当今的图像与文本

“Image”, “text” ,“image and text”: these terms are used in an immense semantic network that would take many pages even to begin to survey. An image is usually in one way or another a visual representation or “image” of something, as in “photographic image,” but sometimes an image may be a “stand alone,” a picture without any referent. A text is usually a set of meaningful words in comprehensible order. We say, in the United States at least, “He is the spitting image of his father.” We speak, or write, of the “text of George Eliot’s Middlemarch,” or announce, in a Christian church service in English that “The New Testament text for today is Johtn 1: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’” The phrase “image and text” implies the juxtaposition of some image with an accompanying explanatory text or, perhaps, a text with illustrations inserted, as was the case with most Victorian novels in their first publication. 

This article explores the relation between image and text in the present time. The “and” in the phrase “image and text” is ambiguous. It may mean a harmonious intertwining of the two or a juxtaposition of incommensurables. It may also obliquely refer to a widespread but problematic assumption about media history, that is, the notion that one or the other, image or text, is dominant in a given period and country. In Victorian England, it is sometimes asserted, text was dominant, for example in Victorian novels, whereas in the twentieth century and down to the present day, image has been paramount, as in films or video games. It is easy to see that this schematizing is an oversimplification. All texts have an image dimension, even if it is only the handwriting’s or printing’s appearance and size. All images have an overt or implicit textual component. As I have said, almost all Victorian novels were, in their original publications in journal parts or as stand-alone volumes, “illustrated.” Even silent films commonly have subtitles, whereas present-day films combine images with spoken or printed texts. Video games are almost always an extravagant overlapping of image and text. From ancient Hebrew, Greek, or Latin manuscripts through medieval ones, then to works of the print epoch, and then down to the most recent video games, image and text have both been present in one mix or another.It might be thought that while texts require educated knowledge of a given language, images “speak for themselves” and can be “read” by anyone. Images are pictures, representations of something or other that is in one way or another recognizable. Widely influential images, however, such as Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” (1484—1486) or Andy Warhol’s “Marilyn” in its many versions (1967), presume, it is easy to see, all sorts of “textual” information for their interpretation. I have chosen these examples somewhat arbitrarily, partly because I greatly admire them and partly becauase they are widely known, at least in the West. It is not an accident that both are images of beautiful women, since that is so frequently a subject for Western “images.” 

Sandro Botticelli was an Italian painter of the early Renaissance. His “Birth of Venus” presumes knowledge of the ancient Greek myth that Venus, the goddess of love, was born full-grown from the sea and came ashore riding a large seashell. 

Think of the intertwining of image and text in the admirable films made by the great American actress and film star, Maryln Monroe, who lived from 1926 to 1962. She was not only beautiful but also a gifted and strikingly intelligent actress. She had an amazing ability to ad lib wonderfully intelligent spoken “texts” in her films as they were being made. Warhol’s “Marilyn” is of course a portrait of Marylin Monroe. 

Warhol was an American artist from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1928—1987). He was a leading figure in so-called “pop art.” “His works,” as the Wikipedia entry asserts, “explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture.” 

Just think, however, of all the information you need to make sense of either of these two great paintings, including an understanding of the relation of “Marilyn” to current means of digital reproduction and transmission. Warhol’s painting may be downloaded from many different online computer sources. It is linked to digitalization and consequently to the ease of making multiple versions in different colors, whereas Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” seems more stable, more connected to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, where it is displayed, and to Western mythological stories. Here they are, as downloaded from the Internet: 

The social and media contexts in which image and text are intertwined or juxtaposed these days are in many ways quite different from what they were just a few years ago. My thinking about image and text is constantly changing as the global media context goes on changing, but the basic issues have for me remained more or less the same in recent years. 

Three features of that present-day changed context are salient. Literature matters less and less to many people in this changed situation. Do we or should we have time for print literature in these ominous times, as I took for granted as recently as 2016? in my part of Does print literature still matter much today? Here are some issues that have exerted a tremendous impact upon our society and our life, as well as on the relation of image and text, for example in printed literary works. 

