Dope.
Screw the exordium.

Alberto Manguel's latest book is entitled Reading Pictures. That title didn't seem right to us -- the verb, surely, should be seeing. Looking at. But Reading does hint at a more theory packed gaze than is usual among the realists, so we overlooked -- or didn't read -- the title. Perhaps the title should have been Overwriting Pictures, a more confrontational, but also more truthful, guide to the author's intention.

But, but... just as we were getting into the book, we were stopped cold by two sentences set pretty close to one another in the introduction:



1. "With the development of perspective during the Renaissance, pictures froze into a simple instant: that of the moment of the viewing as perceived from the standpoint of the viewer."



2."Pictures, however, present themselves to our consciousness instantaneously, held by their frame..."



LI tried to go on, but these sentences so clouded our pleasure that we couldn't trust Manguel from then on. Whatever he had to say about Tina Modotti or Peter Eisenman was going to be colored, for us, by that initial instance of -- well, we hate to use the term, but there isn't another one available: logocentrism.



The first we would call historically ignorant, and the second, upon which the first depends, phenomenologically ignorant. It is an ignorance of a particular genre, however. The kind of ignorance that becomes a clue in a police novel. The telling distortion that hints at a larger, suppressed event.



The thing to do, here, is to track back from the phenomenological error -- the conception of the picture-as-instant -- to the dependent historical error. Will LI ever have time to do the latter? Probably not. But let's address ourselves, with the gusto of some paterfamilias carving the Christmas goose, to no. 2.



Manguel, to illustrate the instantaneousness of the picture, doesn't invoke the real sensory impact of pictures. He has already set the stage (and told us all we need to know of his particular approach) by claiming that "storytelling exists in time, pictures in space." He illustrates this claim, bizarrely, by using a picture -- but really, this isn't bizarre if, like LI, you are hip to the Derridian history of logocentrism, in which the compulsion to illustrate the logocentric claim by way of an example that takes exception to the thesis is a recurring pattern. Derrida calls this the logic of the supplement, and LI could call it the return of the repressed as your ideal straight man, but you get the idea. The idea of storytelling existing in time is, of course, consistent with the idea of language as primarily arising out of voice -- a long, long story of Platonism in action, the shucking off of the material for the spiritual essence, the refusal to countenance the double aspect of the Word unless the two faces were properly hierarchized, and pointed to, eventually, a founding, timeless sense. Etc. Similarly, the silence of pictures becomes prima facie evidence that they exist, primarily, in space. That silence is considered a wholly negative, and wholly accidental, attribute of the picture. But in order to effect the separation of space and times as modes, it is necessary to fictionalize the primary scene of viewing. There is, firstly, the matter of the picture that "presents itself" -- and we can already hear the whisper, the merest whisper, of the pathetic fallacy here, and farther back, in the cold hallways, yes,  that notion of the picture as some sub-anima like thing, zombie to human, opposed to the word, the dead letter, the tool, the techne -- well, there is that. Then there is what exactly it means, the picture-as-instant.



Now, if we unpack our idea (our mental picture) of the picture-as-instant, we get something like this: the gaze, which takes up some quantifiable time, is composed of atomic bits, little glances, indecomposable insofar as decomposition requires some extended period. This is not, by the way, a very good exposition of the phenomenology of seeing -- or its physiological correlates. But Manguel doesn't want to argue for it anyway. His argument takes another turn. The instantaneousness is not about timeless time atoms. No, it is about total impressions. It is about gestalt. Mangual illustrates (the pictures on pictures we string along in this analysis!) his point with, of course, Van Gogh (and excuse us, excuse us, have to say this, have to stick my head into the frame here, much like the film-maker in The Man who Envied Woman, remember that great scene when she appears at the bottom of the screen, on the top is her man, looking at a Playboy, and there she is, harried by her own imagination, this film, and she orders all the viewers who haven't menstruated from the room, or is it all viewers who haven't gone through menopause? well, here LI has to stick his head in, top of the screen is the Mangling of Manguel, bottom is me, and I'm going to allude, here, as my reader, with her ears pricked up, can surely already guess, I'm going to allude to Derrida's essay, Restitutions de la verite en pointure, and the mysterious presence of Van Gogh in these discussions, and not just Van Gogh but 'just-Van-Gogh,' the unspecified Van Gogh, which Derrida has gone through, exhaustively -- for which James Elkin criticizes him in this very pretty essay -- by pointing to the slip slip slip of the concrete referant, the substitution, in the moment of proof, of some variable for the real thing, the titled thing, the picture itself -- a sort of stage fright of reference -- and not in itself but as it presents itself, or is represented, the slip slip slip that in Manguel's case, as though following some fatal, secret law, is represented by Manguel's allusion, here, to an earlier reference to a Van Gogh picture of a beach that could be many Van Gogh pictures of beaches -- which, of course, is the danger of the picture having only space, since space has a tendency to yawn, to become general, to become a marker of itself in time, its truth encapsulated in a glance - that yawn of space being the absolute zero degree of boredom which is the real foundation of logocentrism, the sleep it induces), making the claim of instantaneousness like this: "Van Gogh's fishing boats, for instance, were for me, on that first afternoon, immediately real and definitive. Over time, we may see more or less in a picture, delve deeper and discover further details, associate and combine images, lend it words to tell what we see, but in itself the image exists in the space it occupies, independently of the time we allot to gaze upon it�"

We will take up the amphibolies in these brief claims at some latter date. Really, this post is an excuse to link to the letters of Van Gogh, which have been put up, very generously, with a search tool to shift through them. However, there is a passage we really must quote, here. Van Gogh is discussing with his brother the perennially hot topic, among painters, of drinking. Leading to this wonderful burst of eloquence:

"And very often indeed I think of that excellent painter Monticelli - who they said was such a drinker, and off his head - when I come back myself from the mental labour of balancing the six essential colours, red - blue - yellow - orange - lilac - green. Sheer work and calculation, with one's mind strained to the utmost, like an actor on the stage in a difficult part, with a hundred things to think of at once in a single half hour.

After that, the only thing to bring ease and distraction, in my case and other people's too, is to stun oneself with a lot of drinking or heavy smoking. Not very virtuous, no doubt, but it's to return to the subject of Monticelli. I'd like to see a drunkard in front of a canvas or on the boards. It is too gross a lie, all the Roquette woman's malicious, Jesuitical slanders about Monticelli.

Monticelli, the logical colourist, able to pursue the most complicated calculations, subdivided according to the scales of tones that he was balancing, certainly over-strained his brain at this work, just as Delacroix did, and Richard Wagner.

And if perhaps he did drink, it was because he - and Jongkind too - having a stronger constitution than Delacroix, and more physical ailments (Delacroix was better off), well, if they hadn't drunk - I for one am inclined to believe - their nerves would have rebelled, and played them other tricks: Jules and Edmond de Goncourt said the very same thing, word for word - �We used to smoke very strong tobacco to stupefy ourselves� in the furnace of creation.

Don't think that I would maintain a feverish condition artificially, but understand that I am in the midst of a complicated calculation long beforehand. So now, when anyone says that such and such is done too quickly, you can reply that they have looked at it too quickly."