The Customary Connection

The Customary Connection Miguel Tamen This essay deals with illustration apropos John Tenniel’s illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and claims that, rather than understood as a case of interse- miotic translation, illustration should instead be understood as a case of what David Hume called “constant conjunction” or “a customary connection […] between the object and its usual attendant”. Contrary to Hume, however, the wonder elicited by certain illustrations is explained not by mere habit but by how they fit “into the world of our thoughts and feelings”. Mark Twain remarks with reason that if the nice people who weep in front of the celebrated “Beatrice Cenci the Day Before her Execution” […] did not know the picture, they would inspect it unmoved, and say, “Young Girl with Hay Fever; Young Girl with her Head in a Bag” (1962: 291). This, according to him, “shows what a label can do”. Indisposed to- wards nominalism I would argue instead that it shows both what no label can ever do (tell what a picture is a picture of, regardless) and what a picture can never be (a picture of something, regardless of labels). However, also wary of rushing to the jugular of general philoso- phical considerations, I will build my argument around a discussion of the activity known as illustration. Two caveats are in order. The first is that there seem to be several activities we call illustration. Perhaps, as the critic J. Hillis Miller has suggested, the critic is an illustrator in some sense or under some description of the term (cf. 1992: 150f.). What critics are will not concern me here though. Nor do I want to talk about ‘about’ and the difficult and finer distinctions between illustration, depiction, explanation, description, representation and the like, which I find occasionally handy though in many respects unpromising. As it happens, I will only discuss illustrations in books, i. e., pictures in books. The second caveat is that whatever general considerations we come to, no new theory of what labels do or of what pictures are will be offered, and this for three reasons: the first, that it has already been attempted1, the 1 Famously among many others by Nelson Goodman (1976: chs. 1–2). For other motives, I shall be returning to Goodman in what follows. 310 Miguel Tamen second, that it is not required, and the third, that all such matters are somehow part of the problem I will be trying to see through. Prima facie it looks like I must be wrong. There are numerous ex- amples of situations that seem to require a discussion about the parti- cularities of images and words. It is a well-known fact that Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations to Lewis Carroll’s two Alice books were based on Carroll’s own drawings and that Carroll was a relentless pain in Sir John’s neck (cf. Kelly 1990: 114–116)2, and perhaps also disliked Sir John’s illustrations3, and at any rate “inflicted on that most patient and painstaking firm, Messrs. Macmillan and Co., about as much wear and worry as ever publishers have lived through”4. All this seems to indi- cate that Carroll had very firm ideas about what the illustrations for his Alice books should have been like. The fact that one has very firm ideas about something does not necessarily mean that those ideas are true. But it suggests at any rate that Carroll might have had ideas about telling a good illustration from a bad illustration of his books, which he might indirectly have voiced by, e. g., complaining (in vain) to Tenniel that the White Knight should not be endowed with whiskers (cf. ibid.: 116). As such ideas are expressed in injunctions like ‘Remove the whiskers, please’, and as these injunctions would pre- sumably be satisfied by a change in an image, it should follow that our ideas about illustration, and about what makes an illustration good (the word ‘adequate’ is often used in this context), are often ideas about the peculiarities of certain images and perhaps also about the peculiarities of images in general. They would therefore seem to require a discussion of the connection between words and images, labels and pictures, in the special sense of a discussion of the connection between the properties of words and the properties of images. We could then, if pressed, make our ideas about given connections explicit by rules of thumb such as ‘Every good illustration of the White Knight 2 Thus Tenniel about Carroll to the would-be illustrator of Sylvie and Bruno: “I’ll give you a week, old chap; you will never put up with that fellow a day longer” (qtd. in Kelly 1990: 116). 3 The anecdote is quoted in Hancher (1985: 119), and testimonies for both the inference and anecdote come from Harry Furniss, the illustrator of the subsequent Sylvie and Bruno. Hancher shows that the anecdote is unreliable. 4 Lewis Carroll, “The Profits of Authorship”, lost pamphlet quoted by Hancher (1985: 120). .

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