Ofra Amihay and Lauren Walsh

The Future of Text and Image
The Future of Text and Image:

Collected Essays on Literary
and Visual Conjunctures
Edited by
Ofra Amihay and Lauren Walsh

The Future of Text and Image:
Collected Essays on Literary and Visual Conjunctures,
Edited by Ofra Amihay and Lauren Walsh
This book first published 2012
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2012 by Ofra Amihay and Lauren Walsh and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-3640-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-3640-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface ....................................................................................................... vii
Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Image X Text
W. J. T. Mitchell
PART I: TEXT AND IMAGE IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Chapter One............................................................................................... 15
Portrait of a Secret: J. R. Ackerley and Alison Bechdel
Molly Pulda
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 39

PostSecret as Imagetext: The Reclamation of Traumatic Experiences
and Identity
Tanya K. Rodrigue
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 69

Difficult Articulations: Comics Autobiography, Trauma, and Disability
Dale Jacobs and Jay Dolmage
PART II: TEXT AND IMAGE IN THE NOVEL
Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 93
The Madeleine Revisualized: Proustian Memory and Sebaldian Visuality
Lauren Walsh
Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 131

Immigwriting: Photographs as Migratory Aesthetics in the Modern
Hebrew Novel
Ofra Amihay
vi Table of Contents
PART III: TEXT AND IMAGE IN POETRY
Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 169

Out of Site: Photography, Writing, and Displacement in Leslie
Scalapino’s The Tango
Magnus Bremmer
Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 199

Orientation, Encounter, and Synaesthesia in Paul Celan and Yoko Tawada
Gizem Arslan
Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 231

From Avant-Garde to the Digital Age: Reconceptualizing Experimental
Catalan Poetry
Eduardo Ledesma
PART IV: TEXT AND IMAGE IN ART
Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 273

Burroughs / Rauschenberg: Text-Image / Image-Text
Elise Takehana
Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 309

Creating Unity through Disunity: Futurism as Paradoxical Movement
Cara Takakjian
Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 325

Heterochronic Visions: Imag(in)ing the Present
Heike Polster
Afterword ................................................................................................ 345

X/And: Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Marianne Hirsch
Contributors............................................................................................. 349
Index........................................................................................................ 353
PREFACE
In one of the pivotal moments of his book The Future of the Image (2007),
Jacques Rancière writes:
The mixing of materialities is conceptual before it is real. Doubtless we

had to wait until the Cubist and Dadaist age for the appearance of words
from newspapers, poems or bus tickets on the canvases of painters […].
But as early as 1830 Balzac could populate his novels with Dutch
paintings.1
In other words, before the crossing over between the visual and the textual
became an established artistic practice, literature—and more specifically,
the novel—was able to bring together the verbal and the visual in a way
that challenged the traditional dichotomy between the two, and conceptually
heralded, as Rancière notes, the “real” attempts at such crossover to follow.
This potential to “[redistribute] the relations between the visible and
the sayable,”2 and the cultural challenges it presents, are becoming more
and more manifested in the literary realm today, as the visual, once
primarily conceptual in scope, frequently occupies equally actualized
(“real”) and essential roles alongside the textual, in the novel as in many
other forms. As a result, the relation between the visual and the textual in
literature is at the heart of an increasing number of scholarly projects and
is becoming an independent discipline. Inspired by Rancière’s insightful
survey, this volume is an attempt to explore these profound literary shifts
through the work of twelve talented, and in some cases emerging, scholars
who study text and image relations in diverse forms and contexts.
In a talk he gave at New York University (on April 22, 2008) after the
publication of the English edition of his book, Rancière pointed out that
the translation of the original title—Le destin des images (2003) as The
Future of the Image—is somewhat lacking since it does not convey the
manifold meanings that the term destin carries. Aware of such limitations,
we nevertheless wanted to preserve the sense of homage to that book as it
is known in English, hence our own title The Future of Text and Image.
1
Rancière 2007, 42.
2
Rancière 2007, 12.
viii Preface
Yet we hope that by exploring different examples of text and image

encounters in the past and in the present, this volume will shed light not
only on the future of text and image as an independent discipline. We hope
that it will also elucidate this discipline’s role and place—indeed, its
destiny—among the many scholarly fields from which it draws, such as art
history, literary criticism, culture studies, critical theory, and media
studies, to mention just a few.
When discussing text and image relations, Rancière coins the term
“sentence-image” (phrase-image), which represents not merely the merger
of a verbal sequence and a visual form, but rather “the combination of two
functions that are to be defined aesthetically—that is, by the way in which
they undo the representative relationship between text and image.”3 It is
this complex understanding of text and image relations that our subtitle
“Literary and Visual Conjunctures” aims to convey. The intermedial
conjunctures investigated in this book play with and against the traditional
roles of the visual and the verbal. In the spirit of such perception, The
Future of Text and Image presents explorations of the incorporation of
visual elements into different literary forms, of visual writing modes, and
of textuality and literariness of images. Yet while Rancière’s discussion
expands into other media such as music and cinema, The Future of Text
and Image focuses on the special potential literature offers for the
combination of these two functions. Alongside examinations of major
forms and genres such as memoirs, novels, and poetry, this volume
expands the discussion of text and image relations into more marginal
forms of literature, for instance, collage books, the PostSecret collections
of anonymous postcards, and digital poetry. Considering the special role
that cyberspace plays in the formation and expression of endeavors such as
the PostSecret project or digital poetry, these last two examples also mark
the particular effort to engage with the most recent text and image
conjunctures becoming available in the digital age. In other words, while
exploring the destiny of text and image as an independent discipline, this
volume simultaneously looks at the very literal future of text and image
forms in an ever-changing technological reality.
We would like to conclude by acknowledging the many people whose
efforts helped this volume to take shape. First and foremost, we thank all
those who contributed to this volume their original work, academic and
artistic, thus making it the culturally and intellectually diverse mosaic we
envisioned when we began this project. We would also like to thank every
artist and institute that allowed us to reproduce the many visual elements
3
Rancière 2007, 46; cf. idem 2003, 56.
The Future of Text and Image ix
illustrating the discussions in the book, without which a volume on text

and image relations would not have been complete. We are extremely
grateful to both W. J. T. Mitchell and Marianne Hirsch for their
willingness to contribute their insights and experience to this volume. As
two of the major scholars to lay down the founding bricks for the text and
image discipline, their presence was truly inspiring. A special thanks goes
to the staff at Cambridge Scholars Publishing, and particularly Carol
Koulikourdi, for recognizing the potential of the project from its earliest
stages and for patiently and meticulously escorting us through this
journey. Last but certainly not least, our personal thanks to those dearest to
us, Aryeh, Alex, and Isabelle, for being there beside us with good advice
or a reassuring smile.
—Ofra Amihay and Lauren Walsh

New York, 2011
Works Cited
Rancière, Jacques. 2003. Le destin des images. Paris: La Fabrique edition.
—. 2007. The Future of the Image. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London;
New York: Verso.
INTRODUCTION
IMAGE X TEXT
W. J. T. MITCHELL
What is the “imagetext”? We might begin not by asking what it means, but
how can it be written down. In a footnote to Picture Theory (1994) I took a
stab at a notational answer:
I will employ the typographic convention of the slash to designate the

“image/text” as a problematic gap, cleavage, or rupture in representation.
The term “imagetext” designates composite, synthetic works (or concepts)
that combine image and text. “Image-text,” with a hyphen, designates
relations of the visual and verbal.1
Rupture, synthesis, relationship. The essays in the present volume range

over all three of these possibilities. On the one hand, there are what we
might call “literal” manifestations of the imagetext: graphic narratives and
comics, photo texts, poetic experiments with voice and picture, collage
composition, and typography itself. On the other hand, there are the
figurative, displaced versions of the image-text: the formal divisions of
narrative and description, the relations of vision and language in memory,
the nesting of images (metaphors, symbols, concrete objects) inside
discourse, and the obverse, the murmur of discourse and language in
graphic and visual media. And then there is a third thing, the traumatic gap
of the unrepresentable space between words and images, what I tried to
designate with the “/” or slash.
It is that third thing that I would like to re-open in this introduction.
And I want to do it, again, “literally,” with an exploration of a typographic
1
Mitchell 1994, 89. See also chapter three, “Beyond Comparison: Picture, Text,
and Method” (ibid., 83-107), and the concluding chapter, “Some Pictures of
Representation” (ibid., 417-25). My other key writings on the concept of the
imagetext include Iconology (idem 1986) and “Word and Image,” in Critical
Terms for Art History (idem 1996).
2 Introduction
sign that might synthesize the three relationships of texts and images, and
suggest further possibilities as well. My chosen sign is the “X,” and I wish
to treat it as a Joycean verbo-voco-visual pun that condenses the following
meanings and inscriptions: 1) X as the “unknown” or “variable” in algebra,
or the “X factor” in vernacular usage; the signature of the illiterate; 2) X as
the sign of multiplication, or (even more evocatively) as the “times sign”;
also as a slightly tilted or torqued modification of the simplest operation in
mathematics, the “plus” sign (+); 3) X as the sign of chiasmus in rhetoric,
the trope of changing places and dialectical reversal, as in “the language of
images” providing “images of language”; another way to see this is to
grasp the ways in which image and text alternately evoke differentials and
similarities, a paradox we could inscribe by fusing the relation of image
versus text with image as text, a double cross that could be notated with an
invented symbol, “VS” overlapped with “AS” to produce a double X in
the intersection of A and V; 4) X as an image of crossing, intersection, and
encounter, like the iconic sign at a railroad crossing; 5) X as a combination
of the two kinds of slashes (/ and \), suggesting opposite directionalities in
the portals to the unknown, different ways into the gap or rupture between
signs and senses, indicating the difference between an approach to words
and images from the side of the unspeakable or the unimaginable, the
invisible or the inaudible; 6) X as the phoneme of eXcess, of the eXtra, the
unpredictable surplus that will undoubtedly be generated by re-opening the
variety of relationships subtended by this peculiar locution, the imagetext.
This is the sign of everything that has been left out of my construal of the
X.
Why is it possible, even necessary, to formulate such an abundance of
meaning around a simple relation between two elementary, even primitive
terms like “text” and “image”? One scarcely knows where to begin. A
simple opening is provided by the innocent little phrase, “visual and verbal
representation,” that is often uttered as a kind of alternative to “word and
image” or “text and image.” But a moment’s thought reveals a strange
discontinuity, a shift of levels of meaning. In order to make anything
specific out of the visual-verbal, we must ask, “visual as distinct from
what”? “Verbal as opposed to what?” And the obvious candidates are:
images or pictures as opposed to verbal signs; visual sensations as opposed
to auditory. The visual denotes a specific sensory channel, the verbal
designates a specific semiotic register. The difference between the visual
and verbal is actually two differences, one grounded in the senses (seeing
versus hearing), the other in the nature of signs and meaning (words as
arbitrary, conventional symbols, as distinct from images as representations
by virtue of likeness or similitude). The phrase “visual-verbal,” then,
Image X Text 3
produces a productive confusion of signs and senses, ways of producing

meaning and ways of inhabiting perceptual experience. The following
diagram (Fig. [1]) provides a picture of this confusion:
Fig. [1]: ImageText Square of Opposition
The “X” that links and differentiates images and texts is the intersection
between signs and senses, semiotics and aesthetics. It becomes evident at a
glance, then, that the apparently simple concept of the imagetext opens up
a kind of fractal expansion of terms, as is captured in a more fully
elaborated version of the diagram (Fig. [2]):
Fig. [2]: ImageText Square of Opposition Elaborated
As the sensory-semiotic dimensions of the word-image difference

expand, they begin to demand some essential distinctions. When we talk
about “words,” for instance, are we referring to speech or writing? (Let’s
leave out, for the moment, gesture, which Rousseau saw as the original
form of verbal expression, and which is fully elaborated today in the
4 Introduction
languages of the Deaf).2 Does the “imagetext” concept automatically rule

out orality? On the side of the image, are we talking about visual images—
e.g., drawings, photographs, paintings, sculpture? Or auditory images, as
in poetry and music? And what happens when we include the notion of
“verbal imagery” (metaphor, description, etc.), which has not yet found a
place in my diagram? Is this the “X” factor as an excess that overflows the
boundary of any conceivable graphic diagram?
Any systematic analysis of the relation of images and texts, then, leads
inevitably into a wider field of reflection on aesthetics, semiotics, and the
whole concept of representation itself as a heterogeneous fabric of sights
and sounds, spectacle and speech, pictures and inscriptions.3 Is this not a
mulitply articulated fabric, in which the warp and woof are constantly
shifting not only from sensory channels (the eye and the ear) to semiotic
functions (iconic likenesses and arbitrary symbols), but also to modalities
of cognition (space and time) to operational codes (the analog and the
digital)? The fractal picture of the imagetext has scarcely begun with the
“visual-verbal.” And will we not then have to add the “thirds” that
inevitably spring up between our binary oppositions, sometimes as
compromise formations (could the “ana-lytical” itself be a demand for
fusion or interplay between analog and digital codes?) and sometimes as
blank spaces in which something unpredictable and monstrous might
emerge? The gap between the Lacanian registers of the Symbolic and
Imaginary is the black hole of the Real, the site of trauma and the
unrepresentable (but clearly not an unnameable place, since there it is, the
name of “the Real”). Could it be the “beach” or margin between sea and
land that Foucault names as the frontier between the words and images in
Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe?4 Is it a contested zone in which, as
Foucault puts it, “between the figure and the text a whole series of
intersections—or rather attacks” are “launched by one against the other”?5
Could we then see our “X” as crossed lances (/ \) or “arrows shot at the
enemy target, enterprises of subversion and destruction, lance blows and
wounds, a battle”?6 Leonardo da Vinci called the encounter of painting
and poetry a paragone or contest, and Lessing described their relation as
2
See Mitchell 2006.
3
See “Some Pictures of Representation,” the conclusion to Picture Theory
(Mitchell 1994, 417-25).
4
The oficial title of this work is La trahison des images (The Treachery of
Images—see Magritte 1929).
5
Foucault 1983, 26. Foucault also refers to the blank space between the pipe and
its caption as a “crevasse—an uncertain foggy region” (ibid., 28).
6
Foucault 1983, 26.
Image X Text 5
the frontier between two countries, normally friendly and peaceful, but
sometimes launching invasions into their neighbors’ territory.
There are, then, normal and normative relations between texts and
images. One illustrates or explains or names or describes or ornaments the
other. They complement and supplement one another, simultaneously
completing and extending. That is why Foucault focuses on the “common
frontier” between Magritte’s words and images, the “calm sand of the
page,” on which “are established all the relations of designation,
nomination, description, classification”—in short the whole order of the
“seeable and sayable,” the “visible and articulable,” that lays down the
archaeological layers of knowledge itself.7 Word and image are woven
together to create a reality. The tear in that fabric is the Real. Foucault
makes the space between images and texts even more radical when he
denies it the status of a space at all: “it is too much to claim that there is a
blank or lacuna: instead, it is an absence of space, an effacement of the
‘common place’ between the signs of writing and the lines of the image.”8
X becomes, in this sense, the erasure or “effacement,” not just of
something inscribed, but of the very space in which the inscription might
appear, as if the X signified a pair of slashes, like the tearing of a page, or
cuts in a canvas left by a militant iconoclast—or an artist like Lucio
Fontana.
Let’s say, then, that the normal relation of text and image is
complementary or supplementary, and that together they make up a third
thing, or open a space where that third thing appears. If we take comics as
our example, the third thing that appears is just the composite art form
known as comics, combining text and image in a highly specific medium.
But there is also a third thing in the medium of graphic narration that is
neither text nor image, but which simultaneously links and separates them,
namely, the gutter. These unobtrusive framing lines, as is well known, are
neither words nor images, but indicators of relationships, of temporal
sequence or simultaneity, or of notional camera movements in space from
panorama to close-up. Avant garde comics, from Smokey Stover to Art
Spiegelman to Chris Ware, have often played with the gutter, cutting
across it, treating it as a window that can be opened to hang out the
laundry.
So the third thing, the X between text and image certainly does not
have to be an absence. In fact, we might argue that there is always
7
For an account of the way Foucault’s playful reflections on Magritte’s imagetext
composition serve as a basis for his whole archaeological method, see Deleuze
1988, 80.
8
Foucault 1983, 28-29.
6 Introduction
something positive, even in the blank space of the Real, the slash of the
canvas, or the non-space beyond blankness. Something rushes in to fill the
emptiness, some “X” to suggest the presence of an absence, the
appearance of something neither text nor image. In Iconology: Image,
Text, Ideology (1986), I identified this third thing as my subtitle indicated,
in the ideological framework that invariably suffuses the field of image-
text relationships: the difference between the “natural” and “conventional”
sign; the distinction between an illiterate viewer who can see what images
represent, and a literate reader who can see through the image to
something else (typically, a text). In the polemic of Lessing’s Laocoön
(1766) the difference between image and text is not only figured in the
relation of different nations, but rendered literal in his characterization of
French culture as obsessed with effeminate “bright eyes” and spectacle,
while German (and English) culture are described as manly cultures of the
word.
And if we survey the history of semiotics and aesthetics, we find the
positive presence of the third element everywhere. The locus classicus is,
of course, Aristotle’s Poetics, which divides the “means” or “medium” of
tragedy into three parts: opsis, melos, lexis (spectacle, music, words). Or,
as Roland Barthes would have it, Image, Music, Text (1977). The X-factor
in the imagetext problematic is music, or more generally, sound, which
may be why “imagetext” has always struck me as slightly impoverished in
that it confines words to the realm of writing and printing, and neglects the
sphere of orality and speech, not to mention gesture.9 Sometimes this
silencing of the third dimension becomes explicit, most famously in
Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820), where the text not only conjures
up the sight and image of its titular subject, but further attributes to it a
silent music and speech—“a leafy tale” told “more sweetly than our
rhyme,” accompanied by an “unheard” music. The radio comedians Bob
and Ray used to pose the riddle, why is radio superior to television? The
answer: because the images we see while listening to the radio are better,
more vivid, dynamic, and vital.
The image/music/text triad must be the most durable and deeply
grounded taxonomy of the arts and media that we possess, because it
recurs constantly in the most disparate contexts, defining the elements of
the Wagnerian Gesamstkunstwerk, the components of cinema, radio, and
television, and even the order of technical media that constitute modernity.
I am thinking here of Friedrich Kittler’s masterpiece, Gramophone, Film,
9
A version of the Aristotelian and Barthesian triad was institutionalized some
years ago in the University of Chicago’s common core as a year long course
sequence in “Media Aesthetics” entitled “Image/Sound/Text.”
Image X Text 7
Typewriter (1986), which is, on the one hand, an updating of the old
Aristotelian categories, and on the other, a trio of inventions subject to a
new technical synthesis in the master platform of the computer.
Finally, we must turn to the role of the imagetext in the constitutive
elements of semiotics, the fundamental theory of signs and meaning. There
we encounter Saussure’s famous diagram (Fig. [3]) of the linguistic sign as
a bifurcated oval with an image of a tree in the upper compartment and the
word “arbor” in the lower.
Fig. [3]: From Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1915)
It is as if Saussure were forced to admit that even words, speech, and

language itself cannot be adequately represented by a purely linguistic
notation.10 The image, which stands here not just for a tree but for the
signified or mental image conjured by the verbal signifier, actually stands
above and prior to the word in the model of language itself. Saussure is
building upon a picture of language that could be traced back into the
psychology of empiricism, in which mental images are the content named
by words, or all the way to Plato’s discussion of natural and conventional
signs in the Cratylus. But we also have to notice that the imagetext is not
all there is to the sign, and there is a surplus of “third elements”: the oval,
which is presumably a graphic rendering of the wholeness of the sign,
despite its binary structure; the arrows, which stand for the bi-directionality
of meaning, a kind of circuit of alternating current between spoken words
and ideas in the mind; and (most important) the bar between signifier and
signified, the index of the fundamental duality of language and thought.
But this mention of the index must bring to mind immediately the most
comprehensive analysis of the sign to date, the semiotics of Charles
Sanders Peirce, who identified three elements or sign-functions that make
10
Since Saussure’s text was a compilation of lecture notes by himself and his
students, it is not possible to be certain that this diagram was actually drawn by the
great linguist. Nevertheless, it has become a canonical picture of his understanding
of the linguistic sign.
8 Introduction
meaning possible. These are the elements he calls “icon/index/symbol,” a

triad that describes (very roughly) the distinctions between images
(pictures, but also any sign by resemblance, including metaphors), indexical
signs (arrows and bars, for instance, but also pronouns and other deictic
words that depend upon context), and symbols (signs by “law” or
convention). The relation of image and symbol, we must note, is merely
analogous to and at a quite different level from the image-text relation,
because Peirce is not interested in classifying signs by their singular
manifestations such as “words and images,” but by their sign function,
which depends upon the way in which they make meaning. The category
of the icon includes pictures and other visual, graphic images, but it is not
exhausted by those things. Icons can appear in language as metaphor and
in logic in the form of analogy. They are signs by resemblance or likeness.
Similarly, indices may be exemplified by arrows and bars, but they also
include elements of language such as deictic terms (this, that, there, then)
and pronouns such as I, we, and you. Indices are “shifters” or existential
signs that take their meaning from context. They are also signs by cause
and effect (tracks in the snow indicating where someone has walked;
smoke as an indicator of fire). And finally, symbols are signs that take
their meaning from arbitrary conventions (we will let the word “arbor”
stand for this vertical object sprouting with leaves).
From Peirce’s standpoint, then, the image/text is simply a figure for
two-thirds of the semiotic field, awaiting only the recognition of its third
element, the “/” as the index of a slash or relational sign in the concrete
thing (a text, a work of art) that is being decoded. All these triads of
aesthetics and semiotics can be seen at a glance in the following table
(Table [1]), to which I want to add one final layer that will, as it were,
bring us back to the surface of these reflections, and the original question
of how to write these things down. I’m thinking here of Nelson
Goodman’s theory of notation, which examines the way marks themselves
can produce meaning, and which relies heavily on categories such as
“density” and “repleteness” (where every difference in a mark is potentially
significant), and “differentiated” and “articulate” (where marks belong to a
finite set of characters that have definite meaning, as in an alphabet, in
which the letter “a” still means “a,” regardless of whether it is written or
typed or printed in Gothic or Times New Roman).11 Goodman’s categories,
in contrast to Peirce’s, take us back to the surface of inscription. His triad
of sketch, score, and script reinscribes the image/ music/text triad, but this
time at the level of notation.
11
Goodman 1976.
Image X Text 9
Aristotle Opsis Melos Lexis

Barthes Image Music Text
Lacan Imaginary Real Symbolic
Kittler Film Gramophone Typewriter
Goodman Sketch Score Script
Peirce Icon Index Symbol
Foucault Seeable [X] Sayable
Hume Similarity Cause and Effect Convention
Saussure Bar Arbor
Table [1]
I hope it is clear that this table does not postulate some kind of
uniformity or even translatability down the columns. The rows are the
strong elements, teasing out concepts of semiotics and aesthetics that
happen to fall into these precise terms. The columns are merely iconic:
they suggest a structural analogy between the ideas of radically different
kinds of thinkers. Why, for instance, should we want to link music with
the Lacanian Real? Kittler provides a technical answer based in recording
apparatuses and the physical structure of the ear. Nevertheless, the whole
point of this table is to produce a set of diagonal, X-shaped reflections that
would slash across the rigid order of the columns: the arrows in Saussure’s
picture of the sign are indices, for sure. But are they not also icons in that
they resemble arrows, and symbols in that we have to know the
convention of pointing? Point at an object to the average dog, and he will
sniff your finger.
We still have not addressed the most fundamental question, which is
why the image/text rupture, the image-text relation, and the imagetext
synthesis should be so fundamental to aesthetics and semiotics. Why do
disciplines like art, history, and literary criticism find themselves
inexorably converging around encounters of visual and verbal media?
Why does the theory of representation itself seem to converge on this
primitive binary opposition? My claim is that the imagetext is the
convergence point of semiotics, the theory of signs and aesthetics, the
theory of the senses. It is the place where the eye and the ear encounter the
logical, analogical, and cognitive relations that give rise to meaning in the
first place. David Hume understood the laws of “association of ideas” as a
triad very close to Peirce’s analysis of the sign. Similarity, cause-effect,
and convention are his three laws, corresponding quite precisely to
10 Introduction
Peirce’s icon, index, and symbol. The imagetext, then, is a principle of

thought, feeling, and meaning as fundamental to human beings as
distinctions (and the accompanying indistinctions) of gender and sexuality.
Blake glimpsed this when he asserted that the great Kantian modes of
intuition—space and time—are gendered as female and male respectively.
And Lacan revised the Saussurean picture of the sign by portraying it as a
pair of adjacent doors labeled “Men” and “Women,” as if the gendered
binary (and urinary segregation) was the foundation of semiosis itself. Of
course, some will say that we have transcended all these binary
oppositions in the digital age, when images have all been absorbed into the
flow of information. They forget that the dense, sensuous world of the
analog doesn’t disappear in the field of ones and zeros: it re-surfaces in the
eye and ear ravished by new forms of music and spectacle, and in the hand
itself, where digits are literalized in the keyboard interface and game
controller. Hardly surprising then, that the imagetext can play such a
productive role in the range of essays included in this volume, embracing
poetry and photography, painting and typography, blogs and comics.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image, Music, Text. Selected and translated by
Stephen Heath. London: Fontana.
Deleuze, Gilles. (1986) 1988. Foucault. Translated and edited by Seán
Hand; foreword by Paul Bové. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Foucault, Michel. (1973) 1983. This Is Not a Pipe. Translated by James
Harkness. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Goodman, Nelson. 1976. The Languages of Art. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Keats, John. (1820) 2003. “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” In The Poems of John
Keats: A Routledge Study Guide and Sourcebook (Routledge Guides to
Literature), edited by John Strachan, 150-56. London and New York:
Routledge.
Kittler, Friedrich. (1986) 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated,
with an introduction, by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz.
Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. (1766) 1984. Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits
of Painting and Poetry. Translated by Edward Allen McCormick.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Magritte, René. 1929. La trahison des images. Oil on canvas, 25 3/8 x 37
in. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Image X Text 11
Mitchell, W. J. T. 1986. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.
—. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
—. 1996. “Word and Image.” In Critical Terms for Art History, edited by
Robert Nelson and Richard Schiff, 51-61. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
—. 2006. “Utopian Gestures: The Poetics of Sign Language.” Preface to
Signing the Body Poetic: Essays on American Sign Language Literature,
edited by H. Dirksen Bauman, Jennifer L. Nelson, and Heidi M. Rose,
xv-xxiii. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. (1915) 1960. Course in General Linguistics.
Edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye in collaboration with
Albert Reidlinger. Translated by Wade Baskin. London: P. Owen.
PART I:
TEXT AND IMAGE IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

CHAPTER ONE
PORTRAIT OF A SECRET:
J. R. ACKERLEY AND ALISON BECHDEL
MOLLY PULDA
“Comics have finally joined the mainstream,” The New York Times
announced in March 2009, heralding the addition of a “Graphic Books”
category to its best seller lists.1 The Times graphic list is divided into
hardcover, softcover, and manga—fiction and nonfiction share these
categories, unlike on the other best seller lists, which are separated by
genre. However, leading comics scholar Hillary Chute contends that
nonfiction remains the “strongest genre in the field.”2 As critical attention
to the medium of comics increases, Chute and other critics are mainly
occupied with asking how the graphic narrative differs from the kinds of
narratives with which we have more typically been engaged.3 I would like
to argue that an equally important question should be: how is the graphic
narrative the same as other narratives? In other words, what formal and
thematic elements provide productive comparisons between graphic and
nongraphic narratives?4 W. J. T. Mitchell memorably argues, “all media
are mixed media, and all representations are heterogeneous; there are no
‘purely’ visual or verbal arts.”5 What can the medium of comics tell us
about the verbal and visual possibilities of narratives in all media?
Graphic memoirs—autobiographies in the medium of comics—have
led the wave of literary comics for the past twenty five years, since Art
1
Gustines 2009.
2
Chute 2008a, 452.
3
Chute and DeKoven 2006, 768.
4
See Chute 2008b for an exemplary analysis of how graphic narratives and
contemporary fiction intersect, “investigating different ways to present and express
history” (idem 268).
5
Mitchell 1994, 5.
16 Chapter One
Spiegelman published Maus to critical clamor in 1986.6 That clamor has

nearly been matched by Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, a literary graphic
memoir that officially hit the mainstream as Time magazine’s best book of
2006. Although graphic memoirs are certainly innovative in their hybrid,
word-and-image depictions of the self, it is also important to consider what
graphic memoirs have in common with text memoirs, in order to analyze
what the graphic medium contributes to narrative studies. For one, the use
of images in autobiography is not new; authors often publish photographs
of their younger selves and their families, usually as photo inserts near the
middle of the volume. In this paper I put two verbal/visual memoirs in
dialogue: a graphic memoir and a text memoir with a photo insert. By
doing so I wish to interrogate some of the possibilities and limitations of
visual representation in literature that represents the self. What does an
author attempt to reveal to the reader, through text, image, and their
combination? Can the reader “see” a secret in a portrait? As Mitchell puts
it, “[h]ow do we say what we see, and how can we make the reader see?”7
What are the uses of a family photograph within a memoir of any
medium? Where does the reader fit into a “familial gaze” when a writer
produces an image of a lost parent?8
In order to examine what the graphic and nongraphic do similarly, I
will compare two memoirs about a father’s sexual secrets: J. R. Ackerley’s
memoir My Father and Myself (1968) and Alison Bechdel’s graphic
memoir Fun Home (2006). Both authors, separated by gender, two
generations, and the Atlantic Ocean, write about quests to claim secretive
fathers through photographs. In these works, Ackerley and Bechdel put
desire, death, and heredity into visual and sexual terms. Both texts are
necessarily biography, autobiography, and family albums of secrets. In My
Father and Myself, British author Ackerley strains to glimpse a core of
homosexuality in his father’s youthful photographs. Ackerley (1896-
1967), the long-standing editor of the BBC magazine The Listener and
close friend of E. M. Forster, lived in a period of British history that was
bookended by Oscar Wilde’s indecency conviction and the
decriminalization of homosexual activity in the Sexual Offences Act of
1967.9 Reeling from the revelation of one secret—that his loving, wealthy
6
Although Whitlock (2006, 965) coined the term “autographics” for autobiographical
works in the medium of comics (as many booksellers and critics are still
misnaming the genre “graphic novel”), I employ the more popular term “graphic
memoir.”
7
Mitchell 1994, 114.
8
Hirsch 1997, 10.
9
McHugh 2000, 21.
Portrait of a Secret: J. R. Ackerley and Alison Bechdel 17
father raised a second family with a mistress—Ackerley searches for

another secret that will draw his father’s life in closer parallel with his
own. He begins that imaginative quest with his father’s death, and tries to
link his father’s fatal case of syphilis to a secret history of homosexual
encounters. Similarly, Bechdel tries to connect her father’s violent death—
he was hit by a truck, which she believes was a suicidal act—to two sexual
revelations: her recent discovery of her own homosexuality, and her
father’s secret history of affairs with young men. Like Ackerley, Bechdel
compares her father’s era of secrets to her own era of “out” sexuality. As
Bechdel states in an interview, “our two stories form a kind of longitudinal
sociological study. He graduated from college a dozen years before
Stonewall. I graduated a dozen years after.”10 Bechdel’s theory of her
father’s suicide bridges the generational gap; she inserts her own sexuality
and coming-out into the causal narrative of her father’s death, weaving
what she calls “that last, tenuous bond” between father and daughter.11
Guardians of their dead fathers’ depictions, Bechdel and Ackerley
attempt to build a visual archive that recasts an absent father in the
author’s own image. As Marianne Hirsch demonstrates in her influential
Family Frames (1997), family photographs are uniquely “perched between
life and death.”12 Inspired by Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus,
Hirsch introduced the concept of “postmemory,” which she describes as:
the experience of those who grew up dominated by narratives that preceded

their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the
previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither
understood nor recreated.13
In other words, in instances of postmemory, the parent’s past overshadows

the progeny’s present, and even unspoken trauma is passed on
intergenerationally. In my reading of My Father and Myself and Fun
Home’s visual secrets, I draw upon what Hirsch terms the “imaginative
investment and creation” of postmemory. The writer recreates the parent’s
experience imaginatively, especially when studying old family
photographs. Ackerley and Bechdel’s memoirs demonstrate the reverse
inheritance of the postmemorial imagination: its powers of creative
generation flow from the present to the past, from the writer to the lost
father. Although postmemory relies on patterns of generational inheritance,
10
Bechdel 2006a.
11
Bechdel 2006c, 85.
12
Hirsch 1997, 23.
13
Hirsch 1997, 22.
18 Chapter One
its workings of “imaginative investment and creation” resist what Michael

Warner terms “repro-narrativity” or “the notion that our lives are somehow
made more meaningful by being embedded in a narrative of generational
succession.”14 Through acts of looking and interpretation, the writer can
reverse the “repro-narrative”: she can fill in the parent’s inaccessible story
with a narrative from her own identity and life.
But what are the stakes of casting the lost parent in one’s own image?
Ackerley declares that in researching his dead father’s past, he was
“hoping still to drag him captive into the homosexual fold.”15 Similarly
Bechdel writes that “perhaps my eagerness to claim him as ‘gay’ in the
way I am ‘gay,’ as opposed to bisexual or some other category, is just a
way of keeping him to myself—a sort of inverted Oedipal complex.”16 By
placing homosexuality within the chain of lineage, within two generations
of the family story, these authors attempt to locate themselves within their
fathers’ mortal secrets. I argue that the autobiographical act, in any work
of text, comics, or other “mixed media,” builds a narrative bridge between
generations separated by death and secrecy, serving as a gesture of familial
reparation. For these authors, a sexual confession requires an investigation
of heredity, an envisioning of hypothetical circumstances in which they
would never have been born. As Roland Barthes writes in Camera Lucida
(1980), “I am the reference of every photograph, and this is what generates
my astonishment in addressing myself to the fundamental question: why is
it that I am alive here and now?”17 A father’s secret history of
homosexuality, however, troubles the progression of lineage. As she looks
up “father” and “beget” in Webster’s dictionary, Bechdel writes: “If my
father had ‘come out’ in his youth, if he had not met and married my
mother, where does that leave me?”18 Gazing at the father’s photograph,
the author wavers between yearning to resurrect him through identification,
and keeping a secret essential to the author’s own birth.
Memoirs of family secrets

“Private life is almost always a co-property,” writes the autobiography
theorist Philippe Lejeune.19 Who is more exposed in these works of family
confession: the author or the father? Following Mary G. Mason’s
14
Warner 1991, 7.
15
Ackerley 1999, 259.
16
Bechdel 2006c, 230.
17
Barthes 1982, 84 (emphasis in original).
18
Bechdel 2006c, 197.
19
Quoted in Eakin 2008, 40.
groundbreaking observation about the inherent relationality of autobiography,

which teases out the author’s “delineation of identity by way of alterity,”20
it can be said that every autobiography is, in a sense, also a biography.
That is, a life story unfolds in relation to the significant others who help
shape it. In the subgenre of the memoir of family secrets, the story centers
not on the author’s indiscretions, but on the parent’s sins of omission, the
secrets that marred and protected the intimacy between parent and writer.
And indeed, both Ackerley and Bechdel have complicated histories of
autobiographical revelation. Ackerley’s other works of fiction and drama
all draw upon personal experience. In a review of My Father and Myself,
W. H. Auden writes of Ackerley’s autobiographical impulse:
He says that he went to work for the BBC because he felt he had failed in
his ambition to become a writer himself. […] He discovered that he could
not create imaginary characters and situations: all his books were based on
journals, whether written down or kept in his head.21
Nevertheless, Ackerley insists that My Father and Myself “is not an

autobiography, its intention is narrower and is stated in the title and the
text, it is no more than an investigation of the relationship between my
father and myself.”22 Similarly, Bechdel’s long-running comic strip, Dykes
To Watch Out For, features a community of lesbians with Mo, Bechdel’s
cartoon avatar, as a central character. Yet Bechdel is more forthright than
Ackerley regarding what she defines as “my own compulsive propensity to
autobiography.”23 In Fun Home, a ten-year-old Bechdel begins her first
diary and has an “epistemological crisis” that perhaps leads her toward the
graphic medium.24 She worries about “the troubling gap between word and
meaning,” signifier and signified—and possibly, by extension, photograph
and subject.25 As Bechdel states in an interview about a trove of family
photographs she found: “those photos were really my primary source for
the book. Poring over them, recreating them painstakingly in pen and ink,
trying to discern their hidden messages.”26 Fun Home is all about the
family archive; each chapter opens with a recreated photograph that
appears pasted into a family photo album. By drawing family photographs,
20
Mason 1980, 231.
21
Auden 1969.
22
Ackerley 1999, 271 (emphasis in original).
23
Bechdel 2006c, 140.
24
Bechdel 2006c, 141.
25
Bechdel 2006c, 143.
26
Bechdel 2006a.
20 Chapter One
Bechdel asserts the artist’s hand in her father’s representation, making the
autobiographical act all the more visible. Between each of these two
authors’ fathers and the depiction of his sexuality lies an intervening “I,” a
writing daughter or son whose queer identity and mourning process color
every line of the father’s portrait.
Digging for truth

The themes of death, secrecy, and heredity adopt a similar structure in
both memoirs. Bechdel and Ackerley begin their investigations with their
fathers’ causes of death, inquiring how they as progeny are scripted into
these deaths. Bechdel spirals back repeatedly to a cluster of related scenes,
mainly the moment, which occurs in her college bookstore, when she
discovers she is a lesbian, and the moment her mother tells her on the
phone, in response to her announcement of sexual identity in a typewritten
letter sent home, “Your father has had affairs. With other men”27 (and
underage boys, as Bechdel soon discovers). “And with my father’s death
following hard on the heels of this doleful coming-out party,” Bechdel
ruminates, “I could not help but assume a cause-and-effect relationship.”28
All of Fun Home is awash with death. The title itself is a nickname for the
funeral home her father owned and ran part-time (when he was not
teaching English to local high school students, including his daughter and
the teen-aged boys he propositioned). Furthermore, conjoined scenes of
coming out and suicide lie at the heart of the narrative. Bechdel prefigures
this circling structure, the continual revelation of sexual identities, in a
series of frames about lawn-mowing. She depicts her younger self learning
how to ride a lawn mower with her father. First the father and daughter
ride the mower together; then her father shows her how to operate the
equipment herself. The last frame shows young Bechdel circling the lawn
alone, as though spiraling through a narrative that centers on her father,
but necessarily excludes him. The text above the last frame reads: “but I
ached as if he were already gone.”29 Bruce Bechdel has set the circling
narrative in motion, but at its core lies his absence, the empty lawn that
signals the continuous loss and regrowth of the mourning cycle, as well as
the continuous effort he put into maintaining the appearances of normalcy
in his lifetime.
27
Bechdel 2006c, 58.
28
Bechdel 2006c, 59.
29
Bechdel 2006c, 23.
Ackerley uses a similar structural metaphor for My Father and Myself.

Like Bechdel, who mows around her and her father’s story in search of a
common center, Ackerley claims to “plough” over his father’s past
methodically to unearth his secrets. “The excuse, I fear, is Art,” he
apologizes at the opening of his memoir, adding that “artistically shocks
should never be bunched, they need spacing for maximum individual
effect.”30 His method, then, rather than a chronology, consists of “ploughing
to and fro over my father’s life and my own, turning up a little more sub-
soil each time as the plough turned.”31 Both Ackerley and Bechdel employ
earthy metaphors—mowing grass, turning soil—to gesture toward the
stakes of regrowth, regeneration, and artistic procreation within their
family narratives. But for Ackerley, image and text are arranged in
opposition. The photographic portraits within My Father and Myself are as
“bunched” as the text’s “shocks” are spaced; every image but one appears
within the photographic insert, printed about a quarter of the way through
the book. Here, one advantage of the graphic medium over the text-and-
photo-insert convention becomes clear: a graphic memoirist like Bechdel
can expand, contract, and layer her narrative at will, signaling a fractured
family chronology. Not just the pacing but the spacing of a self-narrative
are at play in a story of the mourning process. While Bechdel presents and
represents the evidence of her father’s secrets, Ackerley’s readers must
flip back and forth between text and image to take in the full portrait of his
father’s secrets. In other words, Ackerley’s to-and-fro “ploughing” evolves
into Bechdel’s multidimensional spiraling in the calculation of affective
distance between child and father and between writer and reader.
In the first photograph appearing in My Father and Myself (Fig. [1]),
hands and eyes indicate the simultaneous entanglement and estrangement
of father and son.32 The father’s hands are hidden, and only one of
Ackerley’s is shown, its fingers folded in, looking more self-protective
than affectionate. Intimacy between father and son is implied in the bodily
contact, but refuted by the curled position of young Ackerley’s hand and
the disjointed gazes of the two subjects. The son looks just to the side of
the camera, while his father, head erect but partially shadowed, seems to
be looking in two different directions, neither toward the camera. Ackerley
explains his father’s divided gaze: “In one of his eyes, which were wide
and blue and greatly magnified by his horn-rimmed spectacles, he had a
30
Ackerley 1999, 5.
31
Ackerley 1999, 5.
32
All images From My Father and Myself (Ackerley 1999) are reprinted by
permission of David Higham Associates. Copyright © 1968 The Executors of the
Estate of J. R. Ackerley.
22 Chapter One
pronounced cast.”33 Ackerley then reveals, “my father held decided views,
often stated, of where eyes should be placed and what they ought to do.”34
In light of these statements, gestures and the location of hands and eyes
become a key to unraveling this son’s verbal and visual portrait of his
father, and the troubled relation the memoir cannot quite heal.
Fig. [1]
Like Ackerley, Bechdel also turns to formal portraits to examine her

relationship with her father. In Fun Home, Bechdel replicates several
photographs as drawings, filtering the purportedly objective record of
photography through her eye, hand, and heart. One panel of Fun Home,
showing a set of school portraits (Fig. [2]), reveals the emotional effort of
Bechdel’s search for meaning in her father’s official image.35 The prints
she reproduces are uncut from a sheet of duplicates. The even spacing of
the prints recalls the gutter-and-frame format of comics panels, but the
duplication refutes the artificial construction of time—of linear progress—
on which the comics form relies. As a static “comic strip,” these panels
33
Ackerley 1999, 112.
34
Ackerley 1999, 113.
35
All images from Fun Home (Bechdel 2006c) are reprinted by permission of
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright © 2006 by Alison
Bechdel. All rights reserved.
point to the lack of narrative advancement in Fun Home, or what Ann

Cvetkovich terms the memoir’s “queer temporality, one that refuses
narratives of progress.”36 As Bechdel points out, “if you don’t count the
subplot of my own coming out story, the sole dramatic incident in the
book is that my dad dies. Everything else is this extremely involuted
introspection about it all.”37 Like a subject of an Andy Warhol portrait,
Bruce Bechdel’s wide-open eyes and pinched smile appear all the more
duplicitous in duplication. In Bechdel’s unusual cropping, the top of the
father’s head is cut off, and the exact excision is preserved in the two
bottom frames. The father is essentially scalped, with the top of his head
floating beneath him, as if Bechdel hopes to extract secrets from his skull.
The text narrates, “but he was more attractive than the photographic record
reveals.”38 Bechdel’s careful replication of her father’s portrait vents the
frustrations of an incomplete archive: though her hand works to duplicate
her father’s image faithfully, her unusual cropping enacts the emotional
force of her search for an image of her father’s secrets.
Fig. [2]
If Bechdel opens her father’s head to the reader to the best of her
ability, Ackerley holds back visually, acknowledging that his interpretations
of his father are more revealing than the photographs he can display. After
his father’s death, Ackerley revisits an 1885 photograph of twenty-two-
year-old Roger Ackerley among three friends at a summer home in New
Brighton. Now that he suspects his father of youthful homosexual affairs,
36
Cvetkovich 2008, 124.
37
Quoted in Bechdel 2006b, 1008.
38
Bechdel 2006c, 64.
24 Chapter One
he deems the photograph “an innocent-looking affair, if only because there

was safety in numbers.”39 In a group portrait taken just outside the house,
four friends lounge with a dog on a lion-skin rug. Two of the friends (and
possible lovers) face the camera straight on, and even the dog and lion skin
at their feet seem to face forward. Ackerley’s father, by contrast, sits in a
cross-legged, closed-off position, eyes averted. In an interesting case of
visual withholding, Ackerley calls Dudley Sykes, one of the men in the
picture, “bold and roving-eyed,” though, he writes in a footnote, “in the
one [photograph] I have selected Mr. Sykes’s eyes are invisible.”40
Ackerley has chosen this shot from two photos of the same group, and his
choice withholds Sykes’s eyes, as if this possible suitor of the elder
Ackerley might charm the viewer, too. In My Father and Myself, Ackerley
keeps his father—and his reader—to himself by withholding this
competitor’s “bold” gaze. Ackerley narrates the image:
Behind them, along the sill of an open window, potted plants are ranged.
Would that I had been able to peep and eavesdrop through that window
and discover their secrets, if any. But I was not yet born.41
Yet in the photograph Ackerley chose to print, just a corner of the

windowsill is visible; the site of eavesdropping is outside the photograph’s
frame. This doubly secretive position—hidden from the portrait’s subjects
as well as the reader—troubles what Philippe Lejeune calls “the
autobiographical pact,” or the implicit agreement between autobiographer
and reader that testifies to the truth of the narrative.42 Ackerley leaves the
reader out of the picture. He limits the reader’s visual access to the tenuous
bond between his father and himself, and the “peeping” methods he uses
to form that bond. The truncated relation between Ackerley and his father
is translated into a selective flow of secret-sharing and withholding with
the reader.
Visual recognition
Nevertheless, even within this structure of withholding, Ackerley does
share with his reader the portrait of his father as a guardsman (Fig. [3])
that inspired his epiphany of his father’s sexuality. “This old photograph
made me sit up,” Ackerley writes and continues:
39
Ackerley 1999, 250.
40
Ackerley 1999, 31.
41
Ackerley 1999, 32.
42
Lejeune 1989, 3-30.
The inherent absurdity of envisaging my father in the arms of another man

had never really faded; it faded now. It is true that, studying the
photograph of him in uniform, I decided that I would not have picked him
up myself; but the picture was said not to do him justice, and the better one
Uncle Denton claimed to have never managed to find.43
Fig. [3]
Although the photographic archive is again incomplete, it is sufficient to

make Ackerley, a lover of men in uniform, “sit up” in interest and
recognition. But what is visible to a reader/viewer outside the family
circle? “My father as a guardsman” is a full-body shot, but the father’s
erect posture competes for attention with the busy background. A dated air
of artificiality reigns here, with the pastoral backdrop and mysterious
foreground elements, including a uniform cap that seems to float lightly
upon an indistinct, fur-draped stool or chair. Clad in his form-fitting
uniform and tall boots, the father appears larger than life, with his left foot
exceeding the frame and his head reaching the very top of it. His gloved
right hand holds the left glove loosely, hiding its fingers beneath the
palm—a secretive or protective position that recalls young Ackerley’s
folded hand in the father and son portrait previously discussed. The
ungloved hand provides what Barthes calls the punctum, the piercing
detail of the photograph. Looking at a portrait of someone who has died,
43
Ackerley 1999, 256-57.
26 Chapter One
Barthes writes, “I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I
observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake.”44 Here,
the father’s hand looks detached, surprisingly thin and bony for such a
large man—nearly skeletal. I read death, at once future and past, youthful
and lost, in this ghostly, free-floating hand. Ackerley delivers the
impossibility of his project through this photograph. The time span of
relation is past: the father—and now the son, Ackerley himself—are dead,
and their mutual secrets will never be exchanged.
Bechdel has a similar photographic moment (Fig. [4]) that makes her
“sit up” with visual identification after her father’s death. Here, though,
Bechdel depicts a photo not of her father, but of one of his teenaged
lovers: the family babysitter, Roy. Instead of poring over the father’s
image, as both authors have been shown to do thus far, Bechdel tries to
discover her father through his gaze—to see what he sees. Bechdel
explains the formative impact of finding this photograph a year after her
father’s death:
That’s when I ran across this photograph. It was a stunning glimpse into
my father’s hidden life, this life that was running parallel to our regular
everyday existence. And it was particularly compelling to me at the time
because I was just coming out myself. I felt this sort of posthumous bond
with my father, like I shared this thing with him, like we were comrades. I
didn’t start working on the book then, but over the years that picture
persisted in my memory. It’s literally the core of the book, the centerfold.45
The “centerfold” is the only double-page panel of Fun Home. A complex

dynamic of revelation and protection inhabits this centerfold. It is probable
that Bechdel altered Roy’s name and appearance in order to protect his
identity; Roy was a minor when this erotic photograph was taken. Plenty
of text crowds the page around Roy’s reclining figure, detaining the reader
long enough to simulate Bechdel’s long, ambivalent gaze.46 Her father has
blotted out the year and the “bullets” printed on Roy’s portrait in “a
curiously ineffectual attempt” to alter the evidence of his illicit gaze.47 Or,
inadvertently, the date-blotting might make that erotic look timeless and
44
Barthes 1982, 96 (emphasis in original).
45
Quoted in Bechdel 2006b, 1006.
46
I am borrowing here a term from Edward Said’s introduction to Joe Sacco’s
graphic narrative Palestine in which he writes: “Sacco’s art has the power to detain
us, to keep us from impatiently wandering off in order to follow a catch-phrase or a
lamentably predictable narrative of triumph and fulfillment. And this is perhaps the
greatest of his achievements” (idem 2002, v).
47
Bechdel 2006c, 101.
intergenerational, as Bechdel imagines herself viewing the photograph

with the same awed gaze as her father. The concealed-and-revealed date
“69” implies both the sexual pose and the legal stakes of the father’s affair
with a high school boy.48 One caption reads, “the picture was in an
envelope labeled ‘family’ in Dad’s handwriting, along with other shots
from the same trip.”49 Residing within the family archive, the father’s
secret hides in plain sight. The photo is a portrait of secret desire, of a
sexual relation from which Bechdel was excluded but now begins to
comprehend. The reader, in turn, feels that very same simultaneous
mirroring and exclusion. Bechdel draws Fun Home in two styles: a
cartoonish, generalized style for “diegetic,” narrative storytelling, and
crosshatched, finely-detailed “archival” style for drawn photographs. In a
layering of these styles, Bechdel’s life-sized, generalized, genderless hand
lies just next to the reader’s hand holding the page.50 Bechdel’s hand is
one step closer to the scene of the photograph, to the site of the secret, but
still outside of it. The reader tries to see what Bechdel sees, as the author
tries to see what her father saw in Roy. In her “imaginative investment and
creation” of postmemory, Bechdel renders her father’s gaze in all its
inaccessibility.51
This diegetic hand of the daughter holding Ray’s portrait echoes an
image on the previous page of Fun Home, in which an adolescent Bechdel
admires a centerfold in Esquire magazine, with her father looking over her
shoulder. Together they gaze at a fashion spread of a shirtless model in a
three-piece suit, with a disembodied female hand caressing the model’s
muscled chest. “The objects of our desire were quite different,” Bechdel
writes: her father presumably desires the figure in the advertisement, while
Bechdel desires to be that man, to inhabit that hard, masculine body with a
desiring gaze and hand upon it.52 In the mirroring of these adjacent
centerfolds—Esquire model and Roy the babysitter—Bechdel’s enlarged
48
Just a few pages later, Bechdel will make a similar numerical discovery of social
censure as she and a group of lesbian friends are “eighty-sixed” from Chumley’s
bar in New York (idem 2006b, 106).
49
Bechdel 2006c, 101.
50
For a very similar layering of diegetic and archival styles see Art Spiegelman’s
early comic Prisoner from Hell Planet, reprinted in Maus. Spiegelman depicts his
cartooned, grotesque hand holding up an actual, archival photograph of his mother
and himself on a family vacation. As Hirsch argues in Family Frames, these
archival photographs break the narrative frame of history and seep into the present
day (idem 1997, 33).
51
Hirsch 1997, 22.
52
Bechdel 2006c, 99.
28 Chapter One
hand, holding Roy’s photo, displaces the female model’s hand; the site of
desire is no longer the male chest or even the father’s lover, but the
longing of Bechdel as a daughter, archivist, and artist. Bechdel’s artistic
thumbprint on this photograph reminds the reader of the intergenerational
and artistic stakes of uncovering a secret and attempting to share its awe-
filled impact outside the family. The scopophilic, gendered caress of the
Esquire centerfold is transformed into an artist’s diligent penstrokes in the
family centerfold, as Bechdel seizes control of how these images will look
and feel, how her father’s secrets will be exposed to the reader. Bechdel’s
artistic hand marks the distances of familial desire.
Fig. [4]
Two levels of confession intersect in Fun Home and My Father and

Myself: the truncated confession of sexuality to parents, and the
subsequent “confession” to readers, outside the family. Bechdel notes that
when she wrote her coming-out letter to her family, “I had imagined my
confession as emancipation from my parents, but instead I was pulled back
into their orbit.”53 Similarly, Helena Gurfinkel identifies within Ackerley’s
53
Bechdel 2006c, 59.
memoir “a figure of the artist who refuses to leave the father’s house.”54
Ackerley and Bechdel do, in fact, leave their fathers’ houses. Yet when
they leave, they carry their fathers within them, refashioning paternal
secrets in their own image. Neither Ackerley nor Bechdel is able to openly
discuss sexuality with the father. Facing his father a half century before
Bechdel, Ackerley is cut off mid-sentence when he confesses to his sick
father, “‘I don’t really mind telling you. I went to meet a sailor friend…’
But he interrupted me with ‘It’s all right, old boy. I prefer not to know. So
long as you enjoyed yourself, that’s the main thing.’”55 Bechdel’s father
also evades his daughter’s self-labeling, sidestepping the question of
sexual identity by responding, “At least you’re human. Everyone should
experiment.”56 Father and daughter cannot intersect in a moment of sexual
confession; they can merely coincide—or as Bechdel writes, “the end of
his lie coincided with the beginning of my truth.”57 Ackerley, in turn,
regrets never telling his father about his homosexuality: “It is the purpose
of the rest of this memoir to explore, as briefly as possible, the reasons for
our failure.”58
Nevertheless, even as these two writers mourn the gaps of secrecy
within their relationships with their fathers, they acknowledge that the
secrecy produced the autobiography. Without a family secret, there would
be no material, no book. According to memoir theorist Nancy K. Miller,
the act of separation is only the first step in the family memoir:
You leave home, cut yourself off […]. You write about this. What you left
is your material. You make reparations for leaving by writing, and by this
act you return home, only as author, not authored. You’ve written the
story, rewritten the story that wrote you. Earned and betrayed the
bequest.59
In that return home for the material of a story worth telling, the lure of
what cannot be known or told is often the strongest. After he discovers the
military portrait of his father, Ackerley writes: “What fun it would be if I
could add the charge of homosexuality to my father’s other sexual
vagaries! What irony if it could be proved that he had led in his youth the
very kind of life I was leading!”60 The story of the secret becomes,
54
Gurfinkel 2008, 555.
55
Ackerley 1999, 190.
56
Bechdel 2006c, 210.
57
Bechdel 2006c, 117.
58
Ackerley 1999, 100.
59
Miller 1996, 94.
60
Ackerley 1999, 257.
30 Chapter One
Ackerley writes, “the raison d’etre, of this examining and self-examining

book; not the only raison d’etre, it must be admitted, for, being a writer, I
perceived that I had a good story to tell, a story which, as it ramified, grew
better and better.”61 In other words, the irony of proving his father’s
homosexuality would satisfy him not only as a son but as a writer as well.
That writer’s irony, the satisfaction of a good story, drives Ackerley’s
search for sexual identification in his father’s image. However, neither
Bechdel nor Ackerley succeeds in making a father’s secrets visually
apparent—neither can produce what Barthes calls a “just image,” which in
their cases would be a visual proof of a father’s sexuality.62 The reader
cannot see the secret: the father’s hidden patterns of desire. What a reader
can see is a writer’s desire: the verbal and visual efforts to render and
interpret a familial bond.
Near the end of her quest for her father’s secret, Bechdel writes:
“‘Erotic truth’ is a rather sweeping concept. I shouldn’t pretend to know
what my father’s was.”63 The “erotic truth” of a father remains unknown,
but when combined with creative truth—the artistic quest itself—the result
is a kind of “relational truth,” the marking of distance and intimacy to the
father’s secrets.64 Nancy K. Miller writes:
The betrayal of secrets is a requirement of the autobiographical act. To

mark off your difference through betrayal—you may be the father, I’m the
writer—is the confirmation of both separation and relation.65
The flow of secrets

Ackerley and Bechdel calibrate their “relational truth,” their similarities
and distances from their fathers. And since a reader cannot see a father’s
secret in these photographs quite like the son or daughter, Ackerley and
Bechdel turn to another representation of secrets. Both authors distill their
61
Ackerley 1999, 214.
62
Barthes 1982, 70.
63
Bechdel 2006c, 230.
64
Susan McHugh identifies canines as the figure that measures the sexual distance
between Ackerley and his father. Ackerley wrote copiously about his emotional
attachment to his dog, Queenie. Analyzing a scene in which Ackerley and his
father regard a dog’s feces on the sidewalk in order to sidestep a discussion of sex,
McHugh argues that dogs are “marking the distance between Ackerley’s father’s
likely sexual relationship with [an] older man and the son’s biographical attempt to
extrapolate from these circumstances a queer identity for his father” (idem 2000,
26).
65
Miller 1996, 124 (emphasis in original).
fathers’ secrets in “secretions”—bodily fluids, photographic developing

fluid—as they seek a solution of sexual identity developed in visual and
bodily terms. Daniel Hayes proposes that secrets, like bodily fluids,
carefully shared or withheld, serve as a mechanism of regulating bonds
between people: “Negotiating the space between people—determining
levels of intimacy, closeness, separation, and distance—is a matter of
controlling or not controlling the permeability of these thresholds, or,
alternatively, governing the flow of secrets.”66 As Hayes points out, the
verb secrete has two somewhat contrary meanings: “(1) to emit, as from a
gland, and (2) to hide or conceal. […] Those closest to our secretions are
often those closest to our secrets.”67 Through images of flow, fluidity, and
cleaving that signify artistic and sexual works-in-progress, both Ackerley
and Bechdel calibrate the family distances necessary to relate, separate,
and create.
For Ackerley’s father, the “flow” of secrets is limited to the realm of
masculinity, of the dirty jokes he calls “yarns.” As Ackerley recalls, “to
my young mind these yarns were seldom good and never single; one of
them always reminded him or his cronies of another; they seemed to
adhere together in their sexual fluid like flies in treacle.”68 But what
“adheres” in that sentence—the stories, or the cronies who tell them? Who
or what exactly is stickily bonded through the proliferation of stories? The
father’s “cronies” were privy to the father’s secret mistress and second
family, which Ackerley did not discover until after his father’s death.
Excluded from his father’s flow of verbal “yarns,” secrets, and
storytelling, Ackerley attempts to identify with the “fluid” of his father’s
bodily secret: the syphilis that caused his death. In order to relate,
Ackerley writes about his own sexually transmitted disease, “a dose of
anal clap.”69 As Ackerley narrates, a Chlamydia-inflicted lover “unbuttoned
his flies to exhibit the proof, squeezing out the pus for my enlightenment
[…] I saw it as one of the highest compliments I had been paid.”70 Denied
his father’s secrets, that “sexual fluid like flies in treacle,” Ackerley
instead shares the pus in pants’ “flies” with a lover and with a reader.71
Exhibiting the proof—sharing that fluid—is exactly what the father’s
photos cannot do. Ackerley substitutes textual secrets for visual ones, and
a reader for a paternal confidante. Although Ackerley repeatedly laments
66
Hayes 1997, 243 (emphasis in original).
67
Hayes 1997, 243.
68
Ackerley 1999, 129.
69
Ackerley 1999. 180.
70
Ackerley 1999, 181.
71
Ackerley 1999, 131.
32 Chapter One
the failure of his relationship with his father, the book ends on a note of
sexual failure: “Sometimes I managed; often the very fear perhaps of the
frustration and humiliation of failure caused me to fail.”72 He closes the
memoir with his failure to ejaculate rather than his failure to relate.
In Fun Home, Bechdel relates the blocked flow of secrets to the
difficulty of capturing what she calls her father’s “fluid charm, which
eluded the still camera.”73 She cannot quite grasp her father, visually or
emotionally. No single photograph can display his secrets; only Bechdel’s
artistic process can substitute for the gaps within the family story. And
indeed, Bechdel’s artistic process and sexual process—the coming-out that
began at age nineteen and which takes flight in the public record of Fun
Home—both hinge on the calibration of the flow of secrets. Bechdel’s
fluids of both sensuality and sexuality are a part of her drawing and her
visual process of storytelling. A few weeks after she begins menstruating,
young Bechdel experiences her first orgasm while working on a drawing
of a basketball player. She codes both the orgasm and menstruation as a
secretive “N” in her adolescent diary.74 These fluids are solitary; there is
no interchange of secrets. And even when father and daughter share the
same atmosphere, their flow of secrets is dammed. Experiencing queer-
friendly Greenwich Village for the first time, vacationing with her father at
age fifteen, Bechdel recalls: “It was like the moment the manicurist in the
Palmolive commercial informs her client, ‘You’re soaking in it.’”75
Bechdel and her father each “soak” separately in their secret sexuality;
their secrets coincide, but never intermingle. In her search for secrets after
his death, Bechdel highlights the process of film development, the
developing solution that brings evidence of her father’s sexuality to light.
She captions the centerfold photo, “a trace of Roy has been caught on
light-sensitive paper.”76 Developing the film—that is, soaking it in
solution—has yielded a lasting photographic trace of her father’s
homoerotic gaze. The development from film to photograph, and then to
drawing and text, allows for the belated flow of an identifactory gaze from
father to artist to reader. Photographic process is written into every panel
of Fun Home. Bechdel, who calls herself a “method cartoonist,”77
sketched each character in each frame from a snapshot of herself in the
72
Ackerley 1999, 283.
73
Bechdel 2006c, 64.
74
Bechdel 2006c, 169.
75
Bechdel 2006c, 190.
76
Bechdel 2006c, 101.
77
Bechdel 2006a.
pose she wished to draw.78 She embodies her subjects, recreating them in
her own image. Each author’s “secretions,” then, point to the narrative
process itself, the documented effort to identify with the father through a
series of visualizations and embodiments.
Conclusion
“The thought of origins soothes us,” Barthes writes, “whereas that of the
future disturbs us, agonizes us.”79 I would like to suggest that for the
nonprocreative queer author, the process of writing and visually incarnating
the past for the reader might ease the uncertainty of the future. The
postmemorial imagination mines unknown history as a source of art.
Embracing an artistic, queer life, both Ackerley and Bechdel carry on the
family name in print, not in blood. Their creativity has an erotic and
generative component. Bechdel writes in Fun Home that as a child she
swore that in order to honor her parents’ dreams and carve out her own
future, she would never marry, “that I would carry on to live the artist’s
life they had each abdicated.”80 That “artist’s life” produces books,
“spawned” and “generated” in Bechdel’s words, by the commingling of
parental photographs and postmemorial imagination.81
Yet in this tricky analogy of artistic generation between queer writers
and fathers, where do mothers fit in? In these family stories, centered on a
father’s loss, the mother is a figure of ambivalence, who nevertheless
quietly drives the writer’s creative process from the memoir’s margins. A
year after the publication of Fun Home, Bechdel wrote:
[My mother] didn’t quite understand why I wanted to reveal all our sordid
family secrets to the general public, but she never tried to talk me out of it.
I know I hurt her by writing this book. She made that clear, but she also let
me know that she grasped the complexity of the situation. At one point
after Fun Home came out, she sent me a review from a local newspaper. It
cited the William Faulkner quote, “The writer’s only responsibility is to his
art. […] If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a
Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.” Then the reviewer went
78
Similarly, Marjane Satrapi posed for all the reference shots for the 2007 film
version of her graphic memoir Persepolis. In referring to that, she said in an
interview: “I play all the roles, even the dog” (quoted in Hohenadel 2007).
79
Barthes 1982, 105.
80
Bechdel 2006c, 73.
81
Quoted in Bechdel 2006b, 1005-1006.
34 Chapter One
on to say, “Rarely are the old ladies asked how they felt about it.” Mom
liked that—that someone was considering her side of the story.82
In Fun Home, Bechdel’s mother is the one who discloses the father’s sexual
secrets. However, in drawing her mother’s guarded but revelatory letter,
held up for the reader’s eye, Bechdel promptly disobeys her mother’s
interdiction: “Her P.S. instructed me to destroy the letter.”83 Had Bechdel
obeyed her mother’s instructions there would have been no book. Ackerley,
too, struggles with preservation and publication in My Father and Myself,
and his mother, an object of scorn throughout much of the memoir, 84 is
nevertheless the one enabling the preservation of the family story. Ackerley
recounts rifling through his mother’s possessions after her death, searching
for more evidence of his father’s sexual life, and instead finding boxes
chock-full of trash, meaningless keepsakes, and waste-paper. Roger J. Porter
likens Ackerley’s digging to “a parody of useless evidence.”85 Yet there is a
lesson within these mounds of waste. From his mother, Ackerley learns to
preserve—and publish—what he does not and cannot know. The secrets of a
family are neither waste nor failure, but the material of a book. Ackerley
writes about his mother’s odd collection of waste-paper:
This was my mother’s comment on life. It might serve also as a comment

on this family memoir, which belongs, I am inclined to think, to her
luggage. A good many questions have been asked, few receive answers.
Some facts have been established, much else may well be fiction, the rest
is silence. Of my father, my mother, myself, I know in the end practically
nothing. Nevertheless, I preserve it, if only because it offers a friendly
unconditional response to my father’s plea in his posthumous letter: “I
hope people will generally be kind to my memory.”86
Bechdel and Ackerley seek in their fathers’ portraits an essence of

heredity, proof that something lives on in paternal absence. Their process
of mourning calls for an image, a visual representation of the father’s
mortal secrets. What is revealed in their photographic quest may not be a
visual secret, but simply the process itself, the negotiation of familial
revelation that is extended to the reader. Ackerley spins the flatness of the
82
Bechdel 2007.
83
Bechdel 2006c, 78.
84
Clayton J. Whisnant calls Ackerley’s misogyny toward his mother, sister, and
other women, “a wedge that Ackerley used to force apart gender and sexuality”
(idem 2002, 138).
85
Porter 2004, 104.
86
Ackerley 1999, 268.
photograph into a “yarn” of sexual confession. And Bechdel’s process of

representation materializes the artist’s hand that sketches the intersection of
death and desire. In Camera Lucida, Barthes, too, finds himself searching
for a “just image” of his deceased mother.87 Moving far beyond Ackerley’s
partial withholding of gazes and grasps, Barthes declines to share that all-
important photo of his mother with the reader. He famously writes in
parentheses, “(I cannot reproduce the Winter Garden Photograph. It exists
only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of
the thousand manifestations of the ‘ordinary’ […] but in it, for you, no
wound.)”88 That open wound of loss is manifest in Ackerley and Bechdel’s
family secrets. Rendering the father’s “erotic truth,” distilled through the
author’s hand and eye, may not restore the father, but it can bond the author
and reader in a sticky solution of secrets withheld and revealed.
Works Cited
Ackerley, J. R. (1968) 1999. My Father and Myself. New York: New York
Review Books.
Auden, W. H. 1969. “Papa Was a Wise Old Sly-Boots” (review of My
Father and Myself, by J. R. Ackerley). The New York Review of Books,
March 27. <http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1969/mar/27
/papa-was-a-wise-old-sly-boots/>
Barthes, Roland. (1980) 1982. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography.
Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang.
Bechdel, Alison. 2006a. “A Conversation with Alison Bechdel.” Houghton
Mifflin press release, June. <http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/
booksellers/press_release/bechdel/>
—. 2006b. “An Interview with Alison Bechdel.” An interview by Hillary
Chute. Modern Fiction Studies 52.4: 1004-13.
—. 2006c. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York: Houghton
Mifflin.
—. 2007. “What the Little Old Ladies Feel.” Slate, March 27.
<http://www.slate.com/id/2162410/>
Chute, Hillary. 2008a. “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic
Narrative.” PMLA 123.2: 452-65.
87
Barthes 1982, 70.
88
Barthes 1982, 73.
36 Chapter One
—. 2008b. “Ragtime, Kavalier & Clay, and the Framing of Comics.”

Modern Fiction Studies 54.2: 268-301.
Chute, Hillary and Marianne DeKoven. 2006. “Introduction: Graphic
Narrative.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.4: 767-82.
Cvetkovich, Anne. 2008. “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun
Home.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36.1-2: 111-28.
Eakin, Paul John. 2008. Living Autobiographically: How We Create
Identity in Narrative. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Gurfinkel, Helena. 2008. “My Father and Myself: J. R. Ackerley’s
Marginal Modernist Künstlerroman.” Biography 31.4: 555-76.
Gustines, George Gene. 2009. “Arts Beat: Introducing The New York
Times Graphic Books Best Seller List.” New York Times, March 5.
<http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/05/-introducing-the-new
-york-times-graphic-books-best-seller-lists/>
Hayes, Daniel. 1997. “Autobiography’s Secret.” a/b: Auto/Biography
Studies 12.2: 243-60.
Hirsch, Marianne. 1997. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and
Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Hohenadel, Kristin. 2007. “An Animated Adventure, Drawn From Life.”
The New York Times, January 21.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/movies/21hohe.html>
Lejeune, Philippe. 1989. “The Autobiographical Pact.” In On Autobiography,
edited and with a foreword by Paul John Eakin; translated by
Katherine Leary, 3-30. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Mason, Mary G. 1980. “The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women
Writers.” In Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, edited by
James Olney, 207-35. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
McHugh, Susan. 2000. “Marrying My Bitch: J. R. Ackerley’s Pack
Sexualities.” Critical Inquiry 27.1: 21-41.
Miller, Nancy K. 1996. Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent’s
Death. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Mitchell, W. J. T. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual
Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Porter, Roger J. 2004. “Finding the Father: Autobiography as Bureau of
Missing Persons.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 19.1-2: 100-117.
Said, Edward. 2002. “Homage to Joe Sacco.” Introduction to Palestine, by
Joe Sacco, i-x. New York: Fantographics.
Spiegelman, Art. 1996. The Complete Maus. New York: Pantheon.
Warner, Michael. 1991. “Introduction: Fear of a Queer Planet.” Social
Text 29: 3-17.
Whisnant, Clayton J. 2002. “Masculinity and Desire in the Works of J. R.

Ackerley.” Journal of Homosexuality 43.2: 124-142.
Whitlock, Gillian. 2006. “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of Comics.”
Modern Fiction Studies 52.4: 965-79.
CHAPTER TWO
POSTSECRET AS IMAGETEXT:
THE RECLAMATION OF TRAUMATIC
EXPERIENCES AND IDENTITY
TANYA K. RODRIGUE
For several decades, the enigmatic cognitive and linguistic effects of

trauma and traumatic experiences have intrigued scholars in disciplines
ranging from literary studies to art history. Trauma—conceived in relation
to actual events as well as the effects of the events —is most commonly
defined as an “overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events”
that results in lasting changes of emotion, cognition, and memories, and
possibly a disconnection among these functions.1 Psychoanalysts,
sociologists, and literary theorists argue that physical and emotional
trauma dismantles language; the experience severs the connection between
the memory of the event and the language that would and/or could
describe it. As a result, traumatized individuals often remember only
fragments of the event, and sometimes nothing at all, and many have
difficulty articulating the experience in discursive terms. Much of the time,
traumatic events are identified as an absence, or that which has not come
to be understood.
From diverse disciplinary perspectives, scholars and theorists have
grappled with complex questions about the (re)construction2 and
1
Caruth 1996, 11
2
I use the term (re)construction rather than reconstruction, or (re)construct rather
than reconstruct, intentionally. Trauma may prevent the formation of memories,
and thus memories of the event or particular moments of the event literally may
not exist. As a result, a person may never be able to reconstruct—defined as
construct again—the experience in its entirety, or in other words, piece together
parts or fragments of memory like a jigsaw puzzle. Yet, a person can construct a
traumatic experience from memories that do exist or identify an experience as
traumatic when a dearth of memories is recognized. While some may not be able
40 Chapter Two
representation of traumatic experiences. How does one give form to

fragments of experience, language, and memory? How can one give
presence to absence? How does one represent and recreate the “real” when
traumatic memory and disjointed language, as well as “reality” itself, defy
“truth” in moments of crisis? How might a traumatized individual bear
witness to the experience and testify about an event that has yet to be
understood? In this essay, I argue that imagetext functions as a productive
means to recognize an event as traumatic, represent traumatic experiences,
and engage in dialogue for the purposes of understanding trauma. Echoing
W. J. T. Mitchell, I refer to imagetext as pictures and texts that embody
both discursive and non-discursive language, as well as multiple,
historical, and sometimes conflicting discourses. The use of imagetext as a
medium of trauma representation extends trauma scholarship in meaningful
ways: it complicates scholars’ understanding of the relationship between
trauma and language, and challenges arguments that trauma is best
represented in either discursive or non-discursive language.
To exemplify how imagetext paves an avenue for the reclamation of
memory, language, and identity, I explore PostSecret postcards—multimodal
confessions ‘inscripted’ on 4-by-6 inch mailable material—as imagetext.
The postcards constitute the PostSecret art project that began in 2004.
Frank Warren, founder of PostSecret, placed postcards in random public
locations, soliciting people to share a secret “that was true” and that they
had never told to anyone.3 Warren began posting the confessions of his
choice every Sunday to a weblog, postsecret.blogspot.com. Since 2004,
this social experiment has transformed into a cultural phenomenon,
whereby thousands of people have sent Warren confessional postcards and
have become devoted PostSecret followers. As of May 2011, the
PostSecret blog had an estimated 1,292,300 monthly visits4 and
434,759,172 total visits.5 Additionally, nearly one million Facebook users
“like” the PostSecret page. Since its inception, Warren, who Forbes
named the fourteenth most influential person on the Internet in 2009,6 has
to reconstruct an experience or parts of it, others have formed memories, and are
able to access and reconnect the severed memories. In turn, a person may be able
to construct the experience again, or reconstruct, via the reconnection of severed
language and memory. Thus in an effort to address both those who have and have
not registered traumatic experiences in memories, I use (re)construction to
simultaneously denote reconstruction and construction.
3
Warren 2005, 1.
4
“PostSecret.Com Overview,” http://www.trafficestimate.com/postsecret.com.
5
PostSecret Website, http://www.postsecret.blogspot.com.
6
Web Celeb 25, in Ewalt 2009.
The Reclamation of Traumatic Experiences and Identity 41
continued to post the cards to the blog and has also published them in
several book collections.7 Additionally, he travels around the country,
hosting exhibits and giving talks, much of the time about suicide
awareness and prevention. The postcard secrets display a range of
emotions and experiences: happy secrets—“I anonymously send e.e.
cummings photos to people;” bizarre secrets—“I made deer hump;”
melancholy secrets—“9,898 students and I’ve never felt more alone;”
amusing secrets—“If I charged the people I babysit for by the scream I’d
be rich;” funny secrets: “I used to think the Sistine Chapel was called the
16th chapel!;” honest secrets—“I am terrified of growing up;” desperate
secrets—“Barely here;” racist secrets—“Asians scare me;” and hopeful
secrets—“Dear Mom & Dad, I was going to commit suicide the day you
sent me to rehab. You have saved my life. I love you both.” Many people
use the postcards to reveal traumatic secrets about sexual abuse including
rape, molestation, and incest: “(I was molested) There I said it” and “I was
molested as a child and never told anyone. As an adult, I tracked him
down, killed him, and never told anyone.”
In this essay, I focus on the confessional postcards that depict traumatic
events, particularly experiences of rape, which are often kept “secret” due
to their “unspeakable” nature. I chose to work with PostSecret postcards
for several reasons. As imagetexts, PostSecret postcards strongly illustrate
how images as texts and texts as images have the potential to evoke and
resist dominant discourses that have guided traumatized individuals in
representing their experiences and thus identities in genres such as
autobiography or memoir. Dominant discourses, in this essay, are defined
as language, knowledge, and worldviews that have become normalized
and accepted as evident in society. Such discourses resist individualized
epistemological frameworks and perpetuate master narratives. Imagetext
evokes discourses of trauma—which can be understood as knowledge-
claims brought forth in scholarly and professional conversations about
trauma, traumatic memory, and the complexity of trauma representation
and identity construction. Trauma discourses, I argue, directly engage and
challenge dominant discourses. It is precisely in these dialogical
engagements, in the conversations among multiple, conflicting discourses,
that trauma can be understood. The connections among languages or
discourses have the potential to elucidate social constructions of trauma
representations and identities. These intersections also reveal that trauma
discourses can serve as sites for the deconstruction of social constructions
of identity and spaces for identity (re)construction. Additionally, the space
7
See Warren 2005; 2006; 2007a; 2007b; and 2009.
42 Chapter Two
of dialogical interaction provides a rich terrain for understanding particular

events as traumatic.
Another reason for my decision to explore PostSecret postcards is that
the project—both its goal and the process by which testimonials are
collected—strongly lends itself to close explorations of trauma
representation, particularly within the context of dominant discourses.
Warren encourages the disclosure of never-told-before secrets, and by
extension, traumatic experiences. Secrets, like trauma, can be defined as
“keeping painful thoughts and impulses out of conscious awareness.”8
Harboring significant secrets is known to produce the same psychological
effects as having experienced trauma—repression and often erasure or
fragmentation of memory. Secrets, also like traumatic experiences, are
initially recorded at a “nonverbal level in the form of mental images,
bodily movements and affect-related visceral charges.”9 Judith Herman, in
fact, draws a direct relationship between trauma and secrets, claiming
traumatized individuals are in conflict “between the will to deny horrible
events and the will to proclaim them aloud,” and are often torn between
“secrecy” and “truth-telling.” She contends that most times “secrecy”
prevails, yet those who do divulge their secrets can begin a “healing
process” in the wake of trauma.10 Herman’s argument encapsulates the
PostSecret project’s goal to encourage traumatized individuals to testify
for the purpose of comprehending life experiences.
Additionally, Warren has created a process for testifying—composing
and sending confessional postcards via “snail mail”—that in itself directly
confronts and resists oppressive dominant discourses. The process
eradicates the demand, which dominant discourses have created, to
“prove” or provide “forensic evidence” in court or elsewhere of a traumatic
experience. In using the postcards, people shape and define their
testimonies in a way they see fit without being accused of lying, which is
often a result of one’s inability to coherently and linearly articulate a
traumatic experience. Since participants submit by postal mail there is no
concern with traceability of IP address; Warren scans and uploads their
postcards whereby PostSecret confessors are thus ensured complete
anonymity in the virtual world, unlike with other confessional websites.
Warren, who has, not surprisingly, been deemed “America’s Most Trusted
Man,” protects each creator’s identity in a way that other confessional
mediums cannot, while simultaneously maintaining the integrity and
8
Kelly 2002, 5.
9
Kelly 2002, 18.
10
Herman 1997, 1.
meaning of the testimonies. Hence, the imagetext in the postcards not only
evoke and resist dominant discourses, the postcards themselves do as well.
Lastly, PostSecret postcards, when read as imagetext in the medium of
a weblog, complicate the traditional understanding of the role and
relationship of testifier and witness, the nature of testimony, and the way
traumatized individuals achieve understanding of their experiences. In
trauma discourses, a person who has experienced trauma is the one who
testifies about the experience and seeks to understand it. Within the
context of PostSecret, the postcard creator may in fact use the postcard to
bear witness and gain understanding of trauma, yet this may not always be
the case. A postcard creator might construct a fictional account of trauma
for other reasons that I later describe. Yet ultimately, the question of
whether or not these representations embody the “truth”—a subject I probe
from various angles and in multiple contexts throughout this essay—is not,
because of the genre in which the postcards are situated, at the heart of
what is at stake. Unlike common confessional mediums such as
autobiography and memoir, the blog as an anonymous confessional space
blurs the line between testifier and witness, the traumatized and voyeur,
and the victim and consumer of trauma—in fact, it has the potential to
eradicate such fixed identities. As PostSecret postcards simulate reality,
trauma representation on the postcards defy notions of “real” and “truth,”
and invite identification and affect. Thus, anyone—the creator or the
viewer—can use the imagetext as a canvas to represent trauma or
recognize an event as traumatic.
Bringing imagetext into focus

