Reading Visually

Author(s): Ernst van Alphen

Source: Style, Vol. 22, No. 2, Visual Poetics (Summer 1988), pp. 219-229
Published by: Penn State University Press
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 Ernst van Alphen

Reading Visually

First I read, then eye saw.

Cynthia Chase, Decomposing Figures

1. Introduction

From time to time the relations between the arts rise up as a fashionable
topic in scholarship. That happens usually in connection with a certain de-
velopment in literature or the fine arts. First, artists try to integrate certain
aspects of the sister art in their work, and then the interdisciplinary study of
art and literature tries to analyze this collaboration between the arts. This
sequence explains why almost all these studies are about baroque, cubist, or
futurist artifacts, the makers of which artifacts have themselves intended to
incorporate characteristics and capacities of the "other" art in their own me-
dium.
The most common approaches in these interdisciplinary studies1 of art
and literature are:

(1) the Zeitgeist approach in which similarities between the visual and the literary artist
are analyzed in terms of their shared milieu;
(2) and the comparison of certain specific literary techniques in terms of techniques em-
ployed in visual arts.

The latter approach is usually taken not because of the effect of these tech-
niques, but because of aesthetic preoccupations and intentions shared by the
creators of the artifacts.
In this essay I am looking for another way of comparing, differentiating,
and drawing parallels between the sister arts. I will explore the hypothesis that
visuality brings a dimension to reading literature that enhances the text's lit-
erariness more thoroughly than more traditional, narrative ways of reading.
The hypothesis will be tested by an examination of a novel by the Dutch
author Willem Brakman, Het godgeklaagde feest [The Goddamned Party]
(19672). This postmodernist novel is subtitled Een beeldroman, meaning both
a comic strip, which the novel is not, and, more literally, a novel in images.
The exact purport of this subtitle is initially enigmatic, though it makes one
expect that the novel will convey a specific idea about the difference between
word and image.

Style: Volume 22, No. 2, Summer 1988 219

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 220 Ernst van Alphen

The Goddamned Party can be read, I will argue, as an allegory of modes

of semiosis. The main character, Vogelaar, who at Christmas visits a hotel
where several people are gathered, has a preference for "images," along with
a preference for the signifier and a dislike of meaning. An analysis of those
aspects which make signifiers so attractive to Vogelaar will allow me, next, to
determine which characteristics he attributes to images as opposed to words.
The conclusions drawn about the differing characteristics of words and
images in The Goddamned Party have a larger purport than just their relevance
to this postmodernist novel.3 To borrow a term from the Russian formalists,
this novel foregrounds the problem of the difference between word and image.
More generally, it offers a choice between two alternative modes of reading:
"reading verbally and reading visually." The self-reflexivity of this text re-
garding the production of meaning allows me to relate it to more theoretical
discussions about "reading visually." I could not have found a more pleasant
and intelligent partner in this discussion than Brakman's novel.

2. Priority of Images

The first pages of The Goddamned Party describe the main character,
Vogelaar, focalizing4 a landscape through the window of a train. Consequently,
he experiences the landscape in visual terms as if it were a painting:

lead grey near the edge of the bridge, and almost of the same color as the riveted bearing,
glaring and pale yellow in the distance. (7)

Having crossed the bridge, he sees "real land this time: sepia brown fields,
blocks of threatening green. . . . Yellow, darker than above the water, floated
over the broom-bare trees" (8). The sun is "framed in a shaking window" (8).
Vogelaar grasps the landscape rushing past him and away from the continu-
ously moving train in levels, blocks, and colors. Impressionistic paintings are
displayed for the reader. Vogelaar's perception of the landscape is characterized
by a complete lack of rest, stillness, and arrest. But the description of his
focalization shows that he tries to freeze the landscape-in-movement into a
row of images, each static and motionless.
"Painting-like" descriptions and comparisons are not restricted to the
beginning of this novel. Over and over again Vogelaar is inclined to translate
his experiences into familiar, motionless representations. What makes "im-
ages" so attractive to him? Why are the fine arts so beneficial for him? When
he is chatting with God in front of a life-size Nativity scene, he confides that
he is "jealous of the stable, of its stillness, of that restful life between heaven
and earth" (13). Later on he says: "I like motionless images and window
dummies, which have laid down everything besides themselves" (78). Vogelaar

