The Pictorial Third: An Essay Into Intermedial Criticism 9781138599017, 9780429485992

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The Pictorial Third

The Pictorial Third: An Essay into Intermedial Criticism examines the extent to which poetry intertwines with painting and the visual at large, and studies the singular relationship established between language and image, observing the modalities and workings of what is termed “intermedial transposition.” By following a critical method of the close analysis of texts, the book examines to what extent the “pictorial” tool may be of help to analyse literary texts and thus enlarge and enrich literary criticism. Examining the technical notions typical of the medium and its history, including perspective, framing, colour, anamorphosis, trompel’œil, Veronica veil, still life, portrait, figure, illusion, apparatus, genres, and styles, this volume presents a pragmatics of image-in-text and of the visual-in-text as an operative tool. This “pictorial” reading necessarily includes synaesthesia and the senses; it also functions as a reading event, or what happens to one when one unawares encounters a picture (be it present in the book or the object of an ekphrasis). Thus, the body is eventually given back a role to play. The sensitive approach has its own resonances, and the eye or the gaze sometimes sees double in such intermedially oriented texts. This volume proposes to identify the pictorial third as the phenomenon that can be apprehended in terms of effect or affect not only as a concept. Dr. Liliane Louvel is Emerita Professor at the University of Poitiers, France, and the President of the European Society for the Study of ­English. She received the title of Chevalier dans l’ordre de la Légion d’Honneur, the highest National Order or award in France, in 2011. She has published numerous articles and books on the interrelationship ­between word and image, including: L’œil du texte (Toulouse PUM, 1998), The Picture of Dorian Gray, Le double miroir de l’art (Ellipses, 2000), Texte/image, images à lire et textes à voir (Rennes PUR, 2002), Le tiers pictural (PUR, 2010) and Poetics of the Iconotext, Translation by Laurence Petit, edited by Karen Jacobs (Ashgate, July 2011).

Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory

The Waste Fix Seizures of the Sacred from Upton Sinclair to the Sopranos William G. Little Figures of Finance Capitalism Writing, Class and Capital in Mid-Victorian Narratives Borislav Knezevic The Other Orpheus A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality Merrill Cole The Individual and the Authority Figure in Egyptian Prose Literature Yona Sheffer The Pictorial Third An Essay into Intermedial Criticism Liliane Louvel Edited and Translated by Angeliki Tseti

For a full list of titles published in the series, please visit www.routledge.com

The Pictorial Third An Essay into Intermedial Criticism

Liliane Louvel Edited and Translated by Angeliki Tseti

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of Liliane Louvel to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data CIP data has been applied for. ISBN: 978-1-138-59901-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-48599-2 (ebk) Translated from the original French by Angeliki Tseti. When the official French to English translation wasn’t available, the author has used their own Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Preface

vii

P rofessor J ulie L eblanc

Introduction: Two or Three “Ideas for Research” 1 1 Language and Image 4 2 L’ut Pictura Poesis, Daverro

55

3 Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards PicturoCriticism: In the Painter-Poet’s Studio: Borrowing from Art History 81 4 Poetics of the Pictorial (II): In the Painter-Poet’s Studio: Questions of Form 114 5 The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns 164 Closing Remarks 207 Bibliography Index

209 225

Preface Professor Julie Leblanc

The complex network of relationships woven between literary texts from various historical, linguistic, cultural contexts and various forms of images (painted, drawn, photographic, cinematic, “ekphrasis”) have been the object of many fields of inquiry: semiotics, rhetoric, narratology, art history, cinematographic studies, theories of perception, genetic criticism, and numerous forms of textual analysis. The multidisciplinary nature of word and image studies requires that we consider the modalities which are at play in the construction of these various forms of intermedial transpositions. The main objective of Pictorial Third is to construct a theoretical and analytical framework where word/image relationships can be treated in a more reconciliatory, less hierarchal fashion, more like a dialectic. The Pictorial Third argues for an intellectual exchange between the interacting forces at play in the multidisciplinary study of word and image relationships. What emerges from Louvel’s indepth theoretical study and analytical endeavors is a certain willingness to treat language and images as “two partners who sometimes compete with one another,” complement each other, “mistrust” one another while looking at collaborating with one another (J. Marizot, Interfaces: text and image, p. 14). One of the great assets of Louvel’s monograph is her conceptual and methodological presentations of numerous questions related to word and image interactions. She is an accomplished pedagogue, and her presentation of ancient and modern concepts and their application to literary and visual media are done with precision and continuously display a sensitivity towards readers who may wish to use her conceptualisation of word/image interactions for the analysis of other literary corpus’s and visual media. In this long-awaited English translation of Le Tiers pictural. Pour une critique intermediale (PURennes, 2010), L ­ iliane Louvel pursues and expands on her theorisation and analysis of various forms of word and image interactions which were the focus of previous monographs: L’Œil du texte, texte et image dans la littérature anglophone (1998), The Picture of Dorian Gray, Le double visage de l’art (2000), Texte/image, Images à lire textes à voir (2002), Poetics of the ­Iconotext (translated by Laurence Petit and edited by Karen Jacobs [2011]). Her

viii  Professor Julie Leblanc theoretical and analytical rigour is also displayed in numerous edited/ co-edited volumes focused on the interdisciplinary nature of word and image studies: La licorne, Like Painting, Texte et image dans la littérature anglophone, EJES: The Visual and the Written, La ­réticence: Texte/ image, La licorne: L’illisible, Littérature et photographie, ­L’intensité: forme et régimes d’intensité. These numerous publications have become fundamental texts for researchers eager to explore the multidimensional, interdisciplinary, multilingual, and multicultural nature of word and image relationships. With the publication of the Poetics of the Iconotext and this latest translation of her extremely well-reviewed Le Tiers ­Pictural, Louvel initiates another dialogue between French and Anglophone traditions on the complex intersections of text and image relationships. Written with the same theoretical discipline, analytical sensitivity, and interdisciplinary demeanour adopted in her other monographs, The Pictorial Third is an expansion of previous publications. She adopts a detailed taxonomic demeanor to study the modalities which underlie various forms of intermedial transpositions. The conceptual and methodological approaches explored by Louvel allow her to propose a typology of image/text relationships, to develop methodologies for the visual analysis of literary texts, and to expand upon existing phenomenologies of reading constructed to take into account the complexities of visually oriented texts. Her typology of texts graded by their degree of visual saturation and her proposed categorisation of various textual subgenres constructed around the criteria of pictorial density represents a rich and innovative way to analyse the heterogeneity of word and image relationships. To explore the modalities of various forms of intermedial transpositions, Louvel ventures into a thorough historical and theoretical analysis of word/image relationships which takes her from a detailed analysis of the art of transposing images into words, words into images, to an intermedial poetics of word/image interactions (“poetics of the pictorial”) and its relationship to pictorial allusions, iconotexts, ekphrasis, synaesthesia, performativity, and phenomenology. The study of intermedial transpositions leads Louvel to consider numerous questions which she attempts to answer throughout the Pictorial Third: what are the pragmatic, aesthetic, and poetic specificities of the word/image relationships within literary texts; which functions does the image-intext fulfil, how are pictorial and interpictorial references constructed, are they visual modulations, do they serve as an aesthetic enhancement, do they enlighten, complement, complicate the reading process; how does description, ekphrasis, pictorial allusions, and iconographic representations differ from one another on the hermeneutical level; what are the cultural ramifications of a literary text that introduces a textual or iconographic pictorial representation (photograph, painting, drawings, etc.); how does the introduction of an image affect the literary texts’ narrative and discursive form and content; should concepts of alterity,

Preface  ix hybridity, and plurality be referenced in the study of word and image relationships; can a typology of the multiple effects created by the pictorial third be conceived by taking into account generic considerations, the degree of visual saturation/pictorial density, etc. The intermedial critical typology introduced at the end of The Pictorial Third organises various forms of internal/external pictorial references, its different modes of manifestation at the microtextual level (anamorphosis, colour, photography architecture, ekphrasis), different generic occurrences (“trompe l’oeil,” still life, portraits, historical paintings, etc.), its macro-textual functions (collages, “mise en abyme,” mosaics, etc.) and stylistic distinctions (gothic, baroque, pointillism, cubism, impressionism, etc.). This detailed typology is a sophisticated attempt to sort out different forms of intermedial exchanges while respecting the fact that their fluidity, hybridity, and heterogeneity are important to respect as they are fundamental to any expansive study of intermedial transpositions. Referencing the title of her book, Louvel’s analysis of the pictorial third is related to the notion of “efficacy”: how can pictorial elements construct meaning, evoke an experience, create an effect, supplement, reinforce, and in certain contexts subvert the text that it is embedded within. This “in-between place” that Louvel calls the “pictorial third” is the result of the linguistic description of a pictorial phenomenon. When the pictorial is put into words, it attracts attention to the tension that exists between the text, which has had an artistic, optical, and photographic quality imposed upon it. The instability of the text/image relationship which the reader faces places him in what Louvel refers to as the “in-between”: during the process of translation, transposition, transaction between the text and the image, the reader is constantly oscillating between the inner and outer circles of the pictorial experience. The pictorial third can carry erotic undertones, have the power to jostle the reader/viewers actualisation of the pictorial text, and allow for a reconceptualisation of particular types of descriptions. Despite the complex nature of intermedial transpositions and its hermeneutical ramifications, Louvel suggests that unlike certain theorists, her vision is much less “war like” and more conciliatory in terms of the way word and image relationships have been conceived in the past. As she points out in her introduction, this more open demeanour towards this problematic is inspired by the fact that both literary and art histories have shown that the “two arts may perfectly coexist.” After an extremely thorough and thought provoking theoretical and analytical parcours which transports us through many historical, cultural, and linguistic contexts, always taking time to accentuate the interdisciplinary nature of text and image relationships, Louvel reiterates with conviction what her monograph so convincingly displays, more precisely that the text and image relationship is not a “mortal combat” but an “energetic collaboration.” It is this dialectical oscillation that culminates into the “pictorial third,”

x  Professor Julie Leblanc this “synaesthesia,” this “in-between moment” when the “rippling text inclines towards the image, when the image rises between the lines” and the readers mind is present to actualise and intellectualise this interaction. The study of text/image relationships have important repercussions as it invites us to think about the intricate functioning of language, the phenomenological nature of images, and our comprehension of the socio-­historical and cultural context in which words and images are constructed and the complexities underlying a thorough analysis of their dialectical relationship. The Pictorial Third is divided into five chapters which are punctuated with a wide range of literary and artistic examples. They offer us valuable insights into historical, multilingual, multicultural, and theoretical complexities of literary-pictorial phenomenon. The introduction draws attention to the many complexities of word and image interactions: it is punctuated with important references and presents an original perspective on the topic at hand. The book begins with theoretical considerations and moves into a theorisation of word and image relationships, to the analysis of literary and artistic mediums which serves to show the applicability of the many theoretical concepts introduced and applied to the analysis of various literary and artistic media. The introductory chapter to Louvel’s monograph (“Language and Image”) clearly outlines her theoretical stance; she conceives the age-long relationship of word and image relationship as a dialectic, not as an interrelationship based on the imperialism of language. The task at hand is to explore the modalities of the intersemiotic transposition which is at play within any medium which display an interest for the complexities of word and image relationships: the concept of intermedial transposition is suggested by Louvel as a more appropriate term to study the relationship between poetry, painting, and other forms of intersemiotic and intermedial relationships. Her other objective articulated in this chapter pertains to the suggestion that applying Horace’s ut pictura poesis (poetry like painting) may serve as a means to reverse the hierarchal domination of language. She very astutely suggests through a close reading of literary texts how the pictorial can be used as a tool to analyse literature, putting linguistic methodologies in second place for the reading and analysis of iconotexts. The introduction ends with references to the reader’s physical (eyes, mind, inner screen, gaze, vision) reactions to images represented in literary texts. The questions of affect and percept (Didi Huberman, Nancy, etc.) are proposed as important elements in any analysis of intermedial ­ hapter 2, transpositions and of iconotexts. “L’Ut Pictura Poesis, Daverro,” C is dedicated to the many functions of the pictorial, understood as what constitutes an image. Its modes of manifestations are related to the reading process and to the pictorial third that Louvel defines in this chapter of her monograph as “what happens, what appears” in the readers mind when she is faced with the task of processing relationship between words

Preface  xi and the images in a given context. The poetics or poïetics of the pictorial allows Louvel to renew the analysis of literary texts which express writer’s nostalgia for the “sister arts” (Proust, Simon, Bonnefoy, Eliot, Wilde, Byatt, Brookner, Winterson, Woolf, Gautier, Zola, James, etc.). As ­Louvel suggests, in the literary texts of numerous writers from various linguistic and cultural origins, painting often holds up a mirror to literature reflecting its objectives, aesthetic, and formal choices. Some of the conclusions drawn in this chapter are focused on inviting us to think of the natural parallels between the arts and how the transitions from language to vision and language to painting are drawn by so many writers with varying linguistic backgrounds. Chapter 3 (“Poetics of the pictorial. Towards picturo-criticism. In the painter-poet’s studio: borrowing from art history”) is focused on creating a context in which art history and critical literary discourse can dialogue with one another. From the perspective of art history, L. Louvel attempts to explore numerous questions of genre, styles, schools of paintings, and its relationship to literature: she quotes, amongst others, Melville and Josipovici as textual examples which are used to lay the ground of an intermedial poetics of word-­ image interactions. This is a brilliant theoretical and critical chapter accentuating L. Louvel’s talent as a theorist, knowledgeable scholar in art history, and close reader of iconotexts which problematise the word and image relationship and its historical and iconographic complexities. ­“Poetics of the Pictorial (II) in the Painter-Poet’s Studio: Questions of Form” aims at exploring the framing effects, perspective, various forms of pictorial intricacies such as “anamorphosis,” “trompe-l’oeil,” and the textual apparata (“dispositif”) that reflect the practices of the visual such as image, paintings, or photographs. The study of margins, frames, artistic frames, structural mountings, the absence of frames in modern art, the generic aspect of frames, their relationship to descriptive, narrative, beginnings and endings, and what Louvel calls the “generic framing of the text” (Hamon) offers us incredible insights into the historical functions of framing that go back to “quadro riportato” and continue to be exploited by classical postmodern writers. The question of perspective or the optical effects of vision follow the numerous pages dedicated to the heterogeneous nature of framing. Space and perspective are treated in this chapter as three different but adjoining problems: pictorial/textual perspective and the infinite dialogue created by textual interplay which are informed by artistic productions. After a thorough presentation of Panovsky’s theorisation of perspective and representation (“A fully perspectival view of space […] is when the entire picture has been transformed […] and we are led to believe that we are looking through this window of space” [Panovsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, p. 27]), Louvel turns to two paradigmatic paintings, “La Meninas” and “The Ambassadors,” to study how questions of representation are related to the artists’ desire to organise “views and visions,” to compromise the

xii  Professor Julie Leblanc integrity of the contemplative self, and to treat paintings as interceptive intersections which interpose themselves like a “visual pyramid.” ­Turning to Marin, Lacan, Deleuze, Foucaul, Agamben, and Ortel in her use of the term “dispositifs” (“a set of practices and mechanisms of a linguistic, nonlinguistic, juridical, technical and military nature” ­Agamben, p. 8), Louvel attempts to illustrate through a series of textual references the proliferation of iterations that the notion of apparatus can unravel when it is specifically related to pictorial practices. Perec, Dunca, Sebald, Byatt, Danielewski are all referenced in an attempt to show how the persistent presence of images within these writers’ literary texts behave like “desiring machines” (Deleuze) which annoys and at the same time seduces the reader faced with elaborate antithetical techniques (“anamorphosis” and “trompe-l’oeil”). These pictorial apparatuses (“dispositifs”) take on many forms all aimed at masking various levels of representation, multiplying them, mirroring constructions, creating montages, disrupting representation, and challenging our syntagmatic reading of the texts, which manipulate and explore these intricate visual phenomena. The chapter ends with a detailed and intermedial critical typology which is constructed to take into account the internal/­external presence of pictorial references, their modes of manifestations at the microtextual level, and their patterning functions at the macro-textual level. The last chapter, “The Pictorial Third. When the Body Returns,” distinguishes itself from the preceding four chapters by its focus on the senses which are triggered during the reading of pictorial allusions, iconotexts, and intermedial transpositions. This chapter presents various phenomenological approaches to word and image relationships, pictorial citations, and the concept of allusion. The premise of this chapter is to explore how the introduction of textual images within literary texts gives rise to a double experience between reading and seeing. This doubling effect (seeing, reading-understanding, and translating) has a performative quality in respect to pictorial allusions. After a thorough theoretical presentation of the concept of allusion and its relationship to ekphrasis and synaesthesia, Louvel moves onto a close reading of a series of literary texts which exploit the use of pictorial allusions. The chapter is concluded with thought-provoking notions of what constitutes the pictorial third: “the in-between moment, the desire of one for the other, the moment when the rippling, ruffling text – in the recognising reader’s mind – inclines towards the image and vice versa.” In The Pictorial Third, Liliane Louvel has not only displayed an original, leading-edge theoretical and critical perspective on word/­ image interactions, but she has made this innovative thought-provoking ­theoretical/critical writing also extremely useful to researchers (theorists, critics, art historians, artists, students from various disciplines) dedicated to deciphering the intricacies of word and images relationships. Her in-depth analysis of the multiple effects of the pictorial third

Preface  xiii are an attestation to her talent as a theorist and literary critic and to her impressive knowledge of art history. Her systematic study of the “tiers pictural” and its relevance to literature, the visual arts, and word and image interactions gives rise to sophisticated proposals on the intricacies of the interdisciplinary nature of this field of inquiry. Intimidating metalinguistic discourse so often used in intermedial studies is not present in this book despite the complex multidisciplinary nature of word and image studies and the multilinguistic corpus that Louvel has chosen to explore. What also clearly distinguishes L. Louvel’s perspective from numerous books dedicated to word and image interactions is the manner in which she so profoundly explores within a variety of literary genres the diversity of the mediums exploited, the originality of her theorisation of word and image interactions. The Pictorial Third is a daring and innovative study which exhibits an impressive command of the theoretical worlds of literary and visual studies. Liliane Louvel’s lifelong interests in the infinite dialogues between text/image relations is beautifully presented in this exemplary text which will transport readers well beyond their theoretical and analytical scopes and enhance their understanding of the complexities embedded into the vicarious pursuit of deciphering the seductive dialectic of word and image interactions. by Professor Julie Leblanc, University of Toronto, Canada

Introduction Two or Three “Ideas for Research”

L’art est le dehors où le dedans s’exile pour se voir. Il est le retournement sans retour.

Bernard Noël1

This work starts with the acknowledgement that if one wants to deal with the relationship between image and language in fairness, one has to take into account the age-long submission of the former to the latter. As we shall see, Lessing himself envisaged the relation between poetry and painting in terms of “genres” whereas other critics saw it as an interrelationship based on the imperialism of language. It is a fact that “the sister arts” have known many ups and downs and that their relation was a lot more agonistic than irenic. In one of my previous works, I suggested that this relationship might be conceived of in more friendly terms, as reconciliation, or, to be more precise, as a dialectic. 2 This is what I hope this book will also achieve amongst other things. First, then, I will try to see what kind of language “poetry” selected to engage with painting and with the image at large. What were the forms adopted for this exchange and to what extent can an image be called a “speaking” image? How did the oscillation between the discursive and the pictorial—and vice versa—occur? How was painting compelled to perform a poetic, “discursive” work? I will try to assess the singular relationship between word and image, to observe the modalities of what we call “intersemiotic transposition,” and replace, I would suggest, the term with the more appropriate “intermedial transposition” for reasons to which I shall return. The question of their “common measure,” if there is such a thing, in the sense of commensuratio, should enable me to examine the terms of a transaction operating in the economy of the visible-in-text—this, while taking into account the extent to which the terms commensuratio and oikonomia are heavily laden with reference to art history and its relationship with the divine. Second, I will attempt to show how, by applying Horace’s ut pictura poesis formula literally, truly “poetry like painting,” the habitual perception of painting, specifically the implicit hierarchy imposed by the

2  Introduction domination of language, may be reversed. Indeed, as far as critical analysis is concerned, it is surprising to realise how often this simile has been understood as “painting like poetry,” in terms of painting being “deciphered” by language, even “read” as a text. I will offer a critical method resting on close text analysis, so as to investigate to what extent the pictorial as a tool enables us to analyse the literary text (whereas until now it was the linguistic tool that has been widely applied to the visible). Of course, a lot of critics have already studied the manifestations of the pictorial in text, and numerous studies have already been devoted to the analysis of photography, the variations of the pictorial, and other semiotic mediators (mirrors, optical devices, tapestry, maps, etc.). What is new in my proposal, or, as Barthes formulates it, in my “idea for research,”3 is that I suggest trying to assemble these practices within a single critical cluster, in order to examine how they could constitute a theory—or at least a poetics, a poietics even—that would reverse canonical critical practice and could be called “a poetics of the pictorial.” I will argue that what has wrongly been called “the grammar of the visible,” “the vocabulary of painting,” or its “idiom”—namely technical notions directly related to the medium and its history, such as perspective, frames and framing effects, colour, anamorphosis, Veronica, stilllife painting, portrait, figure, illusion, apparatus, genres, styles, and so on—may be systematised and constitute an operative mode that opens what I once called “L’œil du texte,”4 the eye of the text. My aim is to avoid metaphor, symbolism, or allegory and to work on the line dividing the literary work—that is to say first and foremost the text, privileged as such in all its most intimate nooks and corners—from the techniques that are specific to the media referred to in the text, as well as art history. Ideally, this work should result in the acknowledgement of the existence of an apparatus that is specific to a visually-oriented text and in the proposition of a supple critical approach akin to a non-static system that does not exhibit any kind of rigidity or constraint. This approach could prove useful to literary analysis, for it would render unto the pictorial what it gave to literature; in other words, it would allow the pictorial to be recognised as such upon its manifestation. Eventually, this type of studies should culminate in giving the body back its full role, somewhat in the way of what Louis Marin called “a reading event,” and point to a process that leads to the emergence of what I call “the pictorial third”; I perceive this not only as a concept, but also in terms of event and affect. Pictorial reading includes synaesthesia, and the implication of the body in this reading process cannot be ignored; a sensible approach has its own resonances and rationale, and the eye sometimes sees double. What happens when a reader is faced with a text that suggests, describes, or alludes to the visual? How do we recognise the image? How is the description of a two-dimensional image distinguished from that of a three-dimensional one, and what are

Introduction  3 the differences between the two as far as their textual effects are concerned? How does the latter affect the literary text in a way a “simple” description of a 3D object would not produce? What does the image do in the text and to the text? To what extent is it different from allusion or literary quotation? What is its status? It is a matter, therefore, of establishing a pragmatics of the image-in-text, or, put more broadly so as to avoid reductions, 5of the visual-in-text. One can also evoke references to the graphic or plastic arts as they manifest themselves in the literary text (installations, interventions, performances, videos, etc.) for therein lies something that includes movement, the strength of the voice (in videos), or the presence of the body (in performances), so much so that one is taken further away from the so-called “frozen image,” that of easel painting, and closer to the animation arts stimulating body response—a fact that, in its turn, alters plastic and textual data. What I will focus on is how an image suggested by a text manifests itself and affects the reader’s body, their mind’s eye, or their inner screen. Can we speak of “double exposure,” double vision, or double gaze? Or is it rather an oscillation represented by the word/image couple, what I call the pictorial third? What are its effects? The question of affect following that of percept and of what an image actually does to a reader obviously lies at the core of this type of studies as well. This work is evidently the result of a double passion, that of literature and that of the image, predominantly painting, the graphic arts, photography, and cinema. It is in the daily exchange with these arts and their practices, as well as in my teaching, that my reflection found its terrain and that I could pass on some of this passion to my students. I want to offer my thanks here to all those who have at one time or another accompanied me in this visual journey.

Notes 1 Bernard Noël, Les Yeux dans la couleur, Paris: P.O.L., 2004. 19. 2 See: Liliane Louvel, Texte/image images à lire textes à voir, Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2002. 3 Roland Barthes, “An Idea for Research”, in The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989. 271–276. 272. 4 Liliane Louvel, L’œil du texte, Toulouse: PUM, 1998. 5 One should also return to the notions of the visual and the image. For a more detailed discussion, see: W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology, Chicago: Chicago UP, 1986, and What do Pictures Want?, Chicago: Chicago UP, 2005; also, Philippe Hamon, Imageries, Paris: José Corti, 2001.

1 Language and Image

But the problem of writing is also inseparable from a problem of seeing and hearing: in effect, when another language is created within language, it is language in its entirety that tends toward an “asyntactic,” “agrammatical” limit, or that communicates with its own outside. The limit is not outside language, it is the outside of language. It is made up of visions and auditions that are not of language, but which language alone makes possible. There is also a painting and a music characteristic of writing, like the effects of colors and sonorities that rise up above words. It is through words, between words, that one sees and hears. [...] “ill seen ill said,” she is a colorist, a musician. Gilles Deleuze1

The Word/Image Relationship: A Difficult Dialogue The relatively recent field of intermediality and the study of word/image relationships necessarily raised a number of theoretical questions that must be duly addressed. Before questioning the conditions allowing for the possibility of word/image transposition, it is necessary to refer to the bases of this practice, so as to be able to build on safe grounds. The word/image relationship is a complex issue, and, ever since Leonardo’s paragone, it has been conceived in antagonistic terms, as a relationship of domination corresponding to different preoccupations: the historical point of view and the inclination to protect different fields of research, the ghost of iconoclasm, the gender-oriented vision, or the imperialist (even colonial) one. Having already proposed a more reconciled view, 2 I will start with an overview of these positions, which will be brief since, despite the weight of this question, a comprehensive analysis of word/ image history is beyond the scope of this study. 3 The Fear of the Other: A Long History of Domination As far as art history is concerned, the aphorism coined by Simonides, if Plutarch is to be believed, implies that painting is an instance of mute poetry, while poetry is a speaking painting: pictura loquens, poesis tacens

Language and Image  5 (“painting is a silent poem, poetry a verbal painting”). This aphorism is in itself a manifest example of dissymmetry.4 Indeed, not only is poetry endowed with the qualities of painting, but it is also endowed with a positive quality, that of speech. Conversely, when paralleled to poetry, painting is afflicted with a negative exponent, that of dumbness. Silence might be seen as positive in some respects, but being dumb means being deprived of the ability to speak, and, therefore, it denotes a lack, while constituting an inhibiting factor, which in this case becomes the leading argument. Following Gérard Dessons’s clear distinction between mutism, in the sense of refusing to speak, withdrawing into silence, and mutity, in other words the impossibility of speaking, 5 this parallel appoints the superior position to Poetry; Language is the determining criterion, the measure of it all. And the notions of measure and the incommensurable rank first in the so-called “intersemiotic” studies (a term I will keep for the time being). As Ernest B. Gilman notes in his paper for Poetics Today, as far as the word/image relationship—illustrated by Horace’s formula ut pictura poesis6 and Leonardo’s paragone—is concerned, the question of the former’s superiority over the latter is, in fact, an ancient topos.7 Phrases such as “the colours of rhetoric” or “the eloquence of colour”8 testify to this relation of comparability to the supposedly rival art and reiterate an old rhetoric, since Coypel, in his Parallèle de l’éloquence et de la peinture(1749), had already pinned the power of the verb against that of colour. Gilman writes an elaborate review of a whole range of theories and critical stances, amongst which that of certain art historians denouncing the domination of language and its attempts to colonise the image. Panovsky’s work, specifically his distinction between iconology and iconography, is significant in this debate where some critics advocate a strict separation between the two arts with a view to preserving their “purity,” while others tend to assimilate or at least confuse them. Between those two extremes lies a wide range of positions, the numerous nuances of which could only be accounted for by way of a gradient. The art historian blames language for ignoring a work’s pictorial mores to the benefit of the texts written about this work, which speaks of a fear of critical allegiance. A contrario, the literary critic feels totally justified when analysing not only “writings on art”9 but also literary pieces figuring painting or the image in general. In fact, as I will try to show in the second part of this book, even though the fields differ, their collaboration may be fruitful. At the same time, the fear that the image may be subordinated to language actually speaks of an act of defence to a deeply rooted anxiety. Gilman identifies this “new iconoclasm” as “the desire to see the image as language,”10 echoing the ancient quarrel between iconoclasts and iconophiles, for the image still seems to inspire a sense of threat to our civilisation that is, nevertheless, massively dependent on it. The

6  Language and Image use of language might function as a means of dissipating this fear, by catching image in the net of words in the manner of Parmiggianino’s famous drawing11 in which Vulcan, discovering Mars and Venus amorously employed, throws a net over them while his body nevertheless betrays a strong arousal. The magical aura of images was also studied at some length by Hans Belting,12 as well as W.J.T. Mitchell who, in Picture Theory13 and in What do Pictures Want?,14 acknowledges the power of images and contends that we are stuck with our magical premodern attitudes toward objects, especially pictures, and our task is not to overcome these attitudes but to understand them, to work through their symptomatology […] Magic portraits, masks, and mirrors, living statues, and haunted houses are everywhere in both modern and traditional literary narratives, and the aura of these imaginary images seeps into both professional and popular attitudes towards real pictures.15 The power of images also makes the title of a book by David Freedberg that begins with this staggering statement: People are sexually aroused by pictures and sculptures; they break pictures and sculptures; they mutilate them, kiss them, cry before them, and go on journeys to them; they are calmed by them, stirred by them, and incited to revolt. They give thanks by means of them, expect to be elevated by them, and are moved to the highest levels of empathy and fear. They have always responded in these ways; they still do.16 Freedberg, therefore, chooses to draw a parallel with Mondrian’s statement that “Curves are too emotional.” Our own cult of image is supposed to have begotten what Mitchell calls “the pictorial turn,” the world seen as image (while images, in turn, make their own worlds). This long-ranging dispute dates back to religious feuds at a time when Reformation used white coating to cover frescoes and wall paintings. The first argument was the interdict linked to the doctrine of Incarnation (and transubstantiation) and the impossibility to represent the Divine.17 Furthermore, word replaced images seen as too sensual, capable of leading into temptation and distracting the praying faithful, inciting them to engage in an act redolent of idol-worshipping and, thus, constituting a major sin. This may seem far from us but, in order to appreciate the extent of such mistrust, suffice it to read Marie-José Mondzain, among others,’ work on the matter, particularly her writings on the suspicion that images—predominantly televised images—in the aftermath of 9/11 become a source of urban violence. In Can Image kill?,18 specifically, Mondzain joins the debate around the power of images by discussing instances when incarnation is confounded with incorporation.

Language and Image  7 In Western Christian thought, our relation to the image and to images is indisputably tied to our freedom as well as to all that endangers this freedom, even to the point of destroying it. It is easier to prohibit seeing than to allow thinking. Images are controlled in order to guarantee the silence of thought, and when thought has lost its rights we accuse the image of perpetuating evil under the assumption that it is uncontrolled. The violence done to the image, that is the question […] Defending the image is to resist that which eliminates the alterity of the gaze that constructs the invisibility of meaning.19 And Mondzain reminds us of the use of such phrases as “the war of images” to underline how “the violence of situations of aggression is immediately articulated in the management of the visible and the transmission of discourses.”20 For the Protestants, according to Gilman, image is on the side of the flesh and of seduction, of illusion too, with language “playing the privileged (masculine) role of agent and mediator of sacred history and imagery confined to a static and treacherous silence in league with carnality and illusion.”21 For Aron Kibedi Varga also: Image converges with illusion, it lies. Religion generally proves hostile. Speech is of divine origin, it is good or coming after the sin, susceptible to corrections, [whereas] the image is dangerous, it seduces. The history of literature proves this. Ever since Petrarch, sensual love has originated in the gaze: « their eyes met », which is also the title of Jean Rousset’s beautiful book on the birth of love in literature. 22 This is, in part, what we see in Raphaelle Peale’s painting Venus After the Bath—A Deception; what Peale reveals of Venus will remain hidden behind the image of a veil, both as illusion and simulacrum, which also points to the power of the curtain as trompe-l’œil and to the myth lying at the origin of the painting: Parrhasios’s and his triumph over Zeuxis. In terms of gender, the image finds itself aligned with femininity, whereas the text is masculine, the former being subdued to the latter. For Wendy Steiner, “the feminine image and the masculine text have a long ideological history.”23 Of course, this division reminds one of Burke’s dichotomy between the sublime and the beautiful and of Lessing’s well-known oppositions (space/time, body/mind, silent/eloquent, beauty/sublimity, féminine/masculine, etc.) formulated in his famous ­L aocoön—which reveals regulated ideological oppositions based on genre and g­ ender—and summarised by Mitchell: “Paintings, like women, are ideally silent, beautiful creatures designed for the gratification of the eye, in contrast to the sublime eloquence proper to the manly

8  Language and Image art of poetry.”24 Let us just note that it is perhaps characteristic that the grammatical gender in French respects the dichotomy between painting (la peinture) and language (le langage), text (le texte), and image (l(a)’ image). The word/image relationship has also been envisioned in more politically oriented terms, borrowed from the colonial past of western nations; language, then, is charged with imperialism, hence Gilman’s title: “Interart Studies and the Imperialism of Language.”25 In this paper, Gilman addresses the issue by responding to Donald Kuspit, an art historian who attacks discourse and what he calls “literature” on the arts: “I want to use their work as an occasion to explore the question of a linguistic ‘imperialism’ from the art historian’s point of view before posing it again from the literary side of the fence.”26 As rightly perceived by the groupe mu in the sixties, the hegemony of the linguistic over the visual dims the specificity of the latter: The second malformation is the linguistic imperialism. It is during its formerly uncontested reign that the pure and simple transfer of terminology was operated: the theory of image accepted terms such as “syntax”, “articulation”, “seme”, which, for lack of a definition, were condemned to acting as but a handy metaphor […] (and then) an unjustified rejection, that of the confrontation between language and visual communication. By throwing the baby out with the bathwater, one is often deprived of the contributions made by other types of knowledge, such as optics, physiology of vision and the psychology of perception. 27 The so-called colonisation of image by discourse also raises issues of borders and the notion of transgression, which, as the writings of ­Virginia Woolf show, was already an issue of debate in modernist terms. Woolf’s choice of metaphors is telling. Writing about Walter Sickert, she expresses her conception of painting and the ways in which she felt self-conscious and out of her depths in front of what truly was “her sister’s art,”28 an art she saw as reserved and distant, confined in a somewhat unsettling mutism. It seemed that those who were not painters were rejected, placed in “the borders and margins,” sent towards the “periphery,” and treated like strangers—literally “outsiders,” those situated on the other side. The “silent land” remained there, unspoilt by language, beyond the human voice: Now they are going into the silent land; soon they will be out of reach of the human voice, two of the diners said, watching them. They are seeing things that we cannot see […] We must resign ourselves to the fact that we are outsiders, condemned for ever to haunt the borders and margins of this great art. 29

Language and Image  9 Yet, the eye of the mind and that of the body both try to make us see, as, painting and writing have much to tell each other: they have much in common. The novelist after all wants to make us see. […] They both speak at once, striking two notes to make one chord, stimulating the eye of the mind and of the body. 30 Therefore, the arts may find a common ground, however tiny, which Woolf sees in terms of a “sunny margin,” where “the arts flirt and joke and pay each other compliments.”31 Woolf offers a “Portrait of the artist” as a raider, for he is the one who plunders and borrows his techniques from the other art. When we talk of his [Walter Sickert’s] biographies, his novels, and his poems we may not be so foolish as it seems. Among the many kinds of artists, it may be that there are some who are hybrid. Some, that is to say, bore deeper and deeper into the stuff of their own art; others are always making raids into the land of others. Sickert it may be is among the hybrids, the raiders. 32 The phrases “to go beyond the outskirts,” “hybridity,” “the sunny margin,” and the artist as “raiders” reflect the notions of transgressions, of light and playful crossings over boundaries between two separate territories; these spatial metaphors evoke territorialisation and deterritorialisations that Gilles Deleuze would have approved of. The word “graphic” fuses the reference to the art of drawing with that of lifelike describing. Once more, the ancient classical tradition, that of Leonardo’s paragone resolved in favour of painting, is revived in Woolf’s discussion of the “sister arts” becoming “the sisters’ art,” as Diane Gillespie has suggested; it is a question of rivalry between sisters or between brothers, like the one Jacques Derrida had with his own brother painter, should one consider his Memoirs of the Blind.33 My vision is much less warlike, since, as both literary and art histories have shown, the two arts may perfectly coexist. When not conceived of in terms of combat, the word/image relationship is often approached in other, highly eloquent terms that introduce notions of purity and impurity, of the contamination of one by the other, dating back to the great fears of past centuries when plagues and epidemics wiped out huge portions of the European population. The concept of purity/impurity is also connected to another phobia, that of racism and of the so-called contamination of one race by another. This to show how powerful the stakes are in the dialogue between the arts. At the other end of the spectrum, leading from the pure to the impure, lays a more supple conception of this relationship, expressed through the notion of hybridity—an idea already advocated by Woolf, in true modernist terms. It is precisely the study of their coexistence and, subsequently, the exploration of the

10  Language and Image tensions and exchanges between the two arts that reveal the possible passages. The study of these phenomena, which we will temporarily call, following others, “artistic” or “intersemiotic” transpositions, will take place on the frontiers and on the margins of the ever-moving realm of interartistic tensions. To return to Gilman, There is in computer science (another imperialistic field, and one threatening to transform our fundamental concepts of text and image) the curious concept of “virtual” memory: a program can be written to assume that some non existent piece of hardware or software is really there and to reap the benefits of that erroneous assumption. ­Perhaps interart criticism would profit from our acknowledging a similar legerdemain. As dialectical categories, pictorial textuality and literary pictorialism both encode a virtual relationship between the system of representation actually on the page or on the canvas and the other that cannot be “there” at all. Yet the tensions and reciprocities between the two members of this virtual partnership remain the proper object of our study, and the sophistication of the work being done on both sides of the disciplinary fence encourages us to keep talking.34 The idea of a virtual image, what Descartes called “real image,” and of the existence of an “in-between world” will be further elaborated on in the final part of this work. For now, let us note Marie-José Mondzain’s perception of the images as lying in an in-between world, as being “both things and not things”: If we want to give a particular status to images by saying that they are enigmatically both things and not things, can we go so far as to say they are persons? As both things and not things they fall instead into a singular unreality that could hardly augment their responsibility. And yet undoubtedly we must consider images in their physical reality and fictional operations; we must admit that images stand halfway between things and dreams, in a quasiworld where our bondage and liberty are perhaps at stake. Thinking about images from this perspective allows us to question the paradox of their insignificance and their power. 35 This, perhaps, corresponds to Patrick Vauday’s drawing a line between image and painting, when he asks “is there a painting without an image?” in the eponymous book that addresses the question at length.36 Interestingly, such perceptions of the image would lead to a redefinition of the notion of images, in the way Mitchell attempts to do in What do Pictures Want?,37 thus returning to a point he had already made in Iconology: The word image is notoriously ambiguous. It can denote both a physical object (a painting or a sculpture) and a mental, imaginary

Language and Image  11 entity, a psychological imago, the visual content of dreams, memories and perception. It plays a role in both the visual and verbal arts, as the name of the represented content of a picture or its overall formal gestalt (what Adrian Stokes called the “image in form”); or it can designate a verbal motif, a named thing or quality, a metaphor or other “figure”, or even the formal totality of a text as a “verbal icon”. It can even pass over the boundary between vision and hearing in the notion of an “acoustic image”. And as a name for likeness, similitude, resemblance, and analogy it has a quasi logical status as one of the three great orders of sign formation, the “icon”, which (along with C.S. Pierce’s “symbol” and “index”) constitutes the totality of semiotic relationships38 Following this brief survey of the issues at stake, and having established how the perception of the relationship between word and image in agonistic terms denotes a relation of hierarchy, of verticality, as a dispute over territories, we could venture that, in consonance to Deleuze’s thought, it might be possible to apprehend this relation in terms of a “plateau” situated between the text and the image, which would develop horizontally in the way of the rhizome. This plateau would have multiple entrances, ramifications, in which word and image would remain closely knit while maintaining their proper differences, an “entanglement” (intrication), as per Georges Didi-Huberman, an eloquent example of which would be F. Dufrêne’s iconopoem Cantate des mots camés. These differences might also be conceived in terms of otherness, or alterity. The sculpture of the Laocoön, rendered even more famous by Lessing, truly represents the inextricable interlacing of the two media, one caught up in the knots of the other (the story does not say which of the two is the snake) even though the relation must not be conceived in terms of torture or imprisonment. William Blake rightly noted the symbolical value of the statue when he chose to fill in the blanks of the engraving with words, literally interlocking with each other as well as with the sculpture, thus creating a word/image artefact long before its formal emergence. I am referring to his engraving The Laocoön as ­Jehovah with Satan and Adam (1820), in which he inscribes a kind of manifesto on Christianity and art. In this work, one can read such phrases as, for instance, on the left hand margin, “Spiritual war A Poet, a painter, a Musician His Man Prayer is the study of Art Fasting & all relate to art,” and just below “Spiritual War”: “Israel delivered from Egypt is Art delivered from Nature & Imitation” (page layout respected). Here, religion and geopolitics are mingled with art in an example of a hybrid technique, that of the engraving mixed with writing. It is also important to note here that, paradoxically, Laocoön, a canonical sculpture in three dimensions, is that of which one often sees (or comments) but one representation, a reproduction (photography or gravure) in two dimensions, a necessarily flat image.

12  Language and Image The complexity of the word/image relationship is also discussed by Fanny Gillet who, in her doctoral dissertation, clearly expresses the intricacies of such interactions and points to the ways they also turn us into reader/spectators. The slash contains it all. Working on the pre-­ Raphaelites and their relationship to the poetry of Keats, Tennyson and Rossetti, Gillet describes the difficulty presented when one refuses to conceive the word/image relation in agonistic terms and argues that even if word/image offers itself as a unit, it still remains an unstable one: This study does not propose concentrating on one art at the expense of the other (even though certain hierarchical tensions may emerge here and there), but to see how the encounter between the two can generate a new dynamic that would be neither purely textual, nor purely pictorial [...] henceforth, we are reader/spectator. This position is not at all evident and this oblique slash, like the one in text/ image, shows how the heterogeneity of the form leads to a first difficulty of the gaze. In effect, it could result in immense frustration, a double reception that would simply conclude in mutual impoverishment: “thus, a feeling of poverty is felt from the two sides of the analogy: the ones think that the image is a very rudimentary system, in comparison to language, and the others that signification cannot exhaust the ineffable wealth of language”.39 According to Liliane Louvel, when placed in the context of his work, R. Barthes’s quote proves that the image’s subjugation to a linguistic, textual type of thinking has been a powerful trend in semiotics40 [...] knowing that the poetic text cannot exhaust the image, nor can the pictorial work exhaust the text, how must the beholder position him/herself towards those works that aspire to achieve a rapprochement, a fusion, perhaps, the creation of an intersemiotic unit that does not include such hierarchies. How to grasp what Liliane Louvel calls “fruitful tension”. [...] must we abandon our perceiving the text, the image, in a more or less violent and destabilising way?41 Gillet justifies her position by grounding it on psychoanalyst Josée Leclerc’s work, for whom the magic of an art object acts upon the one who receives it, owing to the “unsettling effect that might displace us from our position as beholders.”42 She furthermore ventures: “In other words, is it the position of the reader/spectator that may render the text/image unity possible, intelligible, sensible, or not? For it is precisely this unity that results from the text/image bias, as opposed to the text-and-image.”43 Addressing the question of the possible unity between word and image, between poetry and painting, necessitates recontextualising the text/­image theory in the wake of the ut pictura poesis tradition. As a matter of course, in the “word/image” concept, the slash acts as the visible manifestation of both the possibility of a unit and its impossibility. It both brings together and separates the two entities, showing

Language and Image  13 the necessary oscillation between the two. Furthermore, our position— that of a ­spectator/reader, neither one nor the other but both at the same time—will be a constant stepping stone of my analyses. This very tricky point will necessarily entail a theoretical reassessment of the phenomenon. In-between Text and Image: The Art of Transposing, of Exchanging Image into Word/Word into Image Painting is a world on its own, it is self-sufficient.

It’s always hopeless to talk about painting – one never does anything but talk around it. There is always something superficial. What can one say about it? Deep down, I believe that one cannot talk about painting, they cannot. Francis Bacon44 In spite of Francis Bacon’s denial, we still have to try and see what happens when painting or image are being put into words, for this is a recurring fact both in everyday life and in literature. Having seen to what extent the image triggers passionate discussions, we must now move on to a more theoretical approach, which presupposes that, after all, whatever its modes, there is such a thing as a word/image relationship. What is of primary import here is: on what grounds does this relation occur? What are its modes of manifestation and how is it expressed? What are the arguments that may firmly ground and justify it and, conversely, what are the arguments against it? Prior to other considerations, it is then necessary to examine the possibility of a passage between the two arts with the help, at times, of art history. A preliminary remark is imperative, namely, that the passage between image, painting, photography, and their pictorial variations— tapestry, mirrors, miniatures, postcard maps, and so on—and text does not take place in any kind of text other than the literary. The fact that we move on from one art into another justifies our endeavour. It will then be necessary to examine the arguments in favour of transposition, what makes it possible or, on the contrary, what makes it a risky venture. If a certain dissymmetry between the two arts, between “what speaks and what makes one speak,”45 has been noted, their incommensurability, what Régis Durand46 calls their “common measure,” has also been denounced. As far as art historians are concerned, the more favourite position is that of the irreducibility of the two arts. The Term as a Starting Point When referring to the operations taking place between the two arts, scholars commonly used the terms translation, illustration, equivalence,

14  Language and Image transmutation, transfusion, commerce, dialogue, and conversion. Emile Souriau spoke of “Correspondance” between the arts, a Baudelairian term indeed.47 The term ‘transposition’ seems preferable to other terms for, together with trans-lation, it carries a certain dynamic and stresses the notion of exchange, between places or modes, on an equal level, which is not the case with the words ‘illustration’ or ‘replacement.’ Trans-position implies a passage from one medium to/ by another; it entails a change in position on a chiasmic or see-saw pattern. Borrowed from music, games, mathematics, grammar, and translation, this term belongs to worlds ruled by strong principles that may, nonetheless, be imported into other systems of thought and fields of study. Let it be said also that if transposition means transformation or transmutation, as far as the word/image relationship is concerned, it does not mean the replacement of one by the other. Transposition is not tantamount to translation, but to adaptation and the careful use of analogy, as defined by Kant: “Analogy: a word which does not signify as is commonly accepted, an imperfect resemblance between two things, but the perfect resemblance of two ratios between two very dissimilar things.”48 The literary text reaches beyond “the language(s) of art,” to use N ­ elson Goodman’s title, and raises the issue of language and art within a single artistic form; interestingly, despite the difficulty posed by the verbal component being a literary text (rather than a simple linguistic form), it is precisely this type of text that enables us to envisage the operation, for both the artistic image and the literary text belong to the realm of art. As Claus Clüver argues, to transpose a painting into a verbal text is to reconstitute its meaning by creating a sign that draws on the codes and conventions of a literary (and not merely a linguistic) system equivalent to the pictorial system operative in the painting. (my emphasis)49 The comparison, therefore, is made between two artistic modes belonging to the same field and bearing an equivalent status. In other words, while, to return to Clüver, “the real difficulties in interlingual translation of poems occur on the literary and not the linguistic level,”50 which pertains directly to creative choices and transpositional liberties, at the same time, the literary nature of the text allows us to operate on equal terms, since both media are related to artistic production. Needless to say that such a comparison would be fraught with imbalances when exercised between painting and linguistics (in the sense of science) or other types of discourse (journalistic texts, oral or written spontaneous productions) and would entail different strategies.

Language and Image  15 Figuring Artistic Transposition: The Poetic Exchange of Marcel Broodthaers How, then, does this transposition function? Owing to which tools? ­According to Gisbert Kranz, quoted by Claus Clüver in the special issue of Poetics Today dedicated to the topic under scrutiny, ekphrastic poems referring to (existing or fictional) visual works may be classified in terms of: [T]heir purpose (Absicht) and achievement (Leistung). The purpose encoded in the poem, for Krantz can be “descriptiv, panegyrisch, pejorativ, didaktisch, moralistisch, politisch, sozialkritisch, delektierend, [oder] amourös”. Achievement focuses primarily on the relation of the verbal text to is visual model; offers as categories ­“Transposition, Suppletion, Assoziation, Interpretation, Provokation, Spiel, [und]Konkretisation”. The range of these relations is exemplified by the eight twentieth-century poems on the elder Pieter Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus that Kranz has reprinted in a ­separate anthology of ekphrastic poems.51 Actually, Clüver notes, Kranz listed thirty-four poets who have written on Brueghel’s Icarus in 1981, while, by 1986, forty-one twentieth-­ century Icarus poems had also come to his attention. These poems offer all kinds of variations on the same painting, ranging from the slightest mention to the most detailed description. When facing a painting, we tend to verbalise, as we can’t help commenting on it; and so does literature; indeed, the word/image relationship has been an infinite dialogue or, in M. Foucault’s terms, an “infinite relation.” The famous formula he coined a propos Las Meninas, that however hard one may try to say what one sees, what one sees never fully coincides with what one says, 52 expresses the difficulty of “rendering” an image into words. Transposing image into word may be one way of expressing what takes place in the operation, a fact also acknowledged by Claus Clüver in his article for Poetics Today.53 And just like when changing one currency into another there is always a rest, a difference in value, the commission due, so here what we may term “a rest” is the part left to imagination, dangling in-between word and image, the part of fantasy that endlessly tears at the text caught up in this “infinite relation.” Foucault’s voice, in the Order of Things, insists on the irreducibility of word and image, on the endlessness of the task owing to which painting will gleam and glitter, even though caught in a grey anonymous language. But the relation of language to painting is an infinite relation. […] it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say. […] But if one wishes to keep the relation of language to vision

16  Language and Image open, if one wishes to treat their incompatibility as a ­starting-point for speech instead of as an obstacle to be avoided, so as to stay as close as possible to both, then one must erase those proper names and preserve the infinity of the task. It is perhaps through the medium of this grey, anonymous language, always over-meticulous and repetitive because too broad, that the painting may, little by little, release its illuminations.54 Nevertheless, if, on the one hand, critics insist on the heterogeneity, the irreducibility, the incompatibility, and the dissemblance between the two media, still, on the other hand, the relentless presence of the image in literary texts cannot be ignored; it is precisely what Philippe Hamon reminds us of, in his discussion of what he calls the “diehard ut pictura poesis,” when he speaks of “the universally shared and thus culturally real sense of a profound connivance between these two semiotic regimes.”55 What I propose, therefore, is a new figure of the writer, that of the writer as changer, in the manner of Quentin Metsys’s moneychangers in The Money Lender and his Wife, who weigh, value, and exchange currencies without forgetting the small convex mirror that reflects the exterior and converts the invisible into the visible, absence into presence. Currency, as is well-known, is nothing but the representation of an absent value, this a fortiori, since the invention of banknotes. The “semiotic” transaction is an interartistic negotiation that works on the oscillating mode, when image bargains its inscription with/in the text and resorts to transposition. Then, the changer-writer of the text screens the image, thanks to the riddle of language. The word “Enigma” in Greek denotes the sieve of the fisherman’s net, when in English it is a “riddle,” for the term also designates the contraption that helps separate those who understand from those who do not. This is precisely what M. Broodthaers cunningly represented in his 1924 Diptych entitled ­Gedicht Poem Poème/Change Exchange Wechsel that exhibits what we can think of as a table of exchange and the poetic variations on the letters MB, the initials of the artist.56 Actually, this work visually figures what I am trying to express, the poetic exchange between image and language. Hosted in Barcelona’s Museum of Modern Art, Broodthaers’s two framed “pictures”57 are presented as traditional easel-painting yet with a post-Duchampian twist; they constitute a “montage” visually representing what takes place when words as signs become image and vice versa, according to an exchange operation, an operation of conversion, of transposition. Both painter and poet are presented as potential changers. Looking at the framed “pictures,” one may notice symmetrical effects: there are three columns in each frame, the titles of which point to a chiasmus-like patterned inversion proceeding from the languages used: German, English, French, and vice versa. Thus, “poème” folds onto “change” and so forth, pointing to the visual rendering of the

Language and Image  17 transposition. Furthermore, while at a first glance the visitor—lured by the sum-like appearance of the columns suggested by the inscriptions, the black underline, the red ink as in an account book—spontaneously thinks s/he is looking at sums, what s/he is really looking at are letters, initials, those of the artist himself, present in the letters M.B., his signature. And count as s/he may, s/he will realise that, once the converting operation has been done, the numbers and the sums, which do not correspond from frame to frame, seem to signify that 258 M.B. in English correspond to 28+10+12 M.B. in German and to 6+25+45 M.B. in French. The chiasmus presents a mirror image of the two panels on the mode of a diptych, thus quoting its pictorial heritage, that of Flemish and Italian painting; its symmetrical effect operates a visual conversion from term to term. The device shows the passage from numbers to letters, thus corresponding to the conversion of the visual into language, of the symbol into image, the visual here not being rendered by a sign system but signified by visual obviousness. For what the spectator has to do first and foremost is to stop, read, and consider the two panels: two simple black frames and three columns of scribbles that, nevertheless, linger on one’s mind for a long time. This discussion may be further promoted through the observations of Émile Benveniste, who, evoking music and literature as commonly sharing “the production of sounds,” insists on the irreducibility of two semiotic systems that, for him, cannot be “mutually convertible.” Once more, the lexical field of exchange is put to use. This implies that two different semiotic systems cannot be mutually convertible [as there is a] difference in nature between their respective units and between their ways of functioning [...] thus, the non-convertibility between systems that rely on different bases is the reason for the non-redundancy in the universe of sign systems. We do not have at our disposal many distinct systems for the same relation of signification. 58 And of course, for Benveniste, language is “the interpretant of all semiotic systems.”59 It is important to note here that Benveniste considers painting to be a semiotic system as well, which one may take exception to. Still, what is essential to this discussion on the relation between language, discourse, and the visual, between the readable and the visible is, precisely, the possibility of transaction generated by conversion of one “currency” into another: To transpose a painting into a verbal text is to reconstitute its meaning by creating a sign that draws on the codes and conventions of a literary (and not merely a linguistic) system equivalent to the pictorial system operative in the painting.60

18  Language and Image As mentioned before, trans-position implies a see-saw movement, a fruitful oscillation between text and image, image and text. While scholars specialising in literary studies will be more conversant with the second operation—without, however, ignoring the first one—transposition is of the utmost significance in intersemiotic studies. If we accept that “painting, however, is a semiotic system,”61 the underlying metaphor figures the passage from one system of signs to another, a movement from the locus of the image to the locus constituted by the text, a shift from the kingdom of the visible to that of the readable.62 I offer to start by ­examining the conditions that allow for an intersemiotic operation, before describing some of the modalities of the transfer and concluding with the issues at stake concerning the literary text. The Conditions of Possibility of an«intersemiotic» Transposition Evoking an “intersemiotic” transposition between text and image first implies that the interplay between the two so-called “semiotic” systems is possible simply because we are faced with two types of “text.” Literature has already provided us with an abundance of examples of such workings, for this has been going on for a long time, ever since the description of ancient shields by writers such as Homer or Virgil.63 The arguments for transposition pertain to diverse fields. The term itself advances the importance of the sign and of the pervading theories of language, yet comparison is by no means restricted to this mode. For Gilman, for instance, the evolution of the role of language as a modelling system, as well as the literary tendency to appropriate the visual arts, was often seen as verging on the iconoclast: For today’s literary iconoclast, a similar appropriation of the visual arts by language is justified—or more often, loosely assumed to be plausible—on several related grounds. As Steiner (1982: 27, 51) notes, modern linguistic, semiotics and structuralism, all developed within and first applied to the study of language, have tended to regard language as the “primary modelling system” on the basis of which all other semiotic systems, if not cultural phenomena, can be understood. (see also Mitchell 1986: 55–56)64 Indeed, tradition looms large, be it in the realm of linguistics, semiotics, or psychoanalysis which make of language the first interpretant. As ­Gilman notes, “Chomskian linguistics and French psychoanalysts share the assumption of a deep linguistic structure undergirding the imagination. For Lacanians the formation of the subject is intimately bound up with the processes of language.”65 The mirror stage, he argues, may

Language and Image  19 be seen as the iconoclast stage when the visual image switches to the symbolic, to the law of the father, and the fear of castration and power of language this entails. Dreams operate on the modes of displacement and condensation, which are also part and parcel of artistic transposition. The transposition of a dream into language, as art historian Hubert ­Damisch observes, parallels the discourse used by the scholars of his field to speak of the image; once the work of elucidation is completed, the dream image has been replaced by language and has disappeared. As for the ‘text’ of the dream, it isn’t accompanied by any illustration: and even if there is a reproduction, in space, it stems from a transposition, a translation, a convertion inverted to the one with which the dream works; to analyse it, it is only a matter of subjecting the dream to language, of transforming it into an object of discourse or an operation that could be nothing but endless. This is how all discourse on art goes; it only makes sense when it runs the risk of short-circuiting […] on principle, it is forbidden to touch the painting. But to describe, let alone interpret it, is yet another way of touching it, with all the risks this implies, [namely] under cover of the words that celebrate its presence, to initiate its disappearance.66 On the contrary, literary critic Jean Rousset argues that, in the process of transposition, the descriptive language, ekphrasis for instance, enables the image to emerge and, hence, it is the text that recedes in the background as if erased by the nascent image. For Rousset, this is particularly difficult to theorise: What happens in our mind when we read a description? If we transpose the written words into (absent) things, we transform them into a mental simulacrum, or, in other words, we visualise them. By doing so, we substitute the text with this mental simulacrum, which reduces the role [of the text] to that of a support, which is tantamount to effacing it and finally to destroying it; we must admit that this risk exists.67 These observations are particularly interesting in relation to the ways each scholar perceives the word/image relation in terms of their own discipline; more importantly, while seemingly incompatible, these views consistently speak of a battle between the two arts, the two media, one attempting to find its place to the detriment of the other; if the text appears, the image disappears and vice versa. Still, the assimilation of image by language, by means of sign theory, remains a considerable issue of debate. To say that language is “the primary modelling system”68 entails an imperative to use language to communicate and, as a matter of course, to describe the image itself.

