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1 Vol. 15, No. 3 (2014)

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Worth a Thousand Words

At the Intersections of Literature and the Visual Arts

Astrid Bracke and Dennis Kersten

Abstract

The relationship between literature and the visual arts has been complementary, as well as one in which one – usually the visual arts – is seen as a threat to the other. The introduction to this issue explores how literature and the visual arts complement, challenge and inspire each other. It also discusses the contributions to the issue, which include not only five scholarly articles, but also a creative exploration of language and landscape art.

Résumé

Les rapports entre la littérature et les arts visuels ont toujours été complexes: d’une part il y a une forte complémentarité, d’autre part, surtout du point de vue des arts visuels, il y a conflit et concurrence. Dans cette introduction nous voulons examiner comment les deux pratiques se complètent, se défient et s’inspirent réciproquement. En même temps, nous présentons aussi les différents contributions, qui comprennent à la fois cinq essais et une création artistique qui croise langage et art du paysage.

Keywords

literature and visual arts; illustrations; photography; landscape art.

As the cliché goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. One of the first uses of the phrase (Arthur Brisbane’s 1911 “Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words”) reflects the complementary relationship between image and text, as well as the challenge that the image poses to the text. At the intersections of literature and the visual arts, then, the two fields can stand in various relations to each other: the visual can support the text, as is the case in illustrations, the visual can challenge the text, and the visual and the literary can achieve cross-pollination.

While illustrations can play a vital role in foregrounding a certain reading of a text, images, particularly photographs, have also come to be seen as a threat to the text. If an image indeed is worth a thousand words, what is the added value of the text at all? Unlike language, Roland Barthes argued, a photograph “is indifferent to all intermediaries: it does not invent; it is authentication itself” (Camera

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Lucida 87). At the same time, particularly in postmodern literature, the authenticity supposedly inherent in photography is exploited and the image is included “for the purpose of having something authentic to undercut” (Timothy Dow Adams).

A recurrent issue in much scholarship on literature and the visual arts, particularly in relation to photography, are the undesired or unexpected effects that an image can have. Virginia Woolf’s decision not to include the Spanish Civil War photographs that she discussed extensively in Three Guineas has been interpreted as a way of avoiding any sense of ideological compliance which printing them would suggest. Similarly, in her late work on pictures of atrocity and war, Susan Sontag argued against showing pictures such as the Abu Ghraib images, suggesting that the proliferation of these images would only lead to a dulling and numbing. Alternately, images may be interpreted as too powerful in a more personal sense as well. At the heart of Barthes’ Camera Lucida is the famous Wintergarden photograph of his mother. Though extensively discussed, and given prime importance, Barthes decided not to include it, arguing that for the reader “it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the ‘ordinary’” (73). It would, he suggests, be merely an example of what he calls a studium – an interest – rather than produce the punctum – the wound – that it is to him (73). On the one hand, this widespread practice among photography critics of not including the photographs they are discussing is a way of giving primacy of language over the visual, of containing the visual in order to minimize its power to say more than a thousand words. At the same time, as James Elkins has argued, this technique also obscures the pain that he suggests is at the heart of all photography. Moreover, photography, he observes, “gives us all kinds of things that we don’t want it to give us” (174).

The visual, then, can do more than we may want it to as it refuses to be just decoration, or mere support of the text – as the articles in this issue demonstrate. Yet the flip side of the tension between literature and the visual arts is the possibility for cross-pollination between the two fields, and mutual inspiration. Nancy Armstrong has most extensively discussed the close relation between the development of photography in the nineteenth century and the development of the realist novel at the same time. Photography, she argues, created a sense of the real in the Victorian Age that changed both how people previously saw the world, as well as what they recognized as “real” in novels.

The ways in which literature and the visual arts complement, challenge and inspire each other was the focus of the international symposium “Worth a Thousand Words”, held in October 2012 at Radboud University Nijmegen. The articles in this special issue of Image & Narrative are the product of that symposium and reflect the breadth of issues at the intersection of literature and the visual arts. The articles are placed in chronological order, ranging from a discussion of eighteenth-century illustration to the works of the artist Sol LeWitt in the 1970s. This chronology shows both a development, as well as similarities in the treatment of literature and the visual arts. At the same time, the interplay between literature and the visual arts is influenced by technological changes – such as, most obviously, the invention of photography.

From the mid-1700s onwards, images in French novels no longer simply had a decorative function; they were used as narrative illustrations, complementing the novels’ plots. Marijn Kaplan examines how the illustrations in the eighteenth-century French author Marie Jeanne Riccoboni’s novels marginalise

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or even erase the female, while the texts themselves focus on women protagonists and their lives. Contemporary editions of texts like Histoire de Miss Jenny (1764) and Histoire d’Ernestine (1765) add to conventional gender roles by presenting visually attractive and socially acceptable pictures instead of illustrations of scenes that highlight Riccoboni’s feminocentricity. In Kaplan’s words, the results of her investigation of the use of illustrations in Riccoboni’s novels, “does not sanction feminist claims for the visual arts domain similar to those made by literary critics for her novels”.

