THE OSCHOLARS
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Vol. IV |
No. 11 |
Is
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AND I? MAY I SAY NOTHING?
In our last is
|
1.
‘Thinking in Stories’: Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Sphinx Without a Secret’, an
original essay by Bruce Bashford |
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2.
Oscar Wilde and the dynamics of reputation by Trevor Fisher, a
paper given at the Durrell
School, Corfu, in 2007. |
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3.
Masoschisms: Cruelty, Desire, and Subversion between Victorian Women
by Robin Chamberlain, excerpted from the proposal for her
doctoral thesis at McMaster University, Canada, supervised by Dr Grace
Kehler. |
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4.
An article, part essay part review by |
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This month, we publish ‘Max Beerbohm and the Art
of Decadent Illustration’ by Jeremiah
Merceruio
Max Beerbohm
and the Art of Decadent Illustration
Jeremiah Merceruio
Published in 1911, Max Beerbohm’s only
novel Zuleika Dobson defies easy
categorization: it has been described as a fantasy, a farce, an allegory, a
tragedy, a comedy, a comi-tragedy, a parody, a prototypically postmodern novel,
an Edwardian ‘school story’, a thoroughly late-Victorian text, amongst other
things. In spite of, and in many ways
because of, its resistance to categorization, the novel is undoubtedly a
Decadent text—and it is worth noting, as well, that Beerbohm began writing the
novel in 1898, in the final moments of the Decadent movement in Great Britain.[1] More importantly, its demonstration of
linguistic autonomy and artificiality, its particular use of fantastic modes
that underscore its anti-mimetic qualities, and its disregard for stylistic
uniformity (amongst other attributes) mark it as a work of literary Decadence.[2] The addition of Beerbohm’s illustrations to
the text, which he completed in the two months following the novel’s
publication in October 1911, and which were not published until 1985, further
the novel’s status as a Decadent text, adding to the already Decadent prose a
demonstration of Decadent illustration—one which emphasizes the autonomy of the
literary text, demonstrating its mobility by disrupting any fixed
interpretations of the novel’s prose.
Before looking at the illustrations for Zuleika, though, one must keep in mind
Beerbohm’s opinion of illustrated fiction.
It is important to note, for example, that the drawings he did for the
novel—eighty watercolor drawings, twenty of them full-page illustrations—were
never intended to be included with the published text. That Beerbohm would not publish the drawings
follows from what he says about illustrated fiction in a 1900 review of a stage
adaptation of Tess of the d’Urbervilles.[3] He says:
I do not like to read a novel in an illustrated edition.
The process is uncomplimentary either to the author or to myself. [. .
.] If I cannot see the characters in a novel, then they are not
worth seeing. If I can see them, then
any other man’s definite presentment of them seems to be an act of impertinence to myself
and of impiety to the author.[4]
In this case, though, Beerbohm seems to be
objecting primarily to illustrations carried out by someone other than the
author himself (hence, the possibility of impiety towards the author), so this
would appear to exclude the drawings Beerbohm did for Zuleika. The fact that
Beerbohm stipulated in his contract with Heinemann that no illustrated copy of Zuleika Dobson could be printed without
his consent, however, suggests that he extended his reservations about
illustrated fiction to his own work. In
spite of this, Beerbohm still agreed to supply a frontispiece depicting Zuleika
for the 1946 reprint of the novel—and, additionally, supplied illustrations for
several other works[5]—which
implies that Beerbohm was not as strictly against illustrated texts as he
appears to be in this review.
Looking more closely at Beerbohm’s warning
against illustrated fiction, one can see how his prohibition breaks down
further. Since Beerbohm is the
illustrator of his own text, any act of impiety would be impious only towards
himself. The prose of the novel invites
such impieties in the first place, most notably when Zuleika laments (whether
seriously or not) the ‘literary flavour’ of her speech, which, she says, ‘is an
unfortunate trick [. . .] I caught from a writer, Mr. Beerbohm, who once sat
next to me at dinner somewhere’.[6] If Beerbohm can have one of his characters
playfully poke fun at himself, then certainly the impiety of playfully
illustrating his own text cannot be very grave.
