Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No.8, 2013

Presence and Absence of the “Language-Image” Narrative

(Abstract)

Zhao Xianzhang

“Presence” and “absence” relate not merely to the reliability of language elucidating truth, but also to the truthfulness of literary narrative, namely the issue of “non-separation” or “separation.” As compared with language symbols, image narrative is a kind of present “ekphrasis,” because the way of watching of visual organs is “to get immersed” in the world and inhabit in it, so that they can find enjoyment in the intimacy of “watching” and “being watched,” and find intoxication in becoming unaware of the self and the outside world. But image symbols are merely a “pellicle of being,” and the narration of ekphrasis is no more than a “superficial and shallow one.” The so-called “implication” and “virtue comparison” are not inherent in the image itself, for we have ascribed “presence” to ekphrasis. The absence of speaking is manifest not only in the indirectness of symbolic implications, but also in literal texts which serve as the “substitute” of speaking. Therefore, whether oral words can be re-evoked in written texts becomes the latter’s ideal of presence. “Acoustics,” as the “first signifier” of language, determines both its permanent presence and the musical nature of language art, and “images” cannot distinguish fundamentally between literature and non-literature. In the “narrative sharing” domain of language and images, the former may penetrate the latter and enable the opaque “pellicle” to become transparent. “Ekphrasis” is thus imbued with the implications of “speaking.”