The idea that illustrations convey only the external and superficial aspects of literary texts is related to the critique that perceives illustrations as redundant. However, while the latter conceives pictorial representation as an echo or duplication of the text’s meaning, this critique denies this redundancy. Illustrations cannot repeat a text’s meaning: they are limited to a superficial communication of it. We find the first occurrence of this idea in an anonymous article from 1844, published in The Quarterly Review.
Describing the expansion of illustrations in the period as a “partial return to baby literature,” the reviewer argues that the eye was appealed to more than the understanding. Indeed, the reviewer contends that illustrations are motivated by a “low utilitarian wish to give and receive the greatest possible amount of knowledge at the least possible expense of time, trouble, money, and, we may add, of intellect.” Ultimately, he adds, “a superficial knowledge which now pervades the country” (171).
This critique is repeated in the Modernist period as a fundamental difference between arts. For example, Virginia Woolf describes in an essay about films and adaptations the association between visual media such as illustrations or films and literature as “disastrous” because of the unnatural alliance between the brain (here, interiority) and the eye, the visual stimulus. “For the brain knows Anna [Karenina] almost entirely by the inside of her mind—her charm, her passion, her despair. All the emphasis is laid by the cinema upon her teeth, her pearls, and her velvet.” For Woolf, the same conflict between film and literature exists between literary images and meanings and their visual representation “in bronze or traced by pencil.”
Works Cited
[Holmes, John] Quarterly Review, “Illustrated Books” (1844). Publisher J. Murray. 167-199. https://archive.org/details/quarterlyreview08unkngoog/page/n180/mode/2up
Woolf, Virginia. “The Cinema” [1926]. Woolf Online, 2008.
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