Bal Mieke 2000 Poetics, Today PT

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Poetics, Today

Mieke Bal

University of Amsterdam

Abstract Taking up the time of my encounter with Benjamin Harshav, which was

also when PTL became Poetics Today and a key moment in the development of literary

studies toward a more theoretical grounding, this essay raises the issue of the place

and status of poetics in todays field of literary studies. Through probing a passage

from Prousts A la recherche du temps perdu, the claim is put forward that the literary

text itself, in addition to being poetic, is doing poetics. The passage, in other words,offers an experiment in semiotic sign-making that is fully capable of participating in

theoretical debate.

The debate, in this case, concerns the status of visuality in linguistic texts.This is a

happy coincidence, since this is a hotly debated issue in todays humanities. After the

linguistic and anthropological turns, we are now in the middle of the visual turn. In

an attempt to articulate what could be a genuinely visual moment in literature, nar-

rativity and visuality are brought together in the notion of a visual act.To that effect,

two standard equations concerning the visual are scrutinized. On the one hand, the

equation between image and iconicity is criticized. On the other, the equation be-tween speech acts and acts of looking is underlined. Attending to the subtleties of

Prousts text helps understand what a visual act can be instead.

The example allows us to speculate that, among the many advantages the work

around the notion of poetics has offered as a tool toward a more theoretical and more

scientific literary scholarship, the continued attention to poetic practice as potentially

also a theoretical practice is particularly important today, another key moment, when

we are turning to interdisciplinarity.

Poetics Today : (Fall ) Copyright by the Porter Institute for Poetics andSemiotics.


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480 Poetics Today 21:3

Toward a Harshavian Poetics

Under the heading poetry, defined as any literary work of a distinctlyimaginative or elaborate kind, the Cambridge Encyclopedia () definespoetics as follows: The theory and practice of poetry, concerning itselfwith such fundamental questions as what poetry is, what it does, and howit should be written, is known as poetics (Crystal : ). This succinctdefinition is just one of several that show how difficult it is for poetics todisassociate description from prescription, and to define literature in gen-eral. It is an unfortunate shortcoming, too, for these might well be the mostcrucial problems of literary studies attempt to establish itself as a seriousacademic discipline.

Benjamin Hrushovski, now Harshav, seemed to respond to the ingrainedhabit of thinking that this quote exemplifies when he started his campaignfor a scientific poetics, proposed to the academic community in the firstissue ofPoetics and Theory of Literature (PTL) in . His programmatic state-ment for the journal puts forward a definition of poetics as theoretical anddescriptive, and emphatically not prescriptive. His view of poetics is derivedfrom his conception of science as put forward in the following words: Theserious study and analysis of literature. It aims, as any science does, at an objec-

tive and systematic understanding and description of an aspect of the worldaround us, in this case: a field created in human culture, in all its varieties,forms, appearances. It develops a body of knowledge and a system of meth-ods to describe and explain such phenomena in ways which can be verified,argued with, improved upon, or refuted and replaced. Prescriptive poet-ics has no place in this serious study of literature as he defines it. Andwhereas terminologies have changed and utopian expectations have beenmodified, twenty-five years later Harshavs program still seems to hold.

In my view, more important than the program itself, though, is the com-munity he created in order to do this ambitious job. Indeed, for me it is Har-shavs greatest achievement to have been one of the major figures to breakwith this age-old tradition of prescribing how writers should write and ofconfusing literary studies with its object. In establishing the Porter Instituteand PTL, later Poetics Today, he created a context in which a large groupof scholars has been able to develop a view of poetics that is not prescrip-tive, nor derived from the aesthetic statements of writers, but that couldbecome a serious academic field worthy of the name scholarship, discipline,

and perhaps, even, science. By bringing together a great variety of scholarsfrom diverse national, cultural, and academic backgrounds, he has fosteredan ongoing debate that has been decisive for the current state of poetics,now called literary theory. But how can the twothe scientific projectand the open communityyield a coherent discipline?


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Bal Poetics, Today 481

Metalanguage and Visual Poetics

For many, and Harshav is among them, one of the criteria for a scientificdiscipline is that it must have the potential to articulate a metalanguage thatwill facilitate the disentanglement of theory from object. In the same found-ing article, he wrote: Unifying a text can be done only through using normsand models from outside this text (xxix). In this call for a metalanguage, healso calls for an understanding of literatures inextricable interaction withother discourses. This is all the more urgent in the case of the muddled mixof poetics and literature, where both use language as their medium. Thesuccess of poeticsas in Poetics Todayin developing an effective metalan-guage has been considerable, and Harshavs early work has provided an

invaluable inspiration in that respect. Personally, I have always felt this suc-cess was greater here than in some of the competing journals that are per-haps more exclusively and rigorously devoted to the scientific endeavorscientific, as we thought in the seventies, on the model of the sciences. Howis that relatively greater success possible? In this contribution, and in honorof the scholar who provided me and countless other young scholars witha context in which I could flourish in precisely the way I needed when Imost needed it, I would like to reopen the discussion of metalanguage on

the basis of this personal feeling. Needless to say, this project, embodied insuch a personal starting point, does not augur well for total agreement, butlet me say from the start that whatever differences of opinion may remain,it is only thanks to Harshav and his group, his projects, his journal, and hisconferences, that I can venture to speak on this issue at all.1And to antici-pate my conclusion, the greater success ofPoetics Todaygreater than, say,that of a journal like Poetics, which among the competitors is the one I knowbestis, to my mind, paradoxically, due to the openness with which thesought-for metalanguage has been considered; indeed, not prescribed.

Two paradoxes underlie my argument here. First, the attempt to moveaway from a prescriptive poetics has too often led to a deeply prescriptiveconception of science. In contrast, Poetics Today has continued to exercisean attraction for scholars whose interest in literature as the art of languageis grounded in an aesthetic approach to literature. Aesthetics, unlike thepoetics Harshav pursues, tends to be deployed prescriptively. It philosophi-cally articulates concepts such as beauty and sublimity, which explain whypeople get excited about things. In common use, it is then, in a reversal of its

explanatory power, brought to bear on value judgments. These in turn be-come prescriptive criteria. In other words, although this aesthetic approach

. See on this Bal a, my contribution to the issue commemorating one of the Porter In-stitutes founding conferences, ten years later.


