The Structure of Narrative in Early Chinese Pictorial Vessels

Abstract

I N M A N Y developed pictorial traditions, narrative art is bound to the existence of a prior text and necessitates consideration in terms of that originating source. To generalize, however, and to insist that a prior text is a condition for visual narration is mistaken. Indeed, it can be argued that the existence of a prior text should be of secondary significance in the viewing of narrative representation through pictorial forms. The assumption of a verbalized antecedent shapes and even distorts the pictorial formulations as they are analyzed, assigning to as-yet unnamed images and undefined relations the certainty and the historical load of the verbalized model. In some cases that process may have some validity. In others, it derails the analytical and interpretive process. The appearance of images bound in relations of cause and effect may reveal a structural order in which is embedded an actual or implied joining of a beginning, a middle, and an end, and in which are described a gathering and intensification of relationships not known from any prior tale. Through the use of image repetition, image mirroring and image alteration, a tale may emerge that is told first and perhaps only through visual signs: a tale for which a prior text may either be unknowable or of indifferent value. When the originating fable or event cannot be known, the ordering of visual signs into narrative structures is our sole indication of narrational content. Taken together, the images function to create a text in which a rudimentary story describing action and reaction is developed. On this level of gesture and posture, groups of interacting figures demonstrate narrative structures of an immediate, recognizable character. But the stories told by these interacting figures is qualified by other means: by the use and modification of an archaic frontality, by framing or bordering, and by the larger contextual determinants inherent in the relationship between viewer and the object viewed. In these ways both the narrative structures of the known and the structural process of knowing are qualified. The emphasis is shifted from the tale told to the tale's telling. A situation is created in which the apparently simple interactions of figures slip in meaning, acquiring an unconscious rebelliousness while they elaborate a tale for which there was no name. Narration at this level also has structure, like bedrock, with its own properties and laws of cause and effect; but it is a shifting structural bed which sharply modifies the narrative structures