Before beginning the exploration of the postcard as imagetext, it is
necessary to explain the concept of imagetext in more detail. In Picture
Theory (1994), W. J. T. Mitchell claims representations are a result of the
interaction between pictures and texts. “The interaction of pictures and
texts,” he writes, “is constitutive of representation as such: all media are
mixed media, and all representations are heterogeneous; there are no
‘purely’ visual or verbal arts.”11 He defines imagetext as the inextricable
connection of non-discursive language to discursive language, explaining
the manifestation of non-discursive language in textual discourses as
follows:
11
Mitchell 1994, 5.
44 Chapter Two
[T]he pictorial field itself [is] a field understood as a complex medium that
is always already mixed and heterogeneous, situated within institutions,
histories, and discourses: the image understood, in short, as an imagetext.
The appropriate texts for ‘comparison’ with the image need not be fetched
from afar with historicist or systemic analogies. They are already inside the
image, perhaps most deeply when they seem to be most completely absent,
invisible and inaudible.12
Similarly, Mitchell asserts that discursive language is simultaneously non-

discursive language by the very nature of writing. He argues that “‘pure’
texts incorporate visuality quite literally the moment they are written or
printed in visible form.”13 Likewise, discursive language, according to
Mitchell, metaphorically embodies non-discursive language:
The visual representations appropriate to a discourse need not be imported:

they are already immanent in the words, in the fabric of description,
narrative “vision,” represented objects and places, metaphor, formal
arrangements and distinctions of textual functions, even in typography,
paper, binding, or in the physical immediacy of voice and the speaker’s
body.14
Mitchell’s concept of imagetext illustrates the dialogical relationship

between the signified and the signifier. When considering the signified, it
is important also to acknowledge the dialogical relationship between the
discourses embodied in history and in discourses themselves. Mikhail M.
Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism extends Mitchell’s theory of imagetext.
Bakthin explains the dialogical nature of language within a broad context.
Language, Bakhtin claims, is a product of the multiple environments that it
enters and where it is used, and thus consists of multiple social, political,
and historical views and events that cannot be separated. He writes:
The living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a particular

historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush
up against thousands of living dialogic threats, woven by socio-ideological
consciousness around the given object of an utterance; it cannot fail to
become an active participant in social dialogue.15
12
Mitchell 1994, 98.
13
Mitchell 1994, 95.
14
Mitchell 1994, 99.
15
Bakhtin 2008, 288.
The utterance is in constant dialogue with itself as well as with other

utterances and their histories. Exploration of this dialogue, Bakhtin claims,
is essential for understanding a diversified world. Bakhtin’s theory of
dialogism asks us to consider the complex nature of language and to study
language, perspectives, power relations, and cultures that occur within
dialogical relationships. In analyzing images and texts, not only do we
need to resist the common definition of the textual and the visual as
separate and distinct vehicles of representation, but we also need to work
toward a holistic treatment of imagetexts in order to come to a more
complex understanding of representation and the meaning it embodies.
Trauma representation
Imagetext, both in its potential to construct a trauma representation and its
use as a “lens” to read and thus understand trauma, is unique in scholarly
conversations about trauma because it deconstructs the image/text binary
and offers an alternative means to represent and come to know trauma.
Many scholars embrace the binary, arguing that either discursive language
or non-discursive language is most adequate for trauma representation.
Psychoanalyst Dori Laub claims that a person must form discursive,
coherent language—with the help of a listener who acts as a co-participant
in the meaning-making process—to describe the traumatic event.16
Similarly, psychologist Judith Herman claims the traumatized individual
must bear witness and reconstruct the trauma narrative discursively within
a social context “that affirms and protects the victim and that joins the
victim and witness in a common alliance.”17 In opposition, Cathy Caruth, a
literary theorist, claims that trauma can only be depicted “in a language
that is always somehow literary: a language that defies, even as it claims,
our understanding.”18 Toni Morrison agrees, claiming metaphors are most
effective for embodying and conveying the “unspeakable.” According to
Morrison, metaphors are a “way of seeing something, either familiar or
unfamiliar, in a way that you can grasp it.”19 Still other scholars claim
trauma is most adequately represented in images. In Trauma and Visuality
in Modernity (2006), for instance, Lisa Saltzman and Eric Rosenberg state,
“the inability to frame trauma in and of itself lends the form almost
naturally to a process of visualization as expiation.”20
16
Felman and Laub 1992, 57.
17
Herman 1997, 9.
18
Caruth 1996, 5.
19
Quoted in Taylor-Guthrie 1994, 35.
20
Saltzman and Rosenberg 2006, xii.
46 Chapter Two
The most popular medium for the representation of traumatic

experiences today is life writing genres, genres that demand the telling of
“true” experiences, such as autobiography and memoirs. Although these
“truth-telling” narratives give form to absence, and presumably lead to an
understanding of something otherwise incomprehensible, many scholars
argue that life writing genres are nevertheless problematic. For instance,
Wendy Hesford and Leigh Gilmore claim trauma itself defies linear
writing and thus cannot adequately be reflected or represented within
narrative genres. Hence, such established genres that offer traumatized
individuals, or those in “crisis,” a way to represent their “real” experiences
are in fact oppressive. Trauma and violence, Hesford argues, “throw truth-
telling genres into crisis” because the “truth” is unable to be captured.21
The depiction of “real” experiences—characterized as fixed, stable, and
factual—cannot possibly represent a “crisis,” which is characterized by
fragmentation and instability. Hesford identifies the struggle for
representations of crisis or traumatic experiences in genres couched in
truth-telling discourse as the “crisis of the real.”22
Hesford, Gilmore, and Jill Ker Conway also maintain that life writing
genres such as memoir and autobiography emerge from, and are shaped
by, dominant discourses that construct generic identities. Life writing
genres have predetermined structures that consist of pre-established
identity models, or what have been identified as cultural scripts (Hesford),23
archetypal life scripts (Ker Conway), or autobiographical scripts (Gilmore).
According to Gilmore, the autobiography genre forces the writer to mold
his/her experience into these identity scripts. As a result, the writer
represents and embodies a false, generic identity that is socially accepted
and expected. Thus, the reconstruction of trauma narratives in autobiography
not only obscures authentic identity, but also perpetuates a false sense of
what it means to have, to represent, and to bear witness to trauma.
Autobiography, Gilmore contends, also erases the importance of coming
to know one’s trauma and the effects of it. Ultimately, autobiography, in
addition to other life writing genres, silences and oppresses individuals,
and in turn, perpetuates and maintains generic stereotypes.24
21
Hesford and Kozol 2000, 3.
22
Hesford and Kozol 2000, 3.
23
Hesford 2000, 13-14. Hesford specifically refers to rape scripts in this essay. The
term scripts is used to “draw attention to how historical, geopolitical and cultural
struggles, narratives, and fantasies shape the materiality of rape and its
representation.”
24
Gilmore 1994, 25.
In an attempt to offer a less problematic way to tell and hence

understand a traumatic experience, scholars have presented alternative
genres of writing for the representation of trauma. Gilmore advocates the
use of rhetorical strategies—such as writing non-linearly, using hybrid-
writing, and resisting the confessional mode. Naming this genre
“autobiographics,” Gilmore claims this kind of writing will disrupt,
interrupt, and rupture oppressive dominant discourses of truth-telling.
Literary scholar Ellen Brinks advocates writing in the gothic genre, as its
conventions—repetition, fragmentation, return of the repressed and the
uncanny, the feeling of absence, and the lack of coherent narrative—
reflect the nature of trauma itself.25 Ross Chambers claims dual-
autobiography—testimonials that combine a person who suffered the
trauma and someone else who might or might not be explicitly affected—
can function as a means to lead the readers of these texts to a better
understanding and awareness of trauma.26
The use of imagetext as a medium of trauma representation is similar
to that of alternative genres of writing in that it confronts and challenges
oppressive discourses that have historically constructed identities of
traumatized individuals. Yet, in defining texts as images and images as
texts, imagetext as both a medium of representation and a conceptual lens
through which to read trauma representations in general, proves to be an
even more fitting space for trauma expression than alternative genres of
writing. Imagetext captures and encapsulates the language of trauma—
both the “speakable” and “unspeakable”—while simultaneously defining
trauma, its symptoms and effects, and traumatic experiences in relation to,
and in conflict with, dominant discourses. Furthermore, imagetext, unlike
alternative genres of writing, provides multiple epistemological sites and
paths for anyone to (re)construct traumatic experiences and identity. A
close exploration of PostSecret postcards will demonstrate this potential.
PostSecret as imagetext
Although many postcards represent events and situations that may be
considered traumatic, this essay focuses on representations of traumatic
experiences of rape. More specifically, while many PostSecret postcards
that depict the trauma of rape exist, I focus on one particular postcard. My
reasons for doing so are twofold: (1) the close examination and
exploration, that comes through the sustained work with one visual
25
Brinks 2004, 293.
26
Chambers 2004, 380-81.
48 Chapter Two
artifact, allows for the productive scrutiny of the relationship between

language, visuals, and politics,27 and (2) the manifestation of multiple
discourses in the specific postcard under examination is highly evident,
and therefore immensely powerful, in illustrating how imagetext
complicates and extends theories of representation in trauma scholarship.
In this analysis, I do not assume an actual rape victim created the postcard.
I will return to this question of truth and representation later in this essay.
For the present, I am interested in highlighting how the postcard serves as
a representation of how PostSecret’s imagetext—and by extension, the use
of multi-media compositions in virtual spaces—offers a site to help
traumatized individuals come to know trauma.
Fig. [1]
27
Such analysis lends itself to James Elkin’s call for more rigorous analysis in the
field of visual culture. For fuller discussion, see idem 2003, 63.
The PostSecret postcard under analysis (Fig. [1]) is a photograph

seemingly glued to a postcard.28 The photograph depicts a scene on a
beach—beige sand with slate colored water, foaming broken waves in the
distance, and a lone tennis ball sitting in the sand in the foreground. On the
right side of the photograph, there is a figure that appears to be a woman
dressed in green capris pants and a long-sleeved blue shirt. She is barefoot.
The figure’s head and genital region are crossed out multiple times with
what appears to be a thin, black marker. The markings over the genitals
extend beyond the width of this person’s body, thus obliterating other
body parts such as her hands. As a result, both the figure’s face and hands
are obscured. Yet the viewer is faintly able to see the figure’s dark
shoulder-length hair, a feature-less face, and a small part of her neck.
In the foreground of the photograph, there is text written on two white
labels (which are not part of the original pictorial field) that are attached to
the photograph; the text is handwritten in what appears to be the same thin,
black marker that was used to mark the figure. The labels are
approximately one inch apart from one another, of which the bottom
sticker is only a couple of centimeters above the bottom of the photograph.
The top label is situated approximately an inch further to the left than the
bottom label. The text on the top sticker reads: “I hate when ppl. talk about
sex.” The text on the bottom sticker reads: “on the beach as a sexy thing.”
Near the top of the postcard there is text written directly on the surface of
the photograph in the same thin, black marker as the text on the labels. The
text is upside-down and reads: “i was raped on a beach.”
The label text, the text at the top of the photograph, and the figure are
nearly equidistant to one another and although the figure occupies a
smaller space than the text, the viewer’s eye is immediately drawn to the
figure because of the intensity of dark, multiple markings across her face
and genital area. These markings are poignant for several reasons. The
markings are dark scribbles, yet meticulously drawn to black out the
figure’s face and genitals. The inconsistency and darkness of the markings
insinuate that the person who marked the photograph was drawing quickly
and aggressively. This act, in turn, suggests a certain emotive disposition
while marking the photograph—anger, frustration, sadness, rage, grief,
irrationality, pain, sorrow, trauma, and/or confusion. In addition, based on
the way the figure in the photograph is standing, the viewer is expecting to
see the figure’s body in its entirety. However, the markings obscure her
body, leaving the viewer with numerous questions: is that a woman? What
28
Published in Warren 2006.
50 Chapter Two
does she look like? Why are her face and genital area crossed out? What
does the undoctored picture look like?
Yet, the viewer is not drawn only to the figure but to the text as well. In
juxtaposition to the figure, the blog viewer reads the text, presumably the
bottom two stickers first, as they are right-side up. Together they read: “I
hate when ppl. talk about sex on the beach as a sexy thing.” The blog
viewer must angle his/her head in a way that enables him/her to read the
rest of the text—“i was raped on a beach,” which, unlike the other text, is
written directly onto the photograph. The upside down position of the top
text —“i was raped on a beach”—suggests possible reluctance, hesitance,
or fear in declaring this experience. At the same time, the placement of the
statement on the photograph perhaps functions as a rhetorical strategy in
that it imposes the language onto the actual beach scene to emphasize the
happenings of the event or perhaps to “deface” the photograph, a common
perception about manipulated photographs in this society. Here we see a
double defacement—of both the figure and the photograph; moreover, the
idea of manipulated documentation may gesture toward the elusiveness of
truth and even evidence in such cases, a topic I will return to later.
Figurative language—analogy—is used to bear witness to the
experience. Public discourse about the act of sex on the beach is directly
connected to the traumatic experience of rape. If we use the lens of writers
like Caruth and Morrison, the analogy, like a metaphor, suggests the
figurative language embodies and represents the trauma. If we turn our
attention to the figure of the woman and the markings across her body, we
could, like Saltzman and Rosenberg, say that the image contains and
represents the trauma, perhaps leading to an understanding of the event.
Yet, the postcard as imagetext—particularly the language and the image of
the woman’s body—complicates the image-text binary, offering an
opportunity for the exploration of the discourses embedded within the
image and text, and the dialogical interaction among them. The postcard as
imagetext evokes and presents the dominant discourses that have co-opted
trauma representations, as well as the discourses of trauma that challenge
those representations. The exploration of imagetext will reveal how the
text embodies visuals that both define and describe specific discourses that
create a site for the reconstruction of trauma narratives by enabling and
inviting those who have experienced trauma to bear witness. In the
following sections, I will narrow my focus to the imagetext of the figure
and the text “i was raped on the beach,” both of which, I claim, focus the
viewer’s attention on the traumatized individual, and thus embody several
discourses specific to the traumatized person. Although an examination of
the beach scene is important, for the purposes of this essay the exploration
of the figure is more productive for demonstrating the relationship between

imagetext and the representation and (re)construction of trauma narratives.
Dom(i)nant discourses of rape and gender

In the imagetext in question, the handwritten text, which also embodies the
visual, connects the literal words to the traumatized individual; they
literally and figuratively emerge from her being. The visual readings
inspired by the text—“i was raped on a beach”—picture the act of rape
and the environment in which it occurred. We imagine two individuals,
one of whom is physically, emotionally, and mentally violating the other,
and the beach, also evident in the pictorial field, as the location in which
this violation took place. We also see the “I” in “I hate when ppl talk about
sex…on the beach as a sexy thing.” The “I” refers both to the figure in the
pictorial field as well as the “i” in “i was raped on a beach,” and vice
versa. The person who has been raped is situated within a cultural, social,
and historical context, and thereby placed amidst notions of sex, intimacy,
and romance (that connect to broader ideologies and perspectives) to
which many people subscribe. Societal norms and perspectives, in turn,
are situated within her. The confession of rape shatters the collective belief
of the “ppl” (people) to whom the anonymous female postcard-creator
refers as well as her inclusivity in that community.29 The person who has
been sexually violated approaches sex, intimacy, partnership, and romance
from a position different from the “ppl,” a position of one who has
endured a traumatic experience and has potentially suffered cognitive and
linguistic effects of trauma. The woman is seeking an understanding of her
rape within the larger context of trauma discourses. In this imagetext, the
capital I and the lower case i denote both dominant discourses and trauma
discourses (at the heart of which stand individualized narratives of rape),
and the tensions and conflicts between them. Where the dominant
discourses (capital I) offer seemingly fixed ways of seeing the world and
deny personalized interpretive frameworks for understanding trauma, the
trauma discourses (lower case i) potentially offer greater access to and
understanding of an individual’s traumatic experience. The dominant
discourses and trauma discourses in which the individual is immersed, as
represented in this imagetext, are entangled in one another, engaged in a
struggle to construct trauma and identity.
29
In this essay, I focus specifically on females who have been sexually abused, yet
I am aware and sensitive to the fact that boys and men also endure sexual abuse.
52 Chapter Two
The dominant discourses of rape and the raped body, emerging from
the media, politics, and culture, are embodied in this imagetext. The issue
of credibility lies at the center of dominant discourses, as the “truth” of
what occurred is needed to confirm the act of rape. Sometimes people who
experience sexual abuse are viewed with skepticism; their credibility is
often challenged both in the courtroom and in the community.30 Dominant
discourses of rape are couched in criminal justice, truth-telling, and legal
discourses. The rape becomes understood through certain channels: a
crime is evident in that the act is reported, a testimony is required, and,
when officials are involved, court proceedings may follow.31 Thus, just
like any other crime, the “truth” is determined by proof of the incident,
regarding both the act and the people involved. But, of note, the manner in
which this occurs is highly fraught—especially for the victim. Recently, a
former police officer speaking on NPR’s Talk of the Nation said many
police officers (herself excluded) believe “that it’s a victim’s job to prove
they were sexually assaulted”32 from the moment the act is first reported.
Such a demand is likely to cause a victim stress and anxiety. Moreover,
one of the steps taken toward finding proof of the act is through
consideration of rape testimonies, a genre, like all types of trauma
testimonies, that is intimately tied to legal testimony, its characteristics,
and its context.33 A person who has experienced rape gains credibility in
testifying about the rape, whether it be to a police officer, members of the
court, or even in casual conversation with friends or family members, in a
clear and articulate way, coherently narrating the series of events and
telling the story in the same way each time it is retold. But of course here
is where this type of proof becomes complicated. When exploring the
genre of a police report, trauma and feminist scholar Christine Shearer-
30
This skepticism is widely displayed in various communities, and documented in
many sources. Such sources range from victim advocate training manuals, such as
“Excellence in Advocacy: A Victim-Centered Approach at the Ohio Family
Violence Prevention Center,” to judicial workshops, such as The National Judicial
Education Program (NJEP)’s “Understanding Sexual Violence: Prosecuting Adult
Rape and Sexual Assault Cases,” to television reports, memoirs, and newspaper
and magazine articles that narrate circumstances where the credibility of a girl or a
woman has been challenged by family members, friends, the law, or other
community member, such as a recent Ms. Magazine story, “The New York Times
Puts Another Alleged Rape Victim on Trial” (Hallett 2011).
31
Shearer-Cremean 2004, 178.
32
Archambault 2011.
33
Gilmore 1994, 5.
Cremean discusses the complication for demanding such a narrative, as

linear narratives conflict with trauma symptoms.34
The need for a person who has experienced rape to prove one’s
credibility and provide proof of a rape is so embedded in the cultural
fabric of this society that countless Internet forums exist where people
discuss ways to prove that they have been raped, mostly when physical
evidence, such as bruises, is absent. In the same vein, the End Violence
Against Women International (EVAWI) recently launched the Start by
Believing campaign—a campaign “dedicated to improving the criminal
justice response to violence against women on every level.”35 The
campaign encourages all people that play a role in “the many steps a
survivor must take on the road to justice and healing,” including police
officers, doctors, nurses, family members, and friends, to trust rather than
doubt or question when told of a sexual abuse situation. The very existence
of such a campaign reveals that questioning a survivor’s credibility is a
normalized practice in this society. Of course, when searching for “truth,”
in a number of situations, the act of questioning has benefits. But the
situation of rape victims provides a special case in which questioning can
be debilitating, particularly when it comes to the pursuit of justice, as well
as the mental healing of the victim.
In looking at the relationship between credibility and language,
dominant social and cultural discourses that are shaped by institutionalized
patriarchal structures also contextualize the dominant discourse of rape in
a plethora of ways: the historical identity of women as “irrational” (often
times associated with menstruation); the historical and present-day
oppression and silencing of women (literally and metaphorically)—in the
home, workplace, and public space; the historical notion of woman as
property (dowries); the social and cultural perpetuation of the erasure of
woman’s subjectivity (“I now pronounce you man and wife” at marriage
ceremonies; “Mr. and Mrs. Tom Jones”); and the nature of heterosexual
sex—the woman perceived as the receiver, the passive partner, and the
man defined as the giver, the dominant partner. Furthermore, patriarchal
discourses have imposed identities on those who have experienced rape—
“victim,” “survivor,” “martyr”—a person who wants and needs empathy,
34
Shearer-Cremean 2004.
35
End Violence Against Women International (EVAWI), 2011, http://www.
startbybelieving.org/AboutTheCampaign.aspx. This organization is made up of
victim advocates who hold training sessions, webinars, and conferences in an
effort to educate a wide range of professionals who respond to women who have
experienced violence. The board consists of fourteen individuals in various fields,
including law, medicine, publishing, and consulting.
54 Chapter Two
sympathy, or pity. These identity labels, particularly that of “survivor” and

“victim,” according to Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray-Rosendale in “Survivor
Discourse: Transgression and Recuperation,” at times, perpetuate the
dominant discourse of patriarchy and thus function to uphold the
historically patriarchal, dominant roles of men in this society.36
As these varied patriarchal discourses inform the dominant discourse of
rape, the issue of credibility plays a significant role in how dominant
culture silences, disembodies, and (re)defines the identity of traumatized
individuals. As people who experience trauma are often unable to
reconnect fragmented language and recollections—and consequently
fragmented narratives of their own experience—of trauma, they often lose
credibility. If a traumatized person were to report the act of rape to
authorities, to friends, or even to family members, the possible inability to
describe what happened lends itself to the reception of skeptical questions:
why can’t you describe what actually happened? You’re not making
sense—what are you saying?37 Similarly, the inability to remember
portions of the traumatic experience also evokes questions such as: what
do you mean you cannot remember? Why don’t you know what he looks
like? Are you really sure this happened? Weren’t you with your friends?
With rape cases, this is particularly problematic as the perpetrator does not
possess the same symptoms and thus is able to articulate what often times
are lies. Regarding this aspect Judith Herman writes:
After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies
(from the perpetrator): it never happened; the victim lies; the victim
exaggerates; the victim brought it upon herself; and in any case it is time to
forget the past and move on.38
The symptoms of trauma, fragmented language, and obstruction of

memory certainly contribute to how dominant rape discourse has been
constructed to entail a position of distrust of the alleged victim. In turn, the
dominant discourse of rape, which is symbolically embedded in the
imagetext under analysis, serves to further silence traumatized individuals,
as they are afraid of being accused of lying or are incapable of
remembering. The possible inability to remember or explain the rape in
combination with those asking why an individual cannot remember, could
lead the traumatized person to potentially question herself: did I actually
want it? Maybe it was just sex. I did really like him. Did this really
36
Alcoff and Gray-Rosedale 1993, 266-68.
37
Alcoff and Gray-Rosedale 1993, 266-68
38
Herman 1997, 8.
happen? Maybe I am exaggerating. Maybe I am making a big deal out of

nothing. Even if a traumatized individual is able to “prove” herself—either
through physical evidence, dominant autobiographical scripts, or after the
process of working to reclaim memories, the dominant cultural discourses
often still work to define the experience, and at the same time, silence and
erase the traumatized individual. The media and the public contribute to
descriptions of rape as horrific, horrendous, tragic, oppressive, violent, and
brutal. The woman becomes victimized, tainted—she will never be the
same again. High profile rape cases stand the risk of transforming both the
raped person and the incident into a spectacle,39 resulting in the
consumption, commodification, and exploitation of one’s trauma, as well
as possible repeat trauma.
The dominant discourses dictate a raped person’s subjectivity—how
she feels about herself, her body, her emotions, and her place in the world.
Her social identity is that of a “victim” who is literally and metaphorically
confined to her victimization. The traumatized individual is expected to be
irrational, upset, devastated, emotionally unstable, or helpless and
hopeless. Her body is violated, transformed into the site of rape, and as a
result, she loses possession of it. Her victimization aligns her with other
victims of violence, and possibly even all “victims”—people who lose a
sense of self or control due to a situation, experience, or another person or
groups of people that renders them helpless. Although the subjectivity and
social identity of the traumatized individual might be socially constructed,
it is very important to note that it is possible—and even quite likely—that
the traumatized individual does truly feel some, and maybe even all, of the
emotion society projects on her. Yet, my intention in acknowledging the
social construction of trauma and the subjectivity of the traumatized
individuals is to highlight the way dominant discourses create essentialist
39
The Central Park rape in New York City in 1989 is a strong example of a high
profile rape case. Trisha Meili, a 29-year old investment banker was raped, beaten,
and nearly killed in Central Park, and at the time, five black teenagers confessed to
the assault. In this particular rape case, the newspapers carefully recounted every
detail of the rape, with particular attention paid to racial identities. The embedded
discourse of racism and power relations rose to the surface as people asked: would
this case be so highly publicized if the perpetrators were white? Would this case be
so highly publicized if the raped woman was black? The “spectacle” of the Central
Park rape case prompted examination of media (and society in general) and racism,
which of course is an essential exploration, yet at the same time, this attention
obscured and silenced Meili. The five men were convicted and served sentences
from seven to eleven years. In an interesting turn of events, Matais Reyes, a
convicted serial rapist confessed to the assault in 2002, claiming he was the only
perpetrator. The convictions of the five young men were overturned.
56 Chapter Two
identities and thus erase the person who has endured trauma and the
effects it has.
D(I)scourses of trauma, language, and identity

The imagetext under exploration embodies understandings of trauma and
trauma representation that have been neglected, ignored, or erased in
dominant discourses. The postcard as imagetext functions as a “contact
zone” or, in the words of Mary Louise Pratt, a space where dominant
discourses and trauma discourses “meet, clash, and grapple with each
other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power.”40 The
engagement of these multiple, conflicting discourses reveals that the
absence of trauma discourses perpetuates oppressive identity scripts and
domineering avenues of representation. The presence of trauma discourses
exposes, disrupts, and dismantles these oppressive forces, as they offer
knowledge about trauma and the complexity of its representation. As this
knowledge informs visuals and texts, imagetext functions to represent
trauma in a way that resists pre-established identity scripts.
In analyzing the postcard as imagetext, the central discourses of trauma
most obviously manifest in the figure, which directly confronts the
dominant discourses that claim language and identity are not affected by
trauma. The Xs across her genital area and face mark a raped body—she is
biologically, mentally, and literally erased. She is a fractured and
fragmented being. The marks strip the woman of her subjectivity and
identity; she is unidentifiable both to herself and the world. She is
someone different, someone unrecognizable. The X marks across her face
reveal that the experience has potentially left her without voice and
language, a symptom of trauma. The upside-down, lower case “i”—the
identity of the traumatized individual—and the “I”—the identity
constructed by dominant discourses—represent the tension in identity
construction, the struggle in representing an identity that has been altered
by an experience and shaped by dominant discourses.
The suggestion that the person who has endured trauma is left
linguistically paralyzed and with a fractured identity evokes questions
about “true” events and “real” representations. The normalized understandings
of “truth” and “reality” are directly associated with stable, linear, coherent
language and a confirmed understanding of the experience. Trauma
discourses, by contrast, expose that “reality” cannot be represented within
the dominant frameworks, as events that are defined as traumatic resist
40
Pratt 1991, 34.
“truth-telling.” The inability to tell the truth eradicates the possibility for
accurate or authentic representation of the event. The imagetext depicts
resistance to dominant discourses or constructed identities as it proclaims
the “unspeakable”—i was raped on the beach—and confronts accusations
of credibility by clearly identifying the “what” and “where” of the
experience. The imagetext suggests voice and language can be regained
and reclaimed, both from dominant discourses as well as the traumatic
experience itself via mediums such as imagetext.
The postcard as imagetext creates space for discourses of traumatic
memory, calling attention to their absence in dominant discourses and
their role in (re)constructing and representing identity. The dominant
discourses of rape have historically defied the means for reclamation of
experience and identity by eradicating or not acknowledging the complex
role memory plays in understanding and representing the “real.” Memories
live in the body, in places, and in time, and thus in the imagetext under
analysis, memories are contained in the figure, the pictorial field, the
beach, and the event itself. The knowledge that memories embody both the
locational and the temporal is crucial to understanding trauma
representations. Discourses of traumatic memory enable and invite those
who have been traumatized to take ownership of their past and identity, as
memories—whether they are records, recollections, or fragments of an
event—are subjective and unique to individuals. Therefore, they cannot by
nature be “written” or “recollected” by anyone but the individual. The
ownership of memories, in this case, reclaims traumatic experiences from
oppressive dominant discourses that force traumatized individuals to
forget or deem them incapable of remembering, hence suggesting
memories do not exist. In reclaiming memory, the imagetext might also
function as a way to bring recognition to traumatic memories, and perhaps
help a person who has experienced trauma reconnect disjointed
memories—a possibility that is embodied in the imagetext “i was raped on
the beach.” Most importantly, imagetext offers a way to communicate,
express, and represent trauma—the event and effects from the event—by
identifying where it lives, a concept I will explore momentarily.
In Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (2000), Edward Casey
explains that traumatic memories are marginalized memories that have
been pushed to the periphery of one’s consciousness. Traumatic memories,
according to Casey, recede with time because remembering or reliving the
traumatic experience is traumatic in itself, and often times, the memory
turns into re-creations. Therefore, rather than draw on the marginalized,
fragmented memories of trauma and thus experience repeated trauma, a
58 Chapter Two
person might develop a narrative about the experience.41 These narratives,

however, rely on pre-established forms; they are, I would argue, cultural
scripts birthed directly from dominant discourses. Such narratives obscure
the happenings of the event that produced cognitive, emotional, and
mental effects, and more importantly, they obscure how traumatic events
deny such narratives. That is, these re-creations disregard the very failures
inherent in narratives of pre-established forms.
The imagetext, by contrast, calls attention to potential manifestations of
traumatic memories in the body, indicating their fragmented nature and
thus revealing their inability to be articulated. This form of representation
embraces rather than denies the lack of a cohesive narrative. Simultaneously
and perhaps surprisingly, the body, itself informed by discourses of
memory, represents an avenue for expressing trauma without having to
relive the event. Casey explains that traumatic memories first and foremost
live in the body and hence, Casey claims “there is no memory without
body memory.”42 Roberta Culbertson echoes Casey:
The memory of trauma, or the knowledge of things past, is not merely of a

wild and skewed time inaccessible except on its own terms, either in
“flashbacks” or “neuroses” or in the form of the numb survivor self, but
also the memory of other levels of reality, sense not even by the fives
sense, but by the body itself.43
The marks across the figure in the pictorial field of the postcard literalize a
representation of a fragmented person; she is defaced, desexed, and
degendered. Her body, and by extension, her memories, and the language
connected to those memories, are no longer whole.
The imagetext reveals the connection between traumatic memories in
the body to place memory, actual spaces or locations that function as
“containers” where memory and time are held together.44 Casey defines
place as a “keeper of memories…one of the main ways by which the past
comes to be secured in the presence held in things before us and around
us.”45 A particular place, like the beach on the postcard, holds and has the
potential to evoke certain memories that are appropriate for different kinds
of remembering—visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. The imagetext as a
vehicle of trauma representation has the potential for an exposure or
41
Casey 2000, 164.
42
Casey 2000, 172.
43
Culbertson 1995, 176.
44
Casey 2000, 215.
45
Casey 2000, 213.
acknowledgement of possible sites of traumatic memory manifestation,

indicating where fragmentary memories might be held and suggesting
possible ways to reconnect them and the language that describes them.
Imagetext offers an avenue for a traumatized person to feel, see, sense, and
live the trauma—without actually experiencing it again. Via imagetext, a
person who has experienced trauma can bear witness and thus ultimately
come to know his/her trauma or something about it.
A photograph that functions as a postcard in itself evokes discourses of
memory tied to representations of the “real.” Historically, photographs are
understood as documents that capture and freeze a moment in time, sites
that encapsulate and can later be used to evoke memories. Photographs
make the “real” transparent. From crime scenes to paparazzi sightings,
photographs are used as evidence that denote the truth, proving something
true or false, real or fake. Roland Barthes explains that photographs are not
“real” in the sense that they exist in the present; rather, they capture
something “that-has-been,” something that existed in reality in the past
and cannot be repeated.46 The photograph, Barthes claims, cannot be
detached from its referent.
Some scholars refute the idea that photographs are “real” in any way,
and through such a lens, the medium of the PostSecret postcard under
analysis, a photograph (which is appended to a postcard), disrupts
discourses of truth-telling and dominant discourses in general. In “Looking
at Photographs,” Victor Burgin says photographs do not have a fixed
meaning. Strongly echoing Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism and directly in
line with my reading of imagetext, Burgin explains that a photograph is a
“complex site of intertextuality,” a text that has engaged with multiple
texts in and across time.47 In simple terms, photographs are rhetorical, and
can be manipulated in such a way as to construct meaning. The photograph
tells a version of the “truth,” or in other words, a representation—whether it
is a re-creation or a copy—of a traumatic experience while at the same
time, resists the assumption that the event is “true” or “real.” Just like the
creator, the viewer, who I will focus on in the next section of this essay,
will hold power in the construction of meaning.
46
Barthes 1982, 4; 76-77.
47
Burgin 1982, 144.
60 Chapter Two
Confessions:
The role of the blogger and blog viewer
The reading of PostSecret postcards as imagetext on a blog brings a new
dimension to discussions of “truth-telling,” confessionals, representation
in general, and trauma representation specifically. Interestingly, just like
an autobiography or memoir, a blog is what can be categorized as a “truth-
telling,” or confessional, genre.48 Thus, the PostSecret project is a “truth-
telling” genre made up of confessional postcards that are situated within a
“truth-telling” genre, a blog. As explored throughout this essay, the
dialogical engagement of dominant discourses and discourses of trauma in
the postcard under examination work to disrupt the notion of “true” and
“real” representations of trauma. The medium of the blog further
complicates “real” representations and the possibility of trauma
representation, as the traumatic experience, simulated in its existence on
the Internet, challenges “reality” as we know it and presents a pathway for
viewers to shape an identity.
A blog, by its very nature, invites people to share their lives,
experiences, and opinions. Bloggers display personal information or share
their thoughts, ideas, and observations. Bloggers ask viewers to engage
with them via blog posts and hyperlinks.49 In many cases, the blog, in
addition to many other mediums like tabloid magazines, reality television
shows, and talk shows like Jerry Springer, functions as a platform for both
exhibitionism and voyeurism. Our culture, according to Clay Calvert in
Voyeur Nation, is obsessed with watching other people and knowing the
“truth” about their lives. He identifies this social phenomenon as
“mediated voyeurism,” which he defines as follows:
The consumption of revealing images of, and information about, others’

apparently real and unguarded lives, often, yet now always, for purposes of
entertainment but frequently at the expense of privacy and discourse,
through the means of the mass media and Internet.50
In “Blogging as Social Action,” Carolyn Miller claims that voyeurism has

“become synonymous with information access and the public’s right to
know. Seeing is knowing, not just believing.”51 Exposure and consumption
48
Several scholars such as David Weinberger (2002) or Carolyn Miller and Dawn
Shepherd (2004) characterize blogs as confessional in nature.
49
Blood 2000.
50
Calvert 2000, 3.
51
Miller and Shepherd 2004 (emphasis in original).
of “real” life events through mediation have come to prove that which is
“real.” Yet, as Miller claims, mediation has transformed what constitutes
the “real.” Drawing on Baudrillard’s concept of simulacrum, Miller argues
that the social phenomenon of voyeurism in present-day culture transforms
the “real” into a copy of reality—“rather than representing the real, the
simulation constitutes the real.”52
Voyeurism, the act of consuming mediated simulations, and
exhibitionism, revealing one’s personal experiences, are often characterized
as perverse, sexual, and even pornographic in nature, yet are not, in
actuality, always so. In fact, Calvert claims that most “mediated
voyeurism” is neither sordid nor sexual. Rather, voyeurs watch others in
order to: (1) build community; (2) have companionship (particularly for
those that have difficulty interacting with humans face-to-face); (3) be
entertained; (4) feel a sense of power and self-esteem (to see other
people’s tragedies, problems, or issues and feel better about one’s own
life); (5) ease loneliness; (6) help people understand their role in society;
(7) sympathize or empathize; (8) ask people to reflect on how they might
handle a similar situation; (9) identify with others; (10) occupy one’s time;
and finally, (11) know the “truth”—watch people live in an “unscripted”
and “realistic” environment.53 The consumption of others’ “real” lives
fulfills a need for people to enter into the lives of others, to “try” on
various identities, to understand one’s own identity, and to confirm and
affirm one’s own life experiences.54 Voyeurs can do all of these things
from a “safe” distance in a safe “place”—at their home, while surfing the
Internet for example, without any human interaction.55
Although Calvert claims “mediated voyeurism” is mostly sexually
benign, there are countless confessional blogs and forums on the Internet
that cannot be described as such, e.g., “adultconfessions.com” (eighteen
years old and over), “unburdened.net,” “noteful.com,” “subtleconfessions
.com,” “confessionpost.com,” “anoymousvoices.com,” or “roofessions
.com.” Many websites seemingly pride themselves on inviting what one
could call “perverse” voyeurism and exhibitionism, and as a result, these
sites transform trauma into spectacle. For example, “unburdened.net,”
which was unveiled in 2006, is described as “raw, unedited and frequently
disturbing,” and warns that “viewer discretion is recommended for all
confessions.”56 Similarly, “noteful.com,” a site where exhibitionists and
52
Miller and Shepherd 2004. For further discussion, see Baudrillard 1988, 166-84.
53
Calvert 2000, 53-57; 60-71.
54
Conway 1999, 17.
55
Calvert 2000, 66.
56
Anonymous Confessions, http://www.unburdened.net.
62 Chapter Two
voyeurs can buy sex toys, challenges viewers to post the most scandalous
or shocking secrets, stating: “Is your secret unheard of? Is it too dark to
mention? We doubt it, try us!”57 Such sites will appear wholly perverse,
disturbing, and offensive to some. For example, several people on
noteful.com confess and describe incestuous encounters in great detail,
using graphic language to describe invited or uninvited sexual acts. The
viewers rate the confessions, and although they have no shared criteria to
do so, it nevertheless seems that the more sexual or scandalous the post,
the higher the rating. This is likely behavior that many would find
objectionable, even degrading.
To some extent, PostSecret confessional postcards, like the one under
analysis in this essay, can beckon and perpetuate perverse voyeurism and
exhibitionism. Yet as this article shows, when read as imagetext, the
PostSecret blog and its confessional postcards invite forms of voyeurism
that have the potential to help people identify events as traumatic,
understand trauma experiences, (re)construct identity, and form a support
system, as many blogs do, for living with trauma. Unlike other
confessional blogs, the PostSecret project complicates the traditional
mediated confessional mode and blurs the identity of the blogger. The
PostSecret postcard creator is not composing a confession on the computer
nor actually going to a virtual confessional site. The anonymous confessor
is one step removed from the process of blogging. Frank Warren or his
employees are confessional mediators: they decide which confessions are
scanned and posted to the blog. They also control the nature and number
of comments on the postcards; rather than use the comment feature
common on most blogs, viewers must email comments directly to the
organization. Therefore, the blogger—the presumed exhibitionist—is
blurred, complicating his/her role in this genre. In fact, bloggers, Miller
claims, are “less interested in role playing than in locating, or constructing
for themselves and for others, an identity that they can understand as
unitary, as ‘real.’”58 Following this, it is possible that the PostSecret
postcard creators want to construct a “real” identity for themselves and
others. On the other hand, it is equally possible that their goal is to produce
creative artifacts with outrageous secrets for a hope of seeing it on the blog
Sunday morning. Similarly, one can wonder if perhaps Warren chooses the
postcards based on those who he thinks are the most “real”—the most
likely to accomplish a goal of creating community and using the postcards
57
Noteful.com, http://www.noteful.com/publicportal/Home.aspx.
58
Miller and Shepherd 2004.
to help others articulate secrets they might be “keeping from

themselves.”59
Yet, in postcards that depict trauma, the fact of whether or not they are
“real” does not, in the end, matter. Imagetexts do not simply function as a
way for one person to represent a traumatic experience. Rather, they
function as rhetorical epistemological avenues of identity (re)construction
for anyone—voyeurs, exhibitionists, PostSecret employees, and even
postal workers—through affect, identification, and the engagement of
multiple, competing discourses. The avenues do not impose autobiographical
scripts nor fill-in-the-blank identity categories, as each person will “read”
the imagetext in a different way and (re)construct an identity or a fragment
of an identity that he or she sees fit at a particular moment in time within a
particular social context. As a result, the viewer can enact similar
functions as a blogger, building a representation of an event that shapes
ideas about him/herself and others. Although one might argue that
imagetexts equally stand the risk of defining experiences or dictating how
people might understand an experience, compared to other forms of
expression, they have greater potential to more fully succeed in
constructing identity; this occurs precisely because they create a socially
contextualized space that houses competing, conflicting forces—namely
dominant discourses and trauma discourses.
In the postcard examined as imagetext in this essay, the images and the
discourses embodied in the images and texts, as well as the photograph
and manipulation of the photograph ask voyeurs to feel emotion.
According to Charles Hill in the “The Psychology of Visual Images,” the
associations with these facets trigger mental images and emotional
responses.60 The figure of the woman on the beach creates a realistic—or
what psychologists might call a vivid—scenario. Consequently, according
to Hill, viewers are likely to feel more emotion than they would perhaps
from reading a description of a rape in a memoir or autobiography.61 Also,
the photograph itself has the potential to trigger what Barthes calls the
punctum. The punctum, which is a Latin word derived from the Greek for
trauma, is a detail in a photograph that “pricks” or “wounds” a viewer.62
Appropriately named, the punctum is not easily communicable in
language; it is, rather, an unexpected feeling that moves the viewer in a
particular way. The punctum is subjective, thus not everyone will react in
the same way to photographs or details in photographs. This feeling,
59
Warren 2005, 2.
60
Hill 2004, 31.
61
Hill 2004, 31.
62
Barthes 1982, 26-27
64 Chapter Two
Barthes explains, is dependent upon one’s lived experiences. The punctum

is metonymic, and thus can function as a way to define something or
someone.63 A PostSecret blog viewer who has endured trauma may
encounter this “lightning-like” feeling and experience it as an invitation to
construct meaning of his own while interacting and engaging with the
postcards. Emotive responses also spur vivid and strong memories of that
which evoked the emotions. Thus, a PostSecret viewer who is left with a
lasting impression may be prompted to reflect on the postcard, and the
associations, discourses, feelings, and experiences that manifest in the
imagetext. These emotions, particularly those of empathy and sympathy,
have the potential to create connection between the viewer and the
postcard. The voyeur who looks at the postcards in this way, as Calvert
suggests, could perhaps “try on” the identity she thinks is being
constructed via the postcard, or use the postcard as a way to “affirm or
“reaffirm” her own life experiences, or reconnect a fragmented identity.
Furthermore, affect is connected to memory and remembering, and
thus the postcard as imagetext could stimulate the viewer’s memories,
guiding her in recognizing, accessing, or even “feeling” memories,
perhaps traumatic memories stored inside the body. The prompting of
bodily memories also has the potential to evoke place, space, and time
memories. The memories could work to help the viewer understand a
happening in his/her own life or his/her selfhood. The viewer might also
reclaim memories that have been severed from language, which, as we
already know, many scholars argue is the means to represent, come to
know, and thus communicate traumatic experience. Directly connected to
affect, the postcard as imagetext invites identification as it offers viewers a
familiar site (and sight)—the beach; a familiar medium—a photograph
that captures a particular moment in time; a familiar discourse—sex on the
beach; and a familiar (at least insofar as this is a term all are familiar with)
traumatic experience—rape. The viewer, like that which is connoted by
the figure on the beach, is a living body; one who might feel disconnected
or fragmented at times. Identification brings forth a sense of collective
experience, or at least the recognition that shared experiences do exist. The
communal sharing of what is or what could potentially be offers an avenue
for constructing a community, albeit a virtual community. The sense of
community—despite viewers’ remote and passive participation—could be
comforting to those who cannot yet speak about a traumatic experience,
are unable to trust others to share their experiences, or have shame about
traumatic events. Participation in a community might encourage or assist
63
Barthes 1982, 45.
viewers in more clearly understanding their identity, affirming their

experiences, or building an aspect of identity that has not yet been
understood. Such community also has the potential to help those who have
not experienced trauma develop compassion for those who have, and
perhaps encourage thoughtful consideration of the effects of trauma.
Concluding remarks
Imagetext and its use as a medium of trauma representation extends
trauma scholarship, as it deconstructs the image-text binary and reveals the
value in imagining texts as images and images as texts in the representation
and (re)construction of trauma narratives. Imagetext reveals that language
is not one-dimensional; language is both textual and visual, and embodies
struggling, contentious discourses and histories. It fosters layers of
meaning-making spaces and provides various avenues and options for the
reconnection of severed connections related to trauma and trauma
representation. These connections include the noted language-memory
fracture identified in common definitions of trauma, and the dominant
discourse/trauma discourse disconnection that has historically erased
trauma and silenced those who have experienced the trauma. The
construction of a representation can help bring understanding to crucial
(yet also, sometimes, elusive if not buried) life experiences, awareness to
the role of society in defining such experiences, and ultimately can aid in
(re)building one’s subjectivity. In addition, imagetext has the potential to
guide viewers in recognizing the tensions that exist between dominant
scripted identities and actual or individualized identities of those who have
experienced trauma. Both identification and emotive responses from
imagetexts evoke cultural and social contexts, histories, and values that are
constructed by dominant discourses.64 The possible identification of this
tension and of the oppressive forces of dominant discourses might help
viewers understand identity as a rhetorical social construct, which may
prompt reflective practices that could assist in identity and memory
reclamation.
Lastly, imagetext in virtual spaces, such as a blog, offers many
people—not just the person who constructed the representation—the
opportunity to form community and create their own representation. The
sense of community that PostSecret as imagetext fosters, as well as our
knowledge about dominant discourses, trauma discourses, and the
relationship between the two, reveals that the site has the potential to
64
Hill 2004, 34.
66 Chapter Two
function as a space for political and social change. Although many might
argue mediation breeds passivity which breeds inaction, the postcards as
imagetext can also encourage social action. The PostSecret project has the
potential to function similarly to survivors’ movement rallies or
demonstrations like “Take Back the Night,” as it works to bring awareness
to trauma and traumatic events, and encourages people to “break the
silence,” bear witness to their trauma, and share stories about their
experiences for purposes of empowerment and confrontation of violence.
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Kelly, Anita E. 2002. The Psychology of Secrets. New York: Kluwer
Academic / Plenum.
Miller, Carolyn R. and Dawn Shepherd. 2004 “Blogging as Social Action.”
Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs
(online collection), edited by Laura Gurak et al.
<http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/blogging_as_social_action.html>
Mitchell, W. J. T. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual
Representation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Pratt, Mary Louise. 1991. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession 91: 33-
40.
68 Chapter Two
Saltzman, Lisa and Eric Rosenberg, eds. 2006. Trauma and Visuality in
Modernity. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press.
Shearer-Cremean, Christine. 2004. “The Epistemology of Police Science
and the Silencing of Battered Women.” In Survivor Rhetoric:
Negotiations and Narrativity in Abused Women’s Language, edited by
Christine Shearer-Cremean and Carol Winkelmann, 166-96. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
Taylor-Guthrie, Danielle. 1994. Conversations with Toni Morrison.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Warren, Frank. 2005. PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from
Ordinary Lives. New York: HarperCollins.
—. 2006. My Secret: A PostSecret Book. New York: HarperCollins.
—. 2007a. A Lifetime of Secrets: A PostSecret Book. New York: William
Morrow
—. 2007b. The Secret Lives of Men and Women: A PostSecret Book. New
York: Regan.
—. 2009. PostSecret: Confessions on Life, Death, and God. New York:
William Morrow.
Weinberger, David. 2002. Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory
of the Web. Cambridge, MA: Perseus.
CHAPTER THREE
DIFFICULT ARTICULATIONS:
COMICS AUTOBIOGRAPHY,
TRAUMA, AND DISABILITY
DALE JACOBS AND JAY DOLMAGE
By examining Stitches, David Small’s 2009 graphic memoir of medical

trauma, we seek to understand comics memoir in general and comics
memoirs of trauma and disability in particular. Drawing on theories of
comics, multimodality, autobiography, trauma, and disability studies, we
explore these “difficult articulations” as a way to examine how both self
and trauma/disability are constructed in the multimodal textual space of a
comics memoir. While autobiography may not be the genre that most
people associate with comics, autobiographical comics have been an
important form of comics since the underground movement of the late
1960s and early 1970s. In an overview of the field entitled “Autography’s
Biography, 1972-2007,” Jared Gardner traces the current production of
autobiographical comics to the 1972 publication of Justin Green’s Binky
Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, usually seen as the first piece of long-
form autobiography in comics form.1 Like many prose autobiographies,
these graphic narratives often deal with trauma and traumatic events;
unlike prose autobiographies, comics draw on images as well as words to
construct identity and convey meaning to the reader.
In traditional prose memoirs of trauma, such as Alice Sebold’s Lucky
(1999), Dorothy Allison’s Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (1995), or
Aron Ralston’s 127 Hours: Between a Rock and a Hard Place (2004),
language bears the burden of representing what is unimaginable and of
providing an avenue towards “healing” for the trauma survivor. As Leigh
Gilmore explains, what is crucial to the experience of trauma are “the self-
altering, even self-shattering experience of violence, injury, and harm” and
1
Gardner 2008, 7.
70 Chapter Three
“the multiple difficulties that arise in trying to articulate it.”2 She goes on
to write, “Language is asserted as that which can realize trauma even as it
is theorized as that which fails in the face of trauma.”3 Traditional
memoirs of disability also bear the burden of challenging a normative
culture as they confront the normative tropes of narrative. How do you
make the unique, embodied experience of trauma or disability accessible
to the reader? The answer, all too often, is that memoirs of trauma and
disability fail to trouble norms of representation or norms of representing.
Both trauma and disability share the curious problem of being seemingly
ineffable and individuated, yet also over-determined. Despite Gilmore’s
arguments for the necessity to look beyond the claims of language with
regard to trauma memoir, she nonetheless succinctly articulates a central
problem of not only memoirs of trauma, but of all memoirs, including
those involving disability: how do we construct from our memories the
normative shape of narrative?
But what if language were not the only resource available to the
memoirist? Would new possibilities for articulation open? Or would the
difficulties simply multiply and layer? Multimodal texts such as comics
draw on not only linguistic signs, but also visual, gestural, spatial, audio,
and multimodal (the combination of all of the aforementioned) systems of
signs. The available resources expand, just as possibilities and difficulties
proliferate.
What is the story of David Small’s disease and disability? The simple
version is that he had asthma as a child and then cancer, the treatment of
which damaged his vocal chords. A simple way to explain David Small’s
trauma is to note that his father exposed him to excessive radiation in
trying to treat his asthma, causing him to develop cancer, a crucial fact that
his parents hid from him. You could say that his disease caused disability
which caused trauma. Or, you could say his trauma was disabling.
However, through this narrative itself, we see that disease, disability, and
trauma are much more complicated and interrelated. There is no certain
way to trace the causal relationships between these three things and, as we
shall see, the available resources for representing these intersecting
phenomena are extremely complex. As such, comics represent a rich but
fraught medium for mapping the ways that bodies are shaped by disability
and trauma—and also how they might re-shape these experiences. The
shaping-by is powerful but not impossible to subvert; the shaping-of is
potentially rich, but exponentially fraught.
2
Gilmore 2001, 6.
3
Gilmore 2001, 7.
Difficult Articulations: Comics Autobiography, Trauma, and Disability 71
Comic selves
As Charles Hatfield argues in Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature
(2005), today’s alternative comics—including autobiographical comic
books4 such as Joe Matt’s Peepshow, Ed Brubaker’s Lowlife, Chester
Brown’s Yummy Fur, and Julie Doucet’s Dirty Plotte—owe much to the
work of underground creators such as Green, Robert Crumb, Gilbert
Shelton, and Trina Robbins.5 Green’s Binky Brown may be the first
extended piece of comics autobiography, but it must be noted that Crumb
included many autobiographical elements in his comics of the 1960s, a
practice on which Green simply extended with Binky Brown. Moreover,
Crumb realized the potential of using the standard-size comic book format,
with its accompanying expectations and associations, as a medium of
critique within which creators could work against the expectations of the
form. In his work and that of other underground creators, form and content
were inseparable. Creators of underground comics were not constrained by
the mainstream comics industry with its division of labor (with writing,
penciling, lettering, inking, and coloring all performed by different
people), adherence to a restrictive Comics Code, and focus on profit, thus
freeing them to explore a variety of topics and genres, including
autobiography.6 These serialized memoirs often deal with the private and
painfully intimate, focusing on issues such as dead-end jobs, relationships,
and sex as they relate to each creator’s life. While there are still many
examples of such serialized work published through small and
independent presses, comics memoir is now often published by major
publishing houses in the form of original graphic novels, prominent
examples of which include Alison Bechdel’s 2006 Fun Home (from
Houghton Mifflin) and Small’s Stiches (from Norton). Such publications
are marketed to a much broader audience and sold in bookstores and not
solely in comics specialty stores. Rather than drawing on the form of the
comic book and the associations that adhere to it, these comics
autobiographies use the multimodality inherent in the comics form, but
4
By “comic books”, we refer to the material artifact of the serialized, center-
stapled pamphlet. When we refer to “comics,” we are referring to the medium
itself.
5
Hatfield 2005, 3-31.
6
After 1954, most publishers agreed to submit voluntarily to the Comics Code
Authority, a code of standards that curbed depictions of violence, crime, and
sexuality. The Code is generally seen as a stifling force on the development of
comics. For more on the institution of the Comics Code and its effect on the
industry, see Nyberg 1998 and Wright 2001.
72 Chapter Three
also remediate themselves on the prose autobiography, the genre with

which the broader audience to which they are marketed will be most
familiar.
In both comics and prose, autobiography and memoir currently
represent an important segment of the publishing industry, a trend that can
be seen in bestseller lists, bookstore displays, and newspaper coverage.
While the rise in prominence of life writing, like the rise in reality
television, has gained momentum over the last fifteen years, autobiography
and the theory surrounding it has, of course, a much longer history. One of
the first theorists of autobiography, Georges Gusdorf, famously (and
androcentrically) argued the following in his 1956 essay “Conditions and
the Limits of Autobiography”:
The author of an autobiography gives himself the job of narrating his own
history; what he sets out to do is to reassemble the scattered elements of his
individual life and to regroup them in a comprehensive sketch. […] The
author of a private journal, noting his impressions and mental notes from
day to day, fixes the portrait of his daily reality without any concern for
continuity. Autobiography, on the other hand, requires a man to take a
distance with regard to himself in order to reconstitute himself in the focus
of his special unity and identity across time.7
In this conception of autobiography, the author maintains complete control

in the narration of life and construction of identity, consciously
constructing an identity “as he believes and wishes himself to be and to
have been.”8 Here the autobiographer attempts to give meaning to a
(public) life lived; for Gusdorf, autobiography is about “great men” (as he
would have it) presenting and justifying their lives. As we shall see,
Gusdorf’s theory has been extensively critiqued by writers such as
Gilmore and can be productively complicated by work in Disability
Studies.
Gusdorf’s positioning of narrative at the heart of autobiography,
however, is an important concept that can be seen in later theoretical work
by writers such as Paul John Eakin, Paul Anthony Kerby, and Charlotte
Linde. To summarize these scholars’ argument:
[N]arrativization is the way that we as human beings make sense of our

identities and the social spheres in which we exist; both consciously and
unconsciously, we all continuously construct ourselves in story (to
ourselves and to others) as a way to deal with the discontinuities of our
7
Gusdorf 1980, 35.
8
Gusdorf 1980, 45.
lives. […] As we continually construct our identities, we do so through

narrative, whether in private thought or public autobiography.9
This idea of the self made in story is a key concept in autobiography: the
fragmented self is assembled in a temporarily stable form as it is
simultaneously created and communicated in ways that are inextricably
connected. While prose autobiography relies on language to construct the
self, comics autobiography uses multiple modes of meaning as the
building blocks of textual identity, including the alphabetic, the spatial,
and the visual, as well as the audio and gestural (both of which are
represented in comics by the visual).10
A comics page has multiple panels with gutters separating them from
each other. The gutter may be either “a physical or conceptual space that
acts as a caesura through which connections are made and meanings are
negotiated. Images of people, objects, animals, and settings, word
balloons, lettering, sound effects, and gutters all come together to form
page layouts that work to create meaning in distinctive ways and in
multiple semiotic realms.”11 For example, in the first eight pages of
Stitches, Small uses all of these elements to create a self within the
narrative of his family. The opening two pages, identically laid out grids
with five panels per page, act as an extended establishing shot. Each
successive panel on the first page encapsulates an ever more focused view
of where David Small lives—from city to neighborhood to block to street
to house—while the second page continues this movement into the house
until the final panel in which we see David Small as a young child drawing
in his living room.12 All of this scene setting is accomplished through a
combination of the visual and spatial modes, through what is in the panels
and how they are arranged in relation to each other. Readers make sense of
this sequence through what Thierry Groensteen calls arthrology or the
relationship between panels; such relationships happen both in sequence
(restricted arthrology, as we see here) and in the network that is formed by
all of the panels within a comics story (general arthrology, as we shall see
in our later discussion).13
9
Jacobs 2008, 70-71. For a fuller summary of the ideas of Eakin, Kerby, and
Linde, see ibid.
10
For a more detailed description of the application of multimodality to comics,
see Jacobs 2007.
11
Jacobs 2008, 64.
12
Small 2009, 12-13. We use David Small to indicate the character in the
autobiography and Small to indicate the creator of the autobiography.
13
For a fuller discussion of this term, see Groensteen 2007.
74 Chapter Three
As the panels move the reader in and through the house, other modes
are introduced, including the gestural (such as the visual depictions of both
David Small’s mother’s body language and expressions, and David
Small’s reactions to them), the alphabetic (through caption boxes in which
Small uses an authorial voice to describe his mother slamming doors, his
father hitting a punching bag, and his brother banging his drum as their
languages), and the audio (as seen in the sound effects of all of his family
members’ “languages”).14 This depiction of his family stands in stark
contrast to the next two pages in which getting sick, which Small describes
as his “language,” is represented as silent, with no visual representation of
any diegetic sound.15 All of these elements thus combine with both the
depictions of people and place within the panels (the visual) and the layout
of the panels on the page as well as their relationship to each other (the
spatial) to form a multimodal text that gives a complex picture of David
Small’s childhood family dynamic and the way Small constructs his own
place within it and his relationship to it.
Despite the usefulness of the link between narrative, autobiography,
and the construction of self, the danger of Gusdorf’s definition is that it
excludes many people who are often marginalized by disability, race,
class, or gender and does not reflect the current state of publishing in the
field of autobiography.16 Further, Gilmore, in The Limits of Autobiography
(2001), usefully critiques Gusdorf’s focus on the public and on public
personages, arguing instead that the autobiography taps into the
confessional practices that pervade mass culture and mass media in North
America. She goes on to write that “the efflorescence of talk shows and
their mutating confessional forms has pushed forward another
representative: neither celebrity nor statesperson, but the dysfunctional and
downtrodden, the cheated-on and the cheating, the everyman and
everywoman of the bad times that keep on coming.”17 Such foregrounding
of the confessional results in what Gilmore calls “the autobiographical
paradox of the unusual or unrepresentative life becoming
representative.”18 While Gusdorf saw the lives of the famous as
representative in that they served as instructional examples, Gilmore sees
the autobiographical paradox operative in autobiographies that focus on
trauma (such as the aforementioned Lucky, Two or Three Things I Know
14
Small 2009, 15-17.
15
Small 2009, 18-19.
16
See Gilmore 1994 and 2001; Smith and Watson 1998; Benstock 1998; and
Bergland 1994.
17
Gilmore 2001, 17.
18
Gilmore 2001, 19.
for Sure, 127 Hours, and Stitches). Here trauma represents experience that
is outside the ordinary, that is, in fact, unrepresentative. Narratives of
trauma (and disability) thus show how “issues of self-representation and
representativeness intersect and exist in tension that can, if dealt with in
ways that question this relationship, lead to an interrogation of
representation itself.”19 By showing the ways in which a text is itself a
construct, through strategies such as heightening the distance between the
writer-as-writer and writer-as-subject, the tension between representation
and representativeness can be exploited and critiqued. In the comics form,
“the split between the autographer and the subject is etched on every page,
and the hand-crafted nature of the images and the ‘autobiofictional’ nature
of the narrative are undeniable.”20 The body of the author is literally
rendered on the page, a product of both the physical act of inscription and
the rhetoricity of any narrative; it is concordantly a reality and a reality
effect.
Disability rhetorics
Disability Studies theory offers some productive possibilities for exploring
the tension between reality and representation. As Rosemarie Garland-
Thomson writes, “seeing disability as a representational system engages
several premises of current critical theory: that representation structures
reality, that the margins constitute the center, that human identity is
multiple and unstable, and that all analysis and evaluation has political
implications.”21 Or, as Tobin Siebers suggests:
[D]isability offers a challenge to the representation of the body [...]. Usually

this means that the disabled body provides insight into the fact that all
bodies are socially constructed—that social attitudes and institutions
determine, far greater than biological fact, the representation of the body’s
reality.22
In short, understanding the many ways that the disabled body is constructed
is a means of recognizing the social (and rhetorical) construction of all
bodies.
19
Jacobs 2008, 76.
20
Gardner 2008, 12. Gardner uses the term “autographer” intentionally here, in
order to draw attention to the “autobiofictional” nature she mentions. When we use
her term we intend to call up the same attention.
21
Garland-Thomson 2000, 19.
22
Siebers 2008, 54. We will revisit this point later in the chapter.
76 Chapter Three
One avenue into this exploration is to view the ways that disability has
been typically—or stereotypically—constructed through narrative. Thomas
Couser suggests that there are “hegemonic scripts” for autobiographical
disability narratives: “preferred plots and rhetorical schemes” to which
these stories must conform.23 Couser lists five common rhetorics: triumph,
horror, spiritual compensation, nostalgia, and emancipation.24 The rhetoric
of triumph demands that people with disabilities overcome or compensate
for their disability; horror renders disability abject and terrifying; spiritual
compensation implies that disability is a punishment for a moral failing;
the memoir of nostalgia longs for the time before the author became
disabled. Finally, the rhetoric of emancipation, while not leading to the
overcoming of disability, instead removes “physical, social and cultural
obstacles” for people with disabilities.25 Such narratives “decisively
represent disability not as a flaw of [the] body but as the prejudicial
construct of a normative culture.”26 Autobiographical disability narratives
construct temporarily stable selves based on the narratives of the dominant
culture; textual identity is thus, in effect, narratively contained.
Disability has also traditionally been a visually overdetermined
concept. Garland-Thomson suggests that there are four dominant visual
rhetorics of disability: the wondrous, the sentimental, the exotic, and the
ordinary or realistic. Like the rhetoric of triumph, the wondrous trope
places the disabled person on a pedestal—to be admired for his/her
achievements, whether such achievements are remarkable or quotidian.
Sentimental images elicit pity and call for charity. Exotic visual figures are
gothic, grotesque, freakified. As Elizabeth Grosz writes, “freakish” or
“freakified” Others “imperil the very definitions we rely on to classify
humans [and] identities” as the Othered body “confirms the viewer as
bounded, belonging to a ‘proper’ social category.”27 Disability becomes
“all that must be ejected or abjected from self-image to make the bounded,
category-obeying self possible.”28 Finally, the ordinary or realistic mode
of visual representation is intended to humanize, naturalize, maybe even
normalize disability. Robert McRuer offers an important extension of
Garland-Thomson’s scheme when he writes that any of these four
rhetorics can be employed in either hegemonic or counter-hegemonic
23
Couser 2001, 79.
24
Couser 2001, 79.
25
Couser 2001, 87.
26
Couser 2001, 89.
27
Grosz 1996, 57; 65.
28
Grosz 1996, 65.
forms.29 Most commonly, however, these visual rhetorics circumscribe and

limit the experiences of people with disabilities, offering little rhetorical or
narrative space for re-signification by people with disabilities themselves.
Certainly, most mainstream comic books and graphic novels offer up
these visual rhetorics in overtly hegemonic ways. For example, disabled
children are often seen as helpless and in need of rescuing, a trope seen
when Superman or Spider-Man is depicted as pulling a child in a
wheelchair from a burning building; such sentimental visual images serve
to underscore the heroism of the main character as he is saving those who
are deemed most vulnerable. Deformities are worn by comics villains as
signs of evil or divine punishment (Dr. Doom’s disfigurement or the Mole
Man’s hunched and “deformed” body) and these “crippled” geniuses are
seen as motivated by their anger at the world; in other words, these figures
are depicted as the grotesque Other. The flip side of the coin is that
superheroes such as Daredevil or Professor Charles Xavier have
superpowers to overcome their disabilities and are thus celebrated for their
triumphs over adversity. Xavier, although paralyzed, leads the X-Men
from his wheelchair with the aid of advanced telepathic powers that allow
him to transcend his condition; these powers are visually represented by
movement lines that emanate from him as he controls the world around
him even as he remains seated in his wheelchair. Daredevil, like most
superheroes, has a divided identity: Matt Murdoch, blind attorney by day,
and Daredevil, super protector of Hell’s Kitchen by night. When he
appears as Murdoch, his disability is constructed through the visual
markers of the cane and dark glasses. Moreover, despite the fact that he is
a successful attorney, Murdoch is often shown holding someone’s arm to
cross the street or carry out other daily activities, emphasizing disability as
dependence. Such visual cues create distance between this identity and his
alter ego, effectively hiding his secret identity, but also emphasizing his
wondrous triumph over his disability. This distance is emphasized visually
when we see Daredevil in his sleek red costume moving gracefully around
the rooftops of the city, his cane transformed from a blind man’s aid to a
baton that is part weapon and part grappling hook, his remaining senses
heightened to allow him to “see” and move at superhuman levels.30 In
Daredevil, then, we are given visual portrayals that emphasize the ordinary
(as Murdoch does his work as a lawyer), the pitiable (as Murdoch is
29
McRuer 2006, 193.
30
These abilities arose simultaneously to and as a result of the trauma that caused
his blindness: trying to save a blind man about to be hit by a truck, Murdoch is hit
in the eyes by radioactive waste from the truck, causing both blindness and a
heightening of his other senses.
78 Chapter Three
portrayed as being dependent on others), and the wondrous (as Daredevil

fights an array of villains in New York). In other words, in these comics,
disability is visually and narratively circumscribed and there is little room
for revision of this signification.
However, as Susan Squier suggests, “as a medium combining verbal
and gestural expression, comics can convey the complex social impact of a
physical or mental impairment, as well as the way the body registers social
and institutional constraints.”31 She goes on to write that comics may have
the power to “move us beyond the damaging discourse of […] normalcy
into a genuine encounter with the experience of disability,” while Gillian
Whitlock adds that the “unique vocabulary and grammar of comics and
cartoon drawing might produce an imaginative and ethical engagement
with the proximity of the other.”32 We agree with them about the potential
of the medium, and while we will soon address the complicated ways in
which disability and trauma are constructed in autobiography through our
examination of Small’s Stitches, for now let us briefly look at Oracle, an
example from mainstream comics that demonstrates the possibilities of the
medium identified by Squier and Whitlock.
A character in the fictional world of DC comics for more than twenty
years, Oracle is the alter ego of Barbara Gordon, a character previously
known as Batgirl (for just over twenty years). In the 1988 graphic novel
Batman: The Killing Joke by writer Alan Moore and artist Brian Bolland,
Gordon is shot through the spinal cord by the Joker, leaving her a
paraplegic.33 Subsequently, Gordon becomes the Oracle, a computer
expert and information specialist who serves as an invaluable resource to
other characters in the DC universe in their fight against crime. Oracle is,
in most ways, a portrayal of disability in what Garland-Thomson describes
as the ordinary or realistic mode: she is always shown in her wheelchair
and her chair is part of her identity, rather than an object of pity, wonder,
or revulsion. She has no superpowers, but instead is adept at manipulating
information and using computers as part of a life that also includes dealing
with the myriad physical and cultural obstacles that exist because of the
fact that she is in a wheelchair. For instance, she is shown using an
accessible shower.34 As Andrew Wheeler writes, “This is the rare example
of a [mainstream comics] character who has actually been shown coming
to terms with a disability. She leads a full life and makes a unique
contribution, and she’s not consumed by bitterness or anger about her
31
Squier 2008, 74.
32
Squier 2008, 86; Whitlock 2006, 978.
33
Moore and Bolland 1988.
34
Pantozzi 2011.
condition. For all these reasons, she’s an especially popular character

among readers looking for a hero with a disability to identify with.”35 In
fact, she has been so popular among people with disabilities that the news
that DC plans to restore her ability to walk so that she could once again
become Batgirl was met with fierce resistance. In an article on the website
Newsarama entitled “Oracle Is Stronger Than Batgirl Will Ever Be,” Jill
Pantozzi, who self-identifies as using a wheelchair herself, wrote that
“Oracle is my symbol. Just like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman
are symbols for many others.”36 Clearly, for Pantozzi and many others,
Oracle represents what Couser would call an emancipatory narrative that
“represent[s] disability not as a flaw of [the] body but as the prejudicial
construct of a normative culture.”37 Yet in planning to restore Barbara
Gordon’s ability to walk so that she can throw off the mantle of Oracle and
once again become Batgirl, normative culture would reassert its control of
this mainstream comics narrative. What, then, of these possibilities in
comics memoir? Though we recognize the problematic constraint of
dominant cultural/rhetorical tropes of disability and trauma that we
outlined previously, in comics autobiography we see the kind of potential
for textual identity seen here, as autographers seek to construct themselves
through the multimodal form of comics.
Stitching
In Stitches, Small engages in complex representations of his own body that
operate across many of these modes of signification. For most of the first
part of the book, these representations include recurrent instances of the
rhetoric of the “exotic” in his depiction of his own body. For example,
early in the book a young David Small and his brother are looking through
one of their father’s medical textbooks in his study. The first two panels
show the brothers in a frame together, presented without background so
that we will focus on the interaction between the two of them. In the first
panel, David Small asks, “Eeww! And what’s that? A titty? A thing?” as
his facial expression and body language further stress both his curiosity
and his revulsion. In the next panel, his brother, clearly irritated as shown
by the look on his face and his body language, replies, “No, stupid. That’s
a growth.” From there, we move to an extreme close-up of David Small’s
eyes and then to a series of three frames that zoom in on the neck growth
35
Wheeler 2010.
36
Pantozzi 2011.
37
Couser 2001, 89.
80 Chapter Three
depicted in the photograph in the textbook.38 In this way, the reader is not
only invited into this frame (and thus to see the visual depiction of the
growth), but is compelled to follow David Small’s gaze. We cannot help
but look (gawk?) at the individual in the photo, his head twisted so the
camera can focus on his neck. “What’s a growth?” David Small asks.
“It’s…it’s…something that grows. It’s unnatural,” replies his brother.39
What is notable about such medical images is that they form a kind of
visual synecdoche: the anomalous part is at the center of the frame, and
this part stands in for the entire human, whose face is either out of frame
or out of focus, and whose gaze (if present) is always directed elsewhere.
Here, then, the visual, the alphabetic, the spatial, and the gestural all
combine to create a complex multimodal sequence in which Small not
only constructs his own reaction to and relationship with this medical text,
but pushes readers to also engage with this medical gaze.
Disability Studies theorists argue that attitudes towards disability are
constructed powerfully through visual means: Lennard Davis has famously
suggested that disability “shows up as a disruption of the visual field.”40
That is, disability is something that the supposedly able-bodied viewer
recognizes in another body (through the medical gaze) as uncanny or
abnormal, deficient in form and/or function, and the viewer generally
responds with “horror, fear, pity, compassion, and avoidance.”41 Mitchell
and Snyder suggest that “people with disabilities [have] recognized the
violative nature of this tendency toward over-evaluation most viscerally”
because many have “endured hours of diagnostic scrutiny on medical
examination tables (not to mention a representation in textbooks that
replicated this process).”42 The appearance of just such a medical textbook
in Stitches replicates this gaze viscerally for the young David Small, and
for the reader.
Later in the book, when a growth is found on the adolescent David
Small’s own neck, he flashes back to the earlier image from the medical
textbook as he looks at himself in a mirror. In a large panel, with our view
coming from behind the mirror out at David Small, we see him staring at
his reflection, the growth in his neck bulging; immediately beside his neck
is a small bubble with the image of him and his brother looking in the
medical book as his brother says, “that’s a growth,” a clear echo of the
38
Small 2009, 54.
39
Small 2009, 55.
40
Davis 1995, 142.
41
Davis 1995, 142.
42
Mitchell and Snyder 2001, 374-75.
earlier panel where they first discovered the text as children.43 Below this
panel, in a smaller panel, we once again zoom in on the textbook image;
the presentation of this panel is nearly identical to the close-up of the
image discussed earlier, save for the fact that the figure of David Small on
the right side of the panel has been shaded over, forcing us to focus
exclusively on the image of the growth. The use of these panels illustrates
Groensteen’s notion of general arthrology, as both of these panels are
linked to previous panels through the network of the memoir as a whole.44
That is, we make sense of them differently because of the resonance that is
created by their earlier inclusion in the network (we may even physically
flip back to examine these images again) and this reinscription of meaning
in turn affects the way that we make sense of the panels in sequence in this
two-page spread (restricted arthrology); likewise, these panels make us
reconsider the meaning of the earlier panels. Clearly, David Small (and the
audience) is forced, however uncomfortably, to synthesize or assimilate
both the Othering of the medical gaze and a newly unfamiliar sense of self.
As discussed above, Grosz has argued that when we see disability as
“freakish,” these Other bodies “confirm the viewer as bounded, belonging
to a ‘proper’ social category.”45 The medical gaze effectively accomplishes
this Othering, this making exotic. But in directly confronting this Other in
the mirror, Small troubles the clear distinction between the exotic or
freakified body and his own, and he invites his audience into this space
through the available means at his disposal, including the use of general
arthrology.46 The mirror he gazes into is mounted on the inside of an open
closet door. This might be seen as a moment of transition for David Small:
the moment in which he begins to see himself as disabled, sick, or
afflicted. This is also the moment in which Small draws David Small as
disabled.47 As Hatfield writes of comics memoir in general, “[w]e see how
the cartoonist envisions him or herself; the inward vision takes on an
outward form. This graphical self-representation literalizes a process
already implicit in prose autobiography.”48 Small’s evolving sense of self
becomes graphically and rhetorically demonstrated on the page. The
causal relationships between disease, disability, and trauma begin to take
on greater complexity, as Small attempts to demonstrate through his
arthrological braiding of the text.
43
Small 2009, 118.
44
Groensteen 2007, 144-58.
45
Grosz 1996, 57; 65.
46
Small 2009, 119.
47
Small 2009, 119.
48
Hatfield 2005, 114.
82 Chapter Three
At this point David Small also begins to examine himself obsessively.

In one particularly disturbing sequence, he is shown examining his neck in
a bathroom mirror. He stares intensely at his neck and the growth expands.
He imagines the growth as a small fetus, a fetus that David Small stumbled
upon in a medical laboratory in his father’s hospital years before, a
connection that is made by the affordances of arthrology in the comics
form.49 The mirror here becomes a powerful symbol as this bathroom
mirror not only echoes the mirror in the closet, but also recalls
arthrologically a bathroom mirror that his grandmother gazed into after she
had held his hands under hot water, burning them when he was a small
child.50 Later in the book, we return to this viewpoint before the bathroom
mirror. Small graphically depicts a huge scar on David Small’s neck. It
turns out that the growth had been cancerous, and required two lengthy
and painful surgeries to remove when he was fourteen; despite these
surgeries, at this point in the narrative David Small has not yet been told
about the cancer, and neither has the reader. In this post-surgery bathroom
scene, we no longer view him through the mirror, but instead share his
reflected view of himself in it, as though through his eyes. He describes
his neck as “a crusted black track of stitches; my smooth young throat
slashed and laced up like a bloody boot.”51 It becomes clear that his
movement is not out of abjection, but rather into it: he once again sees and
draws himself as though he were the anomaly in the medical textbook. But
he is also beginning to work through some of the medical trauma of his
youth. For David Small, this working-through happens only obliquely on
the pages of the memoir, traced through its narrative. But this happens also
for Small retroactively through the inscription of the story itself. Further,
because neither David Small nor the reader yet knows the true medical
nature of what was beneath the scar, or what it will take to heal, physically
and psychically, we share his discomfort and worry.
In the reveal as the reader flips the page, this close-up view of his
stitches is subtly altered visually so that it becomes a staircase, the parallel
49
Small 2009, 146-47. Near the very end of the book, David Small visits his
mother in the hospital, where she dies. Before he leaves the hospital, he visits the
radiology department, where his father had “treated” his sinus condition. He looks
at the jar of fetuses again. Now, however, a small smile is shown on one fetus as
the protagonist’s gaze zooms in on it. In turn, an ambiguous look—perhaps of
surprise or hope—appears on David Small’s face. The fetus now seems to
represent the possibility of birth rather than the horror of difference or death.
50
Small 2009, 94.
51
Small 2009, 191.
lines of the stitching blurring into the lines of the stairs.52 In the
subsequent pages, we see David Small climb the stairs and encounter his
verbally abusive mother. “Stop pressing on your neck,” she barks. “If you
don’t stop it will never heal properly.”53 She is writing something at a
desk. Later that night, after a nightmare, Small wakes, walks back up the
stairs and reads what his mother had been writing: “Dear Mama, David
has been home two weeks now, of course the boy does not know it was
cancer.”54 The next chapter begins with Small writing, “suddenly things
began making sense.”55 He has come to a sort of awakening.
Much of these first 200 pages of Stitches, before “things start making
sense,” layer what Garland-Thomson would call “exotic” images of
disability, what Grosz would suggest “freakify” disability, and what
Couser would label the “horrific.” We recognize how David Small is
interpellated by a medical gaze, and we move in and out of this line of
sight and its rhetorical entailments. But perhaps the most dominant
disability trope of this pre-“awakening” content in Stitches is what Couser
might label nostalgia. It is not that Small demonstrates fondness for his
past or his childhood. In fact, quite the opposite. Small’s orientation lacks
any real yearning for a pre-disability state. But in revisiting his traumatic
past, Small “ceases to orient [himself] towards the future.”56 After the
tumor has been removed, Small is able to begin piecing his story back
together for himself (and the reader), understanding what has truly
happened, ascribing motivations to actions. He works through some of the
trauma of the surgery, some of the abuse and neglect of his childhood.
David Small has also now lost his voice—his thyroid and a vocal chord
were removed during the surgery. From this point on, David Small’s voice
is marked out as a painful whisper through a speech bubble enclosed by
broken lines, a visual marker indicating that his voice has dropped to a
hushed murmur. This marker renders the act of speech as a physical
struggle; this struggle mirrors the difficult nature of the material David
Small is remembering and Small is representing. Flashbacks to previous
events and the confrontation of memories are also represented in a new
series of modes: several long dream sequences; exchanges with a
psychiatrist in which David Small whispers his narration of painful
memories and listens as the psychiatrist speaks difficult truths; and long
stretches in which the protagonist does not speak at all. In removing or
52
Small 2009, 192.
53
Small 2009, 193-95.
54
Small 2009, 204.
55
Small 2009, 210
56
Couser 2001, 83.
84 Chapter Three
altering one of the key narrative devices of any autobiographer (speech),

internal thought (as represented alphabetically through caption boxes),
visuals, gestures, and the spatial relations of panels take on even greater
consequence. In a sixteen-page sequence in which his father takes an adult
David Small out to dinner, he does not speak at all. The first two pages of
this sequence begin with two page-wide panels that act as establishing
shots for the restaurant, the second of which shows a bustling restaurant in
which music plays in the background (as indicated by the inclusion of
musical notes on a staff that forms a second border near the top of the
panel). We are then given a silent panel that shows David Small in profile
from a perspective just over his father’s shoulder.
The next five panels all have nearly identical composition, with part of
David Small’s face on the left side of the panel and his father in various
poses of drinking and smoking. The only sound here is indicated by the
KLIK of his father’s lighter; even the sound of his father’s voice ordering
a drink is left out of the panel. The final two panels of the second pages
show a close-up of David Small followed by a panel (in both sequence and
in the direction of his eye line) that has nothing in it but an ashtray filled
with cigarette butts and burning cigarettes.57 Words are stripped from this
sequence, just as they have been stripped from David Small. As a comics
creator, however, Small can still construct his textual identity in the
context of his autobiographical story through all of the other modes at his
disposal. At the end of this dinner, his father asks David Small to go for a
walk, and finally admits that, through the ongoing and intense x-ray
treatments he had subjected him to as a young boy, he gave him cancer.58
The adult David Small flashes back to a view of his childhood self on his
father’s x-ray table as his father walks away from him; David Small is left
standing alone. His silence perhaps speaks to the ineffability of the
moment, or perhaps it is just silence.
Arts of self
As we suggested at the beginning of this chapter, in traditional prose
memoirs of trauma, language bears the burden of representing what is
unimaginable and of providing an avenue towards “healing” for the trauma
survivor. Traditional memoirs of disability also bear the burden of
challenging a normative culture as they confront (and sometimes embrace)
the normative tendencies of narrative. Stitches as a narrative does not
57
Small 2009, 280-81.
58
Small 2009, 284-95.
escape the normative tropes of the memoir of trauma or disability, as we

have shown. However, Small does subvert and challenge these norms in
his book. Likewise, the visual rhetoric of the book invokes norms and
challenges them. But because language is not the only resource available,
and always interacts multimodally with visual, gestural, spatial, and audio
systems, new possibilities for articulation open, even as difficulties
multiply and layer. In comics autobiography, a self is “made” through the
story; which self is made is inextricably connected, symbolically, to how
the self is made. Stitches shares this multimodal reflexivity with other
comics autobiographies. Further, because Small’s life is out of the
ordinary, and in a way, what Gilmore calls “unrepresentative,” Small’s
narrative is particularly aware of its own constructedness.59
In a sequence just before his mother’s death, we see David Small
moving out of his parents’ house and establishing a life for himself. Recall
that Couser suggested that the rhetoric of emancipation, while not leading
to the overcoming of disability, instead removes “physical, social and
cultural obstacles” for people with disabilities.60 Moving out of his
parents’ home, David Small does not necessarily “heal” or change
intrinsically; he simply moves into a new, less oppressive environment
that allows him to shape his own life and make friends. He notes that his
new friends’ “circumstances and behavior were, by almost any standard,
bizarre. But I felt more normal among them, and less lonely.”61 Small
directly confronts the “prejudicial construct[s] of a normative culture,” one
of the key conditions of Couser’s rhetoric of emancipation.62 Likewise,
Garland-Thomson suggests that the “ordinary” or “realistic” mode of
visual representation is intended to humanize or maybe even normalize
disability. David Small leads an independent life, with friends and
fulfilling work, but he also carries around the weight of his past and the
difficulties that his vocal disability presents. Through this narrative Small
is, to paraphrase Gusdorf, making sense of his identity and his social
sphere. However, he also deals with, without necessarily solving, the
discontinuities of his life.
The section ends with a borderless full-page panel in which David
Small is shown standing at an easel, drawing a naked woman, looking
back over his shoulder directly at the reader. He is surrounded at the easel
59
Gilmore 2001, 19.
60
Couser 2001, 87.
61
Small 2009, 300.
62
Couser 2001, 89.
86 Chapter Three
by three women.63 One says “Hey! You are really good,” while another
says, “cool neck scarf!,” referring to the scarf that conveniently conceals
his scar.64 In the upper corner of the panel, unbounded by a caption box,
are the following words: “Art became my home. Not only did it give me
back my voice, but art has given me everything I have wanted or needed
since.”65 In this scene, we see evidence of the rhetorics of “triumph” or the
“wondrous”: David Small’s skill as an artist in a way negates the stigma of
his disability, giving him a “voice,” and he hides the scar that represents
his trauma. But we also see evidence of the tropes of the “ordinary” or of
“emancipation” at the same time, in part reinforced by the scene’s
reflexive evocation of its own rhetoricity. This artist is looking at us as he
draws himself; like any image of a painter within a painting, an artist
depicted within her or his creation calls up a mise en abyme. Such scenes
always directly confront their own artifice.
Of course David Small does not necessarily need a woman to view his
art and exclaim that it is “really good!” We also do not need him to
explain that art gave him a “voice.” We see the evidence in our hands, in
this book. Couser points out that the rhetoric of “emancipation” in
disability memoirs often also overtly shapes the act of inscription itself.
That is, “personal narrative is crucial to physical and psychological
emancipation.”66 But the method of this inscription has often been unique
for people with disabilities. Couser examines the case of Ruth
Sienkiewicz-Mercer and her memoir I Raise My Eyes to Say Yes (1989), as
well as Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (1997).
In both cases, the authors needed to develop gestures and other nonverbal
communication in order to “collaboratively self-inscribe” with the help of
“receptive others.”67 To tell these stories, the authors need to invent and
teach a new kind of language. Small instead utilizes the dynamic language
of comics.
The canvas that David Small stands in front of in this panel echoes the
shape and positioning of mirrors David Small has stood before previously
in the memoir. Earlier, these mirrors allowed Small to isolate and focus on
his abnormality, or they called up abject memories. But in this frame,
63
It is perhaps unsurprising that part of Small’s narrated evolution includes some
form of validation from the opposite sex. One social impact of disability is that
people with disabilities are often de-sexualized, disabled men are emasculated.
This scene before the easel appears to be a possible repudiation of this effect.
64
Small 2009, 302.
65
Small 2009, 302.
66
Couser 2001, 87.
67
Couser 2001, 87.
Small is actively shaping his reality. It may not necessarily always be

“really good!” but David Small’s life will be different, in part because he
can now narrate it. As Siebers argues, “the disabled body changes the
process of representation itself […]. Different bodies require and create
new modes of representation.”68 Small not only uses the rhetoric of comics
to tell a story of trauma, disease, and disability, but his unique subjective
and bodily experiences necessarily add to the continual evolution of the
medium itself. The complicated interrelationships between disease,
disability, and trauma call for the complex arthrology Small utilizes in
Stitches.
We have argued that comics in general, and comics autobiography
specifically, might offer unique multimodal means to multiply modes of
representation, and perhaps also to interrogate the limitations of these
modes. As Hillary Chute claims, comics might offer “rigorous experimental
attention to form as a mode of political intervention.”69 As we have shown,
the multimodality of comics makes the physicality of the form more
apparent; but then it also multiplies the “regimes of normalcy” even as it
multiplies the means of challenging them. One does not finish reading
Stitches feeling that David Small has been cured or normalized. Likewise,
one cannot set down this book and feel that comics autobiography has
solved any crisis of representation. That said, a book like Stitches does
several important things at the same time in that memoirs such as this one
draw attention to the diversity of bodies and the sometimes extreme
difficulty of their lives without demanding normative resolutions. These
comics also ask us to pay close attention to the multiplicity of expressive
forms afforded by the medium, without suggesting that any mode is
superior or isolated. Finally, comics autobiographies allow meanings to
multiply in the tension between representation and representativeness. In
these ways, such difficult articulations draw us all in.
Works Cited
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Dutton.
Bauby, Jean-Dominique. 1997. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
Translated from the French by Jeremy Leggatt. New York: A. A.
Knopf: Distributed by Random House.
68
Siebers 2008, 54.
69
Chute 2008, 462.
88 Chapter Three
Bechdel, Alison. 2006. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York:

Houghton Mifflin.
Benstock, Shari, ed. 1998. The Private Self: Theory and Practice of
Women’s Autobiographical Writings. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press.
Bergland, Betty Ann. 1994. “Representing Ethnicity in Autobiography:
Narratives of Opposition.” Yearbook of English Studies 24: 67-93.
Chute, Hillary. 2008. “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative.”
PMLA 123.2: 452-65.
Couser, G. Thomas. 2001. “Conflicting Paradigms: The Rhetorics of
Disability Memoir.” In Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language
and Culture, edited by James C. Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson,
78-91. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Davis, Lennard J. 1995. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and
the Body. New York: Verso.
Gardner, Jared. 2008. “Autography’s Biography, 1972-2007.” Biography
31.1: 1-26.
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 2000. “The New Disability Studies:
Inclusion or Tolerance?” ADE Bulletin 124: 18-22.
Gilmore, Leigh. 1994. Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s
Self-Representation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
—. 2001. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.
Green, Justin. (1972) 2009. Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary.
With introduction by Art Spiegelman. San Fransisco: McSweeney’s.
Groensteen, Thierry. (1999) 2007. The System of Comics. Translated by
Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Grosz, Elizabeth. 1996. “Intolerable Ambiguity.” In Freakery: Cultural
Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, edited by Rosemarie Garland
Thomson, 55-68. New York: NYU Press.
Gusdorf, Georges. (1956) 1980. “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography.”
In Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, edited by James
Olney, 28-48. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hatfield, Charles. 2005. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Jacobs, Dale. 2007. “Marveling at The Man Called Nova: Comics as
Sponsors of Multimodal Literacy.” CCC 59.2: 180-205.
—. 2008. “Multimodal Constructions of Self: Autobiographical Comics
and the Case of Joe Matt’s Peepshow.” Biography 31.1: 59-84.
McRuer, Robert. 2006. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and
Disability. New York: NYU Press.
Mitchell, David T. and Sharon L. Snyder. 2001. Narrative Prosthesis:

Disability and the Dependence of Discourse. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.
Moore, Alan and Brian Bolland. 1988. Batman: The Killing Joke. New
York: DC Comics.
Nyberg, Amy Kiste. 1998. Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics
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Place. New York: Atria Paperback.
Sebold, Alice. 1999. Lucky. New York: Scribner.
Siebers, Tobin. 2008. Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: University of
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Sienkiewicz-Mercer, Ruth and Steven B. Kaplan. 1989. I Raise My Eyes to
Say Yes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
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Theory: A Reader. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
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PART II:
TEXT AND IMAGE IN THE NOVEL

CHAPTER FOUR
THE MADELEINE REVISUALIZED:

PROUSTIAN MEMORY
AND SEBALDIAN VISUALITY
LAUREN WALSH
The moral backbone of literature is about [the] whole question of memory.