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 Reading Visually 221

is also tormented by his fellow men. Only by imagining that there must be
people who have heads like temples with a sun on every corner can he keep
his misanthropy in check "because at such moments I need strong images "
(16; italics mine). He confesses to God that he is not very fond of his creation.
God's promise fills him, not with joy, but with anxiety. Vogelaar's only remedy
against this is " imaginative power " (17; italics mine), thanks to which he never
lacks strong images.
"Imaginative power" should be read literally here, these words signifying
not the origin of creativity in general, but the capacity to transform temporal
events into images. Vogelaar is said to have the custom of translating stories
into images (112). At first sight this habit seems motivated by his tormenting
experience of movement and the dimension of time. Images would differ, then,
from stories because the progression of time can hardly be represented in an
image. With this idea Vogelaar seems to range himself on the side of Lessing's
aesthetic theory. As a reaction to the ut pietura poesis tradition which stressed
similarities between the "sister arts," Lessing differentiates the sister arts from
each other in his influential Laokoön: oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und
Poesie (1766). 5 He contends there that representation in painting is more static
than sequential. Thus, temporal events or ideas are not proper subjects for
paintings, according to Lessing, while physical beauty is. Ideas and sequences
of temporal events are, conversely, proper subjects for verbal art.
As Mitchell and Steiner have argued, Lessing's effort to differentiate the
sister arts fails because he sees as the essence or nature of a medium the
properties of objects he believes appropriately represented in that medium.
This mimetic presupposition about the relation between reality and art results
in the idea that the medium is composed of a sequence, a chain or string of
signifiers, and, thus, "naturally" represents sequences like series of events. The
medium which places signifiers beside each other in space, on the other hand,
would be forced to represent those objects, like bodies, which exist in space.
In semiotic terms, Lessing's theory is based on the idea that signifier and
meaning relate naturally to each other, that meanings share their most essential
properties with "their" signifiers. Lessing's differentiation of the arts betrays
a desire to make signifier and meaning coincide. It can be read as a plea for
arts which represent directly, which are transparent and do not need inter-
pretation.
We cannot lay these implications at Brakman's door. He shares with
Lessing the idea that the temporal dimension makes the difference between
stories and images. But it nowhere appears that his character wants an iconic
relation between the properties of a medium and the properties of that rep-
resented in the medium. Despite his preference for images, Vogelaar, in con-
trast with Lessing, is left absolutely cold about what is represented in an image.
He remembers very well, for instance, a pietà scene he looked at as a small
boy in a museum with his father just because time floated through it. He was

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 222 Ernst van Alphen

forced to create a story around these women sitting with a miserable, green
man on their laps, nails and hammer at their feet. He does not know the
masterplot of the descent from the cross: "In the beginning was the image,"
he says in this context. He develops a story from the painting he sees in which
the women are going to nail this man on the cross. Hence, rather than seeing
the image as a "transparent" representation of a spatial spectacle, he uses the
image for the production of a story.
Another paradox consists of the fact that although he transforms the
stories of others into images, he himself is an excessive narrator. His stories
contain numerous developments and events and profess a strong preference
for images. How does Vogelaar experience the difference between image and
word?

3. Image versus Meaning

Vogelaar's professed preference for images goes hand in hand with a

preference for the signifier and an aversion to meaning. This becomes very
clear in an embedded story in which he is confronted by a salesman who sells
"Jordan water" at a market. The salesman's discourse is a mixture of that of
an aggressive vegetable seller and that of religious fanatics like Jehovah's wit-
nesses. He harangues the people about their bad looks and promises healing
of all kinds after being immersed in the Jordan water. At the same time he
asks them to stand in front of a mirror and abuse themselves. "Being honest,
a little honest, that is the point" (50), says the salesman. They should confess
all their secrets and sinful desires.
The directions for use given by the salesman are extremely strange, se-
miotically speaking. Signifier and meaning are indissolubly linked. He advises
the people to look into a mirror and see, not their bodies, their signifiers, but
the condition of their souls, their meaning. Body and soul, signifier and mean-
ing, relate to each other "naturally." The human signifier must be inspected
because of its meaning. The man does not plead for a healthy body, but for
the contempt of it. He says to a woman who has many gold bracelets: "Do
not beautify yourself; why hang gold on that which you should be sick to death
of?" (51). As the total immersion in the Jordan water reminds us of baptism,
the ritual in front of the mirror closely resembles Catholic confession.
The marketman preaches the ideal of renouncing the signifier and having
only meaning: in other words, the condition of the Risen Lord.

