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Klaus Speidel How single pictures tell stories. A critical introduction to narrative pictures and the problem of iconic narrative in narratologyi
[NOTE TO READERS: This is the original manuscript of a text translated into Polish and published
by Universitas in a volume edited by Katarzyna Kaczmarczyk. Both from a historical and a
theoretical perspective it is by far the most complete article on pictorial narrative I have published
so far. It contains some of the essential ideas of my doctoral dissertation. Please Email me with any
remarks or requests as I will go on developing the work contained here or if you are interested in a
publication in English, German or other languages.]
Bibliographical Reference: “Jak pojedyncze obrazy opowiadają historie. Krytyczne wprowadzenie do
problematyki narracji ikonicznej w narratologii” In: Katarzyna Kaczmarczyk (Ed.), Narratologia
transmedialna. Wyzwania, teorie, praktyki [Transmedial Narratology. Challenges, Theories, Practices].
Krakow, 2018
The English text has only been partially proofread by a native speaker.]
Introduction ................................................................................................................. 3 Narrative pictures and iconic narrative ....................................................................... 5 On the concept of single picture.................................................................................. 6 Three reasons why narratives in single pictures matter .............................................. 7 Narrative in art history, Bildwissenschaften and Visual Studies............................... 13 Iconic narrative and definitions of narrative ............................................................. 15 Narrating pictures ...................................................................................................... 21 Story time and single pictures ................................................................................... 24 Five narratological positions on iconic narrative: a critical presentation ................. 33 Wendy Steiner and the question of realism .................................................... 34 Aron Kibédi Varga and the question of mere illustration .............................. 37 Jean-Marie Schaeffer and the problem of iconic representions of time ......... 41 Werner Wolf and the question of suspense in iconic narratives .................... 54 Rick Altman and the problem of a double standard for narrative .................. 56 Narrative and the picture: a plausibly narrow definition .......................................... 57 Aristotle's plot-structure and Sternberg's curiosity and suspense ............................. 60 The problem of a temporal program in pictures........................................................ 62 Addressing the problem of a temporal program in pictures: relative determination of
order of access ................................................................................................ 64 A painting with a temporal program .............................................................. 65 A painting evoking suspense and relief .......................................................... 66 Alternatives to armchair definitions of narrative ...................................................... 70 Conclusion................................................................................................................. 73 Figures ....................................................................................................................... 75 2
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The author wishes to thank Roy Sommer, the editorial team of DIEGESIS, an
anonymous peer reviewer and Katarzyna Kaczmarczyk for their valuable comments on an
earlier version of this essay. I am the only one to blame for remaining weaknesses. The
research for this essay has been supported by FWF Der Wissenschaftsfond and was part of
M1944: Towards an experimental narratology of the image.
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Introduction That the same story can be told in different media is one of the fundamental and foundational claims of narratology. Tzvetan Todorov, who gave the field its name, insisted that “the structure [of story] is independent of the techniques that transmit it […] We read words, we see pictures, we decipher gestures, but through them, we follow a story; and it can be the same story” (Todorov 1969, 10)ii. Roland Barthes (1966, 1) explicitly refers to the Saint Ursula cycle by Carpaccio as an example of story-­‐telling in painting. The founding fathers of narratology thus prepared the ground of the field’s future as a discipline engaged in narrative research across media, in principle including single picturesiii. That notwithstanding, narrative analysis of single pictures has remained comparatively rare. While there has been an exponential growth of narratological film-­‐, comics-­‐ and computer game-­‐studies, a list of all narratologists who have thoroughly studied the narrativity of single pictures is relatively short. This has different causes, some of which are even reasons. One important cause is certainly the historical division of disciplines with their respective approaches and standard corpora. Narrative in the single picture seems to have fallen through the cracks: narratology’s most traditional locus is literary theory, where training and research is largely text-­‐based. Film scholars focus on moving pictures. Comics, manga, etc. are organized in picture sequences, therefore research looks mainly at how narrative unfolds in text-­‐image sequences. As for art history, a discipline focusing on single still pictures, its links to narratology are all but systematic. The so-­‐
called Visual Studies and German Bildwissenschaften sometimes focus on single pictures, but have been preoccupied with ideology and/or what makes pictures special rather than different socio-­‐semiotic modalities of pictorial representation. All this leads to a situation where 4
reflections on the single picture as a narrative device are scattered in single publications across many highly specialized fields between which there is little exchange (from child book research through art-­‐history to social semiotics). In narratology, there’s another, less sociological explanation for the lack of research on iconic narrative. Many narratologists consider the concept problematic. According to researchers such as Seymour Chatman (1990), Christian Metz (1968), Françoise Revaz (2009), Shlomith Rimmon-­‐Kenan (2006), Marie-­‐Laure Ryan 2004 or Jean-­‐Marie Schaeffer (2001) single pictures may at best evoke or imply stories, but are unsuitable for storytelling in a strict narratological sense. It is not, for all narratologists, clear that a single still picture may indeed communicate “a story proper” (Wolf 2003, 180) and can thus be regarded as a narrative. This, of course, does not exclude that a picture can have a high degree of narrativity. The editor of this volume invited me to write an introduction to the topic of narrative pictures, while also further developing my own work on the topic of iconic narrative. It is thus what you could call a critical introduction. In a multiplicity of chapters I will dwell on several essential topics: the cross-­‐cultural importance of visual narratives, the role of visual narrative in different fields, narratological definitions of narrative and their systematic relationship with the question of iconic narrative, the representation of temporal relationships in pictures and the degree to which pictures can govern the way we view them. I will evoke or explain major positions on each of these topics and try to show their limits where necessary. Last but not least, I will argue that certain pictures can have a complication-­‐resolution structure and that iconic narrative exists. 5
Narrative pictures and iconic narrative Mieke Bal is one of the narratologists who have most consistently analyzed single still pictures as narratives. But the fact is that the single pictures of which she offered narrative analyses (e.g. Bal 1991, 1994, 1997) are quite incompatible with most definitions of narrative and arguably even her own definition (cf. Bal 1997, 9). While Bal’s work convincingly shows that the tools of narratology yield rich interpretations of pictures, she does not take up the challenge of demonstrating that pictures can indeed be narratives. Independently of how we end up defining narrative, we must keep in mind that there are artefacts that are not narratives, but still have a high degree of narrativity (cf. Prince 2012, 26). An artefact which, for example, complied only with two out of four necessary criteria for narrative, would not be a narrative. However, it would, ceteris paribus, still have a much higher degree of narrativity than an artefact which only complied with, say, one criterion. We could thus call it a “narrative artefact” and narratological tools could still yield interesting interpretations of it. In analogy with this, I use “narrative images/narrative pictures” whenever I discuss pictures that have a comparatively high degree of narrativity. I however reserve the term “iconic narratives” to pictures that comply with a narrow definition of narrative such as the one I provide in the second part of the article. While it is likely that most pictures have some narrativity, insofar as they show traces of events and many have a relatively high degree of it, it may well be that very few are iconic narratives. The argument I develop in the second part of my article aims at showing that iconic narrative exists. But I will first discuss different aspects of narrative pictures more generally. 6
On the concept of single picture Before we discuss why narrative in single pictures matters, I would like to briefly clarify the concept of picture I rely on in this text. I am quite aware of the fact that the concept of picture itself is not unproblematic. But as Otto Neurath (1981, 184) famously said “we are like seamen who have to rebuilt their ship while at sea”. In other words: we cannot question everything at the same time. I will therefore only provide rough guidance on how I understand the concept of (single) picture. This seems to be quite unproblematic to me because the concept of picture is not essential for my approach to iconic narrative. I in fact believe that a theory of iconic narrative should respect what I call the compatibility constraint (Speidel 2013, 29): it should be compatible with all sensibly plausible theories of pictures. Narrative is identified at a second level of reference, once the elements that enter the story have been recognized: for instance, we must already have recognized two men and two swords in a certain constellation before we may recognize that they are fighting a duel. But only the latter statement not the former can be said to have a certain degree of narrativity. When I talk about a picture in the context of this article, I have in mind something like Klaus Sachs-­‐Hombach’s (2006, 88) concept of “wahrnehmungsnahes Zeichen” or sign close to perception: “an object is considered a sign close to perception if its content is assigned based on our perceptual competences. The concept of closeness to perception is gradual and varies in relation to the user of the sign. It is in many respects equivalent to the concept of iconicity which is used in semiotics and was introduced by Morris and Peirce. [...] To understand what a picture depicts, we can largely rely on the processes that we possess in virtue of our ability to perceive objects.” Like Sachs-­‐
Hombach, I treat “picture” and “icon” as equivalent. While some authors have advocated larger concepts of pictures, I believe Sachs-­‐Hombach’s definition to reflect the most common acception of the term. The 7
examples I will discuss should all be uncontroversial examples of pictures. I similarly understand “single picture” in a sensibly ordinary manner as “a picture contained within one frame”. While an argument by Flint Schier can make it problematic to speak of a single picture because even a minute detail of what is usually called a picture could already be considered a picture in itself (Schier 1986, p. 66), I believe the above acceptation of “single picture” to correspond closely enough to ordinary use of the term to be clear and unproblematic given the focus of this article. Last but not least I would like to insist that the focus of my article are really pictures rather than artistic paintings or drawings, even though I mainly use examples of drawings and paintings: in fact, anything I say should be applicable to all kinds of single pictures, including, for instance, photographs or pictures that have been created on a computer, artistic as well as non-­‐artistic. In other words: I believe that – just like a good theory of pictures – a good theory of iconic narrative has to comply with the “diversity constraint” (Lopes 1996, 32) and I try to make sure that my theory does so. In Schier’s (1986, p. 10) words a theory respecting this constraint “must be general enough to explain the iconicity of everything from the meanest pictorial scrawl on the wall of a tenement close to a ceiling by Tiepolo.” The same holds true of a theory of iconic narrative.
Three reasons why narratives in single pictures matter
I want to start with a methodological reason that it is easy to explain: the single picture – or icon – is the smallest element of pictorial creation. This has a simple but important implication: the single picture is the basis of more complex visual narratives. In order to understand how visual narrative works in movies or image sequences, we therefore first have to assess the narrative potential of single pictures. As long as we have not firmly understood how one picture narrates, we can 8
always be wrong in the way we decrypt narrative sequences, for example in comics or movies. On a structural level, movies and comics are composed of single pictures. If we have not understood how narrative works in the single image, it may always happen that we miss out on elements of the construction of the cinematic narrative or storytelling in comics. Therefore any methodologically complete approach to visual narrative, whatever the media, has to take into account what I call iconic narrativity and iconic narrative, i.e. storytelling in the single image1. I now want to briefly sketch out two more complex arguments that show the importance of analyzing the narrativity of single pictures. Different aspects of these arguments will appear regularly throughout this text, in places where they more specifically contribute to the argument. The first is based on the shared human tendency to produce and receive images as narratives. The second one is based on the historical importance of narrative in single pictures. I want to call my first argument the argument from anthropology. Given the fundamental human tendency to tell stories, it does not come as a surprise that depictions are also often approached from a narrative perspective by viewers. This is, for example, part of the most common ways we look at picture-­‐books with children or try to hold their attention in art museums. But it is not only a secondary practice supervening on an otherwise non-­‐narrative artefact. It reflects the fact that children tend towards storytelling not only when they speak, but also when they spontaneously draw (Wilson 2016, 189). Brent Wilson is a visual arts researcher who spent more than 40 years comparing child art from different countries and cultures. In a recent article (Wilson 2016, 186), he explains that the narrative strain in drawings by children was long obscured by the modernist vision of child art, where narrative had no place. His ontogenetic observation about the Note to the translator: While there have been theoretical arguments based on a
precisely differentiated use of “picture” and “image”, I'm here using them as synonyms, for
variety.
