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”Word and Image”? Where Is There Any Duality? as the Buddhists would put it
(A more organized person would make this ©Jerry Cullum and try to turn it into a full-fledged essay to be submitted for formal publication, but my readers know better than to believe that I would ever find time to do that. This 1600-word review of a couple of recent books is what it is, just as one might expect.)
Six or seven years ago, I proposed to an editor (who rejected it) a review essay about the increasing number of novels in which the plot was driven by the illustrations. W. G. Sebald wrote haunting narratives accompanied by photographic documentation of the narrative, which in some of his books was completely fictitious and in others was a more or less accurate account of his own experience—the relationship between the “more” and the “less” being an interpretive case in point. Umberto Eco wrote a novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, about an amnesiac and the objects from his early life from which his biography could begin to be reconstructed by implication, or fragmentary memories begin to be recovered, or fact and fiction begin to merge indissolubly. Other writers’ novels circa 2005 ended or began with unlabeled photographs counterpointing the text, or were issued with author-designed cover illustrations that were component parts of the narrative (a point missed by later publishers who chose more commercially appealing cover images for the paperback edition).
In more recent years we have had such delectable oddities as the tale of a failed relationship told in the descriptive catalogue of items being put up for auction by the man and woman in question. (I actually wrote a review essay about this one, which can be found somewhere in one of my two blogs, but I don’t have the time to locate it. It should have been on counterforces.blogspot.com but is more likely somewhere in the vast midden heap of joculum.livejournal.com.)
In any case, I remain fascinated with the ways in which word and image reinforce or contradict one another, whether in museum labels giving us the purported history of the objects presented, or in the mind’s eye when symbolic images suggest meanings, or in the everyday verbal sense we try to make of the mute world around us and of the evidence it presents for our interpretation. (That triad, in its arbitrariness, resembles Jorge Luis Borges’ famous description of the supposed categories into which the Chinese separated animals—including such headings as “which from a long distance off look like flies.” Since the two or three books I am about to discuss also contain digressions or random observations meant to lead the reader into confusion, this is not entirely inappropriate.)
( more???? )
(A more organized person would make this ©Jerry Cullum and try to turn it into a full-fledged essay to be submitted for formal publication, but my readers know better than to believe that I would ever find time to do that. This 1600-word review of a couple of recent books is what it is, just as one might expect.)
Six or seven years ago, I proposed to an editor (who rejected it) a review essay about the increasing number of novels in which the plot was driven by the illustrations. W. G. Sebald wrote haunting narratives accompanied by photographic documentation of the narrative, which in some of his books was completely fictitious and in others was a more or less accurate account of his own experience—the relationship between the “more” and the “less” being an interpretive case in point. Umberto Eco wrote a novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, about an amnesiac and the objects from his early life from which his biography could begin to be reconstructed by implication, or fragmentary memories begin to be recovered, or fact and fiction begin to merge indissolubly. Other writers’ novels circa 2005 ended or began with unlabeled photographs counterpointing the text, or were issued with author-designed cover illustrations that were component parts of the narrative (a point missed by later publishers who chose more commercially appealing cover images for the paperback edition).
In more recent years we have had such delectable oddities as the tale of a failed relationship told in the descriptive catalogue of items being put up for auction by the man and woman in question. (I actually wrote a review essay about this one, which can be found somewhere in one of my two blogs, but I don’t have the time to locate it. It should have been on counterforces.blogspot.com but is more likely somewhere in the vast midden heap of joculum.livejournal.com.)
In any case, I remain fascinated with the ways in which word and image reinforce or contradict one another, whether in museum labels giving us the purported history of the objects presented, or in the mind’s eye when symbolic images suggest meanings, or in the everyday verbal sense we try to make of the mute world around us and of the evidence it presents for our interpretation. (That triad, in its arbitrariness, resembles Jorge Luis Borges’ famous description of the supposed categories into which the Chinese separated animals—including such headings as “which from a long distance off look like flies.” Since the two or three books I am about to discuss also contain digressions or random observations meant to lead the reader into confusion, this is not entirely inappropriate.)
( more???? )