There have been people who were very good in that art, who, we can say, became just a
mirror image, though they stopped existing at the same time. You could compare this with
a total immersion, ha, ha, a kind of eh. ... I must diminish in order that he will increase,
ah, ah. . . . (52)

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 Reading Visually 223

At first sight this can be read as an image of baptism, the beginning of a

Christian way of life: "I should diminish" referring to Christian denial of the
body in order that the mirror image, the soul or meaning, may "increase."
But the giggle and the big effort it takes for the salesman to make the com-
parison pass his lips encourage the reader to read these words more perversely.
With such a preverse reading it becomes quite easy, then, to read the salesman's
words as a description of an erection. Then, remarkably, there is an erect
phallus which symbolizes not the Lacanian Signifier of absent meaning, but
rather the fullness of meaning. In Lacanian semiotics the phallus is the "out-
standing" mediator that makes communication possible; however, the fullness
of meaning is never reached because the phallus is only an effort at mediation
(and the erection is only temporary). The phallus is the signifier for all values
in contrast with "lack" (Silverman).
In Lacanian theory the recognition of the self in the mirror is the subject's
first experience of the mediating role of signifiers. It is the first moment at
which the subject sees itself as a signifier. The salesman describes this expe-
rience the other way around. Claiming to see in the mirror "the fullness of
meaning," the condition of the soul, he sees the reflection of the human body
not as signifier, but as meaning. He believes himself in the pre-Babel world in
which communication was unmediated and the act of interpretation superflu-
ous.

The sentence "I must diminish in order that he will increase" can be
read in yet another way if we realize that the salesman resembles closely the
son, Christ, and that the phallus is also the signifier of the father, of his penis
as value, in opposition to the "castrated" mother. It signifies, then, all the
cultural privileges and positive values which define the male subject in pa-
triarchal society and from which the female subject is excluded (Silverman
183).
The Dutch verb afnemen ("to diminish") is related to the noun afname
("descent"), which occurs in the traditional expression kruisafname. ("descent
from the cross"). The sentence means, then, "I, the son, should descend from
the cross in order that He, the Phallus, the Name of the Father, may increase."
By preaching the celebration of the Phallus/Father, the salesman has Vogelaar
as his adversary, for the latter has a fascination for a character called Ma, the
mother of a friend who has died. The capitalization of her name, as well as
the descriptions of her appearance, makes clear that Ma is a supermother, a
deity for Vogelaar.
At a certain moment Vogelaar sees Ma in front of a mirror (64). However,
at that moment he sees not the reflection of Ma, but only his own head. Within
the concept of the sign as professed by the salesman, this would mean that
Ma has no soul or meaning; she is just a Signifier. But if the Phallus is the
outstanding Signifier for Lacan, so is Ma for Vogelaar. He is looking for her
presence all the time and is completely happy after having copulated with her.

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 224 Emst van Alphen

Vogelaar does not experience Ma, the female body, as a signifier of lack,
but of fullness. Neither does the mother as signifier stimulate the search for
the phallus or for meaning. Rather, in his desire for Ma, Vogelaar tries to
realize an ideal situation from which the Phallus/Father/Meaning must be
excluded.