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importance of narrative drawing in children is confirmed by ethnographical and historical evidence: there are pictorial narratives in most parts of the world and at different times. Artefacts as diverse as Maya vase-­‐painting (Wichmann/Nielsen 2016), ephemeral Aboriginal sand-­‐drawing in Australia (Strehlow 1964), or Cave Paintings in Europe (Sauvet 1979) are considered by their respective specialists to display relatively high degrees of narrativity. As Georges and Suzanne Sauvet have shown, the fact that such pictures may also have performed a function beyond telling a story is compatible with their narrative interpretation (Sauvet 1979, 353). The second argument is directly related to the first. I call it argument from history. It is based on the importance of narrative pictures throughout historyiv. As it seems, pictures have regularly been made to communicate stories and received as communicating them by their intended audiences. This fact is not something, I believe, that can be easily neglected by narratologists who claim that pictorial narrative doesn't exist. It also is, and this is how I use it here first, a good reason for looking at narrative images. I believe that the argument from history even allows to call into question the often-­‐stated primacy of verbal narrative. As Grishakova and Ryan (2010, 4) suggest, “narrative most certainly originated in oral storytelling – verbal language remaining by far the most powerful mode of signification for the representation of what makes a story a story namely interactions between humans and between humans and the world”. There is, however, no way to verify this thesis and the fact is that the oldest human artefacts which have survived and intuitively appear as narratives are pictures rather than texts. While it might still be that the first narratives must have been verbal on semiotic or anthropogenetic grounds, I think the evidence provided by Grishakova and Ryan is weak. First of all, it is anachronistic (verbal language is the most powerful mode of signification). It also doesn't holds semiotically speaking. The authors start with the premise that language is a more – indeed the most – powerful tool to 10
communicate stories. While this is probably true on a referential level (but maybe not in terms of the emotional effect), the conclusion they draw from the premise certainly does not follow: there is no general rule according to which the beginnings of a communicative practice are always optimal. In other words: even if it is easier to narrate using words, the first narratives may still have been based on pictures, maybe drawn on the ground with sticks or walls with coal or on enactments or hand gestures or something else. And whatever the final word – or the right picture – about the first narratives may be, there certainly is pictorial evidence of early narratives. Not only is what is considered the oldest historiographic document, the Stele of the Vultures (2500 BC), a visual narrative. There are also much older examples. Some of the first realistic depictions mankind has produced display at least a certain degree of narrativity. In their Prehistory of occidental art, André Leroi-­‐
Gourhan and his coauthors briefly describe different pictures showing human actors. They speak, for instance, of “a man struck by a bison” in Lascaux and “a man who seems to be attacked by a bear” as well as “a man carrying something on his shoulder, followed by a bison” in Le Roc-­‐de-­‐Sers (Leroi-­‐Gourhan et al. 1995, 162). Though minimal, all of these sentences describe action-­‐loaded scenes. Let's look more closely at one of them: The Shaft Scene in Lascaux (fig. 1), the cave drawing described by the first sentence, shows a man with a bird's head facing a bison which has already been hurt with a spear. As the picture is usually interpreted, the spear goes through the bison's body and his intestines ooze out. Even if we do not want to call it “a narrative”, it can hardly be denied that this picture has a high degree of narrativity, because it indeed shows extraordinary events – and arguable evokes a before (the bison is attacked with a spear) and after (the man is going to fall down, the bison is going to die). The impression that it shows “a hunting story” has been so strong that some researchers searched the hunter's tomb in the cave (Leroi-­‐Gourhan 1966, 39). 11
Leroi-­‐Gourhan underlines that interpreting the picture as telling the story of an accident is likely to be based on later projections and explains that most researchers suppose that the painting had a ritual or magical function. But the fact that the painting may have had such a role does not actually exclude its narrativity. As Hermann Gunkel has underlined, most narratives have a “a locus in life”(Sitz im Leben) and play a specific functional role in society (Gunkel 1906, 3). Many narratologists now think that it is part of the narratologist's job to better understand what this role might be for each narrative (Klein/Martínez 2009, 8). In any case, one may ask why, if the fact that Little Red Riding Hood is also told to prevent children from talking to strangers does not affect its narrativity in any way, the fact that the Shaft Scene has magical value should defeat its narrativity? If the cave drawings had a ritual or magical function, this would simply be a role they played in an ancient culture. It would not affect the drawings' narrativity. In fact, research even confirms the link between narrativity and ritual. In an article for which they analyzed pictures found in 54 French and 26 Spanish caves, Georges and Suzanne Sauvet insist that the drawings' deep link to myths and ritual does not exclude that they are also narratives: “Most often, magic consists in reactivating a situation or event which is supposed to have happened in the past.” (Sauvet 1979, 353). In this sense, the ritual function of the drawings could be based on their primary narrativity. In any case, it would definitely be wrong to consider that the narrative function of pictures excludes others. The catholic church famously used visual narratives both with the aim of reminding viewers of the biblical stories and to instruct them through example. In the 6th century Pope Gregory thus reprimanded Serenius, Bishop of Marseilles, for his iconoclasm. In his letter, Gregory famously argued that pictures can act as replacement of texts for the illiterate. His letter is quoted throughout the middle-­‐ages whenever the function of pictures is discussed (Kessler 2006). And while the 12
reformation is mainly famous for its rejection of images, Martin Luther (1903, 677) specifically excludes narrative images that do not aim for veneration from his criticism. He even recommends the use of such pictures for those who cannot read and edits an illustrated prayer book in 1529 (Moxey 1977, 129-­‐131). Similarly, the Stele of the Vultures, which we already evoked above, celebrated the victory of Eannatum, king of Lagash over the state of Umma. But as Irene Winter has shown it did more than this: its iconography also prepared the king's usurpation of the god state (Winter 1985, 26-­‐28). These three cases are no exceptions: the narrative function of pictures is often intertwined with others. In the future, more research should be undertaken to understand the specific “place in life” of iconic narratives and how they relate to other functions of pictures, such as suggesting certain kinds of behaviour or transmitting ideology. As a first conclusion, we can say that there are numerous examples of pictures made by children or seasoned artists which had a narrative function, and to some extend still do so. In other words, the anthropological and historical primacy of narrative creation and perception of pictures connect quite as they should and when we talk about the how of iconic narrative below, we will discover more striking examples. Given our deeply rooted sense that some pictures tell stories, combined with the historical confirmation that they were intended to do so, and the realization that many of these presentations are very refined and connect to other functions of pictures, they certainly make for an interesting object of study. Insofar as the study of stories in an intermedia perspective has traditionally been an important aspect of narratology, it seems quite incomprehensible, from a methodological, anthropological and historical point of view, that narratology should not study single pictures more thoroughly. Before we look at some of the reasons for the lack of narratological studies of iconic narrativity, I would like to at least evoke the state of the art in other disciplines where I looked for works on the narrative aspect of pictures. 13
Narrative in art history, Bildwissenschaften and Visual Studies As for now, art-­‐historians mostly tried to clarify how pictures referred to existing verbal narratives or else focused on the meaning which artists wanted to communicate by evoking well-­‐known stories (Baetens 2006, p. 68). Examples of this are Imdahl (1975), Brilliant (1984), Thürlemann (1990), Karpf (1994), Kemp (1996a and 1996b) as well as Giuliani (2003). All of these offer interesting analysis of how narrative pictures convey meaning, but none analyzes the autonomous narrative potential of pictures or how the temporal nature of our perception may influence the meanings conveyed. The treatment of narrative in art history seems to have been strongly influenced by the ideas of Alberti and other early art theorists. In his groundbreaking study on narrative in Caravaggio, published in 2011, the art historian Lorenzo Pericolo thus makes a bold statement: In art history there is no narratology worthy of the name. It might sound absurd that a humanistic discipline like art history, which has mostly emerged from the early modern debates about the istoria, has stubbornly continued to appraise visual narratives with criteria that are frankly obsolete. (Pericolo 2011, 94) While scholars like Felix Thürlemann (1990) and Wolfgang Kemp (1996a, 1996b) offer interesting assessments of the narrative dimension of single pictures well before the publication of Pericolo’s study, art-­‐historians rarely seem to fundamentally question the possibility of telling a story with a picture. Wolfgang Kemp is of particular interest because he introduced art history to reader-­‐
response theory. His approach thus seems to be compatible with post-­‐
classical narratology. However, his points of reference are mainly art historical. One exception is the article “Narrative” (Kemp 1996b), which he contributed to the collection Critical Terms for Art History. In the last part of this short article, Kemp ventures some connections to 14
classical narratology, trying to reconceptualize the concepts of lack, desire and transformation in reader-­‐response terms. The article is very insightful and its focus on reception can be considered an anticipation of some aspects of Werner Wolf’s articles on visual narratology. In his Die Räume der Maler (1996a), Kemp analyzes the spatial and narrative structure of paintings, presupposing that a picture can tell a story. Another important study is Richard Brilliant (1984), where the author analyzes narrative in Etruscan and Roman antiquity. Felix Thürlemann (1990) applies concepts developed by Greimas and Hjelmslev to pictures. Jutta Karpf (1994) focuses on medieval picture cycles, applying concepts of classical narratological semiotics to pictures. An early example of narrative analysis of pictures in art history is Max Imdahl (1975), who analyzes how Rembrandt slightly transformed a drawing by his master in order to more convincingly tell the same story. Most of these studies however presuppose that pictures can be narratives. With their more foundational approach to how pictures work and looking for pictures' universal essence, the German tradition of visual studies (Bildwissenschaften) might seem to be a better place to look for an argument that could show that pictures can be narratives. In a recent text, where Gottfried Boehm, one of the major Bildwissenschaftler introduces his approach to a French readership, he explains why an episteme of pictures does not yet exist. The fact that there is “a logic of pictures”, Boehm argues, was masked by the intuitive idea that pictures are transparent. If a picture is like a window, there is little to be analyzed. According to Boehm, we must therefore break free of this association in order to understand the deep nature of pictures. To do so, we must strip pictures of everything they have traditionally been taken to communicate, such as stories (cf. Boehm 2007, 29). The fact that stories can be communicated in different media and thus cannot be essential for pictures might well be the reason why the Bildwissenschaften generally ignore the narrative dimension of images. 15
Pericolo also identifies a more general prejudice concerning the narrative dimension of pictures: The structures and mechanisms of pictorial narrative do not appear to offer enough ground for analysis and interpretation. That is, examining the means by which an artist narrates through an image does not seem to affect the exegesis of the artwork’s ‘content’, the only element that lends itself to being easily decoded in terms of ideology, culture, society, and history. (Pericolo 2011, 3) A strong preference for “decoding ideology” can also be detected in the Visual Studies and is particularly obvious in W. J. T. Mitchell’s (1984) treatment of Lessing’s Laocoon. In an argument which Meir Sternberg (1999, 349) calls “almost embarrassing to confront”, Mitchell provides a list of no less than twenty concepts linked either to poetry or painting to be found in Laocoon (among them male and female), but omits the fundamental distinction between actions told and bodies described at the heart of Lessing's argument. Mitchell is clearly more interested in ideology than narrative analysis or semioticsv and Sternberg (1999) definitely makes for a better guide to Lessing. Let us now move on to our main topic: iconic narrative from a narratological point of view.
Iconic narrative and definitions of narrative There is a striking disconnect between the relatively liberal application of the concepts of story (and, to a lesser degree, narrative) by ordinary spectators and the restraint displayed by narratologists. While I do believe that it is essential that scholars try to offer precise criteria for the definition of concepts which are used without theoretical consciousness in everyday life, I also think that the test for definitions is how well the criteria that have been explicitly provided sort the objects they are supposed to define exactly the same way ordinary people 16
would – at least if the aim of definition is assessment (Feststellung) of the meaning of the term rather than assignment (Festsetzung) (Walter Dubislav (1981, 2). Before moving on, it is important that we understand the direct link between definitions of narrative and the problem of narrative in the single image. The fact is that the degree to which theorists embrace the narrativity of pictures largely depends on their definitions of narrative. It would take a book-­‐length text to enumerate and comment the definitions of narrative on the market, but one aspect is relevant to us here: scholarly appreciation of the narrative potential of pictures often depends more on the (kinds of) definitions embraced than on the pictures themselves and the way they were traditionally experienced. It is true that narratologists often criticise art-­‐historians for their lack of rigour when they use the concept of narrative. But according to my experience working and teaching in art history departments, art-­‐historians often find the ways narratologists sort objects into narratives and non-­‐narratives highly arbitrary. They are thus not always willing to accept narratological methodology concerning the definition of narrative and, frankly speaking, I am not sure they should. What counts most for art-­‐historians is how pictures were conceived by their creators, and how they were interpreted by their initial audience. A denial by a theorist of the narrativity of an artefact that the creator and/or initial audience accepted therefore seems problematic to an art-­‐historian. But such denial is exactly what many narratological definitions of narrative entail. Authors do not always seem to intentionally plan for their definitions to have implications in terms of the media they allow for narrative, but they still do. Let us look at a few definitions to get a feel for how, exactly, different definitions relate to the question of iconic narrative. 17
Four kinds of criteria There are at least four kinds of criteria in definitions of narrative, all of which can make it seem problematic that certain forms of presentation be used for narrative: 1. production criteria (e. g. production of narrative has to be intentional or a narrative has to be an artefact, i.e. man-­‐made) 2. content or representation criteria (e. g. narrative has to represent several events unfolding in time or include intentional beings as actors) 3. presentation criteria (e. g. the presentation of a narrative has to unfold in time) 4. reception criteria (e. g. if something is received as telling a story it is a narrative). Many narrow definitions are combinations of criteria of several of these four kinds. When Gérard Genette, for instance, defines narrative as “the representation of an event or a series of events, real or fictional, by means of language” (Genette 1966, 152), he uses content and presentation criteria, making per definitionem all visual narrative (even in picture sequences or movies) impossible. His definition, however, leads to classifying recipes and weather forecasts as narratives, because they represent events (that are even causally connected). Interestingly, it has prooved so difficult to exclude recipes from narratological definitions of narrative that they have become a sort of test-­‐case for such definitions. Many authors consider Genette's definition both too large because it includes verbal forms that are not usually considered narratives (like recipes and weather forecasts) and also too narrow because it excludes movies, for example, from the realm of narratives. When he is questioned on this topic, Genette (1983, 24) however confirms his 18
