Paintings in the house of fiction: the example of Hawthorne

Abstract

Abstract From Washington Irving's Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon to Henry James's Portrait of a Lady and all the way to Bernard Malamud's Pictures of Fidelman; An Exhibition, titles and themes of American fiction reflect a quite remarkable and sustained concern with literary pictorialism. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, this concern appeared to be little more than a time-ridden stereotypical attitude, like Irving's narrator complacently imitating the fashion of contemporary (presumably European) tourists ‘to travel pencil in hand, and bring home their portfolios filled with sketches’.1 By the time James wrote The Ambassadors, however, the pictorial approach had become part of his narrative technique; the famous shift from an idealized romantic landscape to an early impressionist tableau in the account of Strether's foray to the outskirts of Paris in the eleventh book of that novel2 is just one of the more spectacular instances that have caused scholars to speculate about James's conscious or unconscious interposition of actual paintings between the text and fictional reality.3 And the deployment of pictorial strategies in American fiction reached yet another climax in the passage at the beginning of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, where the rambling, almost disembodied voice of the spinster Rosa Goldfield, re-calling the cataclysmic creation of Colonel Sutpen's mansion in the wilderness, casts up in Quentin Compson's sensitive imagination a heap of broken pictures, representing frozen figures superimposed upon a landscape.4