Autorité du texte et sens de l’image: l’expulsion de l’Éden dans les transpositions iconographiques du Paradis perdu de Milton

Abstract

In the world of the book and beyond, John Milton’s Paradise Lost has inspired a very rich iconography and many translations. Within this vast corpus, our study focuses on the key section of the work, the final verses of book 12, describing the expulsion of Adam and Eve from earthly paradise, and compares several French translations and their illustrations, mostly of English origin. It is first necessary to consider the distance separating Milton’s passage from the biblical source in order to understand the interpretive choices of translators and illustrators. As many critics have remarked, the general perspective of Milton’s poem is that of a theodicy, not simply that of an Old Testament epic. The expulsion scene combines chastisement and the perspective of salvation, and translators have rendered this combination in different ways. However, in the nineteenth century, textual authority is given primacy over adaptation. Diachronic and serial analysis of the final scene as illustrated permits an understanding of the variability of textual authority in iconographic transposition. Milton’s specific rewriting of Genesis rallies to the biblical iconographic tradition and the interpretations of the Fall that it conveys. Two series in the iconographic corpus are distinguished. The first belongs to a tradition originating with Masaccio and Raphael and mostly ignoring Milton’s text, whose specificities are hardly taken into consideration. John Medina, the first illustrator of Paradise Lost, inaugurates a long sequence of images giving precedence to the iconographic over textual authority. The second works in reverse and seeks, in various ways, to integrate details of Milton’s text depending on the illustrator’s sensitivity either to the scene described or to the representation of the human couple, thus providing a visual translation of the text. From such restricted study of the illustrations of the expulsion from Eden, and their comparison with the translations, one may conclude that textual authority varies according to the context of translation, whether literary or iconographic. A conclusion may also be drawn beyond the cited example, observing a tension, presumably inherent to literary illustration practice, between textual authority and iconographic tradition, all the greater when the illustrated text pertains to a theme already fecund within the visual arts. Thus visual memory frequently takes precedence over respect for the text to be illustrated.