—W. G. Sebald1
What is the status of memory in a society obsessed with the visual image?
If in Western culture we have, in part, been taught how to remember by
great modernist authors like Marcel Proust, who wrote in an era before the
triumph of the visual, what new lessons in remembering might we need to
learn in order to recall and thus avoid the catastrophes of the recent past? I
address these questions to W. G. Sebald, in relation to his last novel,
Austerlitz (2001). Writing in dialogue with Proust, Sebald was responding
both to the Holocaust and to the new dominance of the visual image. In so
doing, I will argue, Sebald revises Proust so as to outline a practice of
memory that is both more strenuous and more uncertain.2
Many scholars have written on the role of memory and history in
Austerlitz, often in response to the black and white reproductions of
photographs that appear throughout the novel. They have routinely noted
that Sebald exposes the inability to know the past through photos despite
that medium’s status as documentary. But what remains ripe for
exploration is what Sebald is doing in moments where photos are not
reproduced—specifically, moments of Proustian-like involuntary memory.
In fact, in episodes of unconscious recall, photographs are recurrently
1
Sebald 2001b.
2
The ideas in this chapter were first treated in Walsh 2008. I thank Marianne
Hirsch, Bruce Robbins, David Damrosch, Rachel Hollander, Laura Liu, and Linta
Varghese for assisting me with the conception of these ideas and helping to shape
them for presentation here.
94 Chapter Four
absent. Yet, as I will show, the involuntary memory itself can take the
form of a photograph, albeit a figurative one. Playing with representational
modes, Sebald uses text to convey narrative memory, but he does so in a
quintessentially pictorial manner. Indeed, the novel’s episodes of
involuntary recollection, limited in number overall, are overwhelmingly
visual in nature. Of interest here are the recovered scenes from the
protagonist’s repressed early childhood, and in particular, the instances of
involuntary memory that not only appear without actual photographic
artifacts, but which occur, instead, as ekphrastic “photos,” or what I will
call photo-textual memories.3 Sebald’s text-image work thus functions at
two levels. The abstract concept of involuntary memory now appears in
those cases as a “photograph,” but that “photo” consists of text; the very
words on the page evoke the sense of a framed and static image. The
fictional medium—text as its building blocks—thereby allows readers to
encounter both memory and photography anew. In this way, Sebald’s
novel compels us to address the crucial question of memory’s status today,
in an image-oriented, post-Holocaust world.
Sebald’s writing has produced comparisons to Proust, but such
observations usually remain general in nature.4 Thus I want to begin by
showing that Sebald’s relation to the French writer goes beyond an
abstract measure of stylistic resonance and even beyond the shared interest
in the intricacies of memory. In fact, Sebald consciously adopts moments
of remembrance from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927).5 Yet
3
After constructing this idea, I came across Li Zeng’s doctoral dissertation on the
popular memory of China’s Cultural Revolution (2008), in which the term “photo-
textual memories” is used differently, exploring Chinese public memory through
narratives that include photographs. “Phototextuality” and “photo-text” have also
been used more generally in examination of photographs as narrative and in
analysis of literature that situates photographs and text together, side by side (see,
for instance, Hughes and Noble 2003 or Bryant 1996).
4
For example, in discussing Sebald’s rhetorical strategies, Martin Swales states:
“[T]here is a high degree of literariness in evidence: echoes of earlier literary
forms and periods and of specific writers from Classical Greece to key figures of
High Modernism (Rilke, Kafka, Proust, Nabokov) abound” (idem 2004, 23). By
contrast, the noted Proust scholar Richard Bales provides insightful analyses of the
notion of “displacement” in Proust and Sebald and of the status of both authors as
travelogue writers (see idem 2003 and 2009). Franz Loquai also contributes a
valuable piece to the underexplored connection between these writers (see idem
2005), as does Ann Pearson in her helpful 2008 article on intertextuality in
Sebald’s work, to which I will return later in this chapter.
5
À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) was originally published
over seven volumes, between 1913 and 1927.
The Madeleine Revisualized: Proustian Memory and Sebaldian Visuality 95
in adopting them he also adapts them, significantly rewriting moments of

involuntary recall, in particular when depicting memory itself like a
photograph. The involuntary memory, as a mode of recollection that
occurs spontaneously, not by choice, was, for Proust, a more accurate form
of remembrance, truer to the past than memories that are consciously
produced. Writing the involuntary memory in a manner reminiscent of a
photograph, Sebald plays with and against these ideas of truth and
accuracy; the photograph is a medium of documentation, but it is also, for
him, inadequate as a record of the past and inherently fallible in any
attempted recuperation of past time. He thus invokes the quintessential
modernist author of memory precisely to alter his legacy, reducing
Proust’s “vast structure of recollection” (his édifice immense du
souvenir),6 at times to a static portrayal. In so doing, Sebald declares that
the structures of fiction-based memory of the early twentieth century are
no longer apt at the end of the century. In response both to visual
technologies and to the Holocaust, I will argue, Sebald demands that we
see—almost literally, with his photo-like memories—the importance of
memory, and that we also recognize its failings and limitations. This
double demand emerges from the very literariness of his project, which
can thus be distinguished from the greater body of scholarly writing on the
Shoah and memory.
The reading presented here focuses largely on three literary moments
that unite Sebald with Proust. First, I establish Austerlitz’s Proustian
intertextuality by examining a Sebaldian scene of involuntary memory that
derives unmistakably from In Search of Lost Time. Second, I explore
another scene of involuntary recall in order to establish the new status of
the visual for Sebald’s post-war understanding of involuntary memory.
And third, I read one more scene of remembrance in Austerlitz to ascertain
the role of photography in experiencing memories of an involuntary
nature. My exploration of the tension between visual recollection and
verbal representation leads, finally, to questioning whether imagination is
allowable in the remembering of the Holocaust.
6
Proust 1998, 64; idem 1987, 145. For continuity, all English language passages
quoted from À la recherche du temps perdu come from the translation done by C.
K. Scott Moncrieff (or Andreas Mayor, in the final volume) and Terence Kilmartin
and later revised by D. J. Enright. I also offer in two instances Stephen Hudson’s
translation from Time Regained (see footnotes 20 and 50).
96 Chapter Four
The Proustian past

Sebald defers to Proust because In Search of Lost Time grapples with the
ideas of voluntary and involuntary memory, and sets a defining model for
the unconscious recall of the past as it occurred, for Marcel (the narrator,
who is named late in the novel), through the taste of a madeleine immersed
in a spoonful of tea.7 But importantly, Sebald also engages that
voluminous novel because Proust was highly attuned to the special
relationship between photography and memory. While the nineteenth-
century realist novel incorporated descriptions of photography in its main
narrative, Proust was, arguably, the first major author to consistently
connect photography’s influence to narrative memory. Writing in the early
part of the twentieth century, when the camera was still growing into its
role as a part of everyday social interaction, Proust foresaw the snapshot’s
power to exert an influence on remembrance.8 His references to memory
within the novel often invoke the language of photography: “Our memory
is like one of those shops in the window of which is exposed now one,
now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent
exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen.”9 Furthermore,
Proust writes elaborate scenes structured around a photograph, such as the
episode in Swann’s Way (Du côté de chez Swann) where Mlle Vinteuil
flirts with her friend-lover via their interaction with a photograph of the
dead M. Vinteuil. The photo represents the living memory of the dead
father, and the girls’ irreverent behavior is a response to his legacy as an
overbearing parent.10
Proust thus describes memory photographically while also offering
photographs as objects of tremendous interpretative mnemonic value. Yet
the Proustian structure of memory, that édifice immense du souvenir, is
hardly photographic in portrayal. A photograph, through its flattened, two-
dimensional representation, depicts a single captured moment in time. It is
a frozen rendering of an instant. By contrast, the recovered Proustian
memory leads to an extensive reminiscence. Marcel does not simply recall
an instant from his youth when he tastes the madeleine; rather, for the next
two hundred pages he recounts his childhood in Combray.
7
The protagonist and his creator share a name, but they are not the same figure.
Thus, for the character-narrator, I use “Marcel.” For the author, I use “Proust.”
8
For a social history of photography see, for instance, Lemagny and Rouillé 1987.
9
Proust 1992c, 543. For more on Proust and visuality see, for example, Shattuck
1964 and, more recently, Infantino 1992 and Bal 1997.
10
For an extended exploration of this scene, and of how Vinteuil’s photograph
mediates past and present, see Chapter One in Walsh 2008.
It is useful at this point to review the two modes of memory that

occupy Proust’s thought: voluntary (mémoire volontaire) and involuntary
(mémoire involontaire).11 The voluntary memory, as that which is
consciously recalled, exists, for Proust, in the domain of intellect and not
of sensorial experience. It can never restore the past in its complete
effulgence. The voluntary memory, as such, is a depreciated form,
untruthful to the past. By contrast, the involuntary memory overtakes its
rememberer, flooding him/her with details, sensations, and emotions from
the past in response to some trigger in the present. In Marcel’s most
celebrated case, the trigger is the taste of a little cake moistened by tea, a
snack he had as a child in sick Aunt Leonie’s bedroom. Proust views the
involuntary memory as a pure, or undegraded and unaltered, reconnection
with the past.12 In a passage from In Search of Lost Time, the narrator
delineates this difference between habit-inflected voluntary memory and
its purer involuntary counterpart:
And as Habit (l’habitude) weakens everything, what best reminds us of a

person is precisely what we had forgotten (because it was of no
importance, and we therefore left it in full possession of its strength). That
is why the better part of our memories exists outside us […]. Outside us?
Within us, rather, but hidden from our eyes in an oblivion (un oubli) more
or less prolonged. It is thanks to this oblivion alone that we can from time
to time recover the person that we were, place ourselves in relation to
things as he was placed, suffer anew because we are no longer ourselves
but he.13
In saying that we can “recover the person that we were,” Proust, through
his narrator, seems to claim that the past is recuperable, if only “from time
to time.” We “are no longer ourselves” in the present moment, but rather
11
The conception of these terms may have been influenced by Henri Bergson’s
Matière et mémoire (1896), where the author used similar language, mémoire
habitude (habit memory) and mémoire pure (pure memory). Yet it should be noted
that Proust asserted a fundamental distinction between Bergson’s thinking and his
own (see, for instance, Shattuck 1982, Appendix, 170). Indeed, voluntary and
involuntary memory do not map directly to habit and pure memory. Even so, many
scholars hold that Proust’s thought was influenced by the prominent philosopher.
12
I use “pure” (or “purity”) in this chapter not to invoke Bergson’s term, but when
considering mnemonic episodes that, like Proustian involuntary recollection,
appear to restore the original experience, through the unadulterated recapture of a
preserved past.
13
Proust 1992c, 254; idem 1992a, 226. The appearance of “l’habitude” in this
passage could be seen to indicate a debt to Bergson.
98 Chapter Four
find our past selves and the essence of a past time re-instantiated, however
temporarily, and reanimated. We therefore can regain the past—with a
similar sense of recapture conveyed in the title of the final volume of the
novel, Time Regained (Le Temps retrouvé)—not in moments of ordinary,
voluntary recollection, but in those rarer, more wondrous episodes of pure,
involuntary memory. These episodes, ultimately, will supply the “raw
material” for Marcel’s work as a writer; the extra-temporal re-experience
of the past within the present reveals the truth, as Proust says, of life.14
By contrast, Sebald offers no such promise of recapture. In fact, to
believe the past is recoverable in a re-experiential way is, he suggests,
dangerous in settings where the stakes have risen so high—in the post-
Holocaust context. Memory, whether evoked through fiction or
photography, is always a limited representation, not a true past regained.
Thus even the pleasing idea of a pure, involuntary memory must be
framed, ultimately, as an act of representative construction and not as an
unquestioned re-instantiation of a lost past moment into the present.
Sebald draws this important distinction to the fore in his rewriting of
Proustian memory, showing how both the fiction and the photos—the real
as well as the ekphrastic—function on a representative plane.
Austerlitz’s present efforts in search of past time

As a work of fiction, Austerlitz (as with other of Sebald’s texts) is most
immediately remarkable for its inclusion of black and white photographs,
which punctuate the narrative. Sometimes a given reproduced photo is
large enough to fill the entire space of the two open-face pages; more
often, however, the images are much smaller and cover just a portion of a
single page. A few of the photos seem to have little obvious relation to the
text of the narrative that literally frames them, but in plenty of cases there
does appear to be a connection. Yet because the narrative does not
explicitly refer to the images that sit alongside it and because none of the
photos in the novel is captioned, there is still a tremendous burden on the
reader to perform interpretative work. Sebald seems, quite intentionally, to
force us to consider how we read and interpret photographs specifically,
and forms of documentation, more generally.
14
Shattuck 1982, Appendix, 171. Here Proust speaks of his own writing—although
Marcel talks of very similar “raw material” in the novel—and says that involuntary
memories “alone carry the seal of authenticity.” He also elaborates on the
“untruthful” nature of voluntary memory (ibid., 170).
Austerlitz is a fictional story set against a historically real backdrop.

The main narrative occurs in our present day as the eponymous Jacques
Austerlitz goes in search of his “missing” past, from which he was severed
as a young child. In 1939, not quite five years old, his mother put him on
one of the Kindertransporte, thereby securing his passage out of Nazi-
occupied Prague. A Jew by birth, Austerlitz escapes the Holocaust and is
raised in Wales under a new name, Dafydd Elias. As an adult, he appears
to have no knowledge of his childhood before 1939, unable to recall his
home and his parents, a consequence of the trauma he suffered as a boy,
cut off from his mother and father and thrust into a new and, as we learn,
inhospitable setting. The adoptive parents—one a stern preacher, the other
a frail, sickly woman—cannot offer Austerlitz the affection that a
frightened, vulnerable child needs, and in response, the newly named
Dafydd shuts down to his past, suppressing all memory of his former life
because it is too painful to face the loss he has suffered.
As an adult, the protagonist experiences a moment of Proustian-like
involuntary memory that brings back fragmentary details from long ago.
He recalls a decisive episode from 1939, an experience in a train station,
which I will explore shortly, but is still unable to remember any specifics
from earlier in his life. Shortly after this point in the story, the protagonist
(who learned his birth name, but no other background, as a student)
decides to track down the facts of his childhood; in particular, he seeks
information about his mother, ultimately stating his desire to locate an
image of her.
The novel is distinctive for the way in which we learn the complicated
story of Austerlitz’s search for information regarding his past. Where
Proust gives us Marcel’s first-person recollection of his childhood,
Austerlitz is multiply mediated. Austerlitz tells his story to an unnamed
narrator, who then narrates that tale to the reader in the form of a recall.
The narrator relates the conversations he has had with Austerlitz,
sometimes describing with third-person voicing, other times quoting
Austerlitz’s own words. In doing so, the narrator pieces together for the
reader Austerlitz’s journey to acquire details about his past. Yet even this
is complicated, as the novel does not use quotation marks to signify when
someone is being quoted. Rather, the text slides between characters’
voices, placing the burden on the reader to understand and interpret, as
Sebald again forces us to think about the media we employ in tasks of
representation. Moreover, Austerlitz’s memory, as he conveys it to his
interlocutor (our narrator), is highly fragmentary. One frequently reads
comments such as “if I remember correctly” or “I cannot say exactly.” As
often, however, the reader is given confident assurances that a moment is
100 Chapter Four
“imprinted on his memory” and that Austerlitz can “still remember very
clearly.”15 This attention to the workings of memory permeates the
entirety of Austerlitz, making it, in some regards, an overwhelming text for
scholars of memory. The direct homages to Proust, however, occur
infrequently, and thus in standing out from the broader background of
generalized comments about remembrance and forgetfulness, they take on
great importance. In fact, Sebald chooses moments and details from Proust
discriminatingly. He rewrites moments of involuntary memory, ultimately
taking to task, as I will show, the Proustian assumption of any possible
purity of memory.
Sebald’s rewriting of Proust:

Establishing the intertextuality
Sebald’s most explicit reference to a Proustian scene of involuntary
memory occurs as Jacques Austerlitz walks along uneven paving. He is, at
the time, in Prague, investigating his background, as he has recently come
to believe that the train that sped him through Europe to Great Britain
departed from this Czech city. While there, he visits the state archives
building in hopes of learning the address where he lived as a boy. The trip
proves successful; the government worker in the archives office presents
Austerlitz with a list of seven records, each for an individual with the same
family name, accompanied by profession information and an address that
had been inhabited by each Austerlitz. Yet none of the names, professions,
or city districts appears to spark a recognition for the protagonist, and
instead the archivist simply suggests to Austerlitz that he “try the
Šporkova, a small street a few paces uphill from the Schönborn Palace,
where the register of inhabitants for 1938 said that Agáta Austerlitzová
had been living at Number 12 in that year.”16 Austerlitz sets off, and as he
approaches the building, we read:
[W]hen I felt the uneven paving of the Šporkova underfoot (die unebenen
Pflastersteine der Šporkova unter meinen Füßen) as step by step I climbed
uphill, it was as if I had already been this way before and memories were
revealing themselves to me not by means of any mental effort but through
my senses, so long numbed and now coming back to life.17
15
Sebald 2001a, 219; 140; 112; 262.
16
Sebald 2001a, 150.
17
Sebald 2001a, 150; idem 2003b, 220.
That the “memories were revealing themselves” to Austerlitz “not by

means of any mental effort” defines this experience as a moment of
involuntary recollection. There is no conscious mnemonic straining to
recall the past; instead the trigger of “the uneven paving of the Šporkova
underfoot” prompts the sudden release of formerly suppressed memories.
This scene borrows its trigger from one of Proust’s most poetic
moments of involuntary memory, one that occurs in the final book of his
seven-volume novel. We read in Time Regained:
[A]s I moved sharply backwards I tripped against the uneven paving-stones

in front of the coach-house. […] [R]ecovering my balance, I put my foot
on a stone which was slightly lower than its neighbor […]. […] The
happiness which I had just felt was unquestionably the same as that which
I had felt when I tasted the madeleine soaked in tea.18
In referencing the madeleine, Proust frames this scene as another moment

of mémoire involontaire. Moreover, the two passages, side by side, make
clear that Proust is Sebald’s source for his Austerlitz version of the scene.
In both cases the feeling of “uneven paving” stimulates involuntary recall.
Proust continues:
[A] profound azure intoxicated my eyes, impressions of coolness, of

dazzling light, swirled round me and in my desire to seize them […] I
continued, ignoring the evident amusement of the great crowd of
chauffeurs, to stagger as I had staggered a few seconds ago, with one foot
on the higher paving-stone and the other on the lower. Every time that I
merely repeated this physical movement, I achieved nothing; but if I
succeeded, forgetting the Guermantes party, in recapturing what I had felt
when I first placed my feet on the ground in this way, again the dazzling
and indistinct vision fluttered near me, as if to say: “Seize me as I pass if
you can, and try to solve the riddle of happiness which I set you.” And
almost at once I recognised the vision: it was Venice, of which my efforts
to describe it and the supposed snapshots taken by my memory had never
told me anything, but which the sensation which I had once experienced as
I stood upon two uneven stones in the baptistery of St Mark’s had,
recurring a moment ago, restored to me complete with all the other
sensations linked on that day to that particular sensation, all of which had
been waiting in their place—from which with imperious suddenness a
chance happening had caused them to emerge—in the series of forgotten
days.19
18
Proust 1992b, 216-17.
19
Proust 1992b, 217-18.
102 Chapter Four
Marcel had a similar experience of standing on uneven paving in Venice,

and this moment, outside the Guermantes reception in France, recalls one
of the “forgotten days.” Likewise, though Sebald does not equally
explicate the workings of involuntary memory, the reader can assume—
and this intertext all but confirms—that for Austerlitz, some memories
return because the sensation of the uneven paving is a sensation from his
past. This, we gather, is the street he walked as a child, those many
“forgotten days” ago.
It is significant that Sebald chooses to relate to this scene from In
Search of Lost Time because the Proustian original makes explicit mention
of the interworkings of memory and photography: “the supposed
snapshots taken by my memory had never told me anything.”20 Here the
mental pictures of voluntary memory fail to restore the past to Marcel.
Even when the involuntary memory emerges, this Proustian passage, as
with Sebald’s version, does not show us the memory, but rather focuses on
the moment of experiencing its recollection. While Marcel tells us that his
is a “vision,” in fact it is more; he pushes beyond the visual to a full
emotive recapture of the past, “restored […] complete with all the other
sensations” he experienced that day in Venice. The visual is thus but one
component. Sebald, as I will demonstrate shortly, reconfigures involuntary
memory. At key moments, he will present Austerlitz’s memory, when the
recollection itself (not just the experience of it) is described to us, as if it
were a photograph. That is, the focus is predominantly visual.
While these two “paving” scenes are so clearly related, Austerlitz does
not create a direct echo. Where Proust emphasizes the realm of recovered
affect and the re-living, through memory, of a moment in Marcel’s past,
Sebald shifts in the opposite direction, moving the attention to his
character’s present surroundings. Just after the “memories were revealing
themselves,” we read chiefly of the many sights Austerlitz observes as he
enters 12 Šporkova: “[T]he metal box for the electrics built into the wall
beside the entrance with its lightning symbol, the octofoil mosaic flower in
shades of dove gray and snow white set in the flecked artificial-stone floor
of the hall, […] the gently rising flight of stairs, with hazelnut-shaped iron
knobs placed at intervals in the handrail of the banisters.”21 While these
visuals, we are told, are evocative of his forgotten past, no specific
memory of a buried experience is here restored to Austerlitz as it was for
Marcel.
20
Hudson’s version reads: “And then, all at once, I recognised that Venice which
my descriptive efforts and pretended snapshots of memory had failed to recall”
(Proust 1931, 211).
21
Sebald 2001a, 151.
Despite this disparity, Sebald further shores up the intertextual

connection through his mention of the color blue. Throughout In Search of
Lost Time, moments of involuntary memory are described with colors,
most strikingly with comparisons to an overwhelming or intoxicating
“azure” (un azur profond).22 Proust’s first instance of involuntary memory,
which will be examined in more depth shortly, occurs early in the novel.
Marcel, as yet unused to the sensation of memories, unwilled, rising within
him, perceives a “whirling medley of stirred-up colours.”23 By a later
example, when the feel of a napkin triggers the return of a past time, he is
flooded with an “azure” that is “pure and saline and swelled into blue and
bosomy undulations.”24 Thus as the concept and experience of involuntary
recollection take shape—for Marcel, for the novel, and for the reader—
what began as a swirl of colors, symbolic of the swirling new sensations
enveloping Marcel, crystallizes into a dazzling blue.25
Sebald picks up on this heightened Proustian color and incorporates it,
transfigured for his own novel. The concentrated azure of Proust becomes
just the smallest of details in Sebald. For Proust, the use of color to
describe that which is experiential heightens, and thereby emphasizes to
the reader, the sensorial nature of the involuntary recall. For Sebald, who,
in multiple examples, undoes that fully sensorial nature, the formerly
dazzling blue is now far more muted. It does not saturate the rememberer,
nor swell into undulations. It is even muted in its placement; it does not
always appear directly during the experience of involuntary recollection
itself. Nevertheless, in Austerlitz, episodes that house a moment of
involuntary memory frequently include a mention of the color blue.
Shortly after Austerlitz walks the uneven paving, we read of a “blue dog”
(einen blaufarbenen Hund). Before he enters 12 Šporkova and before
describing the items in the hallway, Austerlitz stops to examine “the
smooth plaster above the keystone of the arch” of another building
22
Proust 1986, 256.
23
Proust 1998, 62.
24
Proust 1992b, 219.
25
In all likelihood Proust would have been familiar with the significance of blue to
earlier literary traditions, for instance, Novalis’s “blue flower” (Blaue Blume),
which became a central emblem of German Romanticism, and the Symbolists’,
especially Baudelaire’s and Mallarmé’s, presentations of “l’azur.” In both cases,
blue symbolizes a move beyond material reality; there is a metaphysical striving
toward infinitude, which resonates here with the all-encompassing, sensory-loaded
experience of the Proustian involuntary memory. These associations with the color
blue were helpfully brought to my attention by Mark Anderson of Columbia
University’s German department.
104 Chapter Four
entrance; “[t]he cast was no more than a square foot in size, and showed,
set against a spangled sea-green background, a blue dog carrying a small
branch in its mouth.”26 The blue marks a connection to Proust, and thus
the modernist literary past appears in a post-war novelistic present—it is,
however, altered in its portrayal.
Ann Pearson, without significant attention to the role of photography,
provides a reading of Sebald’s borrowing of this paving scene from In
Search of Lost Time that also recognizes a departure from the original. She
notes that one difference between Marcel and Austerlitz—a difference that
can be seen as directly connected to Sebald’s emphasis on Austerlitz’s
present surroundings—is that “Austerlitz experiences an actual physical
recovery of a lost place.”27 Indeed, 12 Šporkova turns out to be the
protagonist’s childhood home. Pearson’s exploration of the appearance of
Proust is motivated by a desire to understand how intertextuality works
within Sebald’s oeuvre. Thus here she shows how Sebald uses Proust as a
counterpoint to Austerlitz. Marcel’s recovery is mnemonic; Austerlitz’s is,
she says, literal.28 Yet interestingly, the physical location is incapable of
giving a sense of closure; rather—and here is where attention to photos is
essential—it is shortly after this episode that we note Austerlitz’s need to
find an image of his mother, a need that only intensifies over the course of
the novel. Sebald seems, then, to position the photograph as a medium
vested with heightened potential meaning.
It is fitting that Austerlitz experiences his version of the Proustian
uneven paving involuntary memory as he walks toward his old home, for
Marcel’s recollection of his childhood is triggered within a domestic
space, as he tastes the madeleine, prepared by his mother, at home. At the
same time, this also highlights a tremendous dissimilarity—counterpoint,
as per Pearson—that grows from the difference in the historical settings of
the novels; as an adult in Swann’s Way, Marcel still has his mother, while
Austerlitz can only hope to recover a photo of Agáta.29 The outcome of
26
Sebald 2001a, 151 (emphasis added); idem 2003b, 221.
27
Pearson 2008, 270 (emphasis in original). Pearson notes that Austerlitz also
meets a person from his past, Vera (on whom I will elaborate later). In addition,
she provides a compelling reading of another moment of Proustian interextuality
with the episode of the compost heap in Austerlitz’s garden (ibid., 271).
28
Pearson rightly notes another contrast: Marcel “finds in the resurgence of the
past the impetus for the literary work upon which he will at last embark” whereas
that “ecstatic sense of artistic vocation” is absent in Austerlitz (idem 2008, 270-71).
29
On the limits of art, Pearson says, the “salvation through art” for Marcel is, in
the post-Holocaust setting, an experience of loss for Austerlitz (idem 2008, 273-
74).
history—the Nazi agenda specifically—has ensured that Austerlitz can

never be with his mother again; Agáta perished after being forced to
Theresienstadt. Sebald’s scene of the uneven paving thus establishes an
unquestionable reference to Proust and simultaneously reminds us that the
concerns are graver in the post-Holocaust setting. This scene also signals
an important turning point in the novel, as Austerlitz, intent on his quest
for information, feels sure that he has found some pieces of his past.
Sebald’s rewriting of Proust:

Increased stakes and heightened visuality
The episode just analyzed reveals the evident transposition of mnemonic
prompt from one novel to another. If that assessment shows some of the
ways that Sebald is rethinking Proust, the following does so even more
greatly. Reading what could be considered the grandest moments of
involuntary memory from both novels—Marcel’s scene of the madeleine,
Austerlitz’s scene in a train station waiting room—exposes the prioritized
role of sight for Sebald. As an intertext for framing this emphasis on sight,
Proust is exemplary. More so than many of his modernist contemporaries,
he thinks deeply about photography, reflecting on it in his writings, both
his fiction and essays. It provides a valuable analogy for contemplating
memory. But for Proust, even if the experience of a recovered past is
fleeting, the involuntary memory is nevertheless vast in structure because
it is highly sensorial, conveying a full affective re-engagement with past
time. In other words, the Proustian involuntary memory is not written as if
it were a photograph. Through important scenes of Proustian echo, Sebald
rearticulates the points of emphasis to show how the status of memory has
shifted over the course of the century. If he stresses this new status by
forcing us to read text as if it were image, he also forces us out of a
traditional modernist model of memory and into the image-oriented
present day. His mixing of text and image media obliges us to consider the
nature of representational forms, both literary (novel) and documentary
(photography), as they function—for Austerlitz and its reader—in the late
twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century mindset. At present, I will
show that Austerlitz offers a contrast to the Proustian depiction of memory.
Sebald portrays the photo-textual memory.
The madeleine scene from In Search of Lost Time is so well known that
I will only give it here the briefest of description: Marcel had not much
thought about his childhood in a long time, but upon tasting the small
spongy cake soaked in tea, he experiences a strange, new feeling—
inklings of the past returned. He attempts, consciously, to seize that
106 Chapter Four
memory, but the conscious endeavors repeatedly fail. The memory,

however, suddenly divulges itself to Marcel, and he subsequently recalls
his childhood in tremendous detail.
In Austerlitz, the main character wanders through London’s Liverpool
Street train station, finding himself, eventually and by chance, in a disused
Ladies’ Waiting Room, which is largely in ruins and will soon be built
over. He describes strange visions that occur in the “dusty gray light” of
this spectral space, and initially he recalls memories from the “outlying
regions” of his mind, such as an experience from 1968. But he begins to
sense, if at first abstractly, that this room brings back “memories behind
and within which many things much further back in the past seemed to
lie.”30 There is a shift from the conscious, if outlying, memories to the
unconscious or, as we learn, repressed. While the space as a whole is
rather confounding, Austerlitz is specifically “dazzled” as the critical
recollection involuntarily emerges.31 The significance of this place then
reveals itself in one crystalline memory. It was through this station that
Austerlitz entered Great Britain in 1939; it was here, this waiting room,
where the small boy of four and a half was picked up by new parents and
carried into a new life.
In both In Search of Lost Time and Austerlitz, these scenes are the first
portrayal of involuntary memory as experienced by the main character.
Each scene depicts the protagonist grappling with an experience both new
and stunning—especially stunning, almost nightmarish in Austerlitz’s
case. For Marcel, the past, once accessed through the triggered memory,
comes flowing forth in recollection; for Austerlitz, the involuntary
memory provokes an awakening, and eventually he will undertake a
painful and laborious journey to find information. The realm of memory,
even involuntary memory, which, when triggered effectively, occurs
spontaneously, is nevertheless characterized by Sebald as still strenuous
and arduous in practice. For Austerlitz, this involuntary memory produces
an anguished revelation:
I became aware, through my dull bemusement, of the destructive effect on

me of my desolation through all those past years, and a terrible weariness
overcame me at the idea that I had never really been alive, or was only now
being born, almost on the eve of my death.32
30
Sebald 2001a, 136.
31
This use of “dazzled” (wie ein Geblendeter) could be seen to connect with that
term’s appearance, twice as “dazzling” (éblouissante), in Proust’s uneven paving
episode (Sebald 2003b, 200; Proust 1986, 256-57).
32
Sebald 2001a, 137.
Shortly after, he says: “I realized then […] how little practice I had in
using my memory.”33 In due course, Austerlitz travels to Prague and
commences the detective work of learning about his past.
Marcel, of course, undertakes no similar geographic journey to find a
missing past that was shaped by the dire European politics of the late
1930s. Nevertheless, we find in Proust’s madeleine scene a subdued
(pre)version of Austerlitz’s revelation: “Many years had elapsed during
which nothing of Combray [the place where Marcel spent large portions of
his childhood], except what lay in the theatre and the drama of my going
to bed there, had any existence for me.”34 As with Austerlitz, though less
drastic in effect, Marcel’s greater or deeper memory of the past has
remained unengaged. Yet Austerlitz’s memory, far from being simply
unengaged, has been effaced through “desolation,” and thus Sebald
reworks this overlap, adding ominous layers. The lack of a memory’s
“existence” in Proust becomes a question of life and death in Austerlitz—
“I had never really been alive.” Sebald meaningfully changes the terms at
stake; in the wake of the Holocaust, memory or lack thereof, becomes
associated with narratives of survival and demise. The perishing of
memory, here, is tantamount to the death of an individual.
In addition, Sebald forges another significant connection through the
language of “theatre” and “drama.” For the Proustian narrator those are the
fragments of his Combray past that do remain alive in memory. On the one
hand, Marcel is referring to affecting bedtime scenes, which occur early in
Swann’s Way; on the other, this language, as it describes conscious
(voluntary) memories of Marcel’s past, offers a way to consider
involuntary memory in contrast.35 In Austerlitz, we read similarly that
when the protagonist walks into the space of the waiting room, he feels
“like an actor who, upon making his entrance, has completely and
irrevocably forgotten not only the lines he knew by heart but the very part
33
Sebald 2001a, 139.
34
Proust 1998, 60.
35
Marcel speaks of these memories as quite powerful and in this regard they are
perhaps not the typical “residue” of mémoire volontaire (Proust 1998, 59).
Nevertheless, by Proust’s definition these are voluntary memories because they
have remained accessible and have been consciously recalled. Richard Terdiman
likewise notes that in contrast to the moment of the madeleine, these memories are
voluntarily recollected and thus shown as “depreciated” (idem 1993, 227; 231).
Speaking to what I have here called their powerful quality, he also builds upon this
reading, observing that repressed content from this period in Marcel’s life emerges
late in the novel.
108 Chapter Four
he has so often played.”36 Both authors at these moments thus distinguish

the theatricality of conscious memory from the, until now, dead or
dormant unconscious memory of the past. But again, Sebald reworks the
Proustian original; the bedtime drama becomes post-war nightmare. For
Austerlitz, the actor self is the only self to which he has any access. This
actor cannot remove his costume when the curtain falls because nothing
rests beneath it. From the perspective of clinical psychiatry, Henry Krystal
explains that there exist cases, where, in the wake of trauma (and before
victims have been able to process what has befallen them), “no trace of a
registration of any kind is left in the psyche, instead, a void, a hole is
found.”37 The horror of this moment in Austerlitz rests in the protagonist’s
dreadful realization that his conscious memories have led, in his mind, to
the creation of a false identity in having “voided” the trauma from his
youth. He first consciously grasps his unwitting role as “actor” in the
moments leading up to his visual involuntary memory.
As Proust frames the opening of the madeleine scene, he strongly
asserts a definition of involuntary recollection:
And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture

it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden
somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some
material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of
which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we
come upon this object before we ourselves must die.38
Sebald’s rewriting of Proust reiterates the importance of chance; Austerlitz

winds up in this waiting room “through a series of coincidences.”39 But
significantly, Sebald intensifies this experience, heightening the role of
death. Austerlitz, already described as a man who is not alive, here comes
upon the trigger just before it must die, “a few weeks at the most before
[the old waiting room] vanished for ever in the rebuilding.”40 As I will
examine momentarily, Austerlitz’s experience in this dying space puts
pressure on a dominant medium of historical documentation—the
photograph. Where taste and smell were crucial to Marcel’s madeleine
36
Sebald 2001a, 134.
37
Quoted in Caruth 1995, 6.
38
Proust 1998, 59-60.
39
Sebald 2001a, 138. Furthermore, Sebald echoes the Proustian usage of blue, in
description of one of the odd visions that the waiting room inspires. Austerlitz
relates, “I saw the birds spread their great wings and fly away through the blue air”
(ibid., 135).
40
Sebald 2001a, 138.
episode, here sight is the privileged sense. And precisely what Austerlitz
sees, amidst the ruins of the station around him, is an image from 1939.
The critical moment I want to explore begins: “I felt, said Austerlitz,
that the waiting room where I stood as if dazzled contained all the hours of
my past life, all the suppressed and extinguished fears and wishes I had
ever entertained, as if the black and white diamond pattern of the stone
slabs beneath my feet were the board on which the endgame would be
played, and it covered the entire plane of time.”41 Austerlitz then continues
in a manner that shows the importance of visuality, and moreover, shows
that this involuntary memory is cast as if it were a photograph:
Perhaps that is why, in the gloomy light of the waiting room, I also saw
two middle-aged people dressed in the style of the thirties, a woman in a
light gabardine coat with a hat at an angle on her head, and a thin man
beside her wearing a dark suit and a dog collar. And I not only saw the
minister and his wife, said Austerlitz, I also saw the boy they had come to
meet. He was sitting by himself on a bench over to one side. His legs, in
white knee-length socks, did not reach the floor, and but for the small
rucksack he was holding on his lap I don’t think I would have known him,
said Austerlitz. As it was, I recognized him by that rucksack of his, and for
the first time in as far back as I can remember I recollected myself as a
small child, at the moment when I realized that it must have been to this
same waiting room I had come on my arrival in England over half a century
ago.42
The emphasis on sight is immediately apparent through the repeated usage

of the verb to see: “I saw” (ich sah). What Austerlitz views is decidedly
not cinematic in scope, for the action is frozen. There is no movement in
this portrayal; rather, the weight is on visual description (such as specific
articles of clothing and the detail of the boy’s legs not reaching the floor).
Even the past continuous verb constructions depict no motion, and in fact
they contribute to the descriptive quality of this passage. For instance, the
sentence “He was sitting by himself on a bench over to one side”
communicates an image the reader readily pictures.43 Notably, it is a static
image. The only real action in this description of the people Austerlitz
observes occurs through the verb to see, that is, Austerlitz’s seeing of the
scene before him.44 That act of sight shows us what is being seen—a
41
Sebald 2001a, 136.
42
Sebald 2001a, 136-37.
43
“Er saß für sich allein seitab auf einer Bank” (Sebald 2003b, 201).
44
The other verbs in this passage, such as “recollect” and “recognize,” that could
be thought of as more active, still do not outwardly convey action. Moreover, they
110 Chapter Four
frozen tableau. This moment of looking at an instant of past time is thus

framed like the experience of looking at a photograph.
In preceding this memory, which is so evocative of a photo, with the
statement that the space of the waiting room “contained all the hours of
[Austerlitz’s] past life,” Sebald marks a connection between history and
the media we use to represent it. “[T]he entire plane of time,” or at the
least all of past time, as this waiting room is a site somehow suffused with
the past, is knowable only in mediated form—through constructions such
as photos, memories, and that which here bridges the two, photo-textual
memories. Further, the fact that photos occupy a significant role in our
endeavors to reconnect with the past—an endeavor that we see Austerlitz
later undertake in his ardent desire to find an image of his mother and
which we see in practice in the shape of this involuntary memory—could
be seen as underscored by that which is literally under Austerlitz’s feet. He
stands on a black and white diamond-patterned floor. That floor recalls the
traditional black and white of photography, and the diamond pattern
evokes the rectangular shape of a photograph. Yet that floor is also,
metaphorically, a chessboard or a game. The implications may be both that
Austerlitz is a pawn, having been made subject to historical forces that
upended his life, and that the constructedness of the “game” in this space
suffused with past time parallels the constructions we build (or write, or
see) in trying to know the past. If these constructions cover the entirety of
time and if this is where the “endgame,” as Austerlitz says, plays out, then
perhaps Sebald is suggesting that, especially in today’s image culture, the
ability to distinguish between the actual and the constructed is diminished.
In this light, we can say, for example, that his use of reproduced
photographs without captioning information is meant to disconcert his
reader, and in disturbing us from a relaxed reading, he forces us to think
about our relationship to images.
Austerlitz’s relation to this train station memory image is made fully
apparent through the perspective and voicing in this scene. Unlike the
Proustian narrator who follows his madeleine-induced involuntary
memory with a long first-person reminiscence, Sebald’s protagonist
appears as if dissociated from himself in the moment of his recollected
memory. The past seems to surface, but not in the first person, not as a re-
experience. And it does not, as with Marcel, lead to the recovered
childhood that is so plentifully restored as to be narratively reanimated.
Instead, Austerlitz views his past as if in third person; he looks at the
are only applied to adult Austerlitz (the only active participant here), and, as terms
for remembrance and revelation, they function here to align the workings of
memory and sight.
image of this scene and he sees himself as a boy sitting on a bench,

waiting to go off to his new life in Wales.45 Again, Sebald creates the
sensation of looking at a photograph, here seemingly a photograph from
Austerlitz’s past. But what is described and portrayed like a photo is, in
fact, a memory. In reframing memory in this distanced and photo-like
manner, Sebald affirms that the past cannot be recaptured in the
celebratory fashion of Proust’s narrator. We can attempt to recall the past;
we can even experience moments of involuntary remembrance, where we
can review (or re-view) the details that appear to us, and we can try to
make sense of what we see. But in the end what we obtain is always and
only a representation of the past. Sebald stresses this commentary in the
very act of picturing this memory like a photograph—that is, as a
commonplace, two-dimensional mode of representation. His reworking of
Proust thus demands that the reader consider the limitations of
representation in general and memory specifically.
Trauma and visual memory

Growing directly from Sebald’s concerns for remembrance, forgetting, and
representation in the post-Holocaust age, the third-person distancing of the
train station scene reinforces an emphasis on the protagonist’s traumatic
repression of past experiences. To look at the past, rather than to attempt a
Proustian-like first-person recuperation, is a less painful way to remember
and relate to the Holocaust-based traumas this character suffered. Were
Austerlitz’s recollections to involve an “expansion” of memory, to use
Proust’s term, the character might once again be psychologically destroyed.
As it is, the experience in the waiting room produces a “rending” feeling
within him.46
45
Even the statement “I recollected myself as a small child” embodies a
tremendous distance, positioning the self through an other—that child. Austerlitz
does not reconnect with the child in a first-person manner that could say “I
remember sitting in this train station.” Instead, the adult protagonist reasons that “it
must have been” this waiting room. In contrast, as Marcel experiences an
involuntary recollection in Time Regained, Proust emphasizes the quality of re-
experience: “I seemed to be in the railway carriage again, opening a bottle of beer”
(idem 1992b, 218-219).
46
Sebald 2001a, 137. Many scholars have looked at the place of trauma in
Sebald’s work. For a small but representative set of essays, see Part V, “Haunting,
Trauma, Memory” in Long and Whitehead 2004. Carolin Duttlinger also offers an
insightful reading of “traumatic photographs” in Austerlitz, connecting Freud’s
model of trauma and latency with the novel’s interest in a latency inherent in
112 Chapter Four
This connection of the visual with Austerlitz’s status as a traumatized

individual has more than simply a fiction-based significance. According to
Cathy Caruth, “[t]o be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an
image or event.”47 From the vantage of psychiatry and cognitive
neuroscience, traumatic experiences may be more likely to be encoded
visually. Responding to the visual (even “photographic”) form of
traumatic memories, John H. Krystal, Stephen M. Southwick, and Dennis
S. Charney explain the possibility that “during traumatization, there is a
shift away from verbal encoding toward encoding in emotional, pictorial,
auditory, and other sensory-based memory systems.”48 Such memories,
they suggest, may be “stored and rehearsed” as “essentially ‘snapshots.’”49
Sebald’s rewriting of Proust necessarily takes on the sinister
aftereffects of the Holocaust. His photo-like memories are not memories
of trauma per se, but they are memories that were repressed in the
aftermath of Austerlitz’s traumatic removal from his family. That
evacuation from Prague occurs as a direct response to the circumstances of
the Holocaust that threatened young Austerlitz’s life and took his parents’.
Thus perhaps with this in mind do we see Sebald forging a connection
between the iconic nature of traumatic memory and his photo-like
depictions of memory. In reworking Proust, Sebald appears to push the
portrayal of recovered memory into a more image-based realm. In the
scene of the uneven paving, Proust referred to “snapshots of memory,” but
did not actually depict them.50 In fact, for him, those snapshots represent
the limitations of voluntary memory. For Sebald, by contrast, that form
can now be seen to characterize certain involuntary recollections, as we
saw in the case of the waiting room. We are even told at one point in
Austerlitz, “[w]hen memories come back to you, you sometimes feel as if
you were looking at the past.”51 But for all of Sebald’s language of
“looking at” past time, what is it that one really sees?
What is at stake, now, is how the recall of a Sebaldian photo-like
involuntary memory correlates to the Proustian idea of a purer, buried or
forgotten memory. Of utmost importance to Sebald is the meaning and
developing photographs in a chemical bath (see idem 2004, 158-59). On the

analogy between photography and traumatic memory, see also Barzilai (2006).
47
Caruth 1995, 4-5.
48
Krystal, Southwick, and Charney 1997, 158.
49
Krystal, Southwick, and Charney 1997, 157.
50
Proust 1931, 211.
51
In this passage, a friend of Austerlitz’s mother is speaking, also telling
Austerlitz, “if I close my eyes I see the two of us as it were disembodied” (Sebald
2001a, 158-59, emphasis added).
value assigned to our memories, perhaps especially our involuntary

memories, precisely because they seem less subject to the distortions that
occur over time. This is true for Austerlitz; his moments of involuntary
recollection feel less questioned (by the protagonist and his interlocutor)
within the narrative. In fact, as Austerlitz walks the uneven paving, when
“memories were revealing themselves” to him, even the reader does not
feel pushed to question the existence of these memories or the validity of
this instant. Quite the opposite, she is led to trust in this as a moment of
pure recollection because the novel shortly thereafter confirms that
Austerlitz has located the address where he lived as a boy; he did walk that
uneven street. Yet at the same time, Sebald introduces a tension into this
type of implicit trust when he reminds us to reflect on the constructedness
of our access to the past, as he does through the metaphor of the “black
and white diamond pattern” floor. Greater questions loom behind all of
this. First, despite Sebald’s distrust in the Proustian notion of pure
memory, do photo-textual involuntary memories nevertheless offer
something of an unadulterated access to the past? And second, can the
photo-textual memory grant us historical, even documentarist worth in the
way that a photograph can?
Sebald’s involuntary memory

Having established Sebald’s Proustian intertextuality and, significantly,
the way his literary rewriting can be coded photographically, I turn my
attention now beyond, simply, the observation of visuality in Sebaldian
memory and toward an analysis of the relationship between photo-textual
memory and actual photos themselves. Austerlitz’s involuntary memories
of his “lost” Prague childhood repeatedly transpire in the absence of
reproduced photos. This phenomenon becomes especially noteworthy in
the cases where the involuntary memory itself takes a photo-like form, as
these lead us to interrogate the special role of photographs in recovering
repressed memories. An examination of the photo-textual memory in the
episode at the Estates Theater usefully allows me to explore why Sebald
has created this dynamic between photography, memory, and the
representation of the past.
The scene occurs while Austerlitz is in Prague, after he has located his
childhood home. He is now in touch with Vera, his former nurserymaid,
who tells him that his mother, an actress-singer, made her Prague debut at
the Estates Theater in 1938, and that as a small boy he attended a
rehearsal. With this information, Austerlitz sets off to visit the theater, and
there he experiences another moment of involuntary recollection. Initially
114 Chapter Four
Austerlitz tries to will forth his memory, but “the harder [he] tried to conjure
up at least some faint recollection of [his mother’s] appearance, the more the
theater seemed to be shrinking.”52 In Proustian fashion, the conscious
attempt to recall the “lost” past fails. Instead, and as with Marcel, the
involuntary memory transpires as a chance occurrence:
Only after a while, when someone or other walked quickly over the stage
behind the drawn curtain, sending a ripple through the heavy folds of
fabric with his rapid pace, only then, said Austerlitz, did the shadows begin
to move, and I saw the conductor of the orchestra down in the pit like a
beetle in his black tailcoat, and other black-clad figures busy with all kinds
of instruments, I heard their music mingling with the voices, and all of a
sudden I thought that in between one of the musicians’ heads and the neck
of a double bass, in the bright strip of light between the wooden
floorboards and the hem of the curtain, I caught sight of a sky-blue shoe
embroidered with silver sequins.53
What is particularly curious about this episode is the ambiguous way that
Sebald frames the temporalities. In the narrative’s present, we know for
sure that Austerlitz enters the theater. But at what point does the memory
begin? Is it the movement of the theater curtain that prompts the
recollection, allowing Austerlitz to “see” (remember) the orchestra
members? Or are those members actually in the theater for a dress
rehearsal, initially obscured from sight because they are in the pit and have
not yet begun to play, and does the involuntary memory begin “all of a
sudden,” an echoing of Proust’s “[a]nd suddenly the memory revealed
itself”?54 Though it seems likely that the entire scene is a recollection, this
blurring as we move from present to past is important. It resonates with
Sebald’s stylistic decision to forego quotation marks and captions. In other
words, it creates yet another moment where the text makes us unsure in
order to remind us that ventures into the past are always “blurry.”
Nevertheless, the status of sight remains privileged in this episode.
Austerlitz saw (sah ich) the conductor, saw the musicians, he caught sight
of the shoe (glaubte auf einmal […] Schuh zu erblicken).55 And while the
musicians, on first read, might seem to be moving—“figures busy with all
kinds of instruments”—this is diluted grammatically, as Sebald suggests
possible motion without ever showing specific activity. The English
52
Sebald 2001a, 160-61.
53
Sebald 2001a, 161.
54
Proust 1998, 63.
55
Sebald 2003b, 236.
translation captures this sentiment in framing that phrase without a verb.56

We are even told that “the shadows begin to move,” but again this is
shrouded (shadowed) in uncertainty. Are these literal shadows, given
movement through the curtain’s rippling, or is this a metaphor for the
stirrings of memory? The entirety of the passage after “the shadows begin
to move” is rendered here with no other explicit motion. Thus despite the
mention of sound, there is a flattening of the experience, as this image is
effectively static.
In the end, the critical moment occurs when Austerlitz catches sight of
the shoe.57 The blue of the shoe is, of course, the color associated with
Sebald’s and Proust’s involuntary memories. Moreover, this particular
moment indisputably offers an involuntarily recalled vision; that shoe can
only be interpreted as a memory. The novel shores up this reading through
Vera, as I will explain shortly. Importantly, here, the focus is entirely
visual (not at all auditory), and significantly, at this moment (and in
contrast to the grammar-induced uncertainty with the musicians) there
remains no ambiguity with regard to movement; the shoe conducts no
action. Rather, it is acted upon; it is seen or “caught” by Austerlitz, as if he
had taken a photograph of it. Further, that image, like a photo on display,
is framed on all sides, between the musician’s head and the neck of the
bass, between the “wooden floorboards and the hem of the curtain.” In
addition, the shoe is illuminated in a “strip of light,” as if strategically
spotlighted, to make it the focal point of the tableau—the focal point of
this photo-textual memory.
Immediately following the sentence describing the blue shoe, Sebald
cuts to a new scene, without even beginning a new paragraph:
On the evening of that day, when I visited Vera for the second time in her
flat in the Šporkova and she confirmed, in answer to my question, that
Agáta had indeed worn sequined sky-blue shoes with her costume as
Olympia, I felt as if something were shattering inside my brain.58
56
The German reads, “die mit allerlei Instrumenten hantierten” (Sebald 2003b,
236). This could convey nonspecific motion (as in, “fiddling with instruments”) or
it can act more descriptively (as in, “occupied [or occupying themselves] with
instruments”).
57
Heightening the emphasis on this exact moment, Sebald shifts from the verb
sehen to erblicken (see preceding paragraph), which can carry a more powerful
connotation than what this English translation of the scene registers, that is, a sense
of “to behold,” or to catch sight of something specially, not casually, sought after,
such as the “Promised Land.” Again, my thanks to Mark Anderson for noting this.
58
Sebald 2001a, 161.
116 Chapter Four
It appears that the past and the present have collided (as we saw prefigured
in the temporal “blurriness” at the start of this involuntary recollection),
and this collision subsequently takes a mental toll on the protagonist.
Likewise, after the photo-textual memory in the train station waiting room,
Austerlitz feels that “rending” sensation, previously mentioned. These
moments of rupture and mental “shattering” that sometimes characterize
the protagonist in the aftermath of involuntary memory would seem to
imply that these memories are, like Proust’s, purer. Were they voluntary
memories, they would not produce such a dramatic response because they
would already be known to the rememberer.59 That these memories
mentally shock Austerlitz suggests that some buried, even protected,
information from his past is being forcefully dislodged from its hiding
place, a Proustian oubli. Moreover, and in contrast to a characterization of
the more vaguely recollected form of voluntary memory, Austerlitz recalls
the minutiae of the Estates Theater moment correctly. This appears to be
verified when Vera substantiates the existence of Austerlitz’s mother’s
sky-blue shoes with sequins.
Interestingly, Austerlitz makes a point of stating that he brought his
camera with him to the theater and that he “obtained permission from the
porter, in exchange for a not inconsiderable tip, to take some photographs
in the recently refurbished auditorium.”60 In a text that has so many
reproduced photographs, this diegetic mention of picture taking becomes
especially important. But in fact, the protagonist does not diegetically
share photographs of the auditorium with the narrator, nor does Sebald
reproduce any for the reader. The radical absence of the referenced photos
is thus striking. Moreover, in forcing us to read a mnemonic “photo”
instead of showing us an actual one, their absence is further underscored,
and our attention is consequently directed to the role of photos in such
scenes.
Certainly, we presume along logical lines, there can be no photo of the
recalled memory itself, because that remembrance, despite all its visuality,
is actually only in Austerlitz’s mind. The blue shoe poking out from under
the curtain is not really there when Austerlitz returns to the Estates Theater
as an adult. Significantly, however, we do not even get photos of that
which prompts the involuntary memory—the stage, its drawn curtain.
These are photographable entities from a venue where Austerlitz
supposedly took pictures.
59
Where Marcel’s dramatic response (as gestured to in passages presented earlier
in this chapter) is an overwhelming happiness, here we see Austerlitz’s, in the
post-Holocaust context, as a shattering.
60
Sebald 2001a, 160.
Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1980), a text with which Sebald was
undoubtedly familiar, offers a theoretical framework for consideration of
the phenomenon that Austerlitz here manifests. The photograph, Barthes
says, disables our ability to recall the past; the photo “actually blocks
memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory.”61 Photographs, he believes,
“violent[ly]” impose a finite image and thereby prevent the rememberer’s
attempted recall; the fuller remembrance of a given experience is
supplanted by (only) what is pictured in the photograph from it. The photo
comes to act as the “memory” (or counter-memory) of a given moment
despite the fact that it can only capture an instant, can only convey a
limited perspective. In withholding photographs at moments of involuntary
recollection, Sebald would seem to adopt this Barthesian reading.62 The
lack of photographs allows the memory to proceed.
Such is the situation with the Estates Theater scene. Moreover, this
pattern is borne out with the Ladies’ Waiting Room episode. There is no
photo of that space, only the photo-textual memory. This is even the case
with the moment of the uneven paving, despite the lack of photo-textual
memory in that episode. While that scene at large, from walking up the
street to entering the protagonist’s childhood building, seems haunted with
elements of the past, in fact the only point at which memories explicitly
return to Austerlitz—the point that directly parallels Marcel’s
experience—is when he feels the uneven street. And that is an image that
is noticeably missing, especially in contrast to the fact that shortly
thereafter we see two photos of details that the reader assumes could be of
the building at 12 Šporkova. Yet by the time those images appear,
Austerlitz (precisely because there is no photo-textual memory to view) is
focused in and on his present surroundings.63
Returning to the example of the Estates Theater, the suggestion is thus
that this moment with the blue shoe offers us something “pure”—if the
61
Barthes 2000, 91.
62
While photos sometimes appear alongside the novel’s depiciton of voluntary
memory and sometimes are absent—an interesting topic for exploration in itself—
there seems a heightened significance to the fact that they are recurrently absent
from episodes of involuntary memory of Austerlitz’s repressed childhood.
63
In another episode, when a brief vision occurs, there is a photo. A Czech phrase
written on the back of the photo, not the photo itself, is what incites the vision, but
it is not clear if the vision is a scene from the protagonist’s past or just a mental
picturing of the recollected meaning of the phrase. Significantly, the back of the
photo is not pictured in the narrative (only the front is). This episode, moreover,
and in keeping with Barthes’s formula, goes on to make explicit that when
Austerlitz “studied” the photo, it spurs no memories (Sebald 2001a, 184).
118 Chapter Four
lack of a photo is equivalent to the flow of detailed remembrance. Sebald,

however, will complicate this suggestion of Proustian purity. As I will
show, he creates a push and pull, toward and then against accepting the
protagonist’s memories as accurate, that is meant to unnerve. In shaking us
from a space of relaxed reading, we are forced to think about how we
should understand Austerlitz’s memories.
Why the photographic form?

If the focus is on memory itself, why then, in rewriting Proust, does
Sebald cast involuntary memories photographically? Why choose this
form, if its actual, tangible counterpart in fact blocks memory? On the one
hand, Sebald is literalizing Proust’s figurative mental snapshots, a concept
that conveys the relatedness of these two forms. Both the memory and the
photograph aim to capture and preserve moments of time past. As Susan
Sontag states, “[m]emory freeze-frames; its basic unit is the single
image.”64 On the other hand, Sebald plays with the photographic form in
order to produce a commentary on historical documentation. The
photograph, as I will explain momentarily, carries with it both actual and
assumed levels of authentication. In moving the photograph from its
tangible form to a photo-textual memory, Sebald undoes the levels of
actual authentication and, in the end, renders the involuntary memory as
unsubstantiated as voluntary memory. The suggested alignment of a
Proustian purity of memory with some of Austerlitz’s recollections
therefore serves ultimately to demarcate a point of difference. The reader
is moved between moments of ostensible mnemonic accuracy (the
seeming true past recollected) and scenes that undermine that accuracy
with uncertainty, in order to make her conscious of the complexities of
memory, and of how we use our memories in the present to construct an
understanding of the past. In the end, Sebald pushes our interpretations
further and further into the realm of uncertainty. He again heightens what
we will see as a great dissimilarity between Marcel and Austerlitz, for at
the end of the century, the Proustian model of memory cannot successfully
stand as Sebald’s model.
An important component of Sebald’s model, the photo-textual memory
is informed by the photographic medium. The photograph is, writes
Barthes emphatically, “authentication itself.”65 Working from the
mechanical principles of film-based photography, where one can trace a
64
Sontag 2003, 22.
65
Barthes 2000, 87.
physical path of light from the referent (or subject of the photo) through
the camera to the film that records the image, Barthes says: “I can never
deny that the thing [referent] has been there.” “There is a superimposition
here: of reality and of the past,” he continues; “this constraint exists only
for Photography.”66 When one looks at a film-based photograph, one is
assured of the image’s Barthesian ça-a-été, or That-has-been. Every film-
based photograph, photo manipulation notwithstanding, possesses an
indexical authority that derives from that contact between light, referent,
and film. This renders the photograph a highly documentarist medium. It
documents the That-has-been. “Photographs furnish evidence,” observes
Sontag; “there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist,
which is like what’s in the picture.”67 We are, as a result, conditioned to
view (“presume”) photographs as having a unique ability to authenticate
and, accordingly, a high level of documentary authority. Marita Sturken
and Lisa Cartwright add that portrait images—“on passports, driver’s
licenses, credit cards, and identification cards for schools, the welfare
system, and many other institutions”—function, in today’s society, like
fingerprints.68 This positions our idea of photographic indexicality at an
especially high level, insinuating that the photograph’s trace is as
definitive a form of verification as one’s unique fingerprint. In other
words, there is a cultural belief in the photograph as an empirical tool, a
piece of evidence.
Yet in the end it is that very belief in a documentary authority that
Sebald desires to challenge. Russell J. A. Kilbourn, writing about both
photographic and cinematic images in Austerlitz, argues that “their
worthiness as standards of authenticity on any level is cast irredeemably
into doubt.”69 This observation is particularly germane in light of my
reading of Sebald’s intermedial mixing. Presenting a “photograph” as a
memory, Sebald undoes the That-has-been. There is no longer any
literalized indexical authority, as what had been material (photograph) is
now written (photo-textual memory). Sebald declares that our artifacts,
both the tangible as well as the intangible (memory), can never thoroughly
document, and suggests, to the utter deflation of the reader, that
Austerlitz’s past cannot be known. Austerlitz may think he regains his
missing past—“I came upon the photograph of an anonymous actress who
seemed to resemble my dim memory of my mother, and in whom Vera
66
Barthes 2000, 76 (emphasis in original). For a discussion of indexicality in
digital photography, see, for example, Mitchell 1992.
67
Sontag 1990, 5.
68
Sturken and Cartwright 2001, 23.
69
Kilbourn 2004, 152.
120 Chapter Four
[…] immediately and without a shadow of a doubt, as she said, recognized

Agáta as she had then been”70—but Sebald shows us that certainty in this
belief is misguided. He ensures this reading of the uncertainties of memory
by undermining, in prior episodes, both Vera and Austerlitz’s ability to
remember and recognize. This destabilizing of our access to the past
occurs through scenes that contest the presumed authority of the
photograph, and that, in turn, ultimately challenges the status of the photo-
textual memory.
In one episode, Vera, who was both young Austerlitz’s nurserymaid
and his mother’s dear friend, finds a photo (reproduced in the novel) of an
actress whom she initially believes to be Agáta, but then she determines
that the picture is decidedly not of her.71 Vera’s behavior here, though it
plays out quickly in the narrative, is quite complicated. She “recognizes”
in a photograph someone she knew quite well, but ultimately reverses that
position, realizing that she has misread the image. For a moment, though,
that photograph acts as false documentation, that is, falsely appearing as
an artifact of Agáta. Despite the fact that Vera seems to apprehend and
correct her mistake, Sebald nevertheless points to the exceedingly fragile
relationship we have with media of documentation; it is highly difficult to
ensure the correct reading.
Sebald echoes this behavior of misrecognition in another scene, when
Austerlitz, responding in part to “faint memories” (schwachen
Erinnerungen), clearly believes he may have located his mother in a crowd
of people in video footage from 1944.72 As again an image is reproduced
in the novel, we are led to suppose that Austerlitz has isolated a single
frame of film, effectively turning moving image into a photo. Vera,
however, “stud[ies] the face” and rejects his finding as incorrect, and
Sebald, moreover, casts this moment through a historical veil of utter
falsity and misrepresentation.73 The film that Austerlitz watches is a work
of Nazi propaganda, where what is presented as verisimilitude is nothing
more than a ghastly and deadly fraud. In 1944 Germany’s Ministry of
Propaganda produced the film The Führer Gives a City to the Jews (Der
Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt) within the Theresienstadt ghetto.
While this project was intended to demonstrate to the International Red
Cross, among others, that the ghetto’s Jews were treated humanely and
lived in resort-like conditions, in reality, this film bears false witness; parts
70
Sebald 2001a, 252-53.
71
Sebald 2001a, 181. The reader assumes that the photo pictured on page 182 is
the same as that which Vera describes.
72
Sebald 2001a, 251; idem 2003b, 358.
73
Sebald 2001a, 253.
of Theresienstadt were effectively turned into a large stage while a full-

scale deception was performed and filmed. In fact, the Jewish director as
well as much of the “cast”—the prisoners who appear in the footage—
were deported to Auschwitz after filming was finished. Thus Sebald
returns to the theme of theatrics, here with an example that shows just how
high the stakes are when it comes to seeing—or not—history for what it is.
Furthermore, Carolin Duttlinger links this episode with Sebald’s interest in
trauma, noting that Austerlitz here “is marked by an uncanny complicity
with the film’s own dissimulating strategy, thus illustrating his investment
in images which conceal, rather than reveal, the underlying traumatic
reality behind the veil of reassuring normality.”74
Duttlinger’s insight may explain why Austerlitz has no emotional
reaction upon finally possessing what he supposes to be a genuine photo of
his real mother. If his first “recognition” (the film) of his mother was false,
perhaps it was so for a reason—to protect him from a reconnection with a
traumatic past. That post-traumatic response is also almost certainly in
play with the second recognition (the anonymous actress photo that
Austerlitz finds and which Vera corroborates)—which is thus better
positioned here as a “recognition.” Barthes’s logic on counter-memory
notwithstanding, the allegedly correct photo of Agáta calls forth no buried
feelings in the protagonist because, very likely, this is not an image of
Austerlitz’s mother. The photograph thus functions not as concrete
evidence but as interpretable artifact to which Austerlitz (and Vera, who
likewise suffered the shattering loss of a loved friend) can assign meaning.
It moves from the realm of the historical into a space shaded by invention
and imagination. If Austerlitz has not really found his mother’s image,
then he circumvents a re-experience of the trauma of having lost her.
Sebald’s The Emigrants (Die Ausgewanderten: Vier lange Erzählungen—
1992), a collection of short stories that blends elements of fiction and
documentary-style case studies, reveals a related situation. As Christopher
Gregory-Guider writes of one of the protagonists, “[Max] Ferber waits
years before reading his mother’s diary, hoping that he can somehow
suspend, or at least delay, the reality of her death.”75 Ferber, a character
who, as a teenager, was also displaced by the Holocaust, displays a similar
act of self-protection in relation to a re-engagement with his traumatic
past. Where Ferber delays reading the diary, Austerlitz perpetually seeks,
and on more than one occasion “finds,” women who are likely not his
mother.
74
Duttlinger 2004, 167. Duttlinger notes in particular that Austerlitz imagines a
version of the film where he sees his mother in “idyllic scenes” (ibid., 167).
75
Gregory-Guider 2005, 441.
122 Chapter Four
By identifying the lost maternal figure in images of women who are

probably not really his mother, Austerlitz avoids a confrontation with the
true loss itself—he never comes face to (photographed) face with the real
Agáta. In the end, the alleged true image of Agáta is merely a “memento”
(Andenken) that Austerlitz passes on to the narrator.76 But if the tangible
photo is a mere token, despite having sought it for over a hundred pages,
its power is not; the protagonist has gained. What had been missing for the
vast majority of his life is now believed to be found. Austerlitz’s identity
becomes a little more complete through a potentially imaginative
interpretation of a photo.
Marianne Hirsch’s profound concept of “postmemory” has resonance
with this reading of imagination and recollection.77 With Austerlitz, she
has been particularly interested in the role of gender as a special trope of
remembrance. Providing a reading of the mistaken Agáta from the Nazi
film still, Hirsch writes: “the maternal image in Austerlitz provokes us to
scrutinize the unraveling link between present and past that defines
indexicality as no more than performative.”78
Indeed, the misreadings of the mother photos ultimately demonstrate
Sebald’s point that the past cannot truly be known. This commentary is
further highlighted as the reader sees (even if the character cannot) that
Austerlitz, despite having encountered places as well as a person from his
childhood, and despite having possible pieces of familial evidence at hand,
attains no great surety of his own past. Too much uncertainty abounds. At
a more fundamental level, which engages deeply with the conventions of
literary memory, this commentary exists through the Proustian intertexts.
Sebald fuses a connection to Proust through the adoption of both scenes of
involuntary memory and particular stylistic behaviors. In reiterating
moments of Proustian involuntary memory, Sebald, at times, suggests that
Austerlitz experiences the recall of “pure” memories. But his intertextuality
reshapes the Proustian portrayal, notably when framing the memory as a
static (or practically so) visual. The decision to cast memories as if they
76
Sebald 2001a, 253; idem 2003b, 361.
77
Postmemory describes “the relationship of children of survivors of cultural or
collective trauma to the experiences of their parents, experiences that they
‘remember’ only as the stories and images with which they grew up, but that are so
powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own right” (Hirsch
1999, 8).
78
Hirsch 2008, 125. With the performative index, a term Hirsch borrows from
Margaret Olin, the viewer’s needs and desires (in Austerlitz’s case, the need to find
his mother) are dominant and thereby subordinate the significance of the actual
content of the image.
were photos to be studied puts these mnemonic portrayals in dialogue with

the complicated debates that surround documentation, representation, and
historicity. If photos are shown to be unreliable as evidence, then so too
are photo-textual memories, a form inherently denied any indexical
authority. Moreover, even if select episodes of returned memory from
Austerlitz’s Prague past could be said to gesture toward recovered feelings
or more extended views of a scene, Sebald has nevertheless already
troubled our ability to trust in the veracity of these depictions any more
than in the flattened photo-textual memory.79 He therefore undermines the
status of both the tangible records of the past, the photographs, as well as
the intangible—even the records of the past, which sometimes seem purer
or more accurate, that we hold in the form of memories. Not only are both
forms constructs for representation, but, posits Sebald, all such
representational practice is subject to acts of imaginative interpretation,
whether we are conscious or not of that potential.
Even the very setting itself of the sky-blue shoe involuntary memory
supports this effort of undermining any ability to verify a recollection.
This episode occurs in the space of a theater, where performed artificiality
and not actuality reigns. We read: “Around me the tiers of seats with their
gilded adornments shining through the dim light rose to the roof; before
me the proscenium arch of the stage on which Agáta had once stood was
like a blind eye.”80 Everything here is a production; the chairs are
ornamented, the light too faint to illuminate (a pre-echo of the “dim
memory”—now seen, too, as a construction—with the anonymous actress
photo). Likewise, the “spotlight” that we saw on the blue shoe was another
piece of set design. The proscenium’s comparison to a “blind eye,”
moreover, is highly significant; that description occurs immediately before
Austerlitz attempts to will forth his memory. The remembrance ultimately
proceeds in its photo-like form, but it is viewed in light too dim to see and
framed in an arch of blindness. Though Vera confirms the one-time
existence of the shoe and thus seems to affirm the accuracy of Austerlitz’s
79
Such episodes help, on the one hand, to align recovered memory with a
Proustian-like purity, by offering what may seem a more first-person perspective
or depicting some unambiguous movement. On the other hand, alongside the third-
person distancing and the stasis of photo-like recollection, Sebald emphasizes that
push and pull between believing in memory as a recaptured past and seeing it as a
form of construction. Furthermore, in this light, Austerlitz’s claim (although he is
not speaking of involuntary memory and not of his repressed childhood) that
looking at photographs from a trip to a museum returned memories of that event to
him is also, at the least, troubled (Sebald 2001a, 268).
80
Sebald 2001a, 160.
124 Chapter Four
recollection, the narrative itself strongly implies that no such guarantee of

the memory can exist. The possibly pure memory and the necessarily
contrived setting are provocatively yoked together. It is a pattern—the
seemingly true bound to the essentially constructed—that repeats itself in
Sebald. Indeed, a similar moment occurs in the final story of The
Emigrants. Describing a reverie, the narrator says:
The sound came from so far away that it was as if he were walking about
behind the wing flats of an infinitely deep stage. On those flats, which in
truth did not exist, I saw, one by one, pictures from an exhibition that I had
seen in Frankfurt the year before. They were colour photographs […].81
Again, Sebald fuses the artificial setting of the stage with the apparent
actuality of photos the narrator recalls seeing at an exhibition. Sebald,
therefore, reminds us of what Proust asks us to forget—of a great degree
of ultimate unknowability of the past, even one’s own.
Rewriting as re-imagining
W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz reframes scenes of Proustian involuntary
memory so as to make them more visually photographic and to engage the
historical fact of the Holocaust, which puts an extra burden on
remembrance. At first glance, this appears paradoxical. Vision seems
closer to “pure” memory than verbal description and thus the construction
of photo-textual memories seems to ease the work of remembrance. Yet as
the contrast with Proust reveals, Sebald is wary of the belief in “pure”
memory and the consequent hope that the past can ever be recaptured, let
alone re-experienced. Austerlitz thus highlights the failure to recover the
past. The protagonist does not regain his childhood with any degree of
plentitude. In Sebald’s world, there is an irrevocable disconnect from past
events. It seems likely that Sebald’s skepticism toward memory is
motivated by a situation that Proust did not have to face: a “society of the
image” in which the visual is too often accepted trustingly as an adequate
representation of the past.
At the same time, however, Sebald’s world also differs from Proust’s
in that the Holocaust has happened, and the general imperative to
remember is therefore even stronger than it was for the earlier writer. It is
also now a more collective imperative. One way of reading the implicit
dialogue between the two writers that I have been uncovering would be to
take Sebald as questioning the loose and lazy analogy between memory as
81
Sebald 1997, 235.
therapy for the damaged individual and memory as therapy for a damaged
or guilty society.
Even if Austerlitz, like an artist, imagines or invents some of what he
thinks he remembers, there is arguably a therapeutic pay-off. He earns
some (if small) degree of escape from the trauma that defines his life. In
finding what he thinks is an image of his long missing, long dead mother,
Austerlitz may be able to begin to live again, where before, as we know, it
was as if he “had never really been alive.”82 Having “found” his mother,
and next going in search of information about his father, Austerlitz feels
himself somewhat “liberated.”83 We are reminded late in the novel of just
how dire the situation had been: “Who knows, said Austerlitz, what would
have become of me […] when I could remember nothing about myself, or
my own previous history.”84 This passage, which appears in description of
the first of several episodes of “blackout” that Austerlitz suffers as an adult
(these grow, he indicates, from his traumatic past), questions the
protagonist’s fate should he remain in the hospital where he has been
recovering. But of course it also suggests that Austerlitz, like his
childhood, would be obliterated if it were not for some degree of
remembrance, however partial and inventive. In this light, the imaginative,
in being personally recuperative, appears to be approved of by Sebald. It is
not clear, however, that this would hold true for the non-Jewish Germans,
of whom Sebald vehemently demands that they remember, not invent,
what their nation did.85
The Holocaust thus seems to distinguish Sebald’s problematic of
memory from Proust’s. But perhaps this difference is after all not as
absolute or decisive as it appears. If the Holocaust seems to be the force
working against memory in Austerlitz, one may well ask what force works
against it in Proust. Is the loss of memory simply a biological fact about
the human brain, a sad and universal truth of individual mortality? The
82
Austerlitz’s assertion that he “was only now being born” represents a new
conception—with all of that word’s birth-related associations—of self.
83
Sebald 2001a, 253. He feels liberated from the “false” life he had been living.
84
Sebald 2001a, 270.
85
For instance, condemning Germany’s post-Holocaust “amnesia,” Sebald’s
narrator of “Max Ferber” in The Emigrants states: “I felt increasingly that the
mental impoverishment and lack of memory that marked the Germans, and the
efficiency with which they had cleaned everything up, were beginning to affect my
head and my nerves” (Sebald 1997, 225). See also Sebald’s interview with Maya
Jaggi (Sebald 2001b). There he talks of growing up in a small German town and
particular social bracket where the “so-called conspiracy of silence was at its most
present.” On German civilians silencing their own traumatic history of the period,
see Sebald’s critical essay “Air War and Literature” (idem 2003a).
126 Chapter Four
fact that Marcel’s childhood needs to be recovered may seem self-evident,

a matter about which there is nothing to say. Yet, and as is made clear by
the end of In Search of Lost Time, Proust is thinking of the collapse of an
aristocratic society, overwhelmed by the ambitions of its sometimes
tasteless inferiors; his object is not merely the aging of an individual. Nor
is Sebald, when he lays out the problematic of memory, merely thinking
about the Holocaust. In Austerlitz and elsewhere, he goes to great lengths
to parallel the destruction caused by the Nazis and the destruction that is
still going on around us, caused by modern industrial society. It would not
be unfair to say that on many occasions the Holocaust functions primarily
as a metaphor for a more general process of destruction and loss. Sebald
and Proust both set the problematic of memory within a theory of history
as decline from a past that was, at least from certain perspectives, a thing
of relative greatness and nobility. Though the Proustian narrator comes to
see the sometimes ruthless workings of social codes, he concludes the
novel chiefly occupying a space of detachment, as he prizes most a
position outside of the now and within Time itself, contemplating the
“purer” truth that he finds in the time regained through involuntary
recollection. In the end, neither author can be said to contribute to what
Sontag has taught us to think of as an ethics of the image. Ethics has to do
with action in the present. For both Proust and Sebald, the present, in its
own ways, seems too depleted for any action, other than remembering, to
be meaningful. At the same time, however, the writing of their books is
both remembrance and an ethical act in the present—these works give a
space for reflection on what is remembered, providing the opportunity for
ethical insight that can be lacking when amidst action itself.
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CHAPTER FIVE
IMMIGWRITING:
PHOTOGRAPHS AS MIGRATORY AESTHETICS
IN THE MODERN HEBREW NOVEL
OFRA AMIHAY*
And there were the photographs—the photographs that testified, refuted, or

did neither of that: constructed a third world, an obscure twilight zone.
—Ronit Matalon1
Introduction
In her short story “Bereshit” (“In the Beginning”), Hebrew author Dvora
Baron (1887-1956) describes a photographer visiting the Lithuanian shtetl
Zhuzhikovka.2 He witnesses the Jewish custom of depositing coins in
charity boxes on Friday afternoon but when he takes out his camera to
document the event, the woman conducting the act collapses at the sight of
the camera and bursts into tears. Baron’s choice of a camera as the
instigator of the woman’s shock is by no means coincidental.3 She
*
I thank Yael Feldman and Marianne Hirsch for their constructive comments on
earlier versions of this chapter.
1
Matalon 1995, 35 (cf. idem 1998, 27). While I consulted Marsha Weinstein’s
translation, in order to facilitate my discussion I will mainly use my own
translation and mention page numbers in published translation. All other quotes of
Hebrew material are my own translation.
2
Baron 1968, 225-35; cf. idem 2001, 3-15. The Yiddish word shtetl (small town)
is commonly used for Jewish towns that existed in Central and Eastern Europe
until the mid twentieth century. See for example Zborowski and Herzog 1995.
3
In another short story entitled “Mah shehayah” (“What Has Been”—Baron 1968,
126-81; cf. idem 1969, 77-153), Baron compares herself and her writing about the
shtetl to “a kind of negative glass that has survived long after the photographed
object no longer exists” (Baron 1968, 127; idem 1969, 79). This suggests that
132 Chapter Five
describes the woman’s collapse as a result of seeing not only “the ‘case’ in
the visitor’s hands”—i.e., the camera—but also “what he was doing to her
and to her son.”4 In other words, it is not only the mere sight of a
technological instrument that startles the woman, but the act of having her
picture taken. Both the general fear of technological progress and the
specific fear of the camera were arguably shared by many pre-industrial
societies. However, by creating a clear juxtaposition between the camera
and a Jewish religious ceremony, Baron succeeds in capturing not only the
pre-modern fear of technology or the camera, but also—and more
importantly—the specific anxiety of the visual in traditional Jewish
society.
This story by Baron, considered by many to be the first Modern
Hebrew woman writer,5 represents one of the many national tasks Hebrew
literature took upon itself in the early stages of the Zionist project.
Alongside the development and grounding of the revived Hebrew language
and culture, Modern Hebrew literature played a salient role in reflecting
the anxiety of the visual in the traditional setting, and in promoting the
reembracing of the visual. Though somewhat less highlighted in
scholarship, the reintroduction of the visual was an important goal of the
Jewish national revival movement in its effort to create a “New Jew.” This
imagined new generation of land/body-oriented Jews was envisioned by
several early Zionist thinkers as an antithesis and a solution to the uprooted
and text-oriented diasporic Jewish existence.6 As Avner Holtzman shows,
a few of these thinkers further realized that the reembracing of the visual,
both as an idea and as a practice, was a crucial component in this
development. And as in the cases of the land, the body, and the language,
this notion too was first realized in the literary realm.7 At the first stages of
although Baron started writing when photography was still a relatively new
invention (she published her first stories in 1903), she considered photography’s
multifaceted metaphoric potential. Moreover, a photographer documenting shtetl
life echoes Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport’s real ethnographic expedition from 1912.
Rappoport, known under the pen name S. An-sky (best remembered as the author
of The Dybbuk) traveled through Western Ukraine with a photographer and
documented Jewish folk culture. See Avrutin et al. 2009 and Safran 2010.
4
Baron 1968, 229; idem 2001, 8 (my emphasis).
5
See for example Lieblich 1997; Feldman 1999, 1-20; Seidman and Kronfeld’s
introduction in Baron 2001; Lubin 2007.
6
Much has been written on the subject of the “New Jew”—for good summaries of
this discussion, see for example Shapira 1997; Almog 2000; Gluzman 2007. On
the central role of literature in the crystallization of the “New Jew,” see for
example Harshav 2003; Gluzman 2003.
7
Holtzman 1999, 38-92.
Photographs as Migratory Aesthetics in the Modern Hebrew Novel 133
this process, Modern Hebrew literature was barely catching up with her
sister world-literatures in gradually embracing ekphrastic modes of writing
in prose and poetry, an already long-standing tradition in Western
literature at that point.8 A century later, starting in the early nineties of the
twentieth century, a small number of Hebrew novelists began integrating
actual visual elements into their writing—such as photographs, sketches,
maps, and so on—not as mere illustrations but as an intrinsic part of their
narratives.9 Yet unlike their literary ancestors, they did so in almost
complete accordance with authors in the global literatures surrounding
them. While historically the antagonism towards the visual could be
considered a Jewish feature, the separation between the textual and the
visual, especially within the literary realm, was a general Western notion, a
persisting inheritance of the Enlightenment.10 Notwithstanding, these
Hebrew authors also notably used this technique to confront particular
Israeli cultural and political issues.
One of the authors to stand out in this context is Ronit Matalon. In the
early 1990s Matalon was a young writer at the beginning of her literary
career—a brain-child of Baron who paved the path for feminine authorship
in Modern Hebrew prose.11 In 1995 she published her debut novel Zeh im
hapanim eleynu (published in English in 1998 as The One Facing Us) that
presented a unique portrayal of immigrating and resettling experiences of a
Jewish-Egyptian family. One of the most striking features of this novel are
the different photographs that appear at the heading of almost every
chapter. Her subsequent novels, Sarah, Sarah (2000—published in English
in 2003 as Bliss) and Qol tseadeynu (The Sound of Our Steps—2008), do
not incorporate actual visual images, nor do they declaratively deal with
the exact same family. Yet photographs continue to play a decisive role in
all of them and despite the differences, they are clearly variations of the
8
On ekphrasis in Western literature see for example Krieger 1992; Mitchell 1994,
151-81. As Mitchell points out, many trace ekphrasis back as far as the description
of Achilles’s shield in The Iliad (ibid., 152). On ekphrasis and imagism in Modern
Hebrew literature, see Holtzman 1999; 2003 and Mann 1998; 1999; 2004; 2006.
9
While in this article I focus on the work of Ronit Matalon, it is worthwhile
mentioning other authors in this category, that are a subject of a broader project-in-
progress of mine, namely Yoel Hoffmann (e.g. idem 1989) and Michal Govrin
(e.g. idem 2002).
10
See Mitchell 1986, 95-115. Mitchell even compares Lessing to Newton and
Kant. “If Newton reduced the physical, objective universe,” he writes, “and Kant
the metaphysical, subjective universe to the categories of space and time, Lessing
performed the same service for the intermediate world of signs and artistic media”
(ibid., 96).
11
See Feldman 1999, 225.
134 Chapter Five
same familial saga, touching on the same issues.12 My focus will therefore
be The One Facing Us yet with references to Matalon’s body of novelistic
works as well as her collection of essays Qro ukhtov (Read and Write—
2001). I will analyze this novel as a distinct representative of the new wave
it marks—a literary wave that could be defined, following W. J. T.
Mitchell, as the “Imagetext turn” in the Hebrew novel.13 I will examine
how photographs assist Matalon in what she elsewhere defines as her
attempt to “tell the story of Jewish immigration from the inside.”14
However, I will show that Matalon’s usage of photos aids her in expanding
this specific aspiration into an even wider quest allowing her to explore not
only a specific immigration but immigration as a postcolonial state of
mind. By using photographs as what Mieke Bal calls “migratory
aesthetics,” and by practicing writing as an act of immigration, Matalon
poetically pursues the postcolonial cultural idea of the “beyond.”15 To
describe this literary practice I will suggest the term “immigwriting,”
which echoes its three major components: writing, immigrating, and the
(photographic) image. In this context, I will point out the connections
between Matalon’s work and that of German author W. G. Sebald. A
decisive archetype of the “imagetext turn” in world literature, Sebald is
considered by now an integral component in any exploration of text and
image relations within the novel. Yet his work is especially important in
exploration of text and image as a tool of addressing issues of memory and
immigration in the twentieth-century fin de siècle novel, expressly within a
Jewish context. These comparative analyses result, ultimately, in a reading
of Matalon’s novel that positions her text as a postcolonial appropriation of
the Wandering Jew metaphor, embracing it as a desirable state of mind.
Immigration—the ultimate “in-between”

