Variations on the Pictorial

Word and image have been held in dialogue ever since Homer’s shield served as a prototype for ekphrasis, the verbal description of works of art. This dialogue has been going on ever since, taking on diverse shapes. Horace’s celebrated formula, ut pictura poesis, works as a master trope, a super-figure, staging the inter-arts dialogue based on the analogical model. After studying the relationships between painting and literature, it seemed appropriate to pursue the investigation and focus on objects associated with the image by analogy to form or function, or because they have to do with vision, in one way or another. Mirrors, maps, optical instruments, screens, tableaux vivants, and tapestries may be taken as so many instances of semiotic mediators: pictorial variations of the image returning under a different guise. They open the literary text to the visual, through the ambiguous mechanisms of the referential and the imaginary, invested with the task of testifying to its anchorage in reality.

I will first concentrate on one instance of pictorial variations—mirrors—thereby casting a graphic reflection on the text.

Mirrors in Texts

For art historian Victor Stoichita, the images which, according to the Logique de Port-Royal, immediately offer themselves as signs are paintings, maps, and mirrors:

Paintings, maps and mirrors are three representational surfaces which, when projected into the depths of the pictorial field, initiate in the seventeenth century an intertextual discourse which is but a dialogue regarding the very status of representation.1

Stoichita takes up the example of a painting by Dirck Hals, Joyeuse compagnie, which he analyzes as follows:

Dirck Hals will even go further. He will equate maps and paintings and add to them a third term, open windows. Windows, paintings, and maps are three stages, three degrees in the abstraction process leading to representation. Windows are not paintings yet; maps are no longer paintings. It has to be noted that Dirck Hals emphasizes the optical-box character of his painting thanks to the checkered floor. (Stoichita 243–4)

As is well known, mirrors stand at the center of innumerable major self-reflexive paintings. Let us simply mention for memory, and for the mere pleasure of it, Van Eyck’s Arnolfini’s Wedding, Vélasquez’s Las Meninas and Venus, Parmigiano’s and Rembrandt’s self-portraits, numerous Vanitas, Vermeer’s Young Girl Playing the Harpsichord, Memling’s Triptych in Strasbourg’s Art Museum, Magritte’s paradoxical La reproduction interdite (Forbidden Reproduction), and Duchamp ’s Self-Portrait. The list seems endless. Literature draws from these pictorial examples. As a figure of the painter, of the text, and of the subject, the mirror stages questions and self-contemplation. Its reflexive powers constitute it as a privileged instrument of reflection. The title of the exhibition “On Reflection,” held at the National Gallery, London, in 1998, plays on the polysemy of the term and of the object.2 As both allegory and metaphor, the mirror used in lieu of the painting enriches and diversifies the power of the image and of the pictorial.

First of all, the mirror figures as a frame marking off its limits from the world located beyond the realm of reflection. A smooth surface, empty and immobile in the absence of an animated subject, it comes close to a painting as soon as a subject is reflected in it, cut off by the sides of the frame, delineated, and at the same time ephemeral and fugitive, not immortalized as in painting. For Victor Stoichita:

The co-presence of what represents and of what is represented makes up the specificity of the image in the mirror. For an image to appear in it, someone or something has to stand in front of it. If this being or thing moves away, the image in the mirror disappears. If I can see animage in the mirror without seeing, in front of it, the represented object, only then will the image I am seeing be a sign: aliquid pro aliquo. (249)3

Self-portraits require mirrors, which function as tools satisfying the demands and pleasures of narcissism. They operate on a ternary mode distributing the roles among watching-subject, mirror, and watched-subject. When they become transfixed on canvas by painting, as in Johannes Gumpp’s Self-Portrait at the Uffizi in Florence, the portrait then offers an inverted image of the subject as mirrors are enantiomorphic;4 hence the many commentaries wondering, for instance, whether Rembrandt was left-handed. Perseus’s apotropaic mirror-shield avoided petrification and offered a protection against the severance executed by representation.

As Agnès Minazzoli and Michel Beaujour5 explain, mirrors in the Middle Ages were specula encapsulating the entire knowledge of the time. Vincent de Beauvais’s speculum majus, dating back to the middle of the thirteenth century, stands as a fine example of this. Therefore, right from its origin, the speculative mirror has been linked to knowledge and space. With the phrase “Mirror of the subject and mirror of the world, mirror of the I trying to find itself in the world” (31), Michel Beaujour shows that the same transforming structure links the encyclopedic speculum and autobiography, and that this structure—which may be called a mirror—is linked to space, which differentiates it from narrative structure and allegory, both marked by eventful journeys towards an end.

The rhizome-like structure of the topic mirror could also be evoked as a spatial figure with multiple entries and exits, and no beginnings and no ends. The dichotomy between speculum and allegorical narrative echoes that between teleological or temporal narrative structure and spatial structure, which was rigidly established by Lessing and remained as such for a very long time. Another dichotomy would be that between the open opera, or work of art, and the work closed upon itself. What is of import here is the mirror’s relation to knowledge, as a reservoir of meaning, as well as its synecdochic function as a microcosm reflecting a macrocosm. Meditation, reflection, and mirrors are all connected, as exemplified by Vanitas paintings which reveal their close links to allegory as a spatial figure and not a narrative structure. Lucien Braun also recalls a few essential truths: “It is the gaze which constitutes the mirror.” Mirrors are not passive: “The person looking at himself/herself in the mirror does not look at the mirror, but at what, in the mirror, does not concern the mirror; in other words, the person looks at what in the mirror tells him/her something which is not about the mirror.”6

Mirrors in texts always offer a reflection of something else, of a place beyond the text, albeit the image of the text itself. Despite the boundaries of their frames, mirrors, which are ambiguous by nature, remain open artifacts because of the transient nature of the reflected subject. Anything may fleetingly appear in them before disappearing again. Beaujour also remarks on the ambiguous role of the mirror, which may be an attribute of the Virgin, sometimes called (like the Bible) Speculum sine macula, or an attribute “of Superbia, the diabolic sin par excellence. The mirror appears in the allegory of antique Prudence, which ‘knows itself’ but also in that of Vanitas—the imprudent who looks at himself in it suddenly sees his own skeleton devoid of all flesh” (Beaujour 35).

Paintings are construed as mirrors of nature, revealing absent presences; mirrors play on mise en abyme or specular effects, images of an opera open ad infinitum. Mirrors figure the seesaw movement between speculation and daydreaming, truth and lies. Hence the question of “the truth in painting” explored by Derrida. Mirrors reflect otherness and the infinite, the other as a self caught in its reflection, a finite piece of infinite space. The confrontation of the self and the I/EYE becomes possible when the self discards the limits of its insularity, only to find itself caught up in the snares of its shape and frame and sent back to its isolation. Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla” and Gustave Courbet’s hallucinated Self-Portrait come to mind, as well as the dangers of going “through the looking-glass,” so powerfully rendered by Lewis Carroll. Re-enacting the dream of going through the fascinating “waters” of the mirror renders the “Voyage Out” as dangerous for Woolf’s Rachel as it was for Carroll’s Alice.

Reflections in the Text as Mirror

In the “shadow of the hidden face of the mirror,”7 the image also stands for the other of the text. Mirrors have been of great use in literature, which has exploited their different facets, as evoked in the examples above. Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country could be called “a hall of mirrors,”8 as mirrors and their reflections play such a structuring role in it, relaying painting which also figures prominently in the novel. They serve as tests revealing the disorder of Undine’s face, the dashing and yet utterly despicable heroine; they frame la Superbia. Undine gazes at herself in each and every mirror that she finds on her way, as she does, for instance, “in the mirror-lined lift” of the Stentorian Hotel. The mirror may be reassuring, casting a bright light upon the heroine like a ray of sunshine. In any case, looking in the mirror becomes a habit, a reflex—“according to her invariable habit, she walked up to the mirror above the mantelpiece and studied the image it reflected” (334), until the very last page of the novel: “She turned to give herself a last look in the glass, saw the blaze of her rubies, the glitter of her hair, and remembered the brilliant names on her list” (335). But the careful reader knows that behind the glitter hovers the little black cloud of unassuaged desire; for Undine’s secret desire—that of being an ambassador, the culminating point of her vanity—ends up revealing that she is nothing but a form waiting to be shaped, ready to mold herself to the social content offered by whoever is ready to pay most. The novel itself can be read as a “Vanity” directly inherited from those of the seventeenth century, the greatest of all being Holbein’s Ambassadors, in which the magnificent representatives of France are threatened by the anamorphic figure in the tiles, the deformed skull being also the signature of Holbein, whose name means “hollow bone.” The figure of the ambassador is the emblem of representation. For that matter, an ambassador and an actor, two metaphors of representation, appear in both Wharton’s The Custom of the Country and The House of Mirth. In her desire to be an ambassador, Undine expresses her wish to be representation par excellence in a society which is also metaphorically represented by another optical tool precious to the art of the painter, the camera obscura: “Here at last was a topic that really interested her, and one that gave another amazing glimpse into the camera obscura of New York society” (The Custom of the Country 57, emphasis mine).

