Note 26 to Chapter 1 of the author's George Eliot and the Visual Arts, which Yale University Press published in a 1979. It has been included in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
In Spenser and Literary Pictorialism, John B. Bender has made an interesting attempt to update the theory of literary pictorialism by combining it with E. H. Gombrich's conception of the beholder's share in the perception of art and with Paul J. Alpers's affective approach to The Faerie Queene. Bender argues that a passage is pictorial not when its language reminds us of the visual arts, but only when its language imitates the psychological process of visual perception. He distinguishes three kinds of perception re-created in the poetry of Spenser: focusing, framing, and scanning.
The main weakness of Bender's theory is that it does not discriminate sufficiently between the visual and the pictorial. Many of the examples he cites, especially under the headings of "focusing" and "scanning," are visual but not in any strict sense pictorial; and conversely, many traditionally structured descriptive word-portraits he refuses to call pictorial because they do not mime perceptual processes. Nevertheless, Bender has provided useful definitions of three effects which literary pictorialism can create, and his terms will no doubt help students of the sister arts to speak with greater precision in the future. On framing, see also Winner, Henry James and the Visual Arts, pp. 72-77.
Last modified 20 September 2000