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“Picture Writing”
in Arnaldo Antunes and Marcia Xavier’s ET Eu Tu
Marco Alexandre de Oliveira
On the back cover of a recent collection of poetry by the Brazilian
intersemiotic and multimedia artist Arnaldo Antunes entitled Dois
ou mais corpos no mesmo espaço (“Two or more bodies
in the same space”), there is a brief introduction by concrete
poet, translator and critic Haroldo de Campos that cites a rather visionary
passage from Walter Benjamin. The German critic foresees the eventual
development of a graphic or “picture writing” (Bildschrift)
by poets who “will now as in earliest times be first and foremost
experts in writing.” Such a form of writing will recover the original
multidimensionality of script as it advances “ever more deeply
into the graphic regions of its new eccentric figurativeness.”
Poets as writers will as such “renew their authority in the life
of peoples, and find a role awaiting them in comparison to which all
the innovative aspirations of rhetoric will reveal themselves as antiquated
daydreams.”1 Haroldo de Campos thus sees
the graphic or “iconic” dimension present in Antunes’
works as evidence of Benjamin´s insightful affirmations.
In a sense, picture-writing generally involves the ever elusive –
perhaps illusive – aesthetic dream of relating the word
and the thing by means of a constructive dialogue between verbal
and nonverbal languages. Consequently, the work of Arnaldo Antunes often
combines various forms of text and image media in which the name strives to correspond to the thing it represents. To this effect, a
subsequent book by Antunes – ET
Eu Tu – demonstrates an altogether distinct form of picture-writing
made possible by collaboration with plastic artist and photographer
Marcia Xavier. In an interview the photographer states that for a long
time she had wanted to explore the relationship between words and images.2
Eventually, she began to send photographs via email to the poet, who
wrote poems that were (for the most part) based on the pictures. Commenting
on his efforts, the poet states that in various photos there was “alguma
coisa sensitiva que motivou a construção do poema.”3
Such a “sensitivity” is indeed reflected in the sensibility
of his poetic recreations. Rather than compose a nonverbal (or visual)
poetry to represent the images, Antunes preferred to highlight the interrelations
between word and image by primarily verbal means, in order for the “friction
of codes” (“atrito de códigos”) to exist precisely
in the relations between the poems and the photographs.4
The series of photographs in ET
Eu Tu exhibit a sequence of thematic images that, in Marcia
Xavier’s view, express the deconstruction of the individual.5
For Arnaldo Antunes, such a form of deconstruction “reverberates”
in the syntactic structure of the poems, in the word breaks that come
to suggest other words, or in the “agglutinations” between
words themselves. This technique develops a process that had already
been applied in previous collections of poetry – such as Dois
ou mais corpos no mesmo espaço – in which “a
quebra dos versos com a fragmentação de vocábulos
entre as linhas . . . . sugere mais de um discurso num mesmo espaço
sintático.”6 The poet finally reveals
that, in composing poems for the collaborative work, this formal structure
was often motivated or even inspired by the actual cuts and montages
originally present in the photographer’s images. By thus exploring
and traversing the limits between genres, ET
Eu Tu is ultimately neither a book of poems or of photographs,
but instead constitutes a truly hybrid aesthetic form: “Nem poema,
nem imagem, mas diálogos, parceria de dois códigos.”7
In ET
Eu Tu poetry and photography correspond in both form and content,
as words relate to images and vice versa. The poems in a sense decode
the photographs and rewrite the images in words. But the photograph
as such already represents both an image and a form of writing (or text),
since to photograph is literally to write (or draw) with
light. The photograph is essentially a transcription of
an image that in turn depicts a thing. Such a form of depiction is also
a nonverbal form of description, which further relates the
photograph to a form of language or script. The photograph
can therefore be read or interpreted as form of inscription (or picture-writing) in itself. Indeed, it was a perhaps prophetic Benjamin
who once asked: “Won’t inscription become the most important
part of the photograph?”8 For his part,
in considering the “Rhetoric of the Image,” French semiologist
Roland Barthes also wonders – albeit in a different context –
whether or not there is “always textual matter in, under, or around
the image.”9 Comparing pictures and writing,
he elsewhere declares that pictures are “more imperative than
writing, they impose meaning at one stroke, rather than analyzing it
or diluting it. But this is no longer a constitutive difference. Pictures
become a kind of writing as soon as they are meaningful.”10
The fundamental question for Barthes becomes: “How does meaning
get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?”11
Observing that the etymological origin of the word image is
akin to the Latin verb imitari, Barthes notes that all of the
denominated “imitative” arts virtually encompass diametrically
opposing messages: a denoted message that is analogous to reality,
and a connoted message that communicates what is seen or thought
of reality.12 An image of a thing is not the
thing itself but its “perfect” analogue [analogon].
