The Scene of Writing

THE SCENE OF WRITING 521 liberal aspects of the atmosphere of late seventeenth-century theological currents in England are explored. I wish that Winn had read Tavard, a modern student of continental Catholicism. Much of this material belongs to recent discovery. Winn has made his way to the work of Fr Godfrey Anstruther. Even more would have come through the Catholic Record Society. I understand the difficulties Mack may have had during the years when he was using Mapledurham House. It would have been helpful if he had cited titles from the exceptionally large library there and, more critically, studied them for a charting ofPope's position, one less casual than is usually thought. Obviously every serious student of Dryden or of Pope should possess both these books. But we still need biographies, pared from the higher rhetorical turns of both these performances, so that we can look at what we know, what we think we may know, and what, regrettably, is simply lost to us. The Scene of Writing RICHARD ANTHONY CAVELL Jacques Derrida. The Truth in Painting. Trans Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1987. 386. us $49.95; $19.95 paper Michael Fried. Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1987. 215. us $29.95 Fran<;oise Meltzer. Salome and the Dance ofWriting: Portraits ofMimesis in Literature Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1987. 226. us $24.95 The University of Chicago Press has distinguished itself by the publication, over the last decade or so, of a great number of theoretically engaged (and beautifully produced) volumes on art, and particularly on the verbal/visual relationship, and these three texts add to that distinction, though in different ways. Fran<;oise Meltzer's book, methodologically the most conservative of the three, discusses the literary portrait as the site of textual mimesis. The range of the book is vast, from discussions of mimesis in Plato, Augustine, Kant, Auerbach, Alter, Said, Ricoeur, and Derrida to readings of 'portraits' in the Bible, Virgil, Apuleius, Rousseau, Stendhal, Hawthorne, Poe, and others. While the individual readings are often brilliant, they do not as a whole serve to promote Meltzer's central argument that the literary portraitis the site ofrupture between alternative modes of representation. In the case ofHuysmans'sA Rebours, that representational alternative is figured as Moreau's portrait of Salome. Although Huysmans seeks to make of that portrait and of his writing a single synaesthetic object, Meltzer argues that it is precisely the portrait which prevents the text from ever becoming fully present to itself. The portrait is a sign of rupture out of which emerges difference, and, with UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1989 522 RICHARD ANTHONY CAVELL it, history. Another example of this disparity can be found in the ecphrasis, in the first book of the Aeneid, of scenes of the Trojan War, which Aeneas observes in Juno's temple in Carthage. In that description Meltzer focuses on the spearpoint of Troilus, which '1/ scribbles in the dust" (et versa pulvis inscribitur hasta).' While the scribble is meaningless, 'a scribble signifying nothing,' its representation in the frescos makes it into history. This is an example of what Meltzer calls 'backforwarding,' the 'etymological reversal of chronology,' the ultimate example of which is writing, 'colonizing history into a series of written images'; that is, writing tends to assert priority over history (first there was writing and then there was history). In the same way, writing tries to colonize the pictorial. We are clearly on Derridean ground here; Derrida, however, attempts to subvert this colonial attitude by bringing out the textuality of history as well as the visuality of writing, whereas Meltzer argues that there are two sorts of wnting, pictorial and literary. The terms of Meltzer's argument tend to collapse in that she makes no ontological distinction between the words of literary writing and the words ofpictorial writing. To state that 'thatwhich ruptures the limits ofthe text is the portrait itself, with its solid frame refusing all synthesis' is to make assumptions about what is inside and outside the frame, what is solid and what is not - indeed, where writing begins and where it ends. Meltzer asserts that her book 'has nothing to do with art history or its concerns.' Michael Fried, in contrast, wishes to open up his study of literary texts to art-historical discourse, and vice versa. His book deals with both a writer and a painter, although only 'writing' is mentioned in the title. This serves to alert us, however, to the 'textuality' ofEakins's paintings. Foritis the substantive, material aspect of writing with which Fried is particularly concerned, such that the two essays complement each other: in Eakins's paintings we are shown a tension with writing, and in Crane's writing our attention is drawn to the way in which the visual aspect of writing constantly threatens to disfigure the page with an assertion of otherness. Eakins's The Gross Clinic, painted in 1875 and considered a masterpiece of American realism, depicts Dr Samuel David Gross in the middle of an operation. He is staring abstractedly into the distance, scalpel in bloody hand, while four of