20  Language and Image On the other hand, should one consider Napoleon’s dictum that “a good sketch is much better than a long speech,” discourse would be deemed redundant while the image self-sufficient, instantaneous, economical, easy to understand, evident. After all, literature is not the only case in which a painting or an image spontaneously seems to trigger discourse; while visiting an exhibition or looking at an advertisement, just like in critical essays or in writings on art, one tends to express oneself about the visual, sometimes even in an immoderate way, as is the case with Las Meninas, The Ambassadors, or Duchamp’s Fountain, which have endlessly provided food for interpretation and still do. “But what sort of meaning is that which cannot be expressed in words. What is a picture when it has rid itself of the companionship of language and of music?”69 Virginia Woolf asks. There are many more questions that need to be asked. Must the access to aesthetic pleasure be inevitably mediated by language? Is there such a thing as “pure” contemplation without the detour through language as a means of access to meaning and to the perception of the reasoned “jouissance” of the eye constituting a link between aisthesis and the aesthetic? If “uttering” the painting is another way of saying that it is language first and foremost, what about an unutterable painting, one that is deprived of a conscience to reflect it, to “say” it? What is a “pictorial” reading? An artistic language? Is there such a thing as the “readability” of a painting, of an image? No Image without Language/No Language without Image First, this discussion should start with a reviewing of the image being perceived as text, as a sign system. R. Barthes’s famous semiotic analyses of images, for instance, in his “Rhetoric of the Image,” was aimed at transposing one critical model (that of rhetoric) into another one, specifically semiotic analysis, the case in point being the famous advert for Panzani Pasta. Barthes suggested that our visual perception of the world must necessarily be translated into language.70 In consonance to Barthes’s views, François Wahl reminds us that, since we consist of language, “all experience, for us, is language.”71 Put differently, all experiences are verbalised and thought is realised in language, which would justify calling upon discourse when viewing a painting or an image. Second, the passage from the pictorial to discourse is enabled by the fact that image and writing share a common origin, or by the fact that, as per A-M Christin, “writing was born from the image.”72 M-J Mondzain also notes the anteriority of drawing upon writing, by referring to the sketches on prehistoric cave walls that, hand-drawn, already paved the way to the act of writing. Similarly, the drawing of ideograms, letters, and even calligraphy requires a gesture that is necessary both for writing and for drawing. Bernard Vouilloux perceives the relationship between painting and literature in terms of their origins (a “co-implication

Language and Image  21 originaire”), irrespective of any external relation between the two; this is perhaps also related to the term “representation” commonly describing both modes of presenting the world.73 Visual arts and rhetoric are held in a chiastic rapport where “language and vision, the words that show and the spectacle that triggers speech, are mutually damaged.”74 For Hillis Miller also, evoking Klee’s late series of paintings that consist in small strips of a make-believe alphabet, “[These strange signs] are not yet either pictures or letters. They are the originating point where both coincided before their separation into the different sign functions of picturing and writing.”75 Miller also insists on the ambiguity of the word “graphic” lying at the root of so many intersemiotic conflicts: “The warfare in question is present within the word ‘graphic’ which can refer either to writing or to picture.”76 The paragone looms in the background as well as the antagonistic relation between the “sister arts.” The word “graphic” might conversely be conceived of as a ‘common’ (rather than a ‘battle’) ground for both modes of representation. At the same time, and despite all this, we can also conversely affirm that there is no language without an image. For Martin Heusser, if the image needs language it is also, as Nietzsche, Kant, or B ­ enjamin advocated, integrally connected to it: “there is no direct or non metaphorical way of speaking.”77 One reads and interprets the world (its   image) even before speaking (Benjamin), since “auditory and visual impressions have always carried signification, have always been language for us”;78 in the Neoplatonic logic, the world is perceived as a text: “the world is a monumental book full of signs.”79 On the other hand, ever since the Middle Ages pictures have been conceived as an unlimited source of meaning, giving access to a kind of knowledge language could not reach. Thus, if the image depends on language to fully “work,” language also includes a pictorial dimension, and the two are profoundly interconnected. As Damisch writes in his Preface to the French translation of Meyer Schapiro’s Words, Script and Pictures. Semiotics of Visual language, On the contrary, everything happens as if language and its f­ unction— a fortiori poetic language—were constantly concerned with the question of figurability. […] So much so, that one could be tempted to replace the received translation of the classic maxim which established a parallel between poetry and painting—ut pictura poesis—‘poetry like painting,’ with another translation, deliberately anachronistic and full of risk, which verges on a c­ ontradiction: ‘there must be poetry, so that there is painting’ and, reciprocally, one would not go without the other […] the fact that in a moment, in one title or another, the work of painting could or should pass through words and, against her better judgement, compete with them, correlates, semiotically speaking, [with the fact that] all linguistic expression,

22  Language and Image in its form as much as in its substance, participates more or less in what we call the ‘pictorial’ regime of the image.80 In effect, as Louis Marin put it, “describing is interpreting.”81 Word and image are interdependent and, thus, as practice—first and foremost literature—shows, their interaction is a necessity. Talkative Practices When visiting an exhibition, one deciphers the symbolism of the painting, muses at any incongruities, checks the title or date of composition, and so on. Affect, sensations, and memories surface and thoughts are verbalised, whether one is alone and speaks to oneself or converses with one’s companion to comment upon composition, lighting, characters, or the vibrancy of the colours. The discourse generated by a work of art may also address a potential reader, or a future visitor, when a critic or an artist puts pen to paper for instance. This is also the case with the small bills pinned up on gallery walls giving as much information as possible, which often ends up in a perverse practice, for the visitor is asked to spend more time reading these bills than properly looking at the painting.82 Whereas it could appear secondary, for it is non-inherent in the work on display, all this discourse is triggered precisely by the viewing of a work of art. In accordance with spontaneous daily life experience, literature is also pervaded by the same tendency to expatiate on an image, with Modernism constituting one of the most eloquent examples, in its cultivating a hybridity of genres, but also in consistently using the image as a source of daydreaming or storytelling. A short story by Virginia Woolf, “The Fascination of the Pool,”83 may read as a long narrative on the theme of contemplation. A character lying by a pool little by little lets his/ her fancy animate the mirroring surface of the water and evoke events and characters as well as the forgotten voices of the past. It is in and by the gaze that the hypnotic effect of the water conjures up those fanciful figures. The sale of the farm of Romford Mill, together with its cattle, tools, and implements, represents the abrupt end of a family. The selling bill is reflected in the water: “One could trace the big red letters in which Romford Mill was printed in the water. A tinge of red was in the green that rippled from bank to bank.”84 The scene in question consists in a visual impression that is figuratively rendered as the red letters are literally shown “printed in the water” and make up an image. Paradoxically, the very materiality of the minimal signifier, the letter, is put to the fore even though at the same time it is inscribed in a ceaselessly animated fluid element. The tinge of red has brewed and seeped into the green sleeping water. As the primitive, minimal, black, white, and red colours of the short story are enriched by a tinge of green, writing seems to be

Language and Image  23 restricted to the surface, whereas deep, reflective thought inhabits the depths of the pool: “the red and black letters and the white paper seemed to lie very thinly on the surface, while beneath went on some profound under-water life like the brooding, the ruminating of the mind.” And lives move on: “Many, many people must have come there alone, […] dropping their thoughts into the water, asking it some questions, as one did oneself this summer evening.”85 Another story, “The Blank Page” by Karen Blixen,86 paradoxically blends together the blank page and a white canvas. An old crone tells an age-old story, transmitted from mother to daughter, of a convent in Portugal where a portrait gallery exhibits heavy frames with the names of young princesses together with a piece of the linen sheet cut off on the day following the royal wedding. Within the faded markings of the canvases people of some imagination and sensibility may read all the signs of the zodiac […] Or they may there find pictures from their own world of ideas: a rose, a heart, a sword—or even a heart pierced through with a sword.87 One of these pieces of linen sheet remains blank and so is the frame deprived of the princess’s name. When faced with this absence, and while no explanation is provided by the narrator, the befuddled spectators remain speechless but keep on furiously thinking. Thus is staged the process of interpretation, the sudden dazzling effect produced by the empty blank “page” as meaning indefinitely errs, and it is deferred without ever being fixed. For if the stained sheets offer an opening onto the future, or function as symbols that are interpreted in retrospect, the blank sheet remains inviolable, mute, and enigmatic because of the absence it entails. Furthermore, a picture may trigger an essay akin to fiction, as is the case with Virginia Woolf facing Walter Sickert’s painting L’ennui, in “Walter Sickert, a Conversation.”88 Starting with signifiers that are proper to painting, Woolf then veers on towards something totally different and starts imagining a story to the painting, thus assimilating it to language. This essay, then, is a hybrid of reflections and bits of fiction, just as its title is a combination of the name of the painter and the art of conversation, or, if one is to believe Jean-Jacques Lecercle,89 the essence of literature. This essay stages a conversation between the sister arts, literature and its Other, painting, but also a competition between Woolf and her sister Vanessa who had painted three pictures on the subject: Street Corner Conversation, The Conversation, A Conversation Piece. It is also an allusion to one of the two sisters’ favourite pastime, since, according to Angelica Bell, “what they enjoyed was a good old gossip.”90 Once more, impressed by what she called the reticence of painting and of the painter, Woolf was trying to make them speak.91

24  Language and Image For an essay writer or a critic, the application of discourse on painting may become a kind of fanciful interpretation, revolving at best around a formal quest, at worst around a fictional rendition of the painter’s intention. Hillis Miller’s devious act of bestowing one of Turner’s paintings with an intention would be a case in point: Just as when verbal inscription and graphic representation are set side by side, each turns the other into a form of itself, so the effect of Turner’s double, triple or quadruple representation of the sun in The ‘Sun of Venice’ Going to Sea is to affirm that whatever the real sun can do, his painting can also do.92 What is of particular interest here, beyond the assertion of the porosity between a visible and a readable interpretation, is the use of the verb “affirm,” pinpointing Turner’s effect of a de-multiplied representation of the sun (the discourse of image), which reinforces the singularity of the possessive “his.” If, according to Miller, the effect of representation “affirms” what it does, it is because at the end of the contention between the sun and the painter, it is the latter that stands unscathed. Moreover, the possessive pronoun refers to Turner and not to the “effect” or “representation” as one would grammatically expect. In effect, the critic’s commentary reveals a fiction of intention that—regardless of its rather doubtful objective validity—ascribes intent to the painter; he is the one who eventually “affirms” (thanks to the de-multiplied representation) that his pictorial skill equals the dazzling effects of the “real” sun.

Discursive Variations: The “Discourse” of the Painting Apart from triggering discourse, the picture might also be endowed with speech, so that discourse is produced from/by the picture itself. F. Wahl’s suggestion that “as subjects constituted by language, […] any experience is for us language”93 enables him to reduce what he calls the discourse of a painting to a sentence, to a series of clauses, a “pictorial discourse” complete with a process of uttering and an utterance. The painting formulates its subject and conveys its meaning through its own devices, its signifiers, and its immanence; then, interpretation may take place. This perception has seemed too restrictive to some, among whom Gérald Hess, who, following Nelson Goodman, argues in favour of evoking languages in the plural: As long as artistic representation is, indeed, the expression of a l­anguage, it is necessary, I repeat, to actually envisage as many languages as there are mediums [...] on this matter, one might wonder if these diverse artistic languages are reducible to the verbal language, as F. Wahl seems to think, and, more precisely to the model of a phrase.94

Language and Image  25 As a matter of fact, picture analysis has often been grounded on linguistic models and rhetoric, inspired by models borrowed from classical texts and practices, as well as narratology. Some Instances of the Image’s Assimilation to Language The Linguistic Model and Rhetoric For better or for worse, the image has commonly been “rendered” through linguistic terms such as “the grammar of a painting,” its “reading,” or “the syntax of the visible.” The most blatant example of this practice is, perhaps, Jean-Louis Schefer’s Scénographie d’un tableau, where Paris Bordone’s painting of a Chess Game is patiently submitted to a fine dissection of its “signifiers,” a study of the methodology that the critic now rejects. Nicolas Poussin, also, used to conceive the gestures of his characters as letters of the alphabet corresponding to the different emotions he sought to represent. And Louis Marin borrowed from the semiotic system of language to elaborate on his own method of analysis and proposed that deixis, for instance, may be regarded as the designating gesture of the figure of the admonitor, pointing to what the spectator has to focus his attention on. The binary system of representing/represented space is borrowed from the uttering/utterance system; and the work of art, as suggested in his Semiotic Studies, is construed as a sign system articulated like language. But of course, “like” does not mean identical. One of the consequences of these early semiotic readings is to see the image as a text, even as a text to be read. In his paper, David Scott, a word/image relations scholar from Trinity College, in Dublin, tries to sum up the characteristics of Western visual culture insisting on the break between sign and object, which separated the visual from the other senses it dominates. Scott advocates a more holistic approach, denouncing “the domination of language when the visual is assimilated to a text.”95 Within this context, it is also interesting to note Roland Barthes’s ruminations on the subject, in particular the evolution of his thought, which is so indicative that we now speak of “the early Barthes” and “the late Barthes.” In the seventies, the philosopher contributed to the practice of reducing painting to a text by noting that: And then: if literature and painting are no longer held in a hierarchical reflection, one being the rear-view mirror for the other, why maintain them any longer as objects at once united and separate, in short, classed together? Why not wipe out the difference between them (purely one of substance)? Why not forgo the plurality of the “arts” in order to affirm more powerfully the plurality of “texts”?96

26  Language and Image The brackets in-between which Barthes encloses what he considers to be specific to each art, in other words its “substance,” is actually what makes them irreducible, even though the existence of such a thing as a “pure substance” that differentiates the two arts may be questionable. After all, going back to his analysis of the advert for Panzani pasta— which Barthes ventured as a pioneer of the “Rhetoric of Image”97—­ “discontinuous signs” are evoked as the property of language and not of image. Barthes distinguishes between the signified of the image, that of a return from the market, and its signifiers: fresh vegetables in a halfopen carryall, or the signified of the Italian character of the product as transmitted by its signifiers, namely the colours that Barthes erroneously purports to be those of the Italian flag. Denotation and connotation are the words used to decipher cultural mores. Paradoxically, when correctly picking up the allusion to a canonical genre of painting, that is “still life” (which he calls “still living”), he bypasses the metapictorial reference to the horn of plenty that clearly inspires the half-open carryall and he denies the self-reflective power of the image. This kind of allusion is a way for an image to display what it is made of, what it “speaks of,” and how it does so. Later on, Barthes poses a question that will reaffirm his thesis: “Is painting a language?”98 He thus persists in submitting painting to language, even to the extent of asserting that “it only exists in the narrative I make of it,” while in 1978, with his comment on Arcimboldo’s portraits, Barthes equates painting to a text, by bestowing it with a rhetoric or with figures of speech. His painting has a linguistic basis, his imagination is, strictly speaking, poetic: it does not create signs, it combines them, permutes them, deflects them—precisely what the practitioner of language does […] he casts into the discourse of the Image a whole bundle of rhetorical figures: the canvas becomes a real laboratory of tropes. A shell stands for an ear: this is a Metaphor. A heap of fish stands for Water—in which they live: this is a Metonymy. Fire becomes a flaming head: this is an Allegory.99

The Narratological Model Turning to the rendering of the image through narratology, Meyer ­Schapiro has established a clear division of narrative categories that is reliant on the character’s gaze. More specifically, when the character of the painting looks out at the spectator and engages her/him in a “dialogue,” the relation works on a direct address (you/me/us) model, ­ascribing the spectator to a “homodiegetic” position; when turned towards the  other actors of the scene, the inward gaze of the character

Language and Image  27 ascribes the spectator to a “heterodiegetic” position, where the characters will be designated in the third person (he/she, they, them).100 Mieke Bal also speaks of a “first-person narrative” yet in the context of a “visual narratology,” when the presence of the painter may be felt thanks to “an emphatic inscription in the hand of the artist” as with De Kooning and Pollock; for her, the “third person narrative” refers to the case of “images that eliminate references to the painting process.”101 In this sense, Bal distinguishes between a “deictic” kind of painting referring to a character, the place or time of its utterance (here its elaboration) and a “diegystic” painting that draws attention to its content, its diegesis: “in both cases, if the content can be described in terms of a sequence of events, we can use the terminology of narrative.”102 A dedicated narratologist herself, Bal transposes this system to the frame of the painting or, in extension, to the space of the museum: “I also want to demonstrate how narratology can inform our reading of painting, including non figurative painting.”103 This “visual narratology” effectuates a link between focalisation and vision, which is also acknowledged by N. Bryson in his introduction to Looking In, since, in Bal’s words, “focalization belongs to the story; it is the layer between the linguistic text and the fabula.”104 Thus, a series of paintings in a museum will constitute a kind of ­syntax,105 a “museal discourse,” and, accordingly, a museum installation is a discourse, […] an exhibition is an utterance within that discourse. The utterance consists not of words or images alone, nor of the frame or frame up of the installation, but of the productive tension between images, caption (words), and installation (sequence, height, light, combinations).106 Any objections that may be raised in relation to her method are met— albeit not very convincingly—in her paper “Basic Instincts and Their Discontents,”107 where Bal criticises Paul de Man’s deconstruction of the opposition between semiology and rhetoric,108 grounded on the hypothesis that the word system is undoubtedly the primary one. In order to develop her theoretical approach, Bal offers to study popular combinations of word and image, specifically a German cartoon from 1993 and an extract from a TV series called All in the Family (July 1988), and notes: These assumptions and their discontents [ not only that language is different from the visual, but how these differ are so common that they seem axiomatic, “basic”, and in no need to be spelled out.] can be examined through a kind of popular-culture representation of the word/image combination. If I call artifacts “texts”, it is not to reduce them to language but, on the contrary, to re-activate the etymological riches of the notion that artifacts are fabricated, complex

28  Language and Image and structured; that they have complex surface that matters like a sophisticated fabric; a texture. The cartoon, the comic strip, the emblem, but also film, tenaciously refuse the reduction our disciplinary boundaries have enforced.109 Quite interestingly, however, while an advocate of hybridity, complexity, and a multifaceted approach, Mieke Bal also wrote Reading Rembrandt Beyond the Word-Image Opposition,110 a book whose very title and argument once more reduce image-viewing to a reading process. This is highly reminiscent of Barthes’s own point of view when, in the sixties, he wrote that [t]he picture, whoever writes it, exists only in the account given of it; or again: in the total and organisation of the various readings that can be made of it: a picture is never anything but its own plural description.111 Reading Images The formulations mentioned before raise the issue of the so-called “reading” of images, a practice that has been presumably undertaken by an abundance of books, such as Lire la peinture, Reading Images, How to Read a Painting, What Great Paintings Say, The Secret ­L anguage of Art, Tell Me a Picture, Lectures de l’image, to name but a few, without forgetting Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art, W.J.T. Mitchell’s The Language of Images, and M. Baxandall’s Words for Pictures. As late as 2008, art historian Jean-Luc Chalumeau wrote a book on the different schools within the arts and entitled it La lecture de l’art.112 In 2007, N ­ adeije Laneyris-Dagen went as far as issuing a mea culpa so as to reassess her position regarding her former Lire la peinture; there, she described the controversy and objections rising from her approach which has aroused the readers’ indignation: art historians such as Hubert Damisch, artists like Vincent Corpet have affirmed and reaffirmed how badly they think of an expression signifying that a painted work may be treated like a written work: that it may be thus assimilated, at the risk, of course, of negating its radical singularity. And she concluded: “actually the painted work is absolutely different from the written one.”113 The mere fact that it became necessary at one point to reaffirm the difference between the two media is proof enough of the excesses that the assimilation of painting to language led to. As Laurent Zimmerman

Language and Image  29 argues in his preface to his collection of essays entitled Penser par les images, dedicated to Georges-Didi Huberman’s work: G. Didi-Huberman teaches us that it is a matter of being able to see without necessarily reading, of facing the images without accepting that they are enclosed in a logic of deciphering […] thus letting the otherwise essential experience of the visual unfold at the heart of the visible as it approaches us, to upset the configurations of knowledge.114 Zimmerman here delineates notions that are seminal to this change in our way of thinking about the visual as not necessarily entailing a reading process and as literally advancing towards the spectator to upset cognitive and apprehension data. What is readable in a painting? After all, what may be accessible at one time may remain an enigma at another; what, for instance, constituted a way of encoding time in Medieval paintings, was later inaccessible, and, thus, what art historians call “unreadable.” But this is only a metaphor for understanding. It is important to note here that the question of (un)readability of the visible applies mainly to two-dimensional works of art. As soon as we are confronted with three-dimensional graphic productions, such as installations, videos, or performances, the relation to the work is different; it requires interface, interactivity, direct response. The spectator is included within the space developed by the work and not confronted with a flat surface, which resembles, in a way, an easy to master and dominate written page. In an installation or in an intervention, such as Ernest ­Pignon-Ernest’s collages on Naples’s skinlike walls, the spectator’s body is fully immersed in the work and reacts to its appeal and aura. This was already the case, to a certain extent, with al fresco, trompe-l’œil and architecture, which included the spectator’s body within the swirls and splashes of colour, making make-believe chapels, balustrades, staircases, and domes out of flat walls, an eloquent example of which would be the church of San Ignazio, in Rome, where Father Pozzo developed his dazzling talent for the benefit of his patrons in the name of the glory of God. Still, even if the conceptual work of art requires pages and pages of analysis in order to be comprehended, such as Damian Hirst’s much controversial work testifies, the issue at hand is not their readability. Contrary to baroque or allegorical painting, Lubin Baugin’s Still Life with Chessboard for example, where it is easy to detail the different objects represented in the still life and to attribute them with their respective symbols according to Cesare Ripa’s iconology, there is no code for reading a conceptual work of art. Even though literature and painting share rhetorical terms, the works produced within these disciplines follow diverse codes of realisation and regimes of immanence. And

30  Language and Image this is precisely where the two part. In literature, the questions of reading as well as that of the different modes of approach between a two-­ dimensional work and a three-dimensional one are reflected in the fact that very few contemporary works of art are used in works of fiction, whereas the examples of references to Dutch and Italian or French painting, to Impressionism, to Van Gogh or Chirico and others are numerous. Michel Picard makes a significantly perceptive remark concerning our use of language to designate the person who is looking at a picture. In French, there is no painting specific, or even symmetrical, term to that of reader. In English as well, the terms beholder, viewer, spectator, amateur, receptor, and voyeur do not truly correspond to the particular activity, as these could be applied to other walks of life or art forms. Are we, then, to believe that a question of vocabulary, the lexical hole from which these reflections stem indicates a major epistemological deficiency and decelerates none other than, pure and simply, an ignorance of what art is? Indeed, the word is missing […] this mechanism of mystification may very well appear as a crude caricature that denounces a much vaster phenomenon whose most flagrant manifestations include the scotomisation of the public, the absence of a form capable to designate the artistic activity in itself, and the reduction of art to a thing.115 Whom, then, is the discourse of painting supposed to address? If one speaks of the discourse of painting, then the spectator becomes a reader incited to decipher a “text.” If we concentrate on the viewing process, then the spectacle or contemplation rank first, and seeing takes prevalence over formulating. Must one remain a beholder or a voyeur arrested in front of the hidden, forbidden view? As I contend in the course of this study, the reading of a word/image is akin to a phenomenon that would waver between reading and viewing, a hybrid process we could call “voyure,”116 a term redolent with the desire of a voyeur who is often transgressive, escaping norms and canons.117 These critical stands were followed by heated debate, as the proponents of these “discourses” or “languages of art” have been accused of wanting to reduce the image to language, for gender or imperialistic purposes. The metaphor runs deep, as per Gilman, who wrote that ‘(t)he new interdisciplinarianism’ turns out to be a new imperialism in disguise, and—as was to a large extent also true of the old ­imperialism—its weapon for colonizing, reducing, and ultimately burying the natives of the visual realm is language;118 In his view, suspicions of iconoclasm reappear as “the desire to see the image as a language.”119

Language and Image  31 Still, a conference held in Sorbonne on the subject of the “speaking image”120 clearly showed that this “new iconoclasm” is met with considerable resistance. Marie-José Mondzain started her lecture as follows: Images have never spoken and the question raised by an expression such as this is similar to wondering whether our eyes happen to emit or perceive sounds. We could certainly admit that images speak under the guise of poetic licence, or convenience, but this can only mean that they seem to address us as speaking subjects. What is seen is not also heard. Which is not to say that the visible gives us nothing to hear. Yet, we know well that what may be heard/understood121 does not rely solely on the sharpness of our ears.122 The only image that spoke, she added tongue-in-cheek, was “the historical incarnation of the invisible image. Since its departure for another world, images have remained silent.”123 In the same collection of essays, Philippe Hamon declared: From a literary point of view (which is where I stand), it is not easy to (re-)think and (re-)construct this notion of the speaking image, an insistent metaphor that haunts more than twenty centuries of history, forever crossing with Poetry, Philosophy, art theory and Rhetorics, through thought objects that carry diverse titles, such as : figure, imitation, evidentia, enargeia, motivation, cratylism, mimesis, ut pictura poesis, image, ekphrasis, picturesque, parallel between the arts, correspondences, synesthaesias etc.124 After insisting on the different kinds of images, and of the so called ‘speaking’ images in particular, Hamon continues: An image to be seen, whether artificial (a painting, for example) or natural (an imprint, for example) could not “speak,” in reality all images are not only deprived of meaning […] but also mute. Therefore, there is nothing but spoken images, that is images that are accompanied by gloss, description or (attributive, explicative or narrative) commentary. This accompanying discourse is not simply a subaltern, accessory, marginal, epi-graphic and second accompaniment, it is what makes an image of the image, what institutes and constitutes the image as image (differentiating it, for example, from a simple, unidentifiable trompe-l’œil […] or a hallucination, or a natural object).125 Let us conclude that the discourse of image has often been mistaken with discourse on/about image.

32  Language and Image The “Thought” of/on the Image: “The Pensive Eye” Thought—a variant, in a sense, of the word/image discourse—can also be found at the centre of the debate; the mirror, reflection, and thought present functional analogies that are highlighted by the polysemy of terms related to contemplation and reflection. Starting with the painting, the thinking subject as well as the object of reflection are common themes in pictorial representation. Thought may take the form of an image—as in Dürer’s etching—to thematically depict someone who is immersed in meditation; it may also emerge from the (symbolic) objects in still-life paintings arranged so as to incite the spectator to contemplate on death or the passage of time. What is more, the painting may also instigate reflections of a philosophical, conceptual, or theoretical nature, thoughts on and by the painting practice. Italian painter Valerio Adami spoke of the mazzochio—à propos ­Uccello’s ­Battle of San Romano—and suggested that this form represented thought as structure, pointing to a metaphysics that linked thought to man, space, light, and colour.126 Such observations raise questions about the image’s relation to thought, painting’s relation to (its) theory, as well as to discursiveness and language, but also, for those interested in the literary, about the relations between text and image, literature and painting, when the painting is mediated by the text and the text reflects back on the picture. The first question at hand concerns the relation between thought and image; critics have often spoken of “the thought of the image”— Régis Durand, for instance, who, in his study on photography spoke of the “the pensive look” or Rudolf Arnheim who proposed a Visual ­Thinking.127 But, what does one mean when one says that an image “thinks”? In its relation to language, the image seemed to be moving back and forth, in between thought of the image and thought on the image. ­Moving backwards, from the image to thought, constituted a ­ rigin, a certain reconstruction of the operations that led return to the o to its production, whereas moving forward meant proceeding from the image to its textual descendent, towards a thought generated by the “intellectual density” of the image. A Thought of/on the Image? As R. Arnheim notes, for a long time, painting was related to the ­ echanical arts that were considered inferior, which did not “think,” m exercised by artisans who were deprived of veritable thought and of the power of abstraction. Still, as we often see in films on artists such as Matisse or Picasso, a painting carries the traces of a creative, organising thought that decides on the colours, the composition, and other traits of the painting.

Language and Image  33 Let us suppose, then, that the image does not “think,” not more so than it speaks, neither more so than a text “thinks.” What is needed is a “thought activator” triggered at the moment of reception so that the text or the image may be re-thought, that is, revisited at the point where they are formed in words, pictorial, or other means, moving in the direction they seem to be taking the thought that they have generated. As Durand notes—in response to Barthes’s phrase that “ultimately, photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatises, but when it is pensive, when it thinks”128 —to say that a text thinks would be an overstatement; it would also be the result of an illusion resulting from the fact that language seems to be guiding thought in a more rigid, more didactic manner than that of the image. Language operates a formalisation of thought. As far as the literary text is concerned, the reader would either follow the narrator’s thought on the world that he mediates, or s/he would be under the illusion that s/he has direct access to the thoughts of a character. We, therefore, return to questions of philosophical thought, and this is a question of conception, rather than a matter of nature. In the case of the image, just like in the literary text, thought is not immediately “given,” much less so when it comes to the theory underlying the text or the image. The necessary reconstruction of what is indicated or prescribed depends on the reader or spectator; a text, therefore, restores a thought and/or activates it in the same way that an image may trigger reflection. What the Eye Tells the Brain129 How, then, can we claim that painting enunciates propositions or that it articulates thoughts? Doesn’t this mean, in a sense, that we appoint it with a rather superfluous function? How does the painting question art and its subject? How does the eye communicate the sight of objects or scenes to the brain, in the way Jacques Bouveresse formulates it: what the eye tells the brain seems, all in all, very much like a true judgement of perception, rather than the simple communication of a raw, sensorial material whose ulterior elaboration will supposedly lead to the formulation of such a judgement.130 The real question would be: how are states of mind represented? Wouldn’t it be simply a matter of seeing how the work translates thought, emotions, or the theoretical requirements of its creator? Let us suppose, then, that what lies at the origin of a picture is a thought, a conception of the painting, and a theory that are put into action in the completed work and are translated in the mind of the reader by another thought that, according to M. Picard’s schema of the triad “uniting two subjects and an object,” is quite similar to the original

34  Language and Image one; evidently, the process of transmission will result in interference and a certain loss. When it forces the subject to re-think, as per Nicolas ­Poussin, “the arrangement of things under the sun” and their representation, and by resorting to specific techniques, painting gives us something to think about, not just something to see; it produces a thought on perspective, on representation, or on man’s place in the universe, in a way that is symmetrical to its staging. It is precisely by putting the pre-existing and the coexisting thought— which is continuously present ever since its “encoding”—into action that the work of art reveals its theoretical, philosophical, and artistic requirements. In other words, perspective stages the thought of the painting in the painting. After all, by constructing a movement towards the infinite, perspective has represented the infinite long before this was ever conceivable. A few examples would include the anamorphosis in Holbein’s Ambassadors—forcing the spectator to a positional shift so that s/he adopts the proper point of view and reconsiders the painting—as well as Vélasquez’s Las Meninas and the questions the painting raises as to its composition, the redoubling of the framing, and the position of the painter. Furthermore, one may include instances of criticism exercised by the painters themselves, Picassos’ variations of Las Meninas, for example, where the painter’s analytical eye guides the spectator and invites them to re-see the famous painting through a pictorial, deconstructive, selective commentary that depicts the reorganisation of its multiple compositional elements. When Hillis Miller evokes the paradoxical triple sun painted by Turner in The ‘Sun of Venice’ Going to Sea, he provides a similar analysis that, nonetheless, verges on personal interpretation: [T]he painting on the sail duplicates the painting which duplicates the real scene, in a mise en abyme of receding representations within representations, of which the faint reflection in the water of the fishing boat and its sail is the last in the series. Painted sun and painted Venice are doubled in reverse in the sea, where the painted sun is mirrored as a dull yellow spot in the water, as though to anticipate the swallowing up of all these suns by the sea, the real sun and its simulacra.131 Mise an abyme becomes a metapictorial way of figuring painting and its reflection; and the thought of painting, once acknowledged and reformulated, becomes a thought on or about painting when the interpreting self projects her/his own interpretations and desires onto it: “as though to anticipate the swallowing up of these suns by the sea” (my emphasis). Evidently, in order to make itself “heard,” painting uses its own devices, such as perspective, colour, line, shadows, chiaroscuro, self-quotation (as in the presence of other paintings, of an amateur cabinet, of a gallery),

Language and Image  35 or its genres (portrait painting, still life, landscape painting, historical painting, and so forth). Let us conclude by listening to the painters themselves. Mark ­Rothko expresses a much more abstract, even mystical, thought reaching far beyond the visible, when he states that: “The most interesting painting is one that expresses more of what one thinks than of what one sees. Philosophic or esoteric thought, for example.”132 The use of the word “expresses” is of particular interest here; how can the painting do this and for whom? As has often been noted, in Rothko’s art, large strips of colour offer their chromatic variations and act upon the spectator’s eye as vibrant stimuli, plunging her/him in a deep, trance-like state where abstract thought may find its locus in her/him, springing from a set of primary sensations that are activated even before percept may be acknowledged. A contrario, Duchamp argues that one must resist the pitfalls of “thought-painting” by turning to titles. They are a means of deferring the fetishisation of the work of art by disconnecting “those two main functions [in language system]: reference on the one hand and representation on the other;”133 that is, as Catherine Perret remarks, moving on “according to Broodthaers from Art as language to language as Art.”134 When Image Resists: Against This “New Iconoclasm” In opposition to this new iconoclasm, the term “intersemiotic transposition” may be discarded in favour of the more open “intermedial (or interartistic) transposition.” The heterogeneity of the two media or artistic forms has to be acknowledged together with the impossibility of reducing an image to a text, or, as per art historian Daniel Arasse, with their incommensuratio, since “an image is not a text.”135 After all, there is a fundamental difference between translating from language to language, even within the same language, and “intersemiotic” translation. Roman Jakobson distinguished between “three ways of interpreting a verbal sign,” namely (1) “intralingual translation” or “the rewording” of a text within the same language, (2) “interlingual translation” or the re-creation of a text in a different language, and (3) “intersemiotic translation or transmutation,” which consists in the “interpretation of verbal signs thanks to a non verbal sign system.”136 The main question here is to establish whether painting is indeed a sign system. Incommensuratio: Art Historians’ Point of View The two media’s irreducibility, first and foremost that of the image having to resist the domination of language, pertains directly to a question of incommensurability between word and image, or, as per Régis ­Durand, to whether there is a “common measure between language and

36  Language and Image the image.”137 Quite interestingly, this question relates directly to art history, for incommensuratio (as in Piero della Francesca’s Annunciation) was a way of thinking about God’s incarnation, the boundless, the infinite rendered visible in the finite. Following Paul Valéry’s note that “Spectators know well that language is incommensurable with what they see,”138 both linguists and art historians tend to preserve their own fields and territories against a possible “contamination” of one by the other. Art historian Donald Kuspit, for instance, speaks of “the ultimate irreducibility and specificity of the visual experience,”139 while E. ­Gilman cautions against the use of language that may even lead to falsification since “language must be curbed in its tendency to replace the picture with a verbal substitute that threatens not only to rearrange or blunt its visual impact but to falsify it.”140 D. Arasse also reasserts the nature of image as a figurative process that corresponds to a programme and is partly immune to the conceptual. An image is not a text and, if it is true that a text must often confirm the interpretation of an image, the latter does not have a specific signification. Even though it is composed following a “program,” the image is not discourse, it is a figuration and as such it consists of a non-conceptual part that ensures its function in the society where it is produced.141 Yet, to escape language truly is “Mission: impossible.” Art-historian ­M ichael Baxandall himself acknowledges the difficulty of the task, which “is the interposition of words and concepts between explanation and object of explanation,”142 in tandem with the complexity of word/ image relations, when he states that: Every evolved explanation of a picture includes or implies an elaborate description of that picture. The explanation of the picture then in its turn becomes part of the larger description of the picture, a way of describing things about it that would be difficult to describe in another way. But though ‘description’ and ‘explanation’ interpenetrate each other, this should not distract us from the fact that description is the mediating object of explanation. The description consists of words and concepts in a relation to the picture, and this relation is complex and sometimes problematic.143 For him, it is difficult not to change anything to the internal hierarchy of the painting, when one moves from a simultaneous mode of artistic expression to its linear counterpart. Conversely, the picture would be in turn “affected” by the intervention of the mediating language, but also by any posterior interpretation of the pictorial, the numerous commentaries on Velasquez’s Las Meninas or Holbein’s The Ambassadors being

Language and Image  37 a case in point. Gilman, following Baxandall and S. Alpers, also recognises the necessary mediating function of language, which, nevertheless, cannot replace the work itself: Language necessarily inserts itself between the artwork and the mind: we must communicate our perceptions of a picture not only to others but to ourselves, telling ourselves what we see by means of a verbal, or verbalizable, account. But the medium of language can never be direct or transparent.144 Within this context, Baxandall’s remark that when one speaks of a painting what is offered is mostly a representation of one’s perception of the image, rather than a representation of the painting itself, is of the utmost importance. In effect, and while discussion on a painting risks transforming into a discussion of the painting, discourse remains peripheral to the image. It is precisely here that art historians consort with practitioners of literature trying to appropriate the work of art and transfer it within their own territories, to import it in a poem, a novel, or a play. For Gombrich, the autoreferential nature of the visual arts separates them from literature and the world of objects they share. For Hubert Damisch, “it is less a question of transposing from one sign system into another than of the reciprocal criss-crossing of text by image and image by text,”145 in spite of their dissimilarities and irreconcilable disparities. For Jean-Luc Nancy, also, the image is the absolute Other of discourse; in his chapter titled “The distinct oscillation,” a term I also ventured elsewhere,146 he observes the relationships between word and image in terms of otherness, oscillation, exhibition, and tension, as “image and text: arrow and target for each other”147 in a relationship of interweaving. In fact, for Nancy, “image is the web of a threadless weave” while the text is “textile; it is the material of sense”148; thus, being material, the image is, by nature, distinct from discourse, “matière du distinct,” and closer to Henri Michaud’s “matière-image.” Word and image are irreducible in spite of their convergence and complementarity, yet the absence of common ground does not preclude that there lies something exceptional, something beyond the norm; in R. ­Durand’s words, “without common measure, then, which both signifies that there is a common ground lacking but also that there is the expression of something exceptional in the relationships between the two terms, which goes beyond the norm, beyond common measure.”149 This is one of the dominant reasons why word/image relations constitute such an exciting field of research. For it seems impossible to conceive of the image as totally independent from language at one time or another of its existence, be it for the sake of communication, reference, interpretation, or other. It is precisely on this Gordian knot that word/image studies rest.

38  Language and Image

Word/Image Cooperation: From Intersemiotic to Intermedial Transposition Faced with this intricate relation, one cannot but perceive word/image relationship in terms of reconciliation, as a mutual approach, dialectic cooperation, or, in other words, what Gilman calls “a dialectic of mutual illumination and correction” and Baxandall defines as a “reciprocal reference between the word and the object.”150 The question of incommensurability is, as Gilman reminds us, clearly depicted in Jacobson’s early works, where he insisted on the indifference of poetry towards its subject matter, on its opacity rather than its socalled transparency. By insisting on the materiality of a poem and not on its mimetic capacity, Jacobson advocated total incommensurability and, thus, explicitly delineated the field of each art. The representation of the same object, say a tree or horse, does not render a poem and a painting comparable, Gilman notes; and he quotes Loerke, the painter in D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, when confronting a deeply hurt Ursula whom he rebuked for insisting on seeing a horse in the painting of a horse. Loerke then develops his thought on the autonomy of painting and the irreducible separation between art and life: “But it is a picture of a horse, nevertheless.” He lifted his shoulders in another shrug. […] “That is a kuntswerk, a work of art. It is a work of art, it is a picture of nothing, of absolutely nothing. It has nothing to do with anything but itself, it has no relation with the everyday world of this and other, there is no connexion between them, absolutely none, they are two different and distinct planes of existence, and to translate one into the other is worse than foolish, it is a darkening of all counsel, a making confusion everywhere. Do you see, you must not confuse the relative work of action with the absolute world of art. That you must not do.”151 As Loerke’s musings show, the rapprochement between word and image cannot occur owing solely to their common subject; it consists in the aesthetic solution they each find when treating a specific problem or programme. For Gilman, the comparison rests on a sound foundation, for if they both belong to two different (semiotic) systems, they, nevertheless, both share their non-referentiality, the autotelism of the work—each having its own object. It is this very non-referentiality, then, that grounds the possibility of their comparison while preserving their autonomy, and it is probably more from a formal than from a thematic point of view that the arts can be called “sisters.” Thus, they could be compared as instances of a formal technique, for instance, such as “mise

Language and Image  39 en abyme,” or in terms of the technical solutions each brings to a specific problem. But things are much more complex, as we shall see; and autonomy and referentiality are more complementary than it was conceivable in those years when the work of art was thought to be a closed system. Let me propose, then, that this new iconoclasm be defused, that we discard the—much too laden with sign theory—adjective “intersemiotic,” and that we opt for the term “intermedial,” as in “intermedial transposition” and “intermedial studies.”152 Intermedial insists on the medium, on its materiality as art, as vehicle, a means of expression as well as creation, for one speaks of the “painting medium.” As Mitchell put it, “By ‘medium’ I mean the set of material practices that brings an image together with an object to produce a picture […] understood as complex assemblages of virtual, material, and symbolic elements.”153 Intermedial criticism respects each art, its freedom, specificity, and its immanence; the heterogeneity of the two media or artistic forms ­(literature and the visual) must be taken into account and the image cannot be reduced to a sign system. Their incommensuratio is actually a fact, to use the language of Word made flesh, a resurrection process. Intermedial theory and criticism will then be at the centre of this study with a view to proposing an “intermedial poïetics.” To begin with, I will turn to a specific instance of cooperation between word and image, namely titles, which, although minimal—it is what Michel Butor calls “the first degree of a text”154 —are a true instance of intermedial relationship and will therefore provide an eloquent example of my argument. In the process, I will also briefly refer to a title variant, the signature. I hope this will give readers a delicate pleasure, that of the interplay between word and image. Titles: A Visual Arrow Linking Word and Image If language is widely metaphorical and thus contains a potential for the image, the image only displays partial and limited knowledge,155 or it is inherently plurivocal, thus often requiring glossing. Specifically referring to titles, linguist Bernard Bosredon’s Les titres de tableaux,156 one of the few books written on the subject, offers a meticulous analysis dedicated to linguistic and grammar problems related to the act of naming paintings. It is a very useful work even though topics such as the function of titles, their link with pictures, and their history, too, are beyond the scope of this particular study and remain to be tackled. The title may help bestow some order in the associations and discursive forms triggered by the image, since, as Régis Durand suggests, “More generally speaking, the text often functions as a more or less explicit programme of the image: a narrative or iconographic programme, or an interpretative programme.”157 The notion of a text (even of a title) as generating a programme (be it interpretative, narrative, or iconographic,

40  Language and Image explicit or not) and its consequences—on the one hand playing the part of a virtual straitjacket for the image, on the other triggering its endless “opening”—offers an accurate reflection of the relationship between word and image. The word/image structure (if there is one) enables us to rethink the structure of the devices it engenders and so lies at the core of the conceptual thought of contemporary artists and theoreticians. Martin Heusser discusses Mark Twain’s playful variations on the subject matter of a painting whose title is missing: If we do not know what a given image depicts, the image has no way of conveying the knowledge to us. There is thus more than mere facetiousness in mark Twain’s saucy remarks about the oil painting representing “Stonewall” Jackson’s last interview with General Lee, which he saw in the Washington Artillery building in New Orleans: “Both men are on horseback. Jackson has just ridden up, and is accosting Lee. The picture is very valuable, on account of the ­portraits, which are authentic. But, like many another historical picture, it means nothing without its label. And one label will fit it as well as another:—

First interview between Lee and Jackson. Last interview between Lee and Jackson. Jackson Introducing Himself to Lee. Jackson Accepting Lee’s Invitation to Dinner. Jackson Declining Lee’s Invitation to Dinner— with Thanks. Jackson Apologizing for a Heavy Defeat. Jackson Reporting a Great Victory. Jackson Asking Lee for a Match. It tells one story, and a sufficient one; for it says quite plainly and satisfactorily, “Here are Lee and Jackson together.” The artist would have made it tell that this is Lee and Jackson’s last interview if he could have done it. But he couln’t, (sic) for there was n’t (sic) any way to do it. A good legible label is usually worth, for information, a tone of significant attitude and expression in a historical picture.158

This, undoubtedly hilarious, multiplicity of the superimposed titles shows to what extremes meaning may err when the image is deprived of the crutch of language. Of course, this is only valid for referential painting and not abstract art. As discussed earlier in relation to Broodthaers’s work, the highly exciting question of titles puts word/image relations to the test, for what may seem superfluous (the title) is often more than necessary—that is, until some instances of contemporary art judge otherwise and make it disappear or merely assimilate it to exhibition numbers or, in the case

Language and Image  41 of conceptual art and installations, let it come back under the guise of long commentaries. An interesting example of the latter would be Ann Hamilton’s fourteen-page-long leaflet distributed to the visitors of her installation Phora in Paris,159 which would also correspond to some of Mitchell’s points in What do Pictures Want?, when he evokes the life of images and their relation to objects. The beginning of the text exemplifies the links between word and image, between sound and silence, what in an installation creates a link between body speech and metaphor. The title of the installation is commented upon in the leaflet, so as to make sure that the spectator makes sense of it, for the installation consisted in a series of screens presenting a mouth uttering sounds. For her exhibition at La maison rouge, Ann Hamilton has created phora – a title whose etymology, the Greek pherein, “to bear”, evokes the idea of metaphor, and whose sound evokes the Latin fora, “forum”, a place of assembly. The installation extends through different spaces of the foundation, forming a progression from silence to sound, from sound to voice, from voice to speech and from speech to speaking. How, it asks, do words become things how is speech transformed into action?.160 Indeed, when in excess, language may substitute for the work. A more classic example is presented by one of Andy Warhol’s paintings, entitled Ten-Foot Flowers (1967), which is exhibited in the Musée de Lyon. This descriptive and denominative title produces a redundant or ­mirror-like effect between the title, the painting, and the production of a self-­conscious description: “these are (very big) flowers (painted) and not…a pipe?” This instance of self-referential painting circles back on itself, together with a deictic title and a hint of narcissistic megalomania. Another example that deserves our attention, in the same museum, is François Desportes’s Still Life with a Peacock, a Monkey and a Parrot, dated 1717. Beyond the dutifully designated and identified signs, the title and the painting allude to its generic choice, “a still life” with “animated” subjects. They acquire the dimension of a “metapictorial” discourse enunciated by the painter as a result of both his training and his culture. The peacock stands as a symbol of vanity, as much as the monkey and the parrot represent servile and imitative painting. They seem to turn the painting into a kind of warning against the dangers of vanity and of the easy satisfaction that may lie in wait for the painter when he is too readily flattered. But here again, even if the spectator possesses the required symbolic referents, s/he has to resort to language to transmit them, to formulate the painting’s so-called “discourse.” The recognition of symbols, allegory, biblical or mythological references, and the movements of thought work their way from eyes to speech. This

42  Language and Image is also the case with the quotational (metapictorial) practice in painting, the examples of which are numerous and can be found in Vermeer, Velasquez, Picasso, Bacon, Freud, and others. Here, interpictoriality must be formulated by language, otherwise one will only operate a visual ­see-saw movement between the representing painting and the other works represented or alluded to in the painting. A final example of the complex relationship between title and work may be found of course in Duchamp’s practice of “nominalism.” L’objet dard, for instance, is a truly thought-provoking device that allies the object and its reference and, as Catherine Perret and others have noted, brings about a logic of the event and not a logic of the concept: All the intensity of the objet-dard lies in its title, in this encounter that does not fulfil the expectation of the object, but only its revival, the re-projection. […] This title is not simply that through which the objet-dard arrives, it is what it consists of, to the extent that bringing it into existence would suffice. […] The logic behind [Duchamp’s] work is the logic of an event, not one of concept. […] The result is an “image,” what after Walter Benjamin we would name “image-thought” (Denkbild), so as to distinguish it from the sign that is often too quickly recuperated through symbolism, and from the simple image as a reproducible mirror apparition.161 The object, then, becomes a work of art: it stands as an operation, an event, a performance, “an installation,” a video (as was the case with Sam Taylor Wood’s Still Life, National Gallery 2005, which showed a video of the accelerated total decomposition of a hare hanged by one leg as was familiar with still-life painting dedicated to hunting). The interlocution between word and image on a humoristic and ironical way is lost in the translation of the French (bawdy) pun, which testifies to the importance of language under the guise of the title in this instance. The object itself may remain cryptic if one is unable to see the shape beneath the shape, the joke and the backlash effect of Duchamp’s “art” used versus other, earlier forms. Functions of the Title According to Leo H. Hoek’s perceptive and detailed analysis, a title may function for the purpose of identification, designation, reference-­ building, or obeying a patron’s wish.162 For Bernard Vouilloux, titles have been used by a community to designate an individual or a work of art as part of a mutual understanding,163 which means that Rembrandt’s name, for instance, is no longer necessary to identify The Lesson of Anatomy, the title suffices. Vouilloux also remarks that a title may be translated, which is not the case with the painter’s name, even though, linguistically speaking, they share the same characteristics: the

Language and Image  43 title occupies the same syntactic positions as subject, complement, and so on. Furthermore, it has a descriptive value; it belongs to a code and ascribes limits to it. Contrary to the more fluid allusion, a title is often linked to reference. It bears the names and titles of the models long after their death and possibly carries on the devotional function of the painting, as is the case of The Virgin with Canon Van der Paele by Van Eyck. According to Michel Butor as well, “the title bridges a gap,”164 as it helps represent the subject, “to identify it for sure.” Butor gives the example of Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s paintings, specifically Blanche, of the Royal Hunting Pack, where the name of the dog is written on the surface of the picture.165 The title completes the painting in what it might lack or want or could fool the eye. Another famous example would be Brueghel’s The Fall of Icarus whose title diverts the spectator’s attention onto the two tiny legs desperately trying to kick out of the river and, thus, acts as an arrow pointing to the main subject. This would also be the case with some of Weegee’s pictures, whose (often) ghastly subject of New York or Chicago night crime scenes is presented in a composition that is commonly too dark for the spectator to see clearly, at a first glance; as a result of the rendition of these stills, the viewer often relies on the title to distinguish one from the other. Of course, image can also try to cheat the power of the title, which is what the surrealists enjoyed doing. This is the case with The Treachery of Images by Magritte, better known as Ceci n’est pas une pipe, a phrase emerging from the inside of the painting, which lures us and establishes itself as its true-false title. In the heyday of cubism as well, titles were necessary, as Butor claims, for the title to “keep the trace of this itinerary.”166 In these cases, it is dissemblance that comes to the fore; and the title testifies to a disappearance. One can see it with Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) or The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–1923) the 1912 Bride. As for Picabia, there often was a huge gap between the title and the painting as with Here is the Woman, 1915, which only displays tubes and pipes and frames but also a guillotine or an industrial machine. Magritte’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1930) represents icons of a glass, an egg, and a shoe, under which the words “the storm,” “the tree,” and “the moon” are inscribed, which points to what those figures fail to be, namely, a real glass, an egg as world objects.167 These are but representations and arbitrary codes that do not coincide with usage, hence the subsequent disjunctions and humour effects as well as the reference to Freud’s science of dreams. An image may hide another one. On the other hand, there are “bad” titles that might also disrupt true vision: But if the title is so important for the organisation of the plastic arts, it is evident that works of art may be dangerously mis-named. When a painter is not cautious of this, they could prevent us from looking

44  Language and Image at their painting [simply] by giving it a title without consideration. They would, therefore, have to dispose of this foreign element which would not be possible unless they replace it with another, a more suitable one. And just as we can restore images by stripping the coats of paint or parasitical varnish, we can also restore titles, eliminating misunderstandings that have accumulated, often for centuries.168 Some of these titles may be seen as too meaningful, thus throwing onto the work too closely knit a net, while others are too loose or too neutral, leaving the viewer in front of a redundant, self-evident label like “portrait,” “still life,” “seascape,” and so forth. Francis Bacon used to be good at this sort of violent confrontation of the spectator with his work, since Painting, 1946, Head III, 1946, or Two Figures 1947, even Triptych (1974, 1976 among others) necessitated a description or dating for reference to be possible between commentators. Formalism will designate the work as “composition,” “two green dots” for Kandinsky, or a mere number, “41,” even a letter. For some, of course, the refusal to give their work a title will be marked as “untitled,” which is, nevertheless, a title. The place where the title figures is of importance, too: Klee inscribes them by hand on the frame, even on the canvas itself, in a kind of handwriting graphic design; the Pre-Raphaelites make good use of the frame that may bear, for instance, the sonnet lying at the ­origin of the painting, as a source of inspiration. An eloquent example of this practice would be Alfred Hughes’s Triptych illustrating John Keats’s poem The Eve of St Agnes. Interestingly enough, the very layout of the poem was modified so as to coincide with the frame and the painting, and the ivy leaves seem to point to the lines themselves.169 Thus, the title may migrate from the outside of the painting to the inside even at times denying it as in Magritte’s well-named The ­Treachery of the Images. Literature itself will remember these games when it alludes to fictitious titles or paintings such as The Picture of Dorian Gray. Title and Art History As far as art history is concerned, titles, as Leo Hoek shows, used to work as indices of subjects and themes; their function was that of classification, of the legitimation of the represented subject, and so they offered an equivalence and a successful transposition between history and representation. Still, titles were not supposed to be indispensable; rather, the subject had to be recognisable in itself. “For art critics in the XIXth century, the words ‘subjects’ ‘themes’ or ‘titles’ were perfect equivalents: by reflecting a subject, the title constituted as necessary a quality as a well-chosen subject, as Fromentin perfectly knew.”170 The title was thus becoming an instrument of recognition in art criticism for it was the shape under which the work was conjured. “The

Language and Image  45 contextual discourse in which the title works is called art criticism, understood in its broad sense as any commentary on contemporary or ancient art.”171 Art criticism, then, is the natural locus of picture titles. The Exhibitions and Salons in France contributed to the institutionalisation of the titles working as references and as means to assess and interpret pictures. These processes of progressive, to follow Hoek, “industrialization and professionalisation,” at a time when emerging techniques of image reproduction, such as engraving and photography, made their wide distribution possible, resulted in deep changes and led to new practices. This academic use of titles was debunked by modern painters, which testifies to the utmost importance attributed to the issue of titling and may even reflect a change of paradigm. Manet, in particular, knew how to flaunt his contemporaries’ expectations in diverse ways that were typical of the modernists;172 he actually evaded a direct interpretation of his paintings and refused to succumb to easy narratorial temptations. As Hoek notes, Manet’s painting defies the realist reader and imposes a modernist reading, by its narrative unpredictability, the reflection of the pictorial medium, the artist’s self-reflectivity and the discursive reflections, [functioning] like citations of its predecessors and of the history of the field, parody, irony and mise en abyme.173 Hoek resorts to Luncheon on the Grass, Olympia, and Mademoiselle V. in the Costume of an Espada and shows how those three paintings eluded any direct interpretation and puzzled art critics. For Hoek, Luncheon on the Grass, which did not tally with any registered genre, really offered itself as an eye-cleansing operation for academic painting. Hence its provocative position and the painter’s rejection by institutionalised art criticism. The title of Raphaelle Peale’s 1822 Venus Rising from the Sea—After the Bath (A Deception)174 may also be mentioned as an eloquent example of the games titles may play between painting, viewer, and painter. Apart from the mythological reference one cannot miss, this Anadyomène Venus also refers to the paradigmatic one, Botticelli’s, and, more subtly, to James Barry’s Birth of Venus. Indeed, Peale’s painting is a copy of Barry’s own Venus, which he partially hides behind the tantalising veil of the square of linen he places in front of the naked body, in true Parrhasios’s manner. Hence, the title speaks of the way this painting was actually made “after,” both in the manner of another painting and chronologically following it. Moreover, the addition of “A Deception” in the title announces the snare that the spectator falls victim of, seeing that he cannot see anything beyond the pinned-up bath towel. But after all, we had been warned, as After the Bath also means Venus is no longer naked, for she is getting dressed behind the veil. At another level, this

46  Language and Image also reminds us of the practice of keeping paintings behind veils and curtains to protect them from the light; this was the case with Courbet’s L’origine du monde kept under a green curtain by his first owner Khalid Bey, and then, by Lacan, behind a work by André Masson the structure of which reproduced that of L’origine. Only the happy few were allowed to have a glimpse of the painting when the master drew the first panel to reveal the second one. The Signature as Excursion Before eventually moving on to another ‘extreme’ case of cooperation between word and image, I offer a playful excursion (in the meaning of literary excursio or digression) to ponder another scriptural manifestation included in the painted, either represented or representing, space. M. Butor175 and more recently D. Arasse,176among others, have laid the groundwork for exploring the question of painters’ signatures. I do not mean to enter art historians’ territory but to remark how via this sign a singularity is transmitted, one that is heterogeneous to the properly pictorial means of painting and that, by dint of its mutations, variations, modes, and place, marks the presence of the singularity of a name. Thus, Mantegna, for instance, does not always sign in the same way, not only graphically speaking but also linguistically; he uses Andreas Mantignia, or Mantegna, translates it into Latin, adopts Greek characters, resorts to figurative representations such as overt or covert self-portraits or characters representing him.177 Colour may also attract attention, as in Courbet, among others, who used the colour red to sign. Some painters choose a sign, such as Whistler’s butterfly or Basquiat’s crown. And Picasso’s signature was used to sign a car visibly inscribed on its side, transferring this mechanical object into the realm of works of art. The mercantile use of Matisse’s signature is used as decoration on museum knick-knacks. Moreover, the signature and its variations could be seen as the realisation of the painter’s voice, for he changes it, gives it accents, different stresses, and types according to his needs, thus making it a very singular occurrence. The decision to integrate a signature or not in the represented/ing space turns it into one of the elements of the scene or, on the contrary, into its commentary. The signature is a sign that signals from inside the work. It identifies the painting and constitutes a constant feature, its variations and modulations notwithstanding, like a voiceless voice. Maybe handwriting would be the mode closest to the voice, for the hand gesture is the trace left by a body, the print left by a presence. If a signature is not a breath coming out of the body like the voice, still, it is a projection, a tension, or an emission towards a possible encounter. What the signature shows is “I have painted this,” “here is my work,” in the way “Kilroy” left his trace, under diverse ways like

Language and Image  47 “OPUS ANDREAE MANTEGNA,” in Mantegna’s Christ aux Oliviers de Mantegna, or “ALBERTUS DÜRER NORICUS FACIEBAT ANNO A VIRGINIS PARTU 1511,” in Dürer’s L’Adoration de la Sainte Trinité.178 The signature also bore testimony of the presence of a witness: this was the case with Van Eyck when he attended Arnolfini’s wedding, wonderfully writing the scrolls of “Johannes de Eyck fuit Hic” above the date: 1434. But after all, he was only making visible the usual task ascribed to a painter, as most often they acted as ambassadors or special envoys in the case of an alliance between two kingdoms; for the painter, naturally, had to draw the first portrait of the bride-to-be. This was also the case when Van Eyck was sent to Portugal to prepare Philippe Le Bon’s wedding with Isabel from Portugal held in 1429, in Bruges. Strikingly out of proportion, the sentence was painted in superb handwriting and embellished with flourishes and arabesques, the initial of the surname being composed in the shape of a reversed Horn of Plenty from which more dazzling calligraph whorls and flourishes emerge. Photography is also worth a brief mention here; if plates originally bore no signature, some photographers soon chose to sign their work. Apart from constituting a way of making it marketable and valuable, this sign of aesthetic quality equated this new art with its older counterpart. Yet, signatures still often remain absent for it clashes with one of photography’s powerful effects, that of Barthes’s “ça a été,” its import as testimony and (falsely) transparent medium. Thus, title and signature both provide an outsider’s look back onto the work, which is emphasised by their hybrid nature and marginal position regarding the work they sign and comment upon. As an introduction to the next part of this work, let me refer to an important factor of the word/image relationship—in which titles also play a part—that is the pleasure provided by these exchanges. Walter Pater already saw the importance of effect on the “aesthetic critic” who must find answers to all sorts of questions, “the aim of the true student of aesthetics:” What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give pleasure? And if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence? the answers to these questions are the original facts with which the aesthetic critic has to do; and, as in the study of light, of morals, of number, one must realize such primary data for one’s self or not at all;. […] the aesthetic critic, then, regards all the objects with which he has to do, all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and human life, as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less peculiar or unique kind.179 (my emphasis)

48  Language and Image The great pleasure derived by both writers and readers from the word/ image relationship may also be due to the inherent risk of transposition and, hence, when necessary, of transgression, what Kibedi Varga calls “the question of the legitimacy of transferring methods used in one field to the other field.”180 For the crucial point is that of the validity of the chosen methodology, of the decision to go beyond the boundaries, this “sunny margin” Woolf wrote about, on which the arts dance together. After all, in his “Conte de tableau” (vv. 226–227), La Fontaine asserted the difference between the two media: “words and colours are not similar things / nor the eyes are ears.” Yet, the literary text does tell us about words and colours, light and shade among others. Transgression then operates a movement from the painting back onto the text, which ­effectuates slight changes of point of view, a “revolution” from the visual to the verbal and towards the oral. This is the direction I now offer to follow in the second part of this work by achieving a critical reversal I will call “intermedial criticism.” None of our pleasure will be spoilt, hopefully, for image will still cast its light upon the text.

Notes 1 Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and­ ­Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1997. lv. 2 Liliane Louvel, Texte/image, op. cit. 3 For a more detailed analysis, see: Ernest Gilman, “Interart Studies and the Imperialism of Language”, Art and Literature, Poetics Today, ed. Wendy Steiner, vol. 10: 1, 1989. 5–30. 4 For Pascal Quignard, Horace’s “Ut pictura poesis” carried a true meaning during the Antiquity thatwas lost during the Renaissance. The painter is in no way a taciturn poet; no more so than a poet could be a wordy painter. Ancient painting is a poetic narrative, condensed in the form of an image. Simonides said: “language is the image (eikôn) of actions.” The ethic moment is the “mute speech” of the image. In other words, la zôgraphia (the writing of life) is a plot that is condensed in an image and speaks by remaining silent (siôpôsan). Pascal Quignard, Le sexe et l’effroi, Paris: ­Gallimard, [1994], 2007. 60. 5 See Gérard Dessons’s discussion of Simonides’s aphorism: “La peinture est une poésie silencieuse”, Penser la voix, ed. Gérard Dessons, La licorne, Faculté des Lettres et des Langues, Université de Poitiers, 1997. 216–238. 6 See: W. Lee Rensselaer, Ut pictura poesis, Paris: Macula, 1991. 7 Ernest B. Gilman, “Interart Studies and the Imperialism of Language”, Art and Literature, Poetics Today 10:1(1989). 8 I am referring to the titles of Wendy Steiner’s work, The Colours of ­R hetoric, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982, and Jacqueline Lichtenstein’s La couleur éloquente, Rhétorique et peinture à l’âge classique, Paris: ­Flammarion, 1989. 9 See Stephen Cheeke, Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis, ­Manchester University Press, 2001. 10 Ernest B. Gilman, op. cit., 16.

Language and Image  49 11 Enea Vico, after Parmigianino, “Vulcan at his Forge with Mars and ­Venus”, 1543,www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/49.97.351 12 Hans Belting, An Athropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, trans. Thomas Dunlap. Princeton University Press, 2011. 13 W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory, Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 1995. 14 W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, op. cit. 15 Ibid, 31. 16 David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response, Chicago: the University of Chicago Press. 1. 17 For a good discussion of the stakes of this quarrel, see Hans Belting, La vraie image, Paris: Gallimard, 2007. 18 Marie-José Mondzain, “Can Images Kill?”, Critical Inquiry 36:1 (Autumn 2009). 20–51. 19 Ibid, 50–51. 20 Ibid, 51. 21 Gilman, op. cit., 17. 22 Aron Kibédi Varga, “L’image pensée”, in The Pictured Word, Word and Image Interactions 2, ed. Martin Heusser, Claus Clüver, Leo Hoek, and Lauren Weingarden, Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998. 46. 23 Wendy Steiner, “Introduction”, in Art and Literature, Poetics Today, vol. 10: 1, 1989. 2. 24 W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, op. cit., 110. Mitchell here refers to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön, trans. Edward A. McCormick, Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs Merrill, [1766] 1962. 25 Ernest B. Gilman, op. cit., 5–30. 26 Ibid, 5. 27 Groupe mu, Traité du signe visuel, Pour une rhétorique de l’image, Paris: Seuil, 1992. 28 Reference to V. Woolf’s sister, painter Vanessa Bell. Diane Gillespie, The Sisters’Arts, Syracuse New York: Syracuse University Press, 1988. 29 V. Woolf, “Walter Sickert: A Conversation”, in Virginia Woolf. Collected Essays, vol. II, London: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967. 236. 30 Ibid, 241. 31 Ibid, 243. 32 Ibid, 243. 33 Jacques Derrida, “Mémoires d’aveugle, L’autoportrait et autres ruines”, Paris: RMN, 1990. Derrida recounts how as a child he was jealous of his brother’s cleverness at painting. He then set himself the task to bury graphic arts under layers of clever speech. See also Maria Scott’s analysis “Textual Trompe l’œil in Jacques Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind”, in On Verbal/ Visual Representation, Word and Image, Interactions 4, ed. M ­ artin Heusser, Michèle Hannoosh, Eric Haskell, Leo Hoek, David Scott and Peter de Voogd, TEXTXET Studies in Comparative Literature 50, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005, note 88. 34 Ernest B. Gilman, op. cit., 28–29. 35 Marie-José Mondzain, op. cit., 22. 36 Patrick Vauday, La peinture et l’image, Y a-t-il une peinture sans image? Paris: Pleins Feux, 2002. 37 W.J.T. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want?, op. cit. 38 Hume’s three laws of psychological association (resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect) loosely correspond to Pierce’s semiotic triad. See W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, op. cit., 58.

