ‘numbers’, the musical arias and ensembles, the question arises, what is the significance or the benefit of the absence of music in the spoken sections? The effect of the absence of music in opera can be seen to be similar to the effect of recitative, a presentational form frequently found in opera. Recitatives are declaimed speech, where – especially in recitativo secco (‘dry’ recitative) – the presentation is nearer to speech than to song (cf. Abbate/Parker 2012: 26). Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, in their book A History of Opera, distinguish between aria and recitative – and by extension ‘mimetic speaking’ – by making clear that the passages which are not musically oriented are the “place for narrative, informal dialogue, stage action”; this is where “the plot moves forward” (ibid.: 25), the language is “quite ordinary in the lexicon” (ibid.: 23), with more words which – in contrast to ‘numbers’ – are not repeated; re­ citatives, like mimetic speaking, have a prose quality and are story-oriented. The musical passages, to the contrary, have a “poetic register” (ibid.: 25), are static in nature, do not contribute to the plot, and rather reflect inner life by revealing the characters’ emotions and their musings. The Count in Capriccio objects to the “bleierne Langeweile” (Strauss 1942: 154; see also Gerhard 2015), the ‘leaden boredom’ of recitatives, and in fact many recent productions of operas drastically cut down recitatives, or even do away with them completely. This goes hand in hand with the fact that the traditional Singspiel type of opera, with its spoken dialogues, is definitely out of fashion. Such a development is partly due to the theatrical weakness of many of the dialogues and recitatives, and partly due to audience expectations with their over-emphasis on the 6 The references here to ‘spoken passages’ and ‘speaking’ in opera refer to what Weisstein calls “mimetic speaking”, i. e. passages that are “literally” spoken as “prose dialogues” in the score; this is in contrast to “conventional speaking” in opera (1999: 161), which is that ‘absurd’, ‘preposterous’ and ‘extravagant’ activity when singers sing on stage what characters in the drama only speak. (This distinction is analogous to Abbate’s between “phenomenal” and “noumenal” music in opera; 1991: 119–121.)

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music, above all the singing, at the expense of an interest in the libretto and its plot. However, it is precisely a main benefit of the passages without weighty music that they guarantee a concentration on the plot development and on the theatrical action. As even Richard Strauss himself says in his introductory “Geleitwort” to Capriccio: “Das Seccorezitativ […] ist die primitivste Kunstform, in der eine einigermaßen komplizierte Komödienhandlung immerhin deutlich zur Darstellung kommen kann.”7 (1942: n. p.) Furthermore, it is only in spoken dialogue that wit and intellectual brilliance can find comprehensible expression, and it is only in spoken words that a rational argument which tries to explain and interpret the dramatic situation can meaningfully be developed; whenever such reflections are done in singing they are bound to fail. 3.2 Falling into Speech: Singing Becoming Inappropriate Sometimes, in operas which are basically through-composed, a character at a specific point in the action momentarily switches from singing to speaking. This can happen when a trivial statement of the type “Sir, tea is being served” would sound ridiculous when sung. Again in Capriccio, there is a nice similar example: the majordomo speaks – ‘mimetic speaking’ – in perfect trivial prose: “Wir werden die Schokolade hier im Salon einnehmen.” (Strauss 1942: 108; ‘Chocolate will be served here in the parlour.’) Other, completely different, situations can make a character momentarily fall into speech. As Abbate and Parker phrase it, “a character, usually in crisis, simply talks, or shouts” (2012: 488). Senta, in the critical Holländer passage already discussed, shouts a ‘powerful cry’. Another example is Tosca, who, in Puccini’s opera, at the end of the second act, after having stabbed Scarpia, the villainous chief of police in Rome, contemptuously pants out the only spoken words in the opera: “E avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma!” (‘Once all Rome trembled before him!’). Absence of the Singing Voice: Special Non-Singing Characters, and the Melodram A famous example of an opera in which it is even one of the leading characters who appears only in a speaking role (‘Sprechrolle’) is Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron. Moses, in this opera, lacks the gift of rhetorical speech and communicative persuasiveness of his brother Aron, who is the leading singer in the opera. Moses, who never sings, represents divine inspiration and ‘purity of thinking’ (“Reinheit des Denkens”) as the manifestation of the will of the invis3.3

7 ‘The secco recitative […] is the most primitive art form, in which, after all, a fairly complicated comedy plot can be clearly presented.’

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ible God. Moses says: “Ich kann denken, aber nicht reden”8 (I, 1); so the equivalent in the strange world of opera is that he can speak, but not sing. We can see that the range of situations which lead to the absence of music in opera is surprisingly wide, from the most trivial to the most sublime. Later, we will see which functions of music are responsible for this move away from music. But before turning to pure music and the absence of words in opera, some mention should be made of a specific form of theatre in which music is consistently combined with spoken words and no singing at all takes place, namely the melodram. First a clarification of the terminology is necessary: the ‘melodrame’ is a French invention of the 18th century, with Rousseau’s Pygmalion (1762/1770) as the prototype and Georg Benda as the master of the German form of ‘Melodrama’. This ‘melodram’ (in English) has nothing to do with what we know as ‘melodrama’ in English literary history, namely a 19th century “sensational form of spoken theatre” (Abbate/Parker 2012: 159). Nor should it be confused with what in Italian is called ‘melodramma’, which is just the Italian word for ‘opera’. As a consequence, the Italian word for ‘melodram’ in the French/German sense is ‘melologo’ (which, by the way, is a far more suitable word because it implies the combination of ‘melos’/music and ‘logos’/word, i. e. sheer words without singing; ‘drama’ is a less appropriate term because also lyric, non-dramatic cases of ‘melodram/melologue’ exist, for instance Franz Schubert’s sublime “Abschied von der Erde”, D. 829). There are two forms of melodram,9 the older one has consecutively alternating spoken and instrumental blocks where in a more or less artless way a musical passage illustrates in the mimetic forms of word painting and word expression what the text has just said. (A popular 20th-century case is Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf [1936].) The other form is more sophisticated and shows a simultaneity of spoken words and instrumental music, where this parallel combination allows for more flexibility and in fact has produced even fulllength works such as Zdenĕk Fibich’s Hippodamia (1893), a work of almost Wagnerian dimensions, covering three consecutive evenings of blazing theatre. The most famous important opera which has essential melodramatic passages is Weber’s Der Freischütz, above all its spooky Wolf’s Glen scene. This fountainhead of German Romantic opera had a tremendous innovative force 8 Schoenberg 1957: 12f.; “Thought is easy; speech is laborious”; ibid. This is a free, singing version of the text in English; literally Moses says: ‘I can think, but not speak.’ 9 For theoretical and typological reflections on the melodram, see, e.g. Jiranek 1994 and Bernhart 2000/2015.

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when it came out in 1821; it is truly experimental and shows a fascinating mix of forms of expression, which in fact are almost all interesting for our topic. It has a mix of spoken dialogue, like in the Singspiel, and pure ‘scenic music’, i. e. music without words illustrating scenic situations on the stage (here the storm and the gloomy night); it has significant general rests, and, of course, there is ‘regular’ singing, but also melodram.10 Analyzing the whole Wolf’s Glen scene more closely from the viewpoint of ‘words and music’ would be worthwhile, but from the perspective of ‘absence of music’ in the specific form of ‘absence of the singing voice’ in the melodram the passage which Weber himself titles “Melodram” is of greatest interest. What is the significance of the absence of singing in this passage? The text of the passage is Caspar’s sinister, weirdly spoken incantation conjuring up Samiel, the devil. Singing such eerie words would give them an aura of emotional involvement, a human touch, which would definitely be out of place in this diabolic situation, and singing would also distract attention from what Caspar is uncannily saying and doing. He certainly does not wish to express any feelings. What he grimly wants to do is conjure up Samiel’s infernal powers: for this purpose spoken words are clearly stronger than the singing voice would be. Yet what then is the function, the effect, of the instrumental music which characteristically accompanies the melodram? One can notice that the rising bass line of the low strings mirrors the rising intensity of Caspar’s plea, and it also suggestively contributes, together with occasional drumbeats and a held diminished-seventh chord, to establishing the ominous atmosphere of the horrifying devil’s call. 4

Absence of Words

4.1 Set Pieces Turning to absence of words in opera, the observation can be made that this situation may be found far more frequently than absence of music.11 Many 10 11

For an interesting discussion of Der Freischütz and its genre mix cf. Abbate/Parker 2012: 183–187. Again, the following discussion will concentrate on ‘proper operas’, that is, operas in their shape as found in their scores. This leaves out of consideration purely instrumental ­versions of operas, such as Karajan’s ‘voice-less’ Tosca or orchestral versions of “Isoldes Liebes­tod”, and the once popular Harmoniemusik versions of Mozart’s (and others’) ­operas as well as Liszt’s piano paraphrases of Wagner, Verdi, et al., equally popular once (cf. also Weisstein 1999: 159).  Other forms of presentation in opera, which in the strict sense show an ‘absence of words’ yet not an ‘absence of the singing voice’, are also left out of consideration; such

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stretches of pure music in operas cannot be seen as ‘significant’ in the sense used here, i. e. significant in relation to the work under discussion; they are often set pieces of music as part of theatrical convention or necessity. This is true for many overtures and preludes which do not directly contribute to the drama, and also for the many scene-changing passages which serve the main function of letting time lapse for giving the stage hands a chance to do their work. Rossini is particularly well-known for the great independence, and thus interchangeability, of such set musical pieces, which he quite frequently even re-used in other works. In more thoughtful cases, scene-change music and preludes serve the function of setting the mood for the following scene. Famous music pieces of this kind are the so-called “Sea Interludes” from Britten’s Peter Grimes (1945), or the sequence of interludes in Britten’s The Turn of the Screw (1954) as well as in Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (1925). Sometimes these set pieces are more closely linked to the plot, like – as an exception for Rossini – the thunderstorm music from Il barbiere di Siviglia (1816; a case of ‘scenic music’, i. e. music illustrating what’s happening on the stage), or the expansive “Siegfried’s Rheinfahrt” in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung (1876), to name only two popular examples. But still, in these cases of purely musical passages the dramatic function is not very important, and the music basically acquires independent expressive weight. 4.2 A Mute Protagonist More interesting in our context are those cases where the purely musical passages become part of the drama itself and are actually of central importance for the development of the drama. There is a wealth of such passages in the repertory of operas, but I will mention only two significant cases. The first case is rather unusual but of immediate relevance for our topic, namely DanielFrançois-Esprit Auber’s 1828 La Muette de Portici (The Dumb Girl of Portici, known for being the first grand opéra). This is the very strange case of a mute, silent woman who is the central protagonist of an opera and who, indeed, never speaks or sings. How this works can be demonstrated by taking a look at the passage in which Fenella, the mute girl, appears for the first time on stage. Whatever the plot situation – a dialogue arises between the fisher girl Fenella and Elvira, the Spanish princess, in which Elvira wants to find out about the personal circumstances of the girl who has just been picked up by the authori-

forms are coloratura and the – very rare – case of humming (e. g. the chorus in Madama Butterfly). ‘Absence of words’, therefore, is here taken to mean ‘purely instrumental’ stretches of operas.

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ties after having escaped from prison. This is the dialogue in which Elvira asks questions that Fenella answers only musically, and by gestures: ELVIRA: What was your crime? (FENELLA replies by action, that she has committed no crime; and calls to heaven to attest her innocence.) ELVIRA: What has induced this rigor? (FENELLA expresses, in action, that love has been the cause of all her misfortunes.) (The Dumb Girl of Portici, I, 4; Auber [1828b] online)12

The musical responses by Fenella are rather conventional expressive passages as found in much contemporary instrumental music. Her ‘innocence’ is suggested by four bars of a Beethovenesque “Andante con moto” in B flat major, and her justification of ‘love’ is expressed in surprisingly long 16 bars of an “Allegro vivace”, “appassionato” in G flat major, starting piano and gradually leading into a full-orchestra forte. This is a textbook case of the absence of words in opera where otherwise a verbal response would be expected. The music says what the character is unable to say. To be fair, in performances, Fenella is usually played by a dancer, and her gestures contribute greatly to conveying what the stage directions say that Fenella wants to express. So here the absence of words is compensated not only by the presence of music but also by the presence of theatrical acting. 4.3 Purely Musical, ‘Purple’ Passages  La Muette de Portici is an exceptional case of the absence of words in opera; far more common in the 19th and early 20th centuries are those purely musical, often ‘purple’ passages which have become an essential element of music drama, Wagner’s advancement and replacement of traditional opera. In his 1860 essay “Zukunftsmusik”, Wagner states that the poet at times is unable to express, and therefore conceals, the ineffable; but, as Wagner continues: “[…] der Musiker ist es nun, der dieses Verschwiegene zum hellen Ertönen bringt, und die untrügliche Form seines laut erklingenden Schweigens ist die unendliche 12

“ELVIRE (à Fenella): Quel peut être ton crime? FENELLA: (Elle répond qu’elle n’est point coupable; elle en atteste le ciel.) ELVIRE: Qui troubla ton repos? FENELLA: (Elle fait signe que l’amour s’empara de son cœur, et qu’il a causé tous ses maux.)” (La Muette de Portici, I, 4; [1828a] online)

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Melodie”13 (1860/1983: 166). Wagner here explains his famous notion of ‘tönendes Schweigen’ (‘sounding silence’), according to which the orchestra acquires the unique capacity of expressing what otherwise, for our mind, is inexpressible. This notion has meanwhile become commonplace: the idea that music has a quasi-metaphysical dimension reaching beyond verbal language, the idea that music administers “quasi-psychological intimation of inner, inscrutable forces” (Smart 2004 qtd. in Morris 2012: 101), that it is the supreme vehicle to “articulate subjectivity” (Kramer 2004 qtd. ibid.: 103) and offers “descents into the labyrinths of the soul” (Abbate/Parker 2012: 498). The “‘symphonization’ of opera” (Morris 2012: 110)14 made the orchestra the primary agent of expression and radically changed the face of opera in the late-romantic period. It led to great scenes in opera which are essentially shaped by the full symphonic sound of the orchestra, when even high-strung singing has come to an end. This is true for famous orchestral endings of operas like Tristan or Götterdämmerung, and above all of works by their supreme master, Richard Strauss. Daphne (1938) is an impressive case in point, or – fittingly in our context – Die schweigsame Frau (1935), where the orchestral ending, with its tranquil praise of silence, shows the complete rest and peacefulness which Morosus, after a fierce struggle, has finally reached. A very moving example of a meaningful instrumental ‘purple’ passage is the wonderful violin solo in the third act of the highly symbolical opera Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919), a passage which reflects the central inner transformation of the eponymous heroine: the Empress/Kaiserin who is finally able to accept, in a severe trial situation, that in order to achieve complete humanness, which she craves but lacks as a spirit-being, and thereby to gain the shadow which, as 13 14

‘[…] it is the musician who turns that which is silently concealed into bright tintinnabulation, and the infallible form of his loudly resounding silence is the unending melody’. A radical project of the ‘symphonization of opera’ was contemplated by Sibelius, who confided to his diary (2005: 140) that he was pondering over the idea – which never materialized – of writing an opera without any words:  May 18, 1912: “Jag inser t. ex. tydligt att den opera jag skall skifva, ej får ha ord. Endast arkitektoniska kulisser och sångare, hvilka sjunga på a; framförallt inga ord. De äro i en opera af ondo. Det hela skall verka skönt, sång och färger, musik och åtföljande åtbörder. Ingen intrig?! Ja, ja ihr Herren.” (‘I clearly see, for instance, that the opera I am going to write must have no words. Only architectonic settings and singers who sing a; above all, no words. They are a bad thing in an opera. The whole thing should appear beautiful, vocals and colours, music and accompanying gestures. No intrigue?! O yes, you gentlemen.’)  May 19, 1912: “Arbetat: – Sinfoni eller opera?!” (‘I have worked: – Symphony or opera?!’) I am grateful to Hans Lund, of Lund University, for his indispensable expert linguistic assistance.

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an as yet non-human being, she is missing, she has to learn to sacrifice herself and to experience human pity. “Erfülle dein Geschick!” (‘Fulfil your destiny!’) is the spirits’ command, which sends her off into the trial situation and which she is now ready to face. She bravely enters this inner process of conversion, which is reflected in the long violin solo that immediately follows the pronouncement of the command. Words would hardly be able to mirror that inner process but music certainly can, and one is able to recognize that the very absence of words in this situation significantly supports and enhances the impact of the music. A similar case of an enchanting violin solo in opera is the even more wellknown “Méditation” from Massenet’s Thaïs (1894). This instrumental piece is an entr’acte in the second act of the opera and, as in Die Frau ohne Schatten, mirrors an inner transformation of the eponymous heroine. Here it is the conversion from a prostitute to a saint-like figure at the instigation of Athanaël, a zealous friar, who is successful in getting her on the right track (yet, ironically, in the end is defeated by her allures). Critics have frequently contemplated the tremendous effect of such music in opera. Abbate and Parker come to the conclusion that it is hard “to pin down and yet central to the experience” (2012: 27). What they hesitatingly come up with as an explanation is the notion that musical signs are able to create “an aura around or beyond the action, beyond the emotions represented by the libretto, characters and situations” (ibid.). Such musical pieces, it has been claimed, make their own theatre, “removed from the mundane reality of the stage” (Morris 2012: 110). This notion of a world existing in opera that transcends our material reality is reminiscent of W.H. Auden’s stimulating views on the subject. This highly ingenious lover of opera saw opera as a genre able to establish what he called a ‘secondary world’ over and beyond the ‘primary world’ of our empirical existence, and this transcendence is effected most essentially by the music (cf., e. g. Auden 1968: 12; cf. Bernhart 1994/2015: 100–102). 5

‘Stop the Music!’

The final example to be discussed is a particularly drastic case of ‘absence’ in opera; it is a passage where the score emphatically announces a radical gap in the music: “Die Musik setzt aus!” (‘The music is cut off!’) This example could have been treated before in the discussion of general rests (see section 2); yet it fits in well here as it is enlightening about the function which music plays in opera, as has just been considered, and about the working of music in general.

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A useful example is from Hindemith’s opera Cardillac from 1926,15 which tells the story of Cardillac, an inspired goldsmith, who is unable to part with the products of his art and as a consequence feels forced to kill all the customers who have bought his jewelry. The chosen passage is the end of act one when a character called “Der junge Kavalier” (‘The young gallant’) has given a coronet, purchased from Cardillac, to his lover, the “Sängerin” (‘singer’), and they, while admiring the beauty of the jewelry, start their love play. The whole scene is a pantomime that excludes singing or speaking, and the purely instrumental music of the scene is called in the score ‘duet for two flutes’. We mainly hear the two dominant flutes getting softer and softer as the lovers become more and more intimate. What suddenly happens is that the murderer Cardillac appears out of the dark and stabs the young gallant. This is the precise point when the score says, “Die Musik setzt aus!”, and a long pause sets in. The highly dramatic music which follows after the pause reflects the horror of the woman and the flight of the murderer, but – and this is important to notice – it does not illustrate the murder itself. The question is, why does the music stop precisely at the moment when the actual murder takes place? One could have expected some agitated music that tries to use drastic means of illustrating the crime. But no: the music is sharply cut off right then and there. Apparently Hindemith thought that music was unfitting to reflect the murder, a supreme act of evil. What comes to mind in this context is Gottfried Seume’s popular folk-like verse (“Die Gesänge” [1804]): “Wo man singet, lass dich ruhig nieder, […] Bösewichter haben keine Lieder.” (‘Settle down and relax where people sing; evil people have no songs.’) Evil has no music, and consequently, music is incongruous with a presentation of evil.16 This is because, as Auden puts it in a poem, “song” is “unable to say an existence is wrong”: music as a vessel of “forgiveness” (“The Composer”; 1938/1976: 148) cannot condemn human behaviour.17 According to this, music has a tremendous redeeming power, a power of assertion and remission, and when something is to be shown that as a pure act of negation deserves no 15 16

17

For more information on this opera, particularly from a musico-literary perspective, see Bernhart 1997/2015 and 2009/2015. Abbate and Parker in their discussion of the Wolf’s Glen scene in Der Freischütz subtly observe a gradation of evil in the characters and – in line with the present argument – identify matching styles of stage presentation: Samiel – “very bad” – only speaks; Caspar – “half bad” – sings while Samiel speaks and speaks when Max sings; Max – “mostly good” – sings first but also only speaks after the fatal bullet-casting (2012: 184). Auden’s view is fundamentally influenced by his reading of Kierkegaard’s Enten-Eller (Either/Or [1843) and the philosopher’s clear distinction between ethical and aesthetic issues in relation to the arts. According to these reflections, music is unsuitable for ethical issues (cf. Weisstein 1999: 167).