Dorian’s mirror plays a major role in the novel in that it is closely connected with painting. The mirror is used three times by Dorian to check his unaltered beauty. It is even described in more precise terms than the painting itself, which is never ekphrastically described and is reduced to a few clichés: blue eyes, golden hair, red lips. The mirror is Lord Henry’s first gift to Dorian before the “poisoned” yellow book, “an oval glass framed in ivory Cupids.”9 Dorian “glanced hurriedly into its polished depths. No line that warped his red lips. What did it mean?” (73). The mirror is quickly evoked in Chapter 11:

He himself would creep upstairs to the locked room […] and stand, with a mirror, in front of the portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him, looking now at the evil and ageing face on the canvas, and now at the fair young face that laughed back at him from the polished glass. The very sharpness of the contrast used to quicken his sense of pleasure. He grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty. (99)

Finally, the mirror provides the ultimate test in the very last chapter:

The curiously-carved mirror that Lord Henry had given to him, so many years ago now, was standing on the table, and the white-limbed Cupids laughed around as of old. He took it up as he had done on that night of horror, when he had first noted the change in the fatal picture, and with tear-dimmed eyes looked into its polished shield. […] Then he loathed his beauty, and flinging the mirror on the floor crushed it into silver splinters beneath his heel. (167)

The description of the mirror undergoes a series of reductions and expansions offering a variation on the same signifiers: “Cupids,” “ivory/white limbed,” “framed/laughed around,” “polished depths/polished glass/polished shield.” The primary function of the mirror is to satisfy Dorian’s strong narcissistic tendencies and to comfort him whenever he is confronted with his altering portrait. The mirror also records the progression of the story on a contrapuntal mode in its three textual appearances: Dorian’s discovery of the first alteration in his portrait; his ritual consultations of the painting over 18 years; and the final revelation of the dangers of self-absorption—“then he loathed his own beauty”—culminate in his destructive gesture. The seductive mirror, with its smiling cupids, has become as repulsive as a snake and must be destroyed once its apotropaic function, that of Perseus’s shield, ceases to operate. The last sentence, with its reversed pattern, shows the end of the painting-as-self:

He looked round and saw the knife that had stabbed Basil Hallward. He had cleaned it many times, till there was no stain left upon it. It was bright, and glistened. As it had killed the painter, so it would kill the painter’s work, and all that that meant. It would kill the past, and when that was dead he would be free. It would kill his monstrous soul-life, and without its hideous warnings, he would be at peace. He seized the thing and stabbed the picture with it.

In this passage, which is a self-parody of Wilde’s poem “The Harlot’s House” (1885), the shadows are once more fantastic, and the human beings, “monstrous marionettes,” are dehumanized when they are compared, paradoxically, to “live things.” “Silhouettes” refers to a popular art, the invention of a Frenchman, Etienne de Silhouette who, in the eighteenth century,10 had the idea of projecting onto a screen the figure of a subject whose outline he would draw. One of its variations consisted in cutting out the projected outline in black paper. Projections, reflections, screens, and games of light and shadow are all ways of offering variations of the pictorial in the literary text, all subterfuges of the iconotext. The same goes for optical instruments.

Optical Instruments: A Variety of Reflections

Other transitional objects linked to mirrors, sight, and vision may come between the world and the eye thanks to their lenses and their minuscule, almost invisible mirrors: optical devices such as glasses, cameras, the camera obscura, microscopes, and telescopes all convey the desire to see and be seen. Opera glasses play an emblematic role in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country and The House of Mirth, where looks are of primary importance, particularly both at and in the theater. This focus on vision was another literary topos at the end of the nineteenth century in France (one example of this phenomenon is, of course, Zola) as well as in English-speaking countries. There again the metapictorial citation plays its role as the theater box was repeatedly painted by Renoir, Degas, Eva Gonzales, Mary Cassatt. The device works on the symmetrical mode of the observer being observed: “This train of thought was interrupted by a feeling that she was being intently observed from the neighboring box” (Wharton, Country 38). The tortoise-shell or diamond glasses, “the man’s opera-glass” (60), “Peter Van Degen’s opera-glass” (61) are recurrent motifs. All the characters scrutinize each other in an intense game of perusal. The actual show is more inside the theater hall than on stage. Centrifugal and centripetal gazes cross each other as one has to be, and verify that one is, “the cynosure of all eyes” at all times. Undine’s visit to the picture gallery will help her not to polish her education, but to meet the happy possessor of a highly desirable object, a “tortoise-shell eye-glass:”

Presently her attention was drawn to a lady in black who was examining the pictures through a tortoise-shell eye-glass adorned with diamonds and hanging from a long pearl chain. Undine was instantly struck by the opportunities which this toy presented for graceful wrist movements and supercilious turns of the head. It seemed suddenly plebeian and promiscuous to look at the world with a naked eye, and all her floating desires were merged in the wish for a jewelled eye-glass and chain. So violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the eye-glass, she found herself inadvertently bumping against a stout tight-coated young man whose impact knocked her catalogue from her hand. (31)

The jeweled eye-glass belongs to “Clare,” a character who sees through Undine’s stratagems and is herself situated at the crossroads between the two societies, the old and the new. The eye-glass frames the gaze thanks to all sorts of precious materials, testifying that seeing has a price, and scrutinizing details, even more so. Exhibiting the valuable optical instrument unfailingly draws the attention to its possessor and metonymically endows him/her with a precious quality by stressing her “graceful wrist movements and turns.” An accessory of vanity and narcissism, it enhances its possessor’s qualities. The artifice thus serves as a self-magnifying object, a prop staging beauty, and not merely as a looking-glass.

On the contrary, the twice-mentioned telescope of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea plays a totally different part. At some point, the narrator, who is never actually named but who can be identified through Jane Eyre— therefore “Rochester”—notes that “[T]he telescope was pushed to the side of the table making room for a decanter half full of rum and two glasses on a tarnished silver tray.”11 Foreshadowing the end of “Rochester’s” marriage to Antoinette, the ill-omened, tarnished silver tray sends back an adulterated reflection of the world as the rum-induced haziness replaces the clear-sightedness of the telescope pushed to the side. Later on, under the influence of the rum, Antoinette accuses her husband of being unfaithful and bites him on the arm. In his extreme confusion, “Rochester” sees his West Indian surroundings, including the telescope, as antagonistic, denying him any clear vision: “My arm was bleeding and painful and I wrapped my handkerchief round, it, but it seemed to me that everything round me was hostile. The telescope drew away and said don’t touch me. The trees were threatening.”12

As they multiply illusion, optical devices, supposed to be faithful and objective, magnify or reduce the world, thus blurring judgment. In its visual games, the eye of the text can also make use of reflecting surfaces which, although less faithful than mirrors, either add a dream-like quality to fiction, or disturb it.

Variations on Reflections: A Few Examples

The mirror and its substitutes achieve the reduction of the infinite to a finite space while playing on reflection both in painting and in literature, as in Virginia Woolf’s short story “The Lady in the Looking Glass: A Reflection.” Fleeting reflections of passers-by in shop windows, images reflected in puddles, mirror-like waters in ponds, and reflecting surfaces of all sorts (metals, beads, crystals, etc.) create kaleidoscopic light effects which are mirrored within the text, while shadows, which can be construed as the counterparts of reflections, add an oneiric dimension as they blur vision and thought. By triggering surprise effects or indirect revelations, reflections are on the side of instant knowledge and flashes of consciousness.