his assistants ready the patient (ambiguously a young man) for the next stage of the operation. To Gross's right, a woman in the surgical theatre (conventionally identified as the patient's mother) shields her eyes from the sight of the blood; behind and to the right, another assistant takes notes; behind and to the left is a figure who has been identified as Eakins himself. While traditional interpretations of the painting have tended to treat it generically, Fried problematizes such readings by calling upon post-structuralist, and specifically deconstructionist, methodologies, citing both Lacan's 'The Agency of the Letter' and Derrida's 'Freud and the Scene of Writing' (though he might have profited as well from Derrida's discussion of violence and the imagination in The Truth in Painting). What Fried questions first ofall is the notion ofrealism: that the painting derives from an original scene which Eakins sought to THE SCENE OF WRITING 523 represent. Rather, suggests Fried, the painting can be better understood as deriving from certain artistic concerns evident in Eakins's oeuvre as a whole, as well as from Eakins's psychic makeup. Eakins had in fact trained as a writing master, which was his father's profession, before turning to painting, and his paintings tend to foreground written texts. Thus it is for Fried precisely the shifting ground between painting and writing (with scalpel being read as pen) that The Gross Clinic represents, as well as the family romance between Eakins, his mother (now construed as the figure shielding her eyes), and his father (figured by Gross himself, a conflation suggested at least in part by the pun deriving from the fact that Eakins's father was also an engrosser); in these terms, the scalpel is reinscribed as a sign ofcastration. The connection betweenwriting and painting is further enhanced by Eakins's lifelong interest in perspective, an interest which tended to valorize the horizontal planes of writing over the vertical ones of painting, represented in the Gross canvas by the upright surgeon and the prostrate patient. These different 'spaces' of representation call for different modes of reading; when these spaces of representation are superimposed, they cause a disjunction of perception figured in the Gross painting by the juxtaposition of the extreme discomfort of the mother figure and the analytical coolness of the note-taker. 'Thus,' writes Fried, 'the proliferation of images of writing in Eakins's pictures may be seen both as representing an effort at containment painting depicting writing and thereby mastering it - and as an index of the less than complete success of that effort - writing investing painting and thereby escaping its control.' What fascinates Fried about Crane's texts is the recurrence in them of the upturned face (which is in fact the title of one of Crane's stories), an image which Fried sees as being related to Crane's 'metaphorics of writing.' Just as in Eakins's work the difference between the spaces (or representational fields) of painting and writing was exploited, so in Crane's texts the confrontation of the spaces of writing and of drawing 'required that a human character, ordinarily upright and so to speak forward-looking, be rendered horizontal and upward-facing so as to match the horizontality and upward-facingness of the blank page on which the action of inscription was taking place.' As in Eakins, the confrontation of these two modalities is figured in terms of violence. Crane's style of writing has long been termed 'impressionist,' and Fried likewise notes the tendency in Crane's prose to valorize acts of seeing. But he examines this tendency not in so far as it contributes to a realist reading of Crane but to the extent that it reveals the 'deeply conflictual' nature of Crane's enterprise, that it is precisely writing that this writer fears while at the same time obsessively thematizing it. For by following the Conradian exhortation to make the reader see, Crane was inevitably led to see his writing as writing, as material signs on the page, an insightwhich by its very nature threatened at every moment to interrupt the enterprise in whose service it had originally found itself. In short, Crane's writing is unable to assist in the impressionist urge towards authorial effacement. On the contrary, notes Fried, it becomes difficult 'to reconcile a desire 524 RICHARD ANTHONY CAVELL to read The Red Badge for the story ... with one's interest in the text as the site, almost the theater, of an incessant becoming-visible and disappearing both of aspects of the scene of writing and of what I earlier characterised as the text's reality as writing.' Crane hypertrophies the materiality of his texts most insistently by strewing them with his own initials. Of course, suggests Fried, Crane at the same time developed strategies for repressing this fact, such as 'reabsorbing those letters, after they have been allowed to surface'; or through 'the incorporation of the letters liS" and "C" in single words, a number of which ... are instantly recognizable as among the staples of Crane's idosyncratic verbal armory.' What is so fascinating about these strategies, however, is that they allow Fried to commit the very materialization of writing which he sees in Crane, for if you reread