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redemption and permits no forgiveness, music is out of place. Thus, in the case of Cardillac, where the opera includes an unforgivable act of murder committed on stage, the composer does the most appropriate thing in that situation: he stops the music. This is a most impressive example of the significance of absence in opera. 6

Conclusion

This essay has chosen to analyse the existence of ‘significant absence’ on the level of signifiers in the plurimedial form of opera and has shown a surprising richness of options for the appearance of such absences in the selected areas of investigation, namely the verbal and the musical sides of the works as manifested in the scores. A total concurrent silence of both media is quite rare, and if so, it is generally motivated by the dramatic context, which points to the fact that it mostly coincides with silence also on the level of the signifieds. This coincidence is sometimes reflected in the interesting situation that acoustic silence, in actual fact, is not complete but broken by occasional signals marking the passage of time, which, through these scanty interjections, is even more strongly experienced as the passage of empty time. Other cases of both verbal and musical silence, such as unexpected gaps in the introductory bars of catchy tunes (e. g. by Verdi), in contrast, do not relate to the dramatic context and perform a purely rhetorical function. Absence of music in opera occurs frequently, particularly in earlier and popular, mainly plot-related, often humorous forms (also in operettas), that is, in forms which are nearer to comedies, or spoken plays in general. Other cases are placed at the opposite, serious end of opera formation, where the emotional power of music would stand in the way of expressing certain more solemn metaphysical conditions (e. g. Moses und Aron, Der Freischütz, Cardillac). Absence of words is also quite frequently found in operas. Often the purely musical passages are set pieces such as overtures or interludes with a dominantly framing function. Yet in the Romantic tradition with its increased ‘symphonization’ of opera, the purely musical passages as a rule become the supreme vehicle for the description of inner-life conditions, which are generally out of the reach of words. This survey of varieties of formations of silence and absence in opera – with a first attempt to systematize the wide range of varieties observed – is necessarily limited, even in the areas of ‘words’ and ‘music’ as reflected in the scores, which were chosen for this investigation. Yet, a still larger – though quite

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demanding – area of investigation, with the promise of possibly fascinating results, would be examining distinct performance practices, particularly from a historical perspective – which currently is absent from this field of research.

References

Abbate, Carolyn (1991). Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Discourse in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press. Abbate, Carolyn, Roger Parker (2012). A History of Opera. New York, NY/London: W.W. Norton & Company (first ed.: A History of Opera: The Last Four Hundred Years. London: Allen Lane, 2012). Abbate, Carolyn, Roger Parker (2013). Eine Geschichte der Oper: Die letzten 400 Jahre. Transl. Karl Heinz Siber, Nikolaus de Palézieux. Munich: C.H. Beck. Auber, Daniel-François-Esprit ([1828a] online). La Muette de Portici. French libretto. [02/02/2017]. Auber, Daniel-François-Esprit ([1828b] online). La muta di Portici (The Dumb Girl of Portici). An Opera in Five Acts. Italian and English libretto. [02/02/2017]. Auden, W.H. (1938/1976). Collected Poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson. London: Faber. Auden, W.H. (1968). Secondary Worlds. London: Random House. Benthien, Claudia (2002). “Die stumme Präsenz: Zur ‘Figur’ des Schweigens bei Ödön von Horváth”. Gabriele Brandstetter, Sibylle Peters, eds. De figura: Rhetorik – Bewegung – Gestalt. Munich: Wilhelm Fink. 195–220. Bernhart, Walter (1994/2015). “Prekäre angewandte Opernästhetik: Auden’s ‘sekundäre Welt’ und Hans Werner Henzes Elegie für junge Liebende”. Wolf, ed. 99–114 (orig. publ.: Walter Bernhart, ed. Die Semantik der musiko-literarischen Gattungen: Metho­ de und Analyse. Eine Festgabe für Ulrich Weisstein zum 65. Geburtstag / The Semantics of the Musico-Literary Genres: Method and Analysis. In Honor of Ulrich Weisstein on his 65th Birthday. Book Series of Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 10. Tübingen: Narr. 233–246). Bernhart, Walter (1997/2015). “Cardillac, the Criminal Artist: A Challenge to Opera as a Musico-Literary Form”. Wolf, ed. 171–179 (orig. publ.: Ulla-Britta Lagerroth, Hans Lund, Erik Hedling, eds. Interart Poetics: Essays on the Interrelations of the Arts and Media. Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Litera­ turwissenschaft 24. Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. 137–143). Bernhart, Walter (2000/2015). “Typologische Überlegungen zum Melodrama”. Wolf, ed. 225–234 (orig. publ.: Jana Fojtíková, Vĕra Šustíková, eds. Fibich – Melodram –

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Secese / Fibich – Melodrama – Art Nouveau. Prague: Zdenĕk Fibich Society, Museum of Czech Music. 128–135). Bernhart, Walter (2009/2015). “‘… pour out forgiveness like a wine’: Can Music ‘say an existence is wrong’?”. Werner Wolf, ed. 413–430 (orig. publ.: Keith Chapin, Lawrence Kramer, eds. Musical Meaning and Human Values. New York, NY: Fordham UP. 170–183). Boulez, Pierre (2005). “Richard arbeitet …: Anmerkungen zu Cosima Wagners Tage­ büchern”. Pierre Boulez. Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. Eds. Karl-Ulrich Majer, Hella Preimesberger. Bayreuth: Palladion/Ellwanger. Dibelius, Ulrich (1994). “Kraft aus der Stille: Erfahrungen mit Klang und Stille in der neueren Musik”. MusikTexte 55 (Aug.): 9–14. Elzenheimer, Regine (2008). Pause. Schweigen. Stille: Dramaturgien der Abwesenheit im postdramatischen Musik-Theater. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Gerhard, Anselm (2015). “Bleierne Langeweile?”. Opernwelt 12: 77. Jiránek, Jaroslav (1994). “Die Semantik des Melodrams: Ein Sonderfall der musiko-literarischen Gattungen, demonstriert am Werk Zdeněk Fibichs”. Walter Bernhart, ed. Die Semantik der musiko-literarischen Gattungen: Methodik und Analyse. Eine Fest­ gabe für Ulrich Weisstein zum 65. Geburtstag / The Semantics of the Musico-Literary Genres: Method and Analysis. In Honor of Ulrich Weisstein on his 65th Birthday. Buchreihe zu den Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 10. Tübingen: Narr. 153–173. Kramer, Lawrence (2004). Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss. Berkeley, CA/Los Angeles, CA/London: Univ. of California Press. Lehmann, Hans-Thies (1999). Postdramatisches Theater. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren. Lindenberger, Herbert (1984). Opera: The Extravagant Art. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press. Morris, Christopher (2012). “‘Too Much Music’: The Media of Opera”. Nicholas Till, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies. Cambridge: CUP. 95–116. Schlingensief, Christoph (2012). Ich weiß, ich war’s. Ed. Aino Laberenz. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Schoenberg, Arnold (1957). Moses und Aron: Oper in drei Akten. Klavierauszug von Winfried Zillig. Mainz: Schott. Seidel, Wilhelm (1993). “Tönenden Stille – Klänge aus der Stille: Über musikalische Leerstellen”. Siegfried Mauser, ed. Kunst verstehen – Musik verstehen: Ein interdisziplinäres Symposion (München 1992). Laaber: Laaber. 237–260. Sibelius, Jean (2005). Dagbok 1909–1944. Ed. Fabian Dahlström. Helsingfors: Svenska Litteratursällskapet i Finland/Stockholm: Atlantis. Smart, Mary Ann (2004). Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera. Berkeley, CA/Los Angeles, CA: Univ. of California Press.

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Strauss, Richard ([1911] online). Full Text of Der Rosenkavalier The Rosebearer. [01/02/2017]. Strauss, Richard (1942). Capriccio: Ein Konversationsstück für Musik in einem Aufzug von Clemens Krauss und Richard Strauss. Op. 85. Klavierauszug mit Text von Ernst Gernot Klussmann. Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne / London: Boosey & Hawkes. Strauss, Richard (c.1943). Salome. Musikdrama in einem Aufzuge / Salome. Opera in One Act. Op. 54. Vocal Score. New York, NY: Boosey & Hawkes. Tomlinson, Gary (1999). Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press. Wagner, Richard (1861/1983). “Zukunftsmusik” (excerpt). Attila Csampai, Dietmar Holland, eds. Tristan und Isolde: Texte, Materialien, Kommentare. Reinbek bei Ham­ burg: Rowohlt. 163–166 (orig. publ.: Zukunftsmusik: Brief an einen französischen Freund als Vorwort zu einer Prosa-Übersetzung seiner Operndichtungen. Leipzig: Weber, 1861). Wagner, Richard ([1882] online). Libretti: Parsifal. Ein Bühnenweihfestspiel / Parsifal. Sacred Drama. [01/02/ 2017]. Weisstein, Ulrich (1999). “‘Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, davon muß man singen’: Varieties of Verbo-Vocal Utterance in Opera”. Walter Bernhart, Steven Paul Scher, Werner Wolf, eds. Word and Music Studies: Defining the Field. Word and Music Studies 1. Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. 155–183. Wolf, Werner, ed. (2015). Essays on Literature and Music (1985–2013) by Walter Bernhart. Word and Music Studies 14. Brill/Rodopi: Leiden/Boston. Zenck, Martin (2010). “Wagner in perspective: Luigi Nonos Prometheo, Pierre Boulez und Wieland Wagner in Osaka/Bayreuth”. wagnerspectrum 6/2 (Schwerpunkt: Wagner und die Neue Musik): 69–100.

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Chapter 9

“Où est l’art? perdu, disparu!”: Meaningful Absence in 19th- to 21st-Century Painting  Henry Keazor Honoré de Balzac’s novella Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu was originally written in 1831. Since its republication in 1845, it has been printed with a dedication that presents a series of supplemented, explicitly marked, and therefore clearly signalled highly meaningful absences: its missing text as well as its mysteriously vague addressee anticipate and reflect the ‘unknown masterpiece’ whose unveiling marks the climax as well as the end of the story. Given that the artwork mentioned in the title of the novella is supposed to show the masterly depiction of a beautiful woman, but actually only seems to offer the view of a foot sticking out of a mass of abstract, coloured swirls, one can understand that avant-garde painters such as Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso identified with the artist in Balzac’s novella. As of 1914, Picasso, both in paintings as well as in drawings, worked in a style that converges with that of the painting described in Balzac’s story, since Picasso lets the body of the portrayed sitters fade out into pale sketches. The next step in denying the viewers of an artwork the fulfilment of their expectations is to apparently deprive them of the actual sight of the artwork. This has been practised by the artist Martin Hoener in 2007, who confronted the audience with the backside of a painting. As in the cases discussed before, this ‘absence’ turns out to be highly meaningful. 1

Absence as Evocation “À un Lord …………………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………………………………………………………………… 1845”

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004394520_010

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This is the dedication which has been prefixed to Honoré de Balzac’s novella Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu since the final version of the text was published. In this dedication, we encounter various degrees and forms of direct as well as of indirect ‘absences’, starting with the up to this day unidentified mysterious “Lord”, continuing with the five punctuated lines which seem to stand for an omitted or yet missing text, and ending with the date “1845”. Given that the first version of the short story was already published in 1831, it indicates that the dedication was first missing in this early release (in fact, Balzac added the dedication only in August 1846, when Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu was republished in a revised version in the context of Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine, an unfinished, multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories, as volume XIV which figures at the same time as volume I of the “Études Philosophiques”, a sub-category in the complex, tripartite architecture of the Comédie Humaine).1 Whereas the absence of the dedication in the earlier editions of the story as well as questions regarding the possible meaning of this previous omission (or later addition) are rather more comprehensible to Balzac specialists than to the common reader,2 the absences of a clearly identifiable addressee and especially of a decipherable dedication text are especially obvious. By using the terms of Werner Wolf, as explained in his introduction to this volume, we are faced here with 1 Balzac published the novella for the first time in two parts in the journal L’Artiste (31st of July 1831: “Maître Frenhofer”, and 7th of August 1831: “Catherine Lescault”) with the subtitle “conte fantastique” (‘fantastic tale’). This also shows the strong influence of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s stories “Der Artushof” (1816) and “Der Baron von B” (1819), where the motif of the mediocre, but in his imagination ingenious artist is already treated. The text was published again in 1831 in the third volume of Balzac’s “Romans et Contes Philosophiques”, now without the subtitle “conte fantastique” and with the first part carrying the name “Gillette”. Whereas the first version did not yet feature a theory of painting, in the revised version Frenhofer’s comments on the painting of Porbus are now developed; moreover, the first version ended with an emphasis on the fate of Gillette whereas now Frenhofer is the main focus. This later version was then published again in 1832 in Balzac’s “Contes Philosophiques”. In 1837, a new version of the novella, now of double length in comparison to the previous texts, was published in the third instalment of the “Études Philosophiques”, printed in five volumes. This version already carried most of the present aesthetic discourses and also presented the dramatic end of Frenhofer burning his canvases and killing himself. This is also more or less the version which was then published in the Comédie Humaine in August 1846, now, however, with the addition of the mysterious dedication, written in 1845. With some minor changes (among them the expression of the “Belle Noiseuse” as a nickname for Catherine Lescault), the novella was again published in 1847 under the name “Gillette” in the two volumes of “Le Provincial à Paris”. This change of title, however, has not been accepted by future editors. See Rosen (online). 2 The novella is dated by Balzac at its end with “Paris, février 1832”, hence indicating clearly the chronological gap between the dates of the completion of the text and its dedication, but most readers will not know about the complicated editing process of the novella as well as the date and the circumstances of the addition of the dedication (see note 1 above).

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supplemented, explicitly marked and therefore clearly signalled absences which, given that they deviate from and play with the firmly established literary convention of the dedication, are highly meaningful: instead of a clearly identifiable addressee of the dedication, we just get the vague allusion to ‘an’ English nobleman, and instead of a proper dedication text we only get five dotted lines. The sense of the meaning of the literary form of the dedication is usually to “inscribe or address” something “by way of compliment”, that is: “to say or write that something (as a book or song) is written or performed as a compliment to someone” (Merriam-Webster online, s.v. “dedicate”). Hereby, the chosen words (sometimes a meaningful quote from other works) usually hint at the same time at the particular meaning or feeling associated either with the addressee, the dedicated work, or both. In the case of Balzac’s dedication in Le Chef-d’œuvre, this practice is subverted when the reader is unable to deduce the relationship between author and addressee since the mentioned dedicatee (not a particularly named aristocrat, but just ‘a’ nameless “Lord”) remains mysteriously unspecific. In addition, the meaning associated with the dedicated work remains unclear since the lines presenting it to the dedicatee show nothing other than dots instead of a readable text. However, already when considering the title of the thus framed short story, the reader might see connections between the dedication and the text since in both cases he or she encounters something ‘unknown’: in the dedication, the addressee as well as the dedication text remain as unknown as apparently the ‘masterwork’ specified in the title. Such vaguenesses – that of the dedication as well as that of the eponymous ‘masterwork’ – are then contrasted right away at the beginning of the story by the highly specific way in which time, place and the protagonists of the action are introduced: we learn that all begins on a “cold December morning” in the year 1612 “in front of the door of a house in the rue des Grands-Augustins in Paris”(Balzac 2012: 17)3 (more about this address later), and that a young man, whose name, as we later learn, is Nicolas Poussin, enters the building in order to meet “Master François Pourbus”.4 Thus, we not 3 (This and all further translations are mine). Balzac only gives us Poussin’s name half way into the text, possibly with the intention of thus creating an effect of surprise to his audience since Poussin was, and is, mostly thought of in terms of the older, mature and stoic Master he later became in his career from paintings such as “Et in Arcadia Ego” (Paris, Louvre, ca. 1638). Although from the first quarter of the 19th century onwards there has also been an interest in depictions of the childhood of Poussin, as documented for example by works such as Pierre Nolasque Bergeret’s lithograph “L’Enfance du Poussin” from 1825, or the eponymous engraving by Raymond René Aiffre from 1845, there seem to have been no essays on the depiction of Poussin’s youth. See on the works of Bergeret and Aiffre: Verdi 1969. 4 “Vers la fin de l’année 1612, par une froide matinée de décembre, un jeune homme dont le vêtement était de très mince apparence se promenait devant la porte d’une maison située rue

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only get information about the ‘when’ and ‘where’ of the story, but we are moreover introduced to two historical personalities situated in these contexts: both Poussin (1594–1665) and Frans Pourbus the Younger (1570–1622) are documented (especially in France, Britain, Italy, and Belgium) as famous painters, who, indeed while living in Paris at the same time, might have even been in some connection with each other (although not the way described in Balzac’s novella).5 Balzac seems to have chosen such specific personalities precisely in order to create the most credible context for the protagonist of his tale, the, in his turn, fictitious painter Frenhofer, according to the novel “the only pupil” that the (again actually existing Netherlandish) painter Jan Mabuse (also known as Jan Gossaert, Jenni Gosart, or Jennyn van Hennegouwe, 1478–1532) wanted to have.6 Frenhofer functions in several respects as the complementing tip of several triangular relationships, established in the story: in the same way the young Poussin looks up to “Master Pourbus”, Pourbus himself looks up to Frenhofer. Moreover the action of the story gets its particular momentum from the fact that Poussin offers his lover Gillette as a nude model to Frenhofer in order to be allowed in exchange to catch a glimpse at the latter’s enviously hidden painting of “Catherine Lescault”, the ultimately ‘unknown masterpiece’. Given that Poussin possibly does so, thus jeopardizing his relationship with Gillette, in order to please Pourbus, the two triangles, ‘Poussin – Pourbus – Frenhofer’ on the one, and ‘Poussin – Gillette – Frenhofer’ on the other, are even linked and entwined. (One might also see in the fact that Poussin offers up the real-life girl Gillette in order to see “this imaginary woman”7, Frenhofer’s “Catherine Lescault”, another manifestation of these – sometimes conflicting – triangular relationships which pervade the novella.) Poussin’s sacrifice will turn out in the end to be a problematic one since he thus loses Gillette without gaining the hoped-for glimpse at the masterpiece: all that he and Pourbus get to see when staring at Frenhofer’s canvas, is “colours massed together in a confusing way and held together by a multitude of bizarre lines, forming a wall of des Grands Augustins, à Paris […] et demanda si maître François Pourbus était en son logis.” (Balzac 2012: 7) 5 Henri Sauval states in the first volume of his book Histoire et recherches des antiquités de la ville de Paris, written before 1670 and published only in 1724 in Paris, that Poussin admired Pourbus’s painting “The Last Supper” from 1618 (Paris, Louvre) as one of the two “plus beaux tableaux qu’il eût vus” (1724: 468; ‘most beautiful paintings he had ever seen’). That Poussin actually seems to have drawn some lessons from it for his own early paintings can be shown with reference to his “Death of Germanicus” from 1628 (Minneapolis Institute of Art) where he adapted certain features of Pourbus’s “Last Supper”. See Keazor 2015. 6 “Le vieux Frenhofer est le seul élève que Mabuse ait voulu faire.” (Balzac 2012: 25) 7 “[…] cette femme imaginaire” (ibid.: 40).

