Literary Visualities: Visual Descriptions, Readerly Visualisations, Textual Visibilities [1 ed.] 3110377942, 9783110377941

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Timeline of Case Studies
Preface
Introduction: Literary Visuality Studies
I. Visual Descriptions
Playbooks as Imaginary Theatre: Visuality and Description in Early Modern English Drama
Descriptive Visuality and Postmodernist Fiction
II. Readerly Visualisations
Ekphrasis as Genre, Ekphrasis as Metaphenomenology
The Iconic Power of Short Stories – A Cognitive Approach
III. Textual Visibilities
Media History in Seventeenth- and Twentieth-Century Visual Poetry in English: Two Case Studies
Non-linear Readings: The Dictionary Novel as a Visual Genre
Do you see? Literature and Other Optical Media

Citation preview

Literary Visualities

Literary Visualities Visual Descriptions, Readerly Visualisations, Textual Visibilities Edited by Ronja Bodola and Guido Isekenmeier

Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of the research network ‘Studies in Literary Visuality’ (reference no. IS 222/1-1).

ISBN 978-3-11-037794-1 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-037803-0 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-038733-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover illustration: Art work by Su Blackwell © 2016 Su Blackwell Typesetting: Dörlemann Satz, Lemförde Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents Timeline of Case Studies  Preface   7

 6

Guido Isekenmeier & Ronja Bodola Introduction: Literary Visuality Studies 

 9

I Visual Descriptions Nicola Glaubitz Playbooks as Imaginary Theatre: Visuality and Description in Early Modern English Drama   21 Guido Isekenmeier Descriptive Visuality and Postmodernist Fiction 

 79

II Readerly Visualisations Silke Horstkotte Ekphrasis as Genre, Ekphrasis as Metaphenomenology 

 127

Renate Brosch The Iconic Power of Short Stories – A Cognitive Approach 

 165

III Textual Visibilities Kai Merten Media History in Seventeenth- and Twentieth-Century Visual Poetry in English: Two Case Studies   203 Bernhard Metz Non-linear Readings: The Dictionary Novel as a Visual Genre  Karin Krauthausen Do you see? Literature and Other Optical Media 

 261

 222

1800

1900

2000

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            Sam Winston, A Dictionary Story (2005)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Péter Zilahy, Az utolsó ablakzsiráf (1998)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     David Grossman, ’Ayen ’erekh: Ahavah (1986)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             Milorad Pavić, Hazarski rečnik (1984)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Andreas Okopenko, Lexikon einer sentimentalen Reise (1970)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Marguerite Duras, Le Camion (1977)

Krauthausen                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Gustave Flaubert, La Tentation de Saint Antoine (1874)

Metz

                                                            George Herbert, “The Altar” (1633)

Merten

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          E.E. Cummings, “Poem, Or Beauty Hurts Mr Vinal” (1923)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Graham Swift, “Seraglio” (1982)

 Durs Grünbein, Vom Schnee (2003)

Pere Gimferrer, “The Man in the Turban” (1983)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             Mark Leyner, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (1990)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Paul Auster, Ghosts (1986)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           B.S. Johnson, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973)

                                              Thomas Middleton/Thomas Decker, The Roaring Girl (1611–1612)

                                          William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (1606–1623)

                                   Thomas Middleton, The Puritan Widow (1606–1607)

…

Brosch

Horstkotte

Isekenmeier

Glaubitz

1600

Timeline of Case Studies

Preface This volume is the outcome of the research network ‘Studies in Literary Visuality’, which was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG IS 222/1-1). From 2011 to 2015, the members of the network convened in six workshops in Bochum, Frankfurt (Oder), and Stuttgart to discuss aspects of literary visuality. During this period, we had the pleasure of hosting a number of illustrious guests who generously shared their thoughts on our topic, namely Ralf Simon, Gabriele Rippl, Heinz Drügh, Natalie Binczek, Stephan Kammer, Emma Kafalenos, Ellen Esrock, Julika Griem, Kirsten Kramer, Volker Mergenthaler, Werner Michler, Dirk Wiemann, Robert Matthias Erdbeer, and Madleen Podewski. For their input and their efforts, Ronja Bodola and I would also like to thank those members of the network who could not contribute to this volume for various reasons – Sandra Poppe, Michael Neumann, and Gustav Frank. Bernhard Metz was so kind as to write an article bridging the gap left by these sorely missed pieces of the puzzle. My special thanks go to Ronja Bodola, née Tripp, who co-authored the proposal for the network, co-coordinated its work and co-edited this volume. Finally, Stella Diedrich of De Gruyter was always helpful and, above all, patient in the preparation of this book for publication. G.I.

DOI 10.1515/9783110378030-001

Guido Isekenmeier and Ronja Bodola

Introduction: Literary Visuality Studies Studies in literary visuality investigate the role of literature(s) in visual culture(s). Given the “fast-developing dialogue of textual studies with visual cultural studies” (Harrow 2013, 1) that has led to numerous, usually period-centred, publications over the past two decades or so (for instance, Miles 20051, Thomas 2008 on romanticism; Christ and Jordan 1995, Brosch 2008 on Victorianism; Jacobs 2001, Marcus 2013 on modernism; Tripp 2013 on the 1930s), it seems somewhat surprising that a “basic and programmatic elaboration of a literary studies perspective on visual culture is still in its early stages” (Stiegler 2014, 160)2. If the task is to demonstrate “how literature is interlaced with visual culture, constitutes regimes of visibility, and practices ways of seeing” (Stiegler 2014, 70), then part of the reason for the relative neglect of the specifically literary work on/in visual culture is the derivative status too often accorded to literature vis-à-vis the (visual) media. Again and again, literature has been attributed “a parasitic quality in its relation to visual culture, only passively receiving (and profiting)” (Tripp 2013, 1) from it. Thus, literary texts have been seen as “aesthetic forms of reaction” (Apel 2010, 26) or as “processing (the impact of) visual mass media” (Horlacher 2008, 750), that is, as a means of tracing the contours of a visual culture that precedes them and is largely formatted by technical media. This notion of literature as subsidiary to visual culture informs the research program of literary intermediality studies, which conceives its turn towards the visual as a “media-theoretical widening of the horizon” (Bachmann-Medick 2006, 356); it concerns itself with “questions about visuality, and thus the intermedial relationships among texts and pictures” (Rippl 2010, 39). Against such reasoning, which takes the translation of literary visuality into “literary text-and-image studies” (Bachmann-Medick 2006, 373; cf. Rippl 2014) for granted, this volume emphasises that visuality exceeds pictoriality. Visual studies’ concern is with “the culturality of vision, or true visuality” (Davis 2011, 10), with “the symbolic form of visual perception” (Davis 2011, 230). Thus, pictures cannot be its exclusive focus. While “styles of depiction […] have materially affected human visual perception” (Davis 2011, 6), they do not completely contain visuality: “A picture cannot entirely express the essential ‘symbolic values’ of a visuality, just as a visuality cannot entirely conceive the essential ‘formal values’ of a picture” (Davis

1 All URLs listed in the bibliographies have been checked on September 30, 2016. 2 Throughout the introduction, translations and emphases are ours. DOI 10.1515/9783110378030-002

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2011, 233; cf. Didi-Huberman 2005). Due to the “interaction of visuality and pictoriality” (Davis 2011, 231) this implies, “visual studies is not the same thing as ‘image studies’” (Mitchell 2002, 99). Nor are studies of literary visuality the same thing as intermedial enquiries into literature’s relation to images: “Not ‘the image’ should take centre stage, but visual culture in a comprehensive sense” (Benthien and Weingart 2014, 1). If we conceive of cultures as semiotic systems (Posner 2008) that combine social practices (which constitute societies), material artefacts (which constitute civilisations) and conventional codes (which constitute mentalities), the range of visual cultures extends beyond (the) media and their definition as “conventionally distinct means of communicating cultural contents” (Wolf 2005, 253). Visual cultures, then, include institutions whose primary purpose is to organise practices of transmission (rather than communication, cf. Debray 2000), such as monuments or museums; artefacts which serve to process visibility (rather than contents), such as tele- or microscopes; and mental codes which are not the means, but the rules of communicating (about) visuality, such as the discourses of philosophical aesthetics or art history (for the examples cf. Frank and Lange 2010, 10–11). In other words, visual culture is characterised by “the dynamic, contextualising interplay of discourses, practices, and artefacts connected to vision, sight and seeing, in short: visuality” (Tripp 2013, 29). “Scopic regimes” (Jay 1988), “techniques of the observer” (Crary 1990), or “practices of looking” (Sturken and Cartwright 2001) are all partly situated beyond pictoriality and do not completely condense in pictures: “We’ve been trained to assume that an observer will always leave visible tracks, that is, will be identifiable in terms of images. But here it’s a question of an observer who takes shape in other, grayer practices and discourses” (Crary 1988, 43). At the very least, literature can be said to be one of those “grayer practices” that shape our ways of seeing in the shadow of the image. In fact, one of the visual practices that literature helps cultivate may be that of looking at pictures, especially regarding historical visual cultures: “There are more than a few moments when pictures were negotiated mainly in literature and journals. […] They are the only substitute we have for the empirical observer who has become invisible since that period, or indeed who never could have been seen perceiving in the first place, and who therefore has always already been a textual observer” (Frank 2007, 84). Which is not even to mention the possibility of visual conditions or events that did not manifest in pictorial representations for whatever reasons. With regard to such visualities that have become invisible, literary texts constitute one of the means of transmission (in a mediological sense) and are invaluable in any attempt to (re-)construct historically or culturally distinct “ways of seeing” (Berger 1972). This is not to deny the prominent position of pictures in



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visual culture(s), but to suggest their embeddedness in visual practices, including literary ones, which may take their effect without a material fixation in images (cf. Rimmele and Stiegler 2012, 9–10). Accordingly, our concepts of literary visuality and visualisations emphasise literature’s productive engagement with and involvement in visual culture. We argue that literary visuality is the active participation of literature in visual culture, for literature is involved in the production of discourses as well as practices and artefacts that negotiate and (pre-)configure visualities. Thus, instead of enquiring into what literature might have to tell us about the visual arts, the photographic image, or motion pictures (which translates into the three parts ­‘Ekphrasis’, ‘Literature and Photography’, and ‘Literature and the Moving Image’ in Rippl 2015), this volume addresses literature’s engagement with the visual within the framework of a semiotics of culture: it deals with the visual as arising from a social practice pertaining to literature (reading, → II.), as negotiated in a discursive mode salient to literature (description, → I.), and as embodied in the material artefacts constituting the body of literature (texts, → III.). After all, literary visuality is to do with “literature as a core and inevitable element of visual culture” (Frank 2007, 82), and not with literature’s peripheral reflection of visual media. Intermediality studies’ exemplary response to the “critical voice” (Rippl 2015, 16) of literary visuality studies seems to inadvertently acknowledge that much: “While it seems logical to underline the embeddedness of pictures and visual media in visual practices, scholars of intermediality would reply that all practices of looking and scopic regimes presented in literature are exclusively accessible through the medium in which the text is encoded, hence the question of medium cannot be foregone” (Rippl 2015, 20). The point is that if literary visuality is to be preoccupied with mediality, it will be the mediality of literature itself. Ekphrasis (or, for that matter, pictorialist writing), to be sure, will come up in the following, but it will do as an arena for enacting a phenomenology of readerly visualisation, or, in other words, in the context of an “ekphrastic reinforcement” (Brosch 2015, 350) of literary visuality. Similarly, film will be discussed as just one of the visual repositories of cultural memory or, indeed, as a means of staging the specificity of a literary visuality. Our understanding of literary visuality, visualisations, and literature as a visual medium are indebted to several precursors, particularly with regard to the readerly involvement in the production of literary visuality. The visual quality of the reading process had been vaguely and unsystematically acknowledged for a long time, for instance in Iser’s (1978, 8) interest in the “imagistic character” of meaning or in the numerous visual metaphors of narratology. Most of the studies concerned with the topic, however, spoke rather negligently of the ‘reader’s gaze’ or ‘readerly ideations’. Starting with Esrock’s (1994) groundbreaking work, liter-

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ary research has taken on the task of reconceptualising readerly visualisations, combining cues from phenomenological reception theory with more recent findings in cognitive linguistics as well as discussions in cognitive narratology (cf. Tripp 2007, 2013). The latter helped in conceptualising reader-text-interaction involved in visualisations and complemented certain aspects of phenomenological reader response. While cognitive paradigms offered fresh insight, they also at times appeared to be too restrictive or limited, both in scope of inquiry and applicability. Thus, it was essential to develop an integrated approach that re-considered concepts such as focalisation in a heuristic model grounded in both cognitive and phenomenological approaches (Tripp 2007). Apart from phenomenological response aesthetics, another major theoretical approach to the active role of the reader in literary visuality that deserves reconsideration is Kittler’s (1990, 2010) media-historical perspective. His interest in ‘invisible ideations’ is rooted in romantic literature around 1800, which, he argues, works with “literary hallucinations” (Kittler 2010, 179) similar to contemporary optical media such as the laterna magica. Around 1900, the newly emerging optical media of photography and film forced literature to position itself anew. According to Kittler, literature had two options: either to use ‘optical leitmotifs’ so that literary texts could easily and readily be adapted to the screen; or to withdraw from visibilities altogether and conjure up disembodied ghosts that the optical media could not represent. Put in this way, Kittler’s argument for the primacy of technology, however, strengthens once more the postulate of visibility instead of arguing from a visual position that preconfigures the visibile-invisible divide. Therefore, we have argued that in the historical context of new optical media, literature seems to have a third option, namely, to differentiate its position by redefining its own media-specific visualities (cf. Tripp 2010). Hence, its medial strategies, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, are marked less by a logic of representation than by a concern with dominant epistemes connected to visualities and visual cultures. For instance, new strategies emerged that deploy readerly visualisations with an epistemological impetus to engage, often subversively, with dominant visual discourses, concepts, or media. Extending Kittler’s view in such a way allows us to combine media history with the history of literary visuality. In contrast to the two fields of reader response theory and the history of optical media, other more traditional fields connected to literary visuality are deemphasised in this book. Similar to the ways texts relate to pictures (and their media) in absentia (in intermedial reference and its progenitor, ekphrasis), literary visuality as discussed here largely disregards combinations of word and image in praesentia (from emblem to comics). While the relation between the two ‘base media’ (Schanze 2002, 200) can certainly be agonistic in such hybrids, they



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tend to impede a conception of literature as or, at least, as part of visual culture (Frank 2007, 83, for the former, Benthien and Weingart 2014, 9, for the latter formulation) by anchoring its visuality in an incorporation of material images rather than the distinctive resources proper to literature. Literary visuality’s interest in the “‘programming’ of perception by literature” (Schmitz-Emans 1994, 21) aims at a “poetics of pre-presentation” (Schmitz-Emans 1994, 23) rather than of the reproduction of images (or the mutual absorption of text and image into pictorial narrative). Again, literary visuality studies can be a conceptual alternative (Rippl 2015, 16) to intermediality only to the degree that it manages to capture literature’s constitutive function in visual cultural processes (cf. Benthien and Weingart 2014, 7). And in order to demonstrate the “reciprocal interaction of literature and visual culture” (Tripp 2008, 749) and to uncover the “osmotic processes” (Mergenthaler 2002, 8) between them, literature’s mimetic reconstruction of a history of (visual) perception (writing seeing in Mergenthaler’s 2002 terminology) has to be supplemented by its poietic projection of visualities (seeing writing). In a literary history of visual culture (Frank 2009, 386), literature features as both reflex and motive of visual cultural transformations (Mergenthaler 2002, 395): “There is no need for literary theoretical revision when it is shown that literature reenacts changes in visual culture. It is promising, though, to conceptualise literature not as determined by a visual culture outside it, but as a variable within it” (Frank 2009, 384). Another subject treated with diffidence in this book is that of imagery, that is, the visuality of rhetorical figures (cf. Berndt 2014). The unqualified association of the master tropes (and metaphor, in particular) with the image has to be treated with caution from both a historical and a theoretical point of view. On the one hand, it is a strictly modern development from the late eighteenth century onward (cf. Asmuth 1991); on the other, the assumption of an inherently visual character of metaphors has been characterised as a case of “metaphorological visualism” (Gehring 2011). All in all, it seems necessary to restrict “rhetorical imaging” (Campe 1997) to instances of an intensification of imaginative activities always already at work in the process of reading, or otherwise to their enlistment in descriptive routines which may be classified (cf. Lodge 1977) according to their tendency to focus on similarity (and thus primarily use the figures of metaphor and simile) or contiguity (and thus depend more on metonymy and synecdoche), making these tropes “visual figures within description” (Poppe 2007, 51; cf. Horlacher 1998, 25). As already indicated, the following articles are roughly organised into three parts (cf. Isekenmeier 2015 for this partition), the first of which addresses the descriptive mode and its visual implications. The two contributions subsumed in it move away from the concentration on block description in realist prose fiction prevalent in descriptological analyses, and turn towards descriptive aspects of

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early modern drama and dispersed forms of descriptivity in the postmodernist novel. They highlight that dramatic texts were already geared towards readerly visualisation (rather than towards performative concretisation only) around 1600, and that a consideration of descriptive visuality in late twentieth-century fiction has to take into account the structure of the postmodernist cultural imaginary. They also demonstrate the provisional nature of the line that separates description from readerly visualisation, which is the topic of the second part. The two essays therein locate the visuality of literature in the “processual, reciprocal interaction of text and reader” (Tripp 2013, 82), that is, in the “production of mental images in the process of reading” (Esrock 2005, 633). They put their emphasis more on the cognitive effects of reading while still taking into account the textual strategies that guide those visualisations. Drawing on both the short story and versified literary forms, they emphasise the interplay between visualisation and focalisation, or the narrative construction of space, respectively. Finally, the third part tackles the visuality of literature as grounded in its materiality (cf. Kammer 2014). In principle, this area of investigation will include all the visible aspects of literary texts from the typographical design of font and layout (Gutjahr and Benton 2009; Meletis 2015) to the organisation of printed matter in different generic formats (for instance, the journal, cf. Kaminski and Mergenthaler 2015; Podewski 2016). More than with the “iconicity of script” (Hamburger 2011; cf. Krämer, Cancik-Kirschbaum and Totzke 2012), the first two articles in this part deal with visibilities best called ‘textual’ in that they concern literary texts as ‘wholes’: poems as textual shapes and dictionary novels as hypertextual entities. Starting from visual poetry in its most concretely iconic form (carmen figuratum), they work their way through less definite graphic arrangements of lines (cf. Nink 1993 for prose equivalents) to arrive at the example of a literary genre which depends on a distinctive combination of visual appearance and textual organisation. In each of these attempts at “aesthetically exploiting the visual medium of the text” (Shusterman 1982, 88), the claim is not only that they produce semantic surplus, but that they stake literature’s claim to visual cultural agency. An appreciation of literature as ‘optical medium’ (Kittler 2010) concludes the volume, drawing attention to another kind of literary visibility: that of making the invisible imaginatively accessible (cf. Tripp 2010). This visual capacity of literature neatly reminds us that visual culture not only goes beyond pictures, but also beyond the visible: “the culturality of vision […] is not wholly visible” (Davis 2011, 10).



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Bibliography Apel, Friedmar. Das Auge liest mit. Zur Visualität der Literatur. München: C. Hanser, 2010. Asmuth, Bernhard. “Seit wann gilt die Metapher als Bild? Zur Geschichte der Begriffe ‘Bild’ und ‘Bildlichkeit’ und ihrer gattungspoetischen Verwendung.” Rhetorik zwischen den Wissenschaften. Geschichte, System, Praxis als Probleme des ‘Historischen Wörterbuchs der Rhetorik’. Ed. Gert Ueding. Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1991. 299–309. Bachmann-Medick, Doris. Cultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2006. Benthien, Claudia, and Brigitte Weingart (Eds.). Handbuch Literatur & Visuelle Kultur. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. Benthien, Claudia, and Brigitte Weingart. “Einleitung.” Benthien and Weingart 2014. 1–28. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin, 1972. Berndt, Frauke. “Literarische Bildlichkeit und Rhetorik.” Benthien and Weingart 2014. 48–67. Brosch, Renate (Ed.). Victorian Visual Culture. Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2008. Brosch, Renate. “Images in Narrative Literature: Cognitive Experience and Iconic Moments.” Rippl 2015. 343–360. Campe, Rüdiger. “Vor Augen Stellen. Über den Rahmen rhetorischer Bildgebung.” Poststrukturalismus: Herausforderung an die Literaturwissenschaft. Ed. Gerhard Neumann. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1997. 208–225. Christ, Carol T., and John O. Jordan (Eds.). Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Crary, Jonathan. “Modernizing Vision.” Vision and Visuality. Ed. Hal Foster. Seattle: Bay Press, 1988. 29–49. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990. Crystal, David. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Davis, Whitney. A General Theory of Visual Culture. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011. Debray, Régis. Introduction à la Médiologie. Paris: P.U.F., 2000. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Confronting Images. Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2005. Esrock, Ellen. The Reader’s Eye: Visual Imagining as Reader Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. Esrock, Ellen. “Visualisation.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. New York: Routledge, 2005. 633–634. Frank, Gustav. “Layers of the Visual: Towards a Literary History of Visual Culture.” Seeing Perception. Ed. Silke Horstkotte and Karin Leonhard. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007. 76–97. Frank, Gustav. “Literaturtheorie und Visuelle Kultur.” Bildtheorien: Anthropologische und kulturelle Grundlagen des Visualistic Turn. Ed. Klaus Sachs-Hombach. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2009. 354–392. Frank, Gustav, and Barbara Lange. Einführung in die Bildwissenschaft. Darmstadt: WBG, 2010. Gehring, Petra. “Metapherntheoretischer Visualismus. Ist die Metapher ‘Bild’?” Metapherngeschichten. Perspektiven einer Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit. Ed. Matthias Kroß and Rüdiger Zill. Berlin: Parerga, 2011. 15–32.

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Gutjahr, Paul C., and Megan L. Benton (Eds.). Illuminating Letters. Typography and Literary Interpretation. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009. Hamburger, Jeffrey F. “The Iconicity of Script.” Word & Image 27.3 (2011): 249–261. Harrow, Susan. “Introduction.” The Art of the Text: Visuality in Nineteenth- and ­Twentieth-Century Literature and Other Media. Ed. Susan Harrow. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013. 1–14. Horlacher, Stefan. Visualität und Visualitätskritik im Werk von John Fowles. Tübingen: G. Narr, 1998. Horlacher, Stefan. “Visualität und Visualitätskritik.” Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie. Ed. Ansgar Nünning. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 42008. 749–750. Isekenmeier, Guido. “Literary Visuality: Visibility – Visualisation – Description.” Rippl 2015. 325–342. Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response. London: Routledge, 1978. Jacobs, Karen. The Eye’s Mind: Literary Modernism and Visual Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001. Jay, Martin. “Scopic Regimes of Modernity.” Vision and Visuality. Ed. Hal Foster. Seattle: Bay Press, 1988. 3–27. Kaminski, Nicola, and Volker Mergenthaler. Zuschauer im Eckfenster 1821/22 oder Selbst­ reflexion der Journalliteratur im Journal(text). Mit einem Faksimile des ‘Zuschauers’ vom April/Mai 1822. Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2015. Kammer, Stephan. “Visualität und Materialität der Literatur.” Benthien and Weingart 2014. 31–47. Kittler, Friedrich. Discourse Networks 1800/1900 [Gm. 1985]. Transl. Michael Metteer. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Kittler, Friedrich. Optical Media [Gm. 2002]. Transl. Anthony Enns. Cambridge: Polity, 2010. Krämer, Sybille, Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum, and Rainer Totzke (Eds.). Schriftbildlichkeit. Wahr­nehm­barkeit, Materialität und Operativität von Notationen. Berlin: Akademie, 2012. Lodge, David. “Types of Description.” The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature. London: E. Arnold, 1977. 93–103. Marcus, Laura. “Modernism and Visual Culture.” A Handbook of Modernism Studies. Ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. 239–254. Meletis, Dimitrios. Graphetik. Form und Materialität von Schrift. Glückstadt: W. Hülsbusch, 2015. Mergenthaler, Volker. Sehen schreiben – Schreiben sehen: Literatur und visuelle Wahrnehmung im Zusammenspiel. Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 2002. Miles, Robert (Ed.). Gothic Technologies: Visuality in the Romantic Era. 2005. https://www.rc. umd.edu/praxis/gothic/index.html Mitchell, W. J. T. “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture.” The Visual Culture Reader. Ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff. London: Routledge, 22002. 86–101. Nink, Rudolf. Literatur und Typographie: Wort-Bild-Synthesen in der englischen Prosa des 16. bis 20. Jahrhunderts. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1993. Podewski, Madleen. “Zwischen Sichtbarem und Sagbarem: Illustrierte Magazine als Verhandlungsorte visueller Kultur.” Deutsche illustrierte Presse. Journalismus und visuelle Kultur in der Weimarer Republik. Ed. Katja Leiskau, Patrick Rössler, and Susann Trabert. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2016. 39–58. Poppe, Sandra. Visualität in Literatur und Film. Eine medienkomparatistische Untersuchung moderner Erzähltexte und ihrer Verfilmungen. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007.



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Posner, Roland. “Kultursemiotik.” Einführung in die Kulturwissenschaften. Ed. Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2008. 39–72. Rimmele, Marius, and Bernd Stiegler. Visuelle Kulturen/Visual Culture zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius, 2012. Rippl, Gabriele. “English Literature and Its Other: Toward a Poetics of Intermediality.” ImageScapes: Studies in Intermediality. Ed. Christian J. Emden and Gabriele Rippl. Bern: P. Lang, 2010. 39–65. Rippl, Gabriele. “Intermedialität: Text/Bild-Verhältnisse.” Benthien and Weingart 2014. 139–158. Rippl, Gabriele (Ed.). Handbook of Intermediality: Literature – Image – Sound – Music. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. Rippl, Gabriele. “Introduction.” Rippl 2015. 1–31. Schanze, Helmut. “Medien.” Metzler Lexikon Medientheorie/Medienwissenschaft. Ansätze – Personen – Grundbegriffe. Ed. Helmut Schanze. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2002. 199–201. Schmitz-Emans, Monika. Spiegelt sich Literatur in der Wirklichkeit? Überlegungen und Thesen zu einer Poetik der Vorahmung. Göttingen: Wallstein, 1994. Shusterman, Richard. “Aesthetic Blindness to Textual Visuality.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 41.1 (1982): 87–96. Stiegler, Bernd. “Visual Culture.” Benthien and Weingart 2014. 159–172. Sturken, Marita, and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking. An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. Thomas, Sophie. Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle. New York: Routledge, 2008. Tripp, Ronja. “Wer visualisiert? Narrative Strategien der Visualisierung als Gegenstand einer leserorientierten kognitiven Narratologie.” Visualisierungen: Textualität – Deixis – Lektüre. Ed. Renate Brosch and Ronja Tripp. Trier: WVT, 2007. 21–46. Tripp, Ronja. “Visual Culture Studies.” Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie. Ed. Ansgar Nünning. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 42008. 748–749. Tripp, Ronja. “unsichtbares lesen. Strategien der Visualisierung als mediale Krise der narrativen Literatur um 1900.” Medialisierungen des Unsichtbaren um 1900. Ed. Susanne Scholz and Julika Griem. München: W. Fink, 2010. 193–219. Tripp, Ronja. Mirroring the Lamp: Literary Visuality, Strategies of Visualization, and Scenes of Observation in Interwar Narrative. Trier: WVT, 2013. Wolf, Werner. “Intermediality.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. New York: Routledge, 2005. 252–254.

I Visual Descriptions

Nicola Glaubitz

Playbooks as Imaginary Theatre: Visuality and Description in Early Modern English Drama Abstract: This article focuses on a somewhat neglected genre in studies of literary visuality: drama. It is generally assumed that theatrical performance takes over the work of visualising a drama text, and that drama is not a genre that chiefly evokes readerly visualisation. For early modern drama texts and in particular for printed playtexts (playbooks), these assumptions of drama theory must be questioned (→ 1.): playbooks from circa 1590 to 1642 are multifunctional texts written for readers as well as for stage performance. In this light, it needs to be asked if drama theory is able to correctly define the status of early modern dramatic texts in relation to early modern orders of the visible and the visual (→ 2.): stage design, relations between word and image, text and picture, performance space and spoken word. Following a survey of classical and early modern rhetoric and post-Reformation discourses on images and the theatre (→ 3.), exemplary analyses of plays by Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare and Thomas Dekker elaborate different ways of approaching dramatic visuality and demonstrate different ways of relating the levels of analysis comprised by ‘literary visuality’ (→ 4.). Middleton’s The Puritan Widow and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra are discussed chiefly as discourses on visuality and visibility, and as commentaries on contemporary, religious and rhetorical word-image practices. Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl is analysed as an example for a playbook that attempts to conventionalise the reading of printed play texts as a practice of imagining theatrical experience. Readerly visualisation of playbooks, I argue, is not identical with modern visualisation practices shaped by prose: it has to be understood as the imagination of mediated, theatrical, and performative visibility (→ 5.).

1 Literary Visuality and Early Modern English Drama The study of English literature and visuality in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has long been guided by two key assumptions (Tassi 2005, 16; Porter 2013, 3, 6): that “England’s Renaissance was, after all, literary rather than visual” DOI 10.1515/9783110378030-003

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(Knapp 2011, 1), and that “theater is England’s lively pictorial culture, the answer, the compensation, the supplément in the face of all the painting, sculpture, and art theory that was so famously alive in the European civilizations that the Elizabethans dreamed about” (Barkan 1995, 338). The English Renaissance in the post-Reformation decades from the 1530s onwards is traditionally seen as a literary equivalent to the flourishing of painting and sculpture in Italy. Although England has been diagnosed with “visual anorexia” (Collinson 1988, 119) and significant “gaps in visual literacy” (Barkan 1995, 332), a growing body of research in visual culture studies has to some extent revised the idea of a “barren and austere culture of the Word” (Hamling 2010, 7): the English textual Renaissance is embedded in a rich texture of visuality.1 The use of the period term ‘Renaissance’2 in these quotations indicates a bias towards the culture of humanism in the wake of print and its literary emulation of classical antiquity, and an unquestioned acceptance of the pictorial culture of Northern Italy as a standard of reference. The idea of a predominantly literary Renaissance, furthermore, bolsters the cultural prestige of Elizabethan and Jacobean writers like Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, Middleton, Dekker, Webster or Ford at the expense of a visual culture that has mostly flown under the radar of traditional art history (Hamling 2010, 6). Miniature paintings, textiles and interior decoration, the chief art forms in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, have not attracted much attention until recently. And current research strongly suggests that theatre is not so much the exclusive manifestation of early modern England’s pictorial culture as a part of visual culture. But isn’t theatre, pivoting on the dramatic text, a “literary rather than visual” art (Knapp 2011, 1)? Text-oriented drama criticism has traditionally subjected drama to readings modelled on prose and poetry, and Shakespeare’s plays in particular have attracted critical attention as “primarily literary poetic endeavour[s]” (Kiernan 1996, 1). Shakespearean performance criticism, though, claims that drama texts are merely ‘scores for performance’, and that subjecting them to close, repeated, critical readings amounts to a misunderstanding.3 These two

1 Cf. Marotti and Bristol (2000) and Porter (2011; 2013, 23–25) for an overview of research. 2 ‘Early modern’, a more comprehensive period term, also encompasses social, political and economic aspects and extends from the late fifteenth to the late eighteenth century. It more readily accommodates the Reformation and Counter-Reformation and acknowledges historical continuities from the Middle Ages into modernity – for example the persistence of oral and manuscript cultures, vernacular folk and festive culture, but also epistemological developments like the so-called ‘Scientific Revolution’. It is equally problematic, however, in its configuration of the period as a forerunner or as an anticipation of modernity. 3 Critics like Gary Taylor, J.L. Styan and Richard Levin have argued eloquently for considering



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schools in Shakespeare criticism stand for a larger disciplinary and systematic division into theatre and drama studies. Theatre and drama criticism locate visuality in different dimensions: the visibility of stage and performance, and the (para)textual references to this visibility are the chief concern of theatre studies, whereas visuality in terms of the figurative and referential dimensions of language (imagery, metaphors, references to visible phenomena or works of art) is the domain of textual or drama criticism. Looking at – or for – the visuality of early modern drama, then, seems to stipulate a preliminary decision for drama criticism and its licensing of readings – including ‘ahistorical’ techniques like close, deconstructive, structuralist and other readings. This decision is complicated, however, by the fact that neither ‘literature’ nor ‘visuality’ and its interpretative routines are transhistorically stable phenomena. And while performance criticism has set out to reconstruct historical stage culture meticulously, textual criticism has devoted much less energy to the reconstruction of historical reading practices4  – often assuming that reading is “so obvious and self-evident a practice that the idea of its having a history seems bizarre” (Johns 1998, 384; cf. Erne 2013, 187). This assumption obscures that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century reading and writing cultures, genre traditions, textual practices, print and publication conventions have little in common with ‘literature’ in a post-1800 sense – with “the entire configuration of writing, print, and silent reading” (Siskin 1998, 31) and its mental visualisation techniques. The interrelations of poetry, drama and prose in early modern visual culture, furthermore, are structured by “radically different methods of ordering and imagining visual reality” (Thorne 2000, 52), among them classical rhetoric, post-Reformation religion and image politics, the emerging natural sciences, and the field of vernacular practices. Is literary visuality, a concept tailored to post-1800 prose and word-image relations, applicable to early modern drama at all, then? I take the cue from Berger (1989) and Erne (2003) and argue that it is, albeit in a restricted and yet

Shakespeare’s plays as dramatic scripts that should be analysed in terms of their effect on stage and their ‘actability’. Cf. Berger (1989) for an early critical discussion of this approach. 4 Notable exceptions are the collections edited by Sharpe and Zwicker (2003) and Cavallo and Chartier (1999). For a detailed discussion of gendered forms of early modern reading cf. Snook (2005). The use and truth value of print and writing was contested, as debates on practices of reading demonstrate (Dolan 2013, 6, 10–11, Eisenstein 2011, 19–22). The same holds for images and illustrations, caught in a crossfire of Protestant iconophobia and emerging empirical sciences (Hall 1996, 36). Like theatrical spectacle, pictures were (and of course still are) framed by different ‘visual rhetorics’ that guided picture production, their significance and their use (Acheson 2013, 4).

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exemplary sense. The traditional antagonism construed between William Shakespeare, the poet of the stage indifferent to print, and Ben Jonson, the antitheatrical dramatist who ‘escaped into print’ (Kiernan 1996, 20) and cared only for his future readers, is not very helpful here: it is playbooks, not authors, that reveal something about literature and visuality around 1600. In the 1590s, as Erne (2003, 10–12) has shown, they emerge as a new format for dramatic texts performed at public, commercial theatres. These relatively cheap, sometimes illustrated quarto prints continued to be published even after the closing of the theatres in 1642 (Kastan 2003, 173). Prepared for readers, as Berger (1989, 140) argues, they pivot on “the fiction of performance as a control on reading”. At the same time, the emergent cultural status of playbooks permits us a glimpse at ideas, materials and practices of reading and spectatorship ‘in the making’: they allow us to historicise the configuration of ‘literature’, ‘visuality’ and ‘readerly visualisation’ in the context of the visibility of theatre and early modern pictorial culture, and to consider the genealogy of modern reading with its interpretation practices as well as the ‘roads not taken’. My interest in considering the often heterogeneous processes of consolidation5 that precede and accompany relatively stable cultural practices and that sediment into temporary formats, therefore, is historical but first of all systematic. Which levels of analysis are encompassed by the term ‘literary visuality’, then? I will briefly reiterate some of the preliminary remarks (→ Introduction) and put them into an early modern context in order to outline the different perspectives that can be cast on text-image relations. When we talk about literary visuality, we mean the ‘encultured’ aspect of visibility (Davis 2011, 9): it is visi-

5 This approach is indebted to Foucault’s (1972) history of discourses and dispositifs which observes the interrelatedness of orders of knowledge and utterance with institutions, social conventions and materialities such as books, technologies, and architectures. It is also indebted to work in the history of science and technology, which shares Foucault’s reluctance to attribute historical agency exclusively to human actors or to technologies or to ideas. Latour’s (1986) concept of actor networks as frameworks for stabilising knowledge and Law’s (1994, 24) concept of a ‘relational materialism’ (agency as “an effect generated in a network of heterogeneous materials”) elaborate this thought. In contrast to new historicism and cultural materialism, two influential approaches to the study of early modern literature and culture, the focus of such theoretical frameworks is wider and not only addresses texts as agents of implementing power (Brannigan 1998, 3, 6, 8). Recent work in theatre and book history and visual culture studies, for instance Porter (2013), Stern (2009), Johnson (2003) and Erne (2003) explore sixteenth- and seventeenth-century configurations of print, material culture, discourses on poetics and dramatic or prose texts in the (more) ‘symmetrical’ manner also envisaged by Law and Latour, that is, with an eye for historical contingencies and alternatives to practices and concepts of text, authorship and genre that have survived (or are back-projected).



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bility for someone who is involved in the process of acquiring and refining a set of shared, culturally and historically contingent practices, cognitive styles and emotional responses to visible phenomena. Visuality thus encompasses invisible aspects, one of which is the use of language as a set of concepts providing scripts for visual practice (Davis 2011, 278). In a similar vein, Acheson (2013, 4, my emphasis) speaks of ‘visual rhetoric’ as a set of rules, concepts and practices “that allow us to interpret visual phenomena as visual phenomena, rather than as versions of things that could be as well or even better said with words”. In order to address visuality, then, a combination of several approaches to cultural history is required: critics need tools to address conceptual, discursive and procedural knowledge, to reconstruct cultural and institutional frameworks that assign significance to visible phenomena, and to elaborate how interpretations and pragmatics of visual phenomena in terms of art, entertainment, or trustworthy scientific evidence come into being. Literary visuality refers to one aspect of this configuration, namely the role of literature(s) in visual culture(s). The term captures the role of literature as a discourse on visibility and visuality, its productive role in the figuration and prefiguration of visibility and visuality, and its role as an interdiscourse for epistemologies of sight and vision. Literary texts, furthermore, provide protocols for visual practices by presenting scenes of seeing or observing, modes of seeing and attitudes towards visible phenomena. Early modern print culture, furthermore, operates with specific conventions of textual visibility, that is: typography, layout, and the design of paratexts (→  III.  Textual Visibilities). Words, visual ornaments, typographies and illustrations were often combined in ways no longer familiar to modern readers and viewers (Hall 1996, 3). As Johns (1998, 2) observes, “the very identity of print itself had to be made”. Conventions no longer even perceived as conventions today, such as the identical length, look, and content of different copies of one and the same printed work, could not yet be taken for granted. If we consider illustrations, for example, a linear perspective drawing was not generally legible as an indication of spatial depth (Orgel 2002, 64–65; Johns 1998, 20, 28, 29, 47, 384). All these observations strongly suggest that categories like ‘reading’, ‘literature’, ‘text’ and ‘literary visuality’ must be historicised. The genre of drama requires yet another set of differentiations  – and this is not, as one might think, because readerly visualisation can be neglected in favour of its function as an element in performative visualisation on stage (→ II. Readerly Visualisations): “Any performance of a play actualizes what is (always) already an imagined performance, an imaginary performance, and this prior virtual status is inseparable from the interpretive reading that led to it” (Berger 1989, 140). Early modern plays (and in particular the ones that survived) were per-

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formed but also published for readers, and performers read plays prior to staging. Reading a drama in print or manuscript form in early modernity meant to read aloud for others, with the oral dimension and the visual conventions of staging and theatre architecture in mind and rhetorical training from school as a background (Marotti and Bristol 2000, 6).6 Active forms of reading included nonlinear reading of several books or texts side by side, or ‘reading for the good bits’: texts were scanned for memorable quotations that were entered in so-called commonplace books (Massai 2011, 150). The emerging genre of the printed playbook is, because of its relative novelty in the 1590s, a good example to study the emergence of play reading conventions through paratexts, commentaries and other instructions for use.7 English public theatre since the 1560s experimentally orchestrated and exploited rather than policed the conflicting and competing strains of visual and oral, performative and print culture. It also participated in the discourses on visuality and engaged in contemporary debates on words and images. Theatre attained its prominent status on the margins of officially  – that is, politically and religiously – sanctioned cultural spaces, as Mullaney (1988, 30) has shown: mostly situated just outside the reach of London’s city jurisdiction but licensed by the Crown, not officially sponsored but minimally protected from persecution, public theatre was a “culturally and ideologically removed vantage point from which it could reflect upon its own age with more freedom and license than had hitherto been possible”.8 The emergent and often explorative character of early modern theatre multiplies the contingencies that bear on the very categories of ‘literature’ and ‘visuality’ and their relations. It can therefore put systematic approaches to drama to the test, as will presently be elaborated.

6 Cf. Dolan (2013, 10–15), Johns (1998, ch. 6, especially 383–385), Massai (2011) and the essays in Sharpe and Zwicker (2003) on approaches to an early modern history of reading, proceeding along the lines of a history of the discourses on reading, the study of annotations, and contemporary accounts of reading experiences. According to Jowett (2007, 286), there is no in-depth study of early modern readers yet. 7 Cf. Johnson (2003), Erne (2003, 10, 32–33). ‘Playbook’ refers 1) to the manuscript copies of plays used by companies for performance and 2) to the printed versions of plays in quarto format. Unless otherwise indicated, I use the term in the second meaning. 8 The staging of plays was supervised by the Revels Office, subordinated to the Crown, and printing was controlled by the Stationers’ Company (the printers’ guild). The so-called ‘Liberties’ on the outskirts of London (and some areas inside the city walls), where most theatres were situated, were spaces only nominally under the jurisdiction of the Lord Mayor of London: “While belonging to the city, they fell outside the purviews of the sherriffs of London and so comprised virtually ungoverned areas over which the city had authority but, paradoxically, no control” (Mullaney 1989, 21).



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2 Theoretical Positions and Historical Contexts 2.1 Visuality and Description in Drama Theory Studies on literary visuality rarely refer to drama. Historical, structuralist or functionalist accounts of description, invoked as the chief technique of visualisation, refer mostly to prose and poetry and not to the intrinsically ‘multimedial’ (Pfister 1991, 2) drama text.9 Conversely, description is not an established term for the analysis of plays. It does have a place in narratology, though, and poetry analysis would be unthinkable without considering its imagery. Is the absence of drama in studies on description and literary visuality due to the fact that there is no description in drama – or is it the result of a normative idea of drama that tendentially excludes it? Dramatic art, according to Krieger (1992, 35), has generated a body of theory distinct from theories of prose or lyric from antiquity onwards: it is seen, since Plato’s conception of drama as converging in “total illusion”10, as an art of ‘immediate’ presentation not required to bridge a gap between presence

9 Wall (2006, 6), for example, claims to cover “most literary and non-literary genres” except poetry but also omits drama. Studies on early modern ekphrasis (for instance, Hagstrum 1968) include examples from drama but focus mostly on poetry, and do not consider the generic specificity of drama. Other studies focus on description and visuality in drama but not on the specific visuality of the dramatic text: Krieger (1992) offers an oblique explanation, referring to the exceptional position of drama in the history of ekphrastic description. Ekphrasis as it is conventionally understood is the “illusionary representation of the unrepresentable” (Krieger 1992, xv) – that is, the representation of the visual in the verbal  – but theatre is traditionally conceived of as an art of immediate presentation of ‘natural signs’ (Krieger 1992, 42, 55, 61–63). A structurally analogous argument can be found in Porter (2013, 3), who observes that ekphrasis has been such a critical favourite because it fits well into the paradigm of an absence of visual culture in sixteenth-century England: ekphrases in various genres can be considered as evocations of an absent visuality. Klarer (2001, 138–144, 166) discusses Shakespeare’s ekphrastic descriptions in the traditional framework of the paragone, the contest between verbal and pictorial art, and argues (like Porter 2013 and Kiernan 1996) that they do not opt for one or the other medium but outline his theory of drama, amounting to a mutually supporting combination of visual and verbal arts. 10 Cf. Plato’s The Republic, book 3, 395d. In this section (Republic, 395a–396d), Socrates and his interlocutors debate the appropriateness of performing plays or creating poetry for the ideal republic’s soldiers; while narrative (diegesis) is considered as relatively harmless, playacting allegedly brings about bad habits. The adoption of multiple characters, voices and perspectives is seen as a distortion of the purity of personal character. The report or narration of action is attributed to a poet’s voice (who can be held accountable for its moral content). Enactment (mimesis) is seen as problematic unless it represents the real character of poet or speaker (Republic, 393c, d).

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and its re-presentation; it can dispense with the emulation, substitution or simulation of visual or aural qualities (Krieger 1992, 14, 34, 40; Marotti and Bristol 2000, 5). As a paradoxical consequence, the only truly multimedial literary genre is treated as pure text in drama theory, which sometimes amounts to a radical purification of dramatic language from visual components. Theatricality and spectacle are cordoned off from spoken dialogue and from structures of action since these aspects – and in particular the function of visualisation – are thought to be realised by stage performance. Drama theory since Aristotle has defined drama in a way that subordinates the evocation of visuality to the end of presenting action. For Aristotle, visibility and visualisation do not belong to the essential elements of drama (or more precisely: of tragedy). Visualisation, according to Aristotle, is the task of actors, not of the poet; it is a transitory and contingent aspect of dramatic performance. His well-known definition of drama as the presentation of an action does not require any visible, physical action: action is mental action (reflection or dianoia) as expressed in rhetoric, that is, character speech. The indispensable elements of drama are the story (mythos) and dianoia; character elaboration, figurative language and intonation (melody) can be left out without impairing the overall effect (De Poetica, 1450b). A tragedy unfolds its cathartic effect even if it is not seen on stage (1450b, 1453b), if it is only read or heard. Still, Aristotle draws a parallel to painting in order to illustrate this argument: story and dianoia are like the outline or drawing, the other elements are equivalent to merely decorative, redundant colours (1450a, cf. 1451b). Szondi’s (1974) notion of ‘absolute drama’ likewise identifies non-visual elements as essential to drama: as a transhistorical form, it is centred on the problem of presenting intersubjectivity as manifested in spoken dialogue. Drama is self-contained and does not imitate or refer to any outside reality; it does not even address the audience (which faces the play spellbound and ‘totally passive’, Szondi 1974, 16); it strictly observes the unities of time, place and action and ideally obliterates the duality of actor and role. This allegedly transhistorical form is in fact a naturalisation of the illusionistic picture frame stage and the convention of the ‘fourth wall’ that became common in Europe (and only in Europe) in the late seventeenth century. Deviations from this ideal are, according to Szondi (1974, 14–19), contaminations that more properly belong to the epic mode or result from the choice of inappropriate materials, for instance historical characters or events. Szondi follows the Aristotelian track of a strict division of labour between drama and theatre. Semiotic conceptions of drama such as Elam’s (1980) or Esslin’s (1987) consider drama/theatre as a communication system and include performance. The Aristotelian division is reproduced, however, in their terminology: borrowing



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Peirce’s concepts of iconic and indexical signs, they present terms for describing visual aspects which exclusively apply to aspects of performance (costume, set design, properties, lighting, gestures). Visuality is – once again – addressed solely in terms of theatrical performance rather than in terms of dramatic textuality.11 Pfister’s (1991) structuralist and semiotic theory of drama also treats visualisation as part of a complex of visual, spatial and aural ‘codes and channels’ for transmitting information. Pfister’s model, however, offers terms for a range of descriptive and at least potentially visualising techniques that straddle the boundary of textual visuality and performative visibility: expository narratives summarise past events, messengers’ reports (Pfister 1991, 208) or teichoscopy (‘looking over the wall’, Pfister 1991, 106) refer to offstage events and thus actualise absent phenomena. Implicit stage directions in character speeches indicate, for example, another figure’s costume, gestures or looks; references to visible objects on stage indicate a scene’s locale and thus render visible aspects of staging and performance salient. Spatial information is conveyed by verbal localisation techniques such as word scenery, the evocation of a partially visible or wholly imaginary setting in a character speech (Pfister 1991, 158, 267). Characterisation, finally, is achieved by the use of metaphors or imagery (Pfister 1991, 157) and thus draws on implicit visual aspects of language in general. Still, Pfister’s terminology differentiates between visual, aural and verbal codes for transmitting information in terms of their function-specificity. As a result, the exposition and unfolding of action, characterisation, the modification of character interrelations and the exploration of metadramatic aspects are privileged. Visualisation is not among the chief functions of a drama text – at least as far as the primary text is concerned. Visuality clusters in the secondary text, separated typographically from dialogue in modern drama: it consists of the paratext (title pages, identification tables), stage directions (didascalia), indications of character entries and exits, locational didascalia, character descriptions and stage descriptions, descriptions of costume, props, lighting and gestures.12 The visuality of stage directions has a peculiar (prescriptive) status: it gives instruc-

11 Cf. Esslin (1987, chs. 4 and 7) on ‘Icon, Index and Symbol’ and on ‘Visuals and Design’, which are exclusively devoted to staging. Elam’s (1980) chapters on drama, conversely, focus on action, time structure, speech acts and character while the chapters on theatre address the visibility of performance. 12 Cf. Issacharoff (1989, ch. 3) for a classification of stage directions according to function  – including that of metatextual reference (Issacharoff 1989, 18), and of autonomous description (Issacharoff 1989, 20) directed at play readers. Both obviously move beyond the function of technical instruction.

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tions of how to transpose words “into paralinguistic and non-verbal codes” (Pfister 1991, 15, 269) on stage. Stage directions are conventionally excluded from the interpretative routines applied to the authorised, ‘creative’ and ‘original’ primary text because even in the sixteenth century, their language is formalised and technical (McJannet 1999, 20; Wright 1984, 271). Editors took (and still take) more liberties with these apparently technical instructions,13 not least by excluding them from the line count and making them difficult to quote. As Carlson (1991, 37) observes, literary and even semiotic criticism has treated stage directions as a “transparent tool utilized by the dramatist to guide performers in the proper stage realisation of the central text – the dialogue”. The distinction between primary text, that is, dialogue, and secondary text goes back to Roman Ingarden and has to be approached with caution, as Pfister (1991, 13–14) aptly observes. What speaks against a strict division between primary and secondary text and their hierarchisation is, first and foremost, the slow emergence of this distinction. Medieval dramatic manuscripts do not distinguish yet between dialogue and stage directions (McJannet 1999, 37; Wright 1984, 261). Another problem is the presence of implicit stage directions in dialogue (references to visible aspects of the action on stage) and the possibility of meaningful tension between implicit and explicit stage directions. Explicit stage directions are no longer redundant or negligible if they affect the interpretation (and the performance) of a scene, as, for example, the dagger Macbeth imagines in act 2, scene 1. Is it actually there (and does the soliloquy contain an indirect stage direction involving a prop), or is it a mere figment of his imagination? The meaning of this scene for the subsequent plot varies considerably depending on which option is chosen in staging the play. Carlson’s (1991, 37, my emphasis) observation that stage directions have another vital function, namely to “guide readers in the proper mental picturization of such a realization” contrasts with Pfister’s (1991, 15) dismissal of such reader-friendly stage directions as ‘too literary’ and therefore non-dramatic: when stage directions become too detailed and too prominent (as in George

13 Cf. Pfister (1991, 14). On stage directions cf. also Carlson (1991, 37–38), Issacharoff (1989, 16), and Dessen (1999). McJannet (1999, 8) analyses stage directions in Elizabethan drama in terms of performance and reading, but observes that the uneven transition from manuscript to print did not involve a systematic transformation of a drama into “literary texts specially designed for readers”. She describes the conventions they follow  – stage practice, performance knowhow and printing conventions. Historically oriented research on early modern drama at least since the 1970s has begun to explore these apparently marginal parts of drama in detail, and has begun to devote editorial effort to their reconstruction.



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Bernard Shaw’s plays), the “explanatory, descriptive and narrative functions of the secondary text” (Pfister 1991, 15) are ‘overemphasised’. This appeal to generic purity obscures the vital importance of readerly visualisation, and the multiple purposes of primary and secondary text: professional and lay performers have to read and visualise a play before they act it, and stage designers and directors also refer to primary and secondary text in their ‘translations’ of words into visible phenomena.14 For early modernity, the demotion of readers seems, surprisingly, even less justified: the surviving early modern dramas were precisely those that became available in printed form for an emerging readership, and were sometimes modified for that purpose (cf. Erne 2003). Paying attention to paratexts and stage direction does not mean to read them like dialogue but to explore their specific function in supporting readerly visualisation and reading in different contexts. The abundance of visualisation techniques in early modern dramas – descriptions, ekphrases, metaphors, hypotyposes, word scenery as well as direct references to visible phenomena on stage – can then serve as a starting point for exploring the early modern orders of discourse on visuality and the word. Focussing on visuality in early modern drama, then, neither implies a return to a text-centred, intrinsic approach on the model of New Criticism nor a downright rejection of readerly approaches for the sake of performance studies. Though both these options are viable, I will explore the potentials of ‘literary visuality’ as a starting point for a historicisation of the categories of text, visuality, performing and reading, as well as of the interpretive communities (Fish 1980, 147–174) that assign meanings to texts. I can only begin to address some of these issues in what follows, and my considerations are meant to raise questions and point to the complexity of the task ahead rather than give ready answers. My first point of departure is the assumption that the notion of a text as an organic whole, representing a definite, authorised form either as a script for performance or for reading is not applicable to early modern drama.

2.2 Playbooks: Is There a Text in this Theatre? Orgel (2002, 7) may not overstate the case when he argues that early modern printing house practice “guaranteed that no copy of a Renaissance book would

14 Cf. Marotti and Bristol (2000, 19), Berger (1989, 140). This division is further complicated by the fact that, as Carlson (1991, 38) observes, some stage directions might be available in written form during the performance – in programs, for example, or as a playbill with a plot summary and indication of locale in early modern theatre (Stern 2009, 64).

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be identical to any other copy”.15 Orgel’s and others’ insistence on the instability of printed texts in general and of play texts in particular draws attention to the multiple contingencies that flow into the process of playwriting from inception to manuscript, to the preparation of a promptbook for performance, to eventual print publication in quarto format (and, occasionally, in the more prestigious folio format), to later editorial work.16 The plays still studied today are the surviving ca. 500 texts out of the roughly 3000 plays produced in London between 1560 and 1642 (Donaldson 2011, 123). The selectivity implied by these numbers, and the fact that these are the plays theatre companies thought profitable enough to sell to printers limits the scope of what can be said about early modern plays in general. What I am concerned with here are printed plays as documents of an uneven process of establishing playbooks as reading matter for playgoers and other interested readers. I largely follow Erne (2003, 2013) here, who argues that playbooks emerge as a distinct literary genre prepared and circulated for readers

15 Johns (1998, 31) observes that of Shakespeare’s first folio (1623), “[n]o two copies were identical”. Johns argues against Eisenstein’s (1979) influential thesis of ‘print culture’ as an effect of technology, resulting in standardisation, textual fixity, and the reproducibility and dissemination of identical copies (Johns 1998, 11, 19, 20). Printing in early modernity was a not yet conventionalised practice, producing textual variants and unreliabilities as well as multiple ways of publishing and reading books. He argues that texts, printed or not, “must be interpreted in cultural spaces the character of which helps to decide what counts as a proper reading” (Johns 1998, 20). Porter (2013) and Stern (2009) stress the fragmentary, unstable and incomplete character of early modern dramatic texts, drawing attention not only to their collaborative emergence but also to the ‘patchwork character’ of textual pragmatics. 16 Plays were owned by player companies and resulted from collaborative work between actors and playwright(s), and dramatists began to claim authorship only from the 1590s onwards. Ideas for plays, plot outlines, individual scenes, prologues or epilogues might be contributed by (and commissioned to) different writers. Erne (2003, 44, 47) estimates that sixty percent of all plays published between 1597 and 1600 had multiple authors; the number of anonymously published plays, however, fell steadily in the seventeenth century and speaks for the increasing importance assigned to authorship. The degree of authorial control over a dramatic text – a core modern criterion taken to guarantee the identity and authenticity of a literary text – was generally low. The manuscript copies prepared by professional scribes for use as promptbooks were revised during the process of a play’s production, and often changed again before they were finally licensed and officially approved by the Master of Revels (Jowett 2007, 292, 294, 295). Playhouse manuscripts, according to McJannet (1999, 36), “reveal a disconcerting freedom and absence of regularity” and “the visual design of extant playhouse manuscripts is so complex as to be haphazard”. Similar contingencies bear on the performance process: texts were changed and adapted to suit different performances, for instance when a company toured with a reduced cast. If plays were released in print after the play’s stage run, they were revised again and it is not always clear who saw a drama text through print, which changes were made and how much systematic effort went into the process.



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in the 1590s. For Erne (2003, 35), the available evidence suggests that playbooks did not generally attempt to reproduce the play text exactly as it was acted. Erne takes position in a major controversy in Shakespeare studies which also affects the more general assessment of a text in relation to visibility and visuality. Representatives of the contrary position claim that printed versions of quarto texts were ‘scores for performance’ and corresponded to the acted versions; correspondingly, Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists are “portrayed as writing with no thought of print” (McJannet 1999, 24)17. If we follow this assumption, Meek’s (2009, 10) puzzled question why Shakespeare would “fill his plays with long narrative descriptions that have the capacity to make the audience think they were at the theatre when they were already at the theatre” makes sense, and we can try to assess how and why the text substitutes, complements, emphasises or reduplicates visual information already provided by the stage. Erne (2003, 220–222, 224) observes a general trend towards extending texts for print by adding lines (and sometimes even characters) for the benefit of readers. Some of Shakespeare’s plays – Henry V, Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet – exist in quarto and folio versions of significantly different lengths, indicating extensions for the reader-oriented edition. Longer texts were more likely to be accepted as ‘poems’, that is, as more prestigious works than ‘plays’ (Erne 2003, 145). Revision for print seems to have moved on a middle ground between the extremes of releasing performance scripts and refashioning plays completely for reading. Playbooks, Erne (2003, 34, cf. 15) claims, begin to “legitimate themselves by emphasizing their non-theatrical features and by tying themselves to an authorizing originator”.18 Erne’s study focuses on one genealogy of modern

17 Cf. Erne (2003, 34, 56) on the misleading myth of Shakespeare as an author for the stage and Jonson as an author who wrote for print. Styan (2000) and Coursen (1992), for example, argue that the print versions correspond to those performed on stage. Berger (1989) takes into account the double purpose of the texts as scripts for performance and for reading. My considerations are indebted to Erne’s position but enlarge the scope of his argument, which focuses on the transition from oral to print culture, by adding a perspective on playbooks in the context of visual culture. 18 Erne (2003, 16) estimates that about 20,000 copies of playbooks were sold yearly between 1592 and the 1630s, amounting to about 3.3 per cent of all publications. This number is not as small as it may seem because the point of reference is the whole of registered printed matter in these years (including sermons, Bibles, broadsheets, ballads, official documents etc.). The Stationer’s Company (the printers’ guild) demanded a minimum of 1,500 copies for each setting of type and most editions had a print run of at least 800 copies. For Thomas Middleton, Jowett (2007, 290) estimates about 60,000 buyers. Thomas Heywood mocked Jonson’s presumption in publishing plays, rhyming “Ben’s plays are works, when other’s works are plays” (cit. Donaldson 2011, 327).

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reading and textuality here19, namely the poetically complex text, fixed by authorial decree, demanding careful, repeated reading. The same genealogy is implied in Orgel’s (2002, 25) description of the cuts for performance found in an annotated Shakespeare folio (presumably augmented for readers): speeches were shortened and debates simplified; in Macbeth, much of the play’s “poetic complexity” was removed. But does the added length and ‘poetical complexity’ necessarily amount to an emphasis of non-theatrical aspects of a play text – and thus, one could surmise, to a literary visuality converging with the visuality of prose or poetry? A closer look at paratextual elements and at stage direction revisions indicates different trajectories. First of all, the fact that playbooks were occasionally illustrated adds a non-theatrical but decisively visual element to a play. Although the earliest illustration in a printed playbook dates from 1512–1516 (Davidson 1991, 128), illustrations become more common only with the surge of published plays from the 1590s onwards, and their function changes. Before, playbook illustrations drew on the conventions of broadside or pamphlet illustrations and had a generic character (Astington 2007, 227). Most plays were sold with woodblock prints in a “recognizably exaggerated, non-realistic style which was calculated to stimulate a generic expectation about the kind of printed material it was used to decorate” (Astington 2007, 229–230). The 1590s, by contrast, saw an increasing number of specifically commissioned woodblock prints directly referring to the play – albeit only rarely to specific scenes or characters.20 19 The emerging conventions of playbooks are not invented from scratch but adapt publishing conventions of academic drama, written in Latin and performed at the universities. These plays were already published “with the usual trappings of more respectable publications, with dedications, in collections, even as part of ‘works’” (Erne 2003, 45, cf. Sharpe and Zwicker 2003, 5 on the significance of folio and quarto formats and their intersections with the genre hierarchy). Johnson (2003) draws attention to alternative author positions and scripts for reader expectations in the early seventeenth century with respect to former actors like Nathan Field or the dramatist Thomas Heywood. 20 Cf. Davidson (1991, 128–131) on the first known playbook illustration to Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucrece (1512–1516), which is a woodcut taken from an instruction book for dancing, and other early illustrations that have no direct reference to the plays they decorate. Morality plays were illustrated with images bearing inscriptions identifying the characters as, for instance, Charity, Death or Strength, or Everyman; but again, the choice of images often seems ‘arbitrary’ and not in line with conventional iconographies (Davidson 1991, 134). Davidson (1991, 139–140) refers to one playbook which also contains illustrations within the text, Arthur Golding’s translation of Theodore Beza’s A Tragedie of Abrahams Sacrifice (1577), which contains four scenes from the Old Testament. Cf. Postlewait (2009) on composite images drawing together several key moments of one play, as for example in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1615). Title pages and illustrations of plays are reproduced and commented in Foakes (1985).



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In many cases, the stage and stage performance are invoked on title pages, in prefaces or prologues and evoke visible points of reference. Stage conventions and their technical vocabulary are referred to as a frame of reference when didascalia are hardly altered and expanded in the step from manuscript or prompt book to print (McJannet 1999, 26), presupposing their readers’ familiarity with these conventions. The stage is invoked explicitly when the “fidelity to stage versions” is advertised on title pages in 28 out of the 35 plays in McJannet’s (1999, 25) corpus as a ‘sales argument’ meant to lure potential buyers who had enjoyed the performance. (The claim of fidelity may also indicate that texts did not depart too significantly from the staged versions.) The first playbooks of the 1590s were released with title pages also functioning as advertisements to be displayed outside the booksellers’ shops; they specified the theatrical event, the player company and place of performance, not the author. Christopher Marlowe’s name is not mentioned on the title page of Tamburlaine the Great (1590), for example: the playbook was meant to appeal to customers who had seen the play, not to those who knew Marlowe; the same holds for the plays of Thomas Middleton, published from 1603 onwards (Erne 2003, 41; Jowett 2007, 287; Stern 2009, 59). Title pages or prefaces addressed explicitly to readers also “invoke the authority (or perhaps the notoriety) of performance” (McJannet 1999, 25) and thus evoke the theatrical context for the visualisation of the text. Some title pages even give information on the number of (amateur) players required to stage a play, indicating that lay performance was well within the scope of textual practice (Taylor 2007, 56). Erne even argues that before playtexts were read as literature, “most playbooks were little more than ‘do-it-yourself’ staging aids (with doubling charts and the number of actors needed to perform the play indicated on the title page) or records of performance” (Erne 2013, 93). Jowett (2007, 310) argues on the basis of the annotations and emendations seventeenth-century readers inserted in their copies of Middleton’s plays that they constituted the plays as “imaginary theatre”  – adding missing entries or exits, or missing speech-prefixes, for example. Jowett does not discuss the possibility that these copies could have been prepared for declamation, the most common early modern reading practice (Marotti and Bristol 2000, 6). Concluding from the structure of title pages and identification tables between 1565 and 1618, Taylor (2007, 57) observes a shift from paratextual elements describing “the relationship of readers to the text”, and more precisely a “group reading communally out-loud” to “an individual reading alone silently”. An imaginary ‘theatricalisation’ and therefore visualisation would have preceded both forms of engagement with the text. The “tension between the playhouse and the printing house” (Erne 2003, 35) is borne out with particular clarity in Ben Jonson’s plays. Long before his Works

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edition, the title page of the quarto Every Man Out of His Humour (1600) offers the book as an authorised text with bonus material for repeated critical reading: “As it was first composed by the Author B.I.  Containing more than hath been Publickely Spoken or Acted. With the seuerall characters of euery Person”21. Its Latin epigraph from Horace’s Ars Poetica takes a few words out of the passage containing the famous ut pictura poesis and offers the play as a ‘verbal painting’ that improves by repeated and close scrutiny – a paratextual prompt for readerly activity (Ostovich 2001, 98).22 The alternative ending included in the quarto, which was originally staged at the Globe and at the Christmas celebrations at court, contains a stage direction whose wording departs from the relatively conventionalised technical terminology of didascalia and resembles what we would now call a ‘literary description’. It permits readers an imaginary visualisation of the scene and provides an interpretation: “The Actor portraying the Queen passes over the stage. The very wonder of her presence strikes Macilente to the earth, dumb and astonished; from whence, rising and recovering heart, his passion thus utters itself” (Jonson 2001, 5. 4, p. 367). Jonson frequently changes the codified terminology of stage directions to more descriptive expressions in the folio (Wright 1984, 271, 272, 278). Nevertheless, he carefully “documented his plays […] as historical and theatrical events” (Wright 1984, 260): in Poetaster, Jonson added stage directions in the folio version that allow to visualise the back-and-forth movement of a loving couple in the process of taking leave (Wright 1984, 267). Cave (1999b, 27) argues that the folio layout of a group scene in The Alchemist evokes an effect different from the modern editions, which space out a series of quick repartees: “The layout of the modern editions slows down the pace of it all, as it becomes visually a series of questions and answers and in consequence there is little sense that the trio […] have recovered a unity of intent after their divisive quarrel” or “respond to any given situation as a team”. Still, the revi-

21 Cf. the reprint of the title page in Jonson (2001, 97). Short character sketches of the principal figures (‘persons’) preface the play. For other examples of plays announced as extended versions cf. McJannet (1999, 25). 22 The comedy features metatheatrical commentaries and discussions of classical drama theory by a chorus. Given the comedy’s length, it is likely that some of these passages were cut for performance. For educated readers who customarily annotated, emended and compiled texts and entered memorable passages into commonplace books (cf. Jowett 2007, 310; Sharpe and Zwicker 2003, 7), Jonson’s comedy provided ample occasion for engagement: the wide margins in the Folio edition leave space for annotations, as Wright (1984, 260) argues.



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sion process seems to have been uneven23 and documents a tension between two incompatible aims rather than the imposition of a unity of textual appearance: Jonson, as Wright (1984, 261, cf. 263, 278) suggests, tried to reconcile the conflicting aims to “provide a reading text on the model of the classics, and […] to convey the theatrical impact of his plays”. If one of the functions of playbooks was to refer back to and to evoke theatrical experience and its visuality for groups of readers and listeners, or for individual readers – which conditions shaped this experience? What was there to be seen in the theatre, and what could playbook readers refer to in visualising a text?

2.3 The Visibility of Theatre and the Visuality of Drama around 1600 Recent research in early modern visual culture has revised the widely accepted notion of Elizabethan and Jacobean public stages as bare and undecorated. The first buildings specifically designed for theatre performances were located outside the London city walls – the Red Lion in Stepney (1567) and The Theatre in Shoreditch (1576). Their architectural design was modelled on amphitheatres, coaching inns and the animal-baiting rings which were still in ‘smelling distance’ of the theatres on the South Bank of the Thames (Gurr 2005, 15; Donaldson 2011, 103). Early modern London, whose population had increased from 35,000 at the beginning of the sixteenth century to 200,000 at its end, offered other visual attractions like the annual Lord Mayor’s show (a pageant celebrating the City of London) as well as annual fairs and festivities. Stern (2009, 62, cf. 48, 51) draws attention to the ubiquity of visible text in town: advertisements, broadsheets, plague bills, playbills and other announcements plastered walls and hitching posts in London so that “the city was textual, […] it was covered in texts”. These elements of vernacular visual culture, and the manifold visual practices associated with them, provided important points of reference for early modern drama. Theatres featured an outdoor thrust stage, surrounded by a circular or square audience space on three sides. This architecture does not permit a clear separation of audience and stage but encourages interaction (Royce 2009, 492). The playhouses held 1000–3000 spectators, and covered galleries provided space

23 The quarto version of Every Man Out of His Humour, for example, facilitates the imaginary visual recreation of a crucial crowd scene – the dance choreography in the Paul’s Walk scene opening act 3. Here, stage directions referring to the dance-like character were omitted in the folio (Wright 1984, 262).

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for more affluent visitors. Stages would eventually feature trapdoors, a balcony above the stage and a curtained ‘discovery space’ in the back, used for interior scenes. Elizabethan and Jacobean outdoor stages between the 1570s and the 1640s used few properties, no scenery and no artificial lighting. In this respect, they bore more resemblance to the movable platforms of medieval mystery and miracle plays than to later picture frame stages with their illusionistic scenery.24 Nevertheless, public playhouses and plays were visually appealing. Player companies acquired often costly and elaborate second-hand clothing from aristocrats and affluent citizens. Since even historical plays were performed in contemporary clothing (Orgel 2011, 53), and characters did not change their costume during the play, costume emblematically indicated social rank or designated stock characters such as scholars or lawyers (Lubin 2014, 634; Vaughan et al. 2010, 15). Audience members themselves were on display in the galleries surrounding the theatre’s inner yard (Gurr 2005, 36). Like the private houses of merchants, citizens, yeomen and the ranks above them, theatres were richly decorated with carved statuary, ornaments, hangings and wall paintings, often featuring classical themes (Gurr 2009, 193–94; Cohen 2009, 215; on houses cf. Hamling 2010, 85, 199). Stage architecture meant that action could take place simultaneously on upper and lower stages and the platea (Vaughan et al. 2010, 17), and sightlines were unspecified. Only few audience members were able to see the whole stage at once and following the play had to rely on nonvisual cues as well, as Bessell (2010, 188) observes for the Globe Theatre (opened in 1599, reconstructed in 1996): “The sightlines are such that no single position on the stage allows an actor to be seen by all sections of the audience at the same time. From time to time, each section of the Globe audience must rely on its own ears and on the visible reactions of the nonspeaking or listening actors in order to follow the story”. Apparently redundant parts of the dramatic text, in particular those referring to visible phenomena, must be seen in this context. Early modern public theatres therefore did not create a unity of illusionistic effect but “offered multiple images competing simultaneously for the audience’s attention” (Vaughan et al. 2010, 17). ‘Images’, here, also or chiefly refers to the visuality of character speeches and their verbal evocations of visuality: “a good deal of rhetorical energy within the plays themselves was also expended on what we might term spoken pictures: either imagistic verbal portraits or descriptions,

24 Properties had to be movable for rearranging the stage quickly in plays that were performed without curtains and separations into acts and scenes, and for easy transport on the companies’ tours (Sofer 2009, 564).



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or actual discourse about paintings or other visual images” (Elam 2010, 63). Rhetoric thus adds an additional dimension to the visibility of the staged performance that cannot be reduced to the function of compensating for “the restricted means in the scenic presentation” (Pfister 1991, 268, cf. 16). Indoors playing spaces, which came into use from the 1570s onwards and became increasingly popular in the 1610s (Gurr 2005, 37), offered a different configuration of visibility and visuality. They opened up the possibility (or necessity) of artificial lighting, a feature of later theatre buildings that allows to focus the attention of spectators in the darkened auditorium on the stage, to reduce interaction and to create the illusion of the ‘fourth wall’. This potential was already used in early seventeenth-century indoors theatres – though with the intention to create spectacular rather than illusionistic effects (as contemporaries like Ben Jonson critically observed, cf. Thorne 2000, 50). Another point of attraction (but also of distraction) was, again, the audience itself:25 In the boy companies’ public indoors theatres like St. Paul’s, stage-sitting was common practice for high-ranking and well-paying spectators since the 1570s, and rendered these playhouses attractive for self-display on stage (Gurr 2005, 36, 46–47). Court performances on specially constructed temporary stages seem to anticipate the picture frame stage, and their architecture indeed permitted the creation of an illusionistic, perspectival stage space separated from the audience (Astington 2009, 316). Inigo Jones designed the first perspectival scenery for Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blacknesse, performed at the Banqueting House in Whitehall in 1605 (Thorne 2000, 50). These one-time performances, however, did not amount to an even development towards a configuration of picture frame stage, realist drama, and naturalist acting styles yet. The use of perspective in order to create a stage for ‘looking through’ the proscenium arch onto the action was not common before the later seventeenth century (Thorne 2000, 52). Placing the monarch at the exact spot where perspectival lines converged and permitted a perfect illusion, moreover, was reserved for court performances and fulfilled a specific social and political function. Court audiences did not generally approve of (or understand) perspectival stage design, and it was rarely used outside the court (Thorne 2000, 52). The genre adapted to the court venues, the masque (an allegory or episode from classical mythology), requires the inclusion of the audience and did not permit the sustained illusion of a ‘fourth wall’: the court masque was “about the group it entertained, and always ended by including them […]. In court masques the usual way of bringing this about was to con-

25 Indoors theatres provided space for fewer (ca. 500) spectators and attracted a more affluent clientele (Gurr 2005, 31) – London citizens, law students from the Inns of Court and courtiers.

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clude the work with a grand dance, in which the masquers descended from the stage and took partners from among the spectators” (Orgel 2011, 109). Even though the early modern theatre scene was highly differentiated, and private as well as court and commercial performers specialised on particular segments of the metropolitan audience (in terms of location, admission policy and repertoire), there was also a certain amount of audience fluctuation between theatrical spaces and their particular organisation of visibility (Gurr 2005, 85–86). Playwrights also wrote for different contexts, for example adult players and boy companies, and in various genres, and they acquired familiarity with different theatrical conventions and audience expectations in the course of their careers: Thomas Middleton and Ben Jonson staged city pageants and court masques but also wrote for different venues of public theatre and its audience of male and female London citizens, artisans, apprentices, day labourers, and courtiers. How, then, did early modern Londoners see – inside the theatre and outside of it? How did they read? Even though it is impossible to reconstruct exactly who saw what and how, discourses on visuality represent at least some of the cultural frames for seeing and perceiving visual and visual/verbal phenomena. In their concern with acceptable or unacceptable, desirable and undesirable ways of seeing, they indicate at least some of the contested issues in early modern viewing and visualisation practices. Classical rhetoric is a dominant body of knowledge orienting visual as well as verbal practices (Acheson 2013, 4), and it charts the field of word and image in a manner that differs considerably from the modern, post-1800 ideas of media differences (in the sense of information channels or materialities as restraints on what can be represented).

3 Early Modern Discourses on Literature, Theatre, and Visuality 3.1 ‘Placing before the eyes’: Rhetoric Rhetoric, the theory and technique of persuasive speech, provided a general framework of concepts and practical scripts relevant for poetry, prose, drama and the visual arts (Thorne 2000, 59).26 Word and image are seen as different arts, that 26 In early modern England, Aristotle’s Rhetorike, Cicero’s De Oratore, and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria were among the most frequently consulted authors on rhetoric. Horace’s Ars Poetica was more influential than Aristotle’s Poetics (Alexander 2004, xxxv).



