Introduction: Literature and the Arts: A French Perspective on Visual Poetics, Language, and Artistic Representation

Abstract

The fact that a spatial work of art doesn't speak can be interpreted in two ways. On one hand, there is idea of its absolute mutism, idea that it is completely foreign or heterogeneous to words. . . . But on other . . . we can always receive them, them, or interpret them as potential discourse. That is to say, these silent words are in fact already talkative, full of virtual discourses. (Jacques Derrida, in Peter Brunette and David Wills, eds. Deconstruction and Visual Arts)Much has been written on state of visual poetics and word-image relations and a certain malaise has developed as to \vhere art history and literary criticism are now heading. To be sure, theory, as it was called in 1980s, has had a profound influence on studies of iconotexts, ekphrasis and intertextuality. Structuralists and poststructuralist theoreticians-from Barthes and Kristeva, to Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida-have all, within their respective fields, expanded Horace's original concept of ut pictum poesis, which in art criticism, history, and literature meant correspondences of arts or the sister arts or even the mutual illumination of arts. Roland Barthes, for instance, taught world that everything from painting to objects, to practices, and to people, can be studied as texts. Barthes and Kristeva in his wake, made us see what semiology can do for understanding of cultures and social practices and their expression in images. Foucault, who treated any continuity with suspicion, opened our eyes to social production of meaning and its inscription through power while Lacanian psycho-analysis demonstrated how human subject is formed in play of gender difference. Finally, Jacques Derrida's statement that il n'y a pas de hors texte confirmed that there was no vantage point of reference outside of language from which truth claims of language itself can be verified. Yet, attractive and challenging as their viewpoints were, these theorists often faced cruel and unavoidable tensions between ideals of clarity and coherence that govern philosophy and inevitable shortcomings that accompany its application. As with many others, Foucault applied was often Foucault betrayed. These tensions between artists, writers, and philosophers constructed multi-level narratives of fragmented dissonances and equivocal authorship and yet resulting apparent disjunctive dialogue opened fascinating avenues of research and interests.Contributing to rapid dissemination of French theories in United States were excellent translations and collections of essays such as Norman Bryson's notable 1988 Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France which assembled works by Kristeva, Baudrillard, Marin, Foucault, and Barthes. In his collection Bryson contrasted Anglo-American approach in art history, and notably continuing perceptualist procedure as represented by E. H. Gombrich in Art and Illusion, with French insistence on sign, its social production and formation, and problems of power and control. Focusing on works from antiquity and Byzantium and on paintings by Masaccio, Raphael, Titian, Vermeer, and Manet among others, Bryson explained why classical European painting developed its particular technical features of composition, color, perspective, brushwork, and manipulation of narrative.Presently, question raised in visual poetics is whether connection has played itself out and whether interdisciplinary studies in art and literature have reached a cul-de-sac. I believe essays in this section will prove contrary. There are now new and creative ways in visual poetics; people are moving from literature to art history, from narratology to visual rhetoric, crossing interdisciplinary borders and moving beyond well-established word-image opposition. The articles are reflections on ideology, gendering, and vision, that urge us to consider images as rhetoric or encoded signs that must and can be read with tools provided by narratology and poststructural theories. …