The Art of the Text: Visuality in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Literary and Other Media

by Susan R Harrow (Editor)

Overview

The Art of the Text contributes to the fast-developing dialogue between textual studies and visual culture studies. It focuses on the processes through which writers think and readers respond visually and, in essays by researchers in literature, screen and visual studies, the volume explores the visuality of the literary and non-literary text, with a sustained focus on French material of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Visuality is appraised here not as a state, but as a set of processes of adaptation, resistance, negotiation, and transformation. By reading visually, the contributors here reactivate the visual-textual relations of canonical texts - from Romanticism to Naturalism, Surrealism to high Modernism; from film to fan literature, television to picture language.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781783165797
Publisher:	University of Wales Press
Publication date:	09/15/2013
Series:	Studies in Visual Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Susan Harrow is Ashley Watkins Professor of French at the University of Bristol. Her research interests lie in modern poetry and narrative, and in the interrelation of literary modernism and visual culture. She is the author of books on modern French poetry and narrative.

Read an Excerpt

The Art of the Text

Visuality in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literary and Other Media

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By Susan Harrow

University of Wales Press

Copyright © 2013 Susan Harrow
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78316-579-7

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CHAPTER 1

Jules Verne: The Unbearable Brightness of Seeing

Timothy Unwin

The sumptuously bound and lavishly illustrated volumes in Hetzel's 'Bibliothèque d'Education et de Récréation' offer an unambiguous signal that visual enjoyment is crucial to our experience of reading Jules Verne's Voyages extraordinaires. But Verne's texts also depend intrinsically on visuality, first because they so fulsomely detail the sights of nature throughout the known world, and secondly because sight and seeing — and on occasions their opposite, blindness — are key to the unfolding of many of the plots. Vantage points are essential: ships' prows, mountaintops, privileged views through a submarine porthole or the hatchet of a lunar missile, or from the basket of a hot-air balloon. So too are hideouts where the observer can enjoy invisibility while assessing danger, preparing escape or meditating strategy. The appearance of death itself turns out, on occasions, to be the ultimate vantage point. In Mathias Sandorf (1885) the motto of the eponymous hero, whose future son-in-law rises Lazarus-like from the dead to right all wrongs, is: 'la mort ne détruit pas, elle ne rend qu'invisible'. To see but not be seen confers exceptional and sometimes magical powers. Conversely, to be seen and watched without knowing it can be a fatal disadvantage. In one of Verne's last novels, Les Frères Kip (1902), the identity of two murderers is revealed when their image, fixed on the retina of the victim's eyes in his dying moments, is rediscovered in photographs of the dead body. Thus the criminals are seen and denounced from beyond the grave.

Not all of Verne's novels offer such a dramatic encounter with human sight and its ability to defy death or provide crucial knowledge; but visual curiosities, optical or ocular eccentricities and unusual visual faculties are a constant in his work. In Cinq semaines en ballon (1863), the manservant Joe who accompanies Samuel Fergusson on his balloon trip across Africa possesses 'une puissance et une étendue de vision étonnantes', enabling him to see Jupiter's moons without a telescope (Cinq semaines en ballon, p. 38). The eccentric geographer Paganel in Les Enfants du capitaine Grant (1866–8) is blessed with night vision, even though his eyes — like those of a number of other Vernian heroes — 'se dissimulaient derrière d'énormes lunettes rondes' (Les Enfants du capitaine Grant, p. 53). Paganel, though, delivers the central Vernian lesson when he stresses the importance of seeing correctly: 'Tout est curieux à l'oeil du géographe. Voir est une science. Il y a des gens qui ne savent pas voir, et qui voyagent avec autant d'intelligence qu'un crustacé' (Les Enfants du capitaine Grant, p. 71). Accurate vision, in the sense both of perception and of understanding, is the essential attribute of the scientist-explorer, and often depends in the first place on those instruments that facilitate sight and insight or give objective measurements or detail of the reality that is seen: sextants, telescopes, microscopes, periscopes, theodolytes, mirrors and lenses of all kinds. Sometimes these are allied to exceptional or implausible powers of vision. In Le Pays des fourrures (1873), the astronomer Thomas Black is obsessed with viewing the lunar halo during a solar eclipse, and seems almost conjoined with his telescope: 'C'était un homme à vivre dans une lunette. Mais quand il observait, quel observateur sans rival au monde!' (Le Pays des fourrures, p. 28). Such, indeed, is his ocular power that he is able to look directly at the sun through his own telescope, without any apparent damage to his eyes. In the case of Phileas Fogg's manservant Passepartout, on the other hand, the eyes signal in a different way that he is seeing 'properly', when in the early stages of Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours he senses that Fogg is the right master for him: 'Passepartout eut comme une sensation d'humidité autour de la prunelle. Son maître avait fait un pas dans son coeur' (Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, p. 27). Often, though, the need to see in Verne is bound up with the need to classify, to create maps and to document the observed world in objective terms. The world has not only to be seen, but the memory of what has been seen must be officially recorded.

