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MIMESIS INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE n. 4 WORD AND IMAGE In Literature and the Visual Arts Edited by Carmen Concilio and Maria Festa With a Preface by Federico Vercellone MIMESIS INTERNATIONAL Published with the contribution of the University of Turin – Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Modern Cultures. © 2016 – MIMESIS INTERNATIONAL www.mimesisinternational.com e-mail: [email protected] Isbn: 9788869770838 Book series: Literature n. 4 © MIM Edizioni Srl P.I. C.F. 02419370305 TABLE OF CONTENTS Federico Vercellone PREFACE 9 Paolo Bertinetti IINTRODUCTION. WORD AND IMAGE FROM TEXT TO FILM: RICHARDSON’S FIELDING 13 PART ONE Paola Carmagnani LORD OF THE FLIES: WILLIAM GOLDING’S REALISM AND PETER BROOK’S CINEMATIC “REALITY” 23 Carmen Concilio SOUTH AFRICA’S NEW ARCHIVES. LITERATURE, PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES 55 Pietro Deandrea COUNTER-CANONICAL AESTHETICS IN POSTCOLONIAL ITALIAN LITERATURE AND CINEMA 83 Irene De Angelis DEREK MAHON’S EXPERIMENTS IN EKPHRASIS 105 Paola Della Valle A BRAND NEW STORY? FROM LITERARY CLASSIC TO GRAPHIC NOVEL: THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY AND DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 123 Lucia Folena PLAYING WITH SHADOWS: TIME, ABSENT PRESENCE, AND THE WINTER’S TALE 151 Pier Paolo Piciucco THE USE OF ANIMAL IMAGERY IN TED HUGHES’S ANIMAL POEMS 187 Chiara Sandrin “DISTORTED SIMILARITY”. KAFKA’S PRESENCE IN BENJAMIN’S MIMETIC PRINCIPLE 203 Chiara Simonigh WORD-IMAGE DIALOGIC IMAGINATION HYPOTHESIS FOR A COMPLEX AESTHETICS OF THE AUDITORY-VERBAL-VISUAL 215 PART TWO Maja Duranovic VISUAL AND VERBAL PLAY IN BARBARA HODGSON’S THE LIVES OF SHADOWS 237 Maria Festa TEJU COLE’S NARRATIVE THROUGH WORDS AND IMAGES 263 Alice Gardoncini THE WORD AS MASK. A READING OF TOMMASO LANDOLFI’S OTTAVIO DI SAINT-VINCENT 291 Alessio Mattana ‘FROM ONE FACULTY TO ANOTHER’: TEXT AND IMAGE IN ROBERT HOOKE’S MICROGRAPHIA 303 Ilaria Oddenino PORTRAYING MIGRATION IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPE: TWO COMPARATIVE APPROACHES Part 1. Everywhere and Nowhere: Strategies of Refraction in Emmanuel Carrère’s Lettre à une Calaisienne and Gianfranco Rosi’s Fuocoammare 327 Luisa Pellegrino PORTRAYING MIGRATION IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPE: TWO COMPARATIVE APPROACHES Part 2. No Country for Black Men 339 Nadia Priotti REPETITION AND VARIATION IN HITCHCOCK’S THE 39 STEPS 349 Paola Quazzo TALKING WALLS. (HI)STORIES OF WALLS in ivan vladislavić and William Kentridge 365 Daniela Salusso MAKING THE I APPEAL TO THE EYE: VISUAL SUBJECTIVITY IN JANE EYRE 2006 BBC MINISERIES ADAPTATION 383 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 399 PREFACE Federico Vercellone (University of Turin) Word and image pursue each other within a continuous frame stretching from Plato’s devaluation of aesthetic appearance to Guy Debord’s “society of the spectacle”. It is self-evident that — in principle — there is no reason to ascribe a theoretical primacy to one of the two expressive means over the other. A logic of conflict between the two is rather what has imposed itself and become the rule over the centuries. The relation between East and West is at the origin of this confrontation, which, from the very beginning, has seen a clash between logoi, as one might say, using a journalistic lexicon — a persistent clash of civilizations opposing the advocates of iconophilia to the iconoclasts. This is an ongoing challenge that we have inherited and are faced with even today. As far as we are concerned, by way of updating the debate, we need to decide whether the civilization of the image is a corruption of the civilization of the word, or rather a further step forward which we have to take into account and become responsible for. Choosing the second horn of the dilemma definitely implies adopting a momentous cultural and political stance. It means that the precarious balance between the two logoi, recurrently sought, for instance, in the contexts of the Renaissance and the Baroque through emblematics and iconology, is now lost, and that the wished-for correspondence between the imaginary and the real has undergone a profound, pain-ridden alteration. When Thomas Mann, at the very beginning of Joseph and his Brothers, invited the reader to look behind the stage of history, he was still convinced that the past could reverberate onto the present thanks to descriptions that revived it in its original freshness. 