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need not be prescriptive, it leans extremely heavily on a prescriptive prac-tice. But it also keeps readers geared to what excites them in the first place,thus producing, I like to think, more creativity and depth of thought in its

practitioners than a taboo on aestheticsand an aesthetics of reading, asin Iserwould encourage. This has saved the journal from the rigidly pre-scriptive view of science that dominated in the seventies and that failed tokeep in touch with newer conceptions in the scientific field itself. By con-tinuously publishing on literature, and not just on literary theory, both Har-shav as a scholar and the journal he founded avoided getting stuck in theprescriptive rigidity that doomed the scientistic optimism of the seventies.

Second, the liberal yet structured approach to methodology has been

conducive to transgressions of the principles of methodologysuch as thefirm distinction between meta- and object-languagewhich have ended upcontributing greatly to the furthering of poetics as literary theory. Thereis a good epistemological reason for this. Indeed, for a long time, physicshas been the model for academic attempts to construct reliable, objectiveknowledge (Code ). If I question the definition of metalanguage as rig-orously separate from object-language, it is in view not of an antiscientificstance but, on the contrary, of a revised epistemology that serves the ob-

ject better by complicating, not countering, the production of a metalan-guage, albeit one of a different kind. Following Code, the complication isbest understood as a shift of model, from physics to the social sciences.Themodel is no longer the physical world (a world which, significantly, doesnot, in the uses of this model, include life) that appears (only appears!) tolend itself to being endlessly divided into ever smaller units seen as buildingblocks (Stengers ; Stengers and Schlanger ). The knowledge thatis most relevant for the cultural disciplines is modeled on knowing otherpeople. Code develops an extensive list of properties for such knowledge.

Of her list, the property I would like to foreground here concerns the provi-sional and changing nature of such knowledge, which is constantly revisedin its encounter with other people. I would like to explore the productivepotential of this view through a specific case that, as it happens, meets Har-shav in the end in his recent work.

There are many reasons for my choice of the sample analysis below asmy way of honoring Benjamin Harshav. First of all, I wish to foregroundthe ongoing actuality of the title of his project. This actuality is best em-

bodied by the journal he founded and by itstitle, on the condition that aLacanian, displacing comma is added to it. Second, the journals charac-teristic I value most is primarily his to take credit for, namely its opennessto other people, to colleagues with views different from his own. This is,I contend, how the journal can remain a journal of poetics, in the sense that


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it has defined that, as a metalanguage, and of today, in the sense that it iscapable of absorbing new views of epistemology, hence, of methodology:of poetics, today. Third, and moreover, it seems significant that Harshavs

groundbreaking contributions to poetics (e.g., , ) have includedthe poetics of metaphor and character. These two topics may well be themost central, productive, and also problematic topics in theoretical poet-ics. For metaphor is a discursive practice based on transference from oneexperiential domain to another and has remained intractable to rigorousmetalanguage. And character, in addition to being the least easily under-stood concept of literary theory in terms of metalanguage, also lends itselfto be the site of the fiercest controversy between humanist and postmodern

scholarship, between a mimetic and a constructivist narratology.It is because of its antihumanism that postmodernism is most ferociouslyresisted, whereas the example from Proust developed below demonstratesthat this is a misunderstanding. It is my contention that instead of underesti-mating the importance of other people, this cultural philosophy of today,to which a poetics for today belongs, is extremely alert to, and respectfulof, other people. Antihumanism, as Proust already proposed and as thescientific ambition of literary theory or poetics demonstrates, is not anti-human or antihumanity but anti the universalist and often arrogant claimsto knowledge that makes the humanistic, if uncritically endorsed, detrimen-tal to humansand to knowledge.

It is perhaps provocative to be taking Marcel Proust, of all major writersof world literature, as the author or inventor of a particular poetics. Hiswork is both imaginative and elaborateboth, in fact, to the extremeandutters strong opinions on what poetry is, what it does, and how it shouldbe written. This definition of poetics remains a confusion of categories,levels, and genres.Yet I would like to explore the possibilities that such a de-

scription of what poetics might be is less ill conceived than one might think,and that it could be more productive if it is taken not as a definition butas a heuristic principle. In other words, rather than confusingwhat poetry iswith what it does, I will take these two aspects as purposely distinct, mean-ingfully combined, and leading up to the kind of immanent poetics thatdemonstrate, by doing poetics, not how it should be written but how itshould be understood. In other words, I will radicalize the notion that liter-ary analysis can further both the understanding of literaturethe goal of

poeticsand the development of a metalanguage, albeit one not so rigor-ously distinguishable from the object-language, since it forms a part of it.I will, then, position metalanguage within the object-language. This posi-tioning does not entail giving up the former nor yielding to a prescriptiveconfusion.


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Prescriptive poetics runs counter to everything Harshav has always stoodfor. Any prescription for how to write poetry is fatally essentializing andhopelessly generalizing. Precluding the possibility of a scientific discipline,

prescriptive poetics also ruins poetry. For by essentializing and generalizing,it destroys what most people consider to be an important feature of litera-ture, namely its creativity, its originality, its difference, and its novelty. Butthere is one situation in which seemingly prescriptive discourse can actu-ally be precisely thatinnovative; this is where it is gentle suggestion ratherthan bossy prescription. This is the situation where an extant, culturallyactive discourse is brought to bear on another discourse with which it has noself-evident congeniality. I hope to demonstrate this by endorsing the con-

ception of metaphor as a convergence of frames (Hrushovski ) or dis-courses. This particular kind of metaphoricity underlies the methodologyof Prousts visual poetics. He develops this poetics through a revision ofcharacter.