To the paradigmatic use of convex mirrors in Flemish paintings—as in the works of Van Eyck, Metsys, and Memling—one can add reflections in wellpolished armor such as that of Saint George in Van Eyck’s The Virgin and Canon van der Paele. A short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Endicott and the Red Cross,”13 makes abundant use of this device. The passage below follows an introductory passage on the historical circumstances of the story, situated during the troubled reign of Charles I:

Such was the aspect of the times, when the folds of the English banner, with the red Cross in its field, were flung over a company of Puritans. Their leader, the famous Endicott, was a man of stern and resolute countenance, the effect of which was heightened by a grizzled beard that swept the upper portion of his breast-plate. This piece of armour was so highly polished, that the whole surrounding scene had its image in the glittering steel. The central object in the mirrored picture, was an edifice of humble architecture, with neither steeple nor bell to proclaim it—what nevertheless it was—the house of prayer. A token of the perils of the wilderness was seen in the grim head of a wolf, which had been slain within the precincts of the town, and, according to the regular mode of claiming the bounty, was nailed on the porch of the meeting-house. The blood was still splashing on the door-step. There happened to be visible, at the same noontide hour, so many other characteristics of the times and manners of the puritans, that we must endeavour to represent them in a sketch, though far less vividly than they were reflected in the polished breast-plate of John Endicott. (322–324, emphasis mine)

The passage serves as an “emblem” of the story: it is framed by a chiasmus (the rhetorical equivalent of a mirror) playing on Endicott’s breast-plate, which is polished by his beard. It represents an image, it could bear a title, and it offers a moral. What is interesting here is the use of the armor which throws the reader’s gaze in the opposite direction, enabling him/her to see the invisible thanks to “the mirrored image” encapsulating the whole life of the village and foretelling the events to come. As in a triptych, the scene reflected in the armor unfolds along three descriptive topoi: the place of worship in the center; then the wolf’s head, figuring the enemy’s savagery; and finally the temple’s door with the splashed beast’s head nailed to it, figuring the victory over the enemy. The narrator goes on to mention that at noon, a time of great clarity, so many aspects of the Puritan’s life are visible that he will endeavor to draw a “sketch” of them. Through the word “sketch,” or literary sketch, one can hear the rivalry between the visible and the legible, foregrounding the superiority of the image and of reflection (“though far less vividly than they were reflected in the polished breast-plate of John Endicott”).

The red cross of England, St. George’s cross, undergoes a process of reversal. What is inverted is the story of St. George, who kills the dragon and delivers the princess. In Hawthorne’s story, Endicott cuts up the banner and the red cross, thus heralding the future freedom of New England 100 years later.14 Subversively, the famous pictorial motif, St. George and the Dragon, becomes “Endicott and the Red Cross.” It is therefore perfectly logical that the valiant soldier, whose rebellion announced a later one, the war against England, should bear on his polished breast-plate the image of his entire village. The reflections in the brave rebel’s armor operate as a reduction of the story. The infinite is reflected in an image repeated ad infinitum oscillating between totality and infinity, linking together image and language in its illustration of the story. The image in the armor also pays homage to its pictorial ancestors, as seen above with Van Eyck’s The Virgin with Canon van der Paele, where the painter’s self-portrait is reflected in St. George’s armor. The reflection, so clear and so “lucid” in the midday light, acquires the dimension of a revelation. As an image within an image, it contains the diegesis in miniature in the shape of an emblematic shield linking together religion and man’s triumph over the beast.

The role of mirrors in texts exemplifies the importance of the visual in literary texts, a critical side of which is often neglected or disregarded. As a variation of the pictorial (among others such as maps, shadows, reflections, optical devices, tapestries, miniatures, screens), mirrors enable the critic to examine the text from a different point of view. To use the pictorial tool to open the eye of the text may provide another critical standpoint and initiate a first step towards intermedial criticism.

Photography and Cartography

Iconotextual detours are numerous and subtle. As we saw, the image does not solely open the eye of the text via paintings. If mirrors are one of its favored substitutes—with its representational, even though ambiguous, value—photography and cartography are also two-dimensional representations of the real. If we stick to Pierce’s definitions, photography is iconic but also indexical as it is characterized by an imprint left by the object in the form of an obfuscation of light. Maps belong to the symbolic code but can also be, as we shall see, iconic and even indexical.

As Philippe Hamon remarks in Imageries, the nineteenth century offers a remarkable example of renewed ut pictura poesis. Under the influence of technological innovations, the privileged relationship between painting and literature gives way to that between literature and the image in all its forms (daguerreotype, photography, cartography, postcards, ceramics, caricatures, stained glass, magic lanterns, and other fantasies), which invade cities and everyone’s private space thanks to technical reproducibility:

The question, which in various forms and formulations, traverses the century, is the following: what new gaze, rid of the fatalities of the mediating image, or mastering and domesticating them, or else playing with them, may literature invent? What is the status, the practices and the productions of the imaginary (or of the “sciences” of the imagination such as literature) in a world doomed to an inflation of images, and already saturated with images? […] From then on, the various avant-gardes are going to “come out” of literature in order to seek their models in non-literature or para-literature, in particular in non-literary images, or popular images, or industrial images, all the better to “get back” to literature afterwards. A “tactical” intersemiotic mingling/blending/metissage tends to supplant the usual consanguine marriage. We are even out of the ut pictura poesis and its almost obligatory references to painting […]. It is now “the image,” and not “painting”—two synonymous terms which ought not to be regarded as such—which serves as a model or as a foil to literature.15

Literature is affected by all this “imagery,” and its forms and stakes are changed, starting with photography’s guises.

Photography

I do not claim here to study the presence of photography and its effects in literary texts in an exhaustive manner—a task which would require another book—but to propose a few suggestions so as to examine the ways in which the image plays with the text. I will focus on examples in which photography is translated into writing while not forgetting the visible insertion of photography. In those cases, we will attempt to see how photographs reproduced in a text form a diptych with the text.

There is no need to demonstrate the link between photography and the past. Photography in that sense is a temporal art, if we are to use a distorted version of Lessing’s distinction. Indeed, if photography is a spatial art in the sense that it occupies space, it is no less an art of memory for most viewers and users. Even though it is an art form practiced every day by tourists determined to fix a precious moment, and by parents eager to record pictures of their children and the wrinkles of grandparents, the domestic use of the camera has not altered in any way its resurrecting and aesthetic power.16

A mistake would be to consider photographs as more realistic than paintings and to grant them evidential value when everyone knows that photographs can be distorted, as we will show through many examples. Moreover, a photograph says as much about the subject taking the picture as about the object being photographed. The choice of frame, subject, time, and place are all clues for the non-objective eye, as discussed in the well-known analyses of Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and Jean-Marie Schaeffer.17 There is no need to repeat them here. Let us just, for the moment, point out a few occurrences of photographic images in texts and try to analyze their modus operandi.

Realistic Illusion

The relation between fiction and photography is complex. In order to be credible, fiction supposedly bows to photography, or at least this is what Nancy Armstrong argues in her work on realism when she inverts the relationship between photography and realism. Like Philippe Hamon,18 she regards as essential the invention of original media in the nineteenth century, as they generated new ways of seeing. Literature too was influenced by these technological discoveries. Nancy Armstrong examines how a mentality or aesthetics may be influenced by a mediation or mode of representation: “Culture stereotypes are real, not because they refer to real bodies, but because they allow us to identify and classify bodies, including our own, as image-objects with a place and name within a still-expanding visual order.”19 Realistic fiction was therefore influenced by photography as much as it was influenced by the picturesque. “Indeed, I plan to hold the picturesque aesthetic in part responsible not only for changing the landscape of rural England, but for setting the terms of Victorian realism as well” (32).

According to Armstrong, the aesthetics of the picturesque thus modeled the landscape in the image of its fantasized and idealized representation. The aesthetic opposition between the rough and the smooth, and the importance given to an arresting detail against the integrated totality of Beauty, completely modified the theory of seeing in the eighteenth century and paved the way for the photographic revolution. It was also one of the consequences of the new economic fluxes and of the changes that happened with the invention of the banknote. All of a sudden, the copy was equivalent to the original while the original still retained its value, in the same way the banknote was equivalent to gold. The principle of convertibility is at the basis of this system of exchanges and transactions which fills the gap between a sign and the object. Hence also, for Armstrong, the convertibility of the earth into a landscape project suppressing the traces of farm work and enabling the equation between taste and the cultivated connoisseur. In the same line as the picturesque, photography corresponds to ways of seeing developed by optical instruments such as the camera obscura, the telescope, and the microscope. Seeing was linked to supposedly “objective” knowledge: “the modern apparatus seemed relatively neutral and impervious to such influences, as only a machine could be” (77). The universe all of a sudden extended as images which used to be inaccessible to the ordinary viewer became accessible. The image came to determine the way in which it was suitable to perceive things “since it reproduced not only the image of some person, place or thing, but also a way of seeing subject matter of various kinds” (ibid.). The world was thus perceived as a photographic image fixing the norms of vision. Hence also the numerous discussions, at the end of the nineteenth century, to determine whether photography was a full-fledged art form or just another documentary source.