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painting”,8 among it, as the only figurative element, “the tip of a naked foot, sticking out of this chaos of colours, of tones, irresolute nuances, a kind of fog without form. But it was a delightful foot, a living foot!”9 In front of this sight, Poussin and Pourbus both come to the conclusion that Frenhofer has gone mad and that in his attempt to reach a new state of painting where nature is not copied anymore but instead expressed by seizing the living spirit, the soul, the physiognomy of the things and beings itself by relying more on colour (“colour is life”10) than on the drawn line, he has, in a ”slow and progressive”11 way, destroyed the already achieved image of the female portrait when delusionally “thinking to perfect his painting”12. “There is a woman below”, Pourbus shouts, while pointing out to Poussin the “various layers of colours” covering her figure.13 When Frenhofer realizes that the two artists see ”nothing on the canvas”14, he first refuses to believe that he not only has achieved nothing while working on the painting for ten years, but, worse, that he has also ruined his picture. He therefore accuses them of just being envious of his “Catherine Lescault”: ‘I myself, I can see her!’, he screams at them: “She is wonderfully beautiful”.15 “You are in front of a woman and you are looking for a painting”.16 And then comes the decisive phrase: “Where is the art? Lost, gone!” (“Où est l’art? perdu, disparu!”17), which shows that in his eyes he has achieved his goal to overcome the traditional art of painting and to create instead an equivalent to life: “My painting is not a painting, it is a feeling, a passion”.18 Despite this, after Pourbus and Poussin have left, he burns all his canvasses and then dies, apparently out of despair. Balzac’s dedication thus establishes a kind of textual equivalent to Frenhofer’s “Catherine Lescault”: we, as common readers, do not see any text, just as Poussin and Pourbus are unable to see the hoped-for sophisticated and “wonderfully beautiful” female portrait. Just as they perceive only “the tip of a 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

“[…] des couleurs confusément amassées et contenues par une multitude de lignes bizarres qui forment une muraille de peinture.” (Ibid.: 38) “[…] le bout d’un pied nu qui sortait de ce chaos de couleurs, de tons, de nuances indécises, espèce de brouillard sans forme; mais un pied délicieux, un pied vivant!” (Ibid.: 39) “[…] la couleur est la vie […]” (ibid.: 25). “[…] une lente et progressive destruction […]” (ibid.: 39). “[…] en croyant perfectionner sa peinture […]” (ibid.). “ʽIl y a une femme là-dessousʼ, s’écria Pourbus en faisant remarquer à Poussin les diverses couches de couleurs que le vieux peintre avait successivement superposées […].” (Ibid.) “[…] il n’y a rien sur sa toile […]” (ibid.: 40). “ʽMoi, je la vois!, cria-t-il, elle est merveilleusement belle.ʼ” (Ibid.: 41) “Vous êtes devant une femme et vous cherchez un tableau.” (Ibid.: 37). Ibid. “Ma peinture n’est pas une peinture, c’est un sentiment, une passion!” (Ibid.: 32)

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naked foot, sticking out of […] a kind of fog without form”, we detect only the words “À un Lord” above a sequence of five dotted lines, concluded by the date “1845”. The apparent absence of decipherable text, therefore, is a meaningful evocation of what might be written there, as is the “chaos of colours, of tones, irresolute nuances, a kind of fog without form” on Frenhofer’s canvas which – with the exception of the foot (which the painter would have possibly also blotted out later in a swirl of colourful “bizarre lines”) – rather invoke and summon the idea of a woman than actually represent one. This intensification of the romantic concept of irony and fragmentation, where more is said by just alluding to it, thus opens up all of the possible manifestations of representation instead of narrowing everything down to one distinct and precise interpretation of all the potential forms and shapes a work of art could take.19 Therefore, it is possible to connect the form of Balzac’s dedication to examples of ‘concrete poetry’ from the 20th century, as much as Frenhofer’s “Catherine Lescault” was later considered a prophetic harbinger of abstract art. 2

Absence as Emphasis

According to Frenhofer’s aesthetic theory, the artist has to strive to be not just “a vile copyist, but a poet”20, that is, a creator21 who has to seize the spirit, the expressions and thoughts behind the things: ”a hand is not only attached to a body, it expresses and continues a thought which has to be captured and delivered”.22 But when trying to do this, the artist encounters the problem that, in nature and reality, everything is attached and connected: “the human body does not finish in lines […]. Nature involves a series of roundings which interlace with one another.”23 Therefore, Frenhofer describes form as “a Proteus which is even more inconceivable and prolific in its elusions than the Proteus from the myth”,24 and he thus deduces the principle: “Strictly speaking, drawing does not exist! […] The line is the means by which humans figure out 19 20 21 22 23 24

See especially Walter Benjamin. Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik (1920), here quoted from Benjamin 1920/1980: especially 83–97. “[…] pas un vil copiste, mais un poète” (Balzac 2012: 14). Cf. ibid., where the comment to the text specifies that “poète” here has to be understood also in the etymological sense of the term as ‘creator’. “[…] une main ne tient pas seulement au corps, elle exprime et continue une pensée qu’il faut saisir et rendre.” (Ibid.) “[…] le corps humain ne finit pas par des lignes. […] La nature comporte une suite des rondeurs qui s’enveloppent les unes dans les autres.” (Ibid.: 22) “La forme est un Protée bien plus insaisissable et plus fertile en replis que le Protée de la fable […].” (Ibid.: 14)

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the effect of light on objects; but there are no lines in nature where everything is full: by modelling one draws, that is, one detaches the things from their surroundings […]”.25 But, as the quoted example of the hand shows, by separating objects from their context, the expressions and thoughts they carry, their spirit and soul, risk being killed and reduced to their structure, their ‘bones’, when just rendered in their drawn form: “drawing renders a skeleton”,26 “you will find just a horrible corpse without any resemblance”.27 The remedy here seems to be colour, which is life – but colour without lines is like “life without a skeleton”, “an even more incomplete thing than the skeleton without life”.28 Therefore, the artist has to go beyond the superficial appearances and get down to the “true spirit” of nature29 in order to then communicate the inherent vividness of things with the help of a well-reflected recourse to form and colour. In Raphael’s art, to which Frenhofer refers as an example, form is not used as a means to show things as they are – on the contrary: the forms of things here sometimes seem even to have been “broken” by him – but form is here used as “a mediator in order to communicate ideas, sensations, a vast poetry.”30 This is why Frenhofer claims that he has achieved a state of art where a painting is not just a painting, but “a feeling, a passion”.31 Considering the historical context in which Balzac wrote, it seems obvious, as it has been stated by others, for example by Jon Kear, that this aesthetic discourse is nothing else than “a thinly veiled allusion to the contemporary divisions between the Neoclassical and Romantic schools of French painting” (2006: 347), that is: between the art of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres with his insistence on drawing and lines on the one hand and of Eugène Delacroix with his heavy reliance on expressive colour on the other. However, as Kear also demonstrates in his article, the aesthetic discourse in Balzac’s Chef-d’œuvre inconnu was later understood as a prophetic harbinger of avant-garde painting: Paul Cézanne saw in Frenhofer’s plea not to copy the surface of nature but to express the achieved cognition of its fundamental structure so much of a fore25

26 27 28 29 30 31

“Rigoureusement parlant, le dessin n’existe pas! […] La ligne est le moyen par lequel l’homme se rend compte de l’effet de la lumière sur les objets; mais il n’y a pas de lignes dans la nature où tout est plein: c’est en modelant qu’on dessine, c’est-à-dire qu’on détache les choses du milieu où elles sont […].” (Ibid.: 22) “[…] le dessin donne un squelette […].” (Ibid.: 25) “[…] tu trouveras un horrible cadavre sans aucune ressemblance […].” (Ibid.: 14) “[…] mais la vie sans le squelette est une chose plus incomplète que le squelette sans la vie.” (Ibid.: 25) “[…] la nature […] son véritable esprit” (ibid.: 15). “[…] briser la forme. La forme est […] un truchement pour se communiquer des idées, des sensations, une vaste poésie.” (Ibid.) “Ma peinture n’est pas une peinture, c’est un sentiment, une passion!” (Ibid.: 32)

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runner of his own aesthetic principles that he mentioned Frenhofer as his favourite literary character in a questionnaire from the late 1860s.32 He depicted the doomed artist in drawings such as “The Painter with his Palette” and “Frenhofer Presents his Masterpiece” (cf. Kear 2006: 346) and even, according to his biographers, exclaimed “Frenhofer – that is me!”.33 But Cézanne was not the only one to understand Balzac’s protagonist’s apparent failure as just a tragic misunderstanding by his inept contemporaries. If one reads Frenhofer’s theories about the relationship between drawing and colour, copying and expressing a deeper understanding of nature, in the light of Wilhelm Worringer’s Ph.D. dissertation, Abstraktion und Einfühlung (‘Abstraction and Empathy’) from 1907, one cannot help but see fundamental parallels. Among others, Worringer (without ever referring to Balzac) also opposes an artistic approach that, by empathically rendering the outer effects of nature in a mostly faithful way (Frenhofer’s ‘copying’), seeks to gain control over the world, to an abstracting practise that aspires to the same but emancipates itself from such a faithfulness by instead aiming at communicating principles, found while forming a deeper understanding of the forces beyond the mere phenomena (Frenhofer’s ‘poetry’). Interestingly, Worringer hereby identifies the latter approach as typical for so-called ‘primitive’ art (such as that of prehistoric times or non-Western cultures such as, for example, Africa) whereas the former is associated with the way art had been conceived since the Renaissance in Western cultures. This was surprising inasmuch that before ‘primitive’ art (as the modern connotation of the qualitative epithet already signals) had been denied any intellectual appeal since it was considered as an art produced by ‘indigenous’ (and thus ‘intellectually inept’) people who were not yet advanced enough in their skills and techniques to produce art in which reality was captured in a faithful and convincing way. Such a realistic approach was instead seen as the achievement of ‘civilized’ and advanced cultures in which, for example, the representation of spatial relationships is mastered thanks to a scientific understanding of their mathematical and geometrical implications. 32 33

Cf. the comment by Sylvie Pillu in Balzac 2012: 117. Pillu (Balzac 2012: 116) and Kear (2006: 346), who also argues that Cézanne’s own attempts to paint the nude were heavily influenced by Balzac’s portrayal of Frenhofer’s work. Kear further recalls the end of the friendship between Cézanne and Émile Zola, triggered by the latter’s novel L’Œuvre, published in 1886: “A thinly veiled variation of Balzac’s story, interspersed with fictionalised reminiscences of his friendship with the painter, Zola’s novel reinforced the image of Cézanne as a visionary but tragic ‘artiste manqué’. His protagonist, the painter Claude Lantier, who commits suicide as a result of his failure to realise his artistic ideals, was widely believed to be a portrait of Cézanne, so much so that Arsène Alexandre entitled his review of the 1895 Cézanne retrospective at Vollard’s gallery, ‘Claude Lantier’.” (Ibid.)

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Worringer, however, argued that the makers of apparently ‘primitive’ art had been less incapable of such an assessment of reality as they were rather merely not interested in it. Moreover, he tried to show that their apparently ‘simplistic’ rendition of reality was due to an attempt to grasp not its superficial phenomena, but rather the general principles behind them, leading their artistic productions towards a condensing, synthesizing style where individual and anecdotic features are omitted in favour of generally characteristic and comprehensively applicable properties. Thus, for this type of approach to render, for example, the face of a human being, it does not matter whether the physiognomy of a specific, individual person is represented in a most deceptively naturalistic way, but the goal is, on the contrary, to depict what is understood as the basic and generally ‘true’ characteristics of a human face, leaving everything out that could distract the perception of these fundamental principles which can be seen, for example, in works such as African masks. This is all the more interesting since exactly in the year of Worringer’s dissertation, 1907, Pablo Picasso finished his painting “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (New York, Museum of Modern Art) in which he ultimately broke with the established artistic tradition of faithfully rendering the appearances of nature and instead had recourse to the use of ‘primitive’ African masks as models for some of the faces of the depicted women.34 It is unclear when Picasso read Balzac’s Chef-d’œuvre inconnu for the first time, yet like Cézanne before and Willem de Kooning after him, who considered Frenhofer’s painting as a work that broke the ground towards Cubism, he eventually identified with the fictitious artist (cf. Kear 2006: 345). 34

Cf. Le Fur, ed. 2017: 33. Interestingly, Picasso gave in retrospect the same reason for his recourse to African art as Worringer in his explanations of its abstracting practise. Wilhelm Worringer (cf. 1908/1910:17–28) sees herein the human attempt to thus gain control over a chaotic and therefore frightful world (“[…] die Folge einer grossen inneren Beunruhigung des Menschen durch die Erscheinungen der Außenwelt”; “Unsicherheitsgefühl” vis-à-vis “der weiten zusammenhangslosen verwirrenden Welt der Erscheinungen”; “[v] on dem verworrenen Zusammenhang und dem Wechselspiel der Aussenwelterscheinungen gequält”; “das einzelne Ding der Aussenwelt aus seiner Willkürlichkeit und scheinbaren Zufälligkeit herauszunehmen, es durch Annäherung an abstrakte Formen zu verewigen und auf diese Weise einen Ruhepunkt in den Erscheinungen zu finden”; ibid.: 17f.). Picasso almost repeats this when he characterises the African masks as results of humans to “overcome their fear” with the help of magic. He then says that while visiting the masks in an exhibition he realized that painting serves the same objective: “It is not an aesthetic process, it is a form of magic, which intervenes between the hostile universe and us, it is a way to seize the power […]. The day when I understood this, I had found my way.” (“Ce n’est pas un processus esthétique; c’est une forme de magie qui s’interpose entre l’univers hostile et nous, une façon de saisir le pouvoir […] Le jour où je compris cela, je sus que j’avais trouvé mon chemin.” Gilot/Lake 1964; qtd. Le Fur, ed. 2017: 32).

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Thus, in early 1937, Picasso set up his new studio in 7 rue des Grands-Augustins because it was believed, on the basis of Balzac’s (rather vague) indications as well as his descriptions at the beginning of Chef-d’œuvre inconnu, that this was the exact place of Pourbus’s studio in the novella where Frenhofer makes the first declaration of his aesthetics principles.35 It was here that Picasso – who according to some authors erroneously mixed up Pourbus’s studio with that of Frenhofer, which is the one he actually would have wanted to live in – executed his likewise ground-breaking painting “Guernica” (Madrid, Museo Reina Sofía).36 However, at least ten years earlier, Picasso must have already known Balzac’s story since in 1927 the art dealer Ambroise Vollard had commissioned from him a series of illustrations for an edition of Balzac’s story, which was published in 1931. Apart from the text, the book comprises 13 etchings, 67 wood engravings, cut by George Aubert after Picasso’s drawings, and 16 pages reproducing dot and line drawings in line block.37 Especially the latter ones are interesting in this context since they seem to respond to the dotted lines of Balzac’s dedication (see Figure 9.1): Picasso had already developed the style of these compositions in another context from 1924 onwards,38 but the mysterious dedication must have made it appear perfectly suited for some of the illustrations. Kear has pointed out that another anchor for Picasso’s interest in Balzac’s story might have been the painter’s “lifelong preoccupation with the theme of the relationship of artist and model” (2006: 345), as is in fact also documented in his early painting “The Painter and his Model” from 1914 (Paris, Musée Picasso – see Figure 9.2; Bernadac 1991: 58, No. 21). Picasso here, self-referentially, depicts a painter who seems to be about to paint a naked female model, standing in his studio. What, however, is striking is the fact that the whole scene is already completely sketched, but only the model and a part of the canvas (interestingly showing a landscape rather than a human figure) are already coloured whereas the rest remains achromatic. 35

36 37 38

See, for example, Daix (2012: 411) as well as the commemorative badge at the building of 7, rue des Grands-Augustins in Paris, which, after giving the information on Picasso and his “Guernica”, continues: “C’est ici également que Balzac situe l’action de sa nouvelle ‘Le Chef-d’oeuvre [sic!] inconnu’”. See, for example, Kear: “Picasso bought Porbus’s studio on the rue des Grands-Augustins, mistakenly believing it to be the house in which Frenhofer painted his failed masterwork, and it was there that he painted ‘Guernica’.” (2006: 345) See the online catalogue entry for the copy, owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York: . Cf., for example, Penrose 1973/1981: 244f. Picasso himself, in 1926, claimed that the inspiration had originally come from star charts; cf. Rivera 1965: 19.

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Figure 9. 1 Pablo Picasso, illustrations for: Honoré de Balzac, Le Chef-d’Œuvre Inconnu, ed. Ambroise Vollard, Paris 1931, illustrations O–P

Figure 9.2 Pablo Picasso, “The Painter and His Model”, 1914 Paris, Musée Picasso

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Since especially the centre of the composition is already coloured, this lack of paint becomes even more evident. At the same time, this concentration of colour in one central area of the canvas nourishes doubts that the painting – as one might think in a first moment – is really unfinished. And such qualms are then even further nourished by the less than accidental positioning of the colours since they concern precisely the model, a part of the canvas behind her and continue to the right onto a section of the wall where the palette, the technical source for such colours, hangs. Thus, the lack of colours seems to fit the entire scene; not only is the palette hanging on the wall, but the painter is also not shown painting but instead musingly observing the model – the impression of incompleteness of the picture in terms of its colours therefore seems to be in accordance with the topic of the depicted scene: the painter has stopped painting. Not only the interruption of his work is evidenced by these gaps in colour but at the same time they foster an interesting opposition between the painter and elements of his studio (such as, for example, the still-life of fruit on the table on the right-hand side). Due to the lack of colour these elements become unreal and ghostlike, which sets them off from the model and the shown painting: both of them, thanks to their colours, appear to be real and alive. Intended by Picasso or not, the scene thus presents a demonstrative visualization of Frenhofer’s phrase ‘drawing gives a skeleton, colour gives life’. At the same time, the gaps in the painting work as typical ‘constitutive blanks’ (‘Leerstellen’), whose tasks have been defined for art history by Wolfgang Kemp as “to make the viewer participate in the communication active inside the picture, to interlock the communication with the picture and the communication inside the picture […]. While indicating a left-out connection, the blanks leave room for the capacity of the indicated positions to be relatable for the reader’s acts of imagination […]”.39 This is certainly also the case in Picasso’s painting discussed here since the blanks in the first place are making the viewer aware of the connections and oppositions between figures (the colourless painter versus the fully painted model) and objects (the coloured palette above versus the achromatic fruits below, which in paintings usually work as a source of colour). 39

Kemp 1985: 261, with the last phrase being a direct quote by Kemp from a text by Wolfgang Iser: “[…] den Betrachter an der innerbildlichen Kommunikation zu beteiligen, die Kommunikation mit dem Bild mit der Kommunikation im Bild zu verschränken. […] Indem die Leerstellen eine ausgesparte Beziehung anzeigen, geben sie die Beziehbarkeit der bezeichneten Positionen für die Vorstellungsakte des Lesers frei […].” Kemp hereby adapted the literary theory of the ‘Leerstelle’ as established in the context of the aesthetics of reception by Roman Ingarden, Wolfgang Iser, Susan R. Suleiman, and Inge Crosman.

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“The Painter and his Model” is not the only work in Picasso’s œuvre that he left deliberately ‘unfinished’ and thus where absences can be seen, considering that around four years later he returned to this technique whose allure he must have discovered while conceiving “The Painter and his Model”. This time, he not only applied this approach to painted portraits (such as of his then wife’s “Portrait d‘Olga dans un fauteuil”, Paris, Musée Picasso, 1917/1918; Zervos 1949: 29, No. 83), but he pushed the envelope even further by also applying it to drawn and hence colourless portraits. In order to achieve the intended effect of ‘unfinishedness’ Picasso gave the portrayed sitters a fragmentary appearance as an equivalent to the entirely absent colour: it is only their heads that get a fully drawn rendering whereas the rest of their bodies – from the neck downwards – becomes sketchier and paler, ultimately finishing in increasingly dwindling and blurring outlines (see, for example, the “Portrait of Madame Georges Wildenstein”, private collection, ca. 1918, Figure 9.3; Galassi/McCully, eds. 2011: 234, No. 62). As in the case of the “Painter and his Model”, the effect is that the fully executed parts of the portraits are getting heightened in their presence and expressivity by the opposing paleness of the rest of the composition, and, again, the fact that these parts are carefully chosen – in the painting the model and the canvas, in the drawings the faces of the portrayed – shows the deliberation of the artist. Together with the knowledge that Picasso created an entire series of similar drawings, this again pleads in favour of the understanding that these portraits likewise are not accidentally unfinished but deliberately sport meaningful absences. This is ultimately confirmed when one realizes that Picasso was hereby even following a precise model: already a century earlier, around 1814, Ingres had created a series of similarly drawn portraits, so-called ‘portraits dessinés’, where the meticulously executed faces of the sitters are also further emphasized by a sketchy representation of the rest of their bodies and clothes (see, for example, Ingres’s drawing of his wife, “Madame Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, born Madeleine Chapelle III”, private collection, around 1814, Figure 9.4; Tinterow/Conisbee, eds. 1999: 316, No. 108).40 Picasso had seen such 40

Uwe Fleckner (cf. 1995: 130) insists on the artistic independence of these ‘portraits dessinés’, which did not serve as preparatory studies for painted portraits but are finished works in their own right, balancing between ‘likeness’ (Abbild) and ‘abstraction’ (Abstraktion – hence the title of Fleckner’s book; cf. ibid.: 137). Also Picasso’s above mentioned “Portrait d‘Olga dans un fauteuil” goes back to a model by Ingres: up to the position of her arms and hands, Olga mirrors the pose of Ingres’s “Portrait Marie-Francoise Rivière” (Paris, Louvre, 1804/1805). Picasso worked from a photograph of Olga, taken in Spring 1918 by Pablo Picasso himself or by Émile Delétang (Paris, Archives Picasso, APPH2771), but it

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Figure 9.3 Pablo Picasso, “Portrait of Madame Georges Wildenstein”, c. 1918 private collection

drawings by Ingres in 1905 at the “Salon d‘automne” at the Petit Palais in Paris, an annual art show (since 1903), which apart from showing the newest art of 1905 also dedicated retrospectives to Ingres and Edouard Manet respectively (cf. Daix 2012: 809). Although Ingres, as a neo-classicist who insisted on the importance of the drawn line, is usually seen as representing the opposite standpoint to the one represented by Frenhofer in Balzac’s novel, this appears to be an incorrect simplification since the fictitious painter also emphasizes that, even if colour is life, “life without the skeleton is an even more incomplete thing than the skeleton [the drawing] without life” (cf. Balzac 2012: 25). Moreover, in Frenhofer’s seems as if Olga in the photograph was already posed in the stance of Madame Rivière. Picasso here applied his aesthetics of the ‘unfinished’ from his drawings after Ingres to his portrait of Olga, which also deliberately lacks some finishing touches and thus puts it into contrast to Ingres’s fully executed Rivière portrait.

