Text and Image from the New Novel to Contemporary Expressions of Identity
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(UN-)FRAMING VISION: TEXT AND IMAGE FROM THE NEW NOVEL TO CONTEMPORARY EXPRESSIONS OF IDENTITY DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of French and Italian of The Ohio State University By Randi L. Polk, M.A. * * * * * The Ohio State University 2005 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Karlis Racevskis, Adviser ________________________________ Professor Danielle Marx-Scouras Adviser French and Italian Graduate Program Professor Jennifer Willging ABSTRACT What does one see when he or she looks at a picture? This very broad question has no real answer, because each “he” or “she” will have a different response to the picture that is viewed. Each textual description of a photograph, therefore, will be different, reflecting each individual’s interpretation or sentiment. The goal of this study is to show the result of such interplay between texts and images, how one influences the other. We will begin with an analysis of the French New Novel that emerged in the decade of the 1950s, and provoked debates on subjective versus objective literature, real versus imaginary, sight versus what is seen by the mind’s eye, among other topics. These binary oppositions allow us to gain a better understanding not only of an image, but also the text that accompanies it and gives it meaning. Since we are not looking at images or texts as isolated structures, there is a necessary interplay of language and images. Thus, arbitrary distinctions in the form of binary oppositions are problematic. The chapters of this study are discussions of such problems. We will present ii these problems by using the New Novel and its innovation as a frame of reference for analyses of verbal-visual narrative crossovers that characterize contemporary French literature. The remaining three chapters will show the dialectical relationship that exists between texts and images. Images in the form of photographs are supposed to relate the truth. However, when these photographs become verbal representations, one must question the message they provide. While the texts we have chosen vary in genre, subject matter, and perspective, they all allow us to problematize the text/ image dichotomy. In addition, each text evokes questions of identity that plague the modern era. All of the authors we have chosen highlight the interplay of a text and an image, as well as the way in which images are used for identification. Although their messages vary, the authors we will be discussing all chose to express themselves in terms of their own visual culture while forcing their readers to interpret their works, and see that interpretations are undeniably variable. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to many people for the support they provided me during the writing of my dissertation. I wish to thank my adviser, Karlis Racevskis, for his input, suggestions, and patience. Similarly, I thank Danielle Marx- Scouras and Jennifer Willging for their ideas and suggestions for improving my project. I thank Sanford Ames because a paper for his course was the genesis of my interest in verbal descriptions of photographs in French literature. I am grateful for the support of my parents during my many years as a graduate student. Even though they may not understand my choice of subjects, I never would have finished my “paper” without them. I am grateful to the many students I have had in courses and counseled in Lyon. It is they who remind me that a future teaching is worth the difficult, lonely moments in the library. I thank Thibaut Schilt for reading my work and forcing me to meet my deadlines. Finally, I thank all of my friends who did not desert me even though they may have wanted to during the past year! iv VITA June, 2005………………………….........PhD in French, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH June 1999……………………………… M.A. in French, The University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH August 1998……………………………Magistère de langue et de civilisation françaises, Centre expérimental d’étude de civilisation française associé à l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, Paris, France 1996…………………………………….Institut pour les étudiants étrangers Aix-en-Provence, France 1996…………………………………… B.A. in French and Sociology, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY TEACHING AND RELATED EXPERIENCE 1999-2005…………………………… Graduate Teaching Associate, The Ohio State University 2002-2003…………………………….English Lecturer, Université de Rennes 1 Rennes, France 2001, 2004…………………………… Research Assistant for Dr. Linda Harlow, Associate Provost of Honors & Scholars, The Ohio State University v Summer 2000-2004……………………Resident Director for Ohio State students studying in Lyon, France. 