Intermedial Encounters Between Image, Music and Text

Acknowledgements

The publication of this volume would not have been possible without the generous financial support of the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation; the University of Edinburgh’s School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures; and Meiji University’s Faculty of Humanities International Joint Research Project Support Program and Fund for Hosting International Conferences and Symposia. The editors would like to express their deepest gratitude to these institutions and funding programs.

The poetic interlude by Keijiro Suga titled ‘Water Schools’ (水の小学校) was first published in 一週間、その他の小さな旅 (A Week and Other Little Journeys) (コトニ社: 2023).

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Introduction

Image, Music, Text is the name of the famous English-language essay anthology written by Roland Barthes and selected and translated by Stephen Heath in 1977.¹ In these pieces, Barthes asserts the importance of moving from author to reader and work to text through a series of reflections on and semiological investigations of film stills, musical and theatrical performances, photographs and written texts. Taking examples from Barthes’s intermedial practice and critical essays contributing to the theoretical framework of contemporary intermedia studies, this multi-author volume explores a broad range of relationships between (still and moving, analogue and digital) images, music and texts within and beyond the scope of Barthesian analysis. The book is based partly on the proceedings of an interdisciplinary workshop that took place in Edinburgh in March 2022, which was the inaugural event of the research partnership in intermedia studies between the University of Edinburgh and Meiji University in Tokyo;² it reflects the guiding spirit of this hybrid workshop held online and in person by bringing together young voices and well-established scholars from these two institutions with a view to offer a fresh perspective on intermedial relations informed by the academic and cultural traditions of Japan and the UK.

Barthes was chosen as the central figure for this inaugural publication of the partnership since he provides a methodology that is very close to what many of the chapters gathered here are doing, even if they do not state this explicitly, and given the fact that although he is not prominently cited in discussions of intermediality, his work has been and continues to be instrumental in creating and establishing the field. In his characteristic fashion, Barthes attempted to facilitate new ways of thinking and reading about the interrelations between different media or art forms and their signification, rather than offering an overarching (and inherently limiting) thesis. Essentially, existing scholarship in the field of intermedia studies to date has focused on the theories of intermediality, its critical tools and its historical background with the view to facilitate understanding and analysing a broad range of intermedial phenomena. In recent years, several edited volumes and handbooks have been published with such a general and wide-encompassing perspective, with an occasional focus on educational matters and the potential benefits of intermediality and multimodality for teaching purposes.³ This has been complemented by the publication of monographs and multi-author volumes adopting a more narrow approach focusing on specific fields or topics.⁴ In addition, in recent scholarship in intermedia studies, Barthes’s Image, Music, Text is invoked as a central reference-point. Alison Halsall uses Barthes’s description of adaptation as a ‘stereophony of echoes, citations, references’ in ‘From Work to Text’ (p. 160) to convey the layers of meaning added by P. Craig Russell in his 2014 graphic novel adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s novel The Graveyard Book (2008).⁵ Markku Lehtimäki examines Barthes’s concepts of ‘anchorage’ and ‘relay’ in ‘Rhetoric of the Image’ while discussing how James Agee’s prose interacts with Walker Evans’s photographs in their classic American photo-documentary Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941).⁶ Julia Meier invokes Barthes’s account of how the creative act can produce a ‘new language’ in order to theorize how ‘the virtual “space in-between” has the potential to create genuine thought as an event within the concentrated form of intermedial artwork’.⁷ Barthes’s fascination with the photograph of his late mother Henriette as a girl in Camera Lucida (1980) provides a further focal point. Lar Novack compares Barthes’s fascination with Joseph Merrick’s preoccupation with his mother’s portrait in David Lynch’s film The Elephant Man (1980),⁸ and Katalin Sándor likens Barthes with the similarly haunted narrator of Dubravka Ugrešic’s novel The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (2002).⁹ Additional intermedial investigations extend beyond Image, Music, Text and Camera Lucida. For instance, Per Krogh Hansen coins the term ‘the fictional effect’ in reference to Barthes’s famous theory of the ‘reality effect’¹⁰ to describe self-conscious absurdities such as the ‘two people that were hitherto strangers to each other suddenly bursting into a duet in Show Boat (1936), Astaire’s and Roger’s brilliant dance on roller skates in Shall We Dance (1937)’.¹¹ The regularity with which scholars of intermedia turn to Barthes demonstrates the importance of his ideas for intermedia studies. Yet none of these publications has focused primarily on the work, role and influence of Roland Barthes in the context of intermediality.¹² Thereby filling a gap in research, this book aims to locate the Barthesian corpus in a broader interdisciplinary and comparative context.

Barthes is even discussed by Dick Higgins, famously the Fluxus artist and theorist who coined the term ‘intermedia’, in his essay ‘Horizons’. Higgins praises Barthes as ‘the subtlest of the structuralists’. Nonetheless, Higgins criticizes Barthes in S/Z (1970) for attempting to elicit universal principles from his reading of a single novella, Honoré de Balzac’s Sarrasine (1830), asserting ‘Barthes’s theory, then, is drawn from only one kind of work, and it is inadequate when it comes to the present avant-garde (or, indeed, to many other kinds of work, ancient or non-Western or baroque, for example)’. At the same time, Higgins also suggests Barthes as a practitioner of intermedial criticism, remarking thus: ‘Perhaps one could even argue that structuralist criticism at its best, in such works as the Barthes S/Z, is intermedial between art and sociology.’¹³ For Higgins, Barthes is both an exemplar and a rival, constructing a sophisticated and innovative form of intermedial criticism that partly transcends the limitations of structuralism and post-structuralism.

Barthes’s eclectic work can be described as intermedial in several ways – in Image, Music, Text and many other writings. In ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’ (1966), he, for example, highlights how narrative crosses media, stating that ‘caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself’ (p. 79). In other words, Barthes’s own structuralism and critical writing are therefore transversal and intermedial in character, transcending generic and disciplinary categories by focusing on the way narrative and, more generally, signs function within and across various media. In a similar perspective, in ‘From Work to Text’ (1971), he explicitly advocates interdisciplinarity as a means of breaking down the boundaries between different disciplines, which also applies to intermediality:

Interdisciplinarity is not the calm of an easy security; it begins effectively […] when the solidarity of the old disciplines breaks down – perhaps violently, via the jolts of fashion – in the interests of a new object and a new language neither of which has a place in the field of the sciences that were to be brought peacefully together, this unease in classification being precisely the point from which it is possible to diagnose a certain mutation. (p. 154)

Barthes’s way of linking intermediality to interdisciplinarity here is very reminiscent of several contemporary critical and theoretical approaches to intermedia studies. In fact, Bernd Herzogenrath cites the above passage in the ‘Introduction’ to his edited volume Travels in Intermedia[lity]: ReBlurring the Boundaries (2012), claiming that

much of today’s art operates under such an aesthetic: the [re]combinatorics of different media that was forming an artistic and aesthetic profile in Emerson’s times. From intertextuality to intermediality, today, the extent of that paradigm has become immense: today’s art, creativity, and originality are marked by intermediality and sampling, by a combinatory juxtaposition of genres, media, styles and surfaces, a rejection of ‘objective’ history that explores the various connections of aesthetic forms. Since then, the ever-expanding and heterogeneous field of intermediality and visual studies has grown to be one of the most vital and invigorating developments within the humanities today. Contesting […] the conventional and disciplinary boundaries between different arts and forms, intermediality seems to propose as its object of inquiry the entire culture of the media (literature, paintings, film, music, digital art, photography, installations, comic books, and more) […] As Dick Higgins stated in 1966, ‘intermedium’ is the ‘uncharted land that lies between’ different media, and intermedial works are ‘not governed by rules; each work determines its own medium and form according to its needs’. For Higgins, ‘intermediality has always been a possibility since the most ancient times […] it remains a possibility wherever the desire to fuse two or more existing media exists’. Intermedia[lity] thus can very literally be described as between the between [emphasis added].¹⁴

As Herzogenrath’s quotation and comments suggest, Barthes was clearly an instrumental figure behind the shift from ‘intertextuality to intermediality’ mentioned here, given his wide-ranging interests as a scholar across and in-between various art forms, and through the structuralist and post-structuralist analytical methodologies he employed to open up the works considered through the decompartmentalizing lens of semiology or textuality, and thanks to transversal categories and concepts such as pleasure/bliss, studium/punctum and obvious/obtuse. The reference to Higgins in the above quotation should also be noted in relation to Barthes; indeed, these two authors have several important features in common. One could obviously think first of their position as mid-twentieth-century analysts of an emerging consumer capitalist culture, who sought to create new forms of criticism in response to uncharted paradigms. Moreover, Higgins like Barthes stresses the value not simply of examining intermedia forms but also of fusing perspectives from different disciplines. This is how one should understand his definition of intermedia as ‘works which fall conceptually between media that are already known’,¹⁵ which is explored in depth by Davide Messina in this volume.