Introduction: On literary images

A literary image implies a link between writing, seeing and image making. An image can be a picture and it also can be made of words. Yet a literary image is an ambiguous notion. Some may object to an image that needs language, just as some may reject imagistic language. Should not words refer to words and images to images? Would an image lose its specificity by aligning itself with another practice, like that vast continent called literature? And would literature be in danger of losing its seriousness when put in contact with images? Are images for people who cannot read, as a Renaissance Pope once suggested, and are words the refuge of those with no visual sense?

We may talk, disparagingly, of a text that contains too many images, allegories or metaphors. We may get impatient with images that refer to a text that precedes them. Is the image a mere illustration of a text, and is the text a reductive commentary on the image? Some linguists may argue that an image is rather too simple, inarticulate perhaps, compared with language. Some critics might assert that language is a weak instrument compared with the wealth of meaning contained in a single image. Paradoxically, the defenders of the image as image need to be fluent and articulate to argue for the polysemy and primacy of the image over the text: the visual needs language to assert itself. Inversely, as in Plato's Republic or in the Sophist, the philosopher who tracks down the lure of the mimetic image needs to refer to images as examples. These examples, these images made of words permeate the linguistic domain of philosophy. Language constructs images as much as images are always immersed in language, from its caption or title to its commentary, even and especially if the commentary advocates silence and contemplation.

What is the common ground between the practice of literature and that of photography? It is well known that the most influential texts of theory and criticism of photography come from the domain of literature. Baudelaire's attack on photography is an attack on Realism, a literary genre he scorns. Benjamin, however, gives an appreciation of Baudelairian motifs, such as the flâneur, that relates closely to an urban photographic activity. Sontag's ambivalence about photography is the response of a literary critic. Barthes, whose experience is grounded in literature and literary theory, is perhaps the most eloquent and sensitive analyst of the photograph as text, and of seeing as a practice of reading.

For Alain Robbe-Grillet, photographic representations of objects and situations may become models for a new literature, where words cease to disappear as mere transparent meanings, and instead take on the properties of a photographic image, a stubborn concreteness which is not consumed by signification:

[E]verything occurs in fact as if the conventions of photography (its two dimensionality, black and white, framing, scale differences between objects) contribute to freeing us from our own conventions. The somehow unusual aspect of this reproduced world reveals to us, at the same time, the unusual character of the world that surrounds us. (19)

The strangeness of the reproduced world points to the materiality of the photographic image, which becomes a template for the materiality of language.

The materiality of language, its literariness, was already at the core of Ostrananie, the term Victor Shklovsky proposes for a form of writing found in Tolstoy and Sterne; it makes us see things that are otherwise overlooked, producing a defamiliarisation of language. Words cease to be transparent to meaning and acquire a certain opacity. This is equally true of a “literary photograph”: the image maintains a certain opacity and refuses transparency. The literary text and the photographic text have in common this suspicion of transparency and use value of signs.

Writing begins, Blanchot tells us, when I have nothing to say, when communication comes to an end. Yet photography is generally thought to be a medium of communication that serves a purpose. Would Blanchot's approach imply that photography begins when I have nothing to say, or, more troublesomely, when I have nothing to see or even to show. Nothing and something; negative and positive. These terms also belong the photographic process and discourse.

The literary theorist George Poulet describes literature as “an entirely imaginary world. It is the very end result of an act through which the writer, by transmuting objects into thought, has dissolved everything that is not the latter. What remains is thought”. Would this be true of a photographic image? Is not the photograph bound to the world and not to thought? Is the photograph inexorably dependent upon the object it wishes to represent? For Dali, language and image are hopelessly and endlessly intertwined. He calls photography a “pure creation of the mind”, plagiarising le Corbusier's famous dictum, “Architecture, pure creation of the mind”. The mechanical aspect of the camera enables us to be more spiritual, as the “hands cease to intervene” apart from “the lukewarm pressure of fingertips” (Dali 12) on the shutter: knowing how to look constitutes a new form of invention in itself.

