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Engraven Desire
Eros, Image, & Text in the French Eighteenth Century
By Philip Stewart Duke University Press
Copyright © 1992 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7913-3
CHAPTER 1
Text, Image, Allegory
The proliferation in recent years of reflections on the relationship of literature and art, or more generally word and image, has had surprisingly little place for the subject of literary illustration, which would seem to be the field of their most apparent interaction. Perhaps what this tells us is that a certain tenacious hierarchy in art appreciation still relegates small engravings to the station of minor art, and this both because they are diminutive and because, more importantly, they too evidently manifest an ontological dependence upon the thing imitated—which in its case is not nature, as in classical theory, but narrative. Some seem to have assumed, in consequence, that the subject was artistically minor and semiotically shallow.
This book will treat, in combination rather than serially, three distinguishable but decidedly overlapping subjects: the semiotics of engravings, or the ways in which they are coded and read; the inter textual network relating similar kinds of engravings to each other, more or less independently of the texts to which they are ostensibly tied; and the interplay between particular illustrations and the texts they accompany. The second of these, demonstrating the relation to each other of images whose apparent denotations may be totally unrelated, is the least studied aspect of book illustration, although indeed each of these avenues is still in the early stages of exploration. Recent essays by Alain-Marie Bassy, Alain Guillerm, Gérard Gréverand, and Claude Labrosse have provided many of the needed clues for a comprehensive and varied field of study.
First we must look at the question of how illustrations can and cannot be said to represent text; that is, in what mode they actualize, in their medium, what is assumed to be "contained" in another. Inasmuch as the pertinent text is frequently a narrative, there follows a consideration of what the narrative functions, if any, of a synchronous picture might be. This leads to a discussion of intrinsic factors that set illustration as art and medium apart from the world of painting with which, nonetheless, it must always in some degree be compared. And finally, returning to the image-text analogy, there is the matter of how we go about "reading" illustrations, particularly when they are overlaid with allegorical referents.
Reading and Illustrating
It is well understood by now that one cannot be content to describe illustrations in terms of their "fidelity" to a text in the sense of being a potentially unmediated copy of something that takes place in narrative. The figure, in other words, cannot be thought of as a signifier whose signified is simply the literary text, but rather as some kind of intertext. What we usually mean by the notion of an illustration's supposed fidelity to, or respect of, the text is more plausibly thought of as a state of compatibility or noncontradiction (or, in Nelson Goodman's terminology, of compliance) between the information each contains and the texts to which it relates. But there is no literal sense in which an illustration can be a direct transcription from language to image. Obviously, however, the term literal is often used casually, in a relative sense, to describe illustrations that are rigidly unimaginative, seeming to add as little as possible to the minimal verbal cues taken from the text.
Our first principle of analysis must therefore be that a text never determines how it is illustrated. It does not, in the first place, decide which scenes are to be represented, although there are ways in which it can flag the attention of a potential illustrator; in short tales or tragedies there is usually a fairly evident sort of crisis line or climactic scene that is by all odds the most likely to be selected. In longer, more complex works the range of the artist's options is great. Still, the manner of treating the subject would not be imposed, even if its essential content were. But the choice is powerfully influenced as well by extraneous factors, in particular, by previous illustrations of the same text or other texts.
Illustrations may, up to a point, be thought of as actualizations or "readings" (or even in a certain sense "performances") of the text, much as individual acts of reading are in reception theory. Pointing out that "the verb 'illustrate' itself seems to have been used to refer to verbal elucidation before it was transferred to the pictorial supplementation of verbal texts," Wendy Steiner concludes: "These usages indicate the rootedness of illustration in interpretation and intertextuality" (1982: 141). Such "reading" is constrained by definable boundaries yet by no means fully determined; an indefinite number of illustrations could be compatible with the text, not only because any number of distinct moments of action might be picked for illustration, but also because for any such moment any number of illustrations is imaginable. This is the essential perspective of Gérard Gréverand: "each illustrator contributes his own intelligibility of the text; thus there is always the possibility of a new intelligibility, an infinite field of the figuratively possible" (1983: 91). Such selection may color the story by what it omits as well as what it includes: thus, Jean Sgard notes, in terms of the eight plates by Jacques-Jean Pasquier and Hubert Frangois Gravelot for the Manon Lescaut of 1753, the whole concentration is on the two lovers, to the exclusion of such important characters in the novel as Des Grieux's father; religion, Manon's betrayals are absent (1988: 283, 286). Yet two other theoretical situations must still be envisioned: that the notion of an eventual illustration might itself be a generating factor in the production of the text; and that illustration and text may be less than perfectly compatible, either because the former is obeying rules of its own, or because it embodies a particular angle that is being (visually) applied to the reading of the work.