In her essay “Mihuts lamakom, betokh hazman” (“Outside Place, Inside
Time”—2001), Matalon explains that one of her goals in writing her first
12
There are several unmistakable similarities between the novels; most salient are
the tough and resourceful figure of the mother, the mostly absent, politically active
figure of the father, the caring figure of the blind grandmother, and the dynamic
and adventurous figure of Tante Marcelle.
13
I am combining here two terms coined by Mitchell: “imagetext,” designed “to
replace the predominantly binary theory of [the relation of pictures and discourse]
with a dialectical picture” (idem 1994, 9) and “the pictorial turn,” which describes
the centrality of the visual in twentieth-century thought (ibid., 11).
14
Matalon 2001b, 47.
15
Bhabha 1994, 1; Bal 2007, 111.
novel was to tell the story of Jewish immigration from the inside and that
in order to do so, she had to accomplish two things: “break the one
language—the Hebrew, and break the one place—Israel.”16 And indeed,
Matalon does succeed in breaking in this novel the exclusivity of both the
Hebrew language and the Land of Israel. The Hebrew that many of her
characters speak is porous, frequently gliding into Arabic and French.
Similarly, Israel is described as one immigration-destination among many
others (Africa, France, America), contrary to mainstream Zionist
discourse. Yet a close scrutiny of this narrative reveals that this novel has a
wider goal than merely to tell the story of a specific immigration, and it
“breaks” more than just a specific language or a specific place. As several
scholars have already recognized, through the story of the different
immigration experiences of one Jewish family, The One Facing Us
poetically illustrates the postcolonial call, as Homi Bhabha phrases it, to
“locate the question of culture in the realm of the beyond.”17 Lily Rattok,
for example, describes Matalon’s writing as an illustration of the
postcolonial world reality in which homogenous cultures are redefined.18
Gil Hochberg focuses on Matalon’s return to the Levantinism as a mode of
thinking or a state of mind that opens the possibility of “mobilizing
memory as a decolonizing force.”19 However, a less examined aspect in
this context is the pivotal place of the photographs in constructing this
postcolonial stance. Yet in order to tackle this, we must first examine the
outline of the novel and the ways this postcolonial stance is constructed in
it before the photos “enter the picture” (to use an appropriate expression),
echoing and enhancing it.
The framework of Matalon’s novel entails a visit paid by Esther, an
Israeli teenager, to her maternal uncle living in Duala, Cameroon. Esther is
the daughter of Inès and Robert, who immigrated to Israel from Cairo in
the 1950s. Growing up with a father more absent than present but with a
very much present, although blind, grandmother (Nona Fortuné), at the age
of seventeen Esther is sent by her mother and grandmother to Uncle
Sicourelle in Cameroon, with the hope that the “fancy uncle” might “fix
her head a little,” maybe even get her to finally “settle down.”20 Yet more
than anything else, Esther is eager to reconstruct the story of her scattered
family. And so this visit becomes Esther’s instrument trigger for telling the
story of both sides of the family—Inès’s and Robert’s—mainly through
16
Matalon 2001b, 47.
17
Bhabha 1994, 1.
18
Rattok 1997, 46, and see also idem 2000, 118.
19
Hochberg 2007, 63.
20
Matalon 1995, 22; cf. idem 1998, 15.
136 Chapter Five
the prism of the individual immigration experiences of each family branch

to Israel, France, America, and, of course, Africa.
Above all, this list of destinations reveals the refusal of this novel to tell
the conventional story of what is perceived in Zionist ideology as the
“natural” shift of Jewish immigration—namely, the immigration from the
Diaspora to the Land of Israel. In what one might call the “Jewish
mindset” throughout history, there have always been only two optional
places for Jews: the Diaspora (Hagola) or the Land of Israel (Eretz
Yisrael). Since biblical times, through the two millenia in the Diaspora,
until the awakening of the Zionist movement, this dichotomy was at the
core of Jewish thought. Even when the option of returning to the Land of
Israel seemed out of reach or was not considered a practical option, and
more so when Jews emigrated from one place in the Diaspora to another,
Israel always remained an aspired option or at least, the ultimate Other
option. In an attempt to break this fixed dichotomy, Matalon first of all
multiplies the optional destinations of Jewish immigration. Israel is
certainly one of the options, but it is far from being the only one.
But more important than the actual multiplicity of places in the novel is
the choice to tell the story of immigration as a state of mind. As Hochberg
notes, by choosing to focus on the story of Jewish immigration rather than
on either “exile” or “return,” Matalon replaces the existing narratives of
theological exile or national recovery with the “narrative of immigration as
a permanent condition that entailed no loss or final arrival.”21 Matalon
adds to this “Jewish equation” of exile and return yet another optional
place, the place in-between the Diaspora and the Land of Israel, the place
of immigration. Immigration according to this novel should never be an
attempt to begin anew or to substitute one culture for another. That this
type of immigration is doomed to failure is demonstrated most clearly
through the story of Uncle Moïse and his unsuccessful attempts, however
desperate, to assimilate in a Kibbutz. Rather, immigration should be a
postcolonial state of mind, based on a portable concept of culture, which
goes beyond the dichotomy of origin and destination. Only by maintaining
the former culture within the new place can one create a third place, a
“beyond,” in which the origin is not completely forgotten while the
destination is not entirely absorbed. In short, at the background of
Matalon’s narrative stands Bhabha’s assertion that “the ‘beyond’ is neither
a new horizon, nor a leaving behind of the past.”22
21
Hochberg 2007, 63.
22
Bhabha 1994, 1-2.
In an oft revisited scene in the novel, Inès dismisses the need for roots.
She agrees to give an interview to Zuza, her husband’s niece who is an
American journalist writing a book on her familial roots. When Zuza
wonders how the family could bear to leave Egypt, where their roots were,
Inès exclaims: “roots, roots, roots. A person doesn’t need roots, Zuza, a
person needs a home.”23 Such a proclamation may seem at first to
contradict the call for immigration as a state of mind or for the portability
of culture. By exclaiming that “a person doesn’t need roots […] a person
needs a home,” Inès presumably belittles the importance of culture
replacing it with the importance of a single physical place. However, I
suggest that in the background of this scene stands the description of Inès
as perpetually rearranging the house (to the extent of taking down an entire
wall in a spur-of-the-moment decision!) and, more importantly,
“constantly pulling up plants and trees, moving things from place to place”
in her garden.24 The hidden centrality of this latter description is reiterated
in a blurry photograph (Fig. [1]), entitled “A Photograph: Mother in the
Yard” (Tatslum: Imma bahatser), indistinctly showing a woman in a yard
next to a bush.25 As the text that follows this photo notes, she is holding a
rope or a stick that is attached to the bush and it is unclear whether she is
pushing it in or pulling it out of the ground. When read together with this
description, Inès’s conversation with Zuza takes on a different meaning. It
is not culture she disregards, but rather nostalgia. Roots, according to the
scene in the garden, are portable and therefore there is no place for the
sentimental kind of nostalgia Zuza expresses.26 The sentimental employment
of “roots” makes Inès uncomfortable not because she abandoned her own
roots completely, but because she sees no use in immobile roots.
23
Matalon 1995 294-95; idem 1998, 278.
24
Matalon 1995, 163; cf. idem 1998, 144.
25
Matalon 1995, 74; cf. idem 1998, 66. All images from Matalon’s novel are
reproduced in the form of a full page to demonstrate the “imagetext” effect. In Fig
[3] the full page also conveys the mixture of languages discussed here. I thank the
author for kindly allowing me to reproduce these images.
26
Several scholars note the distinct folklorist or Hollywoodian nature of Zuza’s
roots seeking (see Rattok 2000, 126; Abramovich 2003, 8; Zoran 2008, 325).
Indeed, when explaining her choice to write her book, Zuza defines roots as “a
very hot topic in America at the moment,” and she is thrilled by the connection her
aunt Inès draws between her project and the television miniseries Roots (Matalon
1995 288; idem 1998, 271. On the influence of Roots on root seeking in America,
see Hirsch and Miller 2011, 1-2). However, behind Zuza’s project there is also
clearly much of what Edward Said famously defined as “Orientalism” or the
western imagination of the east as exotic and mysterious (see idem 1978).
138 Chapter Five
Fig. [1]
Through Inès’s character, Matalon manifests the idea that moving from
one place to another does not mean leaving one’s roots or culture behind
since that aspect of life should be portable and not connected to a specific
physical location. By juxtaposing “roots” and “home” Matalon returns to
the original meaning of nostalgia. According to Svetlana Boym, the term
was first used as a medical title for home-sickness or the linking of “home”
to one’s “native land” that leads to an incapability of constructing a new
home anywhere else and to a constant longing.27 As Hochberg states, Inès
represents in the novel the perception that “home is a necessity” and since
culture should be portable, a home “can and should be constructed at any
given moment, at any given place, even under circumstances of transition,
27
See Boym 2001, 3-18. As Boym notes, the term nostalgia was first used by a
Swiss doctor in 1688, who portmanteaued the Greek noun ȞȩıĲȠȢ (return home)
with the Greek verb ĮȜȖȑȦ (to be ill) in order to describe “the sad mood originating
from the desire for return to one’s native land” (ibid., 3).
as within a tent.”28 Hochberg is referring here to a description of the first

years in Israel which Inès and Robert spent in a tent camp for immigrants.
When Robert dismisses Inès’s efforts to improve and decorate the tent,
begging her to realize that “it’s only a tent,” she replies: “tent shment, for
now it’s a home.”29
This juxtaposition between necessity and nostalgia is at the very core of
postcolonial thought.30 As Nissim Calderon notes, those who “fail” to
immigrate in the novel are those who are either nostalgic towards their
previous home or those unable to construct a new home.31 In other words,
the conception of culture and roots as portable is crucial for embracing
immigration as a state of mind. In her third novel, The Sound of Our Steps,
Matalon tells yet another version of this familial saga. The narrator this
time shifts between her childhood and adult perspectives while the mother,
Lucette, is clearly the same counter-nostalgic character as the mother Inès
in The One Facing Us. One of the chapters opens with the narrator
comparing herself to her mother:
Like her, I have no sites of nostalgia, and the return to “there,” as an idea
or a reality, depresses and numbs me. I am willing to recognize the face of
nostalgia for a moment, let it pass me by, but not in order to stay, not in
order to take root. Root—another one of those things whose image, its
mere image, makes me uncomfortable.32
28
Hochberg 2007, 59. In a conspicuous turn of events, the tent has recently
resurfaced in Israeli public space as a central symbol in the civil protests of
summer 2011. An analysis of the compelling connections between Matalon’s novel
and those protests is beyond the scope of this chapter. Suffice it here to quote
Ariella Azoulay (2011), who notes: “The tent, spontaneously chosen as the
elementary form of this protest, quickly became part of a rich civil language of an
orchestrated claim to share the public space,” with the Egyptian protest of last
spring serving as a major source of inspiration for what she defines as a “civil
awakening.” I thank Lauren Walsh for pointing out this text to me.
29
Matalon 1995, 188; cf. 1998, 171.
30
Bhabha 1994, 10.
31
Calderon 1995, 53. Although I agree with Calderon’s definition of failure in the
novel, I reject his reading of the juxtaposition between home and roots as a proof
that Matalon perceives roots as a “mythological fairytale.”
32
Matalon 2008, 100. Henri Raczymow summarizes this stance most beautifully
when describing the state of mind shared by many Jewish writers, who are a
second generation to displacement and loss of an “old world”: “The world that was
destroyed was not mine. I never knew it. But I am, so many of us are the orphans
of that world. Our roots are ‘diasporic.’ They do not go underground. They are not
attached to any particular land or soil. […] Rather they creep up along the many
roads of dispersion that the Jewish writer explores, or discovers, as he puts his
140 Chapter Five
This short paragraph seems to summarize Matalon’s ongoing discourse on

roots, nostalgia, and memory. Furthermore, the repetition of the concept of
“image” here reminds us that these issues are also, for Matalon, constructed
through the very images—the photos—at work in her writing.
Photographic roots
Alongside a wide geographic map and unique characters, Matalon lends
the photographs in The One Facing Us a central role in constructing her
postcolonial “counter-nostalgia” and “pro-portability” narrative. She does
so first and foremost by creating an analogy between photographs and
roots within the narrative. Esther, who is both the protagonist and the main
narrator of this novel, undergoes a seeming process of formation based
primarily on photographs. Discussing the photos from Uncle Sicourelle,
Esther describes her childhood maturation:
He sends photographs, just like that, one every few months, without a date,
without a word, nothing […]. I am raised on these photographs. My
grandmother, Nona Fortuné, raises me. She cannot see a thing […]. She
explains to me what is in the photographs: this is your Uncle Jacquo. He is
a very rich man in Africa. The whole port is his.33
As Hannan Hever maintains, Esther acquires her identity by becoming a

mediator between the photographs and her blind grandmother, who in
return mediates between Esther and the world. Hever defines this novel as
“a series of disjointed gestures of writing in the genre of the novel.”34
These gestures, he argues, are aimed at telling a semi-autobiographical
story by using sporadic elements of the Bildungsroman, but they do not
develop into a full Bildungsroman since the world surrounding Esther is so
fragmented. In such a fragmented world, the only way of telling that story
is through the photographs. The photographs are, to use Hever’s words,
“the only molecules left after the destruction of everything else.”35
Continuing this line of thought, I suggest reading the photographs not only
lines down on the paper” (idem 1994, 103). See also Hirsch and Spitzer 2006, 86.
Unlike Hirsch and Spitzer, who quote Raczymow as part of their discussion of the
“rootless nostalgia of the children of exiles and refugees” (emphasis in original), I
use it in the context of a postcolonial counter-nostalgic perception of roots as
portable (and not absent).
33
Matalon 1995, 14; cf. idem 1998, 7.
34
Hever 2007, 334.
35
Hever 2007, 334.
as the molecules left after the destruction, but as the roots to which the
narrator can cling in order to uncover the fragmented story of her family,
to tell it, and understand it. While Nona Fortuné treasures the photographs
and hands them down to Esther as a precious inheritance, other members
of the family relate to them with what seems at times to be complete
carelessness. Yet even this carelessness is described not as a result of
indifference but rather, as a rejection of the burden of proof, a denial of the
need to record the past:
In the siblings’ neglect, in their wasteful disregard for the few remaining
photographs from There, there was something loud, almost declarative:
that the burden of proof for their existence in the world is not theirs, that
the photographed evidence—that limited object—insults the word, the
memory, the boundlessness of the imagination.36
Furthermore, this carelessness is counterbalanced by the siblings, and

especially Inès and Marcelle, repeatedly stealing photographs from one
another, as if secretely trying to own as many pieces of the familial puzzle
as possible:
For years they had been stealing from each other. Full of self-
righteousness, each reclaiming “what is hers,” caught in an endless game-
routine of half serious acts of retaliation, amused and growling, pushing
aside the thing behind all this—the photographs, using them as a mere
trigger, an insignia of love.37
In other words, whether the siblings care to admit it or not, for them too
the photographs function as familial roots.
Rattok describes the substratum of Matalon’s novel as “the leafing
through a family album,” an act that has no meaning “without a narrator-
observer who can interpret the photographs and provide context to
them.”38 The interpretation of the photographs can be described as based
on two different processes: family traditions on the one hand and close
reading on the other. The former echoes Siegfried Kracauer’s argument
that without the oral traditions running in the family from generation to
generation, the family photograph alone would not have sufficed to
reconstruct the family history.39 And indeed, Matalon puts a great
emphasis on the familial conversations that surround the few family
36
Matalon 1995, 121; cf. idem 1998, 113.
37
Matalon 1995, 170; cf. idem 1998, 151.
38
Rattok 2000, 130.
39
Kracauer 1995, 48. See also Wigoder 2003, 77-106.
142 Chapter Five
photographs. The most salient example is of course the dialogues between

Esther and her grandmother. As Gabriel Zoran posits, by occasionally
positioning the granddaughter as the teller and the grandmother as the
listener Matalon overturns the stereotypical model in which the familial
memory is preserved by the grandparents or the parents and the
grandchildren are passive listeners.40 Albeit in their own ways, the siblings
also take part in accompanying the photos with words and gestures:
They went their separate ways: different countries, times, and personal
experiences divided them, opened great dark gaps between the few
surviving photographs, empty spaces that demanded to be filled and were
crammed with words, emotional gestures, childhood sensations, twisted
and colored in different shades, desires and wishes that glued together past
and future, and a longing for other days and for themselves in those other
days—for a place that had never been a homeland but was nevertheless a
home.41
Such attention to “cramming” the lacuna with words notwithstanding,

Matalon puts even a stronger emphasis on the close reading of the
photographs. By doing so, she echoes Susan Sontag’s assertion that
“photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible
invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.”42 To continue the
photographs-roots analogy, Matalon above all commemorates what people
make of their own roots and how they read them.
At the core of the photograph-reading that Matalon practices in the
novel are both Walter Benjamin’s idea of “the optical unconsciousness” of
the photograph (in his 1931 “Little History of Photography”), and Roland
Barthes’s idea of the studium and the punctum of the photograph (in his
1980 Camera Lucida). “The optical unconsciousness” according to
Benjamin is the information only a camera can reveal due to its ability to
capture a specific moment. Benjamin offers the somewhat technical
example of the inability to give an account of the posture of a person who
begins to take a step until discovering it in a photograph. Yet he concludes
this example by arguing that one “first learns of this optical unconscious
through photography, just as he learns of the instinctual unconscious
through psychoanalysis” thus endowing photography with the ability to
reveal much more than physical postures.43 Barthes’s concepts of the
40
Zoran 2008, 325.
41
Matalon 1995, 121; cf. idem 1998, 113.
42
Sontag 1979, 23.
43
Benjamin 2008, 278-79.
studium and the punctum are undoubtedly influenced by Benjamin’s

“optical unconsciousness” but they add a more subjective element to it.
While the studium represents the cultural and historical context of a
photograph, the punctum stands for a specific detail that engages the
viewer in a more personal manner—a detail that does not merely interest
but rather touches in the most personal possible way. “A photograph’s
punctum,” writes Barthes, “is that accident which pricks me (but also
bruises me, is poignant to me”).44
Photograph-readings based on these two approaches pay attention not
only to the surface of the photo, its straightforward appearance, but also to
its subconscious, hidden content thus making for a rich narrative that uses
the photograph as an important trigger while constantly aiming at
revealing its untold—or unshown as the case may be—secrets. I would
like to demonstrate this by examining the third photo to appear in the novel
(see Fig. [i] in centerfold). Together with the text that follows it, this
photograph serves as an important exposition, both thematically and
poetically. It shows an elegantly dressed man leaning on a bed and
reading. The caption underneath it, which also functions as this chapter’s
title, reads “A Photograph: Father in a Room” (Tatslum: Abba beheder).
When Esther studies this photograph of her father, she tries to decipher the
setting and the context of it—its studium. She attempts to estimate the time
and place of when and where it was taken according to various depicted
details: for example, “if it’s a parquet floor, the place is not Israel; if it’s a
tile floor, it is.” Yet while doing so she suddenly notices a detail in the
photograph that troubles her—a punctum that “pierces” her:
He is wearing polished, black shoes, with socks in an eggplant-shade of

purple; the socks seem tight, closely-fitting his ankles, shining in a
yellowish sheen on the left ankle: a somewhat troubling, double-meaning
sheen, indicating the socks’ silkiness, their superior quality, or the
opposite: the sheen of a rundown fabric, which had been wearing thinner
with each washing.45
This piercing element opens up the “optical unconscious” of the photograph.

From describing the photograph itself, Esther turns to a detailed portrayal
of the complicated and tense relationship between her parents. It is
captured in a typical scene of her father washing his own socks and
underwear in the sink while her mother watches him from a distance,
angry yet at the same time deeply insulted by his aloofness and self-
44
Barthes 1981, 27.
45
Matalon 1995, 38-39; cf. idem 1998, 30-31.
144 Chapter Five
sufficiency. This scene leads to a quarrel between Esther’s parents and

eventually, to her father leaving the house for yet another unknown period
to pursue his political activities, his struggle against what he defines as
“the ruling class’s hatred of the Orient.”46 In other words, a small “crack”
in the photograph of the elegant gentleman reveals its own opposite which
secretly exists within it. To use a photographic term, albeit figuratively,
this crack reveals the photograph’s own negative.
This sense of a reading that aims at exposing the photograph and its
negative is especially strong in light of the description that appears at the
opening of this chapter:
This photograph is always accompanied with a definite article: this is “the

father,” not “Father,” “the father”—a generic adjective, an archetype, the
absolute portrait of a father, floating unchangeable above time, places,
circumstance—with the same slim signature of a mustache, Omar Sharif
smile, and shiny shoes, asking to vanquish the fleeting moment and its
capriciousness, to always be one.47
This text expresses the double function that Giorgio Agamben identifies as
inherent to any photograph: the ability to turn a specific person, moment,
or gesture into every person, moment, or gesture by halting them.
Similarly to Barthes, Agamben is also following Benjamin in celebrating
this specific character of the camera but he uses it to argue that the true
fascination of photography is its ability to represent the world “as it
appears on the last day.”48 As an emblematic example, he uses one of the
first photographs ever taken, Daguerre’s 1838 Boulevard du Temple, also
considered the first photograph to ever capture an image of a person.49
Regarding this photograph, in which the only person seen in a busy
Parisian street is a man who stopped for a shoe-shine (consequently
standing still long enough for Daguerre’s camera to capture him),
Agamben writes:
I could never have invented a more adequate image of the Last Judgment.
The crowd of humans—indeed, all of humanity—is present but it cannot
be seen, because the judgment concerns a single person […]. In the
supreme instant, man, each man, is given over forever to his smallest, most
46
Matalon 1995, 225; cf. idem 1998, 209.
47
Matalon 1995, 37-38; cf. idem 1998, 29.
48
Agamben 2007, 23.
49
For further discussion of this photograph, see Brunet 2009, 18-19.
everyday gesture. And yet, thanks to the photographic lens, that gesture is
now charged with the weight of an entire life.50
In other words, the last day according to Agamben is the everyday

uniquely halted and captured by the camera. This process of freezing and
fixating takes the moment out of the specific and the banal and grants it a
metonymic quality. The shoe-shining gesture becomes an entire life and
the man getting a shoe-shine in the street—every man. This occurs not
allegorically but synecdochically, not because he symbolizes humanity but
because his gesture put into halt becomes an annunciation of all human
gestures. The novel as a genre aspires to accomplish the same goal
precisely. According to Jacques Rancière, a figure in a novel “is no longer
the illustrative ornament of discourse or the allegory of a hidden truth, but
a body announcing another body.”51 When encountering in a novel a
photograph of a man, with the title “father in a room,” readers assume that
the man in the photograph is someone’s real private father (perhaps even
Matalon’s), yet at the same time they witness his transformation into a
fictional character. Like the man getting a shoe-shine in Daguerre’s
photograph who, according to Agamben, becomes “all of humanity” once
photographed, the very specific father, with his signature mustache and
ever-shining shoes (!) becomes every father—“an archetype” of a father—
once photographed and even more so, once his photograph is inserted into
a novel. He is metamorphosed from a specific father to the generalized
idea of the father. Matalon ‘hires’ this specific father (perhaps her own)
like an actor—indeed, like Omar Sharif—to play the role of Esther’s father
in what is after all not an autobiography but a fictional novel (despite the
employment of many autobiographical details and personal photos). The
presence of this photographic image accentuates his role as every father.
To paraphrase Rancière, he is a father “announcing” another father. If we
will, the photograph helps him to surpass the specific moment and
represent the idea of the father that floats above all times, places, or
circumstances. Yet one can hardly imagine a more powerful negative to
this solid figure of a father as presented in the photograph, than the man
exposed in the text—washing his dirty socks in the sink before leaving his
wife and children once again for an unknown period of time.
As this example plainly shows, the photographs/roots analogy does not
endorse a sentimental attitude towards the photograph but defies it.
Matalon belongs to a wider group of artists who, as Marianne Hirsch
defines it, use family photographs in their work “going beyond their
50
Agamben 2007, 24.
51
Rancière 2004, 75.
146 Chapter Five
conventional and opaque surfaces to expose the complicated stories of

familial relation […] that have, for the most part, remained outside the
family album.”52 Yet Esther reads her family photographs not only in a
quest for the “optical unconsciousness” but also for the in-between world
between what really was, what could have been, and, perhaps most
importantly, what could still be. In a highly reflective paragraph, she
concludes:
This is the place where the photograph opens: the precise spot where the
thin line between the real and the fiction flashes for a split moment,
revealing itself, the place where the photograph announces not only of its
being an evidence of the reality, but also of its possibilities.53
Out of Benjamin’s “optical subconscious” and Barthes’s punctum, Matalon

seems to suggest, grow the possibilities the photograph has to offer. With
relation to this paragraph Zoran further notes that these possibilities
transcend photographic realism or Barthes’s Ça a été (That-has-been)
notion, and allow the creation of the “mimetic realism” that comprises a
novel.54 The photographs are, then, the roots that allow Esther to
reconstruct the family story, to locate herself within it, and to find her own
voice. The photographs allow Esther to find her own place and language, if
we will, amongst the many places and languages surrounding her.
The missing photograph lingers

This reading of the photograph’s optical unconscious through a specific
punctum is what Mieke Bal calls a “counterreading,” a reading that
responds to a text but at the same time shifts its emphasis and effect.55
When applied, as in Matalon’s case, in the reading of a photograph, such
counterreading follows Sontag’s assertion that the camera’s rendering of
reality must always hide more than it discloses and therefore, the
assumption that we know something about the world if we accept it as
recorded in a photograph is actually the opposite of understanding.
Understanding, Sontag argues, “starts from not accepting the world as it
looks.”56 Hirsch defines such reading of family photographs as “resisting
the images”—going beyond the conventional techniques of photography
52
Hirsch 1997, 7.
53
Matalon 1995, 10-11; cf. idem 1998, 4.
54
Zoran 2008, 329.
55
Bal 1991, 37.
56
Sontag 1979, 23 (emphasis in original).
as a strategy of intervention into the familial story. This idea corresponds

with Barthes’s definition of the punctum as a “subtle beyond” (hors-champ
subtil).57 Such “resisting of the image,” as Hirsch shows, can wear
different forms, from a textual description of a chemical manipulation of
familial photographs in an autobiographical novel, to a reading of un-
reproduced photographs. The ultimate example of the latter is Barthes’s
choice to avoid reproducing the “Winter Garden” photograph of his
mother in Camera Lucida, thus transforming the image into what Hirsch
calls a “prose picture.”58 Matalon uses this technique in her novel as well,
alongside the multilayered reading of photos, by opening several chapters
with only the title of an un-reproduced photograph, defined by the text as a
“missing photograph” (tatslum haser) as opposed to most other chapters
that open with an actual photograph (as in the previous discussion). One
photograph, the wedding photograph of Uncle Sicourelle, even “goes
missing” during the narrative. It is reproduced on page 69 with the title “A
Photograph: The Wedding: Monsieur and Madame Sicourelle at the
Entrance to City Hall, Brazzaville, 1954” (Tatslum: hahatunnah: Misyeh
umadam Sicourelle befetah beit hairiyah, Brazzaville, 1954) and although
the same title appears on page 88, the photo is not reproduced again. It is
not defined by the text as missing, but the choice not to reproduce it a
second time renders it as yet another “missing photograph” (see Fig. [2]
and Fig. [3]).59
By reading missing photographs, Matalon does not only echo Barthes’s
decision not to reproduce a specific photograph, but also demands that her
readers practice his argument according to which “in order to see a
photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes.”60 She
underscores this choice by placing at the heart of the narrative the
character of Nona Fortuné who treasures the photographs despite her
57
Barthes 1980, 93; idem 1981, 59.
58
Hirsch, Family Frames, 3; 189-215.
59
Matalon 1995, 69; 88 (cf. idem 1998, 61; 80). In the English translation it is
reproduced a second time (see idem 1998, 80), an alteration that subverts the
significance of the original choice.
60
Barthes 1981, 53. This idea is actually quoted in the novel as part of Inès’s
conversation with Zuza. At the beginning of the conversation Zuza declares that
“in order to really see a photograph, we must look away or simply close our eyes,”
while dramatically closing her eyes and tilting her chin (Matalon 1995 285; idem
1998, 268). The choice to plant an almost direct quote from Barthes in the mouth
of this nostalgic, melodramatic character ridicules not the idea itself but Zuza’s
“ready-made” wisdom (as opposed to Nona Fortuné who practices this technique
due to physical limitations and out of a genuine urge). On the missing photograph
in Camera Lucida, see for example Hirsch 1997, 8-9 and Wigoder 2003, 84-5.
148 Chapter Five
blindness and reads them with the assistance of her granddaughter. In her
very blindness she enacts a perpetual literal “looking away” while also
remaining highly engaged with that which the photograph portrays.
Fig. [2] Fig. [3]
That said, in the context of The One Facing Us the missing photographs
have another significant effect. By including not only photographs but also
missing ones, Matalon advances the portability characteristic of the
photograph a step further. As Hirsch notes, it is since the invention of the
portable camera that photography gradually became “the family’s primary
instrument of self knowledge and representation—the means by which
family memory would be continued and perpetuated, by which the
family’s story would henceforth be told.”61 Hirsch relates this to Barthes’s
idea of Ça a été or the evidential force of photography. This distinct
quality leads to the hope of finding some truth about the past of the family
in the family photograph, which sometimes even replaces actual memories
61
Hirsch 1997, 6-7.
(astutely defined by Hirsch as “postmemory”).62 However, I would like to

argue that the portable nature of the photograph, which allows one to move
the family photographs from one place to another, as well as to hand them
down from generation to generation, has played an equally crucial role in
the photograph’s stature as a fundamental component in the family history.
In this sense, missing photographs are one inevitable consequence,
alongside the possibility of physical damage, of photographs’ portability
and tangibility.
Matalon underscores the central place of the photograph in the story of
the family even when lost. A lost photograph, Matalon seems to suggest,
does not leave a complete void; its imagined “negative” keeps lingering
and circulating in the family memory and it remains an active part of the
family roots. It is precisely the portability of the photograph that makes the
photographs/roots analogy so central in constructing the postcolonial
stance in this novel, in locating culture in the realm of the beyond and in
focusing on immigration as a state of mind.
Migratory aesthetics I:
The photographs as immigrants in the novel
As several scholars have noted, this novel is markedly invested in the
mixing of genres. The most prominent genres are of course fiction and
autobiography, since Matalon constructs a work of fiction which practices
the memoir technique of including photographs within a life-narrative,
using some of her own family photos.63 To this she adds the mixture of the
novel and the essay by inserting credited excerpts from Jacqueline
Kahanoff’s essay collection Mimizrah shemesh (Toward the Rising Sun—
1978). Matalon underlines both choices by turning Kahanoff into a
fictional minor character in the narrative, who is said to appear in two
photographs, one extremely blurry and the other missing.64 Hever even
identifies in the opening of the novel, with the photograph and the
assertion “this is my uncle,” a literary homage to the illustrated Africa
stories for children by Hebrew author Nahum Gutman.65 Michael Gluzman
concludes that unlike other writers, Matalon shifts from one genre to the
other in the framework of one text, thus turning the mixing of genres into a
62
Hirsch 1997, 17-40; idem 2008.
63
On the practice of including photographs in memoirs and autobiographies, see
Adams 2000.
64
See Matalon 1995, 130; 197; idem 1998, 123; 180.
65
Hever 2007, 331.
150 Chapter Five
political project, where the borders between the private and the public are
blurred.66
In a recent conversation I had with Matalon, she revealed yet another
genre that is at play in this novel, less obvious but highly significant,
namely: the “photo-roman.” Known in Britain as the “photo-story” or
“photo-novel,” this quasi-literary popular genre (by now in decline)
appeared in the form of booklets or magazines, featuring romantic
dialogues accompanied by still photographs.67 As it turns out, Matalon’s
mother loved reading popular French photo-roman magazines, such as
Nous Deux (Us Two) or Intimité (Intimacy), which she would exchange
with her neighbors, and which fascinated Matalon as a child. “I could sit
with them for hours,” she noted, “trying to decipher the connection
between the words and the images.”68 Matalon’s choice to engage with the
photo-roman as a mode of writing expands the blurring of borders beyond
the private and the public to blurring those between high culture and
popular culture. This registers with the postcolonial perspective that resists
“the attempt at holistic forms of social explanation,” as Bhabha describes it
and continues:
It forces a recognition of the more complex cultural and political

boundaries that exist on the cusp of these often opposed political spheres.
It is from this hybrid location of cultural value […] that the postcolonial
intellectual attempts to elaborate a historical and literary project.69
Furthermore, by using the “imagetext” form, Matalon introduces a

hybridity not only of two (or more) different genres but of two semiotic
languages: the visual and the textual. In other words, the postcolonial
linguistic hybridity at which Matalon aims (“the breaking of the one
language”), is achieved first of all through the incorporation of the
photographs. It is achieved even before the textual narrative begins, by the
mere insertion of a photograph at its opening. Thus, the insertion of the
66
Matalon 2001a, 229.
67
A private conversation with Matalon, Tel Aviv, February 21, 2010. As Clive
Scott notes in The Spoken Image: Photography and Language (1999), the photo-
roman originated in the cine-novel, booklets of film script and stills that flourished
from the 1920s through the 1940s and “best served its social purpose of bringing
the cinema to communities, particularly provincial or rural ones, which did not
boast a cinema” (ibid., 184).
68
A private conversation with Matalon, Tel Aviv, February 21, 2010.
69
Bhabha 1994, 248.
photograph not only resembles the insertion of other languages, genres, or

other works, like Kahanoff’s essays70— it anticipates it.
As Bhabha notes, the postcolonial emphasis on hybridity as an ideal
mode of action relies on Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s discussion of dialogism in
the discourse of the novel.71 According to Bakhtin, alongside dialogism
and pure dialogues, hybridization is the prominent category of devices for
creating the structure of a language in the novel. By hybridity Bakhtin
refers to “a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single
utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two
different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an
epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor.”72
With Bakhtin’s model in mind, the employment of photographs in a
novel can arguably act as an intensification of the hybridization that occurs
in the discourse of any novel. However, in a novel aimed at telling “the
story of immigration from inside,” I suggest that such hybridization can
take on yet a more specific meaning. In effect, Matalon chooses to write in
a manner in which the photographs themselves can be designated as
immigrants—belonging to the visual world, immigrating into the textual
one, into the novel. In other words, Matalon turns the photographs into
what Bal defines as “migratory aesthetics”—a term referring “not to actual
migration, but to the cultural inspiration that migration, if encountered on
its own terms, can yield.”73 In discussing accent as an idea relevant not
only to spoken language, but also to translation, Bal writes:
Instead of being a deviation of a smooth self-evident mainstream, then,

accents that remind us of the translated quality of the words spoken can
also be seen as cultural, specifically linguistic, enrichments. […] By
[accented translation] I mean translation that bears the traces, the
remainder, of what is itself a translation as well as of that translated status
of its ‘original.’ […] The concept of accent, then, becomes a key element
of a ‘migratory aesthetics.’74
Accordingly, Matalon’s project can be understood as translating visual

images—family photographs—into a textual narrative—a novel. By
70
Rattok 2000, 119.
71
Bhabha 1994, 269-75.
72
Bakhtin 2006, 358.
73
Bal 2007, 111.
74
Bal 2007, 111 (single quotes in the original). Elsewhere (idem 2005) Bal refers
to the migratory aesthetics potential of food (namely, communities of immigrants
importing traditional foods) and space (namely, the influence of immigration on
the looks of European inner-cities).
152 Chapter Five
performing such acts of translation in using the photographs as “migratory

aesthetics,” Matalon creates the crucial postcolonial link between
translation and immigration as a state of mind, in which culture is
perceived “as a strategy of survival” which is both “transnational and
translational.”75
Furthermore, in choosing to include those photographs at the opening
of chapters, Matalon not only creates a Balian “accented” translation but
she insists at the same time on preserving the status of the photographs as
immigrants in the text. To use the Benjaminian term in “The Task of the
Translator” (1923), she leaves certain aspects of the photographs
“untranslatable” (unübersetzbar).76 Matalon forges a seemingly dependent
relationship between image and text; for example, readers only understand
the names of depicted characters, and the time and place of the
photographs through the written narrative. At the same time, however, the
image is never completely integrated into the text; it remains autonomous
and preserves its visuality and uniqueness. It is precisely the fact that the
text “translates” it, but only to a certain extent, that allows the photograph
to preserve its own accent. It offers an opposition to the textual language
and an alternative reading by practicing an immigration that transcends the
dichotomy of here and there, an immigration which means, to quote
Bhabha once again, “neither a new horizon, nor a leaving behind of the
past.”77
The photographs thus function both as immigrants and as “migratory
aesthetics” within a narrative dedicated not only to telling the story of a
specific immigration, but to celebrating immigration as a state of mind.
Migratory aesthetics II:

Immigwriting
In explaining her choice to include photographs in her first novel, Matalon
once said: “it is part of my decision not to obscure or erase the footsteps of
the writing […] by leaving the photographs in, it is as if I have revealed
what activated me, what was the ‘trigger’ in my work.”78 What Matalon
describes here in fact is a refusal to obey the established boundaries
between the process of writing and the final product, between the world of
authors and the new world created by them. In a way, the photographs are
75
Bhabha 1994, 247.
76
Benjamin 1968, 81; idem 2005, 64.
77
Bhabha 1994, 1-2.
78
Quoted in Abramovich 2003, 4.
not only her “triggers,” but also her “notes” or “sketches,” which more
typically would never be included in the finished product. Following this,
it can be said that Matalon perceives the act of writing as a certain kind of
immigration in which she as a writer emigrates from a personal world to a
new, more public one. In that personal world, the photographs function as
her roots.79 By including them in the final version of her novel she
expresses a refusal to leave the roots of her writing process behind upon
entering the new world of the novel. In doing so, she creates a third kind of
an accomplished literary product—a novel that still contains “the footsteps
of the writing.” This focus on the process of writing itself mirrors her
focus on immigration itself.80
Interestingly though not surprisingly, when asked a similar question
regarding his choice to incorporate photographs in his novels, German
author W. G. Sebald gave almost an identical explanation. “It is one way,”
Sebald replied, “of making obvious that you don’t begin with a white
page, you do have sources, you do have materials; if you create something
that seems as if it proceeded seamlessly from your pen, then you hide the
material sources of your work.”81 Sebald dedicated most of his
(unfortunately short) literary oeuvre to the poetic exploration of memory,
displacement, and immigration—with a particular interest in post-
Holocaust Jewish immigration. He is also one of the pioneering master
authors of the imagetext turn in the twentieth-century novel. In their
similar statements, then, both authors echo their perception of writing as
an act of immigration that defies conventional categorizations. In their
insistence on including the photographic roots of their writing, both
authors practice Benjamin’s call for authors to adopt the photograph as a
79
It is important to note that these photographs function as Matalon’s roots by
being the visual origins that instigate her writing, but not because they are
necessarily from her own familial collection. At the opening of the book Matalon
thanks five different families, including her own, for allowing her to use
photographs from their collections, thus signaling that not all photos reproduced in
the novel carry autobiographical significance.
80
In her aforementioned essay “Outside Place, Inside Time,” Matalon quotes her
uncle and aunt who used to say that their wish is to die on an airplane since this is
where they spent most of their lives. She sympathizes with the choice of the
airplane, or movement itself, as the right place, “which is not an actual place […]
which is almost exclusively constructed of movement” (idem 2001, 41-42). By
including photographs in her novel it can also be said that Matalon chooses to stay
in the “airplane stage” of writing without entirely arriving at a “final destination.”
Hochberg is also right in relating this quote to the aforementioned description of
Inès constantly pulling up and re-planting plants (see idem 2007, 65).
81
Quoted in Elcott 2004, 203.
154 Chapter Five
means of breaching imposed barriers between author and reader. In “The

Author as Producer” (1934) Benjamin writes:
What we require of the photographer is the ability to give his picture a

caption that wrenches it from modish commerce and gives it a
revolutionary use value. But we will make this demand most emphatically
when we—the writers—take up photography. […] [T]echnical progress is
for the author as producer the foundation of his political progress. In other
words, only by transcending the specialization in the process of intellectual
production—a specialization that, in the bourgeois view, constitutes its
order—can one make this production politically useful; and the barriers
imposed by specialization must be breached jointly by the productive
forces that they were set up to divide.82
Benjamin’s rhetoric is unmistakably influenced by Marxist tradition (the

language of production, specialization, and bourgeoisie), whereas Matalon
and Sebald do not reflect such commitments. Yet both adopt Benjamin’s
notion of interruption through splitting the focalizing authority between
the textual and the visual. In both authors’ work, the act of storytelling is
no longer exclusively textual. In both cases, when speaking of the reader
“one does not refer to empirical reading experiences,” as Silke Horstkotte
notes in reference to Sebald, “but rather to a reader who is also a spectator,”
or, as Hirsch labels it, a “viewer/reader.”83 However, these authors do not
seek merely to split the narrative authority into two semiotic fields; rather,
they aspire to question focalizing authority all together. Both authors
employ different literary techniques in order to break the narration
authority, the main one being splitting the narrating voice. As Bal notes in
her study of narratology, there are several optional narrating voices in the
novel form. The two basic options are either a first-person or a third-
person narrator, but there are also a number of optional combinations.
82
Benjamin 2008, 87. As Azoulay notes, in his own writing Benjamin did in fact
follow this call, but until recently the majority of reprints of his work left no trace
of the visual elements included in the original. Azoulay points out that this erasure
of “visual paragraphs” ironically attests to the very same “violent separation in
modern era between text and image” against which Benjamin writes (Azoulay
2006, 10-11). Yet this tendency is gradually changing. For example, Azoulay
edited a Hebrew edition of “Little History of Photography” which includes all the
photographs that appeared in the original publication, and an English edition of
Benjamin’s writings on media, as well as a German publication of materials from
his archives, include many visual elements (see Benjamin 2004; 2008; 2010).
83
Horstkotte 2005, 269; Hirsch 1997, 39.
Thus “all kinds of ‘I’s” can exist in the sphere of the novel.84 In The One
Facing Us (as in The Sound of Our Steps) Matalon takes advantage of both
basic options, using the first-person and third-person narrator
interchangeably. Sebald, on the other hand, seems to take the splitting of
the narrating voice even further. He uses as many “kinds of ‘I’s” as
possible with the most far-reaching examples found, ironically, in his only
novel titled after its central protagonist—Austerlitz (2001).85 The
questioning of narrative ownership is where photography as a specific
visual medium plays a crucial role. In “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), Benjamin posits that photography
dismantles the concepts of origin and authenticity in the visual sphere.86
Developing this idea, Ariella Azoulay further argues that the very essence
of photography is the defiance of ownership:
The concepts of property and ownership are foreign to the logic of

photography. What is seen in a photograph evades all criteria for
ownership and cannot be appropriated; from this it is impossible to
establish a single, stable meaning of photography that would negate or
supersede all others. A photograph is neither the product of a single person,
despite the concept of ‘author’ having been established in relation to
photography, nor is it even solely a product of human hands. A
photographic image, then, can at most be entrusted to someone for a
certain time.87
By carrying this fundamental avoidance of ownership into the novel, both

in Matalon’s case and in Sebald’s the presence of photographs deepens the
dismantling of any ownership over the narrative. In short, both writers
practice what I term “immigwriting”: writing as a postcolonial act of
immigration, by using photographic images as “migratory aesthetics,” in
order to explore that very same act.
Immigration becomes a major theme in Sebald’s 1992 Die
Ausgewanderten (translated in 1996 as The Emigrants). As the German
subtitle suggests, this novel is divided into four long narratives (vier lange
Erzählungen), each focusing on a different German character in exile that
either is related to the narrator—himself a German in exile (as in all of
Sebald’s novels)—or encounters him at different points of his life.
84
Bal 1997, 123.
85
The narrating authority in Austerlitz constantly changes hands, leading to
oddities such as: “can’t you tell me […] she asked, said Austerlitz” (kannst du mir
nicht sagen, sagte sie, sagte Austerlitz—Sebald 2008, 311; idem 2001, 215).
86
Benjamin 2008, 23-24.
87
Azoulay 2008, 103.
156 Chapter Five
Together the narrator and characters comprise a picture of a lost generation

or what Marianne Hirsch calls the “postgeneration” that is constantly
seeking to reconstruct a lost past. Hirsch argues that in such an existence
photographs play a key role since they uniquely “function as ghostly
revenants from an irretrievably lost past world.”88
Published only three years after Sebald’s The Emigrants, Matalon’s
The One Facing Us similarly presents several stories of immigration,
intertwined with scattered photographs, that unite together into a meditation
on memory and immigration as an existential state of mind. Yet a
fundamental difference between the two authors should be noted in this
context. While Sebald represents a post-Holocaust melancholic dismantlement
of the narrative authority, Matalon reflects a hope to reconstruct a certain
narrating ability that can grow out of the destruction. This ability is based
precisely on a heteroglossic narrating authority, or as Matalon herself
defined it (regarding the differences between herself and Sebald), “an
almost playful understanding of the author as an entire population of
voices.”89 As Rattok notes, Esther’s major discovery throughout the novel
is the world of her own literary creation.90 Continuing this, I suggest that it
is by using the photographic roots, “the only molecules left after the
destruction of everything else,”91 that Esther gradually discovers the in-
between world of writing, and like Matalon herself, she does not leave her
roots behind upon immigrating into that world.
Conclusion:
A wandering Jew with a bundle full of photographs
In the same essay with which I opened, Matalon writes:
My family biography allowed me to examine the two possibilities of

immigration: a permanent state and a chronic disease, as opposed to a
passing traumatic event—and I basically chose the first option, the chronic
state of immigration.92
Matalon’s designation of the immigration-possibility she chose as “a

chronic disease” is highly meaningful. What this essay describes, as does
Matalon’s novel, is in fact a choice of an existence that was perceived as a
88
Hirsch 2008, 115.
89
A private conversation with Matalon, Tel Aviv, February 21, 2010.
90
Rattok 2000, 131.
91
Hever 2007, 334.
92
Matalon 2001b,48.
punishment in both Jewish and Christian traditions. In Jewish tradition, the

idea originates in the story of Cain and Abel, where Cain’s major
punishment is a fate of eternal wandering. A medieval Christian legend
describes Jesus stopping for a rest on a Jew’s doorstep, but the latter
refuses to allow him to do so, crying out “walk faster!” to which Jesus
replies: “I go but you will walk until I come again.”93 As Richard Cohen
notes, visual depictions of the Wandering Jew throughout history reflect
the “historical tension between Jews and non-Jews in different periods.”94
Thus, Matalon’s choice to embrace, figuratively, the state of existence
of the Wandering Jew is an act of self-inflicting punishment or disease that
challenges the very cultural and historical perception of the act of
wandering as such. Notwithstanding, similarly to her choice to tell the
story of immigration from inside, this choice bears meaning in the
particular context of Israeli society as well. Matalon embraces a state of
existence that has been used for centuries as a derisive metaphor in the
constant conflict between Jewish culture and its surrounding cultures. In
choosing that mode of existence, Matalon subverts the traditional
understanding, which renders the wanderer as the punished outsider;
Matalon recasts that role in reclaiming movement from the wanderer in
exile, elevating it to a portability that allows for crucial “betweens” and
“beyonds.” By doing so she employs the postcolonial “beyond” in order to
blur another fundamental boundary in the early Zionist narrative in
addition to the border between “Here” and “There”—namely, the
separation between “Us” and “Them,” between “Me” and the “Other.”
In depicting an immigration of Egyptian Jews to the young State of
Israel (among many other immigrations), Matalon touches on a matter that
was rarely addressed by Zionist thought: the strong connection Jews from
Arab countries felt towards Arab culture, which grew to become the
ultimate Other of Israeli culture. These Jews, who were expected to
sympathize entirely with the young nation in its battle against the
93
Attempts to trace this legend to the New Testament point to Matthew 16:28 and
John 21:20-23, but these are inconclusive as direct links. See Anderson 1965.
94
Cohen 2007, 147. As Cohen shows, the medieval legend might stem from the
New Testament (and possibly from the biblical story of Cain). However, it
emerged into a full-blown legend only in the thirteenth century and gained
popularity only after the publication of an influential German version of it (which
included a vignette portraying the Wandering Jew in crude outlines) in early
sevteenth century. In the context of Matalon’s positive usage of this notion, it is
noteworthy that in 1981 Stefan Heym published his novel Ahasver (published in
English in 1984 as The Wandering Jew), which portrayed the wandering Jew as the
manifestation of the spirit of resistance and solidarity.
158 Chapter Five
competing Other, felt at times torn between the alternatives and offended
by the patronizing and contemptuous Israeli approach towards Arab
culture. This issue is addressed in the novel mostly through the figure of
the father, Robert. In a neighborhood newsletter he publishes as part of his
intensive political activity, Robert defines the Arabs in one of his essays as
“our brethren” (bney amenu—literally “the sons of our people”), lamenting
the humiliation of Oriental Jews and Arabs alike by the Ashkenazi elite.95
In the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War, Robert is described as follows:
He walked around “like someone who just had a cold shower,” shrunk in
humiliation, blinking in disbelief every time he hears the stories about how
the Egyptian soldiers left their shoes behind and fled barefoot. “Barefoot,”
he repeated as if ironically, “barefoot indeed.”96
Inès considers this refusal to join the winning Israeli side an act of treason
and purposely breaks the news of the victory to Robert with the words “we
won.” In response, Robert not only disparages her usage of the first-person
plural but turns to second-person plural, exclaiming: “you [pl.] will eat this
occupation till it goes out of your noses.” In return she ragingly throws a
plant-pot at him yelling: “go on, you traitor, go back to where you came
from.”97 The object Inès uses as a “weapon” in this dispute, a plant-pot,
seems random at first but is in fact quite meaningful. Offering the most
literal possibility for portable roots, the plant-pot comes to signify Inès’s
character as the ultimate representative of postcolonial mobility of cultural
roots in the novel. Yet she uses it to express her disapproval of Robert’s
refusal to participate in the hatred and dismissal of the Other. In this sense,
in their blind devotion to only one side of the postcolonial “coin,” both
characters neglect the crucial second side. Inès is so devoted to her efforts
to construct, maintain, and renew a home that she chooses to ignore the
very same need of her surrounding Others; Robert, on the other hand, is so
dedicated to his political efforts to accept the Others and break imposed
national and ethnical dichotomies, that he neglects his home completely. In
the narrative Esther constructs with the help of the photographs, the
seemingly irreconcilable essences of her mother and father unite after all
into a complex vision of the Wandering Jew as a state of mind. Their
approaches combined together seem to be the real hope this novel offers.
This unification of Inès’s and Robert’s competing stances occurs through
their child, the narrator, and is mirrored in the unique presence of a
95
Matalon 1995, 233; cf. idem 1998, 261.
96
Matalon 1995, 261; cf. idem 1998, 244-45.
97
Matalon 1995, 261; cf. idem 1998, 245.
competing medium—the photographs—within the text. Esther is able to

take in and learn from these perspectives and form a more encompassing
philosophy. In this vision, the mobility of roots and culture is crucial but
depends on an ability to belong even while in motion. At the same time,
this belonging does not denote seclusion. It preserves the sense of the
beyond that allows one to include the “There” and the “Other” within the
“Here” and the “Self”—whether it is a singular “me” or a plural “we.” As
Matalon puts it, in further explaining her choice of “the chronic state of
immigration”:
I chose it not only because it is more colorful, more dynamic, more exotic;
but mainly because that “there” of the immigration allowed me to look at
the “here,” because through the invasion of the foreign language, the
foreign culture, I can better hear the Hebrew, the Israeli culture. The
universal dimension of immigration and its universal validity allow a
perspective in which one can move around, and an identity that already
contains its changing potential.98
In other words, as a postcolonial state of mind, the Wandering Jew

metaphor not only becomes a positive, desirable existence, it also ceases to
be exclusively Jewish.
The One Facing Us marks a climactic point in the entry of photography
into Hebrew literature.99 In this sense, together with a few other authors,
Matalon contributes to the “normalization” of Hebrew literature by taking
part in the completion of the Zionist effort to reembrace the visual. Yet in
doing so, Matalon at the same time questions some of the most
fundamental aspects of the Zionist project, namely the return to the land of
Israel and the revival of the Hebrew language. In turning actual
photographs into a prominent poetic tool in a literary meditation on the
subject of immigration as a desirable state of mind, Matalon breaks the
land/body/language/image Zionist paradigm. Instead of reinforcing Zionist
discourse, the visual image becomes a resisting tool subverting it. To quote
Esther, the photographs assist Matalon in constructing “a third world, an
obscure twilight zone.”100 By doing so, she challenges the limited
boundaries particularly set forth by Zionism, based on a fixed contrast
between here and there, the Land of Israel and the Diaspora. The
alternative reality delineated by Matalon shows her yearning for a
postcolonial space in which Jewish particularism is integrated in a
98
Matalon 2001b,48.
99
Zoran 2008, 317.
100
Matalon 1995, 35; cf. idem 1998, 27.
160 Chapter Five
multicultural background. She connects Hebrew literature to a current

movement in world literature of transcending the dichotomy between text
and image, while offering the postcolonial Wandering Jew figure as a
valuable metaphor in any act of immigwriting.
In April 2008 Columbia University hosted a conference entitled “Rites
of Return: Poetics and Politics,” dedicated to “the new genealogy, cultural
memory, and the contemporary obsession with the recovery of roots.”101
As an illustration for the conference-poster the organizers chose a painting
by Argentinean artist Mirta Kupferminc entitled En Camino (On the
Road—2001, Fig. [4]), showing a group of people with rooted-trees in
their hands or houses on their backs.102 This image fascinated me and was
a meaningful inspiration for my study of Matalon’s work. I will therefore
conclude my analysis with this image, thus practicing myself, as Matalon
and Sebald do, the Benjaminean call for writers not to leave their visual
roots behind. Like Matalon, Kupferminc focuses on immigration itself, the
road, and portrays the need for portability of roots and home in
postcolonial existence. Like the figures in Kupferminc’s painting,
Matalon’s characters—and she herself as a writer—are “on the road,” only
instead of trees and homes, they carry bundles full of photographs.
Fig. [4]
101
From the conference program. For the proceedings of this conference, see
Hirsch and Miller 2011.
102
I thank the artist for kindly allowing me to reproduce her painting.
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Fig. [i]: From Ronit Matalon, The One Facing Us (chapter 5)
Fig. [ii]: From Leslie Scalapino, The Tango (chapter 6)
Fig. [iii]: From Leslie Scalapino, The Tango (chapter 6)

Fig. [iv]: Scott McFarland, Orchard View with the Effect of Seasons, Variations # 1
(chapter 11)
Fig. [v]: Scott McFarland, Orchard View with the Effect of Seasons, Variations # 2
(chapter 11)
Fig. [vi]: Jan Peter Tripp, Time goes on (chapter 11)

Fig. [vii]: Jan Peter Tripp, Déjà vu oder Der Zwischenfall (chapter 11)1
Fig. [viii]: Jan van Eyck, Arnolfini Portrait (chapter 11)
1
The picture within the painting is Tripp’s earlier work, Déclaration de guerre.
PART III:
TEXT AND IMAGE IN POETRY

CHAPTER SIX
OUT OF SITE:
PHOTOGRAPHY, WRITING,
AND DISPLACEMENT IN LESLIE SCALAPINO’S
THE TANGO
MAGNUS BREMMER
Introduction
In February 2001, the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City hosted
an exhibition entitled Poetry Plastique. The show gathered texts written to
be exhibited from more than thirty poets. Words were wrenched, so to
speak, from the paper into the gallery space—displayed on the walls,
projected on screens, printed on objects. One of the participants was the
American poet Leslie Scalapino (1944-2010). She contributed a photo-text
work titled “Wall Hanging: What’s Place—War in Night,” which consisted
of a poetic text and a series of photographs taken by the author.
Photography and text were printed on separate strips of muslin textile and
hung on the wall, draped in a parallel vertical series of discrete paragraphs
and images. Later that same year, Scalapino published an extended version
of this photo-text in book form, entitled The Tango (see Fig. [ii] in
centerfold).1 The Tango consists of ten spreads comprising twenty
unnumbered pages, fifty-four photographs, texts, and reproductions of
textile work by Marina Adams. The text is divided into three sections or
phases entitled: “What’s place— war in ‘night,’” “What’s place—‘moon’
‘rose,’” and “The Tango—‘night’ any night is can’t.” In the four spreads
of the first section, the text and the color photographs are paralleled in
vertical series as shown here. The following sections are less strictly
arranged, or more typographically varied: black and white photographs are
displayed in pairs, intermixed with the reproduced textiles.
1
Scalapino 2001.
170 Chapter Six
In both the book and the exhibition piece, the photographs picture
Tibetan monks in a courtyard, sitting on the ground, gathered in groups
under shadows cast by trees, immersed in ritualized debate. Some
photographs portray individual monks, by focusing in on their backs,
faces, and hands. The juxtaposed serial poem is striking in its sheer
density, the syntactical complexity of its language, a distinguishing
characteristic of Scalapino’s poetry. The text is not a caption of the
photographs; as it seems, it lacks obvious relation to the photographs, to
the pictured scene. The text is noteworthy in its shortage of visual
descriptions. A substantial part of experiencing this medial composite
involves reflecting on how these separate series of images and phrases
could be read/viewed. What is the possible relation of the writings to the
pictured place, the monastic garden in Tibet? And what is the relation
between the text and the photographical space that represents this scene?
In contrast to the main thematic line in Scalapino scholarship, I will not
address these questions as an issue of visuality. Rather, as my title
suggests, I will try to show how deeply Scalapino’s use of photography is
associated with an interest in location. I will address the significance of
this theme in The Tango, both thematically, formally, and in the rapport
between photographs and words, as well as between photo-text and
reader/viewer. In all these cases, a category emerges that I will call
“hetero-positionality” in Scalapino’s writing. My analysis of this “hetero-
positional” quality in Scalapino’s poetic practice will converse with two
concepts that I find relevant and valuable for this discussion: Michel
Foucault’s notion of “heterotopias” (and “heterochronia”) and Roland
Barthes’s concept of the “Neutral.”
After addressing the term “hetero-positionality,” I will take on
questions of writing, subjectivity, and positionality, as it is being evoked
in The Tango. Then, I will discuss the relation between photography and
language by implementing Barthes’s early image-text terminology into his
later thinking. In the last section I will discuss how the multiple
publication forms that Scalapino has used for her photo-texts create
different reader/viewer positions. This section augments the discussion of
hetero-positionality in The Tango to matters of materiality, evoked by the
publication strategies used by Scalapino for her photo-texts.
Building on the fact that Scalapino’s use of photographs has rarely
been commented upon, this article will create three prisms from which to
view The Tango that are all related to photography’s place in the 2001
photo-text. The aim is to show how this use of the photographic imagery
reflects a way of thinking about negativity as a plurality of time and space
that is relevant to Scalapino’s poetic writing at large.
Photography, Writing, and Displacement in Leslie Scalapino’s The Tango 171
Hetero-positionality
Leslie Scalapino’s poetry juxtaposes inquiries into subjectivity and
spirituality with political issues and documentary practices. These two
sides could seem to be paradoxical, but in Scalapino’s work they appear to
be mutually influential. In this context, The Tango is both a significant and
representative part of Scalapino’s oeuvre. The negotiation between the
political and philosophical is at center stage in this poetic photo-text. Most
strikingly, perhaps, is it represented by the very subject of the images in
it—the equally spiritual and political topos of Tibet. Tibet serves as a
location, in several senses, for the poetic discussion. But the seemingly
paradoxical constellation also works on a formal level. The philosophical
negativity, staged in the poetic monologue and represented by the
ostensibly non-communicative relation between image and text, co-exists
with the documentary specificity and concreteness achieved by the use of
photography and material aspects, such as the use of Tibet-originated
muslin textile.
As part of the exhibition Poetry Plastique, and by its various material
instantiations, Scalapino’s photo-text raises questions on the locality of the
literary text already by way of its publication. As the subheading “What’s
place— war in ‘night’” suggests, The Tango is also a text thematically
engaged with the question of location. First of all, linguistically: the text
itself is permeated with place-related words (“location,” “site,”
“placement”), spatial metaphors (“ground,” “basis”), and spatial
demonstratives (“there,” “that,” “where”). On several occasions the text
suggests a certain loss of locality—the word “dis-placement” recurs
throughout, saturated with various meanings by the density of the
surrounding paragraph. It mainly involves a recurrent disposition in
Scalapino’s writing—namely, an address of questions on awareness and
perception—initiating an inquiry into the locations of phenomena, events,
and states of consciousness. A substantial part of reading The Tango
consists in tracing this very process of “dis-placement” in time and space,
which concerns the subversion of subject/object relations and similar
constellations.
In this sense, photography is more than simply illustrative imagery or a
pragmatic aid in Scalapino’s writing. Rather, the medium itself could be
seen as a deep-going influence. Further inquiry into the theoretical history
of photography could give valuable notions for thematizing the plurality,
materiality, and heterogeneity behind the negativity in Scalapino’s work.
For instance, there is a common conception, most influentially proposed
by Roland Barthes, that the photograph has a paradoxical relationship to
172 Chapter Six
its referent.2 A photograph of a particular place preserves a record of that

place, but also displaces it in time and space. When viewing a photograph
in the present, it is a past present that one is witnessing. Additionally, the
photograph puts the viewer in connection with a different place than the
place from where the image is being viewed. I argue that the photographic
experience, with its amalgamation of these different spatial and temporal
modalities, is a strong influence on Scalapino’s writing. The photographs
serve both as an augmentation of the writing space, creating an intermedial
space, and as a locational and positional extension through the represented
space of the photograph, that is, the referential object (for example, the
Tibetan monastery in The Tango). In reading, this creates an experience of
a plural sense of place. The Tango is neither the first nor the only work of
Scalapino’s that feature photographs.3 In all of her photo-texts the
aforementioned plurality is performed on several levels, which I suggest
makes them particularly suggestive in the understanding and reception of
her work.
The process of “dis-placement,” here with relation to photography,
aims at negativity in terms of dissolution of values, but through a
paradoxical plurality. As a recurring element in Scalapino’s writing,
negativity rarely means cancellation in terms of a complete emptiness, but
rather emerges at a point of plurality, of the multiple. Through the serial
form, categories such as the “poetic I” are deconstructed in a process of
mutual cancellation, contradictions, and constellations of plurality. This is
what happens to the allegedly stable concepts of place and site in The
Tango when they are “displaced.”
Following Laura Hinton’s concept of an “a-positionality of the
subject”4 (which she coined with regard to Scalapino’s writing), as well as
Foucault’s notion of “heterotopias” (and “heterochronia”) and Barthes’s
idea of the “Neutral,” I suggest calling this experience in Scalapino’s
writing “hetero-positionality.” Foucault gives “heterotopias” a straggling,
sometimes contradictory definition in his 1967 lecture “Different Spaces”
2
This notion, and its existential or aesthetic consequences, is a much-discussed
issue in the theories of photography. See, for instance, Barthes 1977 or Prosser
2005.
3
Several of Scalapino’s books have photographs as the frontispiece, three of
them—including her last book, Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows (2010)—are
photo-texts, juxtaposing photographs and writing. In two of these, it is the author
herself that has taken the pictures; in both, all photographs are from one particular
place: Crowd and not evening or light (1992) features photographs from Venice
Beach; The Tango pictures Tibetan monks at the Sera Monastery in Lhasa, Tibet.
4
Hinton 1999.
(“Des Espaces autres”).5 Related to his understanding of the outside,

“heterotopia” signifies an “other” place that is not “no place,” i.e.—utopia.
It is a negativistic concept, but—as the prefix hetero- suggests—it aims
towards plurality. A main idea depicts “heterotopias” as a physical place
that in some sense contains several places.6 This negativity by plurality is
something that Foucault’s concept shares with Barthes’s analysis of le
Neutre. At the end of one of his last courses at the Collège de France,
Barthes reaches the final of a swarming series of definitions of this
concept, the topic of the course. It is a concept that shares many
conceptual likenesses with other Barthesian concepts dealing with
“suspension of meaning,” such as “degree zero,” the “obtuse meaning,” or
the “punctum” of Camera Lucida (1980).7 However, its basis is not that of
cancellation or reduction. In fact, the best image of the “Neutral,” Barthes
concludes, “is not the null, it’s the plural.” Barthes maintains:
[T]he Neuter extended to discourse (to texts, to behaviors, to ‘motions’) is

not that of Neither […] nor, it’s ‘both at once,’ ‘at the same time,’ or ‘that
alternates with.’8
It is in this same sense that I apprehend the “hetero-positional” construct in

Scalapino’s The Tango as a modality or figure that seeks negativity
through plurality, by contradiction, suspension, and permutation.
Writing, subjectivity, and place

From her debut with O and Other Poems in 1976 until her sudden death in
2010, Leslie Scalapino produced a complex body of work. In it, the poetry
is the main artery, but her catalogue also contains drama, a novel trilogy,
and several collaborations with artists. Still, everything that Scalapino
wrote is marked by her idiosyncratic use of language. For instance,
Scalapino’s poetic writing often uses a sequential method, producing
series of paragraphs. While participating in the series, every single discrete
paragraph forms a complex entity of its own, interfolded with brackets,
hyphens, and other typographic markers. The series is also pervaded by
5
Foucault 1998.
6
Foucault 1998, 25.
7
Barthes 2000.
8
Barthes 2005, 120.
174 Chapter Six
recurring words and phrases.9 The resulting text is often strikingly

hermetic, but a text with a tangibly oral, rhythmic, and semantic complexity.
Over the last two decades, Leslie Scalapino’s poetry has gradually
gained scholarly attention. This attention has focused upon two main
modalities in her work: visuality and subjectivity. In an interview with the
poet in 1996, Elisabeth Frost asserts that Scalapino is “a profoundly visual
writer.”10 Megan Simpson dedicates a chapter of her study Poetic
Epistemologies to Scalapino, concluding that her writing is a performance
of “language-as-perception” or “perception-as-language.”11 Simpson also
terms the discrete elements in Scalapino’s serial poetry as frames.
Scalapino herself often commented on her own writing in visual, optical,
or even photographical metaphors, talking, for example, about the
“camera-lens of writing.”12 However, these analogies posit a relation
between inner and outer that cannot be reduced to visuality or mere
perceptual issues. They are tangential to a recurring constellation in
Scalapino’s work, a tension between consciousness, writing, and the
exteriority of phenomena and events. As a dialectic between self and
world, Scalapino’s interest in this constellation concerns the second of the
two modalities, subjectivity. The recurring theme in Scalapino’s poetry of
enabling and subverting dichotomies like inner/outer or subject/object has
caused Laura Hinton to suggest, in an interesting and thought-provoking
article, that Scalapino’s writings, as a feminist strategy, evoke an “a-
positionality of the subject.”13 Bruce Campbell discusses a similar subject
category in an article appropriately entitled “Neither in nor out.”14
Scalapino’s texts present writing as a practice that is in-between inner and
outer phenomena.
This “a-positionality of the subject” can also be related to the Buddhist
readings of Scalapino’s writing, most notably by Lyn Hejinian and Jason
Lagapa. Lagapa, arguing for a “disontological poetics,” explores the
thematic similarities between Buddhist thought and Scalapino’s poetry,
pointing to her attempt at denying the substance of the self by, among
other things, conceptualizing the poetic subject in a play of negations and
self-contradictory statements.15 Hejinian emphasizes, above the general
claim of the intricate relation of phenomenal and empirical experience, the
9
On seriality, see Conte 1999, specifically his discussion on Scalapino in 276-77.
10
Scalapino 1996, 4.
11
Simpson 2000, 124.
12
Scalapino 2008, 27.
13
Hinton 1999, 133.
14
Campbell 1992.
15
Lagapa 2006.
ubiquity of pain and suffering as a central Buddhist topic in Scalapino’s

work.16
I propose that both of these modalities are deeply connected to a notion
of location, which ultimately amounts to a wider notion of place. As
Hinton’s phrase “a-positionality” implies, there is a questioning of where
the subject of Scalapino’s poetry is. However, I suggest, it is not a
question of lacking place or position. On the contrary, Scalapino’s poetry
presents an incessant, subversive process of locating the self in writing. In
an essay on The Tango, Scalapino describes her writing practice with the
ambiguous term “location-notation.”17 The serial form of Scalapino’s
writing, I posit, amounts to a continuous localization (and, consequently,
continuous dis-localization) of the self—a positionality that is constantly
changing, incessantly performed and staged in the discrete fragments of
the serial poems, re-inventing itself in every instance of the serial form.
A decisive difference between Scalapino’s photo-texts and her books
without images is the fact that in the photo-texts the serial poetry does not
exist as an isolated item. In The Tango, the writing is juxtaposed to a
photographic representation with a quite specific location—a Tibetan
Monastery. In its exhibition version, Scalapino included a note that,
among other things, informed the readers/viewers that the photograph
depicts the courtyard of the Sera Monastery in Llasa, Tibet. While reading
The Tango, then, one is confronted with the task of approximating the
relation of the writing with the photographic representation of the scene at
the courtyard in Tibet.
The meta-commentary that appears in the very first paragraphs of the
book reads:
observation
(‘so’ present-time) of a real-time event (past)—to make
these be the same ‘in order’ to dis-place ‘them’ and one.
One notices in this paragraph two positions: “observation”/”present” and

“event/”past.” One also notices the outlines of a practice, that of
“ordering” or “dis-placing.” Throughout the text, this “practice” is self-
reflected, making assertions on locations of phenomena and events.
Regarding the photographs, this process could be interpreted in at least
two senses—from the author/photographer’s point of view and from the
reader/viewer’s. Scalapino’s photographic series documents what was a
16
Hejinian 2002.
17
Scalapino 2007, 15.
176 Chapter Six
specific place at a specific time, yet the arrangement is done in hindsight.

The reader of the photo-texts, on the other hand, experiences a
representation in the present, which ultimately is a trace of a past
occasion—a “present observation” of a “past event.”
The writing complicates the whole equation. Throughout, it conceptualizes
these two spatial and temporal modalities, the “presentness” of observation
and “pastness” of place. A few paragraphs later, one reads:
it is not even to state location in a different way, it is /

not to re-state conditions even.
As with the “event,” the categories of facts or objects—that is, “location”

or “conditions”—are not said to be presented by a subjective “statement.”
Rather, location is nothing other than “statement.” Moreover, the
conceptualization of an event according to the text is “not to re-state
conditions even.” In short, there is a motion in The Tango that tends to
equal the process of articulation—i.e., writing—with the event and
location that it is trying to apprehend and formulate. In fact, the text states
that they are part of a simultaneous process. Writing does not “re-state
conditions” of actual events and objects; these are intrinsically linked to
their linguistic articulation. Here, the word “both” is symptomatic,
functioning as answer to the “neither-nor” questions posed throughout the
text. Does an action or event occur in reality, or in the abstraction of
language? The answer is: “both.” A symptomatic phrase reads, for example:
the relation between emotion and event, neither/

causing the other. nor do they have no relation.
The recurring establishment of the constellation “subjectivity/language” in

The Tango is a telling marker on where the critical non-relation between
inner (emotion) and outer (event) is thought to take place. This linguistic,
analytical undertaking in Scalapino’s poetry stages the idea of a dis-
placement of events in language. As an intermedial composite, then, The
Tango connects seemingly incompatible registers of time and space.
It is in this context that I turn now to consider the subject of the
images. An immediate reaction to the use of the word “dis-placement”
next to images of Tibetan monks could elicit thoughts on experiences of
being displaced, in terms of removed from a particular place. In the
Tibetan case, displacement involves geopolitical issues on the struggle for
authorial control of land, the occupation of place, and, consequently, the
displacement of native culture and people. Yet, it is not such reflections
that are being manifestly debated in The Tango. Scalapino has written on
Tibet on other occasions. In Dahlias Iris: Secret Autobiography and
Fiction (2003), for instance, she writes in a prose fragment:
Tibet […] visibly contains all times, is occupied (by invaders and/or by
itself), and impinged on is transforming conceptually and physically en
masse by this cultural and material occupation.18
This passage tells of a complex history, a place occupied by “invaders” as

well as by “itself,” and is therefore in a process of constant transformation.
Yet, it reveals that for Scalapino, it is also a symbolic place that,
remarkably, contains not only several dimensions of time, but also several
places. Tibet is then, in Scalapino’s view, something of a “heterotopias” in
Foucault’s sense. Foucault’s definition of “heterotopias” is complex. The
five principles that he outlines for the concept seem to pull it in different
directions. A common denominator, however, appears to be the place that
in some sense contains other places:
The heterotopia has the ability to juxtapose in a single real place several
emplacements that are incompatible in themselves.19
In The Tango, this heterotopic quality could be figured in several senses. If

the photographic images are reason enough to consider Tibet a topic,
Scalapino’s characterization from Dahlia’s Iris seems relevant, not least
considering Foucault’s addition of the symmetrical temporal sibling of
“heterotopias”—“heterochronia.” “More often than not,” Foucault
concludes, “heterotopias are connected with temporal discontinuities.”20 In
addition, Scalapino’s displacements of binary opposition, as discussed
above, also welcome a view of place that contains several places and
layers of temporal dimensions. The initial subversion of “present
observation” of a “past event” connotes such an idea. The fact that Tibet is
brought to the photo-text as actual photographs (rather than some other
visual representation) could invoke “heterotopias” and “heterochronias”
metonymically. When speaking of the heterotopic capability of
“juxtaposing in a single real place /…/ several sites that are in themselves
incompatible,” Foucault gives the theatre and cinema as two examples.
The photographic technology as such, though, seems supremely apt to
exemplify the concept, in bringing these two places and timeframes into an
18
Scalapino 2003, 17.
19
Foucault 1998, 181.
20
Foucault 1998, 182.
178 Chapter Six
incompatible juxtaposition and materialization. In line with Foucault’s

conceptualization, the photograph is a physical localizable place that
represents or reproduces a spatial and temporal dimension that is
incompatible with the one in which the image is being viewed. In this way,
Scalapino’s photographs of the monastery testify to this paradoxical
locality of the photographic experience. The serial arrangement of the
images multiplies this spatiotemporal complex even further.
The main instance of dis-placement performed in The Tango is in the
intermediate relation between the writing and the photographic
representation. Considering the fact that Scalapino’s complex poetic
inquiry is juxtaposed with photographs of an important site in Tibetan
culture, two questions arise: how can this relation be viewed, and what
possible impact can the visual scenery have on the reading of the text? On
a thematical level, supplemented by the visual scenery, formulations like
the following seem to imply historical context in the written:
Were killed practicing in the monasteries—shipped

to labor, dying, trains shipping them, ringed in by barbed
wire haul on dam sites tunnels exhaustion famine in lines.
the same figure repeated everywhere changes it there as if
changed but not either from within or without that
/[…]/
Rode back in on horses raids into their own land-
and were defeated—by modern military that had invaded
grinding them, sent to camps, starved, were executed.
No details here suggest specific historical moments, though such violence

as portrayed here could elicit historical events such as that of the Chinese
invasion of Tibet in 1950, and the following occupation.21 The scenes here
depicted lie close to John F. Avedon’s account of the atrocities performed
by the PLA in Tibetan monasteries, Sera included, and on its inhabitants.
Like several monasteries, Sera was deserted, plundered, and damaged, its
practice for several years temporarily housed in Bylakuppe, India.22
Needless to say, the history of Chinese-Tibetan relations is highly
complex.23 Some aspects of The Tango, though, may indicate a support for
the Tibetan cause—for instance, material aspects such as the muslin
material used in the wall hanging version. The explicit account of violence
21
See Avedon 1997, 34-61.
22
Avedon 1997, 48; 231-32; 100.
23
For a detailed account of the early years of the Chinese occupation, see
Goldstein 2007.
quoted above relates to certain recurring figures in The Tango. “Famine,”

“starving,” “suffering,” “night”—these are words repeated throughout the
text, though rarely in a context as semantically clear as in the passages
above. The last line of The Tango reads: “Dying sole? (or living. at all.)”
An ambiguous expression, “at all” could be read in several ways, not only
as an expression of totality. The phrase gains from being read as a
rhetorical figure of collectivity, that is, relating dialectically with the
“oneness” of “sole.” It intimates, then, the homonymous “soul” as a
transgressive, collective category. Hejinian’s remark, according to which
much of Scalapino’s poetry is guided by the Buddhist notion of “the
ubiquity of pain and suffering,” seems relevant here.
Yet, the main characteristic of the writing’s relation to the visual
representation remains its hermetic quality. Passages of violence and
suffering are juxtaposed to photographic documents that show harmonious
faces, a quiet conversation. And reflections of metaphysical character face
a visual sibling that is photographically concrete and actual. The impact of
this tension between word and image is perhaps most advantageously
discernible in the indexical qualities of the text. Scalapino’s writing is
permeated with deictic words, spatial but also temporal, as well as
pronouns. Adjectives, by contrast, are sparser. A handful of arbitrary
passages from her work can exemplify how Scalapino makes use of
indexicality (italics added for emphasis): “Him not doing that
intentionally”; “as if from ‘their’ conception (view there were only ‘that’
‘one’)—and only ‘that’ ‘one’ and only ‘that’ ‘one’—an interior—and
‘that’ ‘one’ in it”; “their logic itself hierarchy which they call ‘analysis’ is
invisible to them”; “must ‘accept’ death of others.—except them. except/
him. (can't) is them him also”; “she says the entire thing is ‘theirs’”;
“There is no ‘social’ there”; and, finally, the recurring, symptomatically
phrased: “to make these be the same ‘in order’ to dis-place ‘them’ and
one.” An observant reader notes that the ambiguity in these passages not
only derives from the lack of reference for the deictic words here (who is
“them,” “she,” “him”?), but also from their elusive relations—“them,”
“she,” “him,” and “it” are placed in relation with “there,” “that,” and
“one.” One of these sentences—“(view there were only ‘that’ ‘one’)—and
only ‘that’ ‘one’ and only ‘that’ ‘one’—an interior—and ‘that’ ‘one’ in
it”—brings to mind Gertrude Stein’s iconic phrase “a rose is a rose is a
rose” or, perhaps more pertinently, her deictic laden “There is no there
there.”24 The “blank” qualities here relate to a third attribute, that of
24
The phrase “rose is a rose is a rose” was initially a part of Stein’s poem “Sacred
Emily” from 1913 (Stein 1922, 178-88). Variations on the phrase re-appeared in
180 Chapter Six
seriality—the repetition of “‘that’ ‘one.’” The blankness not only lies in

the deictic signification —“that one”—but in the elliptical identification:
“only ‘that’ ‘one’ /[…]/ and ‘that’ ‘one’ in it.”
Indexical markers concern place in terms of orientation and
directionality. In order to make sense in a written text, a word such as
“here” must have an obvious relation to the speaking subject or the textual
subject of a given context. “There,” in turn, must relate to the placement of
this “here.” Commenting on Alfred North Whitehead’s passage of the lost
traveler (“a traveler, who has lost his way, should not ask, where am I?
What he really wants to know is, where are the other places?”), Edward
Casey remarks that “to become oriented again I have to know the
respective theres of my changing here.”25 Thus, in various senses,
directionality is related to the issue of subjectivity. In The Tango, there is
an alliance between the question of dis-placement and the ambiguous
status of the poetic I. In the text, an “I” appears only on one occasion. The
place from which the text is propelled seems continuously altered or
deferred.
Adrienne Rich deals with the politics of indexical terms in her
influential essay “Notes Toward a Politics of Location” (1986). Rich’s
main objective is to point to the lack of influence from—and receptiveness
towards—other ethnicities in a largely white-dominated feminist
movement. Hence, she argues for the need and significance of localization
in identity politics, as well as an awareness of one’s own position, for
instance, geographically, ethnically, and sexually. From where do we
speak—from what place, what background, and in which context? In this
discussion on locatedness, Rich makes the keen observation that it is an
issue that makes “even ordinary pronouns become a political problem.”
She refers to the relation between “I” and “we,” the subject and the
collective, and the unvoiced power structures that inhabit our use of them.
What one ultimately must ask oneself, according to Rich, is: Who am “I”
and who is “we”? As Rich encapsulates the problem painstakingly, “you
cannot speak for me. I cannot speak for us.”26
Rich’s words are informative for looking at Scalapino’s use of
indexical words in general, and pronouns in particular, in The Tango. The
absence of an outspoken poetic “I” in The Tango should not, I propose, be
seen as a manifestation of reluctance towards localization. Rather, it
reflects a reluctance to form a subject that speaks for the Other. It stages
Stein’s poetry several times later. The phrase “there is no there there” appears in
Everybody’s Autobiography (idem 1993, 298).
25
Casey 1993, 5 (emphasis in original).
26
Rich 1986, 210-31.
unwillingness to name, to fix, and to characterize. The answer to the

previously posed question—who is “them,” “she,” “him,”?—is not
manifested in the text. And neither do these pronouns find an obvious
referent in the images.
One could object here that Scalapino, as author and photographer, has a
preferential right of interpretation. After all, she is the one who has made
these monks and this monastery courtyard available, as photographic
representations, to the reader/viewer. But the author is not synonymous
with the text. The text actively refrains from naming the subjects, the
Tibetan monks. Not only do the pronouns “them,” “she,” and “him” have
no contextual reference, caught up in an intricate web of linguistic
interrelations, but many of them also appear within quotation marks. It is a
signature mark by Scalapino that can have different functions in different
contexts. In The Tango, however, I propose to read them as a direct
reference to issues on representation and discourse. They play with the
very acts of naming, structuring, and determination. Linguist Emile
Benveniste has suggested that the deictic word primarily refers to
instances of discourse itself, since it is the context of the utterance that
determines its meaning. Giorgio Agamben has expressed a similar thought
through different terms, arguing that indexical language refers to the place
of language itself.27 This is also what Scalapino ultimately does by playing
with indexical words. She draws attention to discourse itself—and in
Scalapino’s practice, to the problem of representing without making an “I”
speak for “them.”
Always localized in the linguistic gesture, yet unceasingly dis-localized
in the serial form of writing, the subject of Scalapino’s poetry is not
completely displaced; it inhabits “many places” at the same time. This also
concerns the plurality that an intermedial composite embodies. The
intimate serial arrangement that structures the photographic and textual
material of The Tango highlights the relevancy of this spatial and temporal
plurality.
Photography and language