“narrow definition of ‘narrative’” and explicitly rejects the concepts of theatrical and filmic narration (ibid.). In direct contrast to Genette, André Gaudreault holds that “any message through which a story, whatever it may be, is communicated, should rightly be considered a narrative” (1988, 84). These two definitions do not only differ in terms of restrictiveness, but also insofar as Gaudreault only focuses on the content communicated (a story). Gaudreault's definition is entirely media-­‐neutral and in principle allows for visual narrative (he himself is interested in theatrical and cinematic narrative). A definition like Gaudreault's is certainly a better reflection of how people think of movies or theatrical performances than Genette's. The philospher Gregory Currie also offers a more intuitive kind of definition. In his work on narrative, he defines his subject matter in the following way: “narratives are intentional-­‐communicative artefacts: artefacts that have as their function the communication of a story, which function they have by virtue of their makers' intentions” (Currie 2012, 6). Traditional history paintings, for instance, intentionally conveyed stories and are thus narratives in Currie's sense. As they communicated stories they are also narratives in Gaudreault's sense. Both are definition with which art-­‐historians would likely feel comfortable. What mainly distinguishes Currie's from Gaudreault's, definition, is that it includes an intentionality criteria on the producer side. Gaudreault's definition is mainly reception focused. This has interesting implications: it makes it in principle possible that a narrative be produced by someone not aiming at communicating a story. According to Gaudreault's definition, the paintings in Peter Greenaway's movie The Draughtsman's contract (1982), where a landscape painter records the clues of a murder without being aware of it, are, arguably, narratives (in the fiction). This is because they convey a story to those who know how to read them, even though they look like purely descriptive landscapes to others. As the painter himself is unaware of his paintings' narrative content, they do not, however, have a storytelling function “in virtue of their maker's 19
intention” and are thus not narratives in Currie's sense. While such cases may be rare beyond fiction, it clearly shows how the two definitions differ. In any case, both Gaudreault's and Currie's views allow, in principle, for iconic narrative. Their visions of narrative are similar in several respects. While the use of the terms “message” and “artefact” seems to imply that both authors think of narrative as human productions – thereby excluding the possibility of found or natural narratives – they do not further specify channels suitable for narrative in their definitions. Both also leave open what a story is. They thereby shift the locus of the problem from the definition of narrative to the definition of storyvi. More canonical definitions, such as the one given by Genette, include criteria as to what needs to be represented for something to be a narrative and/or story, where the representation of actions (or at least events) is probably the criteria most frequently provided. Content based definitions are sometimes called semantic definitions. Some authors stick to content criteria alone. Göran Sonesson (1997, 244) explicitly embraces such a definition: “narrative supposes at least two events with a temporal link on the content side. Thus far, then, no particular requirement seems to be imposed on the expression side”. He later ads that “a breach of the structure of expectancy” (ibid., 245) is also needed. Based on this, Sonesson tries to show that pictures can indeed be “mute narratives”. In his Dictionary of Narratology, Prince (1989, 53) championed what could be the most minimal semantic definition, when he affirmed that the representation of one event is enough for a minimal narrative. But like Sonesson, Prince (2012, 24f.) and many other theorist now believe that narrative really is the representation of two or more events. Many authors further believe that these events need to follow one another in time (Forster 1927: 93f), many (e. g. Schaeffer 2001, p. 13) have also added that there has to be a causal link between the events in order for us to speak of a narrative or that there needs to be a recurrent actor (Kafalenos 1996, p. 56). 20
If we are working with definitions which include content-­‐criteria and want to determine if a media is suitable for narrative, we have to check if the media in question is suitable for representing the content required by the definition. For instance, many authors believe that iconic narrative is impossible because single pictures cannot depict events, let alone events ordered in time. Authors like Schaeffer (2001, 13) and Revaz (2009, 92) deem pictures problematic as vehicles for story, among other things, for their supposed difficulty with representing causal connection. Let me say a few words about this point because you will hear this latter remark quite frequently. The art theorist Roger de Piles (1708, 453) already considered that pictures are incapable of representing causal links between events, and the idea is regularly restated (cf. Ryan 2004, 139). Now what exactly is this argument based on? There may indeed be no direct pictorial equivalent of terms such as “therefore” or “because”. But this does not imply that pictures cannot show cause and effect relationships. Look at fig. 2. Doesn't even such a simple pictograph quite clearly show the link between a car hitting a lantern and both being damaged? Would anyone want to deny that a sentence like “The car hit a lantern and was heavily damaged” represents two events as causally connected (even if this connection is not stated through a specific term)? But this is exactly a verbal equivalent of the picture evoked. We are used to provide the missing causes when we observe certain states or traces of events. If we see a bent street lantern, we infer that someone hit it, when we see a broken pitcher by a well we hypothesize that it slipped out of somebody’s hands. As in life so when we watch: “In general, the spectator actively seeks to connect events by means of cause and effect. Given an incident, we tend to hypothesize what might have caused it, or what it might in turn cause. That is, we look for causal motivation” (Bordwell / Thompson 1990, 58). So the fact is that the artefact doesn't have to literally say "therefore" to show causal links. Especially when both the cause and the effect remain visible as in Fig. 2 above, there 21
seems to me to be little reason to deny that causal relationships are shown. Temporally ordered events, causal connections... . In all of these cases there is a clash between contents considered essential for narratives and the scope of what pictures can be used to represent. One last kind of condition concerns neither the producer nor the reception or even the content, but the type of presentation. Genette, for instance offers a presentation criteria when he states that narrative has to be communicated through words. Presentation is also at stake when authors who abandon the language criterion still think that the the elements of a narrative have to be communicated in a precise temporal order (e. g. Metz 1968, 27; Chatman 1990, 7; Rimmon-­‐Kenan 2006, 16) and that this is not something pictures allow for. Emma Kafalenos (2006, vii/viii) thus considers that “a narrative […] is a sequential representation of sequential events, fictional or otherwise, in any medium.” (I underline). Given that a single picture doesn't appear to have a sequential presentation, it can therefore, according to Kafalenos, only have narrative implications. It cannot, strictly speaking, be a narrative (Kafalenos 1996 p. 56). But if this was the case, would it still make sense that narratologists analyze single pictures, as Kafalenos does herself? Narrating pictures While it is true that terms such as discourse, telling or Erzählung naturally evoke verbal formsvii, they are also sometimes used in a media neutral way, and it seems quite natural to say: “This painting tells the story of Adam and Eve”. However, there is disagreement as to what exactly this means. While most theorists accept that it is possible to transmit a story through different media channels, and many narratologists have come to replace the narrator with concepts like 22
transmitting agency (Rimmon-­‐Kenan 2006, 16) or narration (cf. Bordwell 1985, 33), which need not necessarily be a person or a representation of a person, there is widespread disagreement about exactly which media have the potential to transmit stories, defined as such and such. How about pictures which were intended to tell a story and seemed to do so to their creators and their initial audience – for instance, history paintings? Aren’t they narratives? According to Gaudreault's or Curries definition, they are. I'll now explain why many narratologists have been critical of such an approach. The fact is that the historia evoked by a picture was usually mythological, biblical, or, in some cases, linked to famous historical events. These references were known by the intended audience and could be easily identified, usually through means such as attributes that spectators were familiar with or constellations typical of the well-­‐known stories. If an artist provided the basic story-­‐triggers, beholders easily agreed the story was being (re)told to them when they looked at history paintings. A naked woman, a naked man, an apple and a snake were enough to evoke the story of the Fall of Man. If all elements were there it could easily seem as if the picture told the story. Thus it was rarely noticed that many pictures of Adam and Eve make it look like Eve was feeding the snake, which implicates that no clear narrative is being conveyed by the picture alone. The assumptions of the artists and their initial audience thus structured the perception of the works as narratives. The cultural heritage completed the experience. It is likely that pictures that evoke stories which are deeply embedded in our cultural heritage are often completed in rather automatic ways and that such completion can go unnoticed by the viewers projecting the story onto the representation. If this was right, then the fact that spectators and creators presupposed the possibility of iconic storytelling from the Renaissance to the 18th century and regularly used the term istoria (story), the Italian translation of Aristotle's term mythosviii, when they spoke of (single) paintings, 23
wouldn't necessarily mean that a painting can actually tell a story. The fact that art-­‐historians have largely accepted the Renaissance idea of narrative in painting has therefore been criticized by narratologists. Wendy Steiner (1988, 2) writes that “the general art-­‐historical use of the term ‘narrative’ seems incomprehensible to literary scholars”. Werner Wolf shares her point of view and explains: “what most scholars have in mind when using the terms ‘narrative’ or ‘narrativity’ in discussions of pictures is still either the reference […] to some literary narrative, or the representation of any kind of action in a picture, as opposed to static, descriptive images, but hardly ever the representation of a story proper.”. (Wolf, 2003, 180) These remarks point to a more general and important difference between viewers retelling or inventing a story based on an artefact and their activation of a story contained in it. In his book Erzählte Bilder, Bernard Dieterle (1988) focuses on the latter. He analyzes how writers invented stories based on pictures, where the beholders go far beyond anything that could be called the activation of stories contained in the visual artefacts. As Leitch (1986, 40) has pointed out, a “hyperactive audience” can indeed turn any utterance into a tellable story. If the writer Denis Diderot tells a story which is supposed to be motivated by a landscape painting by Vernet where no events can be identified, the motivation for storytelling is external, not internal, to the picture. It tells us more about Diderot than about the picture itself. Using his imagination, he merely invents a story based on the picture and Dieterle rightly compares the kind of narrative readings he analyzes in his book to Rorschach tests (cf. Dieterle 1988, 135). So, the fact that a story is sometimes based on a picture does obviously not show that the picture tells a story in and by itself and the saying “Every picture tells a story” seems to me to be quite obviously wrong. By blurring the difference between containing something and triggering it, it plays into the hands of the sceptic. The fact is that there are many pictures (such as still-­‐
lives, landscape paintings or portraits) that only marginally call for 24
narrative readings – if they do so at all – and of which it would thus be very odd to say that they convey a story. In his Looking at the Overlooked, Norman Bryson (2001, 61) even affirms that “still life is the world minus its narrative”, making the absence of narrative one of still life’s essential traits. As opposed to this, there are painting genres where narrative interpretation clearly dominates (ibid.). Some of these, I believe, mobilize resources that have not yet been recognized as forming part of the iconic toolbox.
Story time and single pictures “The insistence on temporality is part of every definition of narrativity, regardless of its philosophical orientation”(Steiner 2004, 149). Temporality is an essential trait of narrative – or in any case of story, so it is not surprising that one of the most influential studies on pictorial narrative in art history indeed focuses on ways to represent temporal relationships in still images. It was published at the end of the 19th century by Franz Wickhoff and has a very hands-­‐on approach. An introductory article on narrative images would be incomplete without an explanation and criticism of Wickhoff's approach and a much later follow-­‐up study by Kurt Weitzmannix. Based on the Vienna Genesis, a fragment of an illustrated bible probably produced in Syria in the first half of the 6th Century, Franz Wickhoff (1895, 8/9) distinguished three different styles of evoking a story in pictures, according to the number of episodes depicted in one image: distinguierend, completierend and continuierend. Pictures made according to first modality only depict one moment of a complex narrative, pictures following the second modality combine different moments, but do not repeat any persons, pictures made according to the last modality are what is often called continuous narratives, where persons are indeed repeated and distributed in a landscape, along a path, parallel to the picture plane, in 25
the rooms of a house or according to some other principle. Wickhoff's distinctions are still the basis of most classes on pictorial narrative in art-­‐history and it took over 70 years until they were first revised (Weitzmann 1970, 35). Writing about the theme of narrative in Greek Antiquity, Kurt Weitzmann introduced English terminology which is somewhat more intuitive, but, as we will see, still problematic. He distinguishes what he calls the monoscenic, simultaneous and cyclical methods. While he criticizes his predecessor on historical and terminological grounds, his concepts remain very close to Wickhoff’s: monoscenic is his term for distinguierend, simultaneous is his term for completierend. The main difference is that Weitzmann suggests we use the term “cyclical method” -­‐ which replaces Wickhoff's “continuiered” -­‐ not only for single pictures with recurring persons in front of a (more or less) continuous background, but also to speak of picture cycles. While these categorizations are still a good starting point for research on the temporal dimension of pictures, both theorists also introduce difficulties through ambivalent terminological choices and, more importantly, make it impossible to describe certain fundamental differences between ways of evoking time in still pictures. I believe that a taxonomy of how narrative pictures relate to the temporality of their verbal pre-­‐texts should be part of a larger framework that more generally allows to classify different ways in which pictures represent temporal relationships, whether these pictures have a high degree of narrativity or none at all. In the next paragraphs, I'll briefly sketch out what is missing in these classical definitions. I'll then present a refined version of a framework I developed in my doctoral thesis (Speidel 2013) and which seems to me to be a much better approximation of the different ways in which time can be represented in pictures. What lacks in Wickhoff and Weitzmann if we are after a more encompassing framework for describing the ways in which pictures relate to the representation of time is, first of all, a way to describe pictures that do not show one moment or several moments, but no 26
moment at all. We may think of pictograms, such as the representation of an Olympic sport, street signs or pictures used in data visualization (fig. 2). These are clearly pictures, but usually show no moment at all. Gerd Arntz pictograph for what they called “picture statistics” was probably made in the 1930s and designated accidents rather than a specific accident at a specific moment. As this example may illustrate, pictures do not always wear their temporal nature on their sleeves. At the other extreme, we find pictures that, on the opposite, show every moment, all that “is, was and will be”x. Such images are frequent in the religious realm. Arguably, at least some representations of The Holy Trinity (fig. 3) in Christian iconography have this ambition: they do not want to represent any specific moment, but something that always is, was and will bexi. A more complete theory of the representation of temporal aspects needs to account for these kinds of images. In order to designate them we need two new terms. I suggest achrony for the representation of no moment and eonochrony for the representation of ever-­‐recurring events or eternal states. But I'd also like to replace the existing terms for the other types of pictures, in order to create a more precise and homogenous descriptive framework. While Wickhoff's terminology is quite opaque and partly counterintuitive (why would pulling together different moments in a picture be called completierend, i.e. “completing”?), all of Weitzmann's terms are misleading. The term cyclical method is equivocal because there are pictures that indeed offer representations of cyclical events, sometimes represented as a cycle, e. g. the representation of the four seasons (fig. 4). The term monoscenic is equivocal insofar as it evokes a single scene, rather than a single moment. But, arguably, many paintings show several scenes and one moment, and some show one scene and several moments of that scene. Last but not least, the term simultaneous 27
method presupposes – and other similar expressions like “succession simultanée” in French or “Simultanbild” in Germany do the same – that what is shown in a picture is shown as being simultaneous. As I will argue below, the conception implicit in this terminology stems from a misunderstanding of the semiotics of polychronic images. I believe one of the problems with the tripartite distinctions suggested is that it locates all differences on the same level. I therefore introduce a higher-­‐
