The relatively recent field of intermediality and the study of word/image relationships necessarily raised a number of theoretical questions that must be duly addressed. Before questioning the conditions allowing for the possibility of word/image transposition, it is necessary to refer to the bases of this practice, so as to be able to build on safe grounds. The word/image relationship is a complex issue, and, ever since Leonardo’s paragone, it has been conceived in antagonistic terms, as a relationship of domination corresponding to different preoccupations: the historical point of view and the inclination to protect different fields of research, the ghost of iconoclasm, the gender-oriented vision, or the imperialist (even colonial) one. Having already proposed a more reconciled view,2 I will start with an overview of these positions, which will be brief since, despite the weight of this question, a comprehensive analysis of word/image history is beyond the scope of this study.3
The Fear of the Other: A Long History of Domination
As far as art history is concerned, the aphorism coined by Simonides, if Plutarch is to be believed, implies that painting is an instance of mute poetry, while poetry is a speaking painting: pictura loquens, poesis tacens (“painting is a silent poem, poetry a verbal painting”). This aphorism is in itself a manifest example of dissymmetry.4 Indeed, not only is poetry endowed with the qualities of painting, but it is also endowed with a positive quality, that of speech. Conversely, when paralleled to poetry, painting is afflicted with a negative exponent, that of dumbness. Silence might be seen as positive in some respects, but being dumb means being deprived of the ability to speak, and, therefore, it denotes a lack, while constituting an inhibiting factor, which in this case becomes the leading argument. Following Gérard Dessons’s clear distinction between mutism, in the sense of refusing to speak, withdrawing into silence, and mutity, in other words the impossibility of speaking,5 this parallel appoints the superior position to Poetry; Language is the determining criterion, the measure of it all. And the notions of measure and the incommensurable rank first in the so-called “intersemiotic” studies (a term I will keep for the time being).
As Ernest B. Gilman notes in his paper for Poetics Today, as far as the word/image relationship—illustrated by Horace’s formula ut pictura poesis6 and Leonardo’s paragone—is concerned, the question of the former’s superiority over the latter is, in fact, an ancient topos.7 Phrases such as “the colours of rhetoric” or “the eloquence of colour”8 testify to this relation of comparability to the supposedly rival art and reiterate an old rhetoric, since Coypel, in his Parallèle de l’éloquence et de la peinture(1749), had already pinned the power of the verb against that of colour. Gilman writes an elaborate review of a whole range of theories and critical stances, amongst which that of certain art historians denouncing the domination of language and its attempts to colonise the image. Panovsky’s work, specifically his distinction between iconology and iconography, is significant in this debate where some critics advocate a strict separation between the two arts with a view to preserving their “purity,” while others tend to assimilate or at least confuse them. Between those two extremes lies a wide range of positions, the numerous nuances of which could only be accounted for by way of a gradient. The art historian blames language for ignoring a work’s pictorial mores to the benefit of the texts written about this work, which speaks of a fear of critical allegiance. A contrario, the literary critic feels totally justified when analysing not only “writings on art”9 but also literary pieces figuring painting or the image in general. In fact, as I will try to show in the second part of this book, even though the fields differ, their collaboration may be fruitful.