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is, different but complementary techniques and practices of manipulating signs and of creating effects on spectators, readers or listeners (Alpers 1976, 16; Orgel 2002, 51). It is a form of production- and reception-oriented knowledge (Schanze 2000, 449) that distinguishes between word and image but emphasises their similarities (Alpers 1976, 16). Since rhetoric is basically an art of effective mediation with fields of application including politics and law, it comes under scrutiny as a skill with the potential for deception. A pressing concern in this context is how much liberty rhetoric must take in the presentation of facts or ideas in order to be sufficiently persuasive, and how much liberty it may take without departing from the truth. Rhetorical treatises unfailingly engage with Plato’s position that truth can only be approached by philosophy rather than rhetoric, and with the Aristotelian defence of rhetoric as a counterpart to dialectic reasoning and as a legitimate instrument to demonstrate truth and justice (Schanze 2000, 449; Rhetoric 1355a–1356b). The debate on the respective merits of vivid, impressive speech and plain, unadorned, conceptually clear speech27 also concerns the application of rhetoric to the arts. A normative opposition, separating the true, useful and necessary from potentially deceptive, superfluous and ‘merely ornamental’ parts of speech informs aesthetic discourse in early modernity and beyond. Techniques of verbal visualisation are particularly contested in this respect, and much of the confusing variety and conceptual imprecision of terminology in this field has to do with the ambivalent status of visualisation techniques ranging from a trope like metaphor to the figure of hypotyposis to larger segments of discourse like descriptio and ekphrasis: on the one hand, ‘placing something before the eyes’ as if it were really present is seen as a fundamental requirement of any argumentation; on the other hand, the evocation of an absent object, person or event opens up a space for manipulation.28 This faultline is indicated by the almost identical-looking terms energeia and enargeia, both referring to the vividness of verbal representation.29 Enargeia describes the power of persuasion pos-

27 Cicero’s Brutus and Orator are part of a controversy on the merits of the exuberant style cultivated by Cicero and the plain style of speaking advocated by Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Licinius Calvus (cf. Hubbell 1939, 297–298). 28 Only a small number of rhetorical techniques are concerned with visibility (the orator’s gestures, posture and facial expression) and few involve visualisation. In treatises on rhetoric, issues like the philosophical and legal knowledge required for oratory, the moral responsibility of the orator as well as structure, style and intonation are usually discussed at greater length. 29 Both terms are used alongside each other in the rhetorical tradition and are not always clearly distinguished. The predominance of enargeia from Roman rhetoric onwards and in Renaissance rhetoric (Klarer 2001, 2), though, frequently indicates a preoccupation with the truth value of rhetorical speech, not with its effect.

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sessed by facts in relation to words, while energeia refers to the power of words in relation to the hearer’s mind. Both effects are achieved by techniques of ‘placing something before the eyes’ or hypotyposis. Energeia is a term from Aristotelian rhetoric and is introduced in a discussion of different kinds of metaphor. When Aristotle discusses their effectiveness, he singles out the metaphora kai pro ommatôn30 as particularly striking: it does not stop at the transfer of meaning from one word to another but adds ‘[something] for the eyes’ (pro ommatôn) that renders it more vivid. The mere extension of a metaphor achieves energeia, vividness; but the effect can also be due to its semantic content: “things are set before the eyes by words that signify actuality”, by ‘energising’,‘effective’ words (energounta sêmainei, Rhetoric 1411b). Aristotle holds that vivid metaphors substitute action and agency for stasis and inertia, and the emphasis of the dynamic and action-oriented, even action-inspiring qualities of vivid descriptions is one of the topoi that later commentators return to. The other important connection that will continue to inform rhetorical tradition is the association of vividness with visuality.31 Rhetoric in the English Renaissance favours the term enargeia. This concept is prominent in the Roman tradition of Marcus Tullius Cicero and Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, who are chiefly concerned with demonstrative and forensic oratory. Enargeia originates in Stoic and Epicurean philosophy and refers originally to a quality of objects – real, true things, it is argued, impress the senses and the human mind more strongly than fictitious ones (Kemmann 1996, 40–42). Cicero, therefore, calls the clear and striking presentation of facts (the illustratio) subiec-

30 John Henry Freese translates the term, imprecisely but elegantly, as ‘vivid metaphor’. This translation obscures the fact that Aristotle distinguishes between the simple metaphor (meta­ phora) and its supplement, ‘something for the eyes’ (pro ommatôn)  – as Campe (1997, 214) observes. Metaphora kai pro ommatôn literally means “metaphor and ‘for the eyes’”  – the inserted kai (‘and’) emphasises the fact that something is added to ‘metaphor’ (Rhetoric 1411b). In Aristotle’s text, it is stressed by an example for an extended metaphor: “And as Iphicrates said, ‘The path of my words leads through the centre of the deeds of Chares’; here the metaphor is proportional and the words ‘through the centre’ create vividness [pro ommatôn poiei]” (Rhetoric 1411b). The metaphor ‘path of my words’, as Campe (1997, 214) observes, is intensified and visualised in the phrase ‘through the centre of the deeds’. 31 As Campe (1997, 215) argues, this semantic understanding of vivid metaphors derived from Aristotle’s example prevails in later commentaries on the Rhetoric: metaphors of animation are thought to achieve vividness, and the original role assigned to energeia as a technique of achieving visuality is obscured. An appeal to the sense of vision can still be found in Cicero’s discussion of metaphor in De Oratore: all transfers of meaning appeal to the intellect and involve the senses but if the visual sense is involved, the effect is particularly striking (cf. De Oratore, book 3, sect. 161–163).



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tio ad oculos or ‘placing before the eyes’ (Orator ch. 40, sect. 139; Kemmann 1996, 42). The ontologically grounded weight of factual truth, it is argued, only needs to be intensified in order to become evident. The Latin term Cicero coins as a translation of the Greek enargeia is evidentia, striking clarity (Kemmann 1996, 42). Quintilian follows Cicero in stressing the necessity of presenting facts in a quasi-visual manner before judges (or political assemblies) whenever a case is stated.32 The main function of this ‘statement of facts’ is the evocation of emotions, and its main technique is mental visualisation: first of all, visualisation helps the orator grasp the emotional import of what he is going to say – in preparing a speech, it is useful to conjure up “certain experiences which the Greeks call φαυτασίας [phantasias] and the Romans visions, whereby things absent are presented to our imagination with such extreme vividness that they seem actually to be before our very eyes” (Institutio Oratoria vol. II, book 6, ch. 2, sect. 29/30). These vivid mental images then find expression in emotionally charged words conveying “that ενάργεια [enargeia] which Cicero calls illluminatio and actuality, which makes us seem not so much to narrate as exhibit the actual scene, while our emotions will be no less stirred than if we were present at the actual occurrence” (Institutio Oratoria II, 6, 2, 32). While these passages diminish the difference between imagined and real phenomena  – after all, both move speaker and audience alike  – Quintilian is careful to distinguish the merely ornamental amplification or hypotyposis from the statement of facts (narratio) in the service of clarity (perspicuitas): “hypotyposis or picturesque description cannot be regarded as a statement of facts” (Institutio Oratoria II, 4, 2, 4).33 Hypotyposis is a rhetorical figure akin to Cicero’s “ocular demonstration” (Institutio Oratoria III, 9, 2, 40) or ‘placing before the eyes’, and related to Aristotle’s ‘vivid metaphor’. For Quintilian, it is problematic because it

32 Where Cicero speaks of illustratio – literally, illumination or ‘lending lustre’ – Quintilian uses narratio, in Butler’s translation: ‘statement of facts’ (Institutio Oratoria vol. I, book 2, ch. 4, sect. 1). Oratory, Quintilian claims, “fails of its full effect […] if its appeal is merely to the hearing, and if the judge merely feels that the facts on which he has to give his decision are being narrated to him, and not displayed in their vivid truth to the eyes of the mind” (Institutio Oratoria, III, 8, 3, 62–62). Quintilian borrows the expression ‘placing before the eyes’ from Cicero and like him, discusses it in the context of forensic speech. 33 The phrase ‘or picturesque description’ is inserted by the translator. Cf. a passage from book 8 (Institutio Oratoria III, 8, 3, 61): “Consequently we must place among ornaments that ενάργεια which I mentioned in the rules I laid down for the statement of facts [narratio], because vivid illustration [evidentia], or as some prefer to call it, representation [repraesentatio] is something more than mere clearness [perspicuitas], since the latter merely lets itself be seen, whereas the former thrusts itself upon our notice [ostendit]” (Latin terms added, N.G.).

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overshoots the mark and does more than realise the clarity emanating from the truth of factuality. The figure of hypotyposis heightens the effect of a statement and consists in, for example, lingering over a description (Institutio Oratoria III, 9, 1, 27) or in ‘showing how an act was done in full detail’ (Institutio Oratoria, III, 9, 2, 40) instead of only naming its result. Quintilian uses the term hypotyposis for dynamic description when he warns against the use of hypotyposis in forensic speeches, “for the story seems to be acted, not narrated” (Institutio Oratoria III, 9, 2, 44). This definition of hypotyposis as a dynamic, sequential arrangement of facts will eventually fuse with narration.34 The association of hypotyposis with static pictorial representation, dominant in the later tradition and even in modern narratological accounts (Wall 2006, 27), is implied in Quintilian’s use of the term hypotyposis for a form of detailed, retarding description. Ekphrasis in particular has been associated with stasis and a merely ornamental function. Originally, it is a term for a form of amplification in epideictic rhetoric and can also mean ‘giving voice to something’ (Klarer 2001, 3). The sense of ekphrasis narrows down to descriptive visualisation and techniques of exposition and ‘placing before the eyes’ in general.35 Ekphrases are cultivated as rhetorical exercises in dramatising and intensifying the effect of a real or imagined visual phenomenon (Rippl 2005, 63), often in imitation of famous examples like the description of Achilles’ shield in book 18 of Homer’s Ilias, and turn into a specific genre, the description of works of art (Klarer 2001, 5).36 The self-contained and isolated character of ekphrastic descriptions, their lack of integration into a narrative, their merely ornamental function, and their apparently excessive display of skill (Wall 2006, 17) are typical attribu-

34 The dynamic form of hypotyposis can, as Quintilian points out in analogy to Aristotle, also be achieved by language alone – by various tropes that exaggerate, repeat, emphasise, assist the imagination “to form mental pictures of things” (Institutio Oratoria III, 8, 3, 88) and that are related to energeia, vigour. For the tradition cf. Kemmann (1996, 45) with reference to Pietro ­Vettori. Cf. Campe (1997, 219) for the argument that the configurations of narratio/evidentia/enargeia and metaphor/hypotyposis/energeia are two sides of the same coin. Both are associated with visuality, and the pictorial type is differentiated into various ‘-graphias’ (such as topographia, prosopographia, pragmatographia) defined by their respective objects. Halsall (1992, 1495–1496) stresses the closeness of hypotyposis to relatively isolated forms of description, for example ­ekphrasis. 35 For instance by Dionysos of Halikarnassos and Hermogenes and in Scaliger’s Renaissance poetics (Halsall 1992, 1496, 1499, cf. also Wall 2006, 16). ‘Ekphrasis’ often connotes ‘descriptive digression’ (Klarer 2001, 4) in handbooks of rhetoric (progymnasmata) of the first century A.D. 36 The genre is established by Philostratos’ Imagines and Callistratus’ Descriptiones in the third century A.D.  Klarer (2001, 139) observes that ekphrases in Shakespeare reflect on his implicit theory of drama in a most systematic manner.



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tions that continue into early modernity, when ekphrasis is conventionally used for descriptions of real or imagined pictures or works of art in poetry, prose and drama (Wall 2006, 16; Klarer 2001, 6). In an even narrower sense yet, ekphrasis is understood as a “verbal representation of a visual representation” (Heffernan 1993, 3)  – that is, as a second-order representation that transposes a visual artefact into language. This definition, used for example by Krieger (1992) and Klarer (2001), continues to inform newer theoretical analyses of literary description. Ekphrasis has attracted attention as a privileged site of negotiation for the relation of word and image and their respective merits. It is the genre of choice for considerations of the paragone of competing arts – like the dispute opening William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton’s Timon of Athens (ca. 1607, printed 1623). Here, however, the question of superiority is resolved in a manner that lets poetry and painting appear as the ‘sister arts’ of the Horatian tradition, producing the most convincing effects in combination37: only the skill of eloquent description turns painting into something more than a material object, and only a collaboration of visual and verbal art in the form of ekphrasis achieves this goal.38 What is the status of rhetoric and its visuality in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England? Rhetoric, drama and poetry by classical authors were core elements of Elizabethan school education, and translations from Latin and

37 The scene brings a painter, a poet, a merchant and a jeweller on stage, all of them waiting for Timon, an influential Athenian citizen, in the hope of winning him as a patron. Painter and poet praise the merits of their respective productions, a portrait and an ode, to each other. The poet’s ensuing ekphrasis gives listeners and readers an idea of the picture and praises its capacity to surpass nature: “I will say of it / It tutors nature. Artificial strife / Lives in these touches livelier than life” (Shakespeare and Middleton 2008, 1.1, ll. 38–40, p. 163). When it is the poet’s turn to give an outline of his ode, the painter merely scoffs at his attempt to emulate the genre of instructive, allegorical painting: “A thousand moral paintings I can show / That can demonstrate these quick blows of Fortune / More pregnantly than words” (Shakespeare and Middleton 2008, 1. 1. 92–94, p.168). 38 Emblems are another prominent early modern configuration of word and image. This popular genre combines an image with text (a short motto or inscription above the picture and a longer subscription or interpretation underneath) and assigns a complementary status to each component. An abstract maxim or idea is rendered palpable through association with a picture, usually a woodcut. The common alignment of the inscription with ‘soul’ and of the picture with ‘body’ implies a hierarchy, though (Klarer 2001, 41). Emblem books like A. Alciato’s Emblematum Libellus (1531), Geoffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblems (1586), Francis Quarles’ Hieroglyphics of the Life of Man (1638) and Emblems (1635) were popular in religious instruction and in oratory as a device for teaching and memorising (Klarer 2001, 40; Mödersheim 1994, 1098, 1101, 1104).

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Greek as well as the performance of plays were preferred methods of instruction.39 The Elizabethan education system familiarised not only future poets and dramatists but also parts of their male audience with a range of classical authors and provided them with basic knowledge of rhetoric. In grammar schools, Latin plays were habitually staged and classical drama (Terence, Plautus, Seneca) was taught as “a handmaiden to oratory” (Gurr 2005, 87) in order to train young boys in rhetoric: “One favourite exercise was to make the student compose an oration in the person of one character from literature or history addressing another” (Alexander 2004, xxvi–xxvii). Contemporary treatises on poetics like Henry Peacham’s The Garden of Eloquence (1577), George Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy (1589), John Harington’s A Brief Apology of Poetry (1591), Sir Philip Sidney’s The Defense of Poesy (1595) or Samuel Daniel’s A Defence of Rhyme (1603) follow different agendas but nevertheless attest to a renewed interest in Horace’s Ars Poetica, Cicero, Quintilian and to a lesser extent Aristotle (Alexander 2004, xix, xxxv).40 Drama and prose were subsumed under the category ‘poetry’ (and I will use the term in this general sense) but it was generally seen as inferior to lyric and epic. In these treatises, a normative framework of moral instruction is taken for granted: the authors subscribe to the classical maxim that poetry should delight, teach and move – pleasure and animation, however, are frequently downplayed for the sake of a notion of literature as a branch of epideictic rhetoric, presenting examples for morally sound action (Alexander 2004, xxxix). George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesy (1589) is an example for a poetics that highlights such moral concerns and maps it onto a distrust of images. His selective reception of Cicero and Quintilian reduces rather than reproduces the almost naturalised connection between vividness and visuality found in the Roman sources, and intensifies their epistemological concerns with rhetoric and poetry. Puttenham’s (2004, 182) explanation of hypotyposis as “counterfeit representation”41, for example, equates the vivid visuality traditionally attributed 39 School plays were staged at Eton between 1535 and 1548, usually classical drama by Plautus and Terence (Sommer 2011, 52). Academic drama constituted an ongoing tradition of plays in Latin at the universities (cf. Sommer 2011, 53; Gurr 2005, 105). 40 Daniel’s A Defence of Rhyme (1603), for example, is concerned chiefly with style (or elocution), versification, rhythm and metre and pays little attention to visuality. 41 He picks up on the ‘before the eyes’ topos as well, defining hypotyposis as the description of “many things in such sort as it should appear they were truly before our eyes, though they were not present” (Puttenham 2004, 182). To counterfeit is ambiguous: it still bears the neutral meaning of ‘to imitate, to portray, to represent’ in the sixteenth century (cf. Oxford English Dictionary, entry ‘counterfeit’, 7–9) but is also used in the modern sense of ‘to forge, to deceive, to feign’. Puttenham does not refer to visuality when he enumerates several subcategories of hypotyposis, such as prosopographia, prosopopoeia, topographia etc.



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to this figure with ‘feigning’ and ‘counterfeiting’. The pictorial is identified with deceit and excess, and figurative language and visuality are seen as departures from decorum that amount to falsifying illusions (Thorne 2000, 83; Puttenham 2004, 135, 143–144).42 While he refers frequently to hearing, he is indifferent or even hostile to the visual.43 The association of figurative language with excessive and unnecessary ornament is already well established in classical sources (Alexander 2004, xxiv) and ties in with Christian and in particular Protestant scepticism of luxury and exuberance. In the controversies on theatre, though, the allegedly irrational, seductive and morally corrupting power of images and the capacity of rhetorical visualisation techniques to ‘move’ audiences to action is the more fundamental issue at stake.

3.2 Pictures that Speak and Move: Poetics and Theatre Thomas Heywood’s 1612 An Apologie for Actors is, in Barish’s (1981, 119) opinion, one of the most ‘inept’ (because internally contradictory) apologies for theatre imaginable, even though it is coming from a playwright and actor. It echoes ideas from Sir Philip Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy, written about 1580 and published in 1595, and transfers them to the theatre. Heywood, like Sidney, defines poetry as pictures that speak and move (both in the transitive and the intransitive sense). He subsumes drama under the art of oratory and defines it as “a kind of speaking picture”, excelling both the “dumbe oratory” (Heywood 1973, B3) of painting and ineffective description: “Description is only a shadow receiued by the eare but not perceiued by the eye: so liuely portrature is meerely a forme seene by the eye, but can neither shew action, passion, motion, or any other gesture, to mooue the spirits of the beholder to admiration” (Heywood 1973, B3)44. In his own plays, as

42 The one visual analogy treated at length – the “concept of the giudizio dell’ occhio” or the (visual) sense of proportion (Thorne 2000, 95) – is elaborated with respect to the general implications of stylistic appropriateness, moral judgment and decorum and less with respect to its use in contemporary theories of architecture, drawing and painting. 43 He coins the neologism ‘auricular’ figures for figures that appeal to the ear (Puttenham 2004, 148) and mistakenly identifies enargeia as a figure that ‘delights the ear only’ (Puttenham 2004, 135). The figure of “Icon, or resemblance by imagery” is described in a more neutral manner: “But when we liken an human person to another, in countenance, stature, speech or other quality, it is not called bare resemblance, but resemblance by imagery or portrait, alluding to the painter’s term, who yieldeth to the eye a visible representation of the thing he describes and painteth in his table” (Puttenham 2004, 185/86). Puttenham’s examples, however, also include non-visual resemblances (such as illustrating hardness by a stone). 44 Spelling original, only long has been converted.

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Dessen (2006) has shown, Heywood appeals to the playgoers’ imagination and has recourse to techniques like messenger reports, sound effects, synecdochic presentations of actions – battles, shipwrecks, tournaments – that are difficult to present on stage, combining verbal description with enactment. Sir Philip Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy is more consistent and exceptional in its reliance on the visual-verbal analogy. Sidney employs ‘poetry’ (like Aristotle and most of his contemporaries, cf. Klarer 2001, 144) as a generic term for dramatic as well as lyrical and epic forms, and defines it as “an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting or figuring forth – to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture – with this end: to teach and delight” (Sidney 2004, 10). Only as a ‘speaking picture’, Sidney’s argument runs, can poetry unfold its emotional appeal and inspire moral action. Philosophy and history, Sidney claims, fail in this respect. Merely recording facts (like historians do) or presenting arguments for moral virtue is not sufficient; good examples need to be conveyed in a manner that prompts to action (Sidney 2004, 11). Only poetry can give such a ‘perfect picture’ of virtue, and Sidney contrasts it with the ‘wordish description’ of philosophers which fails to affect the ‘sight of the soul’ or the mind’s eye: Now doth the peerless poet perform both, for whatsoever the philosopher saith should be done, he giveth a perfect picture of it in someone by whom he presupposeth it was done, so as he coupleth the general notion with the particular example. A perfect picture I say, for he yieldeth to the powers of the mind an image of that whereof the philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description, which doth neither strike, pierce nor possess the sight of the soul so much as that other doth. (Sidney 2004, 16, my emphasis)

The ‘striking, piercing and possessing’ quality of poetic images is what the rhetorical tradition has conceptualised as energeia (Sidney 2004, 49; Klarer 2001, 77). The emphasis on the action-inspiring and visual qualities of poetry is reflected in visual imagery and supported by analogies to theatre and painting: he compares the work of the poet to the painter who skilfully selects colours that appeal to the eye and serve his moral purpose (Sidney 2004, 11, cf. 21). Presenting nature – that is, the true qualities of things  – as the principal object of poetry, he compares artists to “actors and players, as it were, of what nature will have set forth” (Sidney 2004, 8); the embellishments poets add to natural beauty are compared to tapestries (Sidney 2004, 9); the instructive qualities of poetry are pointed out by analogy to paintings that concretise moral subjects, and to technical drawings that allow for the correct construction of buildings or fortifications (Sidney 2004, 36). The comparison to technical drawings as ‘pro-grammes’, as models for future constructions, is particularly significant here because it illustrates Sidney’s idea of



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mimesis: poetry is not the imitation of an empirical nature in the modern sense,45 and the criterion for truthfulness is not factual truth but moral truth. Invented situations can therefore be as instructive as facts: “a feigned example hath as much force to teach as a true example” (Sidney 2004, 20). Sidney’s (2004, 34) famous argument that “the poet […] nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth”, and that everyone knows “that the poet’s persons and doings are but pictures what should be and not stories what have been” emphasises this point once again. The consistent and confident use of analogies and references to visual art in Sidney’s essay is atypical for early modern English poetics (Klarer 2001, 75).46 It is also strategic: it boldly elaborates the initial definition of poetry as ‘speaking pictures’ into a defence of poetry as well as visual art. This includes, as Tassi (2005, 43) has observed and contrary to critical opinion, drama.47 Sidney’s biting commentaries on plays attack incompetent playwriting, not drama or theatre as such. Sidney (2004, 45) mocks plays that rely extensively on word scenery to make the audience believe that “four swords and bucklers” are “two armies” rushing in, or to imagine the stage as a garden in one scene and as a rock in high sea in the next. Held up against the ideal of classical drama and the Aristotelian unities of time,

45 Sidney draws indiscriminately on Neoplatonic and Aristotelian ideas here. When poetry ‘imitates nature’, it does so in the Neoplatonic sense of approaching an ideal essence, turning its departure from factuality into idealisation. He echoes Aristotle’s notion of mimesis as the presentation of potential consequences of action (De Poetica 1451b), and of tragedy as the depiction of characters who resemble yet surpass real human beings (De Poetica 1454b; Aristotle also uses the analogy to painting in this context). The Platonic notion of the poet as inspired prophet (vates) and the Biblical concept of the prophet as poet are approvingly discussed in the beginning of the treatise, and Tassi (2005, 43) adds that Sidney’s term ‘fore-conceit’ – that is, a proto-Idea – signals his familiarity with the Neoplatonic idea of the painter or artist as having access to the realm of ideas. 46 Thorne (2000, 71–73) points out that Sidney’s extensive travels on the continent had familiarised him with Italian art and art theory. The Defense was written around 1580 and printed posthumously; manuscripts nevertheless circulated among Sidney’s friends. John Harington (2004, 265–266) explicitly refers to Sidney’s essay in A Brief Apology of Poetry (1591) and refutes objections against poetry on similar grounds: for didactic reasons, an ‘honest fraud’ is to be justified, and the objection of evoking wantonness applies only to certain genres (Harington 2004, 272). 47 Barish’s (1981, 117) observation that Sidney defends epic poetry only, and Barkan’s (1995, 338) observation that he favours ‘pictures’ only insofar as they belong to an interior, private imagination activated by reading while theatre amounts to a debasement of the imaginative efforts required by poetry is difficult to support. Sidney does single out the heroic mode as an ideal, but its combination of moral virtue and action-orientation is indifferent to genre.

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action and place48, the unnecessary details and shifts of place in his theatrical examples fail to do justice to the requirements and potentials of the genre, as exemplified by Greek and Roman drama. Sidney (2004, 45–46) encourages playwrights to adapt action to one place and the “two hours’ space” allotted to the performance49, and argues against unnecessary ‘showing’ of places or events that could be reported, for example, by messengers. Still, he does not criticise theatre for a lack of realism here, as Gurr (2005, 130) and others claim, but for falling short of a classical genre ideal. Nowhere does he indicate that the ‘speaking pictures’ of drama cannot in principle come up to the level of poetry. More than 20 years later, Ben Jonson echoes some of Sidney’s arguments in the “Epistle” prefacing the satiric comedy Volpone (1606), and transfers them explicitly to drama. In an even more pronounced way than Shakespeare (Kiernan 1996, 6–7), he integrated a poetics of drama into his plays, often in prefaces or prologues, but also in the form of a chorus. Jonson (1985, 42) declares the “impossibility of any man’s being a good poet without first being a good man” and contrasts the good poet with the “scribe […] in dramatic or, as they term it, stage poetry” who utters nothing but blasphemy. Even though Jonson is notorious for his disdain for spectacle, his allegedly ‘antitheatrical’ attitude (Barish 1981, 132) is not pervasive (Cave 1999a, 33; Orgel 2002, 203). Anticipating and refuting common criticism of the stage (to which I will return below), Jonson sets out to educate an audience capable of critical scrutiny. In the metatheatrical commentaries of many plays, he tends to distinguish between hearers of spoken words and spectators, and to value the former higher than the latter – but Jonson envisages a continuum rather than a dichotomy of hearing and seeing. The polarity of ‘spectator’ and ‘hearer’ is only one part of a cluster of other polarities such as the distinction between mass and individual recipients, or critical and naive, rational and emotional modes of response. The chorus of Every Man Out of His Humour, for example, pits the multitude of spectators who are easily swayed by collective

48 There is no strict formulation of these rules in Aristotle’s Poetics. Julius Caesar Scaliger, on whom Sidney relies in this passage (cf. Alexander 2004, 351, note 232), introduced them and followed Lodovico Castelvetro’s translation of the Poetics from Greek into Italian of 1570. 49 This reference to the common performance time of drama indicates that Sidney actually saw (and not just read) plays, presumably on his travels in Italy (Alexander 2004, 350, note 231) and considered drama as a performance art. Gurr (2005, 130–131) argues that he might even have seen Gorboduc by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville in one of the later stagings in the 1570s (he was seven years old at the time of its first performance in 1561) and speculates that he was thoroughly familiar not only with the court theatre and the theatre of the Inns of Court but also the public stage.



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opinion against individual, ‘judicious’ hearers.50 The discriminatory capacities of playgoers for both visual and aural presentation are crucial, and the play provides its own educational programme by reflecting on possible alternatives for staging: one of the play’s visually most complex scenes (Act 3, scene 1), featuring 15 moving characters on stage simultaneously (and introducing new characters besides) is justified and prepared by the chorus figure Cordatus. His rhetorical question is: “And is it not an object of more state to behold the scene full and relieved with variety of speakers to the end than to see a vast empty stage and the actors come in, one by one, as if they were dropped down with a feather into the eye of the audience?” (Jonson 2001, 2.2, 582–586, p.194). A scene brimming with speaking characters (‘relieved with variety of speakers’) is more impressive ‘to behold’ (and therefore more effective, it is suggested) than an empty stage where successive character appearances deal out the comedy’s didactic message piecemeal, that is, apply it with an eyedropper to the ‘eye of the audience’. This key metaphor mixes visual and aural connotations and refers back to the Latin epigraphs on the title page of the first quarto and the sub­ sequent folios: Jonson inserts a few words from Horace’s Ars Poetica, taken from the passage containing the famous phrase ut pictura poesis. Ostovich’s (2001, 98) commentary gives the full translation and italicises the words quoted by Jonson: “A poem is like a painting: if you examine it up close, / one will strike you more; and another, if you stand further back. / One likes to hide in a shadow; another intends to be seen under a light, / unafraid of the critic’s piercing scrutiny: / one has pleased a single time, the other will continue to please after ten repeated viewings”. Jonson’s epigraph presents the print version of his comedy as a poem/ painting whose chief characteristic is its ongoing capacity to give pleasure. Such a complex verbal and/or visual text is the correlate for an audience possessing the discriminatory capacities that Jonson’s prologues, dedications and metatheatrical commentaries outline.

50 As regards the practice of theatre going, terminology is fluctuating and only gradually narrows down to the modern terms ‘spectators’ and ‘audience’. As Gurr (2005, 104) observes, a “surprising range of terms was available, and the […] concept of huge and regular urban gatherings at plays was new enough to provoke a sensitive and discriminating variety of terms which only slowly narrowed down to the current usage”. The terms ‘spectator’ or ‘beholder’ and references to ‘seeing plays’ were in use alongside synonyms for the more common expression of ‘going to hear a play’ (Gurr 2005, 106–108). The normative distinction between seeing and hearing is also illustrated by the comedy’s action (Glaubitz 2014, 405), presenting characters dependent on group opinion and deceived by outward appearances. The desired audience is interpellated variously as “judicious friends” (“Induction”, l. 54, Jonson 2001, 115), “[a]ttentive auditors” (l. 199, 123) and “critics” (l. 60, 116) who are able to ‘decipher’ the action.

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The relative indifference to the distinction between seeing, hearing and reading that emerges from Sidney’s and Jonson’s poetics has a complement in early modern notions of reading as a form of seeing that involved much the same physiological, cognitive and emotional mental faculties as seeing other visible phenomena (Johns 1998, 387). Orgel (2002, 51) observes that “the antithesis between visual and verbal spectacle did not exist in the Renaissance, even for Jonson, in the way it does for us”. The distinction between speaking, hearing and writing, Eisenstein (2011, 46) observes, is not clear-cut in early modern culture: “speaking and writing had formed a continuum. Reading aloud was the common practice”.

3.3 Post-Reformation Visual Culture, Discourses on Visuality and Elizabethan Theatre As theatre moved out of the confines of schools, academies and the court into a public and legally ambiguous space, concerns over its impact on public morality flared up and were kindled further by the Protestants’ rejection of all kinds of mediation of the word of God (cf. Mullaney 1988, 21; Barish 1981, 83). Playgoing, Barish (1981, 80) remarks, ranked “abnormally high in the hierarchy of sins” in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Willingly consenting to witness spectacles was seen as a grave offense because the sense of vision was considered as particularly sensitive to – and powerless against – the lure of pleasurable, erotic or deluding sights. This view conforms to the intromission theory of sight, dominant since the Middle Ages, which claims that objects emit rays of light that first affect the body – “an image was thought to be ‘imprinted’ or ‘painted’ (both words were used) on the retina” (Johns 1998, 389) – and then the sensus communis, which mediates it to a largely passive mind. The notion of active sight, the extramission theory of Plato, Aristotle and Euclid, is less popular but its adherents in the sixteenth century by no means play down the power of visually perceived objects.51 On the whole, defenders and the more numerous accusers of images and the

51 On intromission and extramission cf. Knapp (2011, 5, 12–13; Porter 2013, 23; Johns 1998, 389). Behind this assumption is the belief that sin – like disease – is contagious and can ‘infect’ even unwitting spectators (Tassi 2005, 17). Munday (1580, 54), speaks of plays as “filthie infections” and stresses the willing consent of spectators, which transforms them from passive witnesses to active participators: “For while they saie nought, but gladlie look on, they al by sight and assent be actors” (Munday 1580, 3, cf. 96). The first source Barish (1981, 80–81) cites for this assumption is a disciple of St. Augustine, Salvianus, who distinguishes between accidentally witnessing an



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stage share the basic assumption that images are powerful, sensually appealing and potentially deceiving (Knapp 2011, 2, 7; Barish 1981, 117). They also agree that images evoke unpredictable responses requiring regulation – either by prohibiting theatres, as the Puritan “lunatic fringe” (Tassi 2005, 18) demanded, or by good sense or proper training in the pragmatics of visuality and spectacle, as its advocates suggest. The dangers of seeing are elaborated in one of the most frequently quoted anti-theatrical pamphlets, Anthony Munday’s A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters (1580). Munday, a former playwright, presents the theatre as a ‘chapel of Satan’ (Munday 1580, 89) and as a predominantly visual ‘spectacle’ closely associated with idolatry (Munday 1580, 33, 34, 116). The sense of vision is even more receptive to sinful pleasures than hearing, he observes: There cometh much euil in at the eares, but more at the eies, by these two open windowes death breaketh into the soule. Nothing entereth in more effectualie into the memorie, than that which commeth by seeing; things heard do lightlie passe awaie, but the tokens of that which wee haue seene, saith Petrarch, sticke fast in vs whether we wil or no: and yet they enter not into vs, vnles we be willing, except verie seldome. (Munday 1580, 95–96)52

Yet Munday (1580, 115, cf. 95, 114) also expounds on the dangers of seeing and hearing “filthie, lewde, & vngodlie speeches”53. As Johns and Schoenfeldt (2003, 217–218) observe, the potentially deceptive power attributed to the visual is extended to textual visibility in physiological treatises not directly connected to religious debates: seeing letters on a page was not considered as fundamentally different from seeing images, and “[i]magination and perception were thus difficult to distinguish precisely” (Johns 1998, 393). Other more radical followers of Calvin and Zwingli’s iconoclast doctrines in England, for example Henry Ainsworth, Thomas Tuke and William Perkins, insisted on a narrow interpretation of the Second Commandment and its prohibition of the worship of ‘graven images’. In the widest sense, this included (for Perkins) the “inner idols or images created in the mind” (Tassi 2005, 52) as well as

atrocious or objectionable event and willingly exposing oneself to one – in the former case, the mind can detach itself, in the latter, it consents to be affected. 52 Tassi (2005, 18) draws attention to a similar observation from Horace’s Ars Poetica, where he considers enacted action as more striking and vivid than a messenger report in theatre. 53 He refers to Cicero when he draws special attention to the gestures and the ‘eloquence’ of the actor’s body to exert the “force to moue, and prepare a man to that which is il” (Munday 1580, 95). If Munday insists on the compelling force of ‘moving and speaking pictures’ here, he also reminds his readers that it exerts its power only if one willingly assents to it.

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gestures of worship like kneeling or joining hands (Hamling 2010, 44). Ainsworth condemns any forme, shape or resemblance, of things in the heavens earth and waters; […] any similitude, shew, or likeness, any frame, figure, edifice, or structure, of man or best, fowl or fish or any creeping thing, any image, type or shadowed representation; any imagined picture, fabrick, or shape. (Ainsworth 1611 cit. Klarer 2001, 38)

Many early modern synonyms for picturing  – painting, shadowing, cunning, counterfeiting, tricking  – reflect a wariness of images and carry the connotation of deceit. Painting, moreover, was unfavourably associated with female face-painting, that is, eroticism and the concealment of the allegedly God-given ‘natural character’ (Tassi 2005, 46–48). Tassi (2005, 18) argues, however, that the Protestant critics of the stage are not representative of common attitudes to images or theatre, which encompassed a wider spectrum. Officially, all pictures with devotional functions were to be removed from churches after the Elizabethan Settlement in 1559, and a 1561 royal order required the display of the (written) ten commandments in all churches. The representation of religious subjects on commercial stages was prohibited (Porter 2013, 24). But practically, these injunctions were implemented flexibly and applied to public places of worship only, as Hamling (2010, 44) shows: theologians carefully differentiated images with regard to their “use, location, media and subject matter”54. Common practices associated with images, one can argue, correspond to some extent to the didactic framing of visuality favoured by Sidney and Jonson, and as in the debates on theatre, anxieties about visual media are strongly class-inflected.55 54 Cf. Thorne (2000, 81). Representations of God and the trinity were unacceptable while Biblical scenes, especially if embedded in instructive and familiar narrative contexts that ensured specific ‘reading’ of images (that is, in friezes or sequential images) were left intact. ‘Graven images’ or sculptures were treated with more suspicion than plain pictorial representations that avoided the use of precious materials. Paintings, hangings, carvings and woodcuts from broadsides were commonly found in domestic spaces where they were permitted and even encouraged as aids in the religious instruction for the illiterate household members. Domestic places of worship, though, were to be kept pictureless (Hamling 2010, 48–51). 55 Thorne (2000, 87) observes that apart from concrete religious scripts for the proper use of images, decorum (a term variously applied to social conduct, moral appropriateness and a measured rhetorical style) was also invoked as an acquired judgmental capacity that enabled people to use images (visual, literary and mental) appropriately. Drawing has traditionally been viewed as closer to conceptual and abstract thought (an example is the comparison of a tragedy’s plot with a drawing and its performance with the merely ornamental colours in Aristotle’s Poetics). Yet this argument is reinforced by an axiological opposition of art vs. craftsmanship, and by



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Far from submitting to the visual austerity politics of radical Protestant iconoclasts, official authorities and affluent Elizabethans continued to commission, own and display pictures between 1560 and the 1620s (Hamling 2010, 62, 85, 199). Miniature portraits were appreciated for their rendering of costly fabrics and jewels, and were encased in precious lockets to be treated as keepsakes and ornaments (Thorne 2000, 41). The small painting featuring in John Lyly’s play Campaspe (1584) evokes these contemporary, private and erotically charged pictorial practices associated with miniatures (Tassi 2010, 66). Pictorial culture and picture-related practices in England thus differed from the viewing conventions and discourses accompanying the often monumental frescoes and large panel paintings in Renaissance Italy, singled out by traditional art history as the dominant and culturally representative pictorial practices (Hamling 2010, 6).56 For the stage, this visual culture meant first and foremost that pictures and sculptures rarely function as representations, that is: as devices for ‘looking through’– even though paintings are frequently-used props on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. As Elam (2010) and Tassi (2010) observe, painters and pictures in plays like Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, the anonymous Arden of Faversham and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, to name only a few, function as material objects that evoke clusters of associations and reflect contemporary debates on pictures. The religious positions on image worship and theatre are frequently targeted by playwrights, who anticipate and engage with their outspoken critics: radical Protestants turn into stock characters as spoilsports and hypocrites (like Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night), and in Middleton’s comedy The Puritan Widow, Protestant image politics figure as a point of departure for satire.

class distinctions: drawing in particular is singled out as a gentlemanly pursuit, acceptable and even advocated in Castiglione’s The Courtier and in the Italian treatises of art as a branch of science which became available in translation, as Bermingham (2000), Acheson (2013) and Thorne (2000) have shown. Richard Haydocke’s 1598 translation of Gian Paolo Lomazzo’s Trattato dell‘arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura (1584) and Henry Peacham’s Art of Drawing with a Pen, 1606, are other landmarks in this development. Class differences are also palpable in the targets for antitheatrical arguments. When Barish (1981, 82–83, 91) traces Augustine’s antitheatrical arguments into the Reformation, he observes that academic drama and drama for educational purposes, as well as court performances, were at first excluded from criticism – indicating that concerns for social stability and lower class morality override concerns with the effects of theatre as a spectacle. 56 Alberti’s doctrine of the publicly displayed and viewed panel painting as a faithful ‘window’ on reality, scientifically precise because of its perspectival construction, did not find much resonance in English art and art theory (cf. Thorne 2000, 33, 35, 51–52).

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4 Exemplary Readings 4.1 A Picture on Stage: Thomas Middleton’s The Puritan Widow (1606–1607) In The Puritan Widow, produced in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot and the introduction of the Oath of Allegiance, Middleton advocates a moderate Protestant position by taking iconophilia and iconophobia to their extremes and showing the point where they meet.57 As Kearney (2009, 21) observes, the normatively charged opposition between words and images in Protestantism encompasses oppositions such as words and things, writing and image, text and idol. The play pokes fun at the belief in the literal sense of scripture and Catholic practices of worship. Both, the play argues, amount to blind idolatry and superstition. The play’s radical Protestants perform acts of image worship usually attributed to Catholics: the protagonist, Widow Plus, mourns her dead husband excessively, but it is clear that she largely deplores the loss of an affluent sexual partner (Middleton 2007, 1.1, 4, 5, p. 514; cf. 87–90, p. 514). Like one of her daughters she vows never to marry (again). Stage directions require her to kneel with her two daughters, “drawing out her husband’s picture” (1.1, stage dir. after 110, p.  515). The gesture indicated here clearly refers to a miniature painting that could be seen as a small object on stage or imagined by readers: Dear copy of my husband, O let me kiss thee. How like him is this model. This brief picture Quickens my tears (1.1, 111–113, p. 515).

Kneeling and rising, essential parts of Catholic mass, are referred to in the character speeches and stage directions of this scene, and are presented as a prolongation of mourning that blocks (re)marriage to the three womens’ suitors. Kissing the image can likewise be read equivocally as part of worship (for instance kissing

57 The play was entered in the Stationer’s Register in 1607. The quarto’s title page gives the title as “THE PVRITAINE Or THE WIDDOW of Watling-streete”; THE PVRITAINE WIDDOW is the running title (Hamilton 2007a, 540). The Gunpowder Plot of November 1605 was aborted before Catholic conspirators could blow up parliament along with James I. and the Oath of Allegiance was introduced in June 1606 for Catholics to enforce their loyalty to the king. According to Hamilton (2007b, 509), the events produced an “increased sense of the need for solidarity among Protestants” and radical positions were (temporarily) silenced. The comedy’s action pivots on the protagonist’s and her daughters’ vows to remain celibate, and the other characters – among them the widow’s second daughter – eventually trick and persuade them to give up their refusal.



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statues of saints) and as an erotically charged act of commemoration (Tassi 2005, 25). The visual expressions of worship like kneeling or joining hands in prayer (Hamling 2010, 44) are highlighted here. The minor character Corporal Oath likewise satirises the worship of sacred objects: his name58 puns on the Oath of Allegiance and other oaths pertaining to religious matters that were sworn on a material (‘corporal’) sacred object such as the Bible, sometimes thought to have healing powers as well (Kearney 2009, 15). In the play, the character is reduced, at one point, to a feigned dead body – he is given a sleeping potion, other characters ‘resurrect’ him, and in an act of fighting fire with fire, or superstition with superstition, this fake miracle persuades Widow Plus to abandon her celibacy. While the widow confuses devotion with the worship of images and hankers after carnal and financial pleasures, other Puritan characters are blinded to immorality by their worship of the literal sense of words: the servant Nicholas is easily assured that the theft of a gold chain is not prohibited by the eighth commandment when the word ‘to steal’ is replaced with the synonym ‘to nim’ (Middleton 2007, 1.4, 155, p.  520), and he willingly performs as an ‘intermeddler’ after he vehemently refused to be an ‘actor’ or ‘player’ (1.4, 177–186, p. 521). When the characters of the subplot hunt the stolen gold chain, the object of their blatant greed is also a materialised version (materialised also as a stage prop) of the radical Protestant William Perkins’ well-known 1591 book of religious instruction The Gold Chain (Hamilton 2007b, 511). The conventional strategy of satire to literalise the meaning of words and character names conflates words and their material referents, and Middleton’s play uses this strategy to point to the consequences of a radical reduction of the metaphoric potential and the complexity of meaning in language. The play spells out the consequences of the radical Protestant rejection of all “inner idols or images created in the mind” (Tassi 2005, 52), including the imaginary pictures Ainsworth had condemned. Lack of imagination, the comedy shows, equals incapacity to envisage the moral consequences of one’s actions. As in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1601–1602), where disguises and crossdressing bring together the lovers despite the frowning presence of a Puritan character, Middleton’s play assigns a key plot function to staging. The feigned miracle bringing about the happy end may stretch Sidney’s (2004, 20) argument that “a feigned example hath as much force to teach as a true example” rather far and is, of course, both an argument pro domo and a generic requirement of

58 Other characters also bear telling names: the widow’s servants are named after parishes associated with radical Protestantism – Simon St. Mary Overies, Nicholas St. Antlings.

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comedy. It also indicates, however, that the play endorses a humanist position and considers spoken and written words and images as parts of rhetoric. As such, their responsible practice is ultimately a matter of decorum and judgment (Thorne 2000, 87), not a question of inherent qualities of a medium. If the Christian defence of images, as Kearney (2009, 10) argues, is restricted to pictures and images “as substitutes for, and supplements to books […] as ‘texts’ that needed to be read”, the same holds for words in Middleton’s comedy: the literal meaning and the material objecthood of scripture also require ‘reading’ in the sense of interpretation. And interpretation, in turn, presupposes a polyvalence of meaning that is ascribed, traditionally, to pictures and images but also belongs to words.

4.2 What is a Crocodile? Description in William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1606–1623) According to Webb (1999, 13), ‘ekphrasis’ is a term that not only refers to the verbal representation of a visual representation, as modern accounts hold. It can – and did, in classical sources – refer to “an action, a person, a place, a battle, even a crocodile”. This definition could have been written with Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra in mind: the play contains descriptions of all these items, even of a crocodile – and somewhat surprisingly, the description of this reptile is highly significant. The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra (first staged between 1606 and 1608) has been chiefly discussed in terms of a contrast between rational, masculine Rome and abundant, erotic, feminine, exotic Egypt. This opposition is borne out on the level of language in a discrepancy between the plain, sober register of the Roman characters and the poetic abundance of Egypt’s, and continues the dispute in rhetoric on the respective merits of plain and adorned style. Rhetorical excess in the play manifests itself in numerous references to visual art, messenger reports, descriptions, hypotyposes and ekphrases whose purpose is, on a very basic level, to provide orientation in a tangle of action and several subplots involving over thirty characters, stretching over ten years and shifting between Alexandria, Rome, Palestine and the sea off Actium. The main purpose of visualisations and descriptions is to probe the reality-constituting and at the same time reality-distorting power of images and imaginations (cf. Adelman 1994, 57, 61).59

59 Klarer (2001, 138) still registered a scarcity of studies dealing with the relation of word and image in Shakespeare; this situation has changed: for a survey of recent criticism on Shakespeare and the visual arts cf. Porter (2011). Gent (1981) and Barkan (1995) are among the influ-



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The play’s conflict cannot be reduced to the title characters’ struggle to juggle love and opposing political loyalties and responsibilities. As Kahn (1997, 111, 115–116, 135) has shown, the play’s key configuration is a character triad (Antony, Cleopatra and Octavius Caesar) exploring, along the lines of homosocial rivalry, the internal contradictions in Roman concepts of virtue. In this conflict constellation, the importance and the precariousness of public personae – and the degree of “command over other people’s imaginations” through “style, effective self-dramatization” (Goldmann 1985, 113) – turns into the drama’s chief concern. Cleopatra’s histrionic talent and capriciousness has an equivalent in Antony, who always comes into view as “someone else’s version of Antony, never himself” (Marshall 1993, 387; cf. Kiernan 1996, 166, 173). The play’s action covers the dissolution of the second triumvirate of Mark Antony, Octavius Caesar (the later emperor Augustus) and Sextus Lepidus, ending with Antony’s and Cleopatra’s suicides in the aftermath of the battle of Actium in 31 BC. It was most likely staged in one uninterrupted sequence and in print (in the 1623 folio edition), it is one of the longest of Shakespeare’s plays – making cuts in the performed versions likely (Wilders 1995, 5).60 For readers, the play’s descriptive passages add up to a sequence of ekphrases in the wider sense of ‘vivid description’, as suggested by Yacobi (1998) and Webb (1999).61 Descriptions in Antony and Cleopatra generally reveal as much about the individual characters’ own motives, preoccupations, intentions and prejudices as about the objects (including other characters) they refer to. Descriptions establish relations and point to relationality and perspectivity, not to essential qualities. The play thus not only exemplifies rhetorical visualisation but also points to its paradoxical limits, and my discussion explores those aspects of the play that qualify it as a discourse about verbally evoked visuality. The relationality of looking is emphasised in the first scene, where Antony is introduced by a soldier commenting on his general’s gaze: since it has settled

ential earlier studies on this topic, and Thorne (2000), Meek (2009), Knapp (2011) and Acheson (2013) have elaborated the issue in the early twenty-first century. 60 The division into acts and scenes is first introduced in Nicholas Rowe’s edition of 1709. I have maintained the modernised division to facilitate orientation. The stage directions referring to locales were also added in the eighteenth century. Erne (2013, 113) speculates that the play was not staged in full length and assumes that even printed plays of roughly 2800 lines were commonly abridged for the stage. Bevington’s (2005) reading, though, approaches the play on the premise that the complete text was staged and explores the interplay of textual descriptions and stage practice. 61 Ekphrasis is also one of the chief concerns of critical studies on Shakespeare and the visual arts (Porter 2011, 544; Klarer 2001, 139).

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on Cleopatra’s face (‘tawny front’), it has lost its martial spirit, and has become unsteady and wavering: Nay, but this dotage of our general’s O’erflows the measure. Those his goodly eyes, That o’er the files and musters of the war Have glowed like plated Mars, now bend, now turn The office and devotion of their view Upon a tawny front. (1.1, 1–6, Shakespeare 1995, 90–91)

The soldier then asks the other characters and the audience to scrutinise Antony for visible signs of a change for the worse, encouraging an active mode of seeing.62 Activity and dynamism also characterise the most famous (but also rather conventional) ekphrasis in the play, delivered by Antony’s companion Enobarbus and retelling the lovers’ first meeting at Cydnus. As Adelman (1994, 67) observes, it “functions as a substitute for a soliloquy” in which Antony could explain the reasons for his political marriage to Caesar’s sister Octavia (which has taken place immediately before) and his return to Cleopatra (which will happen afterwards). The long description closely follows Plutarch63, Shakespeare’s historical source, but renders it more dynamic (Kiernan 1996, 154–156). It thus demonstrates the traditional function of hypotyposis and ekphrasis as devices that render a set of observations vivid in the sense of animated. Enobarbus describes Cleopatra’s nightly approach in a richly decorated boat, with costumed servants and accompanied by music: The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne, Burned on the water; the poop was beaten gold; Purple the sails, and so perfumed that The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver, Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made The water which they beat to follow faster, As amourous of their strokes. (2.2, 201–206, p. 139)

62 “Look where they come! / Take but good note and see in him / The triple pillar of the world transformed / Into a strumpet’s fool. Behold and see!” (1.1, 10–13, p. 91). 63 Wilders gives the corresponding passage from Plutarch in Thomas North’s contemporary translation, relating how Cleopatra “disdained to set forth otherwise, but to take her barge in the river of Cydnus, the poope whereof was gold, the sailes of purple, and the owers of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sounde of the musicke of flutes, howboyes, citherns, violls, and such instruments as they played upon in the barge” (cit. Wilders 1995, 139).



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Hypotyposis here consists in an anthropomorphic transformation of nature and objects, and colour adjectives, references to lighting and details of the qualities of materials heighten the sensuality of the passage. Items that were simply enumerated in Plutarch’s description are tied to verbs of action in Shakespeare, and even the description of Cleopatra is cast in terms of activity like the Shakespearean neologism ‘to overpicture’: It beggared all description: she did lie In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue, O’erpicturing that Venus where we see The fancy outwork nature. (2.2, 208–211, p. 140)

The corresponding visible phenomenon early modern theatre goers or readers were familiar with would have been a moving, richly decorated pageant, which also featured allegorical and mythological figures like the Cupids and Nereids mentioned in Enobarbus’s speech. In terms of its literary and rhetorical dimensions of reference, it draws on the conventions of epideictic rhetoric with its hyperbolic praise, and on the Elizabethan topos of ineffable beauty, well-established (and rather outworn) since the sonnet craze of the 1590s. Later in the second act, a short description epitomises Cleopatra’s conflicted feelings for her lover: she has just received news of Antony’s political marriage to Octavia in Rome and fears to have displeased her former lover Caesar. Debating with herself (and her attendants) whether to “Let him forever go!” (2.5, 115, p. 153), she decides to “Let him not, Charmian. / Though he be painted one way like a Gorgon, / The other way’s a Mars” (2.5, 116–117, pp. 153–154). These lines feature some of the play’s many paradoxes and oxymorons that Adelman (1994, 63, 64, 66) has identified as a characteristic feature of Antony and Cleopatra.64 Here, the combination of mutually excluding opposites is visualised on a rhetorical and a referential level: as a hypotyposis, the comparison and metaphorical identification of Antony with the masculine war god Mars continues an ongoing chain of associations in the play – he is frequently aligned with Mars and Hercules. Cleopatra combines this image with that of the feminine Medusa and her petrifying gaze, heightening its surprising effect through contrast. The imaginary picture has a referential dimension as well (Fig. 1): a so-called ‘turning picture’, a popular seventeenth-century pictorial form consisting of two pictures painted on a furrowed surface. Turning pictures display two different images depending on the angle of looking; seen from a frontal angle, they look

64 Cf. Kahn (1997) for a discussion of numerous instances of destabilised gender attributions.

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Fig. 1: Turning or perspective picture: Anamorphosis, called Mary, Queen of Scots65. Reigned 1542–1587. Artist unknown. The National Galleries of Scotland. 65

confusing.66 A turning picture is a combination of different images that form one and the same material picture yet cannot be perceived as one, just like the paradoxical effect on the level of figurative language. Shakespeare’s ekphrasis is another example for the traditional function of rendering a static image dynamic and bringing out the enargeia of objects or tableaus. Cleopatra’s brief comparison, however, transposes the dynamism to the spectator position; like early

65 The undated portrait by an unknown artist shows Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–1587) from one side and a skull if viewed from the other side. It is displayed on the website of the Scottish National Gallery (https://art.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/3239/anamorphosis-calledmary-queen-scots-1542-1587-reigned-1542-1567). 66 According to Wilders, perspective or ‘turning pictures’ were popular in Shakespeare’s time though they are documented for the first time in the late seventeenth century (cf. textual note in Shakespeare 1995, 153–154). In Shakespeare, there are several references to perspective pictures, for instance in Henry V and Richard II (Klarer 2001, 146). The terminology is unclear; the more precise term ‘turning picture’ is less common than the highly imprecise ‘perspective picture’, used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and beyond for pictures constructed according to linear perspective. Sometimes turning pictures are also called ‘anamorphic’ (Klarer 2001, 146), a specification that should be reserved for pictures with flat surfaces including parts painted in distorted perspective as in Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533).



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modern theatre, a turning picture requires a mobile spectator facing a multi-aspective object (Davis 2011, 7).67 The turning picture epitomises the interaction of multiple and shifting points of view on the level of action and character configuration: Caesar’s first appearance in act 1, scene 4 introduces him disapproving of a report from Alexandria on Antony’s alleged debauchery and disinterest in current political developments, and discussing it with Lepidus. The report refers to events in act 1, scene 2, and as Kiernan (1996, 163) shows, it is already dated (Antony has decided to go to Parthia in the meantime), giving Caesar a distorted impression of his eventual rival that he seizes upon. Antony’s eventual loss of authority over his followers is similarly a matter of mismanaged public perception. Description and the inevitable gaps between an object and its verbalisation, and between the time of event and the time of reporting, have a crucial function in the plot. The Mars/Gorgo-comparison is a micro-element in the play as a whole, easily overlooked. But the issue of description is salient as well in its larger context, a scene showing how Cleopatra instructs a messenger to travel to Rome and return with a description of her rival Octavia. The scene raises the expectation of a report, but before the description is delivered, the crocodile Webb mentions as a possible subject for ekphrasis makes its appearance – or rather, non-appearance. While the other descriptions so far have evoked the presence of absent or past events, persons or objects, and have displayed the figurative power of poetic language to the point of excess – see Enobarbus’ ekphrasis –, the sardonic exercise in rhetorical skill in 2.7 only dangles the promise of an interesting, detailed, palpable description before characters and audience. In the course of an all-male drinking bout, the triumvirs (and eventual enemies) Antony and Lepidus and their men fraternise on board a ship. Lepidus asks what kind of thing a crocodile is (2.7, 41, p. 165) and receives the following answer: “It [the crocodile] is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it has breadth. It is just as high as it is, and moves with its own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates” (2.7, 42–46, p. 165). The response to Lepidus’ inquiry about a crocodile’s colour is: “Of it[s] own colour too.” Antony merely affirms Lepidus’ observation that “‘Tis a strange serpent”, and elaborates: “‘Tis so, and the tears of it are wet” (2.7, 42–51, p. 165). This exchange delineates the intensifying rivalry between Antony and Lepidus and picks up on some of the play’s key metaphors.68 Antony’s answer

67 Cf. Wilders (1995, 154) and Kiernan (1996, 157) for a reading of the ekphrasis and the character of Cleopatra as a figuration of theatricality. 68 For example on the association between the ‘serpent’ Cleopatra (“my serpent of old Nile,”

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provokingly exposes Lepidus’ ignorance of Egypt and adds nothing to his rudimentary knowledge (except the reference to the transmigration of souls, a piece of arcane knowledge about Egyptian religion that once more affirms his superior expertise).69 But Antony skilfully avoids giving any information that would enable Lepidus (or the audience) to imagine the animal in question: his pseudo-description strings together tautologies. As such, it calls up a sophism or dilemma from classical logic, the krokodeilites. First mentioned in English as a crocodilite in 1551,70 it is an example for a logical paradox emerging from the semantic polyvalence of the concepts in a statement. While Antony’s pseudo-description is not a paradox in the narrower sense, its tautological structure draws attention to the self-referential aspects of language, and these self-referential aspects are also features of logical paradoxes (Schröder 1976, 82–83). Antony’s tautology raises the expectation of a vivid description but delivers the opposite; it effectively disables the capacity of language to construct and continue chains of signification, and to establish reference by evoking visual images.71

1.5, 26, p. 121) and the annual inundations of the river Nile, introduced in the Antony/Lepidus dialogue immediately prior to the crocodile (2.7, 17–27, p. 163–164). Snakes were believed to reproduce by spontaneous generation in alchemist lore and were associated with the fertile mud of the Nile. The biblical allusion to the serpent as seductress is also prominent here. 69 For educated Elizabethans, the scene would also have called up the alchemist idea of spontaneous generation which is alluded to several times in the play. Abraham (1982) elaborates a rare (according to the OED) association of ‘crocodile’ and ‘cockatrice’. This relation is mentioned only in the etymological but not in the descriptive part of Edward Topsell’s The Historie of Serpents (1608, 128). This study gives a detailed description and a woodblock print of a crocodile, and cites many classical sources on crocodiles (Herodot, Aristotle, Pliny). A cockatrice resembles a basilisk, a mythological creature emerging by spontaneous generation from mud or soil (Abraham 1982, 101). A similar capacity for spontaneous generation is attributed to quicksilver in alchemical tracts (which connects it to serpents, Abraham 1982, 102). 70 The OED gives the first occurrence of ‘crocodilite’ in T. Wilson’s Rule of Reason (1551). This classical dilemma is reported in Thomas Stanley’s History of Philosophy (1656) as follows: “A woman sitting by the side of Nilus, a Crocodile snatched away her child, promising to restore him, if she would answer truly to what he asked; which was, Whether he meant to restore him or not. She answered, Not to restore him, and challeng’d his promise, as having said the truth. He replyed, that if he should let her have him, she had not told true” (cit. OED, “crocodilite”). The dilemma cannot be resolved: if the mother has correctly guessed the crocodile’s intention, the crocodile cannot keep its promise because it will retrospectively contradict its own criterion for truth. Nor could the crocodile have kept its promise if she had lied because it had insisted on a true answer. The crocodile tears mentioned in Shakespeare are a common saying in the sixteenth century, appearing, for example, in Richard Hakluyt’s 1589 travel accounts (OED, “crocodile tears”). 71 I am indebted to Gustav Frank for drawing my attention to this aspect in a discussion on an earlier version of this paper.



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Description as an empty form becomes relevant again a few scenes later when the messenger Cleopatra had sent to Rome to report on Octavia returns. The parameters of description that Antony had left blank – the crocodile’s size, gait, colour and form – are echoed in Cleopatra’s questions to the messenger. Since she has intimidated him beforehand and given him a rather clear idea of what kinds of answers she will accept, he is extremely cautious and his answers are almost as (literally) nondescript as Antony’s. When Cleopatra asks: “Is she as tall as me?” (3.3, 11, p. 180) the messenger merely denies, and she concludes triumphantly that Octavia must be ‘dwarfish’. When she inquires about Octavia’s gait and reminds the messenger that she is the measure of majesty, his answer conjures up a reptile – “She creeps.” (3.3, 18, p. 180) – and compares her unfavourably to a motionless statue: “She shows a body rather than a life, / A statue than a breather” (3.3, 20–21, p. 180). The interrogation of the messenger emphasises the dependence of description on subjective perspective – calling up the dynamic, perspectival picture switching between Mars and Gorgo from the second act. Seeing and being seen, describing and being described are presented as reciprocally related activities depending, furthermore, on characters’ dispositions and expectations. As the play moves towards the main characters’ suicides after their military defeat, the proleptic role of poetic description that Sidney had noted gains importance  – again introducing a temporal dimension into static description: “Caesar’s triumph seems to happen over and over, twice anticipated by both hero and heroine in four vivid descriptions of some length, and often referred to by others” (Kahn 1997, 127). Kahn refers to Antony’s enraged anticipation of Cleopatra’s inevitable humiliation in Caesar’s triumph (4.12, 32–39, pp. 251–252) and of his own shame (4.14, 73–78, pp. 258–59), and to Cleopatra’s own vision of the coming event as a degrading puppet show (5.2, 51–61 and 213–219, pp. 290–291). These anticipations motivate the lovers’ decisions to commit suicide – but more importantly, they lead them to stage their deaths in a dignified manner for posterity. Antony and Cleopatra attempt to seize control over the later descriptions of their deaths, and set out to defeat Caesar, if not on the battlefield, then on the field of staged triumphs. Antony’s prolonged death is modelled on Plutarch’s account of Cato’s much admired suicide (another text familiar to disciples of Elizabethan grammar schools) and recognisable as a performance (Kahn 1997, 132, cf. 124–125). Cleopatra stages her death in such an impressing manner that Caesar orders a dignified funeral in the play’s closing scene. Antony and Cleopatra pivots on a concern with staging and theatricality on the thematic level, and one can go further and argue that its probing of descriptive excess and descriptive limits raises the question whether spoken or written language, as the tradition of rhetoric has it, necessarily involves signification

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and visualisation – Antony shows that one can talk about a crocodile at length without giving a clear idea or mental picture of the animal at all.

4.3 Visualising Theatrical Experience: Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s The Roaring Girl (1611–1612) A more literal concern with theatricality can be found in Middleton and Dekker’s comedy The Roaring Girle or, Moll Cutpurse (staged in 1611 at the Fortune Theatre, printed in 1612). This playbook text explicitly attempts to constitute a readership and at the same time capitalises on theatrical experience.72 The insistence on the topicality of performance ties in with the comedy’s playful exploration and exploitation of a convergence between factual reality and fiction. This is partly a generic feature of city comedy, a popular type of comedy set in contemporary London and featuring locations and social spheres that were familiar to audiences. Yet no other city comedy models its leading character, Moll Cutpurse, on a contemporary Londoner. Mary Frith, the woman behind Moll, used to appear in taverns and theatres in male apparel and was fined in January 1612 for inappropriate behaviour, including singing a song on the stage of a playhouse. Since the play’s epilogue announces “The Roaring Girl herself” in one of the next performances (Middleton and Dekker 2011, 108), it is likely that she had a guest appearance in Middleton and Dekker’s play.73 72 The title page gives 1611 as the date of publication, due to the early modern convention of beginning the new year in March. A ‘roaring girl’ is the female equivalent to the ‘roaring boys’ of contemporary London, young men prone to pick fights and get drunk (cf. the editor’s commentary in Middleton and Dekker 2011, 7). Mulholland, editor of the Revels edition, considers the text as an edition prepared for print (and not a printed prompt book manuscript) on the grounds of its stage directions: exits are missing, and some directions depart from the technical terminology of stage directions to describe action: “Enter […] Neatfoot […] with a napkin on his shoulder and a trencher in his hand, as if from table” (Mulholland in Middleton and Dekker 1987, 4, cf. 5). All references in the text are to Panek’s 2011 edition of the play, unless otherwise indicated. 73 A record of the consistory court from January 1612 states that “she hath usually in the habit of a man resorted to alehouses, taverns, tobacco shops, and also to playhouses, […] and namely being at a play about three quarters of a year since, at the Fortune, in man’s apparel, and in her boots and with a sword at her side […] And also sat there on the stage in the public view of all the people there present, in man’s apparel, and played upon her lute and sang a song” (Anon. 2011, 147). Although the appearance of women on stage was not technically illegal, women were excluded from playing and female roles were played by men. The additional element of gender confusion – a man playing a woman playing a man – is therefore also present in The Roaring Girl since Moll’s role was played by a male actor. As opposed to disguised comedy heroines like for instance Rosalind in Shakespeare’s As You Like It or Viola in Twelfth Night, whose disguises



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Readers are explicitly addressed in the epistle “To the Comic play-readers”. The preface pivots on metaphors of dress and fashion and evokes a scene of reading in a private room that can be turned into an imaginary theatre; it frivolously suggests that the main character (‘the person’, rumoured to be a prostitute in the play and in real life) may also be admitted: you shall find this published comedy – good to keep you in an afternoon from dice, at home in your chambers. And for venery, you shall find enough for sixpence, but well couched an you mark it. […] The book I make no question but is fit for many of your companies, as well as the person itself, and may be allowed both galley-room at the playhouse and chamber-room at your lodging. (Middleton and Dekker 2011, 5)

The conflation of private rooms and public stage and the issue of ‘reading’ people by their outward appearance is elaborated in 1. 2, when Sir Alexander shows off his newly furnished parlour to his friends. Starting as an instance of word scenery conjuring up an interior space that could not have been brought on stage (1.2, 10–32, p. 12–13), his speech is at the same time a description of the Fortune Theatre, where the play was staged. Sir Alexander brags about the books lining his shelves, and his description turns the books into living, moving faces, evoking balconies filled with spectators watching (and possibly reading) each other: Stories of men and women, mixed together Fair ones with foul, like sunshine in wet weather. Within one square a thousand heads are laid So close that all of heads the room seems made; As many faces there filled with blithe looks, Show like the promising titles of new books Writ merrily, the readers being their own eyes Which seem to move and to give plaudities. (1.2, 17–24, p. 12–13)

The additional warning against pickpockets following upon this description explains why the audience is well advised not simply to watch the play and other spectators but to identify them on the basis of more than a superficial look. The play as a whole, though, warns against rash judgements on the basis of stereotypes: judging and misjudging people by their outward – visual – appearance is a key element in the episodes featuring Moll Cutpurse (the main plot follows the conventional pattern of a pair of young lovers separated by their parents). Spectators are taken on a tour de force of reading and misreading dress codes: characters comment on each other’s clothes and in particular on Moll’s male apparel; her deceive the other characters in the fictional worlds of the plays, Moll is not mistaken for a man. She is presented as a woman in man’s clothing (cf. Rose 2011, 228).

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outward appearance provokes every imaginable attribution from thief and whore to hermaphrodite and monster only to reveal her as the play’s moral centre: she is just, generous and chaste, and she is the agent that brings about the obligatory marriage. For theatre goers, the activity of ‘reading’ in Sir Alexander’s speech therefore refers (as in Jonson) to the critical, close scrutiny of visual phenomena, and spectators would have experienced a metatheatrical doubling of theatrical and imaginative space. For play readers, the speech – and the play as a whole – conflates the literal act of reading with an imaginary performance. The comedy exploits the effects of having a real, contemporary person and well-known London settings at its centre. Mary Frith’s notoriety in 1611 London invited constant comparisons between the theatrical fiction and the city’s inhabitants even if she was not physically present on stage. The precision and richness of allusions to clothing pivots on gendered dress codes74: references to fabrics, colours, textures and items of clothing are given in character speeches, for example when Laxton expects Moll to be wearing “a shag ruff, a frieze jerkin, a short sword, and a safeguard” (3.1, 32–33, p. 42). The ensuing stage direction requires Moll to enter “like a man” (stage dir. after 3.1, 34, p. 42), and this scene is the only instance in which she is really mistaken for a man (meaning that she wears the frieze jerkin, a men’s woollen jacket, but not the safeguard, a protective garment worn by women, in which she appears in other scenes75). These references to fashion draw the audience’s attention to specific items of clothing and facilitate exact visualisation for readers or for spectators with an imperfect view of the stage. Even though the play was apparently rushed to print in 1612 to profit from the publicity of Mary Frith’s court appearance, it was issued with a specially commissioned title page (Fig. 2) – indeed, two separate woodcuts for the title exist but only one was used.76 The title page is among the first non-generic illustrations for

74 Cf. Rose (2011) for a discussion of contemporary cross-dressed women. 75 The ruff is acquired in act 2, scene 1, where Moll is shopping in frieze jerkin and black safeguard (2.1, 190, p. 27); a detailed description of her apparel is given again in act 3, scene 3 (3.3, 23–27, p. 57–58). The sexual jokes male characters make on Moll’s clothing usually ricochet: Moll’s sharp tongue and superior eloquence exposes, for example, the suggestive remarks on what may be missing underneath her breeches (2.2, 86, p. 37) as male bragging that lacks any substantial foundation, and Moll regularly excels them in traditionally male virtues like physical courage, justice and reasonability. The play humorously exposes self-display and judging by appearances. 76 The variant title page is reproduced in Panek’s edition of the play (Middleton and Dekker 2011, 152) and shows a similar picture; Moll has a raised sword in the right hand, though, and her face looks younger, prettier, and less like a caricature. Cf. Astington (2007) and Foakes (1985, 99–100) for a more detailed discussion of the woodcut in its contemporary pictorial context and in the context of playbook title pages.



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Fig. 2: Title page of The Roaring Girl (first quarto edition, 1611)

a playbook and displays key attributes of the leading character: a cross-dressed, sword-bearing, smoking woman in front of a neutral white background, standing on what looks like the boards of a stage receding perspectivally. Pipe-smoking and sword fighting are elements of Moll’s part in the play, and the “details of the male costume she wears are related to the text” (Astington 2007, 232). The motto printed along the left side of the illustration – “My case is alter’d, I must worke for my liuing” – alludes to the legal troubles and social position of Mary Frith and calls up an anecdote concerning the incrimination of Catholics.77

77 Working for a living is what Moll Cutpurse is doing in the play (and intends to continue doing, since she refuses to marry and become dependent on a man in 3.1, 137–140, p. 46, and 5.2, 222–230, p. 106). ‘My case is altered’ refers to a well-known anecdote about the Catholic lawyer Edward Plowden, also giving the title to one of Ben Jonson’s early plays (The Case is Altered, ca. 1597, published in 1609). Plowden is said to have defended a man accused of having attended a Catholic mass; when the alleged priest turned out to be layman in disguise who tried to detect hidden Catholics, he exclaimed: “‘The case is altered: no priest, no mass.’” (cit. Donaldson 2011,

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On the whole, the woodcut emphasises and advertises the stage appearance of Moll Cutpurse/Mary Frith, much in the same way as the play oscillates between literal topicality and fictionality. In act 5, scene 1, this oscillation is made explicit when Moll, accompanied by several young noblemen, exposes two rogues in disguise and conducts part of the dialogue in authentic-sounding criminal slang (‘cant’). This standard comedy scene verges into a play-within-a-play when the noblemen pay the rogues money to hear more cant – including a song that was probably sung, on one occasion, by Mary Frith – and their deceptive act turns into a theatrical performance for paying spectators.78 The scene presents a mirror image of the Fortune Theatre in which a paying audience waits for the appearance of a real-life ‘roaring girl’, Mary Frith, and the audience is positioned in a role corresponding to the slumming gentlemen gaping at the safely commodified spectacle of urban subculture (cf. Knapp 2013, 99–100). Again, the scene caters to both readers and spectators: it offers, on the one hand, a comical and ironic metatheatrical effect for those present at the performance and on the other hand, through direct references to the ‘here and now’ of the stage, a recreation of the actual performance. The reading position and the aim of readerly visualisation, then, is not so much geared towards the imagination of a fictional dramatic world and action than towards the visualisation of a performative media experience – and the readers’ notes and emendations Jowett (2007, 310) has analysed in other Middleton plays seem to attest to the success of launching playbooks as scores for “imaginary theatre”.

5 Playbooks as Imaginary Theatre What can the term ‘literary visuality’ contribute to research in the field of drama and theatre studies? Can it be productively applied to a genre like drama at all? Does it involve a prior decision for theatre or drama criticism? What are its explanatory potentials for a historical period that has a very different understanding

109). The motto alludes to the play’s motif of deceptive appearances. Motto and image refer to the contemporary urban context in which apparel was losing its function of reliably indicating social rank after the repeal of the sumptuary laws in 1603. 78 The two rogues’ names, Trapdoor and Tearcat, refer directly to the stage  – ‘tearing a cat’ stands for a histrionic performance – and Moll puns on their names when she says: “Hold, stand, there should be a trapdoor hereabouts” (5.1, 105, p. 90). Cf. also her reference to a pickpocket at the Fortune Theatre (5.1, 268, p. 94), and to the theft of a purse at a performance in the Swan Theatre (5.1, 287, p. 95).



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and pragmatics of words and images, of literature and text? These questions can be answered at least partially and, more importantly, point to further problems that still require a more detailed and thorough investigation than the scope of this essay permits. The visuality of dramatic texts, I have argued with respect to English plays around 1600, is context-dependent. Reading an early modern dramatic text can take place with a performance in mind when professional or lay actors read and declaim a play; it can take place with an imaginary or imagined performance (Berger 1989, 140) in mind when theatre-goers buy a print version and read it; it can take place in a twenty-first-century classroom, study or theatre with their respective ideas of how to approach a drama; a dramatic text can be heard and seen performed in these different environments and their respective visual context. Each of these settings (and one can surely think of more) comes with a different set of rules for visualisation, and permits different modes of relating text and paratextual elements, textual visibility, visuality and visible phenomena. I have focused, with Stern’s (2009) and Porter’s (2013) studies on the patchwork character of early modern verbal and visual ‘texts’ in mind, on the insufficiency of ‘text’ as a point of reference in early modern drama criticism to argue that we need to be precise in defining what we are talking about when we talk about ‘the dramatic text’  – either the performed, audible text, partly translated into gestures, costume, stage design, or the printed text of a playbook that was at least rudimentarily adapted to conventions of print and reading, or a modernised version bearing the traces of editorial conventions. Awareness of the kind of text one refers to in interpretation may limit and at the same time focus the kinds of questions it can reasonably be expected to answer. This is not to say that some modes of reading or criticism – for instance performance criticism or textual criticism – are superior or more appropriate than others; it simply means that they require different conceptual and methodological parameters, and that their explanatory potential is limited by these parameters. Not every analysis needs to take into account all aspects of literary visuality but may use them as a set of constraints. Berger (1989, 148) suggests, for example, that “decelerated microanalysis […] enlarges and emblematically fixes features not discernible in the normal rhythm of communication” of a spoken, performed play – while the increased speed of performed language heightens different aspects: a play like Shakespeare’s Richard II either appears as a web of interrelated metaphors, allusions and images or as a sequence of expressive, phatic speech acts. Similarly with the prologue to Shakespeare’s Henry V: it is often quoted as an example for word scenery compensating for the nonrealistic stage setting. The prologue speaker asking the audience to ‘piece out’ the ‘imperfections’ of the stage with their imagination, and to conjure

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up armies and battlefields that cannot be brought on stage acquires a different status if it is interpreted in terms of a text for readers. For readers, the reference appears not so much a metatheatrical one, drawing attention to make-believe, but as a ‘script for reading’ that encourages readers to imagine a battlefield – or, one could argue, a theatre. Erne’s (2003) reconstruction of Shakespearean plays in terms of book and publication history points to the discrepancies between readerly and performed dramatic texts from a different angle: it shows how playbooks employ and establish reception conventions that we now perceive as typical for literary fiction, for example by textual structures (first and foremost length and poetic complexity) and by paratextual elements like title pages and borrowing typographies and layout from more renowned genres. What can be said about the literary visuality of playbooks, though, is certainly not limited to the observation that they “legitimate themselves by emphasizing their non-theatrical features and by tying themselves to an authorizing originator” (Erne 2003, 34) and that their texts encourage close and repeated scrutiny on the model of poetry. This is certainly true for many playbooks, and a folio Works edition like Jonson’s in particular can be inserted into the genealogy of what becomes ‘literature’ in the late eighteenth century. It can also be seen as a forerunner of what eventually becomes a reading practice geared towards visualising settings and actions by description. An emphasis on non-theatrical and poetic features, however, is not the only strategy to be found in playbooks. Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour – a play extended for print – and Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl explicitly emphasise the theatrical features of plays: the topicality of performance in Middleton and Dekker is part of the comedy’s plot, and its ‘instructions for reading’ give suggestions for imagining – visualising – a theatrical performance and setting, besides other visible phenomena such as specific items of fashion. Texts like this raise the question in how far dramatic texts  – not only early modern ones  – evoke visualisations that relate to the medial configuration of the theatre without being ‘metatheatrical’ in the narrower sense: they recreate a media experience rather than (or in addition to) commenting on it. The title page illustration of The Roaring Girl also contributes to the recreation of ‘imaginary theatre’: it presents Moll Cutpurse on stage rather than in the urban London setting the play evokes. The title page is consistent with The Roaring Girl’s strategy of capitalising on the evocation of the theatrical event, from its thematic play with the oscillation between real person and dramatic character to the conditions of publication in the immediate aftermath of Mary Frith’s conviction. Other playbooks with the more common nongeneric or reused title pages, or more patchy references to theatrical experience, lend themselves less easily to



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an interpretation that emphasises consistency and the multi-level realisation of a coherent aesthetic strategy: what they offer is a point of departure for studies of early modern printing house practice and the circulation of printed images in early modern England, as Astington (2007, 228–229) has done with reference to an image that appears on several title pages of plays and pamphlets. Here, the embeddedness of dramatic texts in a wider culture of printed matter and the circulation of visual materials comes to the fore. Studying literary visuality, then, is not confined to an attempt at reconstructing the imaginary processes of visualisation a text evokes in a reader’s mind but may lead to investigations into the orders and disorders of visuality and literariness in specific historical contexts. As I have tried to show, the focus on individual, closely analysed texts is one way to approach this topic, but this approach includes treating texts as points of intersection of material culture, discourses on words and visuality, scripts for practices, and institutional contexts.

