Thinking Colour-Writing: Introduction

How do modern writers write colour? How do today’s readers respond to the invitation to think colour as they read? How might literary critics develop ways of capturing colour at work in a range of textual formats? To what extent can critical thought on colour in visual media illuminate the textual life of colour? What language does inexpressible colour make for itself in texts? These questions indicate some of the lines of enquiry pursued by the five contributors to this special issue on reading colour values in modern writing in French: Eric Robertson, Adam Watt, Emily McLaughlin, Shirley Jordan, and Clémence O’Connor. Together the contributors explore the colour capacity — actual and potential — of their chosen texts; they track the variable agency of colour in writing; and they engage in the migration of colour concepts from critical thought and theory to the practice of reading texts visually and, especially, chromatically.

Modern and contemporary poetry and narrative in French have an intense and sustained relation to visual practice in forms and formats that include ekphrasis and the livre d’artiste, yet the question of colour in the literary text remains under-explored by critics and researchers, and, we believe, the colour capacity of texts is consequently undervalued or even occluded. This is something of a paradox in interdisciplinary and increasingly intermedial contexts shaped, inter alia, by text and image studies, visuality studies, emblem studies, screen culture research, and studies of the graphic novel. The persisting under-exploration of textual colour seems anomalous, too, given major contributions to the scholarly understanding of colour in the Western cultural tradition in key areas of aesthetics, philosophy, and art history by experts including John Gage, Michel Pastoureau, Murielle Gagnebin, and Georges Roque, and in the cross-over area of literature and art explored brilliantly by Jacqueline Lichtenstein in La Couleur éloquente: rhétorique et peinture à l’âge classique.¹ The engagement with (primarily) visual colour by Western thinkers of the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Wittgenstein, Adorno, Merleau-Ponty, Barthes, Kristeva, Cixous, Derrida, Deleuze, Didi-Huberman) has had minimal translational impact on critical approaches to colour-writing, yet it can create more porous connections between visual and textual disciplines, as the work of the contributors to this special issue demonstrates.² Colour study in the literary field has, to date, tended to default to invocations of traditional colour symbolism and has, at times, limited its scope to statistical analyses of chromatic frequencies in linguistic corpora and textual databases.³ Yet, sporadically, over time, qualitative approaches to colour-writing have emerged: the work on modernist writing undertaken by Jack Stewart in English studies over thirty years (much of it gathered in Stewart’s monograph study, Color, Space and Creativity: Art and Ontology in Five British Writers) engages extensively with colour as part of (modernist) literature’s aesthetic and philosophical project.⁴

The representation of colour has been receiving invigorated attention most recently in cultural studies, in contemporary postcolonial thought, and in screen studies, developing perspectives that can, in turn, nourish exploratory readings in French and francophone literary studies. In Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour, a highly original series of readings in the nexus of material cultural studies, historical study, and creative writing, Carol Mavor pursues a series of evocative and deeply felt reflections on the aesthetic and affective charge of blue.⁵ Whether she is viewing the cobalt cityscape of Jodhpur or appraising the cyanotypes created by the British botanist Anna Atkins in the mid-nineteenth century, Mavor teaches us important lessons about how to relish colour, visually, haptically, and affectively. Each of Mavor’s ‘blue mythologies’ is a site of cultural, poetic, and autobiographical practice that empowers the reader, in turn, to attend with curiosity and with care — and creativity — to colour instances in art, in nature and the natural sciences, in the human face, in landscape, and in the built environment. Mavor shares ways of encountering colour that arrest and inspire the beholder, and that invite us to approach and immerse in the flesh of colour. Whilst ‘blue’ is the terrain explored here (and possibly the most privileged focus of colour...