Painting Borges: Philosophy Interpreting Art Interpreting Literature

1: Introduction

Introduction / 1 1 Introduction The artistic interpretation of literature is nothing new. A great part of the history of Western art has been concerned with rendering stories, myths, and adventures first recorded in literary genres into the media of art. The subjects of much Greek and Roman art were the myths of the gods that had first been cast in oral or written texts. In late antiquity and in the Middle Ages, many of these stories were replaced by the Judeo-Christian stories found in the Bible. In the Renaissance, as many works of art dealt with Christian stories as with classical subject matter. Michelangelo’s rendition of the story of Genesis on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel is perhaps the most dramatic and well known of these. The images of God giving life to Adam, of his creation of Eve, their temptation by the serpent, and their subsequent expulsion from Paradise, among others, are all effectively retold by Michelangelo’s frescoes. Interpretations of literature are so common that it is hard to walk into an art museum and not be confronted with works whose subject matter is literary. How many artistic depictions of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet have been produced? In spite of this abundance, the general investigation of the artistic interpretation of literature is relatively infrequent. Most commentators are content with discussing particular artistic interpretations of literary works, ignoring the more general questions that such interpretations raise, questions such as: How are artistic interpretations of literature different from other kinds of interpretations? What makes them interpretations as opposed to something else? And what are their legitimate limits? 2 / Painting Borges The Problem and the Task The task of this book is not to investigate, let alone adequately answer, these and the many other related questions that surface in the context of the artistic interpretation of literature. Such a task is well beyond the boundaries of this enterprise, but I hope to formulate some questions and suggest some ways of considering them that should help us understand the general phenomenon and to explore some of the problems that it raises. The problems posed by the artistic interpretation of literature spring from the differences between literature and art, although not every aspect of literature is different from every aspect of visual art. Indeed, literature is art, visual art often integrates literary texts into itself, and literary texts often evoke visual images similar to the ones that are used in visual art. Still, there are important contrasts. One of these is that literary works are always composed of language, and language is in turn composed of a vocabulary and the rules whereby that vocabulary is arranged into units that convey more or less complex meanings. Particular words and rules are essential to particular languages and give them the character they have, thus distinguishing them from other languages. Literature depends on language and feeds on it. Visual works of art, by contrast, are composed of images and, although there may be some rules of composition that visual art obeys at some times, these rules are much more open and their adoption is up to individual artists—the latitude of the artists in how they use or abuse them is much broader than that of writers with respect to the rules of language. True, some art uses texts, but it is not essential for art to do so, or to follow the rules of the language to which they belong. Often artists use letters and words for their value as images, rather than for the meanings they have in particular languages and this is something that literature does not do systematically. The dependance of literature on language, and the fact that language always begins with sounds, carries with it a burden that is not present in visual art. The literary is usually related to sound. Most obviously this is so in poetry, but it is also true in prose. Indeed, we often talk about characteristics of prose that are sound related. Literary critics have no qualms about referring to works in prose in terms of a certain cadence or even rhythm. Visual art, by contrast, does not carry this burden—sound is not something that characterizes its medium. The medium of visual art is images, and the burden of images is not oral; it has to do with color and shape, among other things. Apart from this source...