Between iconophilia and iconophobia: Anita Brookner’s museum of words

Abstract

Contemporary British writer Anita Brookner was for some thirty years a world-renowned art historian specializing in 18th-century French painting—she has published extensively on Watteau, Ingres, Greuze, and Fragonard, among other artists—before she became a prolific novelist. It is therefore hardly a surprise that painting should play such a prominent part in the novels that she wrote later in her life, only a few years before the end of her long professional career as an art historian. And yet, despite the wealth of pictorial images contained in her fiction, Brookner provides a somewhat unexpected and ambivalent discourse on the image, oscillating between iconophilia and iconophobia, which resonates with W.J.T. Mitchell’s analysis of the “pictorial” turn in postmodern culture. In the vast “textual art museum,” or “museum of words,” of Brookner’s fiction, the pictorial image serves a function which is primarily didactic, metaphorical, and allegorical. Brookner’s use of the image strictly in absentia, through nothing but words, as well as her allusions only to actual paintings by the Great Masters of Western art, convey to her novels an erudite and didactic dimension while strongly anchoring her fiction in the real world. The narrative voice, which keeps referring to pictorial images or providing ekphrases of them in absentia, uses them to teach the reader about the history of Western Art while emphasizing the essential role of images as both guides and obstacles in the characters’ quest for knowledge and self-improvement. The protagonists’ “epistemic gaze” scrutinizing the image for clues and answers of an existential, ontological nature is thus met by the “scopophilic gaze” of images which gradually reveal themselves as powerful, hostile predators ultimately threatening the integrity of the self. What emerges from such an interaction is that the aesthetic vision of the world, or “aesthetics of existence,” that seems to prevail in Brookner’s novels through the characters’ infatuation with the visual relies in fact on an ideological mystification whereby the apparent ennobling of art masks instead a veritable condemnation of art as self-absorbed, subversive, and ultimately destructive. Behind Brookner’s visible marks of a fervent love of pictorial images lies in reality a rather pronounced distrust and fear of the image, which, although originally used as a heuristic tool in the quest for identity, turns out to be fundamentally instable, opaque, and blank, its meaning forever deferred through anamorphic variations emphasizing deceit and elusiveness. The visual iconophilia of Brookner the art historian is thus gradually counterbalanced by the textual iconophobia of Brookner the novelist, thereby reflecting similar, ambivalent reactions aroused by, or inherent in, the “pictorial turn” in postmodern culture.