Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures by Leonard Barkan (review)

This is an impressive, challenging, highly innovative study on a subject that we thought we knew by heart: the relationships, either pacific or antagonistic, between words and images. Since Lessing’s Laocoon (1766), Western culture has undergone a major shift from the ut pictura poesis aesthetic, a classic maxim that mainly stresses the similarity of the sister arts, to issues of “medium specificity,” which tend to highlight the gaps between the verbal and the visual. Recent work, often in the line of thinking opened by W.J.T Mitchell’s Iconology (1985), has attempted to question as radically as possible the separation of word and image, by stressing both the visual dimension of the text and the linguistic underpinnings of the image. Yet this book by Leonard Barkan, which clearly belongs to this intellectual family, to which it adds a strong psychoanalytical note, is much more than a late example of this return to ut picture poesis. It is, on the contrary, a study that revitalizes in a very clever way many preformed ideas while addressing questions, texts and images in order to read them afresh.

The biggest surprise is delivered in the coda of the book, and it is to the great merit of Barkan that this secret is hidden so well through the whole work. Despite the dizzying erudition of the author, who seems to have read literally everything that has been said and thought in the world on the comparison of the arts, one will not find in his study a single word on Lessing. The reason for this omission is not the fact that Barkan, a Renaissance scholar, initially foregrounds antique and pre-Renaissance sources as well as domains less frequently included in the word and image debate, such as theater, but the fact that Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures offers new readings of all basic references that are so rich and inspiring that one never feels the need for a more “contemporary,” Lessingian reading. The close reading of Horace, for instance, whose treatise on poetics quotes the ut pictura poesis maxim in a context whose importance is systematically stressed but only rarely really taken into account, is a stunning example of Barkan’s capacity to deliver the kind of intertextual reinterpretation that constitutes the backbone of his argumentation. The author puts his hermeneutical powers at the service of a number of classic texts and images, which are read in a twofold historical perspective: first that of the work’s own period and then that positioning these works in progressive elaboration, from the Greek and Roman era until the Renaissance. In both readings, Barkan explores the same old questions: Why do painters like to represent their images as capable of speaking, and why do writers assimilate the result of their work to images?

At first sight, Barkan’s approach combines the best of historical criticism and deconstruction, which is already quite an achievement in itself, but the most admirable quality of his analyses is both the tightening and the broadening of this age-old debate. On the one hand, Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures brings together a wide range of works, authors, sources, interpretations, debates and concepts that are most of the time separated or only partially covered in most historical overviews. The erudition of the book seems to be the outcome of teamwork, so diverse and gorgeous is the material handled by the author. At the same time, the scholarship remains so elegantly light that one realizes that such knowledge can only be constructed singlehandedly, by an author who has a clear idea of the kind of traces and evidences, as well as labyrinths and open questions, that fascinate him. For it should be underlined that Barkan is not the kind of author who is looking for an overall theory or transhistorical essences. The power that drives his book from the first to the last line is the desire to compare apples and oranges and the skepticism...