level distinction and then go into further details for more precise classifications. On the highest level, I distinguish monochronic and polychronic pictures, the former explicitly showing just one moment, the latter several moments in time. As already mentioned, I also add terms for pictures depicting eternal states or processes, which I call eonochronic (from “eon” the Greek term for eternity) and for pictures in which time plays no role whatsoever, which I call achonic. After having determined if a picture shows one, several, all or no moments, we should then distinguish the ways in which these are depicted. As it stands, Weitzmann's and Wickhoff's conceptual framework doesn't clearly draw this distinction. It includes two polychronic modalities (completierend/simultaneous and continuierend/cyclical) and one monochronic one (distinguierend/monoscenic). As already mentioned, we have to replace these terms. I would like to use the term cyclical in a more intuitive way to describe pictures where several recurring events are represented (like in Fig. 4). In achronic and monochronic pictures there's but one mode of representation. In eonochrony, the mode is either synthetic or cyclical. In polychonic images there are three: the synthetic modality, where different moments are condensed, the distributed one, where moments are spread across the picture plane, and, again, the cyclical. The cyclical and the synthetic modalities are part of two categories here because, events in cycles may be conceived as eternally recurrent or else bound to stop following a specific event. The latter is the case in some conceptions of reincarnation, where enlightenment is supposed to stop the cycle of death and rebirth. A 28
fourth modality is introduced by research on children's drawings and is not frequently taken into consideration by art-­‐historians: rather than only juxtaposing or condensing the depiction of story-­‐events, children also use superimposition or overlaying, where “successive events are graphically laid over one another” (Duncum 1993, 23). A major difficulty with this modality is that pictures produced this way are hard to read once they are completed. One element that is interesting with this modality is that, at least in children, it's temporality seems to directly be linked to the drawing process: because one thing is drawn after the other, they are also conceived of as coming one after another. Rather than the temporality of the presentation and/or reception like in Lessing's paradigm, it is thus the temporality of the creation which “charges” the picture with a temporal order. The researchers who identified it, used to monitor and videotape the drawing process, following the children's comments on their drawing. While I have not had the chance to systematically search for examples of overlaying polychronic depictions in high art yet, I have a hunch that it might exist in paintings from the 20th century, for example in Anselm Kiefer's and Cy Twombly's work. It is definitely a modality worthy of more research and might be linked to the idea of indexical narrativity, where narrative is trace-­‐based. As for the question of continuity – which appeared in Wickhoff's terminology (and is still present in continuous narrative in English or narration continue in French) -­‐, it really seems to be a question of spatial organization on the picture plane rather than a question of how many moments a picture represents. I therefore introduce a third layer in the distinction, which reflects that there are different types and degrees of continuity: something can be more or less continuous or discontinuous. For instance, there is less spatial continuity in a picture where a main scene is shown in a room and a scene from a different moment appears through a window than in a picture where the different scenes appear in different rooms. Here space is again less 29
continuous than in a picture where scenes from different moments appear as separated by trees. Arguably, a picture which shows scenes from different moments depicted in a painting, carpet or statue which are depicted in a picture, displays a kind of polychrony that is closer to discontinuity than continuity and one could in this context speak of embedded narrativity, if both the framing and framed depictions are narrative images. This sometimes happens in representations of the Annunciation (to virgin Mary) where the scene of the Fall of Adam and Eve may appear as a statue or a painting. A drawing or photograph which shows the different phases of an action in direct spatial proximity, has a relatively high degree of continuity (Fig. 5). However, the latter type of image does not always have a particularly high degree of narrativity and would only be a narrative according to a very wide definition such as the early definition by Prince according to which any representation of an event is a narrative (1989, 53). The term continuous narrative contributed to hiding these non-­‐negliable differences between grades (and, arguably, kinds) of continuity. This problem was even enhanced when Weitzmann included comic style storytelling, with several pictures, under the same category. Ways to represent temporality in the still image Signification monochro
achron
ny polychrony eonochrony
t, t+1, …, t+n ∞
y Moments Mode of representati
on Spatial organisation 0 t distri over
synthetic
bute layin
cyclical
d g continuous → discontinuous
30
Before concluding this section on temporality, I would like to point to a difficulty, which the above-­‐mentioned authors seem to have been unaware of because they only looked at pictures where they knew which literary narrative was depicted: without a lot of research it is often impossible to distinguish monochronic pictures, polychronic pictures that use the synthetic method and maybe even achronic and eonochronic pictures based on mere inspection of the picture. Here's just one example to illustrate this. Weitzmann illustrates the simultaneous method with a picture taken from the Odyssey (fig. 6). He comments: “With a naïve gaiety the archaic artist depicts three moments of the tale as one single scene without repeating any of its participants, thereby transgressing the limitations of the unity of time, which later on were so much respected by the representational arts. Not always does archaic art weld together various happenings in such a primitive manner as in the Polyphemus cup, where the actions conflict with each other.” (Weitzmann, 1970, 13) Implicit here – or hardly – is a view of monochrony as a superior standard, polychrony, especially of the synthetic kind, being seen as primitive. As we will see later, this judgement is biased. But let's look at the example at hand for now. Here's a plot summary based on Homer's text: Ulysses and his men land on the island of the cyclopes, where they find an empty cave with food supplies. As they are eating, the giant Polyphemus enters the cave, blocks the entrance with a stone and starts eating as well, but what he eats are Ulysses' men. The next day when he continues his meal, Ulysses makes the giant drunk with wine and as he falls asleep, Ulysses and his men blind him with a wooden stake. This is the scene that is being represented in this work from the 6th century before Christ (Ulysses and Polyphemus, BnF, Monnaies, Médailles et Antiques, ca. 560-­‐550 A.C.). The picture is often quoted as an example of a visual rendering where several moments are condensed into one picture because the elements that appear in the image correspond to three quite long 31
passages of Book IX of the Odyssey, running over more than a hundred verses, where Polyphemus eats up several of Ulysses men (verses 287-­‐
346), after which the giant gets drunk (verses 246-­‐370) and is finally blinded (verses 375-­‐400). Provided this knowledge, the depiction indeed appears as a condensation of many moments and can thus seem to exemplify the synthetic method. However, this classification seems to be determined by the comparison between pretext and painting more than the painting itself, which could just as well be categorized as monochronic: there's no contradiction, causal or other, in the idea that the remains of the last man eaten up by the cyclop are still in his hands and the cup of wine close to his mouth while he is already being blinded, especially at a time when depiction didn't correspond to our standards of naturalism. The same problem applies to depictions of eternal states and achronic pictures. After all, we could mistake figure X for the depiction of an encounter between three men rather than an image of an eternal constellation. Similarly, someone unfamiliar with pictograms might think that a pictogram such as fig. 2 refers to a moment in a specific story and as some recent graphic works have demonstrated, pictograms may indeed be used to tell stories (fig.7). But the problem here is no exception. It is particularly acute when pictures come from cultures of which we know very little. Take the Shaft Scene (fig. 1) from Lascaux, for example. It has been interpreted in many different way. Most often it is seen as depicting a single moment. Some interpretations also seem to imply that it is an achronic image which has a symbolic content. While the picture has not, to my knowledge, ever been suggested to be a synthetic representation, the fact is that nothing makes such a comprehension absurd. The picture could, for instance, show the punishment of a bison who killed a man a few days earlier or, somewhat more symbolically, explain the practice of hunting as the ongoing punishment of bisons for having killed an ancestor in a distant past. The pretext being unknown – and considering that there are indeed polychronic depictions in prehistory, 32
which has, for example, been argued by Marc Azéma (2006), all these interpretations are absolutely compatible with the Lascaux painting that came down to us and with what we know about prehistorical picture-­‐production. These observations have deep implications for picture analysis: if it is not possible to distinguish all monochronic pictures from polychronic ones on visual grounds alone, we might be mistaken about the temporality of many pictures where no pretext is known. More specifically, it might be that we frequently believe that a picture shows one moment, while it really is eonochronic, achronic or synthetizes several moments and is thus polychronic. While a picture like the painting by the Andoque (fig. 4) wears, so to speak, its cyclical nature on its sleeves, we might often need evidence of non-­‐visual kind and answers to questions such as “What were the modalities favored in picture-­‐production at the time and place of our artefact?” or “What were canonical stories?” in order to correctly evaluate a picture's chrony. The problem is of course less acute when pictures are from cultures close to us or when we can directly communicate with their makers. This difficulty should, however, not lead us to be generally skeptical about the determination of chrony, as there are some devices, such as recurrence of the same character, which seem to be quite reliable at communicating, at least, polychrony. Another way to communicate temporality should not be underestimated: representation of causally connected events. Take, again, the Lascaux painting: We see the spear go through the bison's body and its intestines seem to ooze out. Our causal knowledge makes us immediately grasp that there has to be an event preceding the moment explicitly depicted – even if we see the picture as polychronic – a moment when the bison gets hurt. So this picture represents at least two story-­‐moments: one when the man is attacked and one when the bison gets hurt. Interestingly – and maybe unsurprisingly – relying on human understanding of cause and effect here appears as a much more 33
robust way to make us understand temporal order than the use of conventions such as different polychronic methods, which vary culturally and historically. After this introduction concerning ways in which pictures may represent temporal relationships, let us dive right into the narratological debate around the question if a picture can be a narrative.
Five narratological positions on iconic narrative: a critical
presentation As far as I can see, Wendy Steiner (1988, 2004), Aron Kibédi Varga (1989, 1990), Jean-­‐Marie Schaeffer (2001) and Werner Wolf (2002, 2003, 2011) came closest to formulating and – in some cases – answering the major problems anyone who wants to establish the possibility of pictorial narrative within a narratological framework has to solve. They do not presuppose that pictures can be narratives, but seek to establish whether pictures can comply with canonical lists of criteria for defining narrative. While Steiner (2004, 172), Wolf (2002, 96) and Kibédi Varga (1990, 96) stop short of recognizing that monochronic pictures can tell stories, Schaeffer (2001) also rejects the possibility of polychronic iconic narratives. Some of their arguments against the possibility of iconic narrative – or certain kinds of it – have already been answered above, but in order to present the major aspects of the narratological positions on iconic narrative, I will also mention aspects of the arguments that I already have to addressed above. 34
Wendy Steiner and the question of realism Wendy Steiner sets out with more than 10 criteria for what she calls “strong narratives” (Steiner 2004, 168xii), mostly taken from Gerald Prince and William Labov (1972). Rather than mentioning them all, I will only focus on the major problems she raises and on how she solves them. Steiner (2004, 149f.) considers the temporal sequence “the single most important narrative trait […]. The narrative posits an ordering of events independent of its telling them.” We are here speaking of double temporal order, i. e. the order of the story-­‐events as different and independent from the order in which they are rendered by the presentation. The fact that they consider such double ordering a necessity, thus using both a presentation and a content criteria, has been a major reason for many theorists to reject the narrative potential of single pictures. After introducing several other conditions such as “cohesion, and in particular, the continuity of a repeated subject” (Steiner 2004, 154), she also introduces a picture-­‐specific condition, which she deems very important. Steiner posits a “narrative-­‐realism connection” (Steiner 2004, 156f.), where realism seems to be understood as something like “looking as the scene would have looked in nature” (my wording). Postulating such a connection is, among other things, supposed to avoid that pictures where figures are repeated for design reasons, like in M. C. Escher's works, have to be wrongly classified as narratives and vice-­‐versa (ibid.): “the realist norms […] keep the repeated subject from being read as a design” (Steiner 2004, 156). Even though Steiner quotes many allies who also believe the two concepts to be connected, mainly on historical grounds (because narrativity and realism are supposed to have developed simultaneously in Ancient Greece), I think that realism is not a condition for narrativity. Realism can certainly contribute to more striking renderings of scenes. But even if it was historically correct that increases in narrativity and 35
realism often happened simultaneously, this would not mean that they are also causally connected. Co-­‐occurrence isn't causation. But even historically, the connection seems to me to be doubtful. Indeed, trompe l'oeil paintings are by definition the most lifelike – strictly speaking they are even illusionistic – but they are also among the least narrative works. Further more, recent photorealistic painting is not also the most narrative art. So realism is obviously not a sufficient criteria for narrativity. I do not think it is a necessary criteria either. In fact, an increase in realism doesn't necessarily lead to an increase in narrativity. Otherwise, a child's drawing of one person shooting another would necessarily have less narrativity than a photograph of the same scene. Personally, I do not believe this to be the case. Indeed, many of the most widely recognized works of narrative in visual art, such as the Bayeux Tapestry (around 1070-­‐1080), Maya vase painting (fig. 8) or Aboriginal sand-­‐drawing are not in styles that could reasonably be called realistic. An example like the pictographic narrative above (fig. 7), also isn't realistic in Steiner's sense, but may still have a high degree of narrativity. In other words: adding or taking away realism (at least in Steiner’s sense) from a work does not necessarily influence its degree of narrativity. I therefore believe that Steiner's conjecture that strong narratives only exist in realistic art is not well founded. Let us go back to Steiner's main argument. She directly addresses Seymour Chatman's (1981, 118) conjecture that iconic narrative is impossible because pictures do not have a temporal program. Steiner however considers that a temporal program exists in polychronic pictures of the distributed kind, where the same characters appear several times at different locations in space. For her, they fulfill the criteria of double-­‐temporality, insofar as the order in which the different story-­‐events appear on the surface of the painting is different from the order of the events in the story told (Steiner 2004, 172). But the order on the picture surface is spatial not temporal and there is no 36
clear convention governing how the spatial relationships are to be translated into temporal ones. Steiner’s solution therefore fails to address the main objection Chatman and others make, viz. she does not provide an answer to the conjecture that pictures do not sufficiently determine the temporal order in which represented events are perceivedxiii. The problem of double-­‐temporality as formulated by Chatman (1990, 7), Metz (1968, 27), Rimmon-­‐Kenan (2006, 16) and others is, by definition, twofold and we'll have to address it below: (1) the distribution of elements on a picture-­‐plane has to be systematically mapped onto the temporal order of the story-­‐events (as we will see, this problem is part of Jean-­‐Marie Schaeffer's argument) and (2) the elements of the spatial constellation on the picture plane have to be systematically accessed in a certain temporal order. For a media to have a “temporal program” in Chatman's sense, the canonical order of access to its elements must be clear to anyone familiar with productions in this media, as in comics and novels, or, as in movies, be imposed on viewers. For instance, we know that, ceteris paribus, we have to start reading a book with the first sentence on the first page and finish with the last sentence on the last page. If an author does not want us not read her book this way, she has to specifically tell us. In other words: there is a default order of access for the elements of a book. There's no such default for single pictures. Therefore, books have a temporal program. But there is nothing like this for single pictures. If we speak of a temporal order on the picture plane as Steiner does, we seem to be making a category mistake, at least unless we can provide a general rule for systematically translating spatial distribution into temporal order of access. If the elements on the picture plane were to be systematically perceived in the same order by different viewers, then such a rule could probably be provided. As eye-­‐tracking experiments are usually taken to show (cf. Rosenberg/Klein 2015, 94) this is, however, not the case and we'll have to take a closer look at these results. 37
So Steiner accepts the criterion of double temporality, but her analysis does not really show how pictures can correspond to it. In my view, Steiner's account is both too liberal and too restrictive: too liberal when she considers that the criterion of a temporal program is met by any polychronic picture that uses the distributed modality, such that depictions of story-­‐events are spread across the picture plane (with figures usually being repeated) and too restrictive when she believes that only realistic images can be strong narratives.