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Figure 9.4 Jean-AugusteDominique Ingres, “Portrait of Madame Jean-AugusteDominique Ingres, born Madeleine Chapelle III”, c. 1814 private collection

praise of Raphael’s portraits – a painter also more associated with drawing than with colour who therefore was Ingres’s model – one seems to find some of the quality of Ingres’s drawn portraits: “Form in his figures is […] a mediator in order to communicate ideas, sensations, a vast poetry. Each figure is a world, a portrait in which the model has appeared in a sublime vision”41 with the petering out of the outlines in Ingres’s and Picasso’s drawn portraits finding its equivalent in Raphael’s “intimate sense which, in his case, seems to want to break the form”.42 The next step in such an omission of usually realistically rendered elements – respectively in the emphasizing concentration on them (such as in the case 41 42

“La forme est, dans ses figures […] un truchement pour se communiquer des idées, des sensations, une vaste poésie. Toute figure est un monde, un portrait dont le modèle est apparu dans une vision sublime […]”. (Balzac 2012: 15) “[…] du sens intime qui, chez lui, semble vouloir briser la forme.” (Ibid.)

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of the faces in Ingres’s and Picasso’s drawn portraits) – would be the “delightful”, “living foot”, “sticking out of this chaos of colours, of tones, irresolute nuances, a kind of fog without form”43 in Frenhofer’s painting. 3

Total Deprivation?

Frenhofer’s painting – despite everything – still showed something, as, to a certain extent, do the works by Kazimir Malevich and Robert Rauschenberg, evoked by Werner Wolf in the introduction of this volume. But what if we are refused by the artist to see the actual work in the first place? On October 18, 2007, the German artist Martin Hoener received the annual graduate award of the Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste in Frankfurt am Main, the Städelschule. He won with his work “Sinnbild der umgekehrten Vorstellung von Dir in meiner Seele (Porträt des Mr. Glendinning aus ‘Pierre’ von Herman Melville)” (“Symbol of Thy Reversed Idea in My Soul [Portrait of Mr. Glendinning from ‘Pierre’ by Herman Melville]”; see Figure 9.5).44 It consisted of a canvas on a stretcher and a frame, which Hoener had artificially aged; he had then painted a portrait on the canvas and had the painting hung between two pictures in the collection of German paintings of the Städel museum – but with the portrait facing the wall and the back facing the audience. Given that the two framing pictures – on the left Otto Scholderer’s “Im Wildbretkeller (Courbet, ein Reh ausweidend)” (“In the Venison Cellar [Courbet Gutting a Deer]”) from 186245 and on the right a self-portrait by Hans Thoma from 187346 (thus two representations of artists who also knew and estimated each other)47 – were presented to the viewer in the accustomed way with their painted sides towards the room, the effect of the inconvenience of the symmetrically hung painting in the middle, snubbing this habitual museum look and depriving the viewer of the sight of the actual artwork, was even enhanced.

43 44 45 46 47

“[…] un pied vivant!” “[…] qui sortait de ce chaos de couleurs, de tons, de nuances indécises, espèce de brouillard sans forme […].” (Ibid. : 39) See Städelschule 2007 online and newspaper reviews, such as Helbig 2007, Crüwell 2007, and Anon. (“kcd”) 2007. See Bagdahn 2002 online: 28, 151 and 231, No. 30, also with a discussion on the question whether Scholderer actually intended a portrait of Courbet in the painting. See Krämer, ed. 2013: 49, No. 6. See for this also ibid.: passim and, concerning the correspondence between the two artists, 339–390.

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Figure 9.5 Martin Hoener, “Sinnbild der umgekehrten Vorstellung von Dir in meiner Seele (Porträt des Mr. Glendinning aus ‘Pierre’ von Herman Melville)”, 2007, installation view at the Städel, Frankfurt, October 2007

Drawing on Frenhofer’s words, the baffled viewer could ask a fortiori: “Où est l’art?” And it is especially this kind of question that helps us understand where the difference lies between Hoener’s work and a trompe l’œil painting such as, for example, Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts’s well-known rendering of the “The Reverse of a Framed Painting” (Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst, 1668– 1672, see Figure 9.6; Koester, ed. 1999: 206f., No. 29). Whereas here the viewer, after having realized that he or she is actually not looking at a real painting, hung inversely, but at a painted painting, is supposed to admire the deceitful dexterity of Gijsbrechts,48 he or she seemingly remains deprived of the expected art appreciation when realizing that Hoener apparently has simply turned the actual artwork towards the wall, hiding it and only presenting the back of its frame.49 There is, however, a hint as to where the ‘real’ art in the work has to be sought: the title of the work seems to be somewhat 48 49

See the telling title of Koester’s book, Illusions: Gijsbrechts, Royal Master of Deception. Some reviewers actually misunderstood Hoener’s work in that way, see, for example, Nicol 2007: “Was wirklich dahintersteckt, weiß man nicht, man sieht von dem alt wirkenden Rahmen nur die Rückseite, das Bild ist, sofern es eines ist, umgedreht. […] Das Sujet in trompe l’oeil [sic!] hat es in der niederländischen Malerei ja x-fach gegeben.”

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Figure 9.6 Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts, “The Reverse of a Framed Painting”, 1668–1672 Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst

in accordance with such an unusual presentation since it already connects the thought of a ‘reversed idea’ of somebody with a ‘portrait’, and hence one could understand Hoener’s arrangement as an interpretation of this wording, with the ‘reversed idea’ of someone becoming an ‘inverted portrait’ of this person. However, by looking at the further information given with the title, the case becomes even more complex since the words “Sinnbild der umgekehrten Vorstellung von Dir in meiner Seele” contains a quote from the novel, likewise mentioned in the title: Herman Melville’s novel Pierre, or The Ambiguities, published in 1852. The identification of the work’s genre as a ‘portrait’ and the identification of the portrayed sitter (“Porträt des Mr. Glendinning aus ‘Pierre’ von Herman Melville”) also refers to the novel where the quote “Sinnbild der umgekehrten Vorstellung von Dir in meiner Seele” actually refers to the portrait of Mr. Glendinning. The words quoted are spoken by the novel’s protagonist, the 21-year-old American Pierre Glendinning in a decisive moment of his development: as the “only son of an affluent, and haughty widow, a lady” (Melville 1996: I, ii, 4), he had lived until now in great harmony with his mother on the country estate of Saddle-Meadows. Since his father had died early, Pierre

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had created an equivalent to this spatial as well as emotional closeness to his mother with the help of a portrait of his father, showing him as a young and joyful man and almost becoming alive under Pierre’s intense and admiring gazes (cf. ibid.: IV, iii, 71–73 and v, 82–85). One day, the young, mysterious Isabel interrupts this idyll by uttering dark hints to Pierre about her being the result of an illegitimate affair of his father. Although Pierre tries not to believe her, his adoration for the father is heavily shattered by the suspicion, and he therefore cannot stand to look at the previously so intensively consulted and cherished portrait of the joyful father even when just passing it, which is why Pierre ultimately turns it so that the portrait faces the wall. While considering “the defaced and dusty back, with some wrinkled, tattered paper over the joints, which had become loosened from the paste” (ibid.: V, 87) of the wooden picture frame, he groans: “Oh, symbol of thy reversed idea in my soul” (ibid.; exactly the words which are quoted in German translation in the title of Hoener’s work: “Oh, Sinnbild der umgekehrten Vorstellung von Dir in meiner Seele”). Thus, Melville’s protagonist himself already associates the inverted presentation of a portrait as a visual equivalence to the ‘reversed idea’ of the depicted person. Pierre’s former admiration and love for his father has turned into contempt and suspicion which are both mirrored by the condition of the back side of the painting: behind the previously revered depiction of the father on the front side dirt, distortion, disintegration, and destruction are lurking. And since this sight becomes unbearable for Pierre as well, he eventually unhangs the painting with the words “I will no more have a father” (ibid.), and in the end even burns it, thus committing a kind of symbolic parricide (cf. ibid.: XII, iii, 198). As we have seen, Hoener’s work refers in its motifs as well as in its title directly to Melville’s novel – on the backside of the picture frame is even a handwritten label with information on the painter and the depicted person according to which the portrait would have been executed by the (fictitious) painter “Ralph Windwood”, also mentioned in the novel as the artist of the painting.50 However, in one respect Hoener’s work differs from the situation narrated in Melville’s novel since the scene to which his painting refers takes place in Pierre’s family home and not in a museum. By nevertheless hanging his portrait in a picture gallery, Hoener alludes to a moment towards the end of the novel, which, while viewing his artwork, the audience is apparently supposed to consider: that the scene with the inversion and the ensuing destruction of 50

This is a connection that also escaped Nicol in her review: she writes that Hoener possibly used “das Originalporträt (?) eines gewissen Ralf [sic!] Windwood”. Ralph Windwood is, according to the novel (cf. Melville 1996: IV, v, 74) also the cousin of Pierre’s father.

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the father’s portrait is answered by its later, indirect resurgence in a picture gallery. Pierre and Isabel have meanwhile given in to their mutual attraction, also resulting from their common, mysterious past, and have become a couple. During a spontaneous visit to an exhibition, they come across a picture, which, according to the catalogue, shows “A stranger’s head, by an unknown hand” (ibid.: XXVI, 349). The portrayed person, however, appears to Pierre and Isabel as anything but ‘strange’, since they both discover not only their great likeness to the man, but Isabel, like Pierre, also recognizes in him her father who during her childhood from time to time visited her and her mother. In order to further emphasize the awareness of the incest committed by the two siblings, Melville contrasts the father’s portrait with another portrait, hanging opposite and depicting the then famous Beatrice Cenci, the symbol of, as the narrator comments, “the two most horrible crimes […] possible to civilized humanity – incest and parricide” (ibid.: 351). In fact, Cenci had been executed together with her brother Giacomo and her stepmother Lucrezia Petrani on September 11, 1599 at the age of 22 after she had been found guilty as the mastermind of the murder of her father, Francesco Cenci. The accused had confessed that they had had him killed since he had continuously terrorized the family and did not even recoil from sexually assaulting his own daughter Beatrice (hence her association with “incest and parricide”; see, e.g., Jack 2005). The case of the so-to-speak ‘guiltless guilty’ Beatrice had caused a great stir in 16th-century Rome, had then been forgotten, but later experienced a new and huge popularity in the 19th century.51 The opposition between the father’s portrait and the Cenci painting is described by Melville in his novel with the words: “Now, this Cenci and ‘the Stranger’ […] exactly faced each other; so that in secret 51

This was certainly due to two works: Ludovico Antonio Muratori’s Annali d’Italia, a multivolumed account of Italy’s history where in volume 10, published in 1749 in Milan, the previously forgotten events around Beatrice Cenci are recalled. Possibly inspired by Muratori’s account, the search for depictions of the tragic woman began and apparently was successful when a painting in the Roman Palazzo Barberini was identified as a portrait of Cenci in 1783 and attributed to the Bolognese painter Guido Reni, who was now said to have visited and painted Cenci in her cell before her execution. The picture as well as its story triggered the interest and fascination for the woman and her fate even more, and so writers such as Shelley, Stendhal, and Alexandre Dumas interpreted the subject, which remained popular well into the 20th century, when artists such as Antonin Artaud, Alberto Moravia or the composers Berthold Goldschmidt, Havergal Brian, Alberto Ginastera, and Giorgio Battistelli dealt with the topic. It was moreover adapted for film between 1908 and 1969 seven times. Meanwhile the attribution of the painting to Guido Reni as well as its identification as a portrait of Cenci have been refuted – the picture is most likely a work of the female Bolognese painter Ginevra Cantofoli (1618–1672) and shows a Sibyl. For the attribution, cf. Pulini 2006: 84–87.

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they seemed pantomimically talking over and across the heads of the living spectators below.” (1996: XXVI, 351) With this almost intimate dialogue between the two portraits Melville hints at the fact that the crimes represented by them (“incest and parricide”) and the associated biographical implications and consequences for Pierre and Isabel (Pierre, for example, performs both what is associated with the Cenci portrait: “incest” and symbolic “parricide”) had long since been established and were therefore out of the siblings’ control. It appears thus that Pierre und Isabel have no other possibility left than to reconstruct these relationships in retrospect and to understand them – but given the fatalistic view deployed by the narrator of the novel, it does not come as a surprise that they fail and ultimately end in joint suicide. Hoener seems to allude to this deathly end via the choice of the topics of the two paintings framing his picture since they show on the left a hunter gutting a deer and on the right the slightly desperate-looking self-portrait of Hans Thoma. Hoener hereby cleverly also takes up Melville’s description of the two paintings “talking over and across the heads of the living spectators below” by choosing works by Scholderer and Thoma, two artists that were in close contact and highly esteemed each other.52 Thus, Hoener’s work “Sinnbild der umgekehrten Vorstellung von Dir in meiner Seele (Porträt des Mr. Glendinning aus ‘Pierre’ von Herman Melville)”, while apparently showing nothing but the back of an inverted hung picture, indeed refers to more than if Hoener had chosen to actually show an interpretation of the fictitious portrait of Pierre’s father by Windwood.53 4

Conclusion: Scale

In this contribution various forms and degrees of significant absences are presented and discussed: Ingres and, inspired by him, Picasso both strategically neglected and left out parts of the bodies of the sitters they portrayed in their 52 53

See above, note 42. Henry Murray and Douglas Robillard have indicated that Melville’s descriptions of the two opposing portraits of Pierre’s father in the novel – cf. Melville 1996: IV, iii–v, 71–85 – are based on two existing portraits of his own father, Allan Melville, painted once (for the portrait first cherished and then destroyed by Pierre) by John Rubens Smith (New York, The Metropolitan Museum, 1810) and second (for another portrait, preferred by Pierre’s mother) by Ezra Ames (Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, CA, 1815). Hoener could have used the former picture as an inspiration. For the identification of the portraits and their discussion in the context of Melville’s relation to the visual arts, cf. Robillard 1997: 103.

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drawings, thereby centrifugally having these areas fade more the further they are away from the heads of the depicted subjects. In this way, the gaze of the viewer is automatically more strongly attracted to the faces of the people shown, making their heads at the same time the most expressive parts of their depiction. In his work “The Painter and his Model”, Picasso adapted this approach to painting by leaving carefully chosen parts of the canvas uncoloured and as merely sketched outlines, thereby not only emphasizing the represented situation – a painter who has stopped painting – but also demonstrating a principle uttered by the fictitious artist Frenhofer in Balzac’s novella Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu that “drawing gives a skeleton, colour gives life”.54 In Balzac’s story, we also encounter another kind of significant absence since Frenhofer here delivers a portrait of his model Catherine Lescault in which the figurative elements have almost entirely been consumed in favour of an aesthetics that aims less at a naturalistic representation of the model and instead tries to surpass the genre of painting itself by giving direct expression less to what the artist sees than to what he knows and feels – an approach not understood by Frenhofer’s colleagues who see “nothing on the canvas”, but cherished by later avant-guarde artists, among them Cézanne and Picasso, who considered Frenhofer their forerunner. With the ominous dedication of the novella, mostly consisting of significant absences, Balzac tries to put the reader in the position of Frenhofer’s colleagues, who are unable to see anything where Frenhofer sees a vivid and ‘wonderfully beautiful’ image of his model. Enhancing his refusal to meet traditional expectations concerning a work of art while at the same time, like Frenhofer, letting the feelings nourished towards a portrayed subject have a direct impact on the appearance of the resulting depiction, Hoener ultimately denies the audience the viewing of the portrait in the first place. While referring to Melville’s description of how his protagonist Pierre in the eponymous novel acts out his changed feelings towards his father by turning a previously revered portrait to the wall, Hoener simulates this scene by producing a work that especially mimics the description of the painting’s backside in the novel and exhibits exactly only this flipside. By hanging the picture, however, in a specific gallery, Hoener at the same time transgresses the individual moment of Pierre’s alienation from the fatherly portrait and connects it with a moment from the end of the novel where the suspicions that had led Pierre to feel estranged from his father are blatantly confirmed by two other paintings among which one functions as an equivalent to his father’s portrait, meanwhile destroyed by Pierre, but now seemingly resurrected. 54

“[…] le dessin donne un squelette, la couleur est la vie […]”. (Balzac 2012 : 25)

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Hoener’s work shows that even if –: or rather exactly because – the seemingly pivotal element of an art work (in this case the view of the portrait of Pierre’s father) is denied to the audience, this significant absence invites us to always think afresh about which answer to give to Frenhofer’s challenging question “Où est l’art?”.

References

Anon. [“kcd”] (2007). “Wenn der Sohn das Bild des Vaters umdreht”. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Oct. 29: B 4. Bagdahn, Jutta M. (2002 online). Otto Franz Scholderer 1834–1902: Monographie und Werkverzeichnis. Ph.D. Dissertation Albert-Ludwigs-University, Freiburg im Breisgau [01/07/2018]. Balzac, Honoré de (2012). Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu. Ed. Marc Robert. Paris: Hatier. Benjamin, Walter (1920/1980). Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik. Walter Benjamin. Abhandlungen: Gesammelte Schriften I/1. Eds. Rolf Tiedemann, Her­mann Schweppenhäuser. suhrkamp taschenbuch wissenschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Bernadac, Marie-Laure (1991). Picasso Museum, Paris: The Masterpieces. Munich: Prestel. Crüwell, Konstanze (2007). “Lessing als Patron der Turner”. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Oct. 23: 51. Daix, Pierre (2012). Le nouveau dictionnaire Picasso. Paris: Robert Laffont. Fleckner, Uwe (1995). Abbild und Abstraktion: Die Kunst des Porträts im Werk von JeanAuguste-Dominique Ingres. Mainz: Philipp von Zabern. Galassi, Susan Grace, Marilyn McCully, eds. (2011). Picasso’s Drawings 1890–1921. Exh. cat. New Haven, CN/London: Yale Univ. Press. Gilot, Françoise, Carlton Lake (1964). Vivre avec Picasso. Paris: Calmann-Lévy.  Helbig, Felix (2007). “Der richtige Dreh”. Frankfurter Rundschau, Oct. 20: R12/13. Jack, Belinda (2005). Beatrice’s Spell: The Enduring Legend of Beatrice Cenci. London: Pimlico. Kear, Jon (2006). “‘Frenhofer, c’est moi’: Cézanne’s Nudes and Balzac’s Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu”. Cambridge Quarterly 35/4: 345–360. Keazor, Henry (2015). “‘Ensembles flous’: Relations et interactions entre Antiquité et christianisme chez Poussin”. Nicolas Milovanovic, Mickaël Szanto, eds. Poussin et Dieu. Exh. cat. Paris: Hazan-Louvre éditions. 66–75.

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Kemp, Wolfgang (1985). “Über Leerstellen in der Malerei des 19. Jahrhunderts”. Wolfgang Kemp, ed. Der Betrachter ist im Bild: Kunstwissenschaft und Rezeptionsästhetik. Cologne: DuMont. 253–278. Koester, Olaf, ed. (1999). Illusions: Gijsbrechts, Royal Master of Deception. Exh. cat. Copen­hagen: Statens Museum for Kunst. Krämer, Felix, ed. (2013). Hans Thoma: Lieblingsmaler des deutschen Volkes. Exh. cat. Frankfurt am Main: Wienand. Le Fur, Yves, ed. (2017). Picasso primitif. Exh. cat. Paris: Flammarion. Melville, Herman (1996). Pierre, or The Ambiguities. London: Penguin. Merriam-Webster (online). [01/07/ 2018]. Nicol, Gabriele (2007). “Städel-Schüler zeigen ihre Formkrisen”. Frankfurter Neue Presse, Oct. 22: special section “Veranstaltungen”, 1. Picasso, Pablo (online). “Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu 1924–31, published 1931”. Museum of Modern Art. [01/07/2018]. Penrose, Roland (1973/1981). Picasso: His Life and Work. 3rd ed. Berkeley, CA/Los Angeles, CA: Univ. of California Press. Pulini, Massimo (2006). Ginevra Cantofoli: La nuova nascità di una pittrice nella Bologna del Seicento. Bologna: Compositori. Rivera, Diego (1965). Wort und Bekenntnis. Zurich: Verlag der Arche. Robillard, Douglas (1997). Melville and the Visual Arts: Ionian Form, Venetian Tint. Kent, OH/London: Kent State Univ. Press. Rosen, Elisheva (online). “Balzac. La Comédie Humaine: Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu”. Edition critique en ligne. [01/07/2018]. Sauval, Henri (1724). Histoire et recherches des antiquités de la ville de Paris. Paris: Charles Moette/Jacques Chardon. Städelschule (2007 online). “Preisträger ‘Hit the Road Jack’”. Press release from Oct. 19. [01/07/2018]. Tinterow, Gary, Philip Conisbee, eds. (1999). Portraits by Ingres: Images of an Epoch. Exh. cat. New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams. Verdi, Richard (1969). “Poussin’s Life in Nineteenth-century Pictures”. The Burlington Magazine 111/801: 741–750. Worringer, Wilhelm (1908/1910). Abstraktion und Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stil­ psychologie. 3rd ed. Munich: Piper. Zervos, Christian (1949). Picasso. Vol. 3: Oeuvres de 1917 e 1919. Paris: Fernand Hazan.

