L
ILIANEL
OUVELIt is one of the tasks of literature to uncover and recover if not objects of the past, at least some moments of the past, “moments of being” in Woolf’s parlance, and to bring them to light and life and sensation again. Was not Proust trying to do so in his Recherche du temps perdu, his Remembrance of Things Past? This might find an equivalent in painting and engraving in the “Poétique des ruines” (with Hubert Robert or Piranese) and also with the deciphering of traces, prints, palimpsests and hidden secrets. Image combines with text in this process of “uncovering and recovering the past” thanks to its particular word/image “dispositif”, a term we could borrow from Agamben who recently wrote about it (after L. Marin, Lacan, and Foucault), and which we could translate as “apparatus”. Writing about Foucault, Agamben notes:
Il est clair que le terme, dans l’usage commun comme dans celui qu’en propose Foucault, semble renvoyer à un ensemble de pratiques et de mécanismes (tout uniment discursifs et non discursifs, juridiques, techniques et militaires) qui ont pour objectif de faire face à une urgence pour obtenir un effet plus ou moins immédiat. (Agamben 20) It is clear that the term, both in common usage and in the one Foucault proposes, seems to refer to a set of practises and mechanisms (all at once discursive and non-discursive, judiciary, technical and military) which aim at confronting an emergency to obtain a more or less immediate effect.
He gives a wider definition a few pages further down: “J’appelle dispositif tout ce qui a, d’une manière ou d’une autre, la capacité de capturer, d’orienter, de déterminer, d’intercepter, de modeler, de contrôler et d’assurer les gestes, les conduites, les opinions et les discours des êtres vivants.” (Agamben 31) An apparatus then is a way of constraining people, of exerting power over them. It is also a network: “le réseau qui existe entre ces relations” as Foucault, quoted by Agamben, put it (Agamben 18).
One remark: in the instance of the word/image apparatus the issue of anachronism is raised: the image is perforce dialectic for it brings together two times:
past and present. It sizzles in-between the two; there is a kind of friction, of vibration, due to their heterogeneity, their hybridity. A fruitful tension thus animates a word/image apparatus.
Word/image studies owe much to excavation. First and foremost that of the Laocoön Group which was unearthed in 1506 near the site of the Domus Aurea of the Emperor Nero, close to the vats of Trajan’s therms and so often represented by poetry, painting and engraving. William Blake surrounded it with graffitti-like words and formulas.1 We know the use Winckelman and then Lessing made of the statue, the neat separation the latter tried to draw between the arts of time and the arts of space, and the way this has stood at the core of controversies which anyway helped to clarify the debate about visual and literary arts and the word/image relation. Still, a link exists between digging, indulging in archeology, and word/image strategies as far as making sense of chaos is concerned. Image comes to the help of language to bring to view possible hidden meanings in the kind of literature which makes use of it. Let the role of museums also be recalled concerning literature and ekphrasis for, by giving direct access to works which formerly were kept in private collections, museums of art and art galleries gave rise to a great number of writings about them: poems (Browning, Keats, Auden, William Carlos Williams, Durcan), writings on art or for art or about art (Pater, Ruskin, Wilde, Diderot, Gautier, the Goncourts, Huysmans), and novels (Proust, G. Eliot, H. James, V. Woolf, Chevalier, Byatt, Banville . . .).
Three disciplinary fields which emerged practically at the same time, that is at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, i.e. psychoanalysis, art history and detective fiction drawing from the science of police detection (details, proofs, taxonomy, physiognomony and phrenology), also coincide with the building of the great London museums such as the Natural History Museum and the V&A in Kensington. A period and a museum which stand at the centre of A.S. Byatt’s encyclopedic The Children’s Book. Morelli’s, Freud’s and Doyle’s works are all intimately linked to these disciplines, which cohere with the notions of searching for significant details (semiotics) while investigating, digging, hunting. Literature, of course, found inspiration in the methods of these quests and made use of them. Carlo Ginzburg, in a famous study, analyzed the roots of what he called “an indicial paradigm”, that of traces, and he reminds his reader that human beings were first hunters, busy deciphering traces and reconstructing the shapes and movements of invisible preys thanks to prints in mud, dejecta, broken branches, feathers, hairs and smells (see Ginzburg, in particular the chapter on “Traces”). Humans learnt to make sense of, classify and record these, for their survival. Three main activities are thus linked to uncovering/recovering the past: hunting, investigating, excavating. As a consequence, recording, building up archives, and preserving objects from the past in museums are
1 The most unusual intervention in the debate is William Blake's annotated print “Laocoön”, which surrounds the image with graffiti-like commentary in several languages, written in multiple directions.