Images and words are material. They are material for thought in as much as they are material practices. The vexed relation between words and things is particularly well articulated in Swift's Gulliver's Travels. We can read that the scholars of Laputa work on a project “to shorten Discourse by cutting Polysyllables into one, and leaving out Verbs and Participles, because in reality all things imaginable are but Nouns”. A second project is to devise a “scheme for abolishing all words whatsoever”:

An expedient was therefore offered that since Words are only Names for Things, it would be more convenient for all Men to carry about them such Things as were necessary to express the particular Business they are to discourse on. (Swift 172)

For the scholars of Laputa, the division between words and things is also a division between man and woman. We have here a society where the opposition between the sexes mirrors a dichotomy between speaking and showing, between sound and silence. For the men of Laputa, showing things instead of speaking about them is akin to combating the argumentative tendencies of women. The silencing of words is also an attempt to silence women. Yet the attempt to save patriarchy shows rather that speaking by showing is doomed from the start, of course. Expressing oneself by the way of things has “only this Inconvenience attending it: that if a Man's Business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged in Proportion to carry a greater Bundle of Things upon his Back”. And Gulliver observes: “I have often beheld two of those Sages almost sinking under the Weight of their Packs, like Peddlers among us” (172).

The men of Laputa are radically anti-Saussurian. For them, words do not refer to a system but to things only. The extreme consequence of this nominalism can be felt: if language gives names to things, they prefer things to communicate with one another, “like Peddlars among us”. Pointing at things is their form of enunciation. Pointing is an indexical gesture that relies on a contingency with things. This brings the men of Laputa close to the idea of photography. Life in Laputa would have been easier if its inhabitants had used a camera to show each other pictures of the things they would otherwise have to carry. Inversely, is not photography strongly Laputian? In order to make a picture of something I need that thing, unlike language which can dispense with things altogether, where words refer to things in their absence, and, more importantly, where words relate to other words.

The convergence between image and language is at the core of Calvino's short story, “The Adventure of a Photographer”. This fiction is perhaps one of the best introductions to photographic theory and practice. Antonino, its tragi-comic hero, develops an obsession with talking and taking photographs, boring all his friends in the process. He practises every classical photographic genre, moving from the snapshot to the posed portrait to the nude to the still life. Each genre is analysed quickly and rejected so that he can move on to another genre. He devours photography with theory and practice until all he can do is to take photographs of photographs from newspapers, therefore proposing a proper meta-language of photography. “The Adventure of a Photographer” is often cited as a postmodern fable, in which everything is a copy of a copy. Yet Antonino is closer to two of Flaubert's characters, Bouvard and Pécuchet, two clerks with a thirst for knowledge, who put theory into practice with disastrous consequences, because all they can do is copy examples.

Flaubert is a key writer in any discussion of photography and literature. Walker Evans claimed Flaubert's method his own, and recently Jacques Rancière has developed his notion of a pensive image in relation to this photographer and this writer:

Walker Evans’ viewpoint on the peculiar aesthetic arrangement of domestic objects in an Alabama kitchen might in fact remind us of the one Flaubert attributes to Charles Bovary when, on the chipped walls of old Rouault's farm, he comes across the head of Minerva drawn by Emma as a schoolgirl for his father. But above all, in the photographic image of the Alabama kitchen, as in the literary description of the Normandy kitchen, there is the same relationship between the subject's aesthetic quality and art's labour of impersonalisation.... What both Flaubert and Evans do is not an artistic addition to the banal. On the contrary, it is a deletion: what the banal acquires in them is a certain indifference. The neutrality of the sentence or the framing causes the proprieties of social identification to waver. It thus derives from art's effort to make itself invisible. p.118

Pensiveness for Rancière is produced by differing modes of representation that are intertwined: the visual and the literary; the banal as literary genre and the banal as documentary style.

