Abstract
Two groups of figures represented in ‘Rembrandt’1: nude, often mature, women and blind old men; two viewing positions distinguished in modern theory: the gaze and the glance; two gendered positions distinguished by Western culture: women as objects of looking, men as subjects of looking; two gendered feelings distinguished by psychoanalysis: fear and envy; two arts, two media, two semiotic systems distinguished by Western academia: textuality and vision; two ways of processing these: reading and looking; two paradigms of interpretation: the verbal one, based on Jakobsonian ideal, mutual communication, and the visual one, based on one-sided, objectifying voyeurism; is there life beyond binary thinking?
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Notes
See Roman Jakobson, ‘Linguistics and Poetics’, in T.A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960).
See L. Marin, ‘The Iconic Text and the Theory of Enunciation: Luca Signorelli at Loreto (Circa 1479–1484)’, New Literary History, XIV, 3 (1983), pp. 253–96, and
‘Towards a Theory of Reading in the Visual Arts: Poussin’s The Arcadian Shepherds’, in Norman Bryson (ed.), Calligram: Essays in the New Art History from France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 63–90.
The seminal article here is Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16, 3 (1975), pp. 6–18, which started a whole new trend in film studies.
See for contemporary responses, J.A. Emmens, Rembrandt en de regels van de kunst (Amsterdam: Van Oorschot, 1968); S. Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise. The Studio andthe Market (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 137–8, gives a translation of a text by Pels (Dutch edition by Maria A. Schenkeveld-van der Dussen, A. Pels: Gebruik en Misbruik des tooneels (Culenborg: Tjeenk Willink/Noorduijn, 1978) which is typical.
The notion of realism here refers to insistence on one side of the dialectic of ideal and type as discussed by E. Gombrich, ‘Ideal and Type in Italian Renaissance Painting’, in New Light on Old Masters (Oxford: Phaidon, 1986), pp. 89–124.
Bryson Vision and Painting. The Logic of the Gaze (London: Macmillan, 1983), pp. 93–4, relates the term to the French regard, which he decomposes into re- (= repetitively) and -gard (prendre sous garde, taking hold of).
The terms are based on a Lacanian theory of looking; see J. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, edited by J.-A. Miller and trans. A. Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), pp. 65–119.
Also Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986).
In a book written in Dutch, Bij wijze van lezen. Verleiding en verzet van Willem Brakmans lezer (Muiderberg: Coutinho 1988), Ernst Van Alphen discusses the main streams in reader-response theory as criticized by J. Culler in On Deconstruction. Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983). The author is satisfied with Culler’s conclusions concerning the aporia entailed by both positions’ compulsion to grant more importance to the factor — text or reader — they initially deny any stability, but not satisfied with the powerlessness those conclusions entail. Van Alphen then proposes to abandon the idea that we are always talking about one concept of meaning. Instead, he distinguishes between what he calls ‘two moments of meaning’ (p. 235) which are not congruous with each other. A summary of these thoughts appeared in English in the Italian journal VS/Versus, in a special issue on the reader (‘The Complicity of the Reader’, VS/Versus, 1989, pp. 52–3, 121–32).
In other words, the position of the viewer is represented, included in the image, in order to preclude the easy and uncommitted gaze. This is one possible way of countering the disturbing aspects of pornographic films. See Ellis, ‘Photography/Pornography, Art/Pornography’, Screen 20,1 (Spring 1980), pp. 81–108.
The concept was first proposed by Gerard Genette in 1972 (Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, translated by Jane E. Lewin, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1980) and it was meant to distinguish narrative voice (who speaks?) from vision (who sees?). Genette did not give the concept the systematic stature it deserved because he failed to ground it in a systematic theory of narrative. I have tried to solve that problem (Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, translated by Christine van Boheemen, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), an attempt which generated an incredible amount of response; too much, indeed, to hold the theoretical aspects of my proposal accountable for it. The critical, hence feminist, potential of my amendments became clear much later, and I now think it is that potential which gave rise to such strong reactions. I elaborated that aspect of the theory later (Femmes imaginaires. L’ancien Testament au risque d’une narratologie critique, Utrecht: Hes Publishers, Montreal: HMH Hurturbise, Paris: Nizet, 1986) in the framework of my feminist analyses of biblical love-stories. In that French book, I reworked the discussion with Genette and related it to ideological issues. This reworking appeared in English in a different context (On Story-Telling: Essays in Narratology, edited by David Jobling, Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press, 1991).
The concept of focalization is much more specific and therefore, useful than that of ‘centrally imagining’ and its derivative, the ‘internal spectator’, proposed by Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art. The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1984 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987, pp. 101–86).
The literature on Free Indirect Discourse is abundant. See B. McHale, ‘Free Indirect Discourse: A Survey of Recent Accounts’, PTL 3, 2(1978), pp. 249–87,
for a useful summary. A. Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction (Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982) proposes a linguistic theory which raised many criticisms but which is, in my opinion, the best account of the phenomenon to date. Banfield ignores the concept of focalization, however, which leads sometimes to stretching the realm of ‘pure’ linguistics a bit far.
S. Willis, ‘Lettre sur les taches aveugles: à l’usage de celles qui voient’, L’Esprit créateur, XXIV, 1 (1984), pp. 85–98, suggests that in Diderot narrativization is a device in the service of the ideology that suppresses the female subject. The term narrativization, however, refers there to the projection of a priori constructed narratives on an image that is thereby recuperated and displaced.
These two suggestions do not overlap. As recent feminist films have demonstrated, the gaze can be undercut by a redirection of internal focalization as well as by a blocking of it. The first strategy is used in Karen Arthur’s Lady Beware (1987) where the man’s focalization of the store windows is alternated by the woman’s focalization of the same, thus opposing to his erotic interpretation a postmodern play with signifiers. The second strategy is used in Marleen Gorris’s Broken Mirrors (1984) where internal focalization is first proposed and then cut off, so that the traditional parade of women, maintained on the level of the fabula, is undermined on the level of focalization. This example shows clearly that focalization is constitutive of meaning itself, not a dispensable comment; the event of the parade still takes place, but there is no parade.
For primary narcissism in terms of the separation from the mother, see J. Kristeva, Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
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Bal, M. (1995). Reading the Gaze: The Construction of Gender in ‘Rembrandt’. In: Melville, S., Readings, B. (eds) Vision and Textuality. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24065-4_8
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