Illustrations, as Thomas Pavel remarks, can respond only to the informational content of a text and not readily to its stylistic or narratological aspects (1986: 74). In keeping with this insight (and method), one could formulate the propositional equivalent of this notion of compatibility. If one imagines a set of statements that could more or less indisputably be made about the (visually semantic) contents of any picture, any one of these statements could then be said to be "contained by" or "belonging to" the picture itself, in the same manner that elements of meaning or "semes" are said to be possessed by particular words. The number of such statements, though possibly very large, ought to be finite; and the set is at least partly different from the sum of sentences that belong to the text itself. In fact, any statement pertaining to an illustration of a literary text that is not in fact to be found in the text, or could not at least be said to be valid in the text's "world," would constitute an instance of incompatibility; the subset of such statements might consist of none at all (total compatibility of text and illustration) or the entire parent set (a possibility, for instance, when the wrong plate is affixed to a work). One could account for the contents of this subset in various ways: inattention to the text, imaginative excess, artistic license, and the like.
Generally, however, the relation between text and image is, even if not strictly derivative, not exactly reversible either. For if the image can act upon the reader, it is nonetheless powerless, as Greverand notes, to affect the text qua text:
We have to recognize that a variation in an aspect of the image does not entail a change in the narrative it accompanies; hence we cannot consider the illustration as the signifier of a text which is more or less its caption and which, in this perspective, would constitute its signified. Image and text are not the front and back sides of the same meaning. (1983:93)
This applies at least to the pure model in which the text is assigned clear temporal priority. But there are also, both theoretically and practically, more complicated interrelations. The most obvious one is the case where the author has selected either the artist or the subjects of illustration; as in the collaboration between playwright and director, it is impossible then to say that the latter does not supply sometimes decisive feedback to the former. It is tempting to conjecture that Antoine Francois Prevost had a hand in determining the illustrations for the 1753 Manon, and beyond any doubt that Jean-Jacques Rousseau specified the subjects for his Julie in 1761. At that extremity of the scale, William Blake and Salomon Gessner being the only examples that readily suggest themselves within this time frame, authors are their own artists. But one must also consider the subtler anterior influence exerted during the writing process by the realization that a particular situation would lend itself well to illustration, or even the writer's tendency to conceive episodes (and this constitutes the optimal model in Denis Diderot's thought) so that they can. At this level, "illustration" merges with the general category of dramatic imagination, and the potential engraving becomes one of the factors involved in the production of the literary text.
There is thus an inherently interactive relationship between writer and draftsman, for an understanding of which one can seek some clues in the kind of textual cues to which the artist responds. Just as there are scènes à faire (obvious if not facile dramatic situations) in relation to the plot of a play or novel, so one can point in many texts to what one might call scènes à illustrer. Take this example from Louvet de Couvray's Amours du chevalier de Faublas, where the baron discovers his son Faublas in a dark room with Mme de Lignolle and Justine (with whom he has just made love, believing her to be Mme de B***):
Un cri d'effroi m'échappa.... Le baron, armé d'une bougie fatale, s'arrêta dans l'embrasure de la porte; et quelle scène il éclaira! D'abordluimême, qui comptait ne trouver qu'une femme avec son fils, ne fut pas mediocrement étonné d'en voir deux qui se tenaient amicalement par la main. Madame de Lignolle ensuite, madame de Lignolle également indignée, honteuse et surprise, montrait assez, sur son visage où se peignaient les combats de plusieurs passions contraires, qu'elle ne pouvait ni me pardonner l'inndélité que sans doute je venais de lui faire, ni se pardonner à elle-même les sottes caresses dont il n'y a qu'un instant elle accablait sa rivale, sa rivale qui, toute droite plantée contre la muraille, ne donnait pas signe de vie. Mais vous jugez que des quatre acteurs de cette étrange scène, je ne fus pas le moins stupéfait, lorsqu'un coup d'oeil, furtivement jeté sur l'infortunée statue, m'eut fait reconnaître ... je la regardai trois fois encore avant de me persuader que mes sens eussent pu m'égarer à ce point... Cette femme, dans les bras de laquelle j'avais cru posséder la plus belle des femmes, ce n'était qu'une brunette passablement gentille! celle en qui tout à l'heure j'idolâtrais Madame de B * * *, ce n'était que Justine! (§49: 3:125; italics added)
[I let out a cry of fright.... The baron, armed with a fateful candle, came to a stop in the doorway; and what a scene he illuminated! He, to begin with, expecting only to find a woman with his son, was not a little surprised to see two of them holding hands amicably. Then Mme de Lignolle, indignant, shamed and surprised all at once, whose face, crossed by different and opposite emotions, indicated sufficiently that she could neither forgive me the infidelity that I had doubtless just committed, nor forgive herself the foolish caresses she had just the minute before been showering on her rival who, frozen upright against the wall, gave no sign of life. But you can judge that of the four actors in this strange scene I was not the least stupified when a furtive glance at that unfortunate statue revealed to me ... I had to look three times before I could accept that I could have been so carried away by my own senses ... This woman, in whose arms I thought I was possessing the most beautiful of women, was no more than a fairly nice brunette: she in whose person I had just adored Mme de B * * * was merely Justine!]