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Berger, Harry J. Imaginary Audition. Shakespeare on Stage and Page. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Bermingham, Ann. Learning to Draw. Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000. Bessell, Jacquelyn. “The Early Modern Physical Theatre.” Vaughan et al. 2010. 181–201. Bevington, David. “‘Above the element they lived in’: The Visual Language of Antony and Cleopatra, Acts 4 and 5.” ‘Antony and Cleopatra’. New Critical Essays. Ed. Sara Munson Deats. London: Routledge, 2005. 95–110. Brannigan, John. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1998. Campe, Rüdiger. “Vor Augen Stellen. Über den Rahmen rhetorischer Bildgebung.” ­Poststrukturalismus. Herausforderung an die Literaturwissenschaft. Ed. Gerhard Neumann. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1997. 208–225. Carlson, Marvin. “The Status of Stage Directions.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 24.2 (1991): 37–48. Cavallo, Guglielmo, and Roger Chartier (Eds.). A History of Reading in the West. London: Polity, 1999. Cave, Richard. “Visualising Jonson’s Text.” Ben Jonson and Theatre. Performance, Practice and Theory. Ed. Richard Cave, Elizabeth Schafer and Brian Woolland. London: Routledge, 1999a. 33–44. Cave, Richard. “Script and Performance.” Ben Jonson and Theatre. Performance, Practice and Theory. Ed. Richard Cave, Elizabeth Schafer and Brian Woolland. London: Routledge, 1999b. 23–32. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. Brutus. Orator. Transl. H.M. Hubbell. Cambridge/London: Harvard UP/W. Heinemann, 1971. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. De Oratore / Über den Redner. Transl. Harald Merklin. Stuttgart: P. Reclam, 1976. Cohen, Ralph Alan. “The Most Convenient Place: The Second Blackfriars Theater.” Dutton 2009. 209–224. Collinson, Patrick. The Birthpangs of Protestant England. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988. “Crocodile tears.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2015. Web. 15 July 2015. “Crocodilite.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2015. Web. 15 July 2015. Coursen, Herbert R. Shakespearean Performance as Interpretation. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992. Davidson, Clifford. Illustrations of the Stage and Acting in England to 1580. Kalamazoo: Western Michigan UP, 1991. Davis, Whitney. A General Theory of Visual Culture. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011. Dessen, Alan C. A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Dessen, Alan C. “‘The Difference Betwixt Reporting and Representing’: Thomas Heywood and the Playgoer’s Imagination.” Acts of Criticism: Performance Matters in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Essays in Honor of James P. Lusardi. Ed. Paul Nelsen and June Schlueter. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2006. 46–57. Dolan, Frances E. True Relations. Reading, Literature and Evidence in Seventeenth-Century England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Donaldson, Ian. Ben Jonson. A Life. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. Dutton, Richard (Ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009.



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Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe. New York: Cambridge UP, 1979. Eisenstein, Elizabeth. Divine Art, Infernal Machine. The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Elam, Keir. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. London: Methuen, 1980. Elam, Keir. “‘Most truly limned and living in your face’: Looking at pictures in Shakespeare.” Vaughan et al. 2010. 63–89. Erne, Lukas. Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Erne, Lukas. Shakespeare and the Book Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. Esslin, Martin. The Field of Drama. How the Signs of Drama Create Meaning on Stage and Screen. London: Methuen, 1987. Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in this Class? Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980. Foakes, R. A. Illustrations of the English Stage, 1580–1642. London: Scolar, 1985. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge [Fr. 1969]. Transl. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972. Gent, Lucy. Picture and Poetry 1560–1620. Relations between Literature and the Visual Arts in the English Renaissance. Leamington Spa: Hall, 1981. Glaubitz, Nicola. “Staging Groups and Positioning Audiences in Early Modern City Comedies.” Zeitsprünge 18.3–4 (2014): 397–416. Goldman, Michael. Acting and Action in Shakespeare’s Tragedy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985. Gurr, Andrew. Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London [1987]. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 32005. Gurr, Andrew. “Why the Globe is Famous.” Dutton 2009. 186–208. Hagstrum, Jean H. The Sister Arts. The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. Hall, Bert S. “The Didactic and the Elegant. Some Thoughts on Scientific and Technological Illustrations in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.” Picturing Knowledge. Historical and Philosophical Problems Concerning the Use of Art in Science. Ed. Brian S. Baigrie. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. 3–39. Halsall, Albert W. “Beschreibung.” Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik. Vol. 2. Ed. Gerd Ueding. Darmstadt: WBG, 1992. 1495–1510. Hamilton, Donna. “The Puritan Widow or The Puritan or The Widow of Watling Street. Textual Notes.” Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture. A Companion to the Collected Works. Ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007a. 540–547. Hamilton, Donna. “The Puritan Widow or The Puritan or The Widow of Watling Street. Introduction.” Thomas Middleton. The Collected Works. Ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007b. 509–513. Hamling, Tara. Decorating the ‘Godly’ Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation England. New Haven: Yale UP, 2010. Harington, John. “A Brief Apology of Poetry [1591].” Alexander 2004. 260–272. Heffernan, James A. W. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1993. Heywood, Thomas. An Apology for Actors [1612]. New York: Garland, 1973. Hubbell, H. M. “Introduction.” Cicero in 28 Volumes. Vol. 5: Brutus. Orator. London/Cambridge: W. Heinemann/Harvard UP, 1939. 297–302. Issacharoff, Michael. Discourse as Performance. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989.

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Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book. Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Johnson, Nora. The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Jonson, Ben. Three Comedies. Ed. Michael Jamieson. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. Jonson, Ben. Every Man Out of His Humour. Ed. Helen Ostovich. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2001. Jowett, John. Shakespeare and Text. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Kahn, Coppélia. Roman Shakespeare. Warriors, Wounds and Women. London: Routledge, 1997. Kastan, David Scott. “Performances and Playbooks: The Closing of the Theatres and the Politics of Drama.” Sharpe and Zwicker 2003. 167–184. Kearney, James. The Incarnate Text. Imagining the Book in Reformation England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Kemmann, Ansgar. “Evidentia, Evidenz.” Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik. Vol. 2. Ed. Gerd Ueding. Darmstadt: WBG, 1996. 33–47. Kiernan, Pauline. Shakespeare’s Theory of Drama. Cambridge: CUP, 1996. Klarer, Mario. Ekphrasis. Bildbeschreibung als Repräsentationstheorie bei Spenser, Sidney, Lyly und Shakespeare. Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 2001. Knapp, James A. Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Knapp, Jeffrey. “Mass Entertainment Before Mass Entertainment.” New Literary History 44.1 (2013): 93–115. Krieger, Murray. Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992. Latour, Bruno. “Visualization and Cognition. Drawing Things Together.” Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present. A Research Annual. Vol. 6. Ed. H. Kuklick and Elizabeth Long. Amsterdam: JAI, 1986. 1–40. Law, John. Organizing Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Lubin, Robert I. “‘Apparel oft proclaims the man’: Visualizing Hamlet on the Early Modern Stage.” Shakespeare Bulletin 32.4 (2014): 629–647. Marotti, Arthur F., and Michael D. Bristol. “Introduction.” Print, Manuscript & Performance. The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England. Ed. Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2000. 1–29. Marshall, Cynthia. “‘Man of Steel Done Got the Blues’: Melancholic Subversion of Presence in Antony and Cleopatra.” Shakespeare Quarterly 44.4 (1993): 385–408. Massai, Sonia. “Shakespeare’s Early Readers.” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare. Ed. Arthur F. Kinney. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. 143–164. McJannet, Linda. The Voice of Elizabethan Stage Directions: The Evolution of a Theatrical Code. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999. Meek, Richard. Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Middleton, Thomas, and Thomas Dekker. The Roaring Girl [1611]. Ed. Paul A. Mulholland. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1987. Middleton, Thomas. “The Puritan Widow.” Thomas Middleton. The Collected Works. Ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. 509–544. Middleton, Thomas, and Thomas Dekker. The Roaring Girl [1611]. Ed. Jennifer Panek. New York: Norton, 2011. Mödersheim, Susanne. “Emblem, Emblematik.” Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik. Vol. 2. Ed. Gerd Ueding. Darmstadt: WBG, 1994. 1098–1108.



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Mullaney, Steven. The Place of the Stage. License, Play and Power in Renaissance England. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988. Munday, Anthony. A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters. London: H. Denham, 1580. Orgel, Stephen. The Authentic Shakespeare and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage. London: Routledge, 2002. Orgel, Stephen. Spectacular Performances. Essays on Theatre, Imagery, Books and Selves in Early Modern England. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2011. Ostovich, Helen. “Introduction.” Ben Jonson. Every Man Out of His Humour. Ed. Helen Ostovich. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2001. 1–69. Pfister, Manfred. The Theory and Analysis of Drama [Gm. 1977]. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Plato. The Republic. Ed. G.R.F. Ferrari. Transl. Tom Griffith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Porter, Chloe. “Shakespeare and Early Modern Visual Culture.” Literature Compass 8.8 (2011): 543–553. Porter, Chloe. Making and Unmaking in Early Modern English Drama. Spectators, Aesthetics and Incompletion. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2013. Puttenham, George. “The Art of English Poesie [1589].” Alexander 2004. 55–204. Quintilianus, Marcus Fabius. The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian. Transl. H.E. Butler. Cambridge/London: Harvard UP/W. Heinemann, 1966–1969. Rippl, Gabriele. Beschreibungs-Kunst. Zur intermedialen Poetik angloamerikanischer Ikontexte. München: W. Fink, 2005. Rose, Mary Beth. “Women in Men’s Clothing: Apparel and Social Stability in The Roaring Girl [1984].” Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker. The Roaring Girl. Ed. Jennifer Panek. New York: Norton, 2011. 228–250. Royce, Jacalyn. “Early Modern Naturalistic Acting: The Role of the Globe in the Development of Personation.” Dutton 2009. 477–495. Schanze, Helmut. “Rhetorik.” Metzler Lexikon Kultur der Gegenwart. Ed. Ralf Schnell. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2000. 448–449. Schoenfeldt, Michael. “Reading Bodies.” Sharpe and Zwicker 2003. 215–243. Schröder, Winfried. “Paradox.” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Vol. 7. Ed. Joachim Ritter. Darmstadt: WBG, 1976. 82–98. Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra. The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series. Ed. John Wilders. London: Methuen, 1995. Shakespeare, William, and Thomas Middleton. Timon of Athens. The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series. Ed. Anthony B. Dawson and Gretchen E. Minton. London: Cengage, 2008. Sharpe, Kevin, and Steven N. Zwicker (Eds.). Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Sharpe, Kevin, and Steven N. Zwicker. “Introduction: Discovering the Renaissance Reader.” Sharpe and Zwicker 2003. 1–37. Sidney, Sir Philip. “A Defense of Poesie [1595].” Alexander 2004. 1–54. Siskin, Clifford. The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830. London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998. Snook, Edith. Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England. Farnham: Ashgate, 2005. Sofer, Andrew. “Properties.” Dutton 2009. 560–574.

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Stern, Tiffany. Documents of Performance in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Styan, John L. Perspectives on Shakespeare in Performance. New York: P. Lang, 2000. Szondi, Peter. Theorie des modernen Dramas. 1880–1950 [1956]. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1974. Tassi, Marguerite A. The Scandal of Images. Iconoclasm, Eroticism, and Painting in Early Modern English Drama. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP, 2005. Taylor, Gary. “The Order of Persons.” Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture. A Companion to the Collected Works. Ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino. Oxford: Clarendon, 2007. 31–79. Thorne, Alison. Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare. Looking through Language. Houndmills: Macmillan, 2000. Topsell, Edward. The Historie of Serpents. Or, The second Booke of liuing Creatures. London: W. Jaggard, 1608. Vaughan, Virginia Mason, Fernando Cioni, and Jacquelyn Bessell (Eds.). Speaking Pictures. The Visual/Verbal Nexus of Dramatic Performance. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2010. Vaughan, Virginia Mason, Fernando Cioni, and Jacquelyn Bessell. “Introduction. Verbalizing the Visual and Visualizing the Verbal.” Vaughan et al. 2010. 11–22. Wall, Cynthia Sundberg. The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Webb, Ruth. “Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern: The Invention of a Genre.” Word & Image 15.1 (1999): 7–18. Wilders, John. “Introduction.” William Shakespeare. Antony and Cleopatra. Ed. John Wilders. London: Methuen, 1995. 1–84. Wright, Peter M. “Jonson’s Revision of the Stage Directions for the 1616 Folio Workes.” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 5 (1984): 257–285. Yacobi, Tamar. “The Ekphrastic Model: Forms and Functions.” Pictures into Words. Theoretical and Descriptive Approaches to Ekphrasis. Ed. Valerie Robillard. Amsterdam: VU UP, 1998. 21–34.

Guido Isekenmeier

Descriptive Visuality and Postmodernist Fiction Abstract: This article starts from a critique of traditional notions of (fictional) description according to which description addresses clearly definable aspects of the fictional world in a textual mode neatly distinguishable from narrative. Both of these critical convictions, it argues, rely on distinctly nineteenth-century literary models. It goes on to outline the contours of a strictly literary as well as a visual cultural history of descriptivity from the rise of the novel to the late twentieth century, the former relying on the changing relations of the narrative and the descriptive, the latter on the dynamic interplay between literary techniques of visualisation and visual culture(s). Against the backdrop of pre-realist descriptive practices, it addresses two quintessentially postmodernist forms of descriptivity: metadescription and abbreviated description. Using examples by B.S. Johnson, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, and Mark Leyner, it examines the visuality of these forms and their connections with developments in postmodern culture, particularly its commodification and the transformations of its visual archive.

1 Introduction: Towards a Descriptology Over the past decade or so, the descriptive has finally begun to receive the critical attention it deserves from both literary studies in general and studies in literary visuality in particular. A distinctly descriptological approach has come to stake its claim in the literary (and by extension text-linguistic) field more assertively, up to the point where the call for a separate discipline (as mind-set rather than speciality) no longer seems excessive.1 Even narratologists have recently been willing to acknowledge their neglect of an important aspect of literary texts, if not their

1 Cf. Klotz’ (2013, 11) question in his ‘general outline of a descriptology’ (the subtitle of the book as well as a sub-chapter within it), “ob nicht nach den Begegnungen mit dem Deskriptiven die Frage nach einer eigenständigen Deskriptologie gestellt werden muss”. Unfortunately, Klotz all but ignores that earlier bout of critical interest centred in France and roughly spanning the 1980s which constitutes the one notable antecedent for the endeavour to consolidate a descriptological line of enquiry (cf. Kittay 1981, Hamon 1981, Hamon 1991, Adam 1993, which – apart from a single article from the first volume – are sorely missing from his bibliography). DOI 10.1515/9783110378030-004

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responsibility for it.2 In narratology’s imperialist vein, the transmedial extension of the realm of description beyond (literary) texts seems a(n ana)logical move, which is a procedure also inviting intermedial considerations of the relations between literary and pictorial descriptivity, albeit in a framework conceptualising literature as largely parasitic on practices of imaging.3 Closer to the spirit of “true visuality” (Davis 2011, 10), some recent studies have tried to explore the dialogic relationship between literature and visual culture beyond pictures, including the visual makeup of the world of goods or the aesthetic underpinnings of tourism.4 By and large, the general thrust of this recent research has been towards what might be called a more ‘modal’ understanding of the descriptive. In much earlier work description was thought of as being doubly ontologically anchored, that is, definable in terms of both the kind of phenomena in the fictional world that are descriptively constituted and the set of linguistic devices in the literary text that constitute description. Now the focus is on the modality of the descriptive, the sensory channels to which its display of the fictional world appeals, as well as on the descriptive as a mode, a functionally distinct, but formally indistinct manner of literary (re-)presentation. Thus, the descriptive may be seen to comprise all textual means of performing visuality (as well as auditivity, etc.), of appealing to the imagination and guiding visualisation (→ II. Readerly Visualisations),

2 Cf. Fludernik (2008, 131): “Ein weiteres von der Forschung stiefmütterlich behandeltes Gebiet ist das der Beschreibung im Roman”. However, ‘description’ is suspiciously missing from her glossary of narratological terms (168–179). It also still seems perfectly possible to write an introduction to the analysis of narrative without so much as mentioning description, except maybe to label the utmost degree of deceleration of story time a ‘descriptive pause’, no matter whether the narrative is actually pausing for descriptive or other purposes (Lahn/Meister 2008, 90: “Dieser Extremfall der Zeitdehnung wird als deskriptive Pause bezeichnet […]. Der Erzähler setzt diese ein, um den Leser mit Informationen anderer Art zu versorgen – etwa um einen Kommentar oder eine Beschreibung einzufügen.”). The classic statement of narratology’s delegation of description to the outer limits of narrative, at the same time beyond and within it, is Genette’s (1969, 61) account of the descriptive as an ‘internal frontier’ of narration: “Si la description marque une frontière du récit, c’est bien une frontière intérieure”. 3 For the transmedial move cf. Wolf/Bernhart (2007), which includes essays on the descriptive in verbal and visual media as well as in music. For a more narrowly intermedial approach tracing the parallel development of perspectivity in literature and the visual arts cf. Petz (2012). 4 Cf. for the former Wall (2006), who studies the transformations of descriptions of interior spaces in the wake of economic developments during the eighteenth century which produced visual displays of goods such as the shop-window, the auction catalogue, and the country-house guide (→ 3.); for the latter (on a much more modest scale) Isekenmeier (2015), who traces the way literature helped naturalise the touristic appreciation of landscape under the aegis of a picturesque aesthetic in the early nineteenth century.



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without there being a way to transhistorically reduce it to either a set of linguistic surface structures or a set of (fictional) referents. In its appeal to visual cultural context to appreciate the descriptive, such a stance implies a shift in focus from theory to history and engages descriptology in a rewriting of much traditional critical lore of description, which will be the subject of the second part of this essay. Starting from the alternative conceptualisation of the descriptive that emerges from that questioning of critical doxa, the third part will outline the contours of a visual cultural history of literary description that focusses on the variable relations of the descriptive and the narrative across literary periods and employs visual cultural facts and circumstances as an explanatory paradigm to account for the shifts in that relation. From there, it will then be possible in the fourth part to come to terms with the fate of the descriptive in postmodernist fiction, which at first sight might seem to characteristically abstain from description in different ways ranging from metafictionally negotiated refusal to shortcutting it to procedures of naming. On the contrary, as I will argue, postmodernist texts will be shown to be highly descriptive, although their visual energy relies heavily on the make-up of postmodern (visual) culture and post-Fordist economy.

2 From a Theory of Description to a History of the Descriptive The problems in defining description are notorious: “it is a particularly elusive phenomenon” (Wolf 2007, 34). Lopes (1995, 7) even blames the critical neglect of description on its very indefiniteness: “The lack of interest that many critics (from Anglo-American New Criticism and Russian formalism to present-day narratology) seem to reveal towards description is probably due to the fact that, unlike narration, description seems to elude any attempts at being defined in a systematic way”. Notwithstanding their alleged indifference, it is precisely narratologists who have come to lament the theoretical defeatism such an attitude implies, particularly given that the diagnosis of the failure to systematise description’s place in prose fiction seems to already include a solution to the problem, namely, to first and foremost conceptualise it as narrative’s other. From the statement that “it would no doubt be unsatisfactory if this elusiveness and the concomitant difficulties in handling description as a concept led to what has been claimed in research, namely that description cannot be defined at all” (Wolf 2007, 34), we thus move to a “tentative definition of description” (Wolf 2007, 34) that relies above all on its similarities to and differences from narrative. This produces the

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following definitional structure that is already problematic before being filled with argumentative content: “The descriptive – like narrative – is … In contrast to narrative, […] the descriptive provides …” (Wolf 2007, 34–35). If nothing else, this structure suggests the possibility of distinguishing in principle between two different textual frames, fully in line with the age-old assumption that their relation is primarily one of opposition, as Genette (1969, 56) had it: “L’opposition entre narration et description, d’ailleurs accentuée par la tradition scolaire, est un des traits majeurs de notre conscience littéraire”. However, any attempt to locate description vis-à-vis narrative within the literary text is bound to run into difficulties. Though they share the basic premise that description can be delimited from its narrative surroundings, two variants of descriptive ontology can be distinguished for heuristic purposes  – one that locates descriptivity on the story level of fictional world-making, an other that locates it on the linguistic surface level of literary texts. Along the first line, description comes to be associated with a class of constituents of what is being told in fictional texts. Call that content of narrative discourse ‘story’ (Chatman 1978), and description deals with ‘existents’ (as narrative does with ‘events’); call it ‘narratival space’ (Malmgren 1985), and the ‘world’ is the realm of description (and the ‘story’ that of narrative). Regardless of the terminological framework, which may further subdivide existents (or the world) into ‘characters’ and ‘setting’ (Chatman 1978) or ‘actants’ and ‘chronotope’ (Malmgren 1985), these terms are considered to delineate the subject matter of the descriptive: “it seems natural to say that Chatman’s ‘existents’ seem to be ‘the proper stuff’ of description” (Wolf 2007, 23). One need not even go so far as to accumulate further semantic oppositions traditionally grounding the distinction between descriptive and narrative matters (spatial vs. temporal, static vs. dynamic, etc.) in order to realise that in the world-making act of literary texts, there can be no neat separation of ‘What happens?’ from ‘What is?’. The constitution of characters, to take a random example, is at least as much shaped by their actions, the events to which they are linked by virtue of their being actants, as it is informed by their outward appearance, the physiognomic features their existence is endowed with: “the (necessarily) insufficient facts about a character […] don’t matter as much as what a character does” (Mendelsund 2014, 114). In addition, the handling of dynamic happenings in the fictional world may just as well be descriptive as it may be narrative, particularly when they involve objects and/or characters in motion, that is, the kind of event that inseparably combines spatial and temporal traits (Isekenmeier 2011). Taken at face value, the binary assignment of constituents of the fictional world to either narrative or description thus proves problematic at best; even more so, this is true of the latent premise of this procedure of allocation: the pre-



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vious separation of story from discourse. The devaluation of description starts by cutting it off from narrative mediation (narratology’s proper domain) in order to entirely locate it within narratival space (the matter subject to discourse). In some recent discussions, narratology seems on the verge of acknowledging the fallaciousness of this move, but manages to back away from the implications of its own argument at the last moment by displacing them to another arena. Wolf (2007, 26), for instance, concedes the impossibility of descriptive immediacy (of unmediated description): “description […] always presupposes a subject, the descriptor, and his or her perspective (although the descriptor […] need not necessarily be part of the descriptive representation)”. And as if the parallelism of this line of thought to that producing the foundational figure of the narrator (as voice) were not enough, he goes on to insist explicitly on the suppressed (sub-pressed) mediacy of descriptive vision: “In practice, a descriptive act could therefore even be said to be tendentially bi-polar: in it, a dominant referential, object-centred pole is opposed to a subdominant subject-centred pole, which determines the perspective of observation but also contains emotional reactions and evaluations” (Wolf 2007, 26). All of which amounts to a recognition of description’s essential role in focalisation, not only in its more narrowly visual meaning (point of view as perspective of observation)5 but also in its wider figural meaning (point of view as evaluative stance). Clearly, the account of a description with a presupposed descriptor who does not figure in it amounts to a definition of zero focalisation (just as a narrative without a narrator figure marks the degree zero of ‘narratorialisation’, that is, a figural or ‘neutral’ narrative situation). However, Wolf never gets to the point of treating description modally, which is to say: in terms of Genette’s category of ‘mode’ (which only English grammar insists on calling ‘mood’), as his discussion is geared towards descriptive objectivity. Based on the questionable assumption that it is “one of the basic functions of description […] to create an impression of objectivity” (Wolf 2007, 27), the whole issue turns out to be the “descriptiveness” resulting from the isolated treatment of (fictional) facts.6 By thus defining description as the textual frame addressing such constituents of the fictional world as can be separated from the narrative, both the dichotomous distinction of the two frames and the location of descriptive matters on the story level are reiterated, albeit in generalised terms (narrative connections vs. descriptive facts).

5 Cf. Bortolussi and Dixon (2003, 186): “There can be no description of anything that does not have implications for spatial vantage point”. 6 Anything can be an “object of a description” “as long as no narrative connections are made and a mere (seeming) fact is in focus” (Wolf 2007, 27–28).

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Against this view, it is necessary to emphasise that description not only entails focalisation, but that focalisation (at least in its sensory and, above all, visual meaning) requires description. The descriptive, then, is a constituent element of – pardon the terminological mess – ‘narrative’ mediation. Along the second line, description is demarcated from narrative in linguistic terms, usually as a corollary of the distinction drawn in the first line. In this vein, narrative is thought of as a concatenation of actions centred on verbs, whereas description is seen to perform an operation of textual expansion on nouns. The nominal core of a description is variously called “pantonyme” (Hamon 1981, 140) or “thème-titre” (Adam 1993, 116) and said to be the ‘nominal pivot’ (Adam 1993, 104) denoting the ‘object of description’ (Hamon 1981, 140), which may be expanded synecdochically with the help of other nouns or qualified with the help of adjectives (alongside more complex metaphoric and metonymic amplifications). In a different take, the distinction may be founded on different classes of verbs such as ‘singulative verbs’ organising narrative’s “representation of character’s movement” (Mosher 1991, 433) and ‘stasis verbs’ indicating description’s “picturing stationary characters or objects and states or conditions” (Mosher 1991, 433) or, even more simply, on action verbs and verbs of perception, respectively. As this approach shares many of the problematic assumptions of the distributive procedure in the first line, some of the objections raised there can be reformulated to apply to the textual surface level. Genette (1969, 57), for instance, already included the hint that even singulative action verbs may be considered descriptive in and for themselves, or anyway could be descriptively expanded, with verbs of motion as a prime example, again. There is also the occasional canonical text subverting the linguistic apparatus, as in the biblical story of creation (Genesis 1), that features not only expletive existentials without descriptive explication7 but also verbs of perception introducing purely evaluative, non-descriptive qualification (“And God saw the light, that it was good”, Genesis 1,4 KJV). Suffice it to say that word classes are just as unreliable indicators of description (and narrative) as are ontological classifications. As was the case in the first line, the finely wrought differentiations of classes and subclasses (now of words rather than entities), tend to distract attention from a larger argument lurking at their back, here: the assumption that the descriptive materialises in passages that can be neatly set off from the narrative surrounding them. The presumed realisation of description in ‘descriptive grids’ (Hamon 1981) or ‘descriptive sequences’ (Adam 1993) tacitly informs most descriptologi-

7 Compare “there was light” (Genesis 1,3 KJV) with Mosher’s (1991, 428) elaborately descriptive Balzac example (“there are houses that …”).



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cal enquiry, yielding a justification for its method of dealing in “numerous brief quotations” and material “scattered, miscellaneous, often fragmentary” (Irwin 1979, viii) as well as for its still prevalent negative valorisation of description as narrative pause, as interruption of the progress proper to ‘narrative fiction’.8 Even when the positioning of description in texts is under consideration, it is dealt with as a continuous textual segment that can be definitely localised within the text.9 Similar to Wolf’s reluctance to ultimately recognise the role of description in focalisation, there is a certain resistance to accepting the irretrievable contamination of the descriptive with the narrative without reservation. Mosher (1991), whose topic are the various ways in which description “disguises” as narration (and vice versa) in the “mixed types” of what he calls “descriptized narration” and “narratized description”, still clings to positing purified examples as extremes of a spectrum of textual options. At the same time, he is constantly forced to acknowledge the impurity of both his examples of proper description and proper narration, noting the “descriptive exception” in the narrative passage and the “narrative exception” in the descriptive text segment, only to revert to the delusion of their “almost exclusively descriptive or narrative” nature. Instead, it seems best to acknowledge the inextricable amalgamation of the two text types, as Genette (1969, 61) had already done (though somewhat half-heartedly by still upholding the ‘internal frontier’ between them): “la description ne se distingue pas assez nettement de la narration […] par l’originalité de ses moyens, pour qu’il soit nécessaire de rompre l’unité narrativo-descriptive”. In more than one way, then, the theory of description not only fails to account for the multiplicity of descriptive practices10, but also falls short of its own implications. The reason for this unsatisfactory state of the art of descriptology is to be sought in the fact that the doubly ontological model on which it rests for the most part is heavily and hopelessly indebted to the rather singular way the descriptive

8 Traces of which are still to be found in recent accounts such as Mosher’s (1991, 443): “The pace and often the tempo are slow to the point of being arrested”. Needless to say, pace and tempo have to be understood in a strictly narrative sense here, as descriptions not only necessarily require a reader to pace through them (however slowly), but also have a (descriptive) tempo of their own. 9 Cf. Fludernik (2008, 131; 132): “Darüber hinaus ist die Stellung der Beschreibung als abgesetzter Passage im Erzähltext ebenfalls eine Untersuchung wert”; “Durchgehende Textabschnitte von Beschreibung können noch auf verschiedene Weise analysiert werden”. 10 Ronen (1997, 278) states that “although description is not a unified practice, it has been a unified concept”.

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was handled in literary realism.11 As nineteenth-century fiction constitutes its essential corpus, descriptological theory has come to elevate some of its practical and contingent choices into the status of theorems, namely, that descriptions primarily address three classes of existents (people, places, and objects) and that they are presented in self-contained paragraphs alien to, if not devoid of, narrative.12 Again and again, the samples deal with existents ranging from prosopothrough pragmato- to topographia13 and almost without exception comprise a paragraph of concentrated description: the opening of Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet in Mosher (1991, 427), “a typical example of a set, or block, description of setting”; the description of the red-room in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre in Wall (2011); the description of Otsego county in the first chapter of Cooper’s The Pioneers in Isekenmeier (2015), etc. All of these examples work to cement the preconception that descriptions have to address static entities in blocked form, which was not even true of realist fiction in the first place, if we consider, for instance, the presentation of gesture (Irwin 1979, ch. 3), which inclines towards a distributed treatment interspersed with or even building upon dialogue in particular.14 In addition, the illusionist setup of realist novels with their emphasis on the story level and their tendency to “keep distancing elements to a minimum” (Wolf 2011, 22) contributes to the binary fabric of our literary consciousness, which emphasises the opposition of narrative and description at the expense of other text-types (cf. Herman 2008), among them the narratorial commentary in a metafictional vein so important in postmodernist fiction (→ 4.). I suggest that we abandon not only the fictional ontology that lines up description with spatiality and stasis, but also the textual ontology that hypostatises descriptions into isolable ‘building blocks’ (Wolf 2007, 28). Instead of descriptions, descriptology’s focus should be on the descriptive, that is, the multitude of ways in which literary texts conspire with visual cultural contexts to enable

11 Cf. Brooks (2005, 5): “realism becomes so much the expected mode of the novel that even today we tend to think of it as the norm”. 12 Once again, Genette (1969, 56) was almost already there: “Il ne semble pas, à première vue, qu’elle [la description] ait une existence très active avant le XIXe siècle, où l’introduction de longs passages descriptifs dans un genre typiquement narratif comme le roman met en évidence les ressources et les exigences du procédé”. 13 The continuous scale of descriptive objects in Victorian fiction can exemplarily be inferred from the chapter titles in Irwin (1979): faces, clothes, accoutrements, rooms, houses, villages, towns. 14 Due to this ‘peculiarity’, which somehow positions gesture (and facial expression) outside of the traditional realm of the descriptive, Korte (1993) is able to not even mention description in her study of non-verbal communication.



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readers to realise the suchness of fictional states of affairs.15 As these ways, that is, the constellations of literary visual culture that interact with the descriptive, change over the course of history, descriptology opens up to historical rather than theoretical inquiry, with description as self-contained treatment of existents as a distinctly nineteenth-century practice, an insular episode in a protean history of the descriptive, the (realist) exception rather than the (literary) rule. Without this normative backdrop limiting the field of vision, it will be possible to tackle the descriptive in literary periods hitherto neglected in descriptological research, in particular modernist fiction with its fusion of narrative and descriptive moments in focalised, figural presentation (which we are therefore not entitled to call a ‘narrative situation’), a subject even avoided in literary historical accounts almost teleologically geared towards a modernist conclusion.16 Post-modernist fiction, on the other hand, not only incorporates examples of descriptivity without description, but also displays a bias towards reflexive medi(t)ation as a third mode of coming to terms with worldliness, next to the staging of experience that is narrative and the simulation of perception that is the descriptive.17 As with focalisation, the (meta-)descriptive and the (meta-)narrative also prove difficult to separate in metafiction, which constitutes a major aspect of the postmodernist

15 My use of the term ‘suchness’ owes even more to Salinger’s “Franny” than to the Buddhist concept of tathatā (or ‘thusness’). In a classic example of descriptive denial – a strategy of which more will be said in my discussion of postmodernist descriptive strategies – Salinger (1982, 188) has his eponymous protagonist disregard her surroundings (the “ladies’ room at Sickler’s”): “Without any apparent regard to the suchness of her environment, she sat down”. For an almost religiously charged appraisal of description along the Buddhist line cf. Klotz (2013, 25): “Das Thematisieren, ein So-sein festzustellen und/oder zu erfinden, mit Anschaulichkeit zu verbinden und folglich der vorstellenden Wahrnehmung zuzuführen, ist ein Weg der Erkenntnis an sich”. 16 Cf. Petz’ (2012, 85) study of descriptive perspectivity (“Die Entwicklung der Imitation räum­ licher Perspektivität in Landschaftsdeskriptionen englischer Erzählliteratur”) that claims figural narrative to be ‘naturally’ perspectival and thus ‘predestined’ to realise literature’s full potential to visually organise fictional experience: “Ihre Veranlagung zu einer ‘natürlichen’ visuellen Perspektivität prädestiniert die personale Erzählsituation dennoch als die idealtypische Erzähl­ situation zur Entwicklung eines Konzepts von visueller Perspektivität in der epischen Literatur”. The (hi)story he tells, however, ranges from Morus to Conan Doyle, and ends just before the dawn of modernism thus supposed to complete it. 17 Cf. for the persistence of the binary pattern Klotz (2013, 18): “Erfahrungen zu machen, das Faktum also, dass etwas in aktionistischer und affektiver Weise mit dem menschlichen Subjekt geschieht, […] ist eine der beiden grundständigen Begegnungsweisen des Menschen mit der Welt, und Wahrnehmungen zu haben und ihnen im Bewusstsein Raum zu geben ist die andere grundständige Begegnungsweise des Menschen. In der für diese wesentlichen Modi medial funktionierenden Sprache hat der Mensch vermutlich in allen Kulturen zwei relativ spezifische Darstellungsweisen entwickelt, das Erzählen und das Beschreiben”.

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literary consciousness.18 In any case, that “the history of the development of the narrative technique known as ‘description’ has yet to be written because […] no one has dared to provide an historical overview spanning the period from the seventeenth century to the twentieth” (Nünning 2007, 125) may in large part be due to the reduction of the descriptive to description (and its misconstruction as narrative technique), from which vantage point there might not be much more to say for most of the twentieth century than that description tends “to lose visibility and credibility once again” (Wall 2006, 7).19 The historicity of descriptive means requires us to rethink the descriptive in performative terms: if we conceive of literature as act, a “world-making use of language” (Culler 2000, 507), then the descriptive is one of its noetic implicatures. In a manner of speaking, it “creates the state of affairs to which it refers” (Culler 2000, 506) by guiding imaginative operations different from, yet concurrent with, narrative. The latter (narrative) asks readers to construct a sequence of names according to what Barthes (1974, 19) calls the ‘proairetic code’20, which is essentially a conceptual frame: “whoever reads the text amasses certain data under some generic titles for actions (stroll, murder, rendezvous), and this title embodies the sequence; the sequence exists when and because it can be given a name, it unfolds as this process of naming takes place, as a title is sought or confirmed”. The former (the descriptive) requires us to imagine a complex of percepts whose construction is guided by what might be called an ‘aisthetic code’, which is a cognitive frame: “Whatever our reading leads us to ‘see’ not simply in the visual sense but in the entire field of perception is part of the field of descriptive space in literary experience” (Mitchell 1980, 283). With regard to their textual realisation, both modes are essentially out of square or ‘skew’ (in mathematical terms), that is, eschewing each other while existing side by side. Both are ‘artifices of reading’21

18 Cf. Nünning (2007, 122) for an attempt to include “meta-descriptions”. 19 Wall (2011, s.  p.) heads her story of “description in the twentieth century” “revulsion and return”. My interest in the following is primarily with the ‘revulsive’ attitude which dominates early and high postmodernist fiction. At least with regard to the French nouveau roman, the ‘return’ part of the story heavily depends on a reformulation of what constitutes descriptivity, which Wall (2006, 6) accomplishes with the help of a metaphor (“surfaces resurfaced”, “lavish supply of surfaces”, etc.). 20 A conceptualisation not very far removed from common definitions of narrative as plotted: “In Aristotelian terms, in which praxis is linked to proairesis, or the ability to rationally determine the result of an action, we shall name this code of actions and behavior proairetic” (Barthes 1974, 18). 21 Cf. Barthes (1974, 19): “the proairetic sequence is never more than the result of an artifice of reading”.



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potentially working on the exact same linguistic material22, dispersed through the text as independent variables combining to perform the literary act of “bringing into being the things that they name” (Culler 2000, 507), which is the reason why their “theoretical distinction […] appears arbitrary and technical when applied to concrete examples” (Ronen 1997, 279). In more than the one way Mitchell makes explicit, the inverted commas he puts around the verb ‘to see’ caution us not to think of descriptive visuality as too narrowly concerned with matters of vision. For one thing, visuality should not be identified with pictoriality. This reduction has produced definitions of descriptivity in terms of the aspiration to emulate “‘imagic’ iconicity” (Wolf 2007, 31): “Eine Beschreibung ist die kunstvolle sprachliche Darstellung äußerlich sichtbarer Elemente eines Gesamtbildes (Mensch, Gegenstand, Ort, Szene, usw.) durch Porträtieren erkennbarer Züge, vollständiges Aufzählen aller Details oder pointiertes Herausstellen wesentlicher Merkmale. Beschreibung ist die Kunst, mit Worten zu malen oder die Technik, mit Worten einen bildlichen Eindruck beim Zuhörer bzw. Leser hervorzurufen” (Halsall 1992, 1495). Such equation of (descriptive) visuality with visibility (“äußerlich sichtbare Elemente”) and pictoriality (which informs the vocabulary of the definition in an exercise in doublespeak by always evoking a figurative general meaning together with a specifically pictorial one – “Gesamtbild”, “Porträtieren”, “malen”), is not only bound to lose track of the particular role of literature in visual culture, its specific signature as a medium of visuality (→ Introduction), thus codifying its derivative status as parasitic on pictures supposed to represent the core of visual culture; it also requires the impossible in claiming the ‘exhaustive enumeration of all details’ as a descriptive option, thereby misrecognising the linguistic makeup of literary descriptivity which will always involve details not described (gaps) and can never reach pictorial completion, which relies on affirmed absence. A nose, for instance, need not be described (or even mentioned, if that made a difference) in the literary portrait of a person in order to still be assumed to be there, whereas a picture portrait cannot omit it without positively asserting its absence (for the example cf. Mendelsund 2014, 24).23

22 They are therefore not text types, as Klotz (2013, 57–59) somewhat reluctantly claims: “In der Konsequenz solcher Festlegung stößt man auf den Terminus Texttyp, also einer textuellen Erscheinungsweise, die vor allem die ‘konkrete sprachliche Ausgestaltung’ und die ‘Textstruktur’ betrifft. […] Für den Texttyp Beschreibung [fallacious italics in the original, G.I.] ergibt sich genau aus Gründen der pragmatischen Durchmischung kein ganz so klar abgrenzbares sprachliches Bild […]. Deskriptivität ist nicht an die Textsorte Beschreiben gebunden, denn es gibt bei etlichen Sprachhandlungen einen deskriptiven Texttypus”. 23 In Borges and Casares (1985, 22), the pursuit of descriptive completion is parodied as ‘descrip-

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For another thing, while it is certainly possible for the descriptive (and descriptions in particular) to (re-)present structures of perception, such “‘diagrammatic’ iconicity” (Wolf 2007, 31) is by no means necessary for instructing acts of visualisation: “there are ways to evoke such objects which disregard probable structures, and there are ways which iconically imitate them to various degrees” (Wolf 2001, 328). As the ‘objects’ referred to by Wolf (and Petz in his wake) are landscapes24, for which it is especially difficult to avoid the pictorial parallel embodying the principles of perspectival representation (point of observation, partiality of vision, and horizonal limitation according to Petz 2012, 79–125), the caveat that pictoriality is not coextensive with visuality seems relevant again. In addition, descriptive recourse to perceptual structures ‘residing’ in a visual culture may take the form of contextual appeal rather than textual mise-en-scène. In such instances of a displacement of the descriptive engagement with a phenomenology of vision beyond the literary text, the complexities of context come to the fore and “it cannot be taken for granted that the evidence that makes up ‘context’ is going to be any simpler or more legible” (Bal and Bryson 1991, 176). To recover the visual work of the descriptive then entails a (re-)construction of the visual cultural resources that enable experiential readings, which need not imply that such cultural frames either logically or chronologically precede their literary performance. The culturality of vision might just as well be informed by the workings of descriptivity. Finally, as explicated by Mitchell, given “vision’s inevitable proximity to other sense perceptions” (Horstkotte and Leonhard 2007, 5) and visual cultural studies’ concurrent preoccupation with “the entire field of perception”, the descriptive is bound to address not only vision in isolation, but the interplay of the senses as well. In this way, the visually deficient nature of the layout of fictional worlds, the fact that they never attain visibility (in contradistinction to the literary text that engenders it, → III. Textual Visibilities), turns out to be an asset with regard to literature’s staging of the multi-modality of perception. Equally removed from all sensory channels, the descriptive lends itself to the conflation of sensualities and the enactment of synaesthesia. In this area, again, an orientation towards pictoriality, and above all, the visual monism of panel paintings, may give rise to a contraction of the descriptological field characterised by a relative neglect tionism’. In that story, a fictional author realises that his project of exhaustively describing the north-northeastern corner of his desk is ‘theoretically endless’; only for practical reasons does the work (North-Northeast) contain just six volumes. 24 Cf. Wolf (2001, 326): “Iconicity here means the imitation, not of landscapes themselves, but of probable structures of their perception as might be attributed to someone experiencing the fictional world”.



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of an engagement with visuality from the point of view of sensory re-integration or the agonality of senses that have become opaque to each other at the hands of monomedial technologies of representation.25 Descriptivity, in its function of giving to “see” (in double inverted commas), is thus situated beyond pictoriality and beyond vision proper. It is, however, not an internal affair of literature either, in that the “faire voir” (Robbe-Grillet 1963, 125) of literary texts extends beyond the boundaries of the worlds projected by them as well. It is only in its dialectic interaction with visual culture at large (including visual artefacts, practices and codes) that the makeup of descriptive visualities can be fully fathomed. This conception of the visuality of literature has direct consequences for a history of the descriptive, an outline of which (and a sample chapter) will be presented in the following. It relies on the premises compiled in this section: that the descriptive cannot be neatly distinguished from the narrative; that it is interspersed with narrative, yet interferes with narrative mediation; that its function is to instruct visualisation, in a way independent from what pictures do and not necessarily restricted to the visual sense alone, but negotiating between different modalities; and that the concrete realisation of each of these traits is subject to historical change.

3 From a Literary to a Visual Cultural History of the Descriptive There is no lack of acknowledgements that descriptive procedures are subject to variation over time. Very rarely, however, has this elementary insight been heeded to the effect that a history of the descriptive had actually been written: “Some theorists have mentioned in passing that ‘texts describe differently in different poetic periods’, but little sustained effort has been made to consider such questions as which historical changes in the use of descriptions can be observed” (Nünning 2007, 92, citing Ronen, my italics).26 In addition to the general(ised)

25 A five-page chapter on ‘non-visual techniques of imitating spatiality and perspectivity in narrative fiction’ in a book of 500 pages, to turn to Petz (2012) for one more time, can hardly do justice to this aspect of descriptive visuality. That it is followed by a 50-page chapter on ‘landscapes and natural spaces as perspectival constructions in the visual arts’ seems to corroborate that suspicion. 26 Wall’s (2006, 203) formulation of this basic idea as articulated in her book constituting one of the few exceptions to this rule owes much to the more than usual concentration of English literary history on centuries as the basic time frame of literary historical periods: “Description shifts

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hesitation to engage with the history of the descriptive in the first place, the literary historical endeavour is also hampered by the doubly restrictive emphasis on the “use of descriptions”. This entails, first, a preference for function over form in that it (again) assumes the shape of the descriptive to be prefigured in “realistic nineteenth-century novels” in which “descriptions fully come into their own” (Nünning 2007, 119).27 Secondly, it also implies the derivative nature of the descriptive in supposing it to have a function not in and for itself, but in and for the narrative of which it is a part (and which, notionally as well as terminologically, is supposed to constitute the core of ‘narrative fiction’). This functionalist presupposition is another mainstay of the denigration of the descriptive in literary studies, as it tries to unreservedly put the descriptive into the service of narrative. A locus classicus of this gesture is the critical re-appropriation of Barthes’ (1982, 11) attempt to stipulate a function for “descriptive details” which seem “‘superfluous’” or “‘useless’” from a narrative point of view. One of his examples was, of course, a barometer in Flaubert’s “Un Cœur Simple” (the other being a door in Michelet’s Histoire de France), of which he has the following to say: So, although it may be possible to regard the detail of the piano as a sign of the bourgeois status of its owner, and that of the boxes as a sign of disorder and something like a reverse or fall in status, appropriately evocative of the Aubain household, there seems to be no such end in view to justify the reference to the barometer, an object which is neither incongruous nor significant, and which, therefore, at first sight, seems not to belong to the domain of the notable. (Barthes 1982, 11)

The solution to the problem of “notations which no function (not even the most indirect) will allow us to justify” (Barthes 1982, 11) is that the very lack of narrative functionality constitutes the ground for a genuinely descriptive “‘effet de réel’, (a reality effect)”: “Flaubert’s barometer, Michelet’s little door, say, in the last analysis, only this: we are the real” (Barthes 1982, 16). The scandalous detail thus opens up the possibility of a functionality beyond and outside of narrative,

in meaning, function, purpose, and practice, not only across the centuries, but also intensely within the eighteenth”. 27 Nünning (2007, 116) goes on to talk of a “comprehensive reconstruction of the diachronic forms and functions of description”, but labels the relevant section of his article “a diachronic overview” of “the historically variable functions of description in the English novel” (Nünning 2007, 116–123). Remarkably enough, he still thinks of that section as “a very brief outline of the historic variability and polyfunctionality of description” (Nünning 2007, 116), only to conclude it with the half-hearted disclaimer that “not only the forms, but also, and especially, the functions of description are as much subject to historical variability as other narrative modes and strategies” (Nünning 2007, 123, my italics).



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which has brought about scrupulous attempts in defence of the primacy of narrative.28 Koelb (2006, 6–8), for instance, sets out to demonstrate that the barometer not only shares the characterising function of the piano and the symbolic one of the boxes, but also marks a case of foreshadowing, a descriptive anticipation of narrative outcome.29 All of which goes to show that Barthes may have gotten the example wrong,30 but fails to address his basic idea, namely, that it is possible for the descriptive to rely on “data” (Barthes 1982, 11) which cannot be functionally appropriated for the narrative, particularly when formal variability is also taken into account, that is, when such details do not appear as parts of spatial arrangements (“a barometer at the apex of a pyramid of boxes atop a piano”, Koelb 2006, 7), but as replaceable items in a descriptive enumeration or as isolated names in an abbreviated description31, instances of both of which will be found among my examples (→ 4.). In the case of narrative dysfunctionality, the descriptive appears as a function of fictional texts in its own right, which is that of ‘worlding’, and the most remarkable thing about Flaubert’s barometer may turn out to be the fact that it did not need to be visually described itself at all. Still, even from the doubly limited perspective of narrative functions of description (instead of genuine functions of the descriptive), the outlines of a rough literary history centred around some ‘grand moments in the history of

28 Cf. Genette’s (1969, 57) conceptualisation of description as servant/slave of narrative: “la narration, elle, ne peut exister sans description, mais cette dépendance ne l’empêche pas de jouer constamment le premier rôle. La description est tout naturellement ancilla narrationis, esclave toujours nécessaire, mais toujours soumise, jamais emancipée”. Somewhat ironically, Koelb (2006, 10) reads Barthes’ essay as an example of the “radical devaluation of description”, which is precisely what I, in turn, insinuate with regard to his argument. 29 Cf. Koelb (2006, 7): “After all, the barometer signifies the occupant’s bourgeois status as much as the piano; both are standard but not inexpensive furnishings. […] Indeed, if we agree with Barthes that the pile of boxes suggests ‘disorder and something like a reversal or fall in status’ – and I think we should – the barometer, which predicts changes in weather and health, only adds to the sense that Mme. Aubain’s musty parlor is a pathogenic place and that the pyramid is a proleptic tomb”. 30 Cf. Kittler (2010, 139, my italics), who denies the very symbolic function of another of Flaubert’s details he himself so obviously ascribes to it: “Flaubert’s […] Madame Bovary repeatedly mentions a curé de plâtre or plaster priest that initially stands intact in the Bovary’s garden like a garden gnome, which is similarly mass-produced. It receives a few scratches during the first move, and finally, when the marriage collapses, it also falls to pieces. The priest does not serve the slightest function in the narrative other than to prove that the novel has not forgotten any visual detail within its fictional world”. 31 Both lists and names have been taken to mark degree zeros of descriptivity. For the former, cf. Hamon’s (1981, 5–6) “liens priviligiés du descriptif avec la confection des listes pragmatiques”; for the latter, cf. Klotz’ (2013, 21) insistence on the difference between describing and naming.

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description’ (Adam 1993, 40) might be seen to emerge. Its default starting point will of course be the “nineteenth-century habit of preparing an elaborately described setting for characters to enter and act within” (Wall 2006, 201), a setting variously linked to the proairetic code by way of supporting characterisation32 or otherwise preparing the scene for events to take place in (which can be achieved atmospherically by evoking a framework of possible actions, symbolically by mirroring situations to be transformed by action, or anticipatively by foreshadowing actions to be performed in due course). The “descriptive ‘preliminaries’” (Wall 2006, 216) in blocked form, which “virtually every […] English novelist in the nineteenth century went in for” (Wall 2006, 216), are characteristic for the narrative economy of the Victorian (and American Renaissance) novel, and their function invariably is to constitute the arena of narrative entanglement, the space enabling (and reflecting) narrative events. This as it were classical setup, however, no longer holds for late nineteenth-century fiction in a naturalist vein, in which the descriptive takes over and the provision of setting usurps the unfolding of plot within it. Instead of taking place in a descriptive space constituted on its behalf, narrative then appears as the oblique constituent of fiction, deriving from and dependent on the descriptive constitution of an environment which can no longer be thought of as background: “Wenn das narrative Element als eine Konsequenz aus dem deskriptiven Element hervorgehen kann, so deshalb, weil in der beschreibenden Erfassung des Milieus ein semantischer Zusammenhang entsteht, dessen Sinn es ist, einen Determinationszusammenhang so zu entwerfen, daß die Teleologie des narrativen Verlaufs an diese Determination rückgekoppelt bleibt” (Smuda 1980, 389). What is more, around 1900, the novel seems to arrive at the point at which it first and foremost wants to be a descriptive venture, that is, an exercise in extended description (or a series of descriptive routines), while the narrative gesture is only upheld as a necessary evil, a tribute to novelistic generic convention. Hence, the use of the quest pattern in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), which is thoroughly frustrated by the course of events but serves to give the iterative descriptions of the African jungle (and the sites of its colonisation) a narrative guise, thus maintaining the impression that a story is being told, while in fact taking descriptive stock of the situation in the Belgian Congo (cf. Isekenmeier 2013a). Or, the recourse to the plot of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), which turns the main character, Jurgis Rudkos, into “an immigrant pilgrim in the sinful city of Chicago” (Lee 2003, i), only to facilitate

32 Character being the basis of decision-making in Aristotelian ethics, in which prohairesis means moral choice, cf. Chamberlain (1984).



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a descriptive engagement with the wrongs of the meatpacking industry while sustaining a narrative surface. In other words, the generic signature of the novel had undergone a reversal: far from being narratives provided by descriptions with a setting to occur in, these texts have become descriptive encounters barely held together by a narrative thread. The descriptive’s rise to hegemony went on to later find its transient completion in the poetics of the French nouveau roman, which counted ‘story’ among the obsolete notions of novelistic practice and produced texts relying exclusively on descriptivity to beget narrative: “Avec le ‘nouveau roman’, la description parvient à s’émanciper de la narration […]. Les narrations […] sortent des descriptions qui les engendrent et les contrôlent. Le récit n’assure plus la cohérence du texte” (Adam 1993, 62).33 Which is not the end of this (literary hi)story, as one of postmodernism’s declared aims was to replenish literature’s narrative stock and to tell stories again.34 In the other direction, that is, moving back in time from the precarious equilibrium of description and narrative in nineteenth-century fiction35 towards the notorious ‘rise of the novel’ (Watt 2001), textscapes become increasingly barren from a descriptive point of view.36 Even more than in the case of background(ed) description providing “a fully visualized setting in which events will occur” (Wall 2006, 5), the descriptive is at narrative’s disposal in fiction around 1700. Whereas the later descriptive regime at least granted things (to stick to the example of pragmatographia) with an existence if not independent of, then at least prior to narrative by first introducing them in description and then utilising them in narrative,37 in the earlier regime they appear strictly at the command of narrative, 33 Cf. Lopes (1995, 26) for a formulation of the visual implications of this creed: “In many of Robbe-Grillet’s novels, for example, we find a series of motionless instants presented as a set of descriptions, which function very much like a set of pictures or slides the reader is solicited to place into a sequence in order to infer a story”. In ‘English’ literature, the closest thing to the New Novel can be found in a Franco-Irish writer, Samuel Beckett: “In Watt wird dieses Phänomen daran greifbar, daß Sachverhalte, die im traditionellen Sinne dem narrativen Zusammenhang angehören und in der teleologischen Verlaufsstruktur einer Handlung als Ereignis ausgetragen werden, in der Deskription erscheinen” (Smuda 1980, 394). 34 Cf. Barth (1984a, 68): “it might be conceivable to rediscover validly the artifices of language and literature – such far-out notions as grammar, punctuation … even characterization! Even plot! – if one goes about it the right way”. 35 Cf. Smuda (1980, 387): “Coopers Landschaftsbeschreibungen sind derart über den Roman verteilt, daß sie der Ökonomie eines proportionalen Wechsels zwischen Deskription und Narration entsprechen”. 36 Cf. Trickett (1985, 245): “we are so accustomed to description as the natural idiom of the novelist in the nineteenth century that the lack of it in Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett is at first astonishing”. 37 In the third chapter of Moby-Dick, to take a random example, we first get a description of

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precisely when needed, which also wholesale excludes the possibility of a textual surfacing of narratively useless material: “The objects may be lying about waiting to be picked up, but they are not visible to the reader until they are picked up” (Wall 2006, 123).38 To be sure, even though Wall’s (2006, 9) illustration of that point with the help of a juxtaposition of the handling of the House of the Interpreter in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and that of the red-room in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) may be as problematic as the tacit extension of her argument to include topographic descriptions as well,39 the basic literary historical question seems topical enough: “What happened over the eighteenth century to the status of description that transformed Defoe’s unvisualized cityscapes and Pope’s epitheted spaces into the excruciatingly elaborate landscapes of The Mysteries of Udolpho and the familiarly upholstered Victorian novel?” (Wall 2006, 1). The literary historical evidence seems to suggest that the eighteenth century witnessed a series of “transformations of description” (the subtitle of Wall’s book)

Queequeg’s bag (within the room shared with Ishmael in the Spouter-Inn), which can then be singled out and incorporated into the action. First: “I then glanced round the room; and besides the bedstead and centre table, could see no other furniture belonging to the place, but a rude shelf, the four walls, and a papered fireboard representing a man striking a whale. Of things not properly belonging to the room, there was a hammock lashed up, and thrown upon the floor in one corner; also a large seaman’s bag, containing the harpooneer’s wardrobe, no doubt in lieu of a land trunk. Likewise, there was a parcel of outlandish bone fish hooks on the shelf over the fireplace, and a tall harpoon standing at the head of the bed” (Melville 2006, 36). Then: “the stranger entered the room, and without looking towards the bed, placed his candle a good way off from me on the floor in one corner, and then began working away at the knotted cords of the large bag I before spoke of as being in the room” (Melville 2006, 37, my italics). 38 Cf. Wall (2006, 112): “In Haywood, Aubin, and Richardson, as well as in most of Defoe’s narratives, physical objects and structures appear primarily in the immediate service of narrative action: windows appear when they need to be jumped out of, locks when they need to be locked. Things come (literally) to hand as the character requires”. 39 Wrt. Pilgrim’s Progress, the comparison seems problematic from a generic perspective (as it seems rather to belong to the pre-history of the novel proper), which is also important for an appreciation of its (topographical) realism (Hofmeyr 2007); Jane Eyre is a problematic representative of the Victorian novel because of its Gothic romance character as well as its delayed description (which has Wall justify the choice of example much later in her book on p. 216); the inclusion of other types of descriptions without further comment, finally, needlessly implies a complete synchronicity in their development which might not be warranted (there is, for instance, good reason to believe that the career of extended prosopographia was already plummeting while the novel’s obsession with rooms and houses just reached its apex, cf. Irwin’s 1979 chs. 2 and 5, respectively). Fludernik and Keen (2016, 457) cautiously limit the scope of the articles they assemble (among them one by Wall) to “interiors as a fairly manageable common denominator”: “As regards our exclusion of landscapes (or gardens, or architecture, or people, or wildlife), we have restricted our material in order to allow for greater comparability between individual essays”.



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that lead from the descriptive evocation of furnishings and decoration via acts of naming to their comprehensive arrangement in interior spaces via set descriptions: “Description changed from what was more or less a pointing index finger, a bare floor for action and dialogue, to a fully carpeted, thickly detailed space” (Wall 2006, 1), until, in the nineteenth century, “[w]e are given the visual world; we no longer extrapolate it” (Wall 2006, 5)40. However, the lack of visually lavish descriptions in early eighteenth-century fiction in no way implies that it is less visual(isable). Its descriptive qualities just depend to a larger degree on readerly completion, which “fills in the empty spaces between visual tags and finds them full and complete representations” (Wall 2006, 9). Such ‘rehydration’ of spaces implied rather than described is possible because readers could still draw on that “stable stock of text and patterns” (Wall 2006, 6) that Beaujour (1981, 31) has called the “store of cultural images”, in which preconceived ‘visual’ conceptions are archived, thus mitigating the need to describe: “For the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a more universally shared warehouse of literature, as well as of goods, meant that a brief phrase or even a single word could swell instantly into rich meaning for a contemporary reader” (Wall 2011, s.  p.).41 Within

40 To avoid the hyperbole implied in the first clause, inverted commas are sorely needed (as discussed above): it is not that the visuality of the fictional world is simply given, but that it is given to us to “see”. 41 Cf. Beaujour (1981, 28): “What could appear more natural than the ‘picturing in words’ of a garden (provided we possess some commonplace ideas of what a garden is). So simple that the reader already is enjoying mental images of plants and vegetables even before she begins describing [sic!]. Indeed, is there any need for a description?”. It should be noted that Beaujour’s conceptualisation of the “store of cultural images” is essentially that of an anthology of canonised poems, and that the phrase itself (which is the only part of Beaujour’s article quoted by Wall, repeatedly using a wrong page number; cf. Wall 2006, 6 & 31) derives from his discussion of Philostratus’ Imagines (Beaujour 1981, 31): “These famous descriptions of paintings, then, enjoy a peculiar cognitive status. In their majority, the pictures represent scenes which the reader already knows from poetry. The need for a detailed description is therefore limited, since the reader’s memory already contains a ‘mental image’ of the scene and its protagonists. […] Philostratus’ word pictures, then, serve to brush up the reader’s store of cultural images that come from poems which all educated men have learned by heart”. Obviously, Wall’s use of the classical concept (or, rather, the phrase only) requires a visual cultural reformulation with regard to the nature of the archive in which images no longer only mental (and framed in words) are preserved. The barrenness of early eighteenth-century interiors, for example, is ‘stored’ primarily in rooms and houses themselves, and Wall (2006, 157) uses a reproduction of a picture taken from fragment 13 “Concerning Interiors” of Humphry Repton’s 1816 Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (cf. https://archive.org/details/mobot31753002820014, p. 59, page reference not given by Wall) to illustrate it. In other words, cultural memory becomes increasingly stored in non-textual and exteriorised archives (up to the point where it is colo-

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this visual cultural setup, extended descriptions of interior spaces would only be ornamental repetitions of what is already familiar and thus fall prey to the rule of taste: “Just as a gentleman was defined by his likeness to other gentlemen, so a house should resemble other houses of a similar standing; it would therefore be redundant to describe what every courteous author must assume was already known to his readers” (Tristram cited s.  p. in Wall 2006, 156).42 Starting from the situation thus outlined, Wall’s seminal study traces the disintegration of the memory storehouse “under the pressure of sheer material variety” (Wall 2006, 6) in the course of the eighteenth century. With new modes of production and retailing supplying more and more diverse items of furnishing and new forms of textual (and pictorial) engagement coming to terms with that variety, interior spaces are increasingly subjected to practices of decoration and thus turned into ostensibly individuated configurations of objects: “The remarkable expansion of choice in determining, among other things, the domestic interior involved an imaginative exercise in spatial variability, in the tone and nuance of object ordering, in playing with traditional social boundaries, and in creating the simple, self-sufficient satisfaction in personal experience” (Wall 2006, 153). Shopping windows and advertisements displaying the multiplicity of goods conspired with the “textual praxes of […] house description” (Wall 2006, 176) in auction catalogues and country house guides to produce a diversified domestic visual culture “more in need of description for readerly visualization, less the common property of a cultural storehouse” (Wall 2006, 200).43 In this way, economic changes can be synchronised with the evolution of descriptive means:

nised by mechanically reproducible pictures transmitted with the help of technical storage devices; → 4.). 42 In other words, at this point in the history of the descriptive, “mimetic literalism” (Esrock 1994, 37) may actually be possible. Esrock (1994, 36–37) is correct in arguing against the general assumption of an “isomorphism between image and referent”: “Underlying this is the unstated premise, cut from the same cloth as mimetic theories of representation, that the visual images formed in such readings are direct correlates to the fictional world. These images are presumed to be perception-like representations of whatever might be visualised among the textual referents. If the text says ‘red red rose,’ then the reader visually images a red red rose. […] Just as there are problems arising from assumptions concerning the types of visual images that can be produced, so too, there are limitations to the very premise that a perceptible verbal referent, the words ‘red rose,’ necessarily elicits visualisation”. But though there is certainly no necessary link between textual referentiality and readerly visualisation, the possibility of such a link should not be transhistorically excluded from consideration either. 43 In the American context, Poe’s “The Philosophy of Furniture” (1840), which laments the Yankee lack of taste (and thus of a rule of taste moderating the need for descriptivity), marks the consummation of this transition.



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“The spatial contours and object-presences of early novels seemed so certain [that] they required no positioning before narrative, only positioning with it, always immediately at hand. The vast spillage of things in the later eighteenth century demanded a different kind of accounting and assembling, arrayed in rooms and texts as settings for human action” (Wall 2006, 236). The reason for drawing so extensively on the rise of the characteristic nineteenth-century use of description for the allocation of setting while at the same time arguing against its exemplariness in theoretical terms is that it provides descriptological history with another way of looking at the fate of the descriptive in postmodernist fiction. While its immediate literary historical context makes it appear as a reaction against the exuberant descriptivity of the New Novel (or, for that matter, Beckett) and the accompanying narrative exhaustion of literature, that is to say, as an attempt to reconstruct its story-telling abilities at the expense of descriptive strategies, the larger visual cultural time frame suggests a different reading according to which postmodernist texts revert to the minimalist means of pre-nineteenth-century descriptivity. Their seeming descriptive abstention would then indicate a renewed reliance on a cultural store of images enabling readerly concretisations of the visuality of the fictional world. And while the media of this cultural imaginary may have changed, their effect is still (or, indeed, again) that of holding ready a repository of visual supplements to literary texts not overtly engaged in a thorough documentation of their worlds. In this way, the history of the descriptive might be seen to take another counterintuitive turn: if, around 1800, the “mass production of pottery, fabrics, carpets, and furniture paradoxically made interiors more individuated, at least in the quantity and, therefore, the possible patterns of arrangements of their things” (Wall 2006, 176), thereby necessitating detailed description, the post-World War II expansion of commodity culture, producing even more things and requiring even more choices to be made, paradoxically leads to the (re-)constitution of standards of reference for minimalist descriptivity, thus again making the naming of fictional referents a sufficient instruction for full-fledged visualisations.

4 Postmodernist Descriptive Visuality If postmodernist literature arises from a state of exhaustion, that is, “the used-upness of certain forms” (Barth 1984a, 64), and works towards a “replenishment” (Barth 1984b, 193) of literary possibilities, then the constellation in the history of the descriptive into which it inscribes itself is that of an impasse to continue the late modernist descriptivisation of fiction and of the concomitant attempt to

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regain the ability to tell stories in a narrative mode (though not necessarily in a traditional narrative manner). As from the wider point of view of programs or aesthetics (as a plural count noun)44, Beckett and Borges can be considered two of the authors most closely associated with that transition (cf. Barth 1984a, 67) from a descriptological perspective as well: the former in taking to its logical conclusion the descriptive enactment of action45, the latter in making descriptivity the topic (rather than the method) of a new kind of (metadescriptive) fiction46. From the beginning, postmodernism’s struggle for narrativity takes on the form of a striving for a new descriptive economy – first in the shape of metafictional musings on the problematic workings of the descriptive, later in the shape of the adoption of techniques of abbreviated descriptivity appropriate to postmodern culture. It is as if early postmodernist literature tried to come to terms with description with the help of genuinely literary means, before high postmodernist texts put into service the resources provided by their visual cultural context. Among these resources, two visual archives will be dealt with in more detail in the following: that of genre film and that of commodity branding, both of which enable forms of descriptive minimalism reminiscent of early novelistic descriptivity. To begin at the beginning, the early postmodernist engagement with the descriptive is characterised by various efforts to keep descriptive matters in check with the help of intrinsically literary devices. Foremost among these is the metafictionally explicated refusal to describe. In a classic example (cf. Nünning 2007, 122–123), the narrator in B.S. Johnson’s Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973) muses on the impossibility of descriptively guiding readerly visualisation (→ II. Readerly Visualisations), which renders any individuated description of the main character’s looks void. Thus, in a chapter entitled “Christie Described; and the Shrike Created” (the Shrike being Christie’s girlfriend), readers are provided with an extended metadescriptive discourse: An attempt should be made to characterise Christie’s appearance. I do so with diffidence, in the knowledge that such physical descriptions are rarely of value in the novel. It is one of the limitations; and there are so many others. Many readers, I should not be surprised to learn if

44 Cf. Barth (1984b, 206): “What my essay ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’ was really about, so it seems to me now, was the effective ‘exhaustion’ not of language or of literature, but of the aesthetic of high modernism”. 45 Cf. Smuda (1980, 394): “So wird zum Beispiel die Bewegung Watts von einem Ort zum anderen als die umständliche Beschreibung der Bewegung seiner Beine und seines Oberkörpers dargestellt […]. Diese Bewegung ist nicht als Vorgang aufzufassen, sondern als Zerlegung eines Bewegungsablaufs in die einzelnen Elemente seiner Phasen”. 46 Cf. Barth (1984b, 205): “artistic conventions are liable to be retired, subverted, transcended, transformed, or even deployed against themselves to generate new and lively work”.



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appropriate evidence were capable of being researched, do not read such descriptions at all, but skip to the next dialogue or more readily assimilable section. Again, I have often read and heard said, many readers apparently prefer to imagine the characters for themselves. That is what draws them to the novel, that it stimulates their imagination! Imagining my characters, indeed! Investing them with characteristics quite unknown to me, or even at variance with such description as I have given! Making Christie fair when I might have him dark, for an instance, a girl when I have shown he is a man? What writer can compete with the reader’s imagination! Christie is therefore an average shape, height, weight, build, and colour. Make him what you will: probably in the image of yourself. You are allowed complete freedom in the matter of warts and moles, particularly; as long as he has at least one of either. Nor are his motives important. Especially are his motives of no importance to us, though the usual clues will certainly be given. We are concerned with his actions. A man may be defined through his actions, you will remember. We may guess at his motives, of course; he may do so as well. We may also guess at the winner of the three-fifteen at the next meeting at Market Rasen. (Johnson 1985, 51–52)

These paragraphs bring together the anti-descriptive lore of the rhetorical tradition, in which description figures as a mode always to be used with caution, as it interrupts the flow of narrative and invites readers to skip to the point where the action is resumed47, with that of reader-response criticism, in which the un­avoidable gaps in literary description function as main incentives to visualise, allowing readerly projection to possibly overwrite textual clues48. With regard to such acts of imaginative freedom, Johnson’s narrator is not entirely serious: while Christie’s skin complexion might indeed be at issue, no reader in his right mind, that is, with even rudimentary profiling skills, would want to make the protagonist a woman, let alone imaginatively identify with him if only appearance-wise (given that he is “a simple person”49 and a mass poisoner to boot). And though the ironic stance is obvious in the implicit reference to the reality effect “warts

47 One classic articulation of this assessment can be found in Boileau’s 1674 Art Poétique: “Un auteur quelquefois trop plein de son objet / Jamais sans l’épuiser n’abandonne un sujet. / […] Il compte des plafonds les ronds et les ovales; / ‘Ce ne sont que festons, ce ne sont qu’astragales.’ / Je saute vingt feuillets pour en trouver la fin, / Et me sauve à peine au travers du jardin” (cited in Hamon 1991, 27, my italics). The aftermath of this attitude can be seen in narratological considerations of descriptive pauses (→ 1.). 48 Therefore, any pictorial presentation of, for instance, literary characters is bound to disappoint readers, even if it strives to follow textual directions (cf. Iser 1978, 139). The argument has become a commonplace in studies of filmic adaptations of literary texts. 49 The first sentence of the novel (Johnson 1985, 11: “Christie Malry was a simple person.”) is referred back to twice on that first page alone (“I did tell you Christie was a simple person”; “Not only was Christie simple, he was young, too”).

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and moles” have on portraits50, the whole exercise in descriptive circumlocution makes it abundantly clear that the one thing that is not possible at this point is to simply not describe at all. In fact, we do end up with a description, albeit a negative one emphasising the very indistinctness of Christie’s appearance (whatever an average ‘colour’ might be). Finally, the last paragraph of the quotation cuts to the core of the metadescriptive procedure in giving voice to the desire to (re)turn to an essentially narrative constitution of character as a function of action (which proverbially requires a man, not a woman). Not only prosopographia, but prosopopeia (or ethopopeia) also falls victim to the anti-descriptive impetus in that motives are required to be tentatively inferred from actions rather than being provided by character sketch, which denies readers the predictive power located in the descriptive and only allows them to reconstruct the teleology of events retrospectively (which is, in a way, a definition of narrative). However, in reflecting about these matters, the text indicates that it is still only working towards such a recovery of a narrativity unimpeded by description. To be sure, Johnson had also experimented with other ways of keeping the descriptive at bay, for instance in his earlier novel Albert Angelo (1964), which employs a method drawn from the realm of textual visibility (→ III. Textual Visibilities) to literally hedge in his descriptions: the use of special characters to separate prosopographic routines from their textual surroundings, as in the following example (Johnson 1987, 31), the first of many throughout the book:

Not that this concise portrait of one of Albert’s pupils (or many of the other descriptive vignettes to follow) would be ineffective, its sparseness being more than compensated by its visual suggestiveness, encoded into an unusual colour adjective to describe the boy’s hair (whose implications might be metaphoric: black like the oil from a drilled well?) and another compound to indicate the shape of his face whose meaning is even more indefinite (thus lending itself to imaginative concretisation)51. However, neither is this way of seeing systematically 50 This variant of the reality effect was applied to the problem of sculptural realism by Diderot (cf. Isekenmeier 2013b). 51 For the contested meaning of ‘potato face’, cf. for instance the divergent attempts at definition at http://www.urbandictionary.com/. In another enigmatic instance, David Foster Wallace (1996) used the phrase in the Dune part of his review of David Lynch’s work: “Watching Dune



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applied to the eponymous hero’s perception of people (as the descriptions later tend to reinsert themselves into the narrative52), nor does it relieve the narrator of the burden of metadescriptive justification, for instance with regard to Albert himself: “Not that I am not fond of Albert, for I am, very; […] yes, fond of him, I am, very, even though I have hardly provided you with a description of him, a corporate being, I know, but he stands for me, I don’t need one: Albert, who stands for me, poor fool” (Johnson 1987, 170). The narrator thus offers as his solution to the notorious poetological problem of how to portray the appearance of a reflector figure the very strategy that made a description of Christie unnecessary and useless: he makes Albert in the image of himself and therefore abstains from describing him53 – but not without making that very move the topic of his discourse. In the quest for a descriptivity without description, that is, an evocation of visual fullness without the use of extensive descriptive templates, postmodernism only attains its objective of a restoration of narrativity freed from (meta-) descriptive burden when it begins to tap the visual resources of postmodernist culture. Accompanying the rise of new ways or, at least, new intensities of archiving and circulating visual material, high postmodernist fiction manages to install descriptive abbreviations that readers can correlate with their store of cultural images, which increasingly turns out to be a retail facility rather than an idealised repertoire of memorised canonical texts. Thus, the video rental shop and the supermarket are enlisted as cultural depositories that externalise the function of keeping films and branded products in memory, with television acting as a collective medium, an agency collecting the variety of visual goods that make up postmodern visual culture. Together, these (economic) institutions enable new modes of descriptive shorthand, forms of descriptivity that proceed from lists or acts of naming rather than copious textual engagement with visual surface, but which can nonetheless be expanded into sensory richness by readers familiar with and subjected to the archival reiterations of visual commodities. In this way, again on video, […] you can see that some of its defects are clearly Lynch’s responsibility: casting the nerdy and potato-faced Kyle MacLachlan as an epic hero and the Police’s unthespian Sting as a psycho villain, for example”. 52 For an example that alludes back to a description marked-off in this manner but is itself seamlessly integrated into the text cf. Johnson (1987, 131). 53 Earlier on in the novel, he had already practically solved the problem by giving us the essays/ letters Albert had his pupils write about him at the end of term. These, however, focus almost exclusively on his actions (hitting them) and only include Albert’s most conspicuous trait, his uncut hair (“His hair is always over the place”, Johnson 1987, 157; “he needs an hair-cut”, Johnson 1987, 161, et pass.). Can we imagine his hair without a face? Cf. Mendelsund (2014, 24), who wonders about Anna Karenina’s looks if we could picture her noseless, lacking any definite description of her nose.

