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Reviewed by:
  • Visible Writings: Cultures, Forms, Readings ed. by Marija Dalbello and Mary Shaw
  • Abigail RayAlexander (bio)
Marija Dalbello and Mary Shaw , eds. Visible Writings: Cultures, Forms, Readings. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011.

At first glance, the topic of visible writings may seem to simply express the “truism,” as Claude Mouchard deems it, that writing is inherently visible (273). However, this collection of conference proceedings from the 2006 colloquium “Visible Writings,” co-organized by scholars from Rutgers University [End Page 970] and from Université Paris 8 – Saint-Denis, exposes the fallacy entailed by such an oversimplification. The longstanding visual and at times even etymological resonances between writing and painting or drawing open just one avenue of rich complications that emerge in the study of visible writings. Images (over 130 of them) thus take their rightful place of honor in this book and enrich each of the eighteen essays. Introducing, twice dividing, and concluding this collection, are images of Buzz Spector’s literary artwork, a presentation of which served as the culmination of the colloquium. Along with its striking beauty, the great variety of topics addressed in this work render its reading a highly engaging and often surprising experience. Approximately half of the articles in this collection treat a vast assortment of primarily French themes, and the work as a whole runs the gamut from ancient Greek and Mesoamerican views of writing to Margo Humphrey’s African-American rebus art, from the poetry on the walls of the Spanish Alhambra to an early twentieth-century Table of Nations, from the ink blots on Victor Hugo’s manuscript page to Tintin on a rickshaw in Shanghai. Hence co-editor Mary Shaw’s introductory caveat regarding the “at once so elusive and so pervasive” nature of this work’s topic: “This collection does not try to wrap up the field but to further open it” (8). Indeed, the opening up of readings and the recognition of their mobility serves as one of the refrains resonating throughout this collection.

Despite their topical diversity, which proves a formidable challenge to an attempt to conclusively group these studies in an all-encompassing manner, the articles in this work share many recurrent notes. In what follows, I will endeavor to sketch a series of motifs which prove to me most striking, and which I furthermore hope will serve as a representative convocation of these studies: the relationship between writing and painting or drawing, the intermingling of presence and absence in kenotic writing, the variability resulting from the vocal or musical traits of writing, and the way in which the temporality of writing may help readers augment their present conceptions of writing with those of the past. Within these thematic groupings, the power of visibility in writing renders the invisible visible by endowing textual art, presence, absence, silence, sound, space, thought, time, and even invisibility itself, with visibility.

Two articles in this collection share remarkably similar etymological points of departure. In Gordon Brotherston’s work, one learns that the name of the ancient Mesoamerican visual language tlacuilolli itself means “something painted or written” (16). Alexandra Pappas then explains that the ancient Greek verb graphein means “both ‘to write’ and ‘to draw’ or ‘paint’” (45). An identical conflation of writing and painting or drawing within one term in different ancient societies points toward an underlying commonality in human conceptions of these acts, effectively demonstrating them to be inextricably interlaced. One recognizes this particular concept of fusion in Li Jinjia’s study of Chinese “descriptive auxiliaries,” or ancient Chinese words accompanied by gestures, which Marcel Granet, the main source of Jinjia’s study, deems “veritable vocal paintings” that combine (vocal) readings with (graphic and bodily) images (268). Jinjia’s work on misconceptions of Chinese as a fully [End Page 971] ideogrammatic language, similar to Egyptian hieroglyphs, is somewhat tellingly followed by Mouchard’s astute study of the French poet and painter Henri Michaux’s work in Idéogrammes en Chine, in which Mouchard works closely with both the general tension between writing and painting and the more specific tension between alphabetic writing and ideogrammatic writing. As the paintings that Michaux includes to accompany his poetry are themselves painted Chinese...

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