Attempts on the Image in Literature

Nineteenth-century European narrative literature repeatedly refers to the deliberate destruction (or intentions, attempts to destroy) of artificial images. The old artist in Honoré de Balzac’s novella The Unknown Masterpiece burns his collection of art; the hero of Alexander Pushkin’s poem The Bronze Horseman threatens the monument to the Emperor Peter the Great in St Petersburg; the inhabitants of a French village in Prosper Mérimée’s novella The Venus of Ille re-melt the ‘evil’ antique statue found in the soil; the painter in Nikolai Gogol’s novel The Portrait compulsively buys and destroys masterpieces of painting; another picture, in Emile Zola’s novel L’Œuvre, is burned after the suicide of its author; the hero of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray attempts to stab his own portrait, which is displaying his sins; in The Adventure of the Six Napoleons, a short story by Arthur Conan Doyle, six busts of the French emperor are broken, in turn first by a thief, and finally by a detective. Being destroyed or disappearing seems to be the recurrent destiny of intradiegetic images (material images included into a narrative text as its actors), and the attempts of their obliteration always constitute a highlighted, spectacular moment in the narrative, and not just an outward sign of someone’s inner feelings; they are typically presented as a sacrifice of ‘excessive’ (magical, demonic) objects. In some cases, they are explained by a deviant behaviour of the character (madness, delinquency), but the literary text is organized in order to make the reader sympathize with the experiences of that ‘iconoclast’, and mentally reproduce his acts. An analysis of texts should disclose the mechanism of this self-identification and put the stories about the attempts on the image into the general framework of nineteenth-century visual and literary culture.