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the visuality of fictional worlds can again be implied rather than meticulously scripted, and description downscaled to descriptive shortcut. With regard to the filmic archive, such descriptive cues may take the form of specific instructions to search for (or within) a particular film. Instead of providing a description of the facial features of a character, literary texts may refer their readers to a filmic figure, as in the following example from Antonio Tabucchi’s Notturno Indiano (1984, cit. Rajewsky 2002, 151, my translation): “‘You remind me of Ivan the Terrible’, I said, ‘or rather the actor impersonating him’. […] ‘I was talking about an old movie’, I explained, ‘I had just remembered an old movie’”. Rajewsky (2002, 151–153) goes on to identify Eisenstein’s Ivan Groznyi (1944–1946) as the most likely candidate referred to, replicates a still shot of Nicolaj Cherkasov as Ivan IV from that movie, and even goes on to discuss it as an example of ‘cursory narration’54 (or abbreviated description). It seems doubtful, however, whether the heteromedial reference really has an intermedial point, that is, whether it can provide an insight into the nature of filmic representation (as compared to its literary counterpart), apart from the all too general one that (filmic) pictures cannot help depicting a face in a definite manner (where literary description is bound to leave imaginative blanks), which is an intermedial proposition only if ‘medium’ is taken to mean ‘base medium’ (of which text and image are the most important examples) instead of “conventionally distinct means of communication” (Wolf 1999, 40).55 What is more, the central idea of Rajewsky’s (2002, 153) intermedial argument is untenable, namely that the filmic reference allows an ‘intersubjectively determinate picture’ to replace a verbal description that would necessarily be visually vague. Rajewsky (2002, 154) quotes Fowles (1969, 170) to corroborate the “essential difference in the quality of image evoked by the two media”, who argues that “[t]he cinematic visual image is virtually the same for all who see it; it stamps out personal imagination, the response from individual visual memory. A sentence or paragraph in a novel will evoke a different image in each reader. This necessary co-operation between writer and reader, the one to suggest, the other to make concrete, is a privilege of verbal form; and the cinema can never usurp it”. In fact, the image of Nicolaj Cherkasov playing Ivan the Terrible does itself have only a virtual existence in the first place, depending on where we look for it: in the memory of the readers of Tabucchi’s text (Rajewsky 2002, 153), in the still 54 Cf. Kurtz (1992, 340): “eine Abkürzung der erzählten Inhalte auf der Basis des evozierten Hin­ tergrundes”. 55 Cf. Isekenmeier (2013c) for a reformulation of intermediality along these lines, that is, as that area of inquiry which is left if we exclude everything that can be dealt with under the headings of intertextuality and interpictoriality.



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photograph of his face reproduced in Rajewsky (2002, 152), or in a (digital) copy of the moving images of the film. After all, Cherkasov’s face (and its filmic image; and the memory of that filmic image) really is not an immovable object frozen into stasis, but a dynamic compound of physical appearance and facial expressions that will appear differently in different ‘media’ and to different people – virtually the same, but with a difference. Which is not even to mention the interpretative problems involved in ascribing meaning to it. While there is an element of colonisation of the imagination in references to mass-circulated images of technical media56, these pictures also exhibit an essential openness with regard to their significance. In other words, that the character addressed in Tabucchi’s book looks like the Ivan the Terrible of the Eisenstein film does not tell readers what to see, or even according to which codes to decipher the image: are we talking about a lookalike in a doppelganger sense, or just about a man with a particular kind of beard? Or, are we to decode the physiognomical implications of Cherkasov’s performance in his attempt to represent a ruler prone to violence and aberration? In the end, the reference to a material image seems hardly less ambiguous than a descriptive epithet like ‘potato-faced’. But though they do not necessarily produce a standardised imaginative response, such heteromedial references might allow literary texts to evoke the texture appertaining to the (moving) images in question. A filmic reference may, for instance, invoke the combination of image and sound which is the signature of audio-visuality to suggest a sensory richness alien to literature, as in the following piece of dialogue taken from Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985): ‘Who was the greatest influence on your life?’ he [Lasher] said in a hostile tone. [Grappa] ‘Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death. When Richard Widmark pushed that old lady in that wheelchair down that flight of stairs, it was like a personal breakthrough for me. It resolved a number of conflicts. I copied Richard Widmark‘s sadistic laugh and used it for ten years. It got me through some tough emotional periods. Richard Widmark as Tommy Udo in Henry Hathaway‘s Kiss of Death. Remember that creepy laugh? Hyena-faced. A ghoulish titter. It clarified a number of things in my life. Helped me become a person.’ (DeLillo 1998, 214–215)

56 Cf. Virilio (1989, 29): “Seit langem haben die jüngeren Generationen Schwierigkeiten zu verstehen, was sie lesen, weil sie nicht in der Lage sind, sich das Gelesene vor-zustellen, sagen die Lehrer … Für sie haben die Worte aufgehört, Bilder hervorzurufen, weil die immer schneller wahrgenommenen Bilder die Worte ersetzen müßten”; Virilio (1989, 37–38): “Die Entstehung der Logistik der Wahrnehmung und ihrer wieder zum Leben erweckten Delokalisierungsvektoren der geometrischen Optik führte dagegen zu einer Eugenik des Blicks, zu einer sofortigen Abtreibung der Vielfalt von mentalen Bildern und der Vielzahl von Bild-Geschöpfen, die dazu verurteilt waren, nicht mehr auf die Welt zu kommen und niemals irgendwo das Tageslicht zu erblicken”.

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In this witty exchange between two of the New York émigrés staffing the cultural studies department of the novel’s College-on-the-Hill, which is academic tall talk as much as it is autobiographical confession, the reference to a memorable sequence of a 1947 movie does not replace the description of a character, but serves to point to the experiential foundation of what Grappa stylises into a “personal breakthrough”. The absence of any ekphrastic effort indicates a reliance on the availability of the moving images referred to in the cultural archive57 – at least that of Lasher and Grappa’s in-group of film noir aficionados.58 Readers are not provided with a verbal representation of the cinematic images, but are left with Grappa’s idiosyncratic reading which makes psycho villain Udo’s murder of wheelchair-bound Mrs Rizzo into a counselling session on how to conduct your life. Most interestingly, Grappa draws from the filmic model a bodily mode of expression that inextricably combines visual and audible aspects, just like movies come with a video and an audio track.59 While the repeated mention of ‘laugh’ (sadistic or creepy) already tends towards the acoustic, (ghoulish) ‘titter’ firmly locates what Grappa copies in the realm of the audible. But just as a laughing sound can hardly be (re-)produced without the concomitant countenance, ‘hyena-faced’ turns our attention to the visual realisation of that laughter. At any rate, it provides readers with a definite visual frame for a comparison of Widmark’s facial expression, making it even more memorable. Interestingly, zoological folklore about the metaphorically invoked animal, particularly in its spotted variety, specifically highlights two things: its laughing countenance and its giggling sounds, making it the heraldic animal of liter-

57 The relevant sequence of the movie is available at http://theredlist.com/wiki-2-17-513-863820-836-view-film-noir-thriller-9-profile-1947-bkiss-of-death-b.html. 58 Cf. the thoughts of Jack Gladney introducing the scene in the refectory of which the dialogue between Lasher and Grappa forms part (DeLillo 1998, 214): “Murray said that Elliot Lasher had a film noir face. His features were sharply defined, his hair perfumed with some oily extract. I had the curious thought that these men were nostalgic for black-and-white, their longings dominated by achromatic values, personal extremes of postwar urban gray”. 59 Not that there is anything specifically filmic about the audiovisual combination (nor about the mediated nature of experience Grappa’s avowal implies). In fact, DeLillo’s book makes very much the same point with regard to television, albeit in an analytic or distributed rather than a synthetic or compressed fashion. Instead of emphasising the co-presence of image and sound, it splits (the Gladney family’s) television into a mere acoustic presence on the one hand, and a screen for the projection of images on the other. In the first mode, which has much in common with radio, the television sets in the household, always running, contribute strange pieces of dialogue to the family conversations; in the second, which rather resembles a cinematic setup, television functions as electronic hearth assembling the family members to watch footage of catastrophes.



60

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Fig. 1: Richard Widmark as Tommy Udo, “hyena-faced”60

ary audio-visuality, that is, of the bimodality Grappa seems to have in mind.61 I will return to the question of descriptive multimodality below, with the help of another example taken from DeLillo’s archpostmodernist novel. These two examples (Tabucchi and DeLillo) have in common that they presume on the part of their readers if not familiarity with, then at least the ability to unearth the films they conjure up from some sort of memory. This may be personal memory for the film nerds in DeLillo, or the internet for the literary scholar following in their wake; in any case, it relieves the texts from descriptive tasks, enabling a descriptive minimalism to re-fer concretisation to the visual cultural archive. And the more classical and generic the reference, the less need there is for precise search instructions. Thus, where a good amount of filmic metadata seems necessary for the Hathaway movie, Eisenstein’s requires only an allusion. At some point, it might no longer be necessary to insinuate the filmic imprint of an abridged description at all. Such seems to be the case with the opening of Paul Auster’s Ghosts (1986): First of all there is Blue. Later there is White, and then there is Black, and before the beginning there is Brown. Brown broke him in, Brown taught him the ropes, and when Brown grew old, Blue took over. That is how it begins. The place is New York, the time is the present, and neither one will ever change. Blue goes to his office every day and sits at his desk, waiting for something to happen. For a long time nothing does, and then a man named White walks through the door, and that is how it begins.

60 This screenshot can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss_of_Death_(1947_film)#/ media/File:Kissofdeath.jpg. 61 In a remarkable twist, recent research came to see the hyena’s “maniacal giggle” as a sign of frustration (cf. “Hyena Giggles: No Laughing Matter” at http://www.livescience.com/12327-hyenagiggles-laughing-matter.html), which is pretty much the reason for Udo’s killing of Mrs Rizzo as soon as he realises that her son, who he was after, has already left town.

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The case seems simple enough. White wants Blue to follow a man named Black and to keep an eye on him for as long as necessary. While working for Brown, Blue did many tail jobs, and this one seems no different, perhaps even easier than most. Blue needs the work, and so he listens to White and doesn’t ask many questions. He assumes it’s a marriage case and that White is a jealous husband. White doesn’t elaborate. He wants a weekly report, he says, sent to such and such a postbox number, typed out in duplicate on pages so long and so wide. A check will be sent each week to Blue in the mail. White then tells Blue where Black lives, what he looks like, and so on. When Blue asks White how long he thinks that case will last, White says he doesn’t know. Just keep sending the reports, he says, until further notice. (Auster 1990, 161)

In terms of ‘descriptive preliminaries’ (Wall’s term, → 3.), this exposition seems to have reached the degree zero of descriptivity. The traditional functions of the descriptive are still fulfilled in that we are given a setting/chronotope, but it is reduced to the bare minimum of naming the time (the present) and the place (New York) in which the action ‘takes place’ (as they say). The actants/characters are properly introduced by sentences involving a form of ‘to be’ in an expletive construction featuring prominently in many attempts to determine the linguistic form of description (‘there is’), but all that is provided are mere names from which even the slightest semblance of descriptivity is voided by their mere differential use: far from being telling names, Brown, Blue, White, and Black are just meant to be four different positions on an arbitrary scale (could have been Huey, Dewey, and Louie).62 Furthermore, a prosopographic description is reported on, but not

62 There is a point to be made that Blue, if not exactly feeling blue at the beginning, will do so in the course of his stakeout on Black. In the meantime, however, he reminds readers of the many different collocations and connotations the colour can have, none of which seem to make a lot of sense if applied to his character – it is merely his name (just as his eye colour): “Everything we see, everything we touch – everything in the world has its own color. […] Take blue for example, he says. There are bluebirds and blue jays and blue herons. There are cornflowers and periwinkles. There is noon over New York. There are blueberries, huckleberries, and the Pacific Ocean. There are blue devils and blue ribbons and blue bloods. There is a voice singing the blues. There is my father’s police uniform. There are blue laws and blue movies. There are my eyes and my name. He pauses, suddenly at a loss for more blue things, and then moves on to white” (Auster 1990, 217). As if to make sure, he goes through the same motions for white (Auster 1990, 217) and black (Auster 1990, 217–218). White (the character), in addition, is not even white; he is performing a masquerade, as the next paragraph (Auster 1990, 161–162) informs us: “it’s impossible for him [Blue] not to notice certain things about White. The black beard, for example, and the overly bushy eyebrows. And then there is the skin, which seems inordinately white, as though covered with powder. Blue is no amateur in the art of disguise, and it’s not difficult for him to see through this one”. Again, a descriptive function might lie in wait here, foreshadowing the not impossible hypothesis that White might either be black/Black or at least have conspired with him to trap Blue into the case. However, if Blue has seen through White’s disguise, even though he does not



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carried out (“White tells Blue […] what he [Black] looks like”), which amounts to a refusal to describe even where a descriptive mode is prompted.63 Finally, the text achieves a kind of negative experiential iconicity, in that the “long time” Blue is “waiting for something to happen” is related in the shortest of sentences, in which the utmost degree of chronographic compression is marked by the use of ‘do’ as a pro-form to avoid the repetition of the verb ‘to happen’ (“For a long time nothing does”). In short, everything is geared towards an eschewal of description in favour of narrative, that is, the construction of names for the sequences of actions recounted under the proairetic code. The first of these, which tells the prehistory of the story about to begin, can be subsumed under the heading of ‘to succeed’ (“Brown broke him in, Brown taught him the ropes, and when Brown grew old, Blue took over.”). The second marks the beginning of a larger sequence which will be the principal story of the book and comes with the label ‘to detect’ (“The case seems simple enough  …”), which recalls the generic frame needed to follow the plot as that of detective fiction, or, as will soon become clear, anti(Tani 1984) or metaphysical detection (Merivale and Sweeney 1999). Turning to setting in a narrower sense, the way Blue’s office is handled seems to support the impression of descriptive minimalism as well. The only items of interior furnishing supplied are a desk and a door, and these are all but superfluous given the prior cue that the type of room in question is an office. The lack of syntactic modification on the nouns, except for the possessive pronouns indicating that the room is Blue’s (“his office”, “his desk”), is emblematic for the visual barrenness of this interior space, and its constituents can be seen to appear when they are needed: the desk when it needs to be sat at, the door when someone enters the room. All of which suspiciously resembles Wall’s (2006) account of the manner in which interior spaces could be handled in early novels. So if one were to assume that Auster’s description is meant to be “rehydrated” (Wall’s term again) by contemporary readers, what could be the shared cultural storehouse determining the implicit shape of the room beforehand? The ‘rule of taste’ (in a manner of speaking) allowing readers, who are always also viewers, to imaginatively expand on Blue’s office, derives – so it would seem – from the generic formula of noir detective movies, which by the mid-1980s had been generously

have time to give voice to his conclusions (“So Blue begins to think he was wrong, that the case has nothing to do with marriage. But he gets no farther than this, for White is still speaking to him, and Blue must concentrate on following his words”, Auster 1990, 162), why does it take him such great pains to arrive at them (again) later on (e.  g. Auster 1990, 203)? 63 Another instance of descriptive deferral is “so long and so wide”, which provides readers with the information that White had stated the size of the pages to be used for reporting to him, but does not specify it.

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archived and disseminated through video rental stores and re-runs on television. Nor should the lack of any explicit heteromedial reference be thought of as undermining the validity of the claim, as the mere generic frame of detective fiction seems sufficient to evoke film noir as one of its major realisations, given how routinely it is thought to be represented primarily by the hard-boiled detective movie (Blaser and Blaser 2008, s.  p.). If needed, further evidence might be found in that “the present” in which Blue’s story is set is the year 1947 (Auster 1990, 189) and, on a more playful level, the way the lack of colours (apart from the names of the characters) turns it into a thoroughly black-and-white affair (certainly an affair involving Black and White). Plausible readerly supplements that lend Blue’s office a spatial and visual concreteness conspicuously missing in its textual evocation might include, among others (such as Venetian blinds and a rotary dial telephone): first, an emeralite lamp (also known as banker’s lamp), which is a brass-based desk lamp with a green glass shade, notably of the kind produced by H.G. McFaddin & Co., a movable piece of furniture particularly popular in the 1930s (which is ‘the present’ of the hard-boiled detective stories on which many films noirs are based);64 second, a frosted-glass door, either a half-light door or a 1-lite French door, with the name (and profession) of its user printed on the outside, in the case at hand something like ‘Blue, P.I.’. Offices furnished in such a way belong to the stock images of the filmic genre, though there is a certain degree of freedom as to which example(s) to memorise/retrieve from the cultural archive. Randomly chosen, the following screenshot shows one of many versions of a generic film noir office.  65

Fig. 2: Office in Double ­Indemnity (1944), dir. Billy Wilder65 64 For a brief history of these lamps cf. http://emeralite.com/history.html. 65 The picture is part of a series found at http://www.connectstatesboro.com/news/article/6230/. Actually, not a detective’s, but an insurance agent’s office, which again reminds us that not all film noir is of the detective brand.



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The least kind of operation that can be expected to be performed by readers of the spare description of the office is a kind of metonymic expansion of the few (and redundant) items given in the text into a catalogue of things in the room, at least some of them (as the lamp or the door) equipped with a distinct visual signature as drawn from a more or less subjective or arbitrary selection from the corpus of noir films. Additionally, the imaginative projection of the office as a more richly decorated interior space might reinforce the notion that its depiction is actually focalised through Blue. Whereas the overall narrative situation exhibits an uneasy balance between an authorial narrative voice (who knows that the chronotope “will never change”) and a figural presentation of events in the present tense, in the perception of the office, Blue’s point of view (sitting at desk) is tentatively marked as the vantage point of observing White’s entry (walking through the door). And the filmic backdrop seems to support a visualisation of the scene at least from the inside of the office (if not from behind the desk) by suggesting a view of the writing on the door as mirror-inverted, back-to-front ( .I.P ,eulB ). Which is to say that the opening passage of Auster’s novel, while itself almost stripped of visual content, is still able to guide a visualisation not intersubjectively determinate, but richly supported by pictures stored in externalised cultural archives. As in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century novels, “spaces are designated by general terms, […] which leave the blanks of a ‘Chamber’ to be filled […] by the reader’s imagination” (Wall 2011, s.  p.); unlike them, postmodernist novels can draw on a stock of images which have sedimented into a cultural memory formatted by the means of disseminating pictures, or, for that matter, of circulating goods, which brings up another cluster of examples of abbreviated description. As my interest is with the descriptive economy of the postmodernist novel rather than the larger topic of post-1945 economic developments producing what is variously called late (Jameson 1991) or neo-capitalism (Derrida 1994, 46), the following discussion will only address the role of branded products in supplying (visual) anchors for the imaginative expansion of textual worlds. If one were to situate the recourse to branded products as a textual strategy of coming to terms with the proliferation of goods and the fragmentation of the landscape of things which accompanied the rise of capitalism and resulted in a “collapse of the memory storehouse” (Wall 2006, 39)66, one would have to bring into focus that moment in literary and cultural history in which goods change from mere symbols of status into complete signs of character. For while the reduction of

66 Cf. Lynch (1998, 4): “readers had to negotiate the experience of a marketplace that was choke-full of strange new consumables and that beggared description”.

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commodities to their sign value, their “place in a differential system of prestige” (Kellner 2007, s.  p.), may be characteristic for consumer societies at large, the wholesale equation of (the names of) branded goods with (the character of) their possessors as a common descriptive device seems to be an achievement of postmodernism. In high postmodernist fiction, mention (rather than detailed description) of clothing, for instance, no longer serves a characterising function, but comes to replace characterisation per se, to the point that “brand loyalty is synecdochic of identity” (Wallace 1993, 167). Examples of this abound in the texts of the ‘literary Brat Pack’, most prominently in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991), as Bennett (2014, 143) reiterates: “Describing almost every single person he encounters with excessively detailed accounts of the designer clothing that they are wearing, Bateman essentially reduces his mistress, Courtney, to a ‘Krizia cream silk blouse, a Krizia rust tweed skirt and silk-satin d’Orsay pumps from Manolo Blahnik’”.67 Not that this kind of reduction of prosopopeia to a very selective form of prosopographia has anything to do with Bateman’s sociopathic outlook (and would thus be characteristic of him instead of her) or with the fact that his brand shorthand is still at least mildly detailed; the same procedure, abridged to the utmost, was already noted by Wallace (1993, 167) with reference to the texts of another member of the group: “It’s true that there’s something sad about the fact that young lion David Leavitt’s sole descriptions of certain story characters is that their T-shirts have certain brand names on them. But the fact is that, for most of the educated young readership for whom Leavitt writes, members of a generation raised and nourished on messages equating what one consumes with who one is, Leavitt’s descriptions do the job”. These characters are what they wear (and not much else) in a sense beyond the proverbial ‘clothes make the man’ (in Courtney’s case, the girl), primarily because we are not given much else in ethopoeic terms.68 The reason why the descriptive device of naming clothing brands works, though, seems to have to do with the visual as much as the identitarian associations it triggers. After all, brand-name clothes do not only adhere to the brand’s characteristic style (including cut, colour scheme, etc.), most easily identifiable with designer clothing of the Blahnik variety, but often come with the logo of the

67 The sentence can be found in Ellis (1991, 8). The later career of Blahnik shoes in HBO’s television series Sex and the City (1998–2004) neatly confirms Wallace’s (1993) thoughts about the appropriation of postmodernist irony by television. 68 For the venerable origins of the saying through Shakespeare (“the apparel proclaims the man”, Hamlet Act 1, Scene 3, l. 73) to antiquity cf. Atkins (2012). The importance of clothing as a visual means of characterisation in the theatrical context need not be emphasised; even there, however, it is rarely used as exclusively as it is in Brat Pack fiction.



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brand conspicuously printed on them, more often than not a stylised version of the name, which could still be read, but in fact is perceived as an image.69 All of which contributes to the fact that a brand name evokes the visual image of its products in addition to if not before it recalls their public image. The branded product as introduced in “image-fiction” (Wallace 1993, 171) has a visual presence beside a characterising function; it conjures up memories of a certain texture (or advertisements that substitute such memories), which allow readers to concretise their visualisations of the fictional world. Thus, even where clothes and accoutrements are already aptly introduced by descriptive phrases (“silk-satin d’Orsay pumps”), brand names add an imaginary sensory richness otherwise missing (“from Manolo Blahnik”). In fact, Ellis’s yuppie-esque references to global luxury brands with their inevitable implications with regard to social status might overemphasise the ascription of prestige at the expense of the more basic aisthetic qualities of goods which the mention of brand names may call up. Also, the use of national brands, that is, of the products whose circulation constitutes nations as marketed communities, might prove more effective when it comes to enriching descriptions with connotations of visual and material texture, or indeed, synaesthetic combinations of, say, packaging and flavour, as in the following example taken from the beginning of Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985): The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus. In single file they eased around the orange I-beam sculpture and moved toward the dormitories. The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationery and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled-up rugs and sleeping bags; with bicycles, skis, rucksacks, English and Western saddles, inflated rafts. As cars slowed to a crawl and stopped, students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects inside: the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and cassettes; the hairdryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows; the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the junk food still in shopping bags – onionand-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut crème patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints. (DeLillo 1998, 3)

Even though it is apparently extensive, this descriptive passage is defective in more than one way from a traditional descriptological point of view: it is not strictly perspectival, as the position from which autodiegetic narrator Jack

69 A fact well-known with regard to cattle brands, which not only provide the etymology of corporate branding, but also commonly incorporate the initials of their owner (the brand name being a twentieth-century invention) while being designed for easy visual recognition (‘pyroglyphics’, cf. Stamp 2013).

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Gladney observes the scene70 remains unclear (not to mention the fact that his view seems to be as unimpeded as it is hyperopic), though we are later told that he is in his office (DeLillo 1998, 4). Moreover, the whole spatial layout of the scene is uncertain, though the “orange I-beam sculpture”71 holds a promise of spatiality (as well as colourfulness) never honoured in the following metonymic expansions listing the things brought along by the students, which are as devoid of colour as they are of spatial arrangement. The enumerations unfold as the students unload, and the objects processed before our eyes are contiguous in time rather than space. There is still an indication of social status in that the arrival at the college is clearly a middle-class event (station wagons, but no golf clubs), which neatly captures the middling quality of everything about the College-on-the-Hill. However, the descriptive appeal does not reside in the extensive lists, but rather in the intensities captured in the food brands toward the end of the passage. The references to Waffelos, “a sweetened cereal with artificial maple syrup flavor” (as it says on the packaging), Kabooms, a “sugary oat cereal with marshmallow stars”, of Dum-Dum pops, which came in a range of flavours including the so-called Mystery Flavor created when production switched from one flavour to another, and Mystic mints, an oreo-type cookie covered with chocolate mint icing, can rely on the common knowledge of contemporary readers about both the packaging (including its colours and tactile impression) and the content (including its shape and taste), allowing them to complete the mere names with a whole range of sensory echoes. Seen in this light, DeLillo’s descriptive procedure is a demonstration of the difference (cf. Rippl 2005, 70) between what classical rhetoric called enargaia, the method of detailing which introduces all the objects, the stuff of the fictional world (here, the catalogue form), and energaia, the way (some of) these things are brought to life by vivid depiction (here, by descriptive abbreviation). In energetic terms, mentioning the four brand names does more to make the event a lively presence than the whole array of lists surrounding them.72 Nor does it seem that

70 The next paragraph starts: “I’ve witnessed this spectacle every September for twenty-one years” (DeLillo 1998, 3). 71 The arts connoisseur may spot an allusion to the work of Italian American sculptor Mark di Suvero (aka Marco Polo Levi-Schiff di Suvero), the most prominent artist using I-beams in the US (I-beams being structural steel elements with an I- or H-shaped cross-section). The reference may well be to something like Suvero’s The Calling (1981–1982), located at the terminus of East Wisconsin Avenue, Milwaukee. 72 Accidentally, it even helps situate the action of the novel in its time, which is strictly contemporary to its date of publication (Waffelos were discontinued in 1984; Mystic Mint was registered as a trademark in 1985).



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Fig. 3: Waffelos73

Fig. 4: Kaboom74

Fig. 5: Dum-Dum Pops75

Fig. 6: Mystic Mint76

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73 747576

DeLillo’s book simply feeds on a visual cultural context that strictly precedes it, though the familiarity with the products the descriptive device presupposes must rely heavily on television (whose commercials introduce us to the packaging) and the supermarket (whose displays make the foods available), both of which are hailed as providers of sensory experience in the course of the novel.77 That these 73 From Tropf (2009). 74 From Ace (2013). 75 From http://www.candyindustry.com/articles/85091-a-smarter-look-for-dum-dums. 76 From http://www.socialgrocery.com/products/Nabisco/Cookies-Mystic-Mint. 77 Cf. with regard to the supermarket Murray Siskind’s remarks in DeLillo (1998, 37–38): “Everything is concealed in symbolism, hidden by veils of mystery and layers of cultural material. But it is psychic data, absolutely. The large doors slide open, they close unbidden. Energy waves, incident radiation. All the letters and numbers are here, all the colors of the spectrum, all the voices and sounds, all the code words and ceremonial phrases”. With regard to television

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items of confectionery have come to be remembered as signature 1980s matter, inscribed into the formative patterns of (male) experience,78 is, however, at least as much due to their literary stylisation into signs of the times as to their being advertised as appealing objects of consumption at that time. Far from solely leaning on nerdy weblogs, the continued presence of discontinued convenience food depends on the literary transmission of its heritage as much as on memories of contemporary encounters on supermarket shelves, breakfast tables, or television screens. Without such encounters, the descriptive shorthand would not be functional; but without literature’s recalling them, they would irrevocably fade into the background noise of the period. Finally, the literary mise-en-scène of branded goods not only reflects the commodity fetishism of postmodern culture, but guides reflection on it as well. Just as the reduction of character to brand-name clothing at least calls attention to the commodification of vision it implies, even the most playful and ironic applications of brand-conscious descriptive shorthand might thus be seen as agencies of a critique of postmodern visuality. In Mark Leyner’s My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (1990), a book branded by Wallace (1993, 191) as marking the “far dark frontier of the fiction of image” for its “absorption of not just the icons, techniques, and phenomena of television, but of television’s whole objective”, the innocuous and highly gendered colour game a waitress engages the anonymous narrator in leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth: what color is your mozzarella? i asked the waitress  it’s pink – it’s the same color as the top of a mennen lady speed stick antiperspirant dispenser, y’know that color?  no, ma’am, i said  it’s the same pink they use for the gillette daisy disposable razors for women  … y’know that color?  nope  y’know the pink they use on wrappers for carefree panty shields?  nuh-uh  well, it’s the same pink as pepto-bismol, y’know that color?  oh yeah, i said, well, do you have spaghetti? (Leyner 1990, 144)79

cf. Siskind in DeLillo (1998, 51): “You have to learn how to look. You have to open yourself to the data. TV offers incredible amounts of psychic data. It opens ancient memories of world birth, it welcomes us into the grid, the network of little buzzing dots that make up the picture pattern. […] Look at the wealth of data concealed in the grid, in the bright packaging, the jingles, the slice-oflife commercials, the products hurtling out of darkness, the coded messages and endless repetitions, like chants, like mantras”. Cf. Duvall (1998, 433): “In White Noise […] the imagistic space of the supermarket and the shopping mall coincides with the conceptual space of television”. 78 The eighties are the time of the childhood whose breakfast cereals Ace (2013) can never escape; Tropf’s (2009) “tribute to discontinued cereals” centres on the decade as well and is posted on a website “full of Stuff for Guys” (www.gunaxin.com). 79 Also cited in Wallace (1993, 190), albeit with numerous omissions and typographical errors.



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This descriptive exercise is certainly notable for both its gimmicky vehicle, though pink mozzarella is hardly an unusual thing to encounter in Leyner’s tabloid cyberpunk world, and for its narrative inconsequentiality, which almost seems to parody the emphasis on decision-making in proairetic definitions of plot. From a narrative perspective, the whole discussion is utterly pointless, as it neither initiates a relevant relation between the two characters, nor does his choice of spaghetti change anything of import for the story. While thus indicative of the “amphetaminic eagerness to wow the reader” (Wallace 1995, 191), the episode does seem to have a descriptive point. Below its witty surface lurks an insight into the commercial colonisation of even the seemingly simplest perceptive qualities of objects – in this case: their colour. Whether it is pink in general, or the specific pinkness of the cheese that is in question, in order to communicate about it, the waitress has to resort to the only palette they could both recognise, which is that of commercially available branded products.80 Pink being the gendered colour it is, this still proves problematic, but in the end, they manage to find a common point of reference and settle the issue. Where Auster’s Blue still resorted to natural occurrences of colours to calibrate his vision (blue birds, blue flowers, blue fruit), Leyner’s characters live in a television-saturated world that knows only the colours of brand packaging. Their frame of reference looks something like the following (Figs. 7–10).81 Compared to this approach of coming to terms with the varieties of a colour, the handling of the shades of red in Brontë’s description of the red-room must indeed seem hopelessly innocent82. It is also strikingly different from the use of subjective colour( word)s in modernist literature, whose epitome is Joyce’s (1986, 4) “snotgreen”. For as long as the literary history of colour(ed) descriptions remains to be written, suffice it to say that Esrock’s example warning of the dangers of mimetic literalism (“red red rose”, → 3.) seriously oversimplifies matters, as does, inversely, Horlacher’s (1998, 25) unqualified inclusion of colour

80 Not to mention that some colours have become branded elements of corporate design themselves, as is the case with the German telecommunications provider Deutsche Telekom AG’s variant of magenta (colour code #E20074). 81 It is not easy to get one’s hands on pictures of the 1990 versions of the respective packaging designs. Fortunately, the products mentioned have not been discontinued yet, so the illustrations are of their present-day incarnations, taken from random retailer’s homepages. 82 Brontë (2000, 10, my italics): “A bed supported on massive pillars of mahogany, hung with curtains of deep red damask, stood out like a tabernacle in the centre; the two large windows, with their blinds already drawn down, were half shrouded in festoons and falls of similar drapery; the carpet was red; the table at the foot of the bed was covered with a crimson cloth; the walls were a soft fawn colour, with a blush of pink in it”.

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Fig. 7: “mennen lady speed stick antiperspirant dispenser”83

Fig. 8: “gillette daisy disposable razors for women”

Fig. 9: “carefree panty shields”

Fig. 10: “pepto-bismol” 84

8384

83 The ‘Teen Spirit’ variant; the colour of the standard version is actually lavender. 84 The medication itself (bismuth subsalicylate or pink bismuth) is of roughly the same colour.



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adjectives in his list of literary techniques of visualisation. In Leyner’s text, colour has not only become a problematic visual datum, but the way his characters circumscribe it alerts his readers to the (re-)standardisation of perception that branded goods can effect, thereby reconstituting a hard and fast store of images leaving its imprint on every act of imaginative engagement with the world(s) of fiction. In this way, Wallace’s (1993, 191) criticism of Leyner’s novel seems to be its very message, namely, that “in the absence of any credible, noncommercial guides for living, the freedom to choose is about as ‘liberating’ as a bad acid trip”.85 In formatting our vision, commodities inscribe themselves indelibly into our ways of (visually) coming to terms with the world.

5 Conclusion: Where to Go from Here? This brief exploration of some versions of postmodernist descriptivity hopefully demonstrates the viability of the framework for a visual cultural history of the descriptive. It tries to take into account the complex relations of literature to visual culture, in fact, the role of literature as a visual cultural agency performing a variety of functions ranging from critical reflection to affirmative iteration. For the purposes of the particular run undertaken here, it relied on the dynamic interplay of narrative and descriptive moments in and across literary periods, without attaching either mode to an ontological foundation in fictional reference or linguistic realisation. Other textual indicators of the historicity of forms of descriptivity might be equally useful: for instance, a reformulation along literary historical lines of Lodge’s (1977) typological differentiation of descriptive strategies along a spectrum ranging from a metaphorical extreme (where description follows a logic of similarity) to a metonymical one (where description follows a logic of contiguity) might reveal that different “types of description” prevail in different periods. Postmodernist descriptivity, so it would seem, is dominated by the metonymic type, as texts offer us an office, a desk and a door (Auster) or the

85 The difference between postmodernist fiction’s mordant irony and television’s reverent one (“We can solve the problem by celebrating it. Transcend feelings of mass-defined angst by genuflecting to them. We can be reverently ironic”, Wallace 1993, 190) can be seen by comparing Leyner’s treatment of shaded colour with that of television sitcom Frasier’s innocuous handling of character Niles Crane’s obsession with the range of colours, for instance in episode 7 of season 9 (“Bla-Z-Boy”, 2001) with regard to the colour of a new carpet somewhere between almond and buff (cf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGA8z3ycKcE).

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load of station wagons, enumerated item by item (DeLillo), whereas modernist fiction might be defined by a higher incidence of metaphoric descriptivity.86 But before moving on to fill in the gaps between Wall’s descriptological history leading up to Victorian literature and my account of (some) postmodernist fiction, it would seem imperative to further explore the complexities of postmodernist descriptivity, which also enables descriptive vignettes cutting across the all-too-neat formulas insinuated in the course of this article. After all, we might also end up with an example that does it all – that refuses to describe, but still does it; that displays perspectivity (above all, horizonal limitation) in the midst of cliché; and which suddenly turns from metonymical perception to metaphorical epiphany. So here’s Jack Gladney again: How surprised I was, nearing the top of the hill, to see that she [Winnie Richards] had stopped. She wore a Gore-Tex jacket puffed up with insulation and she was looking to the west. I walked slowly toward her. When I cleared a row of private homes I saw what is was that had made her pause. The edge of the earth trembled in a darkish haze. Upon it lay the sun, going down like a ship in a burning sea. Another postmodern sunset, rich in romantic imagery. Why try to describe it? It’s enough to say that everything in our field of vision seemed to exist in order to gather the light of this event. Not that this was one of the stronger sunsets. There had been more dynamic colors, a deeper sense of narrative sweep. (DeLillo 1998, 227, my italics)

Bibliography Ace (of Spades). “No Matter How Hard We Run, We Can Never Escape Our Childhood Breakfast Cereals.” 2013. http://ace.mu.nu/archives/343109.php Adam, Jean-Michel. La Description. Paris: P.U.F., 1993. Atkins, Alexander. “Clothes Make the Man.” 2012. https://atkinsbookshelf.wordpress.com/ tag/clothes-maketh-the-man/ Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy. City of Glass / Ghosts / The Locked Room. London: Penguin, 1990. Bal, Mieke, and Norman Bryson. “Semiotics and Art History.” Art Bulletin 73.2 (1991): 174–208.

86 To support this claim is beyond the scope of this article. It is, at least, not difficult to think of suitable examples, for instance, sticking to the red rose paradigm: “And then, opening her eyes, how fresh, like frilled linen clean from a laundry laid in wicker trays, the roses looked; and dark and prim the red carnations, holding their heads up; and all the sweet peas spreading their bowls, tinged violet, snow white, pale – as if it were the evening and girls in muslin frocks came out to pick sweet peas and roses after the superb summer’s day” (Woolf 1992, 14). Within the synecdochic movement from whole to parts, the visual impetus here relies on the metaphoric parts.



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Barth, John. “The Literature of Exhaustion [1967].” The Friday Book and Other Non-Fiction. London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984a. 62–76. Barth, John. “The Literature of Replenishment [1979].” The Friday Book and Other Non-Fiction. London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984b. 193–206. Barthes, Roland. “The Reality Effect [Fr. 1968].” French Literary Theory Today: A Reader. Ed. Tzvetan Todorov. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982. 11–17. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. An Essay [Fr. 1970]. Transl. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Beaujour, Michel. “Some Paradoxes of Description.” Yale French Studies 61, 1981: 27–59. Bennett, Robert. “Deconstructing Neoliberalism. Sledgehammering the End of History.” Beauty, Violence, Representation. Ed. Lisa Dickson and Maryna Romanets. New York: Routledge, 2014. 139–158. Blaser, John J., and Stephanie L.M. Blaser. “Film Noir and the Hard-Boiled Detective Hero.” 2008. http://www.filmnoirstudies.com/essays/detective_hero.asp Borges, Jorge Luis, and Adolfo Bioy Casares. “Ein Nachmittag mit Ramón Bonavena.” Gemeinsame Werke. Bd. 2: Chroniken von Bustos Domecq / Neue Geschichten von Bustos Domecq. Ed. Gisbert Haefs. München: C. Hanser, 1985. 17–23. Bortolussi, Marisa, and Peter Dixon. Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre [31848]. Ed. Richard J. Dunn. New York: W.W. Norton, 32000. Brooks, Peter. Realist Vision. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005. Chamberlain, Charles. “The Meaning of Prohairesis in Aristotle’s Ethics.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 114 (1984): 147–157. Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1978. Culler, Jonathan. “Philosophy and Literature: The Fortunes of the Performative.” Poetics Today 21.3 (2000): 503–519. Davis, Whitney. A General Theory of Visual Culture. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011. DeLillo, Don. White Noise [1985]. Text and Criticism. Ed. Mark Osteen. New York: Penguin, 1998. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International [Fr. 1993]. Transl. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. Duvall, John N. “The (Super)Marketplace of Images: Television as Unmediated Mediation in DeLillo’s White Noise.” DeLillo 1998. 432–455. Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. London: Picador, 1991. Esrock, Ellen. The Reader’s Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. Fludernik, Monika. Erzähltheorie. Eine Einführung. Darmstadt: WBG, 22008 [12006]. Fludernik, Monika, and Suzanne Keen. “Introduction.” Interior Spaces and Narrative Perspective before 1850. Ed. Monika Fludernik and Suzanne Keen. Special Issue of Style 48 (4), 2016: 453–460. Fowles, John. “Notes on an Unfinished Novel.” Afterwords. Novelists on Their Novels. Ed. Thomas McCormack. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. 161–175. Genette, Gérard. “Frontières du Récit.” Figures II. Paris: Seuil, 1969. 49–69. Halsall, A. W. “Beschreibung.” Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik. Bd. 1. Ed. Gert Ueding. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992. 1495–1510. Hamon, Philippe. Introduction à l‘Analyse du Descriptif. Paris: Hachette, 1981. Hamon, Philippe (Ed.). La Description Littéraire. Anthologie de Textes Théoriques et Critiques. Paris: Macula, 1991.

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Herman, David. “Description, Narrative, and Explanation. Text-Type Categories and the Cognitive Foundations of Discourse Competence.” Poetics Today 29.3 (2008): 437–472. Hofmeyr, Isabel. “Evangelical Realism: The Transnational Making of Genre in The Pilgrim’s Progress.” Reception, Appropriation, Recollection. Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’. Ed. W.R. Owens and Stuart Sim. Bern: P. Lang, 2007. 119–145. Horlacher, Stefan. Visualität und Visualitätskritik im Werk von John Fowles. Tübingen: G. Narr, 1998. Horstkotte, Silke, and Karin Leonhard. “Introduction: Seeing Perception.” Seeing Perception. Ed. Silke Horstkotte and Karin Leonhard. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007. 1–22. Irwin, Michael. Picturing: Description and Illusion in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1979. Isekenmeier, Guido. “Motion Pictures: Literary Images of Horizontal Movement.” Moving Images – Mobile Viewers: 20th Century Visuality. Ed. Renate Brosch. Berlin: Lit, 2011. 195–207. Isekenmeier, Guido. “Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the Failure of Narrative Imperialism.” Unpublished Manuscript, 2013a. Isekenmeier, Guido. “Visual Event Realism.” Realisms in Contemporary Culture. Theories, Politics, and Medial Configurations. Ed. Dorothee Birke and Stella Butter. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013b. 214–226, 228–229. Isekenmeier, Guido. “In Richtung einer Theorie der Interpiktorialität.” Interpiktorialität: Theorie und Geschichte der Bild-Bild-Bezüge. Ed. Guido Isekenmeier. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013c. 11–86. Isekenmeier, Guido. “Literary Visuality: Visibility – Visualisation – Description.” Handbook of Intermediality: Literature – Image – Sound – Music. Ed. Gabriele Rippl. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. 325–342. Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response [Gm. 1976]. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1978. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. Johnson, B. S. Albert Angelo [1964]. New York: New Directions, 1987. Johnson, B. S. Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry [1973]. New York: New Directions, 1985. Joyce, James. Ulysses [1922]. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler. New York: Vintage, 1986. Kellner, Douglas. “Jean Baudrillard.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. 2007. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/ Kittay, Jeffrey (Ed.). Towards a Theory of Description. Special Issue of Yale French Studies 61 (1981). Kittler, Friedrich. Optical Media [Gm. 2002]. Cambridge: Polity, 2010. Klotz, Peter. Beschreiben. Grundzüge einer Deskriptologie. Berlin: E. Schmidt, 2013. Koelb, Janice Hewlett. The Poetics of Description. Imagined Places in European Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Korte, Barbara. Körpersprache in der Literatur. Theorie und Geschichte am Beispiel englischer Erzählprosa. Tübingen: A. Francke, 1993. Kurtz, Gunde. Die Literatur im Spiegel ihrer selbst … Italo Calvino, Antonio Tabucchi – zwei Beispiele. Frankfurt/M.: P. Lang, 1992. Lahn, Silke, and Jan Christoph Meister. Einführung in die Erzähltextanalyse. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2008.



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Lee, Earl. “Foreword.” Upton Sinclair. The Jungle. The Uncensored Original Edition. Tucson: See Sharp, 2003. i–vi. Leyner, Mark. My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist. New York: Harmony, 1990. Lodge, David. “Types of Description.” The Modes of Modern Writing. Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature. London: E. Arnold, 1977. 93–103. Lopes, José Manuel. Foregrounded Description in Prose Fiction: Five Cross-Literary Studies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995. Lynch, Deidre Shauna. The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Malmgren, Carl Darryl. Fictional Space in the Modernist and Postmodernist American Novel. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1985. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick [1851]. Ed. John Bryant and Haskell Springer. New York: Pearson Longman, 2006. Mendelsund, Peter. What We See When We Read. A Phenomenology. New York: Vintage, 2014. Merivale, Patricia, and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney (Eds.). Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Mitchell, W. J. T. “Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory.” Critical Inquiry 6 (1980): 539–567. Mosher, Harold F. Jr. “Towards a Poetics of ‘Descriptized’ Narration.” Poetics Today 12.3 (1991): 425–445. Nünning, Ansgar. “Towards a Typology, Poetics and History of Description in Fiction.” Wolf and Bernhart 2007. 91–128. Petz, Georg. Mind Maps. Die Entwicklung der Imitation räumlicher Perspektivität in Landschaftsdeskriptionen englischer Erzählliteratur. Wien: Lit, 2012. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Philosophy of Furniture.” Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine 5 (1840): 243–245. http://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/philfurn.htm Rajewsky, Irina O. Intermedialität. Tübingen: A. Francke, 2002. Rippl, Gabriele. Beschreibungs-Kunst: Zur intermedialen Poetik angloamerikanischer Ikontexte (1880–2000). München: W. Fink, 2005. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. “Temps et Description dans le Récit d’Aujourd’hui.” Pour un Nouveau Roman. Paris: Minuit, 1963. 123–134. Ronen, Ruth. “Description, Narrative and Representation.” Narrative 5.3 (1997): 274–286. Salinger, J. D. “Franny [1951].” Nine Stories. Franny and Zoey, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters. Moscow: Progress, 1982. 177–203. Smuda, Manfred. “Deskriptionsmodalitäten und ihre Funktion im amerikanischen und englischen Roman.” Poetica 12 (1980): 377–396. Stamp, Jimmy. “Decoding the Range: The Secret Language of Cattle Branding.” 2013. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/decoding-the-range-the-secret-languageof-cattle-branding-45246620/?no-ist Tani, Stefano. The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1984. Tricket, Rachel. “‘Curious Eye’: Some Aspects of Visual Description in Eighteenth-Century Literature.” Augustan Studies: Essays in Honor of Irvin Ehrenpreis. Ed. Douglas Lane Patey and Timothy Keegan. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985. 239–252. Tropf, Zach. “A Tribute to Discontinued Cereals.” 2009. http://grub.gunaxin.com/a-tribute-todiscontinued-cereals/11570

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Virilio, Paul. “Eine topographische Amnesie.” Die Sehmaschine [Fr. 1988]. Berlin: Merve, 1989. 7–49. Wall, Cynthia Sundberg. The Prose of Things. Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Wall, Cynthia. “Description.” The Encyclopedia of the Novel. Ed. Peter Logan. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/ tocnode?id=g9781405161848_chunk_g97814051618488_ss1-4 Wallace, David Foster. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 13.2 (1993): 151–194. Wallace, David Foster. “David Lynch Keeps His Head.” 1996. http://www.lynchnet.com/lh/ lhpremiere.html Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding [1957]. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Wolf, Werner. “Musicalized Fiction and Intermediality. Theoretical Aspects of Word and Music Studies.” Word and Music Studies: Defining the Field. Ed. Walter Bernhart, Steven P. Scher and Werner Wolf. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. 37–58. Wolf, Werner. “The Emergence of Experiential Iconicity and Spatial Perspective in Landscape Descriptions in English Fiction.” The Motivated Sign: Iconicity in Language and Literature 2. Ed. Olga Fischer and Max Nänny. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 2001. 323–350. Wolf, Werner. “Description as a Transmedial Mode of Representation: General Features and Possibilities of Realization in Painting, Fiction and Music.” Wolf and Bernhart 2007. 1–87. Wolf, Werner, and Walter Bernhart (Eds.). Description in Literature and Other Media. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Wolf, Werner. “Illusion (Aesthetic).” The Living Handbook of Narratology. Ed. Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier and Wolf Schmid. 2011. wikis.sub.uni-hamburg.de/lhn/index. php/Illusion_(Aesthetic) Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway [1925]. Ed. Stella McNichol. London: Penguin, 1992.

II Readerly Visualisations

Silke Horstkotte

Ekphrasis as Genre, Ekphrasis as Metaphenomenology Abstract: Classical ekphrasis is the literary form most closely associated with a specifically literary visuality. Understood as a special poetic genre by some critics, and a general principle of literature by others, this article argues that ekphrasis is most productively regarded as a mode of detailed and self-reflective engagement with a visual artefact. This can be a real artefact that actually exists outside the literary text, or a ‘notional’ artefact whose existence is solely based on the ekphrasis. Although the distinction between ‘actual’ and ‘notional’ ekphrasis matters to some readers, it has not had much of an impact on the mode itself; all ekphrases before the Renaissance were notional ekphrases. In both actual and notional ekphrases, the verbal presentation of a visual artefact directs attention to representation itself, to the differences between verbal and visual representation, to the powers and demands that each imposes on the recipient, and to visuality more generally. Because of their inherent self-reflexivity, texts in the ekphrastic tradition lend themselves to a focused enquiry into what it is like when literature engages in making us see something. Through detailed analyses of three such reflective or ‘metaphenomenological’ texts  – one a classical ekphrasis (Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”), the other two more extended reflections on vision and ekphrasis (Pere Gimferrer’s “The Man in the Turban” and Durs Grünbein’s Vom Schnee) – this chapter makes three points about literary visualisation: firstly, that vivid description in ekphrasis often does not lead to lively visualisations but is difficult, even impossible at times, to visualise (and is never purely visual to begin with); secondly, that visualisation is never, in any case, brought up in isolation by literary texts but is always bound up in specific acts of looking that are tied to an instance of the text, the focaliser; and thirdly, that it is culturally contingent, and based on historical assumptions about vision and visuality.

1 Ekphrasis and Visuality All passionate readers are familiar with the feeling of getting lost in a good book. In part, this immersive experience depends on the disposition of individual DOI 10.1515/9783110378030-005

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readers; some readers are more prone to it than others.1 But immersive reading is not only a reception phenomenon. It also relies on textual strategies that guide and skilfully influence the reader’s investment in the storyworld and its particular features. As Ryan (2001, 4) explains in her landmark study on immersion, the nineteenth-century realist novel in particular “effaced the narrator and the narrative act, penetrated the mind of characters, transported the reader into a virtual body located on the scene of the action, and turned her into the direct witness of events, both mental and physical, that seemed to be telling themselves”. Thanks in part to those narrative features, an imaginative visualisation came to be a dominant pattern for reading fictional texts, with vision being privileged over the other senses. Poems and novels of the period address the pleasure of readers in entering an otherwise inaccessible alternative space of experience by offering richly layered descriptions of landscapes, urban spaces and interiors. Many nineteenth-century novels build on this potential of literature to make the reader vicariously experience events and characters by explicitly inviting the reader into their world. For instance, the authorial narrator in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849) calls upon readers to physically enter the world of the book in order to “see” the characters: “You shall see them, reader. Step into this neat garden-house on the skirts of Whinbury, walk forward in the little parlour – they are there at dinner. […] You and I will join the party, see what is to be seen, and hear what is to be heard” (Brontë 1979, 9). Joseph Conrad expresses a similar aim in his preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897): “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see” (Conrad 1974, xxvi). Historically, this trust in the ability of literature to make readers see something can be traced back to the classical rhetorical device of enargeia, or pictorial vividness. Enargeia was employed in ekphrastic description, in teichoscopy and messenger reports, with the explicit goal of causing emotional and visual impact on its listeners and readers.2 It is this nexus, by way of enargeia, between the written and spoken word and a vivid visualisation that, wittingly or unwittingly, underlies many modern and contemporary ideas about literary visuality.

1 Cf. Keen’s (2007, 2008) work on “high” and “low empathy readers”. In Keen’s ethical theory of narrative, empathy constitutes a key factor in immersive reading experiences. Stockwell (2009) argues that the “sympathy” readers develop for the characters of a “text world” leads to a broadly conceived attitude of “empathy” that bridges text world and actual world. Based on the possible worlds theory of modal logic, Ryan’s (2001) account of immersion in narrative offers a more philosophical model. For the “empathy hypothesis” of narrative, cf. also Breithaupt (2009). 2 On enargeia and the rhetorical production of evidence in classical antiquity and the Early Modern age, cf. Plett (2012). Campe (1997) discusses different models of pictoriality in rhetoric.



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When visuality was rediscovered as a legitimate concern of literary scholarship by the mid-twentieth century New Critics, it was with the aim of demonstrating the “generic spatiality of literary form” (Krieger 1967, 8). This spatial form was allegedly the foundation on which the autonomy of the literary text rested and to which the ekphrastic description of external visual forms contributed. Following Frank’s (1963) influential study of spatial form, ekphrasis was seen not as a specific kind or mode of description, but as a general literary principle that pertained, however, most particularly to poetry. In a seminal article, Krieger (1967, 22) uses Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” as his prime example but also claims ekphrasis as “a general principle of poetics, asserted by every poem in the assertion of its integrity”.3 In Krieger’s reading, the poem itself becomes a higher-order visual object while the plastic spatial object of poetic imitation symbolises “the frozen, stilled world of plastic relationships which must be superimposed upon literature’s turning world to ‘still’ it” (Krieger 1967, 5). This identification of poetry with a near-Platonic visualisation not only moved the major concern away from the sense experience offered by ekphrasis, and towards an understanding of literary interpretation as a purely cognitive, disembodied activity; it also narrowed ekphrasis to the evocation of plastic objects which were considered in spatial rather than genuinely visual terms. Ekphrasis, for Krieger, was all of poetry – but only insofar as poetry had a spatial form. For Heffernan (1991, 298), Krieger’s theory of ekphrasis seems, on the one hand, “to give this moribund term a new lease on life”, while on the other to stretch ekphrasis “to the breaking point: to the point where it no longer serves to contain any particular kind of literature and merely becomes a new name for formalism”. Since Heffernan’s study in the early 1990s, studies of ekphrasis have attempted to define ekphrasis more rigorously, but also to widen the scope of the concept beyond the small number of texts that had so far been associated with it – from Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles in book 18 of the lliad through Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, Shelley’s “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery” and Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” to W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts”. Reacting against Krieger’s preoccupation with plasticity, Heffernan points out that classical ekphrasis “often treats the work of art as considerably more than a static object. In Homer’s account of the scenes depicted on the shield of Achilles, for instance, many of the scenes turn into narratives” (Heffernan 1991, 299). Heffernan (1991, 299, italics in the orig-

3 Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is one of the most frequently discussed texts in the ut pictura poesis tradition. Cf. for instance Burke (1945), Brooks (1947), Spitzer (1955), and Fisher (1984), among many others.

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inal) defines ekphrasis as “the verbal representation of graphic representation” and thus differentiates it from the broader category of description, as well as from pictorialism and iconicity. What makes ekphrasis such a special case is neither its visuality nor its spatiality, but the fact that ekphrasis explicitly represents representation itself, as what it describes must already be representational (Heffernan 1991, 300). Thus, Homer’s account of the shield of Achilles is, for Heffernan (1991, 301), both “a verbal tribute to graphic verisimilitude and a sustained commentary on the difference between representation and reality”. Even though most of Heffernan’s sample texts constitute notional rather than actual ekphrases, his reflections on the relation between the verbal and the visual in ekphrasis often fall into the trap of considering ekphrasis in relation to verisimilitude and realism. But there is no discernible reality behind Homer’s description, no fixed or stable image against which the ekphrasis plays off, and thus no “pictorial stasis” (Heffernan 1991, 301) to which the epic responds. In fact, many of the images on Achilles’ shield would be extremely difficult if not impossible to graphically depict, as arrested scenes are again and again mobilised into narrative episodes. In a counter-proposal to Heffernan’s definition, Yacobi (1995) therefore contends that ekphrasis has been too narrowly defined and should include the ekphrasis of pictorial models (rather than specific pictures). Indeed, the transformation of ekphrasis from “a rhetorical description of a work of art” (Hagstrum 1958, 18) into a more general application that occurs when the doctrines of ut pictura poesis4 and the Sister Arts5 are mobilised to put language at the service of vision constitutes a moment of “ekphrastic hope” (Mitchell 1994, 152). This hope or desire for the “still moment”, however, quickly turns into “ekphrastic fear” when we sense “that the difference between the verbal and visual representation might collapse and the figurative, imaginary desire of ekphrasis might be realized literally and actually” (Mitchell 1994, 154). This fear is famously expressed in Lessing’s Laocoon, which ascribes strictly antagonistic means and aims to painting and poetry. It can only be countered by laying open the network of ideological associations embedded in the semiotic, sensory, and metaphysical oppositions that ekphrasis is supposed to overcome. In order to see the force of these oppositions and associations, we need to re-examine the utopian claims of ekphrastic

4 Horace uses the phrase “ut pictura poesis” in his Ars Poetica to draw a comparison between the art of painting and that of poetry. Since the eighteenth century, the phrase has become a staple in discussions about the relation between the two arts. 5 In the first volume of his Modern Painters (1843), Ruskin describes painting as the younger sister of poetry. In the twentieth century, the term “Sister Arts” became another byword for the study of ekphrasis. Cf. Hagstrum (1958).



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hope and the anxieties of ekphrastic fear in the light of the relatively neutral viewpoint of ekphrastic indifference, the assumption that ekphrasis is, strictly speaking, impossible. (Mitchell 1994, 156)

From this viewpoint, the ekphrastic “encounter in language” does not result in any genuine visibility but remains “purely figurative”, and the ekphrastic image acts “like a sort of unapproachable and unpresentable ‘black hole’ in the verbal structure, entirely absent from it, but shaping and affecting it in fundamental ways” (Mitchell 1994, 158). Mitchell forcefully argues this point through a series of close readings of ekphrastic texts that treat the ekphrastic image as a female other, concluding that ekphrastic poetry “as a verbal conjuring up of the female image has overtones […] of pornographic writing and masturbatory fantasy” (Mitchell 1994, 168). He makes the important point that a poem is not a picture – a confusion which underlies much older theorising about ekphrasis.6 But he also emphasises that the visual and the verbal overlap, in important ways, across media – in fact, he claims that all media, to cite his landmark catchphrase, are “mixed media” (Mitchell 1994, 95). Concerning literature’s capacity – including non-illustrated literature – to participate in a visual culture, this means that the visual representations appropriate to a discourse need not be imported: they are already immanent in the words, in the fabric of description, narrative ‘vision’, represented objects and places, metaphor, formal arrangements and distinctions of textual functions, even in typography, paper, binding, or (in the case of oral performance) in the physical immediacy of voice and the speaker’s body. (Mitchell 1994, 99)

Ekphrasis, like other forms of vivid description, contributes towards a literary visuality when it produces readerly visualisations. A poem may not be a picture, but both can make us ‘see’ something. Even Lessing conceded this convergence when noting that poetry and fine art share the goal of enticing the human imagination (“Einbildungskraft”, Lessing 1990, 32 et pass.; cf. Wellbery 1984). More than other kinds of description, however, the meta-representational mode of ekphrasis lends itself to reflection on what it means to make the reader see something. This makes ekphrasis a particularly rewarding object when considering what such an indirect visualisation might entail. Ekphrastic texts often complicate the assumptions that literary theory has made regarding the close proximity of ekphrasis and visuality, and this has consequences for our thinking about literary visuality more generally. As my analyses will show, vivid descrip-

6 Mitchell’s earlier book (1986) introduces a nuanced model of different kinds of images in relation to literature. Cf. also Boehm (1994) and Bohn (1990).

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tion in ekphrasis often does not lead to lively visualisations but is difficult, even, at times, impossible to visualise, and it is never purely visual. Visuality is, moreover, never brought up as such, but through specific acts of looking that can be tied to an embodied viewer or to a disembodied consciousness inside the text. Finally, these acts of looking take place in settings and situations that are shaped by historically specific visual regimes – networks of conditions, actors, institutions and discourses shaped by ideology.

2 Phenomenology and Reading How do readers enter a storyworld? How do we see, hear, and feel with its characters? To a certain extent, the concept of immersion must always remain metaphorical. We cannot physically step into Charlotte Brontë’s neat garden-house outside Whinbury (and even if we could, we would not find the party at dinner there). What readers actually do in an immersive reading, according to Ryan (2001, 11), is to direct not their body, but their attention towards the fictional world. Immersion is the result of a complex mental activity in which readers produce a vivid image of the textual world. Even if immersion therefore remains to some extent an illusion, it is such a characteristic part of reading and such a strong motivation for many readers that it cannot be ignored in literary analysis.7 More­over, even though no somatic transport takes place, readers still experience something: we see, we feel, we even interact and reason with characters. Experience, then, not only resides inside a narrative. It is also constituted in the interaction between reader and text since readers’ sense-making has an important experiential dimension to it. This experience is not limited to the optical. Readerly visualisation, although it is often described as a form of “seeing” (Mendelsund 2014), actually entails a rich array of experiences that involve all the senses and the entire body of the reader (Esrock 1994, 2004). Thus, even though we have been cultured in techniques of silent reading that often make us forget or suppress our sensori-motor engagement with the printed book, we still respond with our whole body when we laugh with the characters or cry at their fate. The experiential dimension of reading has become an important topic of narrative research in phenomenological studies that react against the text-centered approaches of 1970s structuralism and attempt to give greater prominence to the 7 Cf. Zunshine (2006), who argues that immersive readings are produced by the reader’s desire to understand the mental processes of characters. For Zunshine, this need to understand and feel with characters is the reason “why we read fiction”.



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phenomenology of reading – to the way in which actual readers process texts and to their experiences while reading, including perceptual experience. According to Iser (1978), every reading is accompanied by an ongoing stream of visualisations that initially occurs below the threshold of consciousness, but that can be brought up to reflective consciousness when a text’s progression clashes with the reader’s expectations (→ Brosch). In this phenomenological view, a literary text only gains completion through acts of reading, but the text itself also shapes the form such readings can take by including gaps and blanks into its structure that jar the reader out of ingrained reading habits. In this manner, the text constructs an implied reader who ‘gets’ all the text’s signals – a position into which actual readers may or may not (wish to) step.8 Iser did not conduct any empirical studies. To a large extent, his theorising about the implied reader builds on his own experience as an academic reader: the implied reader is a competent reader with a close resemblance to Wolfgang Iser. In part, this first-person perspective is in accordance with the core phenomenological insight that experience is always an experience for me, that experience carries a “perspectival ownership” (Albahari 2006). Merleau-Ponty (2012, lxxii) famously states: “Everything I know about the world […] I know from a perspective that is my own”. Experiences have a subjective feel to them, a quality of “what it’s like” to have them (Nagel 1974). As a philosophical method concerned with the accurate description of experience, phenomenology always starts with experience and describes, as closely as possible, what that experience is like for the person who has it. However, the first-person approach of phenomenology must not be confused with unschooled subjectivism. In phenomenological method, studying experience in terms of the meaning it has for a subject is offset by an intersubjective perspective on subjectivity. For Merleau-Ponty (2012, 5), the apprehension of a quality is always tied to an entire perceptual context: “We are caught up in the world and we do not succeed in detaching ourselves from it in order to shift to the consciousness of the world”. To see is therefore always “to see from somewhere”, “to enter into a universe of beings that show themselves” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 69–70, italics in the original). For this reason, “experience is never an isolated or elemental process. It always involves reference to the world, taking that term in a very wide sense to include not just the physical environment, but the social and cultural world, which may include things that do not exist in a physical way” (Gallagher and Zahavi 2012, 7), such as fictional events and characters. Percep-

8 On the relation between a text’s different (implied/authorial and actual) audiences, cf. Phelan (2005).

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tual experience, including the perceptual experience of visualising while reading, is embedded in contexts that are pragmatic, social, and cultural. Husserl (1982, 52) refers to this contextual embedding as the “horizonal” structure of experience: the intentional object of my perception is constituted by its relation to the horizon, the situation of my immediate perception, it is what it is only because it is within it. Studies by Esrock (1994), Scarry (1999), and others have built more extensively on Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis that perception is embodied, embedded, and enactive. They take a closer account of readers’ sensual pleasure in reading and their affective engagement with literary texts. Thus, Mendelsund (2014, 58) describes reading as a withdrawal from the phenomenal world, but an incomplete one in which “the world in front of me and the world ‘inside’ me are not merely adjacent, but overlapping; superimposed. A book feels like the intersection of these two domains – or like a conduit; a bridge; a passage between them”. In opening a book, readers enter a liminal space that is “neither in this world, the world wherein you hold a book […] nor in that world (the metaphysical space the words point toward)” (Mendelsund 2014, 61). In this liminal space, readers are asked to picture characters, actions and settings. This “picturing” (Mendelsund 2014, 61) is intricately linked to reading comprehension. There is a constant feedback loop between imagining what is being described, anticipating what readers will be told to see farther down the page, and readjusting what has been imagined in light of new textual information. While some of this “picturing” reacts to direct textual commands, most of it is actually quite free and untethered from the author’s text. Seeing when reading is apparently not the same as seeing when seeing. In fact, it is not an optical phenomenon at all in a direct sense, but resides in a nexus of imagination, fantasy, and the memory of actual physiological sight. Seeing when reading is also not necessarily the same as picturing something under detailed textual instruction  – in ekphrasis or other forms of description – although that can be part of it. Different names have been suggested for the peculiar visual experience that occurs when reading, often described as intensely pleasurable, to which some but not all readers seem to be prone. Esrock (1994) speaks of “imaging” as an active part of the reception process, a means of knowing and of making imagined objects more immediate and comprehensible, and thereby ultimately controlling textual meaning. Imaging positions the reader within the text, clarifies spatial descriptions and makes fictional worlds concrete. Esrock derives these insights from a process of introspection based on phenomenological method, describing her methodology as “phenomenography”  – the careful description of felt experience. However, she admits that readers’ reports about their mental images are bound to be influenced by cultural constructions, and that individual readers differ in their ability (and indeed their willingness) to



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visualise. Readerly imaging depends on textual as well as contextual factors such as setting and the type of reading activity as well as on cultural norms. While Esrock uses a distinctive term, “imaging”, for the visual activity of readers, Scarry (1999, 5) connects readerly visualisation with other mental activities such as dreaming, day dreaming and fantasy by writing about “imagining” in a broader sense. She describes the imagining that occurs in relation to literary description as a “perceptual mimesis”, arguing that although literary narrative is “almost wholly devoid of actual sensory content”, it can still call forth a form of perception that approaches the vivacity and vitality of immediate sensual perception. Based on her own self-observation, Scarry distinguishes between degrees of visuality: the most vivid visualisation occurs when readers are under direct authorial direction to perceive the storyworld, while other narrative scenes and occurrences that lack such direction activate a mild form of daydreaming. Its “mimetic content” – “the figural rooms and faces and weather that we mimetically see, touch, and hear, though in no case do we actually do so” (Scarry 1999, 5, italics in the original) – gains vivacity only when readers are given “procedures for reproducing the deep structure of perception” (Scarry 1999, 38). At the basis of Scarry’s study, then, lies a much narrower conception of visualisation than the one used by Esrock, and by Mendelsund: visualisation, for Scarry, is a distinctive readerly activity that depends on very specific textual cues. I suggest a broader conception of visualisation, understood as an umbrella term that covers the entire readerly side of literary visuality. Visualisation, in this understanding, is a fundamental aspect of any reading experience and it may react to a wide range of textual cues from description through perceptual attribution to metaphor. Visualisation can emerge from acts of vision – the perception of literary characters, or formulated ideas about perception – as well as the visuality of objects. But it can also be based in unspecific factors such as a text’s mood or atmosphere.9 Together with the affective engagement with characters, the visualisation of literary worlds is often cited as a crucial factor in the reading experience. For instance, Kafalenos (2001) argues that every reading is a process in which we begin by imagining an initial scene, then move on to constructing a fabula, and finally, after we forget both the fabula and the image, we are left with some details from the interpretation of the image. Readers re-create visual experience by responding to textual cues, but such re-creations can later be accessed directly since they live on in a reader’s memory. This is supported by more recent findings in cognitive cultural studies according

9 The importance of mood for a text’s reception and interpretation has recently been emphasised by Gumbrecht (2011) as well as Reents and Meyer-Sickendiek (2013) and Reents (2015).

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to which visualisation, like character identification, is not a narrative technique per se but a consequence of reading that may be precipitated by the use of particular techniques (Keen 2010, 73). Starr (2010, 277) points out that while some imagery can be prompted by instruction, some is spontaneous, and images also vary in vividness. In fact, vividness itself might be a confusing concept because it refers to imageability as well as experientiality, which are not necessarily identical (Troscianko 2013, 189). Distinctions also need to be made about degrees of visual complexity, and the different reactions readers may have to these. For instance, the tendency towards over-representation of visual complexity in the lengthy descriptions of realist novels may baffle rather than maximise visualisation, especially among contemporary readers.10 At the same time, it is impossible to separate visualisation as a readerly experience from other forms of mental imagery which arise from the mechanics of memory as well as from propositions about the world or patterns for engaging with it (Starr 2010, 277). But even if visualisation is always only accessible from memory, if descriptions of characters are inevitably vague, and if they never yield complete images that are like the memory of a real person, it can still be experienced as vivid. In fact, it may be precisely its vagueness and fluidity that make visualisation a pleasurable activity. Even if visualisation is difficult if not impossible to access in a pure sense, specific kinds of visualisations can be described on the basis of the literary cues and techniques that enable them. Or, conversely, that complicate, frustrate or defer them: for it is precisely vivid description in the ekphrastic tradition which may enable as well as hinder readerly visualisation. Indeed, many ekphrases are specifically designed to achieve this ambivalent effect. Modern ekphrases are written and read in a widely different media landscape than the one in which classical rhetorical ideas of ekphrasis and of enargeia were first developed, and amid a dissimilar conception of visuality. Against the long-standing trust in the power of literature to make the reader ‘see’ something, which still persists in the nineteenth-century novel and in the studies based on it, ekphrases from the Romantic period onward explore moments of ambivalence, even distrust, towards visualisation. Often self-consciously playing off against an increasingly visual culture which offers itself up through a constant stream of instantly accessible, easily consumed images, literary ekphrases complicate ideas about vision, visuality, and visualisation. Their descriptions baffle or even undermine readerly visualisation; as a form of metaphenomenology, they lead away from the idea that visualisation yields precise images, reliably positions the reader within the text, or gives us precise

10 At least, this is suggested by the cognitive studies of Kuzmičová (2012) and Troscianko (2013).



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spatial orientation. One important way in which the three examples of ekphrasis I discuss (5.) achieve this fragmented effect is by focalising their descriptions through a text-internal spectator or a spectatorial position (rather than offering a seemingly objective representation of visual representation). The perceptual “what it’s like” into which readers are invited to immerse themselves is always the perception of somebody, or of some instance, in the text. The phenomenology of ekphrasis is a qualified phenomenology.

3 Focalisation and “what it’s like” The expression “what it’s like” is often used in neuropsychological research to describe the qualia or subjective quality of felt experience. Nagel (1974), who came up with the phrase in the title of his article “What is it like to be a bat?”, argued that we can never know what it is like to be a bat, or any other creature with a different sensory apparatus, because the bat’s senses produce data that human senses cannot access, making it impossible for us to imagine what it is like for the bat to be a bat. In the past decade, a number of cognitive literary theorists have, however, argued that literary fiction can aim, at least somewhat, towards making an utterly strange “what it’s like” accessible to its readers.11 Fictional literature is able, out of an entanglement of experience, to imagine and render imaginable what it’s like to be an entity or person with strange qualia. This imagination, however, remains vicarious if it does not proceed from a “feeling for” the other’s otherness (Stockwell 2009, 78) that acknowledges its encounter with something irreducible and different, often inaccessible through an empathetic vision (Bennett 2005). As Gallagher and Zahavi (2012, 208) point out, our perception of the experience of others is always caught in a balance between the access provided by expressions and gestures, and the fundamental inaccessibility of another’s mental life. Phenomenological approaches question how we understand others from the position of embodiment (rather than treating others as disembodied minds); phenomenologists therefore regard the other as “given in its bodily presence as a lived body, a body that is actively engaged in the world” (Gallagher and Zahavi 2012, 203). On the one hand, then, “my own perspective of the world does not have determinate boundaries, but spontaneously slips into and overlaps that of others” (Gallagher and Zahavi 2012, 117; cf. also Merleau-Ponty 2012, 61, 142). 11 Cf. especially Zunshine (2006), who argues that fiction is at root about mental functioning, as well as Palmer’s (2004, 2010) work on “fictional” and “social” minds.

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Because we both have bodies, the other and I share a fundamental mode of access to the world, and this access is given to me in a shared situation of meaningful context. Moreover, the fact that we both have bodies opens up an important avenue to me through which I can explore the other’s inner life. Against the emphasis on purely mental simulations prevalent in neurobiology and some branches of cognitive science, phenomenologists stress that I can experience others’ subjectivity through their facial expressions and meaningful actions; I do not merely simulate or imagine them. On the other hand, however, my second-person perception of the other can never be the same as their own first-person experience; indeed, this difference between me and the other is constitutive of experience as such. Concerning the representation of others’ experience in the realm of fiction, this means that engaging another’s qualia – through the depiction of human or non-human entities – is always an imaginative undertaking founded on a construction of difference. In that difference resides the vicarious access to experience, including perceptual experience, that literature provides. Theories of narrative since the 1970s have discussed the ability of literary texts to grant readers access to another’s experience through the concept of focalisation, which is often tied to, but sometimes also violently divorced from, a specifically visual or optical route to immersive readings. Considering the visuality of ekphrastic texts through the lens of focalisation theory may contribute towards finding more complex answers that bridge the gulf between a phenomenologically oriented response theory seeking to account for the readerly experience of seeing when reading, and philological and narratological analyses of the textual structures that give rise to these visualisations. If we take seriously the phenomenological claim that experience is always the experience of someone, then the experience vicariously offered by literary texts has to come from an instance or agent inside the text. Stockwell (2009, 14) makes a similar point when he refers to the “texture” of reading as the way in which a text’s style and aesthetics makes experience available to readers. Reading is often described as a kind of simulation, but Stockwell points out that even though the sensation within that extended field is weaker than genuine, unmediated feeling, this does not mean that it is artificial or imagined. From empirical studies conducted on book clubs and reading groups, he concludes that intense, concentrated reading produces a “sense of richness around a particular reading experience” that is experienced at the time of reading “as being authentic, primary and personal” (Stockwell 2009, 63, 58). The reading experience encompasses conceptual as well as physical sensations such as laughter, shivering, or arousal, all “clear physical manifestations of emotions and feelings that are immediate and direct” (Stockwell 2009, 56). Such physical sensations are not distinct from, but rather continuous with the conceptual



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sensations that trained readers are usually more aware of. Both converge at the point of texture, as richness of texture can be directly correlated to a sense of readerly involvement (Stockwell 2009, 63). One concrete element of texture – of readers’ sense of textuality – that is frequently brought up as building a strong connection between a text and its readers is the perspective or point of view of a text. For instance, Stockwell (2009, 109) discusses the “viewpoint” of a narrative as an important “vector” that directs readers towards certain experiences, arguing that “[characters] that are directly presented […] are likely to generate a closer connection than characters which are presented indirectly”. However, “perspective” and “viewpoint” are vague terms often indicating an overall impression rather than the specific instance from which this impression arises. The concept of “focalisation” and of its agent, the “focaliser”, promises a more precise pinpointing of perceptions and experiences.12 Focalisation was first introduced by Genette (1972, 1980), who came up with the term specifically in order to break with the older, muddied terminology of ‘perspective’ and ‘point of view’. Furthermore, he wanted to detangle the confusion between narration, the linguistic mediation of a story, and the acts of perception, reflection, and judgement of characters inside the story. However, Genette’s innovation is itself jarred with inconsistencies. Although he initially proposes focalisation as a relational concept for describing levels of access to information, he also makes use of the older concept of perspective when distinguishing between the two questions “who speaks” and “who sees”, between voice and vision, narration and focalisation. When Bal (1977, 1997, 2009) refined Genette’s model of narrative – which had been developed in a haphazard manner and in relation to only one primary text, Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu – into a coherent system, it was this distinction that she emphasised. Focalisation, according to Bal, concerns “not primarily, where the words come from and who speaks them, but what is being proposed for us to believe or see before us” (Bal 1997, 224).13 Thus, she draws a clear distinction between focalisation and narration. She also highlights the perceptual side of focalisation by introducing a difference between a “focalizor” [sic!] and the object of its focalisation, the “focalized”. The focaliser14 can be a character, or focalisation can lie with the narrator.

12 Many of the following thoughts on focalisation have their origin in my ongoing collaboration with Prof. Nancy Pedri, of Memorial University, Newfoundland. 13 As crucial passages on visual focalisation that Bal had included in the second edition of her Narratology (1997) were omitted in the third edition (2009), references in this chapter are to the older version. 14 This more common spelling will be used here.

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Genette as well as Bal received much criticism for their terminological innovation. The majority of that criticism has been levelled against the optical connotations of focalisation. For some critics, an optical concept of focalisation is too narrow since the filtering of a storyworld through a character’s consciousness also includes more abstract mental processes, as well as ideological, moral, and cultural orientation (cf. Jahn 1996; Rimmon-Kenan 2002). Other critics wish to draw a distinction between optical perspectivation on the one hand, and a more cognitive focalisation, on the other (cf. Niederhoff 2001; Nieragden 2002). In film narratology, a fine-tuned terminology of “focalisation”, “ocularisation” and “auricularisation” has gained some ground (Jost 1983, Jost and Gaudreault 1990; cf. Mikkonen 2008). However, these suggestions miss the point that the “vision” of which Genette and Bal speak is often an indirect or even metaphorical vision, part of an entire web of impressions, experiences, moods and sensations which literary description conjures up before its readers and in which it invites them imaginatively to partake. In the context of this article, which explicitly discusses the literary presentation of visual phenomena, we can leave the question whether focalisation should or should not include auditory or haptic perception safely aside, especially as such hair-splitting ignores the core phenomenological insight that any perception involves the entire body of the perceiver and that this body is in turn part of a perceptual field from which it cannot extricate itself. Neurobiological research, too, shows that human perception is fundamentally multisensory (Starr 2010). In an aesthetic context, the inherent synaesthesia of perceptual experience is a core interest in all three of my sample texts. Any attempt to artificially separate the five senses into different types of focalisation is therefore doomed. The following analyses employ a holistic and dynamic concept of focalisation, understood as a process of representation that is associated with a focalising instance that may or may not be a character and that gives readers access to a subjective or impersonal experience. Since focalisation is (like any element of texture) an effect that has to be realised in reception, focalisation is always to a certain extent a matter of interpretation.15 For this reason, focalisation is both a more abstract and a more relational concept than ‘experience’ or ‘viewpoint’. Focalisation bridges or hinges between text-internal experience, its presentation through texture and style, and the reader’s meaning-making processes. In the words of Jahn (1996, 256), focalisation deals with “the gradient of possibilities of a text’s windows on story events and existents”, providing a crucial link between

15 On focalisation as an interpretative category, cf. Fludernik (1996, 345) and, from an empirical background, Bortolussi and Dixon (2003).



