Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Temporal Deconstructions: Narrating the Ruins of Time
- 2 ‘They peer at my dark land’: The Ethics of Storytelling in Twenty-First-Century Scottish Women’s Writing
- 3 ‘Connected to time’: Ali Smith’s Anachronistic ScottishCosmopolitanism
- 4 Democracy and the Indyref Novel
- 5 Shifting Grounds: Writers of Colour in Twenty-First- Century Scottish Literature
- 6 Mapping Escape: Geography and Genre
- 7 ‘Whom do you belong to, loch?’ Ownership, Belonging and Transience in the Writings of Kathleen Jamie
- 8 Misty Islands and Hidden Bridges
- 9 The Scots Language is a Science Fiction Project
- 10 Convivial Correctives to Metrovincial Prejudice: Kevin MacNeil’s The Stornoway Way and Suhayl Saadi’s Psychoraag
- 11 Scottish Audio- and Film-Poetry: Writing, Sounding, Imaging Twenty-First-Century Scotland
- 12 Post-National Polyphonies: Communities in absentia on the Contemporary Scottish Stage
- 13 Where Words and Images Collide: Will Maclean’s Intertextual Collaborations
- 14 Erasure and Reinstatement: Gray the Artist, Across Space and Form
- 15 Transforming Cultural Memory: The Shifting Boundaries of Post-Devolutionary Scottish Literature
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
13 - Where Words and Images Collide: Will Maclean’s Intertextual Collaborations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2024
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Temporal Deconstructions: Narrating the Ruins of Time
- 2 ‘They peer at my dark land’: The Ethics of Storytelling in Twenty-First-Century Scottish Women’s Writing
- 3 ‘Connected to time’: Ali Smith’s Anachronistic ScottishCosmopolitanism
- 4 Democracy and the Indyref Novel
- 5 Shifting Grounds: Writers of Colour in Twenty-First- Century Scottish Literature
- 6 Mapping Escape: Geography and Genre
- 7 ‘Whom do you belong to, loch?’ Ownership, Belonging and Transience in the Writings of Kathleen Jamie
- 8 Misty Islands and Hidden Bridges
- 9 The Scots Language is a Science Fiction Project
- 10 Convivial Correctives to Metrovincial Prejudice: Kevin MacNeil’s The Stornoway Way and Suhayl Saadi’s Psychoraag
- 11 Scottish Audio- and Film-Poetry: Writing, Sounding, Imaging Twenty-First-Century Scotland
- 12 Post-National Polyphonies: Communities in absentia on the Contemporary Scottish Stage
- 13 Where Words and Images Collide: Will Maclean’s Intertextual Collaborations
- 14 Erasure and Reinstatement: Gray the Artist, Across Space and Form
- 15 Transforming Cultural Memory: The Shifting Boundaries of Post-Devolutionary Scottish Literature
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
Introduction: Word and Image
The present chapter is going to address the issue of word and image, the much-contested possibility of the generation of meaning from a combination of these two different types of representation. The words of Michel Foucault in The Order of Things epitomise the perceived and generally accepted dichotomy:
[T]he relation of language to painting is an infinite relation. It is not that words are imperfect, or that, when confronted by the visible, they prove insuperably inadequate. Neither can be reduced to the other's terms: it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say. And it is in vain that we attempt to show, by the use of images, metaphors or similes, what we are saying. (Foucault 1970: 9)
Yet, Foucault's analysis of Diego Velasquez's Las Meninas as metapicture – as though pictorial representation were a form of discourse on the nature of representation itself – is now well known (Foucault 1982: 3–16). In addition, his extended conversation with Magritte on words and images in This Is Not a Pipe is imbued with the resolution to redefine the ‘reality’ to which words and images refer (Foucault 1982). W. J. T. Mitchell in his comprehensive Picture Theory seems to go along with Foucault, so that both, in their different ways, are committed to finding ways to speak about word and image: Mitchell's text is an extended analysis of the ways that images and words collide (Mitchell 1994).
However, Mitchell admits that the hope that a way might be found to speak about an arena of meaning in which the two kinds of representation might coalesce is somewhat utopian: ‘The “scientific” terms of the otherness are the familiar oppositions of semiotics: symbolic and iconic representation; conventional and natural signs; temporal and spatial modes; visual and aural media’ (Mitchell 1994: 156). The fact then that the two sign systems ‘refer’ to the world in opposite ways suggests that any overlap between systems would be coincidental – the fact that words are bound by conventional symbols which have only an arbitrary relationship with the referent but are bound in a deterministic way to a grammatical system is clearly utterly opposed to an iconic sign which relates to the referent by mimesis.
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- Scottish Writing after DevolutionEdges of the New, pp. 257 - 281Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2022