There is No Such Thing as Narrative Art

Abstract

There is No Such Thing asNarrative Art PAUL BAROLSKY What can be shown cannot be said. ?Ludwig Wittgenstein I. A xTLlthough it is commonplace to speak of the spatial arts, painting and sculpture, as narrative arts?a way of speaking which suggests the intimate relations between image and text?pictorial artists obviously do not narrate stories in the same way thatwriters do. In a certain sense, they do not narrate at all. To speak of an artist as a teller of stories is a figure of speech, since painters and sculptors do not "tell," they "show." As some critics have observed, pic torial artists imply a narrative by referring towhat has been said inwords, but surely such allusions are not the same thing as a narrative inwords. We can trace the comparison of painting and literature back to classical antiquity, to Homer who implicitly com pares his own account of the shield of Achilles to the images rendered on that great work byHephaistos. The idea of such similitude has been sustained over a period of nearly three millennia by the notion of painting as "mute poetry" or "visible speech," and it is still verymuch alive. We must al ways remember, however, that the comparison of literature and painting is imperfect, since it is based on an analogy and isnot an identity. The modern idea of the pictorial artist as storyteller nonetheless has important roots in Leon Battista Alberti's treatise, On Painting of 1435, inwhich the author, himself an artist and writer both, writes famously about painting as a historia. The word historia, which means a "story," sug ARION 18.2 FALL 20I0 50 THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS NARRATIVE ART gests something written. When Alberti says that a historia is a composition, he implicitly compares art to literature, since theword "composition" was traditionally used to describe literature.He further implicitly compares painting and liter ature when he says that in painting a historia the painter should seek the advice of poets and orators. Nevertheless, speaking of a historia as the representation of various bodies and things?human beings, animals, and other subjects or objects?he refers primarily to an image composed in space. He isnot expressly concerned here with the passage of time, which is the province of literature. Of course to examine the spatial composition of a pictorial image takes time, but we are not talking here about the time it takes to read a story, but about the time that passes within the story itself. In Renaissance art, pictorial composition, the arrangement of figures in space, often conflicts sharplywith an image's im plicit associations with the temporal character of a literary narrative. This is so because the episodes of the story that a painter or sculptor presents are not always placed in an obvi ously identifiable sequence within the space defined by the painter. The figures of a single episode or series of episodes in a "continuous narrative," so-called, are dispersed through space, above all, as a way ofmaking the spatial composition harmonious and not necessarily or primarily as a means of making the allusion to a narrative obvious. Two hundred years afterAlberti wrote about painting as a historia, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing underscored the funda mental difference between art, which is spatial, and litera ture,which is temporal, by emphasizing the intrinsic limits of both art forms. In his classic work, Laoco?n, Lessing ob jected to a spatial art that aspires to suggest the passage of time. I do not wish to take up here Lessing's argument against spatial art that aspires to be temporal. I want, in stead, to suggest that any spatial art that calls to mind a story unfolding in time must take license in some degree with the temporal narrative towhich it refers, since the pic torial artist's principal concern iswith the disposition of fig Paul Barolsky 51 ures across the picture plane or within its spatial illusion. It is important to keep inmind those cases where the chrono logical narrative is at odds with the pictorial composition, because these instances remind us of fundamental differ ences between literature and art thatwe can too easily forget or...