The age of images

The mastery of text

Reading a novel today is not associated with images : not only is the novel not illustrated, generally preferring for its very cover the most sober typography, but, in the ocean of contemporary bookshop productions, between travel guides, cooking, gardens, photography and art books, the novel stands as a continent of text, a living island of resistance to images.

The novel is the refuge of reading : we consult, leaf through, look at, collect albums, dictionaries and other books ; but we read the novel, so much so that it takes over theaters and festivals. Reading becomes a spectacle, a haven where words rest sheltered from images. The novel abstracts, slices up, and imaginatively unfolds the obscure and mysterious chamber of our living realities  it doesn't overdo it, and shows its reserve  it plays with the sovereign distinction afforded today by the distant and at the same time brutal prerogative of pure textuality.

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Classical literature is no exception to this sometimes haughty withdrawal. The novel of the Enlightenment is published and read in pocket collections, in tight typography, on mediocre paper, without margins or binding, and of course without images. The text triumphs and offers itself as a proud holocaust to an announced death : its last bulwarks are school curricula, themselves inexorably eroded.

The image between two

There is, however, another path to the novel, which this book explores. From illuminated manuscripts to the first printing presses, from woodcuts to copperplates and the new processes invented in the nineteenth century, the whole of Western novelistic production, Flaubert and Proust included, has been accompanied by images, right up to the photographic rupture of the new novel. The time of the mastery of text was also the time of images. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the classic Chinese novel¹, with completely different codes of representation, is also illustrated. The presence of images is not systematic, but regular  it signals a bestseller, or indicates special attention  it manifests the price of the work to which it provides its case. Coming afterwards, usually from a hand foreign to the writer's intention², the image is given to us in addition to the fiction it illustrates, if not in its place. Its position is that of the uncomfortable supplement  the image comes after, it is redundant in relation to the text  but its redundancy authorizes its heteronomy  the image does away with the text, telling us in advance, and more quickly, the climax if not the denouement. First seen when the bound book is opened, produced in a series and sometimes sold separately as a series before binding, the image is nevertheless only decoded after the text has been read, and is approached within the fiction of a story that is always already known  it adorns and it founds, it follows and it precedes, it structures and it supplements.

Mr. B puts Pamela in a carriage (Pamela 1742, vol. 2) - Gravelot

This supplanting of the image in the novel organizes what Benoît Tane refers to as " entre-deux " : the material and practical entre-deux of an image conceived between the pretextual support of fiction and the codes of visual representation, then inserted between the pages ; the imaginary entre-deux of an image that precedes the reader's imagination, the /// The image is a symbolic in-between, finally, of a normalization of the text by the image, and of the eye defeating the suggested norm.

It's an image that's not just a text, it's an image.

To understand this unstable game, we need to project ourselves into a civilization where the image does not represent a technological threat, where it plays on equal terms with the text and can redouble it without rendering it inaudible. The undisputed mastery of the text is accommodated by an image service that benefits it economically and symbolically. Not that this redoubling of text by image is part of a globally harmonious semiotic system : text and image overflow each other, in registers and according to codes that are never perfectly superimposed ; and the game of normalization and subversion is not distributed in a simple way between the two media.