If a poetical discourse were not so much to explicitly prescribe as to im-plicitly take its clues from a discourse generally considered foreign to it,then, what would otherwise be tediously prescriptive could become inno-vatively explorative, so as to suspend the description/prescription oppo-sition itself. Such a poetical discourse turned poetological would demon-strate how it [poetry] should be written by insisting on the deploymentof its other. Literatures other, here, is visuality. Embedding the specificcase of the presence of literatures other within itself, within the largerproblem of literary methodology, my argument will probe the issue of ametalanguage for poetics through a close scrutiny of Prousts visual poetics.The use and misuse of Charles Peirces semiotic categories on the one hand,and the application and misapplication of the communication model on theother, will be the conceptual problems confronted with Prousts practice in

this domain. My goal is to attach this technical issue of poetics-as-science tothe larger one coming from the tradition of poeticsprescriptionand tothe larger one coming from epistemologyknowing other people as themodel or paradigm of knowledge production.This essay ends on a positionthat is as anachronistic and misplaced for Harshav as it is for Proust, butthat, I submit, honors the actuality of both, for poetics, today.

Proust was not a scholar; nor are most literary authors. But in light of hiswriting, it would be a mistake to say that in order to be respectable as an

academic field, poetics ought to sever itself from its object. This, I will ar-gue in this essay, is the most important lesson to be drawn from what I willpresent here as Prousts visual poetics. I would like to submit that the problem-atic element in the pursuit of a metalanguage is best articulated through therelation of transferencea metaphoric relationbetween literature and


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visual imagery, because vision offers a different model of the relationshipbetween subject (of analysis) and object (the text). The neat distinction be-tween subject and object on which the very notion of metalanguage is based

becomes problematic once visuality is taken into account. As it happens,a questioning of the clear and subordinating relationship between subjectand object lies at the center of the experiment Proust conducted. He didthis in a poetics of subjectivity (a modernist tenet), which attempts to testits own premises by exploring in detail the limits of the subject and the rela-tion between a wavering subjectivity and the object whose status is equallyunder scrutiny.

In what follows, I will take the domain of visuality in Proust as exemplary

for that exploration, as parallel to methodologys tenacious problems withmetalanguage. This is, emphatically, not to suggest that the visual is privi-leged in Prousts work. Others might suggest, and indeed have suggested,something similar for music (Christie McDonald) or architecture (GeorgesPoulet). My point is that the input of visuality is Prousts way of answeringthe question that informs his ambition as a writerhow [poetry] shouldbe writtenin a manner that can be taken as allegorical of what I con-sider to be the fundamental problem of a literary science: the relationship,the antagonism, and the entanglement of subject and object.

Signing a Literary Masterpiece

Public figures tend to have a signature piece. Harshavs was the earlyarticle on character, at least for me. For, like a mise en abyme of his project,this article struck a decisive note by integrating the two aspects of poetics:the search for a metalanguage and the sensitivity to literature, while, as anadditional bonus, concerning those paper people who defy the distinc-

tion between subject and object most keenly. (For a scholar who changedhis name to make us stop using his first name only, this seems a significantgesture!) The signature passage of Prousts A la recherche du temps perdu is,of course, the one in which a piece of cake soaked in linden-blossom teaevokes the involuntary memory that has so centrally figured in the recep-tion of this literary masterpiece. In it, Proust seems to give instructions foruse, dictating how to read his novel. A great deal of scholarshiprecentlyby Julia Kristevahas stopped at this passage to scrutinize its secrets and

marvel at its complexity, at the way in which it would not simply yield afoolproof solution to its own enigma.I sometimes wonder if the author would not turn in his grave if he knew

how many misunderstandings have resulted from his attempt to dominatehis readers by means of the poetic device that would later be called mise


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en abyme.2 The prescriptive quality appears to inhere in the sense that thepassage is so dense that it can only be meant to stand in for something morefar-reaching than itself or its narrative environment. It is this kind of pas-

sage that, in the public opinion, has turned Proust into a philosopher oftime, sensation, and art.3

As a result of the bad habit of believing an author whenever his work isan uncontested masterpiece, the other important characteristic of the bookthat I will call here its visual poeticshas suffered from the same willing sus-pension of disbelief. As a result, attempts to understand Prousts visualityusually amount to discussing his descriptions of paintings. Doing Proust

justice, however, requires shedding automatic acquiescence to his opinions

and looking at his writing as if we knew nothing of what he thoughtor rather, of what he put into the mouth of his often unreliable narrator-protagonist. As soon as Marcel says nous, one had better be alert: herehe goes again, philosophizing.4 Instead, it is in the maddest, least believ-able, and least respectable passages that Proust is at his most creative interms of innovative writingof a poetics. For it is here that he emulatesnot imitates, or describes, or theorizesvisual art and other visual images,in its status as stimulating poetical other. It is the kind of emulation thatundercuts the opposition between description and prescription.5

Let me trade the signature piece, then, for a piece on the signature. Thesignature: a crossroads of linguistic and visual signs, uniquely naming andutterly falsifiable, the sign of human individuality and the object of fictionalexploration of what it means to be someone: a character, and a metaphor ofa character. A figure of changing names, designed to question the subject-

. On Prousts deployment of the figure of mise en abyme, see Collier . On the figure ofmise en abyme in general, see Dllenbach .. Vincent Descombes () warned against reading Prousts philosophy off the page of his

explicit philosophical discourse. He distinguished the novelistic from the essayistic discourse,proposing to read the philosophical thrust of the text in the novelistic passages rather thanthe essayistic ones. This seems to me a very valid idea, one that is, unfortunately, not oftenheeded. Kristeva () considers Proust a philosopher of sensation and time. Proust on arthas been the subject of many studies that have remained confined to the references to art,and none of which have considered the visual domain as a whole in terms of the texts poet-ics. See, for example, Bucknall ; Guillerm ; Henry , ; and Uenishi . Anexception is Bertho .. Antoine Compagnon is one of very few who explicitly takes issue with the tendency tobelieve Proust literally. I would like to have shown that a work remains present and alivebecause of its flaws and its disparities, that these defects are what indicate that the work is

rooted in time (Compagnon : ), and It is by this kind of general law that Prousthopes to give consistency to the novel over and above the dissipation of its individual instants.But do we have to believe in the law? ().. Harold Blooms rather Oedipally based study () of influence among poets resonateshere, but it is the difference between themgenerational versus medialthat makes all thedifference. For an alternative view of emulation and influence, see Lord .