Window

Yet pensiveness is also at the core of the first photographic images, such as those of Niepce. Here the scientific discourse is intertwined with pictorial references. Niepce's work is still within the ethos of an artful science.

Between 1816 and 1827, Nicéphore Niépce took dozens of views with a camera obscura from his attic window in Gras. True, the images were fading and he had to constantly renew the experiment until he managed to find a way of fixing them. Yet he never tired of this view from a window as subject matter. The view from the window is what Niépce calls the first photograph from Nature. There is no landscape. Instead we see diagonal lines, shadows and outlines of buildings and a horizon which gives us a vanishing point and a certain perspectival pull. The image is on a plate of shiny pewter that shows the imprint of a faint and elusive image. From Alberti onwards, we have inherited a notion that a painting or a picture is like a window, a window through which one sees the world. Gerard Wajcman reminds us that Alberti says something a bit different. He writes that a painting is an open window through which we can look at the story. Story rather than world. This is quite a different emphasis. Alberti's window opens upon a text, a narrative. It opens upon a space where the visual and the textual are intertwined. Is Niépce's window also an aperture through which one has access to a story? Is it the story of a photograph, or a story that belongs to a general story of windows? Will window telling replace story telling? A window, Wajcman reminds us, is primarily a hole in the façade of a house. It lets the light in, it lets air in. A window does not necessarily involve looking. Yet how can one not look at a window? Is not a window triggering our desire to look? The hole that is a window is not unlike a lens that lets the light into a camera. And some cameras use just this, a hole made with a pin, a pinhole, instead of a glass lens. What is a lens but a glazed hole? This type of hole produces an image, light forms an image, it does not simply illuminate in the manner of a window. Niépce named his image-making process heliography (sun drawing). We could call it holiography, and attach the image-making device of photography to the iconology of holes, or, following Wajcman's argument, to hology, a discipline that would account for our knowledge of holes. It would deal with piercings, leakages, keyholes and openings of all sorts that facilitate and also threaten visibility. The eye is a type of hole, and so are the mouth, eyes, ears and nose. Bodily holes may have something to do with vision and representation. The photographic image is from the outset determined by a hole and under threat of disappearing into one. The first experiments with light-sensitive substances did fail to fix the image, which would get darker and darker: an excess of light that darkens the image, just as the notorious black page in Tristram Shandy is an excess of ink that dissolves language. The window of course is more than a hole; it is a framing device. Niépce claimed that his view from a window framed a piece of Nature. Why did it take him so long to get it right? Did he spend ten years looking out of his window, in idle fascination? At school, pupils with a tendency for reverie are kept away from windows. Windows can be closed or open, we see through them and we are seen framed by them. Glass is used for windows and for early photographic plates. With a plate camera, the image is formed on a ground glass. Leonardo da Vinci writes: “Of the plane of glass: perspective is nothing else than seeing a place (or objects) behind a pane of glass, quite transparent, on the surface of which the objects behind that glass are to be drawn” (150).

The pane of glass is a motif in Baudelaire's Windows, where we read that “celui qui regarde du dehors à travers une fenêtre ouverte ne voit jamais autant que celui qui regarde une fenêtre fermée” p.111 (the one who looks from outside through an open window never sees as much as the one who looks at a closed window). The glass pane allows a heightened visibility. It is a barrier that prevents access and that prohibits touching what is behind it. Yet the glass also contributes to the sense of an image being seen, an image held at a distance. “Ce qu'on peut voir au soleil est toujours moins intéressant que ce qui se passe derrière une vitre” (what one can see under the sun is always less interesting than what happens behind a window). Too much light reveals too many details. It flattens everything, unlike the flat pane of glass that produces a sensation of depth. As Jean Pierre Richard puts it in regard to Baudelaire, “under the sun we are all equals and miserable”, contrary to what happens behind a window that “glazes the world, transforms reality into a spectacle, the absurd into an enigma, platitude into depth” (112).