With Keri Yousif we stay in France, but move to the nineteenth century, when caricaturist Gavarni and the Goncourt brothers tried to capture in image and in writing the Parisian lorette. As Yousif demonstrates, it was Gavarni who set the standard for the representation of these young female “prostitutes”. But while Gavarni’s early-nineteenth-century portrayal lorette caricatures can be said to be humorous and sympathetic, the Goncourt’s later writing about the figure cast her in the role of “corrupt man-eater”. Yousif shows how the changing imaging of the lorette was affected by political and social developments in nineteenth-century France as well as the shift in medium (visual with Gavarni, verbal with Edmund and Jules de Goncourt). “The figure of the lorette functions as an artistic tool for social commentary,” Yousif writes, but she also emphasises the shaping influence of the materiality of litographs and literary prose on the representation of the cultural icon.

With Anna Cotrell article on George Buchanan’s fiction and Humphrey Jennings’ photographic work May the Twelfth the focus of the articles move into the twentieth century. In “‘An Album of Small, Clear Pictures’: George Buchanan, Humphrey Jennings’s May the Twelfth, and the Practice of Looking Away from the Main Event in 1930s London”, Cotrell relates the investigate method Buchanan employed in his novels of the 1930s to the developments in Mass Observation happening at the same time. Aimed at recording daily life in Britain, both the novels and the Mass-Observation project focused on the details on the margins of the main event to, as Cotrell argues, articulate “the need for an analogical relationship between literature and the visual arts”.

While Cotrell explores the ways in which the literature and photography of the 1930s had similar political and sociological aims, Wim Tigges’ contribution explores the intersections of literature and the visual arts in relation to Edwin Mullhouse, the 1972 mock-biography by Steven Millhauser. In “‘Precise Impressions Scrupulously Conveyed’: Visual Artistry in Edwin Mullhouse” Tigges discusses how Edwin Mullhouse is both textual yet extremely visual. Tracing the importance of the visual through the novel’s minute descriptions, the cartoon made by Mullhouse and references to the animated cartoon, Tigges argues that the narrator’s precise descriptions coupled with a particular emphasis on the Gothic elements of various genres results in a novel that is a “verbalization of a comic book and its derivative, the animated cartoon”.

Finally, in “Reading the simultaneous: literary narrative and musical progression in the art of Sol LeWitt” Mette Gieskes emphasizes not the effects of the visual arts on literature, as most of the other contributions have done, but explores the influence of literary and musical developments on visual art. Focusing on the work of Sol LeWitt, Gieskes explores matters of simultaneity and linearity, and the tension between on the one hand the static visual arts and on the other the ways in which LeWitt’s work is meant to be experienced both in space and time. In this respect, Gieskes argues, LeWitt tapped into

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literary and musical developments of the 1960s, with his early work developing out of “the intersection of instantaneity and […] directional narrativity”.

In addition to these five scholarly articles, we are particularly pleased to include the work of Lilian Cooper, who provides a non-academic and artistic perspective on the intersections of literature and the visual arts. Using temporary materials such as tape and chalk, Cooper seeks out and explores the connections not only between the visual and the literary, but also the connections between nature and culture in her site specific works of art. Placed in between the theoretical discussion offered by the articles, Cooper’s images illustrate yet another way in which literature and the visual arts can complement each other and provide new avenues for expression and exploration.

Works Cited

Adams, Timothy Dow. “Photographs on the Walls of the House of Fiction”. American Literary History 25.1 (2013): 176-189. Print.

Armstrong, Nancy. Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999. Print.

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. 1981. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Vintage, 2000. Print. Elkins, James. What Photography Is. London and New York: Routledge, 2011. Print.

Sontag, Susan. “Regarding the Torture of Others”. The New York Times 23 May 2004. Web. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. Print.

In her research, Astrid Bracke focuses on ecocriticism and contemporary British literature, as well as literature and photography studies. She teaches English literature at the University of Amsterdam and HAN University of Applied Sciences.

E-mail: a.a.l.bracke@uva.nl

Dennis Kersten is Assistant Professor in the departments of Cultural Studies and English Language and Culture at Radboud University, the Netherlands. His dissertation, Travels with Fiction in the Field of Biography. Writing the Lives of Three Nineteenth-Century Authors, appeared in 2011. His latest research project investigates the reception of contemporary British fiction as “modernist”.

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