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Chapter 10

Silent Spaces: Absent Signifiers in Modernist Architecture  Anselm Wagner In recent literature, the topic of silence in architecture has usually been attributed to individual architects like Louis Kahn or Tadao Ando, who have created meditation spaces or to architectural cultures like that of Finland, which is famous for its minimalistic churches (see Lobel 1979, Quantrill/Webb eds. 1998, Blaser 2001). This paper tries to find out more generally why and how silence is normally associated with Modernist architecture, which has frequently been characterized by its renunciation of iconography and signification. While traditional architecture was said to provide a certain message, expressed by the hierarchy of its elements, orders of columns, sculptures, and ornamentation, Modernist buildings are devoid of all these features and present just their ‘naked’, basic forms and functions. A building in the Bauhaus-style was either created to represent a universal, not very specific ‘language’ (as, for example, Mies van der Rohe interpreted his own buildings) or to remain absolutely silent (as Tafuri 1976 characterizes Mies’s buildings). This kind of silence could be realized not only by blank, white, ‘naked’ walls and façades, and minimalist empty rooms, but also by the structural element of the grid (which Mies and his school preferred). According to Krauss (1985), the grid (in Modernist art, but also in architecture) eliminates all kinds of ‘narration’ and signification that prevailed in previously existing art and architecture. But is there a kind of (suppressed) meaning in the silence of Mies and his colleagues? Or is this silence just a sign of absence, “signifying nothing” (as Shakespeare’s Macbeth says at the end of his life), being responsible for all the ugliness, homelessness, and inhospitality so often attributed to Modernist cities? 1

Architecture as Language

Before we talk about silence in architecture we have to put on record that buildings do not normally speak and that remaining silent is their very shared condition. In fact, some spaces like bars, coffee houses, or soccer stadiums encourage people to chat and to make noise, whereas others like churches or

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graveyards usually make people fall silent, but this is more an effect of social conventions and customs and the specific functions of the respective spaces rather than their intrinsic quality. In the following paper, I would like to deal with the semiotic interpretation of architecture as a specific sign system, or, more precisely, as a specific language. In doing so, architecture is regarded as a medium of communication in itself and not just as a medium providing space for communication. I have to admit that the question as to whether architecture is a kind of language is still heavily disputed among architects, architectural theorists, art historians, and philosophers. However, already since the eighteenth century it has become common in architectural theory to compare architecture with language. Initially this was just a simple comparison, an analogy without any scientific pretension. It followed Horace’s classical dictum “ut pictura poesis” (1974: 361) that traditionally served as a basic formula for all analogies between poetry and the visual arts among which, since Giorgio Vasari, architecture was also included (see Vasari 1550). Thus the French architect Germain Boffrand wrote in 1745: “The sections of moldings and the other parts which make up a building, are, in architecture, what words are in a discourse.” (Qtd. Guillerme 1977: 22) At the end of the century, the so-called French revolutionary architects Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Étienne-Louis Boullée developed their “architecture parlante”,1 a speaking – that means iconic – or “narrative” archi­ tecture (Kaufmann 1952: 441) literally representing its very functions. Ledoux, for example, designed a house of the surveyors of the river, including a waterfall cascading from a superimposed semi-cylinder, and figure 10.1 illustrates his draft of a brothel in the shape of a big penis. We could argue that the existence of such extreme examples of an “architecture parlante”, which have been exceptional in the history of architecture, confirm the rule that buildings normally do not speak and that Ledoux simply responded to architecture’s typical lack of language. However, Ledoux reacted to the dissolution of traditional architectonic language around 1800, which was closely linked to the ancien régime and its hierarchical, stable structure of social classes and its equally stable canon of values. As architectural historian Anthony Vidler points out, the idea of “speaking monuments” was a republican one (1977/1998: 447): in 1800, the economist Jean Baptiste Say, an adherent of the French Revolution and a member of Napoleon’s Tribunate, published an essay about an utopian country called Olbie, 1 The term was not coined until the mid-19th century: Anonymous (1852).  “Etudes d’architecture en France”. Magasin pittoresque 388: “Ledoux était partisan de ce qu’on a appelé depuis l’architecture parlante.” (Qtd. Kaufmann 1952: 441, fn. 82).

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Figure 10.1 Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Oikema (House of Pleasure), 1804, plan of the first floor

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where “le langage des monuments se fait entendre à tous les hommes; car il s’adresse au cœur et à l’imagination” (Say 1800 online: 75; cf. Vidler 1977/1998: 447),2 using pedagogical inscriptions for its simple buildings rather than complicated ornaments. Generally speaking, the language of Early Modern architecture was based on the three classical orders of columns: Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. Already in antiquity, each of the orders of columns was felt to have a certain character: the Doric order was regarded as male, rustic, and strong; the slimmer and more elegant Ionic order seemed to be female and delicate; and the Corinthian order expressed virginal tenderness (cf. Vitruvius 1955–1956: IV, 1, 6–8; Germann 1980/1987: 24–27). During the Renaissance, the orders were expanded to what we may call a “set of rules” or “vocabulary” (Forssman 1961: 27–32) for the whole building, since each of them consisted of a constant number of constructive parts and ornaments and led to specific proportions of the entire structure. Finally, in Early Modern French architectural theory, the orders were related to specific functions: the Doric (or Tuscan) order should be used for architectural structures of lower rank, such as bridges, or for military buildings, and prisons; the Ionic order for public buildings like theatres, city halls, and market halls; and the Corinthian (or Composite) order for palaces and churches (cf. ibid.: 50–103). Here, the orders resembled the structure and function of a language. They had a grammar (a set of rules), which gave all words (i.e., the structural or ornamental elements) their specific positions, and the architectonic text communicated specific functions and expressed certain feelings. It is no coincidence that this semantic use of the orders had its role model in ancient rhetoric, in which Quintilianus, for example, demanded that every speech be adapted to its specific purpose, circumstance, and theme, and which distinguished between a plain style (genus subtile), a middle style (genus medium or mixtum), and a high, pathetic style (genus grande or sublime) (cf. Quintilianus 1995–1996: XII, 10, 59–61). The nineteenth century even used historical styles to communicate specific functions or even political messages: on the Viennese Ringstraße, the Gothic revival style of the Votivkirche expressed the climax of Christianity, which was regarded as having taken place in the Middle Ages; the neo-classicist parliament recalled the invention of democracy in classical Athens; and the neobaroque Burgtheater was related to the great age of theatre and opera in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Graz, the bourgeoisie decorated their apartment houses in the Neo-Renaissance style when the owner was a liberal, 2 ‘The language of the monuments was clear to everyone, because it addressed the heart and the imagination.’ (My translation)

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and in the old German or ‘Dürer’-style when the commissioner was a German nationalist (cf. Dimitriou 1979: 24). In his book When Buildings Speak, Anthony Alofsin develops an expansive theory of architectural languages in the AustroHungarian monarchy and their role in nation building (see 2006). However, in the nineteenth century, some voices strictly rejected the idea of an analogy between architecture and language. In his Historical Inquiry in the True Principles of Beauty in Art, More Especially with Reference to Architecture, published in 1849, the Scottish architectural historian James Fergusson writes: “Architecture can repeat no narrative, illustrate no book – it imitates nothing, illustrates nothing: it tells no tale, and barely manages to express an emotion of joy or sorrow […].” (1849 online: 121; cf. Collins 1965: 176f.) As opposed to that, in the 1960s and ’70s semiologists like Umberto Eco regarded “architectural language” as an “authentic linguistic system obeying the same rules that govern the articulation of natural languages” (qtd. Guillerme 1977: 21). Eco’s semiotics of architecture deeply influenced Charles Jencks’s The Language of Post-modern Architecture, which was to become the most successful and popular book of architectural theory after the Second World War (see 1977/1991). Today, however, we have philosophers like Gernot Böhme who heavily criticize Jencks and all attempts at understanding architecture in terms of linguistics, stating that space and the atmosphere created by space can neither be compared nor grasped with semiotic categories (cf. Böhme 2006: 8–12; Böhme 2014: 11; and see Böhme 2013). In the present contribution, I cannot go very deeply into the pros and cons of a linguistic or semiotic interpretation of architecture. Nevertheless, I would like to point out that, without a doubt, there were times when the architecture–language analogy was very fashionable among architects and times when it was rather out of fashion. Half a century ago, the prominent architectural historian Peter Collins wrote that “the analogy between architecture and language has been less popular in recent years than it was from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century” (1965: 173). In fact, Modernist architecture, which had its origins around 1900 and lost its dominant role in the 1960s, preferred analogies with machines or with nature rather than with language. Louis Sullivan’s famous dictum “form follows function” (1896/1988: 111), which became the most important slogan of Modernist architecture and gave functionalism its name, originates from Sullivan’s observation of plants and birds – but it can also be adapted to machines; just think of Le Corbusier’s designation of the house as a “machine-à-habiter”, “a machine for living in” (1927/1960: 10, 100). Only a few years after the publication of Peter Collins’s book, Umberto Eco penned his theories about semiotics in architecture (cf. 1968: chapter C) and initiated a paradigm change in architectural discourse.

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In the late ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, hardly any critical text about architecture could avoid terms like ‘the city as text’, ‘readable structures’, ‘architectonic syntax’, ‘architectonic semantics’ and all kinds of denotations, connotations, signifiers, signs, codes, and symbols.3 It is no coincidence that this period was also the time of Post-modernism in architecture – a movement absolutely opposed to functionalist Modernism. Post-modernist architects (ironically) re-integrated the images of popular culture and the vocabulary of historical styles (columns, arches, pediments, ornaments, etc.) into their structures – everything that Modernism initially had abandoned from the architects’ drawing tables. As we will see, the theorists of Post-modernist architecture, especially Charles Jencks, criticized Modernism due to its lack of proper signification and communication with its users. So we could simply say that Modernist architecture does not work like a language because its inventors did not intend it to do so and that Post-modernist architecture is deeply rooted in semiotics and linguistics because this was a basic conceptual concern of Post-modernism. Therefore, we could distinguish language-like and non-language-like architectural styles or periods. But here we are faced with a serious problem: stating that a Modernist building is silent would be as simplistic as saying that a hearing-impaired or deaf person who cannot speak is nothing but silent. Obviously the case is not so straightforward. There are a few, yet very prominent advocates of Modernist architecture who were well aware of the fact that a building has something to express and to communicate, and that every system of architecture has a kind of grammar. In his essay with the short title “Architektur” (‘Architecture’) from 1910, the Viennese architect Adolf Loos, one of the fathers of Modernism, declared Architecture evokes emotions in man. Therefore it is the task of an architect to specify this emotion. A room must look cozy, a house comfortable. The court house must strike clandestine vices as an aggressive gesture. The bank must say: here your money is safely stored and held in custody by honest people.4 3 The most prominent examples are the writings of Manfredo Tafuri and Charles Jencks. Despite their radically opposite ideological points of view – the former writes from a neo-marxist position, the latter from a neo-conservative one – they are united in the undisputed conviction that architecture is a language. 4 “Die architektur erweckt stimmungen im menschen. Die aufgabe des architekten ist es daher, diese stimmung zu präzisieren. Das zimmer muß gemütlich, das haus wohnlich aussehen. Das justizgebäude muß dem heimlichen laster wie eine drohende gebärde erscheinen. Das bankhaus muß sagen: hier ist dein geld bei ehrlichen leuten fest und gut verwahrt. ” (Loos 1997: 102f.; my translation) Contrary to orthographic rules, Loos uses lower-case letters throughout his German texts.

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Loos went so far as to write the last sentence onto the walls of his branch of the Anglo-Austrian Bank in Vienna that was built in 1912; thus, the walls literally repeated what the building already expressed with its architectonic language. One could argue that Loos, a kind of conservative revolutionary who also admired neo-classicism and Biedermeier, is not a consistent representative of Modernism and that there are some traditional elements in his theory. But we also find the language metaphor in a 1955 interview with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who is, beside Le Corbusier, the leading figure of the Modernist movement in architecture, so that in the United States one speaks of a Miesian style. Having been asked how he felt about the numerous copies of his buildings (and, we have to add, the many copies he did himself), Mies responds Yes, that is what I call the common language […]. That is what I’m working on. I am not working on architecture, I am working on architecture as a language, and I think you have to have a grammar in order to have a language. It has to be a living language, but still you come in the end to the grammar. It is a discipline. And then you can use it for normal purposes and you speak in prose. And if you are good in that, you speak a wonderful prose, and if you are really good, you can be a poet. But it is the same language, that is the characteristic. A poet doesn’t produce a different language for each poem. That’s not necessary; he uses the same language, he uses even the same words. In music it is always the same and the same instruments, most of the time. I think it is the same in architecture. If you have to construct something you can make a garage out of it or you can make a cathedral out of it. We use the same means, the same structural methods for all these things. It has nothing to do with the level you are working on. What I am driving at is to develop a common language, not particularly individual ideas. I think that is the biggest point in our whole time. We have no real common language. (Puente, ed. 2008: 56f.) Compared to Loos, Mies is more interested in the common usage and systematic character of language than in its abilities of expression and communication. And his comparison of architecture with prose and poetry is not quite new; we already find something similar in Ledoux, who declared that “architecture is to masonry as poetry is to belles-lettres” (qtd. Guillerme 1977: 22). But there is no reason to take Mies’s comparison of architecture and language as simply conventional without any reference to semantics. If we take him (and also Loos) seriously, then we cannot in advance exclude their architecture from a linguistic or semiotic interpretation.

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The Meaning(s) of Silence

If architecture is a kind of language or has the potential to speak to us in a way similar to language, we can expect it to share some qualities of language – among them either to speak or to keep silent. Keeping silent has no meaning when it is expected, such as when we are alone or listening to a classical concert, but it can gain remarkable significance when we, for example, are asked something by the judge at a court hearing and we refuse to answer and instead keep silent. The refusal of communication when communication is the rule or even the law is in itself a very powerful sign, but a sign with manifold meanings: in our example, it can be interpreted as a sign of disrespect, of pride, of defiance, of anger, of lack of comprehension, of being shocked (to be literally speechless), or of shame and guilt. So the sign of silence can be a contradictory one: strong and incomprehensible (or at least unclear) at the same time. The ambivalence or polyvalence of silence can also be found in the so-called silent character. The silence of quiet men or women can be interpreted as anything from thoughtfulness (pondering in silence) to nobility and stupidity. In this respect, silence works as a kind of zero sign as described by the linguist Roman Jakobson: a zero sign is “a significant absence where the absence of any explicit signifier functions by itself as a signifier” (qtd. Milun 2011: 50, fn. 2). Furthermore, silence seems to have a historical and a social dimension: all sociologists dealing with life in the Modernist metropolis have described the silent habit of the city slickers, which confuses every countryman or -woman who arrives in a big city for the first time. Silently, without greeting or even seeing each other, they walk along the pavement, sit on the bus or on the subway, or stand closely together in the elevator. This silence is the Modernist mask that, in the view of Richard Sennett, has replaced the communicative masks of public roles that city dwellers wore in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and that transformed cities into theaters (cf. 2002: 107–122). But keeping silent in public is just one aspect of a broader change in communication. After the French Revolution, the strict sumptuary laws and dress codes, which facilitated identifying every citizen in terms of social class, profession, and marital status, were gradually abolished. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the public appearance of city dwellers had become more or less uniform and had become characterized – if compared with former centuries – by a strict lack of color: men and women were predominantly clothed in black, grey, and white, despite the advanced possibilities of industrial textile production in terms of fabric dyes and prints. The result is the stereotyped anonymity of city life or, negatively speaking, the alienation of individuals within a “lonely crowd”, as David Riesman called it (see Riesman/Glazer/Denney 1950).

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The Noble Bourgeois: Loos’s Silence

Adolf Loos launched his career in architecture in the late 1890s as a critic at the Viennese feuilleton. He wrote about – or rather, against – architecture (as in his attacks on Historicism and ornament in his well-known essay “Ornament and Crime”), but he also wrote about handicraft, fashion, cooking, and other aspects of daily life. His general mission was to bring Modernist Western (that means: American or English) urban culture to Austria, which seemed to him backward and outdated (Loos’s consistent use of lower-case letters was also part of his modernization program). For Loos, Modernist man is characterized by his abdication of personal expression in fashion, furniture, and architecture. Covering everything with ornaments (including one’s own skin) is for him a sign of a primitive or Pre-modernist state of evolution. The inner feelings of the Modernist (and we have to add: bourgeois) man are so strong that they cannot be expressed in public. We, says Loos, enjoy Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde or Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at night; and it is a crime to design ornamented wallpapers afterwards. But a shoemaker who does not have the possibility to attend an opera or classical concert may decorate his shoes with ornaments due to the lack of alternatives. In Loos’s writings, expressions of deep feelings are limited to the fields of the visual arts and classical music; all the other arts that serve a special purpose (like architecture, design, fashion) should work as a nearly empty sign; as we would say today: he regarded them as just functional and devoid of individual, specific expression. Only the silence of the subservient applied arts made the climactic impact of high art possible, argues Loos at the end of his essay “Ornament and Crime” Absence of ornament has brought the other arts to unsuspected heights. Beethoven’s symphonies would never have been written by a man who had to walk about in silk, satin, and lace. Anyone who goes around in a velvet coat today is not an artist but a buffoon or a house painter. We have grown finer, more subtle. The nomadic herdsmen had to distinguish themselves by various colours; modern man uses his clothes as a mask. So immensely strong is his individuality that it can no longer be expressed in articles of clothing. Freedom from ornament is a sign of spiritual strength. Modern man uses the ornaments of earlier or alien cultures as he sees fit. He concentrates his own inventiveness on other things. (Loos 1971: 24)5 5 “Das fehlen des ornaments hat die übrigen künste zu ungeahnter höhe gebracht. Die symphonien Beethovens wären nie von einem manne geschrieben worden, der in seide, samt und spitzen daher gehen mußte. Wer heute im samtrock herumläuft, ist kein künstler, sondern ein

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Yet the abdication of expression is just a matter of public life, not of the private realm. Modernist man keeps silent in public and reveals himself just privately, and so does architecture. In his essay “Heimatkunst” (‘Folk Art’), published in 1914, Loos declares: “The house does not have to tell anything to the exterior; instead, all its richness must be manifest in the interior.”6 In the interior, Loos himself used ornamented Persian rugs or the patterns of luxurious materials in a highly decorative way – he only regarded the invention of new ornaments for public use a crime. A man wearing a red jacket with a green velvet collar and golden buttons who walks down the street like a proud peacock, such a true parvenu or “Gigerl” (‘fop’), as Loos calls him (Loos 1997a: 57f.), resembles the overly ornamented Historicist façades of the Ringstraße, which are just silly costumes to Loos, performing a permanent architectural carnival, a “Gschnasfest” (Loos 1997c: 122). The carnival lacks any kind of nobility; it is loud, vulgar, and ‘narrative’, whereas a true nobleman conducts himself discreetly and keeps silent, as Loos writes in his essay “Die Herrenmode” (“Men’s Fashion”), published in 1898 Well dressed, what does that actually mean? […] The point is to be dressed in such a manner as to attract as little attention to oneself as possible. A red tail coat would attract attention in a ballroom, therefore the red tailcoat is not the modern style for the ballroom. A top hat would attract attention when ice-skating, therefore a top hat is not the modern dress for ice-skating. In High Society, to attract attention to oneself is considered vulgar. (Loos 1998: 40)7 In a similar way, stylish façades reveal the attitude of parvenus who try to court the attention of the public by all available means: ‘One prefers doing the same as other parvenus; one should shout down the other one’, Loos writes in a bithanswurst oder ein anstreicher. Wir sind feiner, subtiler geworden. Die herdenmenschen mußten sich durch verschiedene farben unterscheiden, der moderne mensch braucht sein kleid als maske. So ungeheuer stark ist seine individualität, daß sie sich nicht mehr in kleidungsstücken ausdrücken läßt. Ornamentlosigkeit ist ein zeichen geistiger kraft. Der moderne mensch verwendet die ornamente früherer und fremder kulturen nach seinem gutdünken. Seine eigene erfindung konzentriert er auf andere dinge.” (Loos 1997: 88) 6 “Das haus sei nach außen verschwiegen, im inneren offenbare es seinen ganzen reichtum.” (Loos 1997: 129; trans. in Colomina 1992: 94) 7 “Gut angezogen sein, was heißt das? […] Es handelt sich darum, so angezogen zu sein, daß man am wenigsten auffällt. Ein roter frack fällt im ballsale auf. Folglich ist der rote frack im ballsaale unmodern. Ein zylinder fällt auf dem eise auf. Folglich ist er auf dem eise unmodern. Alles auffallen gilt aber in der guten gesellschaft für unfein.” (Loos 1997a: 56)

