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Word, pictorial image and the genesis of writing in Paul Valéry's Cahiers

1997; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 13; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/02666286.1997.10434279

1943-2178

Robert Pickering,

French Literature and Critical Theory

Abstract The close creative conjunction of writing and illustration, whatever the form the latter may take (typographical innovation, for example), has little to it now which might necessarily be interpreted as original. Since the impact of Mallarmé's Un Coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard and its exploration of the full visual polyphony of writing, since also the foregrounding of a simultaneity of meaning and form in Apollinaire's Calligrammes, or Niichaux's graphic experiments, we have come to assume that poetry, for example, depends substantially for its effectiveness on the dynamic relationship between writing and its pictorial potential, or between the communication of meaning and the way in which a text inhabits the space of the page on which it appears. These parameters have become one of the staple ingredients of twentieth-century literary consciousness: the verbal and the visual combine to produce a complementary inherence of associated forms, which we recognize as a unity of intention, if not always of actual realization.