Aron Kibédi Varga and the question of mere illustration A year after Steiner first published her considerations on iconic narrativity in Pictures of Romance, Aron Kibédi Varga (1989, 97) independently took up the question of “narratives presented (or suggested) by still images”. He starts by reminding us of what he calls the “narratological commonplace” that a narrative cannot exist without an obstacle that's surmounted. While he is convinced that pictures can show actions, he asks: “How to go from action to narrative? Is it possible to suggest a narrative while only representing one action? This is the central problem of all visual narratology.” (ibid.) Analyzing different polychronic images, where “characters are repeated” and others where different moments are represented by different characters as is sometimes the case in the synthetic modality, Kibédi Varga (1989, 103) concludes that such images can be narratives, without, however, addressing the time problem in Chatman's sense. Like Steiner, he however, does not believe that monochronic pictures can also be narratives. His argument is based on Rembrandt's painting Belshazzar's Feast, a monochronic picture which evokes a biblical narrative about Belshazzar punished by God for the looting of Jerusalem by his father Nebuchadnezzar. The painting shows the 38
moment when an inscription predicting the end of Belshazzar's reign appears on the wall. As Kibédi Varga (1989, 108) writes: For the spectator who does not know the narrative which is evoked in the painting it doesn't represent a narrative, but a simple action: this is not Balthasar punished by God, but a rich man who is scared […]. The complete narrative only arises in the mind of the spectator if he already knows it […]. The picture is not a second way to tell the narrative, it only evokes it. In this sense, any single painting representing a narrative is essentially an illustration, only that the text is absent. (ibid.). Two problems are pointed out here: first, it is hard to individuate persons in pictures and more importantly: as single (we should ad: monochronic) pictures only show one moment, a complete narrative, which is based on a series of actions taking place in time, cannot be shown. But obviously one example isn't enough to prove the general point. What we are after is the general (im)possibility of iconic narrative. We can easily agree with Kibédi Varga that Belshazzar's Feast by Rembrandt evokes a story rather than telling it. This doesn't implicate that there are no other monochronic paintings that are narratives, even according to the criteria he evokes. That pictures can only illustrate a story already known beforehand is also, for other reasons, what Marie-­‐Laure Ryan (2004, 139) seems to believe: “Since pictures, left by themselves, lack the ability to articulate specific propositions and to explicate causal relations, their principal narrative option is what I call [...] the illustrative mode”. Ryan (2008, 316) distinguishes the latter from the autonomous mode where “the text transmits a story that is new to the receiver. In the illustrative mode, the text retells and completes a story, relying on the receiver's previous knowledge of the plot“. I have already tried to show that it is implausible that pictures cannot explicate causal relations. But there is another element which remains 39
to be treated: as indicated by both Ryan's and Kibédi Varga's skepticism concerning the picture's capacity to articulate a plot, we will have to specify in how far relying on the receiver's previous knowledge is natural and when, on the contrary, it endangers autonomous iconic narrative. After all, the unsaid is essential to narrative: If the scientist or analytic philosopher or logician should be found to be triggering presuppositions in a covert way, he will become the butt of jokes about making a hard sell rather than letting things speak for themselves. His presuppositions should be unpackable, easily so. The writer of fiction who does not use such triggering will simply fail. His story will be 'flat.' (Jerome Bruner, 1986, 28) This is something Kibédi Varga (1989, 10) is also aware of: The text doesn't necessarily have the quality of being complete and explicit, which would be an ideal in science, but would, during the act of communication, burden the text with unbearable and absolutely unnecessary delays. In other words: rather than being a problem, omissions are vital for successful narratives. The question then should not be if pictures omit something, but if what they omit for media-­‐specific reasons disqualifies them as autonomous narratives. I think what's essential here is the complexity of the causal relationships depicted. Something like a bison killed through a spear was sufficiently natural for us to understand using general causal knowledge acquired in life and narrative (fictional or not). We indeed have a stock of available scripts or schemata of typical events, which we quite inadvertently apply when we receive narratives – and this application is likely to be independent of media. As Jean Matter Mandler (1984, 26) showed with texts, “one can leave out all explicit reference to causal and temporal connections from the surface structure, yet leave the narrative comprehensible; the schema itself provides the connectives missing from the surface.” And as David 40
Herman (2002, 90) argues, “comprehension of a text or a discourse – a story – requires access to a plurality of scripts. In the absence of stereotypes stored as scripts, readers could not draw textual inferences of the most basic sort – for example, that a masked character represented as running out of a bank probably just robbed it”. In other words: inferences as to causal relationships are always necessary when we receive a narrative, be it verbal or visual. If we were to ask for the degree of explicitness demanded by arguments such as Kibédi Varga's to qualify a representation as a narrative, then most of what we now conceive of as narratives in literature would likely also lose this status. So let us not operate with a double standard here: If implicated causality and appeal to schemata is not only acceptable but even necessary for the understanding of verbal narratives, why should they disqualify pictures from being narratives? It is precisely the continuity of causal laws and the shared character of many schemata that allow us to understand event depictions from cultures very far from ours. Things are, of course, much more complicated when such things as divine intervention is implicated – and this is one aspect that makes the Rembrandt painting problematic. The ways in which these are imagined and depicted are likely to be determined by master narratives and culture rather than the laws of nature – in fact, they are often identified as godly because they oppose such laws. Ceteris paribus – and abstracting from very specific cultural knowledge – pictures that show events where no supernatural causation is involved are therefore likely to be much more widely understood. Further more, as opposed to what Kibédi Varga's distinction between seeing Belshazzar and seeing an old man suggests, I do not think that a narrative has to make it clear what specific person it is about. In fact, there are numerous folk tales that are quite unspecific as to the identity of the actors that occur in them (coincidentally an old man is a typical folk-­‐tale character). The question that remains open is: is it possible, in 41
a picture, to systematically lead a beholder from perceiving a single action to understanding a narrative if he doesn't know the narrative beforehand? And my answer is: Yes, if the work relies on the clear depiction of natural causal relationships to tell its story. It is certainly possible to construct a narrative with such relationships and, maybe, knowledge about certain event-­‐types only.
Jean-Marie Schaeffer and the problem of iconic representions of time f procedures which are not, at least at their most fundamental level, mediated by the knowledge of a culture-­‐specific iconic code” (Schaeffer 2001, 12). Anticipating the objection that there is no recognition of iconic signs beyond acquired codes, Schaeffer (2001, 13) writes: “facts are sometimes more stubborn than theory: the existence of a biological capability of analogical recognition of visual forms has been so firmly established by neuropsychology and psychology of perception that it is now impossible to get rid of it by arguing that the notions of representation or resemblance are philosophically problematic”. Schaeffer (2001, 15) then proceeds to show that “visual narrative is an oxymoron”. The problem as he sees it is still the one pointed out by G. E. Lessing in 1766 – and Schaeffer quotes Lessing on this point : pictures only show states in space, whereas a narrative has to represent events in time. He draws a strict distinction between visual showing and narrative verbalizing (2001, 13): The factors that makes visual showing intelligible are very different [from those involved in understanding verbal utterances]. These factors are essentially those of analogue visual perception: understanding an image or a flow of images does not mean to be able to identify propositional contents and relationships between propositions, but to be 42
able to translate iconic or quasi perceptive relationships into analogically represented states. For largely the same reasons, Schaeffer (ibid.) also rejects narrative in polychronic pictures: ”only the moving image can directly show […] event sequences; the still image can only represent them by letting you see them as a set of states that spatially co-­‐occur.” According to this, we have to somehow “deduce” scenes temporally following one another in polychronic pictures from the spatially co-­‐
occurent states really depicted. We haven't discussed the exact status of polychronic pictures yet. It is now time to do so. Schaeffer's idea is clear: because still pictures do not move they can only show a state of the world at one moment in time. Schaeffer is not the only one to defend this. When philosopher Paul Crowther (2007, 220) analyzes the polychronic bronze relief sculpture The Feast of Herod (1427) by Donatello, he writes: “The mode of integration is such that the episodes are not presented in strictly pictorial terms as temporally separate. Rather, they are rendered as different events happening simultaneously in three separate open rooms in the same building.” The idea here expressed was, as we saw, already implicit in Weitzmann's terminology when he spoke of the simultaneous method and also appears in terms like succession simultanée or Simultanbild. Crowther's “strictly pictorial terms” and Schaeffer's “most fundamental level” of course refer to the same theoretic construct: a level where pictures are only interpreted as showing what they “really” depict – which is, according to the authors, a strictly spatial distribution of elements. It's important to understand that we are in both cases talking about content not presentation. What is depicted is supposed to be depicted as simultaneous, seemingly because it is supposed to be simultaneously depicted. Crowther and Schaeffer believe that single pictures cannot really depict more than one moment. Their argument is based on semiotics. Let us take a closer look to see if it is sound. 43
Schaeffer starts by reminding us that the ways in which we access visual and verbal information are fundamentally different. According to Schaeffer, research has confirmed the difference between natural (iconic) and artificial (symbolic) signs, which was already formulated by Plato in his Cratylus. The former are understood through recognition of a resemblance, the latter are decoded based on learned associations between signifier and signified. This seems to have been empirically confirmed. In one quite spectacular experiment by Julian Hochberg and his wife Virginia Brooks (1962), they kept their own son away from pictures until he was 19 months old. The child was first shown pictures in an experimental setting, and recognized photographs of most of the things he had seen before in reality. In a more complete experiment, three months old infants were shown to recognize their mother in photographs (Barrera/Maurer 1981). As they cannot yet have learned how to interpret pictures before, such results are usually considered to contradict the idea that depiction is always based on learning to conventionally link pictures to the objects they depict. Contemporary theorizing often uses the terms icon and symbol to draw the distinction between the two kinds of signifiers. This terminology was introduced by C. S. Peirce (1909, 460f.) at the end of the 19th century. In icons (or likenesses as he also calls them) understanding is based on recognition (like in paintings). The interpretation of symbols is based on learning a conventional code (like in verbal language). Peirce adds a third concept to the more traditional distinction of iconic and symbolic signs: the index, where the connection between the sign and signified is causal, the signs being traces of the objects they represent. Now Schaeffer draws a connection between the iconicity of pictures and the impossibility of pictorial narrative. Is this correct? Is he right to consider that “understanding an image [...] does not mean to be able to identify propositional contents and relationships between 44
propositions”? If identifying relationships between propositions wasn't part of the understanding of pictures, then it would always be enough to identify isolated signifiers in images. It would, for instance, be enough to say that the Shaft Scene in Lascaux (fig. 1) shows a man and a bison or we could say that a child's drawing of one person shooting another is already understood by a viewer who has identified two persons, one falling down and the other one holding a gun. Personally, I do not consider that a viewer who doesn't understand that one person is represented as shooting the other has understood the drawing, even on a fundamental level. In other words, I do not think that Schaeffer correctly represents what it means to understand a picture, even on a fundamental level. The fact is that we quite automatically perceive causal relationships in pictures and that it would be quite strange to say that these are added on top of the “real” perception of the picture. Limiting what's “really there” in a picture to the distribution of disconnected elements in space seems quite unnatural and noticing these alone certainly does not amount to understanding it. Further more a temporal order is always implicit in causal chains, even when the time span is extremely short. For instance, the shooting comes before the person is hurt and falls down. Things are a little more complicated with polychronic pictures. Are Schaeffer and Crowther right to say that they really represent events (Crowther) or states (Schaeffer) taking place simultaneously in different places? I do not think so. To affirm this means to simply generalize one kind of pictorial convention, where spatial distribution on the picture plane is used to signify spatial distribution in the world. But this convention is in no way more natural, fundamental or superior to another system, where spatial distribution on the picture plane is used to signify temporal following, like in Donatello's bronze doors, Maya vase painting or drawings made by the Andoque in the Amazonas. In other words: by giving precedence to an interpretation where spatial distributions in a picture only ever directly correspond to spatial 45
distributions in the world, Schaeffer and Crowther are committing a historical and cultural fallacy, where they generalize a model that guides artistic picture production in Europe since the 16th century, probably because the polychronic convention was condemned by Renaissance theorists, to pictures in general. So the fact is that the fallacy has a long prehistory, whose first theoretical culmination point is in G. E. Lessing's Laocoon. Let me now briefly introduce you to his theory and see where, exactly, the theorizing goes wrong. There is no change of state without at least two moments (showing the before and after), and even according to most liberal narratologists there is no narrative without at least one change of state. If pictures were incapable of representing temporal order then one would have to conclude that single pictures are incapable of telling stories. In an article comparing different media in terms of their semiotics, Michael Titzmann affirms precisely this: pictorial propositions can only express synchronous states [synchrone Zustandshaftigkeit] but not temporal sequences of states [diachrone Zustandsfolgen]. Therefore only texts can tell stories (cf. Titzmann 1990, 379). As a result, a picture which shows several moments in time by showing the same person engaged in different activities at different locations in the picture space, such as the polychronic images we mentioned, does not really show a temporal development. Why exactly is a picture supposed to lack the capacity to represent diachrony? A reason independent of the time structure of visual presentations, to be treated shortly, might be the absence of prepositions. While it is easy to say “before” or “the next day” in texts, this may seem impossible with pictures. One might argue, however, that pictures are only less precise than verbal language in this respect. Storytelling does not presuppose precise specifications of temporal distance between the events told. We do not need expressions like “2 years later” to specify temporal order. “Many years later” or even simply “later” are good enough and pictures can provide for something 46
equivalent to this: when we see a depiction of a man alive and then we see a depiction of his death, we know ceteris paribus that his actions must have preceded his death. When we see a broken jar, we know ceteris paribus that it was intact before and that something must have happened to break it. Obviously, we may make incorrect deductions (the man may in fact have been resuscitated and the jar might have never existed as a whole), but this is no different than in real life or when reading novelsxiv. The fact that we are sometimes misled into making wrong deductions certainly does not imply that no picture ever represents temporal order clearly. Our everyday knowledge is quite reliable in helping us grasp temporal order in pictorial representations of stories. The clues we use may be different, but they certainly are not by essence less reliable than the clues provided by texts. The second reason why many scholars believe that pictures can only show synchronous states is because they think that the structure of pictorial presentation prevents pictures from showing temporal order. In a text one sentence follows the other. If the sentences describe events, then the description of one event follows the description of another event. This is what is meant by the formulation “the succession of signs” when Rimmon-­‐Kenan says that there needs to be an “ontological gap between the succession of signs and the temporality of the events (in whatever expanded definition)” in a narrative (Rimmon-­‐
Kenan 2006, 16). There seems to be nothing equivalent to the succession of words and sentences in pictures. Therefore, Metz, Schaeffer, Rimmon-­‐Kenan and others argue, there is no iconic narrative. Connecting the difference between the temporality of texts and pictures to the impossibility of iconic narrative has a long history: according to G. E. Lessing, the difference between ‘signs which coexist in space’ and ‘signs which follow each other in time’ is one of the fundamental differences between pictures and texts. In order to understand why Christian Metz, Shlomith Rimmon-­‐Kenan and others have deemed the 47