Blake presents the sculpture as a mediocre copy of a lost Israelite original, describing it as “Jehovah &
his two Sons Satan & Adam as they were copied from the Cherubim Of Solomons Temple by three Rhodians & applied to Natural Fact or History of Ilium”. [13] This reflects Blake's theory that the imitation of ancient Greek and Roman art was destructive to the creative imagination, and that Classical sculpture represented a banal naturalism in contrast to Judeo-Christian spiritual art.”
“Laocoon”, Wikipedia, accessed 30 April 2012.
reflected in the museum-as-book (Preston and Child’s Cabinet of Curiosities) and the book-as-museum (Byatt’s).2
The question we may ask then is: how can literature represent this process, how can it stage and use this excavating process when it resorts to image and blends it into a word/image apparatus? This is when the critic turns archeologist too.
Hunting, investigating and excavating or digging will help me organize this talk. The three activities of course need not be separate. They are often intertwined, although one of them is often given pride of place. Photography is one of the media best suited to this quest for the past as we shall see. It is given pride of place in this questioning and recovering operation: instantaneous, it has a direct link with the “I have been here” or Barthes’s “it has been”. It is the privileged moment of what I call
“monumental ekphrasis”, a kind of ekphrasis which aims at erecting a monument, at commemorationg a memory of what has disappeared but remains as a trace. Often that of a deeply ingrained trauma. Photography is also closely related to elegy as S.
Cheeke states, who evokes Susan Sontag’s “twilight art”, and recalls “the elegiac nature of photographic art” for “the photographic image has something to do with Death” (Cheeke). As Sontag put it: “first of all a photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a deathmask” (Sontag 154). She humorously goes as far as stating “Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross”. Which nicely ties in with Ginzburg’s theory about traces and our excavating theme. This is also what Huxley in a cycle of conferences (1880) about Darwin defined as “Zadig’s method”, as Ginzburg notes (276). Huxley thus gathered under this name the device common to history, archeology, geology, physical astronomy and paleontology: that is “the capacity to make retrospective prophecies” (Ginzburg 276). An interesting twist in time or time warp that literature will also make use of. Let me just add that Cuvier himself quoted Zadig while defining his own method of work based on animal prints and the study of jaw shapes, verterbrae forms, etc.3
I will choose four examples of a word/image apparatus offering different degrees of visible image commitment. The first one is concerned with hunting and and image lurks in its background, the second makes great use of photographs by dint of ekphrasis, the third and fourth ones combine visible images with text. We shall then have good samples of the word/image apparatus working at excavating time.
This will help us draw a kind of gradient of their possible nature and uses.
The hunting paradigm: Morelli’s detail interpretation
The obvious way for literature is to stage the hunt for ancient testimonies of former civilizations or even of pre-civilization traces. In Remarkable Creatures, Tracy Chevalier tells the story of Mary Anning’s life. At the end of the 19th century, Mary
2 Hence also the link with the mausoleum, often a reproach made to museums (also seen as mortuaries).
Museums are also close to moment and monument.