The world was then perceived as a photograph. Rules of presentation and social ranking demanded from the body that it should conform to photographic stereotypes. In order to exist from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, one had to be both visible and viewed. The real was what could be captured by a photographic image, thanks to its illusory transparency. Photography enabled one to see what could otherwise not be seen; what, at the time of Mesmer—a time very much into occultism and spiritualism—could delude one preoccupied by thinking that the traces left on photographs by moving subjects were those of celestial bodies or other specters/spirits, the medium taking on all its meaning at the peak of medium-ism. The dichotomy between transparency and opacity makes possible an access to the invisible. Photography also satisfied the need to archive, thus meeting the concern for documentation. This gathering of visual information, or “archive fever,” to use Derrida’s phrase (15), explains the link between archives and photographs, and between photography and the new identity sciences. Phrenology, physiognomy, and criminology started to use photography to make the invisible visible, to render the body legible, and to discern psychological components beneath the features of the face. Hence too the similarity with cartography, field transcriptions, and world portraits—imago mundi. The democratizing of portraits and subjects combined with a classifying frenzy to provide masses of documentation: pictures of faces, farmers, prostitutes, lunatics, poor families, portraits of various peoples, particularly from the Empire, but also pictures of architecture, animals, and plants.

if not he, then whose garden rightfully? Who are the ghosts and who the presences? Who outside the picture, leaning on their rakes, leaning on their spades, waiting to get back to work, lean also against the edge of the rectangle, bending it, bursting it in?20

Of course, in the context of South Africa under the apartheid regime, excluding people from a photograph took on a powerful allegorical form. The power of photography as a medium revealing the dialectical nature of an image, in-between presence and absence, is also illustrated in Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude. In this book, a ghost returns in a photograph which materially figures at the beginning. The narrator scrutinizes it and discovers that it has been torn and reassembled. The presence of fingertips gripping a child’s shoulder reveals that someone present in the original is absent in the actual photograph. The narrator eventually discovers the truth:

My grand father had been sitting in a chair next to his wife with one of his sons standing between his knees—and he was not there. Only his fingertips remained, as if he had been exiled to another dimension: “The whole thing made me shake.”21

And well it might, as the revelation is a particularly horrendous one. If a photograph is the result of an exposure, it may also cause one. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, a little black girl discovers the color of her skin she had never up to that point completely registered. The identity and the surprise of the character confirm what language as represented in the dialogues had already suggested to the reader:

Ah was wid dem white chillun so much till Ah didn’t know ah wuzn’t white Ah was round six years old. Wouldn’t have found out, but a man come long takin’ pictures […].

So when we looked at the picture and everybody got pointed out there wasn’t anybody left except a real dark little girl with long hair standing by Eleanor. Dat’s where Ah wuz s’posed to be, but Ah couldn’t recognize dat dark chile as me. So Ah ast, “where is me? Ah don’t see me.”

Everybody laughed, even Mr Washburn, Miss Nellie, de Mama of de chillun who come back home after her husband dead, she pointed to de dark one and said, “Dat’s you, Alphabet, don’t you know yo’ ownself?”

Dey useter call me Alphabet ’cause so many people had done named me different names. Ah looked at de picture a long time and seen it was mah dress and mah hair so Ah said:

Den dey all laughed real hard. But before Ah seen de picture Ah thought Ah wuz just like de rest.22

It is noteworthy that these three examples deal with adult narrators contemplating images of the past and discovering a violent truth about it. Such is the power of photography.23 A case in point has to be made concerning W.G. Sebald as this novelist constantly and coherently made use of photography by inserting all sorts of images within his text, literally opening the eye of the text.

W.G. Sebald displays the whole gamut of the modes of insertion of the image-in-text, and more particularly so of the photograph-in-text including bills, mementos, diary extracts, tickets to a museum, which are nonetheless photographs of two-dimensional objects and which serve as “images,” or “illustrative” devices.24 Image is part and parcel of Sebald’s own writing process, of his aesthetic choices. His text truly is an iconotext. In the classification he offers, Kibédi Varga distinguishes between primary and secondary word-and-image relations according to the simultaneity or the successivity of their appearance.25 Sebald’s use of the photograph presents a particular twist. Morphologically, text and photograph appear simultaneously and thus belong to the primary type, on the mode of “interreference” (Varga 39). But semantically and chronologically, their relation is of the secondary type for they belong to two different times. The text precedes the image as a rule in the Sebaldian text, but the latter belongs to a former diegetic time anterior to the text. It belongs to its past, thus it temporally precedes the text although it appears after its deictic designation or its short ekphrasis. So it is the text which “illustrates” the photograph and not the other way round, as one might morphologically expect. Anachrony gives one more twist to the phenomena of “double exposure” and “double perception.” This device provokes a feeling of aporia, a twinkling effect between the text as posterior to the photograph and the photograph as anterior to the text but posterior to its “announcement.” As a consequence, this twist plunges the reader into doubt concerning the validity of the image to accompany the text: here is “Paul” whom “I” have been talking about, but is it really the case, the reader may wonder?

The Sebaldian device wonderfully exemplifies what happens when the image opens up the eye of the text, when photography performs as critical idiom. For here we are given to witness the full activation of the opening (as wound, as symptom, aphanisis/epiphasis), which first provokes a blinding effect, and then a vacillation. The reader, surprised by the image, by a process pertaining to an aesthetic of surprise—and even more so when he/she is confronted with double pages, as is the case at times—holds his/her breath and considers it. This is what happens in Hurston’s text on the mode of the snapshot (i.e. few lines) or in Coetzee’s novel. Here, in Sebald’s novels, the apparatus is truly “exposed” in a more violent way. For violent it is, as the elected photograph, burrowing itself a space within the page, performs a kind of “rape of the text.”

Thus we may conclude that the morphological description of some of the main modes of interplay between text and photography entails an analysis of the latter’s semantic and narrative functions, reflecting the medium’s specificity. Another way of traveling through the text via the image is to analyze cartographic effects, cartography being also a pictorial substitute and one of the subterfuges or variations of the iconotext.26

Cartography: “The Cartographic Eye of the Text;” the “Garments” of Maps and the Map as Iconotext27

A map is drawn to make one “see,” discover places, but also to help one make decisions and daydream. It is not an image like any other, for it is meant to create order out of the chaos of the world, as well as to provide knowledge. The map is also an attempt at communication: it wears “garments,” it is submitted to anamorphoses, it represents desired spaces and uncharted places, and it helps to classify. The map is a network, made up of charts and dots, proportions and symbols. It may help to monitor population flow or to anticipate social movement. It sets up its models as examples and turns itself into a “thematic map” to be deciphered. This typology of maps, borrowed from the work of cartographer Roger Brunet, makes clear what maps share with the literary episteme. As Brunet explains, “a map is an image, a representation of the World or of a piece of the world. Or more exactly, of something somewhere[…]. A drawing is never self-sufficient: it requires a title, most of the time a legend, and sometimes a comment: in other words, it requires some kind of text,”28 as the term “cartography”—literally, the writing of maps—clearly indicates.

Maps, as semiotic mediators or pictorial substitutes of the image under another guise, open the literary text to the visual, on the ambivalent mode of the referential and the imaginary, by being invested both with a function of veracity, of authentification, and with a function of metaphorization, that of a reading which is the reading of a trajectory. With their close links with toponymy and topography, maps provide the information which creates the referential illusion, while at the same time, as the word “illusion” indicates, allowing all kinds of deception. Maps have many affinities with the pictorial and the literary, as Deleuze reminds us in a famous statement: “Writing has nothing to do with signifying, but with the surveying and mapmaking of even countries to come.”29 First of all, they have links with the literary through rhetorical figures (metonymy, synecdoche) which illustrate the creative work in rhetorical terms: the aesthetic work is metonymic, even synecdochic, in so far as representation is a part of the whole, made in the image of the totality, not to mention the “other language” of allegories. The inter-art dialogue of the ut pictura poesis, modeled on synaesthesia, is at times viewed from the oxymoronic angle, although the two semiotic systems do not seem to be antinomic except if we persist in thinking along the lines of Lessing’s system, which opposes painting, the art of space, to literature, the art of time. Although heterogeneous, the code of the letter and the code of the image are both graphic codes, which makes possible their articulation and even their hybridization, as in ideograms. By delineating spaces, enabling one to follow itineraries, and building up representations, mapmaking, in-between writing and drawing, geometry and language, provides fine instances of iconotexts.

Of mirrors, wax, and a few other devices Through its relation to art and its representations of space, a society reveals its philosophical foundations, testifying to its modes of functioning, whether the subject is located at the center or on the periphery, whether it favors mimetic reproduction or the gap between the object and its representation, the importance given to expression or impression, and the means employed. This aesthetic evolution corresponds roughly to the passage from indexical imprints (the hand on the wall, the stencil, the ambiguous Veronica, vera icona), to the icon (bearing no contact with the referent but resembling by analogy) or the symbol, and then to artistic gestures depriving the object of its primary function and granting it another one, a satirical one, for instance, as with Duchamp’s urinal. This process culminates with the elaboration of a virtual world thanks to digital images, a twinkling constellation which is pure light.

