Page 40 - Studio International - September 1973

Two pages from Sheridan Le Fanu
The Watcher in A Chronicle of Golden Friars
(First edition 1896)

to a notation of immediate and practical bound to one another only through their relationship caption/image (and by implication,
utility. But in no sense does this passage or mutual relations to the 'reality' lying outside the text/image) : here, we move from one type of sign
modulation rupture the web of discourse. This text. If we press examination of these pages a to another as from the less to the more real.
is perhaps analogous to the point made by little further, we can see that these relations to It will be apparent that the two examples
Foucault, in Les mots et les choses, that, in the `reality' are determined by quite different which I have used differ precisely in the
classic episteme, there is 'no opposition between constraints in the cases of text and image. The problem of the relationship of the sign to
the "arbitrary" and the "natural" except if one most prominent device in the text is the reality; and that is to say, in the problem of
wishes to designate the manner in which the variation of tenses, from pluperfect to past subordination between the natural and the
signs have been established' (p. 76). It also historic, and finally to present historic: artificial sign. The presence of subordination is
recalls his general statement that : 'In the `Many restless toings-and-froings had there the direct result of the positing of a reality
classical age, to make use of signs is not, as in been. It was now within an hour of sunset, and beyond the sign (consistent with Tzvetan
the preceding centuries, to try and rediscover she hears a whistle and she guesses who is Todorov's judgment that the 'nineteenth
beneath them the primitive text of a discourse coming. She advances....' century lived . . . in a metaphysic of the real and
exercised and retained in perpetuity; it is a The intention of realism is here perceptible the imaginary'). Conversely, the lack of such
matter of trying to discover the arbitrary in the controlled use of variations in tense, subordination within the system of signs
language which will authorize the deployment which allows the author to achieve a pitch of indicates the lack of such a belief in a hidden or
of nature in its space ...' (p. 77). The immediacy and intensity. In the case of the unattainable 'reality'.
antithesis will become clearer, I imagine, if we illustration, however, the caption reverts to the
contrast the page openings from The Complete past tense: 'A little black-eyed boy came II
Angler with one from Sheridan Le Fanu's 'The running up the road'. Outside the system of Having tested certain semiological concepts on
Watcher', published in A Chronicle of Golden controlled variations within the text, we might this unfamiliar material, I should like to pass
Friars (1896). In this second example, the say, the use of the present historic has no to more promising ground. John Sell Cotman's
full-page illustration facing the text indicates relevance. It is the image itself— the natural sign Abbey Church of the Holy Trinity at Caen is a
not simply an iconic variant in the flow of identified by the caption — which achieves the detached plate from the artist's series of
discourse but a parallel system of meaning : in immediacy of an approach to the real. In other Architectural Antiquities of Normandy
Foucault's terms, the arbitrary and the natural words, the relationship past/present historic is (published 1822). It depicts, as will be obvious,
sign are programmatically opposed, and are reflected on the right-hand page in the the crypt of the Abbey Church. But it also

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