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Figure 10.2 Adolf Loos, House at the Michaelerplatz, Vienna, 1909–1911

ing comment in “Heimatkunst”.8 In 1910 Loos explicitly links unobtrusive fashion and unobtrusive façades: ‘In its external appearance, a house can only have changed as much as a dinner jacket. Not a lot therefore. […] The house has to look inconspicuous. Have I not once coined the phrase: dressed modern is he who attracts as little attention as possible.’9 Loos’s call for silent façades does not contradict his already quoted claim that buildings have to evoke a certain atmosphere – that a bank, for example, has to imply to its customers that their money is safe or that a court house has 8 “Man hat es gerne, wenn man es den anderen parvenüs gleich macht, einer soll den anderen überschreien.” (Loos 1997b: 128; my translation) 9 “Ein haus kann sich in der äußeren erscheinung höchstens wie der frack verändert haben. Also nicht viel. […] Unauffällig muß das haus aussehen. Hatte ich nicht einmal den satz geprägt: modern gekleidet ist der, der am wenigsten auffällt.” (Loos 1997b: 99; my translation)

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to resemble a threatening gesture to all potential criminals. Bank and court house are public buildings which have to communicate their functions and roles in public life, whereas the public side of private buildings – that is the façade – has to keep silent. This can be demonstrated with Loos’s famous house at the Michaelerplatz in Vienna, which was one of the first Modernist buildings in the center of Vienna and which provoked the biggest architectural scandal of the Habsburg monarchy (see Figure 10.2). The first two floors accommodated a gentlemen’s tailor, Goldmann and Sallatsch, and it is a happy coincidence that Loos was able to demonstrate his clothing theory in architecture by means of a tailor shop, whose frequent client Loos was (allegedly, the design for the house was to pay off Loos’s outstanding accounts of several years; cf. Loos 1997b: 109f.). To express the public function of the shop, Loos used a kind of modernized neoclassicist vocabulary: Tuscan columns, green marble, and English bay windows alluded to the contemporary English taste of his tailor. But the upper floors, which were for private use only and, thus, accommodated only apartments, were equipped with a smooth punctuated white plaster façade without any decoration – which amounted to a revolutionary act in that time period (the window boxes were the only concession to the building authorities’ criticism of the ‘nudity’ of the façade). The white, ‘naked’ façade expresses just privacy and keeps silent. For Loos, silence is a Modernist (that means for him also timeless) virtue, one that is bourgeois and noble at the same time. Loos himself describes the noble, earnest, and silent character of his house at the Michaelerplatz in a public lecture, given in December 1911 Journalist Raoul Auernheimer wrote about the house that it looked dark and morose and showed its clean-shaven visage, in which no smile resides, and it seems that this was a principle because a smile is also an ornament. It seems to me that Beethoven’s clean-shaven visage, in which no smile resides, is more beautiful than all the funny goatees of the Künstlerhaus members. The Viennese houses should stand there seriously and solemnly as they have always looked serious and solemn. Enough of the carnival parties, enough of the jokes! In former times, buildings stepped back unobtrusively in style and manner, when a monumental building was surrounded by them. They were unadorned burgher houses. One spoke, the others kept silent. But now, all these pretentious buildings are screaming so violently at each other that none of them can be heard.10 10

“Der journalist Raoul Auernheimer schrieb über das haus, es blicke finster und grämlich drein und zeige die glattrasierte visage, in der kein lächeln wohnt, und das sei vermutlich

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Loos was aware of the fact that the architectonic silence of his house was not only a bourgeois and Modernist virtue but also an urban one: ‘The house at the Michaelerplatz may be good or bad, but even its enemies must give it its due: that it is not provincial. It is a house that can only stand in a metropolis.’11 As the quotations from Loos’s essays and lectures demonstrate, he was a master of the spoken and the written word. His skepticism towards architectonic language may have been rooted in a deep awareness of spoken and written language. Maybe the multi-lingual culture of the Habsburg monarchy sharpened such an awareness of language, which we can also find in Loos’s friend Karl Kraus, in Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in Ludwig Wittgenstein, and in the philosophers of the Viennese circle (Wiener Kreis). All of them dealt with the limits of language and with the necessity of silence to indicate these limits, most prominently Wittgenstein with the last sentence of his Tractatus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” (Wittgenstein 2009: 27)12 This leads me to a very different consideration, that is, the religious meaning of silence which will be discussed in the next section. 4

Sacred Silence: Rudolf Schwarz

The façade of the upper floors of the house at the Michaelerplatz also seems silent because the buildings of that time in Vienna were usually heavily decorated with various architectonic ornaments, thus using various grammars and vocabularies to send their manifold messages to those who saw them. In a conversing crowd, a silent man stands out. I have to come back to my example from the court hearing. In a situation where talking is expected, keeping silent can become a powerful sign. We can say the same about white naked walls. Not every white wall suggests silence; the latter depends on the feeling of absence of something that is normally present. The white wall of a bathroom, for

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ein prinzip, weil auch das lächeln ein ornament sei. Ich finde die glattrasierte visage Beethovens, in der kein lächeln wohnt, schöner als all die lustigen spitzbärte der künstlerhausmitglieder. Ernst und feierlich sollen die wiener häuser dastehen, so wie sie immer ernst und feierlich ausgesehen haben. Genug der gschnasfeste, genug der scherze! Früher traten die häuser, in deren mitte ein monumentalbau stand, im stile und in ihrer art be­ scheiden zurück. Es waren schmucklose bürgerhäuser. Eines sprach, die anderen schwiegen. Jetzt aber schreien alle diese protzigen bauten durcheinander und man hört keinen.” (Loos 1997c: 122f.; my translation) “Das haus auf dem michaelerplatz mag gut oder schlecht sein, aber eines müssen ihm auch seine gegner lassen: daß es nicht provinzmäßig ist. Daß es ein haus ist, das nur in einer millionenstadt stehen kann.” (Loos 1997b: 124; my translation) “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.” (Wittgenstein 1984: 85)

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example, does not convey silence, just hygiene and cleanliness (the absence of dirt in that location is normally expected, not regretted). In the tradition of the Roman Catholic Church, the altar wall or apse has always been the most important part of the building, and is frequently decorated with religious images of Jesus Christ and the Holy Virgin in their glory, surrounded by saints and angels in the celestial realm. The apse was even considered a virtual gate to heaven (cf. Roemer 1997: 14, 18f.) because the pictures were to provide a glimpse of a future world that already existed but that paradoxically was not yet really established on earth. In contrast to Catholicism, Calvinist theology has rejected all images in churches ever since the sixteenth century and, simultaneously, the altar wall or apse lost their significance. The new centers were the pulpit for the sermon and the altar table. One finds many white, empty walls in Calvinist churches, but they just surround the congregation during the service, who, instead, are perceptually focused on the Holy Scripture. A completely different situation can be found in a Roman Catholic church such as the Corpus Christi Church (Fronleichnamskirche) in Aachen, which was designed in 1928 by Rudolf Schwarz, a close friend of Mies van der Rohe,13 and which was erected and completed in 1930 (see Figure 10.3). Until today, this church has been counted among the most radically Modernist Catholic churches ever built. The scheme is still that of a traditional basilica, but in a state of abstraction and reduction to pure cubical forms: a longitudinal space with a huge central nave and a narrow side nave for the congregation, all of which culminates in an elevated altar space with the high altar at the end. Until 1965, Holy Mass had been celebrated there in the traditional Tridentine Rite, which means that the priest stood in front of the altar with his back to the congregation, facing the altar wall, thus indicating the direction of all prayers. Like all walls and the ceiling of the building, the altar wall is completely flat and white, lacking any images or decoration; all we can see is a black altar with the tabernacle, a few lamps hanging from the ceiling and a row of clearstory windows on the left wall with additional two lower pairs of windows at the altar zone, which interrupt the white emptiness. Rudolf Schwarz, and after his death his widow – Maria Schwarz – successfully warded off all attempts of the parish of Corpus Christi to add images or symbols such as crosses, pictures of saints, and so on. Only the tabernacle, which originally had been a simple metal box, was replaced in 1958 by a decorated shrine with a cross on its top, and 13

Cf. Neumeyer 1986: 210–214, 288–292. Cf. also Mies’s foreword to Schwarz 1958 and his contribution to the catalogue of the Rudolf Schwarz memorial exhibition of the BDA Cologne in 1963, reprinted ibid.: 394, 398.

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Figure 10.3 Rudolf Schwarz, Fronleichnams­ kirche (Corpus Christi Church), Aachen, 1928–1930, view from the interior towards the altar

several small images on the left wall and some flags on the right were added in recent years. The absence of images at a place where images are expected makes the altar wall of the Corpus Christi church a powerful sign of absent signification, which here turns into a sign of Deus absconditus, the hidden God. For Schwarz, who also wrote three books on church architecture (see Schwarz 1937, Schwarz 1958, Schwarz 1960), the altar wall does not signify the closure of the church interior but is a kind of threshold towards a spiritual zone imagined behind the wall (not in a literal but in a metaphysical sense; see Schwarz 1960). So the white wall works like the curtain in the Jewish temple in front of the sanctum, where the Ark of the Covenant was preserved. It is a placeholder for something which cannot be said, in a Wittgensteinian sense. In the 1920s, Schwarz was an active member of a Catholic reform group called Quickborn, whose spiritual leader was the Italian-German theologist and philosopher Romano Guardini. Guardini was professor of ‘Catholic

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Weltanschauung’ at the University of Berlin from 1923 and a kind of Catholic ambassador in Protestant Prussia. Guardini and Quickborn represented an avant-garde movement within German Catholicism, especially in terms of liturgy. Many of the reforms that came into effect during the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s had already been tested by Quickborn in the ’twenties. Guardini deeply influenced Schwarz and also Mies van der Rohe, who owned many of Guardini’s books, and we can still find Mies’s underlinings and commentaries in his copies.14 Since Schwarz’s design of the Corpus Christi church was attacked by the church authorities in Cologne, Guardini came to the aid of his combatant. In particular, Guardini had to defend Schwarz against the accusation of planning an iconoclastic, that means a Calvinist, church that has no religious symbolism or message at all and just functions as a building for prayer. It is interesting to follow Guardini’s argument because he insisted that Schwarz’s building has to be read in a semantic way, that it has a message, but that this message works like Jakobson’s zero sign because it is a silent sign making space for that which cannot be signified The properly formed emptiness of space and plane is not merely a negation of pictorial representation but rather its antipode. It relates to it as silence relates to the word. Once man has opened himself up to it, he experiences a strange presence. (Neumeyer 1991: 165)15 Referring to the traditional religious criticism of consumer culture, Guardini regarded the noisy world of things and signs as an obstacle on the spiritual way toward God. In Fritz Neumeyer’s summary, “Guardini described ‘fear of empty spaces and silence […] as a fear of being alone with God and the forlorn standing in front of him’, a confrontation man attempts to avoid: ‘That is why he always wants to have things, pictures, words, and sounds around himself.’” (Neumeyer 1991: 231) Thus Guardini claimed: “We must again rediscover the emptiness in God’s house, and the silence in his service; man is in need of it.” (Qtd. ibid.)16 In a similar way Schwarz interpreted man’s longing for silent, empty spaces like high mountains or monotonous deserts: ‘It is not the longing 14 15

16

On Guardini’s influence on Mies, cf. Neumeyer 1986: 247–294. Neumeyer lists twelve books by Guardini which were owned by Mies (cf. ibid.: 255, fn. 21). “Die richtig geformte Leere von Raum und Fläche ist keine bloße Negation der Bildlichkeit, sondern deren Gegenpol. Sie verhält sich zu dieser wie das Schweigen zum Wort. Sobald der Mensch für sie offen wird, empfindet er in ihr eine geheimnisvolle Anwesenheit.” (Qtd. Neumeyer 1986: 213) “Wir müssen die Leere im Hause Gottes und das Schweigen in seinem Dienste wieder entdecken, der Mensch bedarf ihrer.” (Ibid.)

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to get lost, but the hope of finding oneself that drives him there.’17 Schwarz also referred to the late medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart, who declared that man’s soul has to be emptied with silence in order to be filled with the presence of God. The word as a counterpart to silence is a symbol of God, who needs silence to be heard. Thus Schwarz’s church interior represents the silent community of believers – the church in a spiritual sense – who are expecting the presence of that which is unrepresentable. 5

Absolute Space: The Silence of Mies

After emigrating to the United States in 1938, where Mies van der Rohe became the director of the Faculty of Architecture at the Armour Institute of Technology in Chicago, which in 1940 was transformed into the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), Mies developed his specific architectural language. Primarily, this language was to express the industrial character of the Modernist age. The so-called Miesian style or language consists of rectangular, boxy shapes, black or dark brown high-rise buildings built on stilts and made of steel and glass with curtain walls or low glass boxes providing large spaces nearly without any pillars in the interior, using non-load-bearing walls just as dividers for an open, floating space (see Figure 10.4). As expressed in his famous aphorism “less is more”,18 Mies tried to reduce his formal language to a few elements, which he frequently used and combined with each other: I-beams made of steel, floor-to-ceiling-windows, Roman travertine plates for floors and walls, sometimes bricks to fill the structure of steel. The urban structure Mies preferred had already been developed at the Bauhaus in the 1920s and worked with the dialectics of volume and void: huge buildings were considered to require large empty spaces in front of them; lower buildings had to manage with smaller spaces around them. Ideally, the space surrounding a building was completely flat and empty and had a function similar to a dramatic pause in a speech or a rest in a piece of music. The buildings themselves with their minimalist vocabulary expressed a silent dignity and severity because the ‘words’ Mies used referred just to themselves: he only gives 17 18

“Es ist nicht die Sehnsucht, sich zu verlieren, sondern die Hoffnung, sich zu finden, die ihn dorthin treibt.” (Schwarz 1979: 65; my translation) Mies never used this well-known aphorism in his own writings, which, according to him, he had probably heard for the first time from his teacher Peter Behrens; rather his first biographer, the architect and curator Philip Johnson, attributed it to him; cf. Johnson 1947: 49; Schulze/Windhorst 2012: 205. For the origins of this aphorism in 18th-century literature, cf. Wolsdorff 1986: 54f.

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Figure 10.4 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, S.R. Crown Hall, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, 1954–1956

us the pure essence of the elements used, the stilt, the glass wall, the space as such. One has to keep in mind that at the beginning of his career in the 1920s in Berlin, Mies was in close contact with the avant-garde artists of Dada and Constructivism, who had already discovered “the pure sign, the object devoid of reference to anything but itself, the absolute autonomy of the linguistic ‘material’ […] as early as the years before World War I”, as Manfredo Tafuri pointed out (1976: 152). In fact, Mies’s buildings can be read as such “inflecting signs devoid of any significance” (ibid.: 153), or better, as silent signs. Tafuri literally speaks of “Mies’ silence” (ibid.: 148), and the distance of the Seagram Building to the rest of the city is also interpreted as a distance to the noise of New York in a literal and a metaphorical sense. More than that, Mies’s experiments “with the language of emptiness and silence” need that noise and the “presence of the real”, that is, “the city itself” as a contrast (Tafuri 1998: 296). Due to his pessimism, Tafuri is neither able nor willing to interpret Mies’s silence in the sense of Romano Guardini and Rudolf Schwarz. For him, it is just a symptom of a ‘lost center’ à la Hans Sedlmayr (see 1948/2007) or of “the fragmentation of the ‘order of discourse’” in architecture (Tafuri 1998: 299). Mies’s groundbreaking discovery was the reduction of the building to its structural grid of stilts and floors. His high-rise office building of glass, designed in 1922 (see Figure 10.5), was inspired by Hans Soeder’s structural sketch

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Figure 10.5 Hans Soeder, Entry for a competition for a skyscraper in Berlin-Friedrichstraße, 1921

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Figure 10.6 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Sketch of a skyscraper, 1922

for his entry to the competition for a skyscraper in Berlin on Friedrichstraße in 1921, as Andreas Marx and Paul Weber point out (cf. Marx/Weber 2003: 84–87; see Figure 10.6). What Soeder wanted to show was simply the division of the volumes without showing the details of the façade, including the windows. Mies took this sketch literally as a proposition for a skyscraper with a curtain wall completely made of glass, just horizontally divided by the rows of floors and vertically by the frames of the windows. At that time, he had already expressed his fascination with high-rise buildings in the journal Frühlicht Only skyscrapers under construction reveal the bold constructive thoughts, and then the impression of the high-reaching steel skeletons is overpowering. With the raising of the walls, this impression is completely destroyed; the constructive thought, the necessary basis for artistic formgiving, is annihilated and frequently smothered by a meaningless and trivial jumble of forms. […] The novel constructive principle of these buildings comes clearly into view if one employs glass for the no longer load-bearing exterior walls. (Neumeyer 1991: 240)19 19

“Nur im Bau befindliche Wolkenkratzer zeigen die kühnen konstruktiven Gedanken, und überwältigend ist dann der Eindruck der hochragenden Stahlskelette. Mit der

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The grid as not only a structural but visual element of order dominates both the façades of Modernist buildings and the plan of most Modern cities, especially in the United States. The homogeneous grid of the cities relates to the prevalence of exchange value over utility value in capitalist societies. The standardization of building grounds adapts them to the market laws; they become exchangeable. The German sociologist Georg Simmel had already said something similar about the mental life in the metropolis and its specific “blasé attitude” at the beginning of the Modernist age The essence of the blasé attitude consists of the blunting of discrimination. This does not mean that the objects are not perceived […], but rather, that the meaning and different values of things, and thereby the things themselves, are experienced as insubstantial. They appear to the blasé person in an evenly flat and grey tone; no one object deserves preference over any other. This mood is the faithful subjective reflection of a completely internalized money economy […]. All things float with equal specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money. All things lie on the same level and differ from one to another only in the size of the area which they cover. (Qtd. Tafuri 1976: 87f.) The grid is not only the preferred pattern of Modernist architecture and city planning but also frequently used in Modernist painting. In 1979, American art historian Rosalind Krauss published an essay simply entitled “Grids”, which opens as follows In the early part of this century there began to appear, first in France and then in Russia and in Holland, a structure that has remained emblematic of the modernist ambition within the visual arts ever since. Surfacing in pre-War cubist painting and subsequently becoming ever more stringent and manifest, the grid announces, among other things, modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse. As such, the grid has done its job with striking efficiency. The barrier it has lowered between the arts of vision and those of language has been almost totally successful in walling the visual arts into a realm of exclusive visuality and defending them against the intrusion of speech. (1985: 9) Ausmauerung der Fronten wird dieser Eindruck vollständig zerstört, der konstruktive Gedanke, die notwendige Grundlage für die künstlerische Gestaltung vernichtet und meist von einem sinnlosen und trivialen Formenwust überwuchert. […] Das neuartige konstruktive Prinzip dieser Bauten tritt dann klar hervor, wenn man für die nun nicht mehr tragenden Außenwände Glas verwendet.” (Qtd. Neumeyer 1986: 298)

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Krauss regards the grid as an order of pure, formal relationships that excludes any natural, semantic, or individual values. Surprisingly enough, she does not yet extend her lucid observations to the field of architecture where the silence of the grid has much more public power and influence than in the comparatively private and exclusive circles of Modernist art.20 But is the grid in general and Miesian architecture in particular really so silent? In The Language of Post-modern Architecture, Charles Jencks severely criticizes Mies’s tacit language of architecture, which he calls a “universal language of confusion” (1977/1991: 29) because, in Jencks’s view, there is no such thing as an empty sign in architecture – every architectural element refers to something similar in the history of architecture: to certain functions, uses and conventional symbols. Architecture always speaks – it cannot be completely silent. In his analysis of Mies’s IIT Campus in Chicago, Jencks argues that the boiler house (see Figure 10.7) with its “traditional form of a basilica with central nave and two side aisles, […] clerestory lights” and a “campanile”, looks like a cathedral, whereas the chapel (see Figure 10.8), “a dumb box placed to either side of high-rise buildings […], blank on three sides and lit by a searchlight”, looks like a boiler house (1991: 29). Jencks concludes: “Of course Mies didn’t intend these propositions, but his commitment to reductive formal values inadvertently betrays them.” (Ibid.: 30) In defense of Mies van der Rohe we could argue that he was never a functionalist architect, which means that he never intended his buildings to express or symbolize their functions. Mies buildings were planned to serve changing purposes: a low glass box could serve as a post office, a supermarket, an assembly hall, or as a museum.21 What he was interested in was the creation of a kind of absolute space, or of a space where one feels his or her own presence in a higher dimension. This can be demonstrated at his most famous 20 21