50  Language and Image 39 R. Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill & Wang, 1985. 40 Liliane Louvel, L’œil du texte, op. cit., 15. 41 Fanny Gillet, Saisie/dessaisissement: enjeux de l’unité texte/image chez Keats, Tennyson, Rossetti et dans l’art préraphaélite, doctoral dissertation at the Université de Toulouse II Le-Mirail, under the supervision of C. ­Lanone, defended on the 5th December 2008, 19–20. 42 Josée Leclerc, “Freud devant l’objet de l’art: pour une pensée de l’atteinte”, TRANS: Revue de psychanalyse, N°7, hiver 1996, édition électronique, www.mapageweb.Umontreal.ca/scarfond/CyberTRANS.html, 93. 43 F. Gillet, op. cit., 21. 44 Francis Bacon, Entretiens avec Michel Archimbaud, Paris, Gallimard, ­Folio Essais, 1996, 144–145. 45 This remark was phrased by Thierry Demaubus in the SAIT conference: “L’Ecrit sur l’art”, Paris III, June 2007. 46 Régis Durand, “Sans commune mesure?”, in Sans commune mesure, Image et texte dans l’art actuel, Editions Léon Scheer, 2002. 20–31, 56–63. 47 Emile Souriau, La correspondence des arts, Paris: Hammarion, 1969. 48 E. Kant, Prolégomènes §58. 49 Claus Clüver, “Intersemiotic Transposition”, in Art and Literature, Poetics Today, 10:1, Spring 1989. 61. 50 Ibid. 51 Gisbert Kranz, Das Bildgedichten: Theorie, Lexikon, Bibliographie. ­Literatur und Leben, N.S. 23, 2 vols. Cologne Böhlau 1981, I, 5 173–234, qtd in: Claus Clüver, Poetics Today, op. cit., 57–58. 52 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, New York: Vintage Books edition, Random House 1994. 53 Claus Clüver, op. cit. 54 Michel Foucault, TheOrder of Things, op. cit., 9–10. 55 Phillipe Hamon, Imageries, op. cit., 276. 56 This diptych may be seen on the site of the MACBA the Museu d’arte ­Contemporani de Barcelona and on the site of The UBS Art Collection. 57 One hundred copies of this silk-screen work (97.6 cm × 68 cm) were printed. The one owned by the Barcelona Museum owns bears the number 11. 58 Emile Benveniste, “Sémiologie de la langue”, in Problèmes de linguistique générale, II, Paris: Gallimard, 1966. 53. 59 Ibidem. 60 Claus Clüver, op. cit., 61. 61 Claus Clüver, op. cit., 60. 62 My use of the term locus refers to its classical meaning F. Yates uses in The Arts of Memory. Frances Yates, The Arts of Memory, Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1966], 1978. 63 Murray Krieger’s work, Ekphrasis, The Illusion of the Natural Sign, ­Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992, offers a detailed tracing of the origin of this figure. 64 Gilman, op. cit., 17. 65 Ibid, 18. 66 Hubert Damisch, “L’image dans le tableau”, in Actualité des modèles freudiens, Langage-image-pensée, ed. Pierre Fédida and Daniel Widlöcher, Puf, 1995. 53. 67 Jean Rousset, “Ecrire la peinture: Claude Simon”, in Passages échanges ettranspositions, José Corti, 1990. 163. 68 Gilman, op. cit., 17. 69 V. Woolf, “Walter Sickert: A Conversation”, op. cit., 243.

Language and Image  51 70 Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image”, in Image Music Text, trans. ­Stephen Heath, London: Fontana Press, 1977. 71 François Wahl, Introduction au discours du tableau, Paris: Le Seuil, 1996. 42 72 Anne-Marie Christin, L’image écrite ou la déraison graphique, Paris: Flammarion, 1999. 5. 73 Bernard Vouilloux, Le tableau vivant, Paris: Flammarion, 2001. 39. 74 Ibidem. 75 J. Hillis Miller, “Image and Word in Turner”, Interactions, Word/Image I, ed. Martin Heusser, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990. 173. 76 Ibid, 174. 77 Martin Heusser, “‘The Ear of the Eye, the Eye of the Ear’: On the Relation between Words and Images”, in Interactions, Word/Image I, op. cit., 14. 78 Ibidem. 79 Ibidem. 80 Hubert Damisch, “La peinture prise au mot”, Introduction to Meyer Schapiro, Les mots et les images, Paris: Macula, 2000. 27 81 Louis Marin, Sublime Poussin, Paris: Gallimard, 1994. 82 A notable, yet not singular, example would be The National Gallery of London, where the detailed explanations on the work symbolism, for instance, on its context and conditions of production, as well as the painter’s biography, attract the visitor’s attention at the expense of the painting proper. 83 Virginia Woolf, “The Fascination of the Pool”, in The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan Dick, New York: Harcourt Brace ­Jovanovich, 1989. 26. 84 Ibidem. 85 See also my analysis of the story titled: “Les Voix du voir, illusions d’optique et reflets sonores”, in Journal of the Short Story in English, ed. Linda Collinge et Emmanuel Vernadakis, No 41, 20th Anniversary, Autumn 2003. 41–54. 86 Karen Blixen, Last Tales, London: Vintage, 1975, 99–104. 87 Karen Blixen, op. cit., 101. 88 Virginia Woolf, “Walter Sickert: a Conversation”, op. cit. 89 Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Ronald Shusterman, L’emprise du signe, Paris: Seuil, 2002, 44. 90 Angelica Garnett, “Vanessa Bell by Angelica Garnett”, in The Bloomsbury Group: a Collection of Memoirs, Commentary and Criticism, ed. S.P. Rosenbaum, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1975. 173. 91 For a more detailed analysis, see also: Liliane Louvel: “‘Oh! To be silent ! Oh to be a painter’: ‘The sisters’ arts, ‘Virginia and Vanessa”, in Virginia Woolf: Le pur et l’impur, ed. C. Bernard and C. Reynier, Rennes: PUR, 2002. 149–166. Also, “The Art of Conversation, Conversation as an Art. ‘The sisters’ arts’”, in Conversation in Virginia Woolf’s Works, ed. C. Reynier, Conference Volume of SEW, Montpellier: Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines, Hors série, juin 2003, automne 2004. 135–152. 92 Hillis Miller, op. cit., 178. 93 François Wahl, op. cit. 94 Gérald Hess, La métamorphose de l’art, intuition et esthétique, Paris: Kimé, 2002. 28 and 20, note 16. 95 David Scott, “Visual Cultures: Minding the Gap”, in On Verbal/Visual Representation, Word and Image, Interactions 4, op. cit., 252. 96 Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1974. 56.

52  Language and Image 97 Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image”, op. cit. 98 Roland Barthes, “Is Painting a Language?”, in The Responsibility of Forms, op. cit. 149–152. 99 Roland Barthes, “Arcimboldo ou Rhétoriqueur et Magicien”, in The ­Responsibility of Forms, op. cit., 129–148, 131, 136. 100 On this matter see: Meyer Schapiro, Les mots et les images, Paris: Macula, 2000. The narratological terminology is mine. 101 Mieke Bal, Looking In: The Art of Viewing, with an Introduction by Norman Bryson, G+B Arts, Amsterdam: The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group, 2001. 215. 102 Ibidem. 103 Ibid, 217. 104 Ibid, 47. 105 See the chapter “On Grouping”, Mieke Bal, op. cit., 187. 106 Ibidem. 107 Mieke Bal, “Basic Instincts and their Discontents”, in Text and Visuality, Word and Image, Interactions III, Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999. 108 Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric”, in Allegories of Reading: ­Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979. 3–19. 109 Mieke Bal, “Basic Instincts and Their Discontents”, op. cit., 13. 110 Mieke Bal, Reading Rembrandt Beyond the Word-Image Opposition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 111 Roland Barthes, “Is Painting a Language?”, op. cit., 150. 112 Jean-Luc Chalumeau, La lecture de l’art, Paris: Klincksieck, 2008. 113 Nadeije Laneyrie-Dagen, “Lire la peinture?”, in Littérature et peinture, ed. Daniel Bergez, Europe, No 933–934/janvier-février 2007, 227. 114 Laurent Zimmerman, G. Didi-Huberman: Penser par les images, Nantes: éditions Cécile Defaut, 2006. 115 Michel Picard, La tentation, Essai sur l’art comme jeu, Nîmes: éditions Jacqueline Chambon, 2002. 7, 8, 14. 116 Translator’s note: a combination of the French words voir, i.e. seeing, and lecture, i.e. reading. 117 An eloquent example of the ways in which each critic projects their own favourite topic onto the analysis of painting is offered by Henri Meschonnic, a famous French specialist on the question of rhythm, who, in his study of Pierre Soulages’s “œuvre au noir,” mixes rhythm and light. According to Meschonnic, rhythm supposedly enables the spectator to see what is concealed by the opaqueness of language; he speaks of the paradoxical painter who uses the colour black and illuminates it through rhythm, what he terms “le noir lumière.” Le rythme et la lumière, Editions Odile Jacob, 2000. 118 Ernest B. Gilman, “Interart Studies and the ‘Imperialism’ of Language”, op. cit., 5. 119 Gilman, op. cit., 16. 120 Murielle Gagnebin ed., Les images parlantes, Paris: Champ Vallon, 2005. 121 Translator’s note: the French word entendre used here may be translated as both “hear” and “comprehend, understand.” 122 Marie José Mondzain, “Les images parlantes”, Murielle Gagnebin, op. cit., 13. 123 Ibidem. 124 Philippe Hamon, “Images parlantes, paroles imageante et images parlées”, M. Gagnebin, op. cit., 39. 125 Ibid, 41–42.

Language and Image  53 126 Adami, entretien (octobre 2002), “Peinture fraiche”, France Culture, in Franco and Stefano Borsi, Paolo Ucello, Paris: Hazan, 1992. 127 Regis Durand, Le regard pensif, Paris: La Diffèrence, 1990. Rudolf ­A rnheim, Visual Thinking, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. 128 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard, London: Vintage Books [1982] 2000. 38. 129 Following the title of Jacques Bouveresse’s article “Ce que l’œil dit au cerveau,” Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, Summer 1988. 116. 130 Ibidem. 131 J. Hillis Miller, op. cit., 178. 132 James E. Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993. 261. 133 Catherine Perret, op. cit., 174. 134 Ibid, 173. 135 Daniel Arasse, Les visions de Raphaël, Paris: Diana Levi, 2005. note p. 146. 136 Roman Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation”, Selected Writings, Vol 2, Word and Language, The Hague: Mouton, [1959] 1971. 261. 137 Régis Durand, op. cit. 138 Paul Valéry, Qtd in Jean-Michel Rey, Le tableau et la page, L’Harmattan, 1997. 47. 139 Qtd in B. Gilman, op. cit., 7. 140 Ibid, 12. 141 Daniel Arasse, Les Visions de Raphaël, Paris: Liana Levi, 2003. 13. 142 Michael Baxandall, Formes de l’intention, Nîmes, Jacqueline Chambon, [1985] 1991, v. 143 Idem, 1. 144 Ernest B. Gilman, op. cit., 11. 145 H. Damisch, op. cit., 22. 146 See: Liliane Louvel, L’œil du texte, op. cit. and Texte/image, op. cit. 147 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort, New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. 65. 148 Jean-Luc Nancy, op. cit., 67, 66. 149 Régis Durand, “Sans commune mesure?”, op. cit., 20–31, 56–63. 150 See: E. Gilman, op. cit., 13. 151 D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love, Harmondsworth, Penguin, [1921], 1972, 484. 152 This proposition has now been put to the fore in many scholarly studies; it is worth noting that there is now an International Society of Intermedial Studies. 153 W.J.T. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want? op. cit., xiii. 154 Michel Butor, Les mots dans la peinture, Paris: Flammarion, 1969. 61. 155 Ibid, 15. 156 Bernard Bosredon, Les titres de tableaux, Une pragmatique de l’identification, Paris: PUF, 1997. 157 R. Durand, op. cit., 25. 158 Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, chapter 44, “City Sights” qtd in Martin Heusser, Interactions, op. cit., 16. 159 Ann Hamilton Phora, 18.02.05 to 22.05.05, La maison rouge, Paris. 160 Ibid, 3. 161 Catherine Perret, op. cit., 165–167. 162 Leo Hoek, “Le titre à l’œuvre. Manet, modernisme et institutions”, in Word and Image Interactions III, TEXTXET, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. 105–116.

54  Language and Image 163 Bernard Vouilloux, La peinture dans le texte, XVIIIe-XXe siècles, Paris: CNRS Langage, 1994. 26. 164 Ibid, 26. 165 Michel Butor, op. cit., 32. 166 Ibid, 62. 167 Ibid, 71. 168 Ibid, 18. 169 Fanny Gillet, op. cit., 53. 170 Leo Hoek, op. cit., 108. 171 Ibid, 105. 172 Ibid, 111. 173 Ibidem. 174 In Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri (Nelson Trust). 175 M. Butor, op. cit. 176 See: Daniel Arasse, Le sujet dans le tableau, op. cit., especially chapter two, titled “Signé Mantegna”. 177 See, for example, Daniel Arasse, op. cit., 60–61. 178 See: M. Butor, op. cit., 83–86. 179 Walter Pater, “Preface”, The Renaissance, Studies in Art and Poetry, ­London: Jonathan Cape, 1928. x–xi. 180 Kibedi Varga, op. cit., 31.

2 L’ut Pictura Poesis, Daverro1

Theoretical Reversals: Towards an Intermedial Criticism The functional modalities of the pictorial in the text firstly refer to a critical economy that, taking the image as a point of departure, could allow for a text’s literariness to be assessed under a different mode. At least this is where my working hypothesis, my first “idea for research,” to borrow Barthes’s words on Proust, starts. This would propose “an idea for research”- though without allowing us to entertain any positivist ambition: Proust’s novel is one of those great cosmogonies endemic to the nineteenth century ­(Balzac, Wagner, Dickens, Zola), whose character, at once statutory and historical, is that they are infinitely explorable spaces (galaxies); thereby, our critical work is shifted (from any illusion of “result”) toward the simple production of a supplemental writing whose tutelary text (Proust’s novel), if we write up our “research,” would be only a pre-text. 2 The functions of the pictorial—understood as what constitutes an image (one should note that in the English language the word “picture” [painting, image, portrait] is different from the more abstract “image”)—or the visual, in other words the effects of the image, are part of a reading experience that relies on modulations of pleasure, an almost erotic relationship with the work at hand, which are transcribed in descriptive delays related to an often exciting, sometimes tantalising process of veiling/unveiling. The second “idea for research” I propose, then, pertains to the modes of manifestation of the “pictorial third,” a concept that I will be developing in the third part of the book. I would suggest applying a new approach to the study of the relations between word and image, so as to see what constitutes the reading process of passing from one element to the other, as the two interweave in the way Maurice Merleau-Ponty conceives the body caught up in “the flesh of the world.” I consider this process an event, in the sense of that which occurs, which manifests itself somewhere in the process and changes the course of things. The “pictorial third” is

56  L’ut Pictura Poesis, Daverro the term I use to define what happens, what appears in the reader’s mind and changes them. As well as providing a definition, I will be detecting its modes of manifestation, the way it works. But, before doing so, one must first go through an intermediate stage, that of critical practice. Following a brief account of the extent to which the relationship between word and image is permeated by a careful negotiation between language and the visual, I will propose an approach that is more pragmatic, or, more precisely, more poïetic. In effect, the mere analysis of critical discourse and literary theory reveals that these modes are often more or less imbued by references to the visual, particular but not limited to painting. Once this has been acknowledged, we will be able to turn the elements that the text has borrowed from the image back towards itself and apply Horace’s formulation ut pictura poesis, in other words, poetry like painting. I will attempt to assemble the disparate uses phrased in the already existing diverse commentaries into a critical synthesis and to delineate a typology, the need for which has already been extensively expressed, as we will see, in numerous critical writings. ­Observing what happens and how it happens will lead the way. Principles and Justifications of the Approach Writers A great number of writers have expressed a nostalgia for their “sister art,” often overtly declaring their wish to rival the painting, while at the same time reaffirming, where it was considered necessary, literature’s superiority. Within the context of critical analysis, what interests us is that this nostalgia, this effort to reach towards the other, leaves its traces on the text and shapes it. A simple observation of the writers’ discourse, both within and about their works, reveals a fascination for painting, photography and the image, particularly in relation to the recurrent employment of a lexis that is specific to the arts, their history, and practice. Suffice it to cite Proust and his “dream of painting,” also commented on by Barthes, the writers of the nineteenth century and their “écriture artiste,” Claude Simon or Yves Bonnefoy, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, or E. M. Forster—to speak of the British tradition—as well as contemporary postmodernists such as A. S. Byatt (The Matisse Stories), Anita ­Brookner, or Jeanette Winterson, among many others. Virginia Woolf also once exclaimed “Oh! To be an artist! Oh to be a painter!” when viewing Vanessa Bell’s work3 and tended to pit her art against that of her sister’s, as Jane Dunn recalls: But at this time she was still finding out how (and whether) she could write as a painter would paint. […] She kept testing her judgments against the painters. She went to the Omega shows and tried to make up her mind about the paintings under the barrage of Roger

L’ut Pictura Poesis, Daverro  57 Fry’s opinions. She listened to him talking about Cézanne to Clive, and compared her own responses to the famous apples. She set her aesthetics against Fry’s, when he wrote to praise her for “The Mark on the Wall”: “I’m not sure that a perverted plastic sense doesn’t somehow work itself in words for me”.4 The conclusion of Woolf’s letter to Fry is of particular interest, for she seems to perceive plasticity as a kind of perverse, impure intrusion into the writing experience. In fact, Woolf often explored the question of rivalry between painting and literature and inevitably concluded that the latter exhibited certain advantages; still, she did express some reservations, in particular with reference to colour. In “Pastiches and mixtures,” Proust also declares that the writer functions as a painter without knowing it (“sans le savoir”), 5 as D. Bergez reminds us in his exploration of the powerful role of painting in poetic creation in general and in In Search of Lost Time in particular: Isn’t it in “Aesthetic Curiosities” that Baudelaire has better highlighted an essential aspect of his proper design, specifically by speaking of “the painter of modern life”? In parallel, Valery formulates his own ideas of the poetic by evoking Degas. The novel itself occasionally mirrors an aesthetic reflection by means of the painting: in In Search of Lost Time Bergotte’s death does not reveal its full meaning […] unless seen in relation to Vermeer’s painting that the writer has just seen, which is reminiscent of all the evocations of the painter Elstir.6 As I will try to show, painting holds up a mirror to literature and reflects not only its aims and aesthetic choices, but also its formal choices. The common ground between the two arts was duly exploited in nineteenth-century France, with Gautier, for instance, Zola, or the ­Goncourts; besides, “artistic writing” was the driving force behind numerous creations. As a byline discourse of novels, art often takes on the form of “writings on art” while remaining closely knit to the text and to its composition. In the short story especially, a form that requires density of discourse and compression of effects, the kinship between the two arts is, perhaps, more evident owing to the unity of effect. This is eloquently expressed in Valerie Shaw’s exploration of the short story and her detection of elements that are tantamount to the unity of effect present in the visual arts; Shaw supports her argument with a citation by Henry James, who often explicitly resorted to visual analogies for thematic, metaphoric but also formal purposes, and suggests that: Individually, each story might be self-contained and limited in representational power, but when accumulated these “illustrations” could make up a comprehensive survey, comparable to the inclusive

58  L’ut Pictura Poesis, Daverro though wandering vision afforded by a camera obscura. James himself drew the visual analogy when he wrote in 1888 to tell Stevenson that for the next years he planned to concentrate on short fiction: “I want to leave a multitude of pictures of my time, projecting my small circular frame upon as many different spots as possible.”7 The phrase “projecting my small circular frame,” the employment of what reminds one of the viewing contraptions now used by film-makers, shows how James fragmented the real as small vignettes susceptible to making images and giving birth to a short story—a short story that, when linked to others, would constitute a montage resembling a contemporaneous panel or late nineteenth-century panorama. By insisting on this parallel between painting and the short story, Shaw endows it with the value of an operative concept and claims “that such comparisons between the short story and the visual arts are not merely rhetorical.”8 She reminds us that when James writes, in his notes on “the Coxon Fund,” that “[t]he formula for the presentation of it in 20,000 words is to make an Impression –as one of Sargent’s pictures is an impression,”9 he draws attention to the short story’s most significant aspect, one that differentiates it from the novel. According to James, owing to its sudden “effect,” the short form produces an “impression” of totality and triggers the need to grasp it all at one glimpse. ­“Impression” (italicised in the text), whose unity was also recommended by Poe, emerges from James’s pen as a phenomenon typical of the double articulation between the textual and the visual. Besides, “impression” refers to a new mode of painting that was about to change the ways of seeing the world and, consequently, the ways of writing it. In effect, that James should evoke Sargent is in itself of primary import, for this fruitful word/image comparison springs from the imagination of the writer himself. This speaks volumes about the way the writer perceives his own work, but also his pictorial tastes and aesthetic expectations. Sargent provides both a model and a reflection of what James was trying to do; and the Portrait of a Lady preoccupied both artists. The Discourse of Critique Apart from being constantly reaffirmed within the works of literature, the links with painting are also recurrent within critical discourse, much as Shaw does in the study before. Even though she correlates the writing style of Virginia Woolf or Katherine Mansfield to Impressionism a little too hastily, perhaps, her connections between pictura and poesis establish a theoretical standpoint from which one can examine the text: “because it leaves a sense of something complete yet unfinished, a sensation which vibrates in the reader’s or spectator’s mind and demands

L’ut Pictura Poesis, Daverro  59 that he participates in the aesthetic interchange between the artist and his subject.”10 Impressionism, just like post-impressionism in the cases of Virginia Woolf and Catherine Mansfield, will truly change the visual element, thus showing that there is, indeed, some interaction between painting and literature and that the dialogue between the “sister arts” is fertile. In Valerie Shaw’s own discourse, one can already detect an extensive resorting to the visual in order to speak about the literary, not only by referring to a specific school of painting or to a painting style, but also by tracing fruitful analogies that depend on a pictorial practice or techniques. As has already been discussed, Shaw perceives a series of short stories as a series of illustrations that, once assembled, would produce an accumulative effect. They would offer a type of seeing the whole that is comparable to the complete, albeit blurry, type of vision procured by the camera obscura, an optical device that was widely used by painters, probably including Vermeer.11 With this device, an easily reproducible model was provided, even though the image projected in the interior of the black chamber remained hazy and unstable. For the painter, it was a convenient way to reduce three-dimensional space to two dimensions and, therefore, to practically resolve problems of perspective and the illusionary representation of space. The question of “perspective” in a text may be found in numerous critical discourses and a couple of random examples would suffice, I think, to solidify the validity of this argument. A propos of an ancient instance of word/image collaboration, that of the emblem, dating back to the seventeenth century, Mario Praz cites Emanuele Tesoro, who spoke of the metaphor and said: The metaphor closely encases all objects in one word and makes us see them one inside the other in an almost miraculous way. This increases your delight, as it is more curious and more pleasant to consider a number of objects according to point of view rather than [seeing] the originals successively passing in front of your eyes.12 (I emphasise the terms referring to vision) It is interesting to note how naturally the parallel between the arts and the passage from language to vision and painting are drawn, so as to make the mechanism of delight procured by the metaphor explicit, and how the metaphor is closely linked to the emblem. The platonic echoes of this apparatus notwithstanding, the emblem is perceived as a geometrical artifice (“the angle of the perspective”) whose effect is superior to that of directly seeing the original objects. Stéphane Mosès, in his study of Kafka’s work entitled Exégèse d’une légende,13 also speaks of encasement and perspective in a formal manner:

60  L’ut Pictura Poesis, Daverro “this encasement technique that creates the illusion of perspective and of temporal depth is itself dictated by the personal mode of narration.”14 A bit later, he pursues his argument further and touches on the metaphorical by discussing the case of the grandfather “contemplat[ing] his life ‘backwards,’ in the deforming perspective of memory.”15 D. Bergez also considers the notion of perspective in his studies of Flaubert’s complex relation to the image; Flaubert reproached the image for being too reductive, in comparison to the polysemic possibilities of language, and was wary of illustrations of his works. Despite his reticence, however, we should also note that the writer measures up his art in relation to the pictorial theme, in a rather, as per Bergez, ambiguous manner: According to the novelist, Sentimental Education was a failure because the book does not adhere to the appointed ease of pictorial construction: ‘aesthetically speaking, it misses the falseness of perspective’ (letter of 8 October 1879). By way of an apparently pictorial aesthetic, Flaubert, then, actually dreams of exceeding painting.16 As a final note on the subject of perception, it should also be stated that S. Mosès uses a reference other than that of perspective to allude to the trompe-l’œil, a pictorial genre that is appropriately used to destabilise perception, thus alerting us to the presence of a paradox: “Brecht takes this paradox absolutely seriously: he sees the expression of an authentic logical conclusion in this, and not simply the effect of a rhetorical trompe-l’œil.”17 With reference to the spatial domain and its dazzling effects, one should consider L. Dällenbach’s famous theorisation of the mise en abyme; this technique is clearly dependent on the layout of the coat of arms and the visual representation of a lineage, by duly classified symbols. The aim of the coat of arms was, in fact, to impose the image of the whole on the whole. This motif has been represented by painting for centuries: Marguerite de Bourgogne’s book of hours,18 for instance, features an illustration of the owner of this precious work reading in front of a high window. Held in her hands, the book is delicately protected by a piece of cloth, as it was customary to do. Behind the richly dressed young woman one can get a glimpse of the interior of a gothic church or a cathedral, in the centre of which the Virgin Mary is sitting on a throne, holding the holy infant in her lap, worshipped by the donors, that is Marguerite de Bourgogne and her husband. Thus, while holding the book, the owner of the book of hours could look at herself reading and gaze at the scene she was reading about, which described the Virgin and Child, as well as herself kneeling in a gesture of worship. This device stages the de-­multiplication and mise en abyme of the narrative, the reading activity, and the woman’s devotion and piety. Another example is the frontispiece of Thomas

L’ut Pictura Poesis, Daverro  61 More’s Utopia, engraved in 1516 by the Holbein brothers, which adds to the previous apparatus that of the depiction of the island of Utopia with its river, its towns, its boats, and the face-front figure of death (one of Hans’s obsessions, as he would later reproduce this enigmatic figure in the anamorphosis of his famous painting The ­Ambassadors), as well as three people perching on a hill. As Louis Marin19 has shown, one of them is pointing to what he is describing. Even if this cannot be literally called a mise en abyme (since we only have two levels of refraction), it is clearly a mirror image where discourse is doubled by the image. These are two of the numerous visual apparata that function as a model for their literary equivalents or, at least, highlight these literary texts and represent them in the form of the visual. Reaching beyond the specular image that only works on two levels, the “mise en abyme” spatial metaphor demarcates a process of repetition (réduplication) that is performed on at least three levels; in S­ hakespeare’s play Hamlet, for instance, the actors playing the peasants are transformed into noblemen, into king and queen. They perform on stage a play whose structure, or canvas, reproduces that of Hamlet standing in front of the king and queen, whose roles they unknowingly assume. A quotation from Gide’s Journal, which functions as the point of departure in Dällenbach’s work, allows us to see that the writer has drawn extensively from pictorial sources to elaborate on what, in his opinion, constitutes “vision” in a work of art: In a work of art I rather like to find transposed, on the scale of the characters, the very subject of that work. Nothing throws a clearer light upon it or establishes more surely the proportions of the whole. Thus, in certain paintings of Memling or Quentin Metsys a small, convex and dark mirror reflects the interior of the room in which the scene of the painting is taking place. Likewise in Vélasquez’s painting of the Meninas (but somewhat differently). Finally, in literature, in the play scene in Hamlet, and elsewhere, in many other plays. In Wilhem Meister, the scenes of the puppets or the celebration at the castle. In The Fall of the House of Usher, the story that is read to Roderick, etc. None of these examples is altogether exact. What would be much more so, and would explain much better what I strove for in my Cahiers, in my Narcisse and in the Tentative, is a comparison with the device of heraldry that consists in setting in the escutcheon a smaller one ‘en abyme,’ at the heart-point. 20 The exchange between pictorial, theatrical, and fictional works is clearly stated here. Should the coat of arms provide a good model, in the sense of a prototype, the convex mirror also allows for a figuration of the mise en abyme right from the inside of a work of art. In fact, as we shall see in the explorations to follow, literature and,

62  L’ut Pictura Poesis, Daverro consequently, literary criticism have resorted to all sorts of borrowings from pictorial theory and practice, first and foremost optical devices and instruments. Predecessors: The Call for Criticism Horace and the “die-hard ut pictura poesis”21 Prior to looking at criticism with a view to detecting what was already incipient and what I will be attempting to assemble, organise, and develop in a more formal, more “readable,” and more “visible” manner, let us go back to the foundational writings, first to Horace’s formula. In his ut pictura poesis Horace assigned poetry with the task of painting, namely to produce a work that would be vivid and visual, to be seen from a short or a long distance (near or far). 22 This entailed a positive reassessment of description and of its rhetorical locus. Language had to rival the visual arts. Yet, if one examines critical discourse, one might realise that, ever since the seventeenth century and Charles du Fresnoy’s de arte graphica (1667), 23 it was painting that, unexpectedly, was critically examined in the poetic mode. Whereas one spoke of the picturesque, or described the functions of ekphrasis and hypotyposis, the techniques that were related to painting and its history and were applied to poetry as critical tools remained, after all, minimally explored; discussions were restricted to an “artistic,” metaphorical even, vagueness. The discourse of painting (if there is such a thing) was poorly treated when working on the text. Conversely, discourse on painting refined its tools, as mentioned before, by applying newly found emerging narratological, linguistic, semiotic, and literary theories to the study of image, whose “syntax” now needed “reading” and whose “phrase” or “sentence” called for deciphering. 24 What would happen, then, if one applied Horace’s formula to the letter, “poetry like painting”? Since it has been wrongly interpreted for a long time as “poetry must work like painting,”25 one wonders what the image and its theory bring to the text that is more or less different, when the image is not only a decorative element but a necessary one, and how it becomes so by resorting to its own proper techniques. Thus, simultaneously with the image’s alleged subordination to ­language, when it is a question of seeing “painting like poetry,” ut poesis pictura, I suggest reversing critical habits and applying the theory of the pictorial to poetry, so as to analyse the literary text differently—ut pictura poesis, therefore, literally, as it should be. Besides, it is surprising to ­notice that the reversal of critical thinking mentioned before has ­actually been called for by criticism itself. In effect, one could reverse Marin’s proposition that “an analysis based on semiology may thus use literature as a significant prop to analyze a painting. It enables it to articulate meaning onto it.”26 Let us then presume that this formula

L’ut Pictura Poesis, Daverro  63 is reversible and that the image, painting, pictura, may function as a link between literature, poesis, and meaning, affect and emotions. In his article entitled “How to read a painting,” Marin studies still-life painting, one of the intermedial relays I will be analysing as follows. Later, in “Dans le laboratoire de l’écriture-figure,” he acknowledges the necessity for a critical turn: […] under the domination of Saussurian linguistics, we wondered if it was possible to study image as a text without wondering if the reverse question—to study the text as image—responded to the same theoretical and methodological urgent need. 27 Marin studies “the intertwining of text and image in which the text is the textile including and being included in the image,”28 as is the case with inscriptions, captions, signatures, and letters inscribed in a painting, with an emphasis on the eleven stages of Picasso’s 1934 “It Snows Under the Sun.” What I find of primary import here is the 1991 acknowledgement of a “theoretical and methodological urgency,” to which I will attempt to formulate a response drawing from Jean Rousset, among others, who has accounted for specific literary effects by turning to the enlightening effectuated on literature by painting. Rousset adopted certain criteria permeating the latter to create a model of analysis of/for the former. In Passages, échanges, transpositions, while writing on Claude Simon’s La bataille de Pharsale, Rousset notes: “as an overall instance in this novel, which it constitutes the main structuring material of, painting eventually provides the retrospective key to a ‘code of writing’ and of reading which perhaps was not ‘a predictable given’.”29 He, thus, perceives an inlaid work, a mosaic, “the spatial figure of the written text.” I would argue that this form becomes a “significant form,” to recall R. Fry and C. Bell, which represents the formal principles on which the literary work rests by analogy. As we shall see, this critical approach is reminiscent of Forster, from whom Rousset seems to borrow the notion of “pattern” as a principle of textual organisation and a mode of composition. These pioneering voices seem to support my argument that my “idea for research” stems from a theoretical necessity, a void that is recognised de facto by many of those who have written on word/image relations at one time or another. The foundations of a methodology related to such an intermedial type of research may be traced in David Scott’s call for “a transdisciplinary cross-methodological approach.”30 ­Hybridity, mélange, and percolation are all processes that reflect the porosity between the different media, which actually lie in-between the arts, a true instance of intermedial process. This is where it all happens, in this in-between movement and dynamic exchange.

64  L’ut Pictura Poesis, Daverro The Forsterian ‘Pattern’ and the Typology of Discourses Already in the beginning of the twentieth century, E. M. Forster expressed the need to borrow terms from other arts, so as to “describe” certain aspects of the literary text, when classic literary criticism was found wanting: Now we must consider something which springs mainly out of the plot, and to which the characters and any other element present also contribute. For this new aspect there appears to be no literary word—indeed the more the arts develop the more they depend on each other for definition. We will borrow from painting first and call it the pattern. Later we will borrow from music and call it rhythm. Unfortunately both these words are vague […] Before I discuss what pattern entails, and what qualities a reader must bring to its appreciation, I will give two examples of books with patterns so definite that a pictorial image sums them up: a book the shape of an hour-glass and a book the shape of a grand chain in that old-time dance, the Lancers. (Thaïs, by Anatole France, is the shape of an hour-glass). […] Now for the book that is shaped like the grand chain: Roman Pictures by Percy Lubbock.31 (my emphasis) Spatial forms of the text, such as the hourglass or the grand chain, echo Rousset’s perception of marquetry as “spatial figurations of the written text,” not to forget Achilles’s shield. The Forsterian notions of “pattern” (a vague notion that, as Forster notes, was borrowed from painting and was conventionally translated as “motif,” but that can also be translated as composition, in the visual sense of structure, scheme, figure, or even “logic”) and of rhythm (borrowed from music) may help define literature and its techniques—since, according to Forster, the more the arts develop, the greater the need to engage in dialogue. Here emerges the necessity for borrowings, for the hybrid, for a crossing of the boundaries between the arts, so that one can push the limits of the literary back. These modernist notions appear in E. M. Forster’s work, but also V. Woolf’s, T. S. Eliot’s, J. Joyce’s, among others, prior to the extended use performed—albeit in a different manner—by postmodernist writers. I will return to this point to discuss Gabriel Josipovici’s Goldberg ­Variations, a work situated at a crossroads between literature, music, and painting. In the meantime, one such example can be found in Jonathan Coe’s The Rain Before it Falls, which offers a conscious adoption and a practical illustration of the notion of “pattern.” In Coe’s novel, the main, intradiegetic, female narrator records the story of her life on a tape recorder. Her tale, therefore, is embedded

L’ut Pictura Poesis, Daverro  65 within a larger narrative that includes the story of the women who have discovered the tapes and are listening to them. This autobiographical oral narrative is addressed to a young woman who is blind. Each one of the twenty-two chapters dedicated to this tale begins with the description of a photograph that triggers the memories narrated. These give shape to the ensuing chapter and, thus, the novel takes the form of a family album. Thematically speaking, therefore, the description of the photographs is necessary, given that the narrator addresses someone who cannot see them; besides, these ekphraseis mould the novel. What is more, the female narrator is called Rosamond, just like Rosamond ­L ehmann, a writer who was affiliated with the modernists by maintaining a distant relationship with the Bloomsbury group. Coe’s novel resembles those of Lehmann in more than one respect (a “feminine” novel dealing with sexual scandal and frowned-upon relationships, very much like Dusty ­Answer) and is situated within this British literary tradition; in addition, R. Lehmann published Rosamond Lehmann’s Album, which was a book of memories consisting in a series of photographs.32 The novel takes the shape of an album that one leafs through and adheres to a specific “pattern.” Still, in its very final pages, the main focaliser Gill, Rosamond’s niece, is pondering over these women’s stories, stories that are marked by maternal disenchantment and homosexual attraction. Her own experience, adhering to a totally different pattern, has all the same led her to the places where these lives were lived, as, for example, l’Auvergne. She therefore embarks on a meditation concerning the meaning of life, chance, and the ways someone’s destiny may unfold, in the way the plot of a novel unravels, even though the novel has a specific form and follows a certain logic, a meaning, which is not the case with life. Yet the notions of “pattern” and “design” are there, in the text, designating the construction of the novel that one has just read, a novel that is structured around repetition and difference, based, precisely, on a certain “logic” of organisation. The word “patchwork” uttered by Gill (an equivalent to Rousset’s “marquetry” or Harrap’s “peacemeal literature”) provides the key to this novel made up of bits and pieces, scraps of memory sewn together, and, predominantly, bits of tape recording that, from one strip/chapter to the other, construct an oral/written story: “Nothing was random, after all. There was a pattern: a pattern to be found somewhere …” A telephone call by her daughter interrupts her and then she resumes her thought: Gill hung up and stood in the middle of the kitchen, giddy, her thoughts still spiralling. A patchwork, made up of [...] coincidences? Was that what they were? If only she could stand back, see the design more clearly […] The answer was there, it was there for the ­fi nding. Surely she was being offered something precious beyond belief, some supreme revelation. There was meaning in all this… […]

66  L’ut Pictura Poesis, Daverro Even before she heard her daughter’s first, broken words, she knew it was too late. The pattern she had been searching for had gone. Worse than that – it had never existed. How could it? What she had been hoping for was a figment, a dream, an impossible thing: like the rain before it falls.33 This novel, a photo-novel in a way, is structured by the photographs placed at the beginning of each chapter. Their classic thematic role, that of triggering remembrance, is renewed by the diegetic necessity. But the blind addressee will never receive these tapes, as her accidental death, reproducing an old incident (hence the construction of “pattern”), precedes the death of the old lady. Hence, also, the title: The Rain Before it Falls, or, in other words, the return to the origin, to an impossible causality that is figured in the text by/through the photographs and the temporal games knotting up the before and the after. The ekphraseis intertwine with the memories and endow the text with a hybrid quality mixing together time and space, oral and visual references, cause and consequence. Joined together, the photographs that engender the text effectuate a process of generation and transmission that mimics the stories of mothers and daughters perpetuating a schema of maternal indifference, rejection, and affective destruction even. If Forster and Rousset have clearly identified the necessity for a spatial form to represent the composition of a novel, Barthes, in S/Z, speaks of a certain nostalgia, on the part of the writer, for a “dream of painting” (rêve de peinture). He comments on how, to be able to speak about an object, “the writer, through this initial rite, first transforms the ‘real’ into a depicted (framed) object; having done so, he can take down this object, remove it from his picture: in short: de-depict it.”34 He then speaks of the “pictorial matrix in which it [reality] has been steeped before being put into words.”35 Eventually, he concludes Passage XXIII of S/Z, entitled “Painting as a Model”—which starts with the famous phrase “Every literary description is a view”—by announcing the death of “the pre-eminence of the pictorial code in literary mimesis”36 and by wondering when this began: Why has it disappeared? Why has the writer’s dream of painting died out? What has replaced it? Nowadays, the representational codes are shattered to make room for a multiple space no longer based on painting (the “picture”) but rather on the theatre (the stage), as Mallarmé predicted, or at least wished.37 In this text, Barthes proposes to annul the difference between painting and literature, which he perceives as “purely one of substance” (but, isn’t this the crux of the matter?), to “forgo the plurality of the ‘arts’ in order to affirm more powerfully the plurality of ‘texts’?”38 This phrase is well

L’ut Pictura Poesis, Daverro  67 known. Nevertheless, even if he declares the death of painting, just as he had done for the author, Barthes also attests to the pre-eminence of the pictorial code in numerous literary texts. And if one reads the works published after this declaration—pervaded by a typical, 1970s militant semiology—one feels convinced that this model is not dead. Simon’s La Bataille de Pharsale (1969), but also Byatt’s or W. G. Sebald’s writings, as well as more popular works, such as Tracy Chevalier’s or Deborah Moggach’s, prove this. What is more, in his article on Twombly, Barthes launches an appeal for a “typology of discourses” pertaining to the visual arts, whereby aesthetics would relate to the study not of the work of art but of the ways in which it reflects on the spectator.39 These musings echo the debate mentioned in the first chapter, with reference to the possibility for a work (of art) to be, shall we say, “speaking.” Barthes distinguishes among the different spectators he calls “the subjects looking at Twombly (and) whispering to him in a low voice, for themselves”: the subject of culture, the subject of speciality, that of pleasure, of memory, and, finally, that of production. To these different subjects that go through an exhibition looking at the works while producing an inner discourse, one can add simple amateurs who write about a work of art without being specialists or art historians, as is the case with “writings on art” or with literature. The present study constitutes one of the responses to the possibility of a “typology of discourses” that Barthes insistently calls for so that aesthetics can be renewed; the different “subjects” he identifies will prove useful to this end. Still, here again, one notes the primary role attributed to language, since Barthes substitutes the visual work with the discourse that envelops it (let us not forget his definition of aesthetics as “a discipline which does not study the work in itself but the work the spectator or reader makes speak within him/herself”). As far as I am concerned, the crucial point will be to refuse a conception of the work of art that is too narrow or to let it lapse into an impossible transcendence; my take on this is to integrate it, to incorporate it, and to allow it to acquire its own voice. Rather than exploring the possibility of “making it speak,” I will choose to allow it to resonate in oneself, accepting to be affected, emotionally touched, terms that seem to be more adequate, less rigid than what is suggested by the phrase “making it speak.” The Need for Intermedial Criticism The enthusiastic times of semiotic readings of the image, when language and image still remained entangled to the benefit of the former, are undoubtedly worth remembering. Still, the call for a study and for an elaboration of a “typology of discourses” related to the visual work, whatever that may be (related to art history or literature), presents a premonitory echo of this study here, as it is through these discourses that

68  L’ut Pictura Poesis, Daverro a theorisation of an intermedial critical approach may be, partly, generated. The recent production of critical work that incessantly refines the issues at stake raised by word/image relations and continuously interrogates their modalities underscores this need in the most eloquent way. In his introduction to Mieke Bal’s work, for example, Norman Bryson points to the relevance of visual studies for the analysis of literature: “most unexpectedly, attention to visuality is tremendously enriching for the analysis of literary narrative.”40 W.J.T. Mitchell also makes this point when, in Picture Theory, he insistently calls for what he terms “an iconology of the text.” After lamenting the fact that literary studies have not been transformed by semiotics, even though both have contributed to the transformation of art history, he continues: Literary studies, by contrast, have not exactly been transformed by the new discoveries in the study of visual culture. The notion of an “iconology of the text,” of a thorough rereading or reviewing of texts in the light of visual culture is still only a hypothetical possibility, though the emergence of studies in film, mass culture, and of larger ambitions within art history make it seem more and more unavoidable.41 Therefore, a re-reading or re-viewing of texts in the light of “visual culture,” understood as the enlarged concept of what, for Didi-Huberman, it takes to produce image-effect or even a symptom or “pan,” becomes imperative.42 It is a question pertaining to literary theory that specifies and develops what numerous theoreticians have foreseen and hoped to see put into practice. To a certain extent, this is what Claus Clüver proposed to do in his analysis of Anne Sexton’s poem Starry Night (Nuit étoilée), in 1989, by juxtaposing it with Van Gogh’s eponymous painting.43 Discussing Wendy Steiner’s reading of William Carlos Williams’s poem on Brueghel’s painting Return of the Hunters, Clüver notes: “she demonstrates that there are ‘extraordinary correspondences between the two works that go far beyond mere thematic and iconographic considerations’ and places the greatest weight on the ‘correspondence of technical properties’.”44 He follows course in his own analysis of Starry Night by tracing what he calls the principal “signifiers” of the painting—the orientation of forms and colours, the direction of brush strokes, the effects of symmetry— and paralleling them to the corresponding signifiers in the poem. His conclusion is “telling”: the tapering off of the final lines is almost an inverted iconic representation of the tree shape, so that we are referred back to the image that dominates the opening lines and that connects the two realms in the painting.45

L’ut Pictura Poesis, Daverro  69 In the same issue of Poetics Today, Aron Kibédi Varga comments on the increasing number of studies on the subject and draws up the lines of a research programme, as “few efforts have been made as yet to make explicit the general problems underlying this kind of research. I see at least two central problems, one methodological and one taxonomic.”46 In his article, Kibedi Varga essentially works on a picture placed against a text or integrated within it. He identifies their various modes of collaboration, which differ accordingly to whether they appear simultaneously or successively; thus, coreference, coexistence, and interreference serve to describe the way the two subjects work, depending on whether they refer to one another or are juxtaposed, intermingled, or even fused. In the same way, in the conclusion to his study on photography, Philippe Ortel voices the need to apply pictorial or visual devices to literary analysis: Even though criticism has been greatly interested in the relation between signifier and signified, the relations between the text and the real […] have only rarely been formalized, as the material dimension of language has rarely been taken into consideration. Yet, owing to its internal apparata […] the work permanently carries the possibility to frame this real […] just like the dark room, then, it provides a third dimension, depth, that the reader recreates by transforming a number of signs that lie before their eyes. Thus considered, mimesis is no longer reduced to channelling meaning, as is often the case. Its diverse dark rooms would, literally and figuratively, occupy a prominent place in literary analysis if, that is, we structurally extended the critical gains [to include] a ‘criticism’ of the apparata.47 “Apparatus-related criticism,” “dark chamber,” or camera obscura of criticism, in any case the idea is worth putting into practice on a wider scale. Donald Bergez also, in his editorial introduction to the special issue of Europe entitled “Littérature et peinture,” reminds us of the links between the two “sister arts.” He engages in a retrospective analysis that shows to what extent painting influenced literature, how one mirrored the other: “As far as literature is concerned, the perspective offered by painting has been a particularly fertile theoretical stimulus. Literature now sees and questions itself in the altered reflection that painting offers.”48 Painting, therefore, “is even more consistently a powerful incentive for creation for writers,” whether this occurs at the level of genres (portrait, landscape, historical painting, still life, and so on), of which literature reflected its own “pictorial doubles,” or at the level of impetus, or point of departure, as is the case with “those texts originating in a picture that needs to be described.”49 Or even, of course, in the pattern of ekphrasis that is related to the descriptive.

70  L’ut Pictura Poesis, Daverro As for artistic transposition, where the writer attempts to provide the painting’s equivalent by way of language [...] we find ourselves in an uncertain margin, where literary creation according to a painting verges on art criticism: the work of art is, at once, the writing subject, an object of reflection and the point of departure for a novel usage of language [...] Painting is, in a sense, the other side of language, its double real, where light is incarnated, rather than said. And yet, the writing gesture is not far from the painter’s gesture: in both cases, it is inscribing, tracing, retreaving the memory of an archaic graphic urge.50 (my emphasis) More than being “the inverted side of writing” or its “real double,” painting (the image) holds, perhaps, another place in relation to the literary text in which it appears. Just like light and shadow, painting and literature are born together. The one springs out of the other; they are perforce inseparable. Thus, once it appears in-text, the painting might be seen as the “first shadow” projected through the first light, that of literature.51 Of course, all this is well known, but what is of import to me here is the reaffirmation of the links between poetry and painting, the fact that the image could “impress” the literary text, could impart it with life and form. The logical conclusion, then, from the point of view of literary theory and criticism, is that we should do justice to Horace; in other words, read his formulation correctly and practice a close study of the role of the image-in-text and on the literary effects it performs. Henceforth, it is necessary to build up “a pictorial poïetics” as part of intermedial criticism describing the word/image hybrid. This “appeal” launched to painting, to image-in-discourse, is not restricted to literature, for criticism has already promptly appropriated some of painting’s techniques to analyse literature. Accordingly, in his study of the literary process of framing—effects that I will have the opportunity to explore in due time—Guy Larroux very aptly states: “much like literature, the discourse on literature is haunted by painting. One only needs to focus on a particular item like framing effects to ascertain it.”52 The term “haunted” in this passage is arresting: what spectre or what shadow is this about? What revenant returns to claim its due? Would painting be this subliminal image that appears like a ghost hiding beneath the surface of both the literary and the critical text? As far as I am concerned, the relation between word and image is more like a vital, dynamic event, a necessity rather than a symptom. Our task is to follow the traces, imprints, and manifestations of the palimpsest presence of the painting that endlessly “returns” in the literary text, animates, or, in any case, bestows movement.

L’ut Pictura Poesis, Daverro  71 Let us conclude this part with the words of D. Scott, who reaffirms the poet’s intuition that all experience rests on synaesthesia: […] in other words, the world of the poem is irreducibly audile-­ tactile; the knowledge of the senses are brought together in a process of synaesthesia, the linguistic equivalence of which is metaphor. A new reading of the Horatian formula thus becomes possible: ut pictura poesis means that poetry is like painting in that it includes painting as part of its panoply of expressive effects.53 It is precisely on this “panoply” that I will focus, certain elements of which we have already glimpsed in the notions of perspective and trompe-l’œil. Based on the vocabulary recurrently used by critical writings, I will attempt to discover what lies beneath, beyond the hackneyed correspondence between painting and rhetoric, when these are dutifully paralleled, what they actually mean—which is reminiscent of Kibedi Varga, among other historians—including, as Alain Mérot 54 noted, art historians—and his observation that painters and poets both borrowed their theoretical vocabulary from classical rhetorical treatises. One remembers how Coypel, in Le parallèle de l’éloquence et de la peinture (Paris, 1711), even tried to strictly apply rhetoric to pictorial art. But K. Varga comments, in a note: Rhetorical inventio and dispositio have their more or less strict analogies in pictorial theory (see Kibedi Varga 1983, 1984). The main problem, however, is mostly not even hinted at in classical treatises: Whether the figures of elocutio, that is, of style, can be rigorously applied to images. Can they be “trans-lated”? What is a visual metaphor?55 Inventio, dispositio, what about elocutio? These are issues of structure, composition, description, and style to be rigorously examined. Here we are, at the heart of the intermedial transposition dynamics, raising questions of passage from “style” to the image but also vice versa, from the image to the text; in this case, then, what constitutes a literary “anamorphosis,” a “trompe-l’œil” or “framing?” In a passage he entitles “Pictorial Writing,” D. Bergez traces the parallel: When literature integrates the painting to such an extent that it transforms it into style, we move from the so-called writing of the pictorial to a properly pictorial writing. Writing like painting allows us to retrieve the painterly effects, to achieve a pictorial depiction through literature. This tendency forcefully affirms itself ever since

72  L’ut Pictura Poesis, Daverro the XIXth century. This type of pictorial writing is already at play in Hugo’s work, supported by the visual and visionary character of his inspiration.56 He then uses the beginning of the third stanza of Hugo’s famous poem Contemplations, “Tomorrow, at dawn…,” … I will not look at the gold of evening which falls, Nor the distant sails going down towards Harfleur … to suggest that these lines, culminating in the description of the harbour of Harfleur, constitute a properly pictorial piece of writing whereby: in every verse, [our] sight firstly focuses on a precise, luminous motif (the gold, the sails), and then extends (to the evening which falls; the distant view of Harfleur), thus working towards the composition of a representation organised just like the paintings of the time, where the various planes were staged by way of perspective. 57 And he pursues his parallel further, by turning to Verlaine, in whose ­poetry “the brilliance of juxtaposed notations” is rendered in the manner of the impressionists, “like strokes of painting” that “create vibrations.” In response, then, to Kibedi Varga’s call, I will pursue his reflections further, to suggest a method and a taxonomy of the use of the image and the visual-in-text. Borrowing from art history, from the techniques proper to painting and the visual, it is now a question of organising all this material to create a poïetics of the pictorial. At this stage of analysis, it is necessary to discuss certain elements that are essential for the elaboration of an intermedial criticism, or a kind of picturo-criticism. When the Text Borrows from the Image’s Devices, Its History. What Painting Renders unto Poetry: Synopsis and Examples Percolation, emulsion, a more or less refined mixture, whatever the ­process, it will be necessary to examine what painting renders unto ­poetry since, if poetry makes the image visible, painting envoices poetry.58 Should one start at the other end, should one stop seeing how the text speaks the image and focus more on how the image colours (draws or structures) the text or discourse, one might, perhaps, approach what the image-in-text reveals about the text, what would not have been uttered otherwise, and cannot be uttered in any other way than that of the word/image form. Briefly, let us see what the pictorial and its variants, the constitutive oscillation of intermediality, bring to the text other than the simple, intertextual relationship.

L’ut Pictura Poesis, Daverro  73 The pictorial may constitute a useful tool to scrutinise a certain type of texts bearing a strong pictorial component or to describe and address the modes of production of texts that exhibit a high visual density. This is the case of the text triggered by an image, not only when the intervention of an object results in a descriptive expansion or a kind of reverie on the object, but also when the plot or the action is generated by the image that becomes animated (in fantasy literature), that is stolen (J. Banville’s Ghosts), that reveals (Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray), or serves as an identification model (Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea). The encompassed and encompassing image, the “maternal/paternal” image, to use S. Tisseron’s term, 59 or the image appearing in a mixed mode, functions at a macrotextual level.60 The structuring of the work by the imagein-text, as, for instance, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, presents an example of a novel where the oscillation between mirror/text/painting (picture) regulates the rhythm of the narration and constitutes one of the regimes of the text. My proposition to use the pictorial as an interpretative key—without being limited to locating and analysing the appearance of the image in the text but with a view to employing the pictorial so as to open the eye of the text—stems from all this. In order to analyse a text according to pictorial techniques and account for its visual energy, one should start by acknowledging the image’s vital contribution; in other words, we should employ the pictorial aspect, the pictorial as an angle, as “style,” to open the text in the way that a stylus would. That might, perhaps, allow us to account for certain aspects of the literary text, of a pictorial or “imaging/imagining” quality inherent in the work, in the same way that discourse or narrative analysis, narratology, does. The pictorial turns out to be a sound method of investigation, a tool for analysis that reveals some heretofore insufficiently detailed textual phenomenon related to the visual. Taking the pictorial practices, art history, and aesthetic and phenomenological theories as a point of departure, it will be possible to see to what extent they have been put into practice by the literary text. ­Resorting to the visual is an acknowledged fact, since, as is well known, the literary text uses postcards, photographs, tapestries, miniatures, pages from photographic albums or magazines, maps, plans, mirrors, and reflections, to name but a few. It is the reader’s responsibility to be attentive, alert to what is happening at that precise moment in the text, when the literary language conjures the visual, the visual shapes the text, and the reader is immersed in a certain type of reading/spectacle/ event that changes everything. First, then, the theory of painting should be applied to literature, or at least to a certain type of literature that we will call “pictorial”; there, one should be aware of the more or less extended degree of textual saturation by the image. Next, it would be advisable to distinguish between that which pertains specifically to art history (references to its styles its genres and its topoi) and the pictorial

74  L’ut Pictura Poesis, Daverro techniques that require a more formal approach. Finally, one would have to engage in a close reading of the text, so as to trace the pictorial techniques (framing effects, colours, composition, light, time, and plot) that the text implements. Situated at a junction between history and art, the history of forms and techniques, this work will raise questions related to citation, for instance, or more complex ones, like, for example, allusion. For the time being, to conclude this chapter, I suggest presenting some of the possibilities offered by the image-in-text, while distinguishing between references to art history and elements pertaining to pictorial practice. This first scan will allow me to open up the field of intermedial criticism that I will be developing in the next two chapters. Art History Some of the critical tools that could compose such a system would be the implicit or explicit references to the founding myths of painting (­ Medusa, Narcissus, Orpheus) and to famous stories (the daughter of the potter Butades, Zeuxis’s grapes, Giotto’s burla, Alexander and C ­ ampaspe, Phryne) or to confirmed patrons like St. Luke. In other words, the complete breadth and depth of art history may surface, whether covertly (by allusion) or overtly (by quotation), enrich the text with its connotations, and create an effect of citational intermediality, of interpictoriality, or, in any case, polymediality. Therefore, it would be a question of seeing how and for what purpose these references function as intertextual citations. Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533), for example, allows us to elucidate a fictional character’s dimensions, like Strether in Henry James’s The Ambassadors or Undine in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, and focus on a quality that would have remained neglected without its pictorial contextualisation. Wharton, in particular, enjoys resorting to pictorial encoding in her novels, as she uses allusion widely and often turns to framing effects and operators, such as genitives or adjectives that refer to a painter’s name, as in “a Veronese ceiling” or “a Tiepolo’s Cleopatra.”61 Giving the literary text the title of a painting, an example of the discursive applied to the pictorial that has already been addressed in Chapter 1, is a mixed mode that most naturally articulates a passage between the two media, between image and text. Thus, some novels signal their pictorial project and borrow their titles either from fictitious paintings—such as The Portrait of a Lady, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Girl in ­Hyacinth Blue—or existing ones: Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival, which is the title of one of Chirico’s paintings, or Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, the title of one of Vermeer’s paintings. Other images take the place of a title—for example, Murray Bail’s short story “The Drover’s Wife,” which displays Russell Drysdale’s 1945 eponymous painting

L’ut Pictura Poesis, Daverro  75 right at the start of the text, in lieu of a title. S­ ometimes the name of the author is replaced by their portrait, as is the case with Walt Whitman’s 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass.62 The different styles of painting (mannerism, baroque, cubism) and also the genres (seascape, portrait, still life, trompe-l’œil, Veronica) as well as some privileged characters (Christ, or Marie-Madeleine in Yourcenar’s Anna Soror, for instance) serve as a “pattern” or a “model” for the text that will “borrow” them, whether in the scientific or economic sense of the term. Besides, if art history has been constantly solicited by texts, painting and architectural or photographic techniques are also a source of inspiration. The Formal Approach The issue of the descriptive raises another question, for, if my hypothesis is valid, image must impart the text with its specificities. Thus, a ­visually-oriented text should present some characteristics that are different from an “ordinary” text in which the description of a place or of characters is supposed to be three-dimensional. I have already elsewhere proposed to grade descriptions according to the “nuances of the pictorial” and to place them on a scale regulated by the degree of pictorial concentration; within this context, we can move from “painting-effect” to “picturesque view,” then to “tableau-vivant,” from “aesthetic arrangement” to “hypotyposis,” from “pictorial description” to ekphrasis.63 The introduction of techniques that are characteristic of the work of an artist, like framing, strokes, or colours,64 should affect the text and thus also conjure structural effects. Just like the colours of life consumed by the painting in E. A. Poe’s “The Oval Portrait,” colour also incarnates discourse (the voice of seeing), the “colours of rhetoric” to quote Wendy Steiner’s work, which could justify the attempt to bridge the gap between the two arts. The references to techniques that are specifically pictorial could appear in the text and should be studied as such; this is the case of the engraving’s “à la manière noire,” as employed in M. R. James’s eponymous short story “The Mezzotint” or of the use of a par­ amisch, ticular “signifier” such as clouds, so well-studied by Hubert D which John Banville particularly puts to use in Ghosts. It is a fortiori the case of references to a technique like the camera obscura, the sfumato, Caravaggio’s luminism, the techniques of trompe-l’œil, and anamorphosis that are so often mentioned by critics. It is also the case of the reference to types of painting like “all-over” painting, described and allusively suggested as such in Paul Auster’s Moon Palace or even the employment of the window as a frame of representation, which may suggest a reference to Alberti’s celebrated window or quaddrangolo. What I would call the “eye as vision” (l’œil-vision) is also easily detectable in the literary text. One can see it at work in the effects of

76  L’ut Pictura Poesis, Daverro geometrisation of the text, in the recourse to perspective, symmetry, inversion. The technique of the mirror constitutes a dominant example, owing to its enantiomorphism, its function as a revealer (that of seeing and thus being able to make the invisible visible) or when it serves as an apotropaic shield. These are recurrent features that one can see appear in, for example, V. Woolf’s “The Lady in the Looking Glass,” but other short stories as well, like Stephen King’s “The Reaper’s Im­ ngela Carter’s short story “Flesh and the Mirror.”65 There are age” or A also texts that claim their geometrical heritage through their title, such as Michael Palmer’s “Third Symmetrical Poem” and Roberto Juarez’s Treizième poésie verticale, or that are constructed in the geometrical mode, as is the case with the recessive title in infinite regress of William Gass’s collection in the Heart of the Heart of the Country. One of the modes of employment of the pictorial in text and of the “eye as vision” may also be the place ascribed to the spectator, a place that is constructed through the description of a painting and the process of establishing a “point of view” that is symmetrical to the “vanishing point”—in other words, the linguistic construction of a point of view that the reader must share with the character. In many cases, therefore, the character is situated on the top of a hill or a tower, or positioned near a window, as Philippe Hamon has so well demonstrated in his seminal study of description; once again, this is the legacy of painting, with the strong insistence on the view as a window and, to follow Alberti, that actually runs through the text to facilitate the description of the “good view.” Pictorial techniques associated with perspective and point of view, such as anamorphosis and trompe-l’œil, should equally account for certain textual effects in a more thorough, clearer manner. Anamorphosis, as “degraded perspective,” allows us to follow the transformations and deformations of the point of view throughout the literary work, the modulations of the leitmotifs, the topoi, the syntax; then, the otherwise invisible “picture in the carpet” will appear. As a matter of course, the text imposes a restricted point of view on the reader, which is of import as far as the reading event is concerned. The trompe-l’œil will superimpose its (hyper)realistic effects onto a “neutral” substrate ground that will serve as an undercoat (like in a painting: a wooden panel, a canvas, a wall, a sealed window). The question of “apparatus” and “machine” is also worth mentioning here. We will later see how the use of apparata organises the word/ image that Durcan delivers to his patrons in the National Gallery of Dublin and the National Gallery in London. Taking the lead from ­M ichel Foucault’s works, Gilles Deleuze’s observations, and Giorgio Agamben’s lectures, the use of “apparata” (“dispositifs”) being devoted to hybrid objects may be fruitfully introduced in intermedial reflection. As Philippe Ortel s­ uggests in his introduction to the publication following a conference on the notion of the dispositif, “the composite realities

L’ut Pictura Poesis, Daverro  77 on which we work today call for a theoretical reframing that will allow us to consider organisational phenomena irrespective of the idea of a ‘system’.”66 This intermedial approach pertains to hybrid objects like the illustrated book, the emblem, the painting and its accompanying discourse, legends or captions, titles, or cards to the influence of a specific practice or medium on another (photography, painting, or engraving) on the literary text. One also knows that the cinematic techniques have greatly inspired the nouveau roman, among others, very much like the technique of video has given form to Danielewski’s astonishing House of Leaves.67 This novel presents texts set on the same page, one including the other, text-filled or blank squares, margins that are inversely reproduced (from the bottom to the top so that one must turn the book around in order to read), even texts that are duly framed to be deciphered with the help of a mirror, in the way Leonardo da Vinci did. This is truly a powerful apparatus. Pictorial temporality, the time of the image, is another example of the exchange between word and image when image reflects upon the text. The narrative techniques that are specific to painting and the solutions suggested in order to tell a story or have it read are appropriated by the literary text in a to and fro movement between word and image. Thus, the text has exploited the notion of the “pregnant moment,” punctum temporis, or kairos; the image allows for the condensation of a moment, its before and its after, which is what certain narratives do when they perform the expansion of a key moment. V. Woolf does so when she reconstructs the story of a painting and narrativises it, lending it a before, a during, and an after; this is also the case with A. Bierce’s short story “The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” a paradigmatic short story that condenses a whole life in a few minutes. Other narratives take the lead from medieval paintings and present different moments simultaneously or depict the same character at different times in the same representational space. Faulkner, for example, in The Sound and the Fury, places different narrations of the same event together, in a cubist fashion that shows the crisis from different vantage points. Or, in a more classical way, (alternating) narration can represent at the same time characters that are diversely occupied, as in Past and Present, Eggs’s triptych, where the children and their mother (ostracised as a result of committing adultery) are represented at the same moment but in different places. Either we are shown people that are in different places at the same time, or we are shown people coming from different times in the same place. All combinations are possible.68 In modern literature, like in painting, distinctions are blurred, as in the stream of consciousness and the non-linear painting of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance that represents time simultaneously. This is the case with Uccello’s St. George where the princess holds the dragon on a leash after the battle between the saint and the dragon, a battle

78  L’ut Pictura Poesis, Daverro that, nevertheless, is unfolding in the same scenic space. The well-known story about Nicolas Poussin’s La Manne is worth mentioning here as, accused of putting together the cause and the consequence, Poussin became the subject of intense criticism and incited great academic dispute with reference to the painter’s ability to represent succession. To conclude this part, let me then point out that engaging in intermedial criticism is not a matter of simply tracing the references or allusions to all sorts of images, but of truly using art history, its practices and techniques, to analyse the literary text. Just as semioticians spoke of the “grammar of painting” when linguistic categories where applied to it, we can also, conversely, speak of the “pictoriality” of the text. One should not only evoke the “painterly effect” of a text, but also its pictorial quality, its “colour,” “composition,” its framing effects, perspective games, and graphic appearance. After all, the references to textual “collages” or to chiaroscuro, for instance, are now part of the classical parlance of literary theory. One also knows that the photographic idiom reappears in critical discourse in the form of references to exposure, snapshots, overexposure, or the negative. The field of exploration, then, that of the artist’s studio, that of the picture-lover, and of the poet-as-painter, is truly a vast one; and this exploration will hopefully open up more vistas.

