The Image as Textual Unconscious: Medieval Manuscripts

The Image as Textual Unconscious: Medieval Manuscripts Stephen G. Nichols In the scopic field, everything is articulated between two terms that act in an antinomic way. . . . — Jacques Lacan The Double Vision o f Medieval Manuscripts T HERE IS MORE than meets the eye in Medieval manuscripts. The illuminated manuscript may seem an unlikely place to locate post­ modern theories of text and image, but that is only because we have forgotten what the illuminated folio really was: a piece of dried animal flesh containing the work of as many as four different artists (poet, scribe, illuminator, rubricator) who rivalled one another for the attention of a patron. It was a quintessential field of conflicting desires, aspirations, and jealousies, regardless of what was actually depicted.1 The medieval manuscript page contains four different systems of representation: poetic or narrative text, the highly individual and dis­ tinctive scribal hand(s), illuminated images, and colored rubrications. Each system is a unit independent of the others and yet calls attention to them; each tries to convey something about the other while to some extent substituting for it. Sometimes we see graphic examples of the systemic rivalry, such as the decorated or historiated initials at the begin­ ning of passages, which are so ornate that the image actually replaces the letter to the point where it may be difficult to “ see” the image as a letter. Similarly, the rubric does not simply “ explain” or describe what is to be found in the miniature or passage it introduces. The rubric focuses atten­ tion, telling us what it is we are to see in the visual scene or laying out the narrative thrust of the verbal text. The same kind of subtle appropriations occur in the relation between painted miniature, poetic text, and the copies of a manuscript. A minia­ ture we admire as a work of art in its own right also represents a scene in the poetic narrative now transposed from the verbal to the visual Vol. XXIX, N o. 1 7 L ’E spr it C r éa teu r medium. The poetic narrative gives verbal descriptions which are often examples of ekphrasis (rhetorically imagistic poetic descriptions): in short, poetry substituting for picture. Not infrequently, such ekphrastic passages form the basis for miniatures, which transpose them back into a visual register. Nor is the reproduction or transcription of a manuscript free from mimetic intervention. In the act of copying the text, the scribe supplants the original poet, often changing words, narrative order, sup­ pressing or shortening some sections while interpolating new material in others. As with the visual interpolations, the scribal reworkings may be the result of changing esthetic tastes in the period between the original text production and the copying. Even in such cases, however, the scribe’s “ improvements” imply a sense of superior judgment or under­ standing vis-à-vis the author. By not taking account of the competing processes that produced the manuscript folio, we miss the historical testimony it offers and thus lose the sense of its particular authority as an art object.2This was Benja­ min’s point when he argued that “ the uniqueness of a work of art is in­ separable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition” (“ The Work of Art. . . ,” 225-26). That tradition rises precisely, he argues, in the transaction between the artist(s) and the social forces that determine the original use value of the work. Authenticity, “ the core of the art object,” comes from the human coefficient in the individual work, recoverable traces of human interventions. What the manuscript folio achieved was to maximize these presences, to choreograph them in a plural mode of production, an enterprise dependent upon successive competing interventions. Rather than the psyche of a single artist, the folio page required the participation of different hands, different minds, different psyches. Sight and touch, corporeal presences underlie the architecture of the manuscript folio. “ The most sensitive nucleus of the art work,” what Benjamin calls its “ aura,” derives from a crucial mediation between sociological and psychological forces. Aura is the interactive gaze, the encounter of two or more minds made aware of one another through the mediation of the text/image...