the phrases justquoted you will see that Fried's own diction is marked by the recurrence of the very letters's' and 'c.' Together with the obsessively rhetorical style which Fried employs, which keeps his presence constantly before us, this fact serves to remind us that it is not so much for the individual interpretations of Eakins and Crane that Fried is arguing as for a certain activity of interpretation which disfigures its texts in order to discover the otherness through which they speak. That critical discourse must be articulated as otherness is exemplified throughout Derrida's The Truth in Painting. While the book (published in French in 1978 and adroitly translated here by Bennington and McLeod) covers rather recondite ground - Kant on wildflowers; the pocket-size coffins of Titus-Carmel; Adami's drawings based on Glas; Schapiro's dispute with Heidegger over Van Gogh's shoes - we are nevertheless on familiar terrain methodologically: the notion that utterance is citation (Derrida's title being a citation of a citation of Cezanne); the insistence of the marginal (here, the 'parergon'); the critical self-consciousness (whereby the last essay is set up as a 'polylogue' of voices). 'Parergon' is by far the most important essay in the collection. It questions the criteria which Kant identifies in the third Critique as belonging to the category of the beautiful. Derrida's tactic, here as elsewhere, is to proceed according to a series of mises en abyme. Thus to Kant's own critique he applies Kant's own criteria for the beautiful: that the beautiful represents an ideality, and that this ideality excludes the parergon, or extrinsic. 'When the (beautiful) object is a book, what exists and what no longer exists? The book is not to be confused with the sensory multiplicity ofits existing copies.... Butwhat one would then call its ideality is not pure; a very discriminating analysis must distinguish it from ideality in general, from the ideality of other types of object, and in the area of art, from that of other classes of books (novel, poetry, etc.) or of nondiscursive or nonbook art objects (painting, sculpture, music, theater, etc.).' By definition, the book represents an ideal order, confirmed by the binding. But Kant wrote the introduction to the Critique after he had written the Critique itself, so we are immediately confronted by two systems of ordering, the ordo inveniendi in which the book was written, and the ordo exponendi in which the argument is expounded. According to this logic, then, and to Kant's criteria of the beautiful, his third Critique is neither beautiful THE SCENE OF WRITING 525 (because it contains an extrinsic introduction) nor even a book (because its many copies violate its own criterion of ideality). Derrida then pursues this argument with attention to a series of exclusions which Kant formulates in order to further define the space of the beautiful. For example, veils on statues would have to be excluded from the category ofthe beautifulbecause such drapery is not intrinsic to the statue itself, occupying, rather, the category of ornamentation. But what does one do with absolutely transparent veils, as in Cranach's Lucretia, or the columns of a building, which Kant also declares to be parerga? If the parergon augments a lack, then the concept of beauty is somehow insufficient to itself, a present absence. In the same way, the frame of a picture is both extrinsic and yet that which allows the work to come into being, for a text can come into being only through the process of exclusion, of declaring an absence. Critical discourse can be no exception, speaking of the text by saying what it does not say. Thus Derrida proposes a practice of parallel texts, texts which do not appropriate but which, rather, double the text of which they speak. As Derrida asks of Kant's Critique, we might ask of his own book: 'How to treat this book. Is it a book. What would make a book of it. What is it to read this book. How to take it.' Is the cover part of a book? And how does one read the cover? Here is one way: on the front cover ofDerrida's book is one of Adami's studies for a drawing after Glas, a drawing which is in fact a handwritten citation from Glas incorporating its frame into the drawing, the handwriting transgressing the frame, which is in turn framed by the ruled lines ofthe cover. 'What's at stake here is a decision about the frame, about what separates the internal from the external, with a border which is itself double in its trait, and joins together what it splits.' On the back cover of the book (though not in the French edition) is a photograph of Derrida hunched between two columns of different width, a bare wild tree taking up most of the background: 'death knell [glas] and galactic of the kolossos. In the interval between the mathematical sublime and the dynamic sublime, a tree had been projected into the Milky Way. There was the bridge over the abyss which threatens to swallow everything, on the edge of which the analytic of the sublime is broached. Now this whirlpool which tears up the tree and throws it, immensely, into the milky dissemen [la dissemence]. The question is still, as we know now, the cipher writing (Chiffreschrift) on the surface of nature.' What's at stake here is a decision about the frame. ...