Notes 1 Reference to the italian daverro, meaning truly, really, but also rings as dal vero, as in dipingere dal vero, which means “painting naturally/as in nature.” 2 Roland Barthes, “An idea for Research,” op. cit., 272. 3 See: Jane Dunn, A Very Close Conspiracy, London: Jonathan Cape, 1990; Diane Gillespie, The Sisters Arts; Liliane Louvel, “Oh! To Be an Artist! Oh to Be a Painter!,” Virginia Woolf L’impur, op. cit. 4 Virginia Woolf to Roger Fry, 21 October 1918, LII 981, qtd in Dunn, op. cit., 285. 5 Marcel Proust, “Pastiches et mélanges,” in Contre Saint Beuve, Pleïade, tome III. 900. 6 Daniel Bergez, Littérature et peinture, Paris: Armand Colin, 2004. 5. 7 Henry James, Letters, III, 240 (3 July), ed. Leon Edel, 1974—qtd in Valerie Shaw, The Short Story, a Critical Introduction, London and New York: Longman, 1988. 12. 8 Valerie Shaw, op. cit., 12. 9 Henry James, The Notebooks of Henry James, eds. F.O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdoch, New York. 19, in Valerie Shaw, op. cit., 12. 10 Ibidem. 11 The National Gallery hosts a variation of this optical device, Hoogstraten’s box. One of these camera obscura may also be seen in the Châlone-surSaône Museum of Photography. 12 Emanuele Tesauro, Il Cannochiale Aristotelico. Venice, 1655. 61, 77, 310, qtd in Mario Praz, “Emblèmes,” in Cahiers pour un temps, ed. B. Gautier, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1989. 157. 13 Stéphane Mosès, Exégèse d’une légende, Lectures de Kafka, Paris and TelAviv: L’Éclat, 2006.

L’ut Pictura Poesis, Daverro  79 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 4 4 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

Ibid, 77. Ibid, 92. Daniel Bergez, Littérature et peinture, op. cit., 175. Stéphane Mosès, op. cit., 83. The image is included in Daniel Arasse, Le détail, pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture, Paris: Flammarion, 1992. Louis Marin, Utopiques, jeux d’espace, Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1989. André Gide, Journals Vol 1 1889–1913, trans. Justin O’Brien, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000. 29–30. Formulation by Philippe Hamon cited above. See: W. Lee Rensselaer, Ut Pictura Poesis, op. cit. See: Liliane Louvel, L’œil du texte, op. cit. François Wahl, Introduction au discours du tableau, Paris: Le Seuil, 1996. See also Alain Mérot’s tracing of the development of Horace’s phrase, starting with “ut pictura poesis,” being inversed to “ut poesis pictura” in the sixteenthcentury, to “ut rhetorica pictura” even, which gave the painting a literary referent (“donnait à la peinture un référent littéraire”). Louis Marin, “Comment lire un tableau?,” in Études sémiologiques, Paris: Klincksieck, 1971. 89. Louis Marin, “Dans le laboratoire de l’écriture-figure,” in Ut pictura poesis, Cahiers du MNAM 38. Hiver 1991. 77. Ibid, 79. Jean Rousset, op. cit., 175. David Scott, “Visual Culture: Minding the Gap,” op. cit., 251. E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, London: Penguin, [1927], 1990, 134–135. For more on Lehman, see Françoise Bort’s Rosamond Lehman. Gap, Ophrys, coll. “Des auteurs et des oeuvres.” 2009. Jonathan Coe, The Rain Before it Falls, London: Penguin Books, 2008. 277–278. Roland Barthes, S/Z, op. cit., 54–55 Ibid, 55. Ibidem. Ibid, 55–56. Ibid, 56. Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, op. cit., 175. Mieke Bal, Looking in, op. cit., 54. W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory, op. cit. 210. Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant l’image; questions posées aux fins d’une histoire de l’art, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1990. Claus Clüver, “On Intersemiotic Transposition,” op. cit., 62–70. Ibid, 68. Ibid, 69. Aron Kibedi Varga, “Criteria for Describing Word-and-Image relations,” Poetics Today, op. cit., 31. Philippe Ortel, La littérature à l’ ère de la photographie, Enquête sur une révolution invisible, Nîmes: Jacqueline Chambon, 2002. 347. Donald Bergez, “Perspectives et lignes de fuite,” introduction of Littérature et peinture, op. cit., 4. Ibidem. Ibidem. At this point, I would like to thank Agnès Minazzoli, whose work La première ombre, Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1989, has triggered my reflections on the concept/notion of the mirror.

80  L’ut Pictura Poesis, Daverro 52 Guy Larroux, “Mise encadre et clausularité,” Poétique No 98, Paris: Seuil, avril 1994, 247. 53 David Scott, “Visual Culture: Minding the Gap,” op. cit., 254. 54 See: Alain Mérot, Généalogies du baroque, Paris: Le Promeneur, 2007. 55 Kibedi Varga, op. cit. 49. 56 Donald Bergez, Littérature et peinture, op. cit., 192. 57 Ibid, 192–193. 58 I am partly referring to a piece of work presented in a symposium organised by Jean-Pierre Montier in Rennes II and published under the title: À l’Œil, des interférences textes/images en littérature, J.-P. Montier (ed), Presses ­Universitaires de Rennes, 2007. See also Stephen Cheeke’s work. 59 See: Serge Tisseron, Le Bonheur dans l’image, Paris: Synthélabo, Coll. “Les empêcheurs de penser en rond,” 1996. 60 For more details on this approach, see Liliane Louvel, L’œil du texte,op. cit. 61 Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988. 62 This example has been brought to my attention by Pauline Chay-Lescar. 63 L. Louvel, “Nuances du pictural,” in Poetics of the Iconotext, ed. Karen Jacobs, trans. Lawrence Petit, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011. 89–100. 64 Numerous doctoral dissertations completed in the last two decades testify to this tendency to analyse the literary through the pictorial angle. This is the case with Murielle Caplan-Philippe’s La couleur dans l’œuvre R ­ omanesque de Lawrence Durrell, Paris III, 2002, supervised by H. Teyssandier; Isabelle Keller’s L’anamorphose dans l’œuvre Romanesque de Lawrence Durrell, Toulouse 2, 2002, supervised by C. Lanone; Laurence Petit’s Text and Image in the Fiction of Anita Brookner and A. S. Byatt, University of Colorado, 2004, supervised by K. Jacobs; Randi L. Polk’s (Un)Framing Vision: Text and Image from the New Novel to Contemporary E ­ xpressions of ­Identity, Ohio State University, 2005, supervised by K. Racevskis; Gyöngyi Pal’s Le dispositif photo-littéraire en France dans la seconde moitié du XXème siècle, Université Rennes, 2010, supervised by J.-P. Montier and G ­ yimesi Timea; Emma Tornborg’s What Literature Can Make Us See: P ­ oetry, ­Intermediality, Mental Imagery, Lund University, 2014; Angeliki Tseti’s Photo-Literature and Trauma: From Collective History to ­C onnective Memory, University of Athens and Paris 7 – Denis Diderot, 2015, supervised by T. Tsimpouki and F. Brunet; or Elena Peregrina’s Aperture and Exposure: The Photography of Literature, Princeton University, 2015, supervised by G. Nouzeilles and Eduardo Cadava. 65 For more details, refer to Liliane Louvel, Texte/Image, op. cit. 66 Philippe Ortel (ed), Discours, image, dispositif, Paris: L’Harmattan, “Champs Visuels,” 2008. 6. 67 Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves. New York: Pantheon Books, 2000. 68 On this matter, see the beautiful and useful catalogue of the exhibition entitled Telling Time, Alexander Sturgis, National Gallery, 2000.

3 Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism In the Painter-Poet’s Studio: Borrowing from Art History

This chapter will focus on the application of the diverse observations I have made while studying texts and also variously warranted in critical discourse. I will try to organise them as an apparatus, perhaps even a system. First, I will try to focus on the literary borrowings from art history and then on the more formal ones, those borrowed from pictorial practice and techniques. Both may of course be textually linked, for it is always difficult to neatly separate them but, for the sake of clarity, it will be more convenient to distinguish between them. Therefore, art history and its historical weight will rank first at times, while at others, when a literary technique—like anamorphosis, for instance, which has been a favourite of literary and critical discourse—originates in pictorial art, the formal aspect of the apparatus will prevail. My aim is to lay the ground of an intermedial, word/image poetics so as to specify the m ­ odalities of its workings and open a path to further studies, concerning colour, for instance, or the concept of time, which deserve more ­elaborate analyses.1 To start with, on the macrostructural textual level, I will offer to tackle the question of styles, genres, and schools of painting. I will show how art history, together with the particular modelising function of a­ rchitecture in the text, may define the reading of a novel. The example of some genres of painting being applied on literature, like Veronica in Melville or still-life painting in Gabriel Josipovici, will constitute case studies illustrating my hypotheses. I will try to show how a well r­ egistered—in terms of art history and iconography—pictorial genre may be at play in a literary text in terms of aesthetic and formal correspondences or intermedial translation; in other words, I will try to show what painting and image have “done” to the literary text and have caused it to do.

Pictorial Genres and Styles Critical Discourse In a collection of essays dedicated to Mario Praz, André Chastel noted the art historian’s necessity to work on the relationship between the arts: The analogies between painting and poetry, the artistic exchange, the correspondence of style and the common forms of literature

82  Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism and  the plastic arts [appearing] as image, were, naturally, [an important] part of Praz’s arsenal. Ready to use, emulate and decisively illuminate. [Praz’s] systematic work Mnemosyne. The Parallel between Literature and Visual Arts, 2 dedicated to this question, is not one of his best; fortunately, in an essay of remarkable density he had ­formulated a bold view on La Parentela delle varie arti, 3 which raises, illustrates and reduces this vast problem to a few, simple, obvious cases.4 Indeed, in La chair, la mort, le diable, 5 Mario Praz wonders how to apply art history categories to literary history, since, for him, the languages of art and the literary seem to be interchangeable, warranted in terms of their common history. Maybe it would be more accurate to consider these questions in terms of forms in history rather than in terms of history itself; still, it is imperative to take the historicity of the works themselves into account, as well as their context of emergence and the many transferences and influences among the artists. Praz shows how Mannerism has been put into practice, first in art history and then in literature, and offers the serpentine line as one of the major traits, also characteristic of John Donne’s poetry: just like the Mannerists favoured soft, convoluted lines and the intricate designs of bodies, so are Donne’s sonnets seen as twisting and winding, seemingly closing in on themselves, when the concetti, for instance, give the reader the feeling that access to meaning is being infinitely deferred.6 Praz’s study of Mannerist categories is further pursued in his book on emblems,7 where he applies these categories to this apt instance of word/image combination, whose name originally signified “mosaic work,” and which was established as a genre by Andrea Alciato, drawing inspiration from Egyptian hieroglyphs.8 Evidently, then, M. Praz views the correspondence between the arts in terms of generic traits. Of course, if, beyond the metaphor and quick analogy with mannerism, romanticism, or impressionism, one tries to follow the modalities and characteristic devices of these works, then the passage from one medium to the other will be justified in ­generic terms. The example of the serpentine line is also adopted by Mary Ann Caws when she draws parallels between pictorial style and texts. Yet, Caws reaches beyond strict chronological correspondences, for she offers to make the works echo one another irrespective of their periods; this, of course, raises numerous theoretical questions. What interests me here, however, is when critical discourse offers comparisons grounded on style. An example of one of the most obvious and fruitful comparisons to be made, for instance, is that of the wavy or serpentine lines of Mannerism and Baroque as pictured so vividly in El Greco’s Laocoon, in

Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism  83 the twists of Tintoretto’s Leda and the Swan and some other maidens or of a Titian’s Venus at her ease with the windings and reversals of Donne, Gongora, Sponde and Marino. But once the vital caveats as to difference have been made, a specific Renaissance or Baroque image can serve to illuminate a contemporary poem and to intensify its impact: the contemplation of the figures of de La Tour and Poussin may render a reader of contemporary French poetry more sensitive to its high lighting and setting, just as a Mannerist swan may sharpen our enjoyment of a Surrealist recall of a swan such as Desnos’ “Vanité souvenir du cygnet”.9 It is quite clear that Caws here proposes to reverse the Baroque or ­Mannerism image back onto the contemporary text, so as to examine to what extent the former may “illuminate” the latter, rendering its effects not only more manifest but also more intense. Within this context, she ventures that the works of La Tour and Poussin may render lighting effects, setting, and typography, as well as the page layout of French contemporary poetry, more perceptible. In which case, painting is reversed onto the text and plays a heuristic role. Caws then revisits works by Rilke, Mallarmé, and Malraux under the light of the genre of Annunciation (for Rilke), Brancusi and ­Duchamp (for Mallarmé), the Baroque for R. Char, or the rococo. She puts forward the relation between the textual and the visual by declaring, à propos Mallarmé and Brancusi, that “two sets of materials, textual and visual, may eventually converge within a particular perspective,”10 and proceeds to develop the analogy between the highly polished styles of Brancusi and Igitur, with an additional reference to Robbe-Grillet. The setting for [Brancusi’s] final project—the Temple of Love for the Maharajah of Indore with its private meditation chamber containing a « mirror of square water » as a pool, toward which stairs ascend, its only opening furnishing a skylight for illumination—bears an ideal resemblance to the setting of Mallarmé’s Igitur. The stairs, the isolated chamber and a tomb—all perfect in the Hamletian manner […]. As for the high artistic polish, in both visions—that of the poet and that of the sculptor—it is intimately related to the interior mystery, in an extraordinary dialogue such as that between the two luminous walls of Mallarmé and the two gaps of massive shadows that work as the negating force in Igitur. To read Mallarmé’s description is to experience the disquiet of complete a­ rchitectural exactitude, quite as if one were reading Robbe-Grillet’s descriptions but still in the spirit of Brancusi’s well-planned crime, with no holes and slips.11

84  Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism The analogies offered here are maybe a little more thematic or phenomenological than formal, and what she calls the highly-polished aspect of the work still has to be defined. Nevertheless, the parallel Caws draws between the perturbing effect produced by architectural precision and the reading effect will converge, in a way, with my own reading of the façade of Wuthering Heights. According to critics, styles or schools of painting have found numerous equivalents in literature, even though, at times, some parallels have been a little too hastily drawn. This was the case with V. Woolf’s or K. ­Mansfield’s writings occasionally termed as “impressionist”; favouring the impressions of the moment, as these two writers did, does not presuppose a structural link to impressionist techniques. Pictorial genres and subjects (such as Annunciation, as quoted by Caws à propos Rilke) have been widely used by literary criticism in its analyses and are believed to have inspired equivalent works of poetry, theatre, and fiction. ­Countryscapes, sublime mountain landscapes or seascapes such as Friedrich’s, ruins in the manner of Hubert Robert, fantasised or realistically rendered cities, portraits (be they intimate, grandiose, conversation pieces, or erotic), self-portraits, historical or mythological paintings, allegories, amateurs’ cabinets or studios, and still life, in short all those pictorial doubles or common loci in-between literature and painting, have sufficiently been studied in various contexts, and so a detailed reference is not really necessary to convince the reader of their existence and importance. The portrait is perhaps one of the most favourite subjects and the multilayered parallels between the arts have inspired many fine pages of literary criticism. In the same context, under the pressure of the same aesthetic social and historical necessities, references to these styles and schools, as well as art history and its classifications, have often emerged in literature, constituting an integral part of the intermedial critical system, or poïetics, I intend to develop here. It seems necessary, therefore, to evoke the modes of manifestation of the image in text, as a form that would come back to haunt the text, or better still, preside over its formation—­somewhat in the manner of anamorphosis, the secret form that one would have to discover. It is now time to engage in a more detailed exploration of the manifestations of art history in text, often occurring in identifiable— perhaps even surprising—forms. These manifestations are linked to the strategy of the text, yet they also result from a transposition and are subject to the risks inherent in the transference from one medium to another, discussed earlier, in relation to Broodthaers’s operation: Change/ Gedicht/Exchange. A fine instance of the question of style, genre, and visual codes may be found in a complex façade that serves as a virtual frontispiece to a famous novel, the power of which continues to haunt its readers.

Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism  85

Architecture: Going Beyond the Façade, Wuthering Heights Wuthering Heights12 is a fabulous novel, in the sense that it incarnates a fable, but also in that it endlessly produces fables, as all great texts that resist interpretation do. One of the major characteristics of these seminal works of art, be they paintings, short stories, plays, or novels, is that they never stop engendering different “readings” that—while celebrating the work at hand—bestow a certain perspective and constitute, in a sense, renewed “representations.” Taking the lead from the numerous analyses of the Heights, I have sought to contend that the house of the title, bearing the name of a place, is one of the most fascinating aspects of the novel, a locus of memory (to speak like F. Yates), a space to be infinitely explored. Lying at the centre of the mystery that pervades the novel, it is a character in itself and holds the readers under its spell right from the incipit and throughout their journey as they follow Lockwood’s difficult entrance through it. Occasionally, the towering figures of the protagonists, Heathcliff and Cathy, eclipse the presence of the house; still, the narrator’s consistent references to the land, the roar of the wind, the excessive heights, place this house of violence—as opposed to the calmer, civilised residence of Thrushcross Grange—at the crux of the plot. It is through its pictorial and visual data that this text will provide me with an occasion to reverse image onto text, thus bringing in a supplementary light to it. Here, a certain type of—specifically architectural— ekphrasis, understood in the strictest sense of a description of a work of art, actively participates in the elaboration of the mystery, triggering fiction, setting the reading code, and at the same time establishing the novel as the locus of mystery pertaining to the diegesis but also to a poetic practice. It is well known that Emily Brontë was not only a great novelist and a great poet, but that she also drew and painted watercolours.13 No wonder, then, that architecture should figure as frontispiece to the novel; what is of interest here, however, is to see how architecture is verbally phrased and to examine its function as a full agent. For if the “anatomy” of the house is revealed as soon as the “penetralium” has been entered, at the same time it also ambiguously remains hidden, for the mystery of the “sanctuary” actually constitutes one of the main themes of the novel. Furthermore, the representation of architecture in the text raises the issue of the passage from a three-dimensional space to a two-­dimensional one, that of the text. Once more, the modalities of the transposition between space and text, time and space may be articulated; and time, as a reservoir of images, plays the part of the architect of memory, which finds its locus here. In Wuthering Heights, the trompe l’œil effect, which

86  Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism both veils and unveils the secret right from the very first lines of the novel, also digs deep in the architecture, a maze-like space Lockwood— and, consequently, the reader—cannot immediately fathom. Standing in Front of Time, in Front of Space Both landscape and architecture take on a human appearance in the novel, thus acquiring the stature of a myth. Specifically, “Wuthering Heights” refers to Heathcliff, as onomastics and toponymy seem to indicate the heights/heath paronomasia being echoed by a semantic double: heights/cliff; and to “wuthering,” the sound of the wind on the moors, corresponds heath, the heather growing there. Brontë masterfully resorts to synaesthesia to render the complex vibrant atmosphere of the heights, which is articulated first by an indication of sound (the  roar of the wind) and then through colour (the purple colour of the heather); thus, sight, sound, and the feeling of height produce an uncanny experience. Space and time are linked right from the start, as the novel opens with a premonitory declaration and a date: “1801. – I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour I shall be troubled with;”14 to this early date, another one will answer, two chapters before the last: “1802 – This September I was invited to devastate the moors of a friend…,” while a third date, “1500,” is carved on the front of both the novel and the house, lost in the midst of ornaments, but deciphered by Lockwood. While the time of the novel lasts for one year, the story unravels over thirty, in a vertiginous swirl where the narrators’ errors and confusions mimic memory’s approximations; and, beyond that, the date carved in the entrance carries another three centuries. It is a true temporal maze, mixing up space and time, narration and description. Together with Lockwoood’s thwarted progression towards the inside of the house, descriptive time, which seems to suspend the development of the narrative, is grafted onto the temporal, whereas it purports to be the description of space, signifying time as one of the prevailing themes of the novel. The text progresses together with Lockwood’s steps, hindered by different kinds of reticence, such as Heathcliff’s appearance and cold reception that clearly signifies the visitor is not welcome, or the ambience of the house, which is metonymically described in similar terms; Heathcliff’s black eyes, suspiciously withdrawing u ­ nder their brows, correspond to the house’s narrow and deep windows. A ­ lthough Heathcliff seems to assert his ownership of both the heights and ­Thrushcross Grange by refusing right of entrance, Lockwood, true to his name, ignores Heathcliff’s words and forces his way in despite the resisting gate. Still, he makes one pause before entering the secret of the house, to contemplate its facade.

Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism  87 The Historicised Façade Arrested by the impressive images decorating the entrance of the house, Lockwood describes how: Before passing the threshold I paused to admire a quantity of grotesque carving lavished over the front and especially above the principal door, above which, among a wilderness of crumbling griffins and shameless little boys, I detected a date “1500” and the name “Hareton Earnshaw”.15 While the term “wilderness” points to the untamed aspect of the house and owner mentioned before, the grotesque sculptures indicate a medieval aesthetics—rather than referring to the baroque “grottesque”— that materialises in the fabulous figure of the griffin, a hybrid animal of fictitious nature, and the “shameless little boys” that evoke the putti, those small cherubs or small devils exposing their plump naked bodies. Originating from the painting of Roman grotto, the art of the grotesque combines fantastic, imaginary, human, and animal representations on a hybrid mode, as is the case here; and it is directly related to the aesthetic of the sublime—this composite façade is closer to the sublime than to the beautiful if one follows Burke’s categories—as well as to the gothic in literature, in which medieval architecture plays a major role. In this sense, this passage reveals a complex blending of times, namely medieval gothic architecture and “gothic” writing. Thus, it is owing to the visual aesthetics that heavily laden terms such as “grotesque carving,” “griffins,” and “shameless little boys” help the reader visualise the house. The pictorial and, more generally, the artistic realm “in-form” the text, both in the sense of giving it shape and as bringing in information, through a process of de-monstration that is here forged by the monstrosity of the depicted figures. According to Nancy: The difference between text and image is flagrant. The text presents significations, the image presents forms. Each one shows something: the same thing and yet a different thing. […] In any case, the two show what it means to show—to manifest, to reveal, to place in view, to shed light on, to indicate, to signal, to produce. […] Each is monstrative and monstrous to the other. A monstrum is the sign of a wonder. Image and text are each a wonder for the other.16 The sublime and grotesque façade of the house also constitutes the frontispiece of the text, a message to be decoded, as it were, warning the reader as to the genres of architecture and literature the Heights

88  Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism can be associated with, very much like the façade in medieval times standing as an illuminated page that staged stories, memory, and time: if one could not read, one could at least follow the story, provided that it followed a familiar plotline or schema. Two carefully hidden clues, inscribed at the front yet concealed amongst the rampaging griffins and shameless boys, attract Lockwood’s attention and incite him to engage in detective work—the date “1500,” probably the origin of the house, and the name “Hareton Earnshaw,” indicating the first proprietor and builder of the house and of the family. As the origin of the house and the proprietor are thus linked on the page/image of the stone that welcomes the visitor/reader, they resemble the way in which a self-portrait was dated and signed. Soon, however, as if filigreed in the text, Heathcliff’s metonymic alliance to Wuthering Heights seems to sotto voce contradict this declaration of property; and, while Lockwood is on the verge of asking for a short history of the place, “the surly owner […] appeared to demand [his]speedy entrance, or complete departure.” Even though Lockwood doesn’t comprehend the full meaning of the illustrated façade, but only that it requires further explanation, the knowledgeable reader recognises Hareton Earnshaw’s name and knows that the young man who bears the same name will be the last heir of the Heights; thus, the façade contradicts Heathcliff’s claim to proprietorial rights and, for those who are able to decipher it, clearly denotes the imminent despoliation. In effect, the whole story, both its beginning and its end, figures in a nutshell on the façade, and the numerous decorations do not manage to hide the information pointing back, back to the origin of the family. At the same time, it is also an indication of the powerlessness of the image that, in the absence of referents, remains denotable yet not interpretable—for the image cannot be “read,” it cannot reveal the narrative it carries, unless one is aware of the story lying in the background. The decorated façade, inciting a pause both for Lockwood and for the description, reveals the importance of the visual in text, as it eloquently exhibits how the rendition of an image, an artistic representation, fulfils a function that goes far beyond decoration—that of an apparition or, as per Damisch, the concrete manifestation of an object, a phenomenon, an event or an idea that would otherwise, under normal conditions of reading, escape our attention.17 What is at stake here is not to endow the novel with an aesthetic surplus but to produce an event understood as something that happens right then in the text (an ekphrasis, a ­descriptive pause) and in the narrative, as befits what may anachronistically be called “a freeze.” Struck by the accumulation of signs, Lockwood perceives them as signs to be interpreted; hence, he makes his reader see an “apparition” long before that of Cathy, the true spectre of the text.

Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism  89 The façade has to be deciphered, for it holds a secret message and Lockwood will have to find it during his hermeneutic quest, whose function has been discussed by Damisch: The iconographic inquiry adheres to a principle of intelligibility: all images produced by man respond as such to an intention, or else to a communicative function, and must be comprehensible, decipherable and open to interpretation, even if it is not always easy to bestow meaning onto them, while their ultimate signification very often seems to escape us and shy away. In other words, the work of iconography […] voluntarily dons the guise of a police investigation, with every image presenting itself as a puzzle asking to be solved. This also means that, within this inquiry, the investigator does not necessarily stop at the most superficial layer of meaning, but he could be tempted to pursue his investigation further, until he detects a signification hidden behind the manifest meaning.18 The description of the façade is the result of an affect testifying to the powers of image, which belong to the realm of perception, sensation, and bodily reactions, causing the subject “to pause” in order “to admire.” Accordingly, the warning inscribed in the stone of the “animated” façade is not understood by Lockwood, who, not wishing to further upset his host, hastens towards the “penetralium.” The Anachronistic Reading The fact that the deciphering of the façade that contains the keys to the novel is dependent on reaching the end of the narrative and engaging in an act of revisiting stages reading as an anachronistic experience; this is always the case when contemplating either a novel or a painting upon their completion. Retro-reading is necessary to be able to grasp a story— be it that of a text or of an image—in a pendular movement oscillating between a past and a present vision that resembles Carlos Baker’s “double exposure,” a phenomenon understood as the superimposition of two different views of the same scene: one pertaining to a mnemonic, mental construction and another referring to what actually lies in front of the spectator’s eyes.19 Retro-reading, then, is doubly anachronistic, for one has to repeat the experience of the first reading, already at variance with the moment when the work was written and then made public. These multiple temporalities are contained in the façade, for architecture itself is anachronistic, a gap in time, a permanence testifying to a past elaboration; always acting as memento mori, it is replete with the nooks and corners formerly inhabited by those long gone, including those who planned it, wanted it, and built it. Similarly, still standing, the building resonates of those who inhabited it and attests to a past time, while simultaneously

90  Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism bearing witness to a project, an aesthetics, a future to come. It carries the marks of three centuries and, at the same time, when deciphered by Lockwood, offers a glimpse of the future which is the present of the novel (the one-year cycle); furthermore, it points to an infinity of other futures, in the sense of future readings, amongst which mine. When facing the image, Lockwood pauses, as if under a spell, confronted with his own mortality and engaged in a work of remembering as perceived by G. Didi-Huberman: [When] in front of an image, we always stand in front of time […] in front of an image—no matter how old it may be—the present never stops reconfiguring itself […] in front of an image—no matter how recent, how contemporary it may be—the past never stops reconfiguring itself at the same time, as this image becomes conceivable (pensable) only as a mnemonic construction, if this is not an obsession. Finally, [when standing] in front of an image, we have to humbly acknowledge this: that it will probably survive us, that, in front of it, we are the fragile element, the passing element, and that it stands in front of us as the element of the future, the element of duration. The image often has more memory and more future than the being who looks at it. (my emphasis)20 Lockwood’s description truly is an a posteriori reconstitution, achieved once he returns from his visit to the heights, rather than an in situ one, offered upon his first encounter with the structure. It is already a memory, a past emotion. As the reader follows Lockwood writing about (and staging) the moment when he stopped at the threshold to contemplate the image offered by the façade, three moments linked to deciphering are placed in infinite regress: reading time following the time of writing one’s diary, itself posterior to the adventure of reading the façade. The passage from the representation of architecture to the textual page brings about the passage from a three-dimensional space to a two-­ dimensional one, which E. Brontë has addressed by treating the façade (a  two-dimensional space) as an illuminated page that has to be deciphered. This is not the case with the descriptions of interior spaces, where one will have to detail the house’s “anatomy” and take the time necessary to explore this three-dimensional space that takes up a good part of the novel. The description of the interior architecture of the heights, intertwined with the narrative, is, in fact, the subject of a slow initiation, both for Lockwood and for the reader, reaching towards one of the last scenes, when Lockwood secretly watches Catherine teaching Hareton how to read—both characters being framed by an open window. From being unable to understand the signs on the façade, and in particular Hareton Earnshaw’s name, Lockwood has finally managed to get the keys to the mystery (still remaining opaque in parts). When he sees the last heir of the name deciphering signs with the second Catherine’s help, an effect of onomastic trompe l’œil occurs, where the identities of the

Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism  91 characters are superimposed much in the way the motifs of a pictorial trompe l’œil do. Yet time has moved on, and neither narrator nor reader are the same at the end of the novel; temporality has found its locus and the first visualisation of the façade has become anachronistic. We can see, therefore, how the artistic has “informed” the text, by way of the façade being approached through a visual aesthetics and with the application of the visual categories of the sublime and the grotesque providing a reading code, a way of varying the points of view and making the hermeneutic code play differently. By applying the references and techniques pertaining to painting (to architecture, art history) to the literary text, it has been possible to render unto the latter what, according to Horace’s verse ut pictura poesis, painting has given it. By reversing the critical relationship between literature and painting, it has been possible to use the pictorial as a working tool when before it was only the system of language that used to account for painting and the arts. Brontë’s novel shows that when facing a work of “mute poetry,” to evoke Simonides, discourse is immediately triggered, producing “a speaking painting,” as if the writer was incapable of evading the rivalry with the sister art and gave in to the demon of description. The illuminated façade, which both veils and unveils its past and mixes up its present with its future, eventually constitutes the time of the image, as restored by Lockwood. And, with each reading, the dead are restored to life. If Cathy’s face has haunted Lockwood ever since their first encounter, it is a totally different face which haunts painting and figures in many reproductions. The holy face, printed on St. Veronica’s veil during the Passion, may be seen for instance on one of the rear panels of the Triptych of the Magi Adoration, by Hans Memling, in Bruges’s St John H ­ ospital. The Mandylion, Turin’s Holy Shroud, keeps haunting the Christian imaginary with the miracle of the acheiropoietic image.

Veronica This is the story of an incomparable, sacred, and auratic piece of linen that was supposedly used by St Veronica to wipe up Christ’s face when he paused for the fourth time on his way to the Calvary. For some, the name of the saint would etymologically correspond with vera icona, a fact still being disputed; vera icona is also a writing of shadows, what in Byzantine tradition was called skiagraphe. 21 The saint is always represented holding the cloth between two fingers onto which the suffering face shows. Sometimes, in Zurbarán’s painting, for example, the saint has been erased and the linen is standing alone, held between two pegs, for the benefit of the devout’s eyes and undivided attention. At times, the tortured face comes to the fore of the linen notwithstanding the folds, thus exhibiting its unnatural nature as mystical appearance, while at other times it follows the folds of the linen and is creased by them for the sake of verisimilitude.

92  Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism Literature also offers instances of this image, and a fine example of it may be found in a short story by H. Melville, “The Paradise of ­Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,”22 built on the pictorial model of the diptych. The use of the Veronica adds to the questions already raised with reference to the recurrence of art history while writing literature: what is the power of this image both obscure and self-evident, primitive and ­refined, paradoxical and enigmatic?23 The notion of screen and its power (the primitive screen-memory and image as screen) will help me give more ample meaning to this theoretical case study. After all, does not theorein mean to behold, to observe? The Diptych In “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” Melville brings together two texts, in the form of two inverted “pendants,” whose relationship is rather obscure at first and then rather forcibly highlighted by the second text. The only undeniable common point between the two is sexual restraint: men/women, bachelors/Maids and virginity, eating and drinking/making pulp, euphoria/dysphoria. The first panel of the diptych describes an evening spent by the narrator in the company of lawyers at the Inns of Court in London in Temple Bar. The bachelors are having a good time carousing and standing as the obscure inheritors of the original “degenerate Templars” of the place. In the second panel, the narrator goes on a journey to find the right paper for the envelopes that will hold the seeds he sends all over the United States. The paper mill, “Mad Maid’s Bellows-pipe,” stands at the bottom of a dismal, freezing vale, described in the sublime gothic mode, where the pale maids work under the aegis of their bachelor patron. Structured around the sacrifice of these Young Virgins to the new Minotaur, the animal-cum-machine, with “Behemoth” figuring in the text, the short story describes how the puzzled narrator is guided by an “inscrutably mysterious” and of a “mystic appearance,” cunning young man—whose name, Cupid, is an immediate clue to his character—and is introduced to the labyrinth of the mill and the fabrication of paper pulp. He successively discovers paper marked by “an impress of a wreath of roses” and, urged by Cupid, he writes the name of his guide on a piece of paper, which then undergoes the usual process: I saw a sort of paper-fall, not wholly unlike a water-fall; a scissory sound smote my ear, as of some cord being snapped, and down dropped an unfolded sheet of perfect foolscap, with my ‘Cupid’ half faded out of it, and still moist and warm. 24 Plunged in deep reflection about the future uses of this virgin paper where “all sorts of writings would be writ on those now vacant things,”25 the

Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism  93 projection of future writings on this “vacant” paper turns these still, shapeless, “vacant things” into objects: letters, signs indicating these empty “things” coming to writing, in anticipation for a meaning. Finally, while contemplating the pulp, the young maids’ faces appear like a hallucination and the text operates in an explicitly pictorial mode: I seemed to see, glued to the pallid incipience of the pulp, the yet more pallid faces of all the pallid girls I had eyed that heavy day. Slowly, mournfully, beseechingly, yet unresistingly, they gleamed along, their agony dimly outlined on the imperfect paper, like the print of the tormented face on the handkerchief of Saint Veronica. 26 As the impress of the pain the maids endured is captured “dimly outlined” in the pulp, the phantom-like apparition projects the suffering face par excellence. Woedolor, the name of the nearby mountain, points to the fact that suffering is doubled by its synonymous signifiers (woe ­dolor), in the same way as at the foot of the cross of the Calvary on Mount Golgotha (which means skull) usually rests a skull, Adam’s, thus signifying the ultimate sacrifice and the redemption of the first sin. The apparition that causes the narrator’s unease is the exploitation of the young girls bleeding to death: “So, through consumptive pallors of this blank, raggy life, go these white girls to death.” The love they could aspire to is reduced to the avid and heartless character of Cupid, whose name is feebly printed on the very pulp of the paper carrying their death, yet also described as a birth through the emergence of the paper that operates a classical exchange of life/death, the model/production: [W]hen, suddenly I saw a sort of paper-fall not wholly unlike a water-fall; a scissory sound smote my ear, as of some cord being snapped of perfect foolscap, with my “Cupid” half faded out of it, and still moist and warm […] ‘Ay, foolscap’ handling the piles of moist, warm sheets, which continually were being delivered into the woman’s waiting hands. 27 The old woman who presides in the birth of the paper used to be a nurse before, we are told. And the cylinder requires nine minutes to accomplish its task. The invisible transforming operation remains a total mystery, which completely confuses the narrator: I could not follow the thin, gauzy vail of pulp in the course of its more mysterious or entirely invisible advance, yet it was indubitable that, at those points where it eluded me, it still marched on in unvarying docility to the autocratic cunning of the machine. A fascination fastened on me. I stood spell-bound and wandering in my soul. 28

94  Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism As suggested by certain indicators, such as “inscrutable,” a signifier that repeatedly insists in the text as in “your great machine is a miracle of inscrutable intricacy” (42), the reader understands that what escapes the gaze and generates the desire to comprehend is a true visual enigma. As M-J Mondzain puts it, “what we know nowadays, is that nothing is more enigmatic than on what grounds thought rests in terms of ­image;”29 moreover, the figure of death cannot offer itself as a negative one and then miraculously become the figure of life. It can’t but fuse with another figure, that of the death of death, in this other night that, Blanchot writes, is ‘the death we cannot find’. 30 Image partakes of the enigma, apparently disclosing its overt meaning, whereas the essential remains covert (without a title it may be difficult to decide what the image is about). In the image of the paper bearing “their agony dimly outlined” (my emphasis), the text is like Veronica’s veil bearing the imprint of the shadow of the face, which leaves an inscription, skiagraphé, shadow writing. The Visual Enigma One may then wonder why the tale bears this reference to the visual in general, to Veronica in particular. This is an instance of a purposefully obscure and opaque text’s resistance to deciphering, a case when the text interposes an image to exhibit what it purports to mean while at the same time concealing it. The detour of the text by the visual enigma follows a number of steps: from impression—that of “the impress of a wreath of roses”—to a relief, an embossed or hollow image carrying the potentialities of future writings (ruled paper), then that of the name, “my Cupid,” enclosed in pulp, the experience of a word processed by the machine, to the face projected by imagination onto the surface of the pulp, just as the Divine face printed itself onto the veil. The deciphering of this series requires that the reader is familiar with Veronica and its past, but also that they be able to spot the relevant signifiers: Cupid, foolscap, watermark, “the impress of the wreath of roses.” The reference to art history effectuates a detour of the text via image, which is used as a mirror enabling us to see in enigma, “as in a glass darkly,” to recall St Paul. Hence, then, the role of imagination: And when the marvellous retirement of this mysterious mountain nook fastened its whole spell upon me, then, what memory lacked, all tributary imagination furnished, and I said to myself : “This is

Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism  95 the very counterpart of the paradise of bachelors, but snowed upon, and frost-painted to a sepulchre.”31 The absorption of the maids by the machine that feeds on them is rendered visible through imagination: “I suppose the handling of such white bits of sheets all the time makes them so sheety”; metonymy becomes a figure of absorption, and a series of enigmas flow into the text: why should a red river give white paper? Why are the maids so white? Images and the visual efficiently persist together with the weight of the Christlike reference to the sacrifice of the sacred expiatory victim of incarnation. Ironically, incarnation is reversed—with the word “inverted” being a recurrent signifier in the text, in particular in relation to the bachelors—for the young girls lose their “carnation” to the benefit of the paper pulp and the animal-machine. Still, the maids’ faces become a “watermark” on “the perfect foolscap” (my emphasis), reminiscent of the imprint of the face of the martyr on Veronica’s veil, which is linked to the sepulchral place and to the lexis related to death images. The nature of the print (not man-made) shows that the virgins’ image remains intact, unsullied even by an artist’s hand, and their sacrifice—Death under the guise of cruel indifferent Cupid, administered to them instead of love—comes as a response to the bachelor’s hedonism. Furthermore, at a textual level, imprint is also what warrants the return of the first text within the second one, as a kind of reminiscence or “remanence,” when the first story returns, like a phantom, to haunt the second panel of the diptych. Reappearing sotto voce in the form of an image, it leaves traces in the panel dedicated to the maids like a print, the result of a textual and visual survival. Screen-Like Veronica Beyond the study of the particular working principles of art history in Melville’s tale, what does the veronica “apparatus” teach us? S. Lojkine’s work on the nature and use of screens and the notion of the apparatus32 will come in handy here: The screen apparatus repeats (but diverts) the platonic cave. We could describe it thus: mimesis’s alibi of realism pretends that the real is projected in the form of an image on the representational ­surface. But this representation is not mechanical or technical. It is socially, ideologically coded. The projection apparatus enables, then, an interposition between the real and the representation through a screen that filters, deforms, stylises this real [thus] constructing a symbolic dimension of representation. [Owing to] either a semiotic impossibility or an ideological ban, the screen hides the essence of the images of the real and diffuses [only] a minute part.

96  Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism In the vast, shadowy zone of what is hidden, a rhetoric mesh develops, in its own way, a discourse that is intended to supplement the absent images. Representation, therefore, appears to be a shadow zone, protected by the screen, consisting of a rhetoric net that ensures mimesis, yet surrounded and pierced by the blinding light of the real. This light organises the logic of the image on a par with the rhetoric net (it is Barthes’s punctum).33 The screen may be seen as a way of “screening” reality for the benefit of representation, both interposing itself in-between the two and receiving an image, as a process that is closely associated with the net of the sieve and equally carries its related meanings, 34 which is also asserted in the passage quoted before, where Lojkine also resorts to the mesh or net metaphor. The power of the screen—while psychoanalysis marks the importance of screen-memory, the visual evokes the screen-image, which Lacan will make great use of35 —allows me to shed light on one of the three functions of the screen performed in Melville’s text. Here, it is the pulp that provides the screen on which representation, as the result of imaginary elaboration, is received and projected. The fact that it is a fabric is crucial here, for, apart from the paper pulp recycling lint that refers to the fabric the vera icona is made of, the fabric of the screen mimics the fabric and textile quality of a text onto which “their agony [was] dimly outlined,” a much used metaphor since Barthes. Vacancy, then, becomes necessary for the narrator—and the reader—to project the fantasy of letters, of faces—that of Christ, as well as those of the maids—and their story: the white screen of the pulp discloses the blank faces of the maids. But let us take this exploration one step further, to see “in theory” the image’s effect on the text: why insert it in the form of a veronica? First, let us say that the mode of thinking is altered, since the image brings in a reading rupture, a delay, as it constitutes an eruption. It is a reading event, a peculiar movement, for the presence of the image triggers the formation of the pictorial third in the mind’s eye. Just like the maids’ faces emerge in the form of the narrator’s hallucination projected onto the paper pulp-screen, so is this in-between dialectic image an effect of an imagining reading, eventually printed onto the inner screen of the reader who will, in turn, impart it with their personal imprint and, thus, contribute to its visual formation. The blank page corresponds to the virgin canvas, and the narrator’s visualising screen becomes a writing screen producing another screen of vision for the reader. Once more, this apparatus questions the former rhetorical relationship staged by ut pictura poesis, as well as Simonides’s aphorism that painting is silenced poetry while poetry is a speaking image. Here, when it conjures up the screen of the visual, and by using pictorial quotations as a new kind of trope, poetry truly imitates painting, or rather it produces a similar effect. Henceforth it gains efficacy, energy, and makes the narrator’s vision

Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism  97 more dynamic by instilling it with the strength of evidence. The obscured face of the virgin canvas insists like the faces of the maids slowly resurfacing in the thin white film; and the notion of enigma returns, as, for Lacan, “the relation of the gaze to what one wants to see is based on deception,” which also relates to Saint Augustin: “And here is the great enigma: we cannot see what we cannot not see.”36 A linguistic twist, indeed, a mind twister and an infinite ring. If Veronica plays a fantastic role in this text, another kind of painting, still life, has also influenced literary production and theory. One of the finest examples of this genre, appearing and disappearing as a symptom that depends on the reader’s ability to spot and decipher, is found in ­Gabriel Josipovici’sGoldberg: Variations.37

Still Life Still life and its various manifestations, such as vanitas or trompe-l’œil painting, have been widely put to use by writers and critics in more ways than one. Concerning still life, Rosemary Lloyd’s Shimmering in a Transformed Light, Writing the Still Life38, Mary Ann Caws’s work, and Olivier Leplatre’s articles “Le repas d’une image”39 and “Le papier et la toile, le pli des formes,”40 for instance, explore the relationship ­between still-life painting, vanities, and the literary text. Many a catalogue of fine exhibitions, Les Vanités dans la peinture du XVIIè siècle, méditations sur la richesse, le dénuement et la rédemption,41 for example, provide sufficient subjects for aesthetic meditations. Delphine ­Gleizes begins her study on vanities represented in literature by focusing on its anachronistic uses, by painters as well, in particular in the nineteenth century. If vanity painting has lost its original symbolic code and the original theological discourse it contained, Gleizes claims using Corbet and van Gogh as examples; “nevertheless, the use of the pictorial vocabulary proper to Vanities may still at times retain a quotation value.”42 For Gleizes, vanity is particularly susceptible to being used by literary texts because of its workings, which [b]orrows its syntax and its paradigms from the linguistic mechanisms. Assembled according to their symbolic codes, the objects produce discourse through their articulation in space, through the interplay of complementarity and opposition they establish. Their staging (mise en scéne), as Fabrice Faré pinpointed, [is] already sign-organised (mise en signes).43 What we have then to do, is to envisage how the reemployment of this semiotic system operates at the core of the literary text and, more importantly, what the stakes are. For writing, which could develop a moral and metaphysical ­discourse by its own means, does not transit through pictoriality without endowing it, in the process, with its symbolic impact.44

98  Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism One could of course argue about the theoretical mores of this formulation, particularly with reference to the overall domination of the linguistic model, but the acknowledgment of what the pictorial changes and brings to the literary text, even if it may not always be seen in terms of symbolic echo, remains a fact that deserves close analysis. After having studied the works of Balzac, Chateaubriand, Flaubert, Hugo, and Gautier, Gleizes concludes: “the pictorial reference to Vanities yields a particular profit to literary texts.”45 First, as a model that is close to the linguistic one, it provides an economical working way for the text. Then, as an icon, it reshuffles the textual given, as well as the spectator’s position. Still-life painting will be at the centre of the following case study, in which I will try to show how its discreet, at first, emergence gradually becomes recognisable under the reader’s eye. I do not choose the financial terms favoured by Gleizes, namely that of “output” or “profit”; instead, I favour the term “affect,” understood as that which happens in the text when a foreign object imported from another art erupts and affects the reader. The medieval diptych, consisting in two painted panels, often serves as a model or “pattern” in more ways than one; working once more on a diptych, then, we will investigate the device’s wide use in literature and discuss its reflections on critical theory. Diptych in “Goldberg: Variations”: “Containers” Chapter 11 of G. Josipovici’s novel Goldberg: Variations (2007), ­entitled “Containers,” consists in a sole autonomous chapter (as is the case with other chapters like “The Sand”) and displays, over eighty-two lines, a very particular kind of description, which finds a brief but significant echo some thirty pages later. The text purports to provide a much-­ detailed description of several objects, under the pantonym “containers,” offered by a heterodiegetic narrator.46 By the end of the description, a picture has arisen—“une image s’est levée,” as D. Arasse put it—in the reader-viewer’s mind, evoking the ghost of paintings and in particular of a specific genre of painting. I suggest that, as a consequence of the text ‘affecting’ the reader, the nature of the object must conversely ‘affect’ (I shall come back to the term) the nature of the text and turn it into an ekphrasis, possibly that of an existing painting to be found in our world; the reader-viewer then turns detective, a function in keeping with textual and hermeneutic analysis. This text is particularly interesting as it asks and partially answers some of the critical questions I addressed before, as well as a few more— for example, what are the stylistic devices that create the effects of a pictorial vision? What are the textual elements and concealed references to art history that trigger the reader’s feeling that this description is that of a picture and of a particular genre of painting? How can a text ‘fool’

Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism  99 the eye in the way of a painting? What are its diegetic and metatextual functions? Its anthropological and phenomenological stakes? The Art of Describing47Objects: Objects and Objectivity Upon a first, unsuspecting reading of the eleventh chapter of this novel, what strikes the reader is a kind of obsessive dedication to the location of objects, testifying to a kind of manic precision or accuracy, to an ­apparently—although quickly belied—objective point of view, and, eventually, to the uncovering of an inner yet fruitful contradiction. Let it be noted here that Josipovici’s first novel was entitled The Inventory (1968) and chapter 11 of Goldberg: Variations truly offers such a record, constructed through the repetition of the words “below” (umpteen times), “above,” “the further edge,” “in the middle,” “in the centre,” “to the left/the right hand side,” “bottom,” “above,” “next to,” and many more prepositions that literally madden the reading eye, making the reader feel they are being made a fool of.48 The text is replete with terms related to mathematical precision, fractions, and measurements (size, height, width): “within an inch or two,” “a/three quarter(s) of,” “one third of,” “half of,” “a few inches away,” “three reddish-brown threads,” “two containers,” and so on. What is more, the sizes, shapes, colours, and materials of eleven objects, “two books, a round box, seven bottles and jars, and a fruit,” are presented in the mode of an enumeration: “They are disposed in the following fashion: at the bottom, on the left flush with the left hand wall, lies a large book bound in dark leather, its white pages facing us.”49 The result of this descriptive choice is that objects forcibly come to the fore as in a list, in a collection, a catalogue, or an inventory, testifying to the mastery of the narrator, for, as A. S. Byatt remarked in The Virgin in the Garden, “lists are a form of power.”50 The syntactic choice is that of parataxis and juxtaposition: “This one identical to the other, except that it is shut tight, the bolt in place and the key in the hole. A large bunch of keys hangs,”51 etc. The verb of the main clause is often omitted and action rests on relative clauses: “A shelf in a shallow recess, above which is a cupboard with two small doors, one of which is partially open, but not enough to allow one to see inside, the other firmly shut;”52 or Next to it, a little higher and hanging down just to the right of the lemon, a jar or bottle encased in a yellow wicker basket with a twisted wicker handle attached to the top edge, which is covered with a dark green cloth. 53 The text displays an obsession with extreme nomination and the desire to focus on a close-up of the viewed objects seized in all their dimensions before any kind of action is taken; it invites the eye to take in the object

100  Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism (a bottle) in its entirety together with its colour and material, before concentrating on smaller details. “God is in the details,” Mrs Goldberg quotes.54 It, therefore, satisfies the scopic urge more than the optic one, which tallies with what an “ob-ject” is, namely “put in the way of some of the senses.”55 But an object may also turn subject, as is also testified, to remember Barthes, 56 by the ambiguity of the term. The Return of the Subjective Still, although the description under scrutiny purports to be as “objective” as possible, moving objects to the fore and insisting on material details as in one of A. Robbe-Grillet’s “nouveaux romans,” The Erasers for instance, signs of a human presence or of a human gaze soon become identifiable; the precise location of the objects reveals the position of a viewer, for everything is placed in relation to her/his position: “to the right” (of her gaze) or “to the left as one looks at it.” Furthermore, a phrase such as “whitish brown” suggests that someone has determined what is whitish or not according to one’s criteria. Adverbs of evaluation or opinion, such as “firmly,” “probably,” or “partially,” also contribute to the indication of a human presence. Then, more importantly, in addition to the elements resulting from the (now) more banal use of focalisation, come those which pinpoint indecision and the process of viewing as wavering, suggested by phrases such as “three fainter lines,” “made out,” “indecipherable script,” “­another word just visible on the left,” “suggesting that,” “its base is invisible,” “a label the writing on it is too small to be decipherable,” “clearly visible,” “impossible to be certain,” “dimness,” “just discernible in the gloom,” and “just visible in the gloom.” The (more) discrete lexical field of uncertainty underlying that of control and assertion put to use in the minute description plays the part of a symptom, revealing the importance of seeing/not seeing, and appears in conjunction with an attempt at describing and also at reading or deciphering the objects and the inscriptions they are bearing. The hermeneutic code is at work, and the importance of the gaze, this play of appearing/disappearing, aphanasis/epiphasis, not only highlights the role of the place ascribed to the gazer by the work of art, but also speaks volumes about what a work of art is about. Finally, the paradoxical quality of the text playing on object/subject, inhuman/human, is confirmed when the reader realises that, irrespective of whether human presence seemed absent and yet is present, at least one object is personified, that is “a clay water-bottle, whitish-brown, the marks of the potter’s wheel very visible.”57 The text evokes its rounded “belly,” its handles, “which give it the appearance of having square shoulders,” its “neck,” and “armpits.” This is no wonder, for it is the only object bearing the visible marks of human creation.

Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism  101 The Text as Ghost: Unheimlich/Uncanny Objects When subjected to a text that both “clinically” describes its object and concurrently imperils this process by building up an undermining effect, the reader is destabilised. The constant interplay between certainty ­(accuracy) and uncertainty (indecision) produces a différance of meaning and vision, as well as the blurring of the text and of its reference. Contradiction and tension between what is too visible in a kind of ­hallucinatory way and what is partially or almost invisible culminate in an unheimlich effect in its true sense. For what is both visible and invisible are actually domestic objects and, thus, in a kind of intermittent twinkling effect, the homely verges on the unhomely. The description of jars and containers as a composition seems to acquire a life of its own while the door a/ jar, almost opening onto its “dark recesses,” strangely echoes other recesses, such as in Wuthering Heights when the very first description of the house by Lockwood, who has just forced his way into it, concludes with the phrase “and other dogs haunted other recesses.” Later in the book, the key is provided when Goldberg comments on John Donne’s poem “A Nocturnal Upon S. Lucy’s Day, being the shortest day.” According to him, the first stanza describes the shortest day of the year […] with such a strange mixture of the subjective and the scientific as to leave us feeling that the year and indeed the universe is in reality a huge beast whose hour has now come (my emphasis)58 Furthermore, visual and aural textual echoes produce unsettling sliding and slipping effects, thanks to such signifiers as strap (four times)/strip, in a system of assonances or alliterations, eye rhymes, and visual echoes, for example, lid (repeated four times) and rim; line (five times), middle (three times), thinner, script, fine. This visual and aural overlapping culminates with “the rim of the lid” and “the lines of the lid,” confusing the senses, both of sight and hearing, an effect of synaesthesia Along the rim of the lid and the middle and bottom of the jar runs a delicate pattern of red lines. Between the lines on the lid, a series of reversed epsilons, the middle member of each pushing forward to touch the rounded back of the adjacent one. In the middle, also divided by two firm red lines above and below which are three thinner lines, is a word in a beautiful, very elaborate but indecipherable script, while a fragment of another word is just visible on the left, suggesting that the text runs round the jar. 59 The plasticity of the signifiers is foregrounded when the rim of the lid of the lines of the lid (in Gertrude Stein manner) suggests that the rim and

102  Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism the lines share the same lid; at the same time, despite these variations, the letter ‘i’ functions as a stable peg that allows the text to maintain its coherence and cohesion. The unsettling effect of this vertiginous description makes the reader feel that they are confronted with an enigma, a riddle, that their eye is being deceived, and that delusion and illusion are at play. The Fooled Eye’s Haunting/ed Vision The description before and the feeling of being deceived, of seeing but an illusion, finds an echo in the reader’s mind, awakening a kind of subliminal memory of a particular genre of painting; the title “Containers” already hints at a possible “contained” vision or meaning, and the text irresistibly moulds itself on the genre of ekphrasis, albeit never overtly. More specifically, this text details the objects as if they were three-­dimensional ones, set in the diegetic space, yet at the end of the description the term “surface” in “dividing [one of the containers’] surface into two unequal sections” refers to two dimensions. It, thus, appeals to the knowledge of the viewer, who first reads the description as a hypotyposis but later suspects that it might be an ekphrasis. In other words, what may first appear as a “pictorial description,” a term I have had occasion to define elsewhere,60 strikes the viewer as highly charged in pictorial elements redolent with art history; to the extent that, by the end of the description, the reader-viewer feels convinced that the text refers and purports to describe a particular, still-life painting. A close scrutiny of the clues provided by the text is necessary to the hermeneutic investigation: What are the elements of/in the text that suggest to the reader that “Containers” is an ekphrasis and not simply the description of a three-dimensional object? Strictly textually speaking, few elements support this suggestion; phrases like “and to the left as one looks at it” or “returning to the left hand side” seem to depict a flat surface and may thus imply that the description is of a two-dimensional object, an image. Nevertheless, the insistence on plays of light and colour, for example the phrase “because the door is partially open the light plays on the panel,”61 as well as the use of descriptive static verbs in the present tense, might also apply to a two-dimensional description. It is only the word “surface” in the very last sentence, even though referring to one of the two containers, that introduces an overt analogy with the two-dimensional surface of a painting, while also pointing to the fact that it seems impossible to move around the object to see what is written behind the visible surface. ­Besides, the static quality of the description itself—albeit not sufficient to be able to speak of the presence of a painting—introduces a long pause in the narrative that corresponds to a moment of non-life, much like a “still life” painting.

Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism  103 What is more, the semblance of describing a work of art is maintained by the vocabulary corresponding to that used in iconography, by art criticism, or art historians, specifically the extensive descriptions of geometrical forms, those of contrast effects, the insistence on textures, or the use of technical terms. The comment that “a window seems to be reflected,”62 for instance, evokes the device used to suggest volume by signalling the play on light on a glass object.63 What is presented to the viewer is organised in terms of composition and, therefore, her gaze follows a trajectory dictated, precisely, by this internal organisation. Finally, in dissonance with the various references linked to a three-­ dimensional perspective, the narrator mentions no contact, as one would have with an object that we receive using the totality of our body and senses; there is an absence of relief, and the senses are not solicited through indications to smells, for example, or references to touch or sound. In effect, the fact that only objects are being described as subjects of vision and that these are placed in a specific fashion, rather than simply cast on a shelf in a haphazard way, points to an aesthetic will, in relation to both the represented and the representing spaces, somewhat like what I defined as an “aesthetic arrangement.” These clues strongly suggest that we are in front of a still-life, a genre which made extensive use of books, jars, and fruit, while cupboards and shelves were also staples of a certain type of trompe-l’œil. Still, even though the reader has the feeling that this is the description of a still life, there truly is no actual confirmation in the text itself, except for the knowledge provided by the reader’s own culture. This description truly constitutes a “pictorial allusion,” with all its inherent risks, the main one being that of not being recognised. Half revealed and half concealed, the painting appears/disappears like a symptom, just like the objects described: the cupboard doors, “one of which is partially open the other firmly shut,”64 or the two books and their two straps, of which “only the left hand one performs this function, while the right hand one is loose and folded back over the top cover.”65 All this is encapsulated in the concluding sentence of the second paragraph: “The two books thus mirror the two doors above, the one ajar, the other locked.”66 The reader’s doubts are eventually dispelled by the key provided by a brief description “contained” in “Unterlinden,” a chapter situated some thirty pages later.67 There, five lines recapitulate the first description, bringing in “recognition” and confirming that “Containers” constitutes an ekphrasis, pointing to a still-life in the museum of Unterlinden, famous for Grünewald’s highly renowned Crucifixion. Once the reader encounters the second description, they may return to chapter 11 in a recursive loop and check the list and enumeration, before seeking to find the art object in question, the actual painting, and compare. Meaning becomes fixed after having erred and been endlessly differed. This truly stages the return of a repressed painting when the choice of the profane

104  Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism “ob-jects.” The second of these two “unequal sections” appeals to the memory of the reader, like “a site of memory,” what a still-life painting may also be. Reprise or the Second Panel of the Diptych: “Unterlinden” This time, ekphrasis consists in a brief, minimal description, somewhat offhand as it were, as the former phrasing “eleven objects” is replaced with the more casual “a number of containers,” which also shows the difference of affect and effect between the two passages. More vague and general, the variation echoes and mirrors the previous, very detailed description, offering a distorted, abridged version that is inserted within the name of the main “container,” “Unterlinden,” the famous museum near Colmar. We strolled through the first rooms, the Rhineland primitives e­ xuding a strong sense of trust in the world, their dark pictures glowing. Edith stopped in front of a strange still-life. Utterly different from anything else in the museum, it was at once self-­contained and utterly mysterious. Divided horizontally into two parts, it showed a shallow cupboard, the top half consisting of two doors, one of which was partly open in trompe-l’œil, the lower half consisting of a shelf on which stood a number of containers, while more—bottles, flasks, and the like—hung from nails set in the wall. We stood in front of it for some time, I was surprised by it but not really taking it in, was already in the big gallery with the Grünewald, and had indeed turned to move on, when Edith took my arm.68 This is a profane painting, very different from Grünewald’s Crucifixion, the sacred painting for which the museum is famous; should the reader decide to trace this work, s/he would find that it is a wooden panel displaying objects linked to the art of medicine: books, a chemist’s jar, and a bottle whose label “fürzanwe” shows it was used to cure toothache. The study of the panel proved that it was an autonomous work, probably ordered by a barber or a physician, which has been dated back to 1470 and, according to Charles Sterling, could be the very first still life in Western painting.69 The reference to art history as well as the mention of the genre—that of still-life painting—coupled with that of the trompe-l’œil allow this second panel of the diptych to retrospectively give the first one its status. The words “a strange still life,” “at once self-contained and utterly mysterious,” “different from anything else in the museum,” confirm the reader’s sense of a slightly unsettling homely/unhomely effect. Art history also comes to correct one of the narrator’s errors, namely his reference to the baffling round object “balanced on top of [the round box] … probably a coarse skinned lemon, the

Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism  105 light bringing out its grainy texture,” which, as studies on the painting, particularly those of Charles Sterling, reveal, is not a lemon but a bezoar, a concretion found in the stomach or intestines of sea mammals. The bezoar was believed to protect against all sorts of poison and/or to cure diseases; it used to be a valued component of wunderkammers and ­Rodolphe II possessed one of them.70 And isn’t this Still life with ­C upboard and Bottles a sedate or profane version of the magnificent display of curiosity cabinets often lodged in precious cupboards? Why, then, choose still-life painting in narrative economy? What is the function of this “diptych”? Significantly, the moment of contemplation of the still life is when his wife, Edith, chooses to tell the narrator-writer she has “come to a decision”: “‘I can’t go on, she repeated, I’m going to take the train back.’ ‘You don’t like to drive?’ I said. ‘You haven’t understood,’ she said. ‘I can’t go on. I’ve had enough,’ she said.”71 The narrator’s reaction is true-to-character, as he had not seen the crisis coming to a head and is at a loss: “‘I couldn’t believe this was happening. Edith’ I said, ‘we have been together half our lives. We have two children. We are happy. We are going to die together.’ ‘No we’re not,’ she said.”72 He is in a state of shock, as he had just been planning to tell her his little secret, that the book he had been painfully writing was at last on the point of being finished. But totally wrapped up in his thoughts, he had not noticed there was something wrong with his relationship with Edith. The still life, in its composition and as a genre, sends back a mirror effect on the crisis the narrator undergoes: the word “half” in the quote before is reflected in the half-open/half-shut objects contained in the painting that mirrors his life being at a standstill: “We stood for a while longer in front of that still life. Well she said, goodbye, Gerald. She turned and walked away. I went on staring at the picture.”73 The difference between the narrator and his wife is also signalled by the paintings, since, interestingly, he had planned to make his revelation in front of a sacred painting, whereas she chose a very mundane, domestic subject—unique among the other œuvres exhibited in the museum—a still life; the characters are defined by these choices and decisions. ­Consonant to his choice of painting, the Rhineland primitives, the narrator “exuded a sense of trust in the world,” in other words trust in what he chose to see as true concerning Edith; their life together was a still life, doomed to end, no longer curable, beyond medicine and its objects. His eye was truly fooled when he thought everything was all right, never truly looking at her or taking her in as a subject but more as an object. Trompe-l’œil produces a mirror effect between the pictorial genres and the ­revelation concerning the nature of the characters’ relationship, or even beyond that, the themes of non-communication, half-told/half-hidden truths and lies, illusion and reality, life and death. The destabilising effect of the text wavering between extreme objectivity and subjectivity gives the thematic structure its coherent shape; they are part of the same ‘pattern.’

106  Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism The “reflection” on lies/truth, reality and illusion, actually doubles as an interrogation on representation, duplication, and their variations; and, as the endings of the three paragraphs composing the eleventh chapter reveal, the description suggests the operation of a metatextual programme. To be more specific, the last sentence of the first paragraph, that “the two doors clearly mirroring each other when they are shut, establish a play of similarity and difference now one is partially open,”74 is mirrored by the last sentence of the second paragraph, which reads: “The two books thus mirror the two doors above, the one ajar, the other locked,”75 reminding the reader that meaning is half-veiled/half-­ revealed. Both these phrases are eventually varied in the last sentence of the third paragraph, describing “a belt some two thirds of the way down, clearly dividing its surface [of the two dark angular containers] into two unequal sections.”76 This may be interpreted as a comment of the text upon itself, bearing on its structure as an exercise in variation, its “pattern,” as Forster would have put it, a pattern resting on doubles and duplicity, as “similarity and difference,” “ajar and locked,” and the “two unequal sections of the book” point out. The textual variations on the same/the other, in which the second occurrence already is the double or other of the first one, shows that time has passed in-between, both phenomenological time and reading, as well as textual time. Repetition with a différance, this echo, as system, as pattern, is also staged in the text by the episode of the disease affecting young Westfield, which truly has an uncanny ring: His head would lift as he stepped out into the woods on a bright summer morning, and he would laugh aloud for sheer joy, and then at once the image of himself laughing and the sound of the words his heart would lift as he stepped out would fill his head and drive the happiness from his heart and the laughter from his throat. The way he put it to himself was that everything had developed an echo. And just as continuous echo destroys the initial sound so it was with his life.77 The description of the painted books, lines of writing and unreadable inscriptions indicated by “the writing on it too small to be decipherable”78 or “a word in a beautiful, very elaborate but indecipherable script,”79 also refers to the hermeneutic questions of seeing/not seeing, deciphering/indecipherable. It passes a comment on writing itself, designating it as a tour de force or, as per R. Lloyd, “the endless transferability between the subject and its representation.”80 The still life, as a partial trompe-l’œil, or a verbal equivalent of a visual forgery, unveils the fake relationship between the two characters. More importantly, transformed into a trompe-l’œil and then into a verbal representation of this effect, the object is projected onto the reader’s mind, producing a pictorial

Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism  107 effect that incites the reader to find the original painting reflected in this still life, so that the infinite flux and flight of the visual and of the sign comes to an end. The text mixing word and image becomes a hybrid, like the picture itself, with the narrator also playing on a wish to cheat or fool the eye of the text, to cause it to see, to create a verbal equivalent of the painting, in a “painting effect” that creates the virtual illusion of a painting. The eye is engaged in a double task, that of looking at the visible and that of reading the readable, for, when reading, one not only sees and hears but also combines the eye and the breath in a powerful instance of synaesthesia.

When Art Objects In her series of essays entitled Art objects, Jeanette Winterson tells the story of her first true encounter with a painting, which literally beckoned her from a shop window, and insists on art as affect and event. “That puts me on the side of what Harold Bloom calls ‘the ecstasy of the privileged moment’. Art all art, as insight, as rapture, as transformation, as joy.”81 We know that the universe is infinite, expanding and strangely complete, that it lacks nothing we need, but in spite of that knowledge, the tragic paradigm of human life is lack, loss, finality, a primitive doomsaying that has not been repealed by technology or medical science. The arts stand in the way of this doomsaying. Art objects. The nouns become an active force not a collector’s item. Art objects. The cave wall paintings at Lascaux, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the huge truth of Picasso, the quieter truth of Vanessa Bell, are part of the art that objects to the lie against life, against the spirit, that is pointless and mean. The message coloured through time is not lack, but abundance. Not silence but many voices. Art, all art, is the communication cord that cannot be snapped by indifference or disaster. Against the daily death it does not die.82 The choice of word is very significant, as the form of the signifier is the same for both noun and verb, and it is only the stress that dispels doubts: “art objects” when art raises an objection, when it stands in-between not only us and death, our “daily death,” but in-between us and submission. Art is subversive, saying “no” to what would like to deprive us of our dignity and status as a human being, what would ruin us, make us crumble away. Art objects, indeed, through and by its subjects, but also its objects. This tallies with one of the possible answers to the question on the choice of a still life in Goldberg: Variations. Art’s effect on the text is also acknowledged in Josipovici’s novel when the narrator-writer decides

108  Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism to let Edith go on her own to see Holbein’s Christ in the Tomb, to concentrate on the second meaningful picture of the book, Klee’s Wander Artist: I decided to spend the day in our hotel room, working on my book. A way had opened up for me in the past few days, when what had seemed intractable suddenly became possible, and seeing the Klee in the flesh, as it were, after having lived with a postcard of it for so long, had made such an impression on me that I wanted to have the day to myself to savour it and work out what it would do to my book. (my emphasis)83 What is acknowledged here is how painting may affect writing, both structurally and thematically, as discussed earlier, a question that is addressed with reference to Klee’s painting and what it does to the book, and so is the link between affect and effect. The still life and trompel’œil, with its recesses and dimness, its unheimlich effect, represents objects meant to cure and, thus, offers itself as an art object meant as a remedy, to fight death. This painting can read as an anti-vanitas, an “antitype”; it is also a way of defeating the death of the object by fixing its representation forever in an (anti?) memento mori: when art objects to death and stands in its way, as it were. After all, the Unterlinden still life was probably a panel ordered by a barber or a physician, so it was meant to advertise the curing properties of this art, to wit the bezoar. It was also a portrait, that of a physician or of a barber, through the tools of his art, the tools of his practice in 1470, including the bezoar (belief not science), plants, drugs, fluids, and liquids. Gender-wise, still life refers to a domestic space, defined as “contained,”84 traditionally in keeping with women’s role. In the conclusion of her book on still life in writing, R. Lloyd develops a gendered reflection triggered by the subservient nature of the genre, which reflects back on men and women’s roles and questions of domination, subjecthood, and objecthood also broached in this study. Still life, in all its manifestations, has demonstrated that it is a remarkably flexible device for exploring not just the domestic areas of human experience but also much broader areas of experience, and for adding its own sometimes subversive, sometimes nostalgic, often wry and always energetic voice, a voice that proves to be just as potent in the written form as in the painted form. Above all, and perhaps precisely because it has tended to be overlooked in novels where other, louder modes of narration compete with it for our attention, it often acts as a subversive commentary on perception itself, on how we perceive reality and our place in it, but, above all on whose gaze is seen as dominant, on which gender is presented in control, on

Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism  109 which individuals are to be assigned the role of objects and which will be elevated to subjects. And in the hands of many writers, both male and female, it throws into doubt those modes of thinking that refuse to grant subjecthood to anything designated as an object.85 The celebration of objects usually despised as too homely, and that of a long-neglected, painterly genre, turns out to serve a subversive project, what Lloyd called a reaction versus “male-centered art history.” In Goldberg: Variations, for example, Edith is the one who rejects conventions and material comfort when, standing in front of the still life cum trompe-l’oeil, she chooses the solitude of freedom and truthfulness to oneself against mediocrity and lies. Furthermore, thanks to the energy it develops, which also reminds us of the ancient notion of energeia, the still life produces an effect that affects the viewer in diegetic space, literally “moving” her/him. At another level, it also “touches” the reader, for it effectuates a reading event, or, as per Louis Marin, “un événement de lecture.” It has sometimes happened to me, it happens—and I believe that it is more frequent than one would think—that while reading something suddenly emerges that we could name “a reading event” [...] an event in the most humble sense of that which happens, which arrives from what we read without announcing itself, almost unpredictably.86 When painting appears in a text, it disrupts it because of its heterogeneity. Therefore, it cannot be ignored. It may cause a shock or at least may object, stand in-between the text and the reader’s inner eye, as an art object, what I call “the pictorial third.” R. Lloyd developed the notion of energy a propos Domenico Remps’s Art Cabinet Cupboard and noted how: “the energy of this painting belies its categorisation as still life, indicating the wonderful power inherent in the finest of these works.”87 An attempt at “capturing forces” (as Deleuze saw the work of art), this tour de force is also seen in Goldberg: Variations, in the narrator’s strong reaction to Klee’s Wander Artist and his comment that “I know that this is what I need to capture” (my emphasis).88 Painting also has an effect upon Edith, particularly a third painting (another variation as it were): in Basel, she goes to see Holbein’s dead Christ And when she started to tell me about her day, about the effect on her of that extraordinary painting, two metres long and only twenty centimetres high which shows a gaunt bearded man lying in a coffin, the contemplation of which, said Dostoievsky in a letter, made him lose his faith, a sentiment he put in the mouth of prince Myshkin in The Idiot, I tried to show an interest, but my mind was with my book.89

110  Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism Ironically, this lost opportunity to share one’s passion “with those we love” is the last stroke for Edith; interestingly, in the Unterliden too, it is through irony that the narrator’s own blindness is revealed. In Goldberg: Variations, painting served to give a pattern to the text, modelling it on its working principles, on its function, and on its ­composition. The dual text (with the two main narrators de-multiplied into several others) is duplicated in the two doors of the still life-as-­ description and literally brings forth, under the reader’s eyes, some of its stakes; by so doing, it shows itself as ambiguous, double, pregnant with unheimlich potentialities. In return, the text, haunted by painting ­(several occurrences of which appear and reappear: Holbein’s Christ, Klee’s Wander artist, Tinguely’s installation), justifies the use of painting as a critical tool to account for specific textual effects that would otherwise be “invisible” or unaccounted for. Thus, once acknowledged, the pictorial as a “reading event,” energy and encounter, offers its own critical idiom to supplement the lacks of literary criticism. In other words, Josipovici’s novel stages, once more, what both critics and creators have been doing since the very beginning of their crafts, when Achilles’s shield constituted a frequent object of narration. While, when calling for an iconology of the text, W. J. T. Mitchell remarked that “a thorough rereading or reviewing of texts in the light of visual culture is still only a hypothetical possibility (my emphasis).”90 R. Lloyd has already used the pictorial to account for textual and thematic effects. Seeing the description of letters in Jacob’s Room as still lifes, she ventured that “by focusing so sharply on the written sign, Woolf is also raising questions about the nature of writing more generally and about the relationship between sign and suggestion, seme and implication.”91 Indeed, Forster’s seminal notion of “pattern”—as composition or as structure applied to still life—itself endowed with domestic energy, and its capacity for being subversive in its effects require the appeal to art history to justify and also render the objects of description even more visible. Thus, still life may be seen as part of a system I offer to further develop, in which art truly objects when art mirrors art—something we may leave a/jar for future live (and textual) encounters. Having now confirmed what, in my introduction, started as an “idea for research,” I would like to move on towards a poïetics of the pictorial-in-text, of the iconotext.92

Notes 1 Studies like those of M. Caplan-Philippe already quoted or of Laurence Petit on A.S. Byatt and colour or conferences on the subject prove its vitality. A synthesis now becomes necessary to gather the results of those scattered works. 2 Mario Praz, Mnemosyne. The Parallel between Literature and Visual Arts, (Mellon Lectures) Washington, 1970.

Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism  111 3 Mario Praz, “La Parenteladellevariearti”, Bellezza e Bizzaria, Milan ­Mondadori, 1960. 4 André Chastel, “Pour saluer Mario Praz”, Mario Praz, “Cahiers pour un temps”, Centre George Pompidou, 1989, 25. 5 Mario Praz, La chair, la mort, le diabledans la littérature du XIXème siècle, le romantisme noir, Paris: Denoël, [1930], 2001. 6 Praz’s observations also echo Hogarth’s line of beauty, of course. 7 Mario Praz, Studisulconcettismo, Milan, La cultura, [1934], Florence [1946]. An extended version may be found in Studies in Seventeenth C ­ entury Imagery, London: The Warburg Institute, 1939. 8 It is also interesting to note that Erasmus saw metaphor as the mother of emblems. 9 Mary Ann Caws, The Eye in the Text, Essays on Perception, Mannerist to Modern, Princeton: Princeton Essays on the Art, 1981. 18. 10 M.A. Caws, “Brancusi and Mallarmé, or, About an Egg”, op. cit., 125. 11 Ibid, 125–126. 12 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, [1847] 1982. 13 The architectural construction of Brontë’s writings is also acknowledged by V. Woolf. See, for instance, Virginia Woolf, “JaneEyre and Wuthering Heights”, The Common Reader 1925 (essay written in 1916), Emily Brontë, A Critical Anthology, ed. Jean-Pierre Petit, Harmondsworth: P ­ enguin Books, 1973. 74. 14 Emily Brontë, op. cit., 45. 15 Ibid, 46. 16 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort, New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. 63–64. 17 On this subject, see Hubert Damisch’s Preface to Meyer Schapiro, Les mots et les choses, op. cit., 7. 18 Meyer Schapiro, op. cit., 8–9. 19 Rhoda Flaxman, Victorian Word-Painting and Narrative, Ann Arbor and London: UMI Research Press, 1983. 68; Carlos Baker, “Sensation and ­Vision in Wordsworth”, English Romantic Poets, ed. M.H. Abrams, New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. 107. I will return to the notion in my last chapter. 20 Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps, Paris: Minuit, 2000, 9–10. 21 On this subject, see Marie-José Mondzain, op. cit., 252. 22 H. Melville, “The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tartarus of Maids”, The Piazza Tales, electronic edition edited for Electronic Text Centre, University of Virginia Library, by Graduate Fellow Lisa Spiro, 1997–1998, This text is part of a larger study dedicated to the story published as “La capture de l’ombre: questions posées à la veraicona. Du miroirobscur à l’écran.” in L’obscur, Presses Universitaires de la Sorbonne, ed. Françoise Sammarcelli, 2009. 23 On this subject see also Georges Didi-Huberman, La Resemblance par contact, Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2008. 24 Herman Melville, op. cit., 37–38. 25 Ibidem. 26 Ibid, 41. 27 Ibid, 37–38. 28 Ibid, 41. 29 Marie-José Mondzain, op. cit., 252. 30 Ibid. 31 Herman Melville, op. cit., 24.

112  Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 4 4 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

Translated from the French word “dispositif.” StéphaneLojkine, Image et subversion, Nîmes, Jacqueline Chambon, 2005, 18. I am referring here to the Greek word “enigma,” as discussed in Chapter 1, 21. Jacques Lacan, in particular chapters VI–IX Le Séminaire, Livre XI, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, Le Seuil, (1966), 1973. 65–109. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The S­ eminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alana S­ heridan. W. W. Norton & Company: New York and London, 1981. Saint Augustin, De Trinitate (XV, IX, 16). Gabriel Josipovici, Goldberg: Variations, New York: Harper, [2002], 2007. I thank Marcin Stawiarski who introduced me to Gabriel Josipovici’s work, as part of his doctoral dissertation. Rosemary Lloyd, Shimmering in a Transformed Light, Writing the Still Life, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005. Olivier Leplatre, “Le repas d’une image”, Poétique, n. 98, avril 93 y évoque le trompe-l’œil, 235. Olivier Leplatre, “Le papier et la toile, le pli des formes”, L’illisible, ed. L. Louvel, C. Rannoux, La licorne, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2006, 249–267. Les Vanités dans la peinture du XVIIèsiècle, méditations sur la richesse, le dénuement et la rédemption, organised by Alain Tapié, Albin Michel/ RMN/Ville de Caen, Musée des Beaux –Arts 1990. Delphine Gleizes, “‘Vanités’ Codes picturaux et signes textuels”, Romantisme, “Images en texte”, n. 118, SEDES 2002, 76–91. 75. Fabrice Faré, “Les Vanités en France au XVIIe siècle et ses [sic] particularités”, KonsthistoriskTidskrift (Stockholm Konsthistoriskasällskapet), LXV, Hafte 2 [Still Life Symposium – Stockholm], 1996. 104–114. D. Gleizes, op. cit., 76. Ibid, 91. For a definition of “pantonym” and its modes of action, see Philippe Hamon, 1981. Of course, this phrase alludes to Svetlana Alpers’s seminal book (1990), mostly dedicated to Dutch Painting, which is in keeping with my subject. Gabriel Josipovici, op. cit., 67–69. Ibid., 66. A.S. Byatt, The Virgin in the Garden, London: Vintage, 1994. 90. Gabriel Josipovici, op. cit., 67. Ibidem. Ibid., 66. Ibid, 107. The famous phrase is actually ascribed to Aby Warburg, qtd in Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps, op. cit., 92. Webster’s Dictionary. Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, op. cit. Gabriel Josipovici, op. cit., 69. Ibid, 113. Ibid, 90. See: Liliane Louvel, Poetics of the Iconotext, op. cit., in particular Chapter 4, “Nuances of the Pictorial”, 89–100. Gabriel Josipovici, op. cit., 67. Ibid., 68. Ironically, the use of this device persisted in art history and painting practice, even in the absence of a window in the represented room; the fine reflection of a window had become a dead sign emptied of its link with its referent. Ibid, 69.

Poetics of the Pictorial (I) Towards Picturo-Criticism  113 65 Ibid, 67. 66 Ibid, 68. 67 Even though connected through the art object, the two texts present many differences in terms of their narrative status. The first occurrence of the diptych is offered in the third person, as a description (ekphrasis), whereas the second unfolds as a first-person narrative. The first narrator remains unknown, while the second section is recounted by Gerald, a writer whose last name remains untold, yet whose work we presumably read when going through the chapters dedicated to Goldberg. 68 Ibid, 101. 69 Charles Sterling, La nature morte de l’Antiquité à nosjours, Exhibition ­Catalogue, Orangerie des Tuilleries, 1952. pp. 7–17, n.5. Site des Muséesd’­ Alsace. See also: Patricia Falguieres, Le maniérisme, uneavantgarde au XVIe siècle, Paris, Gallimard, “Découvertes,” 2004. 40. 70 See Charles Sterling; see also the websites of Muséesd’ Alsace and Patricia Falguières (2004: 40). 71 Gabriel Josipovici, op. cit., 101. 72 Ibidem. 73 Ibidem. 74 Ibid, 67. 75 Ibid, 68. 76 Ibid, 69. 77 Ibid, 14. 78 Ibid, 69. 79 Ibid, 68. 80 Rosemary Lloyd, op. cit. 123. 81 Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, London: Vintage, 1996. 6. 82 Ibid, 19–20. 83 Gabriel Josipovici, op. cit., 95. 84 Rosemary Lloyd, op. cit., 129. 85 Rosemary Lloyd, op. cit., 156–158. 86 Louis Marin, L’ecriture du soi, op. cit., 15. 87 Rosemary Lloyd, op. cit., 152. 88 Gabriel Josipovici, op. cit., 173. 89 Ibid, 99. 90 Mitchell, Picture Theory, op. cit., 210. 91 Rosemary. Lloyd, op. cit. 124. 92 This is something I offer in Louvel, 2010.

4 Poetics of the Pictorial (II) In the Painter-Poet’s Studio: Questions of Form

With reference to the modelisation of the literary text by the visual arts, I will be taking examples from the forms that have been commonly used by criticism in a rather, I would say, canonical manner. My discussion here aims at the exploration of framing effects, perspective, and the games or “aberrant” deployments, such as anamorphosis or trompel’œil, as well as the question of dispositif (apparatus) and other devices. Finally, we will see how what has now been established as the discourse of a certain doxa is founded precisely on the elements that poetry has consistently “borrowed” from painting.

Frames/Framing of Some Theoretical Problems: Margins and Frames1 Some of painting’s attributes that may be considered peripheral, namely its frame, but also the framing effects that are inherent in the work, are often used by criticism in an analogic or metaphorical way. Yet, should one venture a rigorous definition of these terms, by referring first to the painting practice, one would notice that the literary text actually exhibits framing effects that are not only metaphorical, but also formal. ­Situated at the hinge between the visual and the textual, the readable and the visible, it is a matter of seeing how this ‘accessory’ element of the materiality of painting can transit or even migrate from artistic practice  to literary criticism. How, then, is the passage from the material to the metaphorical or from the material to the structural effectuated? Why? And what are the consequences with reference to the tools of criticism, in other words for literary theory? Pictorial Excursions: On Artistic Frames In order to address the literary double of the frame, we should first briefly consider its typology in painting. The etymology of the word points to a square structure that, as for L. Marin, “more than an edge or a border, more than an ornament of the extremity, it is the substructure of the support and of the surface of representation.”2 Marin also notes

Poetics of the Pictorial (II)  115 “the remarkable polysemy of the framing artefact, between supplement and complement, a gratuitous ornament and a necessary apparatus; […] in a word, a necessary parergon, a constitutive supplement, the frame makes the work autonomous in the visible space”3 and operates a “modelisation” of the gaze. Originally, a frame served as a way of isolating certain scenes, giving them autonomy, by means of a black edge. According to Shapiro, prior to the end of the second millennium B.C., people started considering the isolation of images by a continuous frame.4 The link between frames and the Renaissance aediculae are easily discernible, as is that which connects them to the frontispiece of ancient books. B. Rougé also mentions “the architectural heritage of the frame,”5 referring to the practice of applying a painting on a wall before placing it on canvas. For A ­ lberti, the quadrangolo—the rectangle, or, more accurately, the ­quadrangular—is first and foremost that space, that first frame, on which one would trace the autonomous composition of the storia and, therefore, an artifice. Turning to a contemporary example, we can note that Siri Hustvedt entitles her collection of essays on painting Mysteries of the Rectangle,6 thus confirming the primacy of the links between painting and space, in consonance to Lessing’s dichotomy. Painting is there all at once. When I read a book, listen to music, or go to a movie, I experience these works over time. A novel, a symphony, a film are meaningful only as a sequence of words, notes and frames. Hours may pass but a painting will not gain or lose any part of itself. It has no beginning, no middle and no end [...] you don’t walk around a canvas. You stand in front of what is most often a rectangle and gaze at what’s inside its edges.7

The Frame as Structure In the etymology borrowed from painting, therefore, a frame is a structure whose function is to present and whose role, as perceived by J. Derrida and L. Marin, is deictic. It is certainly a parergon. The frame separates, links, and cuts off; it bestows autonomy and delimitation. In Georg Simmel’s words: Insofar as the work of art is that which otherwise only the world as a whole or the psyche can be, a unity of individualities, the work of art closes itself off against everything external to itself as a world of its own. Thus its boundaries mean something quite different from what one calls boundaries in a natural entity. [...] Distance and unity, antithesis to us and synthesis within itself are reciprocal concepts; [...] And only if and because the work of art possesses this

116  Poetics of the Pictorial (II) self-sufficiency does it have so much to give us; that existence for itself is the preparatory stepping back with which the work penetrates us that much more deeply and fully.8 Simmel insists on the necessity to avoid the centrifugal dispersion thanks to “this unifying effect of the frame joints [which] is visibly strengthened by raising the outer sides of the frame compared with the inner sides, so that the four sides form converging planes.”9 For B. Rougé, prior to a frontier-limit zone,10 the frame is also a locus of definition, ascribing a place to the spectator and ensuring the works’ intimacy. “Whether it is real or virtual, everything starts by and with it. It is the starting point.”11 Regardless of whether it is “Marie-Louise,” “passe-partout,” or a frame made in ormolu, frames are the beginning, the artisan of the painting’s own material surrounding, an in-between. Furthermore, as an object of the world, it can also appear in the work figuratively. The frame is a useful object that first serves to protect the canvas and to conceal the material with which a painting is made, for without the frame one would see the mounting; as Rougé phrases it, “the frame masks the break of the edge.”12 Once wood was abandoned and replaced by more fragile materials, frames also served to hang the canvas on the wall. They originally surrounded altarpieces, themselves often made of wood, and gave them an architectural structure. As A. Chastel notes, frames were always used in contracts to accentuate the separation between the three orders (the Holy one, the sacred one, and the profane), so that they can be correctly identified.13 The frame became necessary when pictures were exhibited; it is salient in the manner of an architectural element and gives an additional depth, a supplementary value, to the representation; it isolates the work and at the same time unites it with the wall. Its necessary companion was the curtain. The frame quickly became a decorative object that reflected the wealth of the owner of the painting and sometimes spoke of their vanity, much more than of the painter’s intention. As D. Arasse writes,14 the 1660–1670s marked the first appearance of heavy, gilded, and sculpted frames made of ormolu, which were so heavily decorated that they actually smothered the work of art, rather than highlighting it. The appearance of the frame also meant the emergence of a profession, that of the picture framer, as well as the development of variations, for lighter works: “Marie-Louise,” “passepartout,” a piece of white paper, sometimes cardboard, with a wooden finish to ornament designs that were considered to be too flat, such as the engraving, and endow them with a supplementary depth. In effect, contrary to perceptions of the frame as “the necessary accompaniment of a painting … [aiming] at donning it in a way that is more closely related to its quality,”15 the frame also often rivalled painting, occasionally even preventing it from being seen. It indicated another source of “enunciation” than the painting it wanted to subjugate. All this must be taken into account if one wants to pit painting against language.

Poetics of the Pictorial (II)  117 When the Frame Disappears An entire part of modern art has renounced the use of a frame, as a way to emphasise the importance of the work itself, as well as differentiate it from classical painting. The pretended humility of the frameless work of art allows it, nonetheless, to unveil what happens ‘behind the scenes,’ what Rougé calls the “ob-scene.”16 Simmel also regrets the flatness of modern art, which encourages the dispersion of the gaze and the increase of a painting’s centrifugal forces. Even though in contemporary art the object seems to no longer need a frame, however, the framing effect still takes place. With Duchamp and his boxes, the theoretical and practical inversion of this practice comes to full fledge, and it is the frame that becomes the work of art; in his view, the “big glass” (le grand verre) is nothing but an immense glass sheet that contains signifying slag or scoria, just like the bubbles formed in imperfect glass. Accordingly, in the case of installations, the works— or, more specifically, the infinite gaze and the work—are framed by the place where they are located;17 and so sometimes the museum or the gallery frame the work of art, effectuating a frame of ambience, shall we say, that surrounds the three-dimensional work with what D. Château calls “a frame of presentation.”18 Sophie Calle exploited this effect extensively in the Prenez soin de vous exhibition, hosted in Beaubourg, by displaying the effect of grief generated by love and its disappearance on the walls of the same hall, serving as background to the photos and accompanying texts. Further still, the introduction of video-art reinstated the frame, which is multiplied by the screens mounted in array, which inscribes them in a sequence. The scenes are projected in a loop on a wall-frame, in a room-frame, in the interior of a museum-frame. What is more, after Duchamp’s urinal and in the context of “nominalism,” the title has been promoted to the role of the frame, for it designates what one should see; it invites the gaze to concentrate on what is exposed, obscened, yet visible. The title, therefore, plays the role of the centrifugal operator that strikes a balance—and I am paraphrasing Simmel here—between presence and effacement, energy and retention, since, in the sphere of the visible, the title functions as an “intermediary between the work of art and its milieu.” With(out) Frames Still, moving beyond the presence and radical absence of the frame, there are certain transgressions, such as the framing/deframing game, which come into play as a form of resistance to the violent, to follow Rougé,19 cut performed by the frame, which implies a passage, the tearing of the wall’s mundaneness. Among these formal games, one may find false frames, painted entourages like a window frame, as well as stone or wooden buttresses, performing a trompe-l’œil that separates

118  Poetics of the Pictorial (II) the represented space from the spectator. These show the mastery of the painter, when creating a ‘protruding’ relief, and also designate the separation of the plane of representation from that of viewing, while at the same time signalling a change of regime. This depth effect creates a perpetually paradoxical sense of entering the painting while simultaneously maintaining a distance; in Bonnard’s work, for instance, the decorative panels created for the rooms of Misia’s house are framed by large panels that resemble the classical “verdure” tapestries. This type of frame, therefore, resembles the margins found in the manuscripts of the Middle Ages. 20 These margins are the place where imagination is given free rein, the monk’s character is unveiled, and “singeries” appear; it is here that the repressed (ludic, critical, or caricature) elements of the text manifest themselves. 21 We should note here that the difference in the function of the frame and that of the margin echoes the debate surrounding ­L essing’s formulations in relation to the gender of the painting and that of poetry. 22 The frame would be associated to the limit, the frontier, the law, rigidness; as a form of defence, it would offer a space of conflict or violence and, in any case, it would cause rupture, in the agonistic mode. One speaks of a “working frame,” a “frame of reference,” or a “protective frame.” The margin, on the other hand, would be a space of freedom, indicating the possibility of manoeuvring, offering a sense of continuity and possessing versatility; it is, therefore, a more irenic space of negotiation. While the two may be combined—in formations such as the “Marie-Louise,” in sketches and engravings—the frame cuts off, ruptures, or isolates the work, whereas the margin prolongs it. The margin, which may also be the frame of a text, is white and calls for a note, for fantasy, for a remark on the text or on the design. It is a transitional space, simulating the waking state of suspension, between dreaming and waking, leading towards the sketch, the engraving, or the text it surrounds. And, of course, its very simple delimitations give birth to complications and hybrid figures, as in the cases when the margin becomes the very frame of a text, in William Blake’s work, for example, or in Vanessa Bell’s. The question of heterogeneity should also be added, namely the heterogeneous nature of the frame in relation to the work it surrounds: it is neither the same object, nor a matter of the same artistic regime. One is decorative, the other is the result of a creation noted superior in the hierarchy of the arts. In addition to the effect of frames that are refigured in the pictorial work, as doubles of themselves, one also notes the presence of frames within frames or paintings within paintings; this is the realm of a pictorial genre, that of the amateur’s cabinet or an artist’s studio. 23 ­Furthermore, the genre of the painting may shape the form of a text, like Georges Perec’s A Gallery Portrait, with its proliferation of narratives, the descriptions of (false) paintings listed as if in an exhibition catalogue

Poetics of the Pictorial (II)  119 with its framing accompaniments, the descriptive cards that add text onto the image. Finally, one should also note the “semi-frame” effects, as, for example, in Matisse or Bonnard, where only one part of the frame is suggested, thus performing the rupture of a rupture. 24 Similarly, Bonnard’s de-framing effects, when the framing in the canvas bleeds outside the canvas: towards the top, as for example in Nude at the Fireplace, or slips towards the sides. Or even, as in Rauschenberg’s work, when the canvas continues on the wall and even, in the case of Pilgrim¸ on a chair. ­Certain works appropriate these framing effects structurally, like ­Vuillard’s Interieur (Phillips collection), for instance, which stages frames within frames and geometrical variations on the everyday (banal) subject of a kitchen. Other examples would include Poussin’s famous Self-­Portrait, Chardin’s Le jeune peintre, or even Vélasquez’s Las ­Meninas, to name but a few. We therefore witness an erasing of limits and borders or, conversely perhaps, the reinstatement of their presence (and their reinforcement). All the framing, de-framing, semi-framing effects, as well as the effects of adding depth and distance or inverting inner and outer structures discussed before, are largely converted in the literary text. An eloquent example of this process would be the painting-poetry parallel montage performed by Marcel Broodthaers’s Change – Gedicht – ­Wechsel discussed in Chapter One. The Frame in the Text Looking at the ways in which the visual sheds light back onto the text means observing how the pragmatics of the frame in painting becomes a critical pragmatics and calls for studying the ways in which this conversion takes its place in the literary text. As Guy Larroux has noted, “As much as literature per se, the discourse on literature is haunted by painting. If anyone needed to be convinced of this in a particular domain, they would only have to consider the notion of the frame.”25 The question of the frame lies at the heart of the text/image relation. Framing Structure The frame’s equivalence with language is achieved once it shapes into a textual apparatus meant as structure. 26 Let us begin by recalling Larroux’s classification of different framing levels that include the descriptive, the enclosing effects, what Erving Goffman calls “secondary frameworks,” and the difficult question of the implicit and the explicit. The descriptive level concerns references to the frame of action, i.e. its container together with the setting and places of action; in these cases, the often introductory description would assume a framing

120  Poetics of the Pictorial (II) function. As  Philippe Hamon argues, “the metaphor of the frame is a quasi-­stereotype of the descriptions of faces”27 that, one might say, are “framed” by the person’s hair. Within the same context, one would refer to descriptions of frames and their function, as, for example, in H. James’s Portrait of a Lady, where the description of the protagonist pausing on the threshold of a door is “framed” by the rectangle and coincides with her portrait: “framed in the gilded doorway, she struck the young man as the picture of a gracious lady.”28 A similar effect is produced at the descriptive level by numerous substitutes and variations of the frame, such as a window, a balcony, or a door, any opening onto a scene that is itself set within the frame of a closed space. The notion of frame might also be used for a more technical approach, that of narrative embeddings in a narratological sense, or, in other words, the embedding of a secondary narrative within a primary one. In this case, the frame would acquire a demarcating function, opening and closing the narrative, similar to the way the phrase “once upon a time” introduces European tales and the formulation “and they lived happily ever after” concludes them. A strip of text surrounds the main narrative and evokes, as Larroux puts it, “the borders of the text where the expectations and desires of the narrative are expressed.”29 The notion of border, which usually characterises a painting, emerges here once again and leads to more questions, as to whether there is an analogy between text one and text two or even as to where the text begins and where it ends. Larroux compares these textual frontier zones to the traces, or lines drawn in the graphic arts to indicate conversion. They replace the notions of incipit and explicit, both of which have already been extensively formulated and studied.30 Still, the definition of these terms, and predominantly their demarcation, has not ceased to raise a questioning, even though Andrea del Lungo has identified five criteria that are characteristic of the incipit. On the model of the frame, we would have to mention the circular effects favoured by certain texts, effects that emerge, as I have noted before, when the end echoes the beginning of the text. Barthelme’s ­“Sentence,” for example, offers a perfect example of the complete circu­ innegan’s Wake, or the larity achieved when a text curls on itself, just like F biblical formulation “in my beginning is my end,” adopted by T. S. Eliot31 and then by John McGahern in the conclusion of his short story “Like All Other Men”: “In my end is my beginning, he recalled. In my beginning is my end, his and hers, mine and thine. It seemed to stretch out, complete as the emptiness, endless as a wedding ring.”32 (280) This is an eloquent example of a text enclosing the story on itself and enclosing the characters in the infernal, inevitable, chiasmatic circle, in the form of destiny. To pursue the logic of conversion we apply here and resorting to the “demon of analogy”—to quote Kant—concerning literary or pictorial frames and their de-framing effects, I would suggest the instance of Poe’s “The Oval Portrait,” which offers an equivalent of the semi-frame

Poetics of the Pictorial (II)  121 mentioned earlier. The very last words of the story are: “she was dead”; the narrator reads in the book he has found in the embedded narrative telling the history of the portrait, without returning to the primary, embedding narrative. Therefore, this ending corresponds to the narrator’s own textual death, while the frame constructed at the beginning remains open, gaping as it were. The figure of the frame and the incipit/explicit problematic are connected to a key concept of modelisation, that of a world that reproduces the infinite within the finitude of a delimited space. According to Iouri Lotman, who also applies the conversion between the arts, the frame is the definitive structural element of all texts: The frame of the painting, the theatre footlights, the beginning and ending of a literary or musical work, the surfaces that delimit a sculpture or an architectural edifice from the space that is artistically excluded – these are different forms of a general law in art: the work of art represents a finite model of an infinite world.33 Larroux also maintains that while the beginning of a work of art already provides a model for the notions of origin and causality, its ending tends to model a finality and its goal; nevertheless, he argues, maintaining the image of the frame as “an inevitable term of comparison”34 results in specific problems: Yet, homology remains problematic between the arts of space […] and the arts that require duration. Only the former, eluding this ‘vice of the incipit’ that Julien Gracq speaks of—and, let us also add, the vice of the explicit—‘erase all temporal references and present themselves in a purer form, as a closed-circuit, without beginning or end.’35 It is possible, of course, that the problems encountered when precisely implementing the notion of the frame in literature are connected to the forgetting of this constitutive difference as well as to an overestimation of the visual character and the iconic principle […] By focusing on this difficulty, we wish to indicate that we must renounce neither the iconic principle, nor the principle of the function of the frame, but [instead] we must move forward [and] in a more accurate way, in Lotman’s way, namely that of a theory of rupture. 36 Two key questions are then raised: that of a closed, artificial world serving as a model for another world and that of the fundamental difference between the arts, their heterogeneity and their irreducibility, already addressed by Benveniste. This is not a matter of reducing one to the other, but of creating an interplay between the two, where one operates both with and against the other. Should this happen, the result would be enrichment, a fruitful way of seeing and returning a mutual gaze, since

122  Poetics of the Pictorial (II) artists, writers, critics, and theoreticians repeatedly invite us to engage in an artistic comparison. The frame is an auxiliary critical tool, an operator of modelisation, a means of thinking and representing interartistic comparison “in the mind’s eye.” Genre as Frame The question of genre, whereby the specific “frames” correspond to the novel, the poem, and so on, should also be added to the framing effects conjured by the descriptive, by the narrative embeddings, the textual beginnings and endings; this is what Hamon calls the generic framing of the text.37 Certain genres present a special affinity to usages that draw our attention to the frame, more than the world represented—just like the trompe-l’oeil effects mentioned before. The pictorial example goes back to quadro riportato, the “false painting done a fresco, which is represented in the fresco, constituting its counterpoint or commentary”38; also favoured by the Mannerists, this apparatus has been put to use as a classical post-­ modern technique, where the reader’s attention is drawn by the mixing of genres. Examples include John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, D’haen citing Derrida in M ­ arges de la Philosophie and La carte postale, R. ­Barthes’s texts merging writing and criticism, writing and philosophy, or even Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things, where the prose includes sketches; all textual combinations and montages are possible. These generic and diegetic frames are challenged once the characters exit the frame in the famous metalepsis and become “real,” thus invading the space of the reader, of the spectator. Then, one enters within a trompe-l’oeil, in a way that is similar to what happens when the frame advances into the space of representation and viewing. A ­ ccording to Theo D’haen: “in each of these cases, the constant change of frame opens up structural blanks that the reader must fill. At least one part of this operation will concern the measure of the textual framing act itself.”39 Discordant voices may argue that this is simply yet another metaphor, a means for the work of literature to visually represent its structure— even if one is at a macrostructural level—while the opening and closure of the chapters or the paragraphs would be a material, visual means of indicating to the reader the different microstructural levels. But it is well a matter of crossing narrative delimitations, in the way Lotman has designated them, as framed worlds that de-frame and escape their categorical, rigid frames.40 The Frame Made Visible Actually, the “frame” may be rendered visible in its very own materiality, as a crossing of the screen or a tear in the fabric. One could mention the visual games performed in texts such as, for example, Danielewski’s

Poetics of the Pictorial (II)  123 House of Leaves,41 where de-framings are of a typographic nature, yet also signal a blend of genres. This is the case with the notes that become fiction and invade the space of the page; a violent dis-position of (typographic, generic, fictional) frames contending for the space of the text as if at war. As a result, the reader is destabilised and so is his perception of them, which is precisely what happens with the characters in the represented space of their house swelling up from the inside as well. The white margins of a text are, as mentioned before, waiting for notes, for remarks; the margin is a space of liberty, but also of reflection, a “dialogue zone,” as it is called in information technology parlance. The paratext, or even the peritext, may also constitute the “visual” frame of a text—in other words, what surrounds the text, the threshold created by an epigraph, a preface, a warning to the reader, and so on. The cover and the paratext are an in-between zone that opens and closes the text, acting as a framing mat; they point towards the interior by way of the title, just as paintings may carry information on the painter’s name, the title, or the date. Iain Pears’s The Portrait 42 offers an eloquent example of this in-between zone, as it uses the photographic reproductions of the paintings that are evoked in the novel, including their frames, in a small gallery of fold-out, rather “glossy” pictures of the paintings offset on a black background, to which the reader may resort to verify the allusions made in the text. This also points to the frontispieces of old books, which constituted a presentation of the work’s architecture. Hence, I would like to return to Theo D’haen’s evocation of “structural equivalences between works of different arts”43 and reach one step further, in order to turn the metaphor of the frame into an instrumental analytical tool pertaining to the operation of conversion. The inverted equivalence of this appropriation of the visual by critical language allows for a critical reversal, a reversion of the image, or, to cite L. Marin, a reflection, so as to investigate the workings of the frame in the text, as well as the information it provides on social conventions. According to D’haen: Postmodern fiction and painting raise the readers’ and spectators’ awareness of their framing operations, not only in the art domain, but also in the real world. In a very specific way they draw their audience’s attention on the fact that reality is already pre-framed by society, just as much as art may be so.44 While encompassing it, the frame contains the work but may also transgress it, while reflecting the stakes that reach beyond it. We should now turn to questions of perspective, in order to address another stage of the formal bidirectional flow between text and i­mage, where we will see how the discoveries, inventions, and other exploits of art history have also given form to the literary text, just like its subterfuges.

124  Poetics of the Pictorial (II)

Eye-Vision: Questions of Perspective Making art by asking art questions Marcel Duchamp The optical effects of vision, and particularly of perspective, have been masterfully imported in, or even combined with, the literary text. I suggest treating questions of space and perspective within three aspects: the pictorial perspective, the textual perspective, and the “infinite dialogue,” to which one should add textual games creating a perspective that is informed by art. Let us start with a few famous examples where perspective poses questions of representation, and let us see what literature and criticism derive from these effects. First, I will refer to the effects of the illusionist perspective, before coming to a, let us say, “depraved,” to quote Baltusaitis,45 form of the latter, namely anamorphosis, which is a particular ­favourite of criticism. Perspective A Small Detour through Art History According to Panovsky, perspective is linked to representation and to the conception of painting as “a ‘window,’ and (when) we are meant to believe we are looking through this window into a space.”46 After reminding us of Alberti’s famous formulation,Scrivo uno quadrangolo […] el quale reputo essere una fenestra aperta per donde io miri quelle que quivi sara dipinto, Panovsky speaks of [A] fully ‘perspectival’ view of space not when mere isolated objects, such as houses or furniture, are represented in ‘foreshortening,’ but rather only when the entire picture has been transformed […] into a ‘window,’ and when we are meant to believe we are looking through this window into a space. The material surface upon which the individual figures or objects are drawn or painted or carved is thus negated, and instead reinterpreted as a mere ‘picture plane.’ Upon this picture plane is projected the spatial continuum which is seen through it and which is understood to contain all the various individual objects.47 This is to say that perspective seems to add depth to the painting, which disappears into the represented space. This is also what literature does, as it seems to be digging into the space of the page that becomes transparent and opens up like a window onto the space of the represented scene.

Poetics of the Pictorial (II)  125 An invention (or, for some, a discovery) of the Italian Renaissance, perspective is first and foremost a mimetic code, in rupture with medieval symbolic representation and perspectiva naturalis. This perspectiva artificialis was meant to find a code of representation that could create an illusion of the real (hence the stakes pertaining to philosophy, metaphysics, and aesthetics), aiming at the most realistic effect possible, while applying a geometric, artificial code. Perspective is first an operation of highlighting the subjects’ role as the origin of this aim, localised at the point of view that constructs a vanishing point. It is also an ensemble of codes and ways of seeing space according to a representational mode that organises view and vision, thus creating a splitting effect of the self in contemplation, at the centre (of the activity) and on the outside (of the represented), since, as Damisch claims, “the space that representation opens is, by principle, cleaved.”48 The spectator is at the same level as the people depicted, yet at the same time cut off from the scene, and the painting corresponds to the “section,” the intersezione of perspective, as an interception that inter-sections and interposes itself between above and below, like an interceptive screen or a modern version of the ‘visual pyramid.’ “To make art by asking art questions,” as Duchamp said, is precisely what the two paradigmatic paintings Las Meninas and The ­Ambassadors do, by playing with doubling and, thus, raising questions of representation from within the representation through the means of representation themselves. In Las Meninas this is achieved by positioning the painter in an “impossible”—or, at least, non-canonical, as far as the self-portrait genre is concerned—space and through the difficulty in assigning the vanishing point with any certainty. In The Ambassadors, this effect is realised through the use of anamorphosis as an i­nscription of death—“the figure in the carpet,” to use James’s words—and the return of the repressed as a threatening double, achieved through the use of a “depraved,” as per Baltrusaitis,49 perspective. Through the games perspective plays when deformed by anamorphosis, it multiplies the stretches and other elongations, challenging the point of view that it deports and reassigns to the spectator, now forced to change their position and, therefore, to ‘split’ in two. One of the stakes raised by art, therefore, seems to be, among others, to modify our perception of the world, as vision is mediated by knowledge, while perspective traces the lines of vision that superpose their grid onto the landscape and constructs our vision of things. Therein lies the “heuristic power of the perspective apparatus, its value as a model for thought.”50 The Impressionists would later attempt to break away from this type of painting seeing it as too “artificial” and to “render” what one sees, rather than what one knows. The perspective apparata invented by Brunelleschi and Dürer, the camera obscura, but also the use of mirrors or clouds, 51 for example, all

126  Poetics of the Pictorial (II) stage a monocular, central vision set, where point of view is located at the centre; the wooden intarsia of the studiolo in the palace of Urbino, the bronze doors of the baptistery in Florence, testify to this reign of the true-false. What is more, as a geometric system that is governed by specific rules, perspective imposed a way of seeing, while also triggering its own transgressions, not only by way of anamorphosis, contained within the space of the painting, but also through other mystifications that would envelop their destabilising effects—as is the case with trompe l’œil where full-scale illusion triumphs, for instance, when the baroque destabilises the interior of the church of San Ignazio in Rome. The gaze, then, dazzled, 52 is lost in between the here and there, the true and the false. Owing to the mnemonic trace, after all, anamorphosis plays with the memory of the reader, which is why when the effect of the real is such that the reader misinterprets it for a mirror of the world or the author— as it happened, for example, with the “scandalous” cases of Flaubert or Rushdie—certain pragmatic problems emerge. Arts of Time, Arts of Space How are we to deal with these notions when they are put to task in a text? The notion of perspective first applies to what constitutes a narrator’s or a character’s vision (their point of view) and then to the representation of space; perspective, therefore, reveals narrative or descriptive techniques, as well as techniques of focalisation. The very term of focalisation, used par Gérard Genette, shows to what extent seeing is connected to telling, particularly in relation to how “Showing” has been discussed in opposition to “Telling” in American criticism, 53 or in the way, for example, Wayne Booth, in The Rhetoric of Fiction, 54 discusses the problems of vision and distance as connected to enunciation. These terms are in themselves revealing of the use of the metaphor of the eye, but also of what happens when one reads a text that makes us see, often through the mediation of a narrator or a character, no matter how effaced they may be. Optical effects may be represented in the text but also presented by the text itself. Given the multiple studies on the point of view already published, and the number of works focusing on the descriptive55 —specifically the descriptive that is linked to art in text—suffice it to note here how useful the visual tool has proven and how widely it has been integrated as a “natural” addition to the means of literary analysis. I would like to start my discussion with an observation, namely that space has been explored less systematically in literary analysis (except for its use as a theme or symbol) and mostly in its a fortiori difference to time in narratology, in the works of Gérard Genette, for example, and his disciples. This may be easily justified, as the analysis of a narrative is

Poetics of the Pictorial (II)  127 predominantly concerned with the relations between historical time and that of narrative and discourse, with the diachronic development also perceived as a temporal continuity similar to a vision of a linear time. Yet, as Michel Serres has argued, there is no singular time, but, rather, a percolation of different times, the linear time of human existence, the circular time of myths and rites, infinite time, and so on. Of which time and of what space does one, then, speak when these terms are applied in literature or, following Lessing’s distinction, when one says that poetry is temporal while painting is spatial? Evidently, within the literary system itself, this division between time and space has been reproduced and renewed. Nevertheless, should one contest Lessing’s dichotomy and start with the premise that there is space in the temporal arts as well as time in arts that are connected to space, that a description is also an enunciation and an interpretation, the descriptive no longer constitutes a deceleration or a pause in the text. Should one refrain from confusing the descriptive with what is supposed to be represented, or, in other words, an object extending into space, but instead conceive it as belonging to the field of the representing, then, at a textual level, one may no longer speak of deceleration, but of another type of textual modality: of a textual space that is occupied by description, originating from the constantly produced and consequently read text itself. What pretends to halt in the descriptive is, in fact, the plot, the succession of actions and events that pause to allow for the description of a painting, a landscape, or a face. But, at a textual level, this still remains a text, in the sense of a space given to read, with a particular arrangement of letters, paragraphs, or punctuation, on a single page. Following this, the representation of a place or the succession of actions, words, or thoughts take place and form in the imaginary, like in a perspective properly redressed. If one couples the notion of perspective with that of space, one necessarily introduces the presence of a subject, since perspective presupposes a point of view, that of the narrator, residing on the inside or outside of the represented space, or that of one of the characters. In The Custom of the Country, for instance, when Undine is depicted “scanning the long perspective of the poplar avenue,” a specific point of view is inscribed in the text, which dictates conforming to a perspective that, in a way, masters the gaze; in Tulip Fever, a novel that is directly drawn from Dutch painting, the pictorial citation consists in the inclusion in the novel of four notebooks containing reproductions of paintings, such as a detail from Pierre de Hooch’s A Musical Party in a Courtyard (1677), showing a young man standing on the threshold of a house, with a white and black chessboard of a floor behind him. This painting presents a fine example of displaying the painter’s craft at mastering perspective.