Furthermore, the first half of his prohibition states that illustrated
texts are ‘an act of impertinence to myself’—by which he means himself as a
reader—but, insofar as impertinence means, as the OED states, ‘unsuitable’, ‘out-of-place’ or ‘improper’, the
illustrations to Zuleika would be all
the more relevant to the text, considering that the novel is already a
collection of stylistic catachreses.
Adding unsuitable illustrations would, paradoxically, be one of the most suitable next steps in the
development of the text. Finally,
applying Beerbohm’s prohibition against illustrated texts to his ‘improved’
copy of Zuleika produces no
inconsistencies because Beerbohm’s illustrated copy of the text was his own private copy of the novel, which he
shared with friends, but whose audience was first and foremost Beerbohm
himself. The primary reader of the
illustrated novel is Beerbohm, and therefore only Beerbohm is the arbiter of
what is impertinent about the illustrations to the text. His prohibition, in fact, in the context of
his illustrated Zuleika, involves a
conflation of reader, author, and illustrator into one person: Max Beerbohm
himself. In such a circumstance,
Beerbohm’s remark is entirely undermined.
This is also what makes Zuleika
Dobson, especially the Illustrated
Zuleika Dobson, so thoroughly a work of literary Decadence. If one believes, as Linda Dowling has so well
demonstrated in Language and Decadence in
the Victorian Fin de Siècle, that ‘linguistic self-consciousness’[7] is the
defining trait of Decadence, and that the apotheosis of this linguistic
self-consciousness is Aubrey Beardsley’s Under
the Hill, which, Dowling says, ‘shows the way the world looks when it is
perceived to be wholly made of language’,[8] then Zuleika Dobson, too, is an example par excellence of a text that flaunts
its refusal to correspond to any objective conception of reality (or even
form), and which, in its illustrated edition, is purposefully addressed
primarily to the author, making it a work whose audience and author are one,
whose prose is wholeheartedly artificial, and whose illustrations abandon all
attempts to accurately represent anything outside of the novel itself (or even
within it, as this paper will show).
It is also clear from his comments about
Hardy that Beerbohm’s injunction against illustrated fiction refers to a
particular type of illustration, one that
Even if one takes seriously Beerbohm’s
opposition to illustrated fiction, it is still nonetheless true that he has not
allowed in this review for other types of illustration other than those in the ‘quotational’
mode, such as those Kooistra terms impression
and parody: that is to say, in the
case of the former, illustrations that take the text as merely a starting point
from which they develop, and, in the case of the latter, illustrations that
directly challenge the authority of the text, often resulting in, as Kooistra
says, a ‘violent separation or divorce of image and text’.[12] Illustrators who employ these methods of
illumination clearly do not interfere with the author or the reader in the same
way Beerbohm suggests, and it is significant that Decadent illustrated texts
(including Beerbohm’s own) are distinguished by precisely these types of
images, which diverge from the text in ways that create alternative
narratives. These narratives do not
compete with an author’s intention by trying to recreate the verbal
descriptions. Often these narratives
compete even more directly with the text than those in the quotational mode;
however, they do so not by mimicking the text, but by competing to tell their
own narratives, which usually have, at most, a tangential relationship to the
text, and which, in the case of the parodic illustrations, are purposefully
impious towards authorial intent. Two of
the most iconic Decadent illustrated texts, Charles Ricketts’ 1894 edition of
Wilde’s The Sphinx and the 1894
edition of Wilde’s Salome illustrated
by Aubrey Beardsley, employ these methods of illustration, and, in fact, serve
as Kooistra’s examples of impression
and parody respectively.
Beerbohm’s other, and perhaps more
serious, criticism of illustrated fiction relates to the image’s ability to
prevent the reader from imagining more than the illustration can represent by
taking advantage of vision’s ability to circumscribe the limits of the
imagination. Beerbohm says in the same
review, ‘“Tess”‘, that:
If my first reading of a novel is done from
an illustrated edition, I cannot see the characters for myself: my imagination
is paralysed, and I can see them only as they are shown in the pictures. [. . .]
