Между Словом и Изображением: интермедиальность в творчестве Эдварда Мунка

Abstract

The article deals with the question of primacy of verbal or visual modus of perception and representation within the long-lasting European dispute — ut pictura poesis or ut poesis pictura — as reflected in the oeuvre of the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. It discusses the basic philosophical issues related to the phenomenology of perception and covers the main features of artists’ sensorium. It analyzes some of the features of intermediality in the texts of writing artists in general and Munch in particular. The author’s own classification of the types of intermediality in Munch’s works is presented. Munch’s paintings were often accused of being too programmatic. However, interaction between the verbal and the visual media in his art is much more nuanced. The article highlights some of the key principles central to Munch’s work and determines the main types of intermediality he used: paratextual dependent relationships (visual work — explanatory title; text — illustration; graphic work — later explanatory text to it); parity, or bitextuality; interpenetration, or synthesis, of the media (The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil). The article also considers Munch’s visual-text work Alpha and Omega, an early comic book, as well as the types of mental narrative “frames” in his oeuvre as means of switching from the external to the internal point of view: the use of third person narrator, past tense, and pseudonyms. In some cases, such a frame can materialize in graphic form as a visual frame surrounding the text, as in sketches for Baudelaire’s “The Flowers of Evil”, or as an image included in the text, as in the artist’s diaries. The discovery of specific structural parallelism between the visual and verbal discourses in Munch’s art can be considered groundbreaking.