FIGURE 1. André Kertesz. Broken Plate 1929, Paris. Silver Gelatin Photograph. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

Kertész's broken glass plate of 1929 is printed decades after it was taken. It is a view from a high window it seems, looking above the rooftops and into a street of Paris. It is as if we are looking through a broken window, a window with a hole in it. We can see it and see through it.

Another image Niépce is known for is his table laid for a meal, this time a photograph on glass, probably made in 1829, according to the experts. The historians Helmut and Alison Gernsheim tell us that “nothing remains of this still life but a rather poor halftone reproduction made in 1891”. The original on glass was destroyed by a certain Professor Peignot, who “seized one day with a fit of mania smashed everything in his laboratory, including his photographic incunabulum”. (p. 46) The image of the table seems to have been taken outside, against a wall, maybe the wall of the house with the attic window. It shows a table dressed for a meal. On the tablecloth we see a knife, perhaps, a spoon, a bottle of wine, a bowl on a plate, a wine glass with a stem, a piece of bread, I think, and a carafe. The wall has shadows that recall the shadows of the view from a window. This is a meal for a single diner. This is a picture for a single spectator. It is for me, who is looking at it now.

The Gernsheims use the term still life for this picture. And still life is a genre that is particularly concerned with the frame. We move from the verticality of the window frame to the horizontality of a table that frames the objects that occupy its surface. The table is a horizontal frame that contains objects; within the still life genre, attention to the frame can be drawn, for instance, by placing a knife, a fruit or a vegetable at the edge. A tension is produced where the object hovers between the edge of the table and the frame of the picture. It comes out of the frame, as it were, thus making a bridge between the picture and the spectator. For Norman Bryson, the still life is above all a succession of “nouns, adjectives and conjunctions” and “takes as its inaugural act a rejection of the narrative sentence” (23). It produces an accumulation of signs that are free from the linearity of the sentence.

Niépce's image is an awkward still life that depicts the moment before a meal is served. The absent food, the food yet to come, inscribes a future tense into the image. This is an ascetic, sober image that only consumes the light sensitive surface necessary for its making. It is a reminder of Arthur Schopenhauer's famous attack on the Dutch still life, not all still lives but those depicting food, “which by their deceptive likeness necessarily excite the appetite for the things they represent”. (p. 269) Still life would be acceptable if we could look at it “as a beautiful product of nature in form and colour, without being obliged to think of it as eatable”. Is not Niépce's still life just still, yet not a still life? It is not yet full of food to be consumed by the eye. It is unlike the semiotic excess of these Dutch still lives where “unfortunately we often find, represented with deceptive naturalness, prepared and served dishes, oysters, herrings, crabs, bread and butter, beer, wine, and so forth, which is altogether to be condemned”. (269) Here excitement puts an end to aesthetic contemplation, and somehow the philosopher is indeed excited against food as a pictorial genre. Food is like flesh, it is what he calls “base sensuality”, a desire to possess and consume the object. It threatens the spirituality of the image. The soul, the anima, turns into an animal. Yet is not the act of reading also an act of consumption?

Niépce shows us a still life before the meal. Schopenhauer discusses the scandal of our visual appetite. Proust, however, is interested in food as still life when the meal is over. In Within a Budding Grove, the narrator, still sitting at the table while it is being cleared, turns his attention away from the view of the sea to cast his gaze on the remains of the meal. Looking is not here directly associated with eating but with the idle time of the digestion that follows. The eye of the narrator contemplates

...the broken gestures of the knives still lying across one another, the swollen convexity of a discarded napkin upon which the sun would patch a scrap of yellow velvet, the half-empty glass which thus shewed to greater advantage the noble sweep of its curved sides, and, in the heart of its translucent crystal, clear as frozen daylight, a dreg of wine, dusky but sparkling with reflected lights, the displacement of solid objects, the transmutation of liquids by the effect of light and shade, the shifting colour of the plums which passed from green to blue and from blue to golden yellow in the half plundered dish... (235)