No embodiment, howsoever nearly accurate, of a mental image can ever
satisfy me, can do anything but offend me.
The mind’s eye and the body’s see too differently. The mind’s eye sees many things which cannot
appear in a picture. It sees things
moving and in three dimensions. Also, it
is blind to many trivialities of detail which cannot be omitted in an actual
picture. It does not say “There is no
high-light on the toe of the hero’s boots”; for the hero’s boots do not occur
to it. But in a picture a hero must wear
boots, and there must, accordingly, be a high-light on the toe; else the eye of
the body would be offended.[13]
It is somewhat ironic, though, that
Beerbohm would choose to single out a ‘hero’s boots’ to focus on, considering
that feet in his caricatures tend to taper into non-existence, or are large,
ungainly globs; as Sanford Schwartz says in a review, Beerbohm’s ‘boots [. . .]
at first seem plainly crude but [. . .] in time make us realize how much
Beerbohm’s pictures are pervaded by a neatly expressed clumpiness’.[14] Clumpiness, no matter how neatly expressed,
does not connote anything close to the ‘definite presentment’ Beerbohm warns
against; rather, it contributes to the vision formed by Beerbohm’s corpus of
graphic work, which Schwartz describes as a ‘vision of a race of rubberoids,
contorting themselves in the beautifully minimal, palely drawn, deliberately
cardboard-thin settings he liked to include’.[15] In such a vision, representations of
characters, real or imagined, never threaten to solidify into any concrete or
definite images, which could restrict the free-play of the reader’s
imagination. Instead, Beerbohm’s
caricatures, his illustrations for Zuleika
included, open up further possibilities for the free-play of imagination and
demand a greater mobility between text and image.
Beerbohm’s view of illustrated fiction
explains why it was not until 1985 that N. John Hall, with some hesitation,
published The Illustrated Zuleika Dobson. Since then the audience for the illustrated
novel has been much wider than Beerbohm and the select few to whom he showed
the original. The question of whether or
not the illustrations interfere with the mobility of the reader’s imagination,
thus, becomes relevant once more. A
number of the drawings are representations of the characters themselves: twenty
of Zuleika—plus one of her lips alone—and fifteen of (at least some part of)
the Duke of Dorset, along with drawings of many minor characters. Beerbohm, therefore, seems to be providing
the reader with ‘definite presentment[s]’ of the characters; however, a closer
examination of the illustrations reveals that they work against providing any
definite presentment of the characters.
Sanford Schwartz’s understanding of Beerbohm’s vision being one of ‘a
race of rubberoids’ reveals one way that the illustrations work against
solidifying the characters in the mind of the reader. Beerbohm’s drawings are always visually
fluid, with his subjects never being concrete representations of human form,
and the way he manages to turn his subjects into such pliable, contorted
figures is through exaggeration. In all
of his caricatures, Beerbohm relies on exaggeration, defining caricature in his
1901 essay ‘The Spirit of Caricature’ as ‘the art of exaggerating, without fear
or favour, the peculiarities of this or that human body, for the mere sake of
exaggeration’.[16] He goes on to add that one of the two reasons
caricatures are unpopular is that they do not look like the subjects they are
supposed to represent. This demand for
resemblance misses the point of caricature as Beerbohm defines it, saying in an
introduction to Will Rothenstein’s portraits that ‘caricaturists [. . .] are in
some sort students of human character through the human form’[17]; and
also saying elsewhere, in regards to his own method of caricature, that he ‘saw [his] subjects, not in their
presence, but afterwards, in [his] memory, when [he] sat down to draw them’.[18] Caricature, then, both eschews physical
resemblance and seeks, instead, to depict the ‘spiritual’ truth of the
subject. In doing this, as Beerbohm
explains, ‘caricature [. . .] demands acute imaginations from its beholders’.[19] The subject in caricature is entirely
transformed: ‘not only must every line and curve of him have been tampered
with: the fashion of his clothes must have been re-cut [. . .] His complexion,
too, and the colour of his hair must have been changed [. . .] And he will
stand there wholly transformed’.[20] What is caricatured, then, is so transformed
that to recall the original subject after having seen it so altered requires an
act of imagination, one which contravenes the closing off of imagination
expected by illustrations that pose as accurate representations of their
subjects; therefore, Beerbohm’s ‘caricatures’ of his novel’s characters,
instead of standing in for whatever images the reader extracts from the prose
of the text, actually create a multiplicity of representations in addition to,
rather than in place of, those formed by the verbal descriptions of a
character.
