Synopses & Reviews
The clear-cut distinction between texts (literature) and images (art) has been challenged by a culture saturated with television and by an increased emphasis on interdisciplinary studies. From the viewpoint of our present culture, the author suggests, we can now see how some of the great writers and artists of the past overstepped the boundaries of the media in which they worked. The Mottled Screen studies as an example of this process a great literary work that cannot be confined to language alone, even though it consists exclusively of words: Prousts Remembrance of Things Past.
The author of Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition, a widely acclaimed study of Rembrandts discursive, rhetorical, and narrative painting, now offers a symmetrical counterpart to that study with this sustained “visual” reading of Prousts masterpiece, pointing out its visual strategies of representation, fantasy, and poetic thought. She focuses on the narrative and descriptive passages, examining how they make us “see,” arguing that this visual writing is by no means a derivative writing that uses visual imagery as an inspiration or model. Instead, it is the writing of a true vision.
Beginning with the attempts to emulate painting, the book develops a Proust à la Chardin, working around Chardins painting The Skate, but only after first reading Chardin through Proust. Viewing a Chardin with anxieties and emulation, Proust writes in Chardins mood when he sets up the mottled screen as the metaphor of reading. Chardins appeal to a wavering, roving eye is matched by Prousts uncertain perceptions, and the nervous quality of The Skate is matched by the famous passages recording Prousts disgust at the debris of the breakfast table.
The second part of the book is devoted to Prousts use of optical instruments—such as the magnifying glass, the eyeglass, the telescope—to produce or enhance the visions that constitute the raw material of his poetic imagination. These optical instruments guide the probing of the paradoxes of seeing close-up or at a distance, the latter flattening out, the former blinding.
The final part reads the specifically “photographic” writing that permeates Remembrance as a highly original and astonishing contemporary, almost postmodern, poetics. The photographic shows in the way Prousts narrator frames what he sees, contrasts light and dark, zooms in and out, and represents “contact sheets” of snapshots rapidly taken so as to capture the most fleeting sensations and visions.
Synopsis
The clear-cut distinction between texts (literature) and images (art) has been challenged by a culture saturated with television and by an increased emphasis on interdisciplinary studies. Mieke Bal suggests that we can now see how some of the great writers and artists of the past overstepped the boundaries of the media in which they worked. Here, she studies as an example of this process a great literary work that cannot be confined to language alone.
Synopsis
The author challenges the view that literary texts cannot be examined by words alone, arguing that images also play a role in the interpretation process.
About the Author
Mieke Bal is Director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. She is the author, most recently, of Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis.
Table of Contents
Translator's note; Introduction; Part I. The Mottled Screen: Figurations of Visual Art: 1. This is not a painting; 2. Rembrandt, perhaps; 3. Chardin reads Proust; 4. Proust reads Chardin; Part II. Voyages of Discovery: 5. Optical instruments; 6. The magnifying glass and the journey to Spain; 7. Swelling hillsides; 8. Dances; 9. The father revised and corrected; 10. The fountain of ink; 11. Journey under the skin; Part III. The Flatness of Photography: 12. Positive-negative: the visual rhetoric of capture; 13. The photograph from beyond the grave; 14. Photographic effects; 15. Snapshots: fake depth; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography.