Enhancement and Displacement in Turner

Abstract

I will be concerned with some relations between narrative and space, narrative and light, narrative and the Sublime, as these appear in the work of Turner. There are many senses to the word narrative, and the sense I will be mostly exploring should be stated clearly from the outset. One aspect of narrative which I will not, in fact, touch on is that of story, fable, or textual illustration. The whole category of history painting obviously depends on a close tie between painting and narrative in this familiar sense: it is the stories from classical myth, the Bible, and national history which define history painting for Reynolds and for the later Royal Academy. This dependence of the highest category of official painting on texts opens up an area for narrative analysis-as opposed to stylistic or any other kind of analysis-which of course repays our attention. The manner in which history painting represents its stories is as complex, as variable, and as central to its being as its representation of the human body, of space, light, or color. But here I will be concentrating on an aspect of narrative which is less familiar, though I think no less important: put in general terms it concerns the handling of visual information, the ways in which information is manipulated by Turner so that it comes to interact with the ways in which Turner also manipulates space, light, and the emotions of the Sublime. In Turner's work the system of space, the system of light, the system of emotional expression, and the system of information seem to be exceptionally well attuned; what happens in one directly affects what happens in another. I would not claim this integration of different registers as a criterion of value; the claim is rather that, with Turner, the different systems seem harmonically aligned, with remarkable consis-