It would at first seem incongruous to
discuss drawings of fictional characters as caricatures, since the act of
exaggeration would imply a subject with a set of finite features to
exaggerate. To exaggerate the features
of a fictional character is to create an additional level of artifice,
especially considering that the characters in the novel are not characters in
any conventional sense, but, instead, are embodiments of stylistic modes in the first place. Lawrence Danson, for instance, points out how
Zuleika’s voice embodies a literary mode that ‘derives largely from that of the
conventional modern romance (whether stage melodrama or novel) with its
pretensions to realism’, while the Duke of Dorset is revealed to be another
literary mode: ‘his mode is more obviously fantastic’.[21] Danson concludes, ‘He [the Duke] is epic, she
[Zuleika] is novel’.[22] Caricaturing these literary modes removes
them even further from faithful representations of ‘real’ characters, and
looking at some representative caricatures of Zuleika and of the Duke reveals
how just how far removed they are.
Of all the characters in the novel,
Zuleika would seem to be the one whose depiction would require the most
accuracy; ‘any false step here were fatal’[23], N.
John Hall says, since it is Zuleika’s beauty that sends nearly the entire
undergraduate body of Oxford to its death.
Hall, however, explains that ‘to have drawn a photographically realistic
woman would of course have been entirely wrong’.[24] Clearly it would be impossible to draw the
superlatively beautiful Zuleika accurately, since she is an idealized notion of
beauty to begin with; therefore, the drawings of Zuleika are already precluded
from being replicas of Zuleika as described in the text. Hall, though, states in his introduction
that, the drawings are ‘precise visual embodiments of Max’s prose’, adding that
‘if one reads the appropriate text and looks at the drawing and turns back to
the text, one finds a nearly perfect reciprocity, a relation such as Hillis
Miller sees in connection with Dickens and Cruikshank’.[25] Hillis Miller describes this relationship as ‘an
oscillation or shimmering of meaning in which neither [picture nor text] can be
said to be prior’,[26] and
even in the construction of Zuleika
Dobson this might have been true, since Beerbohm would often sketch his
characters in the manuscripts of his works (and elsewhere), leading Hall to
speculate that ‘it is even conceivable that Max drew some similar version of
Zuleika in the margin of the manuscript before describing her in the text’.[27] This reciprocity between image and text,
however, is not one of direct illustration.
When the text describes Zuleika’s neck, for instance, as ‘imitation-marble’[28]—already
a doubly artificial description—one cannot find in any of the drawings a corresponding
illustration. The reciprocity between
image and word is not one in which each expands on the other. In the case of Zuleika’s neck, the drawings
work dialogically to create an impossible picture in the reader’s mind of a
neck, artificial, stiff and solid, yet fluid and often stretched out in the ‘rubberoid’
fashion described by Schwartz. The
full-page illustration of Zuleika performing her conjuring tricks for the
undergraduates, in which she is holding the Magic Canister, for example,
depicts Zuleika’s body grotesquely elongated, her neck stretched and thinned
beyond any shape imaginable in marble.
Her body, instead of suggesting marble, is metaphorically linked to the
egg in the ‘Demon Egg-Cup’ by the graphic match between Zuleika’s dress-top,
which duplicates the drawing of the egg-cup that is resting on the table beside
Zuleika. The verbal description of this
particular moment in the novel does not correspond to the drawing any more than
the general description of Zuleika earlier in the text. In fact the text offers competing physical
descriptions; describing ‘how she might have seemed to a casual observer’,
Beerbohm writes:
Hither and thither
she fared, her neck and arms gleaming white from the luminous blackness of her dress, in the luminous
blueness of the night. At a distance,
she might have been a wraith; or
a breeze made visible; a vagrom breeze, warm and delicate, and in league with death.[29]
Yet this description is already negated in
the text by the Duke’s perception of her: to him, the reader is told, ‘there
was nothing weird about her: she was radiantly a woman; a goddess; and his
first and last love’.[30] The textual descriptions polarize Zuleika as
either wraith or goddess, delicate or robust.