3 Ginzburg (276) quotes Cuvier, Recherches sur les ossements fossiles, vol. 1 Paris, 1834. 185.
Anning would have been termed an unremarkable creature had not she been keen on fossil hunting in her native Dorset area, with its cliffs and fossils her father used to sell to the first tourists visiting the seaside. Mary Anning’s discoveries were the ictyosaurus and the plesiosaur, the first complete pterodactyl now called a pterosaur in Great Britain and the squaloraja. Her findings are now exhibited in Kensington and in Le Museum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. Cuvier exchanged letters with her and her ictyosaurus and plesiosaur are duly registered as hers there. The importance of seeing and seeing well is enhanced in the book right from the narrator Elizabeth Philpot’s very first words: “Mary Anning leads with her eyes. Her eyes are button brown and bright, and she has a fossil hunter’s tendency always to be looking for something . . . I too glance about rather than hold a steady gaze” (Chevalier 7). The memory of a nation before its existence as such, is the object of a fossil hunter’s quest, who against all odds, looks for fossils and excavates them from the cliff sides, fighting to keep them from treasure hunters only interested in selling or exhibiting them in London for money’s sake. The book is grounded in history and the history of science and is an example of literature closely chronicling excavating processes. Mary Anning’s quest ties in with Morelli’s method, which comprises the reconstruction of a whole thanks to its parts, the overall importance of details in the attribution of a work of art, and in the identification of a lost species in Mary Anning’s case.
Ruins, vestiges, what has to be retrieved and put back in place, often but a fragment, a print or a trace. It has to be safely re-placed in a museum (for fossils, archeology, sculptures), or in the memory of a painful event. To say “it” is necessary, for “it” has to be uttered more or less, if not so, “it” will lie deeply buried and cause trauma. A.S. Byatt’s novel describes the first supper gathering the survivors in 1919, when the last rescued soldiers eventually made their way home, after the three families in the novel were cruelly deprived of their sons. The narrator analyzes the experience of repressed horror and the ensuing haunting dream-images when speech was made silent.
They sat, the survivors, quietly round the dinner table, and drank to the memory of Leon. Ghosts occupied their minds, and crowded in the shadows behind them. They all had things they could not speak of and could not free themselves from, stories they survived only by never telling them, although they woke at night, surprised by foul dreams, which returned regularly and always as a new shock. (Byatt 614)
Hence the necessity to classify objects, memories, findings too. A museum gives access to those documents, to archives. The museum-as-book and the book-as-museum displays its collections, its montages. As Roger de Piles said of painting, going to a museum is making a kind of pilgrimage, for the story it tells unfolds as one passes through its different rooms. I think here of the V&A which offers so many different routes as one chooses to go up, down, left or right, and discovers all sorts of unpredictable objects such as snuff boxes, tea spoons, jam spoons, paintings, drawings, jewels, clothes, Asian, Iranian, Indian objects, and stands bemused in front
of so many glittering well-lit glass show-cases. Bemused is an interesting expression by the way. Not musing in the museum but being bemused in a museum.
Excavating and investigating the past: Freud’s model
Freud’s method would be perfectly suited to a kind of literature which seeks to excavate the past in a more personal and hidden way, aiming at uncovering and recovering trauma, both collective and individual, recapturing the past for a character, for a reader, for a nation. The Wars, a novel by Timothy Findley, tries to make sense of a founding image which opens the book and of other allegedly material images, photographs. Robert Ross, a Canadian soldier who held a crucial role in the first World War, the war to end all wars, stands at the centre of this memorial reconstruction.
The Prologue opens onto a fantastic dreamlike image, for the reader is not given acces to where? what? who? why?, while “she” refers to a horse as we understand three lines further down. The book works as an archive, a reservoir of information as one is trying to make sense of the past as ruin, trace, palimpsest, and trauma. Right from the first section (the book is divided into chapters, themselves divided into sections) the narrator declares she/he is trying to know what happened to Robert Ross who “was consumed by fire” but “Sometime, someone will forget himself and say too much or else the corner of a picture will reveal the whole.”
