On Narrativity in the Visual Field: A Psychoanalytic View of Velazquez's Las Meninas

A reading of art books, critical essays or interpretations of paintings reveals that various writers frequently approach figurative painting in narrative terms. For some writers narrativity is the main core of the interpretation of a painting, while for others it is of lesser importance. However, even those critics for whom narrativity is a marginal aspect of interpretation consider it an inseparable part of understanding a painting as a whole.¹

Looking at paintings from the viewpoint of the narrative interpretations given to them renders an equivocal feeling. On the one hand, seeing a picture as an evolving situation seems natural, yet, on the other, there remains a persistent gap between the picture and the narrative discourse it entails. Despite the apparent connection between the narrative discourse and the painting, it appears that from the moment the discourse is uttered and stands on its own feet, there is an inevitable disruption between this discourse and the painting which brought it about. Narrative interpretation, by definition, produces a coherent stable structure of meaning. Viewing a picture, however, is fragmentary by nature; its temporality is not necessarily successive and does not correlate with the strict criteria that narrative structure demands. It seems that juxtaposing a picture with its narrative interpretation always produces a visual surplus that cannot be verbalized, so that a kind of hiatus exists between the two as a result of their positioning.

What is the relation between painting and narrativity? Does narrativity by definition contradict visuality, and if so, why is it so prevalent in the context of painting? Furthermore, how can one explain the complicated relationship of attraction and rejection that has always existed between painting and narrativity? ²

In the hundreds of years during which the term narrative was used solely as a characteristic of literary texts, thinking about narrativity in painting entailed a combination of two distinct components: picturesqueness, relating to the visual aspect of the object, and narrativity, relating to another aspect, borrowed from literature. The visual aspect of painting facilitates, at least according to traditional theories of painting, a simultaneous observation of it, in which the painting is spread out in front of the viewer and she³ can see it fully. The narrative aspect of a painting elicits a different response, literal in nature, and assumes that a temporal sequence can be attributed to a picture despite being viewed at a single point in time.

This way of thinking produced the explanation of the complex relation between painting and narrativity as stemming from a combination of two different components, which, at least since the eighteenth century, has entailed an ongoing debate between thinking of literature and painting as parallel forms of expression, as "sister arts," and between regarding narrativity and painting as two contradictory factors that can never be fully bridged, or that can be reconciled only under certain conditions. The significant point is that the ascription of narrativity to the literal medium constituted the official reason for the problematic relationship between painting and narrativity.

A paradigmatic case of thinking about narrative painting as a literary supplement to a painting is clearly manifested in Lessing's distinction according to which painting, by its nature, is a spatial mode of art, in contrast to literature, which functions in time (91). Painting is designed to provide the viewer with a spatial non-temporal description, while verbal media are meant to describe developing plots occurring along a time continuum, the issue being that a less than prudential use of one medium by the characteristics of the other would impair the aesthetic object. Since narrativity entails a time sequence, it indicates the limited possibility of a painting to represent a narrative.

Lessing thus identifies the problematic nature of the connection between painting and narrativity as the opposition between time and space. The way he specifies the complex relationship between narrativity and painting as resulting from the status of narrativity...