In other words, an image is apparently analogous or equivalent to the
thing it represents. By speaking of the photographic image’s perfect
“analogical plenitude” or its inherent “objectivity,”
Barthes initially seems to propose that the photograph is the only image
(or text) that is “exclusively constituted and occupied by a ‘denoted’
message, a message which totally exhausts its mode of existence.”13
Barthes immediately contests this notion of denotative exclusivity,
however, by asserting that since a photograph is not only seen but “read,”
it still has the means to connote a message as such.14
The photographic message thus communicates an indirect form of meaning
(or connotation) that is relatively distinct from its direct form of
meaning (or denotation). The paradox inherent in the photograph becomes
the “co-existence of two messages, the one without a code (the
photographic analogue), the other with a code (the ‘art’,
or the treatment, or the ‘writing’, or the rhetoric of the
photograph.”15
As a form of writing, photography is fundamentally related to other
pictographic forms of script that are written with images. Barthes actually
considers the photographic language to be similar to “certain
ideographic languages which mix analogical and specifying units.”16
Perceived in such a light, the ideographic nature of photography is
arguably relatable to the ideogrammatic structure of concrete poetry,
a perhaps more obvious form of “picture-writing.” Although
the poems in ET
Eu Tu do not constitute concrete poetry per se, there is nonetheless
a definite concreteness that pervades both the texts and the
images as a whole. Both the analogical denotation and the iconographic
connotation of the photographic image are in effect mirrored by the
concrete character of the poetic word, which also works by analogy and
association. The photographic technique of montage, which incidentally
is based in part on the ideogram, is also imitated by the fragmentary
syntactic structure of poems that demonstrate clear formal affinities
with the techniques of concrete poetry. Not only are pictures of things
cut up and rearranged in order to compose the images, but words are
also treated objectively as things that can be broken apart and reordered
in order to form the poems. Just as an image denotes a thing and connotes
its various meanings, words thus come to denote the image as a thing
while connoting its possible significance.
In ET
Eu Tu verbal and nonverbal codes of signification converge
as words and images correspond to reveal or develop a picture of things. Such a correspondence between word and image also illustrates
how both poetry and photography communicate or express meaning as such.
If plurisignification is characteristic of the poetic word, polysemy
is an inherent feature of the photographic image. As Barthes writes,
“all images are polysemous; they imply, underlying their signifiers,
a ‘floating chain’ of signifieds, the reader able to choose
some and ignore others.”17 Texts that accompany
images operate on a literal level to “fix” the
floating chain of signifieds by identifying the thing itself as represented
in the image. The text thereby becomes “a matter of a denoted
description of the image,” according to Barthes. By assuming the
power to describe or name things, however, words also affect the overall
perception of images, causing one to focus not only on the thing itself
but also on its significance.18 It is thus in
the sense of connotation that, in principle, “the text directs the reader through the signified of the image,” causing him to
accept some meanings and reject others.19 Both
the denotation and the connotation of the photographic message therefore
act as forms of “anchorage” in which a verbal language of
words functions to clarify or elucidate a nonverbal language of images.
Such a process is nonetheless entirely “selective,” as the
text in reality becomes “a metalanguage applied not to the totality
of the iconic message but only to certain of its signs.”20
A relatively similar process of elucidation occurs in ET
Eu Tu despite marked differences, the most significant of which
being that the work as a whole illustrates the poetic and not
the communicative function of language. Accordingly, words may be said
to direct the reader, but not toward any signified per se. Instead the
texts accentuate specific features or qualities of the images which
in turn act as signifiers. The words in effect create a signified
for the images that is – for all intents and purposes –
parallel or correlative to any denoted or connoted message.
The text may no longer be said to have a “repressive value,”
but rather acquires an expressive significance that liberates the signified
of the image, ultimately freeing the image from signifying or meaning
anything other than itself. Such a form of relation, for Barthes, would
perhaps mean that the function of anchorage is surpassed by that of
“relay,” in which “text and image stand in a complementary
relationship,” producing meanings that are not inherent in the
image itself. Both word and image ultimately become parts of another
language, “fragments of a more general syntagm,” while the
message (as medium) is realized at a “higher level,” which
in this case constitutes the realm of art.21
The poem-photograph “asa de pé” displays several of the
unique forms of relations between word and image in ET
Eu Tu. On one side of the page there is the slightly blurred,
pale-blue image of a foot extended in space. On the other side there
is a rather minimalist graphic poem – that incidentally rhymes
– whose actual form is evidently made to appear in a similar shape
(or format) as the image opposite it. One thus immediately perceives
that the image of the poem itself resembles that of the photograph.
