Pictures into Words: Images in Contemporary French Fiction by Ari J. Blatt (review)

Ari Blatt’s examination of the role of pictures in works of fiction by Claude Simon, Georges Perec, Pierre Michon, and Tanguy Viel demonstrates how these authors have responded to the dominance of the image in post-war culture by plundering the visual archive, using the image as a catalyst to writing and thereby annexing some of its power and appeal. Justifying his focus on French fiction in terms of a specifically French intellectual engagement with the image and its decoding, and a long history of literary-artistic exchange, Blatt examines a series of texts that tell stories about pictures but also attempt to create or recreate them in the mind’s eye. Each chapter gives a lively and engaging discussion of a text and its visual procedures, then goes on to relate it productively to relevant contemporary theories of the visual, and to works of art that reflect or perform those theories. Thus pictorial proliferation in Simon’s Triptyque is related to Baudrillard’s hyperreality and to works by Rauschenberg and others in which ‘preexisting representations of reality begin to replace reality itself as one of the prime subjects of art’ (p. 46). Perec’s ‘logic of simulation’ (p. 63) in Un cabinet d’amateur is analysed in relation to Deleuze’s theory of the simulacrum and Orson Welles’s exploration of the false in art in F for Fake. Michon’s interrogation of aesthetic value in Vie de Joseph Roulin is situated in relation to the expansion of the art market in the 1980s, and to a growing awareness, on the part of cultural theorists and artists alike, of modern art’s complicity with commerce. Finally, the literary retelling of Mankiewicz’s film Sleuth in Viel’s Cinéma is unpacked with reference not only to the theoretical death of the ‘author’ as singular, subjective agency, but to a tradition of ‘appropriationist’ works of art, from Duchamp to Sherrie Levine, that reject the imperative of artistic originality and in the light of which Viel’s text may be viewed as an ‘assisted readymade’ (p. 162). These contextualizations are extremely useful, both in elucidating and bringing to life the novels in question, and in teasing out the implications of a dense body of theory concerning visual culture, which the author negotiates with ease. One important facet of Blatt’s argument is that the texts under examination betray a certain anxiety about the dominance of the visual in contemporary culture, and attempt to ‘write back’ (p. 22) against it, reclaiming a space for the properly textual and thereby reflecting an ‘antiocularcentric’ (p. 18) tendency in French thought, from Sartre to Foucault and Guy Debord. This idea of the paragone, or competitive tension between the sister arts, sometimes gets lost, eclipsed by Blatt’s insistence on the hybridity of these ‘imagetexts’, and by the compelling evidence he presents for the positive creative outcomes of their authors’ forays into the visual domain. This is, nevertheless, a wide-ranging and masterful discussion of the complex interactions between contemporary French fiction and visual culture.