The narrative here imposes a stasis on the reader's imagination, effectively freezing the diegetic action while the narrative catches up with its dynamic potential. The notion of scène combines and bridges reference to theater ("quatre acteurs") and painting. The narrative judgment "Quelle scène!" by being repeated in the caption, becomes at the same time a commentary on the illustration—and on illustration. In such spaces do the writer looking for illustrations and the artist parsing a text for subjects sometimes meet.
Illustration as Narrative
A basic, qualitative difference between text and image, recognized in the age-old comparisons of poetry to painting, is that a text is diachronic and a picture synchronic. Although an image may have a narrative content—a subject that Diderot discusses, placing great emphasis upon the range of artistic choices and the importance of the specific narrative moment selected—that content must necessarily be communicated, via gestures suspended in progress or signs of acts either completed or about to be performed, through a medium whose mode of existence is synchronic. This had not always been so strictly the case. Saint Francis could be shown on a single panel accomplishing several saintly gestures side by side; sixteenth-century illustrations of Ludovico Ariosto represent many scenes from each canto laid out as along a road in receding perspective, in a symbolically spatial diachrony that perhaps constitutes the original "time-line." (It might be said that the comic strip reestablished sequential pictorial narrative and, by imbedding words—principally dialogue—redefined the traditional relationship of text and illustration.) It is true, of course, that a picture is never read in an absolutely synchronic manner. To some degree the eye and mind assimilate its various aspects sequentially, but the ordering of that perceptive sequence is not a narrative order, and the quasinarrative aspects of the image's meaning must be reconstructed from the semiotic data that at first may seem randomly dispersed.
Owen Holloway puts it this way: "It is a prerequisite of good illustration to bring together elements which perhaps were never together or even present in so many words in the text of the book. Coupled with this, it is the function of montage to break down a scene into features which are then presented in an order, and with a particular emphasis, and on the particular scale, that the narrative of the illustrator himself requires" (1969: 30). This artistic license with respect to the diachronic text (though hardly a "prerequisite" of "good" illustration) is unquestionably an aspect of the illustrator's repertory. Nonetheless, the analytic principle being put to use here, even though positively intended, is inapplicably vague ("an order," a "particular scale," and so forth) as is the definition of montage; while one may concede that it commendably evokes the ephemeral experience of illustrations, this terminology, partly judgmental and normative, cannot be applied objectively to their description. Wendy Steiner has drawn renewed attention to the means whereby the artist, whether illustrator or history painter, "represents" action in a static medium by catching "the crucial moment when all the past and future of the act are implied" (1982: 148). On another level, an illustration can entail condensation of a purely symbolic type: for example, representation of Julie's bed and room in the fifth illustration to Julie (L 'inoculation de l'amour) recalls the earlier night Saint-Preux spent with her there (the only other time he ever entered this room, but not an element in the sequence of illustrations) and simultaneously foreshadows Julie's deathbed, subject of the twelfth plate (Labrosse 1985: 229). Such coherent sequences of illustrations, which seem to become established only in the 1750s, may, in Jean Sgard's view, owe much both to William Hogarth's "Progress" series and to the copious illustrations in both English and French editions of Samuel Richardson (1986: 32–35). He is quite right to emphasize the particular interior dynamics of such a suite, which can in many instances serve as subject of rewarding study in its own right.
A major distinction between a "narrative" painting such as Jean Honoré Fragonard's Corésus et Callirhoé (one of Diderot's principal examples in his Salons) and a literary illustration is that the latter is physically juxtaposed with its prescribed textual environment, and this proximity imposes the dominant role of text to which the figural must be related. Text dominates also in history painting, but it is not an immediate given; it must either be identified by the title, or by intuitable or reconstructible data coded in the image. Every representational piece of art has some kind of intertext, and this intertext, if not overtly narrative, at least takes on, in the process of deployment, a narrative form. Take, for instance, the following description by Mary Sheriff of a "non-narrative" allegory of fall by Fragonard: "[a] young woman gathers fruit in her apron and squeezes a bunch of grapes over a child lying in the grass below," who moreover "is animated by the spray" (1990: 95, 111; my italics). The verbs here call attention to at least a minimal narrative, and they are surely essential to understanding of the painting. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry made a simple but dramatic demonstration of this relation in the first page of he petit prince, where he presented a childish image in the form of a riddle, looking something like a hat. What the drawing represents, it is explained—its text, in other words—is a boa that has swallowed an elephant: a static image—seemingly a still life—that instead implies a narrative content.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Engraven Desire by Philip Stewart. Copyright © 1992 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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