Drawing on Words: Jasper Johns's Illustrations of Samuel Beckett's Foirades/Fizzles

Abstract

Between 1973 and 1976 artist Jasper Johns produced some thirty-three illustrations to accompany five prose texts authored by Samuel Beckett. The result was the book Foirades!Fizzles, published in New York in 1976. Almost without exception the critical literature published on this book draws the relation between image and text away from any idea of illustration. And this only when the idea is not simply ignored. This critical attitude reflects a wider tendency in especially elevated critico-aesthetic discourse to consider illustration as aesthetically and textually debased. Bracketed off, illustration merely signals a parasitic relation. Compromising the integrity of the texts it enjoins, it articulates a secondary aesthetic of the accessory. This view seems unproductive not only when applied to Johns's work, but also to image-text combinations more generally. The sheer incidence of such combinations (including illustration) in recent and current aesthetic production suggests that the indifference or prejudicial critical reflex routinely provoked by illustration marks a moment of poverty in contemporary critical thinking. This moment appears solidly rooted in a once dominant and still apparently powerful formalist and purist impulses within modernist discourse. The persistence of these impulses suggests the survival of unexamined, limiting and tenacious critical assumptions. A closer examination of selected texts - pre-modernist, modernist, and post-modernist - point beyond these assumptions. Here the logic of the supplement in particular illuminates very specifically how illustration might come to function, and where its incendiary critical potential may lie. The supplement resists the easy hierarchisation or even synthesis of different texts which has been the fate of illustration. It renders illustration both critically robust and radical. The concept of allegory is also illuminating here. It not only helps us understand better the fate of illustration within modernism and postmodernism, but also provides for enlightening readings of Foirades!Fizzles. In turn, a revaluation of illustration opens up a more productive view of allegory in both modernist and postmodernist discourse. Illustration, in coordinating different semiotic systems, however marginally, can function as a framing, focusing and spacing device, a way of bracketing and specifying themes, structures and forms within a given textual complex, a way of opening readings otherwise foreclosed or overlooked. In this study such readings are articulated through a set of textual configurations which include: vision and perception; the body, eye, and skin; calibration, measurement, and point of view; memory, repetition and originality; and finally liminality, ambiguity and metastable signification. Against the grain of published opinion there is then much to be gained by recognising the capacious critical potential of illustration, what we might term its 'motivated contingency'. Rather than being considered critically inconsequential or an aesthetic impedin1ent, illustration may in fact provide an almost unique opportunity not only to explore issues germane to Johns's work (both independently and in relation to Beckett's texts), but also to address certain important critical debates within postmodern discourse. Its value may be felt in reading Foirades!Fizzles, in reading other image-text combinations, and the broader relations between visual art, literature, and language.