Scalapino’s photo-texts are characterized by a sense of “writing against”
the image. The images in her photo-texts bring objects, events, and places
to the literary text that the writing does not simply attest to or authenticate
27
See Benveniste 1971, 217-21 and Agamben 1991, 24 ff. For further reading on
indexical language, subjectivity, and discourse, see Jakobson 1990, 386-92 or
Wlad Godzich’s foreword in De Man 2002, xvi.
182 Chapter Six
in a verbal comment. Instead, it diverges from the specific locality of the

image. Arguably, it suggests or creates other spaces. In Crowd and not
evening or light (1992), the images of people at Venice Beach are
supplemented with handwritten phrases—below, above, and on the side of
the photographs. The photographs are straightforward in style; accordingly,
Frost has likened them with family photographs.28 There is nothing
familiar, however, in the supplementary phrases. In this ambiguous
writing, the sentence “not quite that” recurs. It seems directed towards the
photographs. Reading self-reflexively, one could propose that the phrase is
an altering, even disqualifying gesture. The writer seems to be trying to
grasp something from reality that the photographic representation cannot
convey—it is “not quite that.” However, more than anything, such a
reading sheds light on the ambiguous aspects of the photograph-text
relationship. For example, we are compelled to consider how the use of
indexical words can both establish and disqualify semantic relations
between photo and text. In the following, I want to inquire into this photo-
textual discrepancy, and how it unfolds in The Tango. Barthes’s thoughts
on photography and language will serve as a conversational partner in this
analysis.
Early on in his celebrated book on photography, Camera Lucida
(1980), Barthes likens the essence of the photographic message with the
Sanskrit word “tat,” meaning “that,” or “thus.” “A photograph,” Barthes
writes, “is to be found at the end of this gesture; it says: ‘that, that’s it, that
is something’, but says nothing more.” Significantly, Barthes states that
this “pointing,” this deictic quality of the photograph, will always be
followed by a similar but more semantically sharp verbal gesture—“look,
there is my brother, there, there is my child.” The photograph, he asserts,
“cannot escape this pure deictic language.”29 In other words, the “pure”
pointing of language will always accompany the more obtuse pointing of
the photograph. This gesture is indebted to what Barthes, in an earlier
article, “Rhetoric of the Image” (1964), outlined as the prime function of
language in relation to a photograph, that is, its “anchoring” function. As a
verbal metalanguage, Barthes states, the linguistic comment “anchors”—
that is, “elucidates”—the many potential meanings in a photograph, by
being selective. “The text,” Barthes posits, “directs the reader through the
signifieds of the image, causing him to avoid some and receive others.” It
works against “the terror of uncertain signs,” constituted by the
28
Scalapino 1996, 18.
29
Barthes 1993, 3:1112 (partly my translation). The first sentence of this quoted
passage is omitted in the English translation, see Barthes 2000, 5.
“continuous” message of the photograph.30 “Anchorage” concerns every

instance of language that in some way reduces the semantic layers of the
photographic image, not just indexical words. Barthes’s view of this
gesture is somehow made more absolute in Camera Lucida (probably
since his view on language changed quite drastically from his earlier,
structuralist-oriented writings to his latter). The “pure deictic” gesture—
there, that—seems to a lesser degree to concern semantic determination,
than a repetition or doubling of the photographic gesture.
Naturally, the use of indexical words in Scalapino’s photo-textual
practice does not enter this equation without difficulty. We have already
seen the example of the “not quite that” in Crowd and not evening or light.
Even though indexical words appear with frequency in The Tango, there
seems to be no instance of “pure deictic gesture” from language to
photographs. That the text rarely offers a semantic context in a clear-cut
way is, as mentioned, partly due to the lack of a pronounced subject, a
poetic “I,” in the text. Neither do the photographs offer such an obvious
context. From where, then, would this gesture emanate? One can begin
addressing these issues by taking a closer look at the relation between
photographs and texts in The Tango.
In choosing an epitomizing example of this aspect of the photo-text
relations in The Tango, we could look at the top right corner of the fourth
spread in the first section of “What’s place—war in ‘night’” (see Fig. [iii]
in centerfold). This discrete photo-text composite is illustrative in the
sense that it juxtaposes Scalapino’s characteristic analytical reflection on
the different modalities of location and place with the calm scene of the
Sera Monastery courtyard. The phrases do not address these color
photographs in the way of a caption; neither do they give much of a hint
regarding their potential relevance in the “reading” of the photographic
series. However, though the words in very few places can be said to
comment on, or relate to, the scene of the images, the typographical layout
of texts and photos implies a connection. Some phrases, for instance, are
set in smaller, caption-like typeset. Silke Horstkotte, in an article on photo-
text novels by W. G. Sebald and Monika Maron, has discussed the layout
and spatiality in these authors’ books in terms of “photo-text topography.”31
Borrowing Horstkotte’s terminology, the “topography” of The Tango can
be described as changeable. In the first section, text and photographs are
presented in vertical series. In the following sections, the relation becomes
30
Barthes 1977, 39-40 (emphasis in original).
31
Horstkotte 2008.
184 Chapter Six
more varied. Text and fewer black-and-white photographs are arranged

less strictly on the pages.
Since image and text are juxtaposed on the page, it would be difficult,
if not impossible, to read the text or view the images without noticing the
presence of the other medium. Even more problematic would be to regard
images and words as completely isolated, and not merely separate entities.
The juxtaposing of photographs and words, side-by-side in the same
representational space, has immediate and profound repercussions for how
the words are read and the images are viewed. In short, juxtaposition is a
material practice that conditions the production of meaning.
I return now to Barthes’s terminology in pursuing this relation. One
articulation of Scalapino’s words could be to “anchor” a specific meaning
in the image. “Blossoming trees,” a phrase that recurs no less than ten
times in this double-page alone, has an “anchoring” quality in the sense
that there actually are blossoming trees in the courtyard that is portrayed in
the photograph. Yet, the phrase “blossoming trees” constantly occurs in an
already ambiguous context. Reading the phrase as a pure signification of a
site visible in the photographs is disturbed by other surrounding factors.
For instance, the sentence “‘seeing’ the man starving lying in garbage”
evokes yet another scene, in clear distinction to the scene pictured in the
photographs. The meta-quality in formulations such as these, makes the
account of the states of the blossoming trees elusive: “place this to: seeing
‘at all’ is social—is blossoming trees.” The phrase that flanks one image
on the same page (Fig. [1]), distinguishes the different appearances of
“blossoming trees” in the writing: “there is no basis of the blossoming /
tree—there—// and is ‘as’ one’s / subjectivity/language—‘there.’” The
indexical words now seem uneager to signify a discernible “there” in the
image. Paradoxically, the text is cunningly set in a caption-like
typography, which in Horstkotte’s “topographical” understanding could
assert a stronger relation between text and image. Yet, in the above quoted
sentence, the semblance of a discernible object is, again, literally put in
quotation marks, and involved in the analytical or linguistic play of
conceptualization versus place. The words that end the passage take this
movement full circle: “‘as’ ‘blossoming trees’ are one’s subjectivity/
language/‘there.’” Where is this “there”? Objects, not apprehendable as
other than constructions in thought and language, are recurrently robbed of
factual stability in the text. The issue of language as a form of “placement”
or locational assertion is performed in the rhetorical figures of repetitions
and permutable contradictions. Perhaps the text itself says it most clearly,
when repeatedly stating: “a given in space—dis-place blossoming trees.”
Fig. [1]
“Anchorage,” in its semiotic definition as verbal statements elucidating

a semantic level of a photograph, seems obliterated here or at least hardly
applicable to these sentences as a whole. With “anchorage” put out of
play, one could instead propose that the image-text relation in The Tango
enters here into a “relay,” the second photo-textual relation of image and
word Barthes sketched out in the 1963 article.32 According to Barthes, the
“relay” signifies a complementary relation of image and word on “a higher
32
Barthes 1977.
186 Chapter Six
level, that of the story, the anecdote, the diegesis.”33 But in the end, this
too falls short as no such diegesis or story seems to establish itself in The
Tango.
As Marsha Bryant has observed, Barthes’s system does not include the
possibility of a mutual play of “anchorage,” since he says nothing about
the potential an image has to alter meanings in a written text.34 However,
there are, arguably, examples of this in The Tango. A crucial feature of the
text is the word “rose,” recurring throughout. As a designated “object,” it
functions in much the same way as the “blossoming trees.” It mirrors the
text’s analytical colloquy on the different locations of consciousness, of
the mind’s relation to phenomena or objects, such as a rose, whether
mental or actual. No less important, though, is the fact that “Sera” is the
Tibetan word for “rose”. But the word “rose” gains its particularity
primarily from the homonymous use of the word—both as an adjective
(the color, for example of the monks’ robes) and as a verb (past tense of
“rise”). In the first section of the photo-text, the color of the robes is
visible in the color photographs, and therefore that color could be argued
to be “chromatically” active here. However, in the spreads where
Scalapino uses black-and-white photos, the polysemic reading is
somewhat obstructed. In these cases the color is not “fixed” by the
language—the opposite is true: it is added verbally. A dimension of
randomness is invested here; one could even assert that the “anchoring”
function lies both in word and image. In another fragment in the book
(Fig. [2]), Scalapino plays with the polysemy of the word, again echoing
the famous Gertrude Stein quote: “(R)ose—is not—rose (they rose) /
both.” The three possible meanings—the flower, the color, the verb—are
all relevant here. At times, the word “rose” is uttered in conjunction with
“standing or curling” as well as “delicate backs.”
When these phrases are juxtaposed with photographs of the monks,
sitting in one group or rising to join another, the site of the courtyard could
seem to directly address the text. However, just like the blossoming trees,
the phrases are constantly slipping in, to, and out of different contexts.
Here, the black-and-white photography is one part of the story. The other
is the sentences to the left, again deviating from a possible pointing: “His
dying is to be not in relation to/ space, or to conjecture.” “His” could be
read out as the monk in the picture, but that is not an unequivocal reading.
As an independent statement it leads readers both to collective memory as
a possible theme in the text and to the role of linguistics in the constant
33
Barthes 1977, 41.
34
Bryant 1996, 13.
revision of statements (“conjecture”). This actualizes the second realm of

Horstkotte’s “topographical context”—not the space of representation (the
photo-text), but the represented space—in this case, the Tibetan monastery.
Horstkotte discusses the possible connections between the two realms or
spaces. In The Tango, these two spaces form a heterogeneous composite.
Fig. [2]
As shown, the juxtaposition of photographs and text in The Tango

enables certain readings/viewings, but in the end delivers closure to none.
Arguably, such closure arises only in the “locality” of every individual
reading. Indexical words are in need of context; in the case of The Tango’s
serial poem, these contexts are equivocal or shifting. “Anchorage,” if there
is any, becomes a timely quality, realized in contingent association
between word and image. This assignment is handed over to the reader.
While indexical words are often essential to theories of the disambiguating
role of language in relation to images, The Tango shows how indexical
language can be equally accountable for ambiguity in photo-textual
188 Chapter Six
relations. But even if the text does not “anchor” the image, or the images
do not “illustrate” the text, there still very much exists a case of mutual
relation. For a text highly engaged with reflections on places or locations,
the visual presence of a particular place or site is, of course, far from
insignificant. The information on the front page, stating that photographs
and words have the same originator, is also of importance. The notion of
writing “as placement” or as a “relational location” builds on the
juxtaposition of media as a material practice, the “photo-textual
topography” created by arrangement. Reading Scalapino’s photo-texts
uncovers no procedure of verbally controlling the polysemic character of
the photographic image. Rather, it uncovers a practice of actively
juxtaposing writing to photographs. It is not an act of elucidation but of
producing plurality. The ambiguous use of indexical words, which eludes
the “pure deictic gesture” from the verbal to the visual, both highlights and
gives thrust to the juxtaposition as a practice. Consequently, this practice
is less concerned with the emptiness of language and subjectivity, than
with negativity through plurality. No sign of reduction should be ascribed
to Scalapino’s use of indexical language in her photo-texts. It is not a
practice of framing a photographical site. Instead, the photo-text evokes a
plurality, a multitude of places and positions from which to view them.
I opened by citing Barthes’s final formulation of the Neutral topic,
according to which, “the Neuter extended to discourse […] is not that of
Neither […] nor, it’s ‘both at once,’ ‘at the same time,’ or ‘that alternates
with.’”35 It is clear now that this corresponds exceedingly well with
Scalapino’s assertive ending to her negating neither/nor statements:
“both,” “at once,” and the like. Read in this light, writing in The Tango is
clearly an assertion of plurality. The equally frequently occurring phrase
“bound as ‘split,’” therefore, could be a statement on the juxtaposition of
image and word, which also transpires as the dependent, plural relation of
a separation.
During the course of the lecture series, Barthes gives nuance to the
workings of his concept in order to avoid designation of an absolute
negation, or complete dissolution of the speaking subject. “The Neutral
doesn’t necessarily mean cancelling,” he writes, “but rather displacing,
displacing oneself.”36 Barthes’s confession to plurality as displacement is
also very much in line with the “hetero-positional” quality that I stress in
the reading of Scalapino’s photo-text. Scalapino’s writing thematically
engages with the issue of localization and places itself in relation to
35
Barthes 2005, 120.
36
Barthes 2005, 137.
photographic images, and as we know, the resulting reading is not

characterized by cancellation or reduction but rather by a sense of
plurality. In this regard, Scalapino dis-places writing by forcing it to exist
in relation to another practice and material product, the photographic
image and its represented space. The writing practice repeats that
photographic quality of the self-contained, indexical trace of an action.
The juxtaposition of these two indexical series performs a dis-placement
as such. It binds image and words as it simultaneously splits them; it
separates the representations by bringing them together—and thereby it
forms a “hetero-positional” constellation. This process actualizes the third
realm of Horstkotte’s concept of topography—namely, the extra-textual
position taken by the reader. Ultimately, the photo-textual non-
communicative communication is a product of this realm. For instance,
“anchorage” does not function as a semiotic assurance of elucidation, but
as an extra-textual attribute.
Materiality
Another noteworthy feature of Scalapino’s photo-textual experimentation
is the various material forms in which it has appeared. The Tango is not
the only photo-text by Scalapino that made an unconventional first
appearance. The passages of Crowd and not evening or light that include
photographs were originally written as part of a mail art project. The
project, organized by Alternative Press, gathered poets to write texts for
postcards, which were to be sent to individuals. Scalapino pasted photos
taken at Venice Beach on the paper cards and wrote accompanying
phrases by hand. These postcard artworks were later photocopied and
featured as the title series in her 1992 book.
It makes sense for Scalapino’s participation in projects proposing
unconventional venues for distributing literature (the Poetry Plastique and
the Alternative Press project) to center on photography. The use of the
photographic medium is concurrent with platforms for distribution and
reception unconventional for literary texts. Other poets from Scalapino’s
generation—such as Susan Howe and Harryette Mullen—have worked
with photography and photographers in installation form. Photo-texts by
poets constitute a substantial but largely overlooked genre of twentieth-
century literature, one that has challenged literary convention in multiple
ways. In an American context, it is a vivid tradition—from Paul Lawrence
Dunbar’s books of photographs and poetry around 1900, through the
collaboration of Hart Crane and a young Walker Evans on “The Bridge” in
1930, to the collaborations and artists’ books of the 1960s and 1970s by
190 Chapter Six
poets such as Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, and Bernadette Mayer. One
could say that the photograph’s entry into literary text is concurrent with
the development—from early modernist avant-garde forward—of the book
as an aesthetic object, or “alternative space,” as Johanna Drucker has
formulated it in her research on artists’ books.37 In a similar way that the
book or the journal has functioned as an “alternative space” for artists,
other forms, particularly those affirming three-dimensional space, have
served similar functions for poets. Furthermore, The Tango is indebted to
conceptual photo-text practices in general, and arguably to Robert
Smithson’s photo-texts in particular, considering his interest in place and
location, or what he calls “sites” and “non-sites.”38
Therefore, in their multiple publications in various material forms,
Scalapino’s photo-texts question the confinement of the literary text to the
book. Rather than viewing the poetic text as a final, closed product,
Scalapino makes each publication an instance of an open-ended artistic
process. Yet this does not make the materiality of the literary text less of
an issue. On the contrary—it makes issues of materiality even more
integral to the understanding of the text. It is not unusual to find in
Scalapino’s poetry specific references to its own materiality. For instance,
in a part of Crowd and not evening or light, one of the photographs from
Venice Beach shows a child on a swing but the handwritten text
juxtaposed to the photograph tells nothing of the image’s content. Instead,
it reads: “scratch on it”—a reference to the fact that there is a palpable tear
in the photograph’s surface.39 This reading is further highlighted by two
pen marks on each side of the photograph. Rather than explicitly
commenting on the visual motif of the photographic image, the text draws
attention to a material aspect of the print. This means that this physical
attribute of the photograph is not only directed at the (few) readers/viewers
of the actual post cards, but is made manifest to all readers of the book
Crowd and not evening or light. This deliberate and manifested awareness
of the materiality of the medium is not a superficial aspect pointed out in
passing, but a point made with deep resonance in Scalapino’s writing. It
reflects a conviction that the content of an image is inseparable from its
material conditions.40 Furthermore, I find it interesting that this comment
is made regarding a photograph. As media scholar Friedrich Kittler
37
Drucker 2004.
38
See Smithson 1996.
39
Frost (2004) has viewed the material aspects of Crowd and not evening or light
as part of a larger theme of embodiment in Scalapino’s writing.
40
Arguably, it is in the same spirit that the muslin textile was used in “Wall
Hanging,” as a material condition that must be read as an integral part of the work.
famously claims, literature gained new awareness of its material existence

(as the printed word) when confronted with visual media such as
photography and film in the nineteenth century.41 It is not such a great step
from this assertion to suggest that Scalapino’s awareness of the materiality
of her writing practice is in some way concurrent with her use of
photography and photographs.
Materiality matters, then. But how should we define this category? The
various answers proposed by scholars during the last few decades seem to
agree on one thing: materiality comprises not simply the physical aspects
of the books that distribute literary texts. Drucker has proposed that the
concept of materiality should be understood as “a process of interpretation
rather than a positing of the characteristics of an object.”42 It is only in
relation to interpretation as an activity that this object exits, Drucker
asserts. N. Katherine Hayles has developed a similar understanding of the
concept of materiality. In the light of the digital era, Hayles advocates a
concept of literary materiality as an emergent property rather than some
static, physical attribute of a literary text. “The materiality of an embodied
text,” Hayles writes, “is the interaction of its physical characteristics with
its signifying strategies.”43 In other words, materiality equally concerns
physical reality and signification; it is made from their interactions.
With reference to Scalapino, these claims mean that the materiality of
her photo-texts amounts to the interaction between their physical
appearance and the work performed by the reader/viewer. In Scalapino’s
case, then, the photo-text’s plurality of physical appearances also results in
a plurality of reader/viewer positions. The issue of materiality
consequently has a lot to do with what Mieke Bal, in an investigation of
expository discourse, has called “situatedness.” With this term, Bal relates
to the eventness of the art exhibition and the fact that every viewing of an
exhibited work of art is always “situated” in a specific place at a specific
time. What ultimately amounts to the actual work is always subject to an
“activity of exchange” with the viewer.44 In this respect, Bal likens the
exhibition to a conversation. Hence, The Tango’s “hetero-positional”
quality also concerns the reader/viewer’s altering positions. In the end, it
concerns the question of how reading cards and reading walls, rather than
flipping through books, carries out alternative contexts for reading/
viewing.
41
See Kittler 1990.
42
Drucker 1994, 43.
43
Hayles 1995, 103.
44
Bal 1996, 155.
192 Chapter Six
The ambition of the exhibition project Poetry Plastique was to call the
conventions, materiality, and locality of traditional literary texts into
question. As curator Charles Bernstein asserted, the texts exhibited were
“not poems about pictures but pictures that are poems; not words affixed
to a blank page but letters in time.”45 These words disclose an interesting
constellation of the visual and verbal. First of all, the texts in the
exhibition, according to Bernstein, are to be apprehended as visual and
verbal representation equally. The poems in the gallery are pictures, that
is, not simply linguistically legible phrases but also spatial constructions.
Secondly, Bernstein stresses the importance of time. It is a concept with
long-standing roots, theorized by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in 1766, that
the difference between poetry and painting is that the former extends in
time and the latter inhabits space.46 The past twenty years of cultural and
aesthetic scholarship has proposed alternative perspectives to this idea.
Projects such as Poetry Plastique physically echo these scholarly
alternative perspectives, thus further questioning fixed dichotomies and
hegemonic ideas like Lessing’s.
As Bal puts it, “Talking takes time, and so does looking, but the time-
consuming nature of talking is taken much more easily for granted than
that of looking.”47 The poetic works in Bernstein’s exhibition are words
that are images—but that nonetheless extend in time, in the act of looking.
When Bal speaks of works as “situated,” she aims, precisely, to gain this
spatiotemporal dimension. Agreeing that an art work takes place and
extends in time is the prerequisite for speaking of materiality as an
emergent property of the work. The physical substrate inhabits space, one
could say, and the human intention takes time. Consequently, this
spatiotemporal dimension explains the work as an emergent, rather than
static, phenomenon.
When Scalapino talks about the postcard project (in the aforementioned
essay on her photo-textual practice), she explains how the photo-text
“[exists] in that form only once by being sent to a single individual,” thus
referring to the eventness of the work. This “single individual” naturally
experiences this artifact differently than the reader of the 1992 photo-text,
not simply because he/she receives only a part of it, but because he/she in
fact reads and views the postcard under different circumstances. Different
physical properties elicit different reader/viewer interactions. The visitors
of the Poetry Plastique exhibition (from which a very small amount of
photographs have been preserved, none that are of Scalapino’s contribution)
45
Bernstein and Sanders 2001, 7.
46
Lessing 1984.
47
Bal 1996, 155.
probably experienced the exhibited work in a similar way. In this context,

the photographs from the Sera Monastery and Scalapino’s poetic sequence
will be framed in a significantly different way than when arranged in the
book.
What, then, do these differences signify? The most basic difference is
perhaps the already discussed feature that Scalapino herself put into “Wall
Hanging”—the muslin textile on which the artifact was printed. Also, the
arrangement of photos and texts could have differed in proportion and
scale, probably creating new juxtapositions. Even if small differences like
these are never insignificant, when it comes to distinctions deriving from
the contexts, there are several aspects to be taken into consideration. One
important aspect pertains to what Bal calls “reading walls.”48 That is, to
the fact that Scalapino’s contribution was not alone on the gallery wall,
juxtaposed as it was to other poets’ plastic poetry. In this respect of
expository display, Bal makes a valuable point when arguing that
“connections between things are syntactical; they produce, so to speak,
sentences conveying propositions.”49 Similar to Horstkotte’s “topographic”
view, in her insistence on layout and spatial relations, Bal claims that the
juxtaposition of things also “speaks.” The “exposition as display,” Bal
stresses, “is a particular kind of speech act.”50 Following this, Scalapino’s
“Wall Hanging” would have been viewed in connection with other works
displayed on the same wall, and with the exhibition as a whole as frame.
At the center of Bal’s study on expository discourse stands the question
of what she calls the “expository agent.” This agent is not, Bal
emphasizes, the curators or other actual persons related to the present
event. The expository agent, the “I” of the exhibition, is a discursive
subject that is visible, among other places, in the relation between verbal
commentary and visual display. The “I” of the exhibition organizes,
guides, and suggests viewings.51 The example of Scalapino’s “Wall
Hanging” in Poetry Plastique is interesting in this context. In part this is
because of how that exhibition differed from other, as it were, more
traditional art exhibitions; but also because of the fact that Scalapino
herself took part in the exhibition’s curatorial text, by introducing her own
work. Like all the other contributors, Scalapino added a note on her project
where she gave her view on the work. Among other things, she named the
actual place where the photographs had been taken, the Sera Monastery in
Llasa, Tibet. According to Bal, the speech-act produced by this sort of
48
Bal 1996, 112-28.
49
Bal 1996, 87.
50
Bal 1996, 88.
51
Bal 1996, 16; 158-62.
194 Chapter Six
discourse—which is a product of verbal explanations as much as spatial

connections—has the power to “shape the viewer’s experience to a
considerable extent.” 52
In Scalapino’s case, the participation in the expository agency pertains
to the book version as much as it does to the gallery contribution, since
even the book version comes within a discursive frame. Gérard Genette
calls this the “paratexts”: the cover with frontispiece, the authorial names,
editorial information, and so forth.53 Moreover, on the back cover of the
book Scalapino adds a note with a similar function as her curatorial
contribution to Poetry Plastique, though quite different in character—and
not naming the Sera Monastery. It speaks in the same voice as the poetic
monologue, touching upon themes such as the relation of “mind
phenomena to exterior phenomena.” It adds a reference or dimension
similar to the note added to the exhibited piece. Still, the notes are
embedded in two discursive frameworks that are traditionally provided by
the publisher and curator’s context respectively. Scalapino, therefore,
again exerts her participation in relation to the expository agent.
What I primarily intended to show in this last section is how the
sketched “hetero-positionality” also concerns the locality of the photo-text
itself. Consequently, the work converges with a “hetero-positionality” of
the reader/viewer. I suggest that these different platforms elicit different
instances of interaction, which constitute the various materialities of the
work. The readers/viewers of Scalapino’s photo-texts are gallery visitors
as much as poetry readers. The reading experience can thus equally consist
in flipping the pages of a book or gazing at a representation hung on a
wall. Even in this sense, in its various materializations, Scalapino’s photo-
textual practices concern dis-localization or “dis-placement” as a plural
construct. Most importantly, the various instances remind the reader to
sense to what degree the reading of literary texts is a materially infused
undertaking.
In very much the same way as in the other instances, the “hetero-
positionality” of the material forms of reproduction of The Tango serves to
deny singularity. It does so not by refraining from affirmation of the
material dimension, but rather by supplanting the idea of a single
representational form with a double material implementation.
52
Bal 1996, 30.
53
Genette 1987.
End note
Scalapino’s The Tango raises questions such as from where, when, and in
relation to what does something speak. This article proposes that “where”
or “when” are equally interesting questions as “how” or “what.” The “dis-
placement” of Scalapino’s poetic reflection is, if commenting upon itself,
shadowed by a heterogeneous placement or positionality. I have tried to
show how The Tango evokes notions of location—neither in terms of
identity or singularity nor in terms of complete negativity, but, instead, in
terms of plurality, of “hetero-positionality.” It does so, as shown, on
several levels—thematically, formally, in its physical realizations, and in
the different reader/viewer positions that these entail. The writing
subjectivity of The Tango affirms constant localization without
surrendering to the stability of a poetic “I.” Its photographs and serial
poems enter into a close typographical encounter that ultimately highlights
the fact that the relation is not that between a determining and determined
medium; instead, it is one that forms a plurality of points of view. The
publication of The Tango in two different physical substrates discloses the
existence of the photo-text that is not reduced to a material singularity or
symbolic unity.
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—. 2008. It’s Go in Horizontal: Selected Poems, 1974-2006. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
—. 2010. Floats Horse-Flotas or Horse Flows. Buffalo: Starcherone
Books.
Simpson, Megan. 2000. Poetic Epistemologies: Gender and Knowing in
Women’s Language-oriented Writing. Albany: State University of New
York Press.
Smithson, Robert. 1996. Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Edited
by Jack Flam. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Stein, Gertrude. 1922. Geography and Plays. Boston: The Four Seas
Company.
—. (1937) 1993. Everybody’s Biography. Cambridge: Exact Change.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ORIENTATION, ENCOUNTER,
AND SYNAESTHESIA IN PAUL CELAN
AND YOKO TAWADA
GIZEM ARSLAN
Introduction:
Paul Celan and Yoko Tawada’s letters
Translation and the materiality of language are among the most common
interpretive foci for the vast international scholarship on Paul Celan,
widely regarded as the greatest German-language poet of the twentieth
century, and for the growing body of international scholarship on Yoko
Tawada, one of the most widely read and acclaimed authors of non-
German background living and writing in Germany today.1 A Romanian
Jew whose family and friends perished in the Holocaust, Celan’s self, as
well as the language of his poetry, are marked by the perils of the Third
Reich.2 Although Celan’s literary language was German, this was a
German all his own, transformed by the use of multiple languages,
idiosyncratic word-splitting, as well as employment of the scientific
1
Tawada’s output is more diverse than Celan’s, and includes nearly forty original
works of fiction, poetry, plays for radio and the theater, a libretto, as well as a CD
entitled diagonal (2002) in collaboration with the pianist Aki Takase.
2
In his 1958 “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free
Hanseatic City of Bremen” (“Rede anläßlich der Entgegennahme des
Literaturpreises der Freien Hansestadt Bremen”), Celan famously suggests that
language passed through perils and emerged “enriched by all this” (angereichert
von all dem). His statement resists a triumphant reading even as it appears to
celebrate language's survival. Celan tellingly places the word angereichert in
quotation marks. The word is translated as “enriched,” but can also mean
“enReiched”—i.e., that it acquired elements of the Third Reich (see idem 1983,
3:186 and 2000, 395).
200 Chapter Seven
vocabularies of astronomy, geology, and anatomy. In a very different

historical context of accelerated possibilities of travel in an increasingly
multicultural world, Yoko Tawada is one of few contemporary authors who
“consistently and deliberately developed their literary work in two
languages simultaneously” (in Tawada’s case, German and Japanese).3
Translation and transformation constitute two of the most common themes
and motifs of her literary and essayistic writing.4 Celan and Tawada thus
respond to the transformations of the German language during the Third
Reich and in the age of intensified global encounters, respectively.5 More
generally, they remain attuned to the materiality of language. Although
Tawada proves to be a close reader of Celan and evokes him as one of her
muses, this shared attunement is less a product of Celan’s influence on
Tawada than of common commitments of Celan and Tawada’s
independent literary projects.6
This chapter will trace these transformations and materiality of
language from the micro-perspective of the letter, or, to use a broader
term, the orthographic symbol.7 Orthographic symbols for Celan and
Tawada are multisensory elements of their work. They function as visual
marks on a page, ciphers of absence and silence, sites of encounter, as well
as figures and tools of orientation. This chapter thus argues that the
orthographic symbol is not an incidental product of Celan and Tawada’s
writing, but pivotal to an understanding of the materiality of language and
sensory (e.g. visual) translation in Tawada and Celan’s literary and
3
Yildiz 2006, 157.
4
To give only a few examples, Tawada’s 1998 Tübingen poetics lectures are
entitled Verwandlungen (Transformations). One of these lectures is dedicated to
the problem of translation. Besides having edited a collection of emerging
literature also entitled Verwandlungen (1998), the title of Tawada’s 2002 essay
collection, Überseezungen (Over-sea Tongues), is a play on the words Übersetzung
(translation), Seezunge (sole), Übersee (overseas), and Zunge (tongue).
5
This chapter does not seek to underestimate the authors’ biographical
multilingualism and the historical and cultural circumstances leading to their
transposition into other geographies and languages. Nonetheless, it understands
literary multilingualism as defined by Yasemin Yildiz, “as the co-existence and
interaction of at least two languages, be it at the level of individuals, communities,
discourses, or texts” (idem 2006, 4). For a more thorough exposition of twentieth-
century German literary multilingualism, see the introduction to Yildiz 2012.
6
For a brief discussion by Tawada of her experience of reading Celan’s poetry, see
Brandt 2008, 14.
7
An orthographic symbol is understood as any individual character or punctuation
used in an orthographic system, and an orthographic system as any script or system
of writing.
Orientation, Encounter, and Synaesthesia in Paul Celan & Yoko Tawada 201
essayistic output. This essay, therefore, aims to contribute to the growing

scholarship on the materiality and multisensory nature of writing systems,
whose relationship to Celan and Tawada’s oeuvre has received insufficient
critical attention to date.8
After exploring the dimensions of Celan and Tawada’s preoccupation
with the materiality of language, this chapter will focus on the materiality
of writing and reading on the typo-topographic space of the page and its
relationship to the phenomena of image and sound in Celan and Tawada’s
literary output. It will draw on Sybille Krämer’s plea for scholarly
attention to text as image, cognitive tool, and technƝ, in addition to its
more commonly acknowledged roles in communication and transcription,
and Friedrich Kittler’s work on the intermediality of letters. This chapter
will thus seek to uncover those instances in Celan and Tawada’s oeuvre
when letters are treated as images in continual transformation. The point of
departure for this analysis will be Tawada’s oft-quoted essay “Das Tor des
Übersetzers, oder Celan liest Japanisch” (“The Gate of the Translator, or
Celan Reads Japanese”) from the collection Talisman (1996), which
features an encounter between Tawada and Celan’s poetics, and stages this
encounter at the threshold of the Sino-Japanese ideogram for “gate.”9 As
the ensuing discussion of Daniel Heller-Roazen’s reading of Ovid’s
account of the water nymph Io will reveal, however, an analysis of the
visuality of letters need not be limited to pictograms like the ideogram for
“gate.” It can be extended to the entirety of the Latin alphabet. This,
however, implies that letters of the alphabet are subject to visual translation
as transformation. This chapter will thus trace the metamorphoses of the
8
This essay does not seek to argue for the primacy of seeing over hearing, but
rather to explore the visuality of writing systems in Tawada and Celan in some
detail.
9
This essay is not the first or last in which Tawada refers to orthographic symbols
in Celan’s poetry. In Tawada’s 1993 short work of fiction Ein Gast (A Guest), the
narrator speaks of her difficulties in reading texts written in phonetic alphabet,
which she likens to a “grille” (Gitter) or “sand in the salad” (Sand im Salat—ibid.,
20). This reference is most likely an allusion to the title of Celan’s 1959 poetry
collection Sprachgitter (Speech-grille). See also “Rabbi Löw und 27 Punkte”
(“Rabbi Löw and 27 Dots”) and “Die Krone aus Gras” (“The Crown of Grass”) in
Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte (Language Police and Play Polyglots—Tawada
2007). The three literary essays (including “The Gate”) perform close readings of
Celan’s poetry with detailed attention to punctuation and the shape of letters in
Celan’s original poems, and ideograms and parts of ideograms in their Japanese
translations. Many thanks to Leslie Adelson for pointing out the allusion to Celan’s
Sprachgitter in Tawada’s Ein Gast.
202 Chapter Seven
shape O, which can be read as letter, the number zero, and the circular
form of a meridian in Celan and Tawada’s texts.
This chapter will examine four works from Celan and Tawada’s literary
and essayistic output. Drawing on Werner Hamacher’s exposition of the
figure of inversion, or “the negative positing of the negative” in Celan,10 it
will show that the letter O is a central image, sound, physical presence,
and embodiment of inversion in “Es war Erde in ihnen” (“There Was
Earth Inside Them”) from Celan’s 1963 poetry collection Die
Niemandsrose (The No-one’s-rose). Likewise, Tawada’s chapter
“Coronis” from her 2000 intertextual prose work Opium für Ovid: Ein
Kopfkissenbuch von 22 Frauen (Opium for Ovid: A Pillow-book of 22
Women) foregrounds visual metamorphoses of the letter O. Hence, this
chapter builds productive tensions between the visual mark on the page
and the absence of its sound. The analysis will then trace the figure of the
meridian in Tawada’s essay “An der Spree” (“On the Spree”) from her
2007 poetry and essay collection Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte
(Language Police and Play Polyglots) and Celan’s Georg Büchner Prize
acceptance speech entitled “Der Meridian” (“The Meridian”—1960).
While Celan’s speech does not refer to the meridian as letter, Tawada’s
zero and Celan’s meridian allow momentary orientations in which the
number and the poem oscillate between their status as marks on a page and
something virtual or extraterrestrial. In their multisensory employment of
letters as sound and visual mark, Celan and Tawada display the
irreducibility of their oeuvre to semantic sense-making.
The materiality of language

The materiality of Celan and Tawada’s languages can be understood in
several ways. First, both Celan and Tawada’s vocabulary refer to concrete
objects and bodies. For instance, geological and botanical terms abound in
Celan’s Niemandsrose. Rochelle Tobias draws attention to the languages
of geology, astrology, and anatomy in Celan’s work, emphasizing the
centrality of “forms of embodiment” for all three scientific disciplines and
for Celan’s oeuvre. These scientific terms and Celan’s language all refer to
bodies in some form: a celestial body, a sedimentary body, an organ, or a
limb.11 Likewise, the significance of the body and sensory experience for
Tawada’s oeuvre is evident in Tawada’s consistent engagement with
bodily transformation. Opium für Ovid comprises twenty-two short prose
10
Hamacher 1996, 350.
11
Tobias 2006, 118; 1.
pieces about female characters from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, with special

emphasis on their transformations. Ein Gast (A Guest—1993) not only
features scenes of hearing, mishearing, and an ear-infection, but also
includes visual representations of the ear from various works of Western
art. The 2002 essay collection Überseezungen (Over-sea Tongues) focuses
on experiences of the tongue, understood both as the body part and the
language localized on it.12
Secondly, the materiality of Celan and Tawada’s language can be
understood as the materiality of their texts, which call upon the reader to
enter them like a landscape, or assemble them like fragmented objects.
Celan borrows a term from geography for his presentation of poetry in
“Der Meridian,” which not only employs rich spatial vocabulary (“topos
research,” “tropes,” “map”), but speaks of re-turning and encounter in
poetry.13 Peter Szondi’s close reading of the poem “Engführung”
(“Stretto”) from the collection Sprachgitter (Speech-grille—1959) is also
based on the observation that the poem is a landscape exhorting the reader
to enter it.14 In a similar vein, Ottmar Ette calls attention to texts by
Roland Barthes and Yoko Tawada that not only tell of particular
geographic formations, but perform these geographies in their structure.15
Tawada’s 1987 short-story “Bilderrätsel ohne Bilder” (“Picture Puzzles
without Pictures”) consists of several narrative threads that never converge
into a denouement. Instead, the story ends with the scene of a puppet’s
dismemberment, at which moment the narrator fantasizes that a
dismembered puppet could be reassembled like a disjointed story. The text
thus both narrates this fantasy and enacts it in its narrative structure.16
12
On experiences of the tongue and mouth in Tawada, see for instance Genz 2005.
On the intersections between experiences of the ear and surrealist aesthetics in
Tawada, see Brandt 2007, 111-24. For a study linking bodies in motion and
displacement through travel in Tawada, see Slaymaker 2010.
13
Celan 2011, 2-13; idem 1999, 2-13.
14
Szondi 1972, 49-50. This section of the chapter only seeks to lay out some texts
by Celan and Tawada, and important contributions to Celan and Tawada
scholarship that address different facets of the materiality of language in their
oeuvre. A more thorough discussion of how these scholarly contributions relate to
one another lies beyond the scope of this essay. Yet it should be noted that
Rochelle Tobias opposes Szondi's reading of the performative dimension of
Celan's poetry, where the poem enacts its utterances (see idem 2006, 5-6).
15
Ette 2010, 208-10. Indeed, Tawada’s poetics does recall Barthes’s notion of the
writerly text, in which the reader is “no longer a consumer, but a producer of the
text,” in contrast to the readerly text, in which the reader is only a receiver left with
“the poor freedom either to accept or reject the text” (Barthes 1974, 4).
16
Tawada 1987, 55; 74.
204 Chapter Seven
Thirdly, and most importantly for this analysis, Celan and Tawada
thematize or explore the materiality of writing as visual marks on the typo-
topographic space of the page, in their poetics, and in their oeuvre. With
reference to the visuality of Celan’s oeuvre, Thomas Schestag’s detailed
readings of Celan’s idiosyncratically split words and fragments illustrate
Celan's affinity for anagrams, as well as the rearrangeability and puzzle-
like nature of letters, syllables, and words.17 However, to give one
example from “Der Meridian,” Celan asks in his discussion of Georg
Büchner’s Leonce und Lena (Leonce and Lena):
Gibt es nicht gerade in “Leonce und Lena” diese den Worten unsichtbar
zugelächelten Anführungszeichen, die vielleicht nicht als Gänsefüßchen,
die vielmehr als Hasenöhrchen, das heißt also als etwas nicht ganz
furchtlos über sich und die Worte Hinauslauschendes verstanden sein
wollen?18
And yet: isn’t Leonce and Lena full of quotation marks, invisibly and
smilingly added to the words, that want to be understood perhaps not as
goose-feet (Gänsefüßchen), but rather as a hare’s ears (Hasenöhrchen),
that is, something not completely fearless, that listens beyond itself and the
words?19
The quotation marks around the cited words generate associations of a

distinctly visual nature. At first, the marks are likened to goose feet, that
is, bodily parts whose form and prints on the ground both resemble
quotation marks.20 Celan decides on rabbit ears as the better resemblance,
a pair of bodily organs that not only resemble the quotation marks
visually, but which perform analogue functions in a body and body of text:
that of listening.21 If rabbit ears best resemble quotation marks in function
and visual form, then the quotation marks both reference and enact the
speaker’s porousness in the speech “Der Meridian.” As Kristina Mendicino
17
Schestag 1994, 411-15.
18
Celan 1999, 12 (§48c).
19
Celan 2011, 12 (§48c).
20
“Gänsefüßchen” (goose-feet) is an idiomatic expression for “quotation marks” in
German. The more technical and commonly used term is “Anführungszeichen.”
“Gänsefüßchen” is used mostly by children, or by adults speaking to children.
Celan’s use of the expression in the formal context of an awards ceremony is an
unusual choice that cannot be casual.
21
It is probably no accident that Celan has chosen precisely organs of hearing as
the best visual analogue for quotation marks. Given that Celan’s words are
delivered as part of a speech, this suggests that seeing and hearing for Celan are
equally significant for the world of the text, even if the text is delivered orally.
persuasively argues, “the first thing that the Meridian does is radically
diffuse its speaker by condensing many temporalities and personae in the
same words,” particularly by overwhelming the speaker’s voice with
citations.22 In performing the permeability between Celan’s citations and
the body of his speech on the typo-topographic space of the page, the
rabbit-ears dramatize Celan’s practice of citation explosion and the
ensuing disarticulation of the speaker in “Der Meridian.”23
In her second Tübingen poetics lecture entitled “Schift einer
Schildkröte, oder Das Problem der Übersetzung” (“Writing of a Tortoise,
or the Problem of Translation”), Tawada discusses problems attending
translations between texts written using Sino-Japanese ideograms and
those written in the Latin alphabet. Her observations of the forms of
written characters consistently reveal that she regards them as visual marks
on a page or as bodies in their own right. With reference to ideograms,
Tawada declares: “a [Sino-Japanese] character is a picture that has been
painted over several times” (ein Zeichen ist ein Bild, das mehrmals
übermalt wurde).24 A character from Tawada’s essay “An der Spree” from
Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte reads the letter of the Latin alphabet in
this way, when she mistakes “The Marquise of O...” (a well-known
fictional character of Heinrich von Kleist) for “The Marquise of Zero”
(Die Marquise von Null).25 To the astonishment of Tawada's narrator in
another essay in the same collection, entitled “Kleist auf Japanisch”
(“Kleist in Japanese”), the name of the Marquise appears unchanged in
Japanese translation as the letter O.26 Tawada’s Os and Celan’s quotation
marks rely not on the sound of the letter O but its visual form as image on
the page. This material writing entails more than communication in
language. Writing the meridian, quotation marks, ideograms, and the zero
do not only constitute the means to produce text as text but also text as
22
Mendicino 2011, 635. The faculty of hearing and the notion of the unerhört (un-
heard) are also of critical importance for Mendicino’s discussion of “other
rhetoric” in “Der Meridian.”
23
While Mendicino focuses on the event of Celan’s speech, this analysis focuses
on the written text of the Büchner Prize speech. Celan’s reference to the rabbit-ears
suggests that the written page is significant for him even as he is delivering an oral
address.
24
Tawada 1998, 30. All translations from Tawada’s work are Gizem Arslan’s
unless noted or cited otherwise.
25
Tawada 2007, 19.
26
Tawada 2007, 89. Japanese uses a syllabary called Katakana for transcribing
foreign names and loan-words. It would have been entirely possible for the
Japanese translation to use Katakana and not the Latin alphabet.
206 Chapter Seven
image. The produced images are not those to which the text refers but the
images that the text is as visual presence on the page.
Visual letters
The visual world of the page as typo-topographic space, and the capacities
of letters as visual marks on a page and ciphers of absence in Celan and
Tawada’s oeuvre have received limited critical attention to date.27 Despite
the difficulties attending any interpretation of elements of language not
typically considered vehicles of meaning, an analysis of letters attentive to
their visual metamorphoses performs two significant types of critical
labor: First, it focuses attention on the materiality of that which does the
representing (in this case, letters as signs) as well as the paradoxical nature
of this practice. In his reflections on the materiality of the sign in Western
European philosophical traditions, Dieter Mersch summarizes this
problematic thus: a sign represents something absent, and in so doing,
purports to make that which is absent present again. That implies that
exploring the materiality of the sign entails exploring tensions between the
materiality of the representing and that which it is purported to represent.28
This chapter’s analysis holds that Celan and Tawada are not only attuned
to the visuality of texts, but that they employ individual letters in order to
throw letters in relief as the very material of writing. Secondly and
relatedly, this essay also sees Celan and Tawada’s writing practices as
intermedial, not only as text, but as image and mathematical operation.
This analysis does not seek to present Celan and Tawada’s work, or
texts in general, as image only, or to oppose the visual to other capacities
of text. Rather, its focus on the intermedial should be understood as a plea
for an enriched reading of literary texts that avails itself of their multiple
sensory capacities. In her call for heightened scholarly attention to those
aspects of writing that cannot be captured by the terms “communication,”
“transcription,” and “symbolic structure,” Krämer opposes the “schemata
of language or image, symbol or technƝ” (Schemata von Sprache oder
27
Thomas Schestag’s article “buk” (1994) is a noteworthy exception. While
Schestag seeks to trace fragmented and split words throughout Celan’s oeuvre, this
chapter will perform a close reading of one Celan poem in its entirety, in order to
better understand the relationship between the world of the poem and the creative
labor performed by the letter in it. For references to letters and fragments in
Tawada’s work as nonsensical, see for example Anderson 2010; Arens 2007; or
Knott 2010. This chapter will read such elements not as nonsensical, but rather as
sensory.
28
Mersch 2002, 11-12; 18.
Bild, Symbol oder Technik). She asserts instead that “writing as medium is
a hybrid creation; it is an intermedial phenomenon” (Schrift als Medium ist
eine Hybridbildung; sie ist ein intermediales Phänomen). She elects to
focus on the performative aspects of writing (texts that enact what they
say) as well as on those capacities of writing that spoken language cannot
capture. She does so in order to replace the “or”s with “and”s.29 In this
vein, Friedrich Kittler seeks to give orthographic symbols their place in the
history of media. Although Kittler does not focus on the visual form of
individual characters, his article “Number and Numeral” (2006) moves to
“unfold the essential unity of writing, number, image and tone.”
According to Kittler, letters were once used to record language,
mathematics (letters corresponded to numbers), and music (letters
designated tone).30 Claiming that media studies “only make sense when
media make senses,” he adds importantly, “it is not the meaning of signs
to make any sense, they are there to sharpen our senses rather than ensnare
them in definitions.”31 The distinction between making sense and making
senses is of crucial importance for two reasons. First, Kittler’s essay
illustrates that the intermediality of writing is not an emerging
phenomenon but one overlooked since Aristotle. He adds that for much
longer than thought, letters presented readers with multiple reading
possibilities (letters, numbers, or musical notation) which were left to the
reader to discern. Secondly, Kittler’s letters do not necessarily “make
sense,” in that they do not lead to singular definitions. They rather allow
inherently multiple readings, for phenomenal sense (the sensory
experience of text) as well as semantic sense. Given Celan and Tawada’s
preoccupation with the materiality of texts evident in their attention to the
visuality of quotation marks and the number zero respectively, letters as
images in Celan and Tawada deserve critical attention.
The gate of the translator

One oft-cited encounter between Tawada and Celan’s poetry takes place at
the threshold of a sole written character, the Sino-Japanese radical for
“gate” (㛛).32 In her 1996 essay “Das Tor des Übersetzers, oder Celan
29
Krämer 2003, 160-61; 174 (translation by Gizem Arslan).
30
For a more thorough discussion of operative writing as a tool for cognition and
the developments in mathematical calculations allowed by algebraic symbols, see
Krämer 1993.
31
Kittler 2006, 52; 56-57.
32
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a radical is “[a]ny of the set of
basic Chinese characters which, sometimes in a modified form, constitute
208 Chapter Seven
liest Japanisch,” Tawada observes the appearance of seven Sino-Japanese

ideograms containing the radical for “gate” in the Japanese translation of
Celan’s 1955 poetry collection, Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (From
Threshold to Threshold). These seven ideograms, 㛛 (gate), ⪺ (hear), 㛤
(open), 㛝 (flash, glitter), 㜈 (threshold), 㜌 (darkness), 㛫 (space,
interval) might all have to do with gates at a semantic level.33 Tawada
points out, however, that this connection might not be apparent to a reader
accustomed to grasping the entirety of an ideogram at once, that is, a
reader not attuned to the visual composition of ideograms.34 Precisely this
visual attunement initiates Tawada’s close reading of Celan. In her
reading, Tawada shifts the status of the radical “gate” from an accidentally
occurring—and recurring—product of translation to the embodiment of
Celan’s translatability, that is, the possibility that the translation of a
literary work can itself be literature.35 Tawada suggests that Celan’s poems
“peer into the Japanese” (ins Japanische hineinblicken), although Celan
did not ever learn Japanese or work with a Japanese translator.36 For
Tawada, the German original and the Japanese translation are literature in
their own right. What is more important to her reading, however, is the
semantically or functionally significant elements in the composition of other

characters, and are used as a means of ordering and classifying characters in
dictionaries.” (see the OED Online edition). This chapter categorizes the
ideograms in the Japanese translation of Celan’s poetry as Sino-Japanese. This is
because Chinese ideograms were adapted into Japanese, with important
modifications in pronunciation, orthography, and general usage.
33
For example, the ideogram ⪺ (hear), there is an ear (⪥) under the gate, possibly
eavesdropping on sounds beyond (see Tawada 1996, 126).
34
Tawada 1996, 122-23.
35
Tawada 1996, 126. “The Gate” reads Celan alongside Walter Benjamin’s essay
“Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” (“The Task of the Translator”—1923) and takes
the concept of translatability from Benjamin. Leslie Adelson (2011, 162-3) notes
an important conceptual shift in Tawada’s treatment of Benjamin in “The Gate.”
Adelson observes that “[t]he essay most often cited as bespeaking Benjamin’s
influence on Tawada’s approach to translation” is her earliest published essay on
Paul Celan, “Das Tor des Übersetzers oder Paul Celan liest Japanisch” (“The
Translator’s Gate or Paul Celan Reads Japanese”) of 1996. Yet, in this early Celan
essay, Tawada fashions a narrative “I” that has clearly read Benjamin but diverges
significantly from his thoughts on translation by foregrounding acts of reading and
writers who read, especially in the form of her narrative persona. For Benjamin in
1923, as is well known, neither the literary original nor a worthy translation
revolves around “the reader.” For an overview of Tawada’s references to Benjamin
and appropriations of certain elements of his work, see Ivanovic 2010.
36
Tawada 1996, 125.
gate as site of encounter that enables the mutual illumination between the
German and Japanese texts, and becomes a central figure for reading
Celan’s poetic language.
The gate indeed becomes pivotal, in particular for understanding the
ways in which Celan’s poetry unlocks meaning rather than restrains it. “I
began to regard Celan’s poems,” muses Tawada, “as gates and not as
houses in which meaning is preserved like a possession” (Ich fing an,
Celans Gedichte wie Tore zu betrachten und nicht etwa wie Häuser, in
denen die Bedeutung wie ein Besitz aufbewahrt wird).37 This implies that
Celan’s poems, and also Celan’s words in general, can be read as “gates,”
or to use Celan’s words, as “thresholds.” They do not contain or
circumscribe meaning; rather they open up possibilities for varied encounters
with texts and words. Leslie Adelson comments on Tawada’s reading of
Celan’s poetry:
[It] does not mark a border (Grenze) between two distinct worlds but a
threshold (Schwelle), a site where consciousness of something new flashes
into view. (…) For Tawada reading Celan, the word is a site of opening, a
threshold that beckons.38
According to Tawada, this “gate” or “threshold” is a space in its own

right: “it is not about crossing a particular border, rather, wandering from
border to border” (Es geht nicht darum, eine bestimmte Grenze zu
überschreiten, sondern darum, von einer Grenze zu einer anderen zu
wandern).39 As Adelson too observes, the space of the gate or threshold
can never be closed, never be instrumentalized for passage from one
region to another.
It is important to note, however, that translatability and encounter for
Tawada are embodied in a single written character, the radical for “gate.”
This radical does not represent but embodies translatability as a visual
mark on a page, attesting to Tawada’s insistence on the materiality of text,
concretized in the act of reading. Christine Ivanovic observes that Tawada
is invested in surface phenomena in the world of things and in the world of
language. According to Ivanovic, Tawada is a proponent of a mode of
reading in which the reader transforms the multivalent surfaces of writing
into literary text through a process Ivanovic names “Verdichtung”
(Compaction). Verdichtung refers to the multiple possibilities of
interpreting surfaces “as constellations of writing or signs, which do not
37
Tawada 1996, 134.
38
Adelson 2003, 24.
39
Tawada 1996, 128.
210 Chapter Seven
express something, but draw in the gaze for the sake of compaction” (als
Schrift- oder Zeichenkonstellationen, die nicht etwas ausdrücken, sondern
den Blick in sich hineinziehen um der Verdichtung willen). 40 Secondly, the
radical not only embodies but performs an encounter, quite literally as a
site of opening and reception between Celan’s poetry in German and
Japanese. Lastly, it takes on these functions only in the moments in which
it is being read and written as a distinct and visual orthographic element.
In the process, it becomes a pivotal figure for reading Celan’s poetry as a
series of texts that seek to open up meaning rather than to restrain it. This
mode of reading as a concretization of the non-semantic possibilities of
text is exemplary not only of Tawada as reader but of Tawada as author.
Metamorphoses and writing

The radical for “gate” might be particularly well-suited for visual readings
as an ideogram—in fact, a pictogram whose shape resembles the object it
designates. In related fashion, Daniel Heller-Roazen reads letters of the
Latin alphabet as visual marks in a foundational moment of writing from
Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In his work on the forgetting of language, Heller-
Roazen documents that the babbling infant can pronounce sounds in any
language. As the babble is chiseled into the language in which the infant is
socialized, the gamut of its former sound production is lost. According to
Heller-Roazen, certain moments of loss of speech, extra-linguistic sounds,
and unsounded or lost letters paradoxically recall “the indistinct and
immemorial babble that, in being lost, allowed all languages to be.”41
Heller-Roazen’s foundational moment of writing takes place in the
story of the water nymph Io in the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses:
Jupiter falls in love with Io. In an effort to conceal this relationship from
his wife Juno, he surrounds himself and the nymph in heavy mists. When
Juno descends to the earth to investigate this sudden midday darkness,
Jupiter has little choice but to hide Io by transforming the nymph into a
beautiful white cow. However, posing a series of pointed questions about
the cow’s provenance, Juno requests the animal from her husband as a gift.
Trapped, Jupiter yields. The transformed nymph is then entrusted to the
care and vigilance of the hundred-eyed Argos. One day, however, she is
able to steal away to the banks of her native river. There, unable to utter an
intelligible sound, she communicates with her father the river god, by
writing on the riverbank the two letters of her name. The letters on the
40
Ivanovic 2010, 185.
41
Heller-Roazen 2008, 12.
sand, Heller-Roazen argues, testify to the nymph’s metamorphosis.

Metamorphosis necessitates that one form be changed completely into
another. If the writing cow has undergone a real metamorphosis as
opposed to mere modification, however, it cannot bear any resemblance to
the nymph born to the river god Inachus. Heller-Roazen continues:
Precisely for the metamorphosis to be without residue, it must

paradoxically admit of a remainder that bears witness to the event of the
mutation: an element both foreign to the new body and still contained
within it, an exceptional trait in the body “strange” that harks back to the
earlier shape it once possessed. In the case of the cow, the remainder is the
written name of the vanished nymph, whose inscription marks the
transformation of the creature it designates. I and O, the two letters drawn
in the sand by the banks of the river, at once bear witness to the change and
belie it. They are, in every sense of the word, what betray the
metamorphosis.42
The letters of the nymph’s name, however, “have a unique position in

the alphabet.” I and O are the basic elements from which all of the Attic
Greek letters are built.43 The following can then be said of the nymph Io:
[She] did much more than print her name at the banks of her father. She
inscribed for the first time the two elements of human writing and thereby
invented, albeit in nuce, the totality of human script. Writing, in short, is
the creation of the cow: the remainder produced in the definitive
disappearance of the voice.44
Heller-Roazen’s observations reveal several important features of this

foundational moment of writing. First, if the letters printed on the sand
“betray” the metamorphosis, and the writing-remainder is minute yet
corporeal, then the metamorphosis serves also to materialize the letters by
endowing them with corporeality. Secondly, after the loss of speech, the
visual form of writing is foregrounded at the expense of the sound of the
name Io. Thirdly, the letters I and O are foregrounded as separate elements
of writing. Not only is writing presented as a concatenation of the visual
forms of letters, but the letters of the alphabet themselves as combinations
of two elemental geometric forms. Thus, what follows from the
42
43
The Attic alphabet is not the Latin alphabet, but is related to it. The observation
holds for both alphabets.
44
212 Chapter Seven
impossibility of producing distinct human sounds is the moment of the

innumerable possibilities of writing.
Both Tawada and Heller-Roazen read possible literary coincidences
(that there happens to be a particular high concentration of seven
ideograms containing the same radical, or that the nymph happens to be
called Io) as indispensable to the texts at hand. While Heller-Roazen
thematizes the loss of speech more pointedly than Tawada, his reading of
the Latin alphabet in visual fragmentation recalls Tawada’s reading of
seven ideograms on the basis of their common radical. Their readings
converge in their attention to visual elements of writing over the sound of
a text in two distinct and disparate writing systems.
Celan’s visual poetics

Although the sound-world of a Celan poem is by no means negligible, and
although Celan does visually translate entire words, this section will
expore the visual transformations of the letter O in the poem “Es war Erde
in ihnen” from Die Niemandsrose.45 The letter O in “Es war Erde in
ihnen” appears as a cipher of silence and absence, but also as sound, as the
likeness of the number zero, as a visual mark of the incessant exercise of
digging, and also of the final circular object in the poem, the ring. It thus
participates on the elemental scale of the letter in what Werner Hamacher
terms inversion in Celan’s poetics, “in which the phenomenal and
linguistic world is opened onto a caesura that not a single shape of this
world can exorcize, since each of these shapes results from it.”46 The letter
O both concretizes a gap on the space of the page, and in its refusal to be
read as a single type of sign, withdraws from any stable and unitary system
of communication or sense-making.
Absence is etched visually into the English title No-one’s-rose,
semantically referencing and visually repeating a circular figure: “no-one”
is a set of null value (0), while the title abounds in Os.47 One of the texts
which best presents this abundance of absence on the space of the page is
the first poem “Es war Erde in ihnen:”
45
The significance of Celan’s sound-worlds is evidenced famously by the uncanny
contrapuntal rhythm of “Todesfuge” (“Death-fugue”) from Mohn und Gedächtnis
(Poppy and Memory—1952). In the poem “Bei Wein und Verlorenheit” (“With
Wine and Lostness”) from Die Niemandsrose, Celan translates the words “snow”
(Schnee), “dregs” (Neige), and “neighs” (Gewieher) both visually and semantically.
46
Hamacher 1996, 360.
47
There is only one O in the German title. However, as “Es war Erde in ihnen”
will suggest, Os do appear prominently elsewhere in the collection.
Es war Erde in ihnen, und

sie gruben.
Sie gruben und gruben, so ging

ihr Tag dahin, ihre Nacht. Und sie lobten nicht Gott,
der, so hörten sie, all dies wollte,
der, so hörten sie, all dies wusste.
Sie gruben und hörten nichts mehr;

sie wurden nicht weise, erfanden kein Lied,
erdachten sich keinerlei Sprache.
Sie gruben.
Es kam eine Stille, es kam auch ein Sturm,

es kamen die Meere alle.
Ich grabe, du gräbst, und es gräbt auch der Wurm,
und das Singende dort sagt: Sie graben.
O einer, o keiner, o niemand, o du:

Wohin gings, da‘s nirgendhin ging?
O du gräbst und ich grab, und ich grab mich dir zu,
und am Finger erwacht uns der Ring.48
There was earth inside them, and

they dug.
They dug and dug, and so

their day went past, their night. And they did not praise God,
who, so they heard, wanted all this,
who, so they heard, witnessed all this.
They dug and heard nothing more;

they did not grow wise, invented no song,
devised for themselves no sort of language.
They dug.
There came a stillness then, came also storm,

all of the oceans came.
I dig, you dig, and it digs too, the worm,
and the singing there says: They dig.
O one, o none, o no one, o you:

Where did it go then, making for nowhere?
48
Celan 1983, 1: 211.
214 Chapter Seven
O you dig and I dig, and I dig through to you,

and the ring on our finger awakens.49
The rhythm of digging in the poem is both visual and aural, as the
recurring phrase “sie gruben” (they dug) punctuates the poem. If one
recalls the poetic process of inversion at work in Celan’s oeuvre,
according to Jürgen Lehmann, this recurring phrase “they dug/dig” can be
read as the paradoxical reversal of the line “they shovel a grave in the air”
from “Death-fugue.” The figures here have earth inside them, and instead
of shoveling in the air, they dig into the earth, and into themselves.50 The
poem recalls a biblical beginning, when “the Lord God formed man from
the dust on the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and
the man became a living being.”51 The Hebrew word “adamah,” here used
for “ground,” also means “arable land,” which God’s breath animates into
life. However, God, breath, and arable land have all withdrawn from this
opening scene. Those digging have earth inside them, but this earth
appears to be lifeless. The incessant activity of digging does not appear to
have any purpose or goal other than the activity itself; it is an empty, non-
agrarian exercise. No seed germinates. God is absent from the world he
knows and wills, and which does not praise him.
More importantly, however, breath and sound are absent: those digging
“heard nothing more,” “did not grow wise, invented no song, /devised for
themselves no sort of language.” They do not sound out a breath, that is,
they do not call or sing, which typically involves sounding vowels in
speech and musical tone. Those digging do not “grow wise,” or devise a
language, thus cannot forge language and reason into logos. In Friedrich
Kittler’s account of Homeric song notated by letters of the Greek alphabet,
“the tone letters struck up did what vowels, as indicated by their very
name, are said to do: they called—and like the sirens they called out to
their hero.”52 This initial scene of “Es war Erde in ihnen” is one without
the breath, language, and song of vowels. The O of the vocatives to come
later emerges in this early section only as shapes of gaping holes in the
ground.
Nothing less than a sea-change can transform this scene, and in fact,
the silence of the beginning could be the lull before the storm that comes
in the fourth stanza. What follow are rhythmic invocations of digging, but
49
Celan 2000, 134-35.
50
Lehmann 1997, 51.
51
Gen. 2:7.
52
Kittler 2006, 57. The Greek alphabet is significant for having introduced vowels
into writing.
with one important change: now it is not an empty or generic “they” that
dig, but “I,” “you,” “the worm,” while a voice sings of the digging.53 As
Yoko Tawada points out in her reading of this poem, this conjugation of
the verb “dig” is not an empty grammar exercise, but is musical, much like
a theme and its variations.54 The series of conjugations act like linguistic
seeds that anticipate the botanic terminology and tropes of Niemandsrose.
They germinate the scene, multiply the acts and actors of digging, and
render their contours less vague than the impersonal “they.” Conjugation
as linguistic germination and the stillness-storm dynamic form the poles of
an oscillation, between stillness and deluge, the absence and presence of
life, and the absence and emergence of sound. A breath has entered the
scene. While it is still unclear whether the digging has become an agrarian
exercise, the linguistic world of the poem has been sown with conjugations.
More importantly, breath and music have entered the poem.
However, the tonal call does not end there. It culminates in a series of
vocatives. Grammatically, the vocative is a case where that which stands
in the nominative (i.e. as subject) becomes an addressee. This appears to
be the beginning of any communication in the poem, where one speaking
being calls to another. Now, both the rhythm of digging and the series of
vocative Os punctuate the fifth stanza. That which had insinuated itself
into the fourth stanza as breath and song now appears as a vowel and calls
out to an addressee. The nature of this addressee and the act of calling
deserve particular scrutiny here. Hamacher cautions against reading
Celan’s speakers and addressees as positive figures. Arguing that the
caesura that runs through all of Celan’s poetry “disperses every unit and
every condition that makes unity possible,”55 he holds that Celan’s “I”s
and “you”s are disarticulated by this fissure as the communicative power
of language is disrupted:
I and Thou, which, according to dialogical theories, should reciprocally

constitute each other, deconstitute each other in the chiasmus—it, too, an
inversion—of their crossed attempts to get a grip on themselves and to
make themselves capable of being grasped, until this deconstitution makes
them into figures of an encounter with nothingness.56
53
In German, “the singing there” clearly denotes a person who is singing, not the
event or action of singing that happens “over there.”
54
Tawada 2007, 75.
55
Hamacher 1996, 360.
56
Hamacher 1996, 373.
216 Chapter Seven
The caesura of inversion both separates and binds; it also deconstitutes the
speaker and addressee as parties of communication. But what are the
“letteral” dimensions of inversion at work in the letter O and Celan’s
vocatives?
The vocatives count, address, and mark the entities that follow them.
The first is “one,” the next “none,” then a “nobody,” followed by a “du,”
as the poem alternates between calling “one” and “no-one.” Each O
articulates sound and addresses; however, it simultaneously constitutes the
addressee and deconstitutes him, in addressing him alternately as “one”
and “no-one.” The words introduced by these exclamations refer both to
human subjects and numbers. The words einer (one) and du (you)
designate one person or a quantity of one, while keiner (none) and
niemand (no one) designate both an absence and a set of null value. It is
possible to read the stanza as a series of numbers, by substituting 1 where
a quantity of one is referenced, and 0 where the quantity is zero.
Especially in the last stanza, Celan’s visual poetics becomes apparent
in the encounter between the sound of the letter O and this impossible
counting enabled by the visual resemblance of the letter to zero. This
contact and encounter between the different capacities of writing and of
the orthographic symbol constitute the foundational moment of writing in
which the caller and the addressee are inscribed on the page as “I” or
implied by the word “one” as the number 1. In response and contrast, the
letter O of the multiple vocatives and the number 0 implied by “none” and
“no one” are inscribed as the possibility of their absence, almost visible on
the space of the page as holes dug into the earth. The possibility of
absence is heightened by the references to units of null value. Celan
suggests a third dimension to this circular yet two-dimensional form, as a
ring “awakens” on the last line of the poem. Because the ring could both
refer to the shape of a ring or to the object itself, it remains ambiguous
whether the circular form achieves this third dimension. The ring awakens
as the “I” and “you” become “we,” a possible figure of circumscribing, yet
also of a circularity and gap inscribed into this relationship from the first
invocations of digging to the vocative address.
While the vocative Os designate address, the letter O refuses to be read
as a sign of communication. The multiple readings it invites as phenomenal
sense (the image of the hole), cipher of absence (the number zero), and the
ambiguous ring, disrupt communicative language and participate in a
mode of sense-making that cannot be contained by semantic sense alone.
If the last image of the ring is in fact the concretization of these many
circular forms into a concrete object, then the potential materialization of
the ring at the end might be the paradoxical withdrawal of the very
element of writing (the letter O) from the space of the page.
Coronis and concrete letters

Celan’s poetry concretizes and multiplies the sensory possibilities of the
letter O in order to problematize its participation in semantic sense-
making. The following passage from Tawada addresses letters and
pronunciation more explicitly than Celan, but makes a similar move: it
presents a jumble of letters as sensical and multivalent, only to hinge their
potential for multiple sense-making around the visual transformations of the
letter O.
Each chapter of Opium für Ovid: Ein Kopfkissenbuch von 22 Frauen
features a female character from Ovid’s Metamorphoses transplanted into
what appears to be contemporary Western Europe. The chapter entitled
“Coronis” takes its name from Coronis of Larissa, a princess of famed
beauty, who cheats on her lover Apollo. A raven reports this treachery to
Apollo, who kills Coronis in a fit of jealous rage. However, Apollo’s fury
soon turns upon the spy. He chars the white raven, turning its feathers
black, the color they have remained to this day. This story is thus not about
Coronis’s but rather the raven’s transformation, and not into another body,
but from the common color of a page into a common color of ink.
Tawada’s Coronis is an émigré author from a communist dictatorship.
The dictatorship and its secret police appear to have made her the subject
of practices of surveillance and persecution in her former life. As a result,
she is troubled still by birds, whose appearance in front of her window
arouse uneasiness at the haunting sense of being observed. Among
interwoven and intertextual themes of witnessing, spying, and betrayal (as
well as the refusal to betray), Coronis develops an eye condition in which
there is a dark spot in her field of vision resembling an insect. When she
goes to the doctor for an eye examination, the doctor attributes her
condition to age and gives her an eye test:
Der Arzt setzt ein Probebrille auf Coronis’ Nase und zeigt auf ein
Plakat, auf dem Reihen von Buchstaben zu sehen sind. Sie sehen aus wie
konkrete Poesie.
“Was für einen Buchstaben sehen Sie dort?”
Coronis sieht ein O, aber mit einer anderen Brille sieht sie ein Q, mit
einer dritten ein G.
“Was sehen Sie nun?”
fragt der Arzt.
218 Chapter Seven
“Ich sehe jedesmal was anderes. Durch häufigen Brillenwechsel

Mehrdeutigkeit erleben, soll das der Sinn einer Brille sein?”57
The doctor places test glasses onto Coronis’s nose and points to a
chart, on which rows of letters can be seen. They look like concrete poetry.
“What kind of letters do you see there?”
Coronis sees an O, but with another set of glasses she sees a Q, with a
third, a G.
“So, what do you see?”
asks the doctor.
“I see something different every time. Experiencing ambiguity by
frequent change of glasses, is that supposed to be the point of wearing
glasses?”
Coronis’s visual defect renders her a creator and reader of

metamorphoses. This defect is quite literally a déformation professionelle,
a physical deformation of the eye from age and use. It is the author’s
almost physically irrepressible urge to write and rewrite even in the
absence of pen and paper, and to read every jumble of letters as literature.
Most importantly, however, Coronis interprets the metamorphoses of the
letters O, Q and G neither as errors in the physiological faculty of vision,
nor as written characters to be pronounced. Rather, the reappearance of
letters in different forms constitutes an experience of Mehrdeutigkeit
(ambiguity) whose literal rendering in English would be “multivalence,”
or “multiplicity of meaning or interpretation.” For Coronis, each letter she
does not pronounce but reads, rereads, and misreads, means something.
This meaning, however, should not be mistaken for semantic sense alone.
Coronis’s overall impression of the chart is that it is poetry, that is, not
a series of randomly distributed letters. Importantly, it resembles concrete
poetry, in which the visual form of the text is just as important as the
meaning of the words in it.58 She thus immediately builds a tension
between the totality of a text, the individual letters in it, and the potentially
conflicting modes of reading they invite. Already, Coronis’s reading eye
begins to take leave of the sounds for which the letters stand in favor of
their visual form. In fact, Coronis’s experience of ambiguity is none other
than the visual transformation of the letters she sees. Although the letters
O, Q and G have sounds associated with them, here they are meaningful
57
Tawada 2000, 83.
58
The links between concrete poetry and Tawada’s poetics, while not discussed
here, are worthy of focused critical attention. For a recent analysis of twentieth-
century citational poetics that suggests some links between concrete poetry and
Tawada’s work, see Perloff 2010.
units that always gesture toward their status as visual marks. Coronis never
pronounces or otherwise identifies any of the letters she sees, despite the
doctor’s urging. It is also unclear whether she acknowledges that her eye
condition might be supplying the extra line to the letters G and Q on the
chart, which resemble the letter O and which one can approximate by
adding a horizontal line or stroke to the letter O.
Coronis’s reading is already a form of writing, as her eyes supply the
very material of writing, a kind of ink in the shape of a dark spot in the
eye, to the text before her. This small spot-insect resembles Coronis’s
namesake in Ancient Greek grammar, the term “corǀnis,” meaning “[a]
sign resembling an apostrophe (‘), placed over a vowel as a mark of
contraction or crasis.”59 In fact, “corǀnis” itself is none other than the
typo-pictographic presentation of a hook, as “țȠȡȦȞȓȢ” means “hook” in
Ancient Greek.60 The text calls for the proper name Coronis, belonging to
a person, and the common noun, designating the typographic mark, to be
read together. The typographic mark is thus quite literally inscribed into
Coronis, into Coronis’s name, into her body as a spot in her eye, and into
the text before her as a small spot, signaling the absence of sound.
Coronis’s experience of multivalence in the metamorphoses of the
letters in the Latin alphabet foregrounds the visual form of the letters and
reveals the ways in which letters and parts of letters are integral to
Tawada’s poetics in various capacities. First of all, the letters can
transform into one another: they can be read and misread, rewritten, or be
translated into the elements of another writing system altogether.61 Opium
für Ovid’s intertextuality with Ovid’s Metamorphoses and treatment of
metamorphosis thus need not be limited to bodies alone.62 In fact, the
59
See the OED Online.
60
Smyth 1920, §62.
61
In her second Tübingen Poetics Lecture, dedicated to the problem of translation,
Tawada remarks: “One cannot translate the letters. It is in fact not the text that
cannot be translated, it is the script” (Die Buchstaben kann man nicht übersetzen.
Es ist eigentlich nicht der Text, den man nie übersetzen kann, sondern die
Schrift—idem 1998, 35). This is not a statement about the absolute
untranslatability of writing systems or of texts. Rather, Tawada elaborates that a
literary translation has to work with the problem and impossibility of translation
rather than seek to obliterate it.
62
Ovid’s Metamorphoses begins with the invocation: “My soul would sing of
metamorphoses./ But since, o gods, you were the source of these/ bodies becoming
other bodies, breathe/ your breath into my book of changes” (idem 1993, 3).
Tawada’s essayistic writing supports this link. In her Tübingen Poetics Lecture
cited above, and in her 2009 Cornell Lecture on Aesthetics entitled “The Letter as
Literature’s Political and Poetic Body,” Tawada often speaks of letters as “bodies,”
220 Chapter Seven
letters’ transformations are interlinked with Coronis’s bodily defect.

Secondly, the grounds on which these letters can transform into one
another is not aural but visual. The letters O, Q, and G are pronounced
differently, but might well be mistaken for one another by someone with
poor vision. Lastly, in Coronis’s reading of the different forms of these
letters with different meanings, the letters’ multisensory nature (aural, oral
and visual) are associated with different possibilities of meaning.
The German words Bedeutung (meaning) and Mehrdeutigkeit
(multivalence), both derived from the verb deuten, already suggest multiple
possibilities of meaning. Deuten can mean “to mean,” but also “to
indicate,” “to point to,” and “to interpret.” Multivalence for Coronis
indicates semantic meaning and interpretation, but also the physical
experience of pointing to things. Moreover, the word Sinn (sense), which
Coronis uses in the same sentence as Mehrdeutigkeit, is about as
multivalent in English as it is in German. Here connoting “purpose,” it can
also mean “meaning” or “sense,” and is used with reference to the five
senses. When Coronis asks if multivalence by change of glasses can be the
purpose (“Sinn”) of wearing glasses, she hints at links between the faculty
of vision and multiple possibilities of semantic and phenomenal sense-
making, suggested by the words Mehrdeutigkeit and Sinn. To recall
Kittler’s formulation, the letters O, Q, and G “make senses.”63
Importantly, Tawada’s Coronis is not disarticulated as character in the
same way Celan’s speaker and addressees are dissociated through
inversion. Coronis writ large and the typographical mark that bears her
name are both silent, in that they perform or signal the absence of sound.
They thus make the absence of sound perceptible, in similar ways to
Celan’s Os and zeros that signal absence. The typographic mark is linked
synecdochally to Coronis’s body, while the letters O, Q, and G are linked
intra- and intertextually to transformed bodies. Foregrounding the
possibilities of text in the eye test chart, only to withdraw the
pronunciation of letters from the protocol of the test, Tawada presents
individual orthographic symbols as corporeal metamorphoses of one
another and as vehicles of multivalence. Although these meanings are not
pronounced, they are inscribed in the visually metamorphosed letters as
possibility.
“animals,” and the “remaining bones” once the reader has consumed the text (see
idem 1998, 30 and 2009, 3).
63
Kittler 2006, 52.
Meridians
The question remains, what are the operational functions of the letter O in
Celan and Tawada’s oeuvre, given that “Es war Erde in ihnen” and
Tawada’s chapter “Coronis” by and large do not reference orientation or
mathematical calculation? This section will trace the circular forms of
meridians in Celan’s 1960 Büchner Prize acceptance speech entitled “Der
Meridian,” and Tawada’s essay “An der Spree” from Sprachpolizei und
Sprachpolyglotte.64 Celan’s visual poetics suggest some affinities between
the meridian and the letter O, both marks of re-turning that oscillate
between materiality and absence. Their visual shape and foregrounded
phenomenal sense participate in and enrich the utterances which they
simultaneously interrupt. Tawada’s meridian’s link to the letter O and
orientation, on the other hand, is more explicit. In drawing the shape of the
number 0, Tawada’s text withdraws it from the protocol of communication
and employs it as operative tool of orientation. In achieving orientation,
however, the text suggests that the orientation is neither fixed nor final.
Like Celan’s meridian, Tawada’s 0 suggests that orientation and encounter
are inherently belated and need to be performed continually.
Jürgen Lehmann draws attention to the lack of spatial markers in “Es
war Erde in ihnen,” observing that both the word nirgendwohin (nowhere)
and the question mark at the end of the second line of the last stanza
indicate loss of direction. It is also possible, however, to read
“nirgendwohin” against the grain as a real nowhere, a utopic space.
Lehmann recalls “Der Meridian,” where Celan indicates a direction “im
Lichte der U-topie” (in light of u-topia) towards the poem.65 In the case of
“Der Meridian” and meridians, however, this turn draws a circle back to
the point of departure.
Celan’s conclusion in “Der Meridian” reveals the circular structure of
his speech. He thematizes the globe’s revolution as research of both
place—from the Greek ĲȩʌȠȢ—and movement or “turning”—from the
Greek ĲȡȑʌȦ. Celan delineates his path in delivering his speech, declaring:
“I am at the end—I am back at the beginning [...] I took this path, here too,
in your presence. It was a circle” (ich bin am Ende—ich bin wieder am
Anfang […] Ich bin auch hier, in Ihrer Gegenwart, diesen Weg gegangen.
64
The Büchner Prize is the most prestigious literary prize for German-language
literature. It is given annually in memory of the German author Georg Büchner
(1813-1837). The Spree is a river that flows through the Saxony, Brandenburg, and
Berlin states of Germany.
65
Lehmann 1997, 55; Celan 1999, 10 (§40b); 8 (§31f); idem 2011, 10 (§40b); 8
(§31f).
222 Chapter Seven
Es war ein Kreis).66 There is, however, one more moment of encounter,
the one between this “I” and the circular path of writing around the globe:
Ich finde etwas—wie die Sprache—Immaterielles, aber Irdisches,

Terrestrisches, etwas Kreisförmiges, über die beiden Polen in sich selbst
Zurückkehrendes und dabei—heitererweise—sogar die Tropen
Durchkreuzendes—ich finde […] einen Meridian.
I find something—like language—immaterial, yet terrestrial, something

circular that returns to itself across both poles while—cheerfully—even
crossing the tropics: I find […] a meridian. 67
This is thus a multiple encounter, between poetry and itself, between

the poet and himself, and between the poet and the meridian. Celan’s
choice of the meridian as the site of encounter is significant for the
meridian’s double function as a tool of orientation in space, and indicator
of time difference, but also of its function of traversing the circumference
of the earth and thus dividing it. The meridian might thus be the best
figure for speaking of temporality, splitting, and encounter in poetry in
non-semantic terms. Speaking of time and meaning in Celan’s poetry,
Hamacher observes:
The word of time does not refer to objective data or abstract meanings; it is
only as the withdrawal of objectivity and meaning. The language of
finitude is the chronic retreat of the referential and semantic functions of
language, because with each one of its words—all of which bend
representations into life—the world and the very being of the things thus
spoken are brought to the point of disappearance. In turning to speak to its
own ground, Celan’s poetry can assert the condition of its possibility only
as the condition of the impossibility of its stable semantic subsistence, and
so it opens up the abyss of its own futility.68
According to Hamacher, the semantic potential of language is subject to

time.69 This subjection implies, however, that language withdraws from
stable conditions of sense-making and becomes non-representational, since
by referencing things in the world, the language of time paradoxically
erases its referents. The meridian constitutes the figure of this dimension
of time in Celan’s poetry. Not only is the meridian itself both terrestrial (in
that it is of the earth) and immaterial (in that it is only an imagined,
66
Celan 1999, 10-11 (§42a; §42f); idem 2011, 10-11 (§42a; §42f).
67
Celan 1999, 12 (§50c); idem 2011 12 (§50c).
68
Hamacher 1996, 353 (emphasis in original).
69
Hamacher 1996, 352.
conventional sign), it also the figure of time and splitting par excellence. It
is an imagined site of encounter that deconstitutes the parties of the
encounter by temporalizing and splitting them.
Celan remains cognizant of the meridian’s capacities of temporal and
semantic disarticulation, yet he finds consolation in its power to allow
continual encounter. This does not mean that the meridian is strictly an
operative tool for Celan. However, the meridian does allow orientation on
what appears to be a global, even universal scale, albeit not in any
conventional geographic sense. Celan states clearly that his place of origin
cannot be found, and does not exist as such on a map.70 Still, his project of
“topos research” (Toposforschung) “in the light of u-topia” (im Lichte der
U-topie) can be read against the grain as the search for a real place, as
Lehmann suggests.71 This essay reads “U-topie” as a real non-place, a
place of U. The Greek ypsilon is a semi-vowel that itself stands at the
threshold between the presence and absence of sound, that is, between the
frictionless sound of a vowel and the friction, trill, hiss, or buzz of a
consonant.72 With respect to audibility in Celan, Kristina Mendicino
dissects Celan’s phrase “Majestät des Absurden” (“majesty of the
absurd”), elegantly read by Jacques Derrida in the seminal essay
“Majesties” (2005). However, she does so without attention to its
reference to “an unheard dimension of speech,” since it “literally signals
an intensified (ab-) deafness (surdus) […]. It would seem indeed that
something ‘unheard’ enters Celan's audible speech.”73 Taking Celan and
Mendicino at their word, this chapter suggests that the U of “U-topie” is a
locus of this unheard dimension of Celan’s speech. That is, “U-topie” calls
for the visual form of U to be read alongside its semantic function as
prefix meaning “not,” and the near-inaudibility of ypsilon as one nearly
unheard dimension of “Der Meridian.” U can also be read as a turn on the
space of the page, alongside Celan’s invocations of “re-routings […]
creaturely routes, […] a sending oneself ahead toward oneself, in search of
oneself […] A kind of homecoming” (Um-Wege […] kreatürliche Wege,
[…] ein Sichvorausschicken zu sich selbst, auf der Suche nach sich selbst
70
Celan 1999, 12 (§49b-d); idem 2011, 12 (§49b-d).
71
Lehmann 1997, 55; Celan 1999, 10 (§40a-b; §49a); idem 2011, 10 (§40a-b;
§49a).
72
The German letter ypsilon (y), corresponding to the Greek ȣ, can be considered
an endangered letter in German too, with recurrent yet unsuccessful attempts to
discontinue its use. The author acknowledges that the German transcription differs
from the Greek original.
73
Celan 1999, 3 (§7c); idem 2011, 3 (§49b-d); Mendicino 2011, 639.
224 Chapter Seven
[…] Eine Art Heimkehr).74 U can both erase its place (topos) by negating
it, but read visually, it simultaneously designates the space as a u-place on
the space of the page, performing the turns of which Celan speaks. These
encounters with the text that the meridian, the U, and “Es war Erde in
ihnen”s O invite, call for an encounter with the semantic instability of the
poem and the intermedial and sensory possibilities of reading the smallest
elements of Celan’s texts.
Tawada’s meridian too signals an integral relationship between the
text, orientation, and time, while relying on similar capacities of sense-
making that semantic sense cannot contain. However, her meridian is an
operational tool that, albeit only momentarily, enables orientation.
When Tawada’s narrator in the fiction-essay “An der Spree” arrives in
Berlin, she can name her location as “Europe,” but proclaims that she does
not know where she is. The abundance of spatial markers (e.g. street signs)
that pronounce her coordinates as Berlin, Zoological Gardens, likewise do
not dissolve her disorientation. It appears that orientation in the global
capital city Berlin is not a purely geographic problem, but an orthographic
one:
Das Alphabet erinnerte mich an den Nahen Osten. Vilém Flusser schrieb:
“Das A zeigt noch immer die Hörner des syriakischen Stiers, das B noch
immer die Kuppeln des semitischen Hauses, das C (G) noch immer den
Buckel des Kamels in der vorderasiatischen Wüste.” Man schreibt das
Alphabet, um die Wüste in der Sprache wachzurufen. Die Wüste ist die
Vernunft, der Geist eines Mathematikers.75
The alphabet always reminded me of the Near East. Vilém Flusser wrote:
“A stills shows the horns of the Syriac bull, B still the cupola of the
Semitic house, C (G) still the humps of the camel in the Near Eastern
desert.” One writes the alphabet in order to evoke the desert in language.
The desert is reason, the mind of a mathematician.76
The image of letters of the Latin alphabet call the Near East into
Berlin, and soon, signs from the rest of the world follow suit, when Arabic
74
Celan 1999, 11 (§46); idem 2011, 11 (§46).
75
Tawada 2007, 11-12.
76
It is no accident that Tawada refers to the work of Vilém Flusser, one of the first
practitioners of media theory as such, whose theories of cultural technique
investigate writing, calculation, image, and figure as interlinked phenomena. I treat
this connection between Flusser and Tawada in more detail in my dissertation in
progress at Cornell University, entitled “Metamorphoses of the Letter in Paul
Celan, Georges Perec, and Yoko Tawada.”
numerals, the number zero (an Indian discovery), and Chinese ideograms
are invoked. Berlin’s streets, the architecture of the train station, and
various displays are described in terms of a plethora of mathematical and
orthographic symbols, often supplying place names in Berlin. However,
when the narrator decides to write a postcard to a friend, she realizes that
she still does not know her address. In fact, she knows neither her friend’s
whereabouts nor her own. It is at this point that she solves the problem on
a piece of paper:
Steht hier eine Null, so weiȕ man, dass es einen leeren Platz gibt. Steht
hier keine Null, übersieht man den freien Platz. Deshalb kann man ohne
die Null weder sich orientieren noch gut rechnen. Ich zeichnete auf einem
Briefpapier eine Null und schrieb dazu: “Schau, die Null ist Indien. Der
Ferne Osten ist genauso weit entfernt von Punkt Null wie Europa. Die Null
in der Mitte, links der Nahe Osten mit seinem Europa, rechts der Ferne
Osten: Das ist ein symmetrisches Bild. Ich weiȕ jetzt, wo ich bin.77
If there is a zero here, then one knows that there’s free space. If there’s no
zero, then one overlooks the free space. I drew a zero on the letter paper
and wrote: “Look, the zero is India. The Far East is exactly as far from
point zero as Europe. The zero in the middle, on the left side the Near East
with its Europe, on the right the Far East: That is a symmetrical image. I
know now where I am.
The narrator informs us that she has “drawn” this zero on “letter paper.”
Indeed, this is meant to be a correspondence. However, although she
appears to address her friend, her writing serves not to communicate with
another person but to solve a problem of orientation. This writing, then, is
not communication but drawing and operation. It involves tracing the form
of the number zero on a page, thus performing both mathematical
calculation and geographic orientation. The presence of the zero on the
page that represents null value makes the emptiness of the piece of paper
perceptible. This absence that one might have otherwise overlooked
resonates with that of the meridian, which only exists in the world as
convention. Orientation in this text is not movement in space with
reference to a fixed point, but a production of orientation through writing-
drawing. It is immaterial to the narrator that the street signs in her
surroundings all point to the fact that she is in Berlin.78 These signs remain
77
Tawada 2007, 22.
78
In fact, the narrator’s coordinates in Berlin are anything but given. Her need to
orient herself despite the street signs needs careful consideration as a moment of
resistance to Eurocentric geographic conventions (e.g. the prime meridian that
226 Chapter Seven
illegible and the orientation they allow (fixed-point orientation)

inaccessible, unlike the metamorphoses of O. The narrator can only orient
herself if she can produce that orientation in writing. Secondly, this
orientation cannot happen only once. Immediately after this scene, the
narrator proclaims surprisingly that she still does not know what zero is.79
The zero itself cannot be a given, a piece of writing on a page that is read,
or a map to which the narrator could refer at a later time. If that had been
the case, the street signs and station names in Berlin would have been
accessible. They are not, because the drawing of the zero and the meridian
are markers as much temporal as they are spatial. In fact, the narrator’s
drawing the meridian already introduces time and belatedness into the
writing practice, which has to be produced again in a subsequent moment
of writing.80
Despite its subjection to disruption in time and call for continual
reproductions, Tawada’s practice of orthographic orientation relies on the
act of writing and the physical circumstances that surround it. Berlin’s
streets are animated with the elements of various writing systems and
formal languages (e.g. mathematics), while the narrator remains pointedly
focused on her movements in the city. In addition, the moment of
orientation is localized on the space of the page, reliant on the process of
writing, and portrayed as an operation that yields orientation as its result.
The relationship between the number zero and the meridian is semantic,
visual, and operational: as zero points, circular forms, and tools of
orientation. Celan’s meridian, like the orthographic symbol zero or the
letter O, is “terrestrial” and “immaterial” alike. Tawada’s meridian
likewise introduces temporality into the moment of writing that both
interrupts it and calls for orientation, encounter, and writing to be
performed continually as they gesture towards alternate possibilities of
writing and sense-making.
Conclusion
As Tawada’s reading of the radical for “gate” in the Japanese translation
of Von Schwelle zu Schwelle and Daniel Heller-Roazen’s observations
passes through Greenwich, England), which would require a separate critical

analysis.
79
Tawada 2007, 22.
80
Many thanks to John Namjun Kim for pointing out this dual function of the
meridian, and for suggesting that orientation in this text is not fixed but a continual
production necessitated by the dimension of time.
about Io suggest, the radical 㛛 and the name Io might or might not be
incidental to the Japanese translation of Celan and to Ovid’s text.
However, the metamorphoses and recombinations of geometic
components of orthographic symbols are not incidental but pivotal for a
reading of the strategies by which Celan and Tawada respond to the
semantic and referential potentials of language. The visual transformations
of orthographic symbols into numbers and images allow their participation
in mathematical operations and visual translation as transformation. These
transformations call for an enriched reading of modes of phenomenal
sense-making in Celan and Tawada’s language. The sensory capacities of
the text, writing systems, and orthographic symbols thus resist
participation in unified semantic systems.
Celan and Tawada’s texts do not so much void their semantic content
as disrupt it. They thus call for multisensory and multivalent readings, in
which the sensory world of the text poses one of several reading choices
presented to the reader. Writing thus gestures beyond communication to
the possibility of non-communicative language, at the elemental level of
the letter.
In the context of the geographic, affective, and linguistic residues of
genocide, and of an increasingly multilingual and intercultural world,
respectively, Paul Celan and Yoko Tawada’s literary and essayistic output
calls for critical attention to non-communicative and non-referential
capacities of language. Once contemplated as image-text, the letter O
reveals the historical intermediality of the Greek-derived Western
European writing systems as adumbrated by Friedrich Kittler. O is not
only a vowel but number, image, geographic figure, and body. In its
unique position as one of the smallest elements of Western writing, the
letter O and its circular form present one performance of writing as a
visual and operative practice that opens literary language to inter- and
intralingual encounter, orientation, and a reevaluation of the capacities of
writing. Celan and Tawada’s visual transformations of the letter thus
transform the very material of literary production at an elemental level.
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CHAPTER EIGHT
FROM AVANT-GARDE TO THE DIGITAL AGE:

RECONCEPTUALIZING EXPERIMENTAL
CATALAN POETRY
EDUARDO LEDESMA
Text and image before the digital

Much ink has been spilled in regard to the topic of the text (script) and
image relationship. A fully comprehensive examination of the interactions
between script and image in twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetics
should cover a period spanning from the first avant-garde’s visual poetry,
through the 1960s experimental poetry—concretism, lettrism, phonetic
and process poetry—and culminating in today’s digital and electronic
poetry. In order to limit the length of the essay I will, however, primarily
focus on the two periods that bookend contemporary experimental poetry
(with a special emphasis on the digital), leaving the 1960s, which I only
mention briefly, for a future investigation. Such an examination also
requires that we first determine the changing understanding of the analogy
between the visual arts (painting, photography, film) and the verbal arts
(poetry, prose).1 The aim of this essay will be to investigate how
metaphors (visual and aural) have played a key role in the relatively
seamless fusion of verbal and visual meaning in experimental poetry,
starting with the historical avant-gardes and then proceeding to the digital
1
I use the term analogy here, rather than relationship or correspondence, because
it goes further than just establishing relationships and comparisons between two
things, in this case, painting and poetry. It does so with the purpose of determining
important similarities between the two items compared, often by defining one in
the terms of the other, while maintaining a distinction between them. I will use the
term metaphor for more specific, poetic instances of comparison. Yet, aiming to
destabilize the clear-cut categories that separate language into figurative and
literal, I will occasionally use the terms interchangeably.
232 Chapter Eight
age. Additionally, we shall see how in digital poetry the fusion of word and
image is enhanced through movement and sound, in a process of synthesis
that also plays a role in subject formation. By triggering affective
responses through mobilizing complex metaphors and by eliciting the
active response of readers (who also act as viewers and users), digital
poems work to create viewing subjects willing to approach an inter-
semiotic poem, and to position themselves so as to cooperate creatively
with the computer in an interdependent process of making meaning.2
Spanish and Catalan writers and artists, by virtue of their singular
location at a cultural crossroads between Europe and Latin America, the
“old” world and the “new,” have had a special insight into the newest
trends in experimental poetry coming from both sides of the Atlantic. In
addition, it has not been unusual for Catalan artists to be at the forefront
and even to anticipate the latest trends in experimental poetry. In this essay
I trace the word/image relationship as manifested in contemporary digital
poetry by first making a digression through its roots in the historic avant-
garde and by using Spanish and Catalan works as my texts for analysis.
The inter-artistic analogy has a lengthy tradition going back to
Aristotle’s Poetics and Horace’s Ars Poetica—and his often mis-interpreted
dictum, ut pictura poesis.3 This Horatian simile, which translates “as is
painting, so is poetry,” had limited application in its original context, but
was extended during the Renaissance at which point poetry and painting
became known as “the sister arts.”4 In his seminal study Ut Pictura
Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (1940), Rensselaer W. Lee
states that during the Renaissance the sister arts were acknowledged as
different “in means and manner of expression, but were considered almost
identical in fundamental nature, in content, and in purpose.”5 Some early
modern theorists considered any composition, whether a painting,
2
Dealing with far-ranging topics such as love, disability, or the nature of
communication, recent digital poems require the reader to enter into an iterative
process with the machine, thus entering a hybrid space of collaboration.
3
The key passages can be found in Aristotle’s Poetics II, 1; VI, 19-21; XXV, 26-
28; and also in Horace’s Ars Poetica 1-13; 361-65.
4
Horace’s complete quote has more to do with similarities in how a painting or
poem can be appreciated and interpreted, through either a close viewing/reading,
or examining the work at a distance, and taking it in at a glance. For Horace, the
analogy between painting and poetry was a rhetorical strategy used to make a
specific point, not to advocate for the interchangeable nature of the two arts. For a
lengthy exploration of this subject see Trimpi 1973.
5
Lee 1940, 197.
From Avant-Garde to the Digital Age: Experimental Catalan Poetry 233
sculpture, or even prose, to be poetry (applying the meaning of poiesis as

creation), pushing the analogy to efface any differences between the arts.
During the Enlightenment, Gotthold E. Lessing’s Laocoön: An Essay
upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766) posed a serious challenge to
the notion of the sister arts. Lessing focused not on the similarities but
rather on the differences between poetry (script-based arts) and painting
(also sculpture and architecture), advocating for the “purity” of the arts,
and revealing an early modern rationalist desire to establish limits and
well-defined categories. In this case, purity is the notion that medium
specificity should be respected, and that the artwork in one medium (say
painting) should not be contaminated by the influence of another medium
(say poetry). Lessing was making an early argument for media specificity,
for artistic “purity,” and by extension, advocating for the apartheid of
word and image. He qualified painting as a spatial art and poetry as a
temporal one, a difference that he viewed as irreconcilable. The difference
hinges on the idea that spatial art is experienced only after its creation,
while the temporal is experienced as it unfolds in time, as it comes into
being.
By now Lessing’s separation of painting and poetry into the spatial and
temporal arts has been thoroughly problematized, both by more
contemporary theoretical accounts and via avant-garde and experimental
artistic praxis. W. J. T. Mitchell, among many other critics, has long
championed the cause of literature’s spatiality, arguing that “spatial form
is a crucial aspect of the experience and interpretation of literature in all
ages and cultures.”6 The spatial/temporal division becomes even more
ontologically unstable once we question the separation between process
and finished product, given that the evolution of a visual work of art, a
painting in process, for instance, is also a temporal activity. Precisely one
of the avant-garde’s strategies was to bring forth the process, to make the
creation of the art object a visible part of the “finished” product, blurring
the line between a work in progress and the final work.
While important differences between the arts do exist, so do grounds
for an analogical treatment of the relationship between script and image.
Metaphor can be a useful tool to sort out both similarities and differences,
between script and image, and between the arts.7 Despite modernism’s
attempts to produce a theory that maintained the division of the arts in
practice and criticism, a growing promiscuity and hybridization in the arts
(especially post-1960) has dealt a death-blow to notions of genre and
6
Mitchell 1980, 273.
7
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson define metaphor as “understanding and
experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (idem 1980, 5).
234 Chapter Eight
artistic “purity,” notions further compromised by the increased intermediality

brought about by contemporary digital arts. Although there might not be a
unified theory of the arts toward which to strive, Mitchell states that some
of the arts, such as painting and poetry, are not in essence different,
displaying “no difference, that is, given for all time by the inherent natures
of the media, the objects they represent or the laws of the human mind.”8
Inhabiting the limit where the arts overlap has its rewards. Mitchell has
advocated for probing aggressively into this territory without fear of
transgressing the limits of the inter-artistic analogy, pursuing what he
describes as a “road of excess,” the dangerous crossing of disciplinary
boundaries. In order to do that, according to Mitchell, we must “abandon
our cautious reverence toward the generic laws that divide image from
text.”9
However, just because the categories of text and image have been
systematically destabilized over the course of the twentieth century, it does
not mean that an inter-artistic analysis of twentieth-century poetics is
unproblematic. Such an analogy-driven task is complicated by the
following question: how can one establish comparisons between the poetry
and painting of the historical avant-garde, considered as “traditionally”
analog modes of representation, and contemporary modes of digital
production—digital poetry or art—which are supposedly ontologically
different? One possibility is to question the notion that “digitality might be
embedded in analogicity and perhaps vice versa in an ongoing recursion-
regress,” as Whitney Davis posits.10 Increasingly indiscernible, and often
hybrid, the digital and the analog commingle in contemporary art forms,
resulting in a de-differentiation—a loss of specialization in form or
function—of the terms. Hence, according to Davis, “the representational
value of their distinction (if any remains) can only be generated
figuratively in analogies to this condition.”11 This proposition would mean
that the only way to define either category, digital or analog, would be
strictly through metaphoric, figurative means (through analogy). The idea
of a possible hybrid recursivity that recycles the digital (processed by a
computer and coded in binary, discrete units) into the analog (processed by
a human and coded in continuous units) and back, connects with Jay D.
Bolter and Richard Grusin’s concept of remediation as a reworking or
8
Mitchell 1987, 2.
9
Mitchell 1987, 2.
10
Davis 2006, 73. Davis takes to task the supposition that the analog mode entails
a notion of approximation, of inexactitude, and of continuity, while the digital
mode points to precision, repeatability, and discreteness.
11
Davis 2006, 84.
reusing of old media by new media. “All current media,” they write,
“function as remediators, and remediation offers us a means of interpreting
the work of older media as well.”12 Quite possibly, the digital has
incorporated, indeed remediated, the analog by including formerly analog
genres—photographs, paintings, films, literature—within new digital
formats. The analog, on the other hand, has also mutated to incorporate the
digital, or the aesthetic appearance of the digital, for instance television’s
use of multiple windows, an aesthetic adopted from the World Wide Web.
As such, ontological differences between analog and digital have
increasingly come into question.
The comparison between historical and digital literature entails an
exploration of the limits (temporal and spatial), and a scrutiny of the
polysemic interstices between the arts. Such an approach promotes, in
Mitchell’s words, “the study of the social construction of visual
experience,”13 much in the spirit of early twentieth-century and
contemporary artistic production. The ultimate purpose of this essay is to
work through the earlier part of the twentieth century in order to
understand how contemporary digital poetry uses metaphor to explore the
overlapping spaces between script and image, recycling and expanding the
historic avant-garde’s visual and typographic experiments through the
added capabilities afforded by the digital computer.
The historic Catalan avant-garde poetry:

Synthesis of text and image
Preceding F. T. Marinetti’s First Futurist Manifesto (1909) by a few years,
the Catalan poet Gabriel Alomar laid out his concept of Futurisme in a
1904 lecture at the Ateneu Barcelonès.14 Futurisme differed considerably
from the (later) Italian Futurismo and its right-wing machine-worshipping
excesses. Until 1910 when Ramón Gómez de la Serna published a Spanish
translation of Marinetti’s brand of Futurism (as “manifested” by the Italian
poet in Le Figaro), Alomar’s humanist Futurism (and its call for artistic
12
Bolter and Grusin 1999, 55. Bolter and Grusin provide several examples of how
new media re-use older media, for instance, how “television can and does
refashion itself to resemble the World Wide Web, and film can and does
incorporate and attempt to contain computer graphics” (ibid.).
13
Mitchell 1994, 35.
14
For a translated and annotated version of the lecture see Merjian 2010, 401-8.
236 Chapter Eight
renovation) was among the few forward-thinking proto avant-garde

propositions around.
In 1905, moderniste15 poet Rafael Nogueras Oller published Les
Tenebroses (The Dark Ones), a book of poetry that Joaquim Molas has
qualified as “profoundly revolutionary” (profundament revolucionari).16
The book is ethically charged with an element of social protest against the
Catalan industrialist class, Nogueras being both deeply religious and an
anarchist. Molas explains that Nogueras brought the violence of his
political convictions to the territory of poetic form. Combining free verse,
poetic prose, and an unapologetically direct, colloquial language, Nogueras
attacks the hypocrisy and amorality of the Catalan bourgeoisie in lyrical
experiments that predate many “original” developments of the avant-
garde, and which begin to challenge notions of the division between visual
and textual signification. For instance, Nogueras uses collage-like sentence
fragments which anticipate the cubist poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire and
Pierre Reverdy, and presents nonsensical juxtapositions well before Dada
or Surrealism. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in his poem
“Una esse” (“An ‘S’”). Its verses, arranged to represent the letter S, also
signify a drunkard’s oscillating itinerary, both his physical movement and
his mental divagations. The role of the word as a privileged vehicle for
communication is questioned as the graphical image of the drunk’s path
becomes indispensable for the metaphoric significance of the poem. The
verbal content represents the intoxicated monologue of a petit bourgeois
stumbling home after a drinking spree.17 The mutual reflection of form and
content in the visual (simultaneously spatial and temporal) organization of
the poem functions to place text and image on an equal footing. The
formal subversion is doubled by the poem’s text, which mercilessly
satirizes the man’s thoughts of greatness. By doing so Nogueras ridicules
and exposes the hypocrisy and vanity of the menestral (petty bourgeoisie)
class. Critic Joan Ramon Resina has established a connection between the
poem and anarchist publications of the period, such as the working class
15
Similarly to Futurisme, Catalan Modernisme is not related to High Modernism
but rather to Latin American and Spanish Modernismo, a late nineteenth-century
artistic movement, which had its equivalent in Art Nouveau or Jugendstil in
architecture, or Decadentism, Prerafaelitism, and Symbolism in painting and
literature.
16
Molas 1983, 28. All translations are mine unless noted otherwise.
17
The petit bourgeoisie, known as the menestral class in Barcelona (shop keepers
and tradesmen for the most part) were often the target of artistic ridicule on
account of their obsessive preoccupation with material accumulation and disregard
for spiritual, artistic, or social concerns.
weekly magazine L’Avenir (The Future).18 He does so not just because of

shared ideology, but also due to shared formal strategies that have the
effect of destabilizing semiotic codes. Or as Resina states: “the use of a
visual technique with caricaturesque intentions, relates to the use of iconic
elements in the anarchist press” (“el empleo de una técnica visual con
fines caricaturescos se relaciona con el empleo de elementos icónicos en
la prensa anarquista”).19
Following an argument that recalls Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-
Garde (1984), Resina presents a compelling analysis of the points of
political and aesthetic contact between anarchist publications and the
initial phase of the Catalan avant-garde. These were early examples of
how the avant-garde would understand the poetic text, not just as a verbal
semiotic undertaking, but as a complex interplay between visual, textual,
and political codes, articulated through metaphor and figurative language.
A wonderful example can be found in the way Josep Maria Junoy (1887-
1955), a prominent Catalan avant-garde poet, addressed the interplay of
text and image.
Junoy, a trained journalist and artist, belonged to the wealthy Catalan
bourgeoisie. In his youth he had worked as an art dealer in Paris where he
was influenced by the latest literary currents. Junoy’s initial contribution
to the avant-garde was as an art critic, and he wrote about Futurism and
Cubism in Catalan periodicals such as La Publicitat. In the spring of 1912,
he organized a Cubist exhibition at the famed Galeries Dalmau in
Barcelona, where other members of the avant-garde—such as Joan Salvat-
Papasseit, Ernesto Giménez Caballero, and Federico García Lorca—had or
would exhibit work. This exhibition included works by internationally
renowned avant-garde artists such as Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes,
Marie Laurencin, Marcel Duchamp, and Juan Gris, among others, and was
reviewed enthusiastically by Junoy.20 Fully immersed in this effervescent
18
Only five issues of L’Avenir were published, all in 1905, by Felip Cortiella and
other contributors.
19
Resina 1997, 25.
20
Between 1914 and 1916 Barcelona’s importance as a locus of the avant-garde
grew exponentially because of the influx of artists dislocated by WWI and others
arriving from Latin America. Among the recognizable names to pass through or
live in Barcelona in that period are: Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni, French
cubist painters Robert and Sonja Delaunay, Marie Laurencin, Albert Gleizes,
Swiss painter-boxer Arthur Cravan, Russian constructivist painters Hélène
Grunhoff, Olga Sacharoff, and Serge Charchoune, Dadaist Swiss painter Francis
Picabia, Uruguayan painter Rafael Barradas (originator of vibracionismo), and
writers Andrè Breton and Max Jacob.
238 Chapter Eight
cultural scene, in 1916 Junoy published the first number of the avant-garde
magazine Troços (Fragments), which presented a series of poems
dedicated to many of those visiting artists, such as Pere Ynglada, Albert
Gleizes, Hélène Grunhoff, Serge Charchounne, Umberto Boccioni, and so
on.21
Fig. [1]
This visual poem by Junoy (Fig. [1]), dedicated to Ynglada,22 a Cuban

born painter (of Catalan parents), was published in the inaugural issue of
21
Although only three issues were published by Junoy—the magazine, under the
new spelling Trossos, was continued by the Catalan poet J. V. Foix for an
additional five issues. Due to his efforts, the publication obtained the stellar
participation of internationally recognized talents, such as Pierre Albert Birot,
Philippe Soupault, Pierre Reverdy, Joan Miró, to name just a few.
22
Ynglada’s artistic training took place in Barcelona and Paris. In Barcelona he
frequented the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc, a well-known gathering place for
artists and intellectuals situated above the famed cabaret Els Quatre Gats. His first
show was at the Sala Parés in 1906. Ynglada’s thematic interests revolved around
the circus and the music-hall.
Troços.23 This poem represents a link in the passage from traditional verse
to ideogrammatic or visual poetry, as well as a reference to advertising and
commercial art.24 Indeed the presence of a commercial advertisement is
evident in the English hat company logo on the righthand side of the page.
The “internationalization” of Pere’s name to the French form Pierre (at the
top of Fig. [1]) introduces a ludic aspect into the poem, justified by
Ynglada’s long stays in Paris. The poem functions as a referential
description of Junoy’s friend through the juxtaposition of two different
elements (one verbal, one pictorial). As Willard Bohn remarks, in this
poem “decoration is juxtaposed with denotation,” so that some lines of
free verse are placed next to a “deconstructed” logo from a prestigious
London manufacturer of luxury hats.25 Yet, neither is the poetic text
exclusively verbal nor is the design entirely pictorial. In fact, the poem on
the left is clearly arranged to create a visual impact and to counterbalance
the advertising design on the right, which also contains various types of
script. The verbal and the iconic illuminate each other with a remarkable
“economy” of means. The poem, which evokes idyllic mental images,
reads:
Jardí a la francesa
Estança de Racan
Maduixes en crema d’Isigny
i
del distant Japó
un
Herbari Lineal
French garden
Stanza by Racan
Strawberries in cream from Isigny
and
from distant Japan
a Lineal Herbarium26
Willard Bohn describes the poem as “seven unrhymed lines of poetry

(arranged conventionally).”27 True enough, the poem reads left to right and
23
See Junoy 1916.
24
Junoy’s interest in this area predates Ezra Pound’s exploration of ideograms in
the Cantos (published in 1922).
25
Bohn 1986, 86.
26
Translation by Willard Bohn (see idem 1986, 87).
27
Bohn 1986, 86.
240 Chapter Eight
the words are not arranged on the page only to elicit visual effects (as in
later poems by Junoy). Nevertheless, the poem is, in my opinion, quite
unconventional and displays the recognizable characteristics of a nascent
Catalan avant-garde aesthetic, which blends a subtle local flavor with
internationally inflected themes. The lack of punctuation marks and the
center justified poetic text create a balanced, elegant, and symmetric visual
arrangement. Despite the prominence of the spatial and the visual (which
maintains a measured equilibrium between image and text), the poem does
not discard semantic value, as will be the case with later experimental
poetry. The poem formally prefigures Junoy’s later haiku production, as
thematized by the mention “of distant Japan” (del distant Japó).28 The
influence of haiku is further corroborated by the fact that Ynglada also had
an aesthetic inclination toward Sino-Japanese art and his oeuvre is marked
by an extremely elegant line, evidently based on Japanese drawings.29 As
such, if Junoy’s “portrait” of Ynglada is to function metonymically as well
as metaphorically it is natural that it should adopt the painter’s penchant for
japonerie. A possible interpretation of Junoy’s polysemic verses “del
distant Japò / un / Herbari Lineal” (from distant Japan / a / Lineal
Herbarium), might include a reference not just to Japanese gardens as
opposed to French ones—both “halves” of Ynglada’s aesthetic inspiration—
but might also be a reference to Ynglada’s black ink and brush
“orientalist” style, and to Junoy’s obsession with the haiku as a poetic
form. Examining the verse distribution we see that the central “i” (which
in Catalan means “and”) articulates the duality of the subject(s), which are
both Ynglada and the poem itself. The upper three verses describe Western
images of refined luxury (the French Garden, Racan’s seventeenth-century
poetry, French strawberries with cream from Isigny—a premium dairy
product from Isigny, Normandy), while the verses below deal with topoi
of “oriental” refinement (the Japanese art garden, and indirectly,
Ynglada’s “Asian” style art).30 The avant-gardes (especially the Imagists
28
In 1920, four years after the publication of this poem, Junoy published several
five verse haikus in his book Poemes i cal.ligrames, which look structurally similar
to this first experiment: five lines, center justified, and articulated about the short
middle line, with differing thematic concepts in the top and bottom verses. For
more details see Mas López 2005.
29
See the entry on Ynglada in the online version of the Enciclopèdia Catalana,
available at: http://www.enciclopedia.cat/fitxa_v2.jsp?NDCHEC=0072907.
Additionally, the cover of Ynglada’s memoir Records i opinions de Pere Ynglada
(1959), shows a self-portrait of the artist standing next to a Japanese print.
30
The Catalan avant-garde, like other Western art movements, fell prey to
“orientalism,” drawing on stereotypical images of the Far East.
in England, and most notably Ezra Pound31) believed that in the Far East,
language and the visual arts were in close contact; ideograms were
considered both scriptural and pictoric, as was calligraphic style painting.
They argued that Chinese script was iconic because its characters are
based on pictures that retain a visual (and supposedly “natural”)
connection to their referents.
In Junoy’s poem both the descriptive verses and the iconic hat label
serve as deictic shifters that refer indexically to the real Ynglada (or did, at
the time of its writing), even as (paradoxically) they also refer
symbolically to an absent signified (Ynglada is not really present at the
time and place of the writing or the reading and is not mentioned in the
poem).32 The textual signs and the graphic advertising logo share space on
the page.33 According to Willard Bohn, the logo with its several different
lettering styles stands for “a portrait of the artist as a young aesthete.”34
Ynglada was indeed a dandy who liked to dress well, but the
decontextualized lettering and dismembered, split halves of the hat logo
also point to the different halves of the artist’s persona, while additionally
forming, as Bohn notes, “a pleasing S-shaped curve.” Bohn establishes an
important difference between Junoy’s poem and Guillaume Apollinaire’s
calligrammes.35 “Junoy’s version,” he writes, “does not resemble the
French prototype. Predominantly abstract, it rejects the figurative bias of
the latter, its fascination with objects, and its pictorial structure.”36
Furthermore, unlike in the case of Apollinaire’s calligrammes, Junoy has
not spatialized words in order to create a referential pictorial image.
Rather, the hat logo refers to the materiality of writing as object (the non-
figurative letter types and the varied font styles of the logo call attention to
their graphic, decorative function, as material objects worthy of notice for
their own sake), and to script as a signifier that can be visually interpreted
by the viewer without the need to read the actual text or process its
31
These theories led Pound to create his “Ideogrammic Method.”
32
The content of the verses and the hat logo serve to “point” to their referent,
Ynglada. However, they only gain their full meaning when understood as a
description of his person, information that only the title conveys. The hat logo
indexes Ynglada indirectly and extra-linguistically. The function of the poem and
logo as deictic shifters is further complicated by the fact that this indirect portrayal
of Ynglada requires a knowledge about him that most readers today do not possess.
33
The split circular logo also bears some formal resemblance to the Xiantian
taijitu, the yin and yang symbol; however this is most likely coincidental.
34
Bohn 1986, 87.
35
Apollinaire’s calligrammes appeared in his book Calligrammes, published in
1918.
36
Bohn 1986, 86.
242 Chapter Eight
semantic content. The contemporary reader/viewer would have instantly

recognized such a symbol of “wealth and elegance,”37 signifying the oldest
luxury hatter in London, and hence understood it to stand metaphorically
and metonymically for the dandy Ynglada. The reader can choose to
interpret the words as words, or as image, or both. A complete sense of
this visual poem can only be surmised through a synthesis of haiku and
advertising logo, which operate at different levels of referentiality.
Through the operations of metaphor and metonymy, language is
reassembled to visual form, and visual form to implicit message. Junoy’s
poem/portrait integrates form and function, combining the physical reality
of the objects described—and shown—with their evocative force of an
absent Ynglada (and functions as both words and images). The split hat
advertisement even goes as far as suggesting movement—a sliding
movement between the two semicircles, or perhaps a spiraling movement,
possibly an influence from Italian Futurism.38
Junoy’s avant-garde text/image experiments and his visual poetry pose
a challenge to his readers, forcing reading strategies to go beyond
traditional linear methods toward active engagement with the text.
Dispensing with traditional syntax, the poem becomes spatial as well as
temporal. Connections between words and images become highly
associative, metaphoric, and as such, open to multivalent signification.
Syntax becomes fragmented, even at the level of the individual word (note
the words split in two by the severed hat logo), and the poem becomes
“performative” by nature. The reader must pay attention to the mise-en-
page, and becomes a performer of the poem, reading and viewing it
spatially as well as temporally.
The historic avant-gardes had set the stage for another flourishing of
experimental poetry in the 1960s, a period that warrants further attention
elsewhere. Suffice it to say here that experimental poetry in the sixties
expanded many of the avant-garde’s inquiries into how script and image
might interact in the poetic text. This period, in turn, has been replaced in
our time by the latest instantiation of the “experimental” spirit in
contemporary poetry, stemming from the development of the personal
computer—and subsequently, of the World Wide Web—offering a radical
new engagement in the interplay of word and image.
37
Bohn 1986, 87.
38
It is a virtual or metaphoric motion, which might be inspired by Futurist
concepts of dynamic art. Motion was often suggested by the poems in Troços. It is
also possible given Junoy’s avocation as an art critic that he might have been
inspired by Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist magazine BLAST, first published in 1914.
Catalan digital poetry:

A return to metaphor
The marginal and marginalized form of digital poetry, developed in the
last few decades of the twentieth century, has been characterized by a turn
toward further hybridization of text and image. One way of considering
digital poetry would be as a unique genre of digital literature, defined by
the Electronic Literature Organization as follows:
[A] work with an important literary aspect that takes advantage of the
capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked
computer.39
Additionally, digital poetry could also be defined as a subgenre of

experimental poetry. In fact, it is well poised to enhance an image-oriented
poetics that draws on the traditions of the visual, typographic, and
phonetic poetry movements of the avant-gardes (such as Junoy’s work), as
well as later developments such as concretism or lettrism. Indeed, digital
poetry enhances the expressive possibilities of older poetic forms thanks to
the added capabilities of the graphical user interface, such as interactivity,
high quality graphics, and a greater potential for animation, sound, and so
on. Digital poet and theoretician Loss Pequeño Glazier observes that this
shift toward visuality has found a perfect home online. He writes:
The Web continues to bring to light poetry for the screen predicated upon
the use of increasingly faster connections. This means that sound, kinetic
and video works will become increasingly abundant.40
Not surprisingly, technophilic calls for animating text and integrating

images into digital poetry are somewhat reminiscent of Futurism and other
experimental movements that sought the fusion of the technological and
the artistic. In digital poetry, the integration of older experimental print
practices with new media capabilities involves a transformation toward
moving text in a way that realizes the kinetic desires of the avant-garde.
Similarities with previous experimental tradition arguably cause a
Bloomian “anxiety of influence,” resulting in claims of radical “newness.”
In his text Digital Poetics, for example, Glazier derides static script in
favor of kinetic poetry, claiming movement as one of the defining
characteristics of the digital: “text in digital media, inasmuch as it sits
39
Hayles 2007.
40
Pequeño Glazier 2002, 167.
244 Chapter Eight
inertly on a screen, is simply a holdover from print writing and from low
threshold technology.”41 This drive toward a new parole in libertà is
matched by a reclamation of the image, not as subservient to script but
rather restoring its place as an equally integrated part of the textual-visual
weave:
The visual has as much to do with new media writing as text did to codex
writing. In fact, if we consider the vast role the image has played in writing
generally (cave paintings, Chinese writing, Egyptian hieroglyphic writing,
Mayan glyphs) the codex era can be considered an aberrant period when
text and image were temporarily isolated from one another.42
Despite its tints of nostalgic primitivism, Glazier’s point is well taken. The
digital has augmented traditional poetic experimentalism by enhancing
ambiguity, interactivity, non-linearity, and the visual-formal (i.e. material)
qualities of text, as part of an effort to make script more image-like. This is
illustrated best in the poetry of contemporary Catalan poets Jordi Pope and
Olga Delgado. Pope and Delgado are two relatively unknown and
undervalued poets whose practice has ranged from phonetic to visual
poetry, to performance, and most recently to digital poetry.
Pope (1953-2008, born Jordi Barba i Pérez, nicknamed “el Popeye,”
hence “Pope”) was a remarkable experimental poet who dabbled in many
“underground” poetic modalities such as phonetic poetry, polipoetry, and
in later years—having sadly lost his voice and mobility to the degenerative
disease that eventually took his life—he turned to cyberpoetry.43 One of
his most complex poems is called “Sistemes de comunicació”
(“Communication Systems”). This is a sophisticated work (really a four
poem “anthology”) that eludes facile definition but partakes in a plethora
of hybrid signifying systems or codes (biological, social, and aesthetic): a
linguistic code, a visual code, a sound code, poetic, and literary codes
superimposed on the language codes themselves, even numerical and
mathematical codes; as well as rules of social behavior, and the
exploration of complex biological codes—such as the “language” of
41
Pequeño Glazier 2002, 169.
42
Pequeño Glazier 2002, 169
43
In the 1980s Pope formed part of a poetry group called “O Així” (“Or Like
That”), which was active in performance and poetry readings in cafés and bars of
the Gracia neighborhood in Barcelona. He was joined by other local talents
(including Enric Casasses, David Castillo, Àngel Carmona, Jesús Lizano, and Joan
Vinuesa). In the 1990s, despite his illness, he kept performing, as well as
producing graphic art and installation pieces. For additional “anecdotal”
information see: http://www.lwsn.net/article/obra-dartesa.
insects. Of course, the “deepest” level of code is the computer code used
to program the poem, which remains “hidden” from view but operative.44
Working within these multi-layered code systems that shape but also
constrain poetic possibilities, Pope created a highly structured poem. The
work draws from Claude Shannon’s theory of communication (1949),45
further enhanced by Roman Jakobson’s concern with the importance of
social context in communication, and undeniably aesthetically influenced
by the historic avant-garde.46 From Shannon’s Communication Theory,
Pope takes the notion of a system that has a transmitter that sends a
codified signal, a channel that carries the signal (the medium), and a
receiver that decodes and processes that signal. In poetic terms the poet
might be considered the transmitter, the poem and the digital network form
part of the medium, and the reader/viewer acts as the receiver and decoder.
Pope’s “Communication Systems” enacts what Jakobson called “the
palpability of signs,” making signifiers visible and present, while
simultaneously subverting, questioning, and/or inverting the relation
between signifier and signified. Let us examine the work.
The anthology’s first screen opens with the arrival of the title,
“Communication Systems,” which flies in from the left of the image,
seemingly rupturing the flatness of the screen by unexpectedly
“approaching” the viewer and then rapidly receding into its final position,
having visually mimicked the flight path of an insect. This is immediately
followed by the arrival of the author’s name, whose letters glide in,
unrecognizable until they rotate into legibility. Next, a flower appears in
the center of the screen (Fig. [2]) and a butterfly flutters near it as if it
were responding to a force of attraction, only to then move to the upper
44
I am using the binomial code/message as Jakobson does in his model of
linguistic functions, which is somewhat analogous to Saussure’s use of langue and
parole. Jakobson also makes an interesting observation on the connection between
word and object. “[T]he bond,” he writes, “between word and object, or word and
emotion, then, is the bond between a linguistic sign and another sign (from another
semiotic system). […] One may say, with Peirce, that the referential or emotive use
of language, the linguistic sign and the non-linguistic sign, are in an interpretive
relation with one another” (idem 1985, 153-54).
45
Shannon’s theory laid out the basic elements of communication, namely a source
that generates a message, and a transmitter that transforms the message into a
signal, which is then sent through a communication channel. At the other end, is a
receiver that transforms the signal back into the original message, which is then
delivered to a final destination (organic, such as a person, or inorganic, such as a
computer). For a full account see Shannon 1998.
46
Pope was most notably influenced by Joan Salvat-Papasseit’s visual poetry and
social commitment, as well as by Max Jacob’s prose poetry.
246 Chapter Eight
left where it remains, suspended near the title text. The concept of
biological communication systems is thereby established from the outset
as the theme of the individual poems. The inter-species aspect of the
communication (between flowers and insects, for instance, or arguably,
cybernetic machines and humans) has a parallel in the inter-semiotic
nature of the “image” of the butterfly and its fluttering near the “text” of
the title. The images in this case go beyond being mere illustrations and
provide visual information, acting as a “text” without script. The image
on-screen flows into the text and vice-versa, as they share a common
space.
Fig. [2]
Furthermore, the physical appearance of the text and its movement are
as important as the message the image communicates, so they are both
(text and image) taking on functions of the other, operating as text in the
sense provided by the etymology of the word (from textus, a woven
fabric). Although here we have primarily a physical juxtaposition of text
and image, in each of the poems Pope presents hybrid forms where the
categories text/image are blurred even further. No doubt we are dealing
with a work that approximates and even suggestively commingles
dynamic script with moving images in an attempt at cross-pollination. The
flower is subdivided into four segments, each corresponding to a different
poem, and to a different “communication system” or code. The color
correspondence between flower, insect, and text establishes a connection
that also reaffirms a common code, and the possibility of a multi-modal
communication (sound, image, touch, and even taste or smell). The reader
then must select one of the four “zones” of the flower. Choosing zone “1”
reveals the following kinetic poem (Fig. [3]):
Fig. [3]
A direct translation/transcription of the text might read:
The atoms of the lantalic family

in this system which is not
permeable, have some variations of the
long bands with a peculiarity
well defined, the exit tube is
elongated, proportionately to the exit
of the wave.
Since the poem deals with the micro-molecular chemistry of insect

communication, that is, the way insects communicate using pheromones
and other secretions, the reader (unless she is a trained entomologist or
biochemist) will make sense of it with difficulty, getting only glimpses of
its possible significance. It might speak of inter-species communication,
frequency waves, obscure biological structures, elongated tubes, or
sinuous antennae and raging pheromones released as infinite codes to be
deciphered, just as the reader is challenged to decipher the poetic code.
Lantalic acid is an alternative name for allantoic acid, an organic
compound that is a toxic by-product of uric acid.47 The connection of urine
to communication is not obvious until one searches in the appropriate
book. As P. J. Gullan and Peter Cranston explain in The Insects: An
Outline of Entomology (2010), lantalic (or allantoic) acids are:
47
Generally speaking, the excretory system is a favorite theme in the highly
eschatological Catalan culture.
248 Chapter Eight
by-products of feeding and metabolism [that] need not be excreted as

waste [… but] may form the biochemical base for synthesis of chemicals
used in communication including warning and defense. White-pigmented
uric acid derivatives color the epidermis of some insects and provide the
white in the wing scales of certain butterflies.48
From this, one might surmise that waste can be reused (remediated!) for
communicative purposes in the animal world, and as an added benefit, for
decorative, or perhaps defensive reasons, as is the case with pigmentation
of butterfly wings. The same entomology text has a lengthy discussion
about communication between insects of the same species or even between
different species, as well as communication-like exchanges between, for
instance, flowers and insects. These inter-specific communications depend
on “semiochemicals,” that is chemicals that facilitate such communicative
exchanges mutual to both sender and receiver (lantalic acid is one such
chemical), and that function as the “channel” in Shannon’s theory or as a
poetic code.49 The poem does not easily or clearly yield this information;
rather, it sets up an enigmatic scientific language which points at the
communicative, excretory, and reproductive functions of biological life-
processes, and demands the reader’s involved deciphering labor, even
while it resists coming into clear focus. Pope’s deliberate complexity and
thematic options raise more questions than provide answers: Why the
accumulation of scientific images? What does all this biological information
have to do with poetry, communication, and the digital? Or more to the
point, what is the connection between scientific codes that function to
communicate (computer code, DNA, pheromones, Morse code and so on)
and poetry?
Pope’s poem suggests an affinity with Jakobson’s account of the
poetic, which goes beyond traditional verse form and content. Jakobson
argued that the poetic function of language disrupts the communicative
act, and might also interfere with cognitive processes. As such, poetry is
inherently disruptive and digressive—an undesirable element, according to
Jakobson—in its effort to introduce the aesthetic into the practical.50
48
Gullan and Cranston 2010, 84.
49
The insect-flower communication systems can also be two-way, with flowers
“reciprocating” and exuding chemicals to attract the insects (see Gullan and
Cranston 2010, 111).
50
Jakobson defined six functions of language (referential, expressive or emotive,
conative, phatic, poetic, and metalinguistic) which are part of any communicative
act (speech event). In any act of communication one of these functions is
dominant, according to Jakobson, and the others are subordinate. The poetic
function (also known as poeticity) is concerned with the stylistic and formal
Pope’s poem appears to be an anti-poem. It adapts the form of a scientific

exposition, but in the treatment of its presentation, the poetic function is
enhanced through the power of the images insinuated by the science
(which is presented as “enigma”). By reintroducing the poetic into a
decontextualized scientific text fragment, Pope restores the notion that
science and poetry are not opposites, but rather intersecting or overlapping
fields. The language of the poem presents itself (at first glance) as
essentially non-metaphoric, but rather “scientific” or pseudo-scientific,
discursive, linear, metonymic. It is the image (visual as well as mental)
and how it interacts with the text that introduces the poetic and metaphoric
into the work.51 Poeticity infiltrates this prose poem through the analogies
present in the images and through the movement of its typography.52 In the
first “verse,” the to and fro screen movement of the word “atoms” models
the behavior of atomic particles (in a simplified, conceptual way). By
behaving “like” atoms, the word becomes a visual metaphor for atoms and
their constant movement. Through this isomorphic metaphorization, the
poetic function becomes dominant, and in effect restores the figurative to
the entire text, even as (paradoxically) it literalizes the transformation of
“atom” from signifier into signified (Fig. [4]).
Fig. [4]
Several other words are likewise active in visual and/or aural ways and
serve to “catalyze” the poetic reaction. The word “permeable,” for instance
(as can be seen in Fig. [3]), acts as a porous membrane through which
some liquid particles flow. The word llargues (“long” or “elongated”)
displays a moving “ll” which rotates into the plane of the screen as if it
were some molecular structure in the throes of Brownian motion.
aspects of the message, the creative use of language, for instance in poetry or in
poetic uses of language.
51
This responds to Jakobson’s well-known dictum that “the poetic function
projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection to the axis of
combination,” where the axis of selection is metonym and the axis of combination,
metaphor (idem 1960, 350).
52
Jakobson underscores the physical nature of poeticity: “Poeticity is present when
the word is felt as a word and not a mere representation, or an outburst of emotion,
when words and their composition, their meaning, their external and inner form
acquire a weight and value of their own instead of referring indifferently to reality”
(idem 1981, 750).
250 Chapter Eight
Similarly, the word tub (tube) is formed by a first letter T shaped as a

hollow cylinder or tube, and the word ona (wave) when moused-over
displays outwardly moving concentric circles or frequency waves, while
emitting a sonar-like sound. By “materializing” letters and words through
a depiction of the physical characteristics of the objects they describe (or
the functions they perform) the signifier mimics the signified, even as it
makes a move from the exclusively textual toward a text-image hybrid.
Taking a cue from the Futurist analogia disegnata (where words use their
typography to display physical characteristics, as in Marinetti’s “Zang
Tumb Tumb” poem) and from the long tradition of visual poetry, Pope
finds an intersection between systems, a type of inter-species
communication. His visual and aural tropes point to the notion of “insect
communication as poetry” as being itself a metaphor, indeed a conceptual
metaphor where the domain “poetry” is understood in the terms of “insect
communication.”
It maps simultaneously onto another system of conceptual metaphors
that might be termed “text” as “image” or “script” as “body.” As linguist
George Lakoff has argued in Metaphors We Live By (1980), the notion of
conceptual or cognitive metaphor posits that metaphor or analogy
functions as thought and not just as language. As such, the dividing line
between scientific thought and poetry wears rather thin given the idea,
according to Lakoff, that “abstract thought is largely, though not entirely,
metaphorical.”53 Many analogies are “body-centered” or “embodied,” and
indeed Lakoff’s cognitive science research indicates that figurative
language is experiential and often (though not always) centered on the
body, on relations of spatiality, movement, gesture, orientation, and
directionality. According to just one aspect of his complex theory of
metaphor, Lakoff argues that the functioning of the body informs our
conceptual systems.54 In Lakoff’s model, logic is subservient to metaphor
(since science is founded on model-oriented thinking), and metaphor has a
physical (embodied) nature. Lakoff was among the first to paradoxically
apply modern science (cognitive linguistics) to attempt to rescue metaphor
(and poetry) from marginality, restoring it as the basis for scientific
53
Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 272.
54
In Philosophy in the Flesh, Lakoff and Johnson state: “[T]he mind is essentially
embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely
metaphorical [...] reason is not, in any way, a transcendent feature of the universe
or of disembodied mind. Instead, it is shaped crucially by the peculiarities of our
human bodies, by the remarkable details of the neural structure of our brains, and
the specifics of our everyday functioning in the world” (idem 1999, 3-4).
thought itself, and thus inverting the traditional hierarchy.55 Of course the
notion of the commingling of science and poetry through metaphor has its
list of illustrious precedents in antiquity. Lucretius’s first-century epic
poem “De rerum natura” (“On the Nature of Things”), to name just one
well-known case, explores early physics through figurative language,
relying mainly on metaphor and allegory. Lucretius’s main argument
evaluates poetry (and myth) as indispensable to philosophy for several
reasons: it makes the reading of philosophy (science) pleasant; it clarifies
the “obscurity of the doctrine”; and it might eventually lead to “salvation”
by guiding toward greater understanding of the natural world (including its
“enigmas,” such as pain and death).56 Given Lakoff’s claim that poetry is
the mother of scientific invention, we see how the poetic genre deserves to
be restored to a place of prominence among the disciplines, a concept that
Pope’s poem enacts—by refashioning a scientific text as poetry.
In Pope’s poem the overarching “science as poetry” metaphor is
reflected, not in the relatively “dry” language—although a strong
argument might also be made for the “poetic” nature of scientific syntax
and its seductive words—but in the visual images that evoke embodied,
internal image structures. Despite having “stripped” the text of verbal
poetic images, it is laden with visual analogies and aural actualities that
also reconnect it with a sense of the poetic. Whereas the traditional poetic
image can be construed as having two distinct components, a verbal and a
conceptual one, the more complex “visual image” serves to connect two
domains, the visual and the conceptual. The conceptual domain in turn
refers to the physical world and to its verbal representation. Thus, the
55
Modernist literary circles had issued forth several calls to either reject metaphor
or use it sparingly, calling it needless ornament, a rhetorical tool relying on
falsehood, on an improper naming of the object. They advocated instead for a
return to concrete, literal meaning in poetry, reducing everything to the factual and
to objective reality. For example, in his poem “An Ordinary Evening in New
Haven” (1954), American modernist Wallace Stevens wrote: “We seek / The poem
of pure reality, untouched / By trope or deviation, straight to the word.” American
Objectivist poets in the 1930s and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets in the 1960s also
rejected metaphorical uses of language. Likewise, metaphor has been attacked by
scientific and philosophical circles, as part of what H. J. N. Horsburgh called “the
long-drawn-out twentieth century campaign against imprecision, ambiguity,
vagueness, and logical confusion” (idem 1958, 245). In Spain, José Ortega y
Gasset attacked metaphor by stating it perverted the object “by having it
masquerade as something else, [which] ‘betrays’ an instinctive avoidance of
certain realities,” and asserted that “the weapon of poetry turns against natural
things and wounds or murders them” (idem 1956, 31-32).
56
Gale 1996, 47.
252 Chapter Eight
image of the atom serves as a reminder of the physical nature of atoms,

enhancing the poetic function in the text, as described by Jakobson:
Poetic function is not the sole function of verbal art but only its dominant,
determining function, whereas in all other verbal activities it acts as a
subsidiary, accessory constituent. This function, by promoting the
palpability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and
objects. Hence, when dealing with poetic function, linguistics cannot limit
itself to the field of poetry.57
Although Jakobson does not go as far as Lakoff in declaring the poetic

function as the origin of language, he does reserve for it a clearly
important role in any discursive practice (including the scientific).
Among the other four flower sections (each linking to a different
communication system/poem in the anthology), the reader of Pope’s poem
might click on 3, and see the following image (Fig. [5]):
Fig. [5]
The function represented, some sort of a cubed root, clearly references the
language of mathematics, without immediately revealing its obscure
meaning(s).58 We can see the formula’s index is 3 and the radicand (b+a),
but neither b nor a is provided with a numerical value, rendering the
expression unsolvable. Furthermore, we do not even know if this is an
actual equation to be solved (there is no equal sign present) or just a
jumble of symbols and notation assembled to create a vague sense of the
57
Jakobson 1960, 356.
58
This poem is reminiscent of other “mathematical” poems, such as LeRoy
Gorman’s “The Birth of Tragedy,” which amusingly reads: “(! + ?)2.” See the entry
on Mathematical Poetry in Kostelanetz and Brittain 2001, 396.
mathematical through a pleasing visual composition. The reader/viewer is

unsure what sort of exegetical operation to perform, but intuits that she is
facing a language of some sort, and that math is presented also
metaphorically as object to be investigated. The metaphor of mathematics
as language used to explore abstract notions is actualized in the poem by
facilitating the reader’s exploration of the poetic space through an active
mouse-over function. As the reader moves the mouse, she controls a spiral
shape that rotates hypnotically while changing colors, thus providing a
graphical representation or image of an inward journey of discovery,
strangely reminiscent of psychedelic patterns, or, to recall our historic
avant-garde examples, Futurist and Vorticist images. Through this visual
device, Pope’s poem sets up the hypothesis that mathematics might not be
as fixed and universal a form of understanding reality as we might have
thought. The spiraling shape, by emphasizing its mutability, appears to
echo non-deterministic and probabilistic concepts such as fractal and
nonlinear mathematics, as well as notions of infinity, chaos theory, fuzzy
logic, and other manifestations of uncertainty in contemporary mathematics
and physics. By using a pseudo-equation, he further parodies notions of
math as absolute truth, presenting it instead as a highly formalized but
enigmatic language, like poetry. Rather than as absolute, math might be
understood in different ways given its built-in relativity and the
uncertainty of the observer as represented by the spiral. Indeed as Pope
presents it, math has a mysterious poetic nature underlying its logical
veneer.59 The reader is unsure what properties the displayed mathematical
object might have, or what exactly (in a traditional mathematical sense), if
anything, it is describing.
At the same time, however, the visual presence of the turquoise spiral
reminds her that the symbols are a notation that has a possible referent in
the form of a graph or graphic image, which might in turn stand in
symbolically for something else (in the case of the spiral, a Jungian might
see the cosmic and infinite nature of the universe, but it might also stand
for something concrete like the geometry of a seashell, or the propagation
of liquid or sound waves). While the reader of the poem watches as the
spiraling shape of subjectivity collides with the static formula, the latter
releases a meteor shower of 0’s and 1’s, an echo of the digital binary code
that lies just beneath the poem’s surface, while emitting a bell-like sound.
The main metaphor presented in this poem, “math as communication” (or
perhaps miscommunication), does create a certain tension due to the
59
While their proposition remains highly controversial, Lakoff and Núñez (2000)
theorize that mathematics is a human construct, arising from human cognition and
metaphoric processes.
254 Chapter Eight
surface differences between tenor and vehicle, between math and

language. However, some of these differences are smoothed over by the
visual and aural play, which stresses their common function as systems of
communication and sutures the discontinuities. While a repeating single
tone sound sets up a Zen-like atmosphere of reflection, or perhaps
indicates a metronome’s count (or a monochord’s relationship to math),
the silence of the represented mathematical formula inspires a parallel
visual and imaginary prosody in the measured repetition of its symbols.
Thus, both sound and image work to create a harmonious alternation of
regular intervals of sound and silence. It is a secret rhyme which might be
rendered audible as the reader reads or chants the formula to herself, in
English or Catalan, “the cubed root of b plus a divided by negative one,”60
perhaps reflecting on the mathematics inherent in traditional poetry, filled
with structures of repetition, meter, rhyme, syllabic counts, and stanza
control. Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism (1971) enumerates two
central impulses in poetry, melos and opsis, which define, respectively, the
music of poetry (its sound), and its poetic images (metaphors). Jordi
Pope’s digital math poem displays both melos and opsis, as it uses
mathematical symbols, neither quite linguistic nor quite pictorial, in a
powerfully inter-semiotic structure which leaves a challenging semantic
nucleus for the reader to decode, and once again, exposes the intersecting
spaces of script, image, and sound. The metaphors of math as
communication (which describes the world, and communicates abstract
thought and shapes) and math as poetry overlap in this work. The graphic
space and movement overturn any notion of traditional poetic syntax
indeed, in a poem highly disruptive and dismissive of traditional poetic
structures.
There are two more poems within Pope’s Communication Systems and
although I will not examine either in depth, I will mention a few relevant
details about one of them. It is a curious poem, in which Pope establishes a
series of names and corresponding symbols, arranged as a table under the
title “Nomenclature and Symbols of the System.” Remarkably, each of the
names corresponds to a wheelchair brand, a poignant statement that
establishes the notion of disability as a communication system, presenting
a code which only someone similarly disabled might immediately
recognize, or a very tenacious reader, with considerable effort. As a poet
suffering from disability, Pope fights back through a veiled metonymic
representation of that same disability (the wheelchair as an extension of
60
This is similar to common mnemonic methods in elementary and high school to
memorize multiplication tables or internalize the quadratic equation through song.
the disabled body) that is taking away his mobility and his voice, but not
his power of expression.61 The wheelchair allows for movement, and in
this sense for translation (as in translational movement and metaphor,
meaning transfer), a critical term for poetics, and is also an object often
codified by a symbol ( ) which “stands” for disability at large. It is also
a strange hybrid form, both in its pictorial content—a man and a chair
united as one—and in its iconic quality, which places it between language
and image. Pope appropriates it as a language metaphor that translates the
verbal and the visual via the names and “symbols” of each wheelchair on
the table or “answer key” that he provides. The poem, however, is not
easily accessible to the “able” reader, and in this respect, it impairs her,
renders her “disabled” from an interpretative perspective. While confusion
is not a rare response in reading complex experimental texts, here it is
marshaled specifically to challenge the exegetic task of the able bodied,
inverting traditional hierarchies. Paradoxically, the wheelchair-bound
reader will instantly recognize the chair brands and possibly see in their
schematic symbols some visual analogy of the characteristics of each
particular model, such as their movement, their propensity to overturn, and
so on, or she might otherwise determine that the symbols are purely
arbitrary. Only a reader “embodied” with the necessary knowledge might
fully decipher this code’s enigma (or, the aforementioned “tenacious”
reader who might painstakingly ferret out meaning). The communication
channel in this system is partially closed, as the transmitter and the
receptor rely, to a large extent, on a reader who has corporeal knowledge.
Access is thus effectively denied to those that lack the credentials of
disability. My aim here is not to trivialize or romanticize disability by
rendering it as an advantage, but to show how it is activated by Pope to
temporarily reverse its status as the opposite of “ability,” to challenge “the
presumed stasis of disability.”62 Although the poem speaks to a very
specific type of disability (that of the wheelchair-bound) its claim to how
disability is created by how texts are constructed can be extended to other
types of disabilities. The movement of symbols across the screen, which
emerge directly from the chair brand names, and slide or “roll” toward
their eventual locations (as they emit vibration-like futuristic sounds),
render these visual metaphors expressive and could facilitate the mapping
of concepts such as speed and mobility onto what are essentially abstract
forms (squares, lines, circles). Through association with other icons—such
61
Pope suffered from a degenerative disease that affected his mobility, his vocal
chords, and eventually other major functions, resulting in his death after a very
long illness.
62
May and Ferri 2005, 2.
256 Chapter Eight
as the handicapped symbol—the attentive reader might render (although

always only partially) meaningful the “system” that is being communicated,
one that could transport and “carry” the reader (able) to a new domain of
understanding (the disabled). By undergoing the experience of a text that
“disables,” the reader might—provided she eventually decodes or acquires
the knowledge of the wheelchair brand names—experience how the world
is constructed to render one as disabled, simply because of a body
difference. The image of the wheelchair symbol functions as a multiple
metaphor (etymologically from metapherein, from meta-“over, across” +
pherein-“to carry, bear”): as the wheelchair carries the person, so does the
metaphor carry the understanding of the reader to a greater sensibility
regarding disability issues.
In this sense the poem is politically inflected by a posture that
advocates for disability issues, while rendering the “disability” as a poem.
It encourages understanding, but it makes it difficult. In fact, it requires the
reader to become figuratively “disabled” and to struggle with a task, which
is “natural” to the disabled (but only because the poem is constructed
thus), thereby, once again, subverting traditional roles. Although he was
confined to his home, the digital medium allowed Pope to remain an active
experimental poet until his death and this was among his last works.
Ultimately, Pope inscribes himself into the poem, which might be read as a
bittersweet reflection on his own disability and impending finitude, saving
part of himself for a virtual “afterlife.” After the dynamic effects subside,
the screen becomes still and silent (Fig. [6]):
Fig. [6]
Olga Delgado, another contemporary Catalan digital poet, holds a PhD

in biology and has led a double life as a research scientist and
experimental poet/painter. She considers her work as belonging to the long
tradition that began with William Blake, moved through Stéphane
Mallarmé, and continued with Oulipo, Joan Brossa, Felipe Boso and
others. I will examine Delgado’s “La Dona Que Camina” (“The Woman
Who Walks”), a work that relies on the diagram as a metaphor for love’s
journey. This particular poem uses subway mapping symbols, relating
“schematic” cartography to poetry (thus the technical to the figurative),
and makes the “diagram” simultaneously readable and viewable. The
interactive subway diagram provided by Delgado visually cites the iconic
maps of Barcelona’s metro lines, a style common to most modern urban
transportation system cartography. Clicking on any subway station “takes”
the reader/viewer to individual poems (or “stops”), mostly consisting of
kinetic and image-text hybrids. The subway line is thematically arranged
around the concept of “love,” specifically the metaphor “love as journey,”
and each stop offers a different perspective on the subject, resulting in an
affective map the reader can traverse. Although the subway line has a start
and finish, there is no discernible logic to the progression of the poems,
and one can “click” on any stop without the loss of continuity. Beyond
depicting the post-modern love journey as fragmented and episodic, the
lack of emphasis on a “final destination” seems to stress the notion of
process, creating an appropriate sense of whimsicality adequate to the
elusive subject “love.” If the trajectory involves some transfer of meaning
or knowledge, it is that “love” as an experience has as many possible
outcomes and stops, as those suggested by the multiple subway line
stations, that are also each a distinct poem. This rather original method of
“indexing” the individual poems avoids the inflexibility and hierarchization
of the traditional index in print poetry, creating unexpected connections
between individual poems and effacing the primacy of front-to-back
reading. As the reader chooses her itinerary, she creates one type of love
narrative or another, permitting a circular return to the poem’s diagram to
give it another try. The work does not provide a single model of love, but
rather a visual map (containing text and iconic images), which
metaphorically associates the recognizable and concrete activity of subway
travel to the affective and more “accidentally” prone vicissitudes of the
love journey.
The first screen displayed to the reader shows the schematic subway
diagram and a mock LCD sign that reads “Paraules amb atributs,” (Words
with attributes), meaning words with physical characteristics, immediately
recalling Futurism’s belief in the tangible “materiality” of the word set
free. The reader/viewer can choose between the direct “express” journey,
an estimated eight-minute sequential itinerary through all the poems, or
individual trajectories to any one poem following her own inclination, an
approach that is, arguably, closer to the poem’s notion of love. While
258 Chapter Eight
Delgado makes the “express” option, which mimics the subway’s linear
and sequential motion, available, it is the non-linear approach that is best
suited to the on-line medium, marrying the idea of the journey with that of
the hyperlink, with the ability to defy the spatio-temporal stasis of print
with a more flexible type of reading. It is uncertain whether Delgado
might be directly alluding to the Imagist poem “In a Station of the Metro”
(1913) by Ezra Pound (a poet Delgado has referred to as an influence), but
it certainly shares its emphasis on visuality. Pound’s poem reads:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.63
A model of precision and economy of language inspired by Japanese

haiku, Pound’s poem points to a tension generated by the distance between
the two terms of the analogy, the faces on the subway and the petals on a
bough, which cause an intensely “visual” reader experience. While Pound
relies on a mental image, Delgado adds a more ocular visuality to her
work. Like Pound, Delgado has chosen disparate terms for her metaphor,
subway and love, with the hope of enhancing the poem’s visuality,
materializing Pound’s verbal metaphoric style by actually mixing images
with script.
Here is the first screen of the work (Fig. [7]):
Fig. [7]
Clicking on the first stop, “Metamorfosi” (Metamorphosis), the word

metamorfosi flies into the plane of the screen, and the word amor (love)
separates from it (met amor fosi). Next, it transforms into a red heart (Fig.
[8]), pulsating with different colors and is finally converted into a petrified
63
Axelrod, Roman and Travisano 2003, 663.
gray-green shape, which is pierced by thorns (Fig. [9]), and which

eventually disappears. Thus, through a complex visual metaphor Delgado
connects classical mythology (Ovid’s Metamorphoses) with the subway
diagram, a seemingly precise model of modern travel through space:64
Fig. [8]
Fig. [9]
The metamorphosis from word to image is seamless, as the letters from

“amor” merge together—like Pope’s “atoms”—into the iconic heart-
shaped symbol. As they materialize, the letters signify isomorphically, first
by turning red (the color of blood, passion, and the heart), then by
becoming the object that “metaphorically” and iconically has stood for the
concept of love since time immemorial, the heart. The heart itself
64
Ovid’s classic work Metamorphoses is, arguably, an allegorical text that
destabilizes some traditional hierarchies such as the relationship between love and
reason (even as it upholds others, such as the dominance of the gods over men). By
alluding to it, Delgado foregrounds the power of love—personified as Amor—as
an irrational impulse that defeats logos.
260 Chapter Eight
undergoes a process of gradual “embodiment,” starting from the

commonplace two dimensional icon commercially exploited and
immortalized in pop culture ever since Milton Glaser and Bobby Zarem
created the famed “I Ɔ NY” rebus (1977), and morphing into a seemingly
three-dimensional heart shape, which is also anatomically quite incorrect
but appears considerably more realistic. What both Glaser’s rebus and the
morphing kinetics of Delgado’s poem share (and to an extent the
emoticons that are now ubiquitous short-cuts in digital communication,
such as "<3" for “love”) is the partial or complete replacement of script
with image in order to create a hybrid system that physically represents its
semantic content. The notion of the visual analogy and its correspondent
verbal concept morphing into each other thematically parallels the change
that love itself may undergo, from a red hot throbbing passion to an
ossified, gray, dead thing pierced by the thorns of disappointment. If, as
artist-critic Johanna Drucker believes, words have visible and material
(physical) attributes, it is not difficult to extrapolate that at their center
they have a “heart,” an element which provides them with expressive
force, and this element is often an image or visual metaphor. We could
think of the form/shape of the word as Saussure’s signifier, its conceptual
“heart” as the signified, which when “merged,” correspond to the “sign” or
meaning of the word. But the strict Saussurean interpretation is also
challenged. Through its deconstructivist ambition, the poem “separates”
out its structural elements so they can be rendered visible, although by
doing so it also demonstrates how they were connected. While the move
questions the binary opposition between text and image, it also blurs the
difference between literal and metaphorical, between the word “amor,” the
image of a heart, and whatever external “affect” they might be pointing
towards. As Drucker states, “writing produces a visual image: the shapes,
sizes and placement of letters on a page contribute to the message
produced, creating statements which cannot always be rendered in spoken
language.”65
The visual metaphors present in experimental poetry, such as Pope’s
and Delgado’s, can either disrupt logic or provide a different type of logic
from that of the text. The LCD advertisement in the opening screen of
Delgado’s e-anthology, which reads “Words with attributes,” could also be
read as “words with a heart,” a concise description of the thematics of the
anthology, and of the visual metaphors used within it. The analogy of
letter as body (of the text) in this particular poem becomes letter as body-
part, as heart. The heart image functions metaphorically as love, and
65
Drucker 1998, 146.
metonymically as the body, not unlike the word “metamorphosis” that

stands for the entire process of the life cycle of a love relationship from its
initial stage as concept, through its carnal (embodied) phase, and to its
eventual demise. With just a bit of artful semantic slippage “metamorfosi”
can approximate “metàfora” or metaphor, the carrier, visually and
textually, of meaning in this poem. For Delgado, the corporeality of the
letters appears to reject the notion of language as arbitrary; in their
movement from signifier to signified, these letters perform and become the
heart that “loves,” as if trying to thematize the return to a metaphorical
understanding of language by stressing the iconic possibilities of the
signifier, and its relation to meaning. In short, it can be argued that all
“stops” or poems in Delgado’s subway line serve, similarly, to deconstruct
the polarities of text-image and figurative-literal.
One last poem in Delgado’s “La Dona Que Camina” (one that is
unrelated to the love theme) is worthy of consideration. The subway stop
“Crucigrama Bosiano” (“Bosian Crossword-puzzle”) is a tribute to
Spanish concrete poet Felipe Boso, a clear reference to his 1981 book of
poems La palabra islas (The Word Islands). The first screen of the poem
after the title disappears is the word montaña (mountain). This is followed
by the arrival of a second word, isla (island) which connects to the first
(Fig. [10]):
Fig. [10]
The additive force of the two words resulting from sharing the A (as in the
game of Scrabble, or a crossword puzzle) is visually mimicked by the
letters’ growth to more than twice the size of the other letters. In
subsequent screens a wavy line appears to represent the water, a palm tree
“grows” on the A, and a fish swims by. The iconic transformation into an
island is thus complete (Fig. [11]):
262 Chapter Eight
Fig. [11]
This poem, which at first glance might appear simplistic, weaves

several intertexts together. The poem is inspired by works from Boso’s
aforementioned poetic anthology, which rely on both geography and
poetry in order to unite the worlds of text and image. On her website,
Delgado cites Boso (who was both a poet and a geographer) as an
influence for her poem. Boso’s The Word Islands anthology draws on
different islands from the planet as material for his concrete poems, using
either the names of islands, or their geographical shapes, or in some cases
a symbol or icon representative of the place as the inspiration for his
works. Delgado follows that lead by foregrounding the duality of the word
as symbol and as object. Thus “montAña” signifies mountain semantically
and by virtue of its A, which adopts the plastic shape of our iconic symbol
for mountain. Likewise “islA” signifies and visually metaphorizes the
characteristic of an island rising above the water, as well as suggesting that
islands are (literally) mountains rising from the bottom of the ocean.
The poem also makes reference to another work by Boso (“Open Air”),
which Delgado credits and reproduces on her website. “Open Air” poses a
series of questions that aim at destabilizing the relationship between the
signifier and the signified. It begins with the verses:
¿Qué es una isla?

una isla
es una montaña.
What is an island?
an island
is a mountain66
66
Boso’s poem is fully reproduced in:
http://www.cyberpoem.com/poets/olgadelgado/i-open%20air.swf.
Shortly thereafter Boso’s poem contradicts this statement, stating, “An

island is not a mountain.” The rhythmic assertion and denial is part of a
linguistic game used throughout the poem that points to a disconnect
between the names of things and their meanings, a favorite trope in
Concrete poetry. This becomes clear when the poem asks: “What is a
word?” to later answer “A word is.”67
Although claiming for words their own status as objects autonomous
from their semantic value was a staple trait of the neo-avantgarde, Delgado
chooses a different route. In her poems she attempts to reunite semantic
value with materiality through metaphor. Through her reinterpretation of
Boso’s poem, Delgado seems to suggest that the power to signify resides
both in the semantic meaning and the image, in the combination of the
verbal with the plastic capabilities of the word. A fuller meaning is derived
through the relation of the different elements of signification, and
specifically through the visual metaphors enacted by the poem. The
material aspect of the words is not used at the expense of semantic
meaning. This is remarkably reminiscent of Drucker’s perspective on what
the early twentieth-century avant-gardes were trying to achieve:
This typographic work embodied and manifested a complex attitude

toward the materiality of visual and verbal aspects of signification—one in
which there was a continual interplay of reading and seeing, linguistic
referential functions and visual phenomenological appearance, as well as
traces of social context and historical production evidenced in
materiality.68
This poem combines image and text in such a way that neither can be
extricated from the other without a loss of meaning. The impurity of either
system becomes apparent: the sketch of the ocean, the palm tree, and the
fish share iconic qualities that approximate them to pictographs or to a
rebus, while the text doubles as a visual image. Perhaps there is an implicit
reference in the poem to Spanish philosopher and art critic Ortega y
Gasset’s essay “La isla del arte” (“The Island of Art”), a work that
presents a metaphor of art as an island separate from real life experience
(like the frame that separates a painting from the surrounding wall), an
argument in favor of “pure art” that was part and parcel of debates in the
early twentieth century. Delgado rejects this elitist notion of art’s isolation
by debunking the false notion that an island is disconnected. More
67
This is perhaps a reference to Archibald MacLeish’s poem Ars Poetica, which
concludes with the line, “a poem should not mean / But be.”
68
Drucker 1994, 89.
264 Chapter Eight
importantly, she does so by promiscuously blending text and image in

direct confrontation with Ortega’s obsession with the purity of the
aesthetic experience. Ortega believed the aesthetic experience had to be
“isolated” from real life, arguing that “to isolate one thing from another we
need a third, which is neither like the one nor the other: a neutral object”
(para aislar una cosa de otra se necesita una tercera que no sea como la
una ni como la otra: un objeto neutral).69 This, for Ortega, was precisely
the function of the picture frame. In contrast, far from notions of “pure”
art, the work of Olga Delgado, as well as Jordi Pope’s, point to a synthetic
sensibility in the development of digital poetry that has managed to
incorporate earlier poetic traditions, scientific discourse, and contemporary
concerns through the use of the new technologies of digital computing,
which has facilitated the integration of the textual and the visual.
In Jordi Pope’s work, metaphor was used to explore areas of the
knowable related to science and poetry, while Olga Delgado marshaled
metaphor to explore the domain of the affective. This emphasis positions
metaphor as a poetic device that might synthesize or blur distinctions
between the scientific and the literary. Digital poetry, through its visual
and kinetic characteristics, facilitates the types of metaphors and
metamorphosis that blend the domains of text and image in order to
demonstrate their complex interrelationships. It is through aural and visual
analogies, as well as through verbal ones, that these fields are revealed as
intersecting in the arena of experimental poetics—an “impure” art.
Furthermore, the logic that classifies literal language as primary, and
metaphoric language as secondary, decorative language, begins to break
down in digital poetics in favor of a fluid category that renders all
language as metaphoric, and metaphor as an important element of
cognition.
Conclusion:
Will digital poetry rescue metaphor?
The recuperation of metaphor and the search for origins seem to be two
salient characteristics of contemporary digital poetry, marking a clear
departure from some Modernist and 1960s experimental poetry’s effort to
efface the metaphorical. Contemporary poetry from the 1960s was
crucially influenced by structuralism and its desire to systematize, to
69
Ortega y Gasset 1996, 115-16. There is a word play in Ortega’s notion of aislar
(isolate) since it also means “to become an island,” a clear comment on the
autonomy of art.
minimize, and to break everything down into fundamental units, binary

oppositions, functions, and axioms. With post-structuralism, the pendulum
swung back into a deconstructive stance that has repositioned poetry as the
search for a more complex solution, or rather, as the endless deferral and
quest for an origin never quite attainable, presenting a universe adrift in
entropy and paradox, where signifier and signified de-differentiate, where
image and text collapse into one (only to then separate again), and
metaphor is restituted to a place of prominence. This lack of resolution or
finitude, this promiscuous heterogeneity and boundary-less-ness suggests
an openness and unlimited freedom in poetry at a time when the limits of
science have become painfully apparent, as evidenced by the
environmental crisis, by modern warfare, by unrestrained development,
and by the First/Third World divide. And while the opening of humanistic
spaces within technology (such as the practice of digital poetry) might not
offer direct solutions to these serious problems, it might expand otherwise
narrow and discipline-specific mindsets by bridging the divide between
scientific and humanistic cultures and replacing it with mutual
understanding and collaboration.
Experimental poetry in the twentieth century has pursued a path
towards the blurring of genre lines, among these the dissolution of the
categories differentiating text and image, denying any essential character
of either, and rather locating them as a binomial, to be deconstructed
through theory and praxis. While the first stirrings of the avant-garde spirit
at the turn of the century broke with concepts such as linearity and
temporality in poetry, their attempts at liberating poetry were limited by
the static nature of printed words, which in some sense “closed” texts by
fixing them in time and space. Despite this limitation, much was done
through the use of visual and aural metaphors, which in some sense
“animated” poems. The 1960s represented another explosion of text-
image-sound experiments as new efforts toward a “total” poetry were
carried out by such groups as Problematica 63 in Spain, Noigandres in
Brazil, Oulipo and Lettrism in France, PO-EX in Portugal, or Fluxus and
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in the United States. The relationship of these
groups to metaphor was problematic, as they intended to reject a poetics
based on figural and analogical thinking in favor of a “concrete” and literal
approach that foregrounded a narrow concept of materiality. Despite great
advances in the integration of script, image, and sound, metaphor proved
(fortunately) quite resilient to any attempts at its effacement. With the
arrival of post-modern poetics and digital poetry especially, metaphor has
again been embraced as an efficient poetic device to “synthesize” the
multiple semiotic codes operative in poetry. It has been the flexibility of
266 Chapter Eight
New Media in combining text, image, and sound (and the important
addition of motion) that has reinvigorated metaphor and de-hierarchicized
the visual, textual, and aural systems. Metaphor has been integral to the
approximation of art and science through technology (by dint of being
considered, arguably, as the basis of both pathos and logos),70 as these
new forms of poetry increasingly mix the languages of the disciplines, and
indeed, rely on the collaboration of the disciplines for the creation of their
objects. If affect is at the foundation of our thinking, as Antonio Damasio
contends,71 it could be argued that by activating visual metaphors (such as
the image of a heart in Olga Delgado’s digital poem, or the atoms in Jordi
Pope’s), which mobilize multi-modal perception (sight, hearing) and
engage multiple semiotic codes (linguistic, visual), there is an
intensification of our affective response to the poem. That visual and
sound metaphors link the poem’s concepts to the reader/viewer’s affective
and embodied responses seems to be backed by recent research in
cognitive science. For instance, Michael Borkent, who understands
embodiment (or embodied mind) as the strong, mutually determined mind-
body connection, posits that “embodied metaphorical conceptualizations,
then, start to address how images and texts can synthesize since they offer
a means of connecting perceptual and conceptual meanings.”72 According
to Borkent it is through embodied perceptual metaphors (visual and sound)
that “the verbal and visual can so seamlessly mingle into meaning.”73 In
the case of digital poetry, this commingling of word and image is
accentuated by movement and sound, which provide a “literal” image and
by association, additional mental images, which are added to the linguistic
elements of the poem in a synthesis that amalgamates script and figure.
Digital poems often dramatize this “internal” reader brain activity by
depicting it through yet another visual metaphoric process, that of words
morphing into objects (the script “atoms” into visual spheres, or the word
“amor” into a heart). Thus, the metaphoricity of the visual images is
70
This is, of course, still an ongoing debate, with much research in both camps of
the metaphor/literal divide. Much is at stake in deciding if the basis of language
(and science) is metaphoric, or metaphor is just a rhetorical flourish added to literal
language (a more reductionist view that maintains a clear separation between
poetry and science). For the former stance, see for example Lakoff and Johnson
1980; Lakoff and Núñez 2000; Richards 1936; Black 1962; Gross 1990; or Goatly
1997. For the latter approach, see for example Davidson 1984; Searle 1979;
Reimer 2001; or Haser 2005.
71
Damasio 2003, 79.
72
Borkent 2010, 2.
73
Borkent 2010, 2.
merged with the dynamic performativity of letters, allowing an element of

narrative (an element of story) to enter the poetic structure. Digital poetry
denies any essential distinction between linguistic and visual codes.
Digital poetry is also a hybrid system where brain function and subject
construction respond to the verbal and visual metaphors that appear on-
screen; this represents a dynamic interaction of (recursive) mutual
influence between the human (reader/author) and the New Media
technologies. We can safely assume that the future poetic subject will
hardly distinguish between text and image, productively synthesizing these
via metaphoric processes.
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Davis, Whitney. 2006. “How to Make Analogies in a Digital Age.”
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Frye, Northrop. 1971. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton:

Gale, Monica R. 1996. Myth and Poetry in Lucretius. Cambridge:
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Goatly, Andrew. 1997. The Language of Metaphors. London and New
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Gross, Alan. 1990. The Rhetoric of Science. Cambridge: Harvard
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Blackwell.
Haser, Verena. 2005. Metaphor, Metonymy, and Experientialist
Philosophy: Challenging Cognitive Semantics. Berlin: Mouton de
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Hayles, N. Katherine. 2007. “Electronic Literature: What is it?” Electronic
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—. 1981. “What is Poetry?” In Selected Writings: Poetry of Grammar and
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—. 1985. Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time. Minneapolis: University
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PART IV:
TEXT AND IMAGE IN ART