succession of signs essential for storytelling, one must look at how this idea is connected to narrative in Lessing’s text: I reason thus: if it is true that painting and poetry, in their imitations, make use of entirely different means; the former employing figures and colors in space, and the latter articulate sounds in time – if these signs indisputably require a suitable relation to the thing betokened, then it is clear, that signs arranged near to one another, can only express objects, of which the wholes or parts exist near one another; while consecutive signs can only express objects, of which the wholes or parts are themselves consecutive. (Lessing 1766, 101)xv Based on this explanation, Lessing then goes on to argue that pictures can only represent bodies, and that texts should focus on actions. Like Lessing, Rimmon-­‐Kenan sees the successive nature of signs in a medium as the key factor regarding the temporality of telling (and thus that medium’s narrative potential). But she does not offer any justification for this principle. How, exactly, is the succession of signs connected to narrative by Lessing? As we have seen, after introducing a distinction between signs that follow each other in time and signs that coexist in space, Lessing goes on to argue that “these signs indisputably require a suitable relation [ein bequemes Verhältnis] to the thing betokened [bezeichnet]” (Lessing 1766, 101). In other words: if you try to tell successive events through signs which are not successive themselves, you are doomed to fail. As stories clearly imply succession in time, pictures are not suitable for telling stories. This premise may certainly seem correct at first glance, but in reality, polychronic pictures such as fig. 4 and fig. 9 well use signs in space to signify changes over time. Thus Lessing’s idea that signs in space cannot show temporal developments, if it is only based on his declaration that there must be a suitable relation between signs and signified, is surprisingly weak, and it is hard to understand why it still plays such an 48
important role today. Rimmon-­‐Kenan, who does not argue for her position concerning the succession of signs, has to face the same problem as Lessing. There is no good reason to suppose that signs in space cannot signify developments in time, unless, of course, we presuppose, like Lessing, Schaeffer or Crowther, that pictures only really can (or should) represent anything they directly resemble. But the fact that on some level, pictures operate with iconicity does not mean that iconicity is the only principle they rely on – nor that iconicity is the only principle we spontaneously use when interpreting them. While Umberto Eco (1976, 191-­‐217) has not denied the ease with which iconic sings are understood, he convincingly demonstrated the complexity of iconicity, arguing that there are “elements of conventionality at the heart of 'iconic' procedures.” (Eco 1976, 213). According to the semiotician, the fact that a “certain image is similar to something else does not eliminate the fact that similarity is also a matter of cultural convention” (Eco 1976, 204). These conventions determine which similarities are actually considered essential at different times and by different cultures. While Eco does not address the question of time and space in relation to the iconic, his arguments lead to a much refined conception of iconicity. What characteristics of a representation are to be treated iconically must indeed be sorted out through cultural norm. I think that this is also true for the way spatio-­‐
temporal relationships between picture-­‐elements are to be understood. There is no good reason why a purely spatial understanding of the spatial relationships between picture elements should be primary per se and independently of different cultural contexts. As I argued above, there are many cultures where pictures have indeed been regularly used to represent temporal developments. Based on Eco's (1976, 205) examples concerning the “conditioning by current iconic codes” of spectators at different times, it can be expected that the recurrence of a character on a picture plane was immediately understood as his acting at different points in time by spectators fluent 49
with the image type. One observation which can seem to confirm this idea or even establish polychronic images as primary is that young children from 2 to 8 very frequently draw such images (cf. Duncum 1993, 23-­‐26). Earl Barnes, one of the first researchers to systematically study children's drawings was able to anlayze 6393 drawings with 15,218 distinct scenes in one study, all depicting the same story read to pupils by their teachers. Barnes is already impressed by the children's narrative drive. Just one year before Wickhoff introduced his categories, the Californian researcher writes: “This desire to tell the story leads repeatedly to sacrificing the time limitation that so restricts the narrative power of pictorial art. The children will draw Johnny standing on the river bank, falling over the same bank, and being pulled up the same bank by his two rescurs [sic], all in the same picture and presumably at the same time.” (Barnes, 1894, 460). Similar observations are made by Levinstein (1905) and Luquet (1927) based on other corpora of children's drawings, solicited or spontaneous. Observing children's drawings thus seems to confirm that drawing monochronic narrative pictures is not spontaneous or natural, but rather corresponds to a learned restriction. Interestingly enough, Barnes cannot help but presuppose the monochronic paradigm of pictures himself (which is revealed by his final remark “presumably at the same time”). In Das Kind als Künstler. Kinderzeichnungen bis zum 14. Lebensjahr (1905, 36-­‐38) Siegfried Levinstein takes up Barnes results and completes them with studies of his own. Levinstein notices that there are different kinds of narrative drawings, but does not analyze the difference between monochronic and polychronic pictures in detail. This difference received a more thorough analysis by Georges-­‐
Henri Luquet (cf. 1927, 208-­‐222) in his landmark book Le Dessin Enfantin, which considerably influenced Piaget, among others. Interestingly enough, Luquet rediscovered the different types of narrative distinguished by Wickhoff. He distinguishes two polychronic picture types, one variety without repetition (which corresponds to our 50
synthetic kind) and the other with repetition (which is our distributed type). As a third polychronic modality, he introduces the comic style narrative (which he calls the épinal type), where several pictures are used, each for one moment (Luquet 1927, 209-­‐217). According to his studies, the first two types are mainly used by younger children, the older children then move on to the épinal and what he calls the symbolic kinds, where one moment stands for the whole story. But not only the development of children's drawing habits shows that storytelling is early on part of the functions of picture making and that polychronic iconic narrative is a natural solution for visual storytelling. There is also so much historical evidence for the co-­‐existence of the polychronic and monochronic paradigms until recently, that it seems to me absurd to claim that the latter is somehow more natural. History does also not show a strict evolution towards the monochronic as it was once thought. As Richard Brilliant (1984, 52 and passim) has indeed shown, continuous narrative regularly appeared and disappeared in Greek Antiquity. In the Middle Ages many pictures were polychronic and as Andrews underlines, the 14th century was actually more monochronic than the 15th century (cf. Andrews 1995, 8). Only after the 16th century did the monochronic convention again start to become the standard for creating pictures. Cubism and, even more so, Futurism then systematically subverted monochrony again. While today’s production of (photographic and non-­‐photographic) single pictures in the West is clearly dominated by the monochronic convention, this is a recent culture-­‐specific development, in which the relative ease of capturing the moment with current photographic cameras might also play a part. One important conclusion to draw from this demonstration is that texts and pictures alike are capable of portraying sequential events as being sequential. 51
To finish let us now look more closely at an artistic example where several moments are depicted, with the same characters recurring: a scene from the Saint Nicolas cycle by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (fig. 9). We here see the same boy (and the devil) in several locations. Schaeffer and Crowther would thus argue that the boy is represented as being in different locations at the same time. But this presupposes part of what it is supposed to prove: that a picture is never polychronic. To say that a picture like Saint Nicolas represents the same person in different locations in and around a house presupposes the monochronic convention of pictorial organization. It seems more sound to me to say that the picture really represents the boy as being in different locations at different moments in time. This does not, by the way, make the picture less iconic, for we still recognize the boy, the house, the feast on the top floor, the bed in the ground floor, etc. based on “analogical recognition of forms” and are also familiar with the visual experience of seeing the same person in different places at different times. To be more explicit: as the picture stands, it shows the same person in different places. But time is not part of what it iconically shows. It neither iconically shows the boy as being at different places in the same time nor does it iconically show the boy as being at different places at different times. There is also nothing like a non-­‐iconic experience of the same person being in different places at the same time. But there is nothing like a non-­‐iconic experience of frozen movement, i.e. a real-­‐
world experience which experiencing a monochronic picture could resemble, either. In other words: understanding the picture monochronically or polychronically is always an operation that exceeds the “analogical recognition of visual forms”. It is thus wrong to conclude from a picture's iconicity or the spatial distribution of signs that it can never show several moments. A closer look at G. E. Lessing's work shows that he doesn't actually believe in the validity of the argument attributed to him either. Lessing is quite aware of the existence of polychronic pictures of the distributed kind and rejects them for 52
reasons of taste (cf. Lessing 1766, 120), but he does so only in the realm of art. Interestingly, it's Lessing’s discussion of poetry that helps us best understand the exact nature of his argument concerning painting. As the signs of language are arbitrary, he states, the signs of language can in principle represent anything, including relations that are essentially spatial, while he earlier argued that poetry shouldn't describe. It might thus seem as if a poet in the end had more freedom than a painter. However, Lessing quickly makes his argument more specific and restricts the freedom of the poet: I do not deny that language has the power of describing a corporeal whole according to its parts. It certainly has, because its signs, although consecutive, are nevertheless arbitrary. But I deny that this power exists in language as the instrument of poetry. For illusion, which is the special aim of poetry, is not produced by these verbal descriptions of objects, nor can it ever be so produced. The coexistence of the body comes into collision with the sequence of the words, and although while the former is getting resolved into the latter, the dismemberment of the whole into its parts is a help to us yet the reunion of these parts into a whole is made extremely difficult, and not infrequently impossible. (Lessing 1766, 105/106) This is reception aesthetics: Do not describe objects in words because the understanding of your descriptions is difficult. If she just wants to convey information, a writer may represent bodies and actions, whatever she deems relevant, but if she wants to make a strong (aesthetic) impression, she should limit herself to actions only. This important passage has been rarely quoted, because it may seem to be a side remark, but it is really essential to completely understand Lessing’s argument. It shows that Lessing would not have accepted the generalization of his argument from the domain of artistic texts and pictures to texts and pictures in general. The telos of all arts is, 53
according to Lessing, deception, illusion. As he already states in the preface of his text, in poetry and painting “appearance takes the form of reality” and “the deception is, in either case, pleasing” (ibid., xiii). Lessing thus presupposes that the aim of verbal and visual art is to conceal art, but he does not presuppose that this is the aim of writing or creating pictures in general. As visual artists and writers use different kinds of signs, they must follow different rules to achieve striking renderings. The visual artist can hope to deceive a beholder when representing bodies but not when trying to depict actions. Lessing’s point, it turns out, is not that pictures cannot tell stories, or that they should not tell them for ideological reasons (as W. J. T. Mitchell suggests) but simply that they cannot tell them as effectively as texts. But this statement is not as strong as the other. His imperative is not categorical. It is hypothetical. Lessing does not simply tell artists: “You should not imitate actions in pictures” or even “You should not imitate actions in pictures because the imitation of action should only be done in texts”, which is how W. J. T. Mitchell reads him. Lessing says: “If (and only if) you want to create pleasing illusions, then you should use pictures for description rather than narration”. Lessing’s point does not seem to be completely absurd: when the aim is to create representations which get close to deceiving spectators, the limitations Lessing suggest are definitely worth considering. While failing in the generalized version produced by his followers, Lessing’s argument might still be successful in the hypothetical form he offered himself. After all, Trompe l’oeil painting most frequently depicts inanimate objects and not actions. 54
Werner Wolf and the question of suspense in iconic narratives Werner Wolf is the first theorist in our review who approaches pictorial narrativity from a cognitivist perspective. He treats narrative as a prototype frame for human experience which can also be applied to intentional creations: “As far as artefacts are concerned, the identification and application of the frame narrative is the outcome of an interaction between decoding recipients and features of an artefact encoded by an author.” (Wolf 2003, 184) In terms of features, Wolf offers very strong content and presentation criteria. Reception as narrative is supposed to follow if these features appear together. Therefore a focus on presentation and content alone allows him to assess if something is a narrative. He calls the features that function as triggers for narrative reception narratemes (we also sometimes find the term narremes in the literature). The first one is “figures engaged in some kind of action” (Wolf 2003, 186). Others are “specificity and concreteness […] which I would also like to highlight as conducive to narrative experientiality and hence as additional narratemes.” (ibid.) Like Steiner and Kibédi Varga, Wolf thinks narrative is only possible in polychronic (or multiphase) pictures: I propose to use ‘narrative’ tout court […] only with reference to the ‘strong’ narrativity of a meaningful series of representations in serial or multiphase pictures, provided they depict at least two temporally and causally connected phases of a specific, non-­‐iterative action and contain some uncertain, suspenseful telos centred on anthropomorphic beings. (Wolf 2003, 192) Like Kibédi Varga, Steiner or Kafalenos, Wolf believes that a monochronic picture can at best “induce narration” whereas a series of still pictures or a polychronic picture can be genuine narratives (Wolf 2002, 96). 55
More generally, Wolf (2003, 191) considers that static pictures are best able to “refer to a story or to present moments that the viewer is then required to narrativize. The necessity of inference and of a narrativizing activity on the part of the recipient is thus much greater than in verbal or filmic narratives”. Last but not least, Wolf (2003, 192) also mentions the temporal limitations of pictures, which “can […] unlike drama and other verbal narratives, at best suggest time, that is, a past and a future, yet cannot actually re-­‐present it”. Single pictures' problematic temporality is also seen as preventing the occurrence of an emotion which plays an important role in the reception of narrative: suspense. Pictures are considered to be able to represent stories that are suspenseful, but unable to represent them suspensefully: “As has been said, suspense is as much an effect of the story as of the process of its transmission and reception. However, since an individual painting cannot guide a process of reception complete with gaps and delays in the same way as verbal or filmic narratives can, a vital precondition for suspense is missing” (ibid.). The impossibility of creating suspense through a picture – especially in conjunction with the presentation of a resolution and the evocation of relief in the receiver – is also something pointed out by Kibedi-­‐Varga (1989, 109). Luca Giuliani (2013, 69), author of a book on narrative in Greek Antiquity formulates the problem quite pointedly: “When scanning an image, the beholder is free to choose his own visual path; the producer of the image has no means of […] obliging the beholder to view the image in a particular sequence that might generate a sense of expectation or tension.” The problem is: even if a story is potentially suspenseful, this potential must be activated in order for a telling to evoke a feeling of suspense in an audience. If the viewer learns about the resolution of the story before he learned about the problem, there is no tension and no relief. While I believe that pictures can evoke suspense quite easily, by showing an unsolved problematic situation, I will also try to show that 56
some have a temporal program and induce relief after having created a sense of expectation, even when they only depict one moment in time. Rick Altman and the problem of a double standard for narrative A recent work on narrative (Altman 2008), where pictures play an important role exemplifies a fifth approach to pictures as narratives which may appear to be promising at first: Altman proposes a definition of narrative that has been specifically devised for the single picture. His initial definition of narrative is based on following a recurring character (Altman 2008, 21). But when he introduces his analysis of paintings by Pieter Brueghel the Elder which only show instants and contain no recurring characters, he writes: “only by stretching our definition can we assure coverage of all types of narrative” (Altman 2008, 198), in particular iconic narratives. Speaking of Brueghel’s paintings he says: “Though they do not show the multiple views usually involved in the process of following, the single view that they do show is readily taken – by those with a sufficient level of narrative drive – as implying the full following process.” In other words: they trigger a narrative in an active – if not hyperactive – audience rather than containing one. To account for the narrativity in paintings where he deems its existence undeniable, Altman then abandons the criterion of recurrence, which he first introduced as a precondition for following and stretches his definition to allow for zero degree of following (ibid.). He writes: “Unless we accept this zero degree of following as sufficient to define narrative, then we are bound to forego any possible insights into narrative that single-­‐image graphic texts might offer” (ibid.). If he was right here, it would be a good reason to react as he does. But in order to analyze these paintings from a narratological standpoint, it would be enough if Altman showed that these paintings have a high degree of narrativity. He does not have to show that they are narratives. His 57
strategy thus seems hardly satisfying to me. When there is no action unfolding in time and no recurrence, it seems hardly possible to speak of following. The concept is thus emptied of its descriptive content. While Altman's definition of narrative is original, his sense of observation astute and his analyses of narration in Brueghel quite exceptional, the way he deals with the question of the definition of narrative is problematic. Rather than trying to demonstrate that pictures can comply with the definition he also uses for literary text, Altman presupposes that pictures are narratives. He then adapts his own initial definition by abandoning a criterion which was essential in the first part of his workxvi. The definition of narrative Altman applies to pictures is not quite as strict as the one he applies to texts. While Altman is quite right to insist that pictures can imply a narrative, the way he argues for it is problematic. His introduction of a double standard of narrative makes it seem like a picture could not comply with the real standard. It thus plays into the hands of the skeptic. But the fact is that pictorial narrative is not incompatible with a plausibly narrow definitions of narrative in narratologyxvii.