At the same time, the fear that the image may be subordinated to language actually speaks of an act of defence to a deeply rooted anxiety. Gilman identifies this “new iconoclasm” as “the desire to see the image as language,”10 echoing the ancient quarrel between iconoclasts and iconophiles, for the image still seems to inspire a sense of threat to our civilisation that is, nevertheless, massively dependent on it. The use of language might function as a means of dissipating this fear, by catching image in the net of words in the manner of Parmiggianino’s famous drawing11 in which Vulcan, discovering Mars and Venus amorously employed, throws a net over them while his body nevertheless betrays a strong arousal. The magical aura of images was also studied at some length by Hans Belting,12 as well as W.J.T. Mitchell who, in Picture Theory13 and in What do Pictures Want?,14 acknowledges the power of images and contends that
we are stuck with our magical premodern attitudes toward objects, especially pictures, and our task is not to overcome these attitudes but to understand them, to work through their symptomatology […] Magic portraits, masks, and mirrors, living statues, and haunted houses are everywhere in both modern and traditional literary narratives, and the aura of these imaginary images seeps into both professional and popular attitudes towards real pictures.15
The power of images also makes the title of a book by David Freedberg that begins with this staggering statement:
People are sexually aroused by pictures and sculptures; they break pictures and sculptures; they mutilate them, kiss them, cry before them, and go on journeys to them; they are calmed by them, stirred by them, and incited to revolt. They give thanks by means of them, expect to be elevated by them, and are moved to the highest levels of empathy and fear. They have always responded in these ways; they still do.16
Freedberg, therefore, chooses to draw a parallel with Mondrian’s statement that “Curves are too emotional.” Our own cult of image is supposed to have begotten what Mitchell calls “the pictorial turn,” the world seen as image (while images, in turn, make their own worlds). This long-ranging dispute dates back to religious feuds at a time when Reformation used white coating to cover frescoes and wall paintings. The first argument was the interdict linked to the doctrine of Incarnation (and transubstantiation) and the impossibility to represent the Divine.17 Furthermore, word replaced images seen as too sensual, capable of leading into temptation and distracting the praying faithful, inciting them to engage in an act redolent of idol-worshipping and, thus, constituting a major sin. This may seem far from us but, in order to appreciate the extent of such mistrust, suffice it to read Marie-José Mondzain, among others,’ work on the matter, particularly her writings on the suspicion that images—predominantly televised images—in the aftermath of 9/11 become a source of urban violence. In Can Image kill?,18 specifically, Mondzain joins the debate around the power of images by discussing instances when incarnation is confounded with incorporation.
In Western Christian thought, our relation to the image and to images is indisputably tied to our freedom as well as to all that endangers this freedom, even to the point of destroying it. It is easier to prohibit seeing than to allow thinking. Images are controlled in order to guarantee the silence of thought, and when thought has lost its rights we accuse the image of perpetuating evil under the assumption that it is uncontrolled. The violence done to the image, that is the question […] Defending the image is to resist that which eliminates the alterity of the gaze that constructs the invisibility of meaning.19
And Mondzain reminds us of the use of such phrases as “the war of images” to underline how “the violence of situations of aggression is immediately articulated in the management of the visible and the transmission of discourses.”20
For the Protestants, according to Gilman, image is on the side of the flesh and of seduction, of illusion too, with language “playing the privileged (masculine) role of agent and mediator of sacred history and imagery confined to a static and treacherous silence in league with carnality and illusion.”21 For Aron Kibedi Varga also:
Image converges with illusion, it lies. Religion generally proves hostile. Speech is of divine origin, it is good or coming after the sin, susceptible to corrections, [whereas] the image is dangerous, it seduces. The history of literature proves this. Ever since Petrarch, sensual love has originated in the gaze: « their eyes met », which is also the title of Jean Rousset’s beautiful book on the birth of love in literature.22
This is, in part, what we see in Raphaelle Peale’s painting Venus After the Bath—A Deception; what Peale reveals of Venus will remain hidden behind the image of a veil, both as illusion and simulacrum, which also points to the power of the curtain as trompe-l’œil and to the myth lying at the origin of the painting: Parrhasios’s and his triumph over Zeuxis.
In terms of gender, the image finds itself aligned with femininity, whereas the text is masculine, the former being subdued to the latter. For Wendy Steiner, “the feminine image and the masculine text have a long ideological history.”23 Of course, this division reminds one of Burke’s dichotomy between the sublime and the beautiful and of Lessing’s well-known oppositions (space/time, body/mind, silent/eloquent, beauty/sublimity, féminine/masculine, etc.) formulated in his famous Laocoön—which reveals regulated ideological oppositions based on genre and gender—and summarised by Mitchell: “Paintings, like women, are ideally silent, beautiful creatures designed for the gratification of the eye, in contrast to the sublime eloquence proper to the manly art of poetry....