Here, the still life is neither frozen nor still. Proust's textual still life is very much alive. He is fascinated by the movement of the still life, by “la vie profonde des natures mortes”. Translucence and light animate the objects scattered across the tablecloth. Here the still life embraces the sentence, which is like a cinematic panning on the surface of the table. This is a picture where the only moments of stillness reside in the use of commas that isolate certain gustative and visual events, producing smaller pictures within the general picture of the table. If Proust's text is decisively visual, Niépce's images are now primarily textual. I have only seen the view from the window at Gras in various poor reproductions in books. The same goes for the dressed table. They are ghost images still haunting photographic discourse. Their materiality is uncertain, if not totally absent. They open up the narrative of photography, just as Alberti's window and Proust's table open onto a story. The relation between photography and literature is dialogical. And dialogues are made of fragments. Fragments, like dialogues have neither an essential end nor beginning. Contingent and capricious, they are not concerned with narrative continuity. And what is a photograph, or for that matter an image if not a fragment? And is not photography a collection of fragments, and how do these fragments relate to one another?

The demon of analogy

A recent book by Zoe Leonard is a collection of photographs, all taken with a twin lens Rolleiflex, of shop fronts and second-hand goods, from North America to Africa, making connections between the passage and life of commodities. It is also an homage to Walker Evans and it is called Analogue. This is a surprising title. A few decades ago, this title would not have made much sense. Before the digital production and dissemination of photographic images, photography was just called photography. There was no need for a distinction. The digital created the analogue as a term to think about.

Yet analogy has occupied a particular role in theories of the photographic image. Barthes talks of the analogon, this message without a code. Eco, as a response, dismisses theories of the image as an analogue of reality. Everything is coded, constructed, mediated. No Nature, only Artifice. Yet analogy also has its place in linguistics, and occupies a few chapters in Saussure's Course, to account for phonetic changes due to use, rather than structural transformation.

With images and sounds, analogue denotes a technical mode of recording, copying and storing data. Although, it is more than this. What is an analogical sign and what is its effect? In Roland Barthes’ startling autobiography, where the author alerts us that he occupies the place of a character in a fiction, we find a short text entitled “the Demon of Analogy”. The text testifies to Barthes’ fascination with analogical arts such as cinema and photography. Analogy, he tells us, “is irrepressible: no sooner is a form seen that it must resemble something”. (p. 44) Analogy also implies an effect of nature and produces a copy that may become an emblem for the Natural, that is, for Barthes the uncoded. In the Photographic Message, he claims that the zero degree of the photographic message is the scene itself, the literal reality. Yet he adds that the image is not reality but its perfect analogon; no code intervenes between object and image, and it is this analogical perfection that defines photography (before its well known possible dissolution with the digital, when we cease to believe in this analogical plenitude). Roland Barthes, in Roland Barthes, a title prey to the demon of analogy indeed, asks, “are we doomed to analogy?”, Can we escape it, should we escape it, how to subvert it? Can we transgress the Rule of the Copy, and the reign of this “perfidious analogy”? For Barthes, analogy defines the regime of the copy, of resemblance, of identity and of identification.

Barthes reminds us that etymologically “analogy used to mean proportion: this is like, like for like”. This is what a lens can do, to establish a proportional relationship between an object and its image. Yet Barthes is perhaps hasty in his identification of analogy with identity, as like for like. The philosopher Sarah Kofman reminds us that Emmanuel Kant gives us instead a definition of analogy that is dependent upon difference as much as on identity: “a perfect similarity of two relations between quite dissimilar things” (1). It turns the dissimilar into similarity, yet it is grounded in difference. In the novel Bruges la Morte, by Georges Rodenbach, the sad melancholic hero is immersed in similitudes. He can see traces of his dead wife everywhere. Bruges becomes as dead as his wife. He meets an actress wandering the streets who resembles his departed wife; even the tone of her voice was similar: “le démon de l'analogie se jouait de lui” (the demon of analogy was playing tricks on him) (64). Analogy is here linked to identification; it is irresistible. It is a trap for the gaze and for the ear that catches the narrator in the lure of image and language. Barthes again: “When I resist analogy it is actually the Imaginary that I am resisting: which is to say: The coalescence of the sign, the similitude of signifier and signified, the homeomorphism of images, the Mirror, the captivating bait.” Breton's novel Nadja is a dérive, a drifting through the city that triggers thoughts and mental images, where the narrator is “abandoned to the fury of symbols, a prey to the demon of analogy” (p. 111). Demon implies possession. Just as a demon may get hold of me, analogy possesses me.