Narrative and the picture: a plausibly narrow definition Rather than working with a soft definition of narrative, I will, at least within the scope of this article, accept many of the criteria of a relatively narrow definition of narrative. It is adapted from Chapter 7 of Aristotle's Poetics and also takes into account many of the challenges of the contemporary debates. It also has the advantage of being short, implicating different criteria. I define narrative as a representation with a plot structure of a chain of events. Let me briefly explain the different elements. 58
1. Chain of events is understood as succession of causally connected changes of state (at least two), with no criteria as to the extraordinariness of the changes communicated. This seems important to me to account for boring stories, such as those frequently told by young children or terrible tellers. But it is obvious that the degree of difficulty in showing extraordinary and ordinary events in a picture is similar. 2. I speak of representation because I do not belief that life itself can be a narrative. But I do not use terms such as artefact, utterance or message, even though this would be perfectly suitable for the pictures I'm concerned with, because I do not want to generally prevent a non-­‐
artefactual representation, such as a trace, from being a narrative, to not limit future developments in narratology. 3. To have plot structure here means to contain a complication and a resolution. I have however made plot structure a qualifier of representation, because I want to insist on actualized plot structure. It is not enough if the complication-­‐resolution structure exists in the story (else I would have written chain of events with a plot-­‐structure), it also needs to be actualized in the presentation of the story. Let me make this clear by using an example of the same minimal story verbally represented first with and then without plot-­‐structure: (1) Peter was put into prison by King Herod to be tried. But in the night before his trial an angel freed the saint. When the guards woke up in the morning, Peter was gone.” The same story can also be told without actualizing the plot-­‐structure potentially contained in the story (2) An angel liberated Peter from King Herod’s prison and when the guards woke up in the morning Peter was gone. One implication of this part of my definition is that the presentation needs to have a temporal program, just like my two sentences. Else it cannot be made sure that the complication precedes the resolution at least in the first actualization of a story by a viewer. So given that I also 59
ask for a succession of events as story-­‐content, my definition implies double-­‐temporality. As far as I can see, my definition thus includes the most relevant criteria of the definitions discussed above, either explicitly or by implication, and it is considerably more strict on several points than most of these definitions. To finish, let me however point out a predicament: I deem the criterion of plot structure problematic even when applied at the level of representation. In my opinion, a definition of narrative needs to account for the fact that there are boring narratives, such as those often told by little children, where nothing extraordinary or surprising happens and which do not present a complication-­‐resolution structure. But if I neither demand extraordinary events as story content nor plot structure (in the story or its actualization), the definition classifies recipes and weather forecasts as narratives. The introduction of complication-­‐resolution structure solves this, but leads to the exclusion of boring narratives from the realm of narratives tout court. This is a predicament for which I do not have a solution yet: how can we admit that some stories are boring and avoid that recipes be classified as narratives? I decided to keep the criterion of plot-­‐structure for the sake of the argument, because it makes the definition much more restrictive. With the definition at hand, I do not only have to show that pictures can represent chains of events but also that pictures can have temporal programs which allow them to create suspense and relief. If it was possible to show that pictures can meet the criteria of such a strict definition, it should be quite firmly established that pictures can be narratives. If I only showed that iconic narrative is possible given a large definition of narrative, the results could easily be questioned by someone who believes in a more narrow definition. 60
Aristotle's plot-structure and Sternberg's curiosity and suspense The criteria of plot-­‐structure has, of course, a long history: A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end […] As a rough general formula, 'a length which allows of the hero passing by a series of probable or necessary stages from misfortune to happiness, or from happiness to misfortune', may suffice as a limit for the magnitude of the story. (Aristotle 1920, VII) This idea has been translated by Gustav Freytag (1863) into a pyramid (or triangle). While Freytag speaks of the “catastrophe” at the end, it is clear from Aristotle's text that the ending can also, in principle, be happy. What's essential is that there is a resolution, which can also be called a denouement. Illustration 1 below shows the generalized version of Freytag's pyramid. In 1978, Meir Sternberg correlates these different structural elements with an emotion that we've already come across several times: suspense. To this he adds what he calls curiosity. Here's how he explains the difference: Both suspense and and curiosity are emotions or states of mind characterized by expectant restlessness and tentative hypotheses that derive from a lack of information; both thus draw the reader's attention forward in the hope that the information that will resolve or allay them lies ahead. They 61
differ, however, in that suspense derives from a lack of desired information concerning the outcome of a conflict that is to take place in the narrative future, a lack that involves a clash of hope and fear; whereas curiosity is produced by a lack of information that relates to the narrative past. (Meir Sternberg 1978, p. 65) The use Sternberg makes of the terms here is very different – and much more precise – than ordinary use. Based on his explanation, we can say that different genres tend to more or less evoke suspense, curiosity or both at the same time. The crime novel is usually driven by curiosity. We want to know whodunnit and our attention is thus oriented towards what happened before in the story. But we may also experience suspense, of course: in a typical Miss Marple novel by Agatha Christie, we want to know if and how the old lady finds the murderer and if she does so before it's too late (whatever that means). A movie like Independence Day (1996) by Roland Emmerich, on the other hand, is essential based on suspense. We enter the scene with hostile aliens arriving on earth and want to know if and especially how the American heroes will be able get rid of them. When this finally happens, the relief we're craving for ensues. Now, writers and – even more precisely so – film-­‐makers can evoke curiosity and suspense in us, because they can distill and withhold information in whatever order and quantity they want and then lead us to a moment of relief of their choosing. This seems to most people to be impossible in a single picture, because it cannot govern in what order we access information. If this is right, when seeing a painting of the imprisonment and freeing of Peter, I may see it according to the order in (1) or (2) above. The painter cannot therefore make sure I see the suspenseful version. The representation doesn't have a plot-­‐structure. I hope it is now clear It wIt should start to appear what needs to be done to prove that pictures can 62
in fact be narratives, have a plot-­‐, i.e. complication-­‐resolution structure, and evoke suspense and relief. The problem of a temporal program in pictures While most authors admit that all elements of a picture are not perceived at the same moment in time, some argue that the aesthetic effect is as if we were taking in the whole picture “at a glance” (Chatman 1981, 118). Others deny this as well, but try to show that a picture’s perception is not consistently structured: different viewers see the picture elements at different moments of their viewing process and even the same viewer may follow a variety of different paths through the picture on different occasions. Each of these formulations seems to lead to the same basic problem: telling a story means to communicate temporal developments, and a single picture is somehow not able to represent such developments or to represent them in a specific order. There are two basic ways to assert a picture’s inability to present temporality: (1) Focus on pictures as representations. Pictures cannot represent temporal order (precisely enough). (2) Focus on picture perception. Pictures either (a) are not perceived in time at all, or (b) cannot sufficiently determine how they are perceived in time. We've already dealt with different versions of the first problem in the comments on Schaeffer and Lessing above and shown that the connection between 2 and 1 is not a necessary one. I will now deal with the second problem. 63
According to what could be called the standard view, the reading-­‐as-­‐
presentation is clearly programmed in texts, but this is not the case in pictures. In order to understand a standard text, we have to read it from the first to the last word. A writer can thus program the order of reading-­‐as-­‐presentation as she pleases. There is no rule for pictures that is as strong as this convention. Pictures do rarely depict represented events in a conventional order (cf. Goodman 1981, 338), and even when different spectators look at the same picture, they do not follow the same paths. As a matter of fact, most studies on eye-­‐
movement seem to contradict rather than confirm the wide-­‐spread notion that there is a path in a picture which all spectators follow in the same order. During prolonged viewing, different spectators tend to focus on the same zones (for example, depictions of faces). The only element which seems relatively stable across viewings by different spectators are the zones of fixation and the paths different viewers take regularly, but not the direction or order of viewing of the elements which lie on this path (cf. Rosenberg/Klein 2015, 94). Unlike the order of activation through reading, which reflects order of telling, the order of activation through viewing, or so the argument goes, does not allow the artist to predetermine a (potential) order of showing. Temporal media are different from spatial media insofar as they control presentation-­‐time. A temporal medium “requires us to begin at a beginning it chooses (the first page, the opening shots of a film, the overture, the rising curtain) and to follow its temporal unfolding to the end it prescribes” (Chatman 1990, 7). A picture, on the other hand, does not have “a ‘temporal program’ inscribed in the work” (ibid.). As it appears, there is a tension between the often-­‐stated idea that certain pictures tell stories, an idea that is hardly questioned by a non-­‐
academic or a non-­‐narratologist audience – and the narratological arguments aiming to show that a picture cannot be a narrative. As we went along, we've seen how important iconic storytelling is in different cultures and contexts and how widespread polychrony used to be and 64
still is with the younger part of the population. I've also tried to show that the difference between monochronic and polychronic pictures is a difference between two different conventions. Last but not least, we have already solved several issues that were traditionally seen as problems for iconic narrative, showing, among other things, that there is no problem with the representation of causal relationships in pictures and that temporal relationships are encroached in these. There is one problem, however, which needs a more in-­‐depth treatment, because despite what Kafalenos and Steiner believe, it hasn't yet found a satisfactory solution: the problem of double temporality, which is essential if we want to evoke experiences of suspense and relief in pictures. Addressing the problem of a temporal program in pictures: relative
determination of order of access Hardly anybody would argue that people who read a story more slowly have not read the same story as people who read it faster. What really matters – because it might actually affect story identity and because it certainly affects the identities of narratives – is the order of reading-­‐as-­‐
presentation. A writer only needs to control relative chronology of reception: It may make a significant difference if a reader learns about event A after or before learning about events B and C. But it is not usually deemed essential when exactly he learns about either of them. It is quite clear how to apply these principles to pictures: Even though different spectators may start their viewing at different points and move through pictures in different ways, it might still be that all of them see the depiction of (significant) story event A before seeing the depiction of (significant) story event B. If events A and B form a story, the order of viewing-­‐as-­‐presentation establishes the order of access. An artist may not be able to determine where we look first, but she may 65
still be able to determine where we do not look first. This would mean that she determines relative order of perception. To create a determinate order of access to information about story events, an artist needs less than total determination of order of perception. While there are probably very few pictures that achieve systematic determination of the order of viewing, i.e. pictures whose elements are viewed in the same order by most spectators, there may still be many pictures which sufficiently and systematically determine order, i.e. pictures whose representations of significant story elements are viewed in the same order by most spectators. A relatively simple visual technique to make sure that something is not perceived first is to make it small, to put it in the background and to avoid bright colors. There are indeed pictures in which it is scarcely possible that a spectator sees the depiction of event E first, but where she cannot help but consider it significant once she discovers it.