Upon closer analysis, a reading of the poem reveals that the syntactic
structure corresponds to the fragmentary nature of the image, which
represents a part of the body. The opening words “asa de pé”
relate the image of the foot to the image of a wing. The word “pé”,
however, is actually a fragment of the name “pégaso,”
the mythical winged horse that used his hoof – or foot –
to cause a fountain to spring forth from a mountain. The “foot-wing”
that evokes the fabled figure is in turn depicted as “azulado,”
which relates both to the color of water and to the shade of blue in
the image. In passing, one might also note that the word-fragment “gaso”
suggests the word gas or gasoso, a state or quality
of air. Further on the foot-wing is described as both “luminoso”
and “parado,” as if part of an angelic figure floating
in the sky or heavens which it comes to represent. “O céu”
is presented as not only having been originally made or created (“feito”),
but as actually having been remade or recreated (“refeito”)
in the rarefied space or “air” of the page itself (“no
ar rarefeito do papel”), just as the image has been similarly
represented in words. What therefore becomes either apparent or suggested
in the word-breaks at the end of the poem is that such forms of representation
are purely an effect (“efeito”), a rare (raro)
and significant technique or art.
“Asa de pé” is aesthetically self-conscious and critically
self-aware of its own intrinsic and extrinsic forms of representation
as both poem and photograph. Indeed representation, or mimesis
rather, constitutes the essence of both the verbal and nonverbal (or
visual) arts, but there is a significant difference between representation
as a form of imitation and re-presentation as a form of recreation.
Both forms of representation occur to an extent in ET
Eu Tu. Although in the photographic message the text appears
to denote the image and connote the thing to which it refers, even Barthes
considers that it seems as though the “closer the text is to the
image, the less it seems to connote it; caught as it were in the iconographic
message, the verbal message seems to share in its objectivity.”22
Furthermore, by its proximity to the image and its “approximity”
to the referent, the text “appears to duplicate the image, that
is, to be included in its denotation.”23
It is impossible, however, for the words to “duplicate”
the image. The question now becomes: Might it not be possible for a
text to re-present the image, or to re-create it, in other words?
In ET
Eu Tu, multiple forms of “proximity” between text
and image might lend one to believe that the former is attempting to
sensibly copy or reproduce the latter. Not only is there a proximity
of distance, but also of form or structure. But the words only superficially
appear to denote the image and connote its meanings. By its formal resemblance
and structural correspondence, the poetry exhibits a far more profound
relation with the photography, as the word effectively becomes a translation
of the image in a quite literal sense. Once again, inscription becomes
an even more significant part of the picture as the poems come to describe
the actual composition of the photographs. As words transcribe
the images on (or across) the page, any perceived content or meaning
is represented by a recreation of the forms or structures that compose
the images in themselves. Such a form of recreation perhaps represents
the ultimate essence of translation as such.
According to Benjamin, a translation should strive to incorporate an
original work’s “mode of signification” rather than
seek to express the meaning or communicate the sense. Such a process
reveals that both the original and the translation are really fragments
of a “greater” language whose intention [intentio]
underlies each and every language as a whole.24
The translation thereby “gives voice to the intentio
of the original not as reproduction but as harmony, as a supplement
to the language in which it expresses itself, as its own kind of intentio.”25
It is the underlying intention of such a “pure” or original
language that must be liberated or brought to light in the
recreation of a work of art. The poetry in ET
Eu Tu thus serves to illuminate that sense of intentionality
that underwrites the photography as the word essentially translates
the image, in a sense. As in other “true” forms of translation,
“the original rises into a higher and purer linguistic air . .
. . the predestined, hitherto inaccessible realm of reconciliation and
fulfillment of languages.”26 It is perhaps
also in this sense, then, that one should conceive the harmonious tension
between poetry and photography, word and image in the picture-writing
of ET
Eu Tu – a dialogue of intentions, a partnership of codes,
a kinship of languages that ultimately ends in a realization or fulfillment
of purpose.
*Originally presented at the XVIII Congress
of the International Comparative Literature Association (July 29-August
5, 2007)
Footnotes:
1 “One Way Street” (p. 78)
2 “ET Eu Tu - Entrevista
com os autores”
3 “ET Eu Tu - Entrevista
com os autores”
4 “ET Eu Tu - Entrevista
com os autores”
5 (the sky, the sea, the body) “ET
Eu Tu - Entrevista com os autores”
6 “ET Eu Tu - Entrevista
com os autores”
7 “ET Eu Tu - Entrevista com os autores”
8 “Little History of Photography”
(p. 527)
9“Rhetoric
of the Image” (p. 38)
10 Mythologies (p. 110)
11 “Rhetoric of the Image”
(p. 32)
12 “Rhetoric of the Image”
(p. 32) / “The Photographic Message” (p. 17)
13 “The Photographic Message”
(p. 18-19)
14 “The Photographic Message”
(p. 19)
15 “The Photographic Message”
(p. 19)
16 “The Photographic Message” (p. 28)
17 “Rhetoric of the Image”
(p. 39)
18 “Rhetoric of the Image”
(p. 39)
19 “Rhetoric of the Image”
(p. 40)
20 “Rhetoric
of the Image” (p. 40)
21 “Rhetoric of the Image” (p. 41)
22 “The Photographic Message” (p. 26)
23 “The Photographic Message”
(p. 26)
24 “The Task of the Translator”
(p. 78)
25 “The Task of the Translator”
(p.79)
26 “The Task of the Translator”
(p. 75)
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