Painted Readers, Narrative Regress

Abstract

As with other forms of gradually satisfied desire, with reading, too, you really have to be there. Reflection isn't enough to call up the exact contours of its gratifica- tion. Let alone representation. Least of all a fixed image. Though painting may in- duce any number of desires, it cannot convey the sequence of their quenching. All it gives, borrowing from Keats, is the feel of not to feel it. That's the thing about read- ing in painting. Even while casting its spell in absentia, it withholds the duration of its pleasure. So why bother with it so often? Why doom the canvas to such recurrent frustration? Those were my launching questions, and they've led, very slowly, to my claim here: that painted reading can recruit narrative energy even while removing it from view. The few illustrations of heatedly invested reading I had space for in my book Dear Reader didn't begin closing the distance between hunch and evidence. So it was back to the drawing board—and hence to the history of easel painting—to in- vestigate a suppressed temporal momentum in the static moment of pictured reading. Or, in other words, the bracketed narrativity of painted narrative engagement. One thing struck me as particularly clear: that in the frozen dramaturgy of painting, the modest shape of the read book, to secure thematic attention—to turn the site or scene of reading into a scenario—was usually projected at a greater scale and somehow ramified across the canvas plane. That seemed at least a promising formal hook. But what would I be likely to fish out with it from the high seas or backwaters of the scholarly archive? Though cast far and wide and left dangling for hours at a time in treatise and catalogue alike, my bait was consistently ignored. So I ended up taking it myself.