Medial Envy: Image-Text Relations in Biography

Ní Dhúill, Caitríona

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-34663-8_6

Caitríona Ní Dhúill⁴

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Life Writing ((PSLW))

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Abstract

Biographies often include portraits, just as portraits suggest biographies. But the relationship of word and image in biography is not simply complementary. Charting the ways in which biographies push up against the medial boundaries between text and image, this chapter gleans new metabiographical insights from the venerable analogy between biography and portraiture. The chapter revisits historical debates on image-text relations, explores ekphrastic and pictorialist poetics, and acknowledges contemporary theories of intermediality, all with reference to metabiography. Across a range of biographical writings from Dryden to the present, the discussion attends to the shifting meanings but perennial appeal of the portrait analogy. Eschewing Nigel Hamilton’s subsumption of image and text under the umbrella term ‘life depiction’, the chapter argues that medial difference and incommensurability are of defining significance for biography’s effort to ‘write life’ and for a fuller appreciation of the visual, material, embodied and place-bound qualities of all lives.

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Notes

1.
Boswell, Life of Johnson, 22.
2.
Boswell, Life of Johnson, 22.
3.
Boswell, Life of Johnson, 4.
4.
Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983).
5.
James Field Stanfield, An Essay on the Study and Composition of Biography. [1813] (New York and London: Garland, 1986), 15.
6.
Stanfield, Essay, 15–16.
7.
Margaret Oliphant, ‘The Ethics of Biography’, Contemporary Review (July 1883), 82–91. Quoted in Clifford, Biography as an Art, 99.
8.
Woolf, ‘The New Biography’, in Woolf, Selected Essays, 95–100 (96).
9.
Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Portraits Littéraires [1848 and 1876–1878], ed. by Gérald Antoine (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1993), 166.
10.
Ann Jefferson, Biography and the Question of Literature in France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), chapter 6 (‘Sainte-Beuve: Biography and the Invention of Literary Criticism’).
11.
On the long history of misinterpretation and decontextualisation that has accompanied this Horatian motto since its formulation, see Gabriele K. Sprigath, ‘Das Dictum des Simonides: Der Vergleich von Dichtung und Malerei’. Poetica 36 (2004), 243–280; also Mario Praz, ‘Ut pictura poesis’. In Praz, Mnemosyne: The Parallel between Literature and the Visual Arts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 3–27.
12.
Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, ed. Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart (New York: Routledge, 2004); L. J. Jordanova, The Look of the Past: Visual and Material Evidence in Historical Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
13.
For an overview, see Edward Welch and J. J. Long, ‘Introduction: a small history of photography studies’, in Photography: Theoretical Snapshots, ed. J. J. Long, Andrea Noble, and Edward Welch (New York: Routledge, 2008), 1–15.
14.
Claire Tomalin, The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (London: Penguin, 1991), opposite 81.
15.
Claire Harman, Charlotte Brontë: A Life (London: Viking, 2015), between 292 and 293.
16.
Lyndall Gordon, Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994), inset at 247.
17.
Nye, The Invented Self, 168–169.
18.
Sigrid Weigel, Ingeborg Bachmann: Hinterlassenschaften unter Wahrung des Briefgeheimnisses (Vienna: Zsolnay, 1999), fig. 3, opposite 323.
19.
Richard Wendorf, ‘Ut pictura biographia: Biography and Portrait Painting as Sister Arts’, in Articulate Images. The Sister Arts from Hogarth to Tennyson, ed. Wendorf (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 98–124; Wendorf, The Elements of Life: Biography and Portrait-Painting in Stuart and Georgian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
20.
Saunders, Self Impression, particularly chapter 4, ‘Autobiografiction: Stephen Reynolds and A. C. Benson’.
21.
Apart from in passing, for example, Saunders, Self Impression, 38–39.
22.
Backscheider, Reflections on Biography, 155–156.
23.
A Kit-Kat is a type of portrait, less than half-size, 36 × 28 inches, showing the head and one hand; the name originates from the literary Kit-Cat club, where the dining room was too low for half- or full-size portraits.
24.
Anon.: ‘Contemporary Literature’, Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review 68 (October 1857), 581, quoted in Ira Bruce Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 15.
25.
Nigel Hamilton, Biography: A Brief History (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007), 84.
26.
Hamilton, Biography, 82.
27.
W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 91.
28.
See Hilary Spurling’s scathing review, ‘Oh come on, it’s time you got a life.’ The Observer, 20 May 2007.
29.