Maps, like the other “pictorial variations” of images in texts, seem to be equally ruled by the major metaphors which have been used to represent the workings of the mind—of thinking, memory, and perception—as epistemologically linked to their era. Painting and poetry, as well as word and image, share the indirection of representation and the resort to obliqueness in the necessary use of a medium to “render” the visible. For Plato, “art is like a mirror,” and analogical thought presupposes that art should be thought of in terms of mimesis, as an ephemeral and deceitful simulacrum. Another analogy frequently used to represent thought and artistic creation is also borrowed from Plato and Aristotle by Locke, among others: thought is like a piece of wax on which the sensible world leaves its imprint. We have therefore two modes of thinking artistic creation, two passive analogies: the mirror and the piece of wax, the reflection and the imprint, which can be seen as working in a centripetal mode.30

Unlike these two analogies, another analogy, activated in the Romantic era, works in the active mode, testifying in this way to an epistemological revolution. Thought is conceived of as projecting its light onto the world like a lamp, thus emphasizing the primary role of experience and perception. This second metaphor functions on the centrifugal mode, thought discovering what it had already partially found and projecting onto the world the categories of the sensible, time and space, as though filtered by the mind. As a lamp, but also as a brimming fountain, thought is to be seen as a bright sun or a fountain of light.

Cartography offers a fine instance of primary indifferentiation, as drawing and writing both aim at a symbolical mastery of space. It signals its performative function, in an enunciation stating that the territory is in its image, in a paradoxical seesaw movement between the writing of the referent and the referent of writing, deeply marked by its deictic function. In old maps, this function belongs to the mediator, the intercesseur, like the admonitor in classical painting, or Louis Marin’s “delegate of enunciation,” pointing his finger at the mapped subject.31 The enunciation of the map, “in the double sense, subjective and objective, of the genitive” claims that the territory “adheres” to it, that it is the territory belonging to those who discovered and drew it, and then reduced it to a two-dimensional plan. To write and delineate a map is to trace the limits of the territory, to give it an existence, a shape, a place. It amounts to representing and presenting oneself, tracing a figure, a “portrait”—that which everyone has of his/her country, almost a caricature, in any case a shape easy to memorize, such as a hexagon, a boot, etc.. Hence the attempt to render the state of indifferentiation before the access to the symbolic, to fuse together the representation of the territory and the territory itself into an act of possession which has the value of a deed—in other words, to establish a “cartographic pact.” By writing space, the topographic survey is given a legal existence.

Hence too, the symbolical function of maps, not only as the symbol of a nation or of a town—one may think of the symbolical spire of Strasbourg as represented by its cathedral—but also as a set of signs and symbols, such as an undulating line conventionally representing a river, a dot, a town, a reel, or a weaving-mill. Even though originally there was an analogy of shape between the river and the line, or between a summit and a triangle, the system has become predominantly a symbolical system. It is also what Buci-Glucksmann defines as an “iconic sign” (an index, a trace, which points to the territory represented thanks to an analogical resemblance); that is to say, a mixed mode of representation whose hybrid status combines the projection of the indexical referent and its analogical representation, and in which the gap between the panoptical look and the point of view, Buci-Glucksmann’s “world-eye,” remains unbridged.

Turcici imperii descriptio (the description of the Turkish empire) is written on one of the maps published in Antwerp. But the vocabulary of “descriptio” is widespread, defining a way of looking: “description of Palestine” by Fernando Bertelli (Venice, 1563) […] “description” of Avignon, Marseilles, and Jerusalem in Braun and Hogenberg’s Civitates orbis terrarum (Antwerp, 1572) […] Not to mention more historical descriptions like that of “Old Cairo” in Father Coronelli’s memorie storici-geographiche as recorded by Ballino (Venice, 1569), which inscribes the narrativity of memoirs within visual descriptions. In French, the term “portrait” will be preferred as in Guillaume Guérout’s book published in 1552 First Book of the figures and portraits of the most illustrious and renowned cities in Europe, soon followed by Plans and Profiles of the main cities in France (1564), in which oblique vision becomes dominant. It is through this new regime of visibility, i.e. cartographic “description,” that the “journey through the world,” real or sedentary, is organized. A true theatre (theatrum) of the world, a mirror (speculum) which becomes widespread throughout Europe, to the point that a map by Petrum Shenk and Gerardum Volk is entitled “Scenography of the world.”32

In the literary text, the geographic map is used to reduce the macrocosm to the dimensions of a microcosm, projecting a writing of the world onto a parchment or a piece of paper. The geographic map offers a particular aspect of the descriptive mode, which brings together the scriptural and the legible, the code and the referent. It figures via the topographic description or is inserted in its iconic form, facing the relevant page or chapter, as is the case in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, with the map of the Lilliput and Blefuscu islands.33 It also appears on the thresholds of the text, at the beginning or at the end of the book. It bears a close relationship with travel and adventure writing, which it often introduces, thus providing a transition between the surroundings of the text (the “hors-texte”) and the already-there of the fictitious, in “the exhilaration of creating and naming a world” (Brunet 27). One example of this phenomenon is Thomas More’s Utopia, whose two famous frontispieces—that of 1516 (anonymous) and that of 1518, engraved by the Holbein brothers, “images of access into the reading of the book”—have been studied in their differences by Louis Marin. The second frontispiece with its two characters, one showing the island to the other, designates an operation of mediation, indicating that we see the image of the island only “through the dialogue, the narrative and the description these figures represent, like the ekphrasis which the narrative of one and the writing of the other have provided—in other words, through a fiction” (Marin 352–4). Brunet remarks that “the image accepted by Thomas More in the original edition (1516) covered another one, which can be drawn up by following the text closely, despite a few mischievous tricks by the author. … A good utopia refers to the present” (Brunet 8) To this remark, let us add that the map of the island also looms up in a fantastic way, like a premonitory “vanity,” so great is the resemblance it bears to a skull. And we know what fate was in store for More. A cruel game of signifiers was thus in progress below the surface of the maps (for More’s death was heralded to a certain extent by the skull figure).

John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress is an interesting example of a present/absent map. Claude Gandelman explains that the 1678 edition “did not contain any maps. Only in 1790 did the cartographer John Wallis publish a map entitled The Pilgrim’s Progress Dissected.”34 And yet, the frontispiece of the third edition (1679), following this map by 100 years, offers an interesting example of a mixture of a map and an allegorical painting. Indeed, the initiatory and spiritual value of Christian’s journey was such that it called for the iconic representation of symbolical names punctuating the pilgrim’s ordeal. For instance, Christian, carrying a heavy burden and reading a book, has just left the city of “Destruction” and is climbing up the hill to the “Celestial City.” In the foreground, Bunyan, asleep while leaning against a mountain under which a caged lion is mounting guard (Bunyan was in jail when he wrote his book), is dreaming of the pilgrim’s progress. The frontispiece heralds what is to come and mirrors the narrator’s dream, since he starts his narrative as follows:

IN THE SIMILITUDE OF A DREAM

As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep; and as I slept I dreamed a dream, I dreamed, and behold, I saw a man clothed with rags, standing in a certain place, with his face from his own house, a book in his hand, and a great burden upon his back.35

Another example of a cartographic hallway into a text is provided by the map of Wessex County which is located before the 1895 Preface to Thomas Hardy’s The Trumpet Major. Right at the top of the map, in the centre of it, an oval cartouche figuring a scroll in the manner of old maps, trompe-l’œil and cartellini, indicates the name of the “author” of the map: “Thomas Hardy’s WESSEX.” The map meets cartographic requirements. It displays what Roger Brunet calls the “garments” of the map: a title, a frame, a legend, an orientation, a scale, a source, a word list, a cartouche, and a map inserted in the left-hand corner. The “elementary spatial structures” of the map, its “choremes” (Brunet 190), provide a reading program. One could easily be taken in if it were not for the trompe-l’œil of the embedded frame, which seems to reveal, like the convex mirror in Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait or in Quentin Metsys’s The Banker and his Wife, what is invisible in the represented map—that is to say OFF WESSEX, meaning what is “off the record,” namely Cornwall. And yet, this second map within the map contains a legend too, itself in the shape of a scroll on which can be read: “Fictitious names as Exonbury/ Real names as Portsmouth.” A second code is thus inscribed within the first one, providing the cipher for its mode of reading while undermining referential illusion. Hardy’s map of Wessex County is to be read with bifocals.

