Text and Visuality. Word and Image Interactions 3 (review)

REVIEWS lessons from our literary and cultural histories. In all, Peterson succeeds in that most difficult oftasks in writing: he has produced an insightful message for everyone. Thomas J. GarzaUniversity ofTexas at Austin MARTIN HEUSSER, MICHELE HANNOOSH, LEO HOEK, CHARLOTTE SCHOELL-GLASS, AND DAVID SCOTT, eds. Text and Visuality. Word and Image Interactions 3. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999.321 pp. This volume, the third in the series Word and Image Interactions produced under the auspices of the International Association of Word and Image Studies and published as the 22nd volume in the series Studies in Comparative Literature collects selected papers from IAWIS's 1996 conference. It continues to extend the relations between words and images in a variety ofdirections, some ofthem beyond either ofthose two initial entities, into all kinds ofdiscourses, especially theoretical ones. Except for several articles that deal with literary texts, including "Poetic Painting and Picturesque Poetry: Literature and Visual Arts in the Emergence of National Symbolic Repertoires in the River Plate Area" by Laura Malosetti Costa, "IMAGinING the Text: Baudelaires's Parfum Exotique" by Eric T. Haskell, and "The Painter Who Disappeared in the Novel: Images of an Oriental Artist in European Literature" (on Marguerite Duras) by Shigemi Inaga, it largely concerns art history's recent incursions into semiotics and critical theory. For an initiation into this field of inquiry, the reader might want to consult the introduction (by Stephen Melville and Bill Readings) to the volume Vision & Textuality (Duke, 1995). This current volume is thus markedly philosophical in orientation, but it also contains detailed analyses ofvisual and hybrid texts from all periods—a wealth of information and interpretation that I will be able to deal with only very selectively (the volume contains twenty-six essays in all). In her essay on "Basic Instincts and Their Discontents," which opens the volume and its first section, entitled "Theoretical Considerations," Mieke BaI works out of Althusser's notion of interpellation as interrogation, of the way in which seemingly simple speech acts encode oppression and history. Adopting that perspective to scrutinize the mutual engagement ofverbal and visual aspects oftexts, she argues that visual elements ofmultimedia works continue the expansion beyond the strictly linguistic, and posits the primacy ofthe second person, the target ofthe text's implicit interpellation. Such a perspective allows her to read signs—like a German cartoon—with an indexical intensity and in the complexity of their relatedness to various discourses. The German man in the cartoon, who snaps to attention and responds "Jawohl!" on being asked his nationality, can thus be seen as representing both a past and present Germanness and our own propensity to stereotype him as such. In this interpretive system, "the subject is shaped by the sign it is to others" (21). "Second-personhood, then, is installed, not, or not only, within the imagetext but between sign and viewer. The confrontation of 'to stand to,' or before some body recalls the position of the German character [in the cartoon], standing there at the mercy of bureaucracy as a sign of his troubled nationality" (20). BaI uses this interpellative system to unpack the variety ofmeanings in Caravaggio's painting ofJudith Beheading Holofernes, one ofwhich being the way its statuesque Judith "is a monument to her own reification as a focus or token of 'woman,' either sanctified as heroine or vilified as treacherous, but never Vol. 26 (2002): 154 THE COMPAKATIST allowed to 'live'" (25). She then continues to investigate the multiplicity of Caravaggio 's meanings that she sees confirmed in a contemporary open-ended reworking ofthe painting, an imagetext by the contemporary painter Dottie Attie. Because Attie's reconfiguration objectifies Judith's "figure by underlining the statuesque quality ofthe figure in turning it into a dead body, then a marble relief," andjuxtaposes it with a narrative about Caravaggio's participation in his teacher's possibly murderous activities in obtaining corpses to paint, BaI claims that Attie's imagetext suggests—but only suggests—questions about objectification to the viewer. On the one hand, several of these essays deal with the ability of painting to "speak," as it were, in a theoretical mode, and on the other, how they engage the viewer in particular sensory and formal...