Find in Library

In recent years, critics such as Mieke Bal and W. J. T. Mitchell have ceased to consider the relationship between text and image in terms of an emulation (Horace’s ‘Ut Pictura Poesis’) or a rivalry (Da Vinci’s ‘Paragone’) in order to re-conceive it as a dynamic interaction, a fertile dialogue, transaction, or translation. A. S. Byatt’s long-time fascination with both modes of expression finds its most compelling treatment in her 1993 collection, The Matisse Stories. More than just a tribute to the great master of modernism, the collection as a whole can be read as an attempt to challenge the traditional distinction between the Sister Arts by producing a hybrid object—or ‘iconotext’—partaking of both the textual and the pictorial.The third and last story in the collection, ‘The Chinese Lobster’, makes radical use of these intermedial variations to interrogate literary representation. Through a series of verbal, pictorial, and bodily distortions, this story not only formulates and satirizes contemporary issues of gender politics, but also re-thinks the interaction between text and image in terms of a transgression or ‘distortion’ producing a new iconotextual form. More generally, this story helps to re-think literary representation in terms of an inevitable ‘distortion’ or ‘misrepresentation’, as representation contains by essence its own failure.Drawing from Bakhtin’s ‘grotesque’ and Bataille’s ‘informe’, this paper explores what Kristeva calls the realm of ‘abjection’ in its relation to its counterpart, the sublime, as theorized by Longinus, Burke, and Kant, and, more recently, Lyotard. By presenting itself as a symbolic and cathartic crossing of abjection and death before an epiphanic re-awakening to the miracle of life thanks to Matisse’s art, ‘The Chinese Lobster’ can be read as a celebration not just of Matisse but also of what one may call the ‘sublime of art’ in general, the ‘unspeakable’ or ‘unrepresentable’ at the heart of representation.