4. Alternative Semiosis

In the preceding pages I have argued that Vogelaar has a special fasci-
nation for images, for imagination in the literal sense, for the signifier and for
Ma, the female body, as the supreme Signifier. This combination of preferences
puts us on a scent. Earlier I suggested that Vogelaar's preference for images
was not motivated by Lessing's presupposition that in the medium of the visual
arts, space is represented naturally and time only with great artificial effort.
Vogelaar's interest in images focuses on the image as signifier, not on its sup-
posed meaning. But what differentiates the image as signifier from words as
signifiers? This question should be answered if we are to understand Vogelaar's
experiences and the ways meaning is produced in this novel as a theory of
visual reading.
Several passages in the novel depict Vogelaar's desire. He tells a village
policeman about his attraction to a certain sculpture of a woman who has a
child on her arm. But he is terrified by her face; the mother of stone looks
through him.

Again and again I understand it almost. I ask myself then: should I do something, should
I leave off something? Should I nestle myself against her in an indecent way to break that
face? (31)

Vogelaar is looking for an alternative semiosis. He does not grasp the sculpture
intellectually (in Dutch: begrijpen), but thinks that he should break or grasp
it physically (in Dutch: grijpen) in order to "penetrate" it. The transition from
intellectual to physical grasp would imply that the process of semiosis gains
directness: the difference between signifier and meaning has lost its relevance.
The sculpture has not just the status of mediator of meaning; it is the beginning
and end of the fullness of being.
Later on the same day, Vogelaar takes an initiative to satisfy his desire.
When he arrives again at the life-size Nativity scene, he steps over the little
fence, sits down, and lays his head on Mary's lap, against the roundings of her
thighs (120). By this act Vogelaar makes the distance between himself and the
representation disappear. By sitting down in the Christmas stable, Vogelaar
sits in the image. At the same time he wriggles himself inside another image:
by laying his head on Mary's lap, he also places himself in the pietà scene.

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 Reading Visually 225

With one act he has penetrated thousands of paintings and sculptures in West-
ern Christian culture.
His nestling against Mary signiñes at the same time his desire to penetrate
her and his desire to return to her lap and womb. As soon as he is in her, he
will be part of her. They will be a unity then. This desire becomes very clear
just after he has copulated with Ma:

Where would she be now, or better, who would he be now in her womb? He felt himself
relapse into emptiness, indulging the temptation to disintegrate into ever-stranger fragments.
She made a son in her womb, he became a son, a little Puck. A son without a father. She
conceived immaculately and became Vogelaar. (74)

The regression back into the mother is expressed not by language, but in
language when Vogelaar makes a Freudian slip. Instead of saying: "Ik word
steeds moeier" ("I become more and more tired"), he says: "Ik word steeds
moeder" ("I become more and more mother").6 He looks for the fullness of
being and meaning by a unification with the Mother/Signifier. This alternative
semiosis implies a refusal of the search for the Father/Phallus/Signifier as the
entrance to meaning.
Vogelaar is strengthened in his rejection of the phallus at the moment
that the dying husband of Kee, a character from a famous Dutch children's
book, has an erection. Kee experiences this as a resurrection: "Are you there,
my little sweetheart, my little Lazarus, my little serpent, my ripe ear . . . my
little tree between the trees, my little bird?" (104-05). But just as meaning is
volatile, so is an erection temporary. A few seconds later the penis is in the
following condition: "the member hung in a little arch between waking and
dreaming" (106).
The relation with Ma/Signifier that Vogelaar is looking for is a relation
of unity. In his desire he has his adversary in another character, Ferwerda,
who has extremely sadistic fantasies about pregnant women. He wants to put
his hand on their bellies and then press forcefully. He is called "the one who
is in love with birthgiving" (116). In contrast with Vogelaar, who wants to
enter a womb in order to dissolve difference, Ferwerda's sadistic fantasies can
be read as the desire to destroy the unity of mother and child in the womb.
Christmas signifies for Vogelaar the unity in the womb, the direct relation to
the signifier. For Ferwerda, Christmas is the symbol of separation and differ-
ence. He wants to destroy the direct, unmediated relation to the signifier in
order to reach the heavenly light of meaning.
Vogelaar's happiest moments are those in which he experiences a world
absorbed in itself, in which he feels himself admitted to a centripetal cosmos:
"He felt completely happy, everything began to creep together" (108). Voge-
laar's desire for the unity of the embryonic world can be read as a desire for
the presymbolic experience of the imaginary phase (Lacan). The child expe-

