Fair and Varied Forms

Visual Textuality in Medieval Illustrated Manuscripts

Mary C. Olson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000082838
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Historia del arte

First published in 2003. Research in Medieval Studies continues to be fresh in these volumes in the Medieval History and Culture series which includes studies on individual works and authors or Latin and vernacular literatures, historical personailities and events, theological and philosophical issues and new critical approaches to medieval literature and culture.

chapter one

Graphic Signification

Modern text and image theory perhaps begins with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoön, published in 1766. This study of the relationship between painting and poetry remains an important work in the field.¹ As the basis for his comparison, Lessing uses specific works—the Laocoön statue, now in the Vatican, by a Greek sculptor of uncertain identity and date, and Virgil’s account of the Laocoön story in Book II of the Aeneid. His most important distinction lies in the temporal and spatial characteristics of verbal and visual art (which he takes in a fairly narrow sense, and generally refers to as poetry and painting). He writes:

I reason thus: if it is true that in its imitations painting uses completely different means or signs than does poetry, namely figures and colors in space rather than articulated sounds in time, and if these signs must indisputably bear a suitable relation to the thing signified, then signs existing in space can express only objects whose wholes or parts coexist, while signs that follow one another can express only objects whose wholes or parts are consecutive. (78)

Therefore, by Lessing’s definition, painting is suitable for depicting objects, persons, scenes, or single actions—that which exists in a single moment, from a single vantage point. Poetry is suited to the relating of consecutive actions, and not for ekphrasis, “the verbal representation of visible objects.”² Lessing believes that the representation of more than one point in time in a painting shows bad taste, and that the portrayal of a scene in poetry by consecutive descriptions of objects is tedious and ineffective. In fact, he believes that it is very difficult for a painter to show any kind of progressive action, or for a poet to describe. Therefore, Lessing believes that poets should not attempt description, because even though the eye moves over the painting in a linear fashion, it does so very rapidly, and the impression is that of a unified whole, while the verbal description takes so long that one cannot maintain continuity (86). (However, the poet can describe sounds and smells which the painter cannot depict.)

An interesting development here is that Lessing claims that the referential (motivated) nature of visible signs confines their use to expression of only those objects whose whole or parts coexist. The arbitrary (unmotivated) nature of verbal signs also allows them to represent coexisting bodies; however, the parts must be disassembled in order to be described (85–88), and the object disintegrates. The motivated for Lessing is bound to the spatial and the unmotivated to the temporal.

The problems inherent in an approach which limits the visual and verbal to the extent that Lessing does are obvious. It is hard to see how his analysis of poetry as consecutive action could apply to lyric poetry, for example. And of course a cross-cultural historic spectrum of visual and verbal practices contains works considered admirable in their own time and place which do those very things that Lessing finds abominable.³ Why, then, is Lessing still considered significant? As McCormick claims, it is because of “the principles which he demonstrated in a singularly brilliant display of style and method, and [because of] the new era in art and literature which he ushered in with the Laocoön” (xxviii). Indeed, he makes an important distinction between the temporal and spatial qualities of certain genres. These characteristics of time and space which he recognized in visual and verbal representations are important considerations today in text and image studies. They are also relevant, to a certain extent, for this study, although the focus has shifted to the spatial.

Lessing’s distinctions between visual and verbal rest on the oral nature of the verbal—the sound that exists only at a point of time and then is forever lost, remaining only and imperfectly in the memory of the hearer. Although he does not specifically address the issue, he seems to see writing as subordinate to oral language, and therefore in the category of the temporal. Ironically, while his study encompasses both the form and meaning of visual art, he considers only the meaning of verbal art. The sound of poetry has certainly been an important consideration for poets of many, if not all times and places, including Lessing’s.⁴ A study of imitative sounds and meters in writing reveals that verbal media (especially poetry) have a great deal more referentiality in common with the visual arts than Lessing admits.

Jacques Derrida, in Of Grammatology, seeks to call attention to the very split which Lessing ignores. He challenges the view of verbal representation which relegates writing to a derivative status. He quotes Rousseau’s definition of writing as a “supplement to the spoken word.” Writing, claims Derrida,

… no longer indicating a particular, derivative, auxiliary form of language in general (whether understood as communication, relation, expression, signification, constitution of meaning or thought, etc.), no longer designating the exterior surface, the insubstantial double of a major signifier, the signifier of the signifier—is beginning to go beyond the extension of language. In all senses of the word, writing thus comprehends language. Not that the word “writing” has ceased to designate the signifier of the signifier, but it appears, strange as it may seem, that “signifier of the signifier” no longer defines accidental doubling and fallen secondarity. “Signifier of the signifier” describes on the contrary the movement of language: in its origin, to be sure, but one can already suspect that an origin whose structure can be expressed as “signifier of the signifier” conceals and erases itself in its own production. There the signified always already functions as a signifier. The secondarity that it seemed possible to ascribe to writing alone affects all signifieds in general, affects them always already, the moment they enter the game. (7)

Derrida thus expands the definition of writing. He does not reverse the speech/writing hierarchy, but denies any hierarchy of signifiers. Writing in the narrow sense and speech are aspects of the same system:

For some time now … one says “language” for action, movement, thought, reflection, consciousness, unconsciousness, experience, affectivity, etc. Now we tend to say “writing” for all that and more: to designate not only the physical gestures of literal pictographic or ideographic inscription, but also the totality of what makes it possible; and also, beyond the signifying face, the signified face itself. And thus we say “writing” for all that gives rise to an inscription in general, whether it is literal or not and even if what it distributes in space is alien to the order of the voice: cinematography, choreography, of course, but also pictorial, musical, sculptural “writing.” (9)

Derrida thus places himself in opposition to traditional ways of understanding the nature of writing. He sees the precedence of spoken language (phonocentrism) as the basis for the linearity of Western metaphysics, a concept which “merges with the historical determination of the meaning of being in general as presence” (12). Such phonocentric thinking historically has privileged alphabetic systems, denying to pictographic system even the name of writing. Derrida quotes Saussure’s statement from A Course in General Linguistics that there is “no writing as long as graphism keeps a relationship of natural figuration…” (Quoted in Derrida 32).