Decidedly, this word, analogy, is getting closer to literature than anything else. “The Demon of Analogy” is above all the title of a poem in prose by Stéphane Mallarmé. Here analogy is far from the reality effect evoked earlier. It is about the reality of language and thought and the effect it has on the narrator. The poet, for Mallarmé, disappears into language: “the poet disappears and the verse itself projects its own passions through its leaps and bounds” (95). This is far from affirming identity through an image. Instead, it affirms the poet's dissolution into language. Words have a priority over the writer, just as language precedes our entry into the world, and words use those who make use of them: “unknown words [that] sing upon your lips, accursed rags of an absurd sentence” (p. 209).

The demon of analogy is a text that cannot be summarised, only pointed at, commented upon perhaps, highlighting this or that emphasis. The narrator leaves his apartment with the sensation of a wing, lingering and light, sliding over the strings of a musical instrument. By analogy, this sensation is followed by “a voice uttering these words in a falling tone: ‘the Penultimate is dead’”. A tribute to analogical thought, the poem in prose pays homage to this word, “the Penultimate”, which by analogy becomes a descending sound produced by a wing on a string, until the string snaps, bringing a death sentence to the phrase: “the penultimate is dead, it is dead, quite dead, the hopeless penultimate”. In the process of uttering these words, the narrator feels, “by a nervous magic”, his hand reflected in a shop window, a hand that makes a “stroking gesture onto something”. He realises that he is “in front of a lute maker's shop selling old instruments on the wall, and on the ground, yellow palms and the wings sunk in shadows of ancient birds”.

FIGURE 2. Edgar Degas. Photograph of Auguste Renoir and Stephane Mallarmé, 1895. Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris.

By analogy I leave the apartment feeling like a wing sliding on the strings of an old instrument. By analogy the sliding becomes a sentence, “the penultimate is dead”. The sentence is cut in two:

• The penultimate

• Is dead

and by analogy the string snaps in two. Double death. The hand of the narrator, reflected in a shop window, slides down in the manner of a wing and in the manner of a falling musical tone. Word, sound, image. The shop window reveals a lute maker's shop; on its ground are “yellow palms and the wings sunk in shadows of ancient birds”.

The sliding from analogy to analogy produces a linguistic layering that recalls, by analogy, the optical layering that is produced by a pane of glass or a mirror in the street in the photographs of Eugene Atget and others. It also recalls Baudelaire's apology of the window pane. The literary and the photographic collide. This layering is also in the photograph that Degas took of Mallarmé and Renoir, in front of a fireplace and a mirror. In the mirror we distinguish the camera and the overexposed face of Degas, erased by the long exposure. On the edge of the mirror's frame, like a ghost, are Madame and Mademoiselle Mallarmé. Paul Valéry adds: “this masterpiece of its kind involved the use of nine oil lamps ... and a fearful quarter hour of immobility for the subjects. It has the finest likeness of Mallarmé I have ever seen” (Valéry quoted by Crimp, October 5, p. 94. MIT 1978). Indeed this is a literary photograph, commented by a writer and representing another one. The mirror has a certain opacity and shimmer that recalls the effect of Mallarmé’s poems in prose.

The power of analogy is the power of associations of thoughts triggered by signs that may have in common only the tiniest form of resemblance. “The Demon of Analogy” is like the Dalinian conception of photography: it is a pure invention of the mind.

The present series of essays is an homage to this Demon.