An American counterpart of the British model may be found in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom (1936), which includes, as an end sheet, the map of Yoknapatawpha County drawn by the author himself. One can find in black ink the county roads, its railway, the river, the hills, as well as some official notations, including the title deed (“William Faulkner, sole owner and proprietor”), and in red ink, toponyms together with micro-tales evoking the novel as a whole. For instance, under a red dot on the double sinuous line figuring Yoknapatawpha River, which both highlights and frames the map on its lowest border, one can read the following comment: “bridge which washed away so Anse Burden and his sons could not cross it with Addie’s body.” This is a reminder of an episode of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930). The optical effects of the map of “Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha Co, Mississippi” are by now well known, with the signifiers pointing to a game with reality, with which it coincides at times (Mississippi), but from which it also departs at other times (Yoknapatawpha, Jefferson).

At the other textual extremity, and an example of what we could call “a documentary excipit,” The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, ends with five maps of the Hobbits’ country. The first one is an overall map of Middle-Earth divided into four regions which will be represented and enlarged in the four following maps. The reader may thus follow the tribulations of the characters by looking up the referred places, which are conveniently grouped together at the end of the book. It is absolutely indispensable in this case to understand a fantastic novel with a strong initiatory and allegorical dimension which relies heavily on topography. Maps or plans have also been put to use in detective novels for the reader to follow the investigating character step by step, since the tiniest detail can be of ultimate importance. Maps of the area, plans of castles and estates, and rough sketches of villages offer to the perplexed eye culs-de-sac, secret corridors, and underground labyrinthine galleries. In this way, maps are dream-inducing devices that trigger discourse and function as an auxiliary to, as well as a generator of, fiction. Hence their tale-producing ability which was commented upon by Tristmans, and which is exemplified in the self-revealing French phrase “rêver sur cartes” (“dream-inducing maps”).

to what extent this whiteness is the emblem of an absence (that of any landmark, of any conventional sign) rather than absence itself, for the whiteness of the ocean is, in spite of everything (that is to say the crew’s words) framed, structured all around the map, by topographical indications, which, though touched up compared with traditional cartography, end up restructuring the official blankness.36

Another denial effect is provided by the famous map in Treasure Island “thus made for it to be impossible to use,” which, for Marc Porée and Alexis Tadié, is “akin to a description,” in a destabilizing exchange between the story of the map and map of the story, according to Genette’s terminology.

The map was the chief part of my plot[;] The proofs came, they were corrected, but I heard nothing of the map. I wrote and asked; was told it had never been received, and sat aghast. It is one thing to draw a map at random, set a scale in one corner of it at a venture, and write up a story to the measurements. It is quite another to have to examine a whole book, make an inventory of all the allusions contained in it, and, with a pair of compasses, painfully design a map to suit the data. I did it.37

It is this type of cartographic reading the literary text invites us to perform.

When the map disappears under its iconic shape, it comes back in the manner of the return of the repressed, as a latent subtext, via the figures of ekphrasis or hypotyposis, even via topographic description, which all play their visual role at the fullest. As Christian Jacob notes, “the map cannot be dissociated from descriptive writing,”38 while Claude Gandelman evokes a “hidden map,” asserting that: “All the great narratives contain implicit maps, be they the Bible, the Greek Epic or the French Epic poems of the Middle Ages. In fact, it was possible to make those hidden maps explicit, as some scholars did.”39

Readers must then take on the role of mapmakers in order to follow the characters’ progress as they weave their way within both text and map.40 As Roger Brunet recalls, “In their long history, most maps have had very practical functions […] the very first ones were probably used to travel […] their descendents are our current road and tour maps.”41 The most expensive maps were sea maps and topographic maps, and especially ordnance survey maps representing “in minute detail all that is in relief or might provide an obstacle or a shelter.”42

At the threshold of the text, playing the part of an incipit and being mimetic of its iconic sisters, stands the simulacrum of a map, as in the remarkable opening to Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres. As its title indicates, space—in this case, the table-like space of three isolated farms in the heart of the American Midwest—stands at the core of the novel, as announced in the epigraph which sets forth the drama of the anthropomorphic map:

The body repeats the landscape. They are the source of each other and create each other. We were marked by the seasonal body of the earth, by the terrible migrations of people, by the swift turn of a century, verging on change never before experienced on this greening planet. (Meridel Le Sueur, “The Ancient People and the Newly Come.”)

The incipit is drawn out in the shape of a road map preceding the irruption of the signifier “map” in the second paragraph, and heralding the end of the first chapter with the buying of the family car and its ceaseless road trips.

Because the intersection was on this tiny rise, you could see our buildings, a mile distant at the southern edge of the farm […] and if you raked your gaze from the silos to the house and barn, then back again, you would take in the immensity of the piece of land my father owned, six hundred forty acres, a whole section, paid for.43

Beginning by tracing the spatio-temporal landmarks represented by speed coordinates, the text unfolds the cartographic topoi, the panopticon, the view from above of the divine eye, imago mundi, the plane-like surface of the map, the centripetal vision of the subject at the center of the world’s representation, mappa mundi, the celestial dome, and the overall survey of the gaze taking in space while inscribing in the middle of this geometrical network the place of origin—the father’s farm.

Let us quote another fine example of what Buci-Glucksmann calls “the worldlike eye or Icarus’s fantasy,” literally reinvented by fiction: the rebirth taking place in the incipit of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. In this opening, Gibreel and Saladin Chamcha are falling down from the sky and discovering London from a bird’s-eye view:

Just before dawn one winter’s morning, New Year’s Day or thereabouts, two real, full-grown living men fell from a great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English Channel without benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky […]. Proper London, capital of Vilayet, winked blinked nodded in the night […]. Notice anything unusual? Just two brown men, falling hard, nothing so new about that, you may think; climbed too high, got above themselves, flew too close to the sun, is that it?44

In Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, symbolic and metaphoric maps structure the territory of fiction, very much like the half-fictitious, half-real maps of Thomas Hardy and William Faulkner. Mark Twain’s childhood town, Hannibal, resurfaces for instance under the name of St Petersburg, which was already present in Tom Sawyer. Proper nouns such as Illinois, Arkansas, Mississippi, New Orleans, etc. further anchor the novel in the real. And yet, the blurring of boundaries creates an effect of confusion: not only are reality and geographic/toponymic fiction superimposed, but the North blends into the South, and to go from one point to another, the shortest way is the full loop or long “shortcut.” Moreover, if “the territory” evoked at the end is indeed the one evoked in Chapter 39—i.e. the Indian reservation “Ingean territory” (later to become Oklahoma)—where fugitives and convicts used to take refuge, still an open place in 1834, this “virgin” territory for the Whites is truly a metafictional space, a space where one can dream of inscribing a new story. It contrasts with the well-delineated and abhorred territory of the “there” in “I have been there before”—i.e. the territory of beginnings (to be understood as both the beginning of adventures and the beginning of the narrative) to which Huck as character and narrator does not want to go back. Ethics and aesthetics are linked: a life code has to be established, and one has to trust nature just as the raft is entrusted to the necessarily good Mississippi River. For Twain’s stroke of genius resides in his central metaphor, which merges together the flow of the river and the flow of writing: all writers are discoverers, thinkers, and, above all, explorers. The river is the place of exploration, discovery, and initiation. As the main narrative line, it is traced on the map for the benefit of who can read it together with its rocks, its whirlpools, and reefs, its islands, its steamboats, and its encounters, as well as with the zigzagging itinerary of the fragile canoe connecting its deep bed to its dark banks. The narrative line is molded onto the bends and forks of the river as it follows the tempo of the voyage. And the stops are as many breakdowns, similar to writer’s block. In those cases, just like the narrator, one pauses to light a pipe and wait. This piece of nomadic writing, unpredictable and capricious like the course of the river, escapes the fixity that comes with being ashore, anchored in a temporal rigidity regulated by the irreversible circularity of clock-time. The river and its snares, like the line of narrative reefs and time games, in which one never bathes twice, retain the fluidity of a hazardous labyrinth. To the paradigm of the initiatory road of picaresque novels, Twain substitutes the ambivalent figure of the potent river, the vehicle of good and evil, both a trap and an instrument of liberation, which calls out for adventure and ensnares whoever meets her call—a deep and dark river.