Nadel, Biography, 61.
30.
Nadel, Biography, 60.
31.
The ‘semiotic turn’ in the study of visual culture relativises this difference by conceptualising images as texts that can be read: Victor Burgin argues that the ‘ubiquitous belief in “the visual” as a realm of experience totally separated from, indeed antithetical to, “the verbal” is erroneous.’ Victor Burgin, The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity (London: Macmillan, 1986), 51.
32.
‘Der Porträtist, das heißt der Künstler als Biograph, geht vom Bilde des Menschen aus.’ Emil Ludwig, Genie und Charakter: Sammlung männlicher Bildnisse. [1924] (Berlin: Zsolnay, 1932), 29–30.
33.
‘Kein Dokument ist untrüglicher als das Antlitz des Menschen; man muß nur darin zu lesen verstehen.’ Ludwig, Genie und Charakter, 31.
34.
See Jutta Person, Der pathographische Blick: Physiognomik, Atavismus und Kulturkritik 1870–1930 (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005); Lucy Hartley, Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Geschichten der Physiognomik: Text, Bild, Wissen, ed. Rüdiger Campe and Manfred Schneider (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1996). See also Chap. 1, Footnote 14.
35.
Ludwig, Genie und Charakter, 30.
36.
Gundolf, Goethe, 3 (‘die bloße Biographie’).
37.
Woolf, ‘The New Biography’, 95 and 100.
38.
See Valeska von Rosen, ‘Die Enargeia des Gemäldes: Zu einem vergessenen In-halt des Ut-pictura-poesis und seiner Relevanz für das cinquecenteske Bildkonzept’, Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 27 (2000), 171–208 (172); Brian Cosgrove, ‘Murray Krieger: Ekphrasis as Spatial Form, Ekphrasis as Mimesis’, in Text into Image: Image into Text, ed. Jeff Morrison and Florian Krobb (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 25–31.
39.
Emil Ludwig, Kunst und Schicksal: Vier Bildnisse (Bern: Alfred Scherz, 1953), 7–8.
40.
André Maurois, The Ethics of Biography. [1943] Quoted in Clifford, Biography as an Art, 163.
41.
Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell, 481.
42.
Karlauf, Stefan George, 40.
43.
Juliet Barker, The Brontës (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994), 31.
44.
Sprigath, ‘Das Dictum des Simonides’, 22.
45.
Mitchell, Picture Theory, particularly chapter 5, ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’.
46.
Sprigath, ‘Das Dictum des Simonides’, 8–9; von Rosen, 171–172, lists the main classical sources on enargeia.
47.
Bryan Wolf, ‘Confessions of a Closet Ekphrastic: Literature, Painting and Other Unnatural Relations’, The Yale Journal of Criticism 3, no. 2 (1990), 181–203 (182).
48.
David Cecil (ed.), An Anthology of Modern Biography (London: T. Nelson & Sons, 1936), ix–xvi.
49.
Claus Clüver, ‘Ekphrasis Reconsidered: On Verbal Representations of Non-Verbal Texts’, in Interart Poetics: Essays on the Interrelations of the Arts and Media, ed. Ulla-Britta Lagerroth, Hans Lund and Erik Hedling (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 19–33 (21).
50.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
51.
Mitchell, Picture Theory, 157.
52.
Carol Ascher, ‘On “Clearing the Air”: My Letter to Simone de Beauvoir.’ In Between Women: Biographers, Novelists, Critics, Teachers and Artists Write About Their Work on Women, ed. Carol Ascher, Louise DeSalvo, and Sara Ruddick. [1984] (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 85–103 (100). The biography in question is Carol Ascher, Simone de Beauvoir: A Life of Freedom (Brighton: Harvester, 1981).
53.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, [1766] trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 78, 91.
54.
Wolf , ‘Confessions of a Closet Ekphrastic’, 184. Wolf’s essay aims towards the erasure of medial difference and the subsumption of word and image under the umbrella terms ‘rhetoric’ and ‘representation’.
55.
W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Space and Time: Lessing’s Laocoon and the Politics of Genre’, in Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 95–115.
56.
Svetlana Alpers, ‘Ekphrasis and Aesthetic Attitudes in Vasari’s Lives’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23 (1960), 190–215.
57.
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 178.
58.
See Dietmar Voss, Dialektik der Grenze: Aufsätze zu Literatur und Ästhetik einer unverantwortlichen Moderne (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2001), 24–28. Voss’s study is concerned specifically with the dialectic of reason and excess, but his discussion of the boundary is applicable to other dialectical relationships.

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Caitríona Ní Dhúill

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Ní Dhúill, C. (2020). Medial Envy: Image-Text Relations in Biography. In: Metabiography. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34663-8_6

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34663-8_6
Published: 10 March 2020
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-34662-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-34663-8
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