CHAPTER NINE
BURROUGHS / RAUSCHENBERG:
TEXT-IMAGE / IMAGE-TEXT
ELISE TAKEHANA
I find it nearly impossible free ice to write about jeepaxle my work. The
concept I plantatarium struggle to deal with ketchup is opposed to the
logical continuity lift tab inherent in language horses and communication.
My fascination with images open 24 hrs. is based on the complex
interlocking of disparate visual facts heated pool that have no respect for
grammar.
—Robert Rauschenberg1
While in many cases William Burroughs’s reputation may precede any

discussion of his oeuvre, his work is no less influential. Although Barry
Miles commented in 1993 that Burroughs has had more of an impact on
popular culture than literature, this is becoming less the case with an
increased interest in electronic literature and experimental novels such as
the works of Mark Danielewski. Regardless, it is hard to escape the effect
that Burroughs has had on creative expression in the twentieth century,
influencing performance artist Laurie Anderson, director Gus Van Sant,
Rolling Stone Mick Jagger, computer scientist Ian Somerville, and artist
Tom Phillips to name a few.2 Burroughs’s literary and video work has also
been marked as the antecedent of the music video. Timothy Murphy
argues that Burroughs’s collaboration with Anthony Balch in particular,
paved the road for “the entire MTV video aesthetic of rapid, narratively
discontinuous cuts synchronized to an apparently unrelated soundtrack.”3
While Murphy does point out that many vocal and performance artists are
unfamiliar with Burroughs’s work, from a critical standpoint it is hard to
1
Joseph 2007, 163.
2
Murphy 1997, 140; 203.
3
Murphy 1997, 215.
274 Chapter Nine
deny a particular tradition in musical, video, and literary experimentation

that springs from the work of earlier pioneers, including Burroughs.
Burroughs also associated or collaborated with visual artists including
Brion Gysin, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Jean-
Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Les Levine, and Robert Mapplethorpe.4
Robert Sobieszek argues that Burroughs’s work has been largely ignored
by the art world because his reputation as a literary figure overshadows his
accomplishments in the visual arts. In his catalog for the 1996 exhibit of
Burroughs’s work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Ports of
Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts, Sobieszek posits:
Perhaps Burroughs is technically a writer who paints; it may, however, be

more useful to address him as an artist who employs whatever materials
are at hand for his personal ends. Most critics and commentators have
failed to understand that images—hieroglyphs, pictographs, photographs,
newspaper illustrations, collages, montages, prints, painting, and film—as
well as sound have had at least a marked if not central position in
Burroughs’s working methods since Naked Lunch.5
Clearly his methods of multimedia expression demonstrate the difficulty

and futility of attempting to contain his work within one discipline’s
practices and genres.
That such a number and variety of people have been inspired by
Burroughs’s cut-up is a testament to its success even given the limits
Burroughs and his critics recognized in the method.6 Cut-up as a literary
method was born when artist Brion Gysin spliced newspaper clippings that
lay under his current art projects. He thought the game of shuffling and
recombining these clippings would interest his friend, William Burroughs.
Burroughs found the idea of cutting up texts and rearranging them
regardless of their original context or intention a revolution to his own
writing practice. He had just finished and submitted his final copy of The
Naked Lunch (1959) to Olympia Press and regretted that he had not
discovered cut-up earlier. Cut-up was a way to formalize what Burroughs
had done in Naked Lunch by abstracting the process of estranging the
reader from any spatio-temporal certainty in narrative.7 Burroughs
proceeded to develop Gysin’s chance discovery into a process of
collecting writing samples from existing publications, his own writing, and
4
Sobieszek 1996, 108; 142.
5
Sobieszek 1996, 108; 21.
6
See Harris 2004; Kelley 2003; and Punday 1995.
7
Lydenberg 1987, 44.
Burroughs / Rauschenberg: Text-Image / Image-Text 275
even notes from observations and eavesdropping. With a huge database of

written material, Burroughs would cut the paper into pieces, starting first
by cutting each sheet of paper into quarters and then rearranging each
quarter. He would than take note of interesting juxtapositions of words that
arose from random arrangement. He spent so much time and effort on
these cut-ups that it was not uncommon for him to slice up multitudes of
pages to harvest one interesting phrase to include in his published works.
The cut-up seems revolutionary to Burroughs because it brings writing
closer to painting by making the medium of the writer more tangible and
haptic. By cutting up a text’s syntax, linearity and meaning are
compromised and one sees the word as not simply a vessel of meaning but
a concrete physical manifestation. For Burroughs, the word is an image
typed onto a page, and the ability to move that word freely allows the
word to easily inhabit multiple positions within a composition. With cut-
up, the word can move and blend with other words regardless of its
placement in a certain sentence, chapter, book, language, and so forth, just
as paint can intermingle with any other paint on a canvas.8 He even called
his studio, equipped with a typewriter and scissors, his “writing machine.”
As Frederick Dolan asserts, cut-up “is the instrument of a larger goal—that
of disrupting the conventional narrative structures responsible for the
illusions of temporality, causality, and stable character or identity, with the
help of such tactics as not attributing conversation and refusing to explain
transitions from one place or time to another.”9
While the goals and implications of the cut-up method rise to a greater
scale, the process may seem flippant and thus has been scrutinized, upheld,
dismissed, and even ignored by academia. Outside of the discourse of
popular culture proper, Mike Kelley writes his own cut-up critique of the
works inspired by Burroughs as a way to highlight the relative
conservatism in popular music today compared to Burroughs’s radical
intentions for the cut-up. Kelley’s cut-up argues that the cut-up method
does not only face stripped down, stylized appropriations of itself within
the realm of popular culture, but he also contends that the institutional and
academic adoption of the method is but an underhanded way to neutralize
the revolutionary potential of cut-up.10 On the other hand, David
Schneiderman posits that viewing the cut-up as still effectively resistant is
8
Burroughs often reminds his readers of the intimate connection image and text
have had through the history of pictorial languages whose letters appear more
abstract over time. Such assertions pepper The Third Mind (Burroughs and Gysin
1978) and The Adding Machine (Burroughs 1985).
9
Dolan 1991, 537.
10
Kelley 2003, 23.
276 Chapter Nine
a trite academic perspective that ignores “mass culture’s ability to absorb

innovation.”11 As his career continued, Burroughs progressively used cut-
up in a less prominent way, as the spread of amateur cut-up projects
quickly exemplified the difficulties of skillfully implementing its methods
and aims. However, cut-up as a method encourages critical thinking that
veers from the regimens and assumptions of established institutions of
power and assists navigation through an increasingly dense media
environment. Cut-up is thus a historically and aesthetically relevant
phenomenon significant to digital culture and new media, and, more
importantly for this study, cut-up reflects on the subject position, which
evolves in response to developing media culture.
As Daniel Punday asserts, Burroughs’s career heralded a new
paradigm of creative activity that is involved with shaping the subject’s
interaction with mass media.12 No longer a bourgeois consumer of art as a
decorative marker of success and a definable sense of self, the subject of
digital culture grapples with art as “forcework,” as a potential transformation
of social, political, and personal relations resulting from the subject’s
increased awareness of reality as construction and the intertwined
relationship between the subject and his or her mediated environment.
Perhaps within the popular discourse there is not such an imperative to
divorce ourselves from an individualized sense of self born from the
Romantic tradition of auteurship, but as digital models of storing and
transferring data infiltrate our lives, viewing ourselves as uniquely
individual and beyond or outside a programmer’s ontology becomes
increasingly inaccurate to how we interface with our world. “Human”
expands beyond the biological or fleshy qualities of the body and past the
Romantic perspective of human as a unique individual expressing the
sensational value of his or her lived experience. Today’s human
understands his or her experience by interfacing with the cultural, social,
and political environment through machines and (self-determined)
automated processes. This shift in subject position—from the auteur to
what N. Katherine Hayles calls the “posthuman” or what Donna Haraway
calls the “cyborg”—has developed alongside technological milestones in
computing and robotics in particular. But more generally, the shift has also
been well reflected in the change in artistic expression and attitudes of
twentieth-century visual artists, writers, musicians, and so forth, especially
since the historic Avant-garde.
11
Schneiderman 2004, 147-48.
12
Punday 2007, 33.
By probing the working methods of William Burroughs and examining

one of his later collaborators, Robert Rauschenberg, this essay will
examine the import of Burroughs’s cut-up and Rauschenberg’s studio
practices as harbingers of not only digital media’s influence on literature
and art, but also of a contemporary subject position for the digital
environment.13 In fact, the deepening relationships we sustain with digital
media raise questions with regard to the human subject as a producer,
interpreter, and consumer of texts regardless of whether those texts are
visual, verbal, aural, or otherwise. As multi-media artists, Burroughs and
Rauschenberg offer a productive approach for defining a subject position
appropriate to, while not directly dependent upon, digital media and
technologies. Unlike traditional, uni-linear, print-based narrative that
privileges causal relationships, linear progression, and a hierarchy of
information, database-arranged writing emphasizes thematic association,
chance, and interchangability. Such writing often shares collage’s aim of
simultaneity and spatio-temporal juxtaposition as collages are the result of
selecting from available materials and remixing those options. As models
of narrative and collage overlap and various media borrow from one
another, discussing one medium in isolation becomes increasingly difficult
and even inapplicable to the digital environment. Thus, experiments in the
convergence of visual and verbal, like Burroughs’s cut-ups and
Rauschenberg’s “combines”14 and silkscreens,15 do not simply point to a
13
While the aim of this paper is to draw out similar practices of Burroughs and
Rauschenberg to determine their relevance to digital culture and subjectivity, it is
noteworthy that Burroughs and Rauschenberg did collaborate. In a series of six
lithographs entitled American Pewter with Burroughs, Burroughs supplied six
short sentences that Rauschenberg included in his photomontages. See Sobieszek
1996, 136-37.
14
Mattison 2003, 46-47; 51. Rauschenberg’s works that are properly labeled
“combines” exhibit mixed media collages of painterly and sculptural effect that
work to include found objects, texts, and images with Rauschenberg’s painting.
Some combines are wall-hung while others are freestanding pieces. In his
combines, Rauschenberg was interested in presenting objects and images of New
York streets as objectively as possible to embody the things themselves rather than
his experience of those things. He looked particularly to buildings, litter, and
window advertisements and often incorporated clippings from Life magazine.
15
Mattison 2003, 92-95. Rauschenberg’s silkscreens, unlike his combines, took the
position of viewing the world through media. Rauschenberg was particularly
interested in reproducing the grainy appearance of the journalistic photograph and
television broadcast. His silkscreens regularly included overlapped, blurred, and
complex or saturated imagery. As a process, silkscreening is a printing method that
278 Chapter Nine
precedent for such a merger in several avant-garde movements,16 or

strictly to the roles technological developments such as the moving camera
or the motor vehicle have had on how one processes visual and verbal
information. Such intimacy and borrowing between the visual and verbal,
the image and the text, has immediate meaning to citizens of the heavily
mediated twenty-first century beyond aesthetic formalism or technological
determinism. These interminglings open up a potential model of agency
for the subject of digital culture, disillusioned by the ineffectiveness of
revolt or revolution. By conflating the detritus of their mediated
environment with mechanized processes of the cut-up or studio practice,
Burroughs and Rauschenberg uncover the space to examine the constructed
nature of their work and the “real world” that is often the subject of their
critique. In turning their artistic process into a mechanical one, they
practice their own politics of interrogating what Burroughs calls “pre-
recordings”—dominant views upheld by existing institutions of power—
by continually supplying their audience with alternate representations of
the world they otherwise assume as given. Subjects of the twenty-first-
century mediated environment are not limited to absorbing pre-recordings
but like Burroughs, can position themselves as “recording instrument[s]”17
void of presumed plots. Both William Burroughs and Robert Rauschenberg
provide a compelling example of the potential that combining the visual
and verbal has for empowering contemporary subjects of digital culture to
question pre-recordings and confront their surroundings as non-neutral.
Narrative / database
Burroughs has not been the only one to argue that writing needed to catch
up with the visual arts in order to offer alternate means of representing an
increasingly technological and mediated culture. Updating the written
form is an agenda many twentieth-century innovators adopted. In 1926,
Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy and his student Josef Albers posited
that the printed book is inconsistent with the modern need to read almost
instantaneously and is less applicable to urban life in the twentieth century
due to the printed book’s archaic desire to maintain grammatical
structures, such as complete sentences, as a necessity. Moholy-Nagy even
predicted that philosophical texts would one day be printed like American
uses screens of porous fabric, non-porous stencils, and ink. The stencil is laid on
the screen and ink is pushed through the screen onto fabric or paper.
16
Sobieszek in particular offers a concise overview of Burroughs’s relationship
with word artists, especially the French modernists (see idem 1996, 26-31).
17
DeKoven 2004, 175.
magazines.18 The printed book and particularly the novel, perpetuate a

certain idea of identity as a determinable and unified result of a subject’s
ordered experiences. This assumption is precisely why Burroughs does not
call his books “novels” as none of his books entertain the idea of causality
and finitude but fold into one another to such a degree that critics argue his
Nova Trilogy is in fact only one book divided or reiterated into three
physically separated codices.19 Unlike other multivolume novels of the
modernist era, such as Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (À la
recherche du temps perdu—1913-1927) or Thomas Mann’s Joseph and
his Brothers (Joseph und seine Brüder—1933-1943), Burroughs is not
interested in maintaining the narrative progression, clarifying the setting, or
championing a clear protagonist. Burroughs pursues a method of
expression more aligned to a rising subject position, one closer to a cyborg
or deejay than a Romantic auteur. Such expression does not stem from the
assumption of the author as a unique creator primed for autobiography or
self-reflection. Burroughs’s literary expression is more interested in the
associative meanings that arise when a writer absorbs his or her
environment from its media, social, political, and even architectural
elements. In this way he makes efforts to undermine the centrality of the
author by positioning the author as a node in a larger web of information
that the author filters. In a similar vein, Walter Benjamin chooses Sergei
Tretiakov as an exemplary writer for his time. Though he is a journalist
and propagandist, Benjamin sees Tretiakov’s position and work as
compelling him and other writers and literary critics to “rethink our notion
of literary forms or genres in line with the given techniques of our current
situation, so that we may arrive at the forms of expression to which literary
energies should be applied today.”20
Such updating and expanding of narrative is closer to Burroughs’s
intention with cut-up. He argues that cut-up more realistically represents
the lived experience of the twentieth century by enacting the machinic and
chaotic overflow of undifferentiated information that an ordered narrative
disciplines into a clear progression of scenes in logical and causal
relationships.21 Cut-up phrases that were included in his long-form literary
texts do not mark dividing lines between source materials or otherwise
differ in appearance from phrases conceived without the cut-up process.
However, Burroughs also used cut-up in his journals and scrapbooks.
These texts often reveal a collage of Burroughs’s owned typed or
18
Schwartz 2001, 408.
19
Lydenberg 1987, 52.
20
Benjamin 1970, 86.
21
Burroughs 1999, 93.
280 Chapter Nine
handwritten material with found pieces of writing. Frequently included

were photographs, particularly those from periodicals or newspapers and
occasional book illustrations. Burroughs formatted columns into his cut-up
journal entries and regularly typed on day calendar or ledger pages. In
collaborations with Brion Gysin, Burroughs would use Gysin’s roller,
painting a grid onto the paper to order the cut-up. As a process that
evolved with Burroughs’s interests, cut-ups looked different from one
another, especially as Burroughs would become interested in different
genre iterations such as a travelogue, scrapbook, newspaper, or more
squarely in artistic collage. 22
Yet, if the cut-up is intended to undermine conventional narrative as
the accepted method of representing reality, what is the fate of narrative
itself? In fact, Burroughs’s cut-up is not a revolutionary usurping of
narrative convention but a method that accentuates its constraints and
extends narrative by creating a web of reading and writing that is not
confined to causality or unity.23 In his writings and interviews, Burroughs
addresses cut-up as a method or tool for the writer and never discounts or
calls for the destruction of narrative. His work is not purely reactionary to
tradition or celebratory of technology, but aims to maintain awareness of
the manipulable nature of representation and reality that has both the
ability to subjugate or liberate depending on the intents of its user.
Burroughs in no way demonizes narrative; he argues that there is no
replacing narrative since a reader wants a story.24 For Burroughs, cut-up
alone would be like any other experimental writing project taken to the
extreme—irrelevant. He thus does not align himself with Tristan Tzara
because the Dadaist artist, like many of his colleagues, divorced himself
completely from the art world and centered his art on pure nonsense rather
than reinvesting his experimentalism into the models and institutions that
uphold convention, such as the art gallery or museum. For Burroughs,
purely experimental writing, like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939),
exhausts itself by venturing too far, thus excluding other available options
for estrangement.25 Many readers are not willing to read purely
experimental writing because the written word as a medium centralizes a
linear trajectory that explicates the human experience through time and
space. However, a heavy concentration on narrative alone risks over
22
For images of Burroughs’s cut-up work, see Sobieszek 1996 and Jed
Birmingham’s collection of issues of My Own Mag available on Reality Studio at
http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/my-own-mag/.
23
Burroughs and Gysin 1978, 6.
24
Burroughs 1999, 123.
25
Harris 2004, 257.
absorption into the storyline regardless of the context. 26 This is precisely

why, when revisiting the Nova Trilogy, Burroughs tried to balance the
scales by including more clearly narrative content, to which the cut-up
could be seen in relation.27 Homogeneity, whether it teeters on the side of
narration or experimentation, attention to illusion or to material structure,
is equally static. Burroughs’s work with the cut-up is essentially a method
to converge the conventional narrative with machinic procedures of
remixing available writings, of drawing from a cultural database. Such a
project of bringing database and narrative together is an underlying
objective of digital practices and their products.
In his book The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich argues that a
key characteristic of new media is its database logic, leaving narrative in a
precarious position. He establishes the oppositional relationship between
the database and the narrative as organizing structures only to conclude
that even those new media objects that appear in narrative form are, at
their core, databases. For instance, when saving a document to a
computer’s hard drive the file is not a discrete item saved in its entirety in
one fixed location. Instead, portions of the file are saved differently and in
different locations depending on the nature of the data.28 For new media
objects, narratives are only sets of linked elements that are ultimately
stored in the database, emphasizing the fragmentary over the unitary.29
Yet, databases are useless if their structure is only random as they collect
specific information and hence have some sort of aim or theme that
determines selection into the database. For Manovich, the cultural
emphasis on either narrative or database will alternate, depending on the
interests and ideologies of an era. Manovich describes what he calls the
“syntagm” as a linear combination of signs resulting in a narrative and the
paradigm as a set of related elements resulting in a database or collage.
The syntagm and paradigm are linked to one another as the subject and
26
Such differentiation between traditional and experimental narrative coincide
with Richard Lanham’s now canonical text on media theory, The Electronic Word
(1993), where he divides looking at and looking through a medium as impulses
with divergent goals. A text that looks at its medium takes interest in its formal and
material structure, while a text that looks through its medium deemphasizes
materiality, encouraging an absorption into content.
27
Harris 2004, 256.
28
One could argue that all writing is a rearrangement of the dictionary as database.
However, the key difference is that with the digital file an explicit connection is
made between the database to which the file is saved and the information in it. The
database piecemeal retrieves the individual elements from the hard drive and
reconfigures them into the narrative form in which they were written.
29
Manovich 2001, 226.
282 Chapter Nine
ground of an image are interrelated. This differentiation between the

subject and ground of a visual composition is remarkably similar to the
distinction between database and narrative in the literary composition.
Burroughs’s experiments with the cut-up essentially attempt to bring
forward the database or paradigmatic qualities of the literary text so the
reader gets a glimpse of the “ground.”30 For Manovich, the cultural
emphasis on either narrative or database will alternate, depending on the
interests and ideologies of an era.31 Ultimately, such an observation
highlights the following: artists like Burroughs find a balance—perhaps
incongruent—between elements that appear to be opposites and take full
advantage of all human capabilities by allowing the differences to
converse with one another rather than resolve or argue.
A two-fold interest in the written word—the immersion into it, as well
as the exposure of it as a medium—tends to privilege exposure, as readers
are more accustomed to approaching writing as a vessel of meaning rather
than as distinct material properties such as typeface, paper weight, page
layout, ink, and so forth. The initial interest of both Burroughs and Gysin
in their early experiments with cut-up was the tangibility that cutting
words from their context, author, and signifying function, lent to the
writer. Instead of being enslaved to reproducing meaning in semantic and
syntactical ways, the cut-up allowed for chance, depersonalization, and
experimentation. Other arts, like visual art or music, did not have to
struggle with these issues to such a degree, being unburdened by the
expectations of language.32 Cut-up as disruption becomes a method of
30
Manovich 2001, 230.
31
Angela Ndalianis (2004) similarly argues that Baroque concepts of massive,
spectacular, and complex structures independent of narrative alternate with
Classicism’s emphasis on narrative, order, and categorical thinking. Leo Steinberg
also posits that the visual works of the Masters of Illusion and the Modernists are
simply a variation of iteration rather than complete opposites. For Steinberg, the
difference between the Master of Illusion and the Modernist is not whether each
accentuates illusionism—perspectival realism that helps the viewer dismiss the
composed nature of the art piece—or the surface of the canvas, but which of these
elements is perceived first, as both are present at all times (see idem 2002, 13).
Also see Astrid Vicas, who highlights Isidore Isou’s model of alternating aesthetic
motives in the amplique and ciselant stages of art, where the first is concerned with
compiling more and more complex stories and the second in examining or
reflecting on the process and goals of art (idem 1998, 384-85).
32
See Miles 1993, 181. Cut-up is not meant to serve as a replacement but a
revelation of the illusionistic goals of media. The goal of such disruptions is to
draw attention to the constructed nature of pre-recordings, of the sense of reality to
which a reader or a viewer is conditioned to conform. Similar rhetorical moves are
eliminating automatic responses and drawing attention to the potential of

manipulation to alter perspectives of reality and expose the pre-recording
as only one in an infinite number of assemblages that could represent a
person’s lived experience, in a heavily mediated world. By usurping
conventional narrative, Burroughs’s cut-up liberates the reader from
predictability. As a process, cut-up splices and grafts diverse specimens of
writing where a sentence may begin from a fragment pulled from Life
Magazine and completed by a fragment from a pornographic text. Such
pronounced differences in topic, tone, or even verb tense, undermine the
reader’s ability to anticipate their place and progress throughout a literary
text. Breaking the automatic response that Burroughs credits to the middle
class reader and consumer, involves, as Gladys Fabre argues, “introducing
disorder, the unpredictable, or an arbitrary mathematical order, with a
view to disrupting the reflexive system and calling forth the new or, in
other words, to disrupting the mechanisms of power.”33 It is in these
disruptions that relationships are revealed. By cutting into a variety of
texts, Burroughs literally disrupts the line of the written text, the
cornerstone of its meaning making, by lifting piecemeal segments of an
existing text, to show language’s potential to work outside of semantics
and linearity and instead towards social commentary and association.
Categorization / transformation
Clearly, Burroughs was not ultimately interested in cut-up as a formalist
project as such. Instead, he accentuated its value as a catalyst for critical
socio-political awareness and action from what we can describe as an
overly complacent popular audience. In general, Burroughs saw himself as
a writer of addiction. His concept of addiction did not simply include drug
addiction but extended to a metaphor for power that controls and
disciplines the subject until the subject no longer senses his or her own
consciousness or is able to feel. Such alienated subjects become blind
followers that do not question the image of reality that those in power
common throughout art history; Hans Holbein’s 1533 Jean de Dinteville and
George de Selve (The Ambassadors) and René Magritte’s La Trahison des images
(1929) made efforts to draw attention through their art to the fact that paintings are
not real but crafted illusions that address in some way the conditions of their
reception. Yet, while Holbein and Magritte centralize such breaks in visual
illusions, Burroughs cracks conventions of narrative by breaking from chronology,
causality, and a unified protagonist.
33
Quoted in Kuri 2003, 174.
284 Chapter Nine
forward as truth34. He believed that language is one of the most powerful

tools for controlling human thought since its penchant for logical and
syntactical order conditions subjects to certain configurations of words or
representations—hence his insistence on language’s viral character.35 In
Naked Lunch, Burroughs posits that democracy itself is cancerous and its
bureaus, the cancer: “A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns
malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always
reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled
or excised.”36 Curiously, this observation follows Burroughs’s infamous
“talking asshole” scene as a critique of how our products eventually
overpower our will and agency. The carnival performer who teaches his
asshole to talk is eventually overtaken by his asshole. Undifferentiated
tissue covers his mouth and the asshole takes over the carnival performer’s
brain until the brain dies. As citizens cede functions of governance and
rely on established systems to operate on a daily basis, Burroughs sees a
danger: those who are governed will lose the reflex to question or
evaluate, and will eventually stop thinking for themselves. In his book The
Ticket that Exploded (1962), published three years after Naked Lunch,
Burroughs seems to recommend a course of action to avoid such control
over the individual mind by speaking in the second person:
The first step is to isolate and cut association lines of the control machine
carry a tape recorder with you and record all the ugliest stupidest things cut
your ugly tapes in together speed up slow down play backwards inch the
tape you will hear one ugly voice and see one ugly spirit is made of ugly
old prerecordings the more you run the tapes through and cut them up the
less power they will have cut the prerecordings into air into thin air.37
Burroughs assumes that as the environment becomes more regimented,

human subjects become predictable if not automatic. This is how the
genuinely inventive subject can break down the methods of representation
that already exist, thus undermining the control Burroughs fears is inherent
in language and dangerously hidden by many uses of technology. Nearly
two decades after first publishing Naked Lunch, Burroughs pushed his
imperative to call the masses to act on their faculties to assess their world
and its control methods. He urged the publisher of his co-authored book,
The Third Mind (1978), to encourage potential consumers of the book to
34
35
Kuri 2003, 174.
36
37
try cut-up themselves since they would not understand it as a method with
potential unless they actually did it rather than just read about it.38 He
considered conventional narrative a way to spare readers the arduous task
of thinking about where they are in space and time, of keeping them
complacent as they follow a prescribed ordering. Manipulating textual
linearity was a way to show people that they were not bound to automatic
responses and detached viewing, but could be actively involved in the
decision making procedures of art and language.39 Given some effort and
initiative, the public does not have to settle with the limited options
offered to them.
However, Burroughs’s insistence that his reading public practice cut-
up puts an extra burden on his reader to adopt an ideology and
methodology before or eventually while they read his literary works. By
relying so heavily on theories of cut-up rather than on its practice or its
ensuing products, and by privileging method in his own manifesto “Les
Voleurs,”40 Burroughs ran the risk of replacing one hierarchical system of
power with another.41 Despite the difficult balancing act, Burroughs was
confident about the ultimate potential of cut-up. When Brion Gysin, a life-
long collaborator of Burroughs, revealed his accidental discovery of cut-up
newspapers in 1959, Burroughs excitedly told Allen Ginsberg that he had
found a new way to write. He described the cut-up as a game whose goal
is to make the player lose what he or she has and to avoid being stuck with
“someone else’s rusty load of continuity.”42 Burroughs adopted cut-up in
order to undermine the status quo. For him, the forces at work in society
such as conventions, morals, or codes of conduct, aim to discipline
subjects and manipulate their awareness. This manipulation is not limited
to advertising and marketing, which are perhaps less of a concern for
Burroughs, but more importantly to the very cognitive abilities of humans,
by convincing them that dominant interpretations of reality exist and
38
Harris 2004, 182.
39
Enns 2004, 113.
40
“Les Voleurs,” co-authored with Brion Gysin, appeared in Burroughs’s collection
of short writings The Adding Machine (1985). The essays included therein often
expound a manifesto-like rhetoric. Gysin also contributed his manifesto “Minutes
to Go” to the Gysin and Burroughs co-authored book The Third Mind and to the
cut-up collection Minutes to Go (Beiles et al. 1960), which included his own work
as well as the work of William Burroughs, Sinclair Beiles, and Gregory Corso.
41
Futurism as a movement faced a similar critique of supporting ideology and
method over product with its constant release of manifestoes alongside largely
forgettable artworks. For further discussion see Lista 1996; Vondeling 2000; and
Adamson 1999.
42
Harris 2003, 8.
286 Chapter Nine
showing them how those dominant views function.43 In that case,

upholding the status quo dooms the subject to a life of repetition, a kind of
lip-syncing of the dominant view of reality. Burroughs labels these
dominant views “pre-recordings” to highlight them as merely viewpoints
one has been conditioned to uphold as self-evidently true.44
Beyond the nature of pre-recordings to limit independent thought and
naturalize social conditioning, Burroughs sees the very nature of language
as distracting and confusing. In his essay “Technology of Writing”
published in 1985 in The Adding Machine, he states that because words
are abstract and often not attached to a material or physical referent, their
meaning is constantly changing and always debatable. For instance, when
examining the word “fascism” or his being called an “arch materialist and
a bourgeois mystic,” Burroughs posits that such words have so many
different phenomena attached to them that using them brings about more
questions and confusion than clarity. For Burroughs, debating such
abstractions is an inhibitor to genuinely productive and creative activity.
This is another aspect of Burroughs’s theory that opens itself to criticism,
since instead of viewing loaded terms as having complex meaning, he
argues they have no meaning at all. For those words whose meanings are
clear, such as “desk” or “table,” Burroughs finds argument wholly
impossible. With some words clearly delineated by a referent and others
muddled by a plethora of connotative meanings, Burroughs observes: “All
arguments stem from confusion, and all arguments are a waste of time
unless your purpose is to cause confusion and waste time.”45 It is the
abstract and intangible nature of language that Burroughs cites as the
reason communication is overly complex. Given that he was a writer,
crafter, and compositor of language, it is difficult to imagine Burroughs
overlooking the power a signifier has over the perception of its referent. In
other words, such arguments over the meaning or nature of a word, though
of significance to other goals, do not suit Burroughs’s aim to question and
expose systems of abstract meaning (language, bureaucracy, democracy)
and its power to control. He explains that the root of this problem of
control is Aristotelian either/or thinking whose concern lies in correctness
43
Punday 2007, 44-45.
44
Representations of dominant culture are a larger thematic, conceptual, and
practical concern of diverse thinkers. It is visible, for example, in Rita Raley’s
critique of tactical media works and digital expressions in software, gaming, and
digital and installation art, in the Situationist movements of the mid-twentieth
century, in the installation work of Vanessa Beecroft, or even in the WikiLeaks
organization.
45
Burroughs 1985, 35.
and proper categorization to order reality.46 Instead Burroughs states that

these categorical divisions, like those between intellectual and emotional
processes, are nonsense since these processes are simultaneous. He points
out that such divisions between intellect and instinct do not exist in our
nervous system and are thus arbitrary approximations of functions that
have little to do with realism on a biological or physical level.47 Though an
essentialist claim and one made outside of any formal knowledge of
neuroscience or perhaps even biology in general, it does point out that a
solution to this problem of categorical thinking would not advocate, for
instance, instinct over intellect, but would leave this either/or model of
thought behind. In fact, it is not a solution since Burroughs posits the cut-
up as a potential method that does not solve but opens a conflict to its
surroundings.
Burroughs means for the cut-up to serve as a pointer, indicating that
reality and its control over humans are creations whose tools are available
to everyone. One cannot approach the cut-up method from the perspective
of classical rhetoric, with its either/or thinking and desire to categorize and
determine phenomena. To address the significance of his work, one must
adopt another model of power relations and functions more fitting to the
role of the subject position Burroughs privileges. Because cut-up arises
from avant-garde collage, Krzysztof Ziarek’s book The Force of Art
(2004) and its model of non-power provides a fair description of how
creative activities aligned with the aspirations of the historical avant-garde
resist succumbing to methods of control by avoiding production as the
underlying motivator of technology. For Ziarek, art is not powerful or
powerless because it works outside of the economy of power and
domination. Art beyond aesthetics cannot be seen as purely an object
because it actually functions as a “force field” with dynamic and
transformative potential to rework existing relations within the social,
political, economic, and cultural. As an alternative to domination and
production, art beyond aesthetics practices aphesis, which Ziarek uses as a
metaphor for a letting go that neither denies nor complies with power, in
order to reach the force of art: the transformation of a situation or
environment. Ziarek is careful to state that art is not an escape from the
real world but rather, it “instantiates the ‘same’ (and the only) world
‘otherwise.’”48 The central challenge for art in modernity, he argues, is the
task of differentiating itself from technology and commodity, of not being
disciplined by order and control. While art and technology both unfold and
46
Burroughs and Gysin 1978, 5-6.
47
48
Ziarek 2004, 42.
288 Chapter Nine
reveal, technology does so in order to discipline forces into usable tools of

the socio-political goals of a dominant party or perspective. Art’s force
must be both technic and poetic and thus cannot be purely about
domination or order. Technology tries to regularize and equalize
difference to facilitate production. For art, technology must necessarily be
more than a pure and reductive technoscience.
By reappropriating and repurposing narrative in the cut-up or by
privileging associative meaning in studio practice, Burroughs and
Rauschenberg participate in an established tradition of viewing the artist as
a transformer rather than a producer. By avoiding the disciplinary function
of technology and commodity, art moves away from a model of
production towards one of transformation.49 The major difference between
these models is the action they encourage. The model of production
encourages the use of technology to create consumable commodities that
forward a logic of perpetual increase, of continuing along an established
and determined trajectory. The model of transformation, on the other hand,
encourages the viewing of technology and commodity as intertwined and
opened in their relationship to one another. This model of transformation
operates on a logic of enhancement, augmenting the potential of
technology and commodity ad infinitum.
The significance of avant-gardist methods, including the cut-up, lies
not only with the object but with the subject that interacts with the object.
To demonstrate such a point, Ziarek adopts Frantz Fanon’s idea of
l’homme actionel as a model subject position. Ziarek summarizes and
interprets this homme actionel as one defined by a tension of an opening
that does not resolve itself, essentially a constant questioning rather than a
production of answers that allows for self-invention. This homme actionel
is not interested in the model of production but of transformation, of
enhancing and augmenting an idea of self by opening him or herself to
experiences and interactions, exposing the essentially vulnerable and
unstable nature of selfhood. After an extended psychoanalytical clinical
study of the black man and some self-reflection as a Martinican, Frantz
Fanon champions an identity whose creation is aesthetic and affective
rather than hierarchical in nature. In conclusion he writes:
It is through self-consciousness and renunciation, through a permanent

tension of his freedom, that man can create the ideal conditions of
existence for a human world.
49
Ziarek posits Marcel Duchamp’s readymades as useful examples of non-
commodity art because they simultaneously show aesthetic qualities while
divorcing the object from its function (see idem 2004, 113).
Superiority? Inferiority?
Why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover each
other?
Was my freedom not given me to build the world of you, man?
At the end of this book we would like the reader to feel with us the
open dimension of every consciousness.
My final prayer:
O my body, always make me a man who questions!50
L’homme actionel is not just an inquisitive subject but figures as an

alternative to outright revolt. Both Fanon and Ziarek value l’homme
actionel as a way for political struggle to actually depart from models of
production. For instance, usurping the present party in control of a group
only to be replaced by another party will result in change, but maintains
the same economy of power. Proliferating the figure of l’homme actionel
enacts a more radical change than simply replacing one’s leader by
redefining the required actions of the subject from compliance to
questioning.
During the Kenedy era, Rauschenberg produced silkscreens that
included images of American astronauts and cosmonauts.51 Refusing to
address the politics of John F. Kennedy or the space race between the
Soviet Union and the United States, these silkscreens seem at first to be
apolitical. However, following Fanon and Ziarek’s notion of l’homme
actionel, these works reveal themselves to be resistant by “opening the
processes of perception and interpretation to other voices and points of
view.”52 Instead of explicitly criticizing American policies during the Cold
War, Rauschenberg is more interested in highlighting the human
relationships behind dogmatic political loggerheads. He avoids the
military aspects of space exploration in favor of viewing space exploration
as a collective effort of scientists and civilians.53
Similarly, Burroughs states that overemphasizing political objectives in
one’s art will limit creative potential, turning the writer or artist into a
polemicist. Burroughs sees politics as a dead end, as yet another futile
argument that entrenches people in confusion.54 Perhaps this is simply an
example of Burroughs’s own limited view of politics as grounded in
American governmental institutions; one could suggest here a
misconstrued association of bureaucracy with politics. However, his
50
Fanon 1952, 206.
51
See Rauschenberg’s silkscreen series, Retroactive, in particular.
52
Joseph 2007, 67.
53
Mattison 2003, 115-17.
54
Odier 1969, 56.
290 Chapter Nine
choice to adopt cut-up as a literary practice of collage in order to

undermine the linear progression of narrative, demonstrates a political
motive in his work that conceives of politics in a broader sense and, in
fact, makes his work of interest and consequence to literary history and
expression. Burroughs does not consider modern media technologies as
mechanisms that aid in alleviating humanity from alienation and surplus
information. As Burroughs points out, technology is controlled by the
intentions of those in power. Technology is not the problem or the solution
—one must turn to redefining the intentions behind its uses, steering it
away from disciplining the subject and proliferating the model of power
and its support of increase over enhancement. In fact, Rauschenberg
perceived technology somewhat differently. He saw it as the new nature
and asserted that human interactions with machines would define the
modern era. Rather than escaping or recoiling from technology, he argued
that humans would have to take up an active and responsible involvement
with the technological world.55 He feared that humans were withdrawing
from such an involvement since they were more comfortable divorcing
representations from their own feelings and viewing them as fixed images
of someone else’s life and emotions.56 Despite their different perceptions
of technology, Burroughs similarly observed that the success of a
bestseller, for example, depends on the general public embracing the text.
In order to create such an acceptable text, the writer could not scare,
puzzle, or subject the reader to unpleasant experiences,57 and thus
essentially avoids putting readers in a position that challenges or confronts
their understanding of reality. Both Rauschenberg and Burroughs,
therefore, press the human subject to adopt the role of l’homme actionel
while recognizing the technological and medial quality of the world. But
the question remains how, in more practical terms, is this subject position
acted out?
Or / and
While Burroughs was adamant about forwarding the cut-up as something
for people to do rather than theorize, enacting cut-up and maintaining its
intentions are more complex than merely cutting a page of text in half
twice and rearranging the four pieces. For cut-up to work outside a model
of production towards one of enhancement, it is clear that its goal should
55
Mattison 2003, 125.
56
Joseph 2007, 251.
57
Burroughs 1985, 22.
be not to copy Burroughs’s methods slavishly. Such an act would be

merely a simplistic jab at positing cut-up as a revolution, of replacing
leadership rather than becoming l’homme actionel. While Burroughs urges
his readers, including Allen Ginsberg, to do cut-up rather than talk about
it, I would like to bring a bit of nuance to his imperative. At the very core
of Burroughs’s plea is the idea of learning or experiencing through the act
of doing rather than observing an object. With this in mind, emphasizing
Burroughs’s primary literary works or the criticisms of his writing is not
of central interest in charting this subject position, though both approaches
offer important insights. Instead, viewing the creative process in action of
both Burroughs and Rauschenberg demonstrates the attitude required to
make knowledge outside of a model of production, bringing the subject to
the role of l’homme actionel.
Burroughs posits that the function of any creative endeavor is to make
people aware of what they already know but do not think they know.58 In
other words, he is not just encouraging inquisitiveness but an active and
critical manipulation of all available resources that the subject can obtain.
Similarly, Brion Gysin’s cut-up text “Minutes to Go” urges readers to
become active manipulators:
be your own agent / until we deliver / the machine / in commercially

reasonable quantities […] the writing machine is / for everybody / do it
yourself / until the machine comes / here is the system / according to us.59
While the content of this imperative has its own objective, it also exposes
a weakness of cut-up: the process and the product are not immediately
relatable. That Burroughs urged his reader to practice cut-up is no surprise.
Without experience in the transformative potential of displacing and
reapproriating language, a string of words appears as simply a collection
of units gathered for semantic purpose. This demonstrates the marked
difference between the product of cut-up and the process of cut-up. The
aim of this cut-up process of collection and manipulation is to expose
reality as a construction and media as tools to empower the subject to
contribute rather than simply consume representations of reality, that is,
estranging and thus exposing spectacle as dissimilar to reality. As often
noted, this aim resonates with the objectives of Marcel Duchamp’s
“bachelor machine.”60 Duchamp’s “bachelor machine” specifically refers
58
Burroughs 1982, 12.
59
60
Joseph 2007 and Punday 2007. For a connection between Rauschenberg and
Duchamp’s readymades, see also Fineberg 1998, 86.
292 Chapter Nine
to the lower half of his 1915-1923 piece The Bride Stripped Bare by Her
Bachelors (The Large Glass) designated as the realm of the bachelor.
Critics, and particularly Jean François Lyotard, have adopted the term
“bachelor machine” as a way to describe abstract mechanisms that
juxtapose oppositional concepts to complement rather than resolve their
relationship. With Burroughs’s and Rauschenberg’s interest in indirect
critique when approaching politics, it is no surprise that their work is often
described as or aligned with the concept of the “bachelor machine.”61
Like Duchamp, Burroughs’s cut-up works shift scenes rapidly and
excise many temporal markers so that a chronological interpretation of the
narrative tidbits is impossible. By cutting out such markers as “by now” or
“meanwhile” the reader loses sense of the sentence and takes note of the
severe dependence he or she has on language in order to map reality.62
One cannot order events but is constantly jarred by a series of scenes and
characters whose motives, objectives, and contexts are unstable. For
instance, in his Nova Express, Burroughs cuts in portions of T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land (1922) resulting in the following:
What thinking, William?-Were his eyes-Hurry up please its half your brain
slowly fading-make yourself a bit smart-It’s them couldn’t reach flesh-
Empty walls-Good night, sweet ladies-Hurry up please it’s time-Look any
place-Faces in the violet light-Damp gusts bringing rain-.63
The striated mash up of this and various other source materials—from

Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Arthur Rimbaud, Jack Stern, Jack Kerouac,
Joseph Conrad, Richard Hughes, Graham Greene64—betray any definite
location or time for the scenes.
61
Critical and historical discussions of Duchamp’s idea of the bachelor machine
are rather complex and specific to his oeuvre. The term “bachelor machine”
springs from Duchamp’s own description of The Large Glass as a human courtship
represented through a “machinic” metaphor and the implications this has to ideas
of love, sexual intercourse, exchange, efficiency, and even mechanical engineering
and architecture. However, it is noteworthy as a mechanism, like collage, that the
subject uses to encourage creative activity and critical thought in order to harvest a
non-Aristotelian attitude towards knowledge making. The bachelor machine
combats the urge to unify, determine, and catalogue by positing itself as a machine
that is incomprehensible and nonfunctional. A bachelor machine conceived in a
broader sense is not a machine whose goal is to produce a commodity but rather
mystify a process of exchange.
62
Lydenberg 1987, 66.
63
64
Burroughs 1965.
In Burroughs’s fictional world, this instability is necessary in order to

avoid the global crisis of nova, the complete destruction of the earth
caused by constant petty conflicts between incompatible people. The duty
of the nova police is to ensure that nova does not happen by avoiding both
petty conflict and its resolution in order to pay attention to their
surroundings and situation. In The Ticket that Exploded, the District
Supervisor explains to Mr. Lee, a new recruit to the nova police, “You will
receive your instructions in many ways. From books, street signs, films, in
some cases from agents who purport to be and may actually be members
of the organization. There is no certainty. Those who need certainty are of
no interest to this department.”65 In place of clarity and accuracy, the nova
police must work with intuitions and observations from their environment.
Yet this instability does not equate to incomprehensibility. Burroughs
often observes that his writing is not about nonsense or attempting to
evade meaning but aims to bring writing to the limits of narrative.
Bachelor machines are not meant to solve a problem or unify an
explanation but to maintain an “and/or” relationship that holds onto
mystery and opens a conflict to its surroundings. In order to accomplish
this multi-“mirrorish” state, one must escape the dependence of a binary
relationship by hinging another dimension to spectacle—revealing
spectacle as construction. For instance, an object and its reflection in a
mirror still exist as a dependent binary; they are pure spectacle. If a second
mirror is introduced as a hinge to reflect the actions of the first mirror and
the object, a dimension is added to the scene and creates a dissimilar
occurrence.66 In his appropriation of the bachelor machine as analogy,
Burroughs puts forward the idea of the writing machine (essentially a
beginner’s editing studio comprising a typewriter and scissors) that
demands a plurality of readings, writings, and functions. By doing so, he
in fact argues that nearly any occurrence can be viewed as a mise en
abyme. This is a rather aesthetically aware perspective of the social and
political world that privileges the act of “seeing,” both physically and
metaphorically, as the key to interpreting one’s environment and one’s
decisions when interfacing with that environment. With the cut-up as its
process, the writing machine no longer has a single use, making the
typewriter not only a business machine for preparing memos and reports,
but also an entryway to breaking such a corporate model of production by
dismembering and rearranging meaning, multiplying human interactions
with their machines. While an item may be branded, conceived, and
65
Burroughs 1962, 10.
66
Lyotard 1990, 53.
294 Chapter Nine
advertised as a tool within a specific sector or with a predetermined

purpose, human creativity easily repurposes typewriters to poetic
collaborators such as in the visual poetry movement, Typewriter Poetry.
Similar reappropriations of modern technology to literary expression have
occurred for the cellular phone with cell phone novels written in 160
character segments uploaded and assembled as novels online. While
divisions between creative and pragmatic work are often maintained in
popular discourse, their functions continue to bleed into one another and
such creative insights to pragmatic problems lead to invention and the
pragmatic perspective applied to creative ideas leads to implementation.
Branden Joseph describes Rauschenberg’s Mud Muse (1971) as a
bachelor machine that the artist meant to place within corporate culture to
expose industry’s wastefulness. Mud Muse consists of a large vat of
driller’s mud that is supposed to bubble in response to surrounding sounds,
but the audio equipment does not work. Instead the viewer encounters the
remnants of a machine, a vat of mud, and a computer tower that produce
nothing. By having Teledyne Corporation fund his massive inoperable
machine, Rauschenberg’s bachelor machine contributes to the critique of
the corporation as wasteful, irresponsible, and nonproductive. By using a
computer, Rauschenberg also exposes technology as not only something to
learn from but something to experience, to encounter with the senses.67
Just as Duchamp’s machines are not meant to solve problems, they
equally do not aim to interpret a situation. Duchamp fears mimesis,
simulation, and repetition since the dissimilarity he seeks is created by
chance and a suspended state of explanation.68 In order to maintain the
and/or relationship and the mystery of mirrorish occurrences, one has to
play with description rather than confront it and observe instruction rather
than determine it,69 just as Burroughs and Rauschenberg avoid falling into
polemics by creating bachelor machines with their creative endeavors
rather than directly addressing the political. As the bachelor machine
creates mirrorish situations through tripartite constructions of reality,
Burroughs suggests a similar configuration that results when two
subjectivities work together, forming a third subjectivity: the third mind.
The third element of the bachelor machine exposes the spectacle behind
the binary while the third mind works to eliminate authorial intent and
expression along with the divisions between the subject and their
surroundings, or between disciplines.70 The bachelor machine becomes the
67
Joseph 2007, 277.
68
Lyotard 1990, 84.
69
Lyotard 1990, 122-23.
70
modus operandi of the subject position Burroughs pursues, one that aims
to enact a system of non-power that Ziarek outlines. In fact, Lyotard even
argues that art does not exist as an object but only as transformations or
redistributions of power. For Lyotard, art as transformer enacts a way of
seeing that has a machinic quality, calling attention to Duchamp’s
argument that humans are interested in the machinic and mechanical
because the nonsense of pure logic exposes the vulnerability of human
feeling.71 Humans thus come to learn about the nature of being human by
relating with and working through mechanisms that, on face value, seem
to oppose their “fleshy” or emotional characteristics and that often impair
any other perspective on humanity.
For Lyotard, Duchamp, Burroughs, and Rauschenberg, creating
effective forceworks depends on the creation of a hinge, an additional
dimension that exposes spectacle and releases the illusion of control over
reality, unity, and explanation. Lyotard argues for the need to create hinges
between the unknown and the known in order to give mystery and
mysticism a place in the subject’s interface with his or her environment,
hence opening up the construction of reality for debate.72 Duchamp’s goal
of viewing the form of functional items in his readymades and the
functional background of the forms in The Large Glass show the bachelor
machine as a mechanism to bring oppositions into conversation, thus
avoiding established categorizations. For Burroughs in particular, cut-up,
like collage and montage before it, is an explicit way to show that a
representation is first a compilation that is not given but crafted by a
director, artist, writer, fascist leader, or American President and can thus
be manipulated by anyone. The root of this call to action lies in
Burroughs’s disappointment with the passive complacency of the middle
class and their unwillingness to be challenged. Rauschenberg’s own
agenda of producing bachelor machines is congruous to his lifelong goal
of relating the aesthetic with the world around him, of blending art with
life. For both Burroughs and Rauschenberg, aesthetics and politics are not
separate entities. Aesthetics is already by default political if viewed as a
mechanism for exposing the construction of a composition in the bachelor
machine and its emphasis on the mise en abyme as part of the fabric of
reality. This attention to the immediate environment of the subject is a
particularly relevant aspect for the subject of digital culture as he or she
comes to understand how to impress his or her presence and agency in a
world that has outlived the effectiveness of revolution.
71
Lyotard 1990, 13.
72
Lyotard 1990, 198-99.
296 Chapter Nine
Arrangement / encounter
With divisions between media and genre becoming less and less
distinguishable in a context of proliferating information made available by
mass media and improvements in communication technology, the subject
is increasingly bombarded by more indistinct matter. This state of
bombardment and the resulting distraction is the environment from which
the subject will have to build connections and associations between
apparently disparate objects and phenomena in order to define a sense of
self and social order applicable to the twenty-first century. László Moholy-
Nagy and Walter Benjamin both argued that the urban environment would
change writing practices because it overflowed with information that could
not be reined in to a single linear narrative dependent upon plot.73 The
urban environment forces the writer into a state of constant distraction, of
shifting the focus of attention.74 Rather than discipline these distractions,
Rauschenberg encourages them as motivators for his creative activities. By
filling his studio with assistants and leaving the television on at all times,
Rauschenberg created a web of distraction, an environment that his
artworks could build upon. For instance, while creating his 1993 Score
XXIV (Off Kilter Keys) he overheard his assistants talking about a wedding
and sharing photographs of the event while he was flipping through his
own archive of photographs. Listening to the conversation of the wedding
coincided with his discovery of a photograph of a cement garden statue
reproduction of Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (1485). This
serendipitous coincidence of representations of love brought
Rauschenberg to think about love, and he decided to use the image of a
cheap reproduction of Botticelli’s work as a marker of popular culture’s
capacity to quote existing representations.75 Such casual conversations
provided him a direction in his decision-making. By relying on these
environmental elements, Rauschenberg thus constructs his art as a means
to capture the surface of life, the immediate moment rather than a
calculated ordering that a modern urban state of distraction counters.
Avoiding categorization, order, and conclusions, Rauschenberg’s studio
encourages a space of openness without preconceptions about the direction
or outcome of an individual work. He says of his work:
I make a situation have as many possibilities as I can and things grow out
of it. I’m after total involvement which includes all those things. I want to
73
Schwartz 2001; Benjamin 1970.
74
Schwartz 2001, 409.
75
Mattison 2003, 20.
positively be a distraction, and remind people that there isn’t really

anything that should be avoided.76
Curiously, Rauschenberg shared these observations with critics and

historians that visited his studio. He tried to avoid artistic intent as a
preconception by surrounding himself with the background noise of studio
workers and television in his secluded studio in Captiva Island, Florida.
One could say that Rauschenberg avoided the lived experience while in
the very process of composing his silkscreens, but this line of thinking
only maintains the distinction between lived and mediated experience that
both Burroughs and Rauschenberg essentially conceived of as intertwined.
Rauschenberg accentuates the importance of leaving oneself open to
the environment without imposing preset filters, expectations, or aims of
artistic practice, a goal perhaps more clearly articulated with his combines
and their pointed purpose of seeing an environment objectively.77 One way
of ensuring this free absorption of the environment is to privilege the
immediate moment. When creating his early combines, he did not look for
elements that would represent the street but what was actually there,
collecting items from the gutter and taking note of the building structures
as they appeared and the advertisements that were in the windows.78
Combines are not arrangements of signs but encounters, unique receptions
of a place and time for both the artist and the viewer.79 Meaning then does
not come from a stable representation but from arrangements of
ungraspable or unstable markers of moments that pass and change. The
viewer is confronted with an encounter that is sensed rather than
recognized.80 Concentrating on the moment and the physical artifacts of
that snippet of time is a way for Rauschenberg to avoid the traps of
nostalgia and sentiment that would result from trying to mimic the mood
or atmosphere of a moment. Even in his studio, he avoided contemplating
his art and worked very quickly. When a piece was finished it was
immediately shipped to New York as it had already fallen into the past, a
finished moment of time that Rauschenberg considered an obstacle to his
artistic interest in the “here and now.”81
76
Quoted in Mattison 2003, 29.
77
Rauschenberg’s more renowned combines include the 1957 Factum series, and
his infamous 1955-1959 Monogram and its angora goal. One of his prized
combines, the 1955 Short Circuit, was a piece the artist kept until his death.
78
Mattison 2003, 46-47.
79
Joseph 2007, 162-63.
80
Joseph 2007, 209.
81
Mattison 2003, 10.
298 Chapter Nine
Burroughs shared with Rauschenberg this interest in recording a

moment, an encounter, which showed the subject as reconstructed through
its surroundings.82 Like Rauschenberg at his studio, Burroughs confessed
that overheard conversations were more influential to his work than any
books he read.83 In fact, sourcing from the immediate environment is
central to Burroughs’s work. He writes:
I’ll read in the newspaper something that reminds me of or has relation to

something I’ve written. I’ll cut out the picture or article and paste it in a
scrapbook beside the words from my book. Or I’ll be walking down the
street and I’ll suddenly see a scene from my book and I’ll photograph it
and put it in a scrapbook. I’ve found that when preparing a page, I’ll
almost invariably dream that night something relating to this juxtaposition
of word and image. In other words, I’ve been interested in precisely how
word and image get around on very, very complex association lines.84
Burroughs’s scrapbook and journal projects functioned to document his

surroundings and their convergences with his own thoughts. For instance,
in The Third Mind he describes keeping a multi-column journal while
traveling in a train. He would then document the things he saw, things he
was reading, and things he was thinking into each column, exemplifying
real life occurrence as cut-ups that the mind smoothes into an event. In that
case, cut-up shows that what is already happening in the mind exists as an
association between our world and our consciousness.85 These column
journals also show the database quality of Burroughs’s writing by making
material the qualities of digital storage and processing that breaks down
and stores a file across discrete locations, undercutting the narrative
qualities of memory or transcription.86 Many of these three column
projects, such as “The Moving Times,” appeared in My Own Mag.87
Burroughs posits these scrapbook and journal projects as exercises to teach
one to think in associative blocks rather than linear hierarchical ordering
that plot implies.88 Rather than receiving a narrative about traveling by
train or walking down a city street, one is confronted by a series of
82
Fineberg 1998, 85.
83
Miles 1993, 155.
84
Burroughs and Gysin 1978, 5-6.
85
Lydenberg 1987, 46.
86
Sobieszek 1996, 47. Sobieszek here notes the shared underlying grid structure of
Burroughs’s scrapbooks and Rauschenberg’s combines, pointing to the
informational quality of the world both figures confront.
87
See Birmingham, 2007.
88
encounters, moments of potential associations between a subject and the

environment as well as between different elements of the encounter itself.
This method of building meaning not through plot but through
accidentally and tangentially associated encounters serves, according to
Burroughs, as a more accurate description of the subject’s experience in a
heavily mediated world. However, this immediacy can also be potentially
alarming or dangerous because it encourages exposure and nondifferentiation
from the environment. If received or enacted in a passive mindset, such
journal projects, cut-ups, or environmental distractions can mask or stifle
the motives or intentions of a person. Hence, only when received and
enacted actively, as part of a politically informed practice, can such
models become empowering ways to work with existing representations,
pre-recordings, or institutions of power.
On the issue of active engagement, Burroughs wrote to Ginsberg, in
1958, of his disappointment in his own writing. “I am completely
dissatisfied with all the work I have done in writing and with the whole
medium” he wrote. “Unless I can reach a point where my writing has the
danger and immediate urgency of bull-fighting it is nowhere, and I must
look for another way.”89 And indeed, a certain vulnerability to the
environment is characteristic of the subject position figured in Burroughs’s
cut-up and in Rauschenberg’s combines. The subject’s interaction with the
environment as an encounter rather than an ordering, forces the subject to
be constantly challenged and to take up a position regarding the process of
meaning making rather than merely consume a narrative. The cut-up
challenges the narrative text by turning the text into images as blocks of
associative meaning that blur the distinction between the subject’s
thoughts and surroundings. Burroughs finds such a subject position
liberating and formalizes it with the manifesto he and Gysin wrote, “Les
Voleurs.” This brief manifesto posits that writers, like painters, can steal
anything they see, anything around them, citing the retellings of Romeo
and Juliet as an example of how writing, like art, has always been a
process of appropriating what earlier artists and writers have offered up
like street vendors selling peanuts.90
What brings Burroughs and Rauschenberg to the fore of embodying
creative practices of the subject of digital culture is their role as multi-
media artists that infuse critical thought into the illusionist desires of
popular forms and culture. Burroughs brings popular forms like science
fiction, pornography, and the detective novel to his avant-garde, collage-
89
90
Burroughs 1985, 19-21.
300 Chapter Nine
inspired method of cut-up. He insists there are links between writing and
other media and refuses to undermine the characteristics of popular forms,
using them as only vague inspirations like many modernist writers had
done before him. Similarly, Rauschenberg’s silkscreens take up the
aesthetics of television without supporting pure spectacle, which he saw as
simply one manifestation of the use of television. With television a
mainstay of contemporary culture, Rauschenberg could not imagine
excising it from his art, but did not want to show it as seamless illusion.
Instead he disrupts the consumption of television by showing the
difference between such elements as the television signal and a definable
physical location. His transfer drawings of the 1960s particularly
emphasized the haze of the signal and the centrality and visibility of the
broadcast. By working across media—both high and low culture—
established tradition, and experimentation, these two artists mark the
subject that results from the information overload and its resulting
distraction. These subjects then become increasingly aware of reality’s
construction and their potential to participate in that process of adopting or
constructing their own representations through an encounter or an
experience, rather than consuming a product whose process of creation has
been obscured or concealed.
Object / subject
Characterizing the active, critically-minded subject of digital culture is not
all that difficult. In short, this subject compiles an identity through
encountering and accumulating artifacts from his or her environment in a
way that takes advantage of mass media and popular culture, while not
divorcing him or herself from critical thought and active participation in
constructing, rather than consuming, reality. This subject enacts his or her
potential to reinvent social order, of becoming a transformative force, the
inquisitive and active participant that Burroughs imagines instead of a
mindless consumer waiting for clarity and meaning from pre-programmed
sources. This inquisitive participant of reality construction adopts the
bachelor machine as a method of interrogating his or her situation. Todd
Tietchen observes that Burroughs encourages subjects to recognize that
they are constructed by consumerist ideologies; yet rather than hide or
revolt against the entire system of production and mass media, the subject
should use these same channels to interrogate and reanimate their remixed
identity and shifting social, political, and economic order.91 Cut-up

exposes power structures that discipline the public into accepting the
prerecording as reality proper and reveals this control by highlighting
conventions and traditions as only one option to approach and use a social
artifact. Both Burroughs and Rauschenberg create machines that avoid a
solution in order to posit multiple possibilities. Burroughs’s cut-up offers a
way to discover as many alternatives to the prerecording as possible to free
the subject from control. Similarly, Robert Mattison aligns Rauschenberg’s
studio practices, particularly his need for distraction in the workplace and
extreme organization of his materials, as a space that encourages lateral
rather than vertical thinking. Lateral thinking generates as many possible
approaches in contrast to vertical thinking that selects and eliminates
approaches by choosing the “right” method.92 While vertical thinking will
often force new material to fit existing forms, perpetuating established
social order or literary and artistic genres, lateral thinking overcomes these
limits by revealing multiple options, often inspired by obscure details or
random information from a distracted state of mind, thus disrupting unity.
Rather than executing an ordered step-by-step procedure upheld by
vertical thinking, the lateral thinker places him or herself in the situation
proper and waits for links to suggest themselves.93 Such a subject as
l’homme actionel builds bachelor machines that expose technicity and
commodity as tools for reality construction rather than methods to
domesticate creative activity.
This subject is not the Romantic auteur or a random machinic
producer but maintains both of these oppositions as dependent upon one
another. Burroughs often complained that in critiquing cut-up, many were
surprised that his writing could be the result of a random process. He
adamantly asserted that despite the fact that the results were unexpected,
he still selected what should be cut up, created the cut-up as a program that
writing must pass through, and chose phrases from the results fitting them
into a narrative that the reader could relate to without sharing Burroughs’s
personal experiences, history, or thoughts.94 Rauschenberg also defended
91
Tietchen 2001, 110. More generally, such discussions of the rising role of the
spectator or consumer in media production, political expression, and building
subjective agency appear in Saper 2001; Rancière 2006; Bishop 2004 and 2006.
Jenkins (2006) also discusses the import of viewer/consumer participation. For an
introduction to such concepts of consumer-made meaning see Sturken and
Cartwright 2009, 49-89.
92
Mattison 2003, 30.
93
Mattison 2003, 32.
94
Sterritt 2004, 67-68.
302 Chapter Nine
his combines as not purely random but defined by “themes, ideas,

interests, and procedures.”95 Although the origins of Burroughs or
Rauschenberg’s work may have been in a spark of intuitive or affective
magic, these pieces of immediate encounter of random outcomes are
edited and arranged to be applicable to other such encounters in the future.
The process of editing, of choosing the presence and arrangement of
elements, is where the subject of digital culture interjects its construction
of identity. Instead of making raw data, this subject samples that data,
exploiting what Sherry Mayo calls the power of the artist as an “editor of
mediation rather than as a producer of cultural objects.”96
This process of arranging and editing encounters demonstrates the
digital subject’s position as one that is beyond personal expression,
beyond pure phenomenology. Rauschenberg proposes that the aim of his
art is to form a response to “constantly changing external events,” rather
than exploring the depths of his personality.97 While he may use a personal
incident to begin a work, he does not use that incident as a primer to
express a personal history. Instead, Rauschenberg wants to provide
information that his audience could relate to their own personal
experiences, intensifying the sensual response. In the end, a primary
objective of mediating and using media is to communicate and reconcile
separate people. With a growing audience and a proliferating amount of
available information, mediation is our state of being. It comes as no
surprise that the digital subject’s goal is to build relationships with others
working in and experiencing media rather than projecting an isolated
figure of self-knowledge and individuality. The very technologies that
support and create genres and artistic media of representation and
communication become an intimate aspect of subjectivity for the subject
of digital culture. These subjects collect from their own environment to
ultimately “build” bachelor machines that expose the boundaries of those
media and genres. The search for such a remixed subject position cannot
exclude the technologies and machines that have become tightly enmeshed
with the daily experiences of the digital subject. Burroughs’s cut-up is
impossible without the typewriter, scissors, tape recorder, or film that can
store and manipulate much more data than the conscious human brain. An
enmeshing of the arts and the sciences is beginning to take hold, where
Burroughs and his computer science collaborator Ian Somerville balance
their artistic and machinic contributions to the tape recorder experiments.
The subject of digital culture as such an artist-scientist is not disciplined
95
Mattison 2003, 42.
96
Mayo 2008, 111.
97
Mattison 2003, 10.
by technology as the scientist or enslaved to inspiration as the artist, but

negotiates a process of becoming by allowing technology and artistic
intuition to collaborate. This is why Burroughs does not view the cut-up as
a threat to authorial integrity nor does he view the use of commercial
culture and popular texts as an undermining of cut-up’s values and goals.98
Pressing the limits of a genre or medium and their conventions while
maintaining conflicts that prerecordings “solve” with a dominant
perspective, not only calls the subject to take up a position with regard to
the process of representation but also brings to light the social order those
genres and media support. Positing the subject as intimately enfolded into
his or her environment, media, and technologies exposes a new economy
of power, one in which the subject and object are not distinctly separate.
The subject does not discipline or create the object but can only recompose
the elements of the encounter between the subject and all other subjects
and objects in his or her environment. Outside of an economy of power
and away from the concept of revolution, the subject of digital culture,
l’homme actionel that Burroughs and Rauschenberg advance as a result
and source of their methods of expression, is not the producer of an object
or an object of its environment. No such simple solution or relationship
exists. Instead, the subject and object, the subject and ground, the subject
and environment are interwoven. Roger Caillois’s famous 1935 paper
“Mimétisme et psychasthénie légendaire” (“Mimicry and Legendary
Psychasthenia”) perhaps sums up this subject position best, not by
discussing the subject of digital culture, but by examining the rationale of
camouflage in the natural world. To Caillois, camouflage as an animal’s
mimicry of its environment was not a protective mechanism to avoid
predators and thus had no practical use. Instead he thought that
camouflage was more simply, as Charles Green posits, “a failure to
maintain the boundaries between inside and outside, between, that is,
figure and ground.”99 For Caillois, this was not a failure in the negative
sense but “a doubling, a mimicry, of the space around the body in order to
allow for its possession by the surrounding environment.”100 The digital
subject’s awareness of the material structure of language and his or her
interrogation of the environment and its prerecordings in the form of
creating bachelor machines imagines this subject position as one that is
part of a process of becoming. This subject is not intimidated by instability
or driven by resolution but creates and questions meaning by maintaining
the conflicts between what one would usually consider oppositional,
98
99
Green 2001, 198.
100
Green 2001, 199.
304 Chapter Nine
blurring but not erasing the boundary between the wing of the butterfly
and bark of the tree, the cut-up and the conventional narrative, the
combine and the street. There is no answer, no finitude, but rather an
infinite series of hinges that continue to open and augment the
relationships between any opposition a discourse will conjur:
narrative/database, object/subject, text/image.
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Press.
CHAPTER TEN
CREATING UNITY THROUGH DISUNITY:

FUTURISM AS PARADOXICAL MOVEMENT
CARA TAKAKJIAN
Modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a

unity of disunity; it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual
disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and
anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said,
“all that is solid melts into air.”
—Marshall Berman1
The Futurist movement has primarily been studied as one that embodies
the ideals of strength, vitality, and speed, and that proposes a purging
system of destruction and chaos. Certainly, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
wanted Futurism to explode in the same way that modernity itself had
created an unnerving and often discomforting shock.2 But, as many
scholars have suggested, Marinetti’s insistence on “aggressive movement”
(il movimento aggressivo)3 and “the struggle” (la lotta), his glorification of
war and his incitation to burn museums, libraries, and any institutions that
he considered “old-fashioned” (passéiste)4 should not be interpreted too
flatly. There are significant contradictions to be found in both his words
and practice. Although it may seem contrary to the tenets of the
movement, in this paper I would like to propose that Futurism was an
attempt at construction and unity as much as it was one of destruction and
rupture. This unity was not homogenous, but rather was achieved through
1
Berman 1988, 15.
2
As Fredric Jameson writes, “the new technological machinery brings with it its
own aesthetic shock, in the way in which it erupts without warning into the older
pastoral and feudal landscape” (idem 2002, 143).
3
Unless noted otherwise, all translations are my own.
4
See Marinetti 1909.
310 Chapter Ten
disunity, and it is the product of one of the many contradictions in the

movement’s philosophy and practice.5
I hope to analyze this paradox of an attempt at engagement of the
individual (both the reader-viewer and the artist) countered by an emphatic
call for total alienation. I will do so by looking at Marinetti’s practice—in
this case, his parole in libertà works (parole in libertà and parolibere
poetry translate as “words in freedom” and “free word” poetry,
respectively)—and his theory (manifestos).6 The unique relationship
between text and image in the parolibere works, and the resulting effects
on the reader-viewer in particular, belies much of Marinetti’s professed
ideology. As I will explain, the Futurist manifestos sought to sever any
connection between the artist, the artwork, and the public, promoting a
vision of the material as detached and independent from the reader’s
reception of it. At the same time, however, the form and content of these
works were intended to elicit multiple, and sometimes simultaneous,
sensations from the reader-viewer, in an attempt to replicate real, lived
experience. It is in this way that Futurism, then, might be read as a subtly
paradoxical movement that explicitly called for destruction and alienation
while it quietly created a sense of cohesion and participation.
Before looking at specific parolibere works, it will be helpful to
discuss the disjunctive and unifying elements behind the concept and
practice of the movement, and how they are often times contradictory.
From a technical standpoint, the Futurists called for a total annihilation of
rules and norms of language and literature, with the hope that by
destroying the oppressive foundation that had been the pillar of literary
history for so long, there could be an opportunity for a fresh start. As
Marinetti explained, “we encourage destruction in order to reconstruct”
(Noi siamo intraprenditori di demolizioni, ma per ricostruire).7 Their goal
was to portray the sense of dynamism and velocity that was inherent in the
modernist chaos that surrounded them.8 Thus, they called for the
destruction of syntax and the abolishment of nearly everything from the
adjective to punctuation. Verbs were to be used in the infinitive, so as to
avoid any association with the io (I or self) of the writer, and images and
analogies were to be as random and diverse as possible in order to create
5
See Berman 1988.
6
On the importance of the reader for the fulfillment of meaning in a text, see Iser
1978. For Iser, the reading process is a “dynamic interaction between text and
reader” (ibid., 107).
7
Marinetti, 1915.
8
As David Harvey writes, modernist art “responds to the scenario of our chaos”
(idem 1990, 20).
Creating Unity through Disunity: Futurism as Paradoxical Movement 311
the “maximum chaos” (maximum di disordine). The creative process was

to be “wireless” (senza fili).9 The goal was to generate a disembodied
sensation that was no longer chained to a solid, singular referent, but that
was, as Johanna Drucker has discussed, reflective of the communications
technology of the day: “dematerialized, immediate and simultaneous.”10
Amidst these radical reforms, however, there is one that stands out as
slightly different from the rest and that foreshadows the most revolutionary
aspect of the parole in libertà project:
Solo per mezzo di analogie vastissime uno stile orchestrale, ad un tempo

policromo, polifonico e polimorfo, può abbracciare la vita della materia.11
Only by way of the vastest analogies, can an orchestral style that is at once
polychromatic, polyphonic and polymorphous embrace the life of the
material.
In this sentence, Marinetti makes his first reference to a new way of

representing reality that uses all of the senses and that, according to him, is
the only way to truly embrace the life of the material represented. By
proposing a cross-modal perception of art, he confronts the modernist
anxiety of a language separated from representation.12 He seems to imply
that the only solution for reconnecting language and meaning is to appeal
directly to the senses, perhaps because the senses are, as John Dewey
notes, “the organs through which the live creature participates directly in
the on-goings of the world about him.”13 For Marinetti, in other words, it
is by simulating and recreating lived experience that language can reach its
fullest potential of comprehension and representation. This futuristic
highlighting of the sensorial experience evoked by a piece of literature
necessarily, and blatantly, points to the crucial role of the reader for the
fulfillment of that work.
9
Marinetti 1912. Obviously, Marinetti’s use of the term “wireless” had a far
different connotation than it does in today’s digital age. For him, “wireless”
described a language that was devoid of any referent or any connection to an
original, primary idea. As he explains, it is a language of analogies in which the
first terms are suppressed and the second terms exist on their own.
10
Drucker 1994, 108.
11
Marinetti 1912.
12
On the separation of language from representation, see Jameson 2002.
According to Jameson, this process is “relevant for any theory of artistic
modernism” (ibid., 146).
13
Dewey 1934, 22.
312 Chapter Ten
This apparent focus on the reader, however, seems to be in direct

contradiction to Marinetti’s own belief regarding the role of the self in
literature. Shortly after he mentions the above-referenced importance of a
complex sensorial perception of art, he dedicates a dictum and a lengthy
explanation to the necessity of destroying “the ‘self’ in literature” (nella
letteratura l’io’). The self that he wants to eliminate is not just that of the
poet/creator but also, and more importantly, that of the reader. He sees the
self who has been schooled in the system of libraries and museums as a
“distracted, cold self, that is too preoccupied with itself, full of prejudices
of wisdom and human obsessions” (io distratto, freddo, troppo
preoccupato di se stesso, pieno di preguidizi di saggezza e di ossessioni
umane) and, therefore, he views that self as one who cannot possibly help
further the Futurist project. It is the reader’s tendency towards
anthropocentrism that most irks Marinetti, particularly since it goes against
his proposed material-centrism. For him, “the material is neither sad nor
happy. Its essence is courage, willpower and absolute force” (La materia
non è né triste né lieta. Essa ha per essenza il coraggio, la volontà e la
forza assoluta).14 It is only the reader’s projection of his or her own
emotions onto it that betrays the material’s otherwise neutral, emotionless
nature.
Marinetti’s literary program recognizes, even if only implicitly, the
importance of the “io” by way of the reader. Yet, at the same time, it
undoubtedly promotes an overwhelming disparagement of the reader, and
even an attempt at keeping a distance between him/her, the poet, and his
works. This is most evident in Marinetti’s renunciation of being
understood in exchange for a “wireless imagination” (immaginazione
senza fili). In the “Manifesto tecnico della letteratura” (“Technical
Manifesto of Literature”), he writes:
Giungeremo un giorno ad un’arte ancor più essenziale, quando oseremo

sopprimere tutti i primi termini delle nostre analogie per non dare più
altro che il seguito ininterrotto dei secondi termini. Bisognerà, per questo,
rinunciare ad essere compresi. Esser compresi, non è necessario.15
One day, when we dare to suppress all of the original terms of our
analogies and provide nothing else but the uninterrupted flow of secondary
terms, we will arrive at an art that is even more pure. For this to happen,
we must renounce being understood. Being understood is not necessary.
14
Marinetti 1909.
15
Marinetti 1912.
This idea is reiterated in the manifesto “L’Immaginazione senza fili e le

parole in libertà” (“Wireless Imagination and Words in Freedom”), at the
end of which Marinetti writes:
Mi si obietta che le mie parole in libertà, la mia immaginazione senza fili

esigono declamatori speciali, sotto pena di non essere comprese […] la
comprensione dei molti non mi preoccupi […].16
One may object that my parole in libertà, my wireless imagination,

demand special orators in order to be understood [...] being understood by
the many doesn’t concern me [...].
In claiming that he does not care if his poems are understood, Marinetti
ostensibly refutes the importance of the reader’s experience, much less
that of the reader him/herself, in relation to the poet’s work.17
That being said, I do not think it was Marinetti’s goal to be
incomprehensible to his readers, nor do I think his willingness to exchange
comprehensibility for a new literary language necessarily sought to
exclude the reader from the Futurist project. There certainly is no explicit
recognition of the importance of the reader, and perhaps Marinetti really
did see most of his audience as an obstacle to his program. But, as one
who published various manifestos on Futurism, it seems unlikely that he
was unaware of the necessity of a reader in order for his works to have an
effect. After all, what good is a manifesto if it is not manifested to
someone?18 Indeed, as much as Marinetti avowed disdain for his public, he
was also a master of mass media. As Drucker points out, he succeeded in
constructing himself as a spectacle for public consumption, “a personality
whose identity was made through and processed by media attention.”19
How, then, can we reconcile Marinetti’s emphasis on creating art that
is, as Claudia Salaris puts it, “an immediate approach to reality, always
based on an intensely lived experience, whether sensorial or
psychological”20 with his clear and open rejection of the reader and his/her
personal experience? This question becomes even more interesting in the
16
Marinetti, 1913.
17
This underlying “contempt” (disprezzo) for the audience is explicit in
Marinetti’s 1911 “Manifesto dei drammaturghi futuristi” (“Manifesto of Futurist
Playwrights”).
18
This is also evident in Marinetti’s desire to shock the reader by eliminating
stereotyped images and metaphors and in his call to exploit the “power to amaze”
(forza di stupefazione—idem 1912).
19
Drucker 1994, 106.
20
Salaris 1995, 22.
314 Chapter Ten
parolibere works since they incorporate words and images that are meant
to elicit an almost synesthetic response from the viewer. Although I use
the term, I am hesitant to fully agree that the experience of parolibera
poetry is, in fact, synesthetic. Many critics have discussed the simultaneity
of the sensorial experience of Futurist works.21 Yet I would like to argue
that there is a crucial temporal distinction between the initial visual effect
of the page on the reader-viewer and the reading of the words that follows.
The first view of the page, and the effect of type, shape, and image, are
relatively instantaneous; the reading of the words, on the other hand,
unravels over time. In other words, the two actions are not simultaneous.
This is not to say that multiple senses are not evoked during the reading of
words (onomatopoeia, for example, affects the reader visually and
aurally), but not all elements on the page are experienced at the same time.
By analyzing a few of the parolibere poems I will try to demonstrate how
they function and what effects they have on readers-viewers in search of a
place of resolution between seemingly contradictory ends.22
Marinetti’s “Morbidezze in agguato + bombarde italiane” (“Softness
in Ambush + Italian Bombardments”—see Fig. [1]) presents an interesting
tension for the reader, as the title itself suggests. At first glance, the reader
is struck by the downward pull that seems to draw all of the text into an
explosion at the bottom right-hand part of the page. The explosion takes
place where the words esplosione (explosion) and simultaneità
(simultaneity) are written. It is accompanied by a variety of marks that
look like ink or type that has exploded, such as scratches on the page and
large black diamonds with sharp points sticking out of them. The
explosion is prepared for by the various “schiiii” coming from all
directions of the lower right quadrant, which we might interpret as the
sound of bombs or planes whirling through the air. As words and letters
seem to fly in all directions, propelled from the center of the explosion, the
underlying scratches and chaos represent the final “boom.” In contrast to
some of the earlier parolibere works, this piece is an excellent example of
the breakdown of typical linguistic and visual barriers. As Drucker notes:
21
See, for example, Curi 1995; Salaris 1995; or Fanelli and Godoli 1988.
22
Note that one sensorial element that will be missing from our reading is the
forced tactile relationship between reader and page. As Giovanni Lista notes, “the
parolibere works were much bigger than the volumes in which they were
published. The mystery of the folded page, inhabited by silence [...] forced the
reader to perform the outstandingly tactile operations of unfolding and refolding
the pages” (quoted in Fanelli and Godoli 1988, 22).
[T]he meaning of the words derived as much from their position, their
relation to each other as visual elements and their movement as a series of
marks across the sheet, as from their semantic value. Their differential
linguistic operation cannot be isolated from their phenomenological
appearance on the page: both are at work in the production of signification.23
Fig. [1]: Marinetti, “Morbidezze in agguato + bombarde italiane”24
23
Drucker 1994, 137.
24
Reproduced in Fanelli and Godoli 1998, 57. Image reprinted here with
permission by the Design and Artists Copyright Society, UK (© DACS 2012).
316 Chapter Ten
There is an interesting dynamic contrast that happens in the piece:

while the general sensation that the text gives is one of a fast downward
falling that results in an explosion, there are bits and pieces of softness and
calm present throughout. At the top right-hand corner, following the very
loud “SCRABrrRrraaNNG” and above the three onomatopoeic lines of
falling bombs (bombardare), there is a handwritten note that reads: “I
received your book while I will bomb Monte Greco. F.T.M” (Ho ricevuto
il vostro libro mentre bombardero il Monte Greco. F.T.M).25 This note
immediately creates a sense of intimacy between the viewer and Marinetti,
as if the poet had written the note specifically for him/her.26 The poet
might be addressing the viewer/public directly (voi) or the reader may be
spying a personal note from Marinetti to someone else. Either way, it is
significant that the presence of literature (vostro libro) allows for a human
element amidst the bombings and war, represented by Marinetti’s
handwriting and the personal nature of the note.
The voyeuristic element is further emphasized when we realize that we
are watching the figure of a woman at the bottom right (who, as the title
suggests, is alone, at night in her bed) as she reads a letter from her loved
one at the front. Not only are we spying on this woman, as voyeurs, we are
also sharing in her reading experience, as participatory subjects. The
verbal and visual elements on the page might be interpreted as the words
and images in her mind. Furthermore, the auditory and visual disorder of
the page contributes to our experience of the physical and psychological
effects of war that she is reading about. This reinforcement of us as
spectators and subjective participants in the work only further underscores
the crucial role of the viewer in the fulfillment of these parole in libertà
works.
To the left of the explosion there is a small space of seemingly
juxtaposed word-images: “Isonzo,” “campestre intre fresco” (pastoral
between fresh), and “dolce dolcissiiiimo pacifico” (sweet sweeeeetest
peaceful). It is here that we start to realize that the typical dichotomies of
war/peace, life/death, hell/bliss are no longer valid. The Battles of Isonzo
in World War I are not necessarily irreconcilable with the image of fresh,
pastoral fields. In fact, if war is “the world’s only purifier” (la sola igiene
25
Note that Marinetti here follows his own declaration for a poetry that is devoid
of syntax, notably in the lack of temporal agreement between verbs. Also, it is hard
to tell if the penultimate word is “Greco,” “crecco” or “grecco.”
26
As Fanelli and Godoli note, “from the way in which these characters allude to
the manual nature of writing, one can see the strategy of persuasion used on the
reader, a winking promise of a more personal relationship, an illusion of the
autograph” (idem 1998, 20).
del mondo),27 perhaps the only way to achieve a state of the “sweetest
peaceful[ness]” is through the very explosion and bombarde depicted on
the page.
At the bottom of the page, mixed among the flying bits of exploded
words, is another handwritten message: “grazie e auguri a lei e ai suoi
arditi compagni” (thanks and best wishes to you and your brave
companions). This message could either be a continuation of the message
at the top of the page, or it could be a heartfelt (even more so being
handwritten) thank you letter to the Italian soldiers fighting in the war. To
the left of the message is a supportive shout of “Guerra ai tedescofili!”
(War on all Germanophiles!). This sentiment is perfectly in line with the
“Sintesi Futurista della Guerra” (“Futurist Synthesis of the War”), which
indicates German and Austrian (and presumably all “tedescofili”) cultures
as passeist, and thereby anti-Futurist.28 Finally, “verdi” is written in small
letters at the bottom of the page, most likely evoking the moving music of
Giuseppe Verdi, but also the sense of nationalism and struggle for
independence against Austria that Verdi’s name and music elicited during
the Risorgimento.29
Fortunato Depero’s “Subway” (Fig. [2]) provides another good
example of a parolibera work that prompts multiple senses, effectively
recreating the experience of a crowded subway ride for the reader-viewer.
Not only does the layout of the poem convey the space of a subway (car,
station, and crowd), but the words and shapes also mimic the various
sounds, sights, and feel of a subway experience. The reader-viewer’s
initial response to the work is a sense of chaos and movement (generally
downward). Upon reading, however, the words begin to take on different
effects depending on how they are presented visually. The semi-circles
surrounded by the words “gran-gran” at the top of the page give the effect
of emitting a light, particularly through the long, pointy typography.
The sound of the words, “gran-gran,” brings to mind the incessant
buzzing of bright, halogen lights of an underground subway space. The
“Milioni di Mani” (Millions of Hands) that is written in bold letters of
decreasing size gives a sense of movement and draws attention to the
phrase and image of millions of hands. The last word, “Mani,” is then
surrounded by a semi-circle of other “hands” (mani) that seem as though
they are groping the reader, inducing a sense of claustrophobia and
discomfort through repetition.
27
Marinetti 1909.
28
Marinetti 1914.
29
Verdi’s name was utilized by some Italian nationalists as an acronym for the
phrase “Vittorio Emanuele King of Italy” (Vittorio Emanuele Re d’Italia).
318 Chapter Ten
Fig. [2]: F. Depero, “Subway”30
After the “tese per afferrare” (poised to grab—the curves of the

cursive writing of “afferrare” mimic the rolling sound of the word), the
emphasis is thrown on “1 POSTO” (1 spot), which, from the bold type and
crowded feeling of the page, we may assume is the only place left on the
30
Reproduced in Fanelli and Godoli 1998, 40. Image reprinted here with
permission by the Design and Artists Copyright Society, UK (© DACS 2012).
subway train. The sense of grabbing the last seat is underscored by the
lines that seem to be closing in on the words “1 POSTO.” The fight for a
seat is made audible through the screams of “VIAAA” (GO), which are
interspersed with fragments of an image of a woman that the poet may be
catching glimpses of through the crowd: “a blonde face that goes away.
Beautiful feet that go away sweet desire ripped away” (viso biondo che va
viaaa. Bei piedi che vanno viaaa dolce desiderio sttrappato viaaa). By
analyzing this work, one can truly understand John Milner’s argument
regarding the French symbolist movement that “awareness of an event or
an object, imaginary or observed, is rooted in more than one of the senses”
and that “to limit one’s art to the fruits of one sense was to risk a loss of
suggestive power.”31 The experience of the subway is made much richer
and more profound by Depero’s ability to appeal to more than one of the
senses and call to mind the reader’s own subway experience.
Corrado Govoni’s “bucato + bagni + ballo = primo amore” (“laundry
+ baths + dance = first love”—see Fig. [3]) is another example of the
power of parolibera poetry to stimulate the reader-viewer’s various senses
and evoke personal responses. At first glance, the page seems simply to
read from left to right. Yet, a closer look at the placement of the images
reveals it is actually set up as a landscape picture with the sun at the top
right corner and the sea running along the bottom. The strength of the
summer sun is depicted in the thick, bold type of “SOLE” (SUN) at the top
left of the page. The words “colossale blocco di sapone” (huge bar of
soap) seem to represent a subconscious analogy (perhaps the poet’s) that
connects the brightness of the sun to the whiteness of a bar of soap. This
circular soap/sun is then drawn in the upper right-hand corner.
The analogy between the two objects is continued throughout the poem
in various guises of cleanliness, such as the “bucato di vecchi di bambini
di signorine” (laundry of the elderly of children of young women), the
double meaning of bagnanti, meaning both wet clothes and bathers, and
the “rope” (corda) that could belong to the “life preserver” (salvagente) or
could be a clothesline. Three waves of the sea are represented by the three
pairs of “Spuma ONDE” (foam WAVES). The foam is at the top of the
wave in a slightly rounded type that gives a sense of froth and bubbles.
The base of the wave is strong, represented by capital letters and a solid,
straight font. Under the first and last waves are adjectives (which,
according to Marinetti’s manifesto, should have been abolished) describing
31
Similarly to Drucker, John Milner writes about the fusion of visual and verbal in
both Futurist and French symbolist works. While these comments refer specifically
to symbolism in his article, they are certainly applicable to Futurism as well (idem
1976, 5).
320 Chapter Ten
how the sea appeals to different senses. The base of the wave is solid and
cold, like marble. The foam is fresh and energetic, transparent and
delicate. The consistency of the foam reminds the poet of a frappè and
subsequently leads to his self-definition as “gluttonous” (goloso).
Fig. [3]: C. Govoni, 1915 “bucato + bagni + ballo = primo amore”
Finally, the movement of the waves is rhythmic, indicated by the three

pairs of “Spuma ONDE” that are not simply horizontal but imply a sense
of vertical rising and falling through the connotation of the words
themselves and how they are positioned, as well as the different
typographies. The series of expanding and contracting “M”’s at the bottom
of the page creates the visual effect of a rocking motion, which is
underscored by the wavy hand-drawn sea that lies on top of them. The
auditory sense is stimulated by the visual representation of sound waves,
which also mimic the ebb and flow of the sounds of the sea. The viewer-
reader might even begin to feel slightly seasick after looking at the
unstable position of the boats on the sea, hearing, seeing, and feeling the
rhythm of the waves and remembering that there is a blinding sun-soap
directly overhead.
Through the brief analyses of these three works, I hope to have
demonstrated the multi-sensorial properties of parole in libertà and the
Futurist perception of how visual and verbal representation can evoke
various sensations and emotions. All three of these works are extremely
powerful in that they practically transport the reader-viewer into the world
they are depicting. We experience the shouts, stench, pushing, and shoving
of the subway when we look at Depero’s work just as the first page of
Govoni’s poem rocks us as if we are on a boat. These pieces do exactly
what Marinetti had wanted them to do: they represent the “essence of the
material” (essenza della materia) by stimulating the reader-viewer’s
senses and creating a simulated lived experience of that material or event.
Perhaps, then, we can find a resolution to the seemingly incongruent
aspects of Futurist theory and practice in their very coexistence. As a poet,
Marinetti wanted to remain faithful to what he believed was the true
function and value of the parole in libertà, that is, to represent the mutual
“intoxication” (inebbriarsi) of man and life, something that was only
possible through the force of language itself. He had an outstanding faith
in the power of words, and explained that communication between the
poet and the public should be the same as that between two old friends
who are able to decipher even the most hidden or complex meanings in
“half a word, a gesture, a glance” (mezza parola, un gesto, una
occhiata).32 He believed that words, if they are appropriately saturated
with a “taste of life” (sapore di vita), cannot help but evoke an entire
world of meaning for the reader. This extreme faith in language’s ability to
transmit the essence of its significance through a lived experience,
compared to Marinetti’s supposed nonchalance regarding the comprehension
of his works, reveals that he is proposing, perhaps unwittingly, a new
theory of aesthetics, knowledge, and the relationship between art, reality,
and reader-viewer. He is not concerned with the conscious, logical
understanding of words but rather with the personal, emotional meaning
that is transmitted through them to the reader via association, feeling, and
memory. His goal is to induce a lived experience in the viewer-reader that
32
Marinetti 1913.
322 Chapter Ten
connects him/her to art through life, and connects all readers-viewers

through a shared experience.33 The power that Marinetti attributed to the
word, therefore, is only fully effective in the reading and interpretation of
that word, since language attains its full depth and richness not just
through a literal definition but through the individual reader’s response
and interpretation.34
In looking at these works together, we have made sense of them—
perhaps to Marinetti’s dismay. Even if the works do remain somewhat
incomprehensible, our shared experience of viewing, reading, and
attempting to interpret them unite us as individual, subjective reader-
viewers, albeit perhaps at different levels of comprehension and
appreciation. While we look at parolibere works, we notice that their
exterior forms, words, or images, actually serve to “release and interpret
inner events”35 and we remember that the full extent of their meaning
comes simultaneously from their external presence as objects of art, as
well as from the emotions and memories that these objects trigger in each
of us as individuals. The result, therefore, is a sense of intersubjective
unity among the readers who are reacting to the same objective element
while developing their own subjective experience in relation to that
element:36 A unity created through disunity.
In the end, Futurism is indeed, as Ara Merjian describes it, a “bipolar”
movement. It is rife with contradictions both between its theoretical and
practical formulations, as well as within its very philosophy. It is only the
coexistence of these contradictory elements, however, that supports the
basis for the Futurist ideology. Marinetti’s extreme faith in the power of
language and the force of the material could only be validated through a
program that simultaneously expressed “contempt for the audience”
(disprezzo per il pubblico) alongside the importance of a multi-sensorial
reader-viewer experience.
33
This also relates to Dewey’s perception according to which “emotion is the
moving and cementing force. It selects what is congruous and dyes what is selected
with its color […]. It thus provides unity in and through the varied parts of an
experience” (idem 1934, 44).
34
Iser 1978, 21.
35
Auerbach 1953, 538.
36
Iser 1978, 25.
Works Cited
Auerbach, Erich. (1946) 1953. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in
Western Literature. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton:
Berman, Marshall. 1988. All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience
of Modernity. New York: Viking Penguin.
Curi, Fauto. 1995. Tra mimesi e metafora: studi su Marinetti e il
futurismo. Bologna: Pendragon.
Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience. New York: Penguin.
Drucker, Johanna. 1994. The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and
Modern Art, 1909-1923. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Fanelli, Giovanni and Ezio Godoli. 1988. Il Futurismo e la Grafica.
Milano: Edizioni di Comunità.
Govoni, Corrado. 1915. Rarefazioni e Parole in Libertà. Firenze: Libreria
editrice Salimbeni.
Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into
the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Iser, Wolfgang. 1978. Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response.
Jameson, Fredric. 2002. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of
the Present. London: Verso.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. 1909. “Manifesto del futurismo.” Milano:
Poligrafia Italiana.
—. 1911 “Manifesto dei drammaturghi futuristi.” Milano: Direzione del
movimento futurista.
—. 1912. “Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista.” Milano: Direzione
del movimento futurista.
—. 1913. “L’Immaginazione senza fili e le parole in libertà.” Milano:
Direzione del movimento futurista.
—. 1914. “Sintesi Futurista della Guerra.” Milano: Direzione del
Movimento futurista.
—. 1915. “1915 In quest’anno futurista.” Milano: Direzione del
Movimento futurista.
Milner, John. 1976. “On the Fusion of Verbal and Visual Media.”
Leonardo 9.1: 5-9.
Salaris, Claudia. 1995. “La rivoluzione in biblioteca.” In Edizioni
Elettriche: La rivoluzione editoriale e tipografica del Futurismo.
Edited by Claudia Salaris, 14-36. Roma: Edizioni De Luca.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HETEROCHRONIC VISIONS:
IMAG(IN)ING THE PRESENT
HEIKE POLSTER
New media technologies are changing the arts and our perception. Certain
still, singular images can now depict the passage of time, rather than just a
moment in time. The first aim of this essay is to discuss a few examples of
such images, namely the work of Canadian photographic artist Scott
McFarland and of German painter Jan Peter Tripp. Alongside an
examination of their shared method of visualizing temporality, the second
goal of this inquiry is an analysis of their use of heterochronic imaging
techniques. Through a close reading of both artists’ images, I will offer a
revised perspective on still, singular images as far as their depiction of
temporality is concerned while introducing the concept of heterochronicity
as a useful tool in this discussion. I will also argue that the scholarly (non-
fiction) writings of Tripp’s friend, the late German author W. G. Sebald,
deliver critical insights into the artist’s work, and further aid in deepening
the understanding of an artwork’s attempt to depict time’s passage. This
analysis of Tripp through the lens of Sebald is informed by Deleuzian
theory of perception, visuality, and temporality.
In characterizing Scott McFarland’s compositions, Clint Burnham
accurately describes his method as that of “photographing the
impossible.”1 A good example can be found in McFarland’s work
Orchard View with the Effect of Seasons (Variations # 1 and 2, see Fig.
[iv] and Fig. [v] in centerfold).2 In this work, McFarland displays half a
1
Burnham 2010, 211. Burnham claims that McFarland’s highly premeditated
compositions grew out of a particular brand of photoconceptualism developed in
Vancouver over the past three decades. Lee Henderson (2005, 50-56) adds that
McFarland’s work is similar to the work of artists such as Roy Arden, Arni
Haroldsson, and Evan Lee.
2
Reproduced in Eckmann and Koepnick 2006, 32-33.
326 Chapter Eleven
panorama of an overgrown garden. The viewer encounters a great variety

of bushes, trees, and vines, but may not immediately notice the visual
contradictions—a blossoming shrub, for example, is pictured next to a
bush that is about to drop its foliage. McFarland has shot the garden at
varying times of the year, each time capturing special qualities of light or
different phases of foliage. Constructed from a number of negatives and
then digitally processed, the images are “stitched” together, resembling the
technique of some Impressionists. According to Lee Henderson, the
arranged result produces the effect of a single image while “using daubs
of image to visualize a garden, not capture a single moment.”
Commenting on another photograph, Henderson observes that McFarland’s
images have “the depth of thought and respect for time that marks the
writing of Marcel Proust.”3 It is precisely this “reading” of the image, this
impulse to compare a literary text’s characteristics to the methods and
content of a visual artist’s work, that this article will explore in order to
probe what Henderson defines as the images’ “depth of thought and
respect for time”4 that is usually found in literary texts of a certain kind. I
have previously termed this shared approach “heterochronicity,” a
concept that is informed by both literary studies and visual studies.5 By
showing where their respective practices overlap even in the realm of the
visual, I hope to stimulate a discussion on the relationship between time
as a theme and the temporal logic of storytelling.
What is heterochronicity?
Heterochronicity is a representational mode chosen by writers and visual
artists that prolongs the present for critical reflection, enabling a reading
or a re-reading of the present.6 It displays three main characteristics, the
most significant of which is its unique representation of temporality.
Time, although a universal feature of narrative, is the topic of only a few.
The passage of time is the main topic of heterochonic artworks, both in
literature and in visual art. Heterochronicity relies on a tripartite division
of time into past, present, and future, showing different phases within the
same “frame.”7 Heterochronicity is not the same as simultaneity.
3
Henderson 2005, 55-56.
4
Henderson 2005, 55-56.
5
Polster, 2009.
6
Another excellent example of heterochronicity can be found in the artworks of
Barry Frydlender; see for instance Frydlender and Gallasi 2007.
7
By frame I mean the same pictorial space, but also the same field of vision
described by an observer in a written text.
Heterochronic Visions: Imag(in)ing the Present 327
Simultaneity describes things happening at the same time in different

places. Heterochronicity, on the other hand, denotes the bringing together
of temporally distinct objects, people, or situations within the same frame.
Secondly, heterochronic imaging includes an element of awareness of its
own representational practices. In the photographic work of Scott
McFarland, for example, we find what Henderson defines as a “slight
visual residue of the manufactured,” creating what Burnham describes as
“a not-quite-seamless whole.”8 Frequently, the artists of heterochronic
works set up a competition between two representational media in order
to critique the supposed veracity of certain means of representation. To
remain with McFarland’s artwork as an example, through digital
manipulation, photography, which has been previously thought of as a
medium capable of documenting only a single moment in time, becomes
capable of showing time’s passage. McFarland’s images turn photographic
practice on itself and thereby foster a reflection on representational
practices and media. This self-aware and self-critical element is a
trademark characteristic of heterochronic imaging. Lastly, heterochronic
imaging probes “presentness” by allowing the confrontation of different
presents. Heterochronic imaging thus has implications for our
understanding of both “historicity” and “historical awareness.”
I see heterochronic imaging as a response to a postmodern
understanding of temporality and history. Postmodernity is marked by a
total present. Progress is no longer an end in itself, and the concept of the
loaded term “future” as a thought system dictating our present existence
has come into question. The postmodern “end of history” approach
detaches time from the subject, its history, memory, and any meaningful
chrono-biolographical trajectory. Time, in the postmodern context, is
identified entirely with consumption and information. The general
relationship to time becomes one of impatience and a need for immediacy
and ever greater speed. Its immediacy and instantaneity create a virtual
present that is characterized by commodity culture and “real-time”
technology. The artists discussed in this article use heterochronicity as a
means to decelerate the postmodern experience of temporality by
inserting temporal distance within the present. As time lacks a
representational field of its own, we often rely on space to perceive it.
Heterochronic images make postmodern subjects aware of this reliance
upon space and use this relationship to create critical awareness of the
present moment. In this relational view of time, space can be defined,
following Doreen Massey, as a “trajectory, simultaneity of stories so
8
Henderson 2005, 55-56; Burnham 2010, 211.
328 Chapter Eleven
far.”9 Heterochronic images are narrative in nature. The heterochronic

present demands to be read and reread: its multi-layered temporality and
its associative relationship to other presents create a possibility of conflict,
variation, and non-conformity.
Painters created heterochronic images well before digital photography
existed. In fact, one of the writers of interest here is known, in part, for his
work with, not digital photographs, but an earlier photographic tradition;
some of Sebald’s works include reproductions of analog photos.
Moreover, with the increasing popularity of Sebald’s literary prose, his
work with and about Tripp has generated a fair amount of critical interest.
Sebald and Tripp were childhood friends: the former left Germany to
become a German professor and writer in England, the latter now lives in
France as a painter. Sebald and Tripp’s works frequently conceptualize
the themes of vision, art, and cultural history, as well as an intermingling
of political with literary and personal history. Before turning entirely to
literary writing (these later works are often considered hybrids of fiction
and non-fiction), Sebald published a number of essays on selected authors
and their works—and Tripp often painted portraits of the very same
people. Judging their respective artistic endeavors compatible, they
eventually began to create Unerzählt (Unrecounted—2003), a book
containing 33 of Tripp’s lithographs, and 33 poem-length texts, or
“miniatures,” as Sebald called his contributions. The book was published
after Sebald’s sudden death in 2001. Their work, however, overlapped
long before what was to be their first and last published collaboration.
One of Tripp’s paintings, for instance, appears in Sebald’s last narrative,
Austerlitz. In 1993, Sebald published an essay entitled “Wie Tag und
Nacht—Über die Bilder Jan Peter Tripps” (“As Day and Night—On the
Pictures of Jan Peter Tripps”) in Tripp’s Aufzählung der Schwierigkeiten
(Listing the Difficulties—1993).10 This article discusses nine of Tripp’s
paintings and provides a brief overview of the painter’s range of subjects
and skill.
So far, scholarship has acknowledged the similarities between the
artists’ topics and styles. Claudia Öhlschläger has provided an exceptionally
9
Massey 2005,12.
10
Tripp 1993, 57-62. Sebald subsequently included this article again in his own
Logis in einem Landhaus (Lodging in a Country House—Sebald 1998), as well as
in his and Tripp’s joint publication Unerzählt (Unrecounted—Sebald and Tripp
2003). Unerzählt was later translated by Michael Hamburger who changed the
article’s title into “As Day and Night, Chalk and Cheese—On the Pictures of Jan
Peter Tripp” (idem 2004, 85-95). All translations are by the author unless noted
otherwise.
enlightening analysis on the “mediality and poetics of trompe-l’oeil” in