Throughout the Voyages extraordinaires, the processes of observation are obsessive and driven. The sights of the natural world are taken in and positively consumed by the eyes, which sometimes appear to wear themselves out in over-enthusiastic contemplation or to risk damage through imprudent scrutiny. In the case of Hatteras, the obsessive desire to see the North Pole results in what appears to his colleagues to be both blindness and madness when he stares into the crater of a volcano (Les Aventures du capitaine Hatteras, p. 606). Hatteras discovers here not the unbearable lightness of being, but the unbearable brightness of seeing, and this extraordinary vision costs him his sight and his sanity. It is an indication that visuality in Verne is voracious, exuberant and almost always excessive. The spectator often devours shapes, colours or sights, just as the traveller consumes distance. The expression 'dévorer des yeux', frequently used in the Voyages extraordinaires, might seem a banal and lifeless metaphor, but it is frequently reinvested by Verne with its original connotations of physical appetite and hearty consumption. In Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, the harpoonist Ned Land, ever eager to cook and to consume the creatures of the sea that he beholds, watches a whale with a visual intensity that anticipates his Gargantuan appetite: 'Ned Land n'entendait pas. Il n'écoutait pas. La baleine s'approchait toujours. Il la dévorait des yeux' (Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, p. 465). It is as though the eyes reach out to touch and to draw in the prey. Verne underlines the active, near-bulimic involvement of sight. On other occasions, the consuming appetite of vision may lead to a sense of fatigue or wear, as the eyes weaken from the effort of sustained concentration. When Professor Aronnax scours the waves in search of the strange creature (in the event, the Nautilus) that has been sighted at the beginning of the story, voracious scrutiny (the culinary metaphor is again used by Verne) is accompanied by an anxiety that his visual powers will diminish through excessive use: 'Tantôt penché sur les bastingages du gaillard d'avant, tantôt appuyé à la lisse de l'arrière, je dévorais d'un oeil avide le cotonneux sillage qui blanchissait la mer jusqu'à perte de vue [...] Je regardais, je regardais à en user ma rétine, à en devenir aveugle' (Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, p. 38, my emphasis). In the Vernian world, seeing is as essential to survival and good health as eating, and the visual variety of the world is one of the prime sources of textual proliferation in those copious lists and descriptions that characterize Verne's writing style. The abundance of the visualized world is rivalled by the wealth of the lexicon itself, and Verne's writing thus generates a sense of cornucopian generosity. The eye, or the gaze, is in this sense central to his very approach as a writer. As Christian Chelebourg points out, the eye is 'l'organe par excellence de la reconnaissance, et c'est l'organe primordial de la science vernienne. Les Voyages extraordinaires forment une œuvre du regard.' Not for nothing is Passepartout's reaction to the news that he is about to depart around the world conveyed with the comment that he has 'l'oeil démesurément ouvert, la paupière et le sourcil surélevés' (Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, p. 25). The eyes have it: they not only receive but also tell a story.

Voracious visuality in Verne is apparent not merely because the eyes are ever eager to take in whatever enters their field of vision, but also because, in Verne's cosmology, the world is so abundant that passive spectatorship is simply impossible. The eyes must work overtime if they are to perceive all that is present before them. The human gaze is endlessly solicited, and there is urgency in this. As Michel Strogoff, denounced as a Russian spy, is about to be blinded by his enemies, the leader of the Tartar uprising, Féofar-Khan, famously commands him to use his last moments of sight with the words: 'Regarde de tous tes yeux, regarde!' Sadistically, Féofar-Khan then lays on a pageant of colourful dances and other performances, in order that Strogoff may feast his eyes — for feast is indeed the word — one last time before he loses his sight forever. The sights and colours that are described are, for Strogoff, almost excruciating in their variety and intensity. The brightness is, for all its bewitching fascination, unbearable. The description of the dancers is sumptuous and pulsating. Glittering jewellery, shimmering light and profuse, vibrant colours mingle confusingly in the movement of heads, hair and limbs:

