Barkan - Mute poetry, speaking pictures

Essays in theArts

ALSO IN THIS SERIES:

Wartime Kiss, by Alexander Nemerov

The Melancholy Art, by Michael Ann Holly

Leonard Barkan

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Princeton and Oxford

Copyright 2013 by Princeton University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barkan, Leonard.

Mute poetry, speaking pictures / Leonard Barkan.

p. cm. (Essays in the arts)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-14183-1 (alk. paper)

1. Art and literature. 2. Visual communication. 3. Written communication.

I. Title.

PN53.B38 2013

700.1dc23 2012019508

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Garamond Premier Pro with Myriad Pro
Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

It is not the disciplines which need to be exchanged, it is the objects: there is no question of applying linguistics to the picture, injecting a little semiology into art history; there is a question of eliminating the distance (the censorship) institutionally separating picture and text. Something is being born, something which will invalidate literature as much as painting (and their metalinguistic correlates, criticism and aesthetics), substituting for these old cultural divinities a generalized ergography, the text as work, the work as text.

Roland Barthes, Is Painting a Language?

Art, they say, is long and life short. But a volume like this one, whose concerns the author has nourished over many years even though he is presenting them here in relatively few pages, may turn that clich on its head: something like vita longa, libellus brevis. The long life that gave its origins to this book was lived above all in the classroom. I would not have been able to do the reading and thinking that is reflected in these pages if I hadnt spent so many years in the marvelously demanding job of instructing undergraduates and graduates, of engaging in the reciprocal act of keeping up with them and getting them to keep up with me. So, in place of the traditional salutations to my mentors and colleagues, I acknowledge here four decades of studentsmy other mentors and colleagues. More than acknowledging, I dedicate this volume to the remarkable men and women whom I have taught at the University of California, San Diego (197174), Northwestern University (197490), Washington University in St. Louis (1990), the University of Michigan (199094), New York University (19942001), Princeton University (2001 and counting), the Freie Universitt Berlin (2010) and the Johns Hopkins University (2011).

In a similarly retrospective vein, it should be mentioned that earlier versions of some of the material in this book appeared in Renaissance Quarterly, in Antiquity and its Interpreters, edited by A. Payne, A. Kuttner, and R. Smick and published by Cambridge University Press, and in The Forms of Renaissance Thought: New Essays in Literature and Culture, edited by L. Barkan, B. Cormack, and S. Keilen and published by Palgrave Macmillan.

A few signposts with which to begin our journey:

Where can we find a more violent or elaborate attitude than that of the Discobolus of Myron? Yet the critic who disapproved of the figure because it was not upright, would merely show his utter failure to understand the sculptors art, in which the very novelty and difficulty of execution is what most deserves our praise. A similar impression of grace and charm is produced by rhetorical figures, whether they be figures of thought or figures of speech. For they involve a certain departure from the straight line and have the merit of variation from the ordinary usage.

Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 2.13.810

[The story of Alexander and Roxana] is expressed so well [by Raphael] that one would be doubtful whether Raphael took it from Lucians books or Lucian from Raphaels paintings, were it not that Lucian was born some centuries earlier. But who cares?

Lodovico Dolce, Aretino

Myron, Discobolus. Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome. (Alinari/Art Resource, NY.)

Ill wager, said Sancho, that before long there wont be a tavern, an inn, a hostelry, or a barbershop where the history of our deeds isnt painted. But Id like it done by the hands of a painter better than the one who did these [of the Trojan war, on the wall of an inn in La Mancha].

You are right, Sancho, said Don Quixote, because this painter is like Orbaneja, a painter in beda, who, when asked what he was painting, would respond: Whatever comes out. And if he happened to be painting a rooster, he would write beneath it: This is a rooster, so that no one would think it was a fox. And that, it seems to me, Sancho, is how the painter or writerfor it amounts to the same thingmust be who brought out the history of this new Don Quixote: he painted or wrote whatever came out.

Cervantes, Don Quixote, part 2, chapter 71

The incapacity of dreams to express [logical relations] must lie in the nature of the psychical material out of which dreams are made. The plastic arts of painting and sculpture labour, indeed, under a similar limitation as compared with poetry, which can make use of speech.... Before painting became acquainted with the laws of expression by which it is governed, it made attempts to get over this handicap. In ancient paintings small labels were hung from the mouths of the persons represented, containing in written characters the speeches which the artist despaired of representing pictorially.... But just as the art of painting eventually found a way of expressing, by means other than the floating labels, at least the intention of the words of the personages representedaffection, threats, warnings, and so onso too there is a possible means by which dreams can take account of some of the logical relations between their dream-thoughts.

Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 4:31214

In every one of these casesand thousands of others besidesa writer summons up an artist, a text cannot explain itself without a picture, language momentarily cedes authority to image. Why should the exaggerated arc of the disk-throwers sculpted body, a property of seemingly pure visuality, be invoked to provide justification for practices of speech? What is at stake in fantasizing that the relation between a second-century writer and a sixteenth-century painter could defy the order of time itself and be freely reciprocal? How is it that the idea of spontaneous composition by accident, should seem plausible (if hardly praiseworthy) in the execution of a painting but turn into an accusation of the worst sort of amateurism when applied to literary narrative? And what precisely is the pay-off when Freud characterizes dreams as visual artifacts (the equation is more explicit in