Sebald and Tripp.11 The works of both the writer and the painter,
however, feature a topic seldom discussed—namely, the passage of time
and the image’s power to complicate, produce, and undermine its
perception. In the following inquiry into the use of visual material and
experiences as a means to explore the passing of time, I hope to draw out
Sebald’s “reading” in one case, and a “Sebaldian reading” in the other, of
two of Tripp’s paintings that thematize or negotiate temporality on some
level. I will argue that both images and texts can generate what we may
call “heterochronic visions.” I hope to uncover common methods used to
create a history of the present and to draw out the implications of Tripp
and Sebald’s representations of time.12
Andrea Köhler and Claudia Öhlschläger have, individually, investigated
the common themes in Sebald’s and Tripp’s work.13 Both scholars
compare Tripp’s and Sebald’s modes of aesthetic production, and use
Sebald’s meditation on his friend’s paintings, “As Day and Night,” to
arrive at a better understanding of the writer’s own artistic project.
Sebald’s article probes Tripp’s practices of intermedial representation and
trompe-l’oeil’s “éffet du réel” (“effect of real”). These practices,
Öhlschläger asserts, can be clearly identified as Sebald’s own method. As
Köhler and Öhlschläger are both literary critics, they discuss Tripp’s work
in hopes of gaining a better understanding of Sebald’s use of visual
material in his prose publications. Indeed, while pondering his friend’s
paintings, Sebald spells out some considerations about the process and
content of aesthetic production in general. These considerations have been
used to analyze Sebald’s prose works. I suggest here that it is just as
fruitful to reverse this procedure: rather than using Tripp to read Sebald, I
am interested in using Sebald’s reading practices to understand Tripp’s
work, thus showing how Sebald reads Tripp’s images and draws out their
narratives. Sebald only hints at Tripp’s methods of “presentification”
(Vergegenwärtigung), but in doing so, he points our attention to the way
in which time features in Tripp’s paintings.
11
Öhlschläger 2007. Trompe L’oeil (literally “deceive the eye”) refers to an artistic
technique that uses realistic imagery to create optical illusions, often three-
dimensional.
12
I have approached this issue in my book The Aesthetics of Passage (see Polster
2009). This article is an expanded study on the topic.
13
Öhlschläger 2007; for Köhler’s article (“Penetrating the Dark”) see Sebald and
Tripp 2004, 97-102.
330 Chapter Eleven
Often labeled with the terms “real” and “-ism,”14 Tripp’s influences
can be traced to his art education at the Freie Kunstschule Stuttgart and his
studies of sculpture with Rudolf Daudert at the Stuttgart Academy. The
co-founder of the Vienna School of Phantastic Realism, Rudolf Hausner,
was Tripp’s mentor until 1972.15 Tripp’s work received prestigious
scholarships, such as the DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst)
and the Studienstiftung stipends. His work as a painter and stage designer
for the Staatstheater Stuttgart earned him national recognition and an
ongoing presence in German art galleries dating back to 1971. Wendelin
Niedlich, whose gallery was first to display the drawings and etchings of
twenty-six-year-old Tripp, also owned a small publishing house. In 1972
he issued Kunstkatalog containing nineteen of Tripp’s pictorial works as
well as fourteen brief essays authored by his friends, and two texts by the
painter himself. All subsequent catalogue publications—Die Kehrseite der
Dinge (The Reverse Side of Things—1984), Die Aufzählung der
Schwierigkeiten (Listing the Difficulties—1986), and Ein 17. Januar (A
January 17—1993)—contain texts by the painter’s friends. Tripp
frequently includes his own texts in his catalogues. For instance, Ich male
nicht, was ich sehe. Ich male, was ich nicht sehe (I Do Not Paint What I
See. I Paint What I Don’t See—2003) consists of reproductions of the
paintings featured in one of Tripp’s exhibitions, but the text provided—
which stands in no clear connection to the images—consists solely of a
dialogue authored by the painter.16 In his other publications, the texts’
styles and genres are varied. Some are poetry, some are prose, and they
raise questions of genre and artistic production. Tripp’s early work, much
of which is featured in Kunstkatalog, are mostly etchings that deal with
local concerns, for instance portraits of the former Bavarian prime minister
Franz Josef Strauss. Tripp’s recent work is predominantly oil or acrylic on
canvas.
14
“Reality” is a troubled term, and if at all possible, the discussion of what
constitutes reality shall be bypassed here. Generally, the photograph is considered
“accurate,” in that it depicts what can be seen “as is.” For a painter, an accurate
portrait, a portrait “as the person is,” is not only a technical achievement. The
highest degree of likeness in painting is often a matter of factoring in what the
photograph factors out: the knowledge about the object or person depicted. Despite
their visual likeness to real objects, Peter Renz calls Tripp’s paintings “abstract” in
the true sense. Only photography, he argues, “knows accuracy as powerlessness. It
does not need to know anything about the person depicted. For the painter this is
essential: the more he knows about someone, the more accurately he can depict
him. This has nothing to do with realism” (idem 1984, 127).
15
Hollander 1985.
16
Tripp 2003.
Tripp’s paintings show the characteristics of realist, photo-realist,

surrealist, and trompe l’oeil artworks. Naturally, though, none of these
categorizations exhaustively defines the range of his work. His pictures
display the complex qualities normally attributed to photo-realism. They
are painstakingly detailed and show even the smallest dimple on the
otherwise smooth surface of a pebble. His portraits include every wrinkle,
stubble, or eyelash. An appropriation of reality is not only part of his
method: it is, indeed, the purpose of many of his paintings.
I have chosen to discuss two of Tripp’s works: Déjà vu oder der
Zwischenfall (Déja vu or the Occurrence), a work about which Sebald
wrote in “As Day and Night,” as well as Time Goes On.17 I find it
surprising that the latter painting is not featured in Sebald’s article, as it
demonstrates very clearly the conclusions Sebald draws about Tripp’s
work. Déjà vu oder der Zwischenfall was selected because Sebald
identified in it a poetics that he himself employed in his prose narratives.
Time Goes On offers itself for interpretation because the passing of time is
specifically made the topic of the picture. My analysis of the images will
aim at probing philosophical concepts of time and history, as well as the
act of seeing. Furthermore, I am interested in how these images challenge
representational practices. I argue that Tripp’s and McFarland’s images
rely on visual elements that carry a kind of “time-tag” from different
periods—elements that must be worked into the content of the image since
it is intended to visualize the process of representation.
Tripp and Deleuze

I do not paint what I see. I paint what I do not see.
—Jan Peter Tripp18
John Marks draws a parallel between Sebald’s prose and the theoretical
works of Gilles Deleuze, whose interest in perception, visual representation,
and temporality he sees as the backdrop for Sebald’s literary method.19
17
Both Déjà vu oder der Zwischenfall and Time Goes On are reproduced in Tripp
1984.
18
This was the title to a miniature publication accompanying Tripp’s 2003
exhibition at the Kultur- und Museumszentrum Schloß Glatt, a publication that
Tripp jokingly calls a “Bêtise” (foolishness) in his handwritten book dedication to
me; it captures in his own amusingly lighthearted tone Tripp’s aesthetic method of
handling images and visual perception to challenge common modes of visual
representation.
19
Marks 2005, 89.
332 Chapter Eleven
Indeed, many similarities warrant a comparison, and in what follows, I

would like to expand the comparison between Sebald and Deleuze to
include an investigation of the core characteristics, topics, and methods of
Tripp’s paintings as well. I will focus on Deleuze’s concepts of “genetic
perception” and “archaeology of the present” to illuminate Tripp’s
heterochronic images. Deleuze’s work on vision and temporality is
extensive. As Temenuga Trifonova argues, Deleuze’s project in the two
volumes of Cinema (1983; 1985) was to show how film has made it
possible to surpass the human condition by abolishing subjectivity as a
privileged image in the material world.20 One of the problems with
Deleuze’s account of different kinds of images is that despite entitling his
work on images Cinema I and II, he does not specifically mean
cinematographic images when speaking of perception-images, affection-
images, action-images and time-images. Moreover, Deleuze never
explains what is unique to the movement-image (which is the focus of
Cinema I) and the time-image (the focus of Cinema II) as opposed to these
two kinds of images in everyday perception. In my understanding, he aims
at arguing that some images are perceived as if they were real, actual
things, and others are perceived as mimesis.
Yet despite these critiques, his understanding of images delivers a
meaningful account of a specific type of vision and perception and their
relation to temporality. Deleuze posits that cinema is capable of creating
inhuman perceptions of time, space, and movement. It goes beyond the
representation of an actual event and is therefore “untimely.” Art, in
Deleuze’s view, frees the “anarchy” of experience from the restrictions of
method and form, and returns us to the “genetic” aspects of life. “Genetic
perception” is the kind of perception that certain artists take beyond
human perception (Deleuze’s example is Dziga Vertov’s cinema).21
According to Marks, such perception consists of the “differential of
perception, in the form of the ‘cine-eye.’”22 The cine-eye is capable of
“universal variation” in that it can “connect any point in the universe with
any other point, in any temporal order.”23 Marks quotes Deleuze in
arguing that the cine-eye alone can capture “genuine ‘movement,’” which
implies a “plurality of centers and a ‘superposition’ of perspectives, a
‘tangle’ of points of view, and a ‘coexistence of moments.’”24 But the
cine-eye is not only found in visual art; we can identify the very same
20
Trifonova 2004, 134.
21
Deleuze1986, 80-85.
22
Marks 2005, 94 (emphasis in original).
23
Marks 2005, 94.
24
Marks 2005, 94; see also Deleuze 1994, 55-56.
impetus to represent multiple perspectives and temporalities in literature.

In his article on Sebald, Marks identifies the author’s intention of taking
perception back to the “genetic” state through an analysis of the narrator’s
interest in the worldview of Thomas Browne in The Rings of Saturn
(1995). Marks explains that in Sebald’s novel the narrator “functions as a
conductor or transformer,” granting the reader an access into the
complexities of “‘genetic’ space-time in which individuals, landscapes and
events enter into a new series of disjunctive syntheses.”25 In painting, a
mediating instance facilitating access to the world of the image, the
“‘genetic’ space-time” of the artwork, is much less distinctive. “Genetic”
perception contests the core concept of representation, which tends to
remain with the “domain of the ‘historical’, rather than the ‘untimely’, and
gives a false perspective.”26 Sebald, Marks claims, counteracts this
falsification of perspective by moving towards an “‘inhuman’ form of
perception,” aiming at the liberation of “inhuman, impersonal ‘percepts’
and ‘affects.’”27 Sebald does so by stressing what Öhlschläger has called
the “differential of representation,” a method she identifies both in
Sebald’s work and in Tripp’s.28 The differentials of representation and of
perception are linked together by an altered way of looking—by
heterochronic vision, a vision that perceives and actively produces
multiple temporalities within the same frame. The differential of
representation is constituted by a visual staging of heterochronicity. Only
an inhuman perception could determine an “inhuman time,” a time that,
according to Marks, “simultaneously makes the present pass and preserves
the past itself. There are, therefore, already, two possible time-images, one
grounded in the past, the other in the present. Each is complex and is valid
for time as a whole.”29 Ultimately, Deleuze argues against organizing
perceptions of time to fix things from a specific perspective. The
cinematographic image of the post-war era, in particular, becomes
“legible” in its need for an effort of memory and imagination. It contains a
“coalescence” of what Marks calls the “perceived with the remembered,
the imagined, and the known.”30 These efforts of memory and imagination
are reflected and elicited by the image through creating a composite of an
image of perception and a memory image with an image of
epistemological content. Deleuze draws on St. Augustine’s Confessions to
25
Marks 2005, 94.
26
Marks 2005, 94-95.
27
Marks 2005, 95.
28
Öhlschläger 2007, 25.
29
Marks 2005, 98.
30
Marks 2005, 98.
334 Chapter Eleven
conceptionalize how all three temporal phases can form a comprehensive

presence within the present:
There is a present of the future, a present of the present and a present of

the past, all implicated in the event, rolled up in the event, and thus
simultaneous and inexplicable. From affect to time: A time is revealed
inside the event, which is made from the simultaneity of these three
implicated presents, from these de-actualized peaks of present. It is the
possibility of treating the world or life, or simply a life or an episode, as
one single event which provides the basis for the implication of presents.
An accident is about to happen, it happens, it has happened; but equally it
is at the same time that it will take place, has already taken place and is in
the process of taking place […].31
Moving back to our consideration of Tripp’s art, then, we can say that his
work is collecting, as Kurt Weidemann has it, the “model’s history,”
necessitating that the passage of time create a set of object-related (or
person-related) memories. In painting, these memories can be depicted as
an object or person at an earlier stage of their existence, and also as images
or image elements that are associated with a certain object or person.
According to Massey, setting them side by side traces the “trajectory, a
simultaneity of stories so far,”32 an awareness of change and possibly, a
narrative line that creates a relationship between the distinct temporalities.
The passage of images:

Time goes on
In the center of Tripp’s Time goes on (see Fig. [vi] in centerfold), on a flat
white surface that appears to be a table, there is a white porcelain cup that
holds two bird feathers.33 One feather is entirely black, the other, slightly
smaller one, is dark brown. A drawing pen rests across the rim of the
cup.34 Propped up against the wall, we can see a large square piece of
paper, possibly a piece of canvas. On the left, behind the blank canvas,
there is a postcard with a drawing of a smiling boy, dressed in ornate
clothes, holding a bird in his right hand. The postcard is of the painting
Giovanni de’ Medici as a Child (1545) by Agnolo Bronzino. To the right
31
Deleuze 1989, 100 (emphasis in the original).
32
Massey 2005, 12.
33
Reproduced in Tripp 1984, 12.
34
The German word for drawing pen, Zeichenfeder, further underscores the
relationship of the pen to the feathers.
of the cup, placed in front of the canvas, we can see a postcard of a black
and white photograph of Alfred Hitchcock by Phillippe Halsman, a black
bird perched on the cigar in his mouth.35 The image, which resembles a
promotional postcard for Hitchcock’s thriller The Birds (1963), is resting
on its side with a pinhole visible at the very far right of the image.
The two feathers resemble the birds in the pictures: the larger, black
feather looks like those on Hitchcock’s slightly tattered bird; the smaller
one resembles the bird’s feathers in the boy’s hand in Bronzino’s painting.
Each feather functions as a souvenir, a memory object, “plucked” from the
past. Thus, Time goes on can be read as an arrangement of realistic
elements and quotations from other images, the feathers functioning as
visual quotations taken out of their original context. The original context
is, in both cases, provided within the painting itself. The feathers are
arranged in the middle of the painting, inside of a cup that may well be
used for holding painting or drawing utensils, so as to give them presence,
not only as “objective” proof that the past existed. They also function as
tools for and contents of the production of present and new images. The
empty canvas behind them frames the feathers and part of the cup; the
larger feather casts a shadow onto the canvas, thereby suggesting that
some sort of image-creation is presently in action.
The “creative moment” showcased in this image lies in the artificial
creation of something “image-like” that can unite an arrangement of
objects and visual quotes. Here, the role of the viewer is defined more
clearly than the role of the painter. He or she is responsible for creating
meaning by “decoding” the relationship between the depicted elements.
Instead of “encountering” the composed image, Helmut Heißenbüttel
observes, the beholder must “ask the subject matter of the image” to
understand it; where the object does not transpose, the beholder “is
provoked to reinterpret it.”36 This process requires time, and the painting’s
title Time goes on can be understood to expand beyond the time spent for
the creation of the painting to include the time invested by the viewer to
look at it and understand it. The present object, the cup holding the
feathers, is made up of image quotations from the past and already casts a
shadow that is to become a new picture. Here, Tripp makes the process of
artistic creation the content of his work. As the title suggests, disparate
phases of time are related, connected, and made possible by the ceaseless
passage of time. Carefully staged by the painter, the past exists as a model,
an object, or memory image; the present exists as the act of working with
35
Halsman 1983.
36
Heißenbüttel 1984, 7.
336 Chapter Eleven
past image objects (by placing them visible before us); and the future—as
the shadow that the present object casts upon an empty canvas. The title of
the painting denotes the passage of time as a ceaseless forward pull,
effectively equating it with the process of artistic production. In other
words, Time goes on is a painting about the production of aesthetic
images. It suggests the necessity of art to reflect upon prior images, and
displays as its content this very practice of reflection. Through visual
quotations from older images and the arrangement as “work-of-image-
making-in-progress,” Time goes on renders the process of reflection and
artistic representation visible. By setting older representations of an object
within a framed present moment, the artist is imaging the object as
remembered. The coalescence of objects drawn from different moments in
time creates a sense of retrieval or recovery. Thus, an unnoticed or
undernoticed moment—“a moment,” as Peter Renz observes, “which we
don’t know, because it does not fill our consciousness”37—can be re-
presented in art after it has passed. Tripp’s image uncovers that which
“would remain buried, because it lies behind the look of normality and
everyday occurrence.”38
Deleuze calls such an image “archeological, stratigraphic, tectonic,”
arguing that we are not “taken back to prehistory (there is an archaeology
of the present), but to the deserted layers of our time which bury our own
phantoms; to the lacunary layers which we juxtaposed according to
variable orientations and connections.”39 Similar to Deleuze’s formulation
of an “archeology of the present,” Renz terms Tripp’s artistic process an
“archeology of reality.”40 It is a willful process that revisits past presents
by feeding familiar material into passage. This practice of “archeology”
aims to establish traces of the past as material for present and future
images. Such an undertaking results in a heterochronic image. Reality, as
it is represented here, is made up of a multitude of temporal phases. By
showcasing the passage of time and through time, heterochronic imaging
becomes its own content as a representation of the process of representation.
The vision of the present, as shown in Time goes on, is one of the “future
past.” The painting does not inscribe a predetermined fixed image, but
rather its opposite. Tripp is making the future visible by positing it—as an
absence—in the center of prior images and a (staged) present of
perception. The empty frame within the frame speaks to openness and
possibility.
37
Tripp 1984, 129.
38
Tripp 1984, 129.
39
Deleuze 1989, 243-44.
40
Tripp 1984, 129.
Deleuze’s approach to archaeological images is greatly indebted to

Henri Bergson’s theory of duration, in which durée represents the
simultaneity of perception and memory.41 Bergson analyzes the
phenomenon of déjà vu, which he sees as the most authentic expression of
the true nature of our mental life, and which consists of the “automatic
preservation of the past in the present.”42 As Trifonova points out, the
appearance of the time-image in cinema, according to Deleuze, has
“revealed the true nature of time as a continuous forking into impossible
presents and not necessarily true pasts.”43 The Deleuzian time-image can
therefore be understood as a form of déjà vu. We feel as though we have
experienced something before, but we are unable to trace the experience to
our own past. Our memories appear to have been lost or it might occur to
us that we are remembering someone else’s past.44 The concept and
characteristics of a déjà vu can be compared to the content, method, and
process of one of Tripp’s paintings in particular: Déjà vu oder der
Zwischenfall (see Fig. [vii] in centerfold).45 The second part of the title,
Der Zwischenfall (The Occurrence) evokes a complication of temporal
experience: what “occurred” is singled out as a discrete incident; in the
case of this painting, something lost has been returned. Time features in
Déjà vu as the passage between the present moment of perception and the
past of art history. The same idea is presented in Time goes on in the form
of older artistic images, such as Bronzino’s painting and the postcard of
Hitchcock. Similarly, the scene depicted in Déjà vu features an earlier
work of Tripp’s, a large scale painting called Déclaration de guerre
(Declaration of War), which shows a worn pair of black leather women’s
shoes.46
In Déjà vu, a woman is sitting in front of a painting with her back
turned towards the viewer. Her right shoe is missing, and she has slung her
right foot around the back of her left ankle. On her left foot, she is still
wearing a black leather pump that resembles the pair in the painting.
Outside of the woman’s field of vision, in the foreground of the painting, a
dog is facing the viewer, a wooden sandal lying between its front paws.
Further exploration of the painting’s preoccupation with shoes reveals that
the leather strap of the right shoe in Déclaration de guerre is unclasped,
which is precisely the shoe that the woman in Déjà vu oder Der
41
Bergson 2001.
42
Trifonova 2004, 134. See also Deleuze 1989, 98-99.
43
44
45
Reproduced in Tripp 1984.
46
Reproduced in Tripp 1993, 52-53.
338 Chapter Eleven
Zwischenfall is missing. Sebald takes a closer look at both paintings in “As

Day and Night,” telling the story of the painting’s depiction. According to
what Tripp told him, in the painting process the woman originally “held
this shoe taken off in her left hand, then it lay on the floor on the right,
next to the chair, and finally it had wholly vanished.”47 Déjà vu oder Der
Zwischenfall stages the loss and recovery of the shoe by putting it on
display as the content of a painting within a painting, as a lack in the
woman’s present, and as the recovered item brought into the picture by the
dog. Based on Tripp’s explanations, Sebald suggests that “an X-ray would
show that earlier on [the dog] had once stood at the centre of the picture.
Meanwhile he has been out of doors and has brought in a sort of wooden
clog, from the fifteenth century.” Sebald identifies the source of the
wooden clog as Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (1434—see Fig. [viii] in
centerfold).48
According to Sebald, when a present lack became apparent, the dog
brought the clog into the picture “from a past world because for him there
is no difference between the fifteenth and the twentieth century.”49 Sebald
presents the process of remembrance as an act of quoting or
recontextualizing images from the past by incorporating the quotation into
“a text (or painting) by montage.” In order to make sense of an image or
text, the visual quotations in Tripp’s paintings compel us, as Sebald
observes, “to probe our knowledge of other texts and pictures and our
knowledge of the world.” Hence Déclaration de guerre appears in Déjà vu
oder der Zwischenfall not merely as a quotation but as “a mediating
component of representation.”50 The visual quotations in Tripp’s paintings,
citing art history as well as his own work catalogue, function not as
“stand-ins” for meaning and therefore as symbols, but rather as pictorial
metaphors. They generate meanings by being part of a representational
process, at times specifically to show the structure of this representational
process itself. Déjà vu oder der Zwischenfall stages the necessity of
“reading” the image and thus temporalizes vision to the same extent that it
visualizes temporality. In other words, it gestures toward making the
reading in and of the present. The need for a vision that “reads” the image
at the same time as it is seen, classifies Déjà vu as an archeological image
in the Deleuzian sense. The visualizing of temporality functions as the
dynamic between the three implicated presents within the painting. The
depiction of temporality is tied to an object or visual quotation from the
47
Sebald 2004, 94.
48
Sebald 2004, 95.
49
Sebald 2004, 95.
50
Sebald 2004, 93-94.
past that appears in the present: the shoe in Déclaration, the woman’s lost
shoe, is connected to the shoe in van Eyck’s painting, as that one becomes
“imported into” Déjà vu.
Within the framework of artistic production, the heterochronic image
brings temporally distinct objects together in the seeming unity of a single
pictorial space. A chronological sequence of time-dependent images can
therefore be depicted simultaneously as a single image through an
imagination that unites them. The specific achievement of this creative
imagination is thus to image the invisible, namely the passage of time,
within a single picture. Tripp’s painting’s entire scope, however, does not
become apparent at once. The viewer has to “read” the image, which
works through a decoding of the heterochronic layering within the image.
Yet according to Deleuze, the decoding process is already built into
perception:
In the sense that reading is a function of the eye, a perception of

perception, a perception which does not grasp perception without also
grasping its reverse, imagination, memory, or knowledge. In short, what
we call reading of the visual image is the stratigraphic condition, the
reversal of the image, the corresponding act of perception which constantly
converts the empty into the full, right side into its reverse.51
This process of reading an image takes time. “By spending it,” Sebald
declares, “we enter into the time recounted and into the time of culture.”52
The viewer’s imaginative investment becomes an integral part of cultural
practice and constitutes the “differential of perception” necessary to
understand the temporal nature of specific artistic images. By stressing the
relationship between objects of different temporal phases represented
within the same heterochronic setting, Sebald and Tripp underline the
importance of questioning the methods of representation, thereby trying to
foster an awareness of the temporality of one’s surroundings.
This logic also applies to McFarland’s works. I would like now to
draw out the main characteristics of Tripp’s paintings and extend them to
McFarland’s oeuvre. First, both artists create an alienating illusion, which
invites the use of imagination, thus exposing a representational system that
runs counter to reality. In other words, their works dissolve an artificially
static and “frozen” image of the present. Second, these techniques of
alienation have a focus that reflects on mediality itself and not only on
content. The photo-realistic manner of painting in Tripp’s artworks
51
Deleuze 1989, 245.
52
Sebald 2004, 93.
340 Chapter Eleven
generates an intermedial tension between photography and painting that

causes the question of referentiality to shift, as Öhlschläger states, “from
the content level to the formal level.” Further, the “represented
competition provokes and enhances the question of the status of the degree
of realism, and turns it into a prioritized matter of reflection.”53 In Tripp’s
case, photography as a reproductive medium is brought into painting.
Öhlschläger lays out how the painter “makes visible the differential of
representations” of reality:
In the trickery of the eye inherent in these images, which reflect mediality,
the differential of perception itself is shown. We can speak of “showing”
because Jan Peter Tripp includes so-called “lucky mistakes” as moments of
difference into his paintings, mistakes that spark the imagination and
suggestion of the beholder. In these divergences, the ambiguity of the act
of perception materializes.54
These “lucky mistakes” are also apparent in McFarland’s work. They

consist, for instance (as demonstrated earlier), of showing one tree in
bloom and the other losing its leaves. By inserting a degree of ambiguity
into the act of perception, the viewer is invited to see things as if for the
first time. This ambiguity, Öhlschläger explains, is activated by an
alienating effect that functions on the basis of a condition that Maurice
Merleau-Ponty expressed in L’Oeil et L’Esprit (1961) when contemplating
Paul Cézanne’s paintings. Objects are not represented according to the
standards of human knowledge, but rather according to their manner of
appearance as they should be thought ontologically as perpetually
changing. Thus, an alienating effect such as the different stages of foliage
in McFarland’s pictures leads viewers to see things as if for the first time
and to look even closer.
A recurring theme in the two artists’ works is the arrangement of
objects and people into the same pictorial space that could not readily be
in the same place at the same time. Hence, the realism in their artworks
follows the formal goals of trompe l’oeil, but more than tricking one’s eye
into believing that one is looking at a real object, these paintings and
photographs trick the mind into accepting impossible constellations of
objects. In other words, the “work” of art for Tripp and McFarland is to
image achronic and anachronistic relationships within the same space by
representing realistic elements. Tripp calls this creation “the creative
instant” (bildnerische[r] Augenblick) and “the focal point of the soul”
53
54
(Schwerpunkt der Seele), denoting the painter’s intention—and more

importantly, the engagement of the viewer—in the act of meaning
production.55 The creative instant, set up by the artist and perceived by the
viewer, sets the stage for critical reflection. In general, photographs and
Realist paintings depict objects and people in a manner that leaves little
doubt about their relationship to the present in the picture. Tripp’s
paintings, by contrast, exhibit a high degree of “thematic complication.”56
Tripp utilizes the most precise references to reality imaginable, such as the
depiction of minute details, although abstract concepts frequently feature
in his art. Weidemann observes that Tripp’s work is indeed “abstract
painting in the true meaning of the word: it shows more than the visible
discloses. It collects the model’s history.”57 Collecting “the model’s
history” would consist of showing the model’s past and integrating it into
the present created by the image. Indeed, I view this very procedure as a
fundamental characteristic of heterochronic imaging.
Heterochronic imaging makes the contradiction of the present visible,
thinking and perceiving the present at the same time becomes possible.
The present can become a “timespace” of perception and experience only
when the mental activity combines the present of perception with the
present of memory and the present of anticipation. It is an attempt at
systematizing different levels of time, of external semantic timeframes as
well as preset temporal concepts. Heterochronicity can be thus thought of
as a collage of different aspects of temporal consciousness and therefore
can be viewed as a discrete aesthetic order of time. It is, however, as any
other model of time, figurative, and yet another metaphor shaping our
experience. Thus it is as much a narrative model as it is a temporal model.
By the convenient abstractions of ordinary life and philosophical
debates, we are forced to image our experience of time in a medium we
deem homogenous: in space. The heterochronic image of time, by
contrast, bridges the gap between the assumed internality of time and the
externality of space within a medium that could be both. Heterochronicity
runs counter to a widespread assumption that space can only be treated in
the images and time only in the text. The images discussed in this study
pry open the prior complementary juxtaposition by prioritizing the
question of temporality to that of intermediality. Rather than perpetuating
assumptions about space and time that philosophy and everyday life have
posited and questioned for a long time, the heterochronic perspective,
which is, at heart, a spatio-temporal perspective, necessitates a rethinking
55
Quoted in Tripp 1984, 129.
56
Sebald 2004, 88.
57
Weidemann 1993, 96.
342 Chapter Eleven
of our working definitions of space and time. Space, in this view, is not the
sphere in which possibility comes into existence. Rather, it is a set of
relationships enabling the ongoing process of actualization from the virtual
to the actual. Time, then, is the creative power that is—not has—the
capacity to realize this process. Heterochronic images can lead us to
question, not without some hesitation, whether we can continue to think of
time as a dimension when it is a non-homogenous complex matrix that
includes the observer.
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—. 1998. Logis in einem Landhaus: Über Gottfried Keller, Johann Peter
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einem Nachwort von Andrea Köhler. München: Hanser.
—. 2004. Unrecounted: 33 Poems by W. G. Sebald & 33 Lithographs by
Jan Peter Tripp. With essays by W. G. Sebald and Andrea Köhler and
two additional poems by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Translated by
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Tripp, Jan Peter. 1972. Kunstkatalog: 19 Bilder und 16 Texte. Edited by
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—. 1984. Die Kehrseite der Dinge: Bilder aus zwölf Jahren. Edited by
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—. 1986. Ein 17. Januar: 30 Aquarelle von Landschaften aus dem Elsaß
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van Eyck, Jan. 1434. The Arnolfini Portrait.Oil on oak, 82.2 x 60 cm.
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AFTERWORD
X/AND:
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND
MARIANNE HIRSCH
For the formulation “Image and Text” that organizes this volume, W. J. T.
Mitchell substitutes the challenging, if unpronounceable, “Image X Text.”
With the “X” he opens a set of questions that, in spite of their diversity of
subject matter, are taken up suggestively by each of the illuminating
essays that follow. The unpronounceability is appropriate. How to analyze
the relation of text X/and image for the future? The essays in this volume
struggle against the limits of verbal expression. And yet, the hybrid, and
often awkward, terms they coin are both symptomatic and useful. What is
more, they point to the future toward which the book is gesturing: a digital
future that has neither superseded nor forgotten the sensory world of the
analog out of which it emerges and whose practices and strategies it
somehow perpetuates. What are the genealogies of the future that this
volume, and the “X” that inaugurates it, traces? And how can they be
written?
Literary and visual “conjunctures” are the subject of the essays,
according to the editors, with “conjuncture” designating a critical form of
undoing traditional or representative encounters between images and texts.
These encounters produce something else that is hard to name—“difficult
articulations,” in the terms of Jacobs and Dolmage. They produce “photo-
textual memories” (Walsh) and “migratory aesthetics” or “immigwriting,”
marking the “imagetext turn in the novel” (Amihay). For a number of the
contributors, “intermedial” imagetexts, and comics in particular, are
privileged media of trauma, allowing secrets and “postsecrets” to emerge,
as identities are textually and graphically “(re)constructed” in the aftermath
of trauma (Pulda, Rodrigue).
As writing, especially poetry, encounters the plural dimensions of place
and space, the poetic subject becomes not just migratory but “hetero-
positional” (Bremmer). Language is broken down to the orthographic
346 Afterword
dimension of the letter, the letter “O,” for example, in Arslan’s reading of
Yoko Tawada and Paul Celan. Yet at the threshold of the verbal, language
becomes material, visual, multisensory, revealing the “typo-topographic
space of the page” (Arslan). But in Ledesma’s account of avant-garde
poetry across the space of the twentieth century, digital and analog media
are “de-differentiated,” they “commingle” and older technologies are
remediated and repurposed in newer forms. This insight about the
continuity between the analog and the digital is reinforced in Takehana’s
essay on Burroughs’s “cut-ups,” which traces the genealogy of database-
arranged writings back to the collage and the cut-up. Several of these
essays chart the verbal/visual experience of the digital environment back
to futurism (Takakjian) and the early-twentieth-century avant-garde, in
fact. But others—and here terms again need to be newly created out of old,
repurposed ones—remain in the “heterochronic” vision of the present
(Polster). “Heterochronicity” challenges the punctual character of the still
image, as past, present, and future appear in the same frame in the images
of Scott McFarland and Jan Peter Tripp. For Polster, it is the
“heterochronic” that enables a way of “imag(in)ing the present” and
exposing its contradictions.
What are we to make of this lexicon of composite terms, using dashes,
slashes, and parentheses, that mark the “visual verbal turn” (Amihay) and
its future? No matter how deep a genealogy of word/image encounters in
analog or digital space we can trace, the objects that emerge do demand a
particular kind of visual/verbal literacy, a method of combined
looking/reading that produces a close encounter, of the third kind, one
might say. This encounter is inherently both hybrid and divided,
combining reading in symbolic, and looking in indexical and imaginary
registers. As the essays perform and analyze these shifts in register and the
visual/verbal objects that are constructed through them, they find
themselves hampered by the purely verbal medium of academic discourse
and the medium of the book in which text is enhanced by illustrations
included on the page or in the color insert and referred to by numbered
figures. And so—clearly—do I in this afterword. And they also find, as
Mitchell argues as well, that in the encounter of two media, the third form
that emerges cannot easily be named. Conjoined, as they are in these
essays, texts and images do not remain separate but are mutually
implicated, interrelated, and translated. We can write about their encounter
using familiar terms, or we can try to account for this “third” that,
together, they forge. And if we do that, our language will be strained and
distorted. Perhaps we need to find different media for reflecting on such
conjunctures—layered, composite digital or analog media on the page or
X/And: Close Encounters of the Third Kind 347
screen, embodied performances or live discussions, with films, images,

slides, and sound in three-dimensional space. Words alone will never
satisfy, even if they are supplemented by illustrations, as the essays in this
volume are.
But the lexicon collectively developed here does more than mark a
moment of frustration with writing as medium. By stitching terms together
to account for image/text conjunctures, it gestures to a pedagogy and a
politics as well: a pedagogy toward dealing with the difficulties and
discomforts created by new forms and a politics that might emerge from
the practice of looking and reading relationally, connectively,
contrapuntally. And from doing so with an eye to the future.
CONTRIBUTORS
Ofra Amihay is a doctoral candidate at New York University, working on

text and image relations in Modern Hebrew novels. Her interests include
Hebrew and Jewish literature, German literature, visual culture, text and
image relations, children’s literature, and questions of identity and gender.
She has taught Modern Hebrew at NYU, and has published in Prooftexts
and Teoryah uviqoret (Theory and Criticism). Her article on comics
representations of the Holocaust and the Berlin Wall is forthcoming in the
Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. In spring 2011 she was a fellow at
the Franz Rosenzweig Center of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Gizem Arslan was born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey. She is currently a
doctoral candidate in the Department of German Studies at Cornell
University. Her dissertation project explores orthographic symbols as sites
of multilingual and intermedial writing in post–World War II European
literatures.
Magnus Bremmer is a doctoral candidate in literature at the Research

School of Aesthetics at Stockholm University, Sweden. His research
project inquires into the relations between photography and text in
nineteenth-century Scandinavia, examining the various strategies aiming
to control the viewer’s attention before the abundant images of the still-
new photographic form. Bremmer also writes literary and photographic
criticism, amongst others for the Swedish broadsheet Svenska Dagbladet.
Jay Dolmage is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of

Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. He is the editor of the Canadian Journal of
Disability Studies. His essays on rhetoric and disability studies have
appeared in a few different journals and edited collections, including
Cultural Critique, Rhetoric Review, and the collection Rhetorica in
Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods & Methodologies (University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2010). He also recently edited a special issue on
Disability Studies for the journal Open Words.
350 Contributors
Marianne Hirsch is William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and

Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the
Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She is the Vice-President of
the Modern Language Association of America. Her work engages theories
and practices of cultural memory and transmission in literature and visual
culture, particularly from the perspective of gender and social difference.
Her most recent books are Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in
Jewish Memory, written with Leo Spitzer (University of California Press,
2010); Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory, co-
edited with Nancy K. Miller (Columbia University Press, 2011); and The
Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the
Holocaust (Columbia University Press, 2012).
Dale Jacobs is an Associate Professor of English Language, Literature,

and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada. He
is the author of the forthcoming book, Graphic Encounters: Comics and
the Sponsorship of Multimodal Literacy (Continuum, 2013), the editor of
The Myles Horton Reader (University of Tennessee Press, 2003), and of A
Way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion in Composition Studies, co-edited
with Laura Micciche (Boynton/Cook, 2003). His articles have appeared in
journals such as JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, College
Composition and Communication, English Journal, Composition Studies,
Biography, and the Journal of the Assembly of Expanded Perspectives on
Learning. In addition, he is the editor of North by North Wit: An
Anthology of Canadian Humour (Black Moss Press, 2003) and Ice: New
Writing on Hockey (Spotted Cow Press, 1997).
Eduardo Ledesma is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Romance

Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. He holds advanced
degrees in both structural engineering and Hispanic and Lusophone
literature. His current research focuses on contemporary Latin American
and Iberian film, literature, and new media, with a special emphasis on
digital poetry and narrative.
W. J. T. Mitchell teaches literature, art history, and media at the

University of Chicago, and is editor of the multi-disciplinary journal,
Critical Inquiry. His recent books include What Do Pictures Want? The
Lives and Loves of Images (University of Chicago Press, 2005) and
Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9-11 to the Present (University of
Chicago Press, 2010). His latest book, Seeing Through Race, based on the
The Future of Text and Image 351
2009 W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures at Harvard, will be published by Harvard

University Press in 2012.
Heike Polster is an Assistant Professor of German at the University of

Memphis. She is the author of The Aesthetics of Passage: The Imag(in)ed
Experience of Time in Thomas Lehr, W. G. Sebald and Peter Handke
(Königshausen und Neumann, 2009) and is currently writing a book on
temporality in the autobiographical texts of Christa Wolf. She is also
working on a book-length project about the shared poetics of Walter
Benjamin and W. G. Sebald, and has received funding from the University
of Memphis to pursue research on Buddhism in German literature, culture,
and art.
Molly Pulda is a doctoral candidate and writing fellow at The Graduate

Center of the City University of New York, where she is writing a
dissertation on memoirs of family secrets. She has published in a/b:
Auto/Biography Studies, Doris Lessing Studies, and Contemporary
Women’s Writing. She recently co-edited a special issue of Doris Lessing
Studies on the subject of gender and sexualities.
Tanya K. Rodrigue is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in

Composition and Rhetoric at Wheaton College, Massachusetts. She earned
her PhD in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric at Syracuse University.
Leslie Shapiro is a New York-based designer specializing in interactive,

web, and graphic design. She is currently studying at The New School in
New York City, pursuing a dual-degree in Communication Design and
Writing. She has designed various websites and apps, and this book-cover
is her first published print design.
Cara Takakjian is a doctoral candidate in Harvard University’s

Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. Her research focuses
on image-text relations in a variety of media. Her dissertation is on the
Italian graphic novel and its relationship with history. She has also
published articles on the photographic effect of history in La Storia (in the
Journal of Modern Italian Literature) and on the neorealist storytelling
tradition in the graphic novels of Gipi (in Visual and Verbal Intersections,
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, forthcoming).
352 Contributors
Elise Takehana is an Assistant Professor in the Arts and Communications

Department of LIM College. Her scholarly interests include aesthetics,
digital studies, and twentieth-century text and image production. Her essay
on avant-garde utopianism and relational aesthetics was recently published
in Shift, and her article on association and visualization in data narrative
appeared in the International Digital Media Arts Association Journal. She
has also co-edited a collection of essays for Digital Humanities Quarterly
that documents the work presented and developed at the 2010 Digital
Assembly conference “Futures of Digital Studies.”
Lauren Walsh is a lecturer in the Literary Studies department at Eugene

Lang College at The New School in New York City. Her interests include
twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, media studies and visual
culture, and memory studies. She has published on diverse topics, from the
modernist influences on the American southern novelist Albert Murray (in
Albert Murray and the Aesthetic Imagination of a Nation, University of
Alabama Press, 2010) to the treatment of September 11th photos in cultural
memory and contemporary fiction (in the “About Images” series of The
Bergen Center of Visual Culture: Nomadikon, 2011). She has also written
for Photography and Culture as well as the Los Angeles Review of Books.
She holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia
University.
INDEX
Abramovich, Dvir 137, 152 Aristotle 6-7, 9, 207, 232, 286, 292
Ackerley, J. R. 15-26, 29-35 Arslan, Gizem 346
Adams, Marina 169 Arthrology 73, 81-82, 87
Adams, Timothy Dow 149 Audability (see under: Voice and
Adamson, Walter L. 285 sound)
Adelson, Leslie 201, 208-209 Auden, W. H. 19
Advertising 28, 32, 239, 241-42, Auerbach, Erich 322
260, 277, 285, 291, 294, 297, Augustine 333-34
303 Auteur 276, 279, 301
Aesthetics viii, 3-4, 6, 8-9, 149-56, Autobiography (see also: Memoir)
172, 190, 192, 219, 235, 240-41, 15-20, 24, 29, 31, 41, 43, 46-47,
245, 248, 264, 276, 282, 287-88, 55, 60, 63, 69, 71-76, 79, 81,
295, 300, 321, 329, 331, 336, 84-85, 87, 140, 145, 147, 149,
345 153, 177, 279
Affect 21, 42-43, 64, 257, 260, 266, Avant-garde 5, 190, 231-43, 245,
333 253, 263, 265, 276, 278, 287-88,
Agamben, Giorgio 144-45, 181 299, 346
Albers, Josef 278 Avedon, John F. 178
Alcoff, Linda 54 Avrutin, Eugene M. 132
Alienation 283, 290, 310, 339-40 Axelrod, Steven Gould 258
Allison, Dorothy 69 Azoulay, Ariella 139, 154-55
Almog, Oz 132
Alomar, Gabriel 235 Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 44-45, 59, 151
Ambiguity 26, 49-50, 82, 114-15, Bal, Mieke 96, 134, 146, 151-55,
175, 179-88, 209, 210, 216-20, 191-94
227, 235, 240, 242, 244, 251-52, Balch, Anthony 273
340 Bales, Richard 94
Amihay, Ofra 345-46 Balzac, Honoré de vii
Anderson, George Kumler 157 Baron, Dvora 131-33
Anderson, Laurie 273 Barradas, Rafael 237
Anderson, Mark 103, 115 Barthes, Roland (See also: Studium
Anderson, Susan 206 and Punctum) 6, 9, 18, 25-26,
An-Sky, S. (Shloyme-Zanvl 30, 33, 35, 59, 63-64, 117-19,
Rappoport) 132 121, 142-44, 146-48, 170-73,
Apollinaire, Guillaume 236, 241 182-86, 188, 203
Architecture 225, 233, 236, 278-79, Barzilai, Maya 112
292, 297 Basquiat, Jean-Michel 274
Arden, Roy 325 Bauby, Jean-Dominique 86
Arens, Hiltrud 206 Baudelaire, Charles 103
354 Index
Baudrillard, Jean 61 Burgin, Victor 59

Bechdel, Alison 15-23, 26-35, 71 Burnham, Clint 325, 327
Beecroft, Vanessa 286 Burroughs, William 273-304
Beiles, Sinclair 285
Benjamin, Walter 142-44, 146, 152- Caballero, Ernesto Giménez 237
55, 160, 208, 279, 296 Caillois, Roger 303
Benstock, Shari 74 Calderon, Nissim 139
Benveniste, Emile 181 Calligraphy 241
Bergland, Betty Ann 74 Calvert, Clay 60-61, 64
Bergson, Henri 97, 337 Campbell, Bruce 174
Berman, Marshall 309-10 Cancer 70, 82-84, 284
Bernstein, Charles 192 Carmona, Àngel 244
Bhabha, Homi K. 134-36, 139, 150- Cartwright, Lisa 119, 301
52 Caruth, Cathy 39, 45, 50, 108, 112
The Bible 136, 157, 214 Casasses, Enric 244
Birmingham, Jed 280, 298 Casey, Edward 57-58, 180
Birot, Pierre Albert 238 Castillo, David 244
Bishop, Claire 301 Celan, Paul 199-210, 212-18, 220-
Black, Max 266 24, 226-27, 346
Blake, William 10, 256 Cézanne, Paul 340
Blindness 77, 123, 134-35, 140, 148 Chambers, Ross 47
Blog 10, 40-41, 43, 50, 60-65 Charchoune, Serge 237-38
Bloom, Harold, 243 Charney, Dennis S. 112
Boccioni, Umberto 237-38 Childhood 16-17, 33, 41, 70, 73, 77,
Bohn, Willard 239, 241-42 82, 96-97, 99, 102, 109, 111,
Bolland, Brian 78 113, 120-21, 150, 190, 210,
Bolter, Jay D. 234-35 334-35
Borkent, Michael 266 Children’s Literature 149
Boso, Felipe 257, 261-63 Chute, Hillary 15, 87
Botticelli, Sandro 296 Cinema (see under: Film)
Boym, Svetlana 138 Clothing and footwear 25, 27, 49,
Brandt, Bettina 200, 203 86, 109, 114-17, 123, 143-45,
Bremmer, Magnus 345 158, 241-42, 319, 334, 337-39
Breton, André 237 Cohen, Richard I. 157
Brinks, Ellen 47 Collage viii, 1, 236, 274, 277, 279-
Brittain, H. R. 252 81, 287, 290, 292, 295, 299,
Bronzino, Angolo 334-35, 337 341, 346
Brossa, Joan 257 Comics (see also: Memoir, graphic)
Brown, Chester 71 5, 10, 15-16, 18-19, 22, 27, 69-
Brubaker, Ed 71 73, 75, 77-82, 84-87, 345; gutter
Brunet, François 144 5, 22, 73; panel 22, 26, 33, 73-
Bryant, Marsha 94, 186 74, 79-81, 84-86
Buddhism 174-75, 179, 187; Zen Conrad, Joseph 292
254 Conte, Joseph 174
Büchner, Georg 204, 221 Conway, Jill Ker 46, 61
Bürger, Peter 237 Corso, Gregory 285
Cortiella, Felip 237 Digital viii, 4, 10, 119, 191, 231-35,

Couser, Thomas 76, 79, 83, 85-86 243-267, 276-78, 281, 286, 295,
Crane, Hart 189 298-300, 302-303, 311, 326-28,
Cranston, Peter 247-48 345-46
Cravan, Arthur 237 Disability 4, 56, 69-70, 72, 74-87,
Creeley, Robert 190 134-35, 140, 148, 223, 232, 244,
Crumb, Robert 71 254-56
Cubism vii, 236-37 Disease 29, 31, 70, 74, 81-84, 87,
Culbertson, Roberta 58 97, 99, 138, 156-57, 217, 244,
Cummings, E. E. 41 255, 284, 321
Curi, Fauto 314 Dolan, Frederick M. 275
Cut-up 274-83, 285, 287-88, 290- Dolmage, Jay 345
93, 295, 298-304, 346 Dominant discourse 41-43, 46-47,
Cvetkovich, Ann 23 50-60, 63, 65, 76, 79, 278, 285-
86
da Vinci, Leonardo 4 Doucet, Julie 71
Dada vii, 236-37, 280 Drucker, Johanna 190-91, 260, 263,
Daguerre, Louis 144-45 311, 313-15, 319
Damasio, Antonio 266 Duchamp, Marcel 237, 288, 291-95
Damrosch, David 93 Dunbar, Paul Lawrence 189
Danielewski, Mark Z. 273 Duttlinger, Carolin 111, 121
Davidson, Donald 266
Davis, Lennard J. 80 Eakin, Paul John 18, 72-73
Davis, Whitney 234 Eckmann, Sabine 325
De Man, Paul 181 Ekphrasis 94, 98, 133
Death 16-18, 20-21, 23, 25-26, 31- Elcott, Noam M. 153
32, 34-35, 82, 85, 96, 105-108, Eliot, T. S. 292
121, 125, 179, 212, 214, 251, Elkin, James 48
255-56, 297, 316, 328 Embodiment 33, 40, 44-45, 50-52,
DeKoven, Marianne 15, 278 56-57, 70, 190-91, 202, 208-10,
Delaunay, Robert and Sonja 237 250-51, 255, 259-63, 266, 277,
Deleuze, Gilles 5, 325, 331-34, 336- 299, 347
39 The Enlightenment 133, 233
Delgado, Olga 244, 256-64, 266 Enns, Anthony 285
Depero, Fortunato 317-19, 321 Enright, D. J. 95
Derrida, Jacques 223 Ethics and morality 76, 78, 93, 126,
Desire 16, 27-30, 35, 99, 101, 104, 236, 285
110, 122, 138, 142, 233, 243, Ette, Ottmar 203
299, 319 Evans, Walker 189
Dewey, John 311, 322 Exhibitionism 60-63
Dialogism 41-42, 44-45, 59-60, 151, Experimentalism 189, 231-33, 235-
215 36, 240, 242-44, 255-56, 260,
Diary and Journal 19, 32, 72, 121, 264-65, 273-74, 277, 280-82,
190, 279-80, 298-99 300, 302
Diaspora 132, 136, 139, 159
356 Index
Fabre, Gladys 283 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie 75-

Facebook 40 76, 78, 83, 85
Family 18-19, 20-21, 27-35, 52-54, Gaze 16, 21, 24, 26-28, 33, 35, 80-
73-74, 100, 122, 112, 133-37, 83, 210
139-42, 149, 146-47, 153, 156, Gender 10, 16, 27-28, 34, 51-56, 58,
247; album 16, 20, 141, 146; 74, 86, 122; femininity 28, 49-
father 16-35, 41, 70, 74, 79, 82, 53, 56, 78-79, 85-86, 96, 121-
84, 96, 99, 125, 134-35, 143-45, 22, 133, 203, 210, 217, 257,
158, 210-11; mother 18, 20, 27, 261-62, 316, 319, 337-38;
33-35, 41, 74, 82-83, 85, 99, masculinity 6, 25-26, 28, 31, 54,
104-105, 110, 112-14, 116, 119- 77, 86, 143-45
22, 125, 134-35, 137-39, 143, Genette, Gérard 194
147, 150, 158, 251; parent(s) Genz, Julia 203
16-19, 29, 33, 70, 85, 96, 99, Gilmore, Leigh 46-47, 52, 69, 70,
106, 112, 122, 142-44, 238; 72, 74, 85
photographs 16-20, 27, 140-49, Ginsberg, Allen 190, 285, 291, 299
151, 182 Glaser, Milton 260
Fanelli, Giovanni 314-16, 318 Glazier, Loss Pequeño 243-44
Fanon, Franz 288-89 Gleizes, Albert 237-38
Faulkner, William 34 Gluzman, Michael 132, 149
Feldman, Yael S. 131-33 Goatly, Andrew 266
Felman, Shoshana 45 Godoli, Ezio 314-16, 318
Feminism 52, 174, 180 Godzich, Wlad 181
Ferri, Beth 255 Goldstein, Melvyn C. 178
Film viii, 6, 9, 109, 119-22, 150, Gómez de la Serna, Ramón 235
177, 191, 231, 235, 274, 293, Goodman, Nelson 8-9
302, 332-33, 335, 337, 347 Gorman, LeRoy 252
Fineberg, Jonathan 291, 298 Govoni, Corrado 319-21
Flusser, Vilém 224 Govrin, Michal 133
Fluxus 265 Graphic narration 1, 5, 15, 26, 32,
Foix, J. V. 238 69, 154, 326
Fontana, Lucio 5 Gray-Rosendale, Laura 54
Forster, E. M. 16 Green, Charles 303
Foucault, Michel 4-5, 9, 170, 172- Green, Justin 69, 71
73, 177-78 Greene, Graham 292
Freaks 76, 81, 83 Gregory-Guider, Christopher C. 121
Freud, Sigmund (see also: Gris, Juan 237
Psychoanalysis) 111 Groensteen, Thierry 73, 81
Frost, Elisabeth A. 174, 182, 190 Gross, Alan 266
Frye, Northrop 254 Grosz, Elizabeth 76, 81, 83
Futurism 235-37, 242-43, 250, 253, Grunhoff, Hélène 237-38
255, 257, 285, 309-22, 346 Grusin, Richard 234-35
Gullan, P. J. 247-48
Gale, Monica R. 251 Gurfinkel, Helena 28-29
Gardner, Jared 69, 75 Gusdorf, Georges 72, 74, 85
Gutman, Nahum 149
Gysin, Brion 274-75, 280, 282, 285, Holtzman, Avner 132-33

287, 291, 294, 298-99 Home 29-30, 53, 61, 73-74, 85-86,
99, 104, 113, 137-39, 142, 144,
Halsman, Phillippe 335 158, 160, 223, 243, 256
Hamacher, Werner 202, 212, 215, Homer 133, 214
222 Homosexuality 16-20, 23, 27, 29-
Hamburger, Michael 328 30, 32-33
Haraway, Donna 276 Horace 232
Haring, Keith 274 Horsburgh, H. J. N. 251
Haroldsson, Arni 325 Horstkotte, Silke 154, 183-84, 187,
Harris, Oliver 274, 280-81, 285 189, 193
Harshav, Benjamin 132 Howe, Susan 189
Harvey, David 310 Hudson, Stephen 95, 102
Haser, Verena 266 Hughes, Alex 94
Hatfield, Charles 71, 81 Hughes, Richard 292
Hausner, Rudolf 330 Hume, David 9
Hayes, Daniel 31 Hybridity 16, 47, 150-51, 207, 232-
Hayles, N. Katherine 191, 243, 276 34, 243-44, 246, 250, 255, 257,
Heißenbüttel, Helmut 335 260, 267, 328, 345-46
Hejinian, Lyn 174-75, 179
Heller-Roazen, Daniel 201, 210-12, Identity 16, 18-20, 26, 29-31, 40-43,
226 46-47, 51, 53-65, 69, 72-79, 84-
Henderson, Lee 325-27 85, 108, 122, 140, 159, 174-75,
Herman, Judith 42, 45, 54 180, 195, 275-76, 279, 288,
Herzog, Elizabeth 131 300-302, 310, 312-13, 345
Hesford, Wendy 46 Illustration viii, 5, 133, 149, 171,
Heterotopia 170, 172-73, 177 188, 246, 274, 280, 346-47
Hever, Hannan 140, 149, 156 Imagetext 1-10, 40-41, 43-45, 47-
Heym, Stefan 157 52, 54, 56-60, 62-66, 94, 134,
Hieroglyphics 244, 274 137, 150, 153, 170, 185, 227,
Hill, Charles 63, 65 242, 246, 250, 257, 261, 273,
Hinton, Laura 172, 174-75 304, 345, 347
Hirsch, Marianne ix, 16-17, 27, 93, Immigration 133-37, 139, 149-57,
122, 131, 137, 140, 145-49, 154, 159-60, 217, 345
156, 160 Indexicality 8, 119, 122-23, 179-84,
Hitchcock, Alfred 335, 337 187-89, 241, 257, 346
Hochberg, Gil 135-36, 138-39, 153 Infantino, Stephen C. 96
Hoffmann, Yoel 133 Intermediality viii, 119, 172, 176,
Holbein, Hans 283 178, 181, 201, 206-207, 224,
Hollander, Hans 330 227, 234, 329, 340-41, 345
Hollander, Rachel 93 Intertextuality 59, 94-95, 100-105,
Hollywood 137 113, 122, 202, 217, 219-20, 262
Holocaust 93-95, 98-99, 104-105, Iser, Wolfgang 310, 322
107, 111-12, 116, 120-22, 124- Isou, Isidore 282
26, 153, 156, 199-200; Ivanovic, Christine 208-10
Theresienstadt 105, 120-21
358 Index
Jacob, Max 237, 245 Lagapa, Jason 174

Jacobs, Dale 72-73, 75, 345 Lakoff, George 233, 250-53, 266
Jagger, Mick 273 Language and linguistics 1-2, 4, 7-8,
Jakobson, Roman 181, 245, 248-49, 39-41, 43-45, 50, 53, 56-59, 62-
252 65, 69-70, 73-74, 84-86, 132,
Jameson, Frederic 309, 311 135, 137, 150-52, 159, 170,
Jenkins, Henry 301 173-74, 176, 181-89, 199-207,
Johns, Jasper 274 210, 214-16, 222, 224, 226, 242,
Johnson, Mark 233, 250, 266 244-55, 258-61, 264, 266, 282-
Joseph, Branden W. 273, 289-91, 86, 291, 310-11, 321-22, 345-46
294, 297 Lanham, Richard 281
Joyce, James 2, 280, 292 Laub, Dori 45
Jung, Carl 253 Laurencin, Marie 237
Junoy, Josep Maria 237-43 Ledesma, Eduardo 346
Lee, Evan 325
Kafka, Franz 94, 292 Lee, Rensselaer W. 232
Kahanoff, Jacqueline 149, 151 Lehmann, Jürgen 214, 221, 223
Kant, Immanuel 10, 133 Lejeune, Philippe 18, 24
Keats, John 6, 34 Lemagny, Jean-Claude 96
Kelley, Mike 274-75 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 4, 6,
Kelly, Anita E. 42 133, 192, 233
Kennedy, John F. 289 Lettrism 231, 243, 265
Kerby, Paul Anthony 72-73 Levantinism 135
Kerouac, Jack 292 Levine, Les 274
Kilbourn, Russell J. A. 119 Lewis, Wyndham 242
Kilmartin, Terence 95 Lieblich, Amia 132
Kim, John Namjun 226 Linde, Charlotte 72-73
Kittler, Friedrich 6, 9, 190-91, 201, Lista, Giovanni 285, 314
207, 214, 220, 227 Liu, Laura 93
Kleist, Heinrich von 205 Lizano, Jesús 244
Knott, Suzuko Mousel 206 Location and localization (see
Köhler, Andrea 329 under: Space and place)
Koepnick, Lutz 325 Long, Jonathan J. 111
Kostelanetz, Richard 252 Loquai, Franz 94
Kozol, Wendy 46 Lorca, Federico García 237
Kracauer, Siegfried 141 Love 51, 99, 121, 141, 210, 217,
Krämer, Sybille 201, 206-207 232, 257-61, 266, 292, 296, 319
Krieger, Murray 133 Lubin, Orly 132
Kronfeld, Chana 132 Lucretius 251
Krystal, Henry 108 Lydenberg, Robin 274, 279, 292,
Krystal, John H. 112 298
Kupferminc, Mirta 160 Lyotard, Jean Francois 292-95
Kuri, José Férez 283-84
MacLeish, Archibald 263
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 251, 265 Magritte, René 4-5, 283
Lacan, Jacques 4, 9-10 Mallarmé, Stéphane 103, 257
Manifestos 235, 285, 299, 310-13, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 340

319 Mersch, Dieter 206
Mann, Barbara 133 Metaphor 1, 4, 8, 21, 44-45, 50,
Mann, Thomas 279 132, 171, 174, 231-35, 242-43,
Manovich, Lev 281-82 249-51, 253-56, 258-61, 264-67,
Map 133, 140, 203, 226, 257-58 292, 338
Mapplethorpe, Robert 274 Metzinger, Jean 237
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 235, Miles, Barry 273, 282, 298
250, 309-22 Miller, Carolyn 60-62
Marks, John 331-33 Miller, Nancy K. 29-30, 137, 160
Maron, Monika 183 Milner, John 319
Marx, Karl 154, 309 Mimesis 146, 294, 303, 332
Mas López, Jordi 240 Mitchell, David T. 80
Mason, Mary G. 19 Mitchell, W. J. T. ix, 1, 4, 6, 15-16,
Massey, Doreen 327-28, 334 40, 43-44, 133-34, 233-35, 345-
Matalon, Ronit 131, 133-60 46
Mathematics 2, 10, 27, 206-207, Mitchell, William J. 119
216, 221, 224-27, 244, 252-54, Miró, Joan 238
283 Modernism 93-95, 104-105, 190,
Matt, Joe 71 233, 236, 251, 264, 278-79, 282,
Mattison, Robert S. 277, 289-90, 300, 309-311
296-97, 301-302 Moholy-Nagy, László 278, 296
May, Vivian 255 Molas, Joaquim 236
Mayer, Bernadette 190 Moncrieff, C. K. Scott 95
Mayo, Sherry 302 Moore, Alan 78
Mayor, Andreas 95 Morrison, Toni 45, 50
McFarland, Scott 325-27, 331, 339- Mullen, Harryette 189
40, 346 Multilingualism 200, 227
McHugh, Susan 16, 30 Murphy, Timothy 273
McRuer, Robert 76-77 Museums and galleries 123-24, 169,
Memoir viii, 16, 18-24, 29, 34, 41, 170-71, 175, 191-94, 237, 280,
43, 46, 52, 60, 63, 69-72, 84-86, 309, 312, 330-31
149, 240; graphic 15-17, 21, 23, Music viii, 4, 6, 8-10, 84, 114-15,
33, 69-71, 73-74, 76, 79-87 207, 214-15, 238, 254, 273-76,
Memory 1, 34, 39-42, 54, 57-59, 64- 282, 317
65, 93-102, 105-108, 110-120,
122-26, 134-35, 140-42, 148-49, Nabokov, Vladimir 94
156, 186, 298, 321, 327, 333-41; Narratology 154-56
involuntary 93-118, 122-24, Ndalianis, Angela 282
126; photo-textual 94, 105, 110, New media 40, 42-43, 53, 60-61,
113, 115-120, 123-24, 345; 235, 242-44, 262, 266-67, 276,
postmemory 16-17, 27, 33, 122, 281, 325
148-49, 156; traumatic 40-41, Newspapers, magazines, and
57-59, 111-12 journalism vii, 34, 52, 55, 72,
Mendicino, Kristina 205, 223 137, 237, 274, 277, 279-80, 285,
Merjian, Ara H. 235, 322 298; Esquire 27-28; Forbes 40;
360 Index
Life 277, 283; Ms. 52; My Own Perloff, Marjorie 218

Mag 280, 298; The New York Phillips, Tom 273
Times 15, 52; Time 16 Photography 4, 10, 16, 18-28, 31-
Newton, Isaac 133 33, 35, 41, 49-50, 59, 63-64, 80,
Niedlich, Wendelin 330 93-96, 98, 102, 104-105, 108-
Noble, Andrea 94 13, 115-24, 131-35, 137, 139-
Nogueras Oller, Rafael 236 60, 169-95, 231, 235, 274, 277,
Nostalgia 76, 83, 137-40, 147, 244, 280, 296, 298, 325-28, 330-31,
297 335, 339-41; black-and-white
Novalis 103 93, 98, 109-10, 113, 169, 184,
Núñez, Rafael E. 253, 266 186, 335; camera 5, 21, 24, 32,
Nyberg, Amy Kiste 71 80, 96, 116, 119, 131-32, 142,
144-46, 148, 174, 278; negative
Odier, Daniel 289 32-33, 131, 144-45, 149, 326;
Öhlschläger, Claudia 328-29, 333, paparazzi 59; photomontage
340 277; photo-roman 150; photo-
Olin, Margaret 122 text 1, 94, 169-95; snapshot 33,
Onomatopoeia 314, 316 96, 101-102, 112, 118
Orality (see under: Voice and Picabia, Francis 237
sound) Plato 7
Orientalism 137, 144, 158, 240 Poetry vii-viii, 1, 4, 10, 133, 169-95,
Ortega y Gasset, José 251, 263-64 199-227, 231-67, 294, 310, 312-
Orthographic symbols 200-202, 21, 328-30, 345-46; concrete
207-208, 211-12, 214, 216-20, 216-18, 231, 243, 261-63, 265;
224-27, 236, 250, 253, 259-61 digital viii, 232, 234-35, 243-67;
Other 76-77, 81, 136, 157-59, 180 experimental (see under:
Oulipo 257, 265 Experimentalism); Haiku 240,
Ovid 201-203, 210-12, 217-19, 227, 242, 258
259 Polster, Heike 326, 329, 346
Postcards viii, 40-43, 47-51, 56-60,
Painting vii, 4, 10, 86, 160, 192, 62-66, 189, 192, 225, 334-35,
205, 231-38, 240-41, 244, 256, 337
263, 274-75, 276, 280, 283, 296, Postcolonialism 134-36, 139-40,
299, 325, 328-41 149-52, 155, 157-60
Pantozzi, Jill 78-79 Postmodernism 257, 265, 327
Parole in libertà and Parolibere 244, PostSecret viii, 40-43, 47-49, 59-60,
310-11, 313-14, 316-17, 319, 62-66, 345
321-22 Pope, Jordi 244-46, 248-56, 259-60,
Pearson, Ann 94, 104 264, 266
Peirce, Charles Sanders 7-10, 245 Porter, Roger J. 34
Pequeño Glazier, Loss 243-44 Pound, Ezra 239, 241, 258
Perec, Georges 224 Pratt, Mary Louise 56
Performance 121-23, 174-75, 178, Prosser, Jay 172
203-207, 210, 220-21, 225-27, Proust, Marcel 93-126, 279, 326
242, 244, 261, 267, 273, 284, Psychoanalysis 39, 45, 142, 288
314, 347 Pulda, Molly 345
Punctum (see under: Studium and Robbins, Trina 71

Punctum) Rodrigue, Tanya K. 345
Punday, Daniel 274, 276, 286, 291 Roman, Camille 258
Roots 132, 137-46, 149, 153, 156,
Racan, Honorat de Bueil, seigneur 158-60
de 239-40 Rosenberg, Eric 45, 50
Raczymow, Henri 139-40 Rouillé, André 96
Radio 6, 52, 199; Bob (Elliott) and Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 3
Ray (Goulding) 6
Raley, Rita 286 Sacco, Joe 26
Ralston, Aron 69 Sacharoff, Olga 237
Rancière, Jacques vii-viii, 145, 301 Safran, Gabriella 132
Rape 41, 46-57, 63-64 Said, Edward 26, 137
Rattok, Lily 135, 137, 141, 151, 156 Salaris, Claudia 313-14
Rauschenberg, Robert 273-74, 277- Saltzman, Lisa 45, 50
78, 288-89, 290-92, 294-303 Salvat-Papasseit, Joan 237, 245
Reader-response 21, 23-24, 26-27, Sanders, Jay 192
30, 33, 35, 47, 73-74, 80, 94, 98, Saper, Craig J. 301
102-03, 105, 109-11, 113, 116, Satrapi, Marjane 33
118-19, 122, 145, 147, 153-54, Saussure, Ferdinand de 7, 9-10, 245,
182, 187, 189, 203, 207-209, 260
232, 241-42, 245-48, 252-58, Scalapino, Leslie 169-95
280, 282-83, 285, 291-92, 311- Schestag, Thomas 204, 206
14, 317, 321-23 Schneiderman, David 275-76
Reader/viewer 25, 154, 170, 175, Schwartz, Frederic J. 279, 296
181, 190-92, 194-95, 242, 245, Scott, Clive 150
253, 257, 266, 310, 314, 317, Scrapbook 279-80, 298
319, 321-22 Sculpture 4, 233, 277, 296, 330
Readymade 288, 291, 295 Searle, John 266
The Real, Realism, and reality 5, 40, Sebald, W. G. 93-126, 134, 153-56,
43, 56, 59, 60-61, 63, 72, 75-76, 160, 183, 325, 328-29, 331-33,
78, 85, 96, 119, 121, 135, 139, 338-39, 341
146, 176, 182, 191, 251, 260, Sebold, Alice 69
279-80, 282-83, 286-87, 291-92, Secret (see also: PostSecret) 15-35,
294-95, 300-301, 311, 313, 329- 40-42, 62-63, 77, 86, 141, 143-
31, 335-36, 339-41, 351 44, 254, 345
Reimer, Marga 266 Seeable and sayable vii, 5, 9
Renaissance 232 Seidman, Naomi 132
Renz, Peter 330, 336 Semiotics 2-4, 6-10, 73, 150, 185,
Resina, Joan Ramon 236-37 189, 232, 237, 245-46, 254,
Reverdy, Pierre 236, 238 265-66
Rich, Adrienne 180 Sexuality 10, 16-18, 20, 24, 26-27,
Richards, I. A. 266 29-35, 49-51, 53, 61-62, 64, 71,
Rilke, Rainer Maria 94 86, 180, 292
Rimbaud, Arthur 292 Shakespeare, William 299
Robbins, Bruce 93 Shannon, Claude E. 245, 248
362 Index
Shapira, Anita 132 Spiegelman, Art 5, 16-17, 27

Sharif, Omar 145 Spitzer, Leo 140
Shattuck, Roger 96-98 Squier, Susan 78
Shearer-Cremean, Christine 52-53 Stein, Gertrude 179-80, 186
Shelton, Gilbert 71 Steinberg, Leo 282
Shepherd, Dawn 60-62 Stern, Jack 292
Siebers, Tobin 75, 87 Sterritt, David 301
Sienkiewicz-Mercer, Ruth 86 Stevens, Wallace 251
Signifier and signified 7, 19, 44, 79, Strauss, Franz Josef 330
182, 241, 245, 249-50, 260-62, Studium and Punctum 25, 63-64,
265, 286 142-43, 146-47, 173
Silkscreen (see under: Textile) Sturken, Marita 119, 301
Simpson, Megan 174 Subway 257-59, 261, 317-19, 321
Sister arts 232-33 Suicide 17, 20, 41, 244
Site (see under: Space and place) Superheroes 77-79
Slaymaker, Douglas 203 Surrealism 203, 236, 331
Small, David 69-87 Swales, Martin 94
Smith, Sidonie 74 Symbolism 103, 236, 319
Smithson, Robert 190 Synaesthesia 199, 314
Smokey Stover 5 Szondi, Peter 203
Smyth, Herbert Weir 219
Snyder, Sharon L. 80 Takakjian, Cara 346
Sobieszek, Robert 274, 277-78, 280, Takase, Aki 199
298 Takehana, Elise 346
Somerville, Ian 273, 302 Tawada, Yoko 199-227, 346
Sontag, Susan 118-19, 126, 142, Taylor-Guthrie, Danielle 45
146 Television 6, 52, 60, 72, 137, 235,
Sound (see under: Voice and sound) 273, 277, 296-97, 300; Roots
Soupault, Philippe 238 (miniseries) 137; Springer, Jerry
Southwick, Stephen M. 112 60
Space and place (see also: Spatial- Testimony 24, 40, 42-43, 45-47, 50,
temporal relations) 1, 4-6, 31, 52, 59, 66, 120-21, 131, 217
40-43, 47-49, 51, 53, 56-58, 61, Textile and fabric 169-71, 178, 190,
63-66, 69-70, 73-74, 77, 80-81, 193, 246, 277-78, 289, 297, 300
84-85, 98, 104, 106-108, 110, Theatre and drama 19, 107-108,
113, 117-18, 135-39, 142, 151, 114, 116, 121, 123-4, 173, 177,
159, 169-73, 175-78, 180, 183- 313, 330
84, 186-90, 192-95, 201, 203- Tietchen, Todd 300-301
206, 209-10, 221-26, 233, 235, Time and temporality (see also:
240-42, 250, 254, 259, 301, Spatial-temporal relations) 5,
316-17, 326-27, 339-40, 345-46 21-23, 26, 33, 58, 73, 76, 98,
Spatial-temporal relations 4, 10, 57, 109-110, 114, 116, 118, 126,
64, 133-34, 153, 170-72, 176- 177, 205, 222-23, 226, 233, 275,
79, 181, 192, 226, 233, 235-36, 283, 292, 314, 316, 325-29,
242, 258, 265, 274, 277, 280, 331-42
285, 327-28, 333, 339, 341-42 Tobias, Rochelle 202-203
Translation vii, 9, 115, 151-52, 199- Wagner, Richard 6

201, 205, 207-10, 212, 219, Walsh, Lauren 93, 96, 139, 345
226-27, 255, 346 Wandering Jew 134, 156-60
Trauma 4, 17, 39-66, 69-70, 74-75, Ware, Chris 5
77-79, 81-87, 99, 108, 111-12, Warhol, Andy 23, 274
121-22, 125, 156, 345 Warner, Michael 18
Travelogue 94, 280 Warren, Frank 40-42, 49, 62-63
Travisano, Thomas J. 258 Watson, Julia 74
Tretiakov, Sergei 279 Weidemann, Kurt 334, 341
Trifonova, Temenuga 332, 337 Weinberger, David 60
Trimpi, Wesley 232 Weinstein, Marsha 131
Tripp, Jan Peter 325, 328-41, 346 Wheeler, Andrew 78-79
Truth 20-24, 29-31, 35, 40, 42-43, Whisnant, Clayton J. 34
46-48, 50, 52-53, 56-57, 59-61, Whitehead, Alfred North 180
83, 95, 97-98, 125-26, 145, 148, Whitehead, Anne 111
253, 284 Whitlock, Gillian 16, 78
Typography 1-2, 8, 10, 44, 169, Wigoder, Meir 141, 147
173, 183-84, 195, 201, 205-206, Wilde, Oscar 16
219-20, 235, 241, 243, 249-50, Wright, Bradford W. 71
263, 317, 319-20, 346 Writing machine 275, 291, 293
Tzara, Tristan 280
Yildiz, Yasemin 200
Utopia 173, 221, 223 Ynglada, Pere 238-42
van Eyck, Jan 338-39 Zarem, Bobby 260

Van Sant, Gus 273 Zborowski, Mark 131
Varghese, Linta 93 Zeng, Li 94
Verdi, Giuseppe 317 Ziarek, Krzysztof 287-89, 295
Vertov, Dziga 332 Zionism 132, 135-36, 157, 159
Vicas, Astrid 282 Zoran, Gabriel 137, 142, 146, 159
Video art 243, 273-74
Vinuesa, Joan 244
Violence 4, 41, 46, 51-53, 55, 66,
69, 71, 83, 117, 154, 178-79,
236
Voice and sound 1, 2, 4, 6, 9-10, 44,
57, 70, 73-74, 83-86, 114-15,
124, 201-205, 208, 210-12, 214-
16, 218-20, 223, 232, 243-44,
246, 250, 253-55, 265-66, 273-
74, 277, 283-84, 294, 297, 314,
317-19, 321, 347
Vondeling, Johanna 285
Vorticism 242, 253
Voyeurism 43, 60-64, 316

Ofra Amihay and Lauren Walsh - The Future of Text and Image - Collected Essays On Literary and Visual Conjunctures-Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2012)

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The Future of Text and Image

The Future of Text and Image:

This book first published 2012

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Copyright © 2012 by Ofra Amihay and Lauren Walsh and contributors

ISBN (10): 1-4438-3640-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-3640-1

Preface ....................................................................................................... vii

PART I: TEXT AND IMAGE IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 39

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 69

PART II: TEXT AND IMAGE IN THE NOVEL

Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 131

PART III: TEXT AND IMAGE IN POETRY

Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 169

Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 199

Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 231

PART IV: TEXT AND IMAGE IN ART

Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 273

Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 309

Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 325

Afterword ................................................................................................ 345

The mixing of materialities is conceptual before it is real. Doubtless we

Yet we hope that by exploring different examples of text and image

illustrating the discussions in the book, without which a volume on text

—Ofra Amihay and Lauren Walsh

I will employ the typographic convention of the slash to designate the

Rupture, synthesis, relationship. The essays in the present volume range

produces a productive confusion of signs and senses, ways of producing

Fig. [1]: ImageText Square of Opposition

Fig. [2]: ImageText Square of Opposition Elaborated

As the sensory-semiotic dimensions of the word-image difference

languages of the Deaf).2 Does the “imagetext” concept automatically rule

Fig. [3]: From Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1915)

It is as if Saussure were forced to admit that even words, speech, and

meaning possible. These are the elements he calls “icon/index/symbol,” a

Aristotle Opsis Melos Lexis

Peirce’s icon, index, and symbol. The imagetext, then, is a principle of

Mitchell, W. J. T. 1986. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago:

TEXT AND IMAGE IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Spiegelman published Maus to critical clamor in 1986.6 That clamor has

father raised a second family with a mistress—Ackerley searches for

the experience of those who grew up dominated by narratives that preceded

In other words, in instances of postmemory, the parent’s past overshadows

its workings of “imaginative investment and creation” resist what Michael

Memoirs of family secrets

groundbreaking observation about the inherent relationality of autobiography,

Nevertheless, Ackerley insists that My Father and Myself “is not an

Digging for truth

Ackerley uses a similar structural metaphor for My Father and Myself.

Like Ackerley, Bechdel also turns to formal portraits to examine her

point to the lack of narrative advancement in Fun Home, or what Ann

he deems the photograph “an innocent-looking affair, if only because there

Yet in the photograph Ackerley chose to print, just a corner of the

The inherent absurdity of envisaging my father in the arms of another man

Although the photographic archive is again incomplete, it is sufficient to

The “centerfold” is the only double-page panel of Fun Home. A complex

intergenerational, as Bechdel imagines herself viewing the photograph

Two levels of confession intersect in Fun Home and My Father and

Ackerley writes, “the raison d’etre, of this examining and self-examining

The betrayal of secrets is a requirement of the autobiographical act. To