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 226 Ernst van Alphen

riences no fixed boundaries between her/himself and the mother. Production

of meaning is then characterized as follows:

The imaginary implies a type of apprehension in which factors such as resemblance and
homeomorphism play a decisive role, as is borne out by a sort of coalescence of the signifier
with the signified. (Laplanche and Pon talis 180-210)

5. Reading Visually is Reading Literarily

Vogelaar, the main character of The Goddamned Party and of the stories
which are embedded in it, is also the origin of the novel, the center from which
it originates. There are several passages in the novel which force us to conclude
that the identity of the external narrator coincides with Vogelaar's. When he
enters a room in Ma's hotel, "he calls up a black, little woman" (64), a character
explicitly the product of Vogelaar's imaginative power. Later on when he re-
flects about a sick girl who is also staying in the hotel- "The girl was sleeping
probably, quietly lying till the moment that she would be needed again" (89)-
Vogelaar talks about her as a writer who maps out the structure of her/his
novel. If we take Vogelaar as the originator of the stories within this novel,
then he is at once the object and subject of the stories he narrates. By giving
himself a role in the stories which he fantasizes, he dissolves the distance
between the subject and object of semiosis. He is in the story he has created;
hence he is both subject and object. This can be seen as another way of creating
a direct relationship with signifiers. Thus, this strategy is comparable to his
inclination to creep into images and to nestle himself against sculptures. As
he creates a direct relationship with well-known images of our culture (Nativity
scene, pietà scene, Madonna and Child), so he does with texts. He incorporates
texts of Plato (the cave story, an allegorical text about images), Nietzsche,
Schnitzler, Shelley, Keats, the New Testament and the children's book Dik
Trom in his fantasies. He does not understand these texts, but he stands in
them. The direct access gained towards these texts by this strategy is obvious.
With this conclusion the difference between word and image seems to
be dissolved. Vogelaar creeps into stories as well as into images. Why is it,
then, that he professes a preference for images in his obsessive narrating in
time about temporal events? To understand this we must differentiate various
notions of time. Vogelaar is not as allergic to representing movement in time
through images of the world as Lessing is. He describes his happy moments
in the embryonic world as the "sunny dashing between his legs by the water
in the bath, where the strange pubic hairs wave like seaweed" (68). During a
kind of occult ceremony in the loft of the hotel he experiences that place as
chilly: "Everything cold and still, everything pleaded for movement, for red
and warm blood which wanted to beat and to stream" ( 1 38-39). The movement

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 Reading Visually 227

of time which Vogelaar cannot stand is teleological movement. Fluxing move-

ment, on the other hand, is even better than no movement at all, for this is
the movement of the heart, of the blood, and of the womb.
But how can it be, then, that Vogelaar narrates himself into stories, while
he is allergic to the movement of time, to the development of events in which
he gets absorbed? This is possible because as soon as stories are finished and
have closure they start to function as images. The development of events is
lifted out of the teleological movement of history.
We can learn how stories can be read as images in Nelson Goodman's
theory set forth in Languages of Art (1976). In that text he develops a strictly
conventionalistic theory of language and image in which no medium or type
of sign has a privileged status. All signs, all perceptions are cultural-relative
constructions. Words, as well as pictures and photographs, have to be read
according to an arbitrary code. But this does not mean that there is no difference
any longer between word and image.

Non-linguistic systems differ from language, depiction from description, the representational
from the verbal, paintings from poems, primarily through lack of differentiation, indeed
though density (and consequently total absence of articulation) of the symbol system.
(226)

This difference between word and image implies no hierarchy. "Lack," "den-
sity," "absences" are not meant in a negative sense, but in contrast with dif-
ferentiation. The image is generally read in our culture as a system character-
ized by density. As Mitchell says:

Every mark, every modification of texture or color is loaded with a semantic potential. . . .
The image is syntactically and semantically dense in that no mark may be isolated as a
unique, distinctive character (like a character of an alphabet), nor can it be assigned a
unique reference or "compliant." Its meaning depends rather on its relations with all the
other marks in a dense, continuous field. (67).