Elles portaient le costume national, et des bijoux les ornaient à profusion. De petits triangles d'or et de longues pendeloques se balançaient à leurs oreilles, des cercles d'argent niellés s'enroulaient à leur cou, des bracelets formés d'un double rang de gemmes enserraient leurs bras et leurs jambes, des pendants, richement entremêlés de perles, de turquoises et de cornalines, frémissaient à l'extrémité de leurs longues nattes. (Michel Strogoff, p. 333)

For Michel Strogoff, this is indeed exquisite torture, punctuated as it is by the repeated injunction by Féofar-Khan to enjoy this, his last spectacle, with 'all' his eyes. The imperative 'regarde!', featuring at the beginning and the end of a mere six-word sentence, underlines the extreme urgency of vision in these last moments, the need to take in everything and preserve the sense of it, and thus hold on to the visual imprint. But the plural, too, 'de tous tes yeux', is striking: two eyes may be better than one, but even two eyes, it seems, cannot possibly be enough to take in all the sights that the world has to offer. Each eye must multiply and match the spectacular variety of the display, and there is perhaps a memory here of the all-seeing hundred-eyed giant of Greek mythology, Argus Panoptes, whose miraculous powers of vision extended even to watchful alertness in his sleep, since the eyes themselves rested at different times. So the much quoted command in this chapter of Verne's novel (the phrase will be used by Georges Perec as an epigraph to La Vie mode d'emploi in 1978) sums up the appeal throughout his work to strive for a panoptic vision which is equal to the variety of the world. Yet it also conveys the underlying sense that, however many eyes we might have, and however acute our vision might be, the world is always too profuse to be definitively taken in. The world is blindingly bountiful, over-generous in the sights it offers, overwhelmingly and unbearably intense.

The knowledge that vision may not ultimately be equal to the task of beholding all that is before it is, in Michel Strogoff's case, the most horrible of tortures. If, as he is about to discover, there is total blindness, there is also no such thing as total vision. The eyes cannot consume the fare that is placed before them. Nonetheless, certain images sear themselves upon the eyes, leaving a kind of 'imprint' similar to the one in the victim's retina in Les Frères Kip. As Strogoff is about to be blinded, a woman leaps out of the crowd and he recognizes his own mother. The alimentary image returns in the description of this, his last vision: 'Plus rien n'existait à ses yeux que sa mère, qu'il dévorait alors du regard! Toute sa vie était dans cette dernière vision!' (Michel Strogoff, p. 342). Whereupon he is blinded by the traditional Tartar method, a white-hot sabre being passed so close to his eyes that it destroys them with its heat. However, as is so often the case with Verne, things are not as they seem. In a neat variation of the Oedipal legend, the tears that Strogoff sheds for his mother as he is being blinded are just enough to reduce the effect of the heat from the blade and, although he is left temporarily unsighted, his vision later returns. So, while Strogoff regains the sight that he had thought lost, he is also able to learn the crucial Vernian lesson, which is to behold the world at every moment as if it were never to be seen again. To be overwhelmed by the visual variety of the world, to feel that the eyes are not enough, is also to be aware of its richness.

The sublime visuality of the world, and the need to apprehend it by every means possible, is thus a central message of Michel Strogoff. It is also one of the key messages of Verne's writing more generally. The universe of the Voyages extraordinaires is brimful of beauty, and the narrator or his characters are almost perpetually amazed by the spectacle that is offered to their gaze. The feeling of the sublimeness of creation is, for example, repeatedly evoked in Autour de la lune (1870), as Michel Ardan and his fellow travellers marvel at the celestial scenes before them. In highly charged passages like the following, Verne mixes astrological and scientific erudition with a quasi-mystical response to what is beheld:

En effet, rien ne pouvait égaler la splendeur de ce monde sidéral baigné dans le limpide éther. Ces diamants incrustés dans la voûte céleste jetaient des feux superbes. Le regard embrassait le firmament depuis la Croix du Sud jusqu'à l'Étoile du Nord, ces deux constellations qui, dans douze mille ans, par suite de la précession des équinoxes, céderont leur rôle d'étoiles polaires, l'une à Canopus, de l'hémisphère austral, l'autre à Véga, de l'hémisphère boréal. L'imagination se perdait dans cet infini sublime, au milieu duquel gravitait le projectile, comme un nouvel astre créé de la main des hommes. Par un effet naturel, ces constellations brillaient d'un éclat doux ; elles ne scintillaient pas, car l'atmosphère manquait, qui, par l'interposition de ses couches inégalement denses et diversement humides, produit la scintillation. Ces étoiles, c'étaient de doux yeux qui regardaient dans cette nuit profonde, au milieu du silence absolu de l'espace. (Autour de la lune, pp. 420–1)