Pamela leaves Mr B's house in Bedfordshire - Joseph Highmore

The image then thematizes her in-between situation. Benoît Tane notes, in the corpus he studies, the omnipresence of these in-between spaces that seemingly every time fiction motivates : the domestic parlor in Clarisse, where the young girl receives her suitors, is neither the entrenched space of her bedroom, nor the public space where family tyranny is exercised ; the garden gate, where Lovelace lures her and hurries her toward abduction, already escapes paternal jurisdiction, but does not yet fall into the exteriority of public downfall and infamy in the convent of La Vie de Marianne, where Mme de Miran has installed her protégée, the nun-tourière and the parlor once again play an essential role, not so much mediating as reverberating the unstable play of the in-between  Mme Dutour's back store, where M. de Climal is caught at Marianne's feet, the green room where Marianne signifies her break with Valville, are all double-entrance spaces, thresholds between the public and the intimate, declamation and reticence, the movements of the heart and the tribunal of desire. In La Nouvelle Héloïse, the grove of love's first kiss, like the cabinet in Mme de Miran's garden, acts as both retreat and exhibition stage ; when Saint-Preux, overwhelmed by shame and remorse, leaves the brothel where he cheated on Julie to the jeers of the boarders and customers, Gravelot draws him between the brothel and the carriage, taking up a spatial arrangement he had implemented in 1742 in Paméla, in an entirely different context³, and which will be found in Restif's Le Paysan perverti, in the scene where Edmond stabs Ursule as she exits her carriage⁴, or in the one where he's run over by his nephew's carriage⁵.

Fratricidal Edmond (Paysan perverti, Esprit 1782, fig75) - Binet

As for " La confiance des belles-âmes ", it sets up the improbable meeting of Julie and Saint-Preux under the auspices of Wolmar in front of the gates of Clarens : yet another threshold, yet another in-between, which immediately manifests to the reader's eye the dangerous instability on which the sociability on which Rousseau forms the project and fictionalizes the theory is founded. This threshold in front of the Clarens estate, which evokes the garden gate /// of the Harlowe family, the grid where Pamela⁶, or the scene of Valville in the parlor illustrated by Schley in 1778⁷, is found at the beginning of Paysan perverti, where Binet depicts Edmond and his brother at the clock gate, at the entrance to the town of Auxerre⁸. Restif multiplies scenes of spied intimacy, where the bedroom with its alcove and half-open door⁹ or glazed¹⁰, where the green cabinet¹¹, present themselves less as the delimited frames of a painting than as zones of transit, exchange and mediation where the tumultuous passage of fiction is played out and mimicked, or anticipated, the reader's own shift of gaze, caught between the flow of the narrative and the pause of the scene.

Cutting the scene

Paméla se fait dire la bonne aventure (Pamela 1742, vol. 1) - Gravelot

For, in each of these illustrative engravings discovered between the pages of the great novels of the Enlightenment, it is indeed a scene that we discover, it is the cutting out of a scene that the illustrator has indulged in. Of course, the frontispiece engraving sometimes escapes the rule : Benoît Tane studies how Rétif in particular, at the threshold of each of the eight parts of Paysan perverti, summons and manipulates the codes of allegory. Sade will do the same at the threshold of Justineand of La Nouvelle Justine. But whether the underlying model is Le Choix d'Hercule, in Sade's case, or the trestles and curtain of the theater, in Restif's, allegory comes to be inscribed in the device of the stage.

Such a practice, such a semiological convergence of representational devices, was not self-evident, especially as the very term stage only gradually established itself in the novelistic corpus over the course of the eighteenth century. In Lesage, Challe and even Marivaux, the word scène is still the exception rather than the rule when it comes to defining a narrative sequence in the novel itself. In La Vie de Marianne, only Mme Dutour's explanation in the middle of the street with the coachman who has brought Marianne back from church, and the dispute over the price of the fare, qualifies as a scene, in the sense of scandal. By the end of the century, on the other hand, the term had become commonplace to describe that time in the novel that precisely the draughtsman favors for engraving.

Edmond watching Manon and M. Parangon (Paysan perverti, 1782, fig21) - Binet

The first illustrative engravings, which appeared with the invention of printing, did not illustrate scenes : until the end of the 16th century, when the image represented only a circumscribed episode of the narrative in which it was inserted, this episode was not treated as a scene, but, in the epic mode or its derision, as a performance or counter-performance : encounter and struggle, submission and elevation, acceptance and exclusion are not simply the themes of a narrative sequence, but also of an episode. /// They symbolically format a syntactic arrangement of representational objects and figures, in other words, an arrangement in which the space of representation is subordinated to the syntax of its elements. Characters don't play out a scene in a space: they are signs that make up a message; space, often reduced to its simplest expression, is just another sign in this syntax. This economy of the image goes back to the illumination of the first illustrated novels¹² and is perpetuated, for example, during the the Renaissance in several illustrated Venetian editions of Roland furieux¹³.