The drawing of her, while incorporating some of these aspects,
undermines them at the same time. The ‘luminous’
blackness of her dress and the ‘luminous’ blueness of the night blend into a
pale wash of gray, which also shades and dulls the ‘gleaming white’ of her
skin. Furthermore, it negates the ‘radiance’
of the Duke’s description. The
illustration reconciles the color contrast of the verbal description(s) and
simultaneously inverts that contrast into a more or less uniformly colored
caricature. The drawing also negates
Beerbohm’s description of Zuleika as a delicate breeze. The heavy shading present all along the right
of Zuleika’s dress might portend death, and, thus, be consistent with Beerbohm’s
description, but the heavy application of the pencil lends a weight to the
dress which anchors Zuleika, depriving her of the power of a goddess and
challenging the description of her as a breeze.
Both text and illustration work conjointly to undo any fixed notions of
identity. The text makes direct
illustration impossible to begin with by presenting competing descriptions, and
then the illustration contravenes both of them.
In doing so, the image does not come to replace the textual
descriptions. Not only is the
illustration stylistically dialectical—contrasting Beerbohm’s fluid, curving
lines with intentional clumpiness—but, read in conjunction with the caption (an
excerpt of the Duke’s introduction of Zuleika, which reads: ‘she had earned the
esteem of the whole civilized world’), it becomes impossible to extract one
prevailing image of Zuleika. With the
text offering competing descriptions, the illustration dialectically undoing
itself, the drawing so sharply contrasting with a caption that was an insincere
statement on the part of the Duke in the first place (he rates Zuleika as a mediocre
talent at best), and the interaction between image and text continually
creating and disassembling the figure of Zuleika, it becomes apparent that the
reciprocity between image and text that Hall notes is not a reciprocity that
builds toward an enlarged understanding of the character depicted—if, indeed,
the drawing is, as this one is, of an actual character present in the novel
(and many are not)—but instead is a relationship that deconstructs and parodies
the other. Hall is not precisely correct
when he suggests that the text illustrates the drawings and vice versa. ‘Illustrate’ in this sense has the
connotation of the ‘definite presentment’ of which Beerbohm disapproves;
instead, the novel—prose and drawings—epitomizes the Decadent mode, which Linda
Dowling describes as a ‘counterpoetics of disruption and parody and stylistic
derangement’.[31] She adds to this that, ‘The world as it [. .
.] survives in Decadent writing is [. . .] a belated world, a place of
hesitations and contrarieties and exhaustions’.[32] Decadent illustration compounds the
hesitations, contrarieties and exhaustions of the world as it is presented in
Decadent prose by undercutting the seemingly more concrete world available to,
as Beerbohm calls it, the body’s eye—which perceives a visible world that
appears static and solid, but which, translated into the verbal world, is much
more easily circumnavigated by the mind’s eye.
The illustrations of the Duke, no less
than those of Zuleika, deconstruct the visible.
Just as the Duke embodies a different literary mode from Zuleika, he
also represents a different artistic mode.
Each individual piece in Beerbohm’s oeuvre of visual work possesses,
essentially, the same graphic style, and Zuleika
Dobson’s illustrations, too, all share a consistency of style that seems to
contrast with the wide variety of literary modes employed throughout the
novel. One might argue, then, that,
while individual illustrations work against fixing an image in the viewer’s
mind, the illustrations to the novel, when taken as a whole, do present a
definite style to the reader, so that, even if the reader is given no fixed
presentment of an individual character, a fixed style through which to view of
the characters is imparted to the
reader. Beerbohm’s dandyism, however,
offers a clue as to how to read the consistency of his graphic style. As a dandy, Beerbohm presented one image of
himself to the world throughout his life, through his dress and his
self-caricatures reflecting that dress.