The alphabet, on the contrary, is usually seen as the exemplum of a differ-

entiated system. The meaning of a letter is independent of its context or the
way it is articulated.
It is important to realize that Goodman's difference between continuous
and differentiated symbol systems is not a difference between the essences of
media. Rather, it is a difference between ways in which signs function, between
the ways a reader or viewer deals with signs, in other words, between attitudes
toward reading. Paintings as well as texts can be read both as differentiated
and as continuous symbol systems. While we usually read Da Vinci's Mona
Lisa as a continuous field of meaning, the same image in which Mona Lisa
winks will be read within a differentiated symbol system. Only its difference
from the original Mona Lisa is supposed to be meaningful.
This brings me back to The Goddamned Party. I suggested that a story
can be read as an image as soon as it has closure. This should be understood

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 228 Ernst van Alphen

(stood in) as follows. Reading a story is, in the first instance, a linear activity.
The text is a sequence of signs which should be read one after the other. Insofar
as the text is a narrative text, the reader constructs a sequence of events in a
fabula on the basis of the sequence of signs. Although fabula, or the lack of
fabula, is usually the basic structure of a novel, this does not mean that the
potential for meaning is closed off as soon as this level of meaning has been
constructed. When the reader has followed the text until its end, she can refigure
the coherence between the signs, for after the linear sequence of signs is broken
open, each sign can link up with each other sign. Contrasts, repetitions, con-
notations, and the like can be related to each other right across the text. Through
this attitude toward reading, the text gets the density considered exemplary
for images. Every difference is then a difference in meaning.
Vogelaar focalizes this phenomenon as follows:

The things did not want to disappear, they were all connected. It was like with the rubbish
of space-travellers, which does not stop floating around them. Life became more and more
heavy, everything was so coherent that it made you feel strangled. Everything got inter-
minable meanings as if everything disintegrated more and more. (59-60)

Closing a novel forces us to rethink or reread it. During this process the signs
of the text arrange themselves as in an image: more and more things begin to
link up with each other. This density is not specific to Vogelaar's world or to
Brakman's novel. It is the result of Vogelaar's attitude toward life and of the
reader's attitude toward reading. Vogelaar has a special desire for the signifier
of images because in that organization of signs he sees his experience of life-
"everything link[ing] up with everything" (105)- reflected. He perceives stories
as images, the meaning of each part depending on its relations with all the
other elements of the dense, continuous field which a story possesses within
Vogelaar's attitude toward life. This represents the attitude toward reading that
the novel proposes as an alternative. Ferwerda's attitude toward life represents
an attitude toward reading which contrasts with the one I described previously.
The violent birthgivings he desires in his sadistic fantasies can be read as an
"image" of "reading for the plot" (Brooks), of an attitude toward reading in
which meaning is arrived at through differentiation. Vogelaar's inclination to
stand in images, instead of under-standing them, can now be read as a refusal
to paralyze the unlimited potential of meaning a text provides. Hence, I apol-
ogize for my interpretation of the novel which is, for Vogelaar, a reduction of
it. The dynamic of signifiers in an image is too volatile to be pinned down.
But the dynamic of signifiers in the case of literature is also too volatile
to be pinned down, at least in the case of a novel like The Goddamned Party.
This provides us with the solution to the puzzling subtitle of this novel. "A
novel in images" means literature.

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 Reading Visually 229

Notes

1 For an overview of the field of interdisciplinary studies in art and literature,

see Isaak 125-36.

2 1 will quote from the edition of 1 980.

3 For a excellent discussion of postmodernism and literature, see McHale.
4 For this term, see Bal.
5 For a critical reading of Lessing's Laokoön , see Mitchell.
6 The difference between i and d also stands for a difference in sociolinguistic
level, ¿/being more "classy," more literary. Moeder instead of moeier is then an instance
of hypercorrection. Hence, the slip from language to mother is almost inevitable.

Works Cited

Alphen, Ernst van. Bij wijze van lezen. Verleiding en verzet van Willem Brakmans lezer.
Muiderberg: Coutinho, 1988.
Bal, Mieke. Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: U of Toronto
P, 1985.
Brakman, Willem. Het godgeklaagde feest. Een beeldroman. 1967. Amsterdam: Quer-
ido, 1980.
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