The “Other Language” of Allegories: “Cartographic-Art” And “Archeological Art”45

Even when the map is occult and thus has to be reinvented, it maintains a special relationship with the figure of the allegory. As a means of structuring the novel, the map of the Ideal City, the utopian place of Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City, imprints its mark onto the work. Built on a square plan, the four-gated city functions according to a fourfold model just like the novel itself, divided into four parts, and the series of four novels of The Children of Violence.46 The link between map and allegory is particularly narrow in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. Christine Buci-Glucksmann comments on the allegorical use of maps:

In the middle of the 17th century, the allegorical destiny of maps is fixed once and for all. On Jaugeon’s map of the world (1688), the earth is surrounded by two suns (Louis XIV) and Frederick de Wit’s superb baroque map (1668) is adorned with very colourful images representing the four elements. Be it allegorical or real, the power of maps duplicates the power of the king. It strides across its vast expanse just as we look at the painted maps of Ottaviano’s Great Gallery in the Vatican.47

Combining the knowledge and the arts of a given time, maps were also reservoirs of knowledge. One could see, especially in their margins or parerga, “wild men” posing, adorned with feather headdresses and weapons, details of the local fauna and flora, the presence of allegorical figures, as well as that of winds, angels, and goddesses. This wealth of information corresponded, once more, to a desire of taking it all in, just as the eye was deeply absorbed in the map, busily deciphering its details, and engaged in a physical progression very similar to a journey.

In the manner of Renaissance maps which used to make a (horizontal) flat designation coincide with (vertical) iconic elements seen in perspective, the literary imagination, being the conjunction of both a writing and a reading process, befits the world of the cartographer. The map that the reader of Waiting for the Barbarians could trace of the location of the fort is strongly reminiscent of those maps of Delft whose “portrait” or “profile” offer uncanny coincidences with Vermeer’s own View of Delft.48 The topographical elements of the novel are thus clearly presented with respect to one another and to the magistrate’s comings and goings. The latter is the only character who moves about all the different places in the novel, including the desert where he takes the young Barbarian back to her native tribe. The topographical description thus enables the reader to become a cartographer, to trace a horizontal map of the place, and to give a vertical representation of the walls of the houses, the dunes to the south, and the fishermen’s boats on the lake.

In this novel, which is situated in one of the outposts of the “Empire,” a place exposed to Barbarian raids, the location of the fort is very accurately calculated in relation to the mountains (whose distance is measured in riding days), to the ruins situated three miles to the south of the fort, and to the fishermen’s huts north of the fort on the banks of a salt lake. The details are so precise that a map of the location of the fort could be drawn, with the inn right against the northern wall, the jail, the main square where the prisoners are parked, the barracks and the kitchen, the torture hut in the angle, etc.. Not surprisingly, the magistrate is very keen on archeology and cartography: “I collate what maps we have of the southern desert region.”49 There too the reader is confronted with the precision of ordnance survey maps, which is only natural in a colonial context in which the crucial importance of maps—a way of writing space and a mode of appropriating lands—reflects the fact that space is the bone of contention. South African writer André Brink chose to entitle one of his collections of essays “The Mapmakers.” Maps are thus located between the “aesthetic gaze and political power.”50

It is therefore in the reading activity and in the reader’s mind that the map is eventually achieved, “laid” as one lays a table, on the twofold mode of the planisphere (horizontal space) and of the picture (a space represented perpendicular to the representing space), namely on the descriptive mode of the above-mentioned theatro mundi.

Finally, the text itself becomes an anthropomorphic map as the body, just like the landscape, through a well-known literary topos,51 is mapped with traces, marks, scars, scratches, and networks which function as imprints or indexes, according to Pierce—i.e. close to their origin but fundamentally an-iconic. “The map expresses the identity of both the itinerary and the distance travelled. It becomes one with its object, when the object itself is in movement,” Deleuze says.52 Vestiges, prints, ruins, smoke, often are the landmarks of a bygone era, the presence of an absence, something which is already gone, the mark of a time on a space, that of the sand and of footprints in Robinson Crusoe, that of the page striated by a stroke, a “spoilt” canvas for Dorian Gray, a scarred body, as many memories of the body when memory fails, “archeological-art” more than “cartographic-art” in the way Deleuze means it in Critique et clinique.

The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje,53 offers a paradigmatic instance of the fusion between “cartographic art” (dedicated to journeys and turn-offs, an art of trajectory and becoming) and “archeological art” (the quest for a lost past and for memory). Maps stage the territorialization and de-territorialization of the subject, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s categories. Alamsy and Kip are men who come from nowhere, “born in one place and choosing to live elsewhere. Fighting to get back to or get away from [their] homelands all [their] lives.”54 Just like the burnt body of the wounded man, the text is literally lacerated with marks, traces, scarifications, and vestiges. The signifiers “crisscrossing” and “zigzagging” keep recurring like the scars and the vaccination marks on the characters’ bodies—“I had pushed the sleeve of her shirt up to the shoulder so I could see her vaccination scar. I love this I said. The pale aureole on her arm. I see the instrument scratch and then punch the serum” (58)—or like the marks of the blows inflicted by Katherine to the English patient: “a list of wounds/the various colours of the bruise—bright russet leading to brown […] the fork had entered the back of his shoulder, leaving its bite marks the doctor suspected were caused by a fox” (153). Maps are trompel’œil: like mirrors, they are enantiomorphic, i.e. they cannot be superimposed onto their objects.55 “Give me a map, and I’ll build you a city. Give me a pencil and I will draw you a room in South Cairo, desert charts on the wall” (145). Even the landscape is scarred: “scarred now by phosphorus bombs and explosions “(11); “the scar of a ravine” (15) opens its gaping wound, “the larger womb of the canyon” (19), that of Petra’s siq, easily identifiable to those who have followed the narrow rocky corridor leading to the Kazneh (treasure) where weapons are hidden.

Through these mental maps to be drawn up again by speech and these frescoes, prints, ruins, bombed villas, planes burnt down and buried under the sand,56 the novel maps the bodies and the landscape as the subject tries to reconstruct himself thanks to his memory of places. This is when, under the palimpsest, the scars of the paradigmatic colonial novel reappear, producing and setting the ground for a story which secretly rests on the invisible bookshelf in a no less invisible library that Borgés would not have disowned:

She pulls down the copy of Kim from the library, and standing against the piano, begins to write into the flyleaf in its last pages.

One may also recall the meaning of the two culturally incompatible maps in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. The clue provided by the Kim/Kip paronomasia—Kip the sapper, a Sikh enrolled under the British flag57—refers to the central metaphor of the novel, that of the networks of mine cables, an explosive map recorded in Kip’s memory under those of Tuscany and Naples. The network-like map follows Kip’s movements when he is cast out of Hana’s life by the atomic blast of a faraway explosion which destroys a whole territory one day in August 1941: “I believe in such cartography—to be marked by nature. We are communal histories. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps” (261).

Hence one additional metaphor to theorize maps before closing the cartographic eye of the text. Deleuze and Guattari remind us that “the literary text is a network” functioning in rhizome-like mode with no hierarchical structure and no centre:

The map is open: it can be connected in all its dimensions, taken down, turned upside down, it can be endlessly modified […]. It can be drawn up on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, planned as a political act or a meditation. Perhaps this is one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome: to be made up of multiple entries.58

Unlike the picture, the charm of the map resides in the instability of the aporia which turns it into an enclosed space, even if its frame is now much more sober than the old ones. Still, the frame is undeniably a cut surrounding the representation of an invisible open space. The map is not a foreclosed space like a painting, but a “multiple,” rhizome-like space. The map extends beyond the map and we know it. The map represents a part of a territory (be it literary or geographic) whose unfinished spaces are suggested by the interrupted line of a river, a broken mountain range, or an artificial frontier, which invite us to fill in the gap between the momentarily disjointed spaces. The map is by necessity a fragment, the finite piece of a finite space, contrary to the work of art which Iouri Lotman defines as a finite piece of the infinite.59

Hence too, to close this chapter on a humorous note, the effect of reality superseding fiction, when the real and language reinvest imaginary maps, like the Tender map, the allegorical map representing the different stages of courtship which seduced the aristocrats in the French salons in the seventeenth century, and also reinvent places like 221b Baker Street, or trajectories like Cézanne’s “Walk of Fame” in Aix-en-Provence, which is nailed in copper on the pavement; or, funnier still, Dublin, where Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom’s walks are indicated on the pavement by small, illustrated plaques like so many stations of the cross that one has to follow, book in hand. But after all, isn’t it another way of playing with Homer’s original circumnavigation, as Jacob reminds us: “the written itinerary is a map used by a traveler”?60 Therefore, like maps and rhizomes, the literary work truly has “multiple entries” and just as many exits. It will provide us with one, before we get caught up by Lewis Carroll’s snark, or “written off the map.”

