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Michal Peled Ginsburg, Portrait Stories.
Elke D’hoker
Michal Peled Ginsburg, Portrait Stories. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015) ISBN: 9780823262601
Nineteenth-century narratives about portraits form the focus of this new critical study by Michael Peled Ginsburg, a Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Northwestern University. Although she calls them “portrait stories”, the fictional texts she discusses range from short stories over tales and novellas to novels, while possible differences between these genres are not taken into account. The focus on the nineteenth century, on the other hand, is convincingly explained in terms of a new concern with the painter and the processes of artistic production in these texts. In the introduction, Ginsburg draws on Peirce’s typology of signs to explain the relations between the portrait and its subject, painter and viewer in terms of iconic, symbolic and indexical relations. The intersubjective relations between sitter, painter and viewer through the portrait form the focus of her analyses in the seven chapters that follow.
In these chapters, Ginsburg offers extremely detailed and clever close readings of some fourteen portrait stories, from different traditions of Western literature. With the exception of the opening and closing chapter, which concentrate on a single story, Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” and Gogol’s “The Portrait” respectively, all chapters juxtapose and compare two or three texts. The second chapter reads two of Henry James’s stories in terms of the tension between two opposing views on the portrait: as either a copy or a ghostly double of the sitter. Chapter three continues the investigation of the portrait’s haunting powers in stories by Hoffmann, Gauthier and Nerval, but this time in relation to the painter, whose subjectivity is also at stake in the art of portraiture. In chapters four and five, the markers of gender and class are added to questions of power. James’s “Glasses” and Balzac’s La Maison du chat-qui-pelote are shown to both stage and subtly subvert conventional power relations whereby the portrait reduces the female sitter to object, while establishing the male painter as subject. Stories by Kleist and Hardy as well as Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray are, further, analysed as instances of “the less common scenario in which a man is the object, rather than subject, of vision and desire” (12). Chapter six similarly elucidates a less common relation invoked in portrait stories, that between parents and children. Through a reading of stories by Theodor Storm and George Sand, Ginsburg shows their questioning of hereditary lines of transmission in a patriarchal society. In the chapter on Gogol’s “The Portrait”, finally, the focus on interpersonal relations is abandoned in favour of a discussion of the conflicting views on representation staged in the story’s opposition of money and art. In her afterword, “Reading Portrait Stories”, Ginsburg self-reflexively links her own readings to the way the narratives themselves stage viewing as a process
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of reading and misreading: just like “the portrait in portrait stories provides the shifting and uncertain ground for the construction of identity and intersubjective relations”, so readers must see “the texts as different and differing […] creating/discovering the text in the process of reading while also being affected by it” (165).
As a defense of her own reading practice, these statements clearly show the influence of the post-structuralist criticism of Derrida, de Man and Hillis Miller, all of whom are also quoted in the book. Ginsburg’s readings are indeed organized around binary oppositions which are subsequently undermined, such as universal-particular, copy-original, ideal-real, art-life, subject-object, …. Following Derrida’s destabilizing of the logic of the supplement, a central argument of the book is that the portrait stories’ “reversal of the hierarchical relation between subject and representation […] further destabilizes the status of the portrait as a copy (in the sense of secondary in relation to a preexisting original)” (165). Within this framework and methodology, Ginsburg offers many detailed and original readings which admirably highlight textual details and convincingly tease out ambiguities that have previously gone unnoticed. Yet her approach also has certain consequences which, to me, limit the overall resonance and scope of her study.
First, as is common in a post-structuralist approach, Ginsburg’s readings themselves function as a destabilizing supplement to existing critical readings, whereby earlier interpretations are undermined as they are shown to repeat certain misreadings already staged in the texts. A consequence of this approach is a focus on canonical texts and authors, which already have an array of critical readings at their disposal. Almost inevitably, this also leads to a focus on the work of male authors: of the fourteen texts discussed, only one is by a woman author. This is a pity, not only because it deprives the study as a whole of the possibly divergent perspective of women writers, but also because it would have been very interesting to see what an excellent close reader like Ginsburg would make of the many portrait stories of writers like Edith Wharton, Vernon Lee, Sarah Grand or Ella D’Arcy. That said, Ginsburg shows herself very sensitive to gender hierarchies in the stories she does discuss.
A second consequence of Ginsburg’s close reading approach is that it remains rather tied up with individual texts. In her introduction, she differentiates her approach from that of existing studies of the portrait story, which tend to offer historical surveys of the portrait as a changing motif in literary traditions, while attributing differences between texts to “a broader historical process”. Instead, Ginsberg claims to see these differences “as resulting from the particular concerns (thematic and formal) of each text” (9). In the different chapters, indeed, Ginsburg is primarily interested in teasing out the tensions and oppositions surrounding representation and subjectivity in the individual texts. The brief conclusion at the end of each chapter then compares the stakes of one text with that of another, yet without really explaining these differences, whether in terms of literary tradition, historical context or authorial poetics. The result is that, however intelligent and discerning the readings themselves are, they remain bound up with the particular texts and are difficult to generalize into statements about the development or even characteristics of the subgenre of the portrait stories as a whole. Hence, what Ginsburg’s readings demonstrate above all - apart from the acuity of the critic - is the complexity and richness of these canonical texts as they unsettle conventional beliefs about the nature of art, subjectivity, and interpersonal relations – but perhaps that is something we already knew.
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Elke D’hoker s associate professor of English at the University of Leuven. Email: elke.dhoker@arts.kuleuven.be
