From “Picture This: When Text Is Not Enough”
by Anne-Marie Levine
American Letters and Commentary, Thirteen, p. 104, 2001
con text, as in con brio, means “with the text.”
con text as in contest or pros and cons, means “against the
text.”
Why must text be or not be, enough? Enough for what? The context
is always there, in our minds and imaginations, as well as on
the page, and it is crucially important; it works with or
against the life and reception/perception of whatever we write.
There are always images accompanying the words in our heads. We
don’t write words without calling up images or even sounds in
our minds or on the page. “I couldn’t bear not to leave a stain
upon the silence” (Beckett) The question is, do we include those
images/sounds as text? Do we make them explicit? What if the
image appears on the page as well as in the mind? We have been
conditioned to believe that if words do not stand alone, it
follows that they are unable to stand alone, that they are
somehow weak or deficient. Words accompanied by images are not
as respectable as words that stand alone. “Illustration” is
mostly a dirty word, a “mere” word, among visual artists as well
as writers. But why deprive ourselves?
Roland Barthes about writing: “According to the Greeks, trees
are alphabets. Of all the tree letters, the palm is loveliest.”
And he includes a photo of a palm tree in his book, Barthes by
Barthes.
It has always mattered to poetry what surrounds or accompanies,
the poem, what supports or fights with, the poem. The typeface
and size, the placement of the poem on the page, the visual and
aural effects of the line breaks. Context is desperately
important to the life of a picture on a wall. How a picture is
perceived may depend on where it is hung, what images surround
it, and the quantity and shape of the space around it. Text is
never enough. Chefs pay attention to the composition of a menu
as well of a dish. They know that any food on a platter, or in a
meal, relies for its taste on the color, smell, and texture of
its companions. Try an all white or an all black dinner, a la
Sophie Calle. Try serving broccoli with your rhubarb. Context is
almost all. Performers pay attention to the placement of
compositions on a con/cert program because if the pieces are all
in the same key, for example, the listener will quickly tire,
even if she is not conscious of the keys because she does not
have perfect pitch. A balance of tempo, texture, and style
matters. Con/text, always context.
Mieke Bal (Reading Rembrandt) writes “Studying images [as a
literary critic] has made me aware of how strongly privileging
the word impedes insight into the enormous influence of visual
images on thought, imagination, and social interaction in our
culture.” She has become aware that the study of texts and their
illustrations by the same artist (Blake, for instance), or of
images and the captions that “illustrate” them (17th century
emblems), or of images meant to illustrate well-known stories
(Biblical episodes), all show “the inexhaustibility of the one
medium in terms of the other. Poems will never be fully
illustrated, nor can the plates ever fully be understood with
reference to the poem.” Even context is not enough.
And even context is text. So my question is, why not accompany a
text with its visual, musical, verbal, documentary or pictorial
“links?”