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experience and expressiveness, between how subjectivity is felt within a narrative and how feeling, perception, and experience are marked. My analyses will build on Jahn’s scalar model of focalisation. Although at first seeming to suggest a broadly encompassing concept of focalisation that includes perceptual as well as cognitive and emotional processes, Jahn (1996, 256) actually tends to highlight the perceptual and specifically the visual aspects of focalisation more than the mental and ideological ones, as stressed in his optical metaphor of “windows of focalization”.16 Consequently, both types of focalisation suggested by Jahn – character-based and narrator-based – are discussed in terms of perception, specifically visual perception, and this makes his theory highly useful to the analysis of texts in the ekphrastic tradition. Jahn introduces a second innovation besides proposing linguistic and stylistic criteria to distinguish between narratorial focalisation (which “typically uses descriptive imagery”) and reflector-mode focalisation (“cast in a ‘mind style’ comprising referentless pronouns, the familiarizing article, minimized narratorial perceptibility, in actu presentation, and so on”, Jahn 1996, 257). Jahn (1999) postulates a scale of degrees of focalisation ranging from strict focalisation (views originating from a determinate spatio-temporal position) through ambient focalisation (story events and existents seen from more than one angle as in mobile, summary, or communal views) and weak focalisation (an object seen from an unspecific spatio-temporal position) to zero focalisation (a wholly a-perspectival view). Jahn’s scale of degrees of focalisation, together with his stylistic criteria for distinguishing between character-based and narratorial focalisation, offers promising possibilities for concrete textual analyses dedicated to the perspective-marking resources of different media environments, especially in narratives with a strong visual component. Besides its usefulness for textual analysis, a phenomenologically inflected model of focalisation can also contribute to a better understanding of readerly visualisation, as discussed by Scarry (1999), Esrock (1994), and Kafalenos (2001). Scarry’s stress lies on the role of the author, while Esrock and Kafalenos pay greater attention to the reader, but I argue that it is only in the interplay between narration and focalisation that visualisation becomes possible. Focalisation, then, is here understood to cover all forms of accessing subjective experience, including visual experience, inside a text – and through this experience, focalisation provides access to the world that fictional literature projects. Conceptualised in this way, focalisation offers a way of capturing the relation between a text’s uses of description, perceptual attribution, and aspectual verbs on the one hand, and readerly visualisaton on the other. This argument extends Bal’s

16 For another detailed exploration of the visual side of focalisation cf. Brosch (2007).

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(2009) foregrounding of the visual side of focalisation as well as Brosch’s (2007, 144) suggestion that readerly visualisations depend on perspective and focalisation, and that focalisation functions as a “site of interaction between textual strategy and reader response”. Jahn, too, emphasises that focalisation plays a crucial role in the reading process because the reader actually takes the part of the narrator and of the focaliser when he makes sense of the text; in this sense, narration and focalisation are acts or performances that happen as a text’s meaning is actualised by readers, not ontological entities. However, Jahn seems to use the physiology of vision more as a model for our understanding of what happens in a text than in a strictly optical sense, and does not really consider whether focalisation is a property of the text that facilitates visualisation. In addressing that open question, my close readings will open up some points of convergence between narratology and phenomenology. In particular, they call into question the strict distinction between focaliser and focalised object as it is explicitly drawn in Bal (1997), but also implied in many other contributions to focalisation theory (for instance, Jost 1983; Jahn 1996, 1999). In the three texts I will look at below, focaliser and focalised object are not clearly separable entities or agents but entangled with each other in scenes of dense perception. Experience, in a phenomenological sense, is not contributed to these ekphrastic texts by a perceiving subject, but emerges out of the mutual interaction of subject and object.

4 Regimes of Vision The visual sense is not a physiological or psychological given, but linked to the other senses and embedded in cultural processes of meaning-making (Edwards and Bhaumik 2008). While many aspects of human vision are culturally shaped, cultural practices are in turn visually inflected as vision succeeds to visuality through a historical process (Davis 2011, 9). A visual culture encompasses “artifacts produced in order to be visible and especially to be deliberately inspected in terms of the culturally intelligible aspectivity of visible morphology” (Davis 2011, 122), but also activities of seeing of looking, of touching, moving, smelling and tasting, even of reading. Because of its historical index, there is no general visual culture, only the “unpredictable work of partial succession [of vision] to visuality (and parallel cultural successions in other sensory channels)” (Davis 2011, 9). These successions, for Davis (2011, 9), constitute the “main activity of social life as it interacts with human proprioception”. Literary visuality – the way in which literature participates in a visual culture – is similarly shaped by cultural ideas about vision, just as it in turn gives rise



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to such ideas. Individual text cues such as descriptive passages and focalisation markers call up acts of visualisation in the context of entire visual regimes, understood as a “general structuring of the visible” (Shapiro 2003, 2–3) that determines what can and cannot be seen, and by whom, and under what circumstances. Like Foucauldian discourse, a visual regime includes explicit rules about display and prohibition, but also “what goes without saying, not what is seen but the arrangement that renders certain ways of seeing obvious while it excludes others” (Shapiro 2003, 3). More than Davis’s “visuality”, the concept of “visual regimes” stresses the social, political and institutional constrictions under which visual practices operate. According to Shapiro, who suggested the concept, the age of art is one visual regime, but there are other regimes within Western modernity, as no regime is all-encompassing. Visual practices as well as the regimes within which they arise are thus not only inherently historical, but also plural. This plurality distinguishes Shapiro’s “archeology of vision” from Jay’s (1988) “scopic regime of modernity”, which identifies seeing – all seeing – under the regime of Cartesian perspectivalism with the power structures of an “ocularcentric society”, where visual techniques of observation take precedence over methods of determent and ubiquitous surveillance inscribes itself into the individual’s methods of self-control. Rancière (2004) goes further than Shapiro in politicising the concept of regime. For Rancière (2004, 9), the regime is part of a critical genealogy of art and politics, as aesthetic artworks act as “configurations of experience that create new modes of sense perception and induce novel forms of political subjectivity”. The aesthetic in Rancière (2004, 10) refers to “a specific regime for identifying and reflecting on the arts: a mode of articulation between ways of doing and making, their corresponding forms of visibility, and possible ways of thinking about their relationship”. As a system for the “distribution of the sensible”, the aesthetic produces “self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously disclose the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it” (Rancière 2004, 12) – a system of divisions and boundaries that define what is visible and audible within a particular aesthetico-political regime. For Rancière, as for Shapiro, the regime determines who has the ability to see and the talent to speak; unlike Shapiro, however, Rancière does not address this question through fine-tuned textual analysis, but in a sweeping Hegelian three-step movement from the ethical regime of images characteristic of Platonism, which is primarily concerned with the origin and telos of imagery in relationship to the ethos of the community, to the representative regime which liberates imitation from the constraints of ethical utility and isolates a normatively autonomous domain with its own rules for fabrication and criteria of evaluation, and finally the aesthetic regime of art, which puts this entire system of norms into question by abolishing the dichotomous structure of mimesis in the

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name of a contradictory identification between logos and pathos (cf. Rockhill in Rancière 2004, 4). Rancière argues that the emergence of literature in the nineteenth century as distinct from les belles-lettres was a central catalyst in the development of the aesthetic regime of (autonomous) art. He also identifies the three regimes with three kinds of politics, with the aesthetic regime of politics being strictly identical with the regime of democracy (Rancière 2004, 14). Leaving this tendency to politicise the “regime” aside, especially in Rancière’s use of the concept, it is productive to bear in mind that readerly visualisations, as an aspect of reception that follows identifiable textual cues, is called up within the context of specific visual regimes. Like the philosophical discourses analysed by Shapiro, ekphrasis and other self-conscious representations of visuality participate in an archaeology of vision. More specifically, since about 1800, metaphenomenological reflection in ekphrastic texts is implicated within an aesthetic regime of “art” – a notion designating a form of specific experience that has only existed in the West since the end of the eighteenth century (Rancière 2013). Its ordering of the sensible includes the material conditions of performance and exhibition spaces, forms of circulation and reproduction, modes of perception and regimes of emotions, the categories that identify them and the thought patterns that categorise and interpret them. These are the very conditions that make it possible for visualisation to occur in the first place. Literature, conceived as a second-degree observation, lets us participate in thinking about and experiencing the vision of earlier periods and of other people, since it gives access to the otherwise inaccessible experience of what it is like to see in a specific way. Conceived within the framework of the regime, ekphrasis is not simply an evocation of visuality, but a way of problematising culturally determined modes of visuality. It is with this framework in mind that I now turn to my three sample texts.

5 Metaphenomenology 5.1 John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819) Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?



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What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold Lover, never never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unwearied, For ever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! more happy, happy love! For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d, For ever panting, and for ever young; All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? What little town by river or sea shore, Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e’er return. O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (Keats 1982)

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“Ode on a Grecian Urn” is one of the most famous ekphrastic poems of the modern age, constituting a core example in major studies of ekphrasis since the 1980s (Krieger 1992; Heffernan 1993). A paradigmatic evocation of a non-existent aesthetic object, the “Ode” has frequently been read in the ut pictura poesis-tradition (Spitzer 1955; Fisher 1984); beyond that, it is an immensely canonical text in the critical traditions rooted in close reading. It was much loved by the New Critics, even though the struggle between opposite poles which is at the heart of the “Ode” ultimately defies the New Critical desire for harmony and integration.17 Like many texts in the ekphrastic tradition, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” engages with a (non-existent or imaginary) plastic object and simultaneously mobilises the object through its engagement. The poem describes not so much the urn itself as the effect that the urn has on a spectator who walks around the urn, comments on the depicted characters and scenes, and reflects on the relation between the represented scenes on the urn, the imaginary vivification of those scenes, and his perceptual and affective responses to them. In this process, word and image, sight and sound, spectator and object, male and female, urn and poem are constantly played off against each other. None of these oppositions remains static, as each of the pairs is mobilised. From the first lines of the poem, the urn is set in explicit opposition to the speaker’s words. The first stanza begins by addressing the urn as a mute object – still, silent, and slow. Despite these handicaps, the urn is said to “express  / a flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme” (ll. 3–4). Yet the content of that tale remains enigmatic, as the questions in the second half of the stanza illustrate (ll. 5–10). The speaker knows neither the plot of the urn’s “leaf-fring’d legend” nor its characters (“What men or gods are these?”) or setting (“In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?”). The second stanza adds a further contrast to those between subject and object, visual and verbal expression – that of “heard” and of “unheard” melodies (ll. 11–12). As the poem zooms in on individual scenes and figures depicted on the urn – the piping youth, a “bold lover” chasing a girl –, the references to heard and unheard sounds unfavourably compare the speaker’s perceptual experience to the imaginary perceptions that are implicated in the urn’s visual tale. The movement and tension of pursuit and struggle in these scenes is difficult to reconcile with the “quietness” and “slow time” that are mentioned as characteristic of the urn in the first stanza. The contrasts reach a climax in the third stanza, at the centre of the symmetrically constructed “Ode”. The permanence of the urn’s images and of the

17 For influential New Critical readings of the Ode that stress the element of tension, cf. Burke (1945, 447) and Brooks (1947, 151–166).



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perceptions, sensations and emotions that are implicated in them (warmth, love, happiness) receive a shocking counterpart in the “high-sorrowful” heart, “burning forehead”, and “parching tongue” of the speaker (l. 30). This is one of three passages that make explicit self-reference to the speaker of the poem, who is also the spectator of the urn. All three references are brief and indirect. The mention of “our” rhyme in stanza one (l. 4), the allusion to the urn’s impact on “a heart” in the middle stanza (l. 29), and the pointing at “other woe / Than ours” in the poem’s final passage (ll. 47–48) only allow the briefest of glimpses at a deictic origin for the poem’s descriptions. Yet nothing that is said about the urn makes sense if we do not recognise that “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is not so much a poem about a visual object than a sustained commentary on an embodied, personal set of reactions to a visual object. In terms of focalisation theory, then, we need to add another contrast to the list of tensions operating in the “Ode”, that of a subjective, reflector-mode focalisation on the one hand, and of a weak, unspecific position on the other. The quietness and wild struggle tearing apart the visual fabric of the urn can be reconciled if we acknowledge that the poem’s movement comes not from the imagined still object but from the spectator, the lyrical I of the poem. Although the poem’s speaker makes use of a plural self-reference (“our rhyme”), this is conventional, and the physical consequences of his spectatorship point towards a single body. Through the speaker’s body, visuality is mixed with other senses, especially with the aural (rhyming, piping) and the haptic (struggling, kissing), resulting in a complex entangling of the sensory and the emotional. In an insightful cognitive reading, Starr (2007) argues that the poem’s contrasts enact a commentary on perception itself. The poem is structured around moments of interference between alternative perceptions, indicating that our sense perception is always mixed (and not in the way of synaesthesia). Particularly the first two stanzas thrive on an “interplay of intensity and contradiction” between the visual and the aural in which “vision is supreme […], and it is paired with a relatively deficient sense of sound, but both of these senses are subject to nagging instability and ineffectuality” (Starr 2007, 55–56). Starr connects this interplay to cognitive studies on the interference between sense perceptions, which may have a hedonic effect (cf. Martindale 1984): Keats is manipulating ‘impure’ or mixed sensory imagery, creating an illusion of stability – of pure vision – that is ruptured by the return of something repressed or covered over: the aural. The pleasure and puzzlement of such an effect are related to the ways we process sense. Units of our cognitive architecture compete, and this competition is basic to cognitive function. (Starr 2007, 56)

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“Ode on a Grecian Urn”, in Starr’s (2007, 54) reading, invites its readers into just such a situation in which “[sound] and vision seem to compete for salience and attention. […] However much vision may seem stable when we listen into silence, when we think about the urn we realize that it is an object calculated to evoke visual instability too”. The end of the poem reveals that this interplay is not only a commentary on sense perception, but also on Keats’ poetics. The poem’s final stanza “takes us to a moment of visual and formal completion” when it refers to the “brede” (l. 41), the interwoven pattern that frames the urn’s figural scenes and then returns the “silent form” (l. 44) to the immobility from which it emerged (Starr 2007, 55). However, “the urn’s form comes to completion earlier than does the poem”, as the “final effect of the poem […] depends on blacking out the visual evocation in favour of what has been in competition with, and seemingly suppressed by, it: sound itself, the audible rather than the visual” (Starr 2007, 55–56). The theory of ekphrasis has often focused on the genre’s evocation of the visual, as in Heffernan’s (1991, 299) definition. A close reading of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” shows that this is ultimately a restrictive understanding of ekphrasis. In the poem’s unfolding description of the urn, the latent indeterminacy of the images is tied up in the speaker’s shifting emotional stance toward the urn which ultimately serves as a tool for self-exploration. Considered from the speaker’s embodied perception, the poem’s ambiguous, paradoxical and contradictory ascriptions constitute an extended exploration of visuality as a matter of felt experience which is bound up with emotions, the body, and with the other senses. Within the spectrum of possible readerly engagements with “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” visualisation is only one fairly minor aspect in the larger context of a cognitive and emotional involvement with the speaker. If any coherent idea about vision can be distilled from this tangling of the senses, it is that of sight as a dense experience, in the manner described by Elkins: seeing is irrational, inconsistent, and undependable. It is immensely troubled, cousin to blindness and sexuality, and caught up in the threads of the unconscious. Our eyes are not ours to command; they roam where they will and then tell us they have only been where we have sent them. No matter how hard we look, we see very little of what we look at. […] Seeing is like hunting and like dreaming, and even like falling in love. It is entangled in the passions – jealousy, violence, possessiveness; and it is soaked in affect – in pleasure and displeasure, and in pain. Ultimately, seeing alters the thing that is seen and transforms the seer. (Elkins 1996, 11–12)

On a metaphenomenological level, Keats’s “Ode” can therefore be read as a dynamic engagement with modes of perception and the visual regime(s) in which these occur. In this sustained engagement, invisibility, partial vision and blindness play an important role. Not only is the vision in Keats’s “Ode” embodied and



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mixed with the other senses, it is also reciprocal – and this reciprocity operates within the poem, between speaker and urn, as well as outside, in relation to a reader. Inside the poem, the urn is constructed from a very specific perspective, which is sentimental or nostalgic. Bal (1997, 150) cites three questions that are relevant to determining focalisation: “What does the character focalize: what is it aimed at?”; “How does it do this: with what attitude does it view things?”; and “Who focalizes it: whose focalized object is it?”. The second question draws attention to how focalisation colours the entire mood and feel of a narrative, infusing the storyworld with what Palmer (2004) calls the “aspectuality” of one or several characters, their subjective what it’s like. In Keats’s “Ode”, the relation of the speaker, who is also the focaliser, to the urn and, through the urn, to the world, is characterised by longing and sadness. The speaker is also deeply ambivalent about the urn: on the one hand, he exclaims with great emotion on the “happy, happy boughs”, “happy melodist” and “happy, happy love” in the scenes on the urn (ll. 21–25), yet emphatically describes the entire urn as a “Cold Pastoral” (l. 45). These attitudes of the speaker towards the urn are an important aspect of focalisation, infusing both that which is seen, heard and experienced within the poem, and the possible engagement of the reader with these experiences by way of visualisation (in a wider sense that includes the other senses). However, when other aesthetic objects and perceptual experiences within the urn are brought into play – especially the piper’s unheard melody – and when these are held in relation to the metacommentary of the ode itself, also an art object, the effect of this mutual commenting of art objects on each other is to “lift the experience of reading this poem out of any determined reference to any single, genetic experience of Keats before an urn” (Mauro 1997, 298). The activity, indeed agency, of the described object plays an important role in many ekphrases – in Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”, for instance, it is the torso which sees the spectator, not the other way round. Keats’s “Ode”, too, ends by ascribing a highly-valued activity – the activity of speaking, which the speaker also claims for himself (“our rhyme”) – to the urn, which addresses mankind with the enigmatic words “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,  – that is all  / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” (ll. 49–50). Although the volume of poems Keats published in 1820 puts the first five words in quotation marks, neither the original version of the poem printed in the Annals of the Fine Arts (1819) nor the transcripts made by Keats’ friends contain quotation marks. It is therefore unclear whether the final one and a half lines are meant to be spoken by the urn, or by the speaker of the poem, and whether the “ye” addresses the speaker, the poem’s readers, the characters on the urn, or indeed the urn itself (although the discrepancy between the pronouns “thou” and “ye” makes the last option somewhat less likely than the others). Be that as it may, the end, when the urn takes over

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the poet’s voice, finalises the poem’s consistent blurring of boundaries between subject and object. One effect of this interactive version of speaker-object relations consists in a loosening of the bands of “genetic primacy”, as Mauro (1997, 298) has observed, drawing the reader away “from any specific origin of aesthetic experience, be that origin the urn, the ode, or Keats himself”. Another effect can be seen in the poem’s metaphenomenological commentary on a very specific situation of sight. Despite the speaker’s strong physical reactions to the urn, his gaze is that of quiet contemplation, isolating a single object from its surrounding context and embedding it in a highly subjective reverie. It is the gaze of the modern museum regime which here actually predates museum settings that would isolate objects by hosting them in single installation lit for maximum effect. Keats, writing at the very beginning of the era of art and the rise of the museum, would have seen Greek vases crammed together in a style that is today reserved only for the lesser visited parts of the British Museum.18 The importance of an art-appreciating gaze as practiced in the museum for ekphrastic poetry since Romanticism cannot be overestimated, and Fisher (1984) has fittingly called Keats’s “Ode” a “museum with one work inside”. Heffernan (1993) described ekphrasis itself as a “museum of words”, drawing attention to the simultaneous flourishing of the modern museum and of a remarkable wealth of ekphrastic poetry since the nineteenth century. Besides the English tradition discussed by Heffernan, there is also the rich gallery of continental European poets including Eduard Mörike, Stéphane Mallarmé, Rainer Maria Rilke and Paul Valéry, as well as passages from novels by Henry James, Leo Tolstoy and Marcel Proust which “evoke actual museums of art along with the words they offer us: the whole complex of titles, curatorial notes, and art historical commentary that surround the works of art we now see on museum walls” (Heffernan 1993, 8). The movement of poetry within museum walls has its historical origins in the eighteenth-century dissolution of the encyclopedic early modern curiosity cabinets and the reconstitution of their collections in modern museums. Heffernan (1993, 93) remarks on the importance of the founding of the British Museum (1753) and the Royal Academy of Art (1768) as crucial events in a double effort that aimed both “to preserve the history embedded in works of art” and “to protect those works from history, from the ravages of time”.19 Shapiro (2003, 4) notes that “such terms as image and art mark distinctive eras with their own sets of expec-

18 Cf. Bennett (1995) on the “birth of the museum”, and Hooper-Greenhill (1992) on how museums shape knowledge. 19 Fisher (1994) records the historical friction of that process.



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tations and practices regarding what we see and how it is displayed and valued”. “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is an early museum piece that does not explicitly refer to a museum setting but implicitly relies on the premises of museum culture – on practices of collecting, curating, and exhibiting as well as on a temporal structure of belatedness in relation to the art object and a pervasive atmosphere of late culture. But Keats’s “Urn”/urn activates as well as challenges the aesthetic regime of art that underlies museum culture by highlighting an embodied vision against the cultural norm of silent contemplation; a reciprocal vision against the separation of subject and object; and an embedded vision which is not natural but the product of a web of cultural meanings.

5.2 Pere Gimferrer, “The Man in the Turban” (1983) If anything, the short prose text “The Man in the Turban” is an even less stable piece of ekphrastic writing. While ekphrasis as a stand-alone genre is comparatively rare, ekphrasis as a rhetorical mode encountered as an excursus within larger verse or prose works is quite common. It is in this wider tradition of ekphrasis that “The Man in the Turban” has its place, but that it also challenges. Published as a stand-alone prose piece in Asymptote, an online journal dedicated to translations of world literature, in January 2013, “The Man in the Turban” is also the first chapter in Pere Gimferrer’s novel Fortuny (first published in Catalan in 1983), whose English translation appeared in 2016. In terms of genre, Fortuny is difficult to categorise; it might be more accurate to speak of a series of interwoven prose poems blending into each other. Each of these pays tribute to the art of the non-fictional Fortuny family and to its display in the Fortunys’ Venetian palazzo. Pere Gimferrer i Torrens is a central figure in Catalan literature, a member of both the Spanish and Catalan language academies, and included in Bloom’s (1994) list of Spanish authors who are essential to the Western canon. He is particularly renowned for his imagistic poems and for the “poetic technique of verbal collage that confronts the reader with a multi-faceted experience in which he is called upon to reflect on various art forms and media: film, novels, drama, detective and mystery stories, comic strip characters, music and painting” (Rogers 1984, 207). Fortuny integrates a great many art forms: the reader views paintings, photographs, fabrics and objets d’art. The synthetic form is reminiscent of the collages by modernist artists to whose work Gimferrer often refers: Georges Braque, Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst. Gimferrer himself compares Fortuny to Claude Simon’s Georgics, which is even more fragmented and allusive; however, he is insistent that his texts do not rely on the reader’s ‘getting’ all the references but on the vigour of the poetic images (West 2016).

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Although difficult to comprehend and situate, the scenes in Fortuny are not randomly organised. They follow the course of a gallery tour moving through the Fortunys’ Venetian palazzo and pausing over individual paintings, their subjects and their history. At the same time, the book also charts a version of art historical development in which the lush aesthetics and sensuous excess of the Belle Époque – sometimes bordering on kitsch – gives way to technological reproduction, and colour fades to black and white. The opening section “The Man in the Turban” focuses on works by Mariano Fortuny y Marsal (1838–1874), beginning with his painting “The Odalisque”, then moving on to “The Battle of Tetouán” and “Arab shoeing a horse”, ending with a self portrait. The ekphrasis of these paintings is highly visually descriptive, containing many explicit references to painting, colour, varnish, perspectives, and the like. At the same time, however, “The Man in the Turban” takes even greater pains than Keats’s “Ode” to deconstruct a static scene in which aesthetic objects can be clearly separated from the subjects looking at them, from each other, from the real world, and from the text describing them. Instead, the narrative presents an unfolding scene in which pictoriality produces an affective overall impression in which individual ekphrases that cannot be clearly delineated as representations inside the diegesis vivify into live characters, while figures that appeared to be characters of the storyworld are revealed as painted figures. The very first sentences of the text describe a reclining female nude: The long black hair of the odalisque unfurls in the dense, stagnant air. Her nude body reclines over a white sheet that spreads outward, engulfing the fabric beneath it, of a profuse and vivid red. Further up, high over the head of the odalisque, there hangs a dark green curtain. The odalisque offers up her body, as she offers up the open palm of her hand. An Arab in a turban sits at her feet. (Gimferrer 2013, s.  p.)

Only gradually does it become clear that this is not a description of a live female body but of a painting whose oil colour, “a bit darkened over the desiccated cardboard, lacks the brilliant, waxen clarity of fresh varnish” (Gimferrer 2013, s.  p.). The visual regime called up is that of orientalist painting. The woman offers herself up for visual consumption, or rather the painting (the literary ekphrasis allowing us to visualise the painting) makes her available that way. As the description unfolds, we learn about a second character, an Arab in a turban sitting at her feet and strumming a stringed instrument. Movement and sound enter the scene. Is this a painting that readers are supposed to be seeing, or a narrative scene based on that tradition of painting? Although the initial scene of “The Man in the Turban” describes an actual painting by Mariano Fortuny y Marsal, the text makes no direct reference to the painting. The precise status of the initial scene is thus left explicitly unaddressed. In a recent interview, Gimferrer’s American



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translator Adrian Nathan West describes Fortuny as “an impressionistic history of one of the richest periods of Western arts and letters” and insists on the veracity of the novel’s descriptions: “the book is a treasure chest: every detail in it is based on some kind of real event or drawn from a film, painting, photograph, or play” (Esposito 2016, s.  p.). At the same time, the novel takes great pains to hide the origins of its descriptions from the reader. Its ekphrastic rhetoric is designed to frustrate attempts to coalesce constitutive elements into stable scenes. Nathan West compares this rhetoric to the hermetic culteranismo style of the Spanish baroque sonnetist Luis de Góngora, “particularly in regards to this trick of delayed signification, where discreet and at times seemingly contradictory sensory details accumulate vertiginously and the reader struggles to reconcile them into a concrete image” (Esposito 2016, s.  p.). Even more than that, readers will also struggle to draw a boundary between the imaginative space of the painting and the gallery setting of the diegesis, as Gimferrer’s ekphrasis constantly crosses and re-crosses between levels of its pictorial Chinese-box structure. As the initial scene unfolds, we thus learn about yet another personage, the “viewer”: Despite the shadows cast by the turban, the milky glinting of light, and the murkiness of the chamber, the viewer seems to see the Arab’s face. As one approaches, the face seen up close gives the effect of a face seen from afar; but seen from afar, we know it to be nothing more than the idea of a face. (Gimferrer 2013, s.  p.)

With every sentence, the visual situation in Gimferrer’s text becomes more impossible to pinpoint in a realistic manner, as the ekphrasis progressively blurs the boundaries between the painting and its spectators, between painted and real space, and by implication between the reader whom the text beckons to visualise the Arab’s face, and the text in which this beckoning occurs. Focalisation becomes impossible to determine – we know neither who the focaliser nor what the focalised object is, and so Bal’s constitutive distinction between subject and object collapses. Is the “viewer” someone in the painting or is it the spectator in the gallery setting? Is this viewer the same as the “one” in the next sentence? And what about the “we”? Gimferrer’s prose appeals to our desire to see the painting, but also to understand the different viewing positions in relation to each other, at the same time as it frustrates these desires. Its impure phenomenology enacts the dense perception in a museum setting, where looking at a painting may involve “up to ten different kinds of looking”: (1) you, looking at the painting, (2) figures in the painting who look out at you, (3) figures in the painting that look at one another, and (4) figures in the painting that look at objects or stare off into space or have their eyes closed. In addition, there is often (5) the museum

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guard, who may be looking at the back of your head, and (6) the other people in the gallery, who may be looking at you or at the painting. There are imaginary observers, too: (7) the artist, who was once looking at this painting, (8) the models for the figures in the painting, who may once have seen themselves there, and (9) all the other people who have seen the painting […]. And finally, there are also (10) people who have never seen the painting: they may know it only from reproductions […] or from descriptions. A complementary source of complexity comes from the fact that we never see only one image at a time. (Elkins 1996, 38–39)

By leading its readers into just such a messy visual field, “The Man in the Turban” demonstrates “what it means to live in a world full of gazes, where objects, animals, and people all define one another by the ways they see and are seen” (Elkins 1996, 83). A painting is called “an autonomous space; but this autonomous space also lives in another visible space, in a concrete location” (Gimferrer 2013, s.  p.). This embedding of the art object in a wider context mirrors the integration of a visual representation into the verbal representation that is constitutive of ekphrasis. But the narrative quickly moves beyond such an embedding to a blending of spaces not only encompassing the space of the painting and the concrete location of its viewing, but also of other, unrelated locations such as that in which a young woman may be seen leafing through an album in a suffocating 1870s interior. These locations are not focalised, made visually accessible to the reader, from a precise deictic origin, a center of consciousness where all the vectors converge. Instead, everything is seen (and also not-seen) from several positions at ones – like the narrative equivalent of a Cubist painting, but without the hard edges. If it is already impossible to distinguish between individual viewing positions or to arrive at a coherent image in the initial ekphrasis of “The Man in the Turban”, the later part of the text goes even further in dissolving any idea the reader may still hold about the integrity of aesthetic objects. Fortuny is a novel that creates an impossible vision which excites while it frustrates visualisation; a text about taking the inherent frustration of visualisation to extremes. Vision itself turns into a confusing mirror cabinet when the object(s) which ‘we’ see later turn out to be not seen, or not thought to have been seen, or seen without realising it. Not only do the objects become increasingly unreal, but the anonymous communal focalisation position of the ‘we’, which recurs in several passages, also disintegrates. In the end, the reader is left with a postmodern Escher-like structure. The impossible picture “The Man with the Turban” started out with, the reader learns, is painted by a man “with a minuscule paintbrush” who is himself being seen by the mysterious viewers in the same space where the young woman was before. In this manner, Gimferrer’s text turns the incongruous viewing situations that it has lined up for us to visualise into different paintings blended into the same space.



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The young woman is the subject of a painting, or variously of a photograph; and the photographer is simultaneously the Arab from the odalisque’s seraglio, the two other Arabs in the tumult of Tétouan, all in one man, who is not an Arab, but a photographic portrait of the painter, “Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo, in the Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei, in Venice, around the year 1945”. Visualisation is here not so much dissolved or hindered as it is liquidised in a series of pictorial scenes flowing into each other. In Gimferrer’s version of ekphrasis, we are not meant to see painting as an object. Instead, it is the gradual process of painting and painting-over that serves as a model for this understanding of visualisation.

5.3 Durs Grünbein, Vom Schnee (2003) Like other ekphrastic texts, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and Gimferrer’s “The Man in the Turban” excite as well as frustrate the reader’s desire to see what she reads. In this sense, both can be read as metaphenomenological texts that complicate ideas about vision and visuality. It is, however, my third text, Durs Grünbein’s verse novel Vom Schnee oder Descartes in Deutschland [Of Snow or: Descartes in Germany], which most extensively and most explicitly draws attention to the historicity and culturality of long-held ideas about literature’s ability to make us see. Not only does it develop a sustained poetic engagement with historical modes of vision through a tight interplay between different real and imaginary, seventeenth-century as well as contemporary, characters and perspectives on the world, reflecting vision as it is experienced. It also engages discourses of vision, visuality and looking on a second, meta-reflective level. René Descartes is a crucial figure in the philosophy of vision, an early theoretician of optics. His account of vision as an accurate deciphering of signs was antagonised and disputed by many modern and contemporary theories of vision– including Merleau-Ponty’s (2012), Jay’s (1988), and Shapiro’s (2003), amongst many others. While Descartes sees vision as a reconstruction of the genuine, geometric order of the world, these later critics point out that crucial aspects such as “color, depth, the intermingling of objects, and above all the complicity of the viewer in the scene beheld are excluded from this attempt to construe vision on the model of line drawings, diagrams, and engravings” (Shapiro 2003, 31–32). Still, the Cartesian model of vision continues to exert an enormous influence, even on his critics. Merleau-Ponty (1964) demonstrates the limitations of Descartes’ Dioptrics with its emphasis on line drawings, its reduction of vision to physical contact, and its exclusion of the phenomena of hiddenness and obstruction that characterise perception in the world. Merleau-Ponty plausibly suggests that Descartes is indebted to the monocular and immobile models of vision put

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forward by Renaissance painter-philosophers like Alberti. Yet Merleau-Ponty himself – as Shapiro (2003, 222) points out – “retains the most general frame of this model, that is, the framed portable picture, in his own thought on painting”. This double legacy forms the background of expectation to Durs Grünbein’s verse novel. Grünbein, laureate of the Büchner Award, the highest ranking literary award in Germany (1995), and one of the most famous German poets, is known as a poeta doctus.20 In many of his works, Grünbein mirrors himself in other, equally learned writers  – especially classical ones such as Dante or Juvenal. In Vom Schnee, the protagonist Descartes can be seen as such an authorial figuration through which Grünbein achieves a self-distance that allows him to observe perceptive, cognitive and above all creative processes as if in a lab setting. Beyond that, the name Descartes serves to mark the beginning both of modern subject philosophy and of modern optics – in a wider sense, of modernity itself. Grünbein, however, shows how the Cartesian attempt to use different qualities of vision to order the empirical and hermeneutic experience of the world is doomed to failure because it is based on false dichotomies between inside and outside, subject and world, vision and fantasy, knowledge and imagination. Vom Schnee is a verse novel whose setting is a kind of void. The plot is based on a note in Descartes’ Discours de la Mèthode (1637). It describes how Descartes had three visions and arrived at his foundational method of doing science during the winter of 1619–1620 in Neuburg on the Danube, in the course of the Thirty Years’ War (Descartes 1902, 21–22). The young Descartes, then 23 years of age, had attended the coronation of Ferdinand V as emperor of the Holy Roman Empire; he was on his way to rejoining the army of Maximilian I, Duke of Bavaria and an ally of France in the Thirty Years War, when he was snowed in in the small town of Neuburg. Here, on the night of November 10, 1619, Descartes had a life-changing experience. He had crawled into a wall stove to warm himself, when he fell asleep and had three dreams. In the first, he was chased by ghosts. In the second, thunderclaps and sparks flew around his room. In the third dream, all was quiet. Descartes found a book of poetry lying on the table. He opened it at random and read the verse “quod vitae sectabor iter” (What path shall I take in life?). A stranger appeared and said “est et non” (yes and no). When Descartes wanted to show him the verse he had found, the stranger, the book, and the entire dream disappeared. Descartes was so shaken by his visions that he prayed to the Blessed Virgin and vowed to go on a pilgrimage from Venice to Notre Dame de Lorette. When he

20 From the many publications on the work of Durs Grünbein, cf. especially Bremer, Lampart, and Wesche (2007), Ertel (2011), and the special issue of Text + Kritik dedicated to Grünbein (2002).



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recounted the experience in Discours de la Méthode, however, he presented it as a primary scene of philosophy, explaining that the third dream pointed to the unification of science by the method of reason. In Vom Schnee, Durs Grünbein takes up the theme of irrational foundations underlying Descartes’ rationalist philosophy, especially concerning Descartes’ ideas about vision, and expands it into a plot with several characters. In doing so, Grünbein substantially alters the philosopher’s original account. While the historical Descartes’ note presents solitariness and isolation as the basis of his insights, Grünbein’s Descartes is not alone but accompanied by his manservant, Gillot, whose voice opens the novel and with whom Descartes has many discussions. Grünbein also alters the form through which the visionary scene is presented. Where Descartes relates his experience in prose, Vom Schnee is written in Alexandrines, probably because of their prevalence in French seventeenth-century classicism. Although originally used in verse epic, the Alexandrine is mainly known as a dramatic verse, and this fits well with the dialogic structure of Grünbein’s book which resists generic identification or rather combines elements of poetry (interiority and imagism), epic (narrativity), drama (monologue and dialogue) and philosophical investigation (the posing of questions about perception in the first chapter). Descartes has been a fixture in Grünbein’s oeuvre since the early poems. Up until Vom Schnee, Descartes’ legacy “appears to have functioned as something like an aesthetic-philosophical point of reference, sounding board, matrix, conceptual-topical quarry, and contrastive foil for Grünbein’s varied poetic queries and agendas” (Eskin 2007, 165). With Vom Schnee, “a significant shift occurs in the poet’s engagement with the philosopher. It is now Descartes the man and thinker himself who moves into the foreground – albeit, not quite the ‘real’, historical Descartes, as Grünbein is quick to point out, but, rather, the philosopher’s poetic double” (Eskin 2007, 165). Despite its many references to Descartes’ life, and quotations from his philosophical works, Vom Schnee is based less on historical fact than on literary models. Reviewers have compared the dialogic relationship between Descartes and Gillot that forms the basic narrative structure of Vom Schnee to that of Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa; another, more conspicuous pair of literary predecessors is that of Faust and Wagner in Goethe’s Faust: Der Tragödie Erster Teil. In fact, the opening dialogue quotes Faust’s “Die Wette gilt” (Grünbein 2003, 49). This quote is part of the anachronistic structure of Descartes’ and Gillot’s dialogue, which frequently uses famous (but unmarked) quotations that postdate Descartes, for instance by repeatedly referring to the creator’s “Spieltrieb” (the play drive from Schiller’s letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man), or by citing Jakob von Hoddis’ poem “Weltende” (Grünbein 2003, 22). In part, these are ironic hints toward the novel’s chronicity, a kind of future perfect in which

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“jeder malte sich im Geiste aus, / Wie diese Landschaft aussah einst im Jahr Zweitausend” (“everyone mentally pictured / How this landscape formerly looked in the year two thousand”, Grünbein 2003, 42, my translation). But more than that, these quotations have their place in a set of poetic strategies whose collective aim is to systematically dissolve the boundaries between characters, voices, and visions. The novel’s experiment, set up by the call “Die Wette gilt” (“That bet I’ll make”) describes as well as constitutes an empirical philosophy that challenges Cartesian rationalism by making Descartes the subject of a fictional narrative that takes its departure from the three famous dreams on which, by Descartes’ own admission, his later epistemology was based. In the Meditations on First Philosophy, first published in 1641, Descartes famously introduces a clear-cut difference between mind (res cogitans) and body (res extensa). This Cartesian schism of mind and body made it possible to wrest perception away from the world of the senses, and to shift it towards a pure mental act, thus laying the groundwork for a phenomenology of vision which reduces the embodied gaze to a non-empirical intuitus mentis. However, Descartes experienced profound difficulties throughout his later oeuvre in pinpointing the nature of the relationship between res cogitans and res extensa, and Grünbein takes great pains to expose these difficulties by demonstrating that the subject is not one and unified, that vision is not disembodied or controlled by the mind, and that it is not universal. A first way in which Vom Schnee makes its case is by repeatedly having the characters and their voices blend into each other. Some of the chapters mark characters’ speech with inverted commas, but some do not, so that it often becomes difficult to determine where one character’s discourse ends and the other’s starts, or indeed who speaks at any given point. In these dialogues, the fictitious Gillot serves as Descartes’ alter ego, an imaginary interlocutor who often criticises Descartes’ views about the subject and about subjective perception. A recurrent topic concerns the relation between interior and exterior world, with Descartes privileging “Innenschau” (interior vision, Grünbein 2003, 17) over Gillot’s interest in the outside world – the snowed-in landscape the two find themselves caught in. Not only is Grünbein’s Descartes fundamentally disinterested in exterior vision, he is downright afraid of the snow which reminds him of a shroud, or of foaming at the mouth, or of eyes turned inwards (Grünbein 2003, 16). Snow is something Descartes cannot measure and calculate; it is not open to a controlled perception, but rather leads into a metaphoric excess. At the same time, the characters’ recurring quibbling about the snow illustrate that visuality in Vom Schnee is not something that occurs, a given, but something that the characters have wildly different takes on – a matter of focalisation. My reading of Gillot and Descartes as (to a certain extent) one and the same person can be strengthened when we compare the novel’s plot with Descartes’



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real life. The girl Marie with whom Gillot has an affair in Vom Schnee is based on the maidservant Helena Jans van der Strom, with whom Descartes had a daughter, Francine. In Vom Schnee, however, it is Gillot who is the little girl’s father. At times, Grünbein’s Descartes seems to explicitly suggest that Gillot is a product of his, Descartes’, dreams and not a real person  – someone who “licked my temples / With a cold tongue, rogue, in my dreams” (Grünbein 2003, 17, my translation). And although Gillot at first appears to be the main narrator who sets the entire verse novel into motion, he later claims that it was Descartes himself who spoke in the first chapter, thereby suggesting that Gillot’s monologue is actually Descartes’ dream speech. To complicate matters further, the novel also has an anonymous narrator who at first restricts himself to uttering stage directions that punctuate Descartes and Gillot’s dialogues, but later claims to be an acquaintance of Marie’s – although he also periodically situates himself in our present, over three hundred years after the novel’s action. One main function of this narrator consists in calling the novel’s entire setting into question when he asks the reader to close his eyes and see – not snow, but an alternative landscape, ravaged by war and littered with corpses (Grünbein 2003, 28). Finally, there is also a mysterious personage who watches Descartes and Gillot take their walk through the snow: but is it Satan, as Descartes suggests (Grünbein 2003, 39) – or is it Gillot who speaks here? The narrator also suggests a deer, a fox or a deus absconditus, without resolving the question. Eskin (2007, 169–170) points to the “complex and emphatically unreliable narrative set-up of Vom Schnee – one of the most crucial consequences of which is the characters’ overall ontological indeterminacy”, arguing that “the character Gillot can be read as a persona or mask donned by [Grünbein] himself”. Indeed, the power of Vom Schnee’s poetic imagination to bring the dead back to life and thereby counteract the unidirectionality of time is a consistent theme throughout the novel. When narrative and ontological layers are virtually impossible to seperate, ekphrasis becomes tenuous. We simply never know who sees what (if anything), who speaks to whom (if anybody), and who is whose invention. Vom Schnee can, however, be productively viewed in the tradition of twentieth-century conceptual ekphrasis, which draws on theoretical and conceptual frames rather than concrete works of art. Reumkens (2013, 143) situates Grünbein in the context of other poets such as Friederike Mayröcker, Thomas Kling, and Ulrike Draesner, all of whom “shift attention away from actual works of art to the contexts in which they are embedded and which have been traditionally given less importance”. Where he talks about concrete works of art, Grünbein often reflects on their “paramedial” frame, that is, on the “porous but marked transitional zone between a work, or oeuvre, and the (social) world surrounding it” (Reumkens

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2013, 121). However, the blending of characters and of historical periods in Vom Schnee has consequences for the novel’s engagement with vision and visuality. On multiple levels, Descartes’ goal to understand perception, and to use snow – of all things – to do so is constantly frustrated in Vom Schnee. Snow does not, as Descartes had hoped, turn the world into an abstraction, but into a “camera lucida” (Grünbein 2003, 14) in which ghosts, appearances and nonexistent personages are projected. Snow also serves as a poetological metaphor: it provides the (white, empty) writing ground for the “Discours” (de la Méthode) (Grünbein 2003, 15) – which finds itself on shifting and on blinding ground, a ground more resembling of a chiaroscuro painting (Grünbein 2003, 32) than of a clear and calculable Cartesian space. In this way, Grünbein turns a phenomenological bias against Descartes, fleshing out Merleau-Ponty’s (2012, 170) pointed observation that a Cartesian who looks into a mirror sees not himself but a dummy. In a novel that is set emphatically in the decisive moment of modernity and that alludes, among other things, to the death of the last “auerochs”, the first “cheque”, the introduction of tobacco to Europe, to advances in modern algebra and the spread of printed Bibles (Grünbein 2003, 46), Descartes’ dogmatic rationalism turns out to be nothing but an “espace imaginaire” (Grünbein 2003, 45).

6 Conclusion Ekphrasis is not only an evocation of visuality by way of description, pictorialism, or iconicity, but also a way of problematising, on a second level, culturally determined ‘regimes’ of visuality. Against the universalising bias present in both phenomenological and cognition-based approaches, both of which treat vision as an anthropological given, albeit for different reasons, this chapter has argued that the texts by Keats, Gimferrer and Grünbein show how both literary visuality (a quality of texts that can be pinpointed in instances of ekphrasis, description, and self-conscious references to looking), and the readerly visualisation to which it gives rise, need to be discussed in relation to historically and culturally specific visual ideas and practices. Set in three decisive moments of the history of visual culture  – at the beginning of the aesthetic regime of art, in the heyday of the age of the museum, and in the foundational moment of modern optics –, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “The Man in the Turban” and Vom Schnee can be understood as metaphenomenological texts whose problematising of visual regimes simultaneously challenges core phenomenological concepts and theorems such as the embodied nature of seeing and the distinction between an image and its ground. Although the three texts are generically diverse, written over a period



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of two hundred years, and by authors in three distinct national traditions, their engagement with the classical rhetoric of ekphrasis keeps coming back to the same insights also formulated in phenomenological theories of perception: that vision is fundamentally impure, always mixed with the other senses; that seeing takes place in an intimate situation in which spectator and object share; that visualisation is a dynamic process; and that it is impossible to clearly distinguish from imagination, fantasy, and reverie. As a metaphenomenology in its own right, ekphrasis can contribute to an enriched understanding of literary visuality. To the literary scholar invested in the analysis of specific literary visualities, it holds two important warnings: that visualisation is never brought up as such by literary texts, but is always bound up in specific acts of looking tied to an instance of the text, the focaliser; and that it is culturally contingent, premised on historical assumptions about vision and visuality that we need to address if we are to progress in our understanding of the visual aspect of literature.

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Renate Brosch

The Iconic Power of Short Stories – A Cognitive Approach Abstract: Based on a cognitive approach to genre as reading experience, this chapter argues that the reader’s role in making sense of short stories is different than in reading long narratives. Because of the brevity of the form, readers are more involved cognitively, contributing input from their personal experience and their cultural knowledge when responding to the gaps and absences in the text. The aspect of visuality is a special case in this reader response to stories: on the one hand, the reading experience is accompanied by an ongoing, dynamic default visualisation whose mental imagery remains vague and indistinct in order to accommodate incoming information. On the other, certain moments in the narrative are conducive of highlighted and intensified visualisations whose images stand out in the reading process and often enter long term memory. Several textual cues for these latter especially vivid images are suggested, such as defamiliarisation and emotional appeal. Among these strategies the narrative perspective and the construction of narrative space play a prominent part as triggers for visualisation based on an embodied response. A close examination of these visual strategies in a case study of Graham Swift’s short story “Seraglio” (1982) concludes the chapter.

1 Introduction As most discussions of the genre have noted, it is impossible to distinguish short stories from long narratives on the basis of textual properties alone. I have, therefore, in several publications advocated taking the reader’s response into account, and this chapter addresses short stories as specific reading experience (cf. Brosch 2013). Unfortunately, however, the experience of reading short stories cannot be separated absolutely from the reading of novels, or other long texts, either. Rather, as this article will show, the differences are scalar and modelled on a continuum where, for example, a Victorian three-decker and a Hemingway short story represent opposite poles of the spectrum. Hence, in spite of its more emphatic response-oriented angle, the following discussion resembles earlier genre theory in describing tendencies rather than essential features, and aesthetically successful strategies rather than inherent properties. It differs from conventional understandings of genre in paying attention to mental organisational DOI 10.1515/9783110378030-006

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processes. Faced with the profusion of hybrid genres in the contemporary media landscape, critics of genre theory have to include the mental representations attendant on identifying such schematic structures. Whether conceptualised as “preference rule systems” (Herman 2002, 11) or prototypes (Rosch 1975) or schemata (Sinding 2012, 153), genres are generated in the production and reception of literature through the activation and adaptation of mental representations in cognitive processes that utilise everyday capacities and cultural knowledge. This dynamic and interactive understanding of genre is well attuned to the enormous adaptability of the short story. Subsequent references to genre are thus based on a pragmatic and performative understanding, which regards genre not as sets of stylistic devices or textual properties, but as sets of (ideal and abstract) determinants on the production and interpretation of meaning (Frow 1995, 10). The particular determinants of the short story depend, I propose, to a large extent on the power of images. It has often been noted that the short story invites a degree of reader participation not frequently found in other narrative texts (Korte 2003, 5). In order to overcome its disadvantages in quantity, the genre presents its readers with extra challenges. Since readers seem to remember best the parts where they have to actively contribute, it is these textual challenges that often make the reading experience significant. Hence, participation in the form of puzzling over mysteries, in trying to evoke unusual images or in coming to terms with dissonance and indeterminacy will increase narrative impact. These interactions between reader and text are addressed in the following chapter from the perspective of reading experience. As Groeben (1980, 49) already noted, there exists a fundamental difference between the immediate reading experience (‘Leseerlebnis’) and hermeneutical acts of interpretation, a difference that is too often ignored in literary criticism, because its goal is interpretation.1 Certainly, the experiential aspects of literary texts are difficult to investigate, because they are indistinct and transient mental operations. In contrast to later interpretive acts, they often take place automatically or at a subconscious level that needs to be deliberately recuperated. But the methods that allow us to venture into these speculative domains have received important impulses

1 Iser (1978, 149) also registers the essential difference between a first and later readings which can never repeat the order of disclosure occasioned by the text because knowledge about events and outcomes is already available at second and later readings. This fore-knowledge enables the literary critic with hindsight to analyse how the text produces the ‘first’ meaning. However, interpretations often make judgements that are implicitly based on the spontaneous processes of first reading. This is why cognitive poetics is a useful additional analytical tool; for a comprehensive interpretation of the text, hermeneutics and discourse analysis remain valid approaches.



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from the insights in the neuro- and cognitive sciences since the 1980s. Cognitive approaches can now supplement interpretation with an analysis of the mental operations that necessarily inform it. Though cognitive narratology and cognitive poetics now provide criteria for analysing the reader’s mental operations and their corresponding textual cues, they are not set to displace interpretation as a central activity in literary studies. The whole endeavour of cognitive literary studies is to make overt the mental pathways underlying the process of construing meaning. It recognises interpretation as a formal, scholarly extension of the informal processes that take place during basic reading (Easterlin 2012, 24). To disregard these experiential processes would mean to ignore the very aspect where many differences can be observed between short stories and other narrative genres. There are several answers to the objection that responses to a literary text are too singular and personal to be investigated. First, it is common knowledge that the structure of the text limits the number of ways to comply with textual guidance. Moreover, certain organisational processes can be safely assumed to be shared by all readers, because of the way the brain is hard-wired: when processing a literary text, readers connect the information given to their own physical and mental experience and to their cultural knowledge: “On the one hand […] linguistic expressions encode a particular construal of the events represented; on the other […] this interacts with the reader’s ‘elaborate conceptual substrate’, that is, the reader’s background knowledge and ability to understand an expression’s ‘physical, social, and linguistic content’” (Langacker 2008, 4, citing Neary 2004, 119). As a result of the advances made in cognitive narratology, we are able to identify and explain some important mental operations performed during the reading process, such as priming, foregrounding, projecting, and blending. None of these operations or reading modes is specific to the short story. But in short stories all of them help to capture and hold the reader’s attention and to increase participation, thus demanding cognitive input from the reader and denying him or her a purely immersive reading experience. As I will argue, all these organisational acts have at least a visual component, some are completely visual. Hence, the importance of images for the genre. One of the most prominent ways in which readerly participation takes place is in visual imagining. Again, traditional literary scholarship often resists investigating these images, arguing that they are too personal and singular to be generalised (Esrock 1994, 180). In order to perform certain functions within their cultural context, images must first be envisioned by a recipient; without the receiving mind, the image does and means nothing at all. Only in this sense of a circuitry between individual reception and its exchange with the “cultural imaginary” (Fluck 1997) does Mitchell’s (2005, 10) idea of an “agency” of images

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make sense beyond its metaphorical appeal. There is no denying that via visualisation the visual culture at large can be influenced: that museum-goers flock to see the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa was caused by the poetic power of Walter Pater’s description, not by the undeniable power of Leonardo’s picture. Our imagination of Victorian London as a city of fog, slums and industrial filth probably owes more to Charles Dickens than to any historical documentation. The longevity of these literary visualities is ensured by their remediation into other fictions as well as into their receptive visualisation. But visual culture scholars often prefer to ignore the fact that any effect, function and meaning of images depends on their mental performance or – as traditional literary studies would have it – on the imagination. This traditional concept is, however, too loaded in the present context, which deals with the more narrowly conceptualised visualisation as defined by Esrock (2005, 633) where ‘visualisation’ is used as a synonym of ‘imagining’ and means the production of mental images or mental representations in the process of reading. Visualisation as I understand it is generated through an interplay between the text’s instructions and the reader’s processing capacities. On the side of the text, meaning in short stories is partly imagistic in character, since short narratives resort to compression, and compression tends to be visual (Dancygier 2012, 18). Moreover, images are especially suited to convey issues that cannot easily be put into words. On the reader’s side, allusions, omissions and indeterminacies in a text make multiple meanings possible and activate the reader’s visual imagining. Imagining is a complex phenomenon where primary embodied responses overlap with interpretive reflection. Some of the dynamic mental representations that accompany a reading are especially vivid and memorable; these moments of heightened attention and imagining are perceived as significant and are likely to enter into interpretation and memory. Hence, in processing the literary text and foregrounding certain images, meaningful patterns are established which form the basis of later interpretive understanding. Thus visualisations help readers to organise the complexity and indeterminacy of narrative. They aid comprehension, meaning production and memory. And heightened emotional experience while reading depends at least in part on the power of a story’s images. The degree of emotional involvement fluctuates across a text, of course, but as Toolan (2012, 224) states, the short story makes the most of its licence to counterbalance brevity by including moments of “exceptional emotional and ethical resonance”. I propose that one of the ways in which short stories overcome their disadvantage in quantity is to appeal to the reader’s visualisation. Thus, experiencing short stories unfolds in a tension between verbal economy and imaginative projection. But the question remains, when and how the text triggers especially vivid



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visual imaginings (and intense reading experiences). I will address these questions in the following trying to throw some light on the textual cues that elicit heightened attention and trigger visualisations that stand out in the reading experience and remain in memory.2 In order to do so, I have to disaggregate complex interdependent mental organisational processes and probe them for their emotional impact. Herman (2003, 172) names five core problem-solving activities, among them bounding into segments, foregrounding and imputing causal relations as fundamental parts of cognitive processing. According to Brown (1989, 242), everything can be organised mentally as either a sequence or a compression; both options are actualised in reading, so that the flux of processing and the foregrounding of certain images alternate. The stream of reading experience is segmented into units that are bounded and classifiable and thus more readily recognised and remembered. Brown (1989, 243) claims that readers of short stories compress semantic units in a “synchronic reflective act” which encodes meaning “iconically” in a memorable way.3 These condensed images or parts of images have an intensifying effect that encourages projection and enhances memorability. Herman (2002, 85) also identifies these highlighted visual moments as a (not always conscious) mnemonic resource. In the following, I am going to describe visualisations in first reading processes and discuss what they contribute to interpretation. Using insights from cognitive literary studies, I seek to identify narrative devices that prompt the visual imagination and to single out those reading experiences that promote longterm visual memory. While most visualisations that accompany a reading process hover below the threshold of awareness, some “iconic moments” are highlighted and tend to inform later recollections of a text. These intensified visualisations occur when either embodied or cultural understanding or both receive extra challenge, thereby causing an intense emotional and/or cognitive engagement with the text passage. Since short stories seek to compensate brevity by making special impact, they frequently rely on these strategies that undermine habitual and automatic text processing.

2 My approach is traditional in that it presupposes a dense, carefully crafted narrative literary form which encourages an alert, attentive reading as well as later reminiscence. Yet, it is clear that many stories are neither read nor written in pursuit of these aesthetic qualities. But many an author’s comments deal with the problem of casual consumption and ephemeral reading experience, seeking strategies for leaving a trace on the reader’s mind. 3 Brown (1989, 242) refers to these iconic compressions as “configurations”. But in order to avoid the implication that these images are static, I prefer the term “iconic moments”.

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2 The Immediate Reading Experience Neuropsychological experiments show that mental images are essential to any act of cognition and that visual thinking is a component of cognition just like verbal reasoning (Kosslyn 1980, 4). According to Sadoski and Paivio’s (2001, 1–2) ‘dual coding theory of cognition’, visual and verbal systems function in tandem and readers shuttle between them. Johnson-Laird (1983, 407) proposes that there are three kinds of representations for discourse: the sound or text, a propositional one “close to the surface form of the utterance” and the mental model which is constructed on the basis of the truth conditions of the propositions expressed by the sentences in discourse4. According to Bortolussi and Dixon (2013, 26–27), the verbal propositional input is transformed into a mental model or representation and this is what we remember. Clearly then, visualisation plays a crucial role in text processing.5 As Turner (1996, 18) explains, our constantly active faculty for “storying” is linked to bodily perceptions, especially to visual perceptions, which are again and again repeated in stories. He argues that there is a link between fundamental image schemas and understanding sequences of narrative. According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980), these image schemas pattern the way the human mind works. As defined in their foundational study, image schemas or conceptual metaphors offer a visual form of knowledge, an “imaginative rationality”, which supplements propositional knowledge with a knowledge that is “embodied, imaginative and gestalt” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 235). Image schemas carry culturally determined semantic surplus and values (e.  g. ‘good is up’ and ‘bad is down’), which is processed automatically during the immediate reading experience (Stockwell 2002, 109, 105). These image schemas as well as deixis and perspective constitute visual elements in narrative texts that appeal to embodied experience. Since textual visuality is anchored in sensorimotor perceptions of the real world, their reception resembles the experiential parameters of perceptions in everyday life. This understanding of the reader’s experience is based on the concept of “4e cognition” instantiated by the neurosciences. 4e cognition characterises mental pro-

4 ‘Mental model’ and ‘mental imagery’ are terms used in the neurosciences for visual imagining and visualising (cf. Kosslyn et al. 2006). 5 I am aware that cognitivists who subscribe to an enactivist position hold that the idea of mental representation in narrative texts is fundamentally flawed. They argue that our response to literary characters and events is structurally the same as our everyday management of information (Zlatev et al. 2008, 2–3). I am sceptical of this sort of strong cognitivism which tends to reduce the polyvalence of literature by equating it with everyday experience.



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cesses as (1) embodied, (2) embedded, (3) enacted, and (4) extended (Rowlands 2010, 3). The idea that mental processes are embodied means roughly that they are partly constituted by, partly made up of wider […] bodily structures and processes. The idea that mental processes are embedded is, again roughly, the idea that mental processes have been designed to function only in tandem with a certain environment that lies outside the brain of the subject […]. The idea that mental processes are enacted is the idea that they are made up not just of neural processes but also of things that the organism does more generally – that they are constituted in part by the ways in which an organism acts on the world and the ways in which world, as a result acts back on that organism. The idea that mental processes are extended is the idea that they are not located exclusively inside an organism’s head but extend out, in various ways, into the organism’s environment. (Rowlands 2010, 3)

The central and crucial constituent of this new concept of the mind is the embodiment theory. It is corroborated by the discovery of mirror neurons, which appear to be responsible for simulation-based acts of understanding and meaning-making. The main argument for common mental processing in readers of a common cultural moment is based on insights into the processing faculties of the brain: cognitive theory holds that imagery (recalled or otherwise) is constituted by (partial) enactment of the perceptual acts that would be carried out if one were actually perceiving whatever is being imagined (Thomas 2014). Because the mind works economically, readers automatically call upon their experience of reality in processing textual narratives. Since reading narratives engenders an embodied form of reception, story comprehension entails an imitative imagination of the sense perceptions taking place in the fictional world. This simulation is largely responsible for the emotional effect literary fictions can have on readers, the feeling that ‘it has happened to them’. Thus, on the one hand, making sense of reading is grounded in embodied perception and sensorimotor experience. This is manifest in the ubiquity of spatial cognition which is at the heart of human thinking and informs every verbal articulation, even very abstract propositions, with its properties and values. Embodied response in reading narratives involves a “fictional recentering” of the reader’s senso-motoric positioning (Caracciolo 2011, 118; cf. Ryan 1991, ch. 1).6 This 6 Without using the term, Iser (1978, 150) anticipated the part played by embodied and enactive cognition, by describing how readers are absorbed into the fictional world they themselves imagine and how the absent world enters into their consciousness and vice versa: “Thus text and reader are linked together, the one permeating the other. We place our synthetising faculties at the disposal of an unfamiliar reality, produce the meaning of that reality, and in so doing enter into a situation which we could not have created out of ourselves”.

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fictional recentering of the reading subject is part of the illusion building which is a prerequisite for immersive reading (Schäfer 2010, 168). A simulated enactment enables readers to project their minds into the fictional world and to find their way around there, designating certain figures as “trajectors” whose paths they follow and certain elements of the ground to become visual landmarks (Stockwell 2002, 16). Readers are not just able to mentally map the fictional world and to place things and people into it but they can move around in it themselves and take up different positions in it via “unconscious somatic transfer of sense experience” (Fluck 2005, 38). Besides this spatial understanding, they bring embodied knowledge of their human environment to a reading. In everyday communication, understanding other people takes place in many ways without verbal exchange; mindreading is part of an automatic and largely preverbal orientation (Zlatev et al. 2008, 3). Literary fictions invariably contain corporeal aspects, whether in the most common form of visual perception or other sense experiences such as body movements, postures, gestures and facial expressions that can be decoded by readers effortlessly. Abbreviating the 4e model of cognition, we may think of this whole set of responses as embodied or enactive visualisations. On the other hand, literary texts are produced and received in the context of extensive unconscious associations as well as deliberate acts of connecting to prior knowledge, memory and circumstance, all of which constitute informational material with which readers invest the represented world. Images serve as repositories of information and literary texts carry connotations from the larger cultural imaginary and readers access the cultural memory archive when making meaning. Our understanding of narratives is grounded in cultural knowledge, a knowledge stored in the mind in visual schemas and scripts, which we automatically recall when making sense of a text. Scripts and frames are historically determined knowledge clusters that facilitate the production of meaning in communication whether they are held to be correct or not (Strasen 2013, 41). Constructing images and sequences and aligning them with the cultural reservoir of schemas and scripts happens in everyday communication for reasons of economy. In reading, likewise, the communicative benefit of schemas and scripts lies in the possibility to access an entire set of objects and events when only one aspect is mentioned, so that expressions like ‘having a check-up’ or ‘looking at the menu’ automatically imply manifold aspects of typical situations (Dancygier 2012, 33). In the present context, it is significant that frames and scripts are not exclusively or even primarily language-based but frequently non-propositional visual objects and events drawn from a store-house of well-known images. This aspect of visualisation links it to the cultural imaginary in which each individual participates; it has political implications because such meaning-making always occurs within a pre-existing social field and within actual power relations (Bryson 2001, 5).



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Hence, this aspect of reading may be designated cultural visualisation, since it is culturally determined and potentially critical. Visualisation processes are non-hermeneutic and non-propositional, obviously, but their Gestalt-knowledge enters into and inflects later hermeneutic acts. Insofar, my distinction can be related to Collins’s (1991, xi) notions of “enactive interpretation” and “critical interpretation”. Just as meaning-making is both language- and image-based, it also depends on corporeal processing as well as interpretive reflection. To separate the two modes is an entirely heuristic procedure; in the reading process they are interdependent and interactive. Neither do they represent distinct successive stages in reading, though embodied reactions occur primarily in the immediate reading experience and a critical stance is often taken afterwards. Yet, even when the reading experience feels entirely absorbing, some critical distance always remains in any act of reading and this critical stance becomes greater in retrospective interpretation: “separation from the experience of interiority is what defines criticism” (Schwenger 1999, 9). As several critics have noted, immersion and loss of critical distance is much harder to achieve in short narratives (Wright 1989).

3 The Particularities of the Short Story Genre It stands to reason that short narratives depend on the evocation of schemas and scripts more than long ones, and that understanding a short story must have greater recourse to contextual knowledge. Because stories do not have room to elaborate on the determining factors of their fictional worlds and values they demand more input from the reader who keeps activated schemas in the shortterm memory buffer until they have to be modified or discarded. This dependence on the semantic participation of readers is well-known: short stories are understood to be suggestive, to master the art of omission and allusion and to be more metaphorical than long narratives which have space to develop metonymical relations. Short stories, as has often been noted by theorists and critics, thrive on gaps, mysteries, secrets (Toolan 2012, 223). Their restricted space permits ellipses, absences and uncertainties which we would not accept in a novel (Hanson 1989, 25). Though this is not an exclusive speciality of short stories, their restriction in quantity makes compression necessary which in turn creates a reliance on the reader’s ability to supplement the textual given with extratextual knowledge. Among the cultural knowledge we bring to our reading is some expectation regarding the genre. These expectations shape the reading and prepare readers

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for their contributions to the process of organising textuality. May (1984) terms the short story a “mode of knowing” that differs from other fictions, one that is characterised by epistemic uncertainty, liminality and lack of resolution or closure (May 1984, 328). In Bassler’s (2015, 79) view, this cognitive uncertainty can manifest itself on several levels: on the intratextual level as an epistemological crisis of a character, on the experiential level as a cognitive and emotional space in which readers are invited to rethink their own concepts and beliefs, and, finally, on an interdiscursive level, as short stories bring together and amalgamate a multiplicity of discourses. This is another way of putting the contention that short stories make special demands on cognitive participation by requiring supplementary input at every level. On the intratextual level, in addition to epistemological crises and epiphanies of fictional characters, unresolved puzzles and problems characterise the short story’s uncertainty: summary description relies on contextual knowledge, reduced character specification relies on Theory of Mind and folk psychology and omitted psychological motivation relies on empathy in readers in order to make sense of the narrative events. In this way through what Bassler (2015, 86) calls the “cognitive, emotional and ethical space” of participation and engagement on the part of the reader, a multiplicity of discourses is evoked and brought to bear on the narrative. Whereas novels give readers a certain length of time to spend with their characters and to accommodate to their intratextual belief systems, short stories must somehow manage to engage readers cognitively and emotionally during a brief reading experience. Because of their brevity, short stories cannot depend on absorbing readers easily into an immersive fictional world, so that an embodied response with complete fictional recentering of the reading subject is not as easily accomplished as in an absorbing novel. They must rely extensively on the reader’s supplementary input from personal experience and cultural knowledge. Hence, both embodied experience of the real world and cultural knowledge enable and constrain the readers’ mental images, and both can contribute to an enriched reading experience. In order to leave a lasting trace on readers’ minds, a useful strategy is to aim at moments of intense reading experience in which a sense of significance meets a sense of vivid visuality. Many critics have argued that the genre itself possesses a special affinity to the visual. Early reader response aesthetics already drew attention to the importance of images in the minds of readers. Studies of the short story have often noted its propensity for the creation of memorable images and metaphors. Hanson (1985, 5–6) argues from the perspective of production that the compulsion for writers to compress results in a tendency to evoke iconically. She therefore regards the short story as a form of preference for the visual in place of the discursive. Considering



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textuality, Shaw (1983, 13) points out links between snapshot photography and short stories. Supplementing her argument with regard to reception processes, Brown (1989) points out that it is obviously easier to organise textual material mentally when there is less quantity for our memories to deal with. She claims that shortness inclines readers to grasp together “achronological units” while reading. According to Brown (1989, 242–243), the brevity of short stories encourages readers to foreground what she calls “visual configurations”. On this view, short story reading involves forming units of visualisation which are retained in short-term memory while the reading process is going on and later consolidated and compressed into a selection of images which are associated with the longterm memory of a text. This is confirmed in recent experimental tests of memory in reading literary narrative. In these experiments Bortolussi and Dixon (2013, 26, 27) find that both the surface structure of the text and the text base are lost relatively quickly after a sentence has been understood; what remains in memory is the “situation model”, “a spatial or visual representation of the entities described in the text”. All of these arguments from different theoretical approaches converge on the proposition of short stories as a specifically visual genre. In discussing this proposition, aspects of textual visuality and readerly visualisation have to be considered.

4 Textual Cues for Visualisation: Description, Focalisation and Metaphor Traditional literary scholarship attributes visuality to description, metaphor or figurative language and to perspective and focalisation (Bal 2005, 629–630; → I. Visual Descriptions, → Introduction, and → Horstkotte, respectively). However, these claims have to be qualified with regard to the reading experience. While all three textual features certainly possess the potential to enhance the visualisation of a text, none does so necessarily. Detailed description may encourage immersive reading, but does not necessarily generate intense and enduring mental images: “To suggest that texts encourage visualization is not to imply that the mere description of landscapes and persons will promote imaging. The sheer presence of such ‘verbal images’ does not suffice” (Esrock 1994, 183). Implicit in this reminder is a conventional understanding of description as the delineation of a static object. This sort of narrative arrest is unusual in stories and has declined in novels in the course of history as well; more often, description is part of narrativity which includes a change of events. Description set off from narrativity is, in fact, said to constitute

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the special subgenre of the sketch or “lyrical short story”, a text type favoured by modernist female authors who were experimenting with absence of plot (Jean Rhys’s “In Luxemburg Gardens”, Virginia Woolf’s “Kew Gardens”). What might be called a “standard mode of engagement with narrative” (Currie 2010, 106), i.  e. a reading primarily interested in events in the fictional world, tolerates only a limited amount of arrested description. Yet, the famous effet de réel is supposed to depend on a textual production of the illusion of likelihood and plausibility. Readers process texts economically and will hold to concordance with everyday experience wherever possible. In order to be readily accessible, narratives rely on activating the cognitive actualisation of readers and their ability to naturalise and contextualise in accordance with everyday knowledge (cf. Wolf 1993, 118; Lobsien 1975, 4). This reality effect is supposed to encourage immersive reading and smooth naturalisation. As every avid reader knows, one can become so engrossed in a book that ordinary life seems temporarily suspended (Schwenger 1999, 9). But such absorption is much more difficult to achieve in the short time span of reading a short story. In Wolf’s and Lobsien’s discussion, “immersive reading” is associated with popular and “undemanding” literature and somewhat disparaged compared to highly poetic texts whose indeterminacies and ambivalences will demand a more cognitive engagement (Wolf 1993, 93). Obviously, short stories can belong to both types of texts. But in neither case do they have room for elaborate description of a status quo. Short stories thus remind us of the inadequacy of separating description from narrativity. The conventional notion that description is a static element that halts narration and hence triggers still rather than dynamic images has to be revised. Description is actually an essential part of narration, since the imagination of narrative requires some spatial setting (James 2008, 1). But to characterise it as a static element against the dynamism of narrative is to confuse a special effect with a textual structure. It depends on other factors, whether the description of an object or event invites keen visualisation. Not only descriptions of locations or characters, but viewpoints and intratextual relations between characters contribute to the reader’s act of cognitive mapping. Since spatial mapping is an ordinary organisational process in understanding, it facilitates access not only to the ‘concrete’ setting and location of a narrative, but also to more abstract levels of psychological motivation and thematic content. Narrative spaces can be employed as symbolic or metaphorical reinforcement for significant themes or for psychological contrasts in short stories, so that the semantic overdetermination will cause an intense reading experience. Like spatial descriptions, perspective can also help intensify visualisations. Clearly, focalisation is not itself a visual phenomenon but prompts the reader to take a perspective. In this way, it can produce startling reading experiences and



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hence vivid visualisations. But that is not the case when the perspective produces little recalcitrance in the reader. Many literary scholars argue or at least imply that the subjective and necessarily limited point of view of a character is more likely to elicit sympathy, identification and affective involvement from the reader (Adamson 2001, 90). According to Jahn (1996, 252, 256), for instance, a passage that presents objects and events as seen, perceived, or conceptualised from a specific focus-I will, naturally and automatically, invoke a reader’s adoption of (or transposition of) this point of view and open a window defined by the perceptual, evaluative, and affective parameters that characterise the agent providing the focus.7 In the normal economy of reading practice, readers tend to adopt the perspective of internally focalised passages on grounds of similarity with ordinary experience (cf. Coplan 2004, 142–143). Since short stories often prefer subjective perspectives and the use of homodiegetic focalisers, they may be thought to appeal to an illusory identification. Yet, the effect for the reader is rarely one of simple vicarious emulative perspective-taking. Instead, internal focalisers are often deployed as a cognitive challenge on the assumption that interior perspective does not automatically engender emulative embodied enactment (Brosch 2007b, 156–157). Such a simple correlation between narrative perspective and perspective-taking does not sufficiently recognise the reader’s ability to project different mindsets and underestimates the ability to imagine several points of view simultaneously. Readers are creative in dealing with textual perspectives; they easily perform mental leaps which are habitual in everyday experience. Hence, mental representation is never uniformly attached to a specific fictional figure (Brosch 2008, 65). Rather, it is moments when the perspective invites doubt and distrust that are specially registered, as is the case in unreliable narration, where sympathy and identification are withheld. As Emmott and Sanford’s (2012, 167) experiments have shown, the more personalised a focaliser is, the less readers identify with his or her perspective. When they encounter a limited, unreliable or elliptic perception, readers are prompt to counterfocalise and to shift empathy. These participatory strategies suspend attention and are likely to be remembered. On closer inspection, short stories with a strong subjective perspective frequently belong to that type of unreliability that intends a clear rejection of the point of view by the reader. As many critics have pointed out, unreliability can refer to various forms

7 Traditional narratological models provide little insight into the readers’ mental imaging because for them the question ‘who sees?’ refers to seeing in the text only (Bal 2004, 153). And as Caracciolo (2013, 95) points out, most narratological pronouncements on internal focalisation tend to reify the character’s perspective.

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of manipulated dissent, but again, visualisation follows neither ethical nor epistemic rejection. When something is vividly evoked it will be visualised, no matter what our (later) interpretive judgement; a selective effect will result not from the reader’s cognitive dissent but from the multiplicity of deictic shifts in perspective and frequent need for counterfocalisation in the course of reading a narrative. To acknowledge multiple deictic shifts in perspective and counterfocalisation does not imply a denial of empathy. Empathy is a natural side effect of the dominant person-oriented interest in reading narrative fictions (Vermeule 2010, 11). To comprehend character means thinking another’s thoughts, feeling another’s states of mind and perceiving another’s impressions while at the same time being aware of the fictional nature of the other.8 Instead of orientation towards the self, readers experience a doubling (or multiplying) of the self; they are themselves and another (or several others) at the same time. This is what makes reading so enjoyable and what can cause a new and sometimes transformational experience. In terms of visualisation, it entails seeing through the eyes of another but not necessarily believing what one is seeing. Similarly, metaphors are a possible means of highlighting certain images in the process of visualisation. Not all metaphorical expressions are inevitably visually imagined, as commonly used metaphorical expressions and image schemas are hardly registered as such. This is not to deny that the conceptual metaphors (or image schemas) already mentioned influence text processing profoundly. Indeed, they provide the basis for the most automatic and fundamental organisational processes in reading. As described by Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 235), they constitute a basic pattern in the way the human mind works. Because they carry culturally determined semantic values, conceptual metaphors impart conventional meanings of a general and widely accepted sort in a specific culture (Stockwell 2002, 109). This means that they also contribute to visualisation because they offer a visual form of knowledge, on which human understand-

8 Iser (1978, 154) comments on the habitual orientation towards the self which is temporarily relegated to the background: “In this process there disappears the subject-object division essential for all cognition and perception, and this is what makes literature a unique means of access to new experiences. It may also explain why readers have so often mistaken their relationship to the world of the text as one of ‘identification’”. In a study which is as topical as when it was written, this Cartesianism strikes an odd note. These statements show that Iser could not have been aware that neuropsychology would abandon the ‘subjectivity-first’ model of the mind and posit an innate intersubjectivity that undercuts the ontological division between subject and object, as is now the case. Iser (1978, 159) does qualify his premises at the end of the chapter, however, by stating that literature “enables us to see how little of the subject is a given reality, even to its own consciousness”.



