Christina Rossetti's Sing-Song: Three Illustrators, Three Readings of Image and Text

Abstract

Christina Rossetti's Sing-Song:Three Illustrators, Three Readings of Image and Text Isobel Armstrong (bio) How does one think about an illustrated poem? Does the illustration belong to the poem or the poem to the illustration? The etymological derivation of "illustration" is from Latin illustrare—il + lustrare—to shed light, to illuminate, to light up. The sense of illustration as a text plus drawing did not emerge until the mid-seventeenth century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The meaning of illustration is strangely equivocal: logically the text is prior to its illustration—it gives instructions to the artist—but secondary in the illustration's capacity to light up the prior text. The image is the thing we see first, the primary exponent of meaning. It makes immediate visual claims on the reader—certainly in the case of Christina Rossetti's Sing-Song—almost before the text is absorbed. The illustration appears to throw light on the poem, but the poem also "explains" the illustration; and yet it may well be an explanation that is limited, posthumously as it were, by the illustration itself. Each exercises a limit on the other. Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, the pioneering scholar of Rossetti illustration, has found a fertile language for this relation: she writes of Sing-Song's illustrations as "composites," texts with a "reciprocal" relation to each other, in dialogue, dialogical.1 I want to pursue this reciprocity by asking a further question: What does an illustration illustrate? There is no simple deictic relation between image and text. The animate world of the nursery rhyme, where animals and plants abut on the human world and where language plays with the acoustics of pun, riddle, nonsense, and the rhythms of the body, making use of nonsemantic sound and prosodic patterns of rhyme and assonance outside representation, can hardly be "translated" into the visual. Constance Hassett writes eloquently of the phonemic "delirium," for instance, of the fifth poem in Sing-Song, its "Kookoorookoo!" and "Kikirikee! kikirikee!"2 It is a world where the sensory and somatic qualities of words are ends in themselves. What sort of interrelation can there be between sheer sound and image? That is the problem for all [End Page 547] images claiming to represent language. For Jacques Rancière the image, is always problematical because the image is intrinsically cleft into two elements when it claims mimetic correspondence. While it can stand in for likeness to an original by lines and brush strokes, it is not what it images. Thus its double nature as resemblance and dissemblance means an oscillation between likeness and alterity. But language, too, is subject to this same coupling and uncoupling oscillation: signifiers are arbitrarily linked to the sound-signified, and yet they possess a "blinding" visibility for us, fused with what we think they represent, the sayable and the visible under the same rubric.3 So if language and images come together, if images claim to represent writing, a text, rather than objects in the world, that relation is bound to be complex. Some of these questions can be addressed because Sing-Song acquired not one but three illustrators—Christina Rossetti, Arthur Hughes, and Alice Boyd—and the play between them helps to show what an illustration can be. Or rather, it discloses three quite different forms of illustration, three Victorian modes of approaching image and text. Each one changes the poem in subtle ways. I call these emblematic, narratorial, and performative modes of illustration. Christina Rossetti's Sing-Song was published in 1872, with illustrations by Arthur Hughes brought into being by the facsimile wood engravings of the Dalziel Brothers.4 Rossetti herself illustrated her fair copy manuscript of Sing-Song with small figures placed above the text—she called these her "scratches."5 This makes the "meaning" of the book's illustrations complex enough, particularly as we might properly think of the Dalziel firm's unknown wood engravers, who turned a drawing into a print and were wholly responsible for mediating its end product, as more than proxy illustrators. These have recently been characterized, indeed, as "ghost writers," their critical functions recognized as an essential element of print illustration.6 I bracket the...