This was amended by Krauss’s later essay on Mies van der Rohe and the grid; see Krauss 1994. In 1958 Mies stated: “Die Zwecke, denen das Gebäude dient, wechseln ständig, und wir können es uns nicht leisten, das Gebäude jedesmal abzureißen. Deshalb haben wir Sullivans Formel ʻForm follows Function’ revidiert” (Qtd. Neumeyer 1986: 405). In 1964 Mies argued: “I would not hesitate to make a cathedral in the inside of my convention hall. I see no reason why not. You can do that. So a type, like the convention hall or like the museum, can be used for other purposes just as well. This is not anymore that the form follows function or should follow function. I am, anyway, a little dubious about these statements. There was a reason when somebody said it. But you cannot make a law out of them. You very well could make an apartment building from an office building.” (Puente, ed. 2008: 73)

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Figure 10.7 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Boiler House, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, 1947; from Jencks 1991: 29

Figure 10.8 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Robert F. Carr Memorial Chapel of St. Savior, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, 1949–1952; from Jencks 1991: 29

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Figure 10.9 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Farnsworth House, Plano/Illinois, 1946–1951. Photo: Anselm Wagner, 2010

building, the Farnsworth House, a small weekend house at the bank of the Fox River in Illinois, planned and built between 1946 and 1951 (see Figure 10.9). The house is just an elevated glass box in a steel frame, surrounded by trees and meadows. The replacing of traditional walls by large plates of glass leads the attention to the space itself as an intangible but very real entity. Inside the house, all the sounds of nature are inaudible; the completely silent space makes the surrounding landscape much more impressive as it is transformed into an object of observation, if not meditation, kept at a distance through this abstract space in a glass box. Mies says: “If you view nature through the glass walls of the Farnsworth House, it gains a more profound significance than if viewed from outside. This way more is said about nature – it becomes a part of a larger whole.” (Neumeyer 1991: 339).22 Here, the silence of architecture makes the very essence of architecture extensively perceptible: space. 22

“Wenn Sie die Natur durch die Glaswände des Farnsworth-Hauses sehen, bekommt sie eine tiefere Bedeutung, als wenn Sie außen stehen. Es wird so mehr von der Natur ausgesprochen – sie wird ein Teil eines großen Ganzen.” (Qtd. Neumeyer 1986: 405) In his interpretation of the Farnsworth House, Neumeyer refers to a passage in Romano Guardini’s Briefe vom Comer See, which was underlined by Mies and which claims a new type

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Mies’s reduction of buildings to their spatial essence coheres with Clement Greenberg’s puristic definition of Modernist art, which “eliminate[d] from the effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art” (Greenberg 1960/1992: 755). In this case, architecture eliminated all non-architectonic (that means: non-spatial) elements like narration and signification in order to become truly ‘architectonic’. Or, if we consider that Modernist architecture nevertheless remained a semiotic system, it fell silent to realize itself. 6

Conclusion

When the first Modernist buildings appeared in the cities of Europe and the Unites States, their renunciation of ornament and other conventional signifiers was experienced as a provocative silence. Here architecture used the same strategy as other avant-garde movements in the visual arts, in music, or in literature did. But in contrast to these autonomous arts, which have been much more able to produce their own context, early Modernist architecture always had to deal with a much more oppressively prominent pre-existing context of a conventional semiotic system, i.e., the more or less historicist or neo-classicist city of the nineteenth century. Within this context, the silence of a ‘naked’ façade without ornaments must have been much more appalling and also more meaningful than today, because smooth, simply-structured buildings with ‘silent’ façades have become a convention themselves and nowadays characterize most contemporary cityscapes. Thus the absence of signifiers in Modernist architecture can be related to the semiotic category of a “potential meaningfulness of absence through deviations from conventions and related expectations”, as Werner Wolf points out in the introduction to the present volume (this volume: 12). But what are the actual meanings of Modernist architecture’s refusal to communicate? The examples presented here demonstrate that one can at least distinguish three possibilities: a cultural, a spiritual, and a meta-architectural one. For Adolf Loos, the cultural silence of his façades correlated with the gentility and anonymity of the Modernist ‘private’ man, and therefore the silent, discreet appearance of houses and city dwellers was an expression of Modernist Western culture. For Rudolf Schwarz, the spiritual silence of his empty of space within the modern world of technology, economics and politics that enables man to become silent and makes “Stillwerden” (‘falling silent’) possible (cf. Neumeyer 1986: 293f.).

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churches should enable man to reach silence in a spiritual sense and become receptive to God’s word. And for Mies, the meta-architectural silence of structures was meant to point observers to the very essence of architecture, i.e., to space as such. But while Loos was aware of the necessity of architectonic language and signification (for example, in public buildings), and Schwarz specialized in a very restricted, ‘silent’ building task, Mies created a universal ‘silent language’ that included everything from small family homes to skyscrapers, from office buildings to museums, from factories to whole city districts. His usage of the grid as the most striking tool for creating such a language of silence was exemplary and has become a ubiquitous design feature. The result was greater spatial freedom but also greater spatial boredom, and much too often noble silent structures provided a seemingly empty canvas for other forces like advertising that entirely took over urban communication. However, Mies’s meta-architectural silence remains one of the most important legacies of Modernism, and it continues to shape the majority of contemporary architecture until today so that we are thoroughly accustomed to the strange fact that buildings do not speak about anything but their own nature as architecture.23

References

Alofsin, Anthony (2006). When Buildings Speak: Architecture as Language in the Habs­ burg Empire and its Aftermath, 1867–1933. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press. Blaser, Werner (2001). Tadao Ando – Architekt der Stille. Basle: Birkhäuser. Böhme, Gernot (2006). Architektur und Atmosphäre. Munich: Wilhelm Fink. Böhme, Gernot (2013). “Metaphors in Architecture–a Metaphor?”. Andri Gerber, Brent Patterson, eds. Metaphors in Architecture and Urbanism: An Introduction. Archi­ tecture 19. Bielefeld: transcript. 47–57. Böhme, Gernot (2014). “Atmospheres: New Perspectives for Architecture and Design”. Philip Tidwell, ed. Architecture and Atmosphere. Helsinki: Tapio Wirkkala Rut Bryk Foundation. 7–14. Collins, Peter (1965). Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture. Montreal, QC: McGill Univ. Press. Colomina, Beatriz (1992). “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism”. Beatriz Colomina, ed. Sexuality and Space. Princeton Papers on Architecture 1. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press. 73–128.

23

I am indebted to Petra Eckhard for proofreading and to Ingrid Böck for literature research.

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Dimitriou, Sokratis (1979). “Die Grazer Stadtentwicklung 1850 bis 1914”. Sokratis Dimitriou, ed. Stadterweiterung von Graz: Gründerzeit. Publication Series of Grazer Stadtmuseum 2. Graz/Vienna: Leykam. 8–37. Eco, Umberto (1968). La struttura assente: La ricerca semiotica e il metodo strutturale. Milan: Bompiani. Fergusson, James (1849 online). An Historical Inquiry in the True Principles of Beauty  in Art, More Especially with Reference to Architecture. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans. [04/02/2018]. Forssman, Erik (1961). Dorisch, jonisch, korinthisch: Studien über den Gebrauch der Säulen­ordnungen in der Architektur des 16.–18. Jahrhunderts. Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis: Stockholm Studies in the History of Art 5. Stockholm et al.: Almqvist & Wiksell. Germann, Georg (1980/1987). Einführung in die Geschichte der Architekturtheorie. 2nd ed. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Greenberg, Clement (1960/1992). “Modernist Painting”. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Oxford/Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers. 754–760. Guillerme, Jacques (1977). “The Idea of Architectural Language: A Critical Inquiry”. Oppositions 10: 21–26. Hays, K. Michael, ed. (1998). Oppositions Reader: Selected Readings from A Journal for Ideas and Criticism in Architecture 1973–1984. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press. Horace (1974). The Art of Poetry: With the Original Latin Text of Horace’s Ars Poetica. Albany, NY: State Univ. of New York Press. Jencks, Charles (1977/1991). The Language of Post-modern Architecture. 6th rev. ed. London: Academy Editions. Johnson, Philip (1947). Mies van der Rohe. New York, NY: The Museum of Modern Art. Kaufmann, Emil (1952). “Three Revolutionary Architects, Boullée, Ledoux, and Lequeu”. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series 42, Part 3: 433–564. Krauss, Rosalind E. (1985). “Grids”. Rosalind E. Krauss. The Originality of the Avantgarde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press. 9–22. Krauss, Rosalind E. (1994). “The Grid, / the Cloud, / and the Detail”. Detlef Mertins, ed. The Presence of Mies. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press. 133–147. Le Corbusier (1927/1960). Towards a New Architecture. Trans. Frederick Etchells. New York, NY/Washington, DC: Praeger Publishers. Lobel, John (1979). Between Silence and Light: Spirit in the Architecture of Louis I. Kahn. Boston, MA: Shambala. Loos, Adolf (1971). “Ornament and Crime”. Ulrich Conrads, ed. Programs and Mani­ festoes on 20th-century Architecture. Cambridge, MA, et al.: MIT Press. 19–24.

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Loos, Adolf (1997a). Ins Leere gesprochen: Gesammelte Schriften 1897–1900. Ed. Adolf Opel. Vienna: Georg Prachner. Loos, Adolf (1997b). Trotzdem: Gesammelte Schriften 1900–1930. Ed. Adolf Opel. Vienna: Georg Prachner. Loos, Adolf (1997c). Die Potemkinsche Stadt: Verschollene Schriften 1897–1933. Ed. Adolf Opel. Vienna: Georg Prachner. Loos, Adolf (1998). Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays. Trans. Michael Mitchell. Ed. Adolf Opel. Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press. Marx, Andreas, Paul Weber (2003). “Konventioneller Kontext der Moderne: Mies van der Rohes Haus Kempner 1921–23. Ausgangspunkt einer Neubewertung des Hochhauses Friedrichstraße”. Berlin in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Jahrbuch des Landesarchivs Berlin, Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag. 65–107. Milun, Kathryn (2011). The Political Uncommons: The Cross-cultural Logic of the Global Commons. Farnham, Surrey/Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Neumeyer, Fritz (1986). Mies van der Rohe: Das kunstlose Wort. Gedanken zur Baukunst. Berlin: Siedler Verlag. Neumeyer, Fritz (1991). The Artless Word: Mies van der Rohe on the Building Art. Trans. Mark Jarzombek. Cambridge, MA, et al.: MIT Press. Puente, Moisés, ed. (2008). Conversations with Mies van der Rohe. New York, NY: Princeton Univ. Press. Quantrill, Malcolm, Bruce Webb, eds. (1998). The Culture of Silence: Architecture’s Fifth Dimension. Studies in Architecture and Culture 4. College Station, TX: Texas A & M Univ. Press. Quintilian (1995–1996). The Institutio Oratoria. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press/London: W. Heinemann. Riesman, David, Nathan Glazer, Reuel Denney (1950). The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Roemer, Werner (1997). Kirchenarchitektur als Abbild des Himmels: Zur Theologie des Kirchengebäudes. Kevelaer: Butzon & Bercker. Say, Jean-Baptiste (1800 online). Olbie, ou Essai sur les moyens de réformer les moeurs d’une nation. Paris: Deterville, Treuttel et Wurtz. [04/02/2018]. Schulze, Franz, Edward Windhorst (2012). Mies van der Rohe : A Critical Biography. Chicago, IL: The Univ. of Chicago Press. Schwarz, Rudolf (1937). Gottesdienst: Ein Zeitbuch. Die Schildgenossen, Beiheft 2. Würzburg: Werkbundverlag, Abt. Die Burg. Schwarz, Rudolf (1958). The Church Incarnate: The Sacred Function of Christian Architecture. Chicago, IL: H. Regnery Co. Schwarz, Rudolf (1960). Kirchenbau: Welt vor der Schwelle. Heidelberg: Kerle.

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Schwarz, Rudolf (1979). Wegweisung der Technik und andere Schriften zum Neuen Bauen 1926–1961. Bauwelt Fundamente 51. Braunschweig/Wiesbaden: Vieweg. Sedlmayr, Hans (1948/2007). Art in Crisis: The Lost Center. Trans. Brian Battershaw. New Brunswick, NJ, et al.: Transaction Publications (German orig.: Verlust der Mitte: Die bildende Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts als Symptom und Symbol der Zeit. Salzburg: Otto Müller). Sennett, Richard (2002). The Fall of Public Man. London et al.: Penguin Books. Sullivan, Louis H. (1896/1988). “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered”. Louis H. Sullivan. The Public Papers. Ed. Robert Twombly. Chicago, IL/London. 103–112. Tafuri, Manfredo (1974/1998). “L’Architecture dans le Boudoir: The Language of Criti­ cism and the Criticism of Language”. Hays, ed. 291–316. Tafuri, Manfredo (1976). Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press. Vasari, Giorgio (1550). Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori. Florence: Lorenzo Torrentino. Vidler, Anthony (1977/1998). “The Idea of Type: The Transformation of the Academic Ideal, 1750–1830”. Hays, ed. 437–459. Vitruvius Pollio (1955–1956). On Architecture. Loeb Classical Library. London: Heinemann. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1984). Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Werkausgabe Vol. 1. Frank­ furt am Main: Suhrkamp. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (2009). Tractatus logico-philosophicus. New York, NY: Cosimo Classics. Wolsdorff, Christian Ferdinand (1986). Der vorbildliche Architekt: Mies van der Rohes Architekturunterricht 1930–1958 am Bauhaus und in Chicago Exh. cat. Bauhaus Archive Berlin. Berlin: Nicolai.

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List of Figures 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 2.1 2.2 5.1a–d 5.2a–b 5.3 5.4a–d 5.5a–b 5.6a–b 5.7 5.8a–b 5.9a–b 6.1 6.2 6.3a–b 6.4a–b 6.5a–b 6.6 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 9. 1 9.2 9.3

Beowulf (c. 1000): first page of the only remaining manuscript  6 Kazimir Malevich, “Suprematist Composition: White on White” (1918)  23 Photograph of works by Kazimir Malevich exhibited in the 1915 exhibition “0,10” in Petrograd (Mendgen, ed. 1995: 232f.) 24 “Stille Nacht” – iconic score 27 Williams’s “repetations” (When Women Were Birds, 180) 38 Foer, The Tree of Codes (with a yellow sheet of paper inserted underneath p. 8)  41 Alfred Hitchcock, Blackmail (1929) 110 Chantal Akerman, Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 111 Spike Jonze, Being John Malkovich (1999) 111 George Méliès, L’illusionniste fin de siècle (1899) 114 Gore Verbinski, The Ring (2002) 116 Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction (1994) 117 Spike Jonze, Being John Malkovich (1999) 117 Jim Jarmusch, Stranger than Paradise (1984) 119 Paul Greengrass, The Bourne Supremacy (2004) 120 George Herriman, Krazy Kat (Jan. 25, 1939) 127 Jeremy Love, Bayou: Volume 1 (2009) 135 Jason Lutes, Berlin: City of Smoke 91 and 26–27 (2008) 136 Grant Morrison et al., Batman R.I.P. (2009) 139 Grant Morrison et al., Animal Man: Deus Ex Machina 157 and 224 (2003) 141 Carmine Infantino et al., Cover of Superman vs. Spider-Man (1976) 145 Joseph Haydn, String Quartet op. 33/2 (Hob. III: 38), Finale, mm. 128– 172 164 Joseph Haydn, String Quartet op. 33/2 (Hob. III: 38), Finale, mm. 1–8, 162–172 166 Joseph Haydn, String Quartet op. 76/5 (Hob. III: 79), Finale, mm. 1–20 167 Joseph Haydn, String Quartet op. 55/2 (Hob. III: 61), Allegro, mm. 1–25 168 Joseph Haydn, String Quartet op. 20/3 (Hob. III: 33), Allegro con spirito, mm. 206–213 169 Joseph Haydn, String Quartet op. 20/3 (Hob. III: 33), Allegro con spirito, mm. 217–226 170 Pablo Picasso, illustrations for: Honoré de Balzac, Le Chef-d’Œuvre Inconnu, ed. Ambroise Vollard, Paris 1931, illustrations O–P 203 Pablo Picasso, “The Painter and His Model”, 1914 203 Pablo Picasso, “Portrait of Madame Georges Wildenstein”, c. 1918 206

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246 9.4 9.5

9.6 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6 10.8

10.7 10.9

List Of Figures Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, “Portrait of Madame Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, born Madeleine Chapelle III”, c. 1814 207 Martin Hoener, “Sinnbild der umgekehrten Vorstellung von Dir in meiner Seele (Porträt des Mr. Glendinning aus ‘Pierre’ von Herman Melville)”, 2007, installation view at the Städel, Frankfurt, October 2007 209 Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts, “The Reverse of a Framed Painting”, 1668–1672  210 Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Oikema (House of Pleasure), 1804, plan of the first floor 219 Adolf Loos, House at the Michaelerplatz, Vienna, 1909–1911 227 Rudolf Schwarz, Fronleichnamskirche (Corpus Christi Church), Aachen, 1928–1930, view from the interior towards the altar 231 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, S.R. Crown Hall, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, 1954–1956 234 Hans Soeder, Entry for a competition for a skyscraper in BerlinFriedrichstraße, 1921 235 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Sketch of a skyscraper, 1922 235 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Robert F. Carr Memorial Chapel of St. Savior, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, 1949–1952; from Jencks 1991: 29 238 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Boiler House, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, 1947; from Jencks 1991: 29 238 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Farnsworth House, Plano/Illinois, 1946–1951. Photo: Anselm Wagner, 2010 239

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Notes on Contributors Nassim W. Balestrini ([email protected]) is Professor of American Studies and Intermediality at the University of Graz, Austria, and Director of the Centre for Intermediality Studies in Graz (CIMIG). Earlier, she taught at the universities of Mainz, Paderborn and Regensburg, as well as at the University of California, Davis. Her publications and research interests include American literature and culture (predominantly from the 18th through the 21st centuries), adaptation and intermedial relations (as in her monograph From Fiction to Libretto: Irving, Hawthorne, and James as Opera, 2005, and in the edited volume Adaptation and American Studies, 2011), life writing across media (as in Intermediality, Life Writing, and American Studies, 2018, edited with Ina Bergmann), intermedial hip-hop culture, climate change drama, US-American and Canadian theater and performance, African American literature and culture, and the poet laureate traditions in the United States and in Canada. Walter Bernhart ([email protected]) is retired Professor of English Literature at the University of Graz, Austria, is the founding and current President of The International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA) and was the founding Director of his university’s Centre for Intermediality Studies in Graz (CIMIG). His most recent publications include “What’s in the Bag of Intermediality Studies? Issues, Methods, Projects” (2015) and “From Orpheus to Bob Dylan: The Story of ‘Words and Music’” (2017), and his collected Essays on Literature and Music (1985–2013) were published in 2015. He is executive editor of the book series Studies in Intermediality (SIM) and Word and Music Studies (WMS), both published by Brill | Rodopi (Leiden/Boston, MA), and has (co-) edited numerous individual volumes. Olga Fischer ([email protected]) is Emeritus Professor of Germanic Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam. She is a contributor to The Cambridge History of the English Language (1992), co-author of The Syntax of Early English (Cambridge University Press, 2000), and author of Morphosyntactic Change: Functional and Formal Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2007). She has edited many books and published widely in international journals and handbooks on syntactic change, grammaticalization, analogy and iconicity. She is an initiator of the

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Iconicity Research Project (www.iconicity.ch) and co-editor of the Iconicity in Language and Literature series published by Benjamins. Henry Keazor ([email protected]) is Professor and Chair of Early Modern and Contemporary Art at Heidelberg University, Germany. His main areas of ­research are Early Modern Art (specifically the Italian and French Renaissance as well as Baroque painting), contemporary architecture (Jean Nouvel in particular) as well as the relations between art and media, music videos, and the phenomenon of art forgery. On the latter two topics he has also organized exhi­ bitions, such as Imageb(u)ilder: Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft des Video­clips at the rock’n’popmuseum in Gronau (catalogue, written and edited with co-curators Thorsten Wübbena and Thomas Mania, 2011) and Fake: ­Fäl­schungen, wie sie im Buche stehen at the university library Heidelberg (catalogue written and edited with Maria Effinger, 2016). Among his publications are, in addition to articles and essays, monographs such as Poussins Pargera (1998), “Il vero modo”: Die Malereireform der Carracci (2007), “Video Thrills the Radio Star”: Musikvideos. Geschichte, Themen, Analysen (with Thorsten Wübbena, 2011), FilmKunst: Studien an den Grenzen der Künste und Medien (as author and editor with Fabienne Liptay and Susanne Marschall, 2011) and Täuschend echt! Eine Geschichte der Kunstfälschung (2015). Saskia Jaszoltowski  ([email protected]) is Assistant Professor at the Department of Musicology at the University of Graz, Austria. Her research focuses on the history and aesthetics of music in the 20th and 21st centuries, with an emphasis on audiovisual and intermedial phenomena as well as social and political implica­tions of musical life. She was awarded a doctorate summa cum laude at the Free University of Berlin for her PhD thesis on the soundtracks of animated cartoons while working as a research assistant at the Cluster of Excellence ­Languages of Emotion. Peter Revers ([email protected]) became Full Professor of Music History in 1996 at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz, Austria. He has published widely on Mahler, Mozart, the reception of Far-Eastern Music in Europe, and on contemporary music. His publications include Gustav Mahler: Unter­ suchungen zu den späten Symphonien (1985), Das Fremde und das Vertraute: Studien zur musiktheoretischen und musikdramatischen Ostasienrezeption (1997), Mahlers Lieder (2000), and with Oliver Korte as editors, Gustav Mahler:

