Diderot's Hieroglyphs

"The crew of her soul rushed up to the deck of her body."

--Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

"Ah! Monsieur, combien notre entendement est modifié par les signes."

-- Diderot, Lettre sur les sourds et muets

"Votre âme est un paysage choisi ...."

--Verlaine, Clair de lune

The shield of Achilles has always stopped the show. Interrupting the narrative of the siege of Troy, Homer looks away from the battle to give us more than a passing glance at the warrior's new armor. This description of Hephaistos's masterpiece in Book XVIII of the Iliad is one of the first instances of ekphrasis, the literary description of a work of art, in the Western tradition. Centuries later Parisian gazetteers distributed pamphlets describing new paintings by Boucher, Chardin, Greuze, Van Loo and other official members of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, and so enjoined prospective beholders to come see these works exhibited at the biennial Salon. Writing on art--whether it be ekphrastic, art historical, occasional, or critical--has served varying agendas throughout time. It may even be construed as a metaphor for other rhetorical enterprises.

My reading of the Vernet promenade in Diderot's Salon de 1767 suggests that here the text on art may also be read symbolically as an animated representation of the mind involved in the act of esthetic judgment. I intend to demonstrate how the pictorial and poetic notion of the hieroglyph in Diderot's philosophical letter on deaf mutes, La Lettre sur les sourds et muets, motivates his text on the suite of landscape paintings by Joseph Vernet he saw at the Salon of 1767, as an abstract correlative of thought. This meta-phorical transference of pictorial discourse into discursive hieroglyphs enables us to read Diderot's bucolic text on two very different planes: as the narrative of a fictional randonnée across the French countryside, and as an allegory of the dialectics of the mind caught up in beholding a work of art. With its acute sensitivity to the rich relationship between word, image and the production of meaning, Diderot's multi-representational project here evokes art as both a material and an imaginary presence, in the absence of sound, through the intermediacy of writing. Moving beyond the finitude of ekphrasis, the "father of art criticism" theorizes Vernet's art and allows us to read his text on these paintings as a veritable allegory of interpretation.

I read the promenade de Vernet as an extended metaphor that renders visible something that is not representable to the senses (not unlike the painter Malevitch's nonrepresentational abstraction of White on White). In a word, it is an instance of hypotyposis. Diderot tracks on the page the effect of thoughts that shuttle between cognition and desire in the beholder's mind as s/he contemplates a painting, traversing and retraversing the distance between the awareness that the painting is a lie and the pleasure taken in beholding its truths.

In his ground-breaking Absorption and Theatricality in the Age of Diderot, Michael Fried maintains that "Diderot's conception of painting rested ultimately upon the supreme fiction that the beholder did not exist, that he was not really there, standing before the canvas"(131-32). I would like to insist instead that Diderot's dynamic and dialectic engagement with art differs from what seems to me a far too submissive neutrality that Fried posits in the beholder of eighteenth-century French art. Fried brilliantly exposes the paradox whereby the negation of the beholder's presence due to the painted figures' own quality of absorption was necessary to actualize the beholder's presence before the canvas, "to stop him in front of itself, and to hold him there in a perfect trance of involvement" (103). But the energetic tendency of the body of Diderot's work to move beyond restful contemplation seems more symptomatic of his passion for spontaneity and simultaneity as well as diversity and digression. As we shall see, Diderot literally choreographs his representation of Vernet's...