Parallel to this, a new mode of illustration, teeming with characters  developed, first in late illumination, then in the most luxurious illustrated editions: the image aimed to reproduce the entire narrative progression, repeating the same character in each successive sequence of his adventure. The narrative engraving uses the space of the representation as a principle of organization and a vector of legibility for the sequences. Perspective is used to create a hierarchy of planes that follow the order of the narrative: the further back you go, the further into the text you become. The single performance is inscribed in this narrative space as a liminal performance, which the string of micro-sequences in the background inscribes in a landscape and tends to symbolically discredit. It is interesting to note that several of the great Renaissance illustrators were cartographers¹⁴.

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Julie embraces Saint-Preux (Coll. compl. Londres, t1, 1774, NH fig1) - Moreau

The first engravings organized as scenes emerge from this narrative organization of the illustration, which itself stems from a dissemination of the performative device : for lack of space, or for greater legibility, the illustrator renounces exhaustive representation of the narrative, and retains only a few episodes in the background of the one he selects, at the front, as the privileged sequence. In the illustration, the scene is thus born of a bricolage of the old performance and the new narrative cartography. The scenic space of the illustration print is not immediately a theatrical space: it is first and foremost the result of this syncretism. The setting, the décor, the landscape result from a ruin of performance, which the narrative has disseminated.

A century and a half later, this syncretic process has long since been completed : its reminder, however, invites us not to consider the selection of the scene in the narrative fabric as a cut, more or less arbitrary, in the time of the narrative, but as an insertion in the space of images, which always remains first and foremost a multiple space. Why does Rousseau ask his illustrator, for the first figure in La Nouvelle Héloïse, to draw not " Le premier baiser de l'amour ", according to the title he himself nevertheless chooses, but Julie's failure after this kiss ? The space of the grove and the latticework of its trellis welcome, accompany and inscribe the time of the story in a geometry, because it doesn't cut out a moment, but is part of a layering of time. The succession of moments is no longer immediately represented, but Saint-Preux's hat falling to the ground, the rustling of the foliage in the /// In the distance, the bench from which the two young women have risen, and where they will perhaps sit, spatialize this succession. When, in 1774, Moreau le Jeune thought he had freed himself from what appeared to him to be Rousseau's contradictory prescription by drawing the kiss itself, he left the hat in the ground and the movement of the dress sliding from the bench to indicate an earlier time, while the layout of the green room now places the lovers at its threshold, and their kiss at the fragile border between its interior and the park: wanting to reduce the foliage, Moreau thus accentuates it, or more exactly dramatizes it¹⁵.

The moment of the scene thus becomes this leafing through of time that leads Diderot, in the article Composition in the Encyclopédie, then in the Salons, to define what will become in Lessing, then Barthes, the pregnant instant of the scene. For the illustrator, it's not so much a question of selecting the most important scene as of entering this heterogeneous space, giving it substance through the scene, federating through it a before and an after, an inside and an outside, a symbolic fulfillment and the refusal of this fulfillment : this is what justifies, historically too, why the illustration engraving is an image between two, in a space at the threshold, and with double opening.

The end of figures

This federation of heterogeneities constitutive of the scene offered to us by engraving cannot, however, be thought of exclusively in terms of a historical process of transformation in the modes of creation, composition and organization of images. The strength and originality of Benoît Tane's book lie in the fact that he never separates the meticulous observation of engravings from the precise analysis of the texts they illustrate, always articulating a poetics of the novel with an economy of the image: this articulation methodologically underpins the description he offers of the devices of novelistic representation during the Enlightenment, which he captures through the four major novels of Marivaux, Richardson, Rousseau and Restif de la Bretonne.