A painting with a temporal program Many authors of Flemish paintings created between the 16th and 18th centuries quite consciously control viewing time in such a way that viewers make one or more significant discoveries if they look at them long enough. A landscape painting (fig. 10), which was at least conceived by – but according to recent research to recent to have been painted by (cf. Allart/Currie 2013) – Pieter Brueghel, for instance, shows a landscape with a shepherd, some sheep, a farmer plowing, a fisherman fishing and a large ship in the ocean. But take a look yourself before reading on. Well, only if we contemplate the picture for long enough do we discover two legs somewhere in the sea and realize that the picture tells a storyxviii: The painting is now commonly called Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Whether the spectator thinks of Icarus or not, whether she has heard of him before or not, the two legs 66
are quite a discovery for someone who looks at the picture. So much of a discovery, indeed, that it forces her to rethink her understanding of the scene depicted. What seemed to be an idyllic landscape becomes a scene of death by drowning. The other figures depicted as simply minding their own business may suddenly seem to be acting inappropriately.xix Now, it seems to me that we here have a systematic order of access to significant elements of the painting. This famous painting, whose descriptive title is not part of the original artwork but was only added later, is clearly programmed to hide Icarus from being discovered too early. But certain elements are still very unclear: where did the man come from? And is he just swimming or drowning? In an excellent reproduction, we may see feathers floating in the sky above Icarus (fig. 11, detail), but even this will not readily be interpreted by most viewers, who do not yet know the story. While there certainly is a moment of surprise here, this happens without there having been a moment generating suspense first. There is a resolution, but no complication. So the painting brings us closer to what we need, because it has a temporal program, but it is not a narrative according to my definition, because it does not have a complication-­‐resolution structure. A painting evoking suspense and relief Let us look at another quite famous example (fig. 12). It should at least take you 90 seconds to see all its essential elements – if they are visible in the reproduction at all. Before providing context, let's see what we understand without knowing the pre-­‐text: there are people in a state of suffering. They are on a raft, which they might have assembled themselves. Some seem to be dead or at least in a state of deep physical exhaustion. These elements point to a journey which has already lasted for several days at least. In the centre, some people are agitated: following the movement 67
of the bodies, we end up discovering one of the persons waving towards the horizon and if we look closely enough – it can be seen in the original painting in the Louvre – we also see what he is waving at: a boat appearing at the horizon (fig. 13, detail). I believe we have found what we need: this painting has a complication-­‐
resolution structure. Looking at the people in the forefront on the boat, we understand enough of what happened before (they were shipwrecked) and of the state they are currently in to be intrigued. Suspense ensues: will they find help? Then, if we keep on looking, the painting provides an answer to our question: they discover a boat on the horizon. According to the first tests I've been able to perform with the eye-­‐tracker at the CReA lab of the university of Vienna, the first person fixating on the boat fixates after 22 seconds of viewing. This is of course long enough to build suspense and evoke relief in viewers. For all other picture elements, the moment of first fixation is much more variable. So I believe that, relatively to the raft, we can say that the discovery of the boat comes at the very earliest second in viewing. As we need two causally connected events for a narrative, one of which is a resolution, I believe we have what we need. The fact is that the boat is most likely discovered after many other elements have been consciously looked at by viewers. The human tendency to look at where others look (or point) should indeed lead to the discovery of the boat on the horizon, as there are several persons on the raft looking and waving at something. But within 60 seconds of viewing in the lab, a vast majority of beholders did not discover the boat at all. We can expect that our feeling of relief is greater the greater our impression of misfortune was. As this impression may increase as we discover gruesome or sad details on the boat, one can then predict that the relief once we discover the boat is bigger if we have spent more time looking at the raft. We will have to perform longer experiments to see when the discovery of the boat takes place and what reactions ensue. 68
Let me anticipate another objection: we do not yet know if the boat will discover the people on the raft, so the painting doesn't really offer a resolution. I don't think that this is correct. The painting does not provide the final resolution we may hope for. But it provides a first denouement. To speak in Aristotle's terms: discovering a boat when you are shipwrecked is already a first turn of events from misfortune to happiness. Of course, this discovery introduces a new complication too and thus regenerates suspense soon after it provided for a feeling of relief in the audience. But this doesn't take away the first relief. So when we are looking for minimum plot structure, Scene of a Shipwreck provides what we need. I therefore believe that Géricault's painting is a narrative. As expected, it also corresponds to all of the criteria which we have encountered on the way and deemed acceptable: first of all, it has double time structure, even though it is a monochronic image. Based on our world knowledge, we understand that the people on the raft underwent shipwreck (event no. 1, complication) and were in a state of suffering (event no. 2, complication) before discovering a boat (event no. 3, resolution) and therefore (causal link) entered a state of hope (event no. 4, resolution). So the picture shows two events following one another which are also causally linked, as is necessary according to many definitions of narrative. Further more, viewers systematically access resolution information after having understood what the complication is. In other words: the painting has a temporal program governing the order of access to the depicted story-­‐events. So, all in all, we can say that the painting is a representation with a plot structure of a chain of events. The time of viewing is ‘ontologically independent’ of story-­‐time, as required by Rimmon-­‐Kenan. Scripts, schemas and knowledge of causal relations allow us to understand the order of story events. As opposed to this, the order of presentation is determined by the way in which we view the picture. This viewing is in turn dependent on the way in which the elements depicted on the canvas have been organized. The two processes are thus of a different kind and largely 69
independent of one another. The constellation of elements on the picture plane, is activated as a succession of depicted elements during beholding. Interestingly, this analysis of the temporal structure of the painting does not only show that a monochronic painting can correspond to the criteria of a narrow definition of narrative. It is also interesting for art-­‐history. If temporal structures can be so relevant, art-­‐
historians should try to better understand them. We can, in the case of Géricault's painting, quite nicely show how it instantiates the elements of Freytag's triangle and Sternberg's remarks on suspense (Illustration 2). Géricault arrived at this composition rather late in the process. Indeed, it was a very conscious choice on his part: we still have his preparatory sketches and therefore know that Géricault continuously decreased the size of the boat appearing at the horizon. One hypothesis I would like to suggest is that this was done in order to allow viewers to live through the same experience as the one made by those represented in the picture – at, of course, a much smaller scale, not within days, but within minutes. In other words: the story told here is about searching and discovering and the way it is painted makes it also about these themes. It makes us, on a small scale, feel despair and relief, rather than just showing us what these emotions look like from the outside, like many other paintings do. While pictures with such a complex structure may indeed be rare, I believe that there are more than we might think. Even according to the narrow definition of narrative used here, the so-­‐called Bagno Scene from William Hogarth's cycle Marriage à la mode (1743-­‐
1745) could well be a narrative, where we discover swiftly, but still in relatively ordered fashion, what happened. It might be that most spectators are first intrigued by the person dying in the forefront, discovering the bed and the man who flees half-­‐naked through the window only afterwards. Another example might be Diana's Hunt (1616-­‐1617), a very complex painting by Domenichino, where we only 70
slowly discover the nature and order of events until we may, with enough interest, figure out who won the prize shoot. But only through experiments, where we put a sufficient number of people in front of these images and others to see how they visually scan them and what they actually understand, can we go beyond our introspective argumentations. Alternatives to armchair definitions of narrative To finish, I would like to come back to the question of definition of narrative, which we discussed at the beginning of this article. As we have seen the alleged (im)possibility of what I call iconic narrative is usually considered by narratologists to depend on the definition of narrative that is deemed correct. I here adopted the standard narratological methodology insofar as I first specified plausible criteria through definition and then moved on to test the degree to which pictures can correspond to these. In this article, I have tried to prove the possiblity for monochronic pictures to be narratives according to a narrow definition of the concept. I have tried to show that pictures can communicate stories with a complication-­‐resolution structure and evoke suspense and relief in an audience. To finish, I would like to hint at a completely different approach to the question of the definition of narrative and of media suitable for communicating “a story proper”. As suggested by my earlier hints concerning an art-­‐historical point of view, starting with an arm-­‐chair definition of narrative is not the only methodological possibility. As Ludwig Wittgenstein (cf. 2009, § 68-­‐71, §76-­‐77) famously argued based on the concept of game, the fact that we are not able to explicit state the criteria for applying the concept, doesn't fundamentally impair our use of it: “For how is the concept of a game bounded? What still counts as a game, and what no longer does? Can you say where the boundaries are? No. You can draw some, for 71
there aren’t any drawn yet. (But this never bothered you before when you used the word “game”.)” (Wittgenstein 2009, §68). The same, I believe, could be said of the word “narrative”. Wittgenstein (cf. 2009, § 92) suggests that rather than looking for the essence of the concept, we should, when we are looking for the meaning of a term, analyze the way it is used by ordinary speakers (Wittgenstein 2009, I, §43). J. L. Austin (1961, 130) argues in a similar vein: Our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing and the connexions they have found worth marking, in the lifetime of many generations: these surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of the survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all ordinary and reasonably practical matters, than any that you or I are likely to think up in our arm-­‐chairs of an afternoon – the most favoured alternative method. Given its omniprensence, narrative certainly is a reasonably practical matter. If we accept Austin's and Wittgenstein's arguments, looking at how people actually use the terms “narrative” and/or “story” should thus be a relatively reliable indicator of what the right criteria of use are. It might also be that the question of how to actually define narrative correctly is one that should, as Wittgenstein might have said, be dissolved rather than solved. One of the reasons for strict definitions, is that many narratologists fear that the concept of narrative could lose its meaning entirely if it becomes too broad. “By narrowing the scope of ‘narrative’,” Shlomith Rimmon-­‐Kenan (2006, 17) writes, “I am trying to defend the term against being emptied of all semantic content: if everything is narrative, nothing is”. Like other narratologists, she worries that the concept of narrative might be watered down to a point where it becomes nearly meaningless. There are several reasons why I think this fear is unjustified. But the main one is, again, linked to Wittgenstein's argument: it underestimates 72
peoples’ capacity to intuitively distinguish narratives from non-­‐
narratives. While for the past many years many arm-­‐chair definitions of narrative offered by narratologists would have classified cooking recipes or weather forecasts as narratives, the layman never mistakenly believed that either of these were narratives. Our intuitions are sufficient to sort most artefacts into stories and non-­‐stories. It is easy for any competent speaker of a language to determine that Cinderella tells a story and that the weather forecast does not, that Pretty Woman tells a story while most recipes do not (cf. Prince 1999, 43). In other words: definitions need to stand the test of intuitions, not the opposite. The problem is usually with definitions, not intuitions. For those who accept Austin's and Wittgenstein's basic ideas, i. e. that to find out what a term means we should analyze its existing use, but do not want to give up definitions altogether, an empirically-­‐minded approach seems a good solution. Research in this direction may either be historical – looking at how people historically used and described different artefacts (this is the way art-­‐historians traditionally proceed) – or else use experiments with current viewersxx. In the first case, use is assessed by analyzing existing texts or recordings. In the second case, assessments of artefacts are solicited, in order to understand where the perceived limits of the applicability of a term lie for competent speakers of a language. Based on such an approach we may then try to work our way back to criteria which can explain the judgements made concerning individual items. Eventually, we can thus hope to obtain a list of criteria that form a sound definition of the concept at hand, in our case narrative and/or story, which can be applied to judge the narrativity of new artefacts without having to appeal to experiment or historical research every time. This approach was most famously used by William Labov (1972), who defined criteria for narrative such as tellability based on an analysis of examples of non-­‐fictional oral storytelling. A different empirical approach was used by Françoise Revaz (1997, chapter 2), who asked students to judge the narrativity of certain action 73
texts. The result was one of the reasons which lead her to reject definitions such as Genette's which classified texts like recipes as narratives, because, unsurprisingly, none of the subjects considered the recipe in the experiment to tell a story. Unfortunately, Revaz (1997, 69) was dissatisfied with the considerable disagreement between her participants concerning certain less canonical examples. Therefore, she in the end decided to stipulate what narrative is rather than trying to develop a definition based strictly on the results of her experiments. While this example shows the difficulty of working your way back from real-­‐world feedback to definition, I still believe it still is the most sound approach available. But what approach you choose, is, by and large, a question of methodological belief. Now, would a more common-­‐
language approach to narrative make our considerations unnecessary? I don't think so, for they did much more than showing that there is iconic narrative: They helped us to better understand the narrative potential of pictures. Conclusion This essay has shown that even the most restrictive definitions of narrative do not exclude all pictures from the realm of narratives. It also showed that looking for a temporal program in pictures is not an absurd endeavor and that doing so can even lead to new interpretations of famous artefacts, analyzed many times before, such as Géricault's or Brueghel's paintings. Looking for the succession encroached in the constellation of elements on a picture-­‐plane therefore is an important task not only for narratologists, but for art-­‐historians too and I believe it should become part of the standard methodology. As far as I can see, eye-­‐tracking is the best technology to work in this direction. Research should also aim at better understanding the degree to which pictures can evoke suspense or curiosity, a task that should be taken up by 74
narratologist and image theorists alike and could also be subject to experimental analysis. Klaus Speidel 75
Figures
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
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Wittgenstein, Ludwig (2009), Philosophical Investigations, P. M. S. Hacker/ Joachim Schulte (Eds.), Oxford. [English translation by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, Joachim Schulte] Wolf, Werner (2002): “Intermediale Erzähltheorie”. In: Ansgar & Vera Nünning (Eds.), Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär. Trier, pp. 23-­‐104. Wolf, Werner (2003): “Narrative and Narrativity: A Narratological Reconceptualization and Its Applicability to the Visual Arts”. In: Word & Image 19 (No. 3), pp. 180-­‐197. Wolf, Werner (2011): “Narratology and Media(lity): The Transmedial Expansion of a Literary Discipline and Possible Consequences”. In: Greta Olson (Ed.), Current Trends in Narratology. Berlin / New York, pp. 145-­‐180. Unless indicated, all translations from the French and German are mine.
In the past, I used to speak of “single still pictures”. I now consider the
determination “single picture” sufficient. After all, a single picture can but be still.
Materially speaking, a digital .gif and a movie are more than one picture.
iv
Bence Nanay (2009) made a similar argument, but wholly relied on a nebulous
notion of what “art-historians would say”, which also didn't seem deeply informed about
actual art-historical discourse, either. In any case, he did not take into account the legitimate
criticicism of art-historical conceptions of narrative by narratologists, which I will discuss
below.
v
This is also the main result of Lee B. Brown’s review of Mitchell’s Iconology (cf.
Brown 1986).
vi
Blume (2012, 56/57) even suggests that Currie's definition is circular. But Blume's
criticism is only right if a story is defined as something like the content of a narrative. If it
is defined through it's elements (e. g. events), then there would be no circularity.
vii
David Bordwell rejects the adoption of the histoire / discours dichotomy used by
Christian Metz. For Bordwell the use of “discourse” is linked to enunciation theories of film
narration, which postulate an implicit narrator for movies and omit the essential difference
between verbal language and pictures (cf. Bordwell 1985, 23-26).
viii
There are numerous studies on this topic. For a very concise summary, see Emison
(1996).
ix
The pictures discussed by Wickhoff and Weitzmann would not count as
iconic narratives given the narrow definition of narrative I operate with. They are however
narrative images and certainly have a higher degree of narrativity than most still lives from
Antiquity and later. This is important because my article is an introduction to the question
of narrativity in images and not only an argument for the existence of iconic narrative.
x
Arguably – but this is a theological problem – both fall together in the concept of
timeless eternity (cf. Antonova 2010, 121-142)
xi
For a discussion of the concept of eternity in the Byzantine tradition see Antonava
(2010, 103-152)
xii
Wendy Steiner first formulated her argument in her book Pictures of Romance
(1988). The chapter about iconic narrative was then republished by Marie-Laure Ryan in
2004 in a more widely distributed reader. I decided to simply follow a chronological order
in my presentations so I start my explanations with Steiner, but to facilitate access, I quote
from the 2004 version of the text.
xiii
The same holds true of Michael Ranta (2011), whose broad cognitivist approach
to pictorial narrative implies that even natural objects can evoke narratives.
xiv
It could even be argued that we are more likely to correctly interpret causal
relationships in pictures than in life, because pictures are communicative artefacts: A clue
in a picture was created by someone as a clue, and is not only interpreted as such by us. The
ii
iii
87
knowledge we have of time and causation in pictures is just as good as the knowledge we
have of them when we face a new situation in real life.
xv
While he generally speaks about “painting” and “poetry” rather than “pictures”
and “texts” Lessing underlines that poetry as used in the Laocoon often refers to all arts “in
which the imitation is also progressive” while painting refers to “plastic arts generally”
(1766, xviii). The generalization of his arguments to the domain of texts on the one hand
and pictures on the other is therefore legitimate.
xvi
According to Altman’s initial definition, only paintings where the same person is
shown at several times, performing different actions, could have been narratives. As this is
not the case with the paintings he wants to discuss, he changes his definition.
xvii
In terms of logics, it would be enough if I was able to show that there is at least
one thing (one picture) which is part of the group of single pictures and the group of
narratives (it tells a story). This is so because, in terms of logics, the thesis I have to refute
is that nothing can be part of the group of single pictures and the group of narratives at the
same time.
xviii
To walk away from the painting before every part of it has been viewed would be
just like walking out of a movie before it is finished or stopping to read a novel. It would
leave its perception incomplete.
xix
This is one of the themes of W. H. Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux-Arts”
published in 1939, which takes the form of a poetical comment on several paintings by
Brueghel. Auden’s interpretation seems much more convincing than Rick Altman’s.
xx
Interestingly, Gaudreault's suggestion of defining narrative as that which
communicates a story might be seen to theoretically ground this kind of evidence-based
approach. But, of course, it remains empty as long as no object-based or other criteria as to
what story is are provided.