1998-1999…………………………… Graduate Teaching Associate, The University of Cincinnati 1997………………………………….. Internship with Crédit Lyonnais, Montpellier, France FIELDS OF STUDY French and Italian vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract……………………………………………………………………………...ii Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………iv Vita……………………………………………………………………………………v Introduction: Image and Text: Showing Seeing Through Visual Culture……………………………………………………………………………….1 Chapters: 1. Generating Vision in the Modern Novel……………………………………...14 2. Autofiction and the Photographic Fetish……………………………………...54 3. Writing the Margins: Sex, Lies, and Photographs……………………………99 4. Man Against the Photographic Machine: Encounters with Modernity…..156 Conclusion: The Dialectics of Pictures………………………………………….196 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………….203 vii INTRODUCTION IMAGE AND TEXT: SHOWING SEEING THROUGH VISUAL CULTURE1 Images occupy an enormous place in modern society. They are provocative, influential, and dependant: images provoke reactions from spectators, they influence opinions, and they depend on a spectator to give them life and an identity. Although images are often considered elements of vision, they are brought to life and identified through language. Therefore any attempt to analyze images demands a careful consideration of the interaction of three entities: the image itself, the spectator, and the culture and discourse informing the spectator’s vision. Patrick and Kelli Fuery note the important role of the spectator in the creation of meaning: “It is important to recognize that images do not simply exist—they must be made visible. The rendering visible of the image is part of the creation of the spectator. It is how images come to exist, and, significantly, how they come to be seen as meaningful and the bearers of meanings” (Fuery and Fuery xii). It is from this point of view that we see the importance of not only the image, but the interpretation of the spectator that correlates it to a text which substantiates it or brings it to life. 1 In this study we will use the text/ image dichotomy as a foundation for discussions of visual-verbal narrative crossovers that characterize twentieth and twenty-first century writing. W.J.T. Mitchell speaks of this new visually centered focus as the “pictorial turn.” Mitchell uses Richard Rorty’s way of characterizing the history of philosophy as a series of “turns” to go further and add another turn. Rorty identifies the enlightened contemporary philosophical scene with a focus on words (Mitchell 1994: 12). His final “turn” is the “linguistic”one. Mitchell takes his ideas further and adds a “pictorial turn.” For Mitchell, the “pictorial turn” in Anglo-American philosophy can be traced back to the works of Charles Peirce and Nelson Goodman “both of [whom] explore the convention and codes that underlie nonlinguisitic symbol systems and (more important) do not begin with the assumption that language is paradigmatic for meaning” (Mitchell 1994: 12). In Europe Mitchell identifies evidence of this “pictorial turn” in the works of Derrida (grammatology for example), the Frankfurt School’s “investigations of modernity, mass culture, and visual media” (Mitchell 1994: 12), and Michel Foucault’s distinction between what is seeable and what is sayable. Mitchell has written extensively about images, pictures, and the visual. In Picture Theory, he “asks what a picture is and finds that the answer cannot be thought without extended reflection on texts, particularly on the ways in 2 which texts act like pictures or ‘incorporate’ pictorial practices and vice versa” (Mitchell 1994: 4). Mitchell’s book Picture Theory which was published in 1994 and was written, as he explains, in pursuit of three questions: “What is a picture? How do pictures interact with words? Why do the answers to these questions matter?” (Mitchell 1994: 215).2 Because of the nature of these questions, reviewers questioned Mitchell’s title (Picture Theory), and suggested that he should have entitled his book “What Do Pictures Want?”.3 Mitchell responds to this suggestion in a 1994 article “What Do Pictures Want? An Idea of Visual Culture” by asking that same question. He begins by noting the dubious proposition that pictures could want something: [pictures] can’t want anything because they aren’t persons— aren’t even animate beings. Any notion that pictures want something is a superstitious illusion. It verges on magical thinking—idolatry, fetishism, totemism, and animism. Or it’s just a playful conceit to illustrate the way we project emotions into pictures, allowing ourselves to treat them ‘as if’ they were alive, the way a child treats a doll. (216) An investigation into the wants and desires of pictures does require a certain personification of them. They would have to have a gender and desires that were expressed as a result of their identity. In the course of this current study we will be looking at pictures that are representations of the narrator. In this way, these pictures are much like the persons they represent. Thus, we can work from the hypothesis that pictures 3 have the same desires as their subjects. They are a source of questioning that will lead to answers, or more questions, concerning the truth about their identity. Mitchell concludes his essay on the desires of pictures by saying that what pictures want is to be asked what they want. He also points out that, at times, they want nothing at all. While this may be true, there remains the question of the eye of the beholder of the picture who wants something from it.