1 Victor Stoichita, L’apparition du tableau, p. 249, with a footnote concerning Louis Marin’s Etudes sémiologiques, Ecritures peintures (Paris, 1971), p. 235.

2 Jonathan Miller, On Reflection (London, 1998). Title of the exhibition: “Mirror Image, Jonathan Miller on Reflection,” September 16–December 13, 1998.

3 Stoichita, L’apparition du tableau, p. 163; and Umberto Eco, Sugli specchi e altri saggi (Milan, 1985), pp. 9–37.

4 Michel Thévoz, Le miroir infidèle (Paris, 1996): “In reality, a mirror only inverts the axis perpendicular to its surface […]. For this reason, the specular image is called enantiomorphic, a geometrical term designating a morphological or topological inversion. There is a corresponding figure in linguistics and rhetorics, the palindrome, which designates a word in which letters are reversible and which can therefore be read in both directions.”

5 As can be expected, there are lots of books on mirrors which I will not list here. Let me just mention a few illuminating ones, such as Agnès Minazzoli, La première ombre: réflexion sur le miroir et la pensée (Paris, 1989); Michel Beaujour, Miroirs d’encre (Paris, 1980); Thévoz, Le miroir infidèle; Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, Histoire du miroir (Paris, 1995); Miller, On Reflection; Stoichita, L’apparition du tableau.

6 Lucien Braun, “Speculum & specula, brève rétrospective d’une métaphore inépuisable,” Correspondances, Revue des Arts de l’ Université des Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg, 7 (1995–96), pp. 18–19.

7 Agnès Minazzoli, La première ombre.

8 Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country (Harmondsworth, 1987); mirrors can be found on pp. 51, 52, 62, 68, 141, 171, 172, 298, 334 and 335. See also Minazzoli, La première ombre.

9 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (New York, 1988), p. 3.

10 Edouard Pommier, Théories du portrait: de la Renaissance aux lumières (Paris, 1998), p. 372.

11 Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 104.

12 Ibid., p. 123.

13 Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Endicott and the Red Cross,” Twice-Told Tales in Tales in Three Volumes (London, 1891), vol. 1, pp. 322–8.

14 Charles I was beheaded in 1688. The Seven Years’ War took place between 1756 and 1783.

15 Philippe Hamon, Imageries et image au XIXè siècle (Paris, 2001), pp. 30–32.

16 Most photograph exhibits in the fall of 2001 in Paris had “memory” as their theme. We can cite as a paradigmatic example the exhibit of the National Center for Photography (Centre National de la Photographie) displaying snapshots taken in concentration and extermination camps—photographs which, although for the most part never shown, or with faces, attitudes, and frames that had been touched up by American liberators, were presented there in their original form. Those photographs were taken from inside the camps by the Nazis, by war journalists when the camps were liberated, or clandestinely by the prisoners themselves. In those cases, the prisoners were stealing time twice, since they who were already in transit were transgressing a prohibition and escaping (both temporarily and for posterity) an inescapable death. These photographs also reveal the presence and the emotional state of the person who took them, hidden, for example, in a building, like that of a gas chamber in crematorium 5 in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. This presence had disappeared in the American snapshot but was restored in the original on display, thus emphasizing the operator’s clandestine status and giving a totally different meaning to the photograph. See Télérama (January 10, 2001): “L’horreur vue de l’intérieur” (“Horror from Within”), pp. 6–13, documents published on the occasion of the exhibit: “Memory of the Camps: Photographs of Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camps, 1933–1999,” Hotel de Sully, Paris (January 12–March 25, 2001).

17 Roland Barthes, La chambre claire (Paris, 1980); Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York, 1978); Jean-Marie Schaeffer, L’image précaire (Paris, 1987).

18 Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Cambridge, MA, 1999). Hamon, Imageries. See, in particular, the preface and the first chapter: “Fabricated Images: Dark Rooms.”

19 Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography, p. 31.

20 J.M. Coetzee, Age of Iron (London, 1990), p. 103.

21 Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude (London, 1988), p. 34.

22 Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York [1937], 1990), pp. 8–9.

23 This quick survey of the relationships between photography and fiction and of the modes of insertion of images in literary texts could be completed by the study of a recent collection of essays devoted to it, in which the reader will find echoes of our discussion. See Silke Horstkotte and Nancy Pedri, “Photography in Fiction,” Poetics Today 29/1 (Spring 2008): pp. 1–29; and Louvel, “Photography as Critical Idiom and Intermedial Criticism,” ibid., pp. 31–48.

24 I refer to W.G. Sebald, Vertigo (London, 1990), The Emigrants (London, 1993), and The Rings of Saturn (London, 1995).

25 Kibédi Varga, “Criteria for Word-and-Image Relations,” Poetics Today, 10/1 (Spring 1989): pp. 31–53.

26 It remains beyond the scope of this book to study such forms of the iconotext that entail deliberate creation, such as those involving mixed media, comic strips (the French B.D.), the graphic novel, illustration, or other hybrid works. Not to mention that it would expand the study to too great a length.

27 Christine Buci-Glucksmann, L’œil cartographique de l’art (Paris, 1996).

28 Roger Brunet, La carte, mode d’emploi (Paris, 1987), p. 8.

29 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux (Paris, 1980), p. 11.

30 See M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford, 1953).

31 Louis Marin, De la représentation (Paris, 1994).

32 Buci-Glucksmann, L’œil cartographique de l’art, pp. 28–9.

33 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (London, 1726).

34 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (London [1678], 1967); Claude Gandelman, Le regard dans le texte: image et écriture du Quattrocento au XXè siècle (Paris, 1986), p. 3.

35 Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 12.

36 Jean-Pierre Naugrette, “Cartographies aventureuses,” Cartes et strates, Tropismes, 7 (Paris, 1995).

37 Robert Louis Stevenson, “My First Book,” The Idler, reprinted in Treasure Island, ed. Emma Letley (Oxford, 1985), pp. 198–9.

38 Christian Jacob, “Ecritures du monde,” Cartes et figures de la terre (Paris, 1980), p. 104.

39 Gandelman, “Le texte littéraire comme carte anthropomorphe,” Littérature,“Le lieu, la scène,” 53 (February 1984), p. 3.

40 This echoes Nicolas Poussin’s advice to his friend Paul Fréart de Chantelou: “Read the story and look at the painting.” Letter to Chantelou (November 1747), cited by Louis Marin, Détruire la peinture (Paris, 1977).

41 Brunet, La carte, mode d’emploi, p. 15

42 Ibid., p. 14.

43 Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres (New York, 1991), pp. 3–4.

44 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (Dover, DE, 1988), pp. 3–5.

45 Gilles Deleuze, Critique et clinique (Paris, 1993), p. 87.

46 See Anne-Laure Brevet-Barbaud, “Le sujet et ses reflets dans l’œuvre romanesque de Doris Lessing,” PhD dissertation (Paris, 1998), pp. 328–36.

47 Buci-Glucksmann, L’œil cartographique de l’art, p. 41.

48 Svetlana Alpers, L’art de dépeindre, la peinture hollandaise au XVIIème siècle (Paris, 1990).

49 J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (Harmondsworth, 1980), p. 38.

50 Buci-Glucksmann, L’œil cartographique de l’art, p. 24.

51 Gandelman, “Le texte littéraire comme une carte anthropomorphe,”, cited by Naugrette, “Cartographies aventureuses,” p. 72.

52 Gilles Deleuze, Critique et clinique, p. 81.

53 Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient (London, 1992).

54 Ibid., p. 176, and Geetha Ganapathy-Dore, “The Novel of the Nowhere Man: Michel Ondaatje’s The English Patient,” Commonwealth, 16/2 (Spring 1993): p. 97.

55 See Buci-Glucksmann, L’œil cartographique de l’art, p. 100, and Thévoz, Le miroir infidèle, p. 21.

56 The titles of the chapters are in that sense “telling:” I: The Villa, II: In Near Ruins, III: Sometime a Fire, IV: South Cairo 1930–1938, V: Katharine, VI: A Buried Plane, VII: In Situ, VIII: The Holy Forest, IX: The Cave of Swimmers, X: August. Eight chapters out of ten designate space; one, the passing of time. Two chapters, III and IV, are in mixed mode. Only one chapter bears a name, Katharine, at the heart of the story and at a pivotal place structurally.

57 Ganapathy-Dore, “The Novel of the Nowhere Man,” pp. 96–100, and Naugrette, “Cartographies aventureuses,” p. 92.

58 Deleuze and Guattari, Mille plateaux, p. 20.

59 Iouri Lotman, La structure du texte artistique (Paris, 1973).

60 Jacob, “Ecritures du monde,” p. 110.