The Pascalian confrontation of the smallness of man with the vastness of space (though without the anxiety, since the stars are seen as gentle eyes staring back at the observer) is underpinned in Verne by a pedagogical mode of presentation and by the erudition on which this depends. Seamlessly woven into his description of the vastness of the heavens, there is detail of key stars and constellations, and an explanation of what causes the stars to twinkle when observed from below the earth's atmosphere. But the scientific and the poetic are interconnected, each relying on the other for its impact. For Verne, demonstrable scientific reality is itself proof of the miraculousness of the universe we live in, and there is no need to seek any philosophical or religious explanation beyond nature's observable manifestations. The apparent absence of God in Verne's world does not render creation any less godlike, for the cosmos itself is a divine spectacle.

The sense of the boundless beauty of nature, a defining feature of Verne's writing, is probably nowhere more clearly conveyed than in the stunning lists in Vingt mille lieues sous les mers which describe the flora and fauna of the ocean beds. Perec, one of Verne's great admirers, once wrote: 'Quand, dans Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, Jules Verne énumère sur quatre pages tous les noms de poissons, j'ai le sentiment de lire un poème.' The world that Verne describes in this novel is certainly one of magical abundance, in which the writing itself, with its repetitive and rhythmic lexical combinations, provides a clear textual correlative to the density of physical reality. Whatever the eye can behold, there is always more to be seen. The experience of reading Verne's lists gives a very real sense of the endless variety of nature, and that is indeed partly because it is textually quite impossible for the reader to process every lexical detail that is placed on view in the text. Just as the Vernian traveller's gaze is besieged by an over-abundance of sights, so too the reader's capacity to visualize is unsettled by rampant verbal proliferation. These lists may appear in one sense to be dispensable, for they have no direct impact on the unfolding of the plot, and like classic descriptive passages they may seem to have a rhetorically ornamental function. In another sense, though, they convey something absolutely essential and yet deeply paradoxical, namely, that the world is so profuse that it is impossible ever to 'write' it, or even to capture it momentarily in words. What is seen and reported is only a minute proportion of what exists. For all its astonishing vitality, Verne's writing thus intimates its own powerlessness, and indeed rests on the premise that it cannot bring the visual variety of the world within its compass. Even if the writer had the hundred eyes of Argus Panoptes, he would need a hundred pens to convey what each eye saw. There are not enough eyes to see the world, and perhaps not enough words to write it — or at least, there is not enough time to draw all of the words out of the lexicon. Verne's strikingly powerful representations of marine life thus carefully position themselves as partial reflections of reality, and implicitly recognize how much more lies beyond the range of the text, even though the text itself may seem to overwhelm us in its profusion.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Art of the Text by Susan Harrow. Copyright © 2013 Susan Harrow. Excerpted by permission of University of Wales Press.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Series editors' preface,
Acknowledgements,
List of illustrations,
Contributors,
Introduction Susan Harrow,
I Thinking the visual image,
1 Jules Verne: The Unbearable Brightness of Seeing Timothy Unwin,
2 Affinities of Photography and Syntax in Proust's À la recherché du temps perdu Áine Larkin,
3 Portraits and Neologisms: Understanding the Visual in Henri Michaux's 'Voyage en Grande Garabagne' Nina Parish,
4 The 'trou noir': Visualizations of Nihilism in Nietzsche and Modiano Jenny Devine,
II Intermedial migrations in the 1920s,
5 Painting and Cinema in Aragon's Anicet Katherine Shingler,
6 Isotypes and Elephants: Picture-Language as Visual Writing in the Work and Correspondence of Otto Neurath Michelle Henning,
7 Colette: An Eye for Textiles Anne Freadman,
8 Stars as Sculpture in the 1920s Fan-Magazine Interview Michael Williams,
III Visual negotiations and adaptations,
9 Victor Hugo and Painting: The Exceptional Case of the Orientales Karen Quandt,
10 Visions and Re-visions: Zola, Cardinal and L'Œuvre Kate Griffiths,
11 Donner à voir: Poetic Language and Visual Representation according to Paul Éluard Peter Hawkins,
12 'La lettre au cinéma n'est pas une excellente solution': A Heteromedial Analysis of Chantal Akerman's Proust Adaptation Jørgen Bruhn,
Translation sources,
Bibliography,