Edmond loses an arm (Paysan perverti, Esprit 1782, fig71) - Binet

To think about this articulation, the notion of figure was essential. Figure here does not refer to the face of a character (the term would not begin to take on this meaning until the end of the century), nor even to the character as a whole. Figure refers first and foremost, simply and globally, to the engraving: an edition with figures is an illustrated edition. But the figure is also the basic mechanism of classical rhetoric  through the figure, we move from a textual rhetoric to a semiology of the image, or more precisely, we remain in an undecidable in-between of text and image, syntax and scenic device. In Marivaux, for example, Marianne's body always ends up imposing itself as a revelation of truth, making a tableau against the discourses that oppose it. Marianne cuts a fine figure against the figures of discourse that seek to reach out and reduce her. Richardson's Clarisse, in the same way, makes a spectacle of herself in the very resistance and withdrawal she opposes to her family and then to her captor  this resistance constitutes her as an icon of virtue  Clarisse becomes a figure through the theater she is forced to play, but a paradoxical figure, which pretends to play out her disappearance. In La Nouvelle Héloïse, this tension of the figure towards her disappearance is accentuated : Julie's failure during the first kiss, her invisible presence in the bed when Saint-Preux visits her (" the inoculation of love "), the weariness that her /// makes her turn her face away when her father begs her on bended knee to marry Wolmar (" la force paternelle "), Claire's gesture veiling Julie on her deathbed, each of these scenes unfolds as a withdrawal of the figure, disappointment, disfigurement. The engraving operates here as a symptom : the impossibility of portraying Julie, and more generally the systematic deconstruction of the novelistic spectacle, are part of a concerted writing strategy, consistent with the positions Rousseau defends on image and theater in his Discourses and in the Lettre à D'Alembert sur les spectacles. We need to go even further, and here Rousseau encounters a fundamental movement that runs through eighteenth-century European fiction : the depression of figures outlines a veritable semiological history of the Enlightenment novel, in which virtue appears as a depreciation of truth, presence as the extenuation of virtue, perversion, as the ultimate surge of the figure. By passing through these different symbolic equivalents, the figure gradually demonetizes : that is, it gets rid of its syntactic origin, which is also the medieval origin of the image.

Perversion liberates the figure and at the same time annihilates it : Le Paysan perverti, with its exuberant iconographic program of 82 prints, seems to make the image triumph. Yet Benoît Tane shows that the matrix motif of the novel is the seduction and punishment of the gaze : Restif multiplies the scenes surprised by break-ins, insisting on the dangerous knowledge they deliver. The price of this knowledge and the enjoyment it enables is the loss of the figure : Edmond loses an arm¹⁶, then his eyes, finally his very body. The titles of the last two prints are evocative  " Edmond aveugle ", then " Edmond écrasé ".

As we can see, the enterprise of this book goes far beyond the investigation from which it began : when Benoît Tane began to catalogue in libraries, to collect, photograph, classify the prints of the books he proposed to study, this field of study was largely unexplored. Existing catalogs and descriptions were incomplete, and reproductions were rare. Above all, illustrative engraving was essentially a matter for the bibliophile. It is up to this pioneering book to demonstrate, through the comparisons it makes, and beyond the occasional existence of an illustration opposite a text, the matrix role of the image in the history and economy of novelistic devices. From an inventory of images, we thus move, imperceptibly, to a theory of the novel.

To carry out this investigation, Benoît Tane participated in the creation of the Utpictura18 database, which now boasts nearly 12,000 records and is consulted by Internet users worldwide. But above all, this book restores the pleasure and meaning of a voluptuous circulation from the printed page to the print : perhaps here lies the secret of a contemporary posterity for the novel of the Enlightenment ; in the flavor and secrets of a rediscovered time of images.

Notes

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