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Anamorphic Realism: Veridictory Plots in Balzac, Dostoevsky, and Henry James

Anamorphic Realism: Veridictory Plots in Balzac, Dostoevsky, and Henry James 1 Although this account has been pronounced unverifiable by more recent scholarship on the painting with regard to its details (for example, the door on the right), it is still accepted as a ANAMORPHIC REALISM/295 Except for the anamorphic stain in the middle, The Ambassadors is a straightforwardly representational painting.2 In the stain we are confronted with an unreadable element that disturbs our vision of what appears to be reality. Here, in Stephen Greenblatt’s words, “death is affirmed not in its power to destroy the flesh . . . , but in its uncanny inaccessibility and absence.” Greenblatt goes on: “What is unseen or perceived as only a blur is far more disquieting than what may be faced boldly and directly, particularly when the limitations of vision are grasped as structural, the consequence more of the nature of perception than of the timidity of the perceiver” (19). The need to know arises as a consequence of this disjunction and tension between linear and anamorphic perspectives, between apparent representational plenitude and a blatant flaw within it.3 The viewer of The Ambassadors is encoded into the logic of the painting as a protagonist to whom something happens in time. In http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Comparative Literature Duke University Press

Anamorphic Realism: Veridictory Plots in Balzac, Dostoevsky, and Henry James

KLIGER, ILYA
Comparative Literature , Volume 59 (4) – Jan 1, 2007
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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 2007 by University of Oregon
ISSN
0010-4124
eISSN
1945-8517
DOI
10.1215/-59-4-294
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Abstract

1 Although this account has been pronounced unverifiable by more recent scholarship on the painting with regard to its details (for example, the door on the right), it is still accepted as a ANAMORPHIC REALISM/295 Except for the anamorphic stain in the middle, The Ambassadors is a straightforwardly representational painting.2 In the stain we are confronted with an unreadable element that disturbs our vision of what appears to be reality. Here, in Stephen Greenblatt’s words, “death is affirmed not in its power to destroy the flesh . . . , but in its uncanny inaccessibility and absence.” Greenblatt goes on: “What is unseen or perceived as only a blur is far more disquieting than what may be faced boldly and directly, particularly when the limitations of vision are grasped as structural, the consequence more of the nature of perception than of the timidity of the perceiver” (19). The need to know arises as a consequence of this disjunction and tension between linear and anamorphic perspectives, between apparent representational plenitude and a blatant flaw within it.3 The viewer of The Ambassadors is encoded into the logic of the painting as a protagonist to whom something happens in time. In

Journal

Comparative Literature – Duke University Press

Published: Jan 1, 2007

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