The clear-cut distinction between texts (literature) and images
(art) has been challenged by a culture saturated with television
and by an increased emphasis on interdisciplinary studies. From the
viewpoint of our present culture, the author suggests, we can now
see how some of the great writers and artists of the past
overstepped the boundaries of the media in which they worked. "The
Mottled Screen" studies as an example of this process a great
literary work that cannot be confined to language alone, even
though it consists exclusively of words: Proust's "Remembrance of
Things Past."
The author of "Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word-Image
Opposition," a widely acclaimed study of Rembrandt's discursive,
rhetorical, and narrative painting, now offers a symmetrical
counterpart to that study with this sustained "visual" reading of
Proust's masterpiece, pointing out its visual strategies of
representation, fantasy, and poetic thought. She focuses on the
narrative and descriptive passages, examining how they make us
"see," arguing that this visual writing is by no means a derivative
writing that uses visual imagery as an inspiration or model.
Instead, it is the writing of a true vision.
Beginning with the attempts to emulate painting, the book develops
a Proust a la Chardin, working around Chardin's painting "The
Skate," but only after first reading Chardin through Proust.
Viewing a Chardin with anxieties and emulation, Proust writes in
Chardin's mood when he sets up the mottled screen as the metaphor
of reading. Chardin's appeal to a wavering, roving eye is matched
by Proust's uncertain perceptions, and the nervous quality of "The
Skate" is matched by the famous passages recording Proust's disgust
at the debris of the breakfast table.
The second part of the book is devoted to Proust's use of optical
instruments--such as the magnifying glass, the eyeglass, the
telescope--to produce or enhance the visions that constitute the
raw material of his poetic imagination. These optical instruments
guide the probing of the paradoxes of seeing close-up or at a
distance, the latter flattening out, the former blinding.
The final part reads the specifically "photographic" writing that
permeates "Remembrance" as a highly original and astonishing
contemporary, almost postmodern, poetics. The photographic shows in
the way Proust's narrator frames what he sees, contrasts light and
dark, zooms in and out, and represents "contact sheets" of
snapshots rapidly taken so as to capture the most fleeting
sensations and visions.
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