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Interpretation seiner Werke, 2 volumes (2011). He has also written several articles on Mahler for the Oxford and Cambridge University presses.  His extensive article on the history of interpretation of Mozart’s string quartets was published in 2015, in Zur Interpretation von W.A. Mozarts Kammermusik (klang-­ reden 14, Joachim Brügge, ed., Freiburg/Breisgau: Rombach). Klaus Rieser ([email protected]) is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Graz, Austria, where he teaches in (visual) cultural studies. He chaired the Department of American Studies from 2007 to 2013 and from 2016 to 2017. His major areas of research comprise US film, representations of family, gender and ethnicity, and visual cultural studies. His monographs have dealt with immigration in film, experimental films, and masculinity in film. He has also published a number of articles and co-edited four volumes, amongst other topics on Iconic Figures and on Contact Spaces. He co-edits the book series American Studies in Austria and is presently engaged in transforming it into an online journal. Daniel Stein ([email protected]) is Professor of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Siegen, Germany. He is the author of Music Is My Life: Louis Armstrong, Autobiography, and American Jazz (University of Michigan Press, 2012) and the co-editor of several essay volumes and special journal issues, including the forthcoming Nineteenth-Century Serial Narrative in Transatlantic Perspective (Palgrave) and Transnational Graphic Narrative (proceedings of a special symposium of the International Journal of Comic Art). He is currently finishing the monograph Authorizing Superhero Comics: On the Evolution of a Serial Genre (under contract with Ohio State University Press). Anselm Wagner ([email protected]) was appointed Professor and Chair of the Institute of Architectural Theory, Art History and Cultural Studies at Graz University of Technology in 2009. Since then, he has been editor of GAM (Graz Architecture Magazine) and the book series Architektur + Analyse at Jovis, Berlin, and head of the research projects The Solar Houses of Konrad Frey, and Buddhist Architecture in the Western Himalayas, both funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). He is editor of several books, among them Was bleibt von der ‘Grazer Schule’? Architektur-Utopien der 1960er revisited (Berlin: Jovis, 2012, with Antje Senarclens de Grancy), Konrad Frey: Haus Zankel. Experiment Solararchitektur

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(Berlin: Jovis, 2013, with Ingrid Böck), Staub: Eine interdisziplinäre Perspektive (Wien/Berlin: LIT, 2013, with Daniel Gethmann), Is There (Anti-)Neoliberal Archi­tecture? (Berlin: Jovis, 2013, with Ana Jeinic). His forthcoming books, Popular Terms in Architecture: A Dictionary and Architekturführer Graz (with Sophia Walk), will be published in 2019. Werner Wolf ([email protected]) is Professor and Chair of English and General Literature at the University of Graz, Austria, as well as Vice-Director of the Centre for Intermediality Studies at Graz (CIMIG). His main areas of research are literary theory (aesthetic illusion, narratology, and metafiction/metareference in particular), functions of literature, 18th- to 21st-century English fiction, and inter­mediality studies. His publications include, besides numerous essays, reviews and contributions to literary encyclopedias, the monographs Ästhetische Illusion und Illusionsdurchbrechung in der Erzählkunst (Aesthetic Illusion and the Breaking of Illusion in Fiction, 1993), The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality (1999), and Selected Essays on Intermediality (ed. Walter Bernhart, 2018). He is also (co-)editor of volumes 1, 3, 5, 11, 14 and 15 of the book series Word and Music Studies (1999–2016) as well as of volumes 1, 2 and 4–6 of the series Studies in Intermediality, among them Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media (2006), Description in Literature and Other Media (2007), Metareference across Media: Theory and Case Studies (2009), The Metareferential Turn in Contemporary Arts and Media: Forms, Functions, Attempts at Explanation (2011), and Immersion and Distance: Aesthetic Illu­sion in Literature and Other Media (2013).

Index Index

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Index 2001 A Space Odyssey 113 Abbate, Carolyn 173, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 186, 187, 188 Abbott, H. Porter 5, 25 À bout de souffle 115 Adams, Timothy Dow 47 Akerman, Chantal 111 À La Folie ... Pas Du Tout 107 Alexander, Marc 149 Alexandre, Arsène 200 Allen, Robert C. 140 Alofsin, Anthony 221 Altman, Rick 91 Ames, Ezra 213 Ando, Tadao 217 Antonioni, Michelangelo 7 Anttila, Raimo 60 Aringer, Klaus 157 Arnheim, Rudolf 102 Artaud, Antonin 212 Auber, Daniel-François-Esprit 184, 185 Auden, Wystan Hugh 187, 188 Auernheimer, Raoul 228 Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel 163 Bach, Johann Sebastian 18, 50, 157 Baetens, Jan 130, 143 Bagdahn, Jutta M. 208 Balzac, Honoré de 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 206, 207, 214 Barthes, Roland 163 Battistelli, Giorgio 212 Beavin, Janet 10 Bechdel, Alison 126 Beckett, Samuel 21, 22, 27, 71, 82 Beethoven, Ludwig van 180, 225, 228 Being John Malkovich 111, 116, 117 Benda, Georg 182 Benjamin, Walter 198 Benthien, Claudia 175 Beowulf 5, 6, 7 Berg, Alban 50, 184 Bernadac, Marie-Laure 202

Bernhart, Walter 130, 182, 187, 188 Black, Joel 113 Blackmail 108, 110 Bloom, Lois 79 Boffrand, Germain 218 Böhme, Gernot 221 Bordwell, David 101, 104, 112 Boulez, Pierre 174 Boullée, Étienne-Louis 218 Bourne Supremacy, The 119, 120 Brahms, Johannes 137 Branigan, Kevin 21 Bray, Joe 40 Brian, Havergal 212 Britten, Benjamin 184 Brosch, Renate 102 Brown, Jeffrey A. 128 Bruckner, Anton 13, 18, 174 Brus, Günter 74 Bryden, Mary 21 Buckland, Warren 101 Bukatman, Scott 139 Busiek, Kurt 148 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 112 Butler, Christopher 73 Cage, John 12, 13, 22, 27, 36, 88, 89, 90, 99, 157 Cantofoli, Ginevra 212 Caselli, Daniela 21 Cenci, Beatrice 212, 213 Cézanne, Paul 193, 199, 200, 201, 214 Chaudhuri, Shohini 106 Chion, Michel 97 Christie, Agatha 5 Chute, Hillary L. 126, 135 Clark, Eve V. 65 Clifton, Thomas 7, 18, 22, 28, 87 Cohen, Ted 163 Cohn, Neil 137 Collins, Peter 221 Color of Money, The 112 Conisbee, Philip 205 Constable, John 70 Corbin, Alain 3

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004394520_014

252 Cotton, Sir Robert 7 Crosman, Ingre 204 Crüwell, Konstanze 208 Daix, Pierre 202, 206 Danielewicz-Betz, Anna 158 Daniel, Tony S. 139 Dawkins, Richard 70 Deacon, Terrence W. 60 DeKoven, Marianne 135 Delacroix, Eugène 199 Denson, Shane 144 Derrida, Jacques 3, 37 Dhawan, Nikita 3 Dibelius, Ulrich 175 Dickens, Charles 130 Dimitriou, Sokratis 221 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan 5 Duchamp, Marcel 89 Dumas, Alexandre 212 Eberhard, Johann August 160, 161, 162 Eco, Umberto 147, 221 Edgar, Andrew 8, 18 Eisenstein, Sergei 101 Eisner, Will 128 Eliot, T.S. 61 Elledge, Scott 62 Elsaesser, Thomas 101 Elzenheimer, Regine 175, 176 Emmott, Catherine 149 Enright, Anne 80 Ephratt, Michal 7 Etter, Lukas 134, 135, 137 Fanning, Christopher 14 Feder, Georg 169 Feldman, Morton 157 Ferenz, Volker 101 Fergusson, James 221 Fibich, Zdenĕk 182 Fight Club 107 Finscher, Ludwig 166, 168 Fischer, Olga 14, 20, 61 Fleckner, Uwe 205 Fletcher, Chris 6, 7 Foer, Jonathan Safran 32, 33, 35, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 54, 55 Fónagy, Ivan 60, 61, 65

Index Fox, Sam 90 Franconis de Colonia 157 Franklin, Benjamin 50 Freedman, Jonathan 35 Frey, Hugo 130 Fröhlich, Vincent 128 Frye, Northrop 65 Gabilliet, Jean-Paul 128 Galassi, Susan Grace 205 Gardiner, John Eliot 18 Gardner, Jared 128, 134, 135, 137, 143 Gavin, Joanna 71 Genette, Gérard 11, 138 Germann, Georg 220 Gibson, Mel 128 Gibson, Pamela Church 101 Gijsbrecht, Cornelis Norbertus 23 Gijsbrechts, Cornelis Norbertus 209, 210 Gilot, Françoise 201 Ginastera, Alberto 212 Ginsberg, Allen 74 Gioia, Ted 67 Godard, Jean-Luc 102, 115 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 51 Goldberg, Elkhonon 84 Goldschmidt, Berthold 212 Göllner, Theodor 157 Gomringer, Eugen 1, 8, 13 Goodfellas 112 Gorbman, Claudia 92 Grabher, Gudrun 5 Greenberg, Clement 240 Greengrass, Paul 120 Gregory, Roberta 126 Griffith, David Wark 105 Groensteen, Thierry 129, 133, 134 Guardini, Romano 231, 232, 234, 239 Hallberg, Garth Risk 32, 33, 34, 45, 46, 48, 55 Händel, Georg Friedrich 11, 21 Harrigan, Pat 142 Hawkins, Screamin’ Jay 98 Haydn, Joseph 22, 156, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170 Hayles, N. Katherine 35, 40 Hayward, Jennifer 140, 142 Heaney, Seamus 10, 11 Helbig, Felix 208

253

Index Hemingway, Ernest 69, 70, 71, 72, 73 Henry, Anne C. 64 Hentschel, Frank 95, 96, 97 Herdina, Philip 3 Herman, David 130 Herriman, George 126, 127 Hertzberg, Ludvig 117 Hickethier, Knut 128 Higgins, Charlotte 95 Hill, John 101 Hindemith, Paul 188 Hitchcock, Alfred 107, 108, 109, 110 Hitler, Adolf 94 Hoener, Martin 193, 208, 209, 210, 211, 213, 214, 215 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 178, 179, 229 Hofstadter, Douglas 60 Holtz, William 15 Horace 218 Huston, John 19 Ici et Ailleurs 102 Infantino, Carmine 145 Ingarden, Roman 7, 129, 149, 204 Inge, M. Thomas 128 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 199, 205, 206, 207, 208, 213 Iser, Wolfgang 5, 17, 44, 46, 128, 129, 130, 131, 134, 137, 140, 149, 163, 204 Jackson, Don 10 Jakobson, Roman 224, 232 Jannidis, Fotis 149 Jarmusch, Jim 97, 98, 117, 118, 119 Jaszoltowski, Saskia 91, 92 Jauss, Hans Robert 129 Jaworski, Adam 5 Jeanne Dielman 107, 109, 110, 111 Jencks, Charles 221, 222, 237, 238 Jenkins, Henry 144 Jessner, Ulrike 5 Jonze, Spike 111, 117 Joyce, James 19, 66, 72 Kahn, Louis 217 Kandinsky, Wassily 70 Karajan, Herbert von 183 Katschthaler, Karl 88

Kaufmann, Emil 218 Kear, Jon 199, 200, 201, 202 Keazor, Henry 196 Kelleter, Frank 126, 138, 140, 142, 144, 145 Kemp, Wolfgang 204 Kerouac, Jack 74 Klee, Paul 70 Koester, Olaf 209 Kooning, Willem de 201 Krämer, Felix 208 Kramer, Lawrence 186 Kraus, Karl 229 Krauss, Rosalind 217, 236, 237 Kröger, Karin 21 Kubrick, Stanley 95 Kuhn, Markus 149 Kukkonen, Karin 140, 149 Kurzon, Dennis 7 Laass, Eva 101 Lake, Carlton 201 Lantier, Claude 200 L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat 105 La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon 105 Lebow, Alisa 103 Le Corbusier 221, 223 Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas 218, 219, 223 Lee, A. Robert 73 Leech, Geoffrey 61 Le Fur, Yves 201 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 162 Les Quatre Cents Coups 112 Levin, Phillis 12 Ligeti, György 95, 96, 97 L’illusionniste fin de siècle 114 Lindenberger, Herbert 173 Lissa, Zofia 92, 96, 97, 158 Liszt, Franz 183 Lodge, David 65, 66, 68, 73 Lohse, Rolf 133 Loos, Adolf 222, 223, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 240, 241 Love, Jeremy 134, 135 Lumière, Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas 105 Lumière, Louis Jean 105 Lutes, Jason 136, 137 Lyons, James 128

254 Mabuse, Jan Mabuse, JanJan Gossaert; Jenni Gosart;Jennyn van Hennegouwe 196 Mackenzie, Henry 15 Mahler, Gustav 50, 157 Mair, Christian 7 Malevich, Kazimir 22, 23, 24, 27, 36, 208 Mars-Jones, Adam 83 Marx, Andreas 235 Massenet, Jules 187 Mathieu, Marc-Antoine 132 Matisse, Henri 70 Mayer, Ruth 144 McBride, Eimear 59, 62, 66, 67, 71, 74, 75, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84 McCarthy, Tom 71 McCloud, Scott 127, 131, 132, 137, 138, 149 McCully, Marilyn 205 McEwan, Ian 69, 70 Meier, Stefan 144 Meise, Katrin 9 Meister Eckhart 233 Méliès, George 105, 114 Meljac, Eric Paul 19, 20 Melville, Herman 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214 Mendelssohn, Moses 162 Mendgen, Eva 24 Messiaen, Olivier 50, 51 Metz, Christian 102, 104 Michel, Berit 40 Michelsen, Martina 14 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 217, 223, 230, 232, 233, 234, 235, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242 Mignola, Mike 138, 139 Millar, Mark 148 Miller, Frank 148 Miodrag, Hannah 130 Mittell, Jason 146 Monaco, James 101 Moravia, Alberto 212 Morris, Christopher 186, 187 Morrison, Grant 139, 141 Moser, Sibylle 60 Mozart, Leopold 159 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 51, 180, 183 Müller, Wolfgang G. 60, 61, 64

Index Murray, Henry 213 Nänny, Max 12 Neumeyer, Fritz 230, 232, 235, 236, 237, 239, 240 Nichols, Bill 103, 104 Nicol, Gabriele 209, 211 Nitsch, Hermann 74 Nono, Luigi 157 Norman, Monty 93 Norton, Beverly J. 36 Nöth, Winfried 60 Olson, Gary M. 79 O’Neil, Dennis 142 Orth, Dominik 107 O’Toole, Fintan 71, 75, 81 Owen, Wilfred 12, 20 Packard, Stephan 133 Paolini, Giulio 22 Parker, Charlie 74 Parker, Roger 173, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 186, 187, 188 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 103 Pearson, Roberta 142, 144 Peirce, Charles Sanders 20 Penderecki, Krzysztof 97 Penrose, Roland 202 Pérez, George 144 Petermann, Emily 55 Picasso, Pablo 193, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 213, 214 Picht, Aaron 98 Pinter, Harold 71 Poe, Edgar Allan 5 Pollock, Jackson 74 Porter, Edwin S. 105 Pound, Ezra 66 Pourbus, François 195, 196, 197, 202 Poussin, Nicolas 195, 196, 197 Powers, Richard 32, 34, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 55 Pressman, Jessica 35 Prince, Gerald 5 Prokofiev, Sergei 182 Puccini, Giacomo 181 Pulini, Massimo 212 Pulp Fiction 115

255

Index Pustz, Matthew J. 128, 138 Quintilianus 220 Rajewsky, Irina O. 4 Rammstein 94 Raphael 199, 207 Rauschenberg, Robert 22, 24, 36, 208 Reicher, Walter 169 Reich, Steve 52 Reni, Guido 212 Revers, Peter 21 Riefenstahl, Leni 94 Rieser, Klaus 5 Riesman, David 224 Riethmüller, Albrecht 92 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith 101 Ring, The 115 Rippl, Gabriele 134, 135, 137 Rivera, Diego 202 Robillard, Douglas 213 Roemer, Werner 230 Rosemary’s Baby 112 Rosen, Elisheva 194 Ross, Alex 132 Rossini, Gioachino 184 Rousseau, Jean-Jaques 182 Ryan, Marie-Laure 4, 129, 130, 149 Said, Edward 89 Sander, Emmanuel 60 Sauval, Henri 196 Say, Jean Baptiste 218 Schäfer, Armin 21 Schlingensief, Christoph 176 Schmidt, Johann N. 149 Schoenberg, Arnold 73, 181, 182 Scholderer, Otto 208, 213 Schubert, Franz 13, 182 Schulz, Bruno 40, 41, 42, 43, 54 Schulze, Martin 14 Schwarz, Maria 230 Schwarz, Rudolf 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 240, 241 Scott, Fred 142 Scott, Kate 65, 67, 79, 82 Sedlmayr, Hans 234 Sennett, Richard 224

Serper, Zvika 101 Seume, Gottfried 188 Shakespeare, William 7, 8 Shelley, Mary 212 Sherlock Holmes Baffled 114 Short, Mick H. 61 Sibelius, Jean 186 Silverman, Kaja 106, 122 Simmel, Georg 236 Singer, Shirley 146 Smart, Mary Ann 186 Smith, John Rubens 213 Soeder, Hans 234, 235 Sokolow, Michael 128 Sontag, Susan 32, 56 Speer, Albert 95 Springfield, Dusty 116 Stam, Robert et al. 102, 104, 106, 112 Starre, Alexander 35, 39, 43, 44, 126 Stein, Daniel 5, 126, 128, 130, 134, 135, 138, 140, 142, 143, 145 Steiner, Max 92, 93, 95 Steinke, Anthrin 107 Steirer, Gregory 128 Stendhal, Marie-Henri 212 Sterne, Laurence 13, 14, 15, 17, 26, 67, 68, 69, 72 Stevens, J. Richard 138 Sting 99 Stoichita, Victor 23 Stranger than Paradise 113, 117, 118, 119 Strauss, Richard 173, 178, 179, 180, 181, 186, 192 Suleiman, Susan R. 204 Sullivan, Louis 221 Sulzer, Johann Georg 159 Swallow Prior, Karin 74, 75 Tafuri, Manfredo 217, 222, 234, 236, 244 Talmy, Leonard 62, 80 Tarantino, Quentin 115, 117 Tauriello, William 146 Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilich 157 Thatcher, Margaret 11 Thoene, Tina 108 Thoma, Hans 208, 213 Thon, Jan-Noël 130 Thoss, Jeff 140, 144

256 Tinctoris, Johannes 156, 157 Tinterow, Gary 205 Titanic 113 Trier, Lars von 93, 94, 95 Twain, Mark 45 Uidhir, Christy Mag 126 Uricchio, William 142, 144 Vainiomäki, Tiina 18 Valéry, Paul 65 Vasari, Giorgio 218 Verbinski, Gore 116 Verdi, Giuseppe 178, 183, 189 Verdi, Richard 195 Vernallis, Carol 115 Vidler, Anthony 218 Vitruvius 220 Vollard, Ambroise 200, 202, 203 Wagner, Richard 18, 174, 176, 177, 179, 183, 184, 185, 186 Walsh, Timothy 25 Walter, Michael 22 Wardrip-Fruin, Noah 142 Watkins, Eric 161 Watt, Ian 67, 68

Index Watzlawick, Paul 9, 10 Weber, Carl Maria von 182, 183 Weber, Paul 235 Weisstein, Ulrich 179, 180, 183, 188 Wheelock, Gretchen A. 163, 169, 170 White, John 60 Williams, Paul 128 Williams, Terry Tempest 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 43, 44, 51, 53, 54, 55 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 3, 52, 229 Wolfman, Marv 144 Wolf, Werner 4, 8, 9, 12, 21, 33, 40, 44, 55, 59, 88, 106, 116, 126, 127, 130, 131, 134, 149, 170, 194, 208, 240 Woo, Benjamin 128 Wood, Aylish 115 Wood, James 74, 80 Woolf, Virginia 66, 73 Worringer, Wilhelm 200, 201 Wurlitzer, Rudolph 71 Yacavone, Daniel 101 Zamecnik,John Stepan 90 Zenck, Martin 157, 158 Zervos, Christian 205 Zola, Émile 200