Resemblance, Signification, and Metaphor in the Visual Arts James A. W. Heffernan The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 44, No. 2. (Winter, 1985), pp. 167-169+171-180. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8529%28198524%2944%3A2%3C167%3ARSAMIT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-N The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism is currently published by The American Society for Aesthetics.
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JAMES A. W. HEFFERNAN
Resemblance, Sign@cation, and Metaphor
in the Visual Arts
SOMETHIRTY years ago. Giovanni Giovannini exposed the "impressionism and inconsistency" with which the technical terminology of art had been applied to literature in studies published from 1925 to 1950.' In our own time, the reverse has occurred. Where critics once claimed to see coloring and chiaroscuro in poetry, they now speak of pictures as texts. as readable literary structures complete with metaphors.' But this recent conversion of pictures into texts-really a kind of logocentric empire building-provokes Just as many questions as the old-fashioned habit of treating texts as pictures. Can we now no longer assume that pictures signify objects by means of resemblance rather than by arbitrary or conventional codification'? Has this particular point of difference between graphic and verbal art been obliterated by critical theory, or simply by consensus'? The answer to these questions is by no means clear or decisive. E. H. Gombrich has recently taken pains to define the limits of convention in art, and to affirm that some pictures actually do resemble nature more closely than others.' Likewise. Jonathan Culler has re-affirmed Peirce's version of the traditional distinction between verbal and graphic signification. While the word or "sign proper," he says, signifies by arbitrary convention only, the icon or picture signifies by "natural resemblance. "'
Embedded in this distinction is a history of ambivalence toward the cultural value of the supposed resemblance. On the one hand, we JAMES HEFFERNANis proft~ssar o f Englrsh at Darrmouril College.