One: Global warming has been rapidly accelerating, with relatively few and ineffective attempts to slow it. A constant refrain of the scientists who are experts on global climate

Two: A major transformation of the dominant media from print to digital is happening globally and with amazing rapidity. Though many people worldwide will go on reading print literature for a long time, millions of people now primarily use digital programs on gadgets like cellphones. They live with iPhones in their hands and with eyes glued to the screens, as if these devices were part of their bodies, prostheses, just as printed books used to be gripped in the readers’ hands. Mostly iPhone users today, by the way, are not reading print literature in its rapidly proliferating e-text form. They are playing video games, or “texting,” or using Facebook, or Netflix, or Twitter. Print literature is being marginalized as a result. When I have lectured fairly recently in China about this or that work of Western literature, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady for example, people in my audience, mostly students and young teachers, have almost always wanted my opinion of the film of the literary work in question. Never mind the printed book. It is the film that matters to them. Print literature counts less and less in many people’s lives, even in the lives of those who have come to hear me lecture about print literature. Not only is enrollment in literature courses, at least in the United States, drastically reduced, but the literature courses that remain must and are taking into account the way their students are these days products of the digital revolution. Why study something, they ask, whose human value is no longer self-evident? They are amazingly adept at using cellphones, but not so expert at reading a printed version of George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Teaching literary works these days must exploit as best the teachers can the new fancy technologies, the so-called “digital humanities,” MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), programs and “apps” about literature, and the like, since that is what students are these days will know, understand. and be willing to use. To find out about Middlemach many students and teachers these days would spontaneously begin with the Wikipedia entries for Middlemarch and George Eliot.

We need, I strongly argue, to use a variant of what I call “rhetorical reading” to understand what is going on in specific examples of these new media: Jane Campion’s film of The Portrait of a Lady, for example, or video games such as “Grand Theft Auto” or “World of Warcraft,” two among almost innumerable examples of such games. “Rhetorical reading” is a name for a way of interpreting texts, or images, or texts and images combined, with careful attention to the play of figurative transfers in specific examples of these. “Rhetoric” here means not just “persuasion,” but also the use of figurative transfers. Video games are full of such transfers. Such games, with all their violence, pornography, and often deplorable implicit ideologies, are played by millions of people around the world. Reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch is unlikely to encourage you to go and shoot up your teachers and classmates at your school. Habitually playing video games or seeing violent films might, however, do that. A recent video game is actually about school shootings. It has, not surprisingly, elicited vigorous negative responses, for example, from families of such shootings’ victims.

Three: In the years since my book with Ranjan Ghosh, Thinking Literature across Continents (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2016) was published much change has occurred and is occurring in colleges and universities, at least in the United States. These changes have tended to weaken and marginalize the study and teaching of literature and literary theory in our institutions of higher learning. An op-ed essay by Frank Bruni in the New York Times for May 26, 2018 (“Aristotle’s Wrongful Death,” now no longer available at the original online URL address) forcefully discusses these changes. Bruni argues, against such changes, that despite declining enrollment, traditional college majors in literature are still of immense importance. Colleges, says Bruni, “shouldn’t downgrade the nonvocational mission of higher education: to cultivate minds, prepare young adults for enlightened citizenship, give them a better sense of their perch in history and connect them to traditions that transcend the moment. History, philosophy and comparative literature are bound to be better at that than occupational therapy. They’re sturdier threads of cultural and intellectual continuity.”

I strongly agree, but those running our colleges and universities do not seem to buy Bruni’s defense of the humanities. The cry is all for more STEM programs and courses, that is, programs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. All honor to STEM. It has, among other things, created and is creating the digitized world in which we now live. The word “stem” suggests something vital, like the stem of a plant. The humanities are, by implication, at best a peripheral twig that can be broken off without much damage to the plant. Bruni refers to an issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education for May 20, 2018 on this topic. The Chronicle reports that The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has a combined computer science-liberal arts major while Assumption College has new career-focused programs.