10 Word and Image At that point the world was on the threshold of an announced catastrophe and of a final attempt to conciliate the irreconcilable. From that moment, the two clashing attitudes that have entrapped the western logos in an endless diatribe would diverge so violently as to lead us to the contemporary “civilization of the image”, a sort of extreme, belated and generalized victory of iconophilia. Images deprived of logoi and logoi deprived of images seem to constitute our present destiny. The aseptic rhetoric of scientific discourse is accompanied by vast clusters of images which provide an identity to subjects who have a desperate yearning to know who they really are in an estranged world. The catastrophe affecting ekphrasis embodies the agony of a whole civilization that had believed in description and in the absolute coherence between the logos and the imaginary. The implicit promise was the integrity of the world as a coherent cosmos. The ancient fracture is engaging the present with a violence that was originally unconceivable. The project of modernity — to use Bruno Latour’s words —, which had attempted to restore order by ascribing truth to the world of words, while assigning appearance to the world of images, is on the verge of a shattering crisis. Mending the fracture means crossing the chasm in order to reimagine a habitable world — a world where it is possible to receive the infinite extension of discourse within moments of the collective imaginary in which the flow of time may be temporarily re-invested with the seal of eternity. This would be almost a new Renaissance. Rethinking this nexus through literature takes us back to the core principle of the unity of the arts, whose separation derives — in modern times — from that fatal oblivion of Horace’s ut pictura poesis which dawned with Winckelmann and continued with Lessing. The present, newly-rediscovered unity of the artistic media leads us well beyond art, towards the reconstruction of a single world and the retrieval of the subject’s integrity, which the modern arts system had considered lost. Dividing the arts according to their specific objects, as happened between Batteux and the great systems of German idealism, meant breaking that synesthetic unity which made it possible to have a correct perception of the world, that is to say, a total sensorial F. Vercellone - Preface 11 perception. This led to an increasing fragmentation of sensorial experience on the basis of a rationalistic subjectivity mirrored by the arts system, in a pattern of mutual reflections. In such a context, the task of art is that of plunging once again into human praxis so as to help its essential unity to come to light. Centuries of rationalism have worked in the opposite direction, shaking off the unity to facilitate the advent of a pragmatic form of reason, exclusively devoted to performativity, and to favour a universe of appearances entrusted to an ineffectual imaginary. The aim of the present volume is to probe this nexus. Its main merit consists in the fact that conducting this kind of research means working hard at bridging the gap between two fronts which are not only related to art but also to human experience, as well as, first and foremost, to art as a human experience. (Translated from the Italian by Lucia Folena) INTRODUCTION. WORD AND IMAGE FROM TEXT TO FILM: RICHARDSON’S FIELDING Paolo Bertinetti (University of Turin) Novels, stories, literary texts, both popular and refined, have served as the base, when not as a pretext, for all sorts of film adaptations. The results achieved by directors and film companies have varied greatly: some have been fascinating and others horrible. But the indignation of the literary world, when it considered that the original text had inevitably been degraded to a sort of raw material, has almost always been unjustified; and equally unwarranted, in the eyes of today’s more attentive critics, appears the concern about “faithfulness”. On the contrary in many cases the strength of an adaptation has been found in the conflict with the work on which it is based. Changes, differences, cuts are always revealing, not only in the different sensibility and interpretations of the world that they manifest, but also because they make evident the diversity with which other codes for the expression and communication of experience function. The new version may repeat or reduce the “vision” of the original text, or it may construct a new meaning. And in many cases it is this last possibility which has yielded the most interesting results, when the director is in conflict with the original text, challenging it, in the dialogue and in the transformation of characters. Because of the expectations of the audience, though, most films based on classic novels attempt to give the impression of being faithful, literal translations of the text into the language of the film. There must be a good deal of selection when a six hundred pages novel is transposed into a film of approximately two hours: scenes and subplots must be cut, minor characters have to be eliminated, but this necessity does not exclude the 14 Word and Image possibility of respecting the deep meaning of the original text and of its author’s central concern. Tony Richardson, one of the founders of the British “free cinema” and one of the greatest British film directors of the second half of the twentieth century, directed the film version of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones in 1963.