Reading Relationally: Postmodern Perspectives on Literature and Art (review)

In Reading Relationally, Laurie Edson proposes a paradigm of intertextuality in which the juxtaposition of literature and art "enriches our conception of what texts do and how texts mean" (8). Her goal is to destabilize the parameters that circumscribe the reading of "texts" - meaning both literary and visual - by enlisting art as a catalyst to new ways of decoding literature. The resultant interdisciplinary dialogue depends upon a parallel conjunction between subject and object, the reader and the text. Following the theories of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, Edson maintains that the author is a problematic construct, conventionally employed as a primary tool in formulating meaning. Replacing the author as a stable, originary source are the myriad discourses that inform the reader and mediate between the perception and the knowledge of a text.

Similarly, Edson rejects the relevance of period style or of artistic influence in her choices. Textual alliances largely ignore time/place correspondences and are "dictated by personal preference" (2). Writers and artists are not investigated, only texts shorn of authorial baggage and historical context. By focusing on the process by which the ideal reader deconstructs the text - enriched by a trajectory across disciplines - Edson, in theory, disregards cultural and artistic discourses that may have informed the illusory authors. The pairing of literature and art aims to challenge the "realist assumptions" (1) held by the majority of readers to generate fresh contexts and radical readings. The title, Reading Relationally, refers to these dual and interconnected processes of inter-artistic rapprochement and of subject/object mediation.

Taken together, the seven essays make a cogent case for interdisciplinary studies and delineate various models for this methodology. Chapters one and two "thematize reading," (1) focusing on the interface between reader/viewer and text in works that invite such collaboration to generate meaning. The first pairing of novelist Margarite Duras and contemporary photographer Cindy Sherman underscores gender-biased readings, while the second, poet Francis Ponge and painter René Magritte, addresses issues of representation and how the reader creates the object. The next chapter groups Stéphane Mallarmé, Marcel Duchamp and Italo Calvino to investigate "relational logic" or the process by which each part of a text operates within a network of "dynamic relationships among the parts that form the whole" (63). The next three chapters explore the most promising method, applying the strategies of art history to the reading of literature. Blurring arbitrary boundaries between disciplines dislodges habitual ways of seeing, demonstrated most forcefully in the pairings of Apollonaire-Picasso, Lautréamont-Dalí, and, to a lesser extent, Rimbaud-Matisse. In the final chapter, works by Duchamp, Miró, Apollonaire and Roy Lichtenstein, that merge word and image within a single text - either in titles or as part of the composition - draw attention to the artist's subversion of conventional meaning and to the reader's "interpretive strategies" (129).

The most persuasive chapters reveal an historical specificity in word-image couplings that unveil cultural discourses shared by the "authors" of works under consideration. Margarite Duras's novel, The Ravishing of Lol Stein (1986), is conjoined with Cindy Sherman's photographs in which she impersonates Hollywood film noir heroines enacting scenarios the viewer must decipher. Duras's protagonist is similarly, though unwittingly, staged - her persona a mere projection of the longings and fantasies of the male narrator.Sherman and Duras share the devices of mimicry and parody, using the female as a foil to expose the mechanism of male objectification, institutionalized by the culture's dominant patriarchal discourse. Through close visual and literary analyses - one of the book's strengths - Edson demonstrates that Duras's strategy, like Sherman's, challenges "epistemological assumptions," (11) critiquing habitual ways of gaining knowledge. The comparison has credibility because Sherman and Duras clearly participate in a milieu of feminist discourse that has scrutinized the culturally determined gender biases these works foreground. Similarly...