Partly such changes are a result of the shift from print to digital. What is the point of having big departments of English and of foreign languages if students no longer show up to take the courses they offer? Partly these changes have been the result of a lack of interest in the humanities generally as well as a downright fear of them by some conservative politicians, voters, and media. A fairly recent Pew Research Center national poll, conducted in the United States June 8-18, 2017, discovered that more and more Republicans think colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country. The number was at that point up to an astonishing 58%, from 45% a year earlier.

How will reading Middlemarch or Moby Dick, classic examples of one form of text and image combined, that is, illustrated novels, help to understand our present social situation in the United States, or, at least indirectly, in the world? I can give positive answers to those questions. Read carefully, such books, with their inserted imagistic illustration, teach “critical thinking,” such as how to avoid the disastrous marriage choice Dorothea Brooke makes in Middlemarch. I am less sanguine, however, about getting more than a few people here and there actually to read Middlemarch or Moby Dick carefully and thoughtfully enough to learn from them, no easy task. Reading those novels is good in itself, but how such readings might help more than a few people to deal with our present situation is quite another question. Such old novels did not of course foresee human-caused climate change nor the digital revolution, nor cinema, things things quite different from Dorothea’s mistake, which is in a work of fictionlike Middlemarch presented in words and images as if they had really happened.

I have given my life to studying literature, to teaching it, and to writing about it. I’ll go on doing this as long as I can do so. Literary study is my vocation, my calling. I am therefore deeply sorry to have to say that literature “matters” less these days as a means of dealing with the cultural changes I have mentioned. Those changes have become immensely more salient just since Thinking Literature across Continents was published. What we need now, as I have said, is rhetorical readings, by methods appropriately changed, of media combining image and text that really matter to people globally these days: films, video games, emails, tweets, Facebook entries, and Netflix files. People in general, including most university administrators, feel little need these days, alas, for more readings or teachings of works by W. B. Yeats or George Eliot. Such works no longer “matter” all that much in our digitalized cultures. The methodological changes I have suggested for rhetorical reading would be necessary, however, to deal with visual or auditory elements in the new media as well as with the printed words that are still present in them. An “image” can portray a figurative transfer as well as a “text” can. Video games, for example, mix images and texts in quite novel ways that depend on the exploitation of digitalization. The work necessary to trasnsform rhetorical reading so it can deal with image and text effectively as found in new media for example in video games or cinema, is already beginning here are there, especially for cinema in film studies.

Recent essays about literary study often assume that literature, as well as study, teaching, and writing about literature, are doing just fine and will continue to flourish. These essayists often have secure professorships or good appointments to teach literature and write about it at reputable colleges and universities. The Frank Bruni essay and The Chronicle of Higher Education issue referred to above indicate that such essayists have a false sense of security. Literature, at least in the United States, and I suspect elsewhere in the world too, matters less and less these days as a social force. Those areas of college and universities devoted to literary study are being in many institutions rapidly diminished or outright abolished. Humanities departments are being replaced by job-training courses in areas like actuarial calculations or computer programming.

I wish it were not so. I lament the coming end of the now old-fashioned idea of a general liberal arts undergraduate education with required courses in all fields: history, philosophy, literature, “foreign” languages, as well as science, math, and sociology. The idea behind the concept of a liberal arts education was that students need to know something about all the “disciplines,” partly so they can decide on some basis of valid knowledge whether to go on to graduate study in one or another of those disciplines. That was what Oberlin College was like when I attended it from 1944 to 1948.

I think, however, that the change of higher learning institutions to vocational schools is rapid and irreversible. Hand-wringing will not stop that change. We must devise other ways to teach the critical thinking that is so necessary if democracy is to survive. As I have said, we need above all programs and courses in new versions of “rhetorical reading” that might work for interrelated images and texts in the new digital media such as video games. My own recent work has been a self-conscious attempt to begin to do that in drafts of chapters about specific works of literature to be arranged under the rubric of “What Happens When I Read?’ The finished book will, I plan, also have chapters on specific video games by me or by a more knowledgeable colleague: “What happens when I play ‘World of Warcraft’?”

责任编辑：张爱平

此文原载于《外国文学研究》2019年第4期

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