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ing depends (Stockwell 2002, 109). But in my opinion, because they are totally naturalised, they occasion only automatic and unnoticed embodied responses and inform primary acts of organisation, such as foregrounding, mapping and deictic shifts. Hence, they furnish the primary visualisation with the standard repertoire of “metaphors we live by” without intensifying it. They may not cause particularly vivid imagistic visualisations but they are indispensable to the reader’s fictional recentering. According to May (1984, 329), who supports this view without referencing cognitive processes, the kind of experience we find in the short story reflects a mode of knowing that is grounded in the intuitive and immaterial reality of an inner world. Thus, though image schemas are fundamental to primary and passive visualisation processes, they are not usually pictorial, nor do they trigger intense and noticeable imaginings. Very innovative and poetic metaphors are a different textual cue altogether. And as Gehring (2011) argues, these complex figurative devices often contain obstacles for visual synthesis. Poetic metaphors are a classic prompt for conceptual blending. Ever since Turner (1996) and Fauconnier (1994) launched the concept in the 1990s, “blending” has become the generally accepted term for the mental activity demanded by metaphor.9 The basic premise of blending theory is that human minds can activate two or more “sets of information or mental spaces” at the same time and they can project these input spaces onto one another to produce a blend (Schneider 2012, 3). According to Turner (2006), blending is a mental activity that is going on all the time, whenever we process information aided by the habitual visual attributes of image schemas. We are constantly blending the old with the new, alternative viewpoints with previous ones, adjusting our opinions and modifying them to accommodate alternatives with prior belief and knowledge systems. The important feature of a blend, however, is that it consists of “emergent properties that are not possessed by the input views” (Turner 2006, 96). Though Turner denies it, this seems to be a particularity of literary and poetic metaphors. When a metaphor is so difficult that it does not easily merge into a blend, visualisation is not prevented entirely; rather, mental representations tend to alternate between the vehicle and target images in the manner of a duck-rabbit figure. The very recalcitrance of these ‘incommensurable’ images arrests attention and enriches the reading experience. They represent a major instance of dissonance 9 Though publications on the general mechanisms of blending are legion, blending theory has not been applied to narrative analysis in any extensive way; an exception is a volume recently edited by Schneider, who suspects in his introduction (2012, 10) that the ubiquity and range of mental activities in which blending plays a role has put scholars off. He suggests that the application of blending theory to narrative makes sense within a larger cognitive approach.

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in textual visuality which prompts heightened cognitive management at a more critical stage of text processing than image schemas. Because of the brevity of the short story text and the simultaneous effort to enlarge its resonance, the genre not only prefers evoking images to describing them but also makes extensive use of creative poetic metaphors. This is why it is often called a metaphorical text in contradistinction to novels as metonymical texts (Orr 2015, 252).

5 Dynamic Visualisation: From Transient to ­Intensified Images Scarry (2001, 33) observes that visual imaginings without textual instructions are usually faint and fleeting, while the images generated in reading can be extraordinarily vivid and affecting. She claims that the mental representations which reading generates surpass ordinary imaginings in vivacity, solidity and spontaneity, because daydreaming images are “inert”, that is, relatively static and “individually willed”. Her argument correctly emphasises the dynamics of visualisation, but it has to be elaborated because visualisation is dynamic in a double sense: it follows a dynamic and ongoing development along a time axis and it is itself dynamic in the sense of the fluid adaptation of its Gestalt. It has been emphasised so far that visualisation, as it follows along the time axis of narrative, has different degrees of intensity. Unfortunately, most of the stream of images that accompanies a first reading experience takes place below the threshold of consciousness or in Iser’s (1978, 139, 148) words as “passive synthesis”. In analogy to what neuroscience calls the brain’s “default mode”, when it is not concentrated on a specific task and the mind is free to wander, this relatively passive stage in the receptive modes may be called default visualisation (Richardson 2015, 226). It constitutes fictional space, objects and figures, foregrounds the important agents and assigns others to the background, and thus furnishes the fictional world. As long as the text can be accommodated to ordinary schemas and everyday experience, visualisation will be smooth and economical. Most of this part of imagining during reading will probably be forgotten once the reading is completed. In contrast to later interpretation and recall, visualising in the immediate reading process is partly inchoate and eludes a “blow by blow” description (Phelan 2013, 69). The question then is what constitutes the compressed visual units or situation models that do become lodged in memory. The cognitive sciences have established that the brain manages seeing, remembering and imagining from a common neural substrate; it does not and cannot use entirely different circuitry to produce and differentiate the perception



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of an object and a mental image of it (Spolsky 2007, 46). Yet, the mental images that are assembled through a series of modelling acts of increasing complexity during reading never achieve the same degree of completion as in actual physical seeing. Nor does the visual scenario generated in reading have the vividness of actual perception. Its coarse organisation with one or two details corresponds to the 2½D stage of actual perception at most (Schwenger 1999, 64).10 Thus, in spite of the similarity between and the shared brain activities in visualisation and perception it is, nevertheless, important to remember that the two are vastly different phenomenologically. McGinn (2004, 26–30) lists the main differences: persistence, saturation and distinctness; which is to say that reading images are transient, incomplete and non-specific.11 Iser’s (1978, 138) term “optical poverty” might suggest that it constitutes a failure on the reader’s part. That is not the case at all, rather, as Troscianko (2013, 187) puts it, “indeterminacy is a capacity not a constraint”. The capacity of mental images to be non-committal is not a lack but an advantage: it ensures their adaptability to information received at a later stage. This means that mental imagery is polyvalent to an extent that real images are not. In the reading experience, the whole stream of images accompanying a reading never becomes concrete as in a movie but contains a variety of fluid forms. As we read, most images that we keep in the “visual short term memory buffer” have to be modified, some have to be discarded completely, and only some can be retained (Kosslyn 1980, 82). Thus, the primary advantage of the transience and vagueness of visualisations is the ability to merge and fuse into other images. The visual indeterminacy of mental images at this stage is important, even necessary, because of embodied understanding: readers do not just ‘see’ the fictional world but enter it with and in their consciousness. Story comprehension entails mapping the trajectories of agents and objects across narrated paths (Herman 2002, 8). This is the reason description is not only a visual element in fictions, but a condition of mobility, since it may be said to drive forward the narrative instead of just providing a container background. Narrative spaces open up

10 According to Marr’s (2010, 354) groundbreaking neurological study, proper vision also proceeds in stages, on a continuum ranging from a two-dimensional “primal sketch” through a “2½D sketch”, which establishes the depth and orientation of certain key points relative to the viewer, to full visual realisation of the perceived object in three dimensions. All these modelling modes are employed in rapid succession – within less than half a second – to organise and interpret light’s retinal stimulation. 11 They are different in kind as well as in effect. In contrast to perceptions, visualisations are faint and fleeting; in terms of the reading experience, visualisations are guided by intentionality, hence they are determined by textuality and rely on attention.

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paths, trajectories, thresholds, boundaries and horizons that activate the story world and mobilise the fictional agents as the “virtual reader’s” avatars (Caracciolo 2011, 117). As narratives establish frontiers and borders which mark difference and establish relations, spatialisation is one of the primary principles governing the comprehension process (Lotman 1972, 312). By recalling the experiential parameters of everyday life, narrative space makes an appeal to the embodied and emotional involvement of readers. In consequence, reading is grounded in spatialisation (Caracciolo 2011, 118). In following the trajectories of gazes, observations, and movements from one place to another, visualisation constantly resituates the reader. Yet the reader is able to move around in a largely unspecified environment where certain features may stand out but the general surroundings remain quite indistinct. A first reading process consists of profiling figures against ground. Drawn from the visual arts, the distinction between figure and ground encapsulates the way in which certain elements of a narrative stand out as figures, whereas others act as a backdrop. As Stockwell (2002, 14) points out, the recognition of figures and ground is a dynamic process which has to be constantly updated as different figures are thrown into relief against various grounds. The dynamics of visualisation involve constantly reconstructing these relations: mention of the term ‘mother’, for instance, activates an additional entity which is understood but not profiled; in the course of a story, this hierarchy may be reversed. Foregrounding reflects the way in which we cognitively interact with the environment: in paying attention to certain elements in the visual and spatial field around us we take “cognitive shortcuts which allow us to more effectively process and prioritise the constant stream of incoming data” (Neary 2004, 122). Motion is a highly influential factor in determining which elements possess agency. A profiled character-figure is termed a ‘trajector’ while the features intersecting its path are called ‘landmarks’ (Langacker 2008, 151). Trajectors are typically agents profiled against less conspicuous characters who occupy the background at a certain point in the narrative. These categories designate what occupies the reader’s attention at a certain point in the story. In voluntary evocation of images without a text, Scarry (2001, 33) claims, images cannot be synthesised into a sequence – one must continually abandon an image the moment one is producing a new one. Literary visualisations, by contrast, accommodate and submit to the temporal dimension of narrative, so that images qualify and condition each other in the time-flow of the reading (Iser 1978, 149). The reader is continually able to morph one image into another. The literary text permits such variations, and the short story text from its combination of narrativity and compression allows for it to a large extent. As Iser (1978, 138–139) noted, we are most aware of this process of shape-shifting when the progression



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of the narrative is not what we had expected; when facets appear to clash, when “we are obliged to incorporate new circumstances which means retrospective changes to our past images”.

6 Intense Visualisations and Iconic Moments In the reading experience, the interdependent processes of forgetting and remembering come into play: forgetting is paradoxically prerequisite to remembering. When concerned with meaning-making, readers manage two apparently contradictory, but in fact interacting and interfering impulses: on the one hand, the organisation of sequence and the construction of causality and coherence in the interest of comprehensibility, which involves coming to terms with cognitive dissonances resulting from gaps, indeterminacies or inconsistencies, so that unhampered continuity can be established. On the other hand, as readers attempt to impose coherence, attention is systematically arrested by a detail that seems out of place, by a dissonant element that provokes astonishment, or by a disparity that offers multiple possibilities for understanding a work. These instances of halting reception produce visual impressions for future reference by compressing passive syntheses into emotionally charged visual units (Brosch 2007a, 19). While readers negotiate their visualisations between retention and protention, the dynamic, “passive” visualisation described above is part of a holistic response best addressed with the help of the embodiment theory, because embodied cognition is not merely rational awareness and intentional sense-making but involves emotions and corporeal affect as well. These affective responses are connected to textual visuality because – as psychological experiments have shown – images can readily bring to mind embodied and affected states (Reavey 2011, 11). Whether in the form of memorable metaphors, startling descriptions or comparisons or unusual modes of seeing, when textual visuality possesses emotional appeal, it confers iconic power on the short story. In the reading process, mental images are called into being by certain textual strategies that can be used to capture the reader’s attention. Heightened visualisation depends on attention; and attention in turn differs from passive reception in its intentionality. Attention management is crucial to reader response because it determines a sense of progression and projection, that is, suspense and engagement, and thereby influences how far we are involved in a narrative. As readers are well aware, many short stories are such a transient experience that they are soon forgotten. In order to remain in long-term memory, the short story text must present extra challenge. With regard to language, it is a truism

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that indeterminacy and defamiliarisation demand special efforts in processing, but visuality can also present such challenges. Blanks and gaps suspend the connectability of textual patterns, so that the resultant break in ‘good continuation’ intensifies the acts of imagining on the reader’s part (Iser 1978, 189). When a narrative arrests our attention in such a way as to make us pause and ponder, it can also produce intensified visualisations. For any special impact, cognitive challenge is needed, and iconic moments that are experienced as particularly intense and incorporated into later reflections on the text are prompted by special engagement (cf. Brosch 2015, 96). Though the mental models in our cognition processes are dynamic and in constant flux (as are most of our techniques of representation), captivated and suspended attention arrests certain images and thus triggers intensification. This is why I refer to these intensified visualisations as ‘iconic moments’. A secret of high attention and memorability lies in deviation, in challenging mental adaptation. In processing images, as in processing language, deviation from the conventional and the expected is an attention marker and therefore an intensifier of visualisation. I suspect that the most dramatic shape-shifts or adjustments in visualisation produce the most enduring experiences. Both embodied and cultural visualisation can lead to protracted attention and produce vivid and enduring images when some defamiliarising effect is introduced. This can consist of unusual and unexpected phenomena which contradict cultural schemas or of unusual ways of experiencing. For embodied visualisation to produce this effect, the “unconscious somatic transfer of sense experience” must somehow be highlighted, either through description of unusual or emotionally charged sentience or through some disturbing element that resists automatic enactment on the part of the reader (Fluck 2005, 38). Morphing and conflicting images that contradict ordinary experience can provide an occasion for intense visualisations because of their impact on the emotions through embodied visualisation. On the level of more critical cultural response, a contradiction of cultural schemas or visual ambivalence, that is, conflicting images that must be held in balance by readers and somehow reconciled or brought to blend in coming to terms with the narrative, can produce a great cognitive and emotional effect and lead to a lasting engagement with the world views imagined. In short, for images to stand out in the reading experience, cognitive challenge through novelty, complexity, and/or indeterminacy is needed. Scarry (1996, 162–168) gives examples for intense visualisation on account of unusual perceptions in the literary text: she argues that certain passages from Marcel Proust’s Du Côté de Chez Swann are particularly vivid because they are guided by an intermediary in the text whose perception is unusual in some way. According to Scarry, the reader’s visualisation is facilitated when narratives



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present special viewing situations in which characters or narrators focus an interested attention on an object or event. She claims that the most intense visualisations occur in reading the visual perceptions of fictional characters, when what comes to be imitated is not only the sensory outcome but the deep structure of production that gave rise to the perception (Scarry 1996, 161). She does not use the term but we would now say that these instances of seeing in the text are “cognitively realistic” and therefore particularly appealing (Troscianko 2013, 187). However, Scarry omits the most important ingredient of intense visualisation – the emotions. The appeal to the reader’s emotions need not be sentimental, it springs from the primacy of person-orientation in our reading of narratives. Staging the gaze in the text encourages mental imagining in the reader when powerful emotions are involved, for instance, in scenes of observation when characters are observing each other with an interest in discovering their hidden motives, or true intentions or secret selves. Providing an internal observer in the text whose vision proceeds from indistinctness or misapprehension is not only cognitively realistic but also profoundly engaging because the depicted process of vision matches the readerly visualisation. In these scenes mental visualisations have to be very gradually adjusted to accommodate the shape-shifting of the fictional world. The peculiar effect derives from the pleasing congruence between the processing activity of the reader and the content of the text passage, a congruence that “might contribute to increasing the reader’s feeling of ‘presence’ in the fictional world” (Troscianko 2013, 189).

7 “Impeded Image-Building” and Schema Revision Scarry’s examples confirm what introspection tells us, namely that certain textual moments are highlighted in making sense of a narrative and that some passages do leave a lasting impression on the mind. My thesis is that automatic enactment or smooth naturalisation does not promote intense visualisation; nor does a facile application or affirmation of cultural schemas produce memorable moments. Instead, intensified visualisation occurs when there is some cognitive and/or emotional challenge because expectations are somehow thwarted. In order to become attached to certain images, which are foregrounded and part of later recall, the mind needs extra challenge. Yet, a neat transfer of the concept of gaps and indeterminacies to literary visuality does not seem to be possible. Firstly, default visualisation does not need to resolve indeterminacies and secondly, iconic moments of intense visualisation do

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not necessarily have the same epistemological effect that is attributed to verbal indeterminacies. In terms of visualisations and mental imagery it is extremely difficult for a narrative to withhold central information. Though the fictional world as a whole may be indeterminate and our imagining of events remain indistinct, the strategic retention of an essential detail is very difficult to attain. Toni Morrison’s short story “Recitatif” (1983), for example, thematises race difference and racism but denies readers a definite attribution of race to its principle characters. We are taken aback and made aware of our own racist imagination. Jeanette Winterson’s novel Written on the Body (1992) manages the bravura feat of avoiding gender attribution for its protagonist. Both are examples where the readers’ visualisation will oscillate between the two options presented in the text in a manner similar to the processing of innovative poetic metaphors. The “impeded process of ideation” allows a variety of definitive Gestalten to emerge from the same text (Iser 1978, 188). Cases like these disturb a complacent consumption of fictions; they contain surprise strategies that make a rejection of previous imaginings necessary and some even challenge readers to question the cultural imaginary. The reader’s inability to effectively process the meaning of a particular passage ensures that it captures and maintains attention. The greater the literariness of a text, the more it demands a multi-level cognitive performance that refuses smooth naturalisation (Mäkelä 2013, 132).12 Dissonance and defamiliarisation necessitate some sort of reconciliation in the mind of the reader which is accomplished by way of blending or conceptual integration. The process is a paradigmatic response to the well-known indeterminacy of literary texts. Verbal indeterminacy challenges readers to come to terms with disparate elements of the text by producing an emergent blend which often startles and affects because it contrasts with conventional ways of seeing. Guided by the text, readers mobilise the short story’s input into conceptual integration. Conceptual blending takes place, of course, in any literary reception. Yet, because short stories must omit information or can merely suggest and insinuate, understanding a story means greater proximity to the different possibilities. Gaps in narrative disclosure and information withheld foreground these different possibilities. Here the particular uncertainty created by the genre comes into play. But these processing activities are exactly what Iser (1978, 188) regarded as “impeded image-building”, that is, textual strategies largely responsible for the

12 Many radical cognitive literary scholars want to abandon the “exclusivity thesis” (Herman 2011, 24). But in spite of the many useful applications of cognitive science to literature, I think we need to guard against the dangers of extreme cognitivist theories which tend to reduce literary experientiality to everyday experience (Mäkelä 2013, 132).



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aesthetic potential of a literary text. No doubt, the resulting enriched reading experience can have far-reaching reverberations beyond the process of visualisation. On account of their impact on our imagination, revisions of the schemas brought to bear on the text sometimes become necessary. Such revisions of cultural schemas or previous assumptions are, of course, more profound and wider-ranging than a mere correction of a mental representation of the storyworld. They do not just benefit the individual engagement with a narrative text, they also have a social/cultural function: by altering individual perceptions and challenging prior beliefs, they encourage readers to exchange with other readers and to form temporary communities of readers with a common agenda. Hence, in the long run they also impact on cultural memory, because they can little by little undermine conventional ‘ways of seeing’, albeit here in a metaphorical sense.13 Literature that succeeds in engaging our imagination does this most powerfully when it invites a transgression of the textual world and a transfer to issues that concern us in ours. Our most rewarding experiences in reading occur when we – for even small stretches in time – transcend the given limited perspective of a text and adopt a larger one. Contrary to expectation, the small but challenging form of the short story often succeeds in inspiring these transgressive imaginings.

8 Graham Swift’s “Seraglio” (1982): Binary Spaces and Pattern-Seeking Minds At this point some application to a specific case study may be welcome. I will use Swift’s short story “Seraglio” for a reading that seeks to demonstrate how the narrative prompts some of the aforesaid mental organisational processes that cognitive narratology has described. My analysis of the short story examines textual micro-structures and their effects. For a cognitive reading these micro-structures are extremely important, even though they may not be remembered in their exact linguistic and syntactic form since long-term memory of textual surface structure is extremely fragmentary. However, the influence of literary style on the reading experience has little to do with remembering the exact words used. A literary narrative can achieve its effect by creating an atmosphere or mood that is picked up without readers being able to pinpoint why they respond in a certain way:

13 The far-reaching epistemological effects attributed to literature’s intervention in the cultural imaginary in early reception theory and in this paragraph may be exaggerated, but they certainly go beyond the processes of visualisation which have been discussed up to this point.

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“Memory may be less important here than the on-line experience of strikingness” (Emmott 2002, 113). Style and form influence the passive synthesis of first reading without necessarily entering immediately into conscious awareness. Recovering the cognitive and emotional reactions that are experienced during reading helps to show how interpretations are grounded in “psycholinguistic processes at work” before arriving at interpretive conclusions (Emmott 2002, 113). Like many of Swift’s short stories, “Seraglio” deals with marital strife and the unhappiness that comes from unresolved grievances between the partners. In the following interpretation, my main argument concerns the cognitive mapping of contrasted narrative spaces and domains. I aim to demonstrate that this story works with a tripartite structure very common in short stories which demands of the reader to visualise a set of opposed mental spaces and to resolve them by creating a blend (Brosch 2015, 99). Several strategies are at work here that pave the way for foregrounding certain themes. One is structural contrast, the other focalisation. The opposed mental spaces in this story result from contrasting input concerning the narrative setting and from the contrasting experiences and states of mind in the two main characters. With the help of figurative language these two domains are mapped onto each other and conflated, so that the reader will produce a blend that integrates both when the open end demands creative participation. The title “Seraglio” refers to the culturally determined space of the harem where the women are confined and kept secluded from the men. And the first paragraph not only takes us to the exotic location of Topkapi Serai but links this to a gendered power struggle: In Istanbul there are tombs, faced with calligraphic designs, where the dead Sultan rests among the tiny catafalques of younger brothers whom he was obliged, by custom, to murder on his accession. Beauty becomes callous when it is set beside savagery. In the grounds of Topkapi palace the tourists admire the turquoise tiles of the Harem, the Kiosks of the Sultans, and think of girls with sherbet, turbans, cushions, fountains. ‘So were they kept just here?’ my wife asks. I read from the guide-book: ‘Though the Sultans kept theoretical power over the Harem, by the end of the sixteenth century these women effectively dominated the Sultans. (Swift 1998, 1)

In the beginning of a narrative, readers are most alert, paying close attention to every detail and trying to integrate it into a plausible coherence. Everything mentioned at the beginning of a narrative profits from this primacy effect. Because readers have to attend closely in order to first constitute the fictional world, this information is more resistant to revision than information given at a later stage (Abbott 2008, 88). This rule of privileged position offers an opportunity for narratives to produce startling effects when first impressions later turn out to be faulty



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(recency effect). This strategy is employed here in a subtle manner that may only be realised later. With “Istanbul” as the second word of the story and the content of the paragraph as a whole, the first schema activated by readers is that of tourism. It becomes clear that the story is going to offer a European perspective on the Turkish location. This holiday/travel schema will in fact prove to be the dominant one with vocabulary like “guide book”, “holiday”, “tourist” occurring most frequently in the story as a whole. But the first paragraph makes efficient use of the primacy effect by activating all the other schemas that will prove relevant for the story as well. “Tourism” is immediately succeeded by its corollary “Othering” – a mode of Eurocentric perception that associates Turkey or “the East”, as the story has it, with qualities diametrically opposed to Western culture, which is implicitly posited as humane and rational. Thus the first schema of tourism is energised by the Orientalist exoticisms at the disposal of a Western cultural imaginary. It relies on images that can be easily visualised because they are so well-known as to constitute a stock repertoire in cultural memory. Orientalism is evoked through a lexical paradigm clustering around the exotic clichés associated with the Turkish metropolis (harem, Sultans, sherbet, turbans, cushions, fountains). These images are coupled in the second sentence with “violence” and “callousness”, so that one of the dichotomies that shape the textual structure is set up at this early stage. These binaries, juxtaposing brutality and sensitivity, will later be carried over into descriptions of the city and the city’s past and will transform into metaphors of the relation between the two main characters. In its last two sentences, the first paragraph alludes to the schema of power struggle between the sexes, when the question about the harem and the explanations the husband reads from a guide-book trigger mention of what will be the main issue in the story. All three units of meaning – holidaying, Othering, and vying for power – will each acquire their own set of binary opposites in the course of the story and they will reinforce and interact with each other. The process of priming is slightly jolted in the quoted initial paragraph: it is not until the fourth sentence that readers are allowed to realise that this is a first-person narration. Hence, our taking over the internal point of view is forestalled while we read the generalised proposition in the second sentence. We are tricked into attributing the ‘proverbial’ proposition to the greater authority of a third-person narrator until the recency effect demands a correction of point of view. As a result, the usual scepticism with which we receive information from subjective sources increases. Moreover, the first-person narrator does not appear directly as an ‘I’ but indirectly in the possessive pronoun of the tag to the quoted question (“my wife asks”). Mention of a relational term like “wife” causes the logical background evocation of “husband” in the normal course of communi-

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cation. It is thus his role as a husband for which the reader is primed. At the same time, we are called upon to revise the priming which has already attributed the general remarks of the first three sentences to the authority of a third-person narrator. These shifts in perspective are, of course, performed easily by readers, but an uncanny effect in this case of replacing a presumed third-person narration with a first-person narration is that some impression of reticence or secrecy is associated with the person of the narrator/focaliser who has hidden from our mental representation of the fictional world so far. Especially the second sentence with its generalised moral pronouncement is tinged with doubt in retrospect. And the story’s second paragraph confirms our suspicions when the narrator offers an excessively theatrical description of the Bazaar in the rain, “on which one expects to see, floating with the debris of the market, dead rats, bloated dogs, the washed up corpses of centuries” (Swift 1998, 1). These effects extend into the basic mental process of foregrounding, which usually privileges narrative agents as figures and put their environment into the background. To confer figure-status on these agents means that we regard them as mobile, larger, more focused and more detailed than the rest of the described field (Stockwell 2002, 19). In this respect the first paragraph offers slightly defamiliarising details: the shift from authorial to personal narration contains a loss of fictional ‘objectivity’ concerning the initial privileging of narrative space in the first three sentences. Nevertheless, an awareness of the importance of setting beyond obvious container functions remains. From the beginning “Istanbul” assumes agency like an uncanny place in a ghost story. This makes sense as we realise later because the story is about a couple haunted by the ghosts of a traumatic past. It is thus apparent from the start that the setting is more than a container background to the narrative. “Seraglio” centres on a fundamental mystery: the complexities of injury and blame in a husband and wife’s relationship, who are “close but not touching, like two continents, each with its own customs and history, between which there is no bridge” (Swift 1998, 6). The husband’s adulterous affair and the wife’s subsequent miscarriage endow the relationship with a history of secrecy and mutual blame. Istanbul, described as a place with a history of cruelty and callous murder, as a labyrinth where one can be lost and where corpses of centuries are washed up, becomes the symbol for this marital state of affairs. Hence, all three thematic clusters overlap and reinforce one another. As we will soon find out, despite personalised I-narration, this first voice in the discourse exhibits a great reluctance to expose his own feelings and cannot be trusted for correct assessment of the emotions of others. At the same time, the way we imagine the narrator-character is crucial to our understanding of the story. As soon as we notice the internal focalisation, we can attribute the specific narrative style and thematic idiosyncrasies to the mind style of the narrator.



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According to Semino (2002, 97), the term “mind style” captures the personal and cognitive dispositions of a character, while “ideological point of view” refers to the character’s social, cultural and political world view. Both mind style and ideological point of view can be observed in the linguistic structure of narration. What is immediately noticeable in this narrative voice is the narrator’s habit of presenting his views as general truth, a habit expressed in his frequent use of the impersonal and inclusive pronoun “one” for his own imaginations. This linguistic detail serves to characterise the narrator as someone who habitually speaks from a position of (unfounded) authority, an impression that is confirmed by his constant reference to the travel guide-book. The mention of “guide” or “guide-book” is a noticeable repetition in this story (it occurs nine times, more often than any other of the key terms), pointing to the narrator’s self-perception of his preferred role in his relations to his wife (“she looks upon me to be her guide in this”, Swift 1998, 3) as well as to his profound insecurity regarding the role. These presumptions and unwitting denigrations of his partner are his particular mind style, which will alienate the reader sooner or later and underscore the impression of unreliability rather than dispel it. His habit of never referring to his wife by name, but always as “my wife” consolidates the impression. The strangeness of this elision builds up as the story proceeds and reaches a level of absurdity in the last scene in the hotel room when she tries to tell him of the sexual harassment she experienced. Neuropsychological experiments have shown that subjects could build up images of scenes on the basis of verbal descriptions; the relative ease in generating images depends on the coherence of the description (Kosslyn 1995, 309). Such coherence is not impaired by unreliable perspectives, though their realism and plausibility probably is. The narrator’s descriptions of Istanbul are a good case in point: under his Orientalising gaze the city, past and present, its inhabitants high and low, its skyline, spectacular sights and ordinary sites are subsumed into the binary schema of inhuman disregard for suffering and sensitive appreciation of art and beauty, thus imposing on the perceived world a rare visual coherence: “City of monuments and murder, in which cruelty seems ignored. There are cripples in the streets near the Bazaar, shuffling on leather pads, whom the tourists notice but the inhabitants do not. City of siege and massacre and magnificence” (Swift 1998, 2). Unreliable focalisation concerns the frame, direction and selection of things to be seen in the story world. In this case it serves a melodramatic rendering of the fictional world that is an expression of the mind style as well as the ideological viewpoint of the narrator. That he unwittingly exposes his own emotional deficiency and lack of empathy, preferring to see things from an aesthetic distance is part of his mind style. But his theatrical descriptions are also ideological in

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being derived from the most blatantly racist images of the Orient. Together, his psychological disposition and the underlying prejudices impress an extraordinary coherence onto the descriptions of narrative space, producing highlighted visualisation. Emmott and Sanford’s (2012) findings about personalised focalisers, however, suggest that readers may visualise but at the same not be persuaded by the images generated. In general, unreliable and limited perspectives prompt readers to counterfocalise. Such counterfocalisation is not a mysterious capacity; it is employed in everyday life when we shift perspectives and ‘read between the lines’ of someone’s statements recognising facets which the person has omitted or downplayed (Emmott and Sanford 2012, 167). Dramatic monologues and unreliable narration are standard literary devices for provoking the capacity of readers to gather information which the speakers did not intend to divulge. Here the narrator’s own propensity towards intentional psychological violence is expressed in his excessive fascination with acts of brutality. Because Swift’s narrator is gradually revealed to be morally despicable, his pronouncements and perceptions will be relativised by readers who will pick up cues for alternative interpretations. In this case, the distrust occasioned by the narrator’s hectoring voice and behaviour and his melodramatic perceptions causes us to pay increasingly close attention to his wife. Hence, the silenced wife will gradually emerge into the foreground of visualisations as readers learn to distrust the narrator. This is a major reversal of figure-and-ground attribution and invested with a lot of emotional partisanship; it will therefore lead to an intensification of visual imagining. In the last scene in the hotel room, when she is telling her husband about the sexual abuse by the hotel porter, the wife’s body language is described by the narrator who seems unable to decode it. While the narrator interrogates her in “inquisitorial tone” (Swift 1998, 6), at the same time looking out of the window and realising that he does not “really want to know what happened” (Swift 1998, 7), the wife’s gestures speak to the reader of vulnerability, suffering and despair (Swift 1998, 8). Here, readers are challenged to employ Theory of Mind and “kinesic intelligence” for reading correctly and empathetically the states of mind of the fictional character (Spolsky 1996, 159). This last scene contains images of the wife’s corporeality that compress the violence of the story and encapsulate the cruelty of the relations depicted. First, there is the repetition of the visual indicator of the wife’s wavering eyebrows (Swift 1998, 7), which the narrator admires coldly because of their beauty like “Arabic calligraphy” (Swift 1998, 5), but which we can relate to her suffering because we were told that it occurred for the first time after her miscarriage (Swift 1998, 5). Then the wife performs a gesture commonly signifying vulnerability and



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a wish for (self)-protection: “She holds one hand, closed, to her throat. She has this way of seeming to draw in, chastely, the collar of her blouse, even when she is not wearing a blouse or her neck is bare. It started when we lost our baby” (Swift 1998, 7). This reminder of the earlier traumatic experience is omitted from the observation of her expressive gesture at the end of their argument: “My wife sits down on the bed. She leans forward so that her hair covers her face. She is holding her stomach like someone who has been wounded” (Swift 1998, 8). Counterfocalisation allows us to imagine the wife’s distress and hence enlarges our distance to the narrator who accuses his wife “with deliberate casualness” of spoiling their holiday (Swift 1998, 8). The shift in sympathy that readers perform in this scene, results in part from a decoding of the body language via enactive and embodied cognition. Lexical repetition is a common strategy in short stories to ensure notice of significant themes. The phrase “with deliberate casualness” has occurred before, when the narrator described a traffic accident. This incident, when a taxi driver in his shark-like taxi seemed to be purposefully running over and injuring a poor peddler is the first event in the story of the holiday in Istanbul after sightseeing on Topkapi (Swift 1998, 2). This exaggerated and therefore probably warped description of events echoes the narrator’s theatrical perception of the exhibit in Topkapi museum, where he feels he has stumbled on a crime scene (Swift 1998, 1) and where he has the illusion that the spattered robe of a sultan is his own “lent to another, who is murdered in mistake for yourself” (Swift 1998, 2). Here again, the second-person pronoun that the narrator uses to generalise his impressions actually provokes resistant reading, so that we will probably feel sceptical about having the same feeling. The strange distribution of blame that accompanies the accident (“The injured man looked as if he were to blame for having been injured”, Swift 1998, 2) also function to foreshadow the flashback to the couple’s loss of the baby and their mutual unvoiced accusations. By the time the phrase “with deliberate casualness” is repeated in the hotel room scene, we have learnt to attribute this evidence of malicious cruelty to the main character, not to Turkish culture. What triggers a counterfactual reading of the I-narrator’s story is not only his coldly aestheticising account of his wife’s behaviour while she is suffering, but also his descriptions of the city in which his fascination with the violent aspects of Ottoman history is evident. Inadvertently, his descriptions of the city (“like an array of upturned shields and spears”, Swift 1998, 1) and the foreign culture (“massacre and monuments  … pillage and slaughter”, Swift 1998, 2) reveal his affinity with the violence and cruelty he describes and his deep-seated and unconscious emotional deficiency. As is common in short stories, this one utilises narrative space not only as

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background to the events but transforms it into a metaphor for expressing more vividly the theme of power struggle between the sexes. The city situated on the isthmus between Europe and Asia Minor is perfect for this use. In Western cultural memory it resonates with stock images which are alluded to in the first paragraphs: the proximity of aesthetic sensitivity and cruelty, the uneven power balance in the traditional Sultan’s harem and the clash of European and Eastern cultures. The narrator’s perception activates Orientalising schemas that associate Turkey with sensuality and violence, beauty and danger. He combines clichés of the Arabian Nights (“the sensuous, uninhibited East”, Swift 1998, 6) with images of coldly performed savage customs like ritual murder, implying the moral inferiority of the foreign culture (Swift 1998, 1). Like a haunted man, he sees cruelty everywhere – in the rulers of the past, the present-day policeman, the taxi driver, and the hotel manager. His obsessions provide an opportunity for the evocation of cultural values determined by the imperial and colonial logic of the West. For the reader, the Orientalist schema input is relativised, however, through the increasingly evident unreliability of the narrator. The interplay of narrating mind style and ideological point of view in the short story thus subtly challenges and undermines the conventionally hierarchical tourist schema. From the generally impressive visuality of the story, generated through extreme coherence of mind style and ideology, three moments of particularly intense visualisation emerge which readers probably agree are the memorable scenes of the story: the scene of the accident with the shocking lack of interest on the part of the policeman, the hotel scene where the callous behaviour of the husband resembles that of the policeman and  – in between  – a flashback where the narrator describes the loss of sexual passion that has resulted from the loss of their child. For me and for the students with whom I discussed the story, these three scenes represent the most intensely visualised moments in the story. The three iconic moments are extremely affecting and result in an emotionally enriched reading experience. In the last of these three scenes we can observe how iconic power derives from intensified embodied visualisation: We would lie in bed, close but not touching, like two continents, each with its own customs and history, between which there is no bridge. We turned our backs towards each other as if we were both waiting our moment, hiding a dagger in our hands. But in order for the dagger thrust to be made, history must first stop, the gap between the continents must be crossed. So we would lie, unmoving. And the only stroke, the only wound either of us inflicted was when one would turn and touch the other with empty, gentle hands, as though to say, ‘See, I have no dagger’. (Swift 1998, 6)

This key passage uses the word “dagger” that has already been repeated in the story to create an extended metaphor or conceit that incorporates all the activated



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schemas by figuring the sexual abstinence of the couple in Orientalist terms. Like actual pictures, mental images can neither hypothesise, nor negate. Swift’s effective evocation of this image relies on the effect of what Prince (1992, 2) calls “the disnarrated”. By narrating how husband and wife hide or disown daggers and do not show blades, the passage elicits images of exactly these weapons and their potential to wound, creating a powerful atmosphere of lurking violence. Due to the nature of the conceit, readers have to perform a conceptual integration of images belonging to the sphere of the setting and images belonging to the main characters. As a result, the idea of deliberating secret murder contained in the image is mapped onto the state of the marriage. In these iconic images we can observe the most prominent feature of the narrative: the constant construction of binary opposites, like the opposition of beauty and savagery in the first paragraph. The mental spaces readers develop to encompass the exotic place are mapped onto the mental domain of the social relations: so that the Othering that informs the descriptions is transferred to the narrator’s states of mind. His creative use of metaphor enhances the contrastive vision and further connects the structuring binaries of space and place to the conflicted relationship of the couple. The powerful images of conflict and violence reflect the conceptual system of the narrator, his cognitive habits and personal way of making sense of things. On account of the highlighted adjustments to our accompanying stream of images we have learnt to attribute his associations to an ethically unacceptable way of thinking, a way of thinking that the story gradually encourages us to reject. Thus, the ethical benefit of the unsympathetic reading experience is a rejection of cliché schemas we might have otherwise accepted as standard tourist attitudes. The story thus makes an effective appeal to the reader to question both the contrastive Orientalist and gender schemas. As a coda, I want to refer to the final paragraph of the story which appears to perform a volta and to suggest a slightly different interpretation. In the last scene when the narrator looks down on London from the plane before landing, he comments, “one wants the moment of the story to go on for ever, the poise of parting or arriving to be everlasting. So one doesn’t have to cross to the other continent, doesn’t have to know what really happened, doesn’t have to meet the waiting blade” (Swift 1998, 9). Broich’s (1999) interpretation emphasises this postmodern metanarrative. He picks up an earlier metafictional reference by the narrator who had compared the couple’s life to “characters in a detective novel” (Swift 1998, 6) and connects it to this final confession of a preference for deferral and avoidance that is visually compressed in the plane hovering in the air like an unresolved story (Broich 1999, 288). This ambivalent ending may be seen to stand for the act of fictionising itself because the traumatic past accounts both for the origin of and the necessity for narrative. Narrative has to do with a forever elusive struc-

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ture, that appears to be, as Pedot (1999, 59) shows, the most powerful impetus of a given narrative. As readers are left without a closure, they will cast about for a way to resolve the ambiguous ending. The narrator’s regressive fixations maintain an abstractly conceptualised interim position, the in-between as the only possible space of “perpetual convalescence” (Swift 1998, 3). In order to avoid responsibility, he indicates a space of interim, where one is constantly poised on a hiatus between knowledge and uncertainty. For the I-narrator, story-telling is an escape mechanism for holding experience at bay: “They [the stories] buy the reprieve, or the stay of execution, of distance” (Swift 1998, 9). Though we have to admit this potential of stories, we have exercised our participatory faculties in interaction with this one to break down the schemas that were offered to us. My article aimed to distinguish two modes of visualising in the reading process as well as two major types of resource which allow readers to make sense of the text. To separate more vivid mental imagery from the automatic default visualisation that accompanies it is, of course, a heuristic distinction, but one that can productively relate visualisation to better-studied processes of perception. While default visualisation is undisturbed by gaps and indeterminacies as it draws on cultural schemas and scripts in ongoing adjustment of the story world, highlighted moments of intense visualisation result from less smooth and less automatic processing. They can be triggered by dissonance in the embodied enactment of narrative events or be the outcome of cognitive challenge through the ambiguities of a narrative. My case study tried to show that reading strategies constantly resort to binary organisational patterns, a predilection which short stories often take into account and work with. The example showed how intense visualisations undermine and question conceptual binaries by charging them with semantic surplus that contradicts the assumptions of the cultural imaginary. By correlating stereotypical Orientalist images with the psychological cruelty of the male I-narrator, visualisation in this case serves to make readers resistant to both – the patriarchal attitude and the Othering, too.

Bibliography Abbott, H. Porter. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. Achilles, Jochen, and Ina Bergmann (Eds.). Liminality and the Short Story: Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian, and British Writing. New York: Routledge, 2015. Adamson, Sylvia. “The Rise and Fall of Empathetic Narrative: A Historical Perspective on Perspective.” New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. Ed. Willie van Peer and Seymour Chatman. New York: State University of New York Press, 2001. 83–100.



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Bal, Mieke. Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: Toronto UP, 2004. Bal, Mieke. “Visual Narrativity.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan. London: Routledge, 2005. 629–633. Bassler, Michael. “On the Epistemology of the Short Story.” Achilles and Bergmann 2015. 77–91. Bernaerts, Lars, Diek de Geest, Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck (Eds.). Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. Bortolussi, Marisa, and Peter Dixon. “Minding the Text: Memory for Literary Narrative.” Bernaerts et al. 2013. 23–37. Broich, Ulrich. “Graham Swift: ‘Seraglio’.” Interpretationen: Englische Short Stories von Thomas Hardy bis Graham Swift. Ed. Raimund Borgmeier. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1999. 277–289. Brosch, Renate. Short Story: Textsorte und Leseerfahrung. Trier: WVT, 2007a. Brosch, Renate. “The Curious Eye of the Reader: Perspective as Interaction with Narrative.” Seeing Perception. Ed. Silke Horstkotte and Karin Leonhard. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007b. 143–165. Brosch, Renate. “Weltweite Bilder, lokale Lesarten: Visualisierungen der Literatur.” Visual Culture: Beiträge zur XIII. Tagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft. Ed. Monika Schmitz-Emans and Gertrud Lehnert. Heidelberg: Synchron, 2008. 61–82. Brosch, Renate. “Reading and Visualisation.” Anglistik 24.2 (2013): 169–179. Brosch, Renate. “Experiencing Short Stories: A Cognitive Approach Focusing on Reading Narrative Space.” Achilles and Bergmann 2015. 92–107. Brown, Susan Hunter. “Discourse Analysis and the Short Story.” Short Story Theory at the Crossroads. Ed. Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1989. 217–48. Bryson, Norman. “Introduction: Art and Intersubjectivity.” Looking In: The Art of Viewing. Ed. Mieke Bal. London: Routledge, 2001. 1–40. Caracciolo, Marco. “The Reader’s Virtual Body: Narrative Space and Its Reconstruction.” Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 3 (2011): 117–138. Caracciolo, Marco. “Blind Reading: towards an Enactivist Theory of the Reader’s Imagination.” Bernaerts et al. 2013. 81–105. Collins, Christopher. Reading the Written Image. Verbal Play, Interpretation and the Roots of Iconophobia. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1991. Coplan, Amy. “Empathetic Engagement with Narrative Fictions.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62.2 (2004): 141–152. Currie, Gregory. Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Dancygier, Barbara. The Language of Stories: A Cognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. Easterlin, Nancy. A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. Emmott, Catherine. “Responding to Style: Cohesion, Foregrounding and Thematic Interpretation.” Thematics: Interdisciplinary Studies Ed. Max Louwerse and Willie van Peer. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002. 91–117. Emmott, Catherine, and Anthony J. Sanford. Mind, Brain and Narrative. Cambridge. Cambridge UP, 2012. Esrock, Ellen. The Reader’s Eye. Visual Imaging as Reader Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994.

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Esrock, Ellen. “Visualisation.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. New York: Routledge, 2005. 633–634. Fauconnier, Gilles. Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Fluck, Winfried. Das kulturelle Imaginäre: Eine Funktionsgeschichte des amerikanischen Romans 1790–1900. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1997. Fluck, Winfried. “Imaginary Space; Or, Space as Aesthetic Object.” Space in America: Theory, History, Culture. Ed. Klaus Benesch and Kerstin Schmidt. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. 25–40. Frow, John. Cultural Studies and Cultural Value. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995. Gehring, Petra. “Metapherntheoretischer Visualismus. Ist die Metapher ‘Bild’?” Metapherngeschichten: Perspektiven einer Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit. Ed. Matthias Kroß and Rüdiger Zill. Berlin: Parerga, 2011. 15–32. Groeben, Norbert. Rezeptionsforschung als empirische Literaturwissenschaft: Paradigmadurch Methodendiskussion an Untersuchungsbeispielen. Tübingen: Narr, 1980. Hanson, Clare. Short Stories and Short Fictions 1880–1980. London: Macmillan, 1985. Hanson, Clare. Re-Reading the Short Story. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989. Herman, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Herman, David. “Stories as a Tool for Thinking.” Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Ed. David Herman. Stanford: CSLI Publications/University of Chicago Press, 2003. 163–192. Herman, David. “Introduction.” The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English. Ed. David Herman. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. 1–42. Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. Jahn, Manfred. “Windows of Focalization: Deconstructing and Reconstructing a Narratological Concept.” Style 30 (1996): 241–267. James, David. Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space: Style, Landscape, Perception. New York: Continuum, 2008. Johnson-Laird, Philip N. Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference, and Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. Korte, Barbara. The Short Story in Britain. Tübingen: Francke, 2003. Kosslyn, Stephen M. Image and Mind. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980. Kosslyn, Stephen M. Image and Brain: The Resolution of the Imagery Debate. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. Kosslyn, Stephen M., William L. Thompson, and Giorgio Ganis. The Case for Mental Imagery. New York: Oxford UP, 2006. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. London: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Langacker, Ronald W. Cognitive Grammar: An Introduction. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Lobsien, Eckhard. Theorie literarischer Illusionsbildung. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1975. Lotman, Juri. Die Struktur literarischer Texte. München: Fink, 1972. Mäkelä, Maria. “Cycles of Narrative Necessity: Suspect Tellers and the Textuality of Fictional Minds.” Bernaerts et al. 2013. 129–151. Marr, David. Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010.



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III Textual Visibilities

Kai Merten

Media History in Seventeenth- and Twentieth-Century Visual Poetry in English: Two Case Studies Abstract: This article explores literary visuality by way of visual poetry. A study of two poems, one from the reformatory seventeenth century (George Herbert’s “The Altar”) and the other a modernist early twentieth-century example (E. E. Cummings’s “Poem, Or Beauty Hurts Mr Vinal”), reveals how the history of visual poetry bespeaks a close rapprochement with the historical development of media culture. While Herbert’s poem can be related to early modern religious media conflicts and media developments, Cummings’s text responds to a dynamic audio-visual media culture more closely linked with the economic field. Therefore, whereas Herbert’s poem emphasises the persistence of the concrete image under the “letterpress monopoly” (Kittler 2010, 79) following the Reformation, visual poetry of the twentieth century insists on the visual dignity of the printed, static and ‘small’ letter in a world increasingly dominated by commercial audiovisual sequence media. However, both poems also embrace their opponents: “The Altar” ultimately celebrates the image-compensating quality of literature, and Cummings’s poem includes commerce by imitating advertising language. By working through these historical constellations, my article also makes a case for literature’s capability of both displaying and reflecting upon the scope of visuality in human culture, which comprises not only concrete and abstract images but also a realm of non-figurative visuality beyond the image in general.

1 Introduction In its printed form, common at least from the early modern period, poetry has a strongly visual quality. While all printed literature and indeed all printed texts are visual, poetry’s visuality has always been particular. Poetry is hence an especially apt way of approaching the visibilities of the literary text: it specifies – makes special – a general capacity of textuality that is often overlooked or (in a conveniently paradoxical metaphor) silenced in the act of reading. This starts with the actual print on the page. Given that the line ending, for instance, is determined by the author and not, as in most prose, by the printer, and given that these endings are not realised to the same extent when the poem is spoken, DOI 10.1515/9783110378030-007

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(printed) poetry, through its visible aspects alone, has a generic and unique visual quality to its language. If all poetry is overtly visual anyway, what, then, is visual poetry? According to Berry (2012, 1523), in visual poetry, “the visual form of the text becomes an object for apprehension in its own terms”. By thus relating visual poetry to its “form”, its visuality is posited as constituting a kind of visible pattern which is furthermore ‘apprehended’ (perceived, studied) independently of the rest of the poem. This seems to argue that the poem’s linguistic dimensions are somehow separable from its ‘content’, which many theorists think is impossible. Therefore, it is perhaps safer to say that in visual poetry, language is in a particularly remarkable form, that visual poetry combines, condenses, and offers both an intensified aesthetic and especially meaningful version of the various forms that printed language can have. Despite this slight caveat, Berry’s (2012, 1523) definition of visual poetry is valuable not least because it problematises, but also enriches and enhances, the notion of visibility itself when it states that “the visual form of a poem may be figurative or nonfigurative; if figurative, it may be mimetic or abstract”. Given the fact that a visual poem may either be figurative or not, it appears as a form of language that makes us reflect upon the visuality of language, including its visibility, and, indeed, upon visuality in general. Visuality may be figurative, and in being so it may constitute both concrete images, giving us visible representations of objects, beings or persons (what I will call: ‘pictoriality’ or ‘pictorial visuality’ in the following), and abstract images, for instance purely geometrical patterns. However, visuality does not have to constitute images at all (→ Introduction) and, indeed, in written language mostly does not; this kind of visuality is nonfigurative. Visual poetry, therefore, offers a particularly apt appreciation of visuality not only beyond the concrete image but – by being sometimes visual in a nonfigurative way – beyond the image in general. Furthermore, nonfigurative visual poetry is either “isometrical” or “heterometrical” (Berry 2012, 1523), that is, its line (and line-unit) shaping either follows a regular and repetitive pattern or else is irregular and unique to the poem. Isometrical poetry follows traditional verse and stanza patterns, whereas heterometrical poetry has (or, is) free verse (and ‘free stanzas’). It follows from this that any (prose) text is nonfiguratively visual, albeit mostly iso- or rather ‘mono’-metrical because it obeys a single line and paragraph pattern. And it also follows that all poetry (and indeed all printed language) is visually remarkable and visually analysable. Nonfigurative visuality, particularly if it is heterometrical, can support structures on any linguistic level of the text, for instance by signalling juxtapositions or shifts in the semantic structure of the poem. Even the white space becomes suggestively visual: “white space [may be used] as an icon of space, whiteness, distance, void, or duration” (Berry 2012, 1523). In general, non-



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figurative visuality in poetry either reinforces the poem’s unity and autonomy or is disintegrative and underlines the intertextual and heteronomous quality of the text, possibly “to engage and sustain reader attention by creating interest and texture” (Berry 2012, 1523), but also, I would add, by creating interest in texture. Berry (2012, 1523) lists no less than six “integrative” and as many “dispersive functions” in what seems to be quite an exhaustive catalogue of nonfigurative poetic visualities, showing how rich and important this kind of visuality – and by analogy, visual poetry – is for literature and for culture in general. The genres and periods of visual poetry addressed in this essay will either concentrate on mimetic figurative visuality (as in seventeenth-century pattern poetry) or on heterometrical nonfigurative visuality (as in modernist visual poetry from the early twentieth century). Throughout its history, then, visual poetry seems to have paced through the realm of visuality from the most concrete to the most abstract field. At the same time, the two examples studied below belong to key moments both in the history of visual poetry and in media history: George Herbert’s “The Altar” (1633) was written both at the heyday of pattern poetry and at a time when the early modern conflict between Catholic media support and Protestant antimediality was at its peak. E.E. Cummings’s “Poem, Or Beauty Hurts Mr Vinal” (1923), on the other hand, was published when the modern media revolution in image culture, sound culture and (not least) print drew close to completion with the invention of sound film. At the same time, it is among the first publications of an author who was to become the eminent modernist visual poet. Although visual poetry has not yet been systematically read into media historical developments (and vice versa), it will be shown that the two histories, of media and of visual poetry, are closely intertwined and therefore capable of shedding light on each other. In the seventeenth century, media were mainly discussed in, and developed in relation to, the discourses of religion and politics, whereas in the early twentieth century, tellingly, economy and society took over as the fields shaping media culture. My approach on media history will follow the Kittlerian grand récit of media shifts (with support from British media history specifics where needed), because it can be shown that the poems studied take part in, and reflect on these shifts. In “The Altar”, visual poetry will be seen to work through a medial transition from image to text which Kittler termed “the Reformation’s letterpress monopoly” (Kittler 2010, 79), while Cummings’s “Poem” is connected to the complex separation of literature from the world of audio-visual media scenarios that Kittler sketched out for the turn to the twentieth century. Kittler’s overview will prove useful for making palpable both the (media) historical significance and the historical development of visual poetry. As will be shown not least by the poems themselves, however, his ‘epoch making’ must be both complicated and problematised.

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2 The Image/Text Controversy and the three ­Kittlerian Phases of Early Modern Media History The central media invention of the early modern period was undoubtedly the printing press, which made it possible, roughly from the middle of the fifteenth century, to both produce and to distribute written texts much more cheaply and quickly than before. It must not be forgotten that image reproduction within these texts became possible virtually right away (Hodnett 1988). The printing press, however, both propagated and instantiated a cult of the medium of the ‘letter text’, often bound in books, which is the reason why the new machine is regularly  – and somewhat simplistically  – referred to as the ‘letterpress’. This text cult can be related to a religious movement in which a return to the teachings of the Bible was advocated by protesters against the Catholic Church, starting in Germany and Switzerland early in the sixteenth century. The advocacy of the Bible as the only indispensable source of Christian belief (Martin Luther’s “sola scriptura” from 1520) went hand in hand with a scepticism against all things material, particularly when they were claimed to communicate, or, to mediate, the spirit of God. From a media perspective, this movement (usually referred to as ‘Protestantism’ or ‘the Reformation’) rejected images and other visual media and only accepted the medium of the written text, which, although epitomised by the Bible, was also used to propagate this very movement. Because of their material sobriety and barrenness, printed texts were seen as the only viable (religious) medium, one that approached the Protestant ideal of a-mediality most closely. As Kittler (2010, 76) put it, the Reformation “has abolished or literally blackened medieval church rituals, with all of their visual glitter, and replaced them with the monochromatic, namely black-and-white mystery of printed letters”. According to the Kittlerian media historical narrative, the forces countering this replacement, expectably connected with Catholicism, aimed “to beat the Reformation’s letterpress monopoly with more effective media technologies” (Kittler 2010, 79). Kittler particularly refers to the laterna magica, an early visual projection medium from the mid-seventeenth century, often attributed to the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher. According to Kittler’s account, the laterna magica was particularly suitable for visualising those Bible scenarios both most desired and most feared by the Christian believers, namely Heaven and Hell, and hence for redirecting them to the Catholic Church (Kittler 1994, 222–225). It is important to notice that by using the laterna magica, the Catholic Counter-Reformation not only rehabilitated the visual media antagonised by the Protestants but actually surpassed both the printed text (of the Bible) and the fixed image (of Church art) by mediatising visual sequences, often accompanied by fitting acoustic scenarios.



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The ‘letterpress’, literally outshined by this magical projection, was not at a loss for an answer and countered by simulating audio-visual sequences in another important print medium, namely literature. Around 1800, as Kittler (1990) claims, literature and the (silent) reading process were shaped to make available imaginary audio-visual sequences: the reader’s imagination hallucinated, and therefore compensated, the sequential audio-visual experiences provided by the laterna magica and other media technologies of the period. Literature, it seemed, had prevailed by “internalizing” (Kittler 2010, 117) the competing audio-visual media into the symbolic code of the letter (for the second time in fact, given the ‘blackening’ of visual church ritual by the letterpress some 250 years earlier). In Lacanian terms, which Kittler is not averse to using, the imaginary was henceforth only available through the realm of the symbolic (Kittler 1999, 2, 15). This overview needs to be qualified regarding the historical development in Britain, not least because in this country, the three Kittlerian phases (literalisation, revisualisation, reliteralisation) were compressed and overlaid, and because in England, Reformation and Counter-Reformation happened within one and the same church. Under Henry VIII’s reign (1509–1547), reformatory iconoclasm and scripturalism on the one hand and a counter-reformatory blend of image-defence and book-scepticism on the other, coexisted within the same institution, the Church of England – Henry had images and texts destroyed alternately.1 Image and text became intrinsically connected in a painful dialectics, where positing one automatically entailed rejecting the other. After Henry VIII’s death in 1547, the Anglican Church at first became more Protestant (and hence scriptural) under the influence of the Puritans and then underwent a phase of cruel re-Catholicisation under Mary I with massive book burnings and many executions of Protestant theologians. Elizabeth I and her successor James I tried to overcome this instability and established a kind of umbrella church, which would unify the Puritans and their opponents under the common roof of rigorous anti-Papism and a moderate and tolerant religious practice based on the Bible (whether supported by images or not). The balance of these two positions was always precarious and it was completely destroyed when in the second half of the 1620s, under the reign of Charles I from 1625, official church policy launched the most thorough religious proimage and therefore Counter-Reformatory campaign that England had ever seen: Laudianism. The movement advocated a strongly ritualised and priest-led style of religious service, based on images and other sacred objects, as well as strictly observed religious ceremonies centred around the church and, in particular, its

1 For an overview of Henry VIII’s religious media policy cf. Cummings (2002, 829–832, 839–845).

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altar (cf. Lake 1993). As this church policy outlawed many preachers with Puritan leanings, Britain endured a time of fierce religious and constitutional conflict, in which the question of how belief was to be represented, in image or in text, became increasingly intertwined with the problem of political representation: a pictorial realm of the monarchical body politic could be set against an imageless political order of (more) direct rule, based on the Bible or (later) the ‘holy’ text of a written constitution. This latter position was particularly embraced during the phase of Oliver Cromwell’s military dictatorship (1653–1658), which entailed fierce iconoclasm both culturally and politically.2 The ban on images (and on the theatre in particular) was lifted with the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. While in exile in France, Charles II had met with an elaborate visualisation of monarchy, which he brought to Britain and partly implemented in his palaces in Whitehall and Windsor. He also re-opened the theatrical stages, enabling such dramatic genres as the Restoration comedy, and presided over a rich courtly theatre culture, which he had himself inaugurated with the grand theatrical pageant of his own Entry into London in 1660. Taken together, in British culture, visual and textual medial regimes either remained side by side or followed in quick succession depending on the ruling forces and their cultural (and media) politics. In this respect, the Kittlerian narrative needs to be partly qualified with respect to British culture. It remains illuminating, however, as an account of the macro-interests in British cultural history. This pertains not only to the Reformatory literalisation and the Counter-Reformatory revisualisation of (religious) media culture as suggested by Kittler. It also holds true for his notion of a hallucinatory internalisation of audio-visual sequences into literature. Ever since the Reformation, an antivisual and particularly antitheatrical tendency remained a powerful undercurrent in British society and led to strong antitheatrical legislation not only under the Cromwellian Puritans but also in the eighteenth century. In this respect, the Kittlerian sublation of the visual/ imaginary into the symbolic order of literature started in Britain in the seventeenth century and was already well on its way in the eighteenth century before it culminated in Romantic literature at the end of the century (cf. Langan 2001). As my reading of George Herbert’s “The Altar” will show, this visual poem therefore both rejects and embraces the ‘letterpress monopoly’ of the seventeenth century, while it looks ahead to, without yet fulfilling, the internalisation of visuality into literature.

2 Constitutionalism was not an issue in the English republic under Cromwell but it became a strong one in the course of the French Revolution (cf. Koschorke et al. 2007, 241–50).



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3 George Herbert, “The Altar” (1633): Qualifying the Letterpress Monopoly “The Altar” is a pattern poem. The earliest undisputed examples of the genre are Hellenistic and already provide the ‘pattern’ (in more than one sense) for visual poetry of this kind: they show “an axe, an egg, wings, two altars, and a syrinx” (Higgins 1993, 890) in images made from their letters. In sixteenth-century Europe, these patterns were imitated in Neo-Latin and -Greek pieces as part of the ‘Renaissance’ of ancient culture; these pattern poems were soon complemented by vernacular texts. The earliest English-language pattern poems date from the late sixteenth century (Higgins 1986), and are therefore related to the text/image controversy of the time, particularly so because they often take on religious dimensions by imitating altars, wings, or the Christian cross. In integrating outlines of these religious objects into their textual shapes, they seem to promise the medial cooperation of text and image, strongly desired and much needed at the time, as outlined above. However, this reconciliation also integrates the image into printed language as the overarching code. George Herbert’s “The Altar” was published in 1633, shortly after the death of the poet, in a collection which imitates material and visual religious practices in many respects (I will come back to this at the end of my reading). It belongs to the time when pattern poetry was well-established in English literature but also when the media historical controversy concerning the Laudianist Counter-Reformatory return to religious objects and images in the State Church was at its peak. The poem’s altar shape is therefore potentially highly controversial. The poem uses language iconically not only in the pattern of the poem as a whole but also by highlighting particular words: while the small caps of ‘altar’ and ‘sacrifice’ could be seen as a nonfigurative visualisation of language, ‘heart’ is surely also figurative by being near the place of the (iconic) heart if we see this pattern as also showing a human body. The poem therefore clearly dissolves the text into the realm of the image, which must have been a first-glance provocation for readers with Reformatory, antimedial leanings. Whether this provocation remains, after reading along the lines of the poem, is another matter. Treating “The Altar” like a linguistic construct by separating it into line units undermines its image quality, as happens with any pattern poem when looking at it is followed by reading it. This pattern, however, is not destroyed by reading, but rather supported by the returning word “Altar” in the last line. As we look at the poem, we see an altar; when we read it through we encounter the word “Altar”, visually enhanced, in its first and last lines – lest we forget its image quality.

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Fig. 1: George Herbert, “The Altar” (reproduced from Herbert 1953, 27)

If we study the sequence of the poem more strongly in semantic terms, however, we read about the building of an altar which then turns out to be the speaker’s heart, which, thus, is only being compared to an altar as the poem makes clear at the end: Altar is in fact Heart, which is like an Altar. No real altar is built (or even described), it is only figurative speech. In the poem’s semantic sequence, therefore, the ‘reality’ of the altar is deconstructed after all; the altar remains only as a metaphor – a verbal image. Given the fact that verbal images are usually seen as mere stand-ins for literal meanings, this verbal image is in danger of ultimately disappearing, too, and of giving away the poem’s support for the image medium altogether. The very replacement for “Altar”, namely “Heart”, however, is just another verbal image. In spite of early modern physiological ideas about the heart as the real, literal seat of emotions, Herbert’s speaker refers to more than the mere organ when he talks of a “hard heart”: a character, his way of life, his behaviour etc. Therefore, the poem culminates in an image (and not the literal sense) also on the level of verbal imagery – not the image of the altar, to be sure, but of the “Heart”. Verbal imagery is shown to be unavoidable and ultimately unresolvable for the poem’s communication to work. What is more, the image of the ‘heart’ was, as in the so-called “sacred heart of Jesus”, a central element also in the iconic imagery of the Catholics and exactly the kind of image rejected and persecuted as idolatrous by the iconoclasts. “The Altar” thus supports images both on the level of



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form and on the semantic level, both in its instantaneous effect and its sequential transmission of meaning. What remains to be integrated, though, is the fictional communicative situation of the poem, the prayer-like address to God. The Protestants, and the German Lutherans in particular, saw prayer, the single address and struggle, unmediated by other humans or human means, as the most legitimate form of communication with God. How do we reconcile the stance of solitary praying with the mediality and the pro-medial position of the poem? Since the prayer only exists in the ‘shape’ of the poem, communication with the Lord appears to be clearly dependent on a contemplation both of the text’s iconic shape and of its figurative language. By that, the poem insists on the unavoidable, untranscendable mediality of each and every address to God  – according to the poem, we cannot not use media to reach God. In what seems to be a moderate Laudian position, liturgy appears as indispensable but it may also be a prayer (one that readily accepts its own mediality) – or the writing and reading of poems. What is more, it is only the literary text that offers iconic and verbal images at the same time, as it makes clear exactly by transcending the altar image to the image of the heart. “The Altar” supports the Laudian culture of visually perceptible objects as communicators of the metaphysical while reserving for itself a prime position among these media. The poem both is an altar and is – in the deepest sense – like an altar, an equivalent as well as a supersession of the altar. The poem’s pro-image position is therefore ultimately also a pro-literature position. From this perspective, “The Altar” may even appear reminiscent of Lutheran text veneration but we need to bear in mind that the poem not only numbers itself among a range of religious media (a qualification that scripturalists would never make) but also suggests a textual aesthetics that is the very opposite of Protestant attempts to conceive of the text as a-medial. “The Altar” excessively negotiates its own materiality and explores its own relatedness to the image, its ability to be visual, both iconically and linguistically. The “stones” mentioned are ultimately also its own words, not (only) the heart’s broken parts. No “workman” has touched this altar, as the poem states, not least because it was, after all, written by a poet. “[T]his frame, / To praise thy Name” refers also to the regular (and iconic) shape of the poem itself. In “The Altar”, Herbert extols literature as a religious medium while at the same time suggesting a type of literature that is intrinsically aware of its own mediality and visuality. It is along these lines that I would finally like to analyse the place of “The Altar” in(side) Herbert’s collection The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations. Like “The Altar”, The Temple is not only about an architectural structure; it also is in several ways a temple. It consists of three main parts: ‘The ChurchPorch’, ‘The Church’ and ‘The Church Militant’. Inserted in between ‘The Church-

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Porch’ and ‘The Church’ is a single poem entitled “Superliminare”, after which ‘The Church’, by far the longest part of the collection, begins with “The Altar”. There is a strong suggestion that by opening the book we are entering a Church, walking through the porch, across the threshold (‘superliminare’ being the Latin word for ‘lintel’) before catching sight of the altar. Before that, we come across many more architectural and liturgical elements inside this church/“Church”.3 Herbert’s poetry book as a whole thus repeats, yet also supplants, the complete experience of a religious church visit. It is suggested that by reading the book we gain access to the central religious forms and practices of Christian culture. The Temple – with “The Altar” as one of its central elements – proposes a type of literature that is capable of containing the full (architectural and liturgical) materiality of Christian life within the materiality and mediality of the literary book. This, I suggest, is why it is called The Temple. The book uses the ancient, pagan and hence foreign name for a religious building not in reference to Jewish religious practice, as Guibbory (1998, 74–75) has suggested, but as a symbol of its intermedial aesthetics as a whole: the transposition of “a church” into the other, and therefore foreign, medium of literature. As should have become clear, my reading of “The Altar” both supports, and gains from, Kittler’s notion of a media compensation in and through literature. On the other hand, it also proceeds to complicate and qualify his notions. While it can be shown that “The Altar” undoubtedly inclines towards the Protestant ‘letterpress monopoly’ in suggesting literature as a compensation for all other visual and corporeal medialities (of Catholic belief), it also subverts the primacy of the letter, both by working through the visuality and mediality of literature and simply by giving its letters the shape of an image. Secondly, whereas the idea that by reading the poem’s images we gain access to metaphysical truth certainly gestures towards the notion of an audio-visually hallucinatory literature, a concrete visuality is still provided by the form of the poem. In a sense, “The Altar” both rejects, and gives in to, the letterpress monopoly; it suggests, but also supersedes, the compensation of images in the reader’s imagination. In this poem, the primacy of the letter as well as of the reading process is only accepted if it is accompanied by an acknowledgement of literature’s own mediality which emphatically also includes concrete, figurative visuality.

3 Poems in The Temple referring to architectural or liturgical elements are, for example, “The Church-Floore”, “The Antiphon”, “Even-Song”, or “Church-Music”. Another pattern poem in the collection is “Easter Wings”.



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4 Modern Media and the Separation of Literature The heyday of literature’s medially compensatory capacity was undoubtedly the period around 1800, as has been shown not only by Kittler (1990) for German literature but also by various publications on British literature (Langan 2001, Merten 2006, 2014). This period did not see the publication of any relevant visual poetry, mainly because poetry, not surprisingly, was conceived of as something to be read, whether silently or aloud, and not as something to be looked at (Bradford 1989). Visual poetry, however, made a return with the next media revolution, which was also responsible for the next step in the media history of literature according to Kittler. As Murphet (2009, 14) has shown, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed a “long series of abrupt media-technological intrusions upon the hitherto untrammeled media system or discourse network of Enlightenment”, a series that arguably already started at the end of the Romantic period with the invention of photography in the late 1820s. It is as if literature had barely completed its compensatory inclusion of older audio-visual media cultures when, with the invention of new media technologies, particularly in the fields of audio-visual sequence recording and transmission, the pendulum already swung in the other direction, from audio-visual compensation back to audio-visual mediality. The “very time flow of acoustic and optical data”, which had to be turned into the artistic symbols of letters or (musical) notes before, could now be medially “record[ed] and reproduce[d]” (Kittler 1999, 3). The imaginary was freed from the symbolic and remediatised (cf. Kittler 1999, 15). In the Kittlerian scenario, literature became connected to the typewriter, another new medium around 1900. While before, according to Kittler’s argument, literature was compensatory also in the sense that it was seen as being shaped by, as well as giving access to, the writer’s body, the typewriter “already separate[d] paper and body during textual production, not first during reproduction (as Gutenberg’s movable types had done) […] paper and body, writing and soul f[e]ll apart” (Kittler 1999, 14). Audio-visual mediatisation (or rather: hallucination) was now completely separated from literature, because acoustic, visual, and audio-visual sequences had developed their own media. Literature remained with the symbolic, now thrown back to the letter which stood for nothing but its own symbolising capacity and no longer entailed (any) other medialities. By referring to Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger, Kittler also suggests a connection of the typewriter to modern print technologies such as the rotary press, the typesetting machine (Kittler 1999, 189, 199), or the thermal printer (Kittler 1999, 228). This connection is important and needs to be followed beyond Kittler’s suggestions not least because he also mentions modernist visual poetry in this context (Kittler 1999, 229). Kittler sees the free scattering, staging and

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sizing of letters on the page in these poems, also made possible by these technologies, more as a reduction and disembodiment of language. He is less interested in the fact that the texts thereby also enhance their visuality in competition with the new visual media. This is also because Kittler’s adjective ‘optical’, his term for ‘visual’, suggests scenarios of (moving) pictures and not nonfigurative visuality. Kittler’s visuality is always pictorial, mostly filmic. Other critics, like Murphet (2009, 141), while generally following Kittler, have therefore stressed the importance of the modern media culture of visual language display, particularly in advertising, for modern visual poetry and modern literature in general. Murphet particularly refers to the British modernist movement of Vorticism and its publication Blast. Both the title page and the famous ‘BlastBless’ manifestos are strongly influenced by advertising print technologies, not only in their graphic appearance4 but also in the jussive, aggressive and sloganistic language of the manifestoes.5 This would contradict Kittler’s notion of a separation of literature from modern visual media and rather suggest another visualisation of literary language – albeit an abstract, nonfigurative one – in the face of contemporary visual media technologies. Importantly, it is literature’s “desire to be a ‘thing’” (Murphet 2009, 141) as well as a “medium proper” (Murphet 2009, 26) vis-à-vis its commercial media competitors that leads to this process of self-mediatisation. Taken together, then, Kittler’s disembodiment thesis for modern (visual) poetry has to be confronted with an embodiment thesis as developed by Murphet. As my reading of E. E. Cummings’s “Poem, Or Beauty Hurts Mr Vinal” shows, modern visual poetry must be seen as both an embodiment and a disembodiment of literature in the face of the modern audio-visual media revolution. Visual poetry is therefore, in Kittler’s (1999, 80) words, “a form of typographically optimized blackness”. Modernist literature may be seen as losing its access to moving pictorial scenarios but it definitely both keeps, and medially reflects on, its own visuality.

4 Both issues of the magazine are available at http://modjourn.org/render.php?id=11585914806 33184&view=mjp_object. For an analysis cf. Cork (1976, 250–252). 5 Cf. Reynolds (2000) for an overview of Blast’s relation to British advertising culture.



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5 E. E. Cummings, “Poem, Or Beauty Hurts Mr Vinal” (1923): Advertising the Body of the Letter My sample media historical reading of a modernist visual poem concerns an American text, because no other poem known to me works through so thoroughly modernist poetry’s affiliation with the culture of (graphic) advertising. What is more, its author E.E. Cummings was to become the most famous twentieth-century visual poet writing in English. The poem starts with an order to listen for its addressee, who first seems to be the poet Harold Vinal, mentioned in the title, but is then the US itself. The country is subsequently described in a kind of epic (“of you / i sing”) of complete commercialisation: take it from me kiddo believe me my country, ‘tis of you, land of the Cluett Shirt Boston Garter and Spearmint Girl With The Wrigley Eyes(of you land of the Arrow Ide and Earl & Wilson Collars) of you i sing […] let freedom ring amen. i do however protest, anent the un -spontaneous and otherwise scented merde which greets one (Everywhere Why) as divine poesy per that and this radically defunct periodical. […] (Cummings cit. in Miller 1986, 361–362, ll. 1–11 and 14–18; my italics)

The free verses of the quotation’s second stanza mime the visual display of brand names such as ‘Boston Garter’, ‘Wrigley’s Spearmint’ or ‘Earl & Wilson Collars’ on advertising posters and in newspaper ads. The poetical lines expose the names to the sight of the reader by isolating them on the page similarly to the way they would be exposed in an advertisement.6 However, by putting line endings right

6 Miller (1986) provides reproductions of nearly all of the advertising posters and newspaper ads referred to in the poem.

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between the words of some of the brand names (“Cluett / Shirt”; “Earl & / Wilson”), this advertising is simultaneously disrupted by way of enjambements  – one of the most traditional means of nonfigurative language visualisation in poetry. The poem thus both restages and subverts the culture of graphic advertising; it has poetry both be overwhelmed by the commercial world and write in counterpoint to commercial language (ab)use. The same ambivalence between restaging advertising culture and offering a poetical countervoice can be found in the exhortatory mode of the poem. The orders (“take it”, “let freedom ring”) are typical advertising language7 but they are equally reminiscent of the modernist manifestos such as Blast’s, which showed the same ambivalent inclusion of advertising language. What is more, in the last stanza quoted, contemporary poetry, such as the one written by Vinal, is explicitly likened to commercial slogans (both are “scented merde”). In a way reminiscent of Wyndham Lewis or Ezra Pound, conventional poetry as well as its publication sites (“radically defunct periodical”) are abused and declared to be outdated. Again, this poem implicitly posits itself as an alternative, while remaining quite short on the concrete ‘form’ of this new poetry, both linguistically and visually, beyond a mere restaging of the ‘defunct’ and deadening discourses of advertising and mawkish Neo-Georgian poetry. In the same vein, the speech act structure of the text wavers uncomfortably between cynical descriptions of the status quo and suggestions of alternatives; the modernist ‘j’accuse’ (“i do however protest”) is interspersed with an ‘epic’ of an impotent and consumerist America. The theme of the impotent body is central to the poem as can be glimpsed from the end of the following quotation. The text passage continues the litany of brand names and advertising slogans both staged and ‘broken’ by the poem in a visual shape similar to the first quotation:

7 Cf. “Don’t Suffer in Hot Weather” for B.V.D. undershirts (Miller 1986, 355).



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do you get me?)according to such supposedly indigenous throstles Art is O World O Life a formula: example, Turn Your Shirttails Into Drawers and If It Isn’t An Eastman It Isn’t A Kodak therefore my friends let us now sing each and all fortissimo Amer i

ca, I love, You. And there’re a hun-dred-mil-lion-oth-ers, like all of you successfully if delicately gelded (or spaded) gentlemen (and ladies) (Cummings cit. in Miller 1986, 361–362, ll. 30–45)

The poem sees the body of all American consumers as castrated by the use of body scenting and body regulating products. Against this, it tries to hold up the real, defecating body: the end of the poem alludes to faeces by referring to “tiny violetflavoured nuisance[s]” to be “emit[ted]” (l. 53) on “sternly allotted sandpile[s]” (l. 51) by “painfully / perpetually crouched” (ll. 49–50) Americans. Even if this reference to defecation can be seen as the kind of de-commercialised and de-sentimentalised poetry demanded by the poem, the evocation of the natural body remains ambivalent, too: given that the faeces are “violetflavoured”, it is unclear if the defecating body must be seen as a healthy and realist alternative, or just as an addition, to the ugly commercial body of America(ns). If we consider the possibility that the textual outline of the poem has a concretely, figuratively visual shape (which would make the poem look back to pattern poetry), both quotations could be argued to offer the image of the greedily gaping mouth of a crocodile-like being. Similarly to Cummings’s later famous “Grashopper” poem8, this would make the poem visual both in a nonfigurative and a figurative way. And if we see this mouth as belonging to the body variously evoked in the poem, the egestion element of the body suggested at the end would be complemented by its ingestion part. This reading, however, would rather cor-

8 The poem is entitled “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” and was published in 1935. The title mixes up the letters of the animal addressed in the poem.