128  Poetics of the Pictorial (II) Perspective-in-Text Within the context of the literary text, perspective as a mode of representing space takes on multiple forms. I would like to explore some of these forms, starting with the premise that representing space precisely implies placing an object/a subject into perspective, since it reflects the art of seeing and constitutes, first and foremost, a relation between the different elements of a painting or a text; if perspective suggests an appearance, it also imposes a trajectory of the eye. Poussin’s notion of “prospect,” as a “function of reason that depends on three things, the eye, the visual radius and the distance from the eye to the object,”56 is especially pertinent to this discussion; the attentive consideration of a painting is necessary for one to know it well. The gaze must run its course through the painting according to the double apparatus of the frame and the prospect, whose notion is coupled with that of the point of view—particularly once applied to a three-dimensional spatial art (like architecture or sculpture)—while itself being the consequence of a reflection and a two-dimensional project. The garden, just like a painting, as a place to think and to organise, implies the use of perspective so that a “good view” may be enjoyed, one that obeys the laws of seeing well, neither too close, nor too far, or of keeping the appropriate distance from which to view a painting, or a particular feature of a garden, or a house. An eloquent example may be found in Mansfield Park, where the notion of prospect as “good view,”57 subject to future plans, punctuates the famous passages in chapters nine and ten, where the protagonists meet in Sotherton Park. At the moment of their visit and before being subjected to the “ameliorations” of an aesthetics of the picturesque, the park is still à l’ancienne, abiding to a more traditional type of aesthetics, just like the ones Fanny Price, the heroine, likes. It includes a “wilderness” (in this case the small woods), a terrace, as well as a ha-ha, a kind of gap in the hedge, a ditch, an ambiguous place that must not spoil the view. From the ha-ha one may enjoy the scenery, in this case the famous tree avenue; the gaze is guided by the ha-ha’s presence, even though the preoccupied heroine does not allow her gaze to be led towards the desired destination. Here, space and perspective double the question of knowing/wanting/being able to see, at the same time as the stakes of the text are pronounced and a new aesthetics is introduced, offering variations and improvements, with a view to organising space so that a ‘better view’ is achieved. This aesthetics of the pictorial results in a different perception of nature and will later exert its influence on the perception conjured by a photographic eye.58 Intermedial Mediators and Pictorial Substitutes There are numerous intermedial mediators and pictorial variants that raise questions of space and of perspective in the text, particularly with reference to the ways the reader perceives them. The pictorial is reflected

Poetics of the Pictorial (II)  129 in the text through many of its substitutes that stand as subterfuges of the iconotext.59 These avatars allow for the manifestations of the image to be varied and appear in the form of mirrors, reflections, maps, screens, optical devices, tableaux vivants, or photography. The passage from the painting to the mirror or the map, in particular, is characterised by a historical, consubstantial link, since, as Victor Stoichita notes, “the images that, according to Logique de Port-Royal, readily offer themselves as signs are three: the painting, the map, and the mirror”: The visible relation that exists between objects and these types of signs clearly shows that once one affirms what is signified through the sign, one means to say that the sign is the object not in reality but in terms of signification and figure. And thus one would readily and without any preparation say of Caesar’s portrait that it is Caesar, and that a map of Italy is actually Italy.60 The painting, the map and the mirror are also the three surface-­ representations that, once projected onto the depths of the pictorial field establish—in the XVIIth century—an intertextul discourse that is none other than a dialogue aimed at the status of representation itself.61 V. Stoichita uses Dirck Hals’s painting Merry Company as an example, to comment: Dirck Hal would go even further, so as to equate the map and the painting while also adding a third term, [specifically] the open window. The window, the painting and the map are three stages, three degrees of proceeding through abstraction, headed towards representation. The window is not a painting yet; nor is the map. It is interesting to note how Dirck Hals accentuates the boîte optique quality of his painting through the chessboard tiling.62 What is more, following Louis Marin, Stoichita remarks that there is a: decrease of the resemblance between the sign and the signified. Mirrorpainting-map, or even map-painting-mirror, are, ­therefore, three modalities of representation marked by a difference in ­progression. The image in the mirror (more an “image” than a “sign”) is situated at the exact opposite of the map (“sign” rather than an “image”). The painting is the middle term between the ­cartographic modality of representation and its specular modality.63 Thus, there is a kinship between systems of representation, signs, and indices, symbols that dialogue with the texts and vary the approach. The use of optical devices in earlier works indicate, in relation to the effects

130  Poetics of the Pictorial (II) produced by represented space, a vertiginous, aerial perspective,64 or even reflections in the mirror that either blur perceptions or render them clearer, more revealing. Many such varied examples may be found in O. Wilde, V. Woolf, A. Carter, S. King, among others, where pictorial devices and framing operators result in an oscillating passage between text and image. At the same time, the pictorial theory suggested by the text establishes it as a repository of knowledge. Other apparata, such as the window, the optical boxes, or the rendering of a subject’s perspective through point of view may also be studied within this context; we could even read Alice’s size shifts as materialising the changes in the subject’s point of view in the course of her growth. Another mode of seeing and comprehending space, which is particularly connected to a demand of a pictorial nature and also leading to a v­ arying of the effects of perspective, resides in the phenomenon of “seeing from up close, seeing from afar.” This reflects the oscillation from ut pictura poesis and is linked to the desire to enter the picture, in the way Diderot did in his Salons, which is another way of varying perspective and of raising the question of point of view, a problem resolved by H. James in The Ambassadors.65 Of all the apparata and devices mentioned here, I would like to ­elaborate further on one of the effects derived from perspective, namely anamorphosis, and discuss the ways in which, drawing its inspiration from art history, the literary text imports it both thematically and formally. Anamorphosis Setting a Trap for the Gaze One of painting’s most fascinating figures, suggesting a secret, concealment, the manipulation of the spectator and the mastery of perspective, anamorphosis has kept haunting critical discourse,66 even extending its influence to psychoanalysis. Seen as a deviation from the “normal” use of perspective, anamorphosis is often attributed with characterisations such as oblique, deviant, or, as per Baltrusaitis, “depraved” qualities that render it rather suspicious. As shown in Baltrusaitis’s work, this effect implies either that the spectator changes position or that a mirror is used to distinguish the visible object. Therefore, retrieving an identifiable image, resorting to an instrument, or operating a shift in the space-related point of view is of primary importance. Anamorphosis emanates from the invention of perspective and pertains to both the formless object directly presented to us and to the identifiable figure that belongs to the domain of the known; it appears in front of our eyes through a subterfuge, such as the use of a mirror or a reflecting cylinder, or even when the spectator changes their position in front of a painting, perhaps even

Poetics of the Pictorial (II)  131 moving behind it.67 Evidently, then, anamorphosis is a secret that only reveals itself to those who are recognisant with the art of looking. Anamorphosis also refers to letter games, taken literally or in the epistolary mode. Lacan’s “The Split between the Eye and the Gaze” returns to the Ambassadors to explore the nature of the gaze and its functions: All this shows that at the very heart of the period in which the subject emerged and geometrical optics was an object of research, H ­ olbein makes visible for us here something that is simply the ­subject as annihilated – annihilated in the form that is, strictly speaking, the imagined embodiment of the minus-phi [(−φ)] of castration, which for us, centres the whole organization of the desires through the framework of the fundamental drives. But it is further still that we must seek the function of vision. We shall then see emerging on the basis of vision, not the phallic symbol, the anamorphic ghost, but the gaze as such, in its pulsatile, dazzling and spread out function, as it is in this picture. This picture is simply what any picture is, a trap for the gaze. In any picture, it is precisely in seeking the gaze in each of its points that you will see it disappear.68 This painting, offering its apparatus as an analogy to the workings of certain mechanisms of the unconscious, of apparition/disparition, of lack, is a “trap for the gaze” and also a trap for criticism, since anamorphosis (the paradigmatic example of which is the Ambassadors) is often solicited so as to account for certain textual operations. Is it, then, an operational tool? What is one to think of Baltrusaitis’s characterisation of perspective as “depraved”? Of what geometrisation and which deformation or stretching of the text may one speak and to what extent or at which level? Further still, are we still in the field of metaphor? When applied in the text, and when given an identifiable identity—as is the case with figures of style, such as the oxymoron or structural figures like chiasmus—does anamorphosis allow us to account for certain textual effects that would otherwise have remained unnoticed or, better still, would have been noticed yet not clearly identified? Knowledge of these figures alerts the reader; it allows us to locate them in a text, to observe the way they function, “sense” their effects and “perceive” them without truly identifying, conceiving, or using them in critical discourse. Could anamorphosis, then, play the role of a pattern, on which the composition of a text (or a portion of the text) would be built, as well as certain language games, “secret writings” or coding, or even focalisation effects, playing on a phenomenon’s appearance/disappearance in the eyes of the character or the reader? These are different levels of text, naturally; nevertheless, their function is related to that of the “depraved” perspective that is anamorphosis. What

132  Poetics of the Pictorial (II) are the philosophical and ethical stakes of this operation? ­According to Margolin: The shock-effect of anamorphoses, just like anagrams, but also like language games, secret writings, [and] polysemic expressions, sometimes gives us the impression of a continuous creativity, a wealth of the natural world as well as of the world of art that remains as inconspicuous as our relations to this double world. But what we must retain from this double, visual or linguistic, experience […] is mostly the superimposition or the presence-absence of two images, two paintings, two enunciations that make one, while being two, and, consequently, [achieve] the reflection of a unique referential norm.69 Discarded by classical aesthetics and thought, since it does not befit the thirst for stable truths, certitude, or clarity, anamorphosis is the instrument of baroque. Even today, this device is accused of favouring the depravations of perception, falsehood, distraction, illusion, and fiction, as shown in the essay titled “The theme of anamorphosis,” for example, where Fernand Hallyn writes: “the representations emerging from gazes that are oblique or mediated by a mirror may be presented as perversions or deviations in relation to an image properly formed that reveals itself only to a frontal or direct gaze” (emphasis added).70 ­ Orthomorphosis—that is, the true copy of an object—would, then, oppose anamorphosis. Evidently, Baltrusaitis endows his “aberrations”71 with a negative connotation, a devaluation that may be traced in certain examples of E ­ lizabethan poetry, also cited by Margolin, following ­Hallyn. ­Chapman’s The Tragedy of Chabot, for instance, reads: As of a picture wrought to optic reason, That to all passers-by seems, as they move, Now woman, now a monster, now a devil, And till you stand and in a right line view it, You cannot well judge what the main form is:72 Shakespeare also makes reference to anamorphosis twice, in All’s Well that Ends Well, when Helen’s face is deformed by contradicting sentiments, but also in Richard II, where the optical deformation caused by tears blurring the protagonist’s vision gives the face a peaceful expression, which assigns anamorphosis with a positive attribute. For sorrow’s eye, glazed with blinding tears, Divides one thing entire to many objects, Like perspectives, which rightly gazed upon, Show nothing but confusion – eyed awry, Distinguish form.73

Poetics of the Pictorial (II)  133 The role that anamorphosis played in baroque texts, then, summoned from inside the text by the writers themselves, is parallel to the way criticism later appealed to this figure in order to identify certain deformation effects in the text. Jean-Claude Margolin’s seminal work—which wanes the stakes raised by anamorphosis and paints a rigorous panorama of this pictorial technique and its uses by the literally code,74 mostly during the Renaissance, the age of baroque and mannerism—is foundational in the study of this device. A more positive vision of anamorphosis is offered by Leibniz, a philosopher from the age of baroque: It is as in those devices of perspective, where certain beautiful designs look like mere confusion until one restores them to the right angle of vision or one views them by means of a certain glass or mirror. It is by placing and using them properly that one makes them serve as adornment for a room. Thus the apparent deformities of our little worlds combine to become beauties in the great world, and have nothing in them which is opposed to the oneness of an infinitely perfect universal principle: on the contrary, they increase our wonder at the wisdom of Him who makes evil serve the greater good.75 Given all this, it would be legitimate to ask why criticism evokes anamorphosis, rather than simply employing terms such as “deformation” or “metamorphosis” that designate a variation of the object itself and not the variation of a point of view on an object that stands still. What does this resorting to art history bring, other than duly registering the function of an optical phenomenon? Is it a case of the text being “visibly” enriched because it is reinforced by reference and provided with a layer of supplementary strangeness, consisting precisely in the way the reference and the image are superimposed on the inner eye of the reader? Does the reference entail complicity between close actors (reader-­narrator-writer)? Does it tighten the connections, or does it mislead? On its own, the visible may slip away, but fixed on the canvas, it seems to be in front of our eyes, while at the same time becoming an object that, when animated, creates trouble and an unheimlich effect, similar to that of dreams. This is because what seems fixed in matter may be deformed at any given moment, just like in The Picture of Dorian Gray, depicting a “simple” metamorphosis of the painting—and not anamorphosis, since Basil is also witness to its alterations. According to some, the unconscious might also be revealed in/by (verbal) anamorphosis, depending on perspective and point of view. Would a number of genres, then, show greater thematic affinity to anamorphosis? One might consider the “gothic” where the representation of evils and perversions present a possible analogy to the “depraved” way of seeing. Still, once more, this is a matter of

134  Poetics of the Pictorial (II) ideological or even moral orientation that would affect the pictorial process negatively, in that finding its equivalent in a literary genre would turn it into a perverse manifestation, a deviation of the “normal” rectitude of perspective. In her article on V. Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, Nathalie Pavec observes what she calls an anamorphosis effect that, to me, is closer to an effect of retro-reading at the level of reception. The Woolfian anamorphosis functions in a way that is similar to Holbein’s Ambassadors, as it is in the “last look” addressed to the work itself that the unseen, namely death, manifests itself. The announcement of death plays the role of the visual modifier, and the final chapter in Jacob’s Room forces the reader to cast an oblique look back to the rest of the text “at the moment when the reader prepares him/herself to exit the narrative,”76 which opens up a new perspective, forcing them to reread the text in the light of what has just been revealed. In effect, seen from this excentric locus that is the final chapter, the text seems to imperceptibly modify itself and take in, in places, something other than what has been visible from the frontal perspective of a first reading. We have already stated, in the opening page, the plasticity of this text, which makes it fluctuate according to its [different] readings and which endows it with a varying legibility […] here, we are faced with the emergence of an Other that bursts through the friendly surface.77 This is also, as N. Pavec notes, what Genette calls a “retrograde determination.” Leading to a “retrospective reevaluation,” this retro-reading effect also doubles in the text when the signifiers become a symptom signalling the presence of the Other—in particular, when the familiar becomes unheimlich. Interestingly enough, Jacob’s Room also offers yet another example of anamorphosis in the form of vision distorted by tears, similar to the reference to Shakespeare discussed before: it figures at the beginning of the novel, where the appearance of tears is connected to ink dripping from Betty Flanders’s quill; is this to say that writing, like tears, would also be anamorphotic? Slowly welling from the point of her gold nib, pale blue ink dissolved the full stop; for there her pen stuck; her eyes fixed, and tears slowly filled them. The entire bay quivered; the lighthouse wobbled; and she had the illusion that the mast of Mr Connor’s little yacht was bending like a wax candle in the sun. She winked quickly. Accidents were awful things. She winked again. The mast was straight; the waves were regular; the lighthouse was upright; but the blot had spread.78

Poetics of the Pictorial (II)  135 At the end of the passage, clear vision has been restored, yet the blot remains while the text begins. The word “illusion” places the reader in the realm of the visual and optical games. If anamorphosis and its confusing effects have been staged in-text at a thematic level by writers who make reference to it or critics that seek to identify its manifestations, its parallels have, nonetheless, been effectuated for a long time, touching on allegory, on the games, on the signifier, and the materiality of the text. The Anamorphotic Text/Linguistic Anamorphosis The function of allegory and the opposing interpretations it invites have occasionally been related to the process of anamorphosis. Allegory, etymology’s “speaking other,”79 allows for the introduction of a split within representation itself and for the substitution of an oblique meaning with one that is direct, clearly and overtly stated; in this sense, it is related to anamorphosis. With anamorphosis, just as with any pictorial technique we encounter, we should ask ourselves whether we can go beyond the metaphor of deformation or aberration, the loss of markers, whether there is ­something more than simply detecting the symbolic, thematic, or ­diegetic role of the appearance of anamorphosis-in-text (in the form of a citation, a ­description, or an allusion). While reading a metaphor presupposes a mental operation, this requires that we use the text to work on the text ­itself; in any case, we are dealing with a reading effect that is visible/visual, as well as with, possibly, a diegetic representation of an anamorphosis. Which is the formal relation that may be established between anamorphosis and the text, in terms of its function? Can one literally read in the oblique through an “angle,” and can s/he suddenly see and recognise an identifiable form that makes sense? We can assert that this is a viable possibility when dealing with a text that would otherwise be illegible, were it not for a material subterfuge, a mirror, for example, or the presence of inverse writing. An eloquent example may be found in ­Danielewski’s House of Leaves,80 in the squares of text that are presented recto verso, as if in transparency; there, the eye must accommodate the text offered in verso backwards, by using a mirror or by referring to the previously read recto version. The whole book refers to the story of a metamorphosis, that of a house that grows from the inside without affecting the outside, yet it is actually an anamorphosis, a problem of perspective experienced by the characters who cannot find the correct angle and, thus, consider it a metamorphosis. Arguably, anamorphosis may also be traced in certain rhetorical forms, tropes, or stylistic figures, such as the palindrome; HANNAH may be read from back to front, by reversing the point of view, and so can the classical palindrome DOG/GOD, appearing in Patricia Highsmith’s

136  Poetics of the Pictorial (II) Found in the Street.81 The latter culminates in a linguistic anamorphosis doubled by a trompe l’œil that is effectuated through a card hanging in the house of the old, eccentric owner of a dog called God: “Jack […] noticed above the door a square card edged in brown with black ­lettering: Prepare … DOG. Linderman had pasted DOG over what must have been GOD. It was one of the cards that sold at souvenir shops.”82 Upon viewing, the card offers a trompe l’œil that seems to admonish the believer and to remind them of the severity of the Last Judgment, before they can realise their mistake and the double game suggested by the palindrome. The word GOD—spontaneously read as a cultural and religious code—is eventually replaced with the word DOG, which is what one actually sees on the card when, with a blink of the eye, the reader adjusts their gaze between what they know and what they see, what is above and below. Another degradation and inversion the signifier God undergoes is that the card is sold in multiple copies in a souvenir shop and has, therefore, lost its aura and religious weight. What is more, thus degraded, its value is only parodical, as a mockery, a card one sends to their friends as a joke. All this establishes a carnavalesque effect and a reversal not only of values, but also of the point of view. The example offered in Highsmith’s novel is interesting in that it combines the techniques of trompe l’œil—which displays the true-false effects—and anamorphosis, which, on an inverted model, warps vision in a detective novel imbued with a psychological import. The humour of the DOG/ GOD inversion, of the spiritual/temporal values, as well as the good/bad binary, is suggested a few pages earlier, in a light tone, with a wordplay that reads: Bob Campbell stepped into his path. He wore a black gown and a dog-collar, or God-collar, like a preacher. ‘Jack, you may enter the kingdom of Heaven, I’ve decided. Isie’s already there. We love her, love her.’ Bob spoke with fervor.83 The Dog/God palindrome may also be found in Naipaul’s short story “Man-Man,”84 as well as in Fanny Howe’s The Deep North, albeit in a more complex manner, one that is troubling to the eye, summoned to operate a “restoration” of the letters, so that one can see clearly: You old fraud, she teased. You old goose. Do geese see God? Can you say that backwards? Do … gee … see … odd, go … dog? Try again! It’s a palindrome?85 The text is truly extended here, through the use of the ellipsis, an indication of how anamorphosis may actually be placed in the text as a visible, material object, which raises an interest for the space of the letter

Poetics of the Pictorial (II)  137 as another space of the image, and which points to father Nicéron’s ingenious comparison between anamorphosis and anagrams. As Margolin writes: Even though the anagrammatic game relies on the art of combination—­ which is not the case, apart from certain exceptions, with the function of anamorphosis—that is on a finite number of literal combinations, the great majority of which prove to be insignificant or even unpronounceable, it has this in common with a­ namorphosis: that it asks that the eye and the mind to forsake the axis of (real or hypothetical) reference […] so as to try diverse angles of point of view, or diverse combinations of letters up until the—suddenly emerging— revelation of either a hidden image that will cast meaning on the whole painting, portrait or landscape, or the combination that the primitive arrangement of letters [previously] withheld from the eye and the mind.86 A most eloquent example of how these letter games have been integrated in postmodern writing is offered by John Banville, most notably in Athena,87 a novel that is saturated with pictorial references and whose rhythm is regulated with seven ekphrasis of fictional paintings of the s­ eventeenth century depicting scenes of mythology. The name of the writer appears beneath those of the presumed painters in the form of anagrams and the reader must rearrange the letters so that B ­ anville’s name may appear from those of Johann Livelb, Job van Hellin, Jan ­Vibell, or L. E. van Ohlbijn, which occasionally combine the names of Banville and Holbein. This ana-(gramatic/morphotic) game also includes the names of famous painters such as, for example, Holbein in L. van ­Hobelijn or J. van Hollbein, and Bellini in Giovanni Belli. Graphisms and lettergames have been scriptural devices that Sterne, Joyce, Apollinaire, and e.e. Cummings, to name but a few, have also used. Apollinaire’s calligrams present a double reading where a fountain and a poem, form and verse, are fused together so as to be seen/read just like the famous sketches that present an old woman or a young woman, depending on whether one looks at the right or left profile. Within the context of borrowings and grammatical alterations, we should also note the cases where borrowing from real paintings organises certain passages (and the plot) of novels that are literally saturated by references to painting, turning the names of painters into adjectives. In Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, for example, we encounter a man wearing a “Van Dyke beard” or admire a “Veronese ceiling,” “a Veronese supper,” and a “watteau group”; occasionally, the painters’ names may be offered in the genitive, for instance, “Botticelli’s Spring” or “Tiepolo’s Cleopatra.” Some word games, paronomasias, portmanteau words, instances of hypallage or linguistic deformation, and neologisms (not mentioning

138  Poetics of the Pictorial (II) idiolects, sociolects, jargon, or loans from other languages) may also be placed in the category of anamorphosis, as long as vision is redressed and the point of view of the reader is changed. Rushdie adopts hybridity, in an unbridled manner, fraught with portmanteau words that truly agitate the eye of the reader, such as “chlorophyllosophy” (The Moor’s Last Sigh 54) or “westoxication.” Hypallage, indicating displacement, is also at the heart of Rushdie’s poetics, just like his characters are displaced figures: “my mother arriving nightdressed in the startled room” (330), “the yellow-beaked brutality of crows” (61). As L. Guilhamon notes, The semantic crossover operated in hypallage is emblematic of the anamorphotic quality of Rushdie’s prose: the images fabricated by the narrator are neither immobile nor fixed, but instead they require a type of reading that is dynamic, moving, capable of multiplying the points of view and making the enunciated meaning glide.88 Whether it is Midnight’s Children, The Moor’s Last Sigh, or The Satanic Verses, to mention but a few, English and Hindu superimpose each other in the text, creating hybrid effects that are as tasteful as those also found in G. V. Desani. A final example of Rushdies’ preference for jokes, portmanteau words, and mirroring effects between two languages may be found in The Moor’s Last Sigh: I was both, and nothing: a jewholic-anonymous, a cathjew nut, a stewpot, a mongrel cur. I was – what’s the word these days? – ­atomized. Yessir: a real Bombay mix. Bastard: I like the sound of the word. Baas, a smell, a stinky-poo. Turd, no translation required. Ergo, Bastard, a smelly shit; like, for example, me.89 The tension between the two superimposed languages illustrates the failure to resolve the question of identity, alterity, rather than fusion between the diverse components. We should note that, despite its Indian quality, ­“Bombay mix,” a blend of spiced, grilled cereal consumed in Great Britain with drinks, may only be found in the Western world. ­Figures of style, such as paronomasia or hypallage, thus provide examples of “traducson.” In G. V. Desani also, the visual deformation of the royal “Honni soit qui mal y pense” into “honi! Soot quay Malay-pense”90 is only clearly established once pronounced, and so the oral helps the eye see. Letter games, words that are combined in geometric formations and parallels, suggest a surface effect that is to be looked at with a different eye or with bifocal glasses. A final example is provided by another writer, Fanny Howe, already mentioned before, who writes about how “their pajamas damp around the hems, they trotted hand in hand, into the thickets, silent of birdsong, though fog horn called forlorn to fog horn.”91 These surface effects are

Poetics of the Pictorial (II)  139 meant to be explored, a fact stated right from the start of the novel, in an excerpt that sounds like a manifesto: At first it wasn’t clear. No truth. No belongings. There was snow on the trees, rooftops, streets and that gray light you see in old movies set at sea, where ice floes break the boat apart. This to me is the image of the knowable. Ropes and stripes, black and white, and what you look at, looks back. If it’s a dream, or if it’s what is actually seen, then it comes to the same thing: broken language, foreign syntax, the incomprehensible nature of the world. Anyway I didn’t even want an answer, that’s a fact. All answers are hells. I just wanted to locate the process that underlay the surface image, to put my hand under the top without looking at what I let out. Whatever it was, it didn’t belong to me.92 This passage, with its “foreign syntax” and “broken language,” may also be read as a metaphor for writing; it echoes numerous other examples of dislocated forms seeking to be recomposed. We will see later, for example, how G. Perec plays with such textual effects and stratagems by addressing questions on the apparata and other “machines.”

Le dispositif: A Taste for Technical Borrowings and Arrangement In this part, we will be discussing certain textual apparata, or dispositifs, that reflect the practices of the visual, for instance the image, painting, or photography. The term has repeatedly drawn attention and has been used in manifold ways, be it by Louis Marin, Jacques Lacan, or Gilles Deleuze, who has provided a commentary of the role of the apparatus in the writings of Michel Foucault;93 Giorgio Agamben as well has theorised on the apparatus, taking the lead, again, from Foucault’s use of the term, and has stated that: The term certainly refers, in its common Foucauldian use, to a set of practices and mechanisms (both linguistic and nonlinguistic, juridical, technical, and military) that aim to face an urgent need and to obtain an effect that is more or less immediate.94 Agamben proceeds to elaborate on his own definition of the term and suggests: “I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.”95 He offers a pragmatic view of the apparatus, as an instrument of power, bearing its own efficacy, design, and effects, a “network that is established between these elements,”96 namely discourses, institutions, philosophical propositions, and so on.

140  Poetics of the Pictorial (II) In his introduction to a collection of conference papers entitled ­ iscours image dispositif,97 P. Ortel also discusses this notion and notes D that, even though never explicitly marking the end of literary theory, the crisis of structuralism did not “strike but one theoretical model, that of the Text,”98 and was not apt to account for hybrid forms that combined the discursive and the non-discursive, text and image. Ortel, then, launches an appeal for a theoretical reframing that would allow for consideration of, precisely, the new reality marked by the visual era. ­Reading Bernard Vouilloux who, in his contribution to the same collection, underlines the practical dimension of the apparatus, made to “serve,” Ortel argues that the latter, once applied in a text, “significantly alters” the way we have perceived it so far.99 We should see specifically what the text “does” and wonder on its efficacy, both in terms of publishing or editorial strategies and diffusion, and with reference to the text’s effect on the reader’s memory and imagination. Ortel suggests: Taking B. Vouilloux’s remarks into account, let us attempt a tentative definition: an apparatus is a matrix of potential interactions, or, put more simply, an interactive matrix. An illustrated book, for example, generates multiple reading trajectories [crossing] between texts and images.100 The literary theme and the metaphor might also be considered an apparatus. No matter whether it is editorial, thematic or stylistic, it contains both the idea of control and the notion of an opening: the number of interactions [taking place] on the inside of a frame that is fixed by the matrix is often unpredictable.101 The examples studied as follows illustrate the constraint and opening qualities of apparata, as well as the proliferation of interactions, in a most telling manner that allows us to observe the notion of the apparatus in relation to the ways in which pictorial or visual practices give form to its literary avatars. First, B. Magné’s study of George Perec’s work offers a point of departure to see how the notion of the apparatus befits the technique of oulipian102 constraint and the idea of the productive matrix. Second, I will be borrowing from a book that combines reproductions of paintings with poetry, namely Irish Paul Duncan’s Crazy About Women, which offers a good example of a hybrid form produced under constraint and control that generates a way of reading in keeping with a matrix apparatus. These apparata and the reading effects they entail provide a transition towards the final part of this work that will be dealing with the question of pictorial allusion, the text/image effects, and the notion of the “pictorial third” I venture to propose.

Poetics of the Pictorial (II)  141

Apparatus and Textual Virtuosities With Perec (and B. Magné) The textual apparata that combine text and image may be conceived as deriving from artistic practices presenting “pendants,” twin paintings, in the way a couple of symmetrical and thematically linked (depicting the seasons, husband and wife, two similar landscapes) paintings do. Their detection results from a meticulous observation of the literary text and from the tracing of certain phenomena through the study of criticism, as well as the existing, already listed and used, canonical critical discourse—as there is actually a canon of critical text that takes text/ image into account. The study of this discourse is, indeed, fruitful. I would like to start with Bernard Magné’s 1986 article, “PEINTURECRITURE,”103which discusses the use of painting in G. Perec, particularly in Life A User’s Manual and A Gallery Portrait. Perec’s aesthetics seem especially infused with pictorial references, whose systematic aspect is identified by Magné, alongside certain strategic places. The prevalence of the visual emerges ever since the first pages of the first novel, Things: A Story of the Sixties that reads: “your eye, first of all, would glide over the grey fitted carpet in the narrow, long and high-­ceilinged corridor.”104 This is followed by a description of three engravings representing three vehicles, a horse, a riverboat, and a locomotive. The word EYE appears at the beginning of Things as a foundational element, and the eye itself (O/EIL) is conjured together with the ear (O/REILLE) by the reading of the text which, like any reading, appeals to synaesthesia; the eye travels along the lines of the text just as it skims over the surface of a painting. ­According to Magné, Perec’s work presents a similarity between two spaces, the pictorial and the textual, that is founded on the text—for example, by the very short paragraph at the end of A Gallery Portrait, where we discover that the paintings belonging to the Raffke collection—whose catalogue we have just read—are false, just like “most of the details in this fictional story, conceived for the sole pleasure and the sole thrill of make-believe.”105 Magné defines this space of similarity in Perec as the place of trickery […] as Bescherelle claims, the verb paint [in French: peindre] is conjugated like the verb feign [in French: feindre], and this is the reason why painting in Perec occupies so much space in a kind of writing that cannot be reduced to a solitary game;106 Magné, therefore, suggests “six principal ways in which the textual stratagems relate to pictorial strategies.”107 The exploration I propose, corroborated by critical discourse, brings these strategies together with the questions of trompe-l’œil and anamorphosis discussed before and aspires to generate more perspectives.

142  Poetics of the Pictorial (II) Textual trompe-l’œils Designated as such, Magné lists the pastiche, linguistic trompe-l’œils and referential ones, for example, the painting. In Perec, the pastiche may take the form of a scientific article, but in other writers’ books, one may also find romantic poems—in A. S. Byatt’s Possession, for instance—or, in other works, false fliers, letters, concert programmes, and much more. What is important in all these cases is to distinguish between true and false, which is precisely what happens with a pictorial trompe-l’œil. To these narrativised trompe-l’œils,one could also add visual trompel’œils that, once included in the text, pretend to be reproducing a real element. Life A User’s Manual offers an abundance of facsimile type of occurrences, such as a crossword puzzle, a sketch of a chess game, a funeral notice, a sign that reads “Snacks around the clock” printed backwards, as one would see it from the inside of a café (920), humouristic business cards like “Adolf Hitler, furrier,” “Jean Bonnot, butcher,” or “Madeleine Proust, souvenirs” (958), also, a sales sign, the summary of Bulletin de linguistique de Louvin, dated 1973, and so on. These instances of trompe-l’œil have already appeared in Sterne, with the marbled page, the white page, the line stretching like a whiplash, but also in Joyce and, more recently, in W. G. Sebald, who integrates all sorts of true-false elements in his work: photographs of places and people and reproductions of notebook pages, train tickets, bills from restaurants, newspaper clippings, etc.108 Linguistic trompe-l’œils may play on onomastics, when fictional characters borrow their identity from real characters, also performing an anamorphotic twist; some examples would include Rorschash, ­Bartlebooth (a reference to Bartleby), or Dinteville (concealing another great personality to which I shall return). In Perec, this process may also be used to mirror two languages, as, for example, with COIN A CHAT; such examples may also be found in numerous other works, mostly in Rushdie or Desani who, as we have seen before, also play extensively with linguistic loans and doubles, articulating the language of the Other via trompe-l’œil and, thus, creating a linguistic crossing, a hybrid. Another instance of this technique is the referential trompe-l’œil, appearing in the form of references to imaginary paintings, elaborated from textual elements. Almost all the paintings in The Portrait ­Gallery refer to a practice of intertextuality specific to Perec’s œuvre, with self-­ quotation or self-reference, whereby they inconspicuously cite excerpts or characters from Life A User’s Manual. Danielewski’s House of Leaves is also a goldmine of such games: calligrams appear as a textual trompe-l’œil, taking the form of a bullet or simulating an explosion. The very final page of the novel bears the name of a tree from Nordic mythology, Yggdrasil, printed vertically, in the form of an actual tree creating a complex apparatus of points and gaps that relate to the sky/earth dichotomy; in effect, the tree hides a text that

Poetics of the Pictorial (II)  143 mimics its signified. Danielewski blends anamorphosis and trompe-l’œil to a great extent in his novel. Thus, while simulating the breaking of a rope with “sn-ap,” the word that signifies breaking is itself broken. Accordingly, when one of the characters, Navidson, is knocked off his feet, the trajectory of his fall is figured on the page. We see the line of the fall first, and then we read a text that is not readily discernible, since one must turn the book upside down, so that the line—which follows the binding of the book and is printed on the other side—may be read.109

The letters of the word “sinking” shift downwards, those of “stretching” extend (the s shared with the word “is”), vertically placed along the height of the page, and “expanding” stretches horizontally, as if the point of view were dictated by meaning. These words actively perform

144  Poetics of the Pictorial (II) their signification, the fall, while at the same time hiding from the eye of the reader who needs to amend their gaze and, first of all, turn the book upside down. This elaborate combination of the two antithetical techniques, anamorphosis and trompe-l’œil, slightly annoys the reader, since reading in a syntagmatic way proves difficult. The instances of trompe-l’œil abound in the novel, in the form of false Braille characters, Morse code, the obituary of the so-called Mr. Truant, the false notes at the bottom of the page, or the typography of the discovered manuscript that imitates the keystrokes on the typewriter—also a literary topos to differentiate from the printed book—and so on. B. Magné identifies what he calls “la mise ensemble paradoxale” (the paradoxical putting-together), by which he means the denial of a spatio-temporal verisimilitude and, consequently, the possibility for the writer to juxtapose improbable times and places in order to avoid realist modes of operation. The stake for the text, therefore, is to show that what it is really about is a writing effect and that, like painting, it may become independent of its spatio-temporal referent. As mentioned earlier, this device relates to modes of representation in medieval and early Renaissance paintings, where diverse times and places were brought together. Magné then refers to the “machines,” what I call apparata, intended to make the text operate as a painting. The persistence of the image in the texts that it ceaselessly produces indicates that the image behaves like a desire-producing machine, what Deleuze terms “desiring-­ machines,” similar to the infernal desire machines of Dr. Hoffmann in Angela Carter’s novel. Walter Benjamin’s notion of montage may also prove useful in this discussion on textual arrangements.110 The Levelling Machine From the superimposition of levels of representation to the level of enunciation, what we are dealing with are effects of collage “that, through a coating effect, manage to abolish all ruptures, all discontinuities between these diverse, representative isotopes.”111 There is, therefore, a reduction of levels in two areas: first, at the level of representation, which refers to the characters being all placed on the same surface. Magné also mentions the ways in which “the traditional hierarchy of characters is called into question with the presence of these apparata, as for example, in the list of 179 characters presented in chapter 50 of Life A User’s ­Manual,”112 where they are all appointed the exact same t­ ypographic space. Painting here plays the role of a pattern that shapes a text in which the list “corresponds to the description of a painting that Valène—­himself present in the list, in the final verse, as ‘the old painter making all the construct hold in his ­canvas’—plans to do.”113 This “rolling machine,” a machine meant to flatten, also functions at the level of verbal expression, through the erasure of markers that usually signal a citation. The latter is implicitly woven in

Poetics of the Pictorial (II)  145 the introductory text, e­ specially when it deals with the description of a painting that perfectly manages to conceal the sutures. Perec offers the example of the description of three characters, which is included in the novel Life A User’s Manual in the guise of a painting representing the same characters. Thus, we have a cross-fading effect, one of visual fusion. The Embedding Machine “The painted canvas may also be the place of an inverted strategy […] instead of masking the levels of representation, it can multiply them.”114 This is achieved through mise en abyme, which, as we have seen earlier, is also inspired by pictoriality. Mirroring constructions, paintings that represent other paintings, narrative embeddings, or meta-diegetic montages correspond to this model of the painter painting himself, somewhat in the way Magritte’s “Not to Be Reproduced” (1937) depicts the painter’s back and its improbable reflection in a mirror hanging above a copy of Poe’s Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym. An even more complex example is offered when the painter is depicted in the course of painting himself, in Vermeer’s The Art of Painting, for instance, and of its pastiche by Norman Rockwell’s well-known 1962 Triple Self Portrait, an apparatus that, interestingly, also carries the portraits of ­Rembrandt, Picasso, Dürer, and van Gogh pinned on the canvas, together with five preparatory sketches and the signature of Rockwell himself. As for ­Magné’s note of the “massively perverse system of mirroring and circular structures,”115 this is eventually enacted by Perec, predominantly in 53 Days, a text that has remained incomplete, “as if The Portrait Gallery offered a pictorial and plastic model for the fiction that is to come.”116 Here, criticism clearly acknowledges the modelisation of texts by the pictorial apparatus that is not only thematically and citationally impregnated—triggering or generating text—but also functions structurally, as a mould that gives the text its form. The Authenticating Machine The Portrait Gallery is the story of a mystification that also plays with the notion of true/false by using copies, pastiche, replicas, as well as representation and mimesis to fool the eye. Painting, then, here serves as a referent, necessary not only for the referential illusion, but also for the anchoring and substantiating of the text. Evidently, when everything is revealed to be false, this scaffolding collapses. But, as a final tour de force of this “patient staging […] the paintings in the collection, advertised as copies, as pastiches, as replicas, would naturally seem to be copies, pastiches, replicas, real paintings. The rest depended on the forger.”117 According to Magné, “the painting, an imitating machine, authenticates that which it imitates: it is no longer the model that guarantees the fidelity of the painting, but the painting that attests to the reality of the

146  Poetics of the Pictorial (II) model.”118 Admitting that these elements have been borrowed serves to conceal the true work of writing, and this is also true of the numerous citations—clearly indicated rather that hidden, this time—that permeate the text. Magné uses Cadignan’s portrait of Dinteville as an example, a portrait that is depicted as hiding, in effect, that of Panurge, in chapter XVI of Gargantua and Pantagruel, hence “a quote by Rabelais that the system of constraint writing forces Perec to insert in this chapter.”119 The reader is faced with a game of true and false portraits, true and false authors, a textual mirroring effect that is inspired by portrait games, such as the one performed by Rockwell. In relation to Cadignan’s painting, one might also add the true/false authentication effect, an effect of anamorphosis, located in the name of doctor Dinteville—that Cadignan deforms and misspells “D’Inteville” in his false-true portrait—which is, in fact, the name of the commissioner of H ­ olbein’s Ambassadors, Jean de Dinteville, the French ambassador to Henry VIII’s court, who wanted the painting for his French château at Dinteville. And the ekphrasis of the painting appears in Life A User’s Manual at the beginning of chapter two; we should also note, of course, that, while the painting is uncovered under its anamorphic ekphrasis mingling recognisable details (the tile of the floor at Westminster) and whimsical disguises, the reader enjoys a series of humouristic adjuncts and laterations. The Transforming Machine In the final section of his non-exhaustive but highly sophisticated study of the typology of the Perecian text, Magné addresses the question of anamorphoses and argues that: In the Perecian aesthetics the painting offers a space where a series of regulated deformations is produced, always resulting in the multiplication of possible images: the pictorial space is polyiconic […] this poly-iconicity evidently finds its equivalent in what massively characterises Perec’s text: its effervescent polysemy. Anagrams, hypograms, palindromes, homophones [...] [aim at making] the text a machine that produces meaning, multiple meanings, through the transformation of the linguistic material.120 (emphasis added) Magné’s interesting conclusion corroborates my suggestions; having reminded his readers that one of the specificities of the literary text is, precisely, its metatextual dimension, he continues: Therefore, it is certain that the paintings constitute remarkable meta-­ textual connotations, since they maintain very strong structural similarities with the text […] in Perec’s work, the multiplicity of pictorial

Poetics of the Pictorial (II)  147 references allows us to see a metaphor of the text in the painting. Thus, the inscription that Perec has borrowed from Paul Klee for Life A ­User’s Manual corresponds exactly to the painter’s other phrase that I use as an epilogue: “writing and drawing are identical at heart”.121 In my view, to conclude this discussion with the notion that painting or image may be seen as a metaphor for the text and writing would be rather banal and as expected as simply saying that one mirrors the other. Painting—or, more generally, the image—is what shapes the text, gives it its form; rather than simply engaging with the text, triggering or providing a generic framework, the image also gives it “the idea” of being what it is, to mould itself on a pictorial model, in terms of organisation, composition, deformation, and structure. The force of the image is dynamic, playing the role of a factor that intensifies the text, as perceived by G. Didi-Huberman: “images do not only attract vision. They appeal to the gaze, first, but also to knowledge, memory, desire and [they draw on] their always available ability for intensification.”122 With Urquhart Layers and Layers of Painting: Towards the Macrostructural Apparatus If Perec is a master at combining text and pictorial references, pictorial games, and typographic pursuits, it is another sort of apparatus that may also visibly resort to painting as generating a text. Jane Urquhart’s novel The Underpainter 123 presents a very particular way of using a painting technique to structure a novel on the pictorial mode: specifically, this novel is governed by an apparatus that takes the form of undercoating, again a technique borrowed from painting. Urquhart is linked to the world of painters and knows their work very well, as she spends a lot of time with them and they are part of her immediate environment.124 Her use of a pictorial technique as an apparatus that gives form to a work of fiction also takes us back to Forster’s notion of “pattern,” the difference being that the apparatus articulates at different levels what is actually a reading constraint that conditions its reception and constitutes a true instance of what has been commonly called “the painter’s novel.”125 A little like Perec, who, in The Portrait Gallery, blatantly declares the colour, his narrative programme, and offers the keys to deciphering its apparatus and its goals by placing it under the auspices of art history, Jane Urquhart places the composition of her novel under the sign of a more concrete technique. The term Underpainter may refer to the person who works “under” the painter in hierarchy, his assistant, but also to the one who paints the inner layers of a painting, its undercoat. This alludes to the technique favoured by the protagonist, American painter

148  Poetics of the Pictorial (II) Austin Fraser, who buries the original subject of his painting under layers and layers of paint. Reminiscent of Frenhofer, the painter in Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece, Austin spends his life burying his models and classic subjects under layers and layers of painting, thus erasing the life of his paintings, true to his rejection of all sentimental and aesthetic engagement. The title also draws attention to the structure of the novel, unfolding around Austin’s life narrative, a life that is protected from harm as Austin lives by proxy, through the others’ stories of love and pain, particularly the stories of his friend, George, which have formed a palimpsest on the surface of the account of Austin’s life that is entirely devoted to art. The protagonist’s attempts to avoid the tormenting of life and love by finding refuge in art is consonant with his artistic choices, his adopting the technique of erasure by accumulation. One then notes that Urquhart performs a reversal of the use of art history, in that the painter does not make fine art, but “ugly” art, spoiling, messing, and intentionally botching his work. This is a good example of transgressive and rebellious art, in accordance with Agamben’s view of the artist as “a true terrorist in art.”126 Another instance of the use of a particular apparatus, whose stakes remain to be identified, is provided when text and image are literally “coupled” together—a most eloquent example of which is also offered by Paul Durcan and his “gallery of paintings.” With Paul Durcan, the Macrotextual Apparatus: Poetry and Painting. Durcan’s Gallery of Paintings Casting the Net of Words over Images Irish poet Paul Durcan’s Crazy About Women was published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition taking place in 1990 at the National Gallery in Dublin. Durcan narrated the birth of this project saying that: In the summer of 1990 I was invited by the National Gallery of ­I reland to compose a book of poems out of my experience of the Gallery and its collection. I accepted the invitation on the basis that the book would not be a coffee table book but a book as wellfounded and inexorable as any other book of mine.127 Raymond Keaveney, director of the Museum, introduces this work and writes: Though many of history’s most celebrated artists drew much of their inspiration from the great corpus of classical literature, particularly its poetry, few writers have used painting as the basis for their creations. The exhibition Crazy About Women and this volume which

Poetics of the Pictorial (II)  149 accompanies it is therefore somewhat exceptional in that it reverses the usual process. … The pictures he has chosen to write about [are] capable of provoking a rich and varied personal response which works on many levels, aesthetic, historic, cultural and emotional. This collection reflects the deeply personal response of the poet to the many images contained in the Gallery’s collection.128 Following Keaveney, assistant director Dr Brian P. Kennedy insists on the writer’s uniquely personal response, namely, that Paul Duncan is fascinated by the potential of paintings to offer us a unique and personal relationship with a visual image. [Paintings] prompt the entire range of human emotions and provoke a different reaction depending on our mood as we view them.129 This seems particularly important to me, as it foregrounds the “plasticity” of the image, its capacity to arouse emotion and enact a true “encounter” between text and image, as Blanchot defined it: “This infinite movement that is the encounter itself, an encounter that is always apart from the place and the moment in which it is spoken, for it is this very apartness, this imaginary distance, in which absence is realized.”130 Play, event, and encounter are the elements that made Paul Durcan’s book possible. Crazy About Women was followed by a second publication, Give Me Your Hand,131 dedicated to the London National Gallery. In parallel to the questions raised by these endeavours, with reference to their object and stakes, what is striking is that what lies before our eyes is the result of linking word and image in a work that is similar to an artist’s book, except that here the poet is not also the painter. Durcan’s Gallery: An Apparatus As we turn the pages of Durcan’s poetry collection, we realise that, in the manner of the grand tradition of painting gallery, Durcan offers his readers a reading trajectory and constructs the fiction of a word/image gallery, a verbal narrative nourished by the images that simulates one’s wandering through the rooms of Dublin’s National Gallery. Roger de Piles broached this subject in his famous Cours de peinture par principes where he envisages painting as the pilgrimage one makes when moving from one side of a painting to another or from one genre to another: For painting must be regarded as a long pilgrimage, as when while traveling one sees several things capable of pleasantly entertaining one’s mind for some time. The different parts of this art are

150  Poetics of the Pictorial (II) considered; one makes a stop while moving on, as a traveler will stop at resting places along his way.132 The relationship between painting and pilgrimage insists on the movement one is instigated to follow, its trajectory inscribed in time, and the fact that it narrativises the viewing of a verbal account. Juxtaposing paintings and poems, the titles of which are borrowed from the painted works, Durcan offers the viewer-reader133 a series of works that constitute his dispositif. Durcan’s case illustrates Agamben’s conception of the apparatus as both a way of constraining people and a network; in Durcan’s work, the apparatus is the answer to a particular constraint, that of the Gallery commission, and it also exerts a constraint on the reader, that of a set, visual reading. It is a praxis and also an oikonomia, or, in other words, an economy of the visible. The theological heritage of the apparatus linked to oikonomia and translated by Latin theologicians as dis-­positio underlines Durcan’s work, and the concept of the image is linked to presence/absence, to the doctrine of Incarnation and the figure of Christ as God’s son modelled in His image. The doctrine of transubstantiation also plays a part here, as Serge Tisseron suggests when he insists on the role of the body in the visual process and its link with the Holy Trinity: “Like Christ who in Christian theology occupies an essential position as mediator between God and men, image is the essential mediation between bodies and words”134; the reader’s body functions as the transmuting sieve or net (like that of enigma). Durcan’s “apparatus” consists in a structure that proposes forty-nine images referring to forty-seven paintings and two sculptures that accompany forty-seven poems, either facing one another or following one another. At times an image is even inserted within a poem. The motif of an Irish harp, printed in the centre of a page, separates the different “chapters” and imparts rhythm to the work. Thus, the reader’s mind is made to look at Durcan’s word/image apparatus in a specific way, creating an object we may also call an iconotext, or more precisely, an iconopoem, which builds up the fiction of a gallery made up of a selection of the National Gallery’s works, generated as a result of the poet’s reaction to this or that painting and the workings of his imagination. Lecture-voyure: “après/d’après” To this spatial aspect of the apparatus, we may add what I call “lecture/­ voyure” (a reading and a sighting),135 which is a more “temporal” reflection on the current formula, such as a poem titled “Poem after Dürer.” The ambiguity of the term is telling; it refers to the poem being written after the painting while also purporting to offer an ekphrasis of the painting in the manner of the poet. Furthermore, psychoanalysis

Poetics of the Pictorial (II)  151 has pointed out the complex interplay between word and image: Freud insisted on the gap between word and image when he remarked that dreams think in images and that language comes after the dream so as to cast its net onto the images. As long as a trace of the image lingers, the work of dream-elucidation is not finished and language causes images to disappear.136 Since writing about painting refers to an image created before the verbal text, the critic cannot dispense with anachronism as a precious critical heuristic tool. This is one of the staples of Georges Didi-Huberman’s critical stance when he remarks: What does it take to understand an image? Experience teaches us that, while looking at it, we must pay attention to its temporal content, to the polyrhythmic quality of which it is made up. Yet the standard historical models—past and present, ancient and new, obsolescence and renaissance, modern and postmodern—fail to describe this complex nexus of the image.137 Intermedial transposition, therefore, is a combination of time and space that defies Lessing’s separation between the arts; a temporal hiatus exists between image-time and text-time, which constitutes a particular apparatus, ascribing to the spectator a specific place in a specific historical context. According to Damisch, “rather than caught, right from the start and by its own nature, in an uninterrupted circuit of exchanges, translations, conversions, transpositions, and, firstly, descriptions and interpretations, shouldn’t we say that the image is polytheist?”138 In Durcan’s gallery, both time and space are put to work, combining the two arts for the production of a new “object,” a combination, a hybrid composition, an iconopoem. Speed, the combination of time and space, and rhythm, that of the flux of the voice and of a walk, a breath, enable us to rethink this artistic object beyond the age-old categories of the traditional word/image (time/space) opposition and beyond the paragone. Hence, they are “art objects,” as Jeanette Winterson demonstrated in her eponymous work; that is, an instance of art interposing, irrupting, opposing death, and thinking on its own merits: The picture on my wall, art object and art process, is a living line of movement, a wave of colour that repercusses in my body, colouring it, colouring the new present, the future, and even the past, which cannot now be considered outside of the light of the painting. […] Process, the energy in being, the refusal of finality, which is not the same thing as the refusal of completeness, sets art, all art, apart from the end-stop world that is always calling “Time Please!” […] the arts stand in the way of this doomsaying. Art objects. The nouns become an active force not a collector’s item. Art objects.139

152  Poetics of the Pictorial (II) Last Twists and Turns of the Apparatus: The Eroticism of Reading Crazy About Women testifies to a desire to prolong this soothing intercourse and rich exchange, by creating a textual poïetics equivalent to the painting “elected” among all those hanging on the walls of a Museum Gallery. It would be a text that, more than mere accompaniment, would offer a reading, a hallucinated image together with its mnemonic trace of both the affect and effect of its first advent. This is what Durcan’s apparatus testifies to: the madness of seeing, of women, of word and image. Called forth by the image, words arise. Image is a place one enters. Like in free association, Durcan lets the erotic pervade his poems to a point of incandescence: the erotic of the Virgin Mary’s foot in ­Granacci’s The Holy Family with Saint John (c. 1494), the erotic of a woman’s breasts in Jacob Jordaens’s La Vénération de l’Eucharistie (1630), or that of the bishop’s wife in James Letham’s Double Portrait of Bishop Robert Clayton and his Wife Katherine (c. 1730). The eroticism of intercourse is suggested in various moments, or, as far as Bishop Clayton is concerned, at Christmas night. This is a wording of the potentialities of the image, which is not an interpretation but rather a discourse, an intercourse, or a course, a becoming-conscious of the forces captured in the painting and liberated in the intercourse, which is a trade suggested in the “inter,” where values are exchanged between the spectator and the work itself. It discovers what might be “deposited” in the painting, “according to the words in their sensory (auditory visual) perception and becoming aware of what lies in the subconscious,” to quote Fédida.140 Active Role of the Reader/Spectator The spectator/reader becomes active once the book and word/image gain momentum, thus triggering “arousals.” As memory claims the loci, creates an event, and animates and instigates movement, the reader engages in a kind of pilgrimage where s/he has to navigate superimpositions, collages, reconstitutions, and montages, notably those of places and of the see-saw movement between poems and pictures. These are what Fedida calls “vision processes,” montages, and “passages” reminiscent of ­Walter Benjamin.141 Confronted with the apparatus, the spectator/ reader performs a double anachronistic movement: first from the painting to the model (for example, the bishop and his wife), and then back to the painting, led by the painter who assumes the role of a translator or a stage manager. Then, the model of the picture-poem, as fantasised by the reader-spectator-writer, is conjured. The apparatus of reading-as-vision is triangular: the reader looks at the painting reproduced in the book and reads the printed poem, and hence there is a see-saw movement between word and image. Both stem from

Poetics of the Pictorial (II)  153 the elaboration of things that are not located on the same level. In effect, while the painter truly stood in front of his models, the poet, (already) faced with a representation (that of the model and of the painting), will produce a new representation of a work as an inanimate thing—rather than human beings, for they are at a second remove. The reader/spectator receives two joint representations: that of the model (the painting) and that of a representation (the poem) of a representation (the painting). Could we, then, speak of a phenomenon we could call a super-vision, in the same way one speaks of a superimposition or “double exposure”? To pursue this intermedial reflection further, we should note that, in the context of this apparatus, what the reader is holding in their hands is not the painting and the poem; rather, he is holding one of several possible actualisations of the poem, while the painting is only a reproduction. Hence, we move from the autographic mode on to the allographic mode, from the painting to its photograph, but without the initial frame. Removing the frame means removing the volume of the object, notably the reference to the thing as an object of/in the world. The object is thereby deprived of its deictic reference or what it points out as a painting. De-framing it, then, means idealising it, making an image of it, and even losing the painting in situ. Hence, at the very moment when the reader/spectator forgets that they are becoming caught up in the meshes of the net of the apparatus, the book seems to be “cheating” them, even though it pretends to offer the original painting together with the original poem that was born from the image. But, truth be told, unless the reader pays a visit to the ­National Art Gallery in Dublin, that is the only thing they will ever have: a reproduction at their disposal. For the apparatus combines the photograph of the painting and the text, which sets the subject at three or even four removes: that is to say, the original (the model), the painting, its photograph, and this photograph reproduced in great numbers. The frameless work, once isolated on the blank page, becomes a flat, ­ etached dematerialised picture, which has lost its pictorial quality and is d from its exhibition context. Hence, too, the interest in Durcan’s work, which renders its “flesh” unto the image by way of words, while at the same time asking the reader to collaborate in order to restore the aura to the picture. This is partly the poem’s work, which testifies to the effect of the image: its affect and the fantasies that its encounter with the verbal has triggered. Writing finds its “locus” after the contemplation of the painting by the poet, who, notebook in hand, probably jotted down his “imaginary” visions. The see-saw, “reading-as-seeing” activity we experience moves between the text and the photographs of the paintings. Subject to this oscillation, the reader has to check details, look for clues, and spot references, which are ways of seeing what would have remained unseen. The apparatus thus offers itself as a pragmatic event. What is its potential? What are its effects?

154  Poetics of the Pictorial (II) There is one last paradox. The meandering, narrativised ekphrasis urges the reader to go back to the image while reading the poem, for the image both replaces the text and is replaced by it and by the other image that subverts the original and that is inscribed on the inner “screen” of the reader-spectator-voyeur. Hence, the advent of what I call “the pictorial third,” which is in-between word and image, neither one nor the other. Enigma to End Up with the Net of Words Damisch recalls the enigmatic power of painting, which can never be exhausted by either interpretation or iconographic solution.142 A painting might partake of a kind of atonement, as when a spectre awakes before coming back to haunt. But what kind of a “sin” has a picture committed, if we speak of atonement? Is it in its feminine destiny, as Lessing would have it? What is the “destiny of an image”143 submitted to the effects of interpretation, or even of an image’s mere description, in terms of loss or gain? Durcan’s desecrating apparatus shows that a reproduced image “sizzles” with all the strength of its latent desire. It strives for advent and to rise for the reader/spectator just as it rose for the poet. Is it once more the power of the text (still envisaged in its masculine dimension) to give the image back its flesh, to, once again, give it life? The table that follows brings together and summarises some of the applications of the intermedial critical typology. Intermedial critical typology Internal/external presence of the pictorial reference

Formal and structural borrowings from painting etc./formal effects of the text.

Image specifically absent/only evoked of.

Mode of manifestation: Integrated microtextual level - Framing, white canvas, anamorphosis, perspective, colour, arabesques, photography, architecture, etc. - Giving form to the text through the visual: the descriptive, ekphrasis … nuances of the pictorial.

Function at a macrotextual level: overhanging “pattern” Frames, apparata, photography, collages, mise en abyme, “machines.” In a global form: “pattern” and composition: shield, hourglass, chain, undercoating, mosaic, squared/checked form (the sonnet), fugue and counterpoint, variations. (Huxley, Gide, Josipovici, N. Huston, borrowings from musical forms.)

Poetics of the Pictorial (II)  155

Direct borrowings from art history.

Image absent/evoked.

Present visual effect: material presence of the image-in-text.

Genres (local occurrence): trompe l’œil, still life, portrait, historical painting.

Styles: gothic, mannerism, baroque, pointillism, cubism, impressionism.

Interpictoriality: quotations, allusions. Direct references: to painting schools, artists, titles, museums, or galleries. Quotations. Indirect references: allusions, truncated/ false quotations, etc.

Formal borrowings: the white canvas. (K. Blixen, “The Blank Page,” J. Urquhart, The Underpainter.)

Embedded designs (A. Gray), sketches, inserted photographs (W. G. Sebald). Photographic reproductions of paintings: P. Durcan, D. Moggach’s Tulip Fever.

Genres (global occurrences): the portrait. (The Picture of Dorian Gray[O. Wilde], Portrait of a Lady [H. James].) Historical painting, epic. Typographically visual text: calligrams (Perec, J. Joyce’s Ulysses, Danielevski’s House of Leaves). The Apparatus: system and hybridity. P. Durcan’s gallery of painting. A. Gray and his sketches, integrated throughout Poor Things. Montage (Benjamin). Bricolage, Multicolouring effects.

Depending on the case, the function of the image in text is situated at the junction between the level of appearance of the reference and the type of borrowing; thus, between the microtextual level and the formal borrowing we would find some passages imitating photographic framing or an anamorphosis effect. In between the microtextual (or local) level and the direct borrowing from art history, one would identify the description of a still life (Josipovici) or that of a portrait (Patrick M ­ cGrath’s Martha Peak offers one of the many examples). In The Picture of Dorian Gray there is a cross between the direct borrowing from the portrait genre and the structuring of the novel on the portrait mode, thus situated at a macrotextual level. The cross between formal borrowing and pictorial techniques that belong to art history, painting, and its techniques is found, for example, in J. Urquhart’s The Underpainter as well, which functions on the mode of superimposed coats and undercoats of painting that concern the hierarchy in the arts (decorative art, craft, and painting).

156  Poetics of the Pictorial (II) Naturally, the distinctions between diverse cases are permeable and we must apply all sorts of modulations. Depending on the degree of the presence of the reference in the text, we may distinguish between internal and external mode, that is, between the (internal) case when a text cites a work that is included, even a fictional work, and the case of external reference, when a text cites a work that does not make part of its composition, but exists in the real world or the world of another novel. We may also differentiate between cases when the text presents a visible reproduction of a work of art and those when the text offers itself with concrete visible effects, a calligram, for instance, a collage, typographical games, or notes, and so on. It is sometimes difficult to clearly differentiate between the occurrences at a microtextual and those at a macrotextual level. A. Gray offers an eloquent example, as his drawings occasionally illustrate the text, yet the massive presence of images—as is also the case with photography in W. G. Sebald’s work—also creates a structuring effect at a macrotextual level; a repetition effect is produced, a production of series that, from one sketch to the other, or from one photograph to another, endows the text with a visual structure. The fluidity of these textual exchanges presents great interest, and the hesitations in placing these texts under a specific category reflect, precisely, the hybridity of their nature. It would be wrong to envisage this typology as a rigid system or a recipe. Rather, it constitutes a guideline and an aid, with a view to clarification, reflection, and the observation of phenomena that would otherwise elude a strict classification, since we are, after all, in the domain of invention, creation, and, therefore, of the unprecedented. This typology is, therefore, an attempt to sort out the different cases and create a taxonomy; the flexibility and porosity of the apparatus proposed here relates to the nature of the intermedial exchange, itself supple and vibrant.

To Review In the previous chapters, dedicated to a poetics and a poïetics of the pictorial, I have tried to renew the approach of literary texts by performing a critical reversal that had already been anticipated by some theoreticians. Suffice it to apply ut pictura poesis to the letter, accounting for a whole section of literary production whose “pictorial” specificity has been approached by turning artistic critique back onto the text in a diffuse, “impressionist,” and non-modelised manner. My proposition is that we can think in terms of a system or of a critical category that is complex and distinct from others; further still, I wish to advance intermedial criticism and consolidate it as a fully-fledged discipline in its own right. The crisis of the descriptive as a critical category, as a “critical” moment of the literary text—either because the descriptive is expelled from the text or, on the contrary, because it invades the discourse of the

Poetics of the Pictorial (II)  157 novel—could provide a partial solution to our attempt to renew the approach. And what really happens when the descriptive relates to works of art?144 How can we revisit these encounters after the foundational work of Philippe Hamon? I have therefore suggested an alternative approach, stemming from the contribution of the visual arts, a particular type of description that may be combined, of course, with other tools. The contribution of the new technologies and the new ways of seeing that these generate, the incredible diversity of contemporary plastic manifestations, as well as the predominance of the virtual world, produce new literary forms that we must reconsider, notwithstanding the number of narrative modes and diegetic constructions that the descriptive device also engineers. This is not a matter of arbitrarily separating one textual element from the others; the goal is mainly to render the different facets and functioning modes of literature and the arrangement of the parts of the intermedial apparatus, in the smoothest way possible. The question of the apparatus and the famous critique du dispositif that P. Ortel has called for may be one of the means of renewing our approach of texts whose apparatus puts image into play. The lexicalisation of the reading of the image, also advocated by Hamon, may be another. These are tools that may be turned back onto the text. Hamon suggests that we seek to lexicalise the ways of “reading” (or “comprehending”) the image using terms such as “zigzag, rapidity, scanning.”145For Hamon, the act of seeing an image, truly gazing at it, must be able to permeate a text that fictionalises such an activity and restores it to the reading eye. As if owing to its “translation” through different media, a certain type of mental activity can be transmitted and maintain a recognisable form, despite its conversion. Fiction is, after all, an anthropological phenomenon whose metaphysical stakes manifest themselves through utterance. The descriptive may be a means of renewing criticism and exploring theory from another angle, that of intermedial criticism, a term that is preferable to that of “intersemiotics,” which is heavily loaded with theories of the sign and the reduction of the image to a code. The literary text is no longer seen as a teleological construction, a predetermined design towards which all elements lead, but it is conceived in terms of a plateau, or a rhizome, a configuration and an apparatus that is open to an interplay between the elements that superimpose, intersect, and interpenetrate each other, on a smooth, flat level. Rather than favouring, once again, a hierarchised approach that would prioritise a textual instance over another—such as the narrative or focalising instance, the instance that regulates characterisation, time/space relations, referential anchorage, language games and polysemy, the descriptive—intermedial criticism incites a combination of all this working together as a bricolage. It would be a means of articulating these instances and allowing them to fully come into play so as to see how the focalising instance, for example, is to be thought of in terms of perspective and point of view,

158  Poetics of the Pictorial (II) how it would emerge from a trompe-l’œil or an effect of anamorphosis, or even how the characterisation of a character might be presented as a portrait or how the scene might be staged as a domestic pictorial scene, or, further still, how the historical scene or a battle scene follows the apparatus of historical painting. The description then becomes the locus of a mode of saying, but also seeing, whose modalities organise the discursive arrangement. Arrangement, apparatus, rhizome, plateau, these are obviously Deleuzian categories that I suggest adopting but also adapting, because of their advocating a vital opening of categories, a suppleness, a rejection of all sorts of denominations and asphyxiating hierarchies. The rejection, finally, of the vertical, treelike structuring in favour of the “plateau” suggests a more serene and egalitarian relation. What we are aiming at is not to provide answers but, instead, to raise questions. What precedes, then, is a series of propositions for readings of literary texts that are open, that do not seek hierarchies between relations but, on the contrary, that perceive the literary text as a complex configuration. Intermedial criticism is a means of articulating all this and also figuring the complexity of language, first and foremost, but also, of aesthetics and philosophy. Having observed what the image “does” to the literary text, the final part of this work will be discussing how the word/image affects the reader. We must first address the question of a kind of allusion that is more discreet than pictorial quotation. We will inevitably face the problem of the double, a phenomenon that is characteristic of illusion and refers to the double vision or the double visual game between text and image that play with the cognitive properties of the apparatus. Finally, I will try to understand what the “reading event” is when it emerges as a consequence of the appearance of a creative event, in the full singularity of its emergence. And, consequently, I will follow the effects of the emergence of this phenomenon in the reader’s mind, namely the production of what I call “the pictorial third.”

Notes 1 Inspiration for this title stems from an article I have submitted in “Cadres Cadrages,” the conference volume of SAIT 2006, Catherine Pesso-Miquel and Nelly Valtat-Comet (eds), Polysèmes, 2010. 2 Louis Marin. “le cadre de la représentation et quelques-unes de ses figures,” Les Cahiers de Museé National d’Art Moderne n.24 (summer 1988). 63. 3 Ibid, 67. 4 Meyer Schapiro, Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist and Society, New York: George Braziller, 1994. 5 Bernard Rougé, “En-visager l’absence, ou la circonstance du vis-àvis. A ­ utour d’un cadre dans un tableau de Vermeer,” Cadres et marges, ­C ICADA, Pau, PUP, 1995. 28. 6 Siri Hustvedt, Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005.