(Findley 3, my emphasis) Then in the very next section the narrator declares:
You begin at the archives with photographs. . . . boxes and boxes of snapshots and portraits; maps and letters; cablegrams and clippings from the papers. All you have to do is sign them out and carry them across the room. Spread over table tops, a whole age lies in fragments underneath the lamps. The war to end all wars. All you can hear is the wristwatch on your arm. Outside it snows. The dark comes early. The archivist is gazing from her desk. She coughs. The boxes smell of yellow dust. You hold your breath. As the past moves under your fingertips, part of it crumbles. Other parts, you know you’ll never find. This is what you have. (Findley 3–4) This is a remarkable passage in terms of staging research and the work of one busy digging into archive treasures complete with the archivist’s presence. Referential illusion plays in full as we are given details about time, place, senses: smells, hearing, looking, touching, feeling. Doyle’s method of investigation will also come in handy here when details will help to find out “who has done what”.
The next section develops the uncovering of photographs kept in boxes. A date 1915 opens the section and then the reader is given the ekphrasis of several photos
“sepia and soiled” like the year “muddied like its pictures”. The tense is the present and there is an abundance of deictics mimicking the discovery of the successive pictures as the looker-on dis-covers them: “Here is the boys’ brigade”, “This is the
image of motorized portation”, “Here are families”, the deictic “Here come” opens several paragraphs.
Then something happens. April. Ypres. Six thousand dead and wounded.
The war that was meant to end by Christmas might not end till summer.
Maybe even fall. This is where the pictures alter—fill up with soldiers—
horses—wagons . . . more and more people want to be remembered.
Hundreds—thousands crowd into the frame. (Findley 5)
Pictures “alter,” i.e. they become “other”, the pictures bear the traces of memory, itself the trace of the event: everything changed with Ypres.
The text goes one step further in its attempt at mimicking the object and subject of the archive and photographs perusing, for italics erupt to describe the photograph of Robert Ross:
Robert Ross comes riding straight towards the camera. His hat has fallen off. His hands are knotted to the reins. They bleed. The horse is black and wet and falling. He leans along the horse’s neck. His eyes are blank. There is mud on his cheeks and forehead and his uniform is burning—long bright tails of flame are streaming out behind him. He leaps through memory without a sound. The archivist sighs. Her eyes are lowered above some book. . . . You lay the fiery image back in your mind and let it rest. You know it will obtrude again and again until you find its meaning—here.
(Findley 5–6) Robert is described as an infernal horseman straight out of the Apocalypse leading 100 horses to safety. Once more, the narrator anchors his/her ekphrasis in reality with a return to the archivist’s presence. Memory is recaptured thanks to images, in particular this one, representing the beginning and the end of it all: it has to be deciphered for the looker-on to find rest. Which is close to what Freud wrote about dream images: they (and their affect) only disappear once their elucidation (their being put into words) has been made in full. The narrator even mimicks the inscriptions the photographs bear at the back “You turn them over—wondering if they’ll spill—and you read on the back in the faintest ink in a feminine hand:
‘Robert’. But where? . . . Then you see him: Robert Ross.” (Findley 6) The inscriptions in italics run as: “Robert Ross and Family”, “Rowena”, “Mother and Miss Davenport”, and with more personal comments: “Here is Meg—a Patriotic Pony”, or exclamation marks: “This is Peggy Ross with Clinton Brown from Harvard!!!”
(Findley 6–7) Bold letters are also inscribed on photographs: “WHAT IS THIS?”, or the “clipping from a paper reading ‘LONGBOAT WINS THE MARATHON!’”
(Findley 8).
The transcript of the tapes of the interview of Marian Turner are also introduced by italics and numbered: Transcript of Marian Turner—1. The interview is another way of digging up the past. M. Turner keeps alluding to “what happened”, of
course without disclosing it and circling around a secret, giving it the shape of a secret that will only be revealed at the end. Something awful happened, but what? “My opinion was—he was a hero.” (Findley 10) This turns out to be controversial. The book strikes one as extraordinary for the strength of the images it evokes, the fire, the horses, the soldier, the war.
Archives like museums are repositories of the past and of salvaged documents.
Of course, history could be rewritten if different documents had been kept or found
Of course, history could be rewritten if different documents had been kept or found