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roborate the suspicion that the poem nowhere really evades the ugly commercial body: of course, the anus is no alternative to, but the counterpart of, the mouth, belonging to the same body. If we take a closer look at the gaping mouth, however, and deepen our consideration of the visual form of the poem, its concrete visual pattern dissolves again into the nonfigurative, while at the same time the visuality of the poem becomes more complex. At the centre of the second mouth figure we find the sequence “America, I love You”, cut up and stretched out into short lines down to one letter. “America, I Love You” is a popular song from 1915, written in the aftermath of the First World War, and later used as a call to arms in World War II. It contains the line “And there’s a hundred million others like me”, also referred to (and chopped up) in this poem. While the inclusion (and visualisation) of popular sound culture, in particular 1920s radio culture, in modernist poetry is beyond the scope of this essay, it must be noted how the poem responds to this commercial acoustics by way of its visual form: the extreme stretching out of the song’s lyrics suggests an exaggerated and mawkish performance while at the same time entailing a radical shortage of letters on the page (for which Cummings’s poetry later became famous). The acoustic oversupply is reacted to by a visual staging of verbal paucity. These lines, I want to argue, both suggest the song’s lack of substance and visualise an alternative, ‘quiet’ and intentionally slim, poetry. So again, we are confronted with what is both a bitter parody of commercial audio-visuality and a rather despondent alternative literary mediality.

6 Conclusion In the sense suggested by Murphet, Cummings’s poetry is an embodiment, a desperate but also aggressive self-mediatisation, where the visually enhanced language of advertising is reworked by the visuality of the poetical text, taking up but also radicalising visualised language by way of poetical nonfigurative visuality. At the same time, the radical visual isolating of “America, I Love You” on the page lies at the ‘heart’ of what could be seen as an embodiment, in the sense that it is an iconic, figurative visual rendering of (parts of) the human body. The thin ‘heart of the mouth’, however, can also be read as a Kittlerian moment of disembodiment where literature splits itself off from the loud and glaring commercial (media) world and isolates itself as the meagre marks on the blank page. Altogether, Cummings’s poetry is both a critical countermediality that uses the new culture of language visualisation for its own purposes, and a desperate and resigned self-disembodiment before the ‘body’ of American con-



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sumer media. However, just like modernist (visual) poetry in general, this poetry never renounces its visuality, even if, or rather: just because it becomes in a sense a-medial. Modernist visual poetry visualises language both against and beyond the new (visual) media. While this visualisation is both figurative and nonfigurative, it is the latter kind of visuality that is especially fruitful in modernist visual poetry. Starting from what is also a critical reception of modern advertising, it moves in the direction of an independently poetical language display, where the scarce marks on the page are meant to bring home both how rare unalienated language is today and how little is needed for this free language to communicate. In this sense, the nonfigurative visuality of modernist visual poetry moves in the direction of abstract painting (or collage) – which is strictly speaking figurative – a movement eagerly explored by concrete poetry from the 1950s onwards.9 In the two case poems studied in this article, visual poetry reminds us that literature has both an untranscendable visuality and an actual visibility. Literature brings this to the fore by using, analysing and ultimately also renouncing the visualities discussed and defended in media discourses or offered by other media themselves. Visual poetry works through the visualities and discourses of visuality of its time in order to establish its own literary visuality both with and beyond these other (media) visualities. In doing so, visual poetry also reacts to the processes and shifts in media history. My example from the seventeenth century saw poetry partaking in an antivisual literalisation of the world, while at the same time insisting that concrete images endured even in a media world monopolised by the letterpress. In my second example, on the other hand, visual poetry of the twentieth century did the opposite: insisting on the dignity, and also the visual dignity, of the printed, static and ‘small’ letter in a world increasingly dominated by audio-visual sequence media. In doing so, both poems use and reflect on the materiality and visuality of literature in general. Far from being special cases of the medium where literature rattles at the bars of language, childishly unsatisfied with its own medial limitations, visual poetry questions, explores and expands exactly what this mediality of literature can be. It is particularly in exploring nonfigurative visuality and its capacities that visual poetry exemplifies literature’s important contribution to, and reflection of, the scope of human visualities, both within and beyond the media that we have. So, even if visual poetry always (also) engages with concrete, material ‘visuals’, this engagement may nonetheless expand our notion of visuality. While other literary texts, also discussed in this volume, evoke new visualities

9 Despite its name, concrete poetry has often been compared to abstract painting (cf. Weiß 1982, Shaw 1989).

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by way of the readers’ imagination (Kittler’s hallucination), visual poetry makes us look at the world (and the texts) that we already have in a new way, as it were. Its visualities are therefore no less visionary.

Bibliography Berry, Eleanor. “Visual Poetry.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Ed. Roland Greene and Stephen Cushman. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012. 1522–1524. Bradford, Richard. “The Visual Poem in the Eighteenth Century.” Visible Language 23.1 (1989): 9–27. Cork, Richard. Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age. Vol. 1: Origins and Developments. London: Gordon Fraser, 1976. Cummings, Brian. “Reformed Literature and Literature Reformed.” The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature. Ed. David Wallace. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 821–851. Guibbory, Achsah. Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Herbert, George. The Works of George Herbert. Ed. F.E. Hutchinson. Oxford: Clarendon, 1953. Higgins, Dick. “The Corpus of British and Other English-Language Pattern Poetry.” Visible Language 20.1 (1986): 28–51. Higgins, Dick. “Pattern Poetry.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Ed. Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan. Princeton: Princeton UP, 21993. 891–892. Hodnett, Edward. Five Centuries of English Book Illustration. Aldershot: Scolar, 1988. Kittler, Friedrich A. Discourse Networks 1800/1900 [Gm. 1985]. Transl. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Kittler, Friedrich A. “Die Laterna magica der Literatur: Schillers und Hoffmanns Medienstrategien.” Athenäum 4 (1994): 219–237. Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter [Gm. 1986]. Transl. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. Kittler, Friedrich A. Optical Media [Gm. 2002]. Transl. Anthony Enns. Cambridge: Polity, 2010. Koschorke, Albrecht, Susanne Lüdemann, Thomas Frank, and Ethel Matala de Mazza. Der fiktive Staat: Konstruktionen des politischen Körpers in der Geschichte Europas. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1997. Lake, Peter. “The Laudian Style: Order, Uniformity and the Pursuit of the Beauty of Holiness in the 1630s.” The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642. Ed. Kenneth Fincham. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993. 161–185. Langan, Celeste. “Understanding Media in 1805: Audiovisual Hallucination in The Lay of the Last Minstrel.” Studies in Romanticism 40.1 (2001): 49–70. Merten, Kai. “Visions of Visuality: Wordsworth and the Media around 1800.” Anglistentag 2005, Bamberg: Proceedings. Ed. Christoph Houswitschka, Gabriele Knappe, and Anja Müller. Trier: WVT, 2006. 279–290. Merten, Kai. Intermediales Text-Theater. Die Bühne des Politischen und des Wissens vom Menschen bei Wordsworth und Scott. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. Miller, Lewis Jr. “Advertising in Poetry: a Reading of E.E. Cummings’ ‘Poem, or Beauty Hurts Mr Vinal’.” Word & Image 2.4 (1986): 349–362.



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Reynolds, Paige. “‘Chaos Invading Concept’: Blast as a Native Theory of Promotional Culture.” Twentieth-Century Literature 46.2 (2000): 238–268. Shaw, Mary Lewis. “Concrete and Abstract Poetry: The World as Text and the Text as World.” Visible Language 23.1 (1989): 29–54. Weiß, Christiana M. Seh-Texte: Zur Erweiterung des Textbegriffs in konkreten und nach-konkreten visuellen Texten. Ph.D. thesis. University of Saarbrücken: 1982.

Bernhard Metz

Non-linear Readings: The Dictionary Novel as a Visual Genre Abstract: This contribution characterises the dictionary novel as a visual (and meta-visual) genre marked by reading practices uncommon to the linear reading of novels like leafing and skimming. Since the typographic layout and typesetting of dictionary novels mimics dictionaries and encyclopaedias, the dictionary novel is a rewarding genre to study in regard to literary visuality and visibility. It consists so far of only few examples, all from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and is marked by a special type of hypertext fiction that fosters non-linearity, openness, and infiniteness; the essay will discuss works by David Grossman, Andreas Okopenko, Milorad Pavić, Sam Winston, and Péter Zilahy, which in part have also been republished in electronic hypertext versions.  1

Reading is usually understood as a linear sequence, but the basic concepts of dictionaries and therefore also of dictionary novels are different: leafing, skimming, and page turning all point to a non-linear reading process.* Dictionaries and by implication dictionary novels are not read in the conventional way, that is from the first to the last page. Instead, they challenge linear reading habits. They follow a typographic layout and typesetting which a typographer or publisher would normally avoid in a novel as it is not easy or comfortable to read: letters too small, too many letters in each line or on each page, too many abbreviations, for instance. Dictionaries are designed to be consulted, not to be read entirely. The dictionary novel as a genre or sub-genre in fictional literature did not exist before the twentieth century. Nonetheless, it predates and anticipates the entire electronic hypertext literature. The corpus of this visual genre so far consists of only few books, but famous and paradigmatic ones at that. It evolved from * A first draft of this paper was presented at the Conference ‘On the Page: Seeing, Reading, Interpreting’, September 8–9, 2009, University of Salford, organised by Simon Barton and Glyn White under the title “Reading page turners when reading is page turning out of necessity”; an extended version was given as a lecture at the Università degli studi di Verona, March 2, 2011, at invitation of Anna Maria Babbi and Massimo Salgaro. I would like to thank all of them, including the audiences in both places, for helpful suggestions, comments and discussions. In addition, I owe many thanks to Annette Gilbert, Leah Matthews, Katharina Metz, and Ulrike Schellhammer for reading and correcting earlier versions. Last but not least I am very thankful to Ronja Bodola and Guido Isekenmeier for their advice and for accepting the paper for this volume. DOI 10.1515/9783110378030-008



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its typographic layout and from the design of the printed book. By making use of visual conventions regularly found in the non-fictional dictionary novels indicate at a glance that they challenge different types of reading practices. This makes the dictionary novel a rewarding genre to study in regard to literary visuality and visibility as well. While its negotiations of literary ‘visibilities’ are very specific, the dictionary novel can moreover be considered a meta-visual genre as it foregrounds core assumptions of literary visualities in the first place. In contrast to, for instance, concrete poetry (→ Merten) that displays a semanticised visuality, the medial strategies of the dictionary novel operate on a different level of visibility. The same holds true when the dictionary novel is compared to the visualisations underlying imagistic readings of an alleged ‘immersive’ quality (→ Brosch). Instead, its strategies rest on typographic conventions borrowed from reference works and thus posing a particular challenge to linear reading, that enables the so-called visualisations in the first place.

1 Dictionaries and Encyclopaedias in/as Literature: The Dictionary Novel Literary texts are often related to dictionaries and encyclopaedias, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (cf. Clark 1990; Wiethölter et al. 2005). Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet or some of the stories by Jorge Luis Borges, such as “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” or “El idioma analítico de John Wilkins”, are famous examples. More recent representatives include Lawrence Norfolk’s Lemprière’s Dictionary (1991), and Georges Perec’s La Vie, mode d’emploi (1978), for some critics one of the outstanding literary texts of the twentieth century. Perec’s novel, for example, it contains a character, Albert Cinoc, who works as lexicographer for the Larousse. In his spare time, he eliminates lexical entries which have fallen into disuse.1 Other literary texts exist of whole passages directly

1 “Cinoc, qui avait alors une cinquantaine d’années, exerçait un curieux métier. Comme il le disait lui-même, il était ‘tueur de mots’: il travaillait à la mise à jour des dictionnaires Larousse. Mais alors que d’autres rédacteurs étaient à la recherche de mots et de sens nouveaux, lui devait, pour leur faire de la place, éliminer tous les mots et tous les sens tombés an désuétude. […] Cinoc lisait lentement, notait les mots rares, et peu à peu son projet prit corps et il décida de rédiger un grand dictionnaire des mots oubliés, […] mais pour sauver des mots simples qui continuaient encore à lui parler. En dix ans il en rassembla plus de huit mille, au travers desquels vint s’inscrire une histoire aujourd’hui à peine transmissible” (Perec 1978, 361–363)  / “Cinoc, who was then about fifty, pursued a curious profession. As he said himself, he was a ‘word-killer’:

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drawn from encyclopaedias and dictionaries, for instance Jean Paul Richter’s novels, but also great parts of the tradition of polyhistory and polymathia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Kilcher 2001, 2003, 2005). Encyclopaedic knowledge in literature often relates to well-read authors or at least to authors able to use and reuse encyclopaedias and dictionaries. A famous text-generating method, Oulipo’s ‘S+7’, is based upon replacing each noun of a given text with the seventh noun following it in a deliberately chosen dictionary (cf. Oulipo 1973, 139– 150; Oulipo 1981, 166–170; http://oulipo.net/fr/contraintes/s7). And there are also collections of satiric and ironic word definitions, which use the term “dictionary” in their titles, well-known examples of which are Flaubert’s posthumously published Dictionnaire des idées reçues or Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary (1911). The dictionary novel, on the other hand, is defined by a formal arrangement more than by certain topics and themes. It needs to be distinguished from the encyclopaedic novel or ‘encyclopedic narrative’ (Mendelson 1976, who lists Dante’s Divina Commedia, Rabelais’s Gargantua et Pantagruel, Cervantes’s Don Quijote, Goethe’s Faust, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow as examples).2 By presenting its content in a semantically arbitrary order, regularly following the alphabet, the dictionary novel arranges small snippets of information and connects them using a variety of reference types, including pictures, alphabetic and numeric signs. Dictionaries always used the alphabetic order, while the first encyclopaedia arranging its content alphabetically was not published before the seventeenth century.3 Thus, the term ‘dictionary novel’ should be taken to refer to texts that employ this alphabetic arrangement instead of ‘encyclopaedic novel’ or ‘lexicon novel’.

he worked at keeping Larousse dictionaries up to date. But whilst other compilers sought out new words and meanings, his job was to make room for them by eliminating all the words and meanings that had fallen into disuse. […] Cinoc read slowly and copied down rare words; gradually his plan began to take shape, and he decided to compile a great dictionary of forgotten words, […] so as to rescue simple words which still appealed to him. In ten years he gathered more than eight thousand of them, which contain, obscurely, the trace of a story it has now become almost impossible to hand on” (Perec 1987, 287–290). Cinoc is not the only character consulting or possessing dictionaries in Perec’s novel, cf. Adèle and Jean Plassaert in chapter LIV with their Egyptology dictionary Libvre mangificque dez Merveyes que pouvent estre vuyes es La Egipte (Lyon 1560). 2 Hoorn (2014, 392) gives a typology consisting of “four variations of encyclopedic novels: the concretionist type (Andreas Okopenko), the constructivist type (Milorad Pavic), the potential lexicon novel (Kurt Marti), and the implicit novel-within-the-encyclopedia (Ror Wolf)”, but this classification misses important aspects of the dictionary novel. 3 Louis Moréri’s Grand Dictionaire Historique, ou le mélange curieux de l’histoire sacrée et profane, etc. (Lyon 1674), cf. Kilcher (2002, 2003).



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Yet, there are several terms in use, at least judging from the subtitles, though one has to bear in mind that these might change in translation. So de facto there is no clear distinction between ‘lexicon novel’, ‘literary encyclopaedia’, ‘fictional dictionary’, ‘encyclopaedic novel’ or ‘dictionary novel’. In dictionaries or encyclopaedias of poetics or literary studies ‘dictionary novel’ or ‘lexicon novel’ generally have no entries.4 The dictionary novel is a special type of hypertext fiction and fosters non-linearity, openness or infiniteness. The genre is marked by a collaborative effort of author and reader. It demands ways of reading that are conventionally reserved for non-fiction and can be found in encyclopaedias, dictionaries, manuals, reference-books, but also recipe-books or phone-books, in short: books that are often consisting of many volumes and thousands of pages. Reading a dictionary-style book means consulting it, looking up articles and entries, skimming them for snippets of information for the answer to a certain question. When consulting, or reading, a dictionary, no matter how frequently, one does not read it in a linear fashion from A to Z or from the first to the last page.5 Dictionaries and reference books are regularly typeset in small print and have two or three columns, they are printed on thin paper and in large formats to save space, using abbreviations, italics, bold print, typographic glyphs; their typography is not comfortable to read and violates certain guidelines or norms common for the design of novels. It is, first of all, a visual genre, defined by spatial and typographical conventions common in dictionaries and normally never used in fictional texts. To execute an entire and linear reading of a dictionary or an encyclopaedia is uncommon, to say the least; managing it has led to new books about this experience. A.J. Jacobs, for instance, read the entire 32 volumes of the 15th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica; afterwards he wrote The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World (2004), iron­

4 For an insightful comparison of ‘dictionary’ and ‘encyclopaedia’ cf. Eco (1984, 55–140), for the interplay between alphabet, lexicography and encyclopaedistics in literature cf. Schmitz-Emans et al. (2012). 5 Cf. Voltaire’s introduction to his own Dictionnaire philosophique, portatif (1764): “Ce livre n’exige pas une lecture suivie; mais, à quelque endroit qu’on l’ouvre, on trouve de quoi réfléchir. Les livres les plus utiles sont ceux dont les lecteurs font eux-mêmes la moitié; ils étendent les pensées dont on leur présente le germe; ils corrigent ce qui leur semble défectueux, et fortifient par leurs réflexions ce qui leur paraît faible” (Voltaire 1967, XL). This, of course, became a widespread topos in modern literature, as in Borges’ prologue of El libro de los seres imaginarios (1967), where he compares the book to a kaleidoscope to play with: “El libro de los seres imaginarios no ha sido escrito para una lectura consecutiva. Querríamos que los curiosos lo frecuentaran, como quien juega con las formas cambiantes que revela un calidoscopio.” (Borges and Guerrero 1996, 8). For leafing and non-linear types of reading cf. Gunia and Hermann (2002); Schulz (2015).

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ically organising its content in alphabetically-arranged entries. Jacobs nevertheless was not the first person to read an edition of the Britannica, or another huge encyclopaedia or dictionary, in its entirety.6 The dictionary novel is also related to the tradition of alphabet books and ‘abecedaries’, which were of special interest in the twentieth-century autobiographical French tradition and included authors such as Michel Leiris (1939), Georges Perec (1969, 1976), Roland Barthes (1975), Renaud Camus (1998) and others. However, there are some notable differences: dictionary novels do not necessarily cover all of the letters of the alphabet, and they tend to have more than one entry for each letter, thus being rather voluminous, with several hundred pages. They invite the reader to jump between the entries with the help of links.7 Dictionary novels support non-linear types of reading while abecedaries 6 Fat’h Ali Shah read the entire 3rd edition, while George Bernard Shaw read the 9th edition of the Britannica, apart from the science articles, Richard Evelyn Byrd took the Britannica as reading to the South Pole during his five-month stay in 1934; nevertheless there are only two people known to have read two independent editions, C.S. Forester and Amos Urban Shirk, who read the 11th and 14th editions (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica). Reading encyclopaedias and dictionaries after Bayle and D’Alembert and Diderot became part of the erudition process and educational experience; cf. among others Goethe in his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit (II, vi): “Allein unruhige Wißbegierde trieb mich weiter, ich geriet in die Geschichte der alten Literatur und von da in einen Enzyklopädismus, indem ich Gesners ‘Isagoge’ und Morhofs ‘Polyhistor’ durchlief, und mir dadurch einen allgemeinen Begriff erwarb, wie manches Wunderliche in Lehr und Leben schon mochte vorgekommen sein. Durch diesen anhaltenden und hastigen, Tag und Nacht fortgesetzten Fleiß verwirrte ich mich eher, als ich mich bildete; ich verlor mich aber in ein noch größeres Labyrinth, als ich Baylen in meines Vaters Bibliothek fand und mich in denselben vertiefte.” (Goethe 1811–1831, IX, 238–239)/“But a restless eagerness for knowledge urged me further; I lit upon the history of ancient literature, and from that fell into an encyclopaedism, in which I read through Gessner’s ‘Isagoge’ and Morhov’s ‘Poly­histor’, and thus gained a general notion of how many strange things might have happened in learning and life. By this persevering and rapid industry, continued day and night, I more confused than instructed myself; but I lost myself in a still greater labyrinth when I found Bayle in my father’s library, and plunged deeply into him” (Goethe 1848, 200). For the French tradition and Baudelaire and Sartre cf. Kilcher (2002, 77). A later reminiscence is Arno Schmidt and his complete reading of Pierer’s Encyclopaedia as a necessary preparation for his own encyclopaedic novel Zettel’s Traum: “Und die Nebenarbeiten waren […] ungeheuerlich obwohl ich ja selbst ein alter Bücherfresser und -Verschlinger bin; […] ich habe – ein ganzes KonversationsLexikon [sic!] von 1845 mit 34 Bänden (den alten Pierer der übrigens ausgezeichnet ist), habe ich Wort für Wort lesen müssen um mein Gehirn in – in die Falten jener Zeit zu legen; und vergessen durfte ich’s auch noch nicht was ich da gelesen hatte.” (Schmidt 1969, 3)/“And the extra work was tremendous, although I am a real devourer and glutton for books […] I had to – an entire encyclopaedia of 1845 in 34 volumes (the old Pierer, excellent by the way), I had to read word by word to furrow my brain according to that decade; and I was not yet to forget what I did read there”. 7 Therefore a book like Walter Abish’s Alphabetical Africa (1974), executed in a ludic and Oulip-



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are normally read (in the traditional sense) from the first to the last page. Nonlinear reading or jumping from one entry to another while not reading the entire book, is the conventional way of reading a dictionary; the dictionary novel tries to transpose this style of reading to a literary form.8 Compared to other books supporting non-linear reading, for instance, when the order of chapters is more or less left to the choice of the reader, the dictionary novel is exceptionally challenging, but at the same time grants the reader complete freedom from conventional strategies and restrictions of linear readings. For instance, Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (1963) allows for two possible types of reading or reading directions outlined in the “Tablero de dirección”, the “Table of Directions”: there is the traditional form, “read in a normal fashion,” that starts with the ian manner, should not be considered a dictionary novel. It contains 52 chapters on 152 pages, the first chapter “Ages ago,” for instance, is written with words starting with A/a, the second “Before African Adjournment” only with words starting with A/a or B/b and so on. Chapters twenty-six and twenty-seven (“Zambia helps fill our Zoos” and “Zanzibar is clearly marked”) contain words with all twenty-six letters, while the last chapter again consists only of words with A/a (“Another Abbreviation”). But there are no typographically formalised links between these chapters, no entries, no abbreviations etc. 8 Cf. Peter Bichsel’s (1982, 41–42) description of his first encyclopaedia-related reading experiences: “[Ich] las dann alle Bücher, die wir hatten: ein dickes Buch über Martin Luther, Kochs großes Malerhandbuch, ein Fachbuch für Anstreicher und Dekorationsmaler, auch die Bibel wie einen Roman von vorn bis hinten. In einem zwanzigbändigen Konversationslexikon entdeckte ich erstmals, daß man Seiten überspringen kann, entdeckte mein Interesse für Sexuelles und in diesem Zusammenhang das Nachschlagen von Stichwörtern. Den männlichen Geschlechtsteil fand ich sehr lange nicht: er war unter dem Stichwort ‘Die Rute’ zu finden.”/“Then I read all books we had: a thick volume on Martin Luther, Koch’s big book on painting, a technical book for limers and painters, also the bible like a novel from start to finish. In 20 volumes encyclopaedia I discovered for the first time how to skip pages. I uncovered my interest for all sexual issues sand in this regard the looking up of entries. For a very long time I couldn’t find the male genital: it was to be found under the catchword ‘prick’”. It’s obvious that lexical entries for everything related to sex play a dominant role in many dictionaries (Mugglestone 2011, 104–108) and also dictionary novels, among them Okopenko and Grossman. Words and dictionaries may have an erotic quality to some, see Hermann Burger’s “Der Mann der nur aus Wörtern besteht”, where the narrator encounters a phantasm every time he reads, erotically stimulated, in his reference books: “Ich meine den Mann, der nur aus Wörtern besteht. Meistens taucht er gerade dann auf, wenn ich im Wörterbuch lese. Wie andere Telefonbücher studieren vor dem Einschlafen, um sich mit Zahlen und Adressen zu betäuben, vertiefe ich mich in den Wahrig, den Dornseiff, den Duden, denn nichts ist so anregend wie nackte Wörter, wenn man sie mit den Fingerspitzen fassen und mitsamt ihren Wurzeln ausziehen kann.” (Burger 1983, 239)/“I’m talking about the man consisting only of words. He mostly shows up the moment I am reading my dictionaries. Other people study telephone books before going to sleep to get numbed by numbers and addresses, but I immerse myself in the Wahrig, Dornseiff, Duden. Nothing is as exciting as naked words, if one manages to tweeze them with one’s fingertips and to pull them off including their roots”.

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first chapter and ends with chapter 56; and, additionally, the Hopscotch approach starting from chapter 71 and then turning back to chapter 1, chapter 2, going to chapter 116, chapter 3 and so on.9 The reading order of the chapters of the two first parts of Rayuela always remains the same, the chapters are complemented and completed by the detours and digressions the 99 chapters in “De otros lados” (“From diverse sides”) are offering.10 The same holds for the jumps between chapters and corresponding architectural rooms in Perec’s La Vie, which follows the rules of a chess game. All of these texts break with the traditional linear reading approach that starts with the first chapter, but they still prescribe a certain way of reading and to read chapters in a certain linear order, only following a different logic. The dictionary novel does challenge and call into question the order and structure of a book or a story. It makes use of the order of the alphabet to arrange

9 The “Tablero de dirección” offers the reader explicit advice. Quotes are from the critical edition which contains the slightly different text of later editions, the translation in brackets is, what Rabassa’s translation of 1966 had to omit: “A su manera este libro es muchos libros, pero sobre todo es dos libros. El lector queda invitado a elegir una de las dos posibilidades siguientes: [/] El primer libro se deja leer en la forma corriente, y termina en el capítulo 56, al pie del cual hay tres vistosas estrellitas que equivalen a la palabra Fin. Por consiguiente, el lector prescindirá sin remordimientos de lo que sigue. [/] El segundo libro se deja leer empezando por el capítulo 73 y siguiendo luego en el orden que se indica al pie de cada capítulo.” (Cortázar 1991, 3)/“In its own way, this book consists of many books, but two books above all. [The reader is invited to choose one of the following options:] [/] The first can be read in a normal fashion and it ends with Chapter 56, at the close of which there are three garish little stars which stand for the words The End. Consequently, the reader may ignore what follows with a clean conscience. [/] The second should be read by beginning with Chapter 73 and then following the sequence indicated at the end of each chapter” (Cortázar 1966, V). 10 Nevertheless, there’s (at least) a third official way to read Rayuela; as long as one takes the following dialogue between Oliveira and Morelli as an advice for reading the entire novel. Chapter 154 treats a book project of Morelli consisting of loose pages which has to be delivered to the publisher without being supervised by its author: “– Póngale que metamos la pata – dijo Oliveira  – y que le armemos una confusión fenomenal. En el primer tomo había una complicación terrible […] sobre si no se habrían equivocado al imprimir los textos. [/] – Ninguna importancia – dijo Morelli –. Mi libro si puede leer como a uno le dé la gana. Liber Fulguralis, hojas mánticas, y así va. Lo más que hago es ponerlo como a mí me gustaría releerlo. Y en el peor de los casos, si se equivocan, a lo mejor queda perfecto.” (Cortázar 1991, 154) / ‘“But what if we should make a mistake,” Oliveira said, “and get things all mixed up. There was a terrible complication in the first volume […] whether there hadn’t been some mistake in the printing of the texts.” [/] “Who cares,” Morelli said. “You can read my book any way you want to. Liber Fulguralis, mantic pages, and that’s how it goes. The most I do is set it up the way I would like to reread it. And in the worst of cases, if they do make a mistake, it might just turn out perfect”’ (Cortázar 1966, 556). It is only this last reading method which breaks with a linear approach, as it neither prescribes a certain way of reading nor does it suggest reading chapters in a certain order.



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its contents and thus produces new and contingent combinations of objects and ideas, especially when read in a linear order (Schmitz-Emans 2002, 182). The dictionary novel supports juxtaposition and heterogeneity and creates a coincidentia oppositorum. By the complementary movements of dividing a huge amount of text into many small units and linking them together by several nodes, the dictionary novel represents a complex type of text that calls for unconventional ways of reading fiction. Therefore, the criticism levelled against the dictionary as a formal structure to organise readings, as one may find in Chapter 71 of Cortázar’s Rayuela, is rather unjust: “Let us say that the world is a figure, it has to be read. By read let us understand generated. Who cares about a dictionary as dictionary?”11 Contrarily, reading a dictionary generates something new, and moreover, reading a dictionary novel is far more challenging than following an official alternative reading as suggested in Cortázar’s Rayuela or Perec’s La Vie. The case studies will focus on Sam Winston’s A Dictionary Story (2005), Andreas Okopenko’s Lexikon einer sentimentalen Reise zum Exporteurtreffen in Druden/Dictionary Novel of a Sentimental Journey to the Exporters’ Meeting at Druden (1970), Milorad Pavić’s Hazarski rečnik/Dictionary of the Khazars (1984), David Grossman’s ’Ayen ’erekh: Ahavah/See under: Love (1986), and Péter Zilahy’s Az utolsó ablakzsiráf: Öt éven felülieknek / The last Window-giraffe. A Picture Dictionary for the Over Fives (1998).

2 Sam Winston, A Dictionary Story (2005) By using the explications of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), certainly one of the most famous dictionaries in the world, British artist Sam Winston narrates a story about the dictionary. He starts with a problem that concerns the genre of the dictionary novel: what is a dictionary? This is a relatively simple task as one just needs to look up the word. Under ‘dictionary’ in the last edition of the OED one reads: dictionary […] A book dealing with the individual words of a language (or certain specified classes of them), so as to set forth their orthography, pronunciation, signification, and use, their synonyms, derivation, and history, or at least some of these facts: for convenience of reference, the words are arranged in some stated order, now, in most languages, alphabetical; and in larger dictionaries the information given is illustrated by quotations from

11 Cortázar (1966, 379)/“Digamos que el mundo es una figura, hay que leerla. Por leerla entendamos generarla. ¿A quién le importa un diccionario por el diccionario mismo?” (Cortázar 1991, 311)

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literature; a word-book, vocabulary, or lexicon. […] By extension: A book of information or reference on any subject or branch of knowledge, the items of which are arranged in alphabetical order; an alphabetical encyclopædia: as a Dictionary of Architecture, Biography, Geography, of the Bible, of Christian Antiquities, of Dates, etc. (Simpson and Weiner 1989, vol. IV, 625–626)

The dictionary in Winston’s Dictionary Story does not belong to any fictional genre and cannot be classified in terms of literary studies: “Once there was a time when all the books knew what they were about – children’s stories for bedtime to send the kids to sleep, novels for grown-ups to take away on holiday and text books for students to make them look clever. But there was one book that was never sure of itself. It was called the dictionary” (Winston, 2009[, 1–2]). That is the beginning, a rather conventional way of storytelling, but as soon as one turns the page and starts leafing through it, the normal order of reading from left to right and from top to bottom is called into question. For every word of the first phrase a related dictionary entry out of the OED pops up, “Once there was a time,” for example, is echoed by related entries, “Once” refers to “one time and no more,” “there” refers to “introducing a sentence,” “was” refers to “an objective existence,” “a” refers to “particular instance,” “time” refers to “a period when something occurs.” Once one folds out the entire Dictionary Story, there is a great temptation to read every column-line from left to right or to skip something and start your own way through this short text. Winston’s Dictionary Story tells the story of a dictionary, in the OED’s explanation a “book containing words alphabetically arranged,” which is angry about not being properly and conventionally read by its users: “What upset this Dictionary was that all the other books seemed to be properly read, whereas with her, she tended to be flicked through.” (Winston 2009[, 2]) The dictionary decides to bring her words to life to tell her own story. The result is astonishing, all words get mixed up and there is great confusion, until “Law” cries for “Order” to restore the conventional structure, but nothing happens: “The Dictionary was ecstatic, suddenly thousands of little stories were coming alive. But by doing this she had managed to break the only rule the Books have. The Books knew that if the Dictionary’s words kept changing meaning, they themselves would become unreadable.” (Winston 2009[, 7–8]) This becomes visible to the reader who sees that all the letters are disarranged and spread out on the page (fig. 1). The solution is – once again – to use the alphabet as an ordering device, arranging, taming and pacifying all the words and letters thrown into confusion since “the Alphabet was in charge of every letter” (Winston 2009[, 14]). The dictionary is sad about this law-and-order politics of “the Alphabet”, but by now she has her “own story to tell – The time when she brought her words to life. End.” Here one may flick through one last time and see that “end” is again related to “See; Dictionary”



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Fig. 1: Winston (2009[, 8–9])

(Winston 2009[, 15–16]), supplying this entire Dictionary Story with a loop structure where you may jump from the end to the beginning and reread this little story again; most likely with different results. This first example with the very visible take on non-linearity already points to the kind of visuality or the meta-comments that dictionary novels – or stories – add to the discussion of literary visuality. In this case, the focus is drawn to the logical order, usually covert if not invisible, now made visible, as well as to the letters as literally characters. As such, the shift from understanding to staring at the signifier foregrounds a medial strategy of disruption. Yet, the following examples add multiple dimensions to this, and show a more complex rendition of aspects of literary visuality.

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3 Andreas Okopenko, Dictionary Novel of a ­Sentimental Journey to the Exporters’ Meeting at Druden (1970) Austrian writer Andreas Okopenko’s Lexikon einer sentimentalen Reise zum Exporteurtreffen in Druden is a 292-page text whose typography, including the cover artwork by Walter Pichler, is rather conventional and not particularly remark­ able for the books of Residenz during the 1970s. The typeface, the Stempel Garamond,12 and its single column-layout are not usually associated with dictionaries, but it is a common font used for typesetting novels. Only the column titles, arrows and capitalised nouns indicate that this book is anything but conventional. The first article (out of 790 entries) deals with the first letter of the alphabet, the capital A. From the outset, the reader is confronted with unusual reading directions and orders leading him back to the “Instructions for Use” of the book just opened: A. You are used to reading a book – avoiding its prologue – from the beginning to the end. Very convenient. But this time you should please turn back to the Instructions For Use. Without them you won’t be able to turn this book into a novel. Yes: This book must be made into a novel by you!13

Likewise, the reader who starts the Dictionary Novel by looking up its very last entry, thus consulting the entry “Zz.”, is given a similar order to read the instructions first: Zz. You’re used to reading first whether they get each other, Napoleon and Désirée, or the cop and the robber. Very convenient. By using this method this time you will only know that Zz means myrrh for the old pharmacists and ginger for the new. If you wish to be better informed, please turn back to the Instructions For Use. Because it is you who must turn this book into a novel.14

12 It’ is not the only font used in this book, see “ZOO” or “ø” (Okopenko 1970, 262) typeset in Futura. 13 “A. Sie sind es gewohnt, ein Buch – unter Umgehung des Vorwortes – von vorn nach hinten zu lesen. Sehr praktisch. Aber diesmal schlagen Sie, bitte, zur Gebrauchsanweisung zurück, denn ohne die werden Sie das Buch nicht zum Roman machen. Ja: dieses Buch müssen erst Sie zum Roman machen” (Okopenko 1970, 9). 14 “Zz. Sie sind es gewohnt, zuerst nachzulesen, ob sie sich kriegen, Napoleon und Désirée, oder der Bulle und der Kunde. Sehr praktisch. Diesmal aber erfahren Sie auf diese Weise nur, daß Zz bei den alten Apothekern Myrrhe, bei den neuen Ingwer bedeutet. Wollen Sie besser infor­



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This “Gebrauchsanweisung” or instruction for use is the only element of the novel that doesn’t follow the alphabetical order and constitutes the 791st element of the text. So what is there to learn, what exactly is the information we need to “turn this book into a novel”? This book contains instructions for use, since it would be nice if you would cobble yourself together a novel out of it. The sentimental journey to the exporters’ meeting at Druden has yet to be completed. […]. The material is alphabetically ordered for your convenience. Like a dictionary. From the dictionary you know the arrows (→), which may advise you to do the following: move on, gain further information or get lost in the details. As in a dictionary you have the freedom to follow the arrow or not […]. All you have to do is read criss-cross through my dictionary. […]. That’s the world. To glance in a prescribed direction following a designated order is, however, the classical mode of reading – or call it pre-Khrushchev Thaw East-tourism. I would like you to be free – let’s give it a try – from the reading into the world. It has been mentioned that the sentimental journey is a novel of possibilities. […] It’s a game, not fully teased out after the first time. […] Later you may thumb through the book randomly and thoughtlessly or you use your children’s game of dice.15

This sounds like a hymn to aleatory freedom, and it is one; Okopenko is evidently proud of breaking with conventions and traditions.16 One also might remember the words of advice given to the reader in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1767), that is to skip or reread certain chapters. Sometimes the reader is invited to skim and leaf through (cf. Okopenko 1970, 47), sometimes asked to reread passages pedantically.17 Nevertheless Okopenko’s dictionary novel is miert werden, schlagen Sie, bitte, zur Gebrauchsanweisung zurück. Denn Sie selbst müssen dieses Buch erst zum Roman machen” (Okopenko 1970, 292). 15 “Dieses Buch hat eine Gebrauchsanweisung, denn es wäre hübsch, wenn Sie sich aus ihm einen Roman basteln wollten. Die sentimentale Reise zum Exporteurtreffen in Druden muß erst vollzogen werden. […]. Das Material ist alphabetisch geordnet, damit Sie es mühelos auffinden. Wie in einem Lexikon. Aus dem Lexikon sind Ihnen auch die Hinweispfeile bekannt (→), die Ihnen raten sollen, wie Sie am besten weitergehen, wie Sie sich zusätzlich informieren oder wie Sie vom Hundertsten ins Tausendste gelangen können. Wie im Lexikon haben Sie die Freiheit, jeden Hinweispfeil zu beherzigen oder zu übergehen. […/] Sie brauchen nur kreuz und quer durch mein Lexikon zu lesen […]. Das ist Welt. In vorgeschriebener Reihenfolge vorgeschriebene Blicke zu werfen, ist hingegen klassische Lektüre oder vortauwetterlicher Ost-Tourismus. Ich will Sie – versuchen wir es einmal – aus der Lektüre in die Welt befreien. [/] Daß die Sentimentale Reise ein Möglichkeitenroman ist, wurde nun ausgesprochen. […] Er ist ein Spiel, das nicht nach einmaligem Gebrauch ausgespielt ist. […] Blättern Sie später wahl- und gedankenlos in dem Buch oder benützen Sie das Würfelspiel Ihres Kindes” (Okopenko 1970, 5–6). 16 See also the entry “Freiheit, die ich meine” (Okopenko 1970, 94). 17 See also the rather harsh advice reminding of Sterne: “Krämer 2. → Krämer 1. Nein, Sie lesen dasselbe nicht zweimal? Und wenn ich Ihnen sage, Sie haben den Mittelteil zu hudelig kon­su­

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defined as a “liberal system,” a quodlibet for the reader’s sake: “Add one … is in liberal systems like the dictionary novel a short form for: ‘Add one, if you happen to be in the mood for taking advice’”.18 The result is a novel which is very funny but also very confusing, rich in bibliographies (cf. Okopenko 1970, 212), mathematical formulae (cf. Okopenko 1970, 64–65, 221), sources (cf. Okopenko 1970, 130, 168–169), handwritten facsimiles,19 lists and charts (cf. Okopenko 1970, 18, 29, 40–41, 58, 74, 83–85, 98, 149–150, 167, 210–211, 213, 286). This novel makes fun not only of linear and rigid reading models, but also of the entire encyclopaedic and scientific tradition: there is a variety of footnotes, but also phrases like “Schlagen wir […] nach” (Okopenko 1970, 267), so “Let’s look it up”, or “Vgl. auch” (Okopenko 1970, 291) or “Compare”. Some of the links are empty, following, for instance, the arrows to “Katzen-Musik,” “caterwauling” (Okopenko 1970, 65), or “Hunde-Stall,” “dog-kennel” (Okopenko 1970, 209), do not lead anywhere –, since these entries simply do not exist. When following the links referring to existing articles, the reader very likely will become lost as well. Some of the arrows lead to only one entry, some to many; many articles are linked with several arrows. This often ends in looped structures and only the decision not to follow an arrow leads back to sections unread so far. While 23 articles in Okopenko’s novel work like this and contain the lemmata of other articles, there’s also the opposite: 583 out of 790 articles are dead-end entries, they contain no (further) link and make fun of the conventional indexicality of arrows and indices. Okopenko also violates some basic rules of an encyclopaedic dictionary. Many of the articles consist only of arrows and titles of articles, some articles do not contain anything their titles suggest, some topics cannot be found the usual way. The alphabetic order in this dictionary novel is therefore only good for finding a linked entry, but not very helpful for using this dictionary novel as a dictionary. Every act of reading will be different, touching on different articles; to read means entering a labyrinth where the main purpose is actually to get lost: Labyrinth. I always loved Ariadne, the bright woman, who would lead me out of the maze; now I am supposed to be the Minotaur? No, well-arranged as ever, my world lies before me:

miert? Gönnen Sie sich mehr Stehfleisch, im Krämerladen” (Okopenko 1970, 146) / “Grocer 2. → Grocer 1. No, you won’t read the same twice? And if I tell you that you consumed the centrepiece too impatiently? Allow yourself more patience, in the grocery store”. 18 “Man nehme … ist in liberalen Systemen wie dem Lexikon-Roman eine Kurzform und bedeutet: ‘Man nehme, wenn man gerade ratsempfängerisch gelaunt ist’” (Okopenko 1970, 165). 19 Cf. Okopenko (1970, 191–192, 285); a reproduction of the author’s handwritten signature (cf. “Zeitung 8”) may also be found at the end of Zilahy’s novel (Zilahy 1998, 117/2008, 115).



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the model as well-arranged as its model. Which teaches us that there are no labyrinths as soon as we see the path as a goal […].20

The story’s main plot in Okopenko’s dictionary novel is nevertheless rather simple: on June 22, 1968, a salesman for chemistry, “J.”, travels up the Danube from Vienna to Druden (a fictitious name that is linked to Dürnstein) to join a meeting of export-salesmen. During his short trip he feels attracted to two women and thinks about the world and his wife. J. realises the wide range of possibilities the world he lives in is offering.21 This plot, consisting of 35 entries, is annotated and commented on by 755 entries, which complete this small world model. The reader may see the right pointing arrows as invitations for digression, but it is up to him to decide whether to follow them or not.22 Following these arrows, one ends up at literary crossroads and bifurcations, leafing back-and-forth through

20 “Labyrinth. Ich liebte immer Ariadne, die geisthelle Frau, die aus dem Labyrinth herausführte; nun soll ich Minotaurus sein? Nein, übersichtlich wie je liegt meine Welt da: das Modell so übersichtlich wie sein Modell; das uns lehrt, es gibt keine Labyrinthe, sobald wir in Wegen Ziele sehen (vgl. Wittgenstein, den man ja unbedingt zitieren muß, Tractatus 6.4311 […])” (Okopenko 1970, 151–152). 21 Cf. Okopenko’s later short version of his novel: “Ein Exportkaufmann fährt allein im ungewohnt beschaulichen Reisemedium eines Donauschiffs zu einem Exporteurtreffen. Die ungewohnte Muße läßt ihn beiläufig sein Leben reflektieren, andrerseits die Schönheiten, Häßlichkeiten und Tiefen der Landschaft wie die Schicksals-Spots der wahrgenommenen Menschen mit großer Intensität erfassen. Vorübergehend schwillt es zu der Erkenntnis an: ‘Du mußt dein Leben ändern.’ Die Route verläuft von der Wiener Reichsbrücke die Donau aufwärts nach Dürnstein. Die Orte seitlich der Strecke laden zum imaginären Aussteigen, Weiterwandern und Erleben ein, ebenso gedankliche Nebenwege. Im Schiffsrestaurant vergröbern sich die Gefühle zu sinnlicher Verliebtheit in eine attraktive dicke Dame aus der platt konventionellen Sphäre, kontrapunktisch erahnt der Mann später die anziehende Außergewöhnlichkeit eines überintelligenten kleinen Mädchens. Die Reise zum Wesentlichen scheitert an der konventionellen Gebundenheit des Kauf­manns und der Konsequenzlosigkeit seiner Hochgefühle. Allerdings wird ihm eine Ahnung vom bestrickenden ‘Überall geht es weiter’, ‘Alles steht mit allem in Zusammenhang’, ‘Überall könnte man neu beginnen’, eine Ahnung vom Netzcharakter der Welt, ihrer ‘Mög­lich­kei­tenStruktur’, ihren Freiheitsgraden bleiben” (Okopenko 1993, 40). 22 The arrows could also be considered as order to follow immediately; but after following them for a while one gets into a recursion and loop. Cf. Okopenko (1980, 42–43): “Als Form bot sich augenblicklich die alphabetische Reihung kleiner Portionen von Innen- und Außenleben an, ein LEXIKON mit Hinweispfeilen von einem Artikel zu manchen anderen, die aber wie in einem echten Lexikon wahlweise beachtet oder ignoriert werden könnten.” / “Immediately the alphabetical order of small portions of inner and outer life came to mind as a form. A DICTIONARY with arrows from one article to several others, which can be taken into account or ignored, just like in a real dictionary”.

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the book. Small texts and portions of texts build the novel; but it is the reader’s job to construct and combine them into a meaningful whole. The more the reader reads, and the more frequently he browses, the less important is the sequential order of the entries read.23 The so-called “main line”, “Hauptlinie” (Okopenko 1970, 54), has a strict linear direction which parallels a ship’s journey: once the reader reaches a certain station, the arrows won’t lead him back to a station he has already passed. The journey starts with “Anfang der Reise” at 6.30 a.  m. and a tram journey from J’s home, after the “Einmarsch ins Schiff” the boat leaves Vienna at 7.15 a.  m. and reaches the next stop Nixdorf (Nußdorf in terms of real topography, cf. “Geographie”, Okopenko 1970, 107) at 7.45 a.  m., Grottenolm (Greifenstein) at 9.00 a.  m. and so on, until Druden is reached at 2.15 p.  m.24 Therefore, the reading paths, which are not prescribed by the author, are the real content of this dictionary novel. This bears consequences regarding the visualities involved, especially regarding the spatialisation that is so intricately linked to this kind of literary visuality and the visibility of literary texts. This is also evident by how the story finds ‘closure’. The 35 elements of the main plot are linked to italicised lemmas with arrows, while 710 typographically non-marked entries provide side-lines and annotations to this main plot.25 Apart from these entries, the novel consists of 45 so called “Mini-Essays” (cf. Okopenko 1970, 13, 25), which also function as 45 possible epilogues, linked from the entry “Nachworte” and ordered alphabetically. These epilogues ensure that the novel can be read in an infinite number of ways. Looking up the keyword “Vorwort”, prologue, refers directly to “Nachworte”, epilogues: “Prologues. → Epilogues, but consider

23 Cf. Haslinger (1971, 60): “Je öfter der Leser schmökert, umso bedeutungsloser wird die Abfolge.”/“The more frequently the reader browses, the less significant is the sequential order”. 24 Cf. Kastberger (1998) for an exact reconstruction of this timetable related to an Okopenko diary from 1968. The titles of these 35 main entries are: Gebrauchsanweisung; Anfang der Reise; Brücke; Kuhdreck; Weg zur Schiffsstation; Stationsgebäude; Wasser; Einmarsch ins Schiff; Deck 1 und Deck 2; Mittelteil; Zero; Ufer; Verladelandschaft; Befreiung der Aussicht; Paddelclub-Haus; Schleuse; Ufermauer; Station Nixdorf; Auen im allgemeinen; Nach dem Auftauchen der Auen; Silo; Fehlen von Brücken oder Fähren; Zunächst aber; Grottenolm; Verauung; Menschennäheres Stadium; Auflockerung im allgemeinen; Mittagserwartung; Restaurant; Siesta; Wachau; Knopf; Senf; Autostraße an den Terassenhügeln; Löwenfaß. 25 Actually the novel offers three different types to refer to material: lemmas with an arrow; italicised lemmas with an arrow; small caps. But not all small caps refer to entries. Apart from this, there are page links, for instance, “Heißt du Arnica? Fragte der Chemiekaufmann J. die Gelbsüchtige auf Seite 98.” (Okopenko 1970, 13)/“Are you called Arnica? The chemistry salesman, J., asked the icteric woman on page 98”.



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first, please, whether you shouldn’t save them for afterwards. On the other hand, keep in mind your present disposition for questions, which intrude while reading”.26 Looking up the keyword “Nachworte”, you have the possibility to choose from a wide range of topics. The dictionary novel does not have an explicit epilogue, but a choice of 45 possible epilogues from “affirmative poetry” to “Cigar 3”27: Epilogues. → Affirmative poetry, → Omniscient narrator, → Arcimboldi, → Baroque, → Enthusiasm, → Reason for the article Body, → Deformation, → Fat people, → Eclecticism, → Pattern of expectation, → Fault tolerance, → Feminism, → F-Experience, → Fetishist, → Freedom, that I mean, → Geography, → Joyce, → Collaboration, → Composition, → Body, → Culinary, → Plastic love, → Labyrinth, → Landscape, → Dictionary novels, → Localisation, → Manipulation, → Add one, → Marketing, → Collection of motives, → Vernacular, → Move-up procedure?, → Noveau roman, → Localisation, → Politics, → Popnovel?, → Realism, → Saturation, → Yearning, → Sex, → Specific weight, → Rule of the game, → Susi-and-Eiske-Epilogue, → Ulli addendum, → Cigar 3.28

The order is alphabetical, which means that the reader can not only choose what to read but also in which order (fig. 2).29 Frequently, Okopenko also offers a variety of possibilities to choose from: the novel contains 20 different entries, among many others, for floodplain (“Auen 1–9”, “Auen im allgemeinen”), 8 entries for loosening (“Auflockerungen 1–7”, “Auflockerung im allgemeinen”), 4 “Barbaras”, 12 on-board adventures (“Bordabenteuer 1–12”), 14 on-board events (“Bordereignisse 1–14”), no less than 21 inns (“Gasthäuser 1–21”) and 22 afternoon conversations (“Nachmittagsgespräche 1–22”). It is the reader’s choice which one to choose or even to read them all consecutively, the only advice one is given for

26 “Vorworte. → Nachworte, aber überlegen Sie, bitte, erst noch, ob Sie sie nicht wirklich für danach aufsparen sollen; behalten Sie andererseits ihre derzeitige Verfügbarkeit für Fragen, die sich während des Lesens aufdrängen, in Erinnerung” (Okopenko 1970, 266). 27 Okopenko’s plan was first to print these essays on differently coloured paper, later he integrated them into the alphabetic order (cf. Kastberger 1998, 91). 28 “Nachworte. → Affirmative Dichtung, → Allwissender Erzähler, → Arcimboldi, → Barock, → Begeisterung, → Begründung für den Artikel Körper, → Deformation, → Dicke Leute, → Eklektizismus, → Erwartungsmuster, → Fehlertoleranz, → Feminismus, → F-Erlebnis, → Fetischist, → Freiheit, die ich meine, → Geographie, → Joyce, → Kollaboration, → Komposition, → Körper, → Kulinarisch, → Kunststoffliebe, → Labyrinth, → Landschaft, → Lexikonromane, → Lokalisation, → Manipulation, → Man nehme, → Marktkundliches, → Motivsammlung, → Mundart, → Nach­ zieh­verfahren?, → Noveau roman, → Ortsbestimmung, → Politik, → Pop-Roman?, → Realismus, → Sättigung, → Sehnsucht, → Sex, → Spezifisches Gewicht, → Spielregel, → Susi-und-Eiske-Epilog, → Ulli Ergänzungen, → Zigarre 3” (Okopenko 1970, 189). 29 Cf. Okopenko (1970, 292, 242): “in beliebiger Reihenfolge”, “in beliebiger Reihung”.

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the choice between “Deck 1” and “Deck 2” is simply: “look up the one you don’t know already”.30 Dictionary Novel of a Sentimental Journey is full of what the late 1960s and early 1970s celebrated as the ultimate breakthrough: pop culture, movies, rock music, liberal sex, and free life. The system it is based on, as we know from the entry ‘Composition’, is not the symphony, but the jam session.31 On the other hand, the novel consciously references meta-fictional and inter-textual traditions. Sterne’s influence is visible in the subtitle,32 but Okopenko also lists all the authors he feels indebted to under the rubric “eclecticism”; among these predecessors we find Bertolt Brecht, Hermann Broch, John Dos Passos, André Gide, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Arno Schmidt and Thomas Wolfe (cf. Okopenko 1970, 57–59). In the novel, the characters have particularly melodic names thanks to the alliteration the author employs like Encore Edibelbek, Myra Metelli, Quenta Quebec or Zero Zobiak, but also Andreas Okopenko, and many typified persons without names, like “other salesmen”, “ladies” and so on. In the end, Okopenko’s Dictionary Novel of a Sentimental Journey to the Exporters’ Meeting at Druden offers several reading directions or reading paths: Firstly, one could follow the 35 main entries narrating the travelogue-like story of the chemistry salesman J. Secondly, one could follow every link as soon as it appears and leave out every passage already read. Thirdly, one could read all entries in a linear or alphabetic order (even though this is prohibited in the instructions).

30 “(man schlage jenes nach, das man noch nicht kennt”) (Okopenko 1970, 177) Cf. also “Freuen wir uns seiner → Bordabenteuer (mehrere nachlesen und am richtigen Ort in der eben gebotenen Auswahl spielen lassen)” (Okopenko 1970, 174)/“Let’s be happy for him → Aboard adventures (consult several and let it play on the right place in the given choice”; “→ Essen und Trinken (mehrere nachlesen)” (Okopenko 1970, 176)/“Eating and Drinking (look up several entries)“; “Unter all den → Schläflingen, Schwitzlingen, Sättlingen (mehrere nachlesen), ein Prachtexemplar […] und welche → Perspektiven läßt das zu, fragte er. (Mehrere nachlesen.)” (Okopenko 1970, 234)/“among all these → Sleepys, Sudatys, Saturatys (look up several) a beauty […] and which → Perspectives do that support he asked (look up several)” or “Und jetzt denken wir uns eine morgenweiße, vormittaghimmelblaue Modifikation des Eiszylinderklirrgenusses aus” (Okopenko 1970, 198)/“And now let’s imagine a morningwhite, forenoon sky-blue modification of the pleasure of the ice-cylinder clattering” or “→ Frau und Freude (mehrere Textstellen).” (Okopenko 1970, 218)/ “→ Woman and Pleasure (several text passages)”. 31 Cf. “Komposition. Hiermit bestätige ich, daß auch dieser Roman eine Ordnung hat. Es ist nicht die Ordnung der Sinfonia, sondern der Jam session.” (Okopenko 1970, 142)/“Composition. I hereby confirm that this novel too is based on a system. It is not the system of the sinfonia, but of the jam session”. 32 Cf. the catchword “Motivsammlung”: “Nur aus praktischen Gründen habe ich diesen Roman nicht auch noch ‘… eine Motivsammlung’ untertitelt.” (Okopenko 1970, 178)/“For practical reasons only I did not subtitle this novel also ‘… a collection of motives’”.



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Fig. 2: Okopenko (1970, 22–23)

Fourthly, the reader could reject reading the book in its entirety and consult it like a dictionary. Once interested in the entry of, say, “Kissing”, he could look up the lemma in Okopenko’s novel and decide whether to read the entire passage or not, to jump to another entry, or follow the arrows (and since there are six articles on “Kissing”, he could do this repeatedly).33 Finally, he could also read the novel

33 Strict orders and cuts in the reader’s freedom (but you do not have to adhere to these!) are maybe the problem. Okopenko’s novel Meteoriten, published in 1976, could be considered as trying to overcome these disadvantages. The novel includes 461 entries, all alphabetically ordered, from “Alles war provisorisch” until “Zu einer bestimmten Tagestunde” spanning 208 pages, offering a selection of mottoes and postscripts. Likewise the instructions “Zum Lesevorgang” are very deliberate: “Eventuelle Leser meines ‘Lexikon-Romans’, vielleicht von damals her neurotisiert im Gebrauch meiner Bücher, seien dahin beruhigt, daß die Meteoriten vollends ohne Spielregel lesbar sind. Die Freiheit ist nun unscheinbar und total. Am stoffgetreuesten ist es, wenn man in diesem Buch einfach blättert, man kann es aber natürlich auch vom Anfang bis zum Ende lesen

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entirely and could decide each time which directions to follow; in some cases his active collaboration is explicitly asked for. Okopenko’s novel was re-published as an ELEX, as Elektronischer LexikonRoman (Electronic Dictionary Novel) in 1998. The ELEX was released on Macintosh CD-ROM as an art project and included music, 23 readings performed by Okopenko himself,34 and coloured pictures produced by the Austrian art group “Libraries of the Mind”. The best thing about this Electronic Dictionary Novel is the hyperlinks that provide a faster way to find the articles than looking them up conventionally in a physical copy. The ELEX also offers a full-text search function and an index of all entries, the feature to mark all read entries as well as to take notes. The result is, however, not very appealing, as it offers a hypertext which is less inviting than the original 1970 book. A map is always visible on the top of the screen depicting the entire trans-Danubian journey. This forces the text back into a somewhat linear order. And the novel simply does not read well on a computer monitor, at least not on the state-of-the-art screens of the time of its publication. The ELEX significantly restricts the reader’s choice regarding his own reading directions and reading practices known from the printed book: it starts with the instructions manual, but limits the possibility to start with the first or last entry as with the book version. It is impossible to get to the middle of the book, or to leaf idly through it to find anything in an aleatory fashion. When reading a certain entry, it is not possible to leaf back and forth to the next entries within the alphabetical order. Apart from this, the printed book invites each individual reader to insert material and complete the story ad libitum on empty pages, something that is well-known from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (cf. VI, xxxviii). In Okopenko’s novel, the reader is invited to write down or paste in “specific memories” (Okopenko 1970, 11), “nuances of impressions” (Okopenko 1970, 17), photos of favourite pin-up girls (Okopenko 1970, 23), poems (Okopenko 1970, 33, 43), entire dissertations (Okopenko 1970, 85), paintings and drawings of arcs or other drafts oder nach irgendwelchen privatmathematischen Gewohnheiten. […] Damit irgendeine äußere Ordnung gegeben sei, reihe ich die Artikel wieder alphabetisch.” (Okopenko 1976, 12)/“Potential readers of my ‘dictionary novel’, maybe neuroticised from that time by my books, can put their mind to rest. ‘Meteorites’ is readable entirely without any rules. Freedom now is plane and total. Most faithful to the subject is simply browsing in this book. One may also read it from start to finish or following other private-mathematical customs. […] For having any external order I am indexing the articles alphabetically again”. 34 The following lemmata are spoken by Okopenko himself: Gebrauchsanweisung, Affirmative Dichtung, Barock, Begeisterung, Begründung für den Artikel Körper, Dicke Leute, Eklektizismus, Fehlertoleranz, F-Erlebnis, Fetischist, Freiheit, die ich meine, Geografie, Kulinarisch, Lexikonromane, Mundart, Nachbetrachtung, Nachmittagsgespräche 20, Realismus, Sex, Spielregel, Städtchen 4, Städtchen 15, Ulli Ergänzungen 1.



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(Okopenko 1970, 124–125), composition tests at school (Okopenko 1970, 250), excerpts from literature on sexual education, partner magazines or from memory or a fogged glass (Okopenko 1970, 202, 270). Or the user is asked to solve riddles and to write down his or her solutions (Okopenko 1970, 280–281). It is literally impossible to include all of these elements in the ELEX; you simply cannot copy music or pictures into this electronic novel, it only allows you to take notes (which eventually will not be saved in the ELEX for other readers). You can only write or attach something to the monitor of your computer or electronic device, but that is it. Ironically, the 1970s book version offered more interactive possibilities than the electronic hypertext, released 30 years after the book, had to leave out, also in part due to technical reasons at the time the ELEX was published. The book version already encouraged taking notes, but this is not the only example of an interplay of reader and author: “We disperse other exporter’s thoughts while reading. Write a note, label it ‘Exporter’s thoughts’ and put it to the right or left of the book to use it from case to case”.35 In Okopenko’s novel, the oldest example of the dictionary novel, the reader is invited to develop the model and the genre. Dictionary Novel of a Sentimental Journey relies heavily on visual and typographic conventions of the dictionary and encyclopaedia, but at the same time transforms and transcends them. Nonlinearity and infiniteness is the result, but also an opening up of the realm of the visible to empty or blank pages and frames, while encouraging the reader to individually insert material at will.

4 Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars. A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words. Male Edition/Female Edition (1984) Milorad Pavić’s Hazarski rečnik. Roman leksikon u 100.000 reči. Muški primerak/ Ženski primerak was published in 1984 and looks like a dictionary: the 242-page book is divided into two columns, it has column titles, includes picture material and illustrations, bibliographic sources, quotes in Hebrew, Latin, Greek etc. (fig. 3). Another distinctive feature of this “Lexicon novel in 100,000 words” is 35 “Die weiteren Exporteurgedanken streuen wir gelegentlich beim Lesen ein. Man nehme einen Zettel, beschrifte ihn “→ Exporteurgedanken!” und lege ihn zur fallweisen Verwendung rechts oder links neben das Buch” (Okopenko 1970, 111).

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that it was published in both a male edition Muški primerak and a female edition Ženski primerak. These editions differ not only in title and cover, but also in their content. In one passage, for instance, a crucial change leads to two different endings,36 “because masculine and feminine stories cannot have the same ending” (Pavić 1989, 310). The male and the female reader are invited to compare their editions and find out about the differences and how “the book will fit together as a whole, like a game of dominoes” (Pavić 1989, 335). This Serbo-Croatian dictionary novel touches on many books in the Jewish tradition, namely Jehuda Halevi’s Sefer ha-Kusari or in Latin Liber Cosri from the seventeenth century, nevertheless it is clearly a work of fiction. The Khazars have probably been a Turkic people between the sixth century and the eleventh century, but we do not know very much about them. Referring back to the myth of the Khasar religion the Dictionary of the Khazars tries to show the brotherly bonds between the three monotheistic religions. For this purpose, the book is divided into three different parts, symbolically representing fragments of a Christian, Islamic and Hebrew encyclopaedia. All of them try to reconstruct the Encyclopaedia of the Khazars, which has been lost, none of them, being only fragments, contains 100,000 words. The Christian encyclopaedia is called the “The Red Book” and it is indicated by two fish, its language is Greek, and references are marked by a cross; the

36 The male edition reads: “And he gave me a few of the Xeroxed sheets of paper lying on the table in front of him. I could have pulled the trigger then and there. There wouldn’t be a better moment. There was only one lone witness present in the garden – and he was a child. But that’s not what happened. I reached out and took those exciting sheets of paper, which I enclose in this letter. Taking them instead of firing my gun, I looked at those Saracen fingers with their nails like hazelnuts and I thought of the tree Halevi mentions in his book on the Khazars. I thought how each and every one of us is just such a tree: the taller we grow toward the sky, through the wind and rain toward God, the deeper we must sink our roots through the mud and subterranean waters toward hell. With these thoughts in my mind, I read the pages given me by the green-eyed Saracen. They shattered me, and in disbelief I asked Dr. Muawia where he had got them”. The female edition reads: “And he gave me a few of the Xeroxed sheets of paper lying on the table in front of him. As he passed them to me, his thumb brushed mine and I trembled from the touch. I had the sensation that our past and our future were in our fingers and that they had touched. And so, when I began to read the proffered pages, I at one moment lost the train of thought in the text and drowned it in my own feelings. In these seconds of absence and self-oblivion, centuries passed with every read but uncomprehended and unabsorbed line, and when, after a few moments, I came to and re-established contact with the text, I knew that the reader who returns from the open sea of his feelings is no longer the same reader who embarked on that sea only a short while ago. I gained and learned more by not reading than by reading those pages, and when I asked Dr. Muawia where he had got them he said something that astonished me even more” (Pavić 1989, 293–294).



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Islamic encyclopaedia is “The Green Book” and bears the sign of the lion, it is written in Arabic and references to it are marked by a crescent; the Hebrew encyclopaedia, “The yellow book”, is indicated by a ram, written in Hebrew, while references are marked by the star of David. Some entries have articles in all three dictionaries and are indicated by an inverted Delta. What we have in terms of the Serbo-Croatian or in the English translation is therefore only the translation of a reconstruction, the reconstruction of the “Lexicon Cosri”, a “Dictionary of the Dictionaries on the Khazar Question”, printed in 1691 and destroyed only one year later by the Inquisition. All three parts are linked to each other, and, not surprisingly, they do contradict each other in many aspects. Thus, the Christian encyclopaedia will inform us that the Khazars converted to Christianity, the Islamic encyclopaedia claims that they converted to Islam and finally the Hebrew encyclopaedia will inform us that the Khazars converted to Judaism etc. However, only by reading all three versions together will the reader be privy to the complete truth. This truth about the Khazars can be obtained only by combining all contradictory half-truths into one bright truth, “if only it could be pooled, would provide a clear and complete picture of everything concerning this question” (Pavić 1989, 47). It is the reader’s duty to reconstruct the Dictionary of the Khazars and this is only possible through a combination of all three dictionaries, based on an allusion to the myth of Adam Ruhani, the spiritual Adam, whose body consists of books only (cf. the lemma ‘Masudi, Jusuf’ in the Green Book). Likewise, the reader is asked to reconstruct the lost Lexikon Cosri printed by Prussian printer Daubmannus from the dictionary fragments in hands, as the “Preliminary Notes” state: 3. How to Use the Dictionary For all its problems, this book has preserved some of the virtues of the original Daubmannus edition. Like that one, it can be read in an infinite number of ways. It is an open book, and when it is shut it can be added to: just as it has its own former and present lexicographer, so it can acquire new writers, compilers, and continuers. (Pavić 1989, 11)

Similar to Okopenko’s dictionary novel, the reader is not only invited to complete and rewrite this book, but also the possibilities of how to read it are discussed: Thus, the reader can use the book as he sees fit. As with any other lexicon, some will look up a word or a name that interests them at the given moment, whereas others may look at the book as a text meant to be read in its entirety, from beginning to end, in one sitting, so as to gain a complete picture of the Khazar question and the people, issues, and events connected with it. The book’s pages can be turned from left to right or from right to left, as were those of the Prussian edition (Hebrew and Arab sources). (Pavić 1989, 12)

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Fig. 3: Pavić (1985, 176–177)

One may also get lost in this Dictionary of the Khazars, as one of the fictitious writers of the Green Book – in Pavić’s dictionary novel it is the reader who decides what his book contains: But the reader should not be discouraged by such detailed instructions. He can, with a clear conscience, skip all these introductory remarks and read […]. He may, of course, wander off and get lost among the words of this book, as did Masudi, one of the writers of this dictionary […]. No chronology will be observed here, nor is one necessary. Hence, each reader will put together the book for himself, as in a game of dominoes or cards, and, as with a mirror, he will get out of this dictionary as much as he puts into it, for, as is written on one of the pages of this lexicon, you cannot get more out of the truth than what you put into it. After all, this book need never be read in its entirety; one can take half or only a part and stop there, as one often does with dictionaries. (Pavić 1989, 13–14)

To get lost in Pavić’s dictionary novel is easy as it is full of snippets – not to say snapshots  – of theological and philosophical subtleties and fantastic events, philological fragments, translations and appendices, a criminal story plot and the appearance of the devil, destroyed texts and poisoned books and so on. In



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the most gripping sections, the novel reads like a balkanised blend of the Kabala and One Thousand and One Nights, Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco. Interestingly, it is not the book’s formal organisation that is confusing. It is rather the difficulties that grow out of the Khazar question and the great number of contradictory information the book showcases that make it hard for the reader to blend information and thus visualisations. There are relatively few entries, the Christian Dictionary or “Red Book” contains 14 entries and 3 inserted stories; the Islamic Dictionary or “Green Book” 16, with 3 stories; and, finally, the Hebrew dictionary or “Yellow Book” has 15 entries and 3 inserted stories. There are no entries left empty and no references to non-existing lemmata, no circularity and therefore there is no real danger for the reader to become lost while leafing through the text  – nevertheless Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars is a fascinating novel with a really encyclopaedic background in history, religion and the arts. Although CD-ROM editions of Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars were planned during the late 1990s (cf. Mihajlović 1998, 217–218), there is only a multilingual electronic book from 2005 available so far. It unifies the Serbian text with the Swedish, English and Russian translations but is still available in two editions, one male and one female. Like Okopenko’s ELEX you have to read it on a screen, though not necessarily on a computer; you can use an e-reader as well. But there is a certain loss of haptic and sensual qualities. It makes a difference whether you read and leaf through a printed book about a dictionary with allegedly poisoned pages or to read the same content safely in purely visual e-book format.

5 David Grossman, ’Ayen ’erekh: Ahavah/ See under: Love (1986) Israeli author David Grossman’s 1986 ’Ayen ’erekh: Ahavah is such a dictionary that actually reads from right like Pavić suggests. Unlike the other books in this sample, this text cannot solely be categorised as a dictionary novel. Only it’s fourth part, “The Complete Encyclopedia of Kazik’s Life. First Edition,”, after the parts “Momik,” “Bruno” and “Wasserman”, and followed by a glossary for “The Language of ‘Over There’,” is modelled on a dictionary novel. Nevertheless, this “Encyclopedia of Kazik’s Life” – with 129 out of 399 pages in its Hebrew version – is not only the longest, but also the most important part of the book. It works as a concave mirror, in which all characters and discourses of the novel are finally focused together.

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Even the title of the novel could be read as a set of reading instructions, and also indicates how significant encyclopaedias are for this novel.37 “The Complete Encyclopedia of Kazik’s Life” is part of the novel See under: Love; it is typeset like the other chapters, in one column, without any special dictionary typography. The only distinctive feature is the huge single letters indicating the alefbetical order of the 76 entries from Aleph to Tav (fig. 4). The column title always repeats the same text, the chapter’s title, ‫“ האנציקלופדיה המלאה של חיי קאזיק‬The Complete Encyclopedia of Kazik’s Life”. In Grossman’s novel, Salomon Neumann is the only son of two Polish Holocaust survivors born to them in late life. Similar to Bruno Schulz they used to live in Drohobycz, Galicia, and migrated to Jerusalem after 1945. Salomon, or Momik, is a bright and talented boy with an incredible memory, but the terrible history and traumata of his parents are something he can only sense, they don’t talk to him about it and use the “language of over there”, Yiddish and Polish, as a private language between them. The multi-volume Hebrew Encyclopedia is the only book Momik’s parents possess, they pay for it in instalments, and it is the only source of education for the 9-year old boy in the late 1950s. It gives him access to knowledge about the Shoa, the so-called “Nazi-Beast”, and why his parents behave the way they do. Momik loves to hold the big book in his hands, and it makes him feel good all over to run his fingers down the smooth pages that seem to have a protective covering that keeps your fingers away, so you won’t get too close, because who are you, what are you compared to the Encyclopedia, with all the little letters crowded in long, straight columns and mysterious abbreviations like secret signals for a big, strong, silent army boldly marching out to conquer the world, all-knowing, all-righteous, and a couple of months ago Momik vowed he would read an entry a day in alphabetical order, because he’s a very methodical little boy, and so far he hasn’t missed once, expect for the time Grandfather Anshel arrived, so the next day to make up for it he read two entries […]. (Grossman 1989, 43–44)

Momik visits public libraries and studies everything there is to know about the Shoa, becomes a poet and dreams of writing “a young people’s encyclopedia of the Holocaust. The first of its kind. To spare our children having to guess or reconstruct it in their nightmares.” (Grossman 1989, 155) In the 1980s, he travels to Poland to visit the hometown of his parents and the extermination camps (perhaps Sobibor). Momik imagines what it would be like to get in contact with his grandfather Anshel Wasserman, who is an immortal literary character in Grossman’s novel and used to be a famous author of serialised novels for children,

37 Cf. Fried’s German medical encyclopaedia (Grossman 1989, 295, 298).



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Fig. 4: Grossman (2002, 274–275)

published in pre-war newspapers. Momik will not be able to finish his “children’s encyclopedia on the subject of the Holocaust” (Grossman 1989, 278), but signing up as a member of the editorial board, he is the author and editor of “The Complete Encyclopedia of Kazik’s Life.” Only by using the form of the encyclopaedia is Momik able to tell the story of Anshel Wasserman, his grandfather. His method to shape the text and make it beautiful is by splitting the material up into articles and arranging it in alefbetical order, Momik mentions related to the Hebrew encyclopaedia of his youth: “I discovered that filing, writing, and editing the material in this way was helpful.”38 Again the reader is invited to jump between the articles and leave some content out; on the other hand, the alefbetical order is considered to be necessary in the “Reader’s preface” of this last part of See under: Love:

38 Grossman 1989, 155. Momik mentions this passage related to the Hebrew encyclopaedia of his youth.

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1. The following pages represent a unique attempt to compile an encyclopedia embracing most of the events in the life of a single individual […]. Perhaps it is this […] alphabetization of the entries – that transformed various illusive and equivocal figures into wieldy and effective raw material, and helped to reveal the simplicity of basic mechanisms animating all members of the human race. […] 6. In view of the aforesaid, the reader should feel free to read the encyclopedia entries in any sequence he chooses, skipping forward and backward at will, though we wish to thank the disciplined reader in advance for taking the king’s highway of the Hebrew alphabetical order. (Grossman 1989, 303–304)

In See under: Love, something very special occurs: instead of leading to confusion, the dictionary part of the novel clears up everything and gives the solution to every obscure passage of its three preceding parts. It’s also possible to consult it while reading and comes in handy when reading the other parts “Momik,” “Bruno,” and “Wasserman.”39 The same is valid for the glossary, which explains idiomatic phrases in Polish, German and Yiddish. Nevertheless, the entries of See under: Love sometimes play with the reader. The first entry of the “Complete Encyclopedia of Kazik’s Life” is “love,” “ahavah;”it’s also related to the title of the novel itself. Looking up “Ahavah” leads only to one entry: “See under: sex” (Grossman 1989, 305). Looking up “Sex,” “Min,” the reader finds: “1. See under: love” (Grossman 1989, 376), while “Secondly” he will find long discussions between Wasserman and the camp commander, Neigel, during his time in the Polish extermination camp. In another entry one reads: “A  certain difficulty arises in describing what took place between them. The reader is invited to see under love and also under sex” (Grossman 1989, 413). Apart from these recursions, the editorial staff or Momik respectively is deliberately deleting and adding material to the encyclopaedia even against the declared will of its characters. There’s even a fight between Wasserman and Momik. The latter, on the other hand, adds personal memories that are not fitting for an encyclopaedia. In the entry for “Chatuna,” “marriage,” Momik writes entirely about his own wedding day and his aunt Idka, who “covered her [concentration camp] number with a Band-Aid because she didn’t want to cast a pall on the happy occasion.” Momik, of course, looks at her arm during the entire ceremony, indicating the trauma of the Shoa and the impossibility to get rid of it even on this happy day. The last phrase for the entry “Wedding” therefore reads “I had to put that in here. Sorry.” (Grossman 1989, 356–357) The encyclopaedia also deals with Momik’s own problems leading a good married life with his wife

39 E.g. Wasserman’s daughter, Tirza, has been killed by Neigel, which is not mentioned in Was­ ser­man’s narration on page 261.



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Ajala, untouched by the demons of the past. Therefore, not only the first, but also the last entry of Momik’s dictionary refers to love; Momik quotes his wife who asks him to leave behind the past and embrace the present: ‫תיעוד‬ TIUD DOCUMENTATION A system facilitating the storage and identification of various types of information. “No”, said Ayala, “that won’t help you, you’ll fail. This whole encyclopedia business is utterly worthless. It doesn’t explain anything. […] I hope you see that you’ve failed, that your whole encyclopedia is not enough to fully encompass a single day or even a single moment of human life. And now, if you want me to forgive you, if you want to save yourself so that at least part of this disaster will be canceled and forgotten, write me a story. A good story. A beautiful story. Yes, yes, I know your limitations: I don’t expect a happy ending from you. But promise me that at least you’ll write with mercy [q.  v.], with love [q.  v.]! Not See under: Love, Shlomik! Go love! Love!” (Grossman 1989, 450)

6 Péter Zilahy, The Last Window-Giraffe. A Picture Dictionary for the Over Fives (1998) Hungarian writer’s Péter Zilahy’s Az utolsó ablakzsiráf: Öt éven felülieknek is, with only 120 pages, perhaps not even a true novel, but A Picture Dictionary for the Over Fives, as the subtitle of the English translation indicates. It makes a connection with the bed-time story theme Winston’s Dictionary Story touched on at the beginning of this paper. The text is divided into two columns, has footnotes and simulates a children’s primer or alphabet book, which is explicitly footnoted from the first page. “Ablak” for “Window” is the first entry in this Hungarian children’s classic, “zsiráf” for “Giraffe” the last one. In The Last Window-Giraffe, the primer Ablak–Zsiráf is characterised as follows: “The Window-Giraffe was a picture book from which we learned to read when we didn’t know how. I already knew how by then, but I had to learn it anyway, because what else was school for. The Window-Giraffe made the world intelligible to us in alphabetical order”.40 Therefore, the dictionary not only challenges the way we read in a linear direction, it is also often the first book from

40 Zilahy (2008, 2)/“Az ablakzsiráf egy képeskönyv volt, amelyből olvasni tanultunk, amikor még nem tudtunk olvasni. Én már tudtam olvasni, mégis meg kellett tanulnom, mert akkor minek az iskola. Az ablakzsiráf közérthető módon tárta elénk a világot ábécésorrendben” (Zilahy 1998, 4).