Poetics of the Pictorial (II)  159 7 Siri Hustvedt, op. cit., XV. 8 Georg Simmel, “The Picture Frame: An Aesthetic Study,” Theory, Culture and Society 11 (1994). 11–17. 11–12. 9 Ibid, 12. 10 M. R. James’s novella “The Mezzotint” exploits this concept of the frontier zone and its transgression. 11 Bernard Rougé, op. cit., 27. It is also interesting to see Rougé’s analysis of the notions of beginning (début) and end (but). 12 Ibid, 28. 13 André Chastel, Histoire du retable italien, des origines à 1500, Paris: Liana Levi, 2005. 17–18. 14 Daniel Arasse, L’invention de Vermeer 84, n.4. 15 Henri Matisse, Ecrits et propos sur l’art, ed. Dominique Fourcade, Paris: Hermann, 1972. 196, n.60. qtd in Bernard Rougé, op. cit., 35. 16 Bernard Rougé, op. cit., 103–114. 17 This is a point raised by Dominique Château, “Duchamp, du cadre,” qtd in Bernard Rougé, op. cit., 103–114. 18 Ibid, 104. 19 Ibid, 31. 20 For a more detailed analysis on this subject, see Michael Camille’s work Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art, London: Reaktion Books, 1992. 21 For an elaborate analysis of the differences between frames and margins, see Bernard Rougé, op. cit. 22 See Chapter 1. 23 See: Victor Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting, Cambridge University Press, 1997. 24 This is what Vermeer was already doing by combining heavy curtains and tables covered with rugs. We must emphasise the specific role of the curtain as a frame-margin, since it is often deictic. D. Arasse’s study La madone Sixtine, qtd in Bernard Rougé, op. cit., is of particular value on this subject; Arasse sees the green curtain behind the Virgin as an evocation of the torn curtain of the temple. An interesting study is also offered by Georges Banu in Le rideau ou la fèlure du monde, Paris: Adam Biro, 1997. 25 Guy Larroux, op. cit., 247. 26 Theo D’haen, “Frames and Boundaries,” in Poetics Today, “Art and ­Literature,” vol. 10, 1989. 430. quoting Ervin Goffman, Frame Analysis, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. 27 Philippe Hamon, Introduction a l’analyse du descriptif, Paris: Hachette, 1981. 218. 28 Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, New York and London: Norton ­Critical Edition, 1995. 309. 29 Guy Larroux, op. cit., 248. 30 See: Andrea Del Lungo, “Pour une poétique de l’incipit,” Poétique n.94, Paris: Le Seuil, avril 1993; also, Liliane Louvel (ed), La licorne, Faculté Lettres et Langues, Poitiers, 1997. 31 T. S. Eliot, “Four Quarters,” Collected Poems 1909–1962, London and ­Boston: Faber and Faber, 1990. 196. 32 John McGahern, “Like All Other Men,” The Collected Stories, London: Faber and Faber, 1992. 280. 33 Iouri Lotman, La structure du texte artistique, Paris: Gallimard, 1973. 300. Also, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, the First and the Last,” Apocalypse 21:6, 22:13. 34 Guy Larroux, op. cit., 249.

160  Poetics of the Pictorial (II) 35 Julien Gracq, En lisant en écrivant, José Corti, 1986. 116. 36 Guy Larroux, op. cit., 249. 37 Philippe Hamon, “La Question des genres.” I thank the author for providing me with a copy of the paper he delivered in a conference in Istanbul, 2005. 38 Patricia Falguieres, op. cit., 57–58. 39 Theo D’Haen, op. cit., 432. 40 An eloquent example of the complex and destabilising usage of these ruptures of level is presented in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo. 41 Mark Danielewski, op. cit. 42 Iain Pears, The Portrait, London: Harper Perennial, 2005. 43 Theo D’Haen, op. cit., 429. 44 Ibid., 436. 45 Jurgis Baltrusaitis, Aberrations: An Essay on the Defend of Forms, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [1957] 1989. 46 Erwin Panovsky, Pespective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood, New York: Zone Books, 1991. 27. 47 Ibidem. 48 Hubert Damisch, L’origine de la perspective, op. cit., 443. 49 Jurgis Baltrusaitis, op. cit. 50 Hubert Damisch, op. cit., 7. 51 On this subject, see Hubert Damisch, op. cit. 52 I am referring to the title of Cuchi White and George Perec’s work on trompe l’œil: L’ œil ébloui, Paris: Chêne, 1981. 53 See: René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature, Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1942], 1993. 54 Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, Chicago: The Chicago University Press, 1961. 55 For a more detailed analysis, see the conference volume of SAIT, Le descriptif, Isabelle Alfandari and Isabelle Gadoin (eds), Polysèmes n.9, P ­ ublibook, 2007. 56 Louis Marin, Sublime Poussin, op. cit. 57 Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, [1814] 1986. “There have been two or three fine old trees cut down that grew too near the house, and it opens the prospect amazingly” (87), “The situation of the house excluded the possibility of much prospect from any of the rooms” (114), and the metaphoric and ambiguous alternative Mr Crawford suggests to Miss Bertram: Your prospects, however, are too fair to justify want of spirits. You have a very smiling scene before you/Do you mean literally or figuratively? Literally I conclude. Yes, certainly, the sun shines and the park looks very cheerful. But unluckily that iron gate, that ha-ha, give me a feeling of restraint and hardship. I cannot get out, as the starling said. (127) 58 See: Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. 59 See also: Liliane Louvel, L’œil du texte, op. cit., and Texte/image, op. cit. 60 Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, Logic or the Art of Thinking, ed. Jill Vance Buroker, Cambridge University Press, [1683] 1996, qtd in Victor Stoichita, L’apparition du tableau, op. cit., 234, n.69. 61 Victor Stoichita, op. cit., 235. 62 Ibid, 243–244.

Poetics of the Pictorial (II)  161 63 Ibid, 249. 64 I am referring to the example developed in Liliane Louvel Texte/image, op. cit., following Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres, New York: R ­ andom House, 2003; or Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, Dover: The ­Consortium, [1988], 1992. 3–5. 65 See my analysis in Texte/image, op. cit., “Entrer dans la peinture,” 185–204. 66 See, for instance, Isabelle Keller’s dissertation, op. cit. 67 This is the case with Edward VI’s Portrait (1546), hosted in the National Portrait Gallery in London, whose traits are not recognisable, unless when the spectator is taken behind the canvas and looks through a hole situated facing a mirror that redresses the image. 68 The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1981. 87–88. 69 Jean-Claude Margolin, “Perspectivisme, relativisme, et scepticisme: précarité et créativité de l’anamorphose,” Studi Francesci, Rivista quadrimestrale fondatata da Franco Simone, n.138, Anno XLVI, Fascicolo III-Settembre-­Dicembre 2002, Rosenberg & Sellier editori in Torino. 534. 70 Fernand Hallyn, “Le thème de l’anamorphose,” in La Métamorphose dans la poésie baroque française et anglaise. Variations et résurgence, conference volume Valenciennes 1979, Gisèle Mathieu-Castelani (ed) (Etudes litteraires françaises, 7), Gunter Narr Verlag, Tublingen, Paris: Editions Jean-Michel Place, 1980. 9. qtd in Jean-Claude Margolin, op. cit., 536. 71 Aberrations is the title of the first volume of Jurgis Baltrusaitis’s Perspectives dépravées,Paris: Flammarion, “Idées et recherches,” 1983. The second volume of this work refers to anamorphosis. 72 The Plays and Poems of George Chapman: The Tragedies, ed. with introductions and notes by Thomas Marc Parrott, Ph.D., London: George Routledge & Sons, Limited, 1910. 276–277. 73 William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. General editors Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, London: Penguin Books, 2002. 977. 74 Daniel Arasse, Le detail, op. cit., 133; Jean-Claude Margolin, op. cit. 75 Gottfried W. Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil, ed. with an introduction by Austin Farrer, trans. E. M. Huggard, La Salle: Open Court 1985. The Project Gutenberg Ebook, part I § 147, p. 123. 76 Nathalie Pavec, “Hantise de l’impur dans ‘Jacob’s Room’,” Conference volume Virginia Woolf, Le pur et l’impur, Cerisy-la-Salle, Catherine Bernard and Christine Reynier (eds), Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2002. 55. 77 Nathalie Pavec, op. cit., 55–56. 78 Virginia Woolf, “Jacob’s Room,” in Selected Works of Virginia Woolf, ­London: Wordsworth Editions, 2007. 11. 79 On this subject, specifically the ways in which allegory is connected to ­Lacanian psychoanalysis, the “discourse of the Other,” see also: Joel ­Fineman, “The Structure of Allegorical Device,” in Allegory and Representation, ed. Stephen J. Greenblatt, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins, 1981. 46. 80 Mark Z. Danielewski, op. cit., 119–142. 81 Patricia Highsmith, Found in the Street, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986. God, here, is the name of a dog whose owner is an atheist, with a pathological behaviour. 82 Ibid, 222. 83 Ibid, 165.

162  Poetics of the Pictorial (II) 84 V. S. Naipaul, “Man-Man,” in Miguel Street, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. 85 Fanny Howe, The Deep North, Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1988. 52. 86 Jean-Claude Margolin, op. cit., 533. 87 John Banville, Athena, London: Secker and Warburg, 1995. 88 Lise Guilhamon, Poétique de la langue autre dans le roman indien d’expression anglaise, novembre 2006, these de Doctorat de l’Université de Rennes 2, sous la direction de Emilienne Beneth-Nouailhetas. 354. 89 Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, op. cit., 104. 90 G. V. Desani, All about Hatterr, New Delhi: Penguin Books, [1948], 1998. 105. 91 Fanny Howe, op. cit., 10. 92 Ibid, 9. 93 Gilles Deleuze, “What Is a Dispositif?,” in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007. 338–349. 94 Giorgio Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus?,” in What Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, trans. David Kisnik and Stefan Pedatella, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. 8. 95 Ibid, 14. 96 Ibid, 3. 97 Philippe Ortel, Discours image dispositif, op. cit. 98 Ibid, 6. 99 Ibidem. 100 Ibidem. 101 Ibidem. 102 Translator’s note: An acronym for the French Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, OULIPO is a group of (mainly) French-speaking writers who define “potential literature” as the creation of works pervaded by “constrained writing” techniques, where new structures and patterns are employed by writers as a means of triggering ideas and inspiration. In addition to well-­ established techniques, such as lipograms and palindromes, the group also devises new methods, often based on mathematical problems. OULIPO was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais and included notable novelists and poets, such as Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Oskar Pastior,and Jacques Roubaud. 103 Bernard Magné, “Peinturecriture,” in Transpositions, ed. Gwenhaël Ponnau, Université Toulouse-le-Mirail, 1986. 79–87. 104 Georges Perec, Things: A Story of the Sixties, and A Man Asleep, trans. David Bellos and Andrew Leak, Boston: David R. Godine, 1990. 21. 105 Georges Perec, “The Portrait Gallery,” in Three, trans I. Monk, M ­ ichigan: Harvill Press, 1996. 106 Bernard Magné, op. cit., 81. 107 Ibidem. 108 See, for example, W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants, London: Vintage, 1996. 109 Mark Z. Danielewski, op. cit., 289. 110 See: Georges Didi-Hubermann, Penser par les images, op. cit., 27. 111 Bernard Magné, op. cit., 83. 112 Ibidem. 113 Ibidem. 114 Ibid, 84. 115 Ibid, 85. 116 Ibidem. 117 Georges Perec, “The Portrait Gallery,” op. cit.

Poetics of the Pictorial (II)  163 118 119 120 121 122 123 124

125 126 27 1 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 37 1 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145

Bernard Magné, Ibidem. Ibid, 86. Ibid, 87. Ibidem. Georges Didi-Huberman, L’image survivante. Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2002. 150. Jane Urquhart, The Underpainter, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, [1997], 1998. Tony Urquhart is a painter. His work may be found in the exhibition catalogue The Revenants: Long Shadows (19 September–4 October 2002), University of Waterloo Art Gallery, Ontario, with a prologue and epilogue written by Jane Urquhart. I thank Héliane Ventura for bringing this catalogue to my attention. See: Le roman du peintre, Marie-Christine Paillard (ed), “Littératures,” Université Blaise Pascal, Clemont-Ferrand, 2008. See: Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Paul Durcan, Crazy about Women, National Gallery of Ireland, 1991. X. Raymond Keaveney, Introduction, Paul Durcan, op. cit., VIII. Dr. Brian P. Kennedy, Ibid, IX. Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. 9. See also: David Kennedy, The Ekphrastic Encounter in Contemporary British Poetry and Elsewhere, Ashgate, 2012. Paul Durcan, Give Me Your Hand, London: MacMillan and the National Gallery Publications, 1994. Roger De Piles, Cours de peinture par principes, Paris: Gallimard, tel, 1989. 90. See the discussion on Michel Picard, p. 38, on the right choice of word to refer to one standing in front of a work of art. Serge Tisseron, “L’image comme processus, le visuel comme fantasme,” Cahiers de psychologie clinique 2003/1, n.20. 125–126. I remind the readers that I propose the term “voyure” because it combines the intermediary act between seeing (voir) and reading (lecture) and evokes the ray this process leaves on the spectator/reader/seeer’s internal eye. See: Hubert Damisch’s notion of “d’après coup,” citing Freud, Didi-­Huberman, Fedida, and Lacoste in Actualité des modèles freudiens, op. cit., 52. Georges Didi-Huberman, L’image survivante, op. cit. Hubert Damisch, ibidem. Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects, op. cit., 19. Notice the wordplay whereby the word “objects” may be read both as a noun, in the sense of art objects, and as a verb, namely that art objects, resists, in the way the novelist notes. Pierre Fédida, “Théorie des lieux dans la psychanalyse sur la transformabilité métapsychologique du modèle,” op. cit., 128. Ibid, 128 and 133. Fédida also refers to Benjamin in Livre des passages. Hubert Damisch, ibid, 45. Reference to Jacques Rancière’s work Le destin des images, Paris: La fabrique, 2003. On this matter see also Olivier Bonfait’s introduction to La description de l’œuvre d’art, du modèle classique aux variations contemporaines, op. cit., XI–XII. These reflections are the product of our discussions in a symposium organised by Jean-Pierre Montier (CELAM), Université Rennes 2. See: A l’Œil, des interferences texts/images en littérature, ed. Jean-Pierre Montier, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007.

5 The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns

This final part of this book will be exploring text/image reception using an approach that pertains to the senses, as the image-in-text reaches the reader/viewer’s inner eye, the screen of her/his vision. We will commence this part of our exploration by returning to the question of allusion, particularly the “pictorial” type of allusion and its impact once it appears in a literary text; while distinguishing it from the conventional allusion, we will examine the effects of double seeing and double understanding (double entendre) that it performs on the text. Allusion will be here connected to the “domestic,” as per R. Lloyd, genre of still life, and our examples will mostly be taken from a text/ image that is largely based on the golden era of Dutch painting; this will also allow me to further pursue the discussion on the use of art history by the literary text, as well as the more formal question of the ­Fosterian “pattern” or motif. We must first define pictorial allusion, how it manifests itself, what it accesses, and how. What is the truth, this subtle sense one reaches owing to this detour by way of another art that is so close and at the same time so distant? Which secret is revealed, and what kind of revelation is taking place? What are its effects? What interests me mostly is the specificity of pictorial allusion (how it functions) and what distinguishes it from discursive allusion. Then, it will be a matter of specifying its function, why the writer chooses to make this detour through the painting or image, the sister art. What does this add to the literary text? This will tally with a scholarly veiling/unveiling strategy realised in the text. A synthesis of the existing critical viewpoints will allow us to set the basis for a phenomenological approach of the text/image reception, or, in other words, the reception of the pictorial appearing in the text. ­Subsequently, I will be proposing a definition for what I consider to be “a textual event,” the dynamic advent that pictorial citation and allusion constitute. I argue that, following the disruption the image creates once integrated in the literary text, an event which is necessarily double, received between reading and seeing, in the sense of a dynamics, phenomenon, or movement, it produces a ‘third’ term.

The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns  165

Preamble: Two Theoretical Reminders First Reminder: Situated in-between citation and suggestion, allusion is different from the latter, as its potential does not remain virtual,1 it is actualised; allusion is, by definition, intimately linked to intertextuality. According to Pizzorusso, 2 allusion appears in the second half of the seventeenth century in France and constitutes an “implicit evocation, ”literary at first and then rhetoric and verbal, which is from where the notion of an “allusive art,” one that frequently uses literary allusions from Latin and Greek texts, 3 stems. Parody and pastiche then constitute examples of prolonged allusion, “a singerie, a mimetic genre: a mimesis that underlines, that accentuates its mimetic character.”4 In painting, that would be the case of pastiche, imposture, and artifice. The term ‘singerie’ evokes a pictorial topos, that of the monkey, the mirror, and the parrot, symbolising servile imitation and sterility. In the particular case of pictorial allusion, it is important to mention B. Vouilloux’s differentiation between “referential enunciations” and “allusive enunciations, ”both of which “exploit a determined linguistic material in a way that is very specific to them: the designating elements of language, comprising names and descriptions.”5 For him, “reference is on the side of the monument (memory), allusion on the side of movement (loss).”6 Second Reminder: The common origin of the linguistic and the visual7 is seen by B. Vouilloux in terms of “originating co-implication” without any relation of exteriority between the two: “it is, therefore, not exactly accidental if, in classical language, the same word ‘representation’ denotes these two distinct modes.” Given that the visual arts and rhetoric are situated in “a relation of chiasmus,”8 I would place pictorial citation or allusion at the nodal point. Taking the argument further, I would like to discuss the questions of this detour, when the image has to go through language and that of the pictorial, when the image, painting, and its variants (mirror, photography, tapestry, etc.) have to be “translated” by language, what Jacobson called “intersemiotic translation.”9 The image interrupts the literary text in return, by the detour of its other, the discourse that utters that the image cannot but be fundamentally allusive since it is never directly engaged with its referent, with the event, the emergence of the image. This is a fortiori the type of mediation invoked by Plato, where the mediating tool passes through another mediating tool and is thus twice or three times distanced from its object. Does this suggest loss or a supplement?

“Painting the Clouds to Evoke the Moon”:10 Pictorial Allusion, a Risk for the Text By “pictorial allusion,” I refer to the practice and hermeneutics of evoking painting so as to speak of the text, by taking a detour, through

166  The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns the text’s other, very much like the one suggested by the phrase in the heading. While working on Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and Deborah Moggach’s Tulip Fever, I was struck by the importance of reference to seventeenth century Dutch painting in contemporary British novels.11 If Tulip Fever truly offers explicit references to Dutch painting—through the regular insertion of images in the work—Girl with a Pearl Earring functions on allusion, a completely different mode which consists in offering a multiplicity of references to the visible, as well as the principal reference to Vermeer, that is profuse in the text. The paratext immediately disperses with any doubt concerning this reference, by reproducing Vermeer’s painting right from the start on the book cover and, for good measure, also adding the painter’s View of Delft, thus reinforcing the allusion performed by the title, both to the painting and to the novel.12 Nevertheless, as the text unfolds, the reference to Vermeer’s painting is joined with indirect, allusive references to other paintings as well. Other than the strategies of pictorial citation and/or allusion, the most persistent question in these cases seems to be that of reception, specifically the cases when the reader does not detect the allusion. Where One Sees How We Necessarily Borrow the Words of Others… For Philippe Hamon, allusion is the regulator of language,13 and in order to evoke it, we must go through a topos that is borrowed from painting, that of Timanthes, an example that has also been extensively commented on in Vouilloux’s work on the tableau vivant. In this painting, Agamemnon’s face is painted veiled, so as to depict his grief, which is to say that pain is rendered through allusion and also poses the relation between allusion and allegory.14 J. Authier-Revuz also sees “the act of allusion as a dimension that is inherent in language. This path which leads from a circumscribed form to a law of discursive functioning.”15 For her, “the enunciating subject […] only speaks language through the discourse that incarnates it […] we always speak using the words of others.”16 According to Authier-Revuz, the work of art would be a place where “voices resonate”: “the borrowing and allusion are the secret law of saying, that of an incompleteness in an unruly alterity.”17 The entire literature, then, topples into allusion, treating its p ­ recise, rhetoric, or stylistic forms as none other than variants of the intertextual (like in Ulysses) or interpictorial (Girl with a Pearl Earring) macro-­allusion; literature borrows its language from all kinds of others, including its own others, the ancient works, infinitely recycling them just as it can choose to recycle the particular artistic mode of the rival arts following an intertextual or intermedial modulation.

The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns  167 Let us resume with Henri Godard:18 1 allusion is co-substantial to literature: it is a particular variation of metonymy and intertextuality. 2 two opposite yet complementary tendencies coexist: complicity with the reader and the potential aggression against the object of discourse. 3 the number of allusions in the text may pose an editing problem. Rather than clarifying everything, however, the pleasure of understanding without any help or indications must remain intact, since literature is the “construction of a virtual world of relations […] a text must remain allusive, at least in part.”19 In the particular case of pictorial allusion, the game with the reader poses the subject of the quest as a pictorial otherness right from the start. It is, indeed, a mode of access to the text’s other, the image, which reveals the relational workings of allusion; it always presupposes an other, to address, to consider when setting the rules of the game, and to play with. Where Allusion, a Relational Mode, Winks at the Reader P. Hamon reminds us that addressing these questions necessitates a context that is globally “conversational.”20 Conversation implies sociability, concrete places and locations, a rule, hierarchies, etc. Allusion does possess such a frame since it presupposes a receiver without whom the effect would not develop. Just like irony, allusion reveals itself through a “transparent dissimulation,”21 that is modes of communion, more than of communication. For Hamon: “the textual pact of the differed literary conversation is, without a doubt, too primordial to codify, for the author, as well as for the ‘finder’ of allusion, of the phenomenon.”22 For Authier-Revuz also, “[…] a discursive act, allusion is necessarily a relational phenomenon.”23 “A segment that is recognized as allusion is sometimes set as ‘other’ in relation to its context and as ‘same’ in relation to the discursive elsewhere with which it ‘makes one’.”24 As for pictorial allusion, it pertains to an infinite dialogue between the two arts, similar to the infinite relation discussed by Michel Foucault. 25 Seeing that all proper names (titles, the name of the painter, or references to museums) are erased in allusion, can we consider it as a kind of what Foucault calls “grey language”? Allusion allows for the painting to shine from inside the language. Doubly other, by definition and by nature—in its pictoriality—it maintains this relation of double otherness both with reference to the text (language) and with reference to the literary (an aesthetic mediation),being a portion of vibrant text between text and image, situated beyond the text and representing its elsewhere.

168  The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns Generally speaking, allusion also relates two temporal modalities, two relations, one in the present and one in the past; necessarily retrospective and anachronistic, it, therefore, solicits memory. In Girl with a Pearl Earring, the relational aspect of allusion and its connection to memory appear right from the beginning, when Griet’s blind father recalls a painting that he had seen together with his daughter, a painting made by the painter she is going to work for/with. The two protagonists share the memory and cooperate towards a progressive description where allusion functions not for their benefit, but for the reader’s, who must recognise the work whose title is not specified: ‘Do you remember the painting we saw in the Town Hall a few years ago, which van Ruijven was displaying after he bought it? It was a view of Delft, from the Rotterdam and Shiedam Gates. With the sky that took up so much of the painting, and the sunlight on some of the buildings.’ ‘And the paint had sand in it to make the brickwork and the roofs look rough, ’I added. ‘And there were long shadows in the water, and tiny people on the shore nearest us.’ ‘That’s the one.’ Father’s sockets widened as if he still had eyes and was looking at the painting again. I remembered it well, remembered thinking that I had stood at that very spot many times and never seen Delft the way the painter had. ‘That man was van Ruijven?’ ‘The patron?’ Father chuckled. ‘No, no, child, not him. That was the painter. Vermeer. That was Johannes Vermeer and his wife. You’re to clean his studio.’26 Ekphrasis is framed by the paragraphs, and the painting—broken down to its elements—may be identified as Vermeer’s View of Delft, even before the name of the painter appears in the text. The term “view” signals both a point of view and a painting genre, while the phrases “sky,” “the sunlight on some of the buildings,” the assembly of signifiers signifying “a view of Delft” constitute the sign of Vermeer’s painting. The tools of “pictorial description” figure here as deictic of the “it was” designation, characteristic of the description, and the polysynthetic effect relying on phrases that start with “and,” “with and…” give the impression that the painting emerges in the characters’ memory during the accumulation of remembered details, for the characters as well as for the reader. It is “a structure of visual accompaniment.”27 The details of the painting are brought together, then comes the reiteration of the signifier, which serves to frame the description: the painting, whose original is inscribed in the father’s mind, thus enacting an astute literary game of allusion: the painting remains inscribed in the memory of the blind man who reads it out just like Homer.

The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns  169 What we are dealing with here is a descriptive allusion to a wellknown painting that is progressively revealed and recognised, integrated in the narrative, in this case in a dialogue.28 In addition, the reader is given a lesson in aesthetics: there is no perception without meditation, nor beauty without art. When Griet acknowledges the fact that she has never seen Delft in the way shown to her by the painter’s singular eye, it is the painting that makes her see. The “allusor” connives with the “allused,” to follow Hamon, 29 yet this also implies a certain competence on the part of the reader, as well as raising questions of phenomenology and reception, since allusion presupposes a good reader. 30 Allusion necessitates interpretation—be it intra-diegetic, when the recipient is another character, or inter-diegetic, when it is addressed to the reader—and reading becomes a game31 where intertextuality rhymes with games of language and polysemy. In fact, the double game of allusion and interpretation stems from the classical literary game, of which what interests us here is but a variation, that of pictorial allusion. As Hamon notes, “allusion is essentially the responsibility of he who finds it, it is speech ‘at risk’”32; taken to its limits, that of silence miming silence, just like the role of the mime in Mallarmé discussed by Catherine Perret: The mime creates absence through absence: he works in silence. And what he designates more than anything is silence […] A radical zone of silence where it would not be necessary to have anything but ­allusion; not that rhetorical allusion that betrays anything it dissimulates in the way that it does, but an essential allusion, because it would no longer be a question of awakening what the mime alludes to in no other way but through allusion. Not only does the mime evoke no action, but he also stages the setback that precisely betrays fantasy and denounces the impossibility of the act, in other words  this kind of syncopation (Mallarmé calls it hymen) which always robs desire of its accomplishment, just as it automatically erases the perpetration of the trauma of remembrance. 33 Whereby stems the idea of a Mallarmé-like “milieu of pure fiction,” for which A. Compagnon states: “there must be […] nothing but allusion […] To name an object is to suppress three quarters of the pleasure derived from a poem that is guessed little by little: to suggest it, there lies the dream.”34 Where Allusion Shines from an Obscure Clarity How, then, does allusion function? How to detect it? And what happens in the case of pictorial allusion? Hamon poses the question of a possible existence of “alerting signs that are specific and identifiable.”35 I have

170  The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns suggested elsewhere a typology of pictorial description based on carefully established markers, 36 which aspires to recognise the course of the pictorial description—that is, a description that functions on the mode of allusion to a painting or an image without being ekphrasis. A convincing example of pictorial description may be found in the famous scene of the dinner, in To the Lighthouse, during which Mrs Ramsay’s reverie leads her to evoke an allegorical painting, verging on the ­Caravagesque afterwards, without ever making an explicit reference, but simply ­mentioning “in some painting.”37 Of course, it is a matter of reception, a problem of subjective, more or less shared knowledge. Vouilloux offers an impressive repertoire of tropes—paronymy, homonymy, rhyme, anagram, or congealed periphrasis—that indirectly point to a pictorial work, to the name of a painter, or a school of painting. In Girl with a Pearl Earring, pictorial allusion functions in the mode of allusive pictorial description, a description that is detailed, disseminated through the novel in a coherent series of paintings that are integrated in the diegesis. Alerted by the title, the two paintings on the cover, and the direct reference to certain art works, the reader is immersed in a pictorial atmosphere and suspects that they will also encounter other works by the painter. The examples of direct reference to Vermeer’s paintings acquire the value of an affirmation and endow the work with credibility. They function as signals. In parallel, the reader’s attention is also drawn by a certain number of linguistic devices in the form of recurrent signs that allude to their pictorial homologues. An eloquent example is offered by the furniture and elements of interior design: the famous chair that is ornamented with lion heads, the various paintings, the table that is covered with a thick carpet, the multi-panelled window, as a carrier of light. The characters’ clothing also constitute signals: “the yellow mantle,” “the five pointed red ribbon,” “the yellow ribbon,” “the pearls,” “the studded jewellery box.” Their importance is highlighted when the young servant changes a detail so as to reinforce the harmony and balance of the painting: she “invents” the folds of the blue carpet on the table.38 By doing so, she substitutes for the artist, in a sense, and brings a supplementary detail that allows for the reader to identify the painting whose ekphrasis is diffused and expands over numerous pages, seeping through the narrative structure of the story. 39 This process also allows for the offering of an explanation and an interpretation of what the fold adds to the painting, a true iconographic examination elaborated in terms of structure, rhythm, rupture of the monotony, and a way of educating the reader. In this novel, paintings function in the blinking mode of allusion and constitute puzzles that need be deciphered, jigsaws that need be reconstructed. Thus, during the linguistic unfolding of the narrative, the painting both changes time and inscribes itself in time.40 Besides, as the painter’s models borrow their accessories—including the pearl

The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns  171 earrings—from his wife, the arts are revealed to be borrowings that are renewed and rearranged while, nevertheless, always remaining in a dialogic exchange with their predecessors. If allusion is diversified and points to Vermeer’s various works owing to the characters, their mood, their accessories, or the light, the windows, the poses, and the direction of the gazes, the subject matter of the painting may also indicate the work alluded to,41 allowing us to visualise it by means of the narrativised description that points back to the absent title. This is the case when van Ruijven describes in detail what he wishes to see depicted in the paintings he has commissioned: one picturing himself in the company of a young girl, the other treating the subject of a music concert, including a harpsichord.42 The reader recognises a particular detail and then another and so on, details that they memorise and assemble in a series that uncovers the painting in question, The Concert. In the end, the reader comes upon the complete description of the painting with the harpsichord43: this time, it is a case of overt ekphrasis rather than an allusion to a possible painting, signalled by classic signifiers of the pictorial description and intensified by the certainty that this is really the description of a painting, regardless of the absence of a title: “I described the other painting.” Once more, the mediation of a third, constructed in-between the reader and the characters, is required. Moreover, the allusion to other paintings is often achieved through the characters’ activities—“The Milkmaid,”44 for example, or the “Woman with a Water Jug”45 and the young woman in yellow writing a letter,46 a theme that is quite common in Vermeer’s work, yet, in this case, particularised through the details of the pose: she is holding a quill and looking at the painter directly. Sometimes the paintings seem to be linked, performing a series of embedded allusions, one leading to another in an infinite and ludic chain: By the time he returned, with a still life of musical instruments, she looked as if she had always been sitting at the table, writing her letter. I had heard he painted her once before the previous necklace painting, playing a lute.47 (137) Furthermore, when, in the allusion to Vermeer’s The Music Lesson,48 one of the characters proposes the subject of a matching piece to the painter, the active reader must identify this work of art and trace it back to a painting hanging in a museum; hence, we go through a series of intermediaries before arriving to the existing work of art. Some of Vermeer’s paintings appearing in the novel hold our attention a bit longer, for instance the Girl with the Wineglass, a work that is alluded to a number of times on a double mode, both pictorial (alluding to the painting) and narrative,49 with a story of misfortunes attributed

172  The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns to the young girl depicted, who is seduced by the man who commissioned the painting. It is interesting to note how the homodiegetic narrator, Griet, blends the subject of the painting with the story of an unfortunate idyll that may serve as a cautionary tale for her own life. In parallel to questions of form, we should also consider the thematic affinities of allusion, taking the lead from P. Hamon, who wonders if the allusive phenomenon is linked to particular subjects corresponding to censorship, interdiction, and connected first and foremost to gender. Zola’s Nana offers an illustrative example through a passage that ends with the characters speaking allusively and indirectly, thus rendering the reader responsible for any obscene inferences. 50 What is it that may obstruct direct formulations and explicit references in pictorial allusion? What dictates the choice of the implicit like, for example, John Banville’s Ghosts resting on Watteau’s work? Is it a specific type of poetics, or rather poïetics, an activity that manifests itself as an intimate emulsion between text and image? Is the image repressed by the literary only to return indirectly, in a way similar to how sex re-emerges in Zola’s text? Pictorial allusion speaks of the desire for the image when one compensates for a certain lack by creating a displacement. It reveals the way in which it situates itself in relation to the pictorial art or, more broadly speaking, the image, just like intertextuality shows the way in which the author situates himself in relation to the alluded text. In his discussion of Céline, Henri Godard speaks of names that carry a “double hearing/ understanding.”51 For him, any type of allusion that pays tribute to certain works is also a sign of flippancy, as the cited text is not respected.52 In Chevalier’s novel, since the painting is lowered to the level of the mundane, allusion would reflect the appropriation of the painting by the text, of its “embourgeoisement”; the text is domestic, just like its pictorial Flemish model. Girl with a Pearl Earring is the story of a servant but also the story of an ancillary work that serves the text, a work that is pegged down to the role of an ad hoc allusion, which is also macrotextual and all-encompassing. Once detected, allusion—in the case of this novel, as mentioned earlier, starting with the title and the cover—is a signal of intermediality, a “time for suspicion,” pointing to other allusions. The reader, alerted, is on guard. Where One Sees the Reader Unsettled by Allusion Let us now return to our point of departure, that is, what happens when one does not detect the allusion? I suggest that even if allusion is not recognised or identified, it, nevertheless, sends a signal because of its poetic value, the defamiliarisation brought about by a sound, a plagiarised sentence. According to A. Compagnon, this represents “an obscurity, or a literary strangeness that plays the role of an ‘index of allusion’”53 or even a “‘sign of allusion’ (Riffaterre’s ‘agrammaticality’).”54 For Hamon also,

The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns  173 “allusion is the textual locus of discomfort of the reading accessing that which haunts it, the truth.”55 In other words, where the text presents a certain jolt, the reader must assess her/his position and resituate her/ himself in the reading, which is further complicated when the narrator oscillates between wanting/knowing/being able to/having not to say or not wanting to say. Even when allusion is not interpreted or identified, the vagueness remains, an effect that troubles the reader’s consciousness like a recollection, a latent dream that still troubles one upon awakening. This is where allusion’s unheimlich effect lies, an effect that is undoubtedly connected to dreams, memory, and games. Authier-Revuz notes the way in which the fragment “projects itself on the threads of speech,”56 moving from a pure rupture to a gentle troubling effect brought about by the unexpected, the bizarre, the suspicion, or certitude of a borrowing whose source escapes us. What suspends the reader’s activity is the “discomfort [created] by a saying traversed by the shadows of another discourse.”57 If allusion fails, a feeling of dysphoria is produced and the speaker risks losing some crucial meaning. This risk pertains to the relation of interlocution that plays with memory, draws the figure of the addressee, and establishes a community. 58 It is an “enclosing strategy of exchange, destined to succeed only within an adequate community. On the contrary, without the prerequisite of a recipient, the (marked) borrowing tends towards the self-sufficiency of a saying.”59 Herein lies the notion of a “double audience” founded on the “pleasure of complicity with a restricted audience without risking the failure of communication with a larger one: this is achieved by commenting on the allusion, very often in a note.”60 Indeed, allusion is of greater interest than an explicit citation, a question of “selective elegance.”61 Pictorial allusion plays on the literary’s obliqueness. It performs a transmutation. It constitutes a paradox, in that it functions as an attenuation of the discourse’s impact, while acquiring the value of a euphemism. It is also endowed with a metalinguistic and/or metatextual function, highlighting the text as an artifice, a word play. Pictorial allusion stages the intermedial relation and designates the image from a distance while avoiding the precision of ekphrasis. The memory solicited by the textual signal, its incongruity, and the reminder of the subject must, therefore, recover the painting or the medium to which it alludes, be it photography, mirror, tapestry, and so on. Specifically with reference to the relation between image, allusion, and memory, the latter may manifest itself as image or use it so that, as Vouilloux notes, it reminds us of it by bringing forth the domain of memoria as in ancient rhetoric, studied by F. Yates. Yates starts with referring back to Simonides of Ceos and how he invented the art of memory through visually memorising guests at a banquet. Cicero told this story insisting on “the importance of order for memory […] and that the sense

174  The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns of sight is the strongest of all senses.”62 Allusion is indexical and metonymic (a signal designating something else deictically), a relic, a trace, an imprint, pointing back to its origin and evoking it by association. Even though the allusive index does not resemble the original image63 and is only iconic in the second degree, on the screen of the spectator’s inner eye, still, it is the trace of a mnemonic presence, the imprint of a passage, an already crossed territory, put in memory and signalling the presence of a figured absence. Taking the lead from Authier-Revuz,I would suggest that the strong ties between allusion and memory are best described as “a reminiscence [of a seeing] in saying”64 that gives access to a forgotten before. Thus, the book becomes a “site of memory,”65 a living museum, a book of illustrated art produced after memory and according to66 this memory. Hence, pictorial allusion realises the link between memory, vision, and representation even more intimately; it solicits memory, yet, contrary to reference, it does not freeze it. Allusion sets memory in motion and so its imagistic value would be more pregnant with meaning when placed in the literary text that makes it more visual. It, therefore, fulfils a function of reinforcement and carries an aesthetic or artistic surplus that functions differently from the intertextual allusion. Actually, if the latter refers to a text while remaining in the same semiotic code, with pictorial allusion, there is a change of degree, a change of medium. While a text alluding to another text refers to language and to signs that have already been read and reactivated, to a reading experience rather than a viewing or a contemplation, the image and its force of evidence interposes a “something,” an “other thing” that cannot be pinpointed exactly, the visual, the instantaneous (in perception). The reader turns into spectator. In other words, while allusion to a work of literature consists in a concentric (centripetal) evocation, allusion to a painting performs an excentric (centrifugal) movement. Where Allusion Touches Goal As mentioned before, pictorial allusion may be conceived as a transfer (that of a detour, of an enigma), an exchange operation between text and image in action, at the moment when it is effectuated. It is, therefore, a movement in the mind of the reader, who recognises the still veiled and imprecise image rising from between the lines of the quivering text, but also a change of rhythm, since the pace of the text and that of reading are affected, modified. As a constitutive mode of the literary event, a mode of accessing truth, a certain meaning or form, or the past, allusion is, in any case, an expression veiled by something that needs be said or needs be seen. More importantly, allusion is a mode of being, because it cannot exist otherwise. Finally, even if allusion to other works of literature, cultural

The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns  175 happenings, events, or works belonging to other arts escapes us, what counts is, first and foremost, the value added to the text that is modulated by this inscription of the other discourse, of the image of the other, of the painting of the other. Pictorial allusion is but one of the modes of the “pictorial third” manifestations. The pictorial third resonates with a visual syncopation as much as with a dynamic arrangement of time and space, the visible and the legible. Yet, prior to setting the critical foundation for this double event, we must examine its constituent elements, illusion, and double perception.

Phenomena and Double Perception: Double Seeing and Reading I read a text and here is an image, or indeed, here is yet more text! In looking at the image, I always textualize it in some way, and in reading the text, I image it.67 The phenomenon occurring once a text refers to an image and attempts to make the reader “see” constitutes a superimposition of visions, where the reading/legible vision produces a modality of the visual reaching out toward the visible, doubled by the invisible, a “seeing” in-between vision and reading. As mentioned earlier, several scholars have acknowledged this phenomenon, in their own way, yet without systematically applying it to text/image. The exploration of the mechanism of illusion allows us to better comprehend this phenomenon, while investigating the notions of percept, affect, and concept. The image assumes the role of the text’s illusion. The text itself, as a trompe-l’oeil, fooling the eye, makes us believe that we are seeing an image. The image misleads meaning, the letter, our hearing, and disturbs the text. When conjured by the text, image creates an illusion and constitutes an apparition, an “illumination,” a light in between illusion and reality. Are the image and its flicker the par excellence light of the text? Illusion The terminology of the term, stemming from the Latin verb ludere—to play, to mock, to jeer—carries a certain ludic quality that brings it close to allusion. According to Webster’s Dictionary, an illusion is: to deceive, to delude, to mislead; apparition; perception of something objectively existing in such a way as to cause misinterpretation of its actual nature, either because of the ambiguous qualities of the thing perceived or because of the personal characteristics of the one perceiving or because of both factors.

176  The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns This definition readily shows that what we are faced with is a phenomenon that is situated in-between—in-between the properties of the object and its ambiguities, and/or those of the receiving subject and their personal desire. In any case, as Bernard Noël puts it, illusion entails an experience at the limits of seeing: “seeing an illusion is a way of thinking the limit, since the limit itself is none other than an illusion in the game of thought.”68 In his own exploration of the mechanisms of illusion, in Le réel et son double, C. Rosset demonstrates how a double vision masks the perturbing real at the moment when one wants to be released from it so as to avoid its potentially unpleasant consequences: […] it is a fair perception that appears powerless to engage in a type of behaviour adapted to perception. I don’t refuse to see, not at all, and I certainly don’t deny the real that I am shown. But my complacency stops there. I have seen, I have admitted but you shouldn’t ask for anything more. As for the rest, I stick to my point of view, persist in my attitude, just as if I hadn’t seen anything. My present perception and my previous point of view coexist in a paradoxical relation. It is not so much an erroneous perception but, rather a useless perception. It seems that this “useless perception” constitutes one of the most remarkable characteristics of illusion (…) It is not denial: it is simply displacement, placing elsewhere.69 Rosset takes his argument a bit further and adds: “we could say that the perception of the one experiencing an illusion is as if split into two: the theoretical aspect (that designates, precisely, ‘what is seen,’ (the theorein) artificially emancipates itself from the practical aspect (‘what is done’),”70 which is to say that the acts are not direct “logical” consequences of what is placed before our eyes. We can see, then, how the lexis of vision and that of perception are solicited by theoretical discourse. Seeing (Voir) is dissociated from Knowing (Savoir). Considering Rosset’s suggestion that a “very profound link unites illusion to duplication, to the double,”71 implying that it is both itself and other, the connection between the phenomenon of illusion and that produced by text/image appears clearly; the text creates the illusion of the presence of an image owing to linguistic means, while continuing to present the reader with a series of printed signs. ­Regardless of the paradox emerging from Rousset’s analysis, namely that the image rising from the text makes it disappear, I read the text while at the same time choosing to see the image. In short, as Nancy states: I read a text and here is an image, or indeed, here is yet more text! In looking at the image, I always textualize it in some way, and in reading the text, I image it. These actualizations are innumerable: no text has its proper image, no image its proper text.

The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns  177 But when an actualization occurs—which one could call, in either case, an interpretation—there is indeed soul and body, that is, form and intensity (for these are the true senses of the words soul and body). Form and intensity are intimately mingled together, however, just as the Cartesian soul is present everywhere in the body that it animates, or that animates it, as one might say. […] Body and soul are in truth only one word, divided in two in order to show how they interpret each other in both senses at once.72 These observations on optical effects resulting from perception remind us of Deleuze’s conception of percept: “is this not the definition of the percept itself—to make perceptible the imperceptible forces that populate the world, affect us, and make us become? […] Painting’s eternal object is this: to paint forces, like Tintoretto.”73 Deleuze’s take on art as a way of “capturing forces” echoes, in a sense, the classical concept of energeia. It is what Nancy calls the “pressure” of the image: The image is a thing that is not the thing: it distinguishes itself from it, essentially. But what distinguishes itself essentially from the thing is also the force—the energy, pressure, or intensity. The “sacred” was always a force, not to say a violence. What remains to be grasped is how the force and the image belong to one another in the same distinction. How the image gives itself through a distinctive trait (every image declares itself or indicates itself as an “image” in some way),and how what it thus gives is first a force, an intensity, the very force of its distinction.74 Force and intensity, as well as the double perception inherent in illusion, are also at the heart of classical representation: one sees the subject and forgets the canvas that offers its surface before our eyes. Perspective pierces the space represented by its representative artifices; nonetheless, it is no longer the object directly presented before my eyes, but an image that imposes itself, with its forceful lines and its intensity, its energeia. When grafted onto illusion, the text/image double phenomenon, already acknowledged by several theoreticians and put into play in various ways, pertains to a double vision. “Double Exposure,” the Phenomenon of Double Vision: Superimposition Barthes’s expression “an idea for research” that I have used as a starting point for this study stems from a visual reversal, what he calls an inversion (a term carrying heavy connotations in the nineteenth century),produced by a particular image in Proust’s In Search of Lost

178  The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns Time: the narrator sees an ugly woman reading on the train to Balbec and he mistakes her for a brothel-keeper but later learns that she is Princess Sherbatoff. The two pictures clash. Barthes’s conclusions on this “my wife/my mother-in-law” type of image see the changes in the narrator’s point of view in terms of a drawing, which is most appropriate here: This pattern, which conjoins two absolutely antipathetic states in one and the same object and radically reverses an appearance into its contrary, is frequent in Proust’s novel. These notations are so frequent, they are applied so consistently to such different objects, situations, and languages, that we may identify in them a form of discourse whose very obsessiveness is enigmatic. Let us call this form, at least provisionally, inversion, and let us anticipate (without presently being able to do so) inventorying its occurrences (…) This would propose “an idea of research.”75

Double Vision: The Shady Image Even though theoretical formulations as to what exactly happens at that moment are not always in agreement, it is generally accepted that in the plastic arts an image may hide another image.76 Some famous examples of this phenomenon would include mirrorings or illusions of double figures found in the paintings of Archimboldo, for instance, the anthropomorphic landscapes, caricature, the visual games of S­ urrealism, as well as Joseph Raetz’s sculptures, particularly his homage to Joseph Beuys entitled Métamorphose II Beuys Lapin, presenting a troubling analogy to Jastrow’s well-known carved figure of the duck/rabbit paintings. Sketches and engravings that constitute examples of double vision have often been discussed by philosophers and theoreticians such as ­Gombrich or Mitchell, particularly so in relation to their cognitive functions. The fact that such ambiguities are inherent in an image underlines the possibility that such a double image may undoubtedly exist, just as one cannot doubt the double nature of an image oscillating between two temporalities and two spaces. In his discussion of the duck/rabbit, ­Gombrich elaborates on the difficulties the viewer faces when passing from one visual interpretation to another: True, we can switch from one reading to another with increasing rapidity; we will also “remember” the rabbit while we see the duck, but the more closely we watch ourselves, the more certainly we will discover that we cannot experience alternative readings at the same time. Illusion, we will find, is hard to describe or analyse, for though

The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns  179 we may be intellectually aware of the fact that any given experience must be an illusion, we cannot, strictly speaking, watch ourselves having an illusion.77 (5) The imaginary is activated when it is stimulated by the blink of double perception or the double gaze. Patrick Vauday reminds us of J. P. Sartre’s seminal work where he speaks of a way for the image and imagination to create a non-existent world, a world whose image can only arise when the former recedes in the background. Here is Sartre’s contribution: painting does not reflect the world, it projects an imaginary. No matter how strong the resemblance, there is no way of confusing the image with the real that it represents, as it exists differently than a thing, notably the thing of which it is the image. This is because perceiving and imagining are two activities of a very different nature: in the first case, we have an intuition of a real that presently imposes itself on us and whose function as our being-in-the-world varies; in the second case, the object is sighted in its unreality and absence to respond to the call of our desires and beliefs. To imagine is to give oneself to a world that, precisely, does not exist, and whose image can only exist on condition that we refuse the real world (…) To adequately measure the impact of Sartre’s analysis it is essential to comprehend that we do not perceive an image – photography, painting – without intentionally, albeit spontaneously, forming it, even when it is another’s work: we do not perceive an image without, in a sense, imagining it; otherwise, we are only dealing with something simple, a canvas or a piece of paper.78 Following M. Merleau-Ponty and R. Wollheim, Vauday claims that it is no longer a matter of seeing the canvas or the painting but of seeing the two together, of going beyond Sartre’s alternative so as to “see something in something else.”79 Vauday thus revisits the phenomenon of “double perception,” identified by Wollheim when defining the two categories of “seeing-as” and “seeing-in,”80 and suggests that “[the type of] vision that is suitable for representation allows [us] to pay attention simultaneously to the represented and to representation, to the object and to the medium.”81 Indeed, Wollheim returns to his formulation of “seeing-as” in his essay entitled “Seeing-as, Seeing-in and Pictorial ­Representation, ”the fifth of the essays supplementing his Art and its Objects, and refines it: However, I now think that representational seeing should be understood as involving, and therefore best seeing-as, seeing-in, and pictorial representation elucidated through, not seeing-as, but another

180  The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns phenomenon closely related to it, which I call ‘seeing-in’. Where previously I would have said that representational seeing is a matter of seeing x (= the medium or representation) as y (= the object, or what is represented),I would now say that it is, for the same values of the variables, a matter of seeing y in x.82 According to Wollheim’s proposition, when looking at the photographic image of a friend dressed as Alcibiades, “seeing-as” consists in actually seeing Alcibiades—rather than my friend in his costume—the medium having disappeared; if what I see is everything simultaneously, that is Alcibiades, as well as the model and the photograph, then it is a case of “seeing in.” It should be noted here that photography is yet another particular case, different from painting, even though the latter may derive inspiration from a photographic subject matter, which would complicate the process further. Many instances of these phenomena might be found in cloud shapes, in interesting figurative wall stains, or remarkable landscapes found in the veins of stones. One may also remember the famous episode concerning Leonardo’s sponge-throwing onto a wall for pattern’s sake. The list of suchlike rich, optical, illusionist stimulations would be long. Contrary to Gombrich, Wollheim argues for the possibility of a double perception, what he calls “the twofold thesis” or “twofold attention,” whereby the spectator sees both the subject matter and the medium, sometimes in different degrees of intensity: This requirement upon the seeing appropriate to representations I shall call ‘the twofold thesis’. The thesis says that my visual attention must be distributed between two things though of course it need not be equally distributed between them, and I have argued for it in arguing against Gombrich.83 For Wollheim, then, it is possible to see both the painting and the represented object, in a manner that is very different from the ambiguous case of the duck/rabbit drawing; for him, this ambiguous case does not present any “primary disjunction,” nor any disjunction of the first order (between the medium and the object, concerning the representation and perception of a painting), as suggested by Gombrich, but only a “second disjunction,” a disjunction of the second order (ambiguous drawing). This is also reminiscent of Merleau-Ponty’s ruminations on the Lascaux cave art: Thus there appears a “visible” to the second power, a carnal essence or icon of the first. It is not a faded copy, a trompe l’oeil, or another thing. The animals painted on the walls of Lascaux are not there in

The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns  181 the same way as are the fissures and limestone formations. Nor are they elsewhere. Pushed forward here, held back there, supported by the wall’s mass they use so adroitly, they radiate about the wall without ever breaking their elusive moorings. I would be hard pressed to say where the painting is I am looking at. For I do not look at it as one looks at a thing, fixing it in its place. My gaze wanders within it as in the halos of Being. Rather than seeing it, I see according to or with it.84 According to Merleau-Ponty, this double perception constitutes an illusionary phenomenon resulting in the appearance of a “‘visible’ to the second power.” Two images appearing at the same time, in the same space, without being fixed, neither here, nor there—all this oscillates and scintillates: “where is the painting that I am looking at?” Finally, let us also quote Daniel Arasse’s work and his discussion on the necessity of a double gaze, one in close proximity and one from a distance, when he addresses the question of the detail and pleads for an art history that is closer to painting. The development of this concept of seeing from up close/seeing from afar has been developing ever since Horace’s Art of Poetry, specifically the verses 361–365 where, following his famous ut pictura poesis, the poet highlights the notion of taking pleasure in the contemplation of a painting: Poetry ís like painting: there are pictures that attract You more nearer to, and others from further away. This needs the shadows, that to be seen in the light, Not fearing the critic’s sharp eye: this pleased once, That, though examined ten thousand times, still pleases.85 Interestingly, the pleasure that the art historian derives from moving closer or further away from a painting, so that an image may be revealed, simulates that of the encounter with the image in literature. The workings of the constitutive oscillation between the represented object and its background, their physical, material appropriateness and their perceptual or cognitive discordance, or, better still, the question of the possibility of their simultaneous coexistence, present many analogies to what happens in the text/image compound. The modalities of its function also adhere to the modes of the double, are articulated on the principles of illusion, and play with ambiguity, or even duplicity. The text plays the role of the support/background (itself already a representation) and the image is contained within it, playing the role of the represented object (even if it is itself already a representation). This constitutive oscillation in the text/image relationship I advocate finds an echo in Nancy when, in a chapter interestingly entitled “the distinct oscillation,” he speaks of the workings occurring between text and image and, having

182  The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns argued that “the difference between text and image is flagrant,”86 he continues: Each one draws the other toward itself or is drawn toward it. There is always a tension. There is a drawing out [du tirage], a traction: in a word, a line [un trait]. There is an invisible, untraced line that draws out and traces on both sides, that passes between the two without passing anywhere. It draws out and traces nothing, perhaps, but this impalpable line[...]87

Double Vision in Text/Image The experience of double vision, be it temporal (mnemonic) or spatial (visual), allows for a reconsidering of the palimpsest effect between two texts or between a text and an image; remembering in-text resembles a remanence, a rewriting in the visual mode. In order to handle this difficult question and to avoid the “threat of visualisation” discussed in Jean Rousset’s writings on Claude Simon,88 certain writers chose to unsettle the mechanisms through which a mental image emerges, by resorting to fragmentation, rupture, reduction of the description, even by proposing versions that are “incompatible or contradictory … it is perhaps here that we should look for one of the effects produced by such texts: disquiet or paralyse the reader in his habits with a view to provoking a new type of reading.”89 A reading/seeing experience, perhaps. What happens, then, in the mind of those reading such a description? The notion of “double perception” has not only been used by art historians and phenomenologists, but also by theoreticians of the text; Carlos Baker,90 for instance, defines the ambiguous phenomenon of “double exposure” as a present vision, that of the event, on which a past vision is superimposed, as if in an imaginary visualisation. An eloquent example of this process is offered by R. Flaxman who, taking the lead from Baker, discusses Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey and comments on its ­effects: the poet returns to these places and describes the scene in detail, in a “word-painting” that superimposes the remembered view and the contemplated landscape, fusing perception and imagination. The first helps us understand the second, reveal it, and thus give it meaning. More specifically, while discussing Wordsworth’s lines: Once again I see These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild (I. 14–15)

The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns  183 Flaxman elaborates on the effect produced: This verse includes two different versions of the same scene, on the one hand a mental construction piously preserved from the passage of time, on the other hand the present aspect of the scene. […] The reading of this passage underlines the way in which Wordsworth’s word-painting transmits the message of “Tintern Abbey:” the poet discovers how he can relate to nature in a process that fuses perception and imagination. […] Thus, we can embark on a study of nineteenth century writers that links narration to description in a way that is more organic than it was the case with “word-painters” of the previous century.91 This “double exposition,” then, unfolds on the temporal axis, fusing two separate events in one poetic verse that translates the poet/viewer’s view and affect. Besides, the stakes of the connection between narration and description in text/image are also legible here in terms of genre, as the nineteenth century makes it one of the poetic, “organic” constituents of its literary apparatus. The same term reappears in a more recent work by Tamar Yacobi, who studies ekphrasis and speaks of “Ekphrastic Double Exposure.”92 Yacobi defines ekphrasis as an intermedial citation, a “verbal representation of a visual art, that represents itself an object of the first order,”93 separating the object from its text/image representation in four stages. Double exposure is defined as “texts that simultaneously evoke – in the way of montage – a certain number of discreet visual sources”94; it is a “joint evocation.” Still, Yacobi’s definition is different from that by Carlos Baker, adopted by Flaxman, who refers to the superimposition of a perception and a remembrance that glides into poetic expression. For Yacobi, it is a case of a simultaneous, montage-like use of multiple visual sources or specifically refers to the ekphrastic double exposure of two works of art that are not to be seen together, yet are placed together in the way of a palimpsest and become supplementary. These are not two texts blended together as hypotext and hypertext, but two works of art manifesting themselves simultaneously in one (or even, according to Yacobi’s suggestion, two) texts. An illustrative example of this process is offered by Blake Morrison’s poem “Teeth,”95 introducing one of Bacon’s paintings at the diegetic level, while also “in montage” with Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” that ekphrastically unfolds an image of the same genre. The interplay staged among the four art forms reveals “Teeth”’s unsaid meaning, uncovering the murder of a woman by her husband for reasons of aesthetic incompatibility.96 Yacobi takes the argument even further, making a “visual discourse” out of ekphrasis and treating painting as an act of communication situated at the same level as writing. Once more, the pictorial model is assimilated by the model of language.

184  The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns These examples of critical writing demonstrate the acknowledgement of a phenomenon that operates on the basis of a double, when text and image coexist and their joint forces, captured in the work, become perceptible. What happens, then, in these cases? Text/Image Effects Risk and Subversion When one speaks of an image in the text or one traces a discourse of the painting, the form of linguistic expression itself indicates a disjunction— or a forced, disjointed junction—of heterogeneous elements. The slash separating the two terms in the “text/image” definition of this phenomenon plays the role of a suture, also indicating rupture. Apart from what Lojkine calls the disjunction “between the representational medium and the semiology organising this representation,”97 what emerges is a desire to keep the two together. Lojkine promotes the fruitful idea of the text being subverted by the image and perceives the image as a phenomenon that exposes the structure of the work while implementing an apparatus. The image acquires the value of an emergence that opens up the “eye of the text” and then produces an anachronistic discourse that necessarily takes place “after” the image and “according to” the image. What rises in between medium and representation is alterity, heterogeneity, a fruitful, although sometimes disturbing, distortion. The Sensible Approach: A Singular Resonance In certain cases, therefore, painting is a mediator of impressions, rather than a model of writing, a means of accessing truths that would otherwise have been impossible to phrase; it is a way of approaching “real life,” of enabling its essence to appear or also—considering Bergez’s reading of Proust98 —a way of recapturing memory. An image reaches out with a soothing effect, as per Lacan, constituting, in the case of anamorphosis, a “trap for the gaze”99; contemplating an image produces a kind of trance-like effect. On the other hand, some images liberate unsettling and upsetting forces, for instance, the emotions generated by Bacon’s paintings that, in high dosage, are difficult to support. Perhaps this is what Lyotard termed affect.100 In any case, be they paintings or photographs, images produce affects; the body is touched, captivated by the image and its subsequent encounter with it. However, my interest here does not lie in discussing the divisions between cognitivists, psychoanalysts, or neurologists on the subject of mental images101 or emotions but, more simply, in signalling the wealth of information inherent in them. The cognitivist aspect of intermedial studies remains to be explored, as a next step that might allow for the development

The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns  185 of new ideas of research. Let me just briefly mention that Wollheim adopts a cognitivist approach, based on which he recognised his limits, while Eric Laurent holds the position of the analyst discussing the distinction between emotion, affecting the body, and sentiment, which is of the cognitive order, related to the intellect.102 Neurologist Lionel Naccache explores what he calls “the new unconscious” and raises issues concerning psychoanalysis (the Freudian unconscious) and cognition (cognitive unconscious), as well as questions of mental representation and conscience, in light of the recent experiments on the neurosciences and the mind.103 Bernard Noël brings his poetic experience into the discussion and revisits Merleau-Ponty’s cross of the visible and notion of chiasmus: “Mind is the place which does not work as a place. It informs but has no form. Whereas it shapes those ambiguous objects, of which art is both flesh and reason, the end and the beginning.”104 Inner space meets outer space. Focusing on the idea that the reading of a text/image produces an event, an advent, the next part of this study will be investigating the ways in which the reader is affected by text/image. What happens when the body is brought into play? An opening? A type of dreaming also? A shiver, an emotion? The text/image necessarily implies a co-­production, a “movement of the book,”105 and the stimulated, alerted, unsettled reader becomes active; they perform superpositions, superimpressions, collages, a montage even that endows the image with a dialectical quality. In the text/image dialogue, just like in Michaud’s work, we are invited to: live (his) work and the links it draws between texts and images according to the falsities and revivals of memory, thought and ­imagination—up to, why not, false reconstitution—by tracing each one of our trajectories in this gigantic work that endangers all principles of unity, redistributing what once was or seemed to be one.106 The text, therefore, becomes “bi-faced,” polymorphic; it is the result of a cooperation. We might envisage the text/image effect as a question of repercussions, pointing to the Latin roots of the word, meaning to resonate. We are faced with an event, a dynamic resurgence that also carries an aesthetic quality, an element of surprise, of the unexpected, and effectuates a recomposition or a modification. The image/text upends and instigates a re-examination of what was previously considered true or stable, a redisposition, a reorganisation. This is one of the most important functions of the visual in text, one of its ethical stakes: to provoke a ‘folding’ of the interrogation, a derangement of the event, a soft revolution. As the forces triggering the senses are released in the work and the body enters this process, an affect is produced, as well as a singular experience and thought of the work; something “happens” through sensation in sensation. The resonances of the senses draw the individual

186  The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns towards the singular, towards the vibrations of what I have elsewhere called “iconorythm,” a blend of text/image,107 time and speed. The movement of seeing imparts the text with the rhythm of the painting and combines it with that of reading. And Nancy wonders: But what is “giving presence”? Isn’t it giving what cannot be given: what is or is not? […] It is the squaring of the circle, or of love, which gives something one does not have to someone who does not want it, as a psychoanalyst (which is to say, a specialist in image-texts) once said. The image gives a presence that it lacks—since it has no other presence than the unreal one of its thin, filmlike surface—and it gives it to something that, being absent, cannot receive it.108 The pleasure of the contemplated work doubles with the pain of the loss inherent in the final gaze cast back on the painting. The text/image truly vibrates in a process of capturing and releasing, when, no matter how taken or moved by it, we accept to break free, so that we can see better. Let us finish this quick touring of sensations with Anne Sauvagnargues’s reprise of Deleuze’s thoughts on art: Art forces thought to create new concepts. Thus, Deleuze forbids reducing the image to a single analogic or allegoric theory: images, in the sense that he employs this term, do not require to be translated into a discursive enunciation in order to produce their cognitive effect. Captures of forces and images solicit thought to the level of sensation. Art does not operate in a private and mental, subjective dimension: it is neither reducible to a symbolic system, nor to an appeal to the imaginary, the fantasy or the dream; instead, it really produces images that make [us] think.109 For Deleuze, then, in each case, the thoughts are inseparable from the images; they are completely immanent to the images. There are no abstract thoughts realised indifferently in one image or another, but concrete images that only exist through these images and their means.110 Further down, having specified that: what I call a thought is not the content of a question, which can be abstract and banal (where are we going, where do we come from?). lt is the formal passage from a situation to a hidden question, the metamorphosis of the faces,111 he adds that “an image is only worth the thoughts it creates.”112

The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns  187

The Pictorial Third, the In-between Event When the pictorial is put into words, it may serve as an indicator of the tension of the text being (in)formed by the image and hence being endowed with a visual (artistic, optical, photographic) quality that—beyond its own energy and force, and beyond the intensity it sends forth—also carries meaning and becomes another mode of signification that cannot be bypassed or ignored. Criticism, then, “ex-changes” the text in the way the mirror in Quentin Metsys’s The Moneylender and his Wife—by allowing us to see the invisible, the painting’s other, what lies outside—­ performs an exchange from saying into doing, from doing into saying, from the image to the text. It is through the outside of the text (the pictorial), once located inside it, that the invisible is “rendered” by way of the pictorial. “Art does not reproduce the visible, it makes things visible.”113 The modalities of transposition explored in the first chapter of this book allow us to rethink the relation between image and text and to better grasp the impact that their fundamental analogy—seen as a perfect resemblance despite their dissimilarities—has in the process of translating or transporting from one medium to the other. The passage between the two media is read in-between as the reader is never totally inside the one, nor completely outside the other. This instability of text/image, what Nancy calls “distinct oscillation,” which results in the establishment of a relation between the text and the image, fascinates the writer and the reader, since it constantly places them inside the transposition, the transaction, the negotiation, and imposes a kind of writing or a dynamic, active reading where the image provides an impetus throughout the text, throughout the language that allows it to rise. It is an operation of conversion and change, the “change of relations.” I therefore suggest calling this event, this in-between space, the “pictorial third,” a third that is necessary for the analysis of some intensely pictorial texts. I ground this term on Michel Serres’s “instructed third” and Derrida’s “third book,” the book that remains suspended somewhere between the one the reader holds in their hands and that which the writer intended, as a supplement, an invention, in every sense of the term, most of all in the sense of a treasure. The Pictorial Third: Effects, Affects: A Dynamic, a Rhythm Definition and Modalities of Function As a starting point, we might adapt and apply on the text/image what Wollheim says on the subject of “seeing-in” and “twofold attention” (with the relative dissociation between representation and represented object) as a way of “exploiting dissociation:” I have, however, spoken of ‘relative dissociation’, and advisedly.