Linguists who espouse the hierarchical model, of whom John de Francis is representative, have claimed that writing in the “full” sense of the word depends on a phonetic correspondence to spoken language. In Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems, DeFrancis examines several pictographic documents: a Yukaghir (Siberian) “love letter,” and several examples of Native American picture writing. The love letter, an often cited example, is not, he claims, writing at all, but “nothing more than the semiritualized product of … Yukaghir party games” (932). The Native American texts he dismisses as (1) having a mnemonic function—as a supplementary memory aid for events already committed to memory (35), and (2) having a “preconcerted” nature (40), whereby the meaning of symbols has been agreed upon beforehand. DeFrancis’s reasons here seem to be based partly on the fact that he himself (and others outside of the culture of origin) could not decipher the content of the messages. He does not explain why the presence of a pre-arranged code might not be seen as an indication of a writing system rather than otherwise. In any case, he calls these types of communication “Partial/Limited/Pseudo or Non-writing” (42) They are writing systems that never quite made it. The one step that they lack, according to DeFrancis, is the phonetic connection. Writing, in his scheme, undergoes an evolutionary process where pictographs and ideographs are lower on the scale than syllabic systems, which in turn are lower than alphabetic systems. DeFrancis points out that even hieroglyphic writing has a phonetic element which allows it the status of full writing. However, as Derrida demonstrates, there is no writing system that is purely phonetic:

Phonetic writing does not exist; no practice is ever totally faithful to its principle. Even before speaking … of a radical and a priori necessary infidelity, one can already mark its massive phenomena in mathematical script or in punctuation, in spacing in general, which it is difficult to consider as simple accessories of writing. (39)⁵

DeFrancis’s privileging of the alphabetical system is ethno-centric, as is (it follows) the separation of writing and image. Chinese painting, for example is so closely allied to writing, that artists speak of writing a painting. In fact, in many Chinese painting styles, techniques are derived from the techniques of calligraphy (Yee 206). Lessing’s neglect of the form of poetry would be unthinkable for the Chinese who say that language has three elements—thought, sound, and form. There is such reverence for the form of writing in Chinese culture, that people do not tear up or throw away paper that has writing on it. Instead it is burned in a little pagoda built especially for the purpose (Yee 5). In the West, Elizabeth Hill Boone, in the introduction to Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes, points out that art and writing in pre-Columbian America are identical. The Nahuatl word for “to write,” tlacuiloliztli, is also the word for “to paint” (3). Boone calls upon Derrida’s theories of grammatology to refute the ideas of writing historians, especially those of DeFrancis. She writes:

What is most alarming about these statements and views is that they are based on harmfully narrow views of what are thought and knowledge and what constitutes the expression of these thoughts and this knowledge, and they summarily dismiss the indigenous Western Hemisphere. It is time that we realize that such views are part of a European/Mediterranean bias that has shaped countless conceptions—such as “civilization,” “art,” and the “city”—that were defined according to Old World standards and therefore excluded the non-Western and non-Asian cultures. An expanded epistemological view would, and should, allow all notational systems to be encompassed. If the indigenous American phenomena are to be considered objectively, a broader view is required. (9)

Boone agrees that some writing systems followed a process of development from pictographic to abstract to phonetic systems. However, she points out that this evolutionary model does not fit all systems. Some other systems, including Aztec and Mixtec, seem to have developed from earlier abstract forms to more the pictorial ones of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (13).

Boone points to mathematical and musical notations as examples of non-verbal writing systems (9), and diagrams and models which portray spatial relationships more economically than verbal writing (10). The identification of different forms of writing with varying spatial and temporal applicability has something in common with Lessing’s distinction between spatial and temporal modes; but because the designation of pictorial systems as “writing” has blurred the boundaries and foregrounded the distinction between speech and writing, the territory looks very different. Writing has shifted its center of gravity from aural to graphic. Written word and picture are no longer polarized but reveal themselves as aspects of the same mode of expression.

An examination of Aztec and Mixtec writing systems reveals that not only can their texts use both spatial and linear modes of expression, but some texts utilize both types in the same textual space. Boone describes three modes of structuring stories in Late Post-classic Mexico. Mixtec texts are event-oriented (she calls them res gestae). In these, individual elements are oriented to the “intersection of event and participant” (54). A series of pictures shows events involving a person or persons; the time and place change. Aztec writing is of two types. The first, cartographic histories, are primarily spatial. Events are placed in relation to the geographic whole,

“each part is framed spatially by everything else” (55). Lines of footprints show movement from place to place, blue disks indicate years. The year-count annals, however, are primarily temporal or linear. They consist of year blocks in sequence (Figure 1.1). Each block contains the year name and number, while significant events are shown outside the block, connected to it by a line. The location of events is assumed unless a place sign is present. These documents all contain temporal and spatial elements, yet their form allows shifts from one mode to another. They are both writing and drawing, made of motivated signs.

Figure 1.1 Aztec Annals, Codex Mexicanus

Dana Leibsohn, also in Writing Without Words, shows how Nahuatl car...