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which we learn to read, even the first book we get to read from; think about other famous series such as My first Encyclopaedia, My first Dictionary, all for children certainly not able to read them unaided. For some of us, dictionaries and encyclopaedias are the first books we come across. Whenever possible, Zilahy quotes the 1971 Hungarian picture primer, which is still in print and has already had 31 editions in 2005. But it is, of course, a fake naiveté, as the entry of “gumi”, rubber, exemplifies: g gumi = rubber gén = gene gödöd = pit golyó = bullet ‘Rubber trees grow in the jungles of far-off hot climates. When their bark is slit, raw rubber oozes out. The raw rubber is turned into car tyres, gumboots, rubber balls and rubber erasers in the rubber factory.’* You can read more about the jungle on p.  73. The rubber sticks – gumibotok – that the cops carry are also made from raw rubber. In fact, riot cops carry loads of other equipment that begins with the letter G: géppisztoly (machine gun), golyóálló mellény (body armour), gázálarc (gas mask), könnygáz-gránávető (tear-shell launcher). *W-G, p. 58.41

Sometimes Zilahy imitates this children’s book style, but some of his narratives and portraits are less childlike. They are all, however, somewhat ironic (fig. 5). A simple phrase concerning Belgrade is repeated, in the English translation there’s a slight variation: “In this dictionary you can learn many interesting things about Belgrade”42 or “You can learn lots of interesting things about Belgrade from this dictionary”.43 The irony and sometimes even sarcasm in Zilahy’s portrait of East European history and dictatorships is overwhelming, going to extremes to outline the situation in Yugoslavia and former Yugoslavia during the twentieth century. To quote Lawrence Norfolk, who wrote a foreword for the English translation,

41 Zilahy (2008, 22)/“Távoli meleg vidékeken, őserdőkben nő a gumifa. Ha a kérgét megvágják, csöpög belőle a nyersgumi. A nyersgumiból csinálják a gumigyárban az autógumit, a gumicsizmát, a gumilabdát, a radírgumit.”* Nyersgumiból készül a gumibot. A rohamrendőrök csupa G betűs holmit hordanak: gumibot, géppisztoly, golyóálló mellény, gázálarc, könnygáz-gránátvető. [* ablak, 58. Az őserdőről többet a 74. oldalon olvashatsz.]” (Zilahy 1998, 24). 42 Zilahy (2008, 1)/“Ebből a szótárból sok érdekes dolgot tudhatsz meg Belgráddal kapcsolatban” (Zilahy 1998, 3). 43 Zilahy (2008, 41)/“Ebből a szótárból sok érdekes dolgot tudhatsz meg Belgráddal kapcsolatban” (Zilahy 1998, 43).



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the novel “proceeds via reportage, vignette, historical essay, quotation, comparison and anecdote” (Norfolk 2008, iii) – combining all of them into a very unique book. Nevertheless, the anti-Milosević-protest in Belgrade from 1996 to 1997, in which Zilahy took part, is the main plot of the The Last Window-Giraffe. The book is therefore full of stickers and photographs, relating to the massive protests with thousands of young people walking on the streets of Belgrade and their peaceful demonstrations against the electoral fraud in confrontation with military and armed forces. So The Last Window-Giraffe is also a documentary-like narration for the children of the next generation, a revolutionary alphabet to learn forms of peaceful resistance: “Anything we do not know but would like to know we ask about. We get an answer to the question”44 as the Ablak–Ziráf primer is quoted. That is the way protests and demonstrations may work, but to some extent it is also something that the reader of this dictionary novel has to practice. Following the catchwords and references, the reader has to move and walk between sections of the text, reading footnotes, skipping between columns, going back and forth: “Walk Hard / Belgrade 96/97”.45 There are several loops between the entries, leading the reader from page to page, from footnote to footnote. And yet, the reader does not gain other knowledge than the continually repeated phrase about the jungle which is also a rainforest, for instance: “You can also read out about the jungle”.46 Navigating through this jungle of words, which at the same time is an old paradigm not only for human life, but also for poetry and literature, is the only thing the reader has to achieve. The novel is self-reflexive concerning the genre it is part of, the dictionary novel. Once when Pavić came to give a talk to students, he was asked to sign a dedication:

44 Zilahy (2008, 43)/“Amit nem tudunk, de szeretnénk tudni, azt megkérdezzük. A kérdésre feleletet kapunk.”* [* ablak, 80.]” (Zilahy 1998, 45). 45 Zilahy (2008, 71)/Zilahy (1998, 73). 46 Zilahy (2008, 1)/“Az őserdőről a 24. oldalon olvashatsz” (Zilahy 1998, 3). Actually the first jungle link refers to page 22/24, where one gets relegated to page 73/74, from there back to page 22/24 and 41/43, from 41/43 again back to page 73/74. The only information there is to be found on the jungle is a quote from Ablak–Zsiráf: “ő […] őserdő = rainforest […] ‘In far off countries where it is never winter there are huge rain forests. It is dangerous to go into a rainforest.’* [*W-G, pp. 113 & 153] Rainforests are also called jungles (see more about them on p.  22 and p.  41).” (Zilahy 2008, 73) / “‘ő Messze országokban, ahol soha sincs tél, hatalmas őserdők vannak. Őserdőben járni veszélyes.’* Az őserdő másnéven dzsungel. Az őserdőről lásd még a 24. és a 43. oldalt. [*  ablak, 113., 153.]” (Zilahy 1998, 74). These references do not refer to the entry “dzsungel = jungle”, where one reads: “For jungle: see rainforest (p. 73).” (Zilahy 2008, 14)/“Dzsungel: nézd meg az őserdőnél!” (Zilahy 1998, 16).

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Milorad Pavić entertains with literary sleights of hand: a Tarot novel, a menu-card play, and his Dictionary of the Khazars. Pipe in hand, grey-moustached, a supercilious smirk – a Serb Sherlock Holmes. Six months ago he still supported the war and Milošević, but last night he spoke at the student protest. He signs a book for me. The words are intelligible, but I can’t decipher a single letter of the writing. What do you make of that, my dear Watson?47

And there are reflections on the status of the dictionary and the dictionary novel: A dictionary juxtaposes words that you never find together in real life. It is a meeting-place which raises the accidental to the status of law, like the names in a class register. […] The alphabet seemed an unchangeable fixture, like lining up by order of height in PE class. At any rate, it stood outside time as we perceive it. […] Every word in the dictionary is indispensable. Each on its own is of no use, only together do they make any sense, like a class register. It’s the solidarity of words that creates language, like the solidarity in a classroom. It could be anybody’s turn next, and every day begins with a roll call. Our names are called out to see if we’re still there, from A to Z, Almási to Zilahy, every single one.48

Also, the Last Window-Giraffe does exist in an electronic hypertext version, which was published in 2001 as a multilingual CD-ROM in English, German, Hungarian and Serbian. It contains music and video files, sounds and pictures, but the text is rather difficult to read on-screen. Still, more than the Okopenko ELEX CD-ROM it allows for a non-linear reading: The text on the CD-ROM can be watched linearly as the story goes on, also you can jump, as in all dictionaries, according to the letters of the alphabet. You can also read the book as a hypertext and take alternative routes by lifting the carpets along the specially designed Carpet Basin where meaning was swept under the carpet. (Zilahy 2001)

47 Zilahy (2008, 77)/“Milorad Pavics irodalmi bűvészmutatványaival szórakoztat: tarokk regényével, étlap drámájával és a kazár szótárral. Pipa a kezében, ősz bajusz, fölényes mosoly, szerb Sherlock Holmes. Fél éve még a háború és Milosevics híve, tegnap éjjel a diáktüntetésen szónokolt. Dedikál egy könyvet, a szöveg érthető, de az írásából egyetlen betűt sem tudok azonosítani. Mire következtet ebből, kedves Watson?” (Zilahy 1998, 78–79). 48 Zilahy (2008, 86–88)/“A szótár olyan szavakat állít egymás mellé, amelyek az életben soha nem fordulnak elő együtt. A szótár a találkozások helye, a véletlent emeli törvényre, mint a naplóban a névsor. […] Az ábécé, mint a tornasor, legyőzhetetlennek tűnt. Legalábbis kívül állt az érzékelhető időn. […] A szótárban minden szó nélkülözhetetlen, kűlön-külön felesleges, csak együtt van értelme, mint a névsorban. A szavak szolidaritása teremti a nyelvet, mint ahogy az osztályban is létrejön a szolidaritás, bárkire sor kerülhet, és mindennap névsorolvasással kezdődik. Felolvassák, hogy megvagyunk-e az ablaktól a zsiráfig, az Almásitól a Zsuppánig, mindannyian” (Zilahy 1998, 88).



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Fig. 5: Zilahy (1998, 64–65)

Once again this CD-ROM also shows that multimedia is not the be-all and end-all. In fact, the book version is more worthwhile reading. A primer is no electronic book nor CD-ROM, no learning software and no virtual content. Reading The Last Window-Giraffe means reading the quotes of Ablak–Zsiráf and at the same time holding a coloured primer in hands. The CD-ROM offers music and sound-files and quick navigation, but one will like to browse this CD-ROM only if one read the printed book before.

7 Conclusion According to a commonly-held belief, dictionary novels tend to support a flimsy, ludic notion of literature. They are considered to be minor compared to high literary standards, more game-like than ‘serious’ literature with ‘serious’ subjects of the alleged ‘High Culture’-variety. The novels of Pavić, Grossman and Zilahy show that this is a misjudgement. Something as playful as the dictionary novel can be the correct, or even best, formal solution to handle topics as difficult as

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the Jewish reflection of what happened in the Warsaw Ghetto and the German extermination camps as well as the problems of survivors and second generation Israelis, but also for some ardent religious and political problems or some recent political changes.49 There is an important tradition, in which Zilahy’s book takes part, of EastEuropean political dictionary novels, often satirical, often polemical, for instance, Romanian writer Mircea Horia Simionescu’s Dicţionar onomastic (1976) or Hungarian writer Ferenc Temesi’s Por (1986). There is also a Chinese dictionary novel by Han Shaogong Han, A Dictionary of Maqiao (1996), with a subtle criticism of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the “Down to the Countryside Movement”. Even a less interesting work like Kurt Marti’s Abratzky oder Die kleine Brockhütte. Lexikon in einem Band (1971), a fictious dictionary, is deeply political. Die kleine Brockhütte incorporates many features of Der Große Brockhaus, probably the most famous German encyclopaedia of the twentieth century, shrinking “The Great Brockhouse” into “The small Brockcabin”. Marti’s “Dictionary in one volume” tries to combine fiction and reality into a new “lexifiction” containing entries on existing and invented events, persons and objects; but at its core, it deals with (serious) topics such as the Vietnam War, racism, third-world politics, sexism and capitalism. In terms of the use of pictures and other pictorial material, the novels discussed here are – apart from Zilahy – below their possibilities; Grossman leaves them out entirely, which has to do with the fact that See under: Love, for the most part, is a conventionally-told novel that simply includes the “Encyclopedia of Kazik’s Life” which does function as a dictionary. Examples for this inclusion of dictionary-style text can, albeit to a lesser degree, also be found in famous novels like Perec’s La Vie (1978), Bora Ćosić’s Tutori (1978), Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) or Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1985).50 In Pavić’s novel there are some glyphs and illustrations indicating the three different sections of the book, but not as many as you would expect. Okopenko includes them in a more encyclopaedic manner, but due to printing reasons, only in black and white. Zilahy’s children’s primer therefore is the only diction-

49 One could add that Kastberger (1998, 98) reads Okopenko’s novel as political novel of the late 1960s. 50 Cf. Perec (1978, 43, 78–79, 316, 362, 364–366). Ćosić’s Tutori (1978, 7–99) starts with a long chapter organised as dictionary, “Teodor, 1828”, Kundera’s novel contains a “A Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words” in three parts, and Gray’s Lanark an “Index of Plagiarism” in the marginal notes of the “Epilogue”. The posthumously published fragment Wirths Roman. Lexikon eines Lebens (1990) by György Sebestyén contains a ‘Lexikonteil’ with short biographies and word explanations.



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ary novel from the sample using four-colour printing and glossy paper on a large format reminding of a primer or My First Encyclopaedia-type of book. Nevertheless, the dictionary novel is a visual genre recalling a specific typographic layout.51 Okopenko’s novel, the oldest of them all, is  – apart from offering many alternate reading paths – the only text or book where the reader is invited to complete and improve the entire novel – materially speaking – by gluing and attaching something into it, whether it may be coloured or not.52 In Okopenko’s version, all later dictionary novels are already included – the reader is invited to develop and challenge the model: Dictionary novels. I herewith confirm not to consider later authors of dictionary novels to be imitators […]. The possibility for a dictionary novel is a topos, therefore a venue, where everybody may walk, limp or skate. To this effect I call upon you, not only as individuals, but as entire collectives.53

Even in the “instructions for use”, modifications and rewritings of the novel by the reader are warmly welcomed; the reader is in many ways also the author (or writer) of the dictionary novel: “Take the principle as its realization, […] enlarge this novel by adding your own threads of catch phrases, best: write a book, which nails down my own in its smallness”.54 Similarly, Pavić once expressed in his

51 The first part of Ror Wolf’s Enzyklopädie für unerschrockene Leser, Raoul Tranchirers vielseitiger großer Ratschläger für alle Fälle der Welt (1983) has a huge format, ribbon page markers, coloured tables, hundreds of illustrations and claims to be a house-book, albeit ironic, for all purposes and questions of daily life. David Foster Wallace’s “Passion, Digitally” (1996; republished as “Datum Centurio” in 1997) is a short narrative with bold print, capitals, abbreviations and footnotes, reproducing a part of the dictionary entry for ‘date’ from an utopian electronic Leckie & Webster’s Connotationally Gender-Specific Lexicon of Contemporary Usage in 2096. René Gisler’s Der En|zyk|lop (2001), a collection of nonsense explanations, gives each of its entries with indications of possible hyphenations, from “Aal|lee” to “Zwi|stern”, but uses also two columns, abbreviations, bold print etc. 52 Cf. Gilbert (2010) for this imperative for participation. 53 “Lexikonromane. Ich bestätige hiermit, daß ich die Verfasser weiterer Lexikonromane nicht als Nachahmer betrachten werde […]. Die Möglichkeit Lexikonroman ist ein Topos, also ein Platz, der von allen begangen, behinkt oder schlittschuhbelaufen werden kann. Hierzu rufe ich nachgerade auf, nicht nur einzelne, sondern auch Kollektive” (Okopenko 1970, 157). 54 “Nehmen Sie das Prinzip für die Durchführung, […] erweitern Sie den Roman durch eigene Weiterknüpfung an Reizwörter, am besten: schreiben Sie ein Buch, das meines in seiner Kleinheit festnagelt” (Okopenko 1970, 7); see also “ich gebe zu, daß ich mit dem Lexikon jedes Mitmenschen froher spielen werde als mit meinem eigenen” (Okopenko 1970, 94)/“I admit to being happier playing with the dictionary of every fellow human being than with my own”. See also the meta-literary entry in Kurt Marti’s dictionary novel on “Lexi-Fiction” empowering the reader to enhance also this lexicon: “Lexi-Fiction, die. Aus ‘Lexikon’ und engl. ‘fiction’ [= Erfindung,

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statement “The Beginning and the End of Reading – The Beginning and the End of the Novel” the following thoughts about the responsiblity of the reader in reading his novels: I tried to change the way of reading by increasing the role and responsibility of the reader in the process of creating a novel (let us not forget that in the world there are many more talented readers than talented literary critics). I have left to them the decision about the choice of the plot and the development of the situations in the novel: where the reading will begin, and where it will end; the decision about the destiny of the main characters. But to change the way of reading, I had to change the way of writing. […] Each novel should select its specific form, each story can search for, and find, its adequate form.55

While books of fiction are widely considered to have a beginning and an end, and are believed to tell a straight story which is read best by starting with the first page and ending with the last, the dictionary novel is a “page turner” of neces-

Erzählung, Fiktion] gebildetes Wort, das der elsässische Schullehrer, Volkskundler und Verfasser phantastischer Schriften Theodor Obermann (1909–1962) zur Bezeichnung eines von ihm konzipierten Lexikons mit erfundenen Stichwörtern, Definitionen, Beschreibungen und Illustrationen ohne ersichtliche Realitätsbeziehung schuf. Obermann nannte sein fingiertes Le­xi­kon eine Bestandesaufnahme ‘neuer, möglicher und möglicherweise auch nützlicher Dinge’. Die Methode der L. erlaubt die Herstellung beliebig vieler und beliebig verschiedenartiger L ­ exika, die aber nie ‘fertig’ oder ‘vollständig’ sein können. Obermann wollte deshalb sein Lexikon nie ‘vollenden’, er konzipierte es zum vorneherein als einen Anfang, als Fragment, als immerwährendes ‘work in progress’, das jeden Leser zur fortführenden Mitarbeit einlädt. (Stichworte aus Theodor Obermanns immerwährendem Lexikon. In: Blätter für elsässische Volkskunde und Kunst, II/1965)” (Marti 1971, 59)/“Lexi-Fiction developed from ‘Lexicon’ and ‘fiction’. The term was coined by Alsatian teacher, folklorist and author of fantastic writings, Theodor Obermann (1909–1962). He used it for his dictionary containing made-up catchwords, definitions, descriptions and illustrations without obvious relation to reality. Obermann termed his fictional dictionary an inventory for ‘new, possible and possibly also useful objects.’ The method of L. allows the production of as many und as different dictionaries ad libitum, which never can be ‘finite’ or ‘complete’. Obermann therefore never wanted to finish his dictionary and started it in the beginning as a fragmented, eternal ‘work in progress,’ inviting every reader to join in on a permanent collaboration. (Keywords from Theodor Obermann’s Everlasting Dictionary. In: Magazine for Alsatian folklore and art, II/1965)”. 55 Pavić (1998, 145). Since sections of the Dictionary of the Khazars were written in Regensburg as the colophon indicates, let me mention an interesting fact about one of the reasons for the formal organisation of this novel. Pavić was often a guest of his German translator Bärbel Schulte, where also her son Jörg met him. With regards to Jörg Schulte, today an eminent Slavic studies scholar especially interested in the relationships between Slavic and Jewish Cultures and Literatures, Pavić’s novel started as a personal defeat: he was not able to write a non-fiction book about the Khazars due to the extremely heterogeneous and contradictory source materials he had collected. This resulted in Pavić finally writing a novel fed with the note cards of his slip box and in his choice of the dictionary novel (personal communication, Oxford, September 2009).



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sity. Instead of being an unwelcome interruption of a linear reading process, page turning, leafing, flicking, skimming, browsing and other conventionally forbidden and aberrant reading practices – at least for works of fiction – are the best way to read a dictionary novel. Sometimes you will also find reiterations, repetitions and loops; the moment you reach the “End” in Winston’s Dictionary Story, you are sent back (or forth) to “See; Dictionary” showing but a little of how such texts function. The dictionary novel can therefore be considered as a hypertextual and visual fiction avant la lettre. On the other hand, it simulates a typographic layout or visual genre that it does not fulfil. There are good reasons why the metamorphosis of at least Okopenko’s, Pavić’s and Zilahy’s works into electronic media did take place, since it is very easy to adapt them. While electronic dictionaries and encyclopaedias (apart from electronic versions of printed books also online collaborative sites as Wikipedia or Wiktionary/Urban Dictionary) outrule printed books, the dictionary’s typographic layout remains intact in the dictionary novel. At the time the digital revolution started to change the entire process of cataloguing and collecting data for dictionaries, the dictionary novel evolved as a visual genre. The dictionary novel cries for digressions and cursory readings, radically challenging linear and unidirectional reading movements. It supports many different points of view and explores the possibilities to tell a story from many different perspectives in many small fragments, snippets and micro-texts. Nevertheless, it leaves to the reader the freedom to read in a conventional manner, from left to right and from start to end, offering the maximum number of possible reading directions and reading experiences. The dictionary novel is radical with respect to its non-linearity, allowing the possibility to jump from one link to another chapter, going back, reading entire entries and leaving out others. It supports hyper-textuality and non-linear reading in an unknown form. If we consider the short period of time that dictionaries have been with us, and the relatively short timespan of less than fifty years since a novel like Okopenko’s was published, there are still many opportunities and chances left to this genre.

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Kilcher, Andreas Benjamin. “Im Labyrinth des Alphabets. Enzyklopädische Lektüreweisen.” Literatur als Blätterwerk. Perspektiven nichtlinearer Lektüre. Ed. Jürgen Gunia and Iris Hermann. St. Ingbert: Röhrig, 2002. 63–83. Kilcher, Andreas Benjamin. mathesis und poiesis. Die Enzyklopädik der Literatur 1600 bis 2000. München: Fink, 2003. Kilcher, Andreas Benjamin. “Enzyklopädische Schreibweisen bei Jean Paul.” Vom Weltbuch bis zum World Wide Web. Enzyklopädische Literaturen. Ed. Waltraud Wiethölter, Frauke Berndt, and Stephan Kammer. Heidelberg: Winter, 2005. 129–147. Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being [Cz. 1985]. Transl. Michael Henry Heim. London: Faber and Faber, 1984. Libraries of the Mind. ELEX –Elektronischer Lexikon-Roman einer sentimentalen Reise zum Exporteurtreffen in Druden. CD-Rom. Wien: Mediendesign OEG, 1998. Leiris, Michel. Glossaire j’y serre mes gloses [1939]. Mots sans mémoire. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. 71–116. Marti, Kurt. Abratzky oder Die kleine Brockhütte. Nachträge zur weiteren Förderung unseres Wissens. Lexikon in einem Band. Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1971. Mendelson, Edward. “Encyclopedic Narrative from Dante to Pynchon.” Modern Language Notes 91 (1976): 1267–1275. Mérei, Ferenc, Ágnes V. Binét, K. Lúkats Kató, and Szűcs Erzsébet. Ablak–Zsiráf. Kêpes gyermek­lexikon. Budapest: Móra, 1971. Mihajlović, Jasmina. “Milorad Pavić and Hyperfiction.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 18.2 (1998): 214–220. Mugglestone, Lynda. Dictionaries. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. Norfolk, Lawrence. Lempriere’s Dictionary. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1991. Norfolk, Lawrence. “Foreword.” Péter Zilahy. The Last Window-Giraffe. A Picture Dictionary For The Over Fives. Transl. Tim Wilkinson. London: Anthem, 2008. iii–iv. Okopenko, Andreas. Lexikon einer sentimentalen Reise zum Exporteurtreffen in Druden. Roman. Salzburg: Residenz, 1970. Okopenko, Andreas. Meteoriten. Roman. Salzburg: Residenz, 1976. Okopenko, Andreas. “Ein Vermächtnis [1980].” NEXT GENERATION – Karlheinz Essl. Programmheft der Salzburger Festspiele 1997. Ed. Margarethe Lasinger. Salzburg: Festspiele, 1997. http://www.essl.at/bibliogr/lexmeta.html Oulipo. La littérature potentielle (Créations Re-créations Récréations). Paris: Gallimard, 1973. Oulipo. Atlas de littérature potentielle. Paris: Gallimard, 1981. Okopenko, Andreas. “Lexikon-Roman – Inhaltsangabe [1993].” NEXT GENERATION – Karlheinz Essl. Programmheft der Salzburger Festspiele 1997. Ed. Margarethe Lasinger. Salzburg: Festspiele, 1997. http://www.essl.at/bibliogr/elex-inhalt.html Pavić, Milorad. Hazarski rečnik. Roman leksikon u 100.000 reči. Muški primerak/Ženski primerak. Belgrade: Prosveta, 1984. Pavić, Milorad. Dictionary of the Khazars. A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words. Male Edition/ Female Edition. Transl. Christina Pribićević-Zorić. London: Hamish-Hamilton, 1989. Pavić, Milorad. “The Beginning and the End of Reading – The Beginning and the End of the Novel.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 18.2 (1998): 142–146. Pavić, Milorad. Hazarski rečnik/Kazarisk Uppslagsbok/Dictionary of the Khazars. E-book. Stockholm: ICIS Creative factory, 2005. Perec, Georges. “Petit abécédaire illustré [1969].” Oulipo. La littérature potentielle (Créations Re-créations Récréations). Paris: Gallimard, 1973. 235–240.

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Perec, Georges. Alphabets. Cent soixante-seize onzains hétérogrammatiques. Paris: Galilée, 1976. Perec, Georges. La Vie mode d’emploi. Romans. Paris: Hachette, 1978. Schmidt, Arno. Vorläufiges zu Zettels Traum. Textaufzeichnung von Arno Schmidts freier Rede beim Gespräch mit dem NDR (Gesprächspartner Dr. Christian Gneuß) über Entstehung, Aufbau und Absicht seines Typoskriptbuches Zettels Traum [1969]. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1977. Schmitz-Emans, Monika. “Labyrinthbücher als Spielanleitungen.” Paragrana 11 (2002): 179–207. Schmitz-Emans, Monika, Kai Lars Fischer, and Christoph Benjamin Schulz (Eds.). Alphabet, Lexikographik und Enzyklopädistik. Historische Konzepte und literarisch-künstlerische Verfahren. Hildesheim: Olms, 2012. Schulz, Christoph Benjamin. Poetiken des Blätterns. Hildesheim: Olms, 2015. Sebestyén, György. Wirths Roman. Lexikon eines Lebens. Ein Fragment. Ed. Helga Blaschek-Hahn. Graz: Styri, 1999. Simionescu, Mircea Horia. Jumătate plus unu. Alt dicționar onomastic. Bucharest: Albatros, 1976. Simionescu, Mircea Horia. Dicţionar onomastic. Din ciclul Ingeniosul bine temperat. Bucharest: Allfa, 2000. Simpson, John A., and Edmund S.C. Weiner (Eds.). The Oxford English Dictionary. 20 vols., Oxford: Clarendon, 21989. Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman [1759–1767]. Ed. Ian Campbell Ross. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Temesi, Ferenc. Por. Regény. Budapest: Magvető Kiadó, 1986. Voltaire. Dictionnaire philosophique [1764]. Ed. Julien Benda and Raymond Naves. Paris: Garnier, 1967. Wallace, David Foster. “Passion, Digitally”. The New York Times Magazine. 20 September 1996, 189–191 (republished as “Datum Centurio” Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1997. 106–110). Warning, Rainer. “Enzyklopädie und Idiotie: Flauberts Bouvard et Pécuchet.” Vom Weltbuch bis zum World Wide Web. Enzyklopädische Literaturen. Ed. Waltraud Wiethölter, Frauke Berndt, and Stephan Kammer. Heidelberg: Winter, 2005. 165–192. Wiethölter, Waltraud, Frauke Berndt, and Stephan Kammer (Eds.). Vom Weltbuch bis zum World Wide Web. Enzyklopädische Literaturen. Heidelberg: Winter, 2005. Winston, Sam. A Dictionary Story [2005]. London: Arc Artist Editions, 2009. Wolf, Ror. Raoul Tranchirers vielseitiger großer Ratschläger für alle Fälle der Welt [1983]. Frankfurt/M.: Schöffling, 1999. Zilahy, Péter. Az utolsó ablakzsiráf. Öt éven Felülieknek. Budapest: Ab Ovo, 1998. Zilahy, Péter. Az utolsó ablakzsiráf/The Last Window-Giraffe/Die letzte Fenstergiraffe/Poslednji Prozor-Žirafa. The Multimedia Reader. CD-ROM. Budapest: C3 Kulturális és Kommunikációs Központ Alapítvány and Zilahy Péter, 2001. Zilahy, Péter. The Last Window-Giraffe. A Picture Dictionary For The Over Fives. Transl. Tim Wilkinson. London: Anthem, 2008.

Karin Krauthausen

Do you see? Literature and Other Optical Media Abstract: With the help of the media theory of Friedrich Kittler, the question of literary visuality can be referred back to media and processes of making visible, that is, to those instruments, apparatuses, and practices that support the eye. With a focus on the conditions and supports of vision, the distinction between ‘imagined’ and ‘real’ perceptions shifts to the background: even visual aids such as the microscope do not simply reveal an empirical ‘truth’; they also produce perceptions. Such technically and/or artistically determined visual experiences are grasped by Kittler with the adjective ‘optical’. In his history of optical media and arts, literature plays a leading role insofar as in the eighteenth century  – and therefore before the invention of photography, film, and finally digital image production  – it functions as a rare technique of image storage (through description) and image production (through evocation). This article draws on Kittler’s approach (→ Merten), but focuses on the period after the heyday of optical literature. With two examples taken from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the contribution addresses the procedures through which literature successfully asserts a specific optical potential  – and indeed against the competition of the popular visual media of the time: photography and film. In the nineteenth century, Gustave Flaubert’s play La Tentation de saint Antoine (1874) stands not only for an overwhelming rhetorical visuality, but also for the claim to make visible with great precision what in fact eludes conscious perception (hallucinations and mental images). In the twentieth century, Marguerite Duras shows with her film Le Camion (1977) that literature is also able to assert itself within the successful visual medium film as the real power of optical projection, and at the same time is able to develop a mode of critique and of conjectural historiography.

DOI 10.1515/9783110378030-009

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1 Visual Aids Following Kittler (2010), we know that literature has to be counted among the optical media. The adjective ‘optical’ refers to the visual, but it emphasises mediation inasmuch as it also refers to the conditional and constructed part of visual impressions.1 Accordingly, scientific optics is concerned with the analysis of light and the eye, but also with the development of instruments that manipulate vision by focusing it through frames and lenses (for instance, camera obscura, telescope, and microscope) or by opening it to projections (for instance, laterna magica and cinematography). Technical optics can enhance or format vision in two ways: it sharpens perception but it also produces illusions; it is at the service of both the knowledge of reality and the construction of fictional worlds.2 For Kittler, the extensions of vision carried out by engineers through technical media can also be found, and in equal measure, in artistic techniques, and to the latter belong not only linear perspective in painting, but also the devices of literature. Fundamentally, writing can act as a storage medium and in addition as a – if slow – broadcast medium, and it can do this also for images (for example, through descriptions). In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with the reproduction and dissemination of literature through printing, it can be said, furthermore, that it satisfies a new need for images and projections that was formed in the Renaissance through linear perspective, the camera lucida, and the laterna magica, as well as later through the proscenium stage in theatre. Literature – this is one of Kittler’s central theses – satisfied these needs more flexibly and comprehensively than all other media and arts. That required two different but complementary developments: a new understanding of the object of knowledge and a training in techniques of the imagination. Hence, in the eighteenth century, on the one hand, in the wake of the emerging natural sciences, the idea of the object-nature of the world became relevant. This brought with it the need to both

1 This becomes clear when one recalls the subjects of optics: physical optics analyses light propagation and hence the condition also of human vision, while technical optics is concerned with the construction and production of optical devices that act on vision. Among the developments of technical optics are optical devices such as reading aids (for instance, glasses and the magnifying glass), the instruments of knowledge (for instance, the telescope and the microscope), recording apparatuses (for instance, the camera), and projection apparatuses (for instance, the stereoscope and the film projector). 2 And mostly the two are interlinked: Crary (1992) has shown how the visual entertainment media of the nineteenth century developed out of scientific apparatuses for the investigation of vision. In addition, Kittler (2010) examines the close ties between the history of the entertainment media and the history of military technology.



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enhance vision (for instance, through microscope and telescope, thus extending vision to what had previously been invisible), and to concentrate it (for instance, through the camera obscura, linear perspective, and verbal description). Parallel to this, on the other hand, the representatives of the Counter-Reformation developed techniques of the self supposed to provide instruction in imaginary seeing, hearing, smelling, and feeling in order to attain a quasi-living experience of Biblical events. The Scriptures thus became the cause and object of a religious praxis that deployed the faithful themselves as quasi projection apparatuses. Profiting from these technical extensions of perception into the realms of the invisible and the imaginary was also a literature that was becoming increasingly accessible as a result of printing, and by extension volatile. By making optical experiences universally available to the literate, literature gained quickly in importance, though suspiciously eyed by some because the range and effects could not be controlled. Only with the emergence of photography in the nineteenth century and cinematography toward the end of the same century – both of which are more comprehensive and apparent image storage and broadcast media – as well as of projection apparatuses, did literature lose its special status as an optical medium.3 In the history of competing visual media that Kittler outlines from the Renaissance up to the twentieth century, the significance of literature as an optical medium is therefore to be evaluated in relation to specific historical contexts. Kittler’s approach regarding the question of literary visuality is of central importance for three reasons: firstly, it has usefully extended the concept of visuality via the reference to optical instruments and arts to include the images created through language and the imagination; secondly, he has shown that literature is necessarily to be included among the optical media, and can even occasionally be considered as a privileged visual medium; thirdly, he has pointed out that in the current audio-visual electronic and digital media environments the status of the book and of literature can only be understood in the context of historical competitive interactions between media. In this perspective, there is a direct correlation between literature and explicitly pictorial media, which is why literature must also be considered as a technical precursor to cinematography, since it contributed to the emergence of optical needs whose satisfaction would be served by film: In this respect, there were centuries at least that already belonged to the history of optical media, as they dreamed of modern technologies and developed mechanical devices, whose scientific realization was finally made possible in the nineteenth century through photo-

3 In the twentieth century, the competition between media is reconfigured, since now electronic and digital (hence calculating) media are developed that have a new specific capacity for simulation.

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graphy and film. […] For film did not fall from heaven, but rather it can only be understood through the fantasies and the politics that its invention was responding to. (Kittler 2010, 22)

The history of seeing images in each respective medium or through each respective artistic technique also determines the focus of the following remarks. Against the background of Kittler’s theory, this will involve two paradigmatic negotiations of literary visuality that should be understood in the context of the respective historical competitions between media: on the one hand, a complementarity between literary prose and theatre performance (and their relation to supposedly non-technical projections such as hallucination and dream) in Gustave Flaubert’s La Tentation de saint Antoine (published in 1874); on the other, the production of a film through literary speech as presented by Marguerite Duras in her film Le Camion (1977). With these examples from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, two distinct stages come into view that are clearly situated after the heyday of literature as an optical medium (the eighteenth century according to Kittler). Both examples make clear, however, that, even after the invention of photography and film, literature does not relinquish its optical potential, but extends into an area that lies beyond what is visible to the naked eye alone. The literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries sets itself apart from other visual media by asserting itself as an artistic apparatus for the making visible of the invisible. Literature becomes an intelligent visual aid. While in Flaubert it gives form to the reality of mental images, in Duras it becomes a critical optics and founds a conjectural historiography.

2 Seeing Literature: Gustave Flaubert’s La Tentation de saint Antoine (1874) The acceptance of images (which also implies the acceptance of images of the imagination) was, according to Kittler, significantly promoted by the programmatic considerations of the Counter-Reformation, particularly the Ars magna lucis et umbrae (2nd ed., 1671) by Athanasius Kircher and even earlier the Exercitia spiritualia (produced between 1522 and 1524) by Ignacio de Loyola. In Kircher’s treatise, one finds the description of an optical instrument for the dynamic display of images showing the stations of Christ’s Passion.4 Loyola’s idea – more than a

4 Kittler (2010, 74) describes Kircher’s apparatus (the smicroscopium parastaticum) on the basis of its way of functioning as a precursor of the zoetrope that in the nineteenth century simulated



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hundred years before Kircher – was more radical still: he established exercises for an imaginative experience of Biblical places and events. The exercises originated from the Bible, but aimed to be independent of reading and, for example, to enable one to experience ‘Hell’ in the imagination with all one’s senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell). The prerequisites for bringing such scenes to life were asceticism and meditation, and hence the retreat from the sensory stimuli of the ‘real’ world while concentrating on the Christian faith. The training of the imagination prompted the production of subjective images, all of which were oriented to a field of knowledge connected with the Scriptures. Nevertheless, books and paintings, even relics, only acted as catalysers of hallucinatory intensity. The aim of the exercises was to give rise to “new hallucinatory readings”, which in the centuries after Loyola “had to become simplified, trivialized, mechanized, and mass applied” through apparatuses of all kinds (Kittler 2010, 79). Apparatuses such as the laterna magica and peep-show cabinets contributed to this process through the transmission and presentation of images, but in the eighteenth century it was primarily literature that prompted such compelling mental images in the reader, before, in the nineteenth century, photography and, beginning at the turn of the century, film served this hallucinatory reading technique.5 Against this background, it seems no accident that Flaubert’s play La Tentation de saint Antoine takes as its subject the visions of an early Christian saint. For the sake of his faith, the hermit Anthony has withdrawn to the desert where he experiences a series of apparitions.6 In Flaubert’s text, it is the reading of the Bible – along with the lack of stimuli provided by the saint’s lonely, ascetic existence in the desert – that is the cause of the hallucinatory impressions.7 In

moving images and foreshadowed film. In this sense he can describe the parastatic smicroscope as the precursor of the direct precursor of film. 5 At the same time, the camera obscura and the invention of scientific observation and description results in an apparative and conceptual isolation and focusing of the observer. For this observer, the world is reduced to a section and to the object to be observed. 6 Cf. Flaubert (2001) and Flaubert (1951) for the French original. Flaubert reworked the text on a number of occasions (1849, 1856, and 1869–1872) and only published the last version in its entirety in 1874 (extracts appeared in 1856 in Théophile Gaultier’s review L’Artiste). The French edition reproduces the third and last variant, which forms the basis of the following interpretation. 7 Cf. Flaubert (2001, 9–18; 1951, 25–32), that is, the beginning of the play. Anthony complains about his loneliness and begins to leaf through and recite from the Bible. This is followed by the first hallucination, as the shadow of the cross seems to transform into the horns of the Devil. The saint sees immediately that this is simply an illusion and blames it on his asceticism: “Ah! … it was an illusion … nothing more. It is needless for me to torment my mind further! I can do nothing – absolutely nothing” (Flaubert 2001, 18).

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this respect, the play’s theme recalls the exercises of Loyola. In Flaubert’s text, however, the spiritual practice is transformed into a tale of suffering, since Anthony’s visions become a threat to his faith by tempting both his body and mind (from the banquet table via the Queen of Sheba to the promised vision of the gods). At first, the saint takes each of these apparitions to be true, to then painfully recognise that the objects of his perceptions are only illusions. In the penultimate act/ chapter he identifies as cause of these temptations the Devil. As Anthony makes clear at the beginning of the last act/chapter, the Devil had tempted the hermit through his knowledge of religion and philosophy: “Ah! the Devil!  – I remember; – he even repeated to me all that I learned from the aged Didymus respecting the opinions of Xenophanes, Heraclitus, of Melissus, of Anaxagoras, – concerning the infinite, the creation, the impossibility of knowing anything!” (Flaubert 2001, 171; 1951, 149).8 Hence, in the logic of the fiction, the illusions have an originating ‘author’, who in turn also belongs to the religious system of Anthony. In this system, the Devil is seen as a fallen angel and consequently included in the Christian faith as a powerful representative of a counter-world to be rejected. However, neither for Anthony nor for the reader/viewer does this knowledge of the cause lead into a world without apparitions, nor does it lead out of the experience of the saint, that is, away from his perspective. Instead, at the end of the last act/chapter, the illusions of the hermit are subsumed in a final vision: Day at last appears; – and, like tabernacle curtains uplifted, clouds of gold uprolling in broad volutes unveil the sky. Even in the midst thereof, and in the very disk of the sun, beams the face of Jesus Christ. Anthony makes the sign of the cross, and resumes his devotions. (Flaubert 2001, 191, italics in the original; 1951, 164)

In La Tentation de saint Antoine the series of apparitions is concluded with a Christian apotheosis, which is not relativised as an illusion. Following the exposure of the previous series of illusions, however, it is virtually impossible for the viewer/ reader to believe in the evidence of this last vision and to understand the appearance of Christ as an affirmation of the Christian religion. Rather, Flaubert’s construction leads to a fatal insight: the end of images is followed by a further image. Valéry admired Flaubert’s play, but also criticised it for the somnambulistic hero Anthony whom, he felt, remained passive “at the centre of the infernal turmoil of delusions and errors”.9 For Valéry, instead of a convincing dramatic

8 Didymus was Anthony’s teacher. At the beginning of the play we learn that “none equalled him in the knowledge of the Scriptures” (Flaubert 2001, 11; 1951, 26). 9 Valéry (1957, 617): “au centre de l’infernal tourbillon de phantasmes et d’erreurs”. Cf. also Valéry’s remark (1957, 617) on Anthony’s passivity: “Anthony, one must admit, scarcely exists. […]



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composition, Flaubert presents above all a “masquerade” (“mascarade”, Valéry 1957, 617) and a “scenic entertainment” (“divertissement des décors”, Valéry 1957, 618). This description grasps the optical quality of the textual representation as well as the seriality of the apparitions and their illusionistic – or, more neutrally, their medial  – character. Thus, still in the nineteenth century, La Tentation de saint Antoine claims literature as an optical medium. But how did Flaubert set his work apart in the media competition of the time when photography in particular was able to create, store, and broadcast images far more easily? In view of the medial superiority of photography, principally two alternatives remained available to literature in the nineteenth century, which Kittler (2001, 136–137) has formulated for paintings of this period: technical reference or artistic difference. Accordingly, painters could either accept photography as a model and reference for painting (and no longer rely either on what appeared to the naked eye or the tradition of idealism). Or they geared painting to subjects and procedures that photography simply could not cover, whereby art mostly differentiated itself through self-reflexivity. Flaubert’s literature seems to follow above all the first option as his novels exhibit numerous depictions of details that have no function for the action. The (apparent) contingency that enters the work in this way can be compared to the objective image of reality promised by photography. Here, too, there is a simultaneity of unconnected or singular elements, as well as an excess of detail. As Kittler writes, a novel such as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856–1857) demonstrates, precisely due to its erratic elements, that it “has not forgotten any visual detail within its fictional world” (Kittler 2010, 139). This orientation of literary depiction towards the technique of photography even leads to a similar effect on the recipient: photography is understood as a ‘self-recording’ of reality and to that extent as a document, and Flaubert’s realistic literature is (at least in retrospect) attributed a ‘reality effect’ (Barthes 1975).10 As Barthes (1975, 142) noted, it is the “‘useless detail’” of the description, and thus a surplus created by the writing technique, that founds the literary reality effect.11 The excess elements no longer

He is mortally passive” (“Antoine, il faut en convenir, existe peu. […] Il est mortellement passif”). [If not otherwise noted, all translations by Ben Carter.] 10 Photography is called on especially in science for a self-recording of nature. Cf. the exemplary case of Marey (1885), which includes a supplement on photography that summarises his previous work with this medium. 11 The “‘concrete detail’” sabotages the structural closure of the text and precisely for this reason appears to the reader as a mark of the “‘real’” (Barthes 1975, 147). Flaubert’s realism is characterised by this inclusion of concrete material that was traditionally opposed to the verisimilitude of literature. Barthes extends his argument even further: modern realism is constituted

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refer to the structural order of the artwork, but to an outside: namely, reality. Valéry noticed something similar in La Tentation de saint Antoine. For Valéry, Flaubert privileges here the “direct observation of the present” and believes in the authority of the “‘historical document12 – but with both he disrupts the unity of the artistic composition. According to Valéry, what is opposed to art is chance or contingency, which pertains both to ‘banal’ reality and to the documents that have come down to us.13 Against this background, Flaubert’s play too enters into competition with the medium of photography, and indeed precisely through the opening of the representation to an apparently random lining up of the elements. It should be noted, however, that this new narrative strategy of realism need not be understood in opposition to the composition or the structural coherence of an artwork. Unlike Valéry and Barthes, Rancière comes to the conclusion that Flaubert’s descriptive excess does indeed have an aesthetic function: through this mode of narration, social strata and states of consciousness were made accessible to literature that previously had been excluded from art. For Rancière, the formal poetic decision is therefore primarily a political decision, and in this sense Flaubert is thereby implementing a “literary democracy: anybody can feel anything” (Rancière 2009, s.p.). An important effect of this poetological revolution, according to Rancière, is the blurring of the opposition between description (or image) and action, since now both “become one and the same fabric of sensory micro-events” (Rancière 2009, s.p.). The descriptions and images therefore no longer interrupt the action, but are assimilated and become “operators producing differences of intensity” (Rancière 2009, s.p.). Precisely this new kind of narration is presented by Flaubert’s La Tentation de saint Antoine. Hence, Flaubert does not simply draw on the comprehensive aspect of photography in order to assert his literary texts in the face of the new visual medium. Instead, he opts for the second alternative proposed by Kittler: he differentiates literature as medium and art by making something visible that photography is not able to show in the same way. In his play, this is shown initially in the long

through the invention of “a new verisimilitude”, (Barthes 1975, 147), and it is based here on the singularity of the detail and no longer on the completeness of narration. 12 Valéry (1957, 613): “l’observation du présent toute crue” and “du ‘document historique’”. However, Valéry considers the literary interest in reality an error, since realism or literature as a whole (and also the historical scholarship on which Flaubert depends) is subject to another “true” (“vrai”) than the exact sciences: “The only real in art is art” (“Le seul réel dans l’art, c’est l’art”, Valéry 1957, 613). 13 On the “attention to the banal” (“attention au banal”) in realism and on the “chance” (“hasard”) that determines the historical passing on and the interpretation of the documents, cf. Valéry (1957, 614–615).



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descriptions in the stage directions, which make out of the action a series of images and out of these in turn action. This includes for example the banquet table that materialises from the small crust of dried bread, the only item of food left in Anthony’s possession: And he flings the bread upon the ground with fury. No sooner has the action occurred than a table makes its appearance, covered with all things that are good to eat. The byssus cloth, striated like the bandelets of the sphinx, produces of itself luminous undulations. Upon it are enormous quarters of red meats; huge fish; birds cooked in their plumage, and quadrupeds in their skins; fruits with colors and tints almost human in appearance; while fragments of cooling ice, and flagons of violet crystal reflect each other’s glittering. (Flaubert 2001, 24, italics in the original; 1951, 37)

The enumeration of the lavish dishes does not end here, and Flaubert continues to make use of comparisons and metaphors (cf. above the “luminous undulations” produced by the tablecloth). Finally, he also describes olfactory impressions, the diffuse memories of Anthony, and the self-activating transformations of the objects to be seen – on the stage all these elements could only partially be translated into scenery and props: And the aroma of all this comes to him together with the salt smell of the ocean, the coolness of fountains, the great perfumes of the woods. He dilates his nostrils to their fullest extent; his mouth waters; he thinks to himself that he has enough before him for a year, for ten years, for his whole life! As he gazes with widely-opened eyes at all these viands, others appear; they accumulate, forming a pyramid crumbling at all its angles. The wines begin to flow over – the fish palpitate – the blood seethes in the dishes – the pulp of the fruit protrudes like amorous lips – and the table rises as high as his breast, up to his very chin at last – now bearing only one plate and a single loaf of bread, placed exactly in front of him. (Flaubert 2001, 25, italics in the original; 1951, 37)14

The verbal description at this point exceeds a possible staging. The sudden apparitions and metamorphoses could only be convincingly staged using the substitution splice found in early silent film. Considered as the inventor of this technique is Georges Méliès, who in his short film La Tentation de saint Antoine (1898) shows the saint being ‘tempted’ by women. The women appear as if from nowhere and 14 Even more difficult would it be to find ways of staging the inner feelings and impressions of Anthony that are described in the stage directions – here the theater text becomes entirely a narration with a large part given over to description. The description of the vision is considerably longer and more detailed than is reproduced here in the quotation – at this point too the theater text operates as narrative.

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change place so abruptly that it is impossible for the eye to follow. Finally, one of them takes the position of the sculpture of Christ in front of which Anthony is praying. The appearance of the women in the film recalls an act of prestidigitation15, and indeed the film effect is based on a trick: in the course of filming, the camera is momentarily stopped, something is changed on the set – for example, a woman enters  – and then the camera resumes filming. For the viewer of the finished film, the pause is imperceptible, and the sudden appearance of the additional character is completely unexpected. In this respect, in the vividness of the mise-en-scène, film surpasses theatre (but not of optical literature). Nevertheless, the new medium film is also subject to constraints. Accordingly, Méliès is forced to greatly shorten and simplify Flaubert’s play for the intermedial translation. Out of the seven long acts/chapters in Flaubert’s play and the vast array of fantastic apparitions a film is made that lasts scarcely more than a minute (and therefore can only show a few characters or apparitions), is limited to black and white, and has to manage without audible or readable dialogue. By overburdening the stage machinery of the nineteenth century through an excess of descriptions in the stage directions, Flaubert shifts his play into the realm of prose. The text seems to be made more for solitary reading and the production of imaginative images than for a public performance with painted stage scenery. This becomes particularly clear with Anthony’s last visions, when he follows the transformations of matter into the microscopically small, and therefore into what is invisible to the naked eye. Here, his perceptions assume a kaleidoscopic quality: And all sorts of plants extend themselves into branches, twist themselves into screws, lengthen into points, round themselves out like fans. Gourds take the appearance of breasts; lianas interlace like serpents. […] And then the plants become confounded with the stones. Flints assume the likeness of brains; stalactites of breasts; the flower of iron resembles a figured tapestry. […] At last he perceives tiny globular masses, no larger than pinheads, with cilia all round them. They are agitated with a vibratite [sic!] motion. (Flaubert 2001, 189–190, italics in the original; 1951, 163–164)16

15 Prestidigitation (or legerdemain) denotes the skillful and dexterous feat of a conjurer in making something vanish or appear. As Kammer (2012) has shown, what is taken to be magic here is actually the effect of a technique and, despite the fascination it holds, understood as such by the viewer. It is only in this way that the viewer is able to enjoy the conjurer’s act – this is clearly different from the experience of a direct participant in a magical rite (in voodoo for instance). The proximity between the conjurer’s art and technical media has been well documented historically. Méliès, for instance, showed his first films in a variety theatre. 16 Flaubert’s interest is directed towards the productivity of the imagination, which alongside



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The reader follows the visual descriptions of the author and in doing so enters increasingly into the production of mental images him- or herself – the reading activates optical impressions (→ Brosch) In this way, what is imagined by Anthony and what is imagined by the reader correspond in an artful dramaturgy, which has been described by Foucault (2001). Accordingly, the reader of Flaubert’s book is addressed by the text as a theatre spectator who watches Anthony as he reads a book (the Bible) and subsequently begins to hallucinate; at this point, Anthony’s former disciple Hilarion appears, who prompts the further visions of Anthony. The sequence of perspectives established by the text (reader, viewer, Anthony, Hilarion, apparitions, and more apparitions) corresponds to a sequence of formats or “orders of language” (Foucault 2001, xxxii), since the formats are all bound to the medium of language. Foucault distinguishes “the book, a theater, a sacred text, visions, and visions that evolve into further visions” (Foucault 2001, xxxii). And only through the gradual coupling of both sequences does the reader enter deeper into the optics of the text, until he or she – like Anthony – is hardly able to distinguish the reality established by the play and the apparitions: The frieze of marionettes and the stark, colored surface of these figures who jostle one another in the shadows offstage […] are the composite result of a vision that develops on successive and gradually more distant levels and a temptation that attracts the visionary to the place he has seen and that suddenly envelops him in his own visions. (Foucault 2001, xxxiv)

In this sense, Flaubert’s play is considerably more solidly composed and structurally coherent than Valéry and Barthes acknowledge. The author does not simply present material from historical sources fortuitously passed on in an additive and excessive way, but he selects, reshapes, and arranges it to force the reader/viewer into an optical experience that brings together both illusion and document. What is thereby evoked in La Tentation de saint Antoine is the reality of mental images, and Flaubert practices a veritable realism of phantasms. As Janßen (2013, 281–358) has shown, this realism can indeed be made consistent with the scientific investigations of the time. Hence, the depiction of Anthony corresponds to the physiological and psychological research on dreams and hallucinations, especially to Alfred Maury and Léon Hervey de Saint-Denys’s studies on the alien-

pathological phenomena also gives rise to artistic phenomena. The threshold between hallucination and creative imagination is porous, but Flaubert understands artistic creativity as an actively sought and controlled image production in contrast to the passively experienced apparitions of dreams and hallucinations (cf. Janßen 2013, 293, 296–299).

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ation of consciousness in dreams.17 The passivity that Anthony shows with regard to the visions corresponds to Maury’s (1861) characterisation of the dreamer as an automaton: while the dream-I is the author of the apparitions, he or she is also implicated in them (cf. Janßen 2013, 311–312). Therefore, the dreamer is mostly neither able to deliberately direct the apparitions nor recognise them as dream images, and the sequence of projections acquires an almost mechanical quality. Hervey’s (1867) investigations on dream processes complement this almost ‘machinic’ conception. He describes the sequence of dream images in terms of abstraction and superposition, which can both be applied to Anthony’s visions. In Flaubert’s text, one apparition is repeatedly linked with the preceding one in such a way that it takes up an element and develops it (abstraction). Likewise, there are passages in the play in which two visions partially overlap (superposition); for example, a speech by a character from one hallucination is continued in the next by a completely different character, but in a similar form (cf. Janßen 2013, 322–323). Janßen (2013, 352) convincingly shows that the psychological knowledge implemented by Flaubert does not only inspire the content of his play; it also specifically characterises the artistic process: Flaubert transforms the psychically and physically determined “dream illusionism” into formal representation techniques and thereby develops a “dream poetics”. Accordingly, the mechanisms of the dream and the literary technique are superimposed in La Tentation de saint Antoine. However, Flaubert does not thereby limit the reader either to the distanced attitude of the scientist (who studies the mechanisms) or to the distanceless experiences of the hallucinator (who suffers from the mechanisms). Flaubert’s La Tentation de saint Antoine functions simultaneously as analysis and as phantasmagoria, and the resulting hybrid establishes his realism as a structural mimesis. In this way, the play unquestionably develops an enormous optical potential, but one that is based explicitly on verbal descriptions – the visions of Anthony finally determine literature as an optical medium. Indeed, a capacity for evocation linked to the word is thematised in the play itself when Anthony admits after the departure of Apollonius regarding the latter’s speech:

17 Flaubert’s interest is directed towards the productivity of the imagination, which alongside pathological phenomena also gives rise to artistic phenomena. The threshold between hallucination and creative imagination is porous, but Flaubert understands artistic creativity as an actively sought and controlled image production in contrast to the passively experienced apparitions of dreams and hallucinations (cf. Janßen 2013, 293, 296–299).



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That one, indeed, seems in himself equal to all the powers of Hell! Nebuchadnezzar did not so much dazzle me with his splendours;  – the Queen of Sheba herself charmed me less deeply. His manner of speaking of the gods compels one to feel a desire to know them. (Flaubert 2001, 116; 1951, 106)

That the first-century ascetic Apollonius shares a name with Apollo, the Greek and Roman god of poetry, adds further to the significance of this statement. Here, the artful speech itself is the actual temptation, since it awakens a need for a sensual presence that (at least in Flaubert’s play) it is also able to satisfy. In the play the fulfilment follows immediately after Anthony’s exclamation since, in the following visions, a series of gods present themselves. In this way, around 1870 literature too competes with technical visual media. Flaubert is successful in this media competition because he places the focus of literature on the reality of mental images, and in this way to a phenomenon that photography cannot record and collectivise. Here, literature does not only fulfil existing visual needs, but also creates new ones: the making visible of elusive psychic and physiological realities. In this case, however, Flaubert’s literature also trains the recipient in a completely new form of reading in which optical experiences become crucial elements of the narrative construction.

3 Reading Film: Marguerite Duras’s Le Camion (1977) Flaubert addresses the reader in La Tentation de saint Antoine through format (theatrical text) and method (description/image, dream poetics) as a viewer. A century later, in her film Le Camion, Duras to some extent reverses this method and addresses the viewer as a reader. The eye is called upon as an instrument of reading and of the imagination to enable a completely different kind of vision. The vehicle for this new optics is literature, since Duras calibrates large parts of the film as artful discourse. In Le Camion the reading of the film is staged in a very concrete way: the viewer sees and hears two protagonists as they read a text that they have as typescript in front of them. The text takes the form of a dialogue, and the author Duras and the actor Gérard Depardieu read out the parts of the two speakers with allotted roles (cf. Fig. 1). What the reading brings to the ears of the viewer of Le Camion is a conversation about a film. This ‘film in a film’ is presented exclusively via language and is therefore ‘narrated’ – the reading of Duras and Depardieu serves as a projection apparatus and the imagination of the listener as a screen. In the

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book of the film Le Camion (first published in 1977), Duras names the setting of the reading in this sense as a “DARKROOM, or reading room”.18 In this way, she alludes to the technical ‘darkroom’ in which an exposed film is developed, but she also connotes the darkened auditorium of the cinema in which the finished film is screened. This shift from spoken word to optical experience is repeatedly thematised in the dialogue: M.D.: […] And then at the edge of the road a woman would have waited. She would have made a sign. One would approach her. It is a woman of a certain age, dressed in city clothes. (Pause.) Do you see? G.D.: Yes, I see.19

At this point in the film, the speaker Duras sets out a possible film scene only with words: a woman hitchhikes at the side of the road and ‘someone’ (i.  e. the gaze of the viewer or the film camera) approaches her. While Duras continues to narrate this scene, the actual film continues to show only the reading room. On the cinema screen, the viewer of Le Camion sees the two readers, of which one acknowledges that he ‘sees’ the verbally evoked scenes (“Do you see? […] Yes, I see”). Accordingly, it is solely the speaking about a possible film that brings forth the film – and fundamentally this is true in a double sense, since the read dialogue brings forth both the imagined film and the actual film Le Camion, which consists in large parts of sequences filmed in the reading room. In this oral variant, literature once again demonstrates its optical competence. However, the verbal evocation of the film takes place in a curious grammatical form, the French conditionnel passé (conditional perfect): “une femme aurait 18 Duras (2014, 268): “CHAMBRE NOIRE, ou chambre de lecture”. The stage directions are in italics in the film book and therefore clearly marked. On the ‘reading room’ it is said (Duras 2014, 268): “À l’exception du ‘off’, tout le film se déroule dans ce lieu” (“With the exception of the ‘off’ the whole film takes place in this place”). In this way, the central function of reading for the film is clearly named. Cf. also Duras’s (2014, 308) statement in the interview with Michelle Port: “Une lecture vue, une première lecture vue, feuillets à la main, c’est autant du cinéma – sinon d’avantage – que le jeu du contentu de cette lecture ou sa représentation” (“A reading seen, a first reading seen, the sheets in the hand, is as much cinema – if not more – as the acting out of the content of this reading or its representation”). 19 Duras (2014, 268): “M.D.: […] / Et puis, au bord de la route une femme aurait attendu. Elle aurait fait signe.  / On se serait approché d’elle.  / C’est une femme d’un certain âge. Habillée comme à la ville. / (Temps.) / Vous voyez ? / G.D.: / Oui. Je vois”.



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Fig. 1: Screenshot from Duras (2012, 29 mins)

attendu” (“a woman would have waited”).20 In French, the use of the conditional perfect indicates a possibility and therefore something to be situated between fact and fiction. This manner of presentation is programmatic for the narrated film in Le Camion. That is shown by the very first sentences in the reading room, which point to the uncertain ontological status of the film in the film: G.D.: Is it a film? M.D.: It would have been a film. (Pause.) Yes, it’s a film.21

The unusual grammatical form of the conditional perfect (“It would have been a film” / “Ç’aurait été un film”) and the aporetic shift from the conditional (“aurait

20 In Porte’s interview with Duras (2014, 309) both designate the grammatical form frequently used in the film as the futur antérieur – this is not quite correct. The quoted sentence would then have to be “une femme aura attendu”. The equation may be due to the use of the conditionnel in indirect speech, since here the temporal aspect can predominate and the conditionnel then approximates the temporal function of the future. On the remarks of Porte and Duras as well as the uses of the conditionnel passé in Le Camion, cf. Hanania (2007). 21 Duras (2014, 268): “G.D.: / C’est un film? / M.D.: / Ç’aurait été un film. / (Temps.) / C’est un film, oui”.

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été”) to the indicative (“est”) and from past to the present characterise this utterance. The conditional here has both a modal and temporal significance: the film in the film belongs to a past future horizon; it is a possibility of the past. The sentence “It would have been a film” therefore oscillates between two temporal levels (past and future) and two moods (indicative and subjunctive), but this double ambivalence is then immediately replaced by an actually excluded third possibility, the assertion of its presence in the present: “it’s a film”. Both declaratives are in a logical sense disjunctive, but their sequence functions in a performative sense, since the speakers subsequently begin with the visualisation of the (im)possible film: a hitchhiker climbs into a passing truck, where she begins a monologue about class struggle and the end of utopias. The narration alternates between the conditional perfect and an occasional indicative, which is used for the direct speech of the hitchhiker. Accordingly, the French conditional perfect has a threshold function in Le Camion. This is also shown by a quotation from a grammar textbook (Grevisse 1969) that the author/director Duras places at the front of the film book as an epigraph: Traditionally, the conditional has been considered a mood. One can suppose that it is in reality a tense (a hypothetical future) of the indicative mood. Strictly speaking, the conditional expresses a possible or irreal event whose realization is considered as a consequence of a supposed event or of a condition. […] [It is also used] to indicate a simple imagination transporting in a certain way the events into the field of fiction (especially the preludic conditional used by children in their play arrangements).22

The grammatical form of the conditional transports the children’s suggestions for the imminent game, and in this way creates a link to the fiction of the game (which can then take place in the indicative). Analogously, Duras uses the shift from the conditional to the indicative quoted above to indicate the beginning of

22 Duras (2014, 265): “C’est par tradition que l’on considère le conditionnel comme un mode. On peut estimer qu’il est en réalité un temps (un futur hypothétique) du mode indicatif. / Le conditionnel proprement dit exprime un fait éventuel ou irréel dont la réalisation est regardée comme la conséquence d’un fait supposé, d’une condition. […] / [Il est employé aussi] pour indiquer une simple imagination transportant en quelque sorte les événements dans le champ de la fiction (en particulier, un conditionnel préludique employé par les enfants dans leurs propositions de jeu)”. Here, Duras quotes Grevisse only in an extract and omits the further examples of the use of the conditional. As a result the quoted passage is open to misunderstanding, since children’s games activate primarily the modal (and less the temporal) aspect. The conditional announces the fiction of the game.



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the filmic imagination. Hanania (2007) has interpreted the Grevisse quotation in the film book and the use of the conditionnel passé in Duras’s film as a marking of the fiction to come. For Hanania, the author, through the reference to children’s games, foregrounds the modal aspect of the conditional (the irrealis) that is explicit in the language gesture of the children, since children’s games are the embodiment of fiction. Hanania reads the Grevisse quotation as a statement concerning the narrative method in the film Le Camion, according to which, the conditionnel passé of the written and spoken speech establishes an access to the imagination of the viewer that is superior to the film image precisely because it indicates the irrealis.23 In the way in which children introduce their games (for instance, “On dirait que tu es un policier” / “Let’s say you’re a policeman”), there is still an awareness that the following involves the assertion of a world. The introductory formula marks the threshold to a fiction, and it contains in addition directions on how this is to be crossed, as it already structures what follows. The setting of the reading room fulfils a similar regulation: here, the author/director (Duras) and the actor (Depardieu) appear in their formal function for the film: both appear neither as themselves nor as fictional characters, but move in an in-between that is staked out through the reading of the text. As allegory of their function for the medium film and as mediating figures, they belong to the frame of the fiction and at the same time to its content.24 They represent the projection apparatus (author, director, actor), but they also instruct the viewer in the imaginative transgression of the technique to the extent that they ‘see’ the read film: the woman standing at the side of the road; the truck that stops to pick her up; the driver’s cab with the two so dissimilar characters, the taciturn truck driver and the woman in city dress whose class affiliation is uncertain; the construction sites, supermarkets, and industrial buildings that drift past the windows; the road stretching out in front of them that gives their accidental and temporary community a direction; the woman’s speech and her silence; how she occasionally closes her eyes and sings; and finally the stopping of the truck, how the woman climbs out and is left behind.

23 Cf. Hanania (2007, 120): “Par sa distance au réel, il est la voie priviligée de l’imaginaire” (“Because of its distance to reality, it is the privileged way for the imaginary.”). 24 The mediating figure, like the Rückenfigur (figure seen from the back), belongs to the inventory of forms in painting that draw the viewer into the scene of the painting through the identification with the gaze of these marginal figures, or which can open up the depth of the picture. Accordingly, the role of this figure is to direct the gaze, and traditionally to support the immersion in the picture. See, for example, Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Chalk Cliffs on Rügen (1818).

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For both readers, the conditional film becomes the actual film, and the grammatical form is used in Duras accordingly as a fiction-marker and as a fiction-maker. Nevertheless, the language gesture cannot be reduced to this operation, since there is a clear difference to a children’s game. In the reading room of Le Camion, it is the French conditional perfect that is used and not the present conditional that children use in their play arrangements. The author/director and the actor speak in a grammatical form that belongs above all to written language. This binding of the spoken to the written is further enforced by the staging, since they both read from clearly visible typescripts, and Depardieu reads the text for the first time. Furthermore, Duras makes use of the conditionnel passé not only at the beginning of the film-imagination, but rather alternates repeatedly between the conditional perfect and the present indicative (in the speech of the hitchhiker). In this way, the viewer is made constantly aware of the transition between ‘apparatus’ and ‘fiction’, and the composition gives rise to a multiple undecidability: between past and present, between possible and real, and between projection apparatus and evocation. This undecidability ultimately takes hold of the question of who is speaking, since the speech of the two readers shows elements of direct speech (the ‘quoted’ speech of the hitchhiker) and indirect speech (through the non-identification of the two speakers with the figure of the hitchhiker). Something arises between the speakers and their utterances, and likewise between writing and oral speech, as well as between image and sound. Deleuze, in his cinema books, has identified such an intrinsic splitting and doubling as a structural characteristic of the modern sound film. With ‘modern’ here he is not designating a specific period, but rather an artistic re-characterisation of the sound film. For Deleuze, directors such as Duras, Alain Resnais, JeanLuc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub/Danièle Huillet (and others) no longer deploy the noises, music, and voices on the soundtrack as an illustration of the film images. Rather, they create a non-redundancy and even an incoherence between the visual and the acoustic. In this way, the speech made ‘resistant’ in Le Camion contributes to the development of “a pure act of speech or music” independent of the image (Deleuze 1989, 252). In addition, in Duras and other directors, the viewer is made aware of the images as an independent level through irrational cuts; the images thereby become part of a format that cannot merely be seen passively, but has to be actively read.25 The autonomous and hence ‘pure’ speech acts (as well as pure sounds and music) finally constitute an independent acoustic level of the

25 Cf. Deleuze (1989, 245): “To read is to relink instead of link; it is to turn, and turn round, instead of to follow on the right side: a new Analytic of the image”.



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film that Deleuze (1989, 246) calls an “autonomous sound-image” that is contrapuntally opposed to the visual image. Important for the specific character of the sound image is a narrative technique that film imports from literature: style indirect libre (free indirect discourse).26 This technique can already be found in mediaeval literature, but only with the nineteenth-century novel (with Flaubert among others) does it become a prominent stylistic device. The form refers above all to written language, and from a grammatical point of view it is equivocal (cf. Banfield 1995). Thus, free indirect discourse oscillates among other things between direct and indirect speech. Deictic references to the here and now as well as emphatic sentences resembling exclamatory speech (the experience of a character in the present tense) are linked with the narrative preterite and the third person singular or plural – they refer to a narrative voice that is precisely not identical with the internal perspective of the character. In the narrative technique of the style indirect libre, the speech of the characters (that is, their thoughts, feelings, and exclamatory remarks) is therefore neither quoted as direct speech nor reported as indirect speech. This literary form produces utterances that can no longer be clearly attributed, and in this way founds a new dimension of narrative.27 In the literature of the nineteenth century, this narrative technique operated entirely as a means of immersion by drawing the reader into the written fiction. With the application to sound film and in connection with the specific character of the sound image, however, free indirect discourse becomes a resistant element. The viewer becomes engaged in the film, but is also motivated to an independent relinking of the images and speech, and, in Duras, even to an “unlimited reading” (Deleuze 1989, 258). Instead of a hallucinogenic experience, the modern artistic sound film prompts an audio-visual reading, and to some extent a reinvention of film. With free indirect discourse, literature provides the medium of film with the method for this, and thus literature trains the film recipients in a new optics, which as “a kind of clairvoyance” aims at the limits of vision (Deleuze 1989, 260).28

26 Central for this translation from literature is the author and director Pier Paolo Pasolini (cf. Deleuze 1997, 71–76). 27 For a definition, cf. Deleuze (1989, 324, note 34): “We have defined free indirect discourse as an enunciation forming part of an utterance which depends on a different subject of enunciation”. On the independent dimension that is also opened up in film through this form of speech, cf. Deleuze (1989, 242). 28 According to Deleuze, seeing and speaking assume in this modern artistic constellation a new sense, which can also be made useful for a critique (of the medium, of knowledge, of society, and of reality). Crucial for this expanded optics is, however, the separation of image and sound,

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Duras belongs to the film authors who have developed free indirect discourse in film, and her film Le Camion deploys all the variants of this stylistic device named by Deleuze. Thus, the uncertain relation between direct and indirect discourse in Duras is realised as a resistance of the film to a text (the film in the film is read from a typescript); no ‘character’ in the film is identical with his or her speech (author/director and actor only read out their speeches and the speech of the hitchhiker too; thus, the film in the film is only presented as mediated); and the sound image is organised fundamentally in resistance to the visual images. Duras’s film develops this difference not only in the reading room but also as a difference between images: the static interior sequences are repeatedly interrupted by exterior shots showing a truck travelling through the department of Yvelines. The latter images respond quite literally to the title of the film Le Camion, but they do not illustrate the narrated film about the journey of the hitchhiker in the truck. In the exterior sequences, the camera always remains outside the truck and only shows the truck’s journey through Yvelines. One sees the industrial zone of Trappes, the vast housing projects for the immigrant workers at the car plants in Plaisir, and the numerous construction sites of the new town Saint-Quentin-enYvelines.29 The images of the travelling truck operate in a quasi-documentary way, and apparently only stand for themselves. The fictional truck on the other hand is inconsistently located and removed from a concrete geography. According to the speech of Duras in the reading room, it could be under way in the new towns of Yvelines, but also in Beauce and toward Chartres. In addition, it is said that the truck travels along the seacoast (which is almost 200 km from Yvelines or Chartres).30 As a result of this inconsistency, the film Le Camion clearly distinguishes between the visual image (the filmed and clearly located truck) and the sound image (the speech of both readers about the conditional truck in its indeterminate surroundings). At the same time, however, in the references of the speech of the hitchhiker to the filmed landscape mentioned above, the film also establishes a correspondence: the fictional truck comments on the concrete truck

resulting in a new correspondence between sound image and visual image. On Duras and the “seeing voices”, cf. Deleuze (1989, 260): “What speech utters is also the invisible that sight sees only through clairvoyance; and what sight sees is the unutterable uttered by speech”. 29 In the 1960s, France began building new towns, so-called villes nouvelles, to counter the housing shortage in the cities. Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines was begun in 1970 and quickly grew to be one of the larger associations of communes (today the region comprises twelve communes). 30 On the inconsistent location of the filmed or narrated events  – for example, the remarks about the fictional truck and the following description of the journey of the filmed truck – cf. Duras (2014, 269).



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and vice versa. This results in a new optics that is linked both to the reading of the conditional film and to the images of the journey through the real Yvelines. The reading of the text in the reading room and the images of the filmed truck become woven together when the voices occasionally wander into the scenes of the filmed truck in the form of a voice-over. In addition, the utterances of the fictional hitchhiker make reference to the concrete upheavals in Yvelines, which can be seen in the images of the filmed journey. Thus, she speaks (direct speech of both readers) about the swelling ground seen through the windscreen, and the reading author/director then adds her own utterance: “all revolution impossible”.31 These utterances can be read as a commentary on the landscape that the filmed truck passes through, since repeatedly in this journey the building works for the housing projects, roads and supermarkets of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines come into view. The alterations to the landscape refer to social structures (the housing shortage in the cities, the relocation of the workers to the surrounding areas and close to the large factories), and the movement of the filmed truck through the industrial zones of Yvelines further supports this connection. These filmed images provide a reference to the present that can also loosely tie the utterances of the hitchhiker back to a reality, especially when she speaks about the end of the communist utopia and a “complicity between employers and proletariat”, as well as about the ‘material fear’ of the workers.32 Through this free and indirect correspondence between visual and sound image the utterances of the fictional character are momentarily tied back to a contemporary reality. The aim of this procedure is a consciousness-expanding optics: Duras’s critique of the present is not strictly Marxist (in the sense of class struggle, as with Straub/ Huillet), but, as Deleuze (1989, 258) writes, it functions as a “creative story-telling”. And already the eponymous truck provides a direction for the reading of the film. The truck is a ‘transport’ vehicle and in this function it translates the Greek term metaphorá into a technical concept (Groddeck 1994, 249). Just as a metaphor brings together two semantic fields in a non-self-evident way and thereby expands the imagination, so too the conflicting levels in Le Camion also work at gaining a horizon of possibility. And they do this against all probability, since what is being searched for is a utopia after the end of utopias.33 The critique of

31 Duras (2014, 273): “toute révolution impossible”. This statement too is read out. For the dream-like description of the swelling ground, cf. Duras (2014, 272). 32 Duras (2014, 286): “La complicité entre le patronat et le prolétariat”. Cf. Duras (2014, 286): “L’angoisse n’est que matérielle. / L’angoisse est celle de la classe ouvrière” (“The fear is only material. / The fear is that of the working class.”). 33 Cf. Duras’s (2014, 321) remark in the interview with Porte: “Je crois à l’utopie politique […]. C’est l’utopie qui fait avancer les idées de gauche, même si elle échoue” (“I believe in political

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the present calls for figures of the ‘improper’; it calls for the means of literature to prompt a reading beyond the literal.34 In an interview with Michelle Porte, Duras herself clearly named the artistic method of Le Camion: “It takes up the great tradition of storytelling … writing as bearer of everything, writing as bearer of the image”.35 Such a hybrid undoubtedly belongs to the history of literary visuality. Duras’s Le Camion establishes literature once again as an optical art, but this time within a visual medium. Translation: Ben Carter

Bibliography Banfield, Ann. Phrases sans paroles: Théorie du récit et du style indirect libre. Paris: Seuil, 1995. Barthes, Roland. “The Reality Effect [Fr. 1968].” The Rustle of Language. Transl. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. 141–148. Blumenberg, Hans. Arbeit am Mythos. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1979. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image [Fr. 1983]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image [Fr. 1985]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Duras, Marguerite. Le Camion: Un film écrit et réalisé par Marguerite Duras [1977]. DVD. Paris: Benoît Jacob Vidéo, 2012. Duras, Marguerite. “Le Camion; suivi de Entretien avec Michelle Port [1977].” Œuvres complètes, Vol. 3. Ed. Gilles Philippe. Paris: Gallimard, 2014. 265–336. Flaubert, Gustave. The Temptation of Saint Anthony. Transl. Lafcadio Hearn. New York: Modern Library, 2001.

utopia […]. It’s utopia that advances the ideas of the left, even when they fail.”). In the same passage, Duras links the end of the communist utopia with the violent suppression of the so-called Prague Spring in the summer of 1968 after the invasion by troops of the Warsaw Pact. 34 On the anthropological necessity of being able to produce or read metaphors, and hence all kinds of transfer, cf. Blumenberg (1979). Cf. in addition Deleuze’s (1989, 258) remarks on the uninhabitable and the movement of flight that characterises both the form and the content of Le Camion, and is focused in the image of the travelling truck: thus, it is a question of finding a form for “a story […] that no longer has a place (sound image) for places that no longer have a history […] (visual image)”. 35 Duras (2014, 310): “Ça rejoindrait donc la grande tradition du conte … l’écriture porteuse du tout, l’écriture porteuse d’image”.



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