188  The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns For the artist who (as we have seen) exploits twofoldness to build up analogies and correspondences between the medium and the object of representation cannot be thought content to leave the two visual experiences in such a way that one merely floats above the other. He must be concerned to return one experience to the other. Indeed he constantly seeks an ever more intimate rapport between the two experiences, but how this is to be described is a challenge to phenomenological acuity which I cannot think how to meet.114 The analogy to what I propose is striking: the image that floats above the text or between the two (the medium like the text and the image, whether mimetic or not), the wish to relate the two experiences and to study their interactions, and, finally, the admission of the difficulty in rendering the subsequent phenomenological challenge presented. It is interesting to note that Wollheim uses the French word rapport in his text, to refer to an intermediary/intermedial activity, which is reminiscent of Foucault’s rapport infini. The pictorial contribution, an oblique flash of glazing light projected onto the text, activates the pictorial third that is actualised once an image-in-text, an in-between phenomenon, rises in the reader’s mind; it is a dynamic, oscillating between an imagistic reading and a read image. The pictorial third is this vibrant in-between, situated between text and image, just like the slash separating the two. It is what materialises on the screen of the reader/spectator’s inner eye, very much like what C. Perrer said of the mirror in Las Meninas: if there is ‘vision,’[the spectator] is neither its holder nor its source, but a dark room, the secret panopticon, the screen of projection. The mirror turns the spectator into this empty place where the painting appears, producing an image.115 Bernard Noel also evokes the dark room as one of his leitmotifs: The invisible is behind our eyes, it is the thickness of the body. We are thus obscure machines: the blackness, in a sense, of a dark chamber. There has been much talk about the body [yet] under these circumstances the body is nothing but an eventuality: we must look behind the look to operate the reversal that could, perhaps, make it happen.116 The dynamics of the pictorial third is put into play in these “obscure machines” as movement, a kind of energy bringing about perturbation, a surplus of meaning and affect, a dream that dances between the two. Neither one nor the other, it is both one and the other, as the image turns and returns; it is an operation and also a performance.

The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns  189 Emerging between the text and the image, the pictorial third triggers an interplay between the two; it is a floating image (virtual or real, ­Descarte’s “image in the air”117) suggested by the text, an image that may allude to a painting in the extra-text but also a painting (or one of its substitutes) that is imaginary or notional, to be reconstructed by the reader. The pictorial third image, therefore, is the property and invention of the reader, as it never coincides with the one intended by the narrator’s inner vision. It is worth remembering here that while discussing ancient rhetoric, doxa and deixis, Vouilloux stipulates for the establishment of relations between the two through the mediation of a third and, as such, through a technique; in one of his earlier works, he suggests the necessity to use a “third element” by arguing that: All linguistic production that takes image as an object is included in the totality of the cultural ‘text’ that is stratified in a multiplicity of discursive occurrences. The latter, together with the purely linguistic, inherent in language constraints, constitute the paintings ‘interpreter,’ or, in other words, the mediating term, the third element through which all discourse that refers back to the painting (through reference or through allusion) transists.118 My definition of the “pictorial third” is not exactly the same: I would say, on the contrary, that “it is the in-between which makes the third advent,” which constitutes an event—also relating to Marin’s definition of the “reading event”119 —a movement produced by this passage between the two media Marin experienced on discovering drawings by Stendhal penned on the written pages of his own drafts of Vie de Henry Brulard. When the image emerges in a text, it ruptures, interrupts, disassembles it, and causes a bisection, haziness, a hesitation. Because of heterogeneity, one cannot ignore it. This can create a tremor or, at least, an obstacle between the text and the reader’s inner eye. As an art object, it interposes itself, subverts the text, and startles both text and reader and creates a tremor. The pictorial third presents multiple effects: 1 When the text is translated through the image (in the form of an illustration, for example, as shown by Shapiro, with the Bible120), the chain of language becomes an actualised painting, which is evoked by the text while at the same time erasing it. The image takes primacy over the text. 2 When the image (outside the text) is translated by the text, it ­becomes an image-in-text that produces a text/image; it loses its pictorial permanence to be de/recomposed in a chain of language (like, for instance, in Girl with a Pearl Earring, the painting is disseminated in a series of signifiers in the text; it is narrativised and, once

190  The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns recognised, must be reconstructed by the reader into a painting by Vermeer). The image goes through the chain of language that also becomes a painting (iconotext, text/image), which is not fixed and is not a “frozen image,” to use Rhoda Flaxman and others’ words. On the contrary, the passage from the text to the image and vice versa imparts the reading experience with the shivering of life; the reactualisation of the painting that appears, disappears, and reappears in the text—as, for example, in Claude Simon’s The Flanders Road— energises the image and inscribes a duration. Its fragmentary quality and its ensuing dissemination also shun fixity. Depending on its function, as well as the degrees of exteriority and of pictoriality, this device may present different nuances. Some Critical Propositions for Furthering Reflection First Proposition: Generic Stakes Given that the word/image transposition implies a change of theoretical position, a generic alteration, can one go as far as speaking about “pictorial” or “visual” texts? The quotation or allusion to a text in a text is different from the quotation or allusion to a painting; there, the eye of the text must be opened, so that we may be allowed to see, dream, pay attention to the pictorial, and, finally, derive pleasure from it. This presupposes a particular “competence” on the part of the reader who must reconstruct the image; it also requires a learning process—learning how to look—that is no different to learning a foreign language, a translation, or to using a kind of “lorrain-glass” painters used to carry so as to frame a landscape prior to drawing it. Second Proposition: A Text/Image Gradient It is also necessary to elaborate on a typology of texts graded according to their degree of visual saturation, based on a text/image gradient, and to propose a categorisation of texts in subgenres, depending on their degree of pictorial density, ranging from “artistic” text to “writings on art.” When the text calls the image forth, or “speaks” the image, it produces an a fortiori pictorial discourse during which the image exists outside the text, for discourse moulds itself on the image, or recourse to the image is punctual. In this case, movement is exocentric; the text moves towards the image, towards its other, as is the case with ­Banville’s Ghosts pointing towards Watteau’s paintings or Woolf’s To the ­Lighthouse pointing towards Caravaggio. When the image calls for a text and when the text becomes image (virtually or not), a pictorial discursive is produced. In this case, the image

The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns  191 summons the text while consistently remaining predominant, the text ceding under its pressure. An eloquent example is offered by The ­Picture of Dorian Gray or Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn, when the image is so ­ ousset’s strong that it has the upper hand, somewhat in the way of Jean R perception of the text disappearing under the description of the image.121 We, therefore, get the impression that the text is exchanged into an image, a little like a Chinese painting juxtaposing a poem and an image and placing them both in the visual domain. Taken to a limit, the text may even become an image, become visual, like in Philippe de Champaigne’s well-known Ex-votoor in Klee, Rauschenberg, Basquiat, Finlay, and many others, where writing becomes a pictorial process or a graphic apparatus. This is also the case with Apollinaire’s calligrams, Perec or Danielewski’s mimetic typography, instances where the image figures specifically in the literary work, such as Deborah Moggach’s Tulip Fever or Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things, or when cartography is included in the literary territory. Then, the text is of a high pictorial concentration, as the image constitutes one of its major structural elements, which is very different from the cases when text and image appear on equal terms and confront each other in a dialogic exchange. The discursive image goes through the text and loses its material quality even if the text passing through the image does not stop being a text. Nevertheless, the image brings something to the text that, in turn, borrows the visual supplement that unleashes the “pictorial third.” Pragmatics of a Pictorial Reading: Where one sees the effects of the text/image relation being ex-changed into “pictorial third” Specificity of Text/Image It is now time to pose the difficult question of what the image-in-text (producing the text/image) changes in relation to a text that does not point—in one way or another—to an image. How does painting the image (once it has become “pictorial language”) “render” unto the text what it has lent it? Is there something specific there? What is the function of the image-in-text? What does the pictorial reference do? What does the pictorial third bring to the literary text? A visual modulation? An aesthetic surplus? A complicity with the reader? Do allusion, quotation, and interpictorial references result in an aesthetic communion? Language infinitely interprets the painting and its substitutes. Yet, conversely, the painting (or, more broadly speaking, the image)-in-text subtly enlightens the text, supplementing and complementing it, bringing in meaning and energy that would not have been possible otherwise. It is a matter of “making one see” (more, or differently),of giving form to the text in the manner of the image, according to its modalities and its history.

192  The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns In order to address these issues, we should firstly explore the question of the specificity and differential manifestations of the image in a text, particularly in relation to the description of an object that is not (necessarily) artistic. Specific Effects: A Thorny Question122 Criticism must first wonder what an image does in/to a text that cannot be accomplished with a “simple” description. What constitutes the difference between a simple description (of a landscape, an interior, a portrait) and an ekphrasis, the apparition of an art image in its most ­diluted forms? I have already addressed this issue in the “Nuances du pictural”123 where I propose grading these apparitions as “painting-­ effect,” “aesthetic arrangement,” “pictorial description,” up to ekphrasis. In ­order to pursue this study further, I start by quoting J. Lichtenstein: To describe a painting is not exactly the same thing as describing a table, a landscape or a person, because a painting is not the same kind of thing as a table, a landscape or a person. A painting is an object of a certain type, ontologically different from other natural or artificial objects destined, on principle, to be aesthetically perceived […] Contrary to what Duchamp said, it is not the viewer who makes the table. To describe a painting is to describe an object that is made not just to be seen, but to be seen in a certain way, in other words, that supposes a particular way of perceiving an object. If, as Corneille, following Aristotle, in his first Discourse on Dramatic Poetry, said, the pleasure of art is not just any kind of pleasure but a kind of pleasure that is proper to art, the perception of art is also a kind of perception that is proper to art, different from other forms of perception.124 The power of an art object is not tantamount to that of an everyday object, yet the latter may be also be brought to us by modern art and specifically its reuse, its being incorporated in various ways. Second, we should trace the distinctive traits that make the reader conscious of the presence of an image. How does the image affect the text and, consequently, the reader? Does a screen, a filter, or even an apparatus interpose between the descriptive text and its object whose outline slowly emerges in/on the eye of the reader? This supplementary screen would be an “apparatus,” placed by the text which constructs a two-dimensional representational effect without aiming at the restoration of the three-dimensional effect. The reader, then, experiences a visualisation, effectuated through the “recognition” of the fact that it is an image whose description lies before their eyes—that it is, in other words, the representation of an already represented object, thus an object twice

The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns  193 distanced from its origin, an object “in the second degree.” Here, we find, once again, the votive relation that is characteristic of the image, namely that “the image was the mirror where the object was reflected; it was also the screen behind which transcendence shied away,”125 as well as its double nature as mirror and screen that both displays but may also conceal. Tamar Yacobi’s attempt to establish the difference between ekphrastic figure and “simple figure,” in “The Ekphrastic Figures of Speech,” is pertinent here: In the ekphrastic figure of language, then, ekphrasis and figurality meet, as do the corresponding fields of research. The question is what such an intersection entails, signifies, performs within the literary text or its reading. Where, for example, does the composite whole overlap or exploit, where does it outshine, either of its components? What does the ekphrasis gain in assuming the shape of a figure? Conversely, how can the figure profit from an ekphrasis (rather than purely verbal) analogue to its subject?126 Yacobi’s intuition is just and, when raising the question of the link between figure and ekphrasis, in other words the question of the poetic exchange effectuated on a figure whose comparative is an ekphrasis, her work advances intermedial studies considerably, even though her definition of ekphrasis is restricted to allusion or citation of a work of art and does not extend to the description of a work of art. Accordingly, ensuing responses are somewhat limited to the level of reception and reference, the symbolic and the thematic, without reaching the infratextual level, nor that of form. Yacobi maintains that the comparison of an object to the Mona Lisa, for example, rather than a red rose introduces the heterogeneity of the two worlds, that the ekphrastic comparison blends three domains: of the first order (the represented, a woman),of the second order (the representing, Mona Lisa), and of the third order (the representing inscribed in linguistic discourse, the citation of Mona Lisa in the text),which distances the expression of the represented object three degrees from the object itself—all this, of course, on condition that the reader knows the Mona Lisa. If the comparison is made in relation to a red rose, for Yacobi, we remain in the “all-linguistic whole,”127 yet, arguably, using the red rose as a referent is as “just linguistic” as using the Mona Lisa, since both exist in our world and the two segments of phrases are linguistically equivalent—if we ignore that the one is the title of a painting. It is their nature as objects that differs, as well as their aesthetic status. While these observations operate at the level of a reference to an object existing in our world but not at a textual level, on the other hand, what Yacobi defines as “figurative chain” or “figurative cluster,”128 implying diverse combinations of ekphrasis with an “ordinary”

194  The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns figure of style, contributes to a fruitful discussion. These stimulating concepts are now well-accepted in intermedial criticism and testify to a research in full development. As a reading effect, or “reading event,” the image causes a shock, following the acknowledgement that there is, indeed, a hidden painting or an image, whose effects are, nevertheless, perceptible. The description takes the imaged/imaging character of the image (the visual) into ­consideration: if the person describing renders an account of a landscape, s/he gives the impression of directly perceiving the scenery while immediately translating it into words. If the landscape described is represented, the gaze follows an already organised trajectory, the trajectory of the gaze inscribed on the painting, by the painting, for we are given to read the linguistic representation of a pictorial representation. In consonance with Kibedi Varga’s studies on the effects of reading129 and Philippe Hamon’s establishment of a parallel between the zigzag movement of the eye and that of reading, the semiotic or artistic description of an object retranscribes the framing effects, as well as those of light or flatness that figure in the text as the reflections of a previous work and a creative intention. The question of allusion resurfaces here: if the image remains covert, the reader is exposed to the “risks of allusion,”130 to the shock of the visual; they may be captivated by the recognition of the image and by the text itself. Allusion calls to the reader from inside the text, even if they have difficulty pinpointing it. It is up to them, then, to decide whether they will respond or not. Obviously, one might contend that the image (painting, photograph, etc.)-in-text is first and foremost a cultural phenomenon; the literary text reproduces a “vanity-effect” that entails the acknowledgement of the signifiers that are specific to the genre: the mirror, a still-smoking candlestick, a skull, or a book, etc. It is an explicit citation of the pictorial type with its own value and importance. But, in this case, one remains at a thematic or symbolic level, and in the issue of genres, all considerations pertain to the text, albeit less immanent and less formal. The first stage of the study will consist in locating and classifying its effects. At a second stage, the question of how the image affects the text’s structure and form—in a way that differs from “simple” description given as the description of a mere object—should be addressed. Are there any discriminatory criteria at the level of reception, of effect, of the event? The pictorial third will be based on phenomenology, the notion of the inner screen, vision, the inner gaze, the result of a textual effect, a comment that must be different from the description of objects that are not “displayed” so as to form an image. As I have shown in my analysis of G. Josipovici’s “containers, ”the objects described are aligned according to the viewing eye that sweeps and shifts depending on the focaliser’s gaze. In Noël’s words, “what moves

The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns  195 in painting is uniquely the gaze of the spectator.”131 ­Josipovici’s text seems to want to mould itself onto an image by presenting the objects before the locating verbs that are presented as if “fixed” by a gaze, then organised following “the course of the gaze, ”its scan being imposed by the painting apparatus. Perhaps this is a first response: a painting is composed—it is not a “natural” landscape—and so a certain “ranging order” of things is formed onto the spectator’s mind. The gaze is guided, and it is “affected” by the image. It may be attracted, at first, by an object or a face whose eyes are fixedly set on the spectator. In interpellation, there is engagement, a duel of the gazes, or, to follow Didi-­Huberman, gaze/gazed at, and this concerns me. What is more, as we have seen in Goldberg: Variations, the static side of the fixed image is rendered through stative verbs, passives, enumeration, juxtaposition, parataxis, a kind of lexis denoting fixity. The description predominantly suggests a two-dimensional space, rather than a three-dimensional one, specifically due to the choice of certain adjectives, adverbs, verbs, or nouns. Since an image (painted or other) is an artefact, everything in it is “composed” and “disposed” and the text follows suit by describing the arrangement of the objects/subjects more than such and such character or piece of furniture allegedly present. Framing, composition, unvarying light, all these are intrinsic properties of an image that converge so as to produce a pictorial impression. Just like the “painting effect” or the “aesthetic arrangement” that suggest the presence of a painting, an image. In addition, the vocabulary of the image and the vocabulary of criticism, or of art history, infuse the text and affect it with an artistic coefficient. They call upon the reader’s knowledge, his ability to recognise genres, the painterly “tricks” (as acknowledged in Josipovici’s reflections on bottles),as well as artistic arrangements: “they are disposed in the following fashion.” The reader has to remain available, sensitive to the emerging impression and its confirmation, even to a fleeting impression, crossing the page like a veil or a cloud, moving between the signs read and the reader’s imagination. The saturation of colours and forms—often also found in a non-­ pictorial description—constitute pertinent markers, especially when one notes their recurrence, the saturation of the text by this lexis specifically referring to colours, as noted on oil paint tubes: for example, chromium yellow, Veronese green, Van Dyke brown, or Bourbon red show that the vocabulary we are faced with is technical, not metaphorical. Moreover, the use of a reference to matter placed before the noun—for instance, “earthen-brown” or “lemon yellow”—may also lay emphasis on the writer’s insistence on creating a quasi-painting by approaching technique and “make-believe” in the closest possible way. Accordingly, the terms evoking the flatness of the contemplated object, or indications of dimensions, show that a surface is “measured.” This presupposes

196  The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns enough time to do so, as well as a narrator who is practically immobile, facing an object that he may not walk around. When the insistence on lexis relevant to (in)visibility, which may also figure in an “ordinary” description, is reiterated, it becomes an index of saturation. Then the narrator turns into an art critic. What, Then, Does the Pictorial Third Do to a Text? Taking the lead from D. Gleizes’s use of the term, we can claim that the pictorial third is associated with the notion of “efficacy,” which, in terms of economy, is in congruence with the image/text function discussed in Chapter One. This function is meant in the way operated by Broodthaers, where the change of the text and the exchange between painting and poetry are engaged in a trade and a translation between the two media. The “efficacy” of the image in text could, therefore, be measured in terms of supplement, of added value, resulting in an economy of means, since the use of added reference to a work of art “short-circuits” a lot of unnecessary discourse that would be too long or too demonstrative. Gleizes offers an eloquent example of this process, through Flaubert’s A Simple Heart, where Vanity is used “not to amplify the discourse of the text, but to short-circuit it”132; the distortions inflicted on the pictorial code here render mediation inoperative and the text shortens. Another example of this short-circuiting is the use of abbreviations performed through the grammatical transformation of a painter’s name into an adjective—a contradiction that is rendered more forcefully in English where a simple juxtaposition of terms may be effectuated: “a Veronese ceiling,” or “a Titian banquet,” for example. In French, this effect is produced by analogy—a beard à la Van Dyck, a tree à la Constable, a prison à la Piranese—that, nevertheless, equally allows for an economy of description while opening the text to the powers of the image in the highest possible degree. Some of the “rendering” effects include resonance, concentric circles, augmentation, or densification that may also include condensation (like in the short story). They, therefore, signal subtraction or a kind of contraction that endows the text with intensity, just like what happens with allusion and connivance/an entente. The pictorial third gives meaning (or causes an affect, evokes an experience) that is either additional or of another nature to that of the text and that could never have been accessed without this operation. In Banville’s Ghosts, for instance, the structural allusion to Watteau’s work reinforces the spectral effect of a text in which one of the characters is a “revenant” from a previous book (The Book of Evidence). A layer of opacity is, thus, superimposed on/to the text since no direct reference (title, name of the painter) appears. In a misleading drift, Watteau is named

The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns  197 Vaublin, and Gilles becomes the object of a “pictorial description” actualised in the competent reader’s mind and ascribed to a painting that is progressively identified due to the numerous details (like the number of buttons of the silk costume) offered by the narrator.133 This is also the case with Girl with a Pearl Earring, where pictorial allusion is equally structural, even if its function is different, for, adopting a didactic role, it renders painting and its secret workings “accessible” to the reader. In both cases, the pictorial third supplement reinforces connivance with a cultivated community. On the contrary, the pictorial third may occasionally give meaning by subverting the text, interfering with its imaging powers or even working against it, as is the case with A Simple Heart or even Blake Morrison’s “Teeth,” where the reference to Browning’s “My Last Duchess” destabilises the text and casts a different light, in view of which the text denounces the smooth discourse of a murderer who is confounded by the power of the image that returns in the form of Bacon’s painting. Further still, as suggested by Bergez, the image may block the text’s effects and mitigate the affect produced by symbolic representation. The image may also confer an aesthetic presence on the text, as it plays the essential role of an incarnation. Taking the limit case of the mime, we should turn to Mallarmé, who said “It is thus that the mime operates, whose game is limited to a perpetual allusion without breaking the mirror: this way, he establishes a pure space of fiction.”134 Catherine Perret seeks to understand how the image represents through an absence: “as Mallarmé shows, the mime represents through allusion, through a game where the dissolved reflection de-realises that which it reflects.”135 Allusion compensates for meaning when it points to absence, fulfilling the role of an attenuation. In relation to euphemism, it is more of a supplement, as it indirectly brings a surplus of emotion, of enjoyment. This is the case with the tableau vivant, which is: [n]ot limited to theatrical representation and may refer to precise works and maintain enjoyment through the recognition of the imitated subject […] the cryptic of the reference leaves all [the necessary] latitude for the second spectator, that is the reader, to recognise the works that are exemplified and to appeal to the visual culture, the strong presence of which defines the ‘imaginary museum’ of man (in the sexual sense of the term) during the French Second Empire.136 These examples explicitly demonstrate that the pictorial third is an event, in the sense of what happens, what arises from the text and by the text, by language. It is connected to what has strangely been called “anti-­art,” the art of the event, action art, performance art, the corporeal type of art whose programme is perfectly defined by Robert Filliou’s famous formulation: “art is what makes life more interesting than art.”137

198  The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns Without a pictorial reference, then, be it in praesentia or in absentia, the text would be lacking substance. According to D. Bergez, pictoriality allows us to “go beyond the limits of language to access a more immediate, sense-related rapport with the real.”138 In consonance with Bergez, Nancy also notes that: The image thus gives presence to the text, if with this word text you understand the interlinking, the meshing and weaving together of a sense. Sense consists only in being woven or knit together. Text is textile; it is the material of sense. […] This image is necessary for us […] But how could there be a weave without a web? The image is the web of a threadless weave. Sense requires the image in order to emerge from its meager material, its inaudibility and its invisibility.139 And, further down, on the issue of imago, which designated the effigy of departed ones: The imago hooks into the cloth. It does not repair the rip of their death: it does less and more than that. It weaves, it images absence. […] essentially, it presents absence. The absent are not there, are not “in images.” But they are imaged: their absence is woven into our presence. The empty place of the absent as a place that is not empty: that is the image. […] the place of a displacement, a metaphor—and here we are again.140 And, in relation to the verb “image,” Nancy joins Arasse in seeing the image rise. “To image” must be heard as a transitive verb whose action, however, cannot act on an object. […] If, by contrast, I say that I image this discourse (for example, the discourse that says, “I say ‘a flower’”), this is something completely different: I present its saying with its said; […] No denotation is without connotation, if you like. Connotation borders on denotation, and embroiders its borders. It is there that the image rises.141 (67) The pictorial reference adds something to classical intertextuality that operates from one text to the other while returning to the text; it is a variation. Here, the passage is performed from the text to the image and, even though the return to the text is still operated, the latter is found augmented, varied, and modulated by the image and its techniques. Thus, the power of the “alluded” image, which also brings flesh and the colours of rhetoric to the text and enables the reader to visualise what

The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns  199 the text purports to be saying more effectively. It is an illusion also of the representation and a troubling effect of the “painting-effect.” Hence the idea of a “pictorial reading,” when the pictorial third challenges received ideas; and it would have one more thing in common with one of allusion’s favourite subjects—namely, as Hamon puts it, eroticism. The pictorial third can offer the pleasure of a pictorial reading carrying an erotic undertone. An eloquent example of this aspect is presented, as I have shown elsewhere,142 in V. Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which offers a pictorial description with the quality of a shared erotic pleasure, when Mrs Ramsay and Augustus Carmichael’s gazes are united in contemplation of the image of the fruit bowl, multiplied by the memory of other images by Caravaggio, Velasquez, cubist fruit bowls, and picturesque mountains; it is through this diffused, light eroticism that the faint essence of the pictorial third is revealed. This pleasure in silent communication between partners through pictorial allusion or citation matches that of recognition. At the moment when the reader recognises Watteau’s Gilles in Banville’s Ghosts, for instance, everything is unsettled: the mist of the unknown dissolves but is also immediately replaced by the pictorial phantom interposing between the text and the reader’s inner eye. This veiling/unveiling effect performed by the veiled revenant haunting the text and seeking to be unveiled belongs to the classical topos of the erotic, similar to the one evoked in Phryne, as discussed by Vouilloux.143 It also evokes Loïe ­Fuller’s veils described by Mallarmé,144 when the body becomes an “image-­as-movement,” to use Deleuze’s words. The then-reassured reader recognises the subject and is at the same time relieved from the tension of interrogation, of being at risk,145 of not being able to grasp the allusion. The reference to the visual acquires a function similar to the function of laughter in Freudian libidinal economy. It is “suggestive,” and the veiled becomes more erotic than the unveiled. The reader is led to practise a sort of literary strip-tease, forever deferred. Thus, the pictorial third constitutes a virtual screen of hide and seek, like in a tableau vivant, where the flesh appeared in the openings of the costume as a pulsation, in a constant movement of diastole/systole, appearance/disappearance, or, as Didi-Huberman calls it, aphanisis/ epiphasis.146 The pictorial reference shows and masks its object like a discursive veil, which provokes excitement and rouses desire. This is precisely what stages the long elaboration of the painting in Girl with a Pearl Earring in the eponymous novel, as well as in Balzac’s The ­Unknown Masterpiece, Zola’s Masterpiece, and many others. The pictorial third restitutes forces and jostles the reader/viewer. The reading event caused by the image and its related affect constitutes a capturing of forces, but also an advent, that of the written text, which, reinforced by the power of the image, propagates this rippling effect and opens up a visual, imaginary plane. The detour through the image

200  The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns allows us to see “in enigma” just like in a “lorrain glass,” a dark mirror that concentrates the landscape, encloses it in a frame, unifies the colours and reduces the picture to two dimensions. The pictorial third confounds the places of the spectator and the reader, and changes their status in the “seeing” process by depriving them of their comfort. It also changes the status of the text and turns it into a text/image. At the same time, it assigns a place to the reader that is a construct, just like the text, from which s/he must see and comprehend synaesthetically, through the eye and the ear, seeing/hearing while reading/seeing. The originality of a gaze finds its true place. Following M. Picard’s fine title La lecture comme jeu, let us suggest that reading/ seeing an image/text presupposes a game, a movement, an idea, which is also supported by the notion that art “objects,” intrudes, interrupts and blocks, opens horizons, imposes, and even proposes an alternative route. The pictorial third may function as a litmus test for literariness. ­A rguably, the pictorial third could become one of the criteria assessing the validity of the work of art, as it allows us to question the text by showing its limits and inherent dangers. The pictorial third could be a catalyst, as it may place the text (its reading and receptibility) into danger or, on the contrary, give it a surplus value, an added value of literariness. Using the pictorial third as a test means observing what an external, and, therefore heterogeneous element may cause to the text, either perturbing and drawing it toward the pictorial, showing what it lacks, or reinforcing it and constructing a successful “text/image.” The pictorial is a risk for the text, just as much as allusion is. The pictorial third always resides in excess or in lack, but never in the “middle ground” of a turn-of-the-mill text; it also carries the question of the reading rhythm: we become impulsive with a “passionate” book, skipping descriptions, for example, or we grumble knowing that at the end there is compensation, there is pleasure. It is necessary, therefore, to make an effort with a reading that is slowed down by the intervention of a third, even though the desire to know what comes next propels the impatient reader to a “page turner” kind of reading. What is more, through the pictorial, we approach the manifestations of a world that has already been mediatised. The pictorial third, then, enables us to revisit the descriptive, or, at least, a particular type of descriptive, one that has a pictorial quality, in the broader sense of what conjures a picture, an image. How can we think of it today? How can we renew it? The contribution of the plastic arts to a specific type of descriptive may serve to start this discussion, as it means resorting to structuralism, narratology, and rhetoric combined with the plastic arts, phenomenology, the philosophy of language, and so on. Installations and other forms of the so-called “contemporary” arts—in their dimension of collaborative event, happening, trace, virtual image, ephemeral art, or art registered with the help of video, as well

The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns  201 as digitally produced techniques—offer a most valuable contribution so as to rethink the links between discourse and painting, text and image, plastic arts and literature. As scholars like Patrick Vauday, Bernard Vouilloux, and Hubert Damisch have already suggested,147the notion of image itself may even be revisited. Research on the relations between text and image have at the moment largely focused on the mimetic image (painting or photography) as these are used by literature. What remains to be explored is the passage from the work of art to the art event.

Notes 1 Michel Murat, “L’universelle doublure” in L’allusion dans la litterature, Conference at the Sorbonne, Presses Universitaires de la Sorbonne, 2000. 11. 2 Arnaldo Pizzorusso, “Considérations sur la notion d’allusion” in L’allusion dans la literature, op. cit. 13. 3 Claude Hagège, L’homme de paroles, contribution linguistique au sciences humaines, Paris: Fayard, 1985. 253. qtd in Arnaldo Pizzorusso, op. cit., 20. Hagège speaks of the “nomadisation of messages” that revelas their conversion or transmutation from one context to another. 4 Arnaldo Pizzorusso, op. cit., 21. 5 Bernard Vouilloux, La peinture dans le texte, op. cit., 18. 6 Ibid, 28. 7 Bernard Vouilloux, Le tableau vivant, op. cit., 38. 8 Ibid, 39. 9 See: L’allusion dans la litterature, op. cit., 79. 10 François Jullien, Le détour et l’accès, stratégies du sens en Chine en Grèce, Paris: Grasset, 1995. 407. This work is partly based on my article titled “‘Peindre les nuages pour évoquer la lune …’ L’allusion picturale,” in ­L’allusion et l’accès, eds. Peter Vernon and Claudine Raynaud, Tours, Presses universitaires François Rabelais, 2005. 63–88. 11 Three novels were published in 1999: Tracy Chevalier’s Girl With a Pearl Earring, Deborah Moggach’s Tulip Fever,and Susan Vreeland’s Girl in ­Hyacinth Blue. 12 Interestingly, this is only on the cover of the book’s 2000 first edition. In later editions, the “View of Delft” does not appear. 13 Philippe Hamon, “De l’allusion en régime naturaliste”, in L’allusion dans la littérature, op. cit., 181. 14 Ibid, 182. 15 Jacqueline Authier-Revuz, “Aux risques de l’allusion”, in L’allusion dans la littérature, op. cit., 229. 16 Ibidem. 17 Ibid, 230. 18 Henri Godard, “Céline, De la provocation à l’allusion”, in L’allusion dans la literature, op. cit., 206–207. 19 Ibid, 207. 20 Philippe Hamon, “De l’allusion”, op. cit., 184. See also Antoine Compagnon’s contribution in the same volume, specifically note 4 on Edmond de Goncourt connecting conversation and allusion, as well as Marc Fumaroli’s, Trois institutions littéraires françaises, Paris: Gallimard, 1994. 21 Ibidem. 22 Ibid, 187. 23 Jacqueline Authier-Revuz, op. cit., 217.

202  The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns 24 Ibid, 218. 25 “But the relation of language to painting is an infinite relation […] it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say […] But if one wishes to keep the relation of language to vision open, if one wishes to treat their incompatibility as a starting-point for speech instead of as an obstacle to be avoided, so as to stay as close as possible to both, then one must erase those proper names and preserve the infinity of the task. It is perhaps through the medium of this grey, anonymous language, always over-meticulous and repetitive be-cause too broad, that the painting may, little by little, release its illumina-tions.” Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, op. cit., 9–10. 26 Tracy Chevalier, Girl with a Pearl Earring, London: Harper, 1999. 7–8. 27 I suggest this term in relation to the workings of the pictorial third. 28 This pertains to the dialogical structure of allusion and the complicity, in the form of a double trigger, between characters, but also between characters and readers. 29 Philippe Hamon, “De l’allusion” op. cit., 188. 30 Antoine Compagnon, op. cit., 243 and Michel Murat, op. cit., 10–11. 31 See: Michel Picard, La lecture comme jeu, Introduction to the ABF conference titled “Qui lit quoi?”, May 1984; and La tentation, essai sur l’art comme jeu, op. cit. 32 Philippe Hamon, Ibid, 183. See also the title of the article written by ­Jacqueline Authier-Revuz. 33 Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres, Paris: Garnier, 1985. 238, qtd in Catherine Perret, op. cit., 71. 34 Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, Paris: Gallimard, “Pleïade”, 1945. 869. qtd in Antoine Compagnon, op. cit., 249. 35 Philippe Hamon, Ibidem. 36 See: “La description picturale: pour une poétique de l’iconotexte,” Poétique, n. 112, November 1997; and “Nuances du pictural”, in Texte/ image, op. cit. 37 Liliane Louvel, “Love with a Fruit-Dish: an Instance of Pictorial ­Eroticism,” conference volume, SEW (January 1999), Things in Virginia Woolf’s Works, Christine Reynier (ed), spec.issue SEW, EBC, Université Michel de Montaigne, Bordeaux III, autumn 1999. 38 Tracy Chevalier, op. cit., 140–142. 39 Ibid, 136–142, 144, etc. 40 Ibid, 146. 41 See: Philippe Hamon, op. cit. 42 Tracy Chevalier, op. cit., 164, 171–172. 43 Ibid, 184. 44 Ibid, 70. 45 Ibid, 96. 46 Ibid, 137. 47 Ibidem. 48 In tchevalier.com the writer includes “the Concert” rather than the “Music Lesson.” 49 Ibid, 134 and 164. 50 Philippe Hamon, ibid, 187. 51 Henri Godard, op. cit., 204. 52 Ibid, 205. 53 Antoine Compagnon, op. cit., 244. 54 Ibid, 245.

The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns  203 55 Philippe Hamon, Ibid, 186. 56 Jacqueline Authier-Revuz, op. cit., 218. 57 Ibidem. 58 Ibid, 221. 59 Ibidem. 60 Ibid, 222. 61 Ibidem. 62 See: Francis A. Yates’s discussion of “mnemotechnics” and the supremacy of the sense of sight in The Art of Memory, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966. 17; also, Bernard Vouilloux, Le tableau vivant, op. cit., 117 and 353. 63 See: Georges Didi-Huberman, Dissemblance et figuration, Paris: Flammarion, “Champs”, 1995. 64 Jacqueline Authier-Revuz, op. cit., 226. 65 Antoine Compagnon, op. cit., 242. 66 Translator’s note: In French: après/d’après. 67 Jean-Luc Nancy, op. cit., 69. 68 Bernard Noël, Journal du regard, Paris: POL, 1988. 15. 69 Clèment Rosset, Le réel et son double, Paris: Gallimard, Folio/Essais, 1976. 10. 70 Ibid, 12. 71 Ibid, 19. 72 Jean-Luc Nancy, op. cit., 69. 73 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?,trans. Hugh ­Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York, Chichester, West Sussex: ­Columbia University Press, 1994. 182. 74 Jean-Luc Nancy, 2. 75 Roland Barthes, “An Idea for Research,” op. cit., 271–272. 76 See Une image peut encacher une autre, Archimboldo, Dali, Raetz, BeauxArts numero special, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery, Grand Palais, 8 April–6 July 2009. 77 Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, Vol 5 of A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, Phaidon, [1960] 1977. 5. 78 Patrick Vauday, op. cit., 18–19. 79 Ibid, 28. 80 Richard Wollheim, “Seeing-as, Seeing-in and Pictorial Representation,” in Arts and its Objects, 2nd ed., with six supplementary essays, Cambridge University Press, 1980. 81 Patrick Vauday, op. cit., 28. 82 Richard Wollheim, op. cit., 139–140. 83 Ibid, 142–143. 84 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-Ponty ­Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, trans. ed. M. B. Smithand, G. A. J­ ohnston, Evanston Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993. 126. 85 Horace, The Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica, trans. A. S. Klein, 2005. 178–179 PDF. 86 See p. 98. 87 Jean-Luc Nancy, op. cit., 64. 88 Jean Rousset, op. cit. For the full quote refer to Chapter 1, 24. 89 Ibidem. 90 Carlos Baker, “Sensation and Vision in Wordsworth,” in English ­Romantic Poets, op. cit., 107. 91 Rhonda L. Flaxman, op. cit., 68–69.

204  The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns 92 Tamar Yacobi, “Ekphrastic Double Exposure: Blake Morrison, Francis ­Bacon, Robert Browning and Fra Pandolfo as Four-in-one,” Word/Image n. 4, op. cit. 93 Ibid, 219. 94 Ibid, 219. 95 The poem is included in With a Poet’s Eye, Pat Adams (ed), London: Tate Gallery, 1985. This is an anthology of poems exclusively consisting of poems inspired by the works of art exhibited in the gallery. 96 The woman detested Bacon’s work while her husband bought his paintings. 97 Stéphane Lojkine, op. cit., 13. 98 Daniel Bergez, op. cit., 179. 99 Jacques Lacan, op. cit., 83. 100 See: Jean-François Lyotard, Le diffèrend: Phrases in Dispute, University of Minnesota Press, [1983] 1988. 101 See also: Serge Tisseron’s article “L’image comme processus”, op. cit. 102 Éric Laurent, Lost in Cognition, Psychanalyse et sciences cognitives, Nantes: Editions Cecile Defaut, “Psyché,” 2008. See especially the discussion on Antonio Damasio seen through Bernard Victorri, in Chapter 3, “Psychanalyse et cognition”. 103 Lionel Naccache, Le Nouvel inconscient, Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006. I thank Philippe Ortel for bringing this work to my attention. 104 Bernard Noël, Les yeux dans la couleur, op. cit. 105 Laurent Zimmerman, G Didi-Huberman, Penser par les Images, op. cit., 110. 106 Estelle Jacoby, “‘Désobéir à la forme’. Quand textes et images jouent a se ressembler”, in G Didi-Huberman, op. cit., 111. 107 See also: Liliane Louvel, Poetics of the Iconotext, op. cit., particularly chapter seven. 108 Jean-Luc Nancy, op. cit., 66. 109 Anne Sauvagnargues, “L’art comme symptomatologie, capture de forces et image”, Forces-figures, Noëlle Batt (ed.), Tle, Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2007. 41. 110 Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, op. cit., 210. 111 Ibid, 211. 112 Ibid, 212. 113 Paul Klee, qtd in Alain Bonfand, L’expérience esthétique à l’épreuve de la phénoménologie, Paris: PUF, 1995. 3. 114 Richard Wollheim, op. cit., 149–150. 115 Catherine Perret, op. cit., 61. 116 Bernard Noël, Journal du Regard, op. cit., 19. 117 See A. Minazzoli, La premiere ombre, 1989. 118 Bernard Vouilloux, La peinture dans le texte, op. cit., 19. The notion of the “interpreter” is founded on Charles S. Pierce’s On Signs: Writings on Semiotic, ed. James Hoopes, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991; see also Michael Rifaterre, “The Interpretatnt in Literary Semiotics in Intertextuality”, American Journal of Semiotics 3 (4): 1985. 41–55. 119 For the complete reference see Chapter 3, page 125. 120 Meyer Schapiro, Les mots et les images, op. cit. 121 Jean Rousset, op. cit. 122 These thoughts are the result of my conversations with Chantal Delourne, who I thank here for her unrelenting strictness. 123 Liliane Louvel, Nuances du pictural, op. cit. 124 Jacqueline Lichtenstein, “Énoncé de quelques problèmes”, in La description de l’œuvre d’art, Du modele classique aux variations contemporaines, Conference volume ed Olivier Bonfait, Collection d’Histoire de l’art de l’Academie de France à Rome, Villa Medici, Paris: Somogy, 2004. 297.

The Pictorial Third When the Body (Re)turns  205 125 Ibid, 266. n.147. 126 Tamar Yacobi, “The Ekphrastic Figure of Speech,” Word/Image ­Interactions III, op. cit., 93. 127 Ibid, 94. 128 Ibid, 100. 129 For instance, in his article “Entre le texte et l’image: une pragmatique des limites,” for Word/Image Interactions III, op. cit., 77–92. 130 Jacqueline Authier-Revuz, “Aux risques de l’allusion”, op. cit. 131 Bernard Noël, Journal du regard, op. cit. 132 Delphine Gleizes, op. cit., 90. 133 John Banville, Ghosts, London: Secker and Warburg, 1993. 225–226. 134 Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres, op. cit., qtd in Catherine Perret, op. cit., 137. 135 Ibidem. 136 Bernard Vouilloux, Le tableau vivant, op. cit., 27. 137 Robert Filliou, qtd in Catherine Perret, op. cit., 294–295. 138 Daniel Bergez, op. cit., 195. 139 Jean-Luc Nancy, op. cit., 66–67. 140 Ibid, 67–68. 141 Ibid, 67 142 Liliane Louvel, Texte/image, op. cit. 143 Particularly one of its avatars, painted by Jean-Léon Gérôme, Phryné devant l’aéropage, Hambourg, Kunsthalle, 1861. 144 See: Catherine Perret, op. cit., 72–72 and 137, among others. 145 Reference to Authier-Revuz’s article. 146 Georges Didi-Huberman, La peinture incarnée, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1989. 147 Appearing as a guest in France Culture, Hubert Damisch suggested that abstract painting (which he calls ‘concrete’) defines itself in contrast to the image and affirmed that Mondrian’s paintings are not images. France ­Culture, “Peinture fraiche,” November 2002.

Closing Remarks

The study of text/image relations shows an essential knowledge that concerns the function of language and image, our knowledge and comprehension of the world, in a way that is more evident and visible than when literature and painting function separately, in self-sufficiency. Establishing this path is often necessary. Lessing’s fetish sculpture Laocoön offers a paradigmatic example of the inextricability of the relation between the two arts. In dissonance to the classical vision of perceiving this relationship in terms of combat, I conceive it as more reconciled, less warring, and also less hierarchical, since, in my view, this is not a vertical operation but instead a plane of immanence, a horizontal, rhizomatic structure that dismisses the imprinted separation of domineering, imperialist, or even gendered conjectures.1 The text/image relation is not a mortal combat but an energetic, fruitful collaboration that culminates into the pictorial third; text and image are, thus, interdependent, connected in a dialectic, fruitful oscillation. The fact that the image appears summoned by the text, as its Other, as a recurrent need, shows that language is image, that there is always interpretation. Discourse is nothing but a constant reactivation of other discourses, the words reactivate other words and so do the images, pointing to more images that are already there, imported and deciphered by language. Combined with the text—even a minimal one, in the form of a title or signature—in a text/image construct, the image shows that the text may be necessary so as not to misconstrue the meaning. Besides, the text/image relation also reveals the inscription of a singularity, an aesthetic choice, made in a way that is much more than style. Just as the detour of the text through the image is necessary, as a route to access meaning, inversely, so must the image pass through the text, through discourse, in order to acquire a complete signification for the recipient, beyond the affect and the experience of performance or modern installation, both of which are aesthetic events. The synaesthesia achieved through the coupling of the eye and the ear, of the image and the text, is operated in this ‘something’ that Hillis Miller describes: The warfare in question is present within the word “graphic” which can refer either to writing or to picture. Could peace be established

208  Closing Remarks between the two parties by showing that they are different forms of the same thing, as blue and red are both light? What would that something be?2 This something, for me, is the pictorial third, a name that I give to this synaesthesia, to this in-between movement, the desire of one for the other; the pictorial third is the in-between moment when the rippling, ruffling text—in the recognising reader’s mind—inclines towards the image and vice versa. The image rises in between the lines, still veiled, still imprecise, posing questions of rhythm, since the pictorial third makes a visual syncope vibrate, like a counterpoint in the text’s fugue.

Notes 1 Jagna Oltarzewska in particular reminds us that the narrative was often akin to a dynamic element that progressed aggressively in a virile world, whereas description was connected to the pause, to rest, to luxury, to a feminine futility. Jagna Oltarzewska, “Projecting Wor(l)ds: The Descriptive in Contemporary Fiction,” in Isabelle Alfandari and Isabelle Gadoin (eds), Le descriptif, op. cit. 2 Joseph Hillis Miller, Illustration, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1992. 75.

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224 Bibliography Winterson, Jeanette, Art and Lies, London, Vintage 1995. ———, Art Objects, Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, London, Vintage, 1996. Woolf, Virginia, A Writer’s Diary, St Albans, Panther Books, 1978. ———, « Walter Sickert: A Conversation », Collected Essays, II, ed. Leonard Woolf, London, The Hogarth Press, 1966. ———, To the Lighthouse, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, [1927] 1966. ———, « The Fascination of the Pool », The Complete Shorter Fiction of ­Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan Dick, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989. ———, Jacob’s Room, Harmondsworth, Penguin, [1922] 1992. Images Online Sites William, Blake, Laocoon, engraving. The Fitzwilliam Museum https://arthistoryproject.com/artists/william-blake/laocoon/ Hans, Holbein, The Ambassadors the National Gallery www.nationalgallery. org.uk/paintings/hans-holbein-the-younger-the-ambassadors Ian, Hamilton, Finlay www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/ian-hamilton-finlay-1093 Jastrow’s duck/rabbitt (1892) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit%e2%80%93 duck_illusion Mazzocchio Paolo Uccello https://fr.images.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search;_ylt= AwrIRhd_kjNa7ioAoDGPAwx.;_ylu=X3oDMTByZmVxM3N0BGNvbG 8DaXIyBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzYw--?p=Mazzocchio&fr= yhs-CND-002_swt&hspart=CND&hsimp=yhs-002_swt Marcel Broodthaers change exchange Gedicht MacBa Barcelone www.artnet. com/artists/marcel-broodthaers/gedicht-poem-po%c3%a8me-change-exchange-wechsel-jtX7Ge5iDSbMjLZ0KoObnA2, www.macba.cat/en/gedichtpoem-poeme-change-exchange-wechsel-3932 Peale, Raphaelle, Venus Rising from the Sea, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, US, http://wallonica.org/peale-venus-rising-from-the-seaafter-the-bath-a-deception-1822/

Index

Agamben, G. xii, 76, 139, 148, 150, 162, 163 Alberti, L.B. 75, 76, 115, 124 Ambassadors, The xi, 20, 34, 36, 47, 61, 74, 125, 130, 131, 134, 146 Anamorphosis ix, xi, xii, 2, 34, 61, 76, 81, 84, 114, 124, 125, 126, 130–138, 141, 143, 144, 155, 146, 154, 155, 158, 161 Anachronistic reading 88, 89, 91, 152, 184 Arasse, D. 35, 36, 46, 53, 54, 79, 98, 116, 159, 161, 181, 198 Architecture ix, 29, 81, 85–87, 89–91, 123, 128, 154 Authier-Revuz, J. 166, 167, 173, 174, 201, 202, 203, 205 Bacon, F. 13, 42, 44, 50, 183, 184, 197, 204 Baker, C. 89, 111, 182, 183, 203 Bal, M. 27, 28, 52, 58, 79 Baltrusaitis 125, 130, 131, 132, 160, 161 Banville, J. 73, 75, 137, 162, 172, 190, 196, 199, 205 Barthes, R. 2, 3, 12, 20, 25, 26, 28, 33, 47, 50–53, 55, 56, 67, 78, 79, 96, 100, 112, 122, 177, 178, 203 Baxandall, M. 28, 36–38, 53 Benjamin, W. 21, 42, 144, 152, 155, 163 Bergez, D. 52, 57, 60, 69, 71, 78–80, 184, 194, 198, 204, 205 Blixen, K. 23, 51, 155 Brontë, C. 85, 86, 90, 91, 111 Broodthaers, G. 15, 16, 35, 40, 84, 119, 196 Butor, M. 39, 43, 46, 53, 54 Byatt, A.S. xi, xii, 56, 67, 80, 99, 110, 112, 142

Caws, M.A. 82–84, 97, 111 Camera obscura 58, 59, 69, 75, 78, 125 Chevalier, T. 67, 74, 166, 172, 201, 202 Chiaroscuro 34, 78 Chiasmus 16, 17, 131, 165, 185 Clüver, C. 14, 15, 49, 50, 68, 79 Collages ix, 29, 78, 152, 154, 185 Crazy About Women 140, 148, 149, 152, 163 Damisch, H. 19, 21, 28, 37, 50, 51, 53, 75, 88, 89, 111, 125, 151, 154, 160, 163, 201, 205 Danielewski, M.Z. xii, 77, 80, 122, 135, 142, 143, 160–162, 191 Deleuze, G. xii, 4, 9, 11, 48, 76, 109, 139, 144, 162, 177, 186, 199, 203, 204 Derrida, J. 9, 49, 115, 122, 187 D’haen, T. 122, 123, 159, 160 Didi-Huberman, G. 11, 29, 52, 68, 79, 90, 111, 112, 147, 151, 162, 163, 199 Diptych 16, 17, 50, 92, 9/5, 98, 104, 105, 113 Dispositif xi, xii, 76, 80, 112, 114, 139, 140, 150, 157, 162 Double exposure 3, 153, 177, 182, 183, 204 Double seeing xii, 164, 167, 181, 182, 186 Duchamp, M. 16, 20, 35, 42, 43, 83, 117, 124, 125, 159, 192 Durcan, P. 76, 148–155, 163 Efficacy ix, 96, 139, 140, 196 Ekphrasis vii, viii, ix, xii, 19, 31, 48, 50, 62, 69, 75, 85, 88, 98, 102–104, 113, 137, 146, 150, 154, 168, 170, 173, 183, 192, 192–3

226 Index Flaxman, R. 111, 182, 183, 190, 203 Forster, E.M. 56, 63, 64, 66, 79, 106, 110, 147 Foucault, M. 15, 50, 76, 139, 167, 188, 202 Frames xi, 2, 17, 23, 43, 114–120, 122, 123, 154, 159 Gallery Portrait, A 23, 118, 123, 141, 142, 145, 147, 152, 155, 161, 162 Gaze x, 3, 7, 12, 22, 26, 60, 94, 97, 100, 103, 108, 115, 117, 121, 126, 127, 128, 130–132, 136, 144, 147, 171, 179, 181, 184, 186, 194, 195, 199, 200 Gender 4, 7, 8, 30, 40, 66, 85, 108, 118, 172, 207 Ghosts 73, 75, 172, 190, 196, 199, 205 Gilman, E. B. 5, 7, 8, 10, 18, 30, 36–38, 48–50, 52, 53 Girl with A Pearl Earring 74, 166, 168, 170, 172, 189, 197, 201, 202 Goldberg: Variations 64, 97, 98, 99, 107, 109, 110, 112, 195 Gombrich, E.H. 37, 178, 180 Goodman, N. 14, 24, 28 Hamon, P. xi, 3, 16, 31, 50, 52, 76, 79, 112, 120, 138, 157, 159, 160, 162, 166, 167, 169, 172, 194, 199, 201, 202 Hoek, L.H. 42, 44, 45, 49, 53 Horace x, 1, 5, 48, 56, 62, 70, 79, 91, 181, 203 House of Leaves 77, 80, 123, 135, 142, 155 Hustvedt, S. 115, 158, 159 Hypotyposis 62, 75, 102 Iconoclasm 4, 5, 30, 31, 35, 39 Iconotext vii, viii, x, xi, xii, 80, 110, 112, 129, 150, 190 Imperialism x, 1, 8, 30, 48, 52 Incommensuratio 35, 36, 39 Infinite dialogue xi, xiii, 15, 124, 167 Interartistic 10, 16, 35 Intermediality 4, 72, 74, 80, 172 Interpictorial viii, 42, 74, 155, 166, 191 Intersemiotic x, 1, 5, 10, 12, 18, 21, 35, 38, 50, 79, 157, 165 James, H. xi, 45, 53, 57, 58, 74, 75, 78, 120, 125, 130, 152, 155, 159, 204

Josipovici, G. xi, 64, 81, 97, 98, 99, 107, 110, 112, 113, 154, 155, 194, 195 Kibedi Varga, A. 7, 48, 49, 54, 69, 71, 72, 79, 80, 194 Lacan, J. 46, 96, 97, 112, 131, 139, 161, 184, 204 Laocoön 7, 11, 49, 82, 207 Larroux 70, 80, 119, 120, 121, 159, 160 Las Meninas xi, 15, 20, 34, 36, 61, 119, 125, 188 Lecture/voyure 153, 163 Lessing, G.H. 1, 11, 115, 118, 127, 151, 154, 207 Lloyd, R. 97, 106, 108–110, 112, 113, 164 Lotman Iouri 121, 122, 159 Louvel, L. i, ii, ii, iv, vii, viii, ix, x, xi, xii, xiii, 3, 12, 48, 50, 51, 53, 78, 79, 80, 112, 113, 159, 160, 161, 205, 202, 204 Magné, B. 140–142, 144–146, 162, 163 Mallarmé, S. 66, 83, 111, 169, 197, 199, 202, 205 Margin xi, 8, 9, 10, 11, 31, 47, 48, 70, 77, 114, 118, 123, 159 Margolin, J.-C. 132, 133, 137, 161, 162 Marin, L. vii, 2, 22, 25, 51, 61, 62, 63, 79, 83, 109, 113, 114, 115, 123, 129, 139, 158, 160, 189 Merleau-Ponty, M. 55, 179, 180, 181, 185, 203 Metapictorial 26, 34, 41, 42 Mise en abyme ix, 34, 45, 60, 61, 145, 154 Mitchell, W.J.T. 6, 7, 10, 18, 28, 39, 41, 68, 110, 178 Moggach, D. 67, 155, 166, 191 Mondzain, M.-J. 6, 7, 10, 20, 31 Montage xii, 16, 58, 119, 122, 144, 145, 152, 155, 183, 185 Nancy, J.-L. x, 37, 87, 176, 177, 181, 186, 187, 198 Narratology 25, 26, 27, 73, 126, 200; narratological 26, 52, 62, 120 Noël, B. 1, 3, 176, 185, 188, 194

Index  227 Ortel, P. xii, 69, 76, 140, 157 Oscillation (word/image) ix, 1, 3, 13, 18, 37, 72, 73, 130, 153, 181, 187, 207 Panovsky, E. xi, 5, 124, 160 Pattern xii, 14, 16, 63, 64–66, 69, 75, 98, 101, 105, 106, 110, 131, 144, 147, 154, 164, 178, 180 Perec, G. xii, 118, 139–142, 145–147, 155, 191 Perspective xi, xii, xiii, 10, 34, 59, 60, 69, 71, 85, 103, 114, 123, 124–128, 130–135, 141, 154, 157, 177 Phenomenology viii, 169, 194, 200 Phenomenological x, xii, 99, 106, 164, 188 Pictorial substitutes 67, 120, 128, 129, 191 Picture of Dorian Gray, The i vii, 44, 73, 74, 133, 155, 191 Plasticity 57, 101, 134 Poetics Today 5, 15, 69 Poïetics xi, 2, 39, 70, 72, 84, 110, 152, 156, 172 Poor Things i 122, 155, 191 Rain before it Falls, The 64, 66, 79 Reading event 2, 55, 73, 76, 88, 96, 107, 109, 158, 164, 182, 185, 187, 189, 194, 199 Reception 12, 33, 86, 134, 147, 164, 166, 169, 170, 193, 194 Rosset, C. 12, 50, 176 Rougé, B. 115, 116, 117, 158 Rousset, J. 7, 19, 63, 64–66, 176, 182, 191 Screen x, 3, 16, 41, 92, 95, 96, 117, 122, 125, 129, 154, 164, 174, 164, 174, 188, 192–194, 199 Sebald, W.G. xii, 67, 142, 155, 156 Seeing-as 179, 180, 203

Seeing-in 179, 180, 187, 203 Sensation 22, 35, 47, 89, 185, 186 Schapiro, M. 21, 26 Signature 17, 39, 46, 47, 63, 145, 207 Simonides of Ceos 4, 48, 91, 96, 173 Sister Arts xi, 1, 9, 21, 23, 38, 49, 51, 56, 59, 69, 78, 91 Steiner, W. 7, 18, 68, 75 Stoichita, V. 129, 159, 160 Still life ix, 2, 26, 29, 32, 35, 41, 42, 44, 63, 69, 75, 81, 97, 98, 102, 103, 104, 105 Synaesthesia viii, x, xii, 71, 86, 101, 107, 141, 207, 208 Tableau vivant 75, 129, 166, 197, 199 To the Lighthouse 134, 170, 190, 199 Trompe l’œil 7, 29, 31, 60, 71, 75, 76, 97, 103–106, 117, 141, 142–144, 158 Unheimlich 101, 108, 110, 133, 134 Urquhart, J. 147, 148, 155, 163 Vanity 41, 97, 116, 194, 196 Vauday, P. 10, 49, 179, 201 Velasquez, D. 34, 36, 42, 61, 119, 199 Veronica (veil of) 2, 75, 81, 91–97 Vermeer, J. 42, 57, 59, 74, 145, 158, 159, 166, 168, 170, 171, 190 Vouilloux, B. 20, 42, 140, 165, 166, 170, 173, 189, 199 Wharton, E. 74, 80, 137 Wilde, O. xi, 56, 73, 87, 128, 130, 155 Winterson, J. xi, 56, 107, 151, 163 Wollheim, R. 179, 180, 185, 187, 188 Woolf, V. xi, 8, 9, 20, 22, 23, 48, 56, 57, 58, 59, 64, 76, 77, 84, 110, 130, 134, 190, 199 Wuthering Heights 84, 85, 86, 88, 101 Yacobi, T. 183, 193 Yates, F. 85, 173