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object distinction, and to probe the possibility of knowing by exploring thefailed knowledge of another person. Symbolically for the deunifying visionthat emerges from it, it is a two-part piece, one fragment coming from the

first volume, from the chapter Within a Budding Grove, and one from thethird, from the chapter The Fugitive. Both fragments describe the signa-ture of Gilberte Swann, the childhood sweetheart of the hero, graphically,visually, that is. In terms of the communicative power of written language,Gilberte writes rather poorly; her handwriting is practically illegible. Thisalready quite subtly undermines the commonsense distinction that holdsthat in language, meaning making is based on convention, and in pictureson iconicity. Gilberte writes illegibly, but she also writes well, visually, since

she creates a beautiful but, more important, strong, memorable form. Thisform is not iconic but, as standard artspeak would have it, abstract expres-sionist, betraying the hand of the artist so that index replaces both iconin visual artand symbolin language:

I opened it [the letter] carelessly, since it could not bear the one signature that

would have made me happy, the name of Gilberte, with whom I had no rela-

tions outside the Champs-Elyses. But there, at the foot of the page, which was

embossed with a silver seal representing a helmeted head above a scroll with thedevice Per viam rectam, beneath a letter written in a large and flowing hand in

which almost every phrase appeared to be underlined, simply because the crosses

of the ts ran not across but over them, and so drew a line beneath the corre-

sponding letters of the word above, it was precisely Gilbertes signature that I

saw. But because I knew this to be impossible in a letter addressed to me, the

sight of it unaccompanied by any belief in it gave me no pleasure. For a mo-ment it merely gave an impression of unreality to everything around me. With

dizzy speed the improbable signature danced about my bed, the fireplace, the

four walls. (Proust .)

Emblematic of the difficulty of seeing, which only grows with desire andon closer inspection, the first description of this handwriting suggests an ex-treme illegibility due to an excess of pen strokes.The effect of this signatureis characterized by a delaying action: the joy that the narrator should havefelt in receiving a note from his dear friend is not instantaneous.6 The narra-tor uses this example to argue for a radical disjunction between perceptionand reading, or between seeing and acceptance by the mind.

Both the effect of delay and the discrepancy between seeing and reading

are again crucial in a later reflection on, and description of, Gilbertes sig-nature. Much later, when the narrator is in Venice with his mother, the same

. For more on the delaying effect of the signature and its performativity in general, see Bal, my article on Esther.


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signature leads him to think that Albertine, whom he knows to be dead, hasbeen resurrected. Days later he realizes his error, for

as the somewhat belabored originality of Gilbertes handwriting consisted

chiefly, when she wrote a line, in introducing into the line above the strokes of

her ts which appeared to be underlining the words, or the dots over her is which

appeared to be punctuating the sentence above them, and on the other hand

in interspersing the line below with the tails and flourishes of the words im-

mediately above, it was quite natural that the clerk who dispatched the telegramshould have read the loops of ss or ys in the line above as an -ine attached to

the word Gilberte. The dot over the i of Gilberte had climbed up to make a

full stop. As for her capital G, it resembled a gothic A. (Proust .)

All of this would come close to madness if it were not precisely for the ques-tion of what is involved in image-writing, that is, in flat writing. By flatwriting, I refer to a poetic that emulates the flat image rather than the artimage, and that, on the contrary, absorbs the other meaning of flatvul-gar, banal.7 It integrates the banality of a modernist poetics that no longerendorses the romantic belief in originality with an endorsement of the epi-stemic limits of the possibility of knowing others. In Proust, whose ambiva-lent relationship to modern technology is well known, flatness becomes the

two-dimensionality of literatures written page, arts two-dimensionality,and the reproducible, flat, glossy image of the photograph, all at the sametime.8

Just before receiving the telegram, the hero has again been in touch withGilberte, having brushed against her, watched her, and then been intro-duced to her without having recognized her as his childhood love. Thisfailed encounter primarily serves the purpose of stating that the point ofthe telegrams evocation of the signature is not to suggest some idealizedcloseness that Marcel would have maintained in his mind with Gilberte.There is no miraculous resurrection of Gilberte, only a fleeting momentof the much less miraculous resurrection of Albertine, whose temporal dis-tance from the narrator is so much smaller than Gilbertes (whereas herontological distance is so much larger).

When Marcel receives the telegram in Venice, he does not see the signa-ture of his correspondent, as would normally be the case in telegrams. Infact, he ascribes his own reading error to the clerks transcription of Gil-bertes handwriting. Nevertheless, and despite his earlier failure to recog-

nize her face, he is able to describe Gilbertes signature, which he saw onceas a child, without having it before him, and in such minute detail that all

. On the notion of flat writing, see Bal , my book on the subject.. On the investment of modernism in technology, see Armstrong .


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concerns about plausibility are suspended. Realism must yield to semiotics.For the signature ishyperbolically, taken literallythe paradoxical signthat guarantees the authenticity and the originality of the absentsubject. It

is the most characteristic index, and yet it is also capable of being falsified,of being an icon passing for an index.

It is as if this appeal to semiotic difference is needed in order to make acaseprescriptivelyfor a form of narration in which plausibility yields toexperiment and subjectivity is detached from individuality. Person becomescharacter, character becomes structure, flesh becomes sign, and names, well. . . whats in a name? It is the only moment in the entire work where Gil-berte and Albertinethe lover defined by existence in time and the lover

who, elusive, is defined by existence in spaceare not only joined togetherbut actually and explicitly confused, so that two long and major stretchesof the narrative lose their semblance of realistic narrative and yield to signreading. Both doing and being lose their defining power to produce acharacter, and only flatness, failed naming, remains.

It is this potential of the signature to pass, pass for what it is notanindex of existential subjectivityin other words, to be used in order to lie(Eco : ), that is the very nature of the sign. And it seems significant tome that this crucial moment, where novelistic narrative yields to semioticexperimentation, is heavily invested in visuality. By means of the graphicsignature of Gilberte/Albertine, the imaginary graphics and the image ofgramm, the importance of the visual for Proustian poetics is sketched outand signs itself.

