Abstract

120 RHETORICA Rhétorique et image. Textes en hommage à Â. Kïbédi Varga, ed. Léo H. Hoek and Kees Meerhoff (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), 318 pp. The subject of this book has been aptly chosen: it echoes and honours Kibédi Varga's published work on visual rhetoric and narratology (for example, Rhétorique et littérature and Discours, récit, image, as well as numerous articles—the bibliography of his works in French, German, English, Dutch, and Hungarian runs to twenty packed pages); it also reflects his founding of the Association for Word and Image Studies ten years ago. Rhétorique et image ranges widely over several disciplines and yet it has a unity of theme and purpose. It is both illuminating and open-ended, refreshingly undogmatic and tentative, and thus, paradoxically perhaps, goes some way towards defining a methodology. Some of the writers here allude to the evolution of their subject and apply the ancient topoi in a modem context. What is new in this book is the narrowing down of the subject to the place of rhetoric in word and image studies. There are four sections: "Reflexions interarts," "Reflexions rhé­ toriques," "Echanges," and "Reflets: fins de siècle," necessarily overlap­ ping, but providing a useful focus. The academic papers are framed and enhanced by a previously unpublished introductory poem, "Un retour à San Biagio," by Yves Bonnefoy, and another closing poem by Salah Stétie, "Fièvre et Guérison de lTcône." Sorin Alexandrescu starts from a photograph taken by the author, of bottles and glasses on a table, and analyses the limits of meaning such an unposed photograph may have. While not representing action, it contains a "récit," presupposing past action and implying a future; but if it is to have meaning, some external information (title, supporting text, context) is necessary to "narrativise" it. Elrud Ibsch gives a very critical account of Charles Jencks' The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, rejecting his idea that this architecture is distinguished from modernist architecture by its semantic richness and its power of communication. His theory of build­ ings as metaphors (in relation to other buildings) is also found wanting because of the confusion over whether the metaphor lies in the observer, the building, or the architect, Ibsch concludes that Jencks' method is that of a critic, who may therefore be allowed personal judgments and a depar­ ture from impartiality, but it is not helpful to historians of literature or architecture. David Scott addresses squarely the rhetoric of images through the example of Dutch postage-stamps of the last forty years, a Reviews 121 particularly beautiful series of typographic and commemorative stamps designed by leading graphic artists. Scott concentrates on the rhetorical figures of repetition, pleonasm, emphasis, enumeration, and parallelism, all in the larger context of communication (semiotics and hermeneutics) and the balance between decorativeness and persuasiveness. Leo Hoek concludes this first section with an attempt at classifying the ways in which text and image may interact, among which are pictorial poetry, clas­ sical ekphrasis (or "art transposition"), novels about artists, art criticism, history, or theory. The author concludes that it is not so much the nature of the text or image which provides the best basis for its classification, but rather the process of production and reception. In production what mat­ ters is which comes first, text (for example, book illustration) or image (for example, emblematic literature), but for reception it is simultaneity, which is important since text and image appear together, although one has pri­ macy over the other. Anne-Marie Christin begins the second, more strictly rhetorical sec­ tion with an analysis of memoria and actio, subjects which usually receive little attention from historians of rhetoric; she concentrates on memory as an important component of visual thought. Starting from the legendary anecdote of Simonides' identification of the guests at a feast after the roof had collapsed, she qualifies this by a discussion of ideas of space and place from Cicero to the birth of printing and on to the present day. She reflects on what the rhetoricians say about writing, images, and the need for blank spaces in the formation of memory. Bernard Vouilloux looks at...