Beerbohm’s image was so consistent that he solidified into the, in Shaw’s
phrase, ‘the incomparable Max’, or just ‘Max’, as he signed his artworks. Dandyism, however, as Rhonda Garelick reminds
us in Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender and
Performance in the Fin de Siècle, ‘is itself a performance, the performance
of a highly stylized, painstakingly constructed self’.[33] Beerbohm himself tells us in ‘Dandies and
Dandies’ that ‘dandyism is, after all, one of the decorative arts’.[34] Dandyism is a performance and an art, and is,
therefore, continually open to reinterpretation, to new performances, even if
those performances are never enacted.
Beerbohm’s graphic style is similarly a
stylized performance whose artificiality is masked by its consistency, but
which is perhaps all the more artificial for being so consistently
stylized. Since Beerbohm identifies
dandyism as one of the decorative arts, it is not a large stretch to compare
his opinions of dandyism to his strategies of illustration. Image and text in The Illustrated Zuleika Dobson interact in the same way that
Beerbohm says body and costume interact.
He says in ‘Dandies and Dandies’, ‘if there be a heaven for the soul,
there must be other heavens also, where the intellect and the body shall be
consummate’.[35] In such a world, he goes on to say:
the marvellous
affinity of a dandy’s mood to his daily toilet is not merely that it finds therein its perfect echo nor that it may
even be, in reflex, thereby accentuated
or made less poignant. [. . .] [But] in a perfect dandy this affinity must reach a point when the costume itself,
planned with the finest sensibility, would change with the emotional changes of its
wearer, automatically.[36]
The relationship Beerbohm sees between
costume and body is like the relationship between image and text in Zuleika in that each transforms with a
change in either one. That Beerbohm’s
costume retained a consistency throughout his life does not negate the
relationship between body and costume described above, just as the graphic
consistency in Beerbohm’s visual art should not be confused with stylistic
stasis. The style of Beerbohm’s
caricatures advertises itself as the same kind of painstakingly constructed
performance as his costume. It is an act
of observational lethargy to mistake the dandy’s dress for something organic or
inevitable, since its very essence is ornamentation, underscoring its
constructedness. The spats, hats, canes,
and so on, of the dandy are equivalent to Beerbohm’s curving lines, elastic
figures, color washes, and ‘neatly expressed clumpiness’ (to use Schwartz’s
phrase again).
The illustrations of the Duke testify that
consistency of style should not be confused with immobility. More evidently than any other drawing, the
one depicting Zuleika throwing a jug of water onto the Duke’s head demonstrates
the mobility of Beerbohm’s style. The
background is entirely composed of curving lines, some representing the water,
and the others the night. The lines
explode away from the Duke’s upturned face in a starburst that exemplifies
motion. Underneath the lines of water
coming off of the Duke, dark lines swoop down in a curve parallel to the tilt
of the Duke’s body, but in a direction that jars with the movement of the
water. The Duke himself approximates a
line, one that completes an s-curve with the falling water. In the entire drawing, excluding the borders,
one struggles to find any straight line.
Not only is the use of such curving lines reminiscent of Beardsley’s
flowing lines—and those of the art
nouveau artists he inspired—but it is a hallmark of Beerbohm’s style that
nearly every reviewer of The Illustrated
Zuleika Dobson has mentioned, even when, as they almost always do, those
reviews fails to mention any other aspect of Beerbohm’s style. For example, Sanford Schwartz, in the only
review that addresses Beerbohm’s graphic style at any length, describes
Beerbohm’s ‘exuberantly expressive sense of line’.[37] Also, Sam Pickering, writing in the Sewanee Review, notes how Beerbohm’s ‘lines
curve flowingly’, although Pickering longs, in the face of the mass suicide, ‘for
a little cold angularity’.[38] This, of course, misses the very point of the
novel and the point of Beerbohm’s graphic style. The tragedy of the novel is