Semiotics for a Visual Poetics

The importance of this double passage as a mise en abyme of a visual poet-

ics resides first and foremost in its effect of eliminating two misconceptionsabout such a poetics. First, there is no connection whatsoever with highart, with painting, or even with any recognized visual genre. Nor is thereany connection with language as a meaningful sign system. The signatureis just there, as a visual object of remembrance no less, infused with moodand feeling, so as to radiate meaning outside of the linguistic, which is onlyarbitrary scribbling unless read. Second, the term iconic, so often appliedto the visual in yet another misconception, cannot be adduced to read

the signatures description either.9

Thus, the literary object disagrees witha widespread, often unquestioned assumption of theoretical poetics.

. The use of iconic for /visual/ is very widespread, even among avowed semioticians.See, for example, Louis Marin, who, in spite of his brilliance, is remarkably confused abouticonicity () and sometimes disappoints because of it (e.g., ). His posthumous volume


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Iconicity invariably shows up in inquiries on the contributions of thevisual domain to the domain that appears to be its systemic counterpoint,the literary. To be sure, there are well-known cases of iconicity in onomato-

poeia, in visual poetry such as Apollinaires, and in novels where a blankpage hides either a crime (Robbe-Grillets Le voyeur) or an immeasurableduration of sleep (Durass Laprs-midi de Monsieur Andesmas). But the con-cept is of little help in accounting for the invasion of one sensevisionof the realm of another, by means of the concepts of semiotics. Semioticssthrust is precisely to offer an intermedia perspective, not to pin down eachmedium to just one of semioticss concepts. The distribution of Peirceanconcepts among the media kills their critical potential. If iconicity equals

the visual, and symbolicity equals the literary, there is absolutely nothingto be gained.In contrast, I am interested in examining to what extent and in which

ways the senses encounterwith the concepts can take place at the crossroadbetween the media while preserving the dominant mediumhere, literarylanguageand in assessing the importance of the other medium qua other.The issue is exchange between frames, or discourses, a meta-metaphor soto speak. Prousts text is almost too good to be true as a playing field forsuch an inquiry. Rich in visual evocations, it isnt particularly rich in icons,and those icons that it does contain are more often auditory than visual.But it is replete with visual takes, as well as with reflections on what itmeans to look.

The famous passage where Peirce defines the three categories of signs ac-cording to their groundclose, but not identical to codehas suffered, likevarious canonical examples of literary theory, from overciting and under-reading. Yet it deserves to be quoted to remind us that there is no specialaffiliation between iconicity and visuality:

An icon is a sign which would possess the character which renders it significant,

even though its object had no existence; such as a lead-pencil streak as represent-

ing a geometrical line. An indexis a sign which would, at once, lose the characterwhich makes it a sign if its object were removed, but would not lose that charac-

ter if there were no interpretant. Such, for instance, is a piece of mould with a

bullet-hole in it as a sign of a shot; for without the shot there would have been no

hole; but there is a hole there, whether anybody has the sense to attribute it to a

shot or not. A symbol is a sign which would lose the character which renders it a

sign if there were no interpretant. Such is any utterance of speech which signi-fies what it does only by virtue of its being understood to have that signification.

(Peirce, in Innis : )

() is less focused on the ill-guided attempt to equate looking with speech acts, and muchmore profound on visual discourse as a result.


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In the case of the icon, it is the sign itself that possesses its ground. Andfar from leading to the kind of realism that informs the equation of iconwith image, the definition, based as it is on resemblance, stipulates that the

objectthe signified or meaning rather than the referentdoes not needto be anything at all (even though its object had no existence).

The example of an icon does recall Gilbertes signature (such as a lead-pencil streak as representing a geometrical line), but what defines thestreak as an icon is beinga streak to which we give a different name: a line.The signature is an icon because it is self-enclosed; it owes its ontologicalstatus to nothing but itself. It is an effective sign because it enables one tolie, as Ecos (: ) famous definition has it. Here, again hyperbolically,

it enables error; it promotes the mistaken identity that calls forth the child-hood memory in all its visual intensity, precisely because it does not exist:there is no signature on telegrams, Gilberte is a different person from thegirl he loved, and Albertine is dead.

It is an example of the index that brings into the discussion the interpre-tive mania (a piece of mould with a bullet-hole in it as a sign of a shot; forwithout the shot there would have been no hole) that makes lawyers poreover a signature with a magnifying glass to assess its visual resemblance tothe authentic signature, the guarantee of the existential origin in the bodyof the person it signifies. According to Peirce, no interpretantis necessary. ButProusts narrator, in his (modernist) exploration of subjectivity, emphasizesthe reverse of this: the interpretant becomesthe object. Proust, here, revisesa concept from semiotic metalanguage.

Is iconicity bound up with resemblance, analogy, conformity? Peircedoesnt say. But it is a sign that possesses a quality of its meaning. This canlead to resemblance if, and only if, the quality is predominantly visual, evenif the sign as a whole is not.10 The example Peirce gives is neither more

nor less visual than the example of the index. But, without the existence ofthe object, we have no other standard than a presumed resemblance, a re-semblance that is neither ontological nor total, and that does not overruledifference.

Prousts revisionist iconicity has an important implication for poetics,both theoretical and historical. What is important in the definition of theicon is primarily its negativity, which suspends the ontology of the object.The icon is constructed or conceived by the reader, the decipherer of signs

that we all are in our quality ofhomo semioticus. In other words, what makesthe notion of iconicity important for reading is not that it leads to some

. See Ecos () relevant critique of the motivated signsicon and indexwhich definesresemblance more on the basis of ontology than I think is warranted for Peirce.


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preestablished, real model but that it produces fiction. But one would beunable to make the streak signify anything outside of a cultural environmentin which geometry and handwriting both circulate and are based on lines.

Hence, the second important feature of the icon thus conceived is that it canonly emerge from an underlying symbolicity. It is as a trace that the pencilleaves the streak behind when it is guided by the hand that projects it. Thefluidity of the categories is inherent in their definitions. It is in this sense thatPeirces basic concepts can be of use for an analysis of literary visuality, ofvisual poetics.This entails not a rejection of metalanguage but the porousnessof its distinction from object-language. The object-language, here, revisesthe metalanguage, but the latter in turn further illuminates the former.

I contend that thinking about visual poetics fares better if it does not takedefinition and delimitation as its starting point. This is not to argue that ametalanguage should be avoided but that it should be developed in muchcloser touchliterally, that is, indexicallywith the literary text that offersits elements and cases to its formation. For such a poetics can only workif its primary premise remains the undeniable ontological boundary thatseparates visual from linguistic utterances. The very attempts to produceintermedia texts prove it, and the existence of essentially mixed-media textssuch as cinema and video doesnt contradict this at all. Moreover, one can-not deny the visual aspect of textuality in generalthe visual act of read-ingyet textuality cannot be grasped at a glance.11And, although readingrequires seeing, the blind can read more easily than they can see paintingsor photographs.12 The fact that Proust situates this probing of the metalin-guistic concept of iconicity in the realm of ontology announces the com-mitment of postmodern poetics to ontological questioning. This is wherethe signature piece contributes to historical poetics, as I will propose in thenext section.

But the question of the visual within the literaryof a visual poeticsisbest not answered by definition and delimitation, by a mode of classificationthat turns difference into opposition and family resemblance into hierar-chical polarization. The question is not ifliterary texts are able to have avisual dimension but how the visual writes itself, and how literary writerscan deploy visuality in their artistic projects. An analysis that invokes semi-otic concepts not to define but to overcome stultifying definitionsthat fol-lows the intertwinements of the three modes of meaning making that are

. Nor is the glance so self-evident as a way of apprehending the image, as I have arguedat length (Bal b, ). But the glance remains the basis of the distinction between anobject that is primarily spatial and one that is primarily temporal, even if neither can existwithout the other dimension.. On blind seeing, in particular seeing visual art, see Eriksson .


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never purecan contribute to a richer understanding of a poetics that isirreducible to a linguistic structure, yet irreducibly linguistic.

Serial Killing: Postmortem Poetics

Since for Proust, poetical, libidinal, and epistemological considerations areone and the same, the problems of representation he raised tend to be prob-lems pertaining to the integration of these three domains. It is specificallyfor this reason that I find Proust a good guide in helping to understand whata visual poetics can be. It is here, too, that Proust provides a specific answerto the call by Harshav (then Hrushovski) for norms and models drawn from

other cultural discourses than literature. For example, the reflection on thechanging nature of beings, tres de fuite, articulates the issue of ontologywhat is the other?as one of epistemologyhow can I know that? Thus,Morel, the love object of all the homosexuals in the novel, is comparedto an old medieval book full of errors: He resembled an old book of theMiddle Ages, full of mistakes, of absurd traditions, of obscenities (Proust .), a comparison that suggests an epistemology. But as a result,he is qualified as extraordinarily composite, in other words, as beinga plu-rality.

According to Brian McHale (), this shift from epistemological toontological uncertainty is crucially bound up with the shift from modern-ism to postmodernism. Of course, Prousts work is a monument of mod-ernism, and a postmodernist reading of it is offensive to the delicate sensi-bilities of literary historians. In my reading of the novel, however, I drawit in the postmodern direction because it is precisely in the shift from epis-temology to ontology that the radical otherness becomes the ultimate ob-

ject of desire. Prousts signature piece thus engages critically with the ten-

dency of historical poetics to chronological linearity, offering support, forexample, to McHales positioning of Faulkner between modernism andpostmodernism.

The character who makes epistemology tumble into ontology is Alber-tine. The entire roman dAlbertine is a quest for knowledge about her, but thisepistemological anxiety is constantly fed by glimpses of her ontological dif-ference. She is unknowable because, as a woman and a lesbian, she is doublyother. And the representation of this ontological otherness is carried out by

way of snapshot effects.This object of obsessive jealousy is a fugitive beingbecause all she leaves behind is snapshots. Jealousy, paranoia, and certaintypes of images appear to be bound up together.

The ontology of the snapshot consists of the denial of depth, of exis-tence, behind or beneath the glossy, random surface of the accessible visual


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present.13Albertine is the figuration of this ontology by means of a snap-shot effect. She was selected as a love object the moment she visually de-tached herself from the take of the girls on the beach, setting off on her

bicycle and thus riding out of the picture, necessitating the change of photo-graphic aesthetic from group portrait to quick snapshot.

This is now beginning to look like something that we might call a visualpoetics. The essence of the novel is its preoccupation with the ontologi-cal consequences of epistemic doubt; and desire, that motor which so mas-sively informs the novels forward movement, is anchored in, based on, anditself becomes sick from, the fine but absolute line between the two do-mains. The desire that is strictly never gratified and the jealousy that in-

stead turns desire into paranoia are propelled by a visual poetics that offersa theoryprecisely a novelistic, not an essayistic onefor the need,as well as the impossibility, of disentangling what separates modern frompostmodern vision.

Indeed, in The Prisoner, Albertine, who has lost her former, fixed qualityof the photo taken that day on the beach, consists only of a series ofsnapshots: . . . a person, scattered in space and time, is no longer awoman but a series of events on which we can throw no light, a series ofinsoluble problems (.; my emphasis). As I argued in The MottledScreen (), the shift from epistemology (no light) to ontology (is nolonger a woman) announces postmodernism, and the phrase scatteredin time and space (dissmin) with its Derridean overtones articulates thatshift.14 That woman as other falls prey to this existential craze of thesnapshot is, of course, no coincidence.This dissolution into visual, flat seri-ality is only aggravated as Marcel tries to counter it and fix Albertine bymeans of light thrown onto her, and onto paper. Thus she ends up be-coming(ontology) the sheet on which the images (epistemology) of jealousy

are going to be fixed: For I possessed in my memory only a series of Al-bertines, separate from one another, incomplete, a collection of profiles orsnapshots, and so my jealousy was restricted to a discontinuous expression,at once fugitive and fixed (Proust .).

With the word mmoire also keeping the issue on the level of episte-mology and subjectivity, ontological fugitivity is presented here as a per-version of the former.The final words here, la fois fugitive et fixe, define

quite precisely the nature of the series of snapshots and explain the specific

. The concept of the snapshot effect is further elaborated in Bal .. Derrida, Diffrance, most accessible in Writing and Difference () and Dissemination(). For a feminist critique of the concept of dissemination, see Bal b: and :.


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use of this poetics in the novel. The importance of eroticism is crucial: theobject of this fugitive fixing is the love object whose sexual orientation thenarrator, focalizing with his desiring gaze, is unable to fix. Desire does not

lead to penetrationa word that is, here, both epistemological and eroticin meaning.

This implication of the passage produces a philosophynarrativelyembodied thoughtof looking as fixingthat will become a particular,visual form of killingthat is, both contiguous with and quite differentfrom the standard theory of the gaze as control, which sometimes comesclose to a paranoid iconophobia.15 Most readings of Lacans theory of thegaze emphasize the confining aspect of it, although it seems obvious that

the symbolic underpinnings of the visual imaginary also enable social inter-course through semiotic exchange. Proust explores this more cheerful, infact saving, aspect of the gaze in other passages.16 Here the snapshot pro-duces unhappiness but primarily for the photographer himself, who isforced into the awareness of an incurable existential solitude. In terms ofthe problematics of a visual poetics, the question is, who acts hereas thesubject of the visual utteranceand who is the object of the act?

But this is not a whodunit. The question of whether the object of pho-tography (Albertine) or the subject (Marcel) is the agent who produces therepresentation is moot. Is there a being doing the doing or has char-acter become something else, a flat image, closer to a glossy photographthan a human being? Albertine, ironed out ontologically, does not benefitfrom this at all. If looking is a form of killing, a possibility of agency thatthe phrase if looks could kill denies yet evokes while horror films aboutvoyeurism suggest it (Adams ), then it might be important that lookingaway is what kills Albertine. The moment she turns from an tre de fuite intoa real fugitive, running away from the obsessive attempts to flatten and fix

her, she is killed off by redundancy, a state the author, with his genius forcultural anticipation, represents in a superbly proto-postmodern play, byher literal death.17 Remarkably, however, it is not the subject, Marcel, wholooksaway but the object, Albertine, who runsaway.

. See Martin Jays seminal account of iconophobia in contemporary thought, DowncastEyes().. A wonderful example is the passage describing the encounter between Robert the Saint-Loup and the impassioned stroller. See Bal : chap. .

. Thus the earlier decision to live his novel with her is here coming to a symmetrical clo-sure, when she is killed off in reality but resurrected in a posthumously received letter, andlater in the misread telegram. This is one argument why it is necessary to interpret Proustsway as at least proto-postmodern. Either that or he qualifies as a misogynistic, sadistic mon-ster, a view that few of his readers will want to endorse, although, astonishingly, some do(e.g., Georgin ).


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But proto-postmodernism is proto- precisely because it feeds off mod-ernism to nurture its future postmodernism. The ontology of the snapshotneeds, and is predicated upon, the utterly subjectivist epistemology that

founds it. And the foundation of the integration is, precisely, visual. Dur-ing Albertines presence at his side, the narrator composes an album, in thevain hope of fixing the inaccessible other in existential contiguity with him-self: in indexicality. But the photographs flatness has yet another feature,one that hinders the very attempt that makes the narrator cultivate it: it en-courages deceit, role-playing, masks; what is fixed is, precisely, the exterior,the appearance, which only hides more effectively the being underneathit. But in the case of Albertine, one is justified in assuming that this being

does not exist outside of the album. If the serial picture-taking helps thesubject to an epistemological trick, the fixing of an image on paper bearson the object as well, and hence the endeavor cannot but fail: And beforeshe pulled herself together and spoke to me, there was an instant duringwhich Albertine did not move, smiled into the empty air, with the same airof feigned spontaneity and secret pleasure as if she were posing for some-body to take her photograph, or even seeking to assume before the cameraa more dashing pose . . . (Proust .). The ontology is grafted uponthe epistemology, because what is at stake is not, or not primarily, the fugi-tive being herself.The series of snapshots functions to reveal not the othersessence but the relationship between subject and other in all its problematicsuspensionthe double bind of vision predicated upon a failing subject-object opposition. This is why it matters that this is a narrative text, andthus why it needs to be considered as such. This is why, in other words, it isa visual poeticsthat is worked out here, not a pseudovisuality or an emula-tion with high art. On the one hand, the relationship happens, betweenthe subject of perception, interpretation, desire, and knowledge, and on the

other, the object, whose sole function is to elude being grasped, is transient,tenuous, changing, and, ultimately, elusiveso as to posit her existence asa subject in her own right.

Thus, taken seriously, the series of snapshots explores the limit of epi-stemic discretion when the object is another human being. In other words,it partakes of a methodological exploration of ethnography in which theothers being cannot be assessed without knowledge, yet knowledge in-fringes upon being. Albertine is the embodiment of this problem, and there-

fore it is crucial that she be gay, a woman, and literally fugitive; she has tobe (other) so that he can never know her. Once this is established, Albertine,already rather un-autonomous, can die, a death that allows for the fleet-ing resurrection through the telegram, misread by the puppet player whocreated her according to his needs. The proto-postmodern ontology does


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not reduce the character to an antihumanist glossy image but acknowledgesthat spectatorship, like knowledge, cannot penetrate the other.

Visual Acts

The gaze at stake here is a gaze that produces meaningful signals; it is asemiotic mode. Active but secretive, masking understanding with visuality,pursuing a knowledge that is more profound and new for being unacknowl-edged: this is the particular form of vision that I want to put forward here asthe visual poetics that the ambitious modernist writer develops in emulationof flat, banal, reproducible images. The modernist author takes postmod-

ern vision as his poetic model.But even if the whodunit questionwho killed Albertine?is inappro-priate because she never lived anyway, the question who actsin the event oflooking that narratively kills her off remains relevant for the tensions it re-veals in that other background often invoked for the study of word/imageinteraction. I now mean not semiotics as a theory designed for intermediarelations, yet often used to blur distinctions, but the philosophy of languagein its guise as a revisionist speech-act theory. Once the equation of iconicityand visuality is out of the way, there is that other frequently endorsed equa-tion to be taken care of. Looking at a visual objectsay, a paintingcannotbe equated to speaking, in an undertheorized speech-act theory of look-ing. 18 Looking is an act parallel to listening, or reading, not to speakingor writing. It is a reception, not an utterance. The subject of looking is theobject of the visual agent that compels her to look.

One of the very few scholars who has not taken the equation betweenlooking and speaking for granted but who has instead theorized the issuesthat call it forth is the philosopher of art Hubert Damisch.19 In his semi-

nal book Lorigine de la perspective, Damisch posits that perspective providedpaintersthe speakers, that is, not the receiverswith a network of in-dexical signs equivalent to the system of enunciation in language.This is afundamentally anti-iconic conception of visuality. To show the basic sym-bolicity of visual representation, Damisch demonstrates various possibili-ties of relating to the law of perspective. Either one obeys or ignores thelaw, in which case two narrative situations are unambiguously represented,or, as a third possibility, one only puts in a sign or two of it, not necessarily

coherent within the work but enough to make the law work: to make sure

. See my argument against this equation (Bal b: chap. ), taking issue with Marin andhis followers, among whom John Searle (), who ought to know better.. In this assessment of Damischs position, I quote extensively from my book Double Expo-sures(Bal : chap. ), modifying my remarks for the present discussion.


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it will be assumed, endorsed by the viewer. This is how perspective, evenwithin the practice of painting, is a discourse: it can be intertextually sig-nified without being obeyed and yet it will be read. This would be as close

as one visually gets to third person narrative with an invisible narrator.Or, as a fourth option, a painting can refer to the model, only to deny it.Damisch demonstrates this with Raphaels Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia,whereper-spective is heavily signified but not obeyed.20 Such a denial can work asan ironic, self-reflective statement. Damisch rightly adds that rather thanundermining or invalidating it, such a denial reaffirms the system.

In his analysis of perspective, Damisch (: ) sees it as a device forthe demarcation of subjectivity. He shows a keen sense of the issue when

he writes, in a passage of great theoretical momentum: In order for thethings in this world to become objects for perception, the subject must takedistance from itself. . . . But that movement, even in its slight theatricality,remains subjected to the law which is the law of representation: the dis-tance the subject takes in relation to the object . . . allows him to escape tothe immediately lived experience; but he can only discover that he is im-plicated, irremediably so, in the spectacle which takes its truth from thatvery implication. 21 This implicatedness is the very essence of the systemof perspectiveand of the ontology of the subject. Overcoming it consti-tutes the systems major motivation. Its analysis helps Damisch to under-stand the difference within perspective as illusion, bound up with realismbut not with reality, a provider of the illusion of original and autonomoussubjectivity. Ironically, the subject who needs to see its origin mirrored inthe system of perspective, that subject which is considered dominatingsince it appears to be established in a position of domination, is tenuouslyestablished (ne tient qu un fil) ().

Domination, then, is not the political background of representational

realism but its product; knowledge production has not innocently inheriteddomination but actively produced it. Yet, at the same time, that product isillusionary, imaginary.22 The fundamental confusion underlying the equa-tion of speech and the look in a speech-act oriented theory of vision is pre-cisely the same illusionary origin that Damischs entire book works to ex-plain yet discursively reaffirms in this theoretical moment of his text. Forthe subject of vision is not the subject of painting but its addressee.

Damischs study is concerned with painting. But what happens to visual

. Raphael, The Ecstasis of Saint Cecilia, about , Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna (Da-misch : ).. Translation modified.. The Lacanian overtones are obvious here. See the famous short essay on the mirror stagein Lacan : .


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culture with the advent of the visual medium that became so important, pri-marily because of how it differs from painting, its greater reliability in termsof representation of reality: photography? Proust takes advantage of the fact

that photography makes these subject-positions and their illusory counter-parts a little more difficult to disentangle. Both in individual confrontationswith particular images and in the visual narrative Proust writes, the vieweris a second person addressed by the image or by the expository agent. Thesubject of painting is the expository agent who represents his vision withinthe painting so as to propose it as a model for identification. Flattered bythis invitation to share the position of master, scholars tend to step in andidentify with the subject, assuming that they see and think themselves what

is exposed to them.23

Thus they relinquish their own subjecthood and va-cate the slot of the you. The occurrence of this confusion inherited froma premodern anthropocentrism in the work of major theorists seriously en-gaged in the pursuit of a metalanguage demonstrates the difficulty of thatpursuit. Prousts probing of the subject-object distinction contributes, thus,on the same level as theorists of poetics rather than as the latters object.

For this is emphatically notwhat Proust is doing with his attribution ofagency to vision. He does not consider either looking as an utterance or animage as an object. Nor is he at all interested in the making of the photo-graphs, in other words, in considering the relation between the stand-in forthe painter and the image, a relation we see as indexical.What makes his useof vision so special, so compelling, and so productive that it can be calleda poetics, is the exploration of the power of looking and the agency of theimage at the same time, in an irresolvable tension that is heavy with conse-quence. What exactly am I doing when I take this visual writing and writingof visuality as a poetics, in the stricter sense following from Harshavs writ-ings? I contend that my step does not entail a disillusioned abandonment of

the pursuit of a metalanguage. True, it does entail giving up the separationof meta- and object-language. But this is for the benefit of, not against, thescientific project for which Harshavs work has so firmly stood. In the pre-cise and limited sense I have tried to elaborate here, Prousts poetics is a true,potentially scientific poetics. It promotes the confrontation between theoryand literary practice that is literary studies moment of truth, or rather, offalsification.

Over the last decade, many literary scholars have turned to studying

visual art. Benjamin Harshav is one of them. His work on modern art dem-onstrates the relevance of such work, in which the general semiotic per-

. I have discussed this issue at length elsewhere (Bal b: ), in a discussion withFoucault (), Searle (), and Snyder and Cohen ().The conflation has been widelypracticed by followers of Marins influential essay ().


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spective enables the literary scholar to cross over into a different semioticsystem. It may sound perverse, but what I am proposing here is a return toliterature with the baggage that such excursions have furnished. A semiotic,

perhaps even literary, understanding of how images mean, as well as ofhow they create, can, in a convoluted way, further illuminate literature.

Perhaps this detour can accomplish what literary theory has had so muchtrouble doing: overcome the dogmatic status of the linearity of language.Not to deny difference between language and imagery but to understandhow each harbors the other. If a poetics for postmodern literature is pos-sible, then Proust offers insight into how it can be articulated. And likeProust, who anticipated postmodernism from within modernism, Harshav,

standing in the vital middle of structuralism, allowed, inspired, and facili-tated the entrance of a self-critical, sometimes deconstructive, poetics insideits own metalanguage.

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