Perception, Interpretation, and the Signs of Art

1. Dimensions of an Aesthetic Encounter

In Iris Murdoch's novel, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, Harriet Gavender, the wife of Blaise Gavender, the psychological and narrative pivot (and even butt) of the novel, is visiting the National Gallery in London and has been viewing a famous picture of St. Anthony and St. George. Murdoch writes:

She had felt very strange that afternoon . . . An intense physical feeling of anxiety had taken possession of her as she was looking at Giorgione's picture . . . There was a tree in the middle background which she had never properly attended to before. Of course she had seen it, since she had often looked at the picture, but she had never before felt its significance, though what that significance was she could not say. There it was in the middle of clarity, in the middle of bright darkness, in the middle of limpid sultry yellow air, in the middle of nowhere at all with distant clouds creeping by behind it, linking the two saints yet also separating them and also being itself and nothing to do with them at all, a ridiculously frail poetical vibrating motionless tree which was also a special particular tree on a special particular evening when the two saints happened (how odd) to be doing their respective things (ignoring each other) in a sort of murky yet brilliant glade (what on earth however was going on in the foreground?) beside a luscious glistening pool out of which two small and somehow domesticated demons were cautiously emerging for the benefit of Saint Anthony, while behind them Saint George, with a helmet like a pearl, was bullying an equally domesticated and inoffensive little dragon.

Hypnotized by the tree, Harriet found that she could not take herself away. She stood there for a long time staring at it, tried to move, took several paces looking back over her shoulder, then came back again, as if there were some vital message which the picture was trying and failing to give her. Perhaps it was just Giorgione's maddening genius for saying something absurdly precise and yet saying it so marvellously that the precision was all soaked away into a sort of cake of sheer beauty. This nervous mania of anxious "looking back" Harriet recalled having suffered when young in the Louvre and the Uffizi and the Accademia. The last visit on the last day, as closing time approached, indeed the last minutes of any day, had had this quality of heart-breaking severance, combined with an anxious thrilling sense of a garbled unintelligible urgent message. (52-53)

This is a remarkable description--of a full and deep encounter with a remarkable painting. The body-mediated encounter with this painting--the art product on the way to becoming the artwork--is for Harriet first and foremost a work of embodied perception, just as the actual production of the painting was. Its enigmatic significance, however, elicits a work of interpretation, just as the painting itself is an interpretation of a complex "spiritual" relationship conveying a "vital message." But in spite of its explicitness, indeed, its absurd precision, what it means seems to slip away beyond the bounds of discourse, even though the configuration of marks on the canvas was as "articulate" as possible and consummately beautiful. Harriet finds--or experiences--a deep "affective" affinity (not necessarily harmonious) between herself and the world projected in the painting. The affective quality or affective tone that structures the painting offers her a source both of self-recognition and of a kind of shattered, even undefined and indefinable, self-completion. The painting "speaks" to her even though she is not able to say or fully comprehend what it is saying. Murdoch, at the analytical level, pinpoints the distinctive features of the existential meeting between Harriet and the painting. Both the description and the painting described, which are clearly correlative and mutually defining, are...