Self-Representation in Byron and Turner

Abstract

In his widely noted Structuralist Poetics, which first appeared fourteen years ago, Jonathan Culler (1975) reaffirmed a traditional assumption about the difference between pictures and texts by firmly placing icons outside the domain of semiotics. Icons differ markedly from other signs, he wrote, because they represent objects by means of actual resemblance rather than arbitrary or conventional association (ibid.: 16).1 Yet recent studies of the visual arts and their relation to literature show that semiotics can substantially enhance our understanding of this relation, that we can move well beyond merely formal, atmospheric, or thematic correspondences between pictures and texts when we see how both of them use systems of signification to represent the world.2 This essay concerns the systems of signification that Byron and Turner use to represent themselves. I connect the two figures because Turner himself did so by linking passages from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage to several of his paintings during the years from 1818 to 1844. But this is not a study of influence or illustration. Turner's periodic quoting of Childe Harold has led me rather to search Turner's own work for signs of something corresponding to the self-expressive character of Byron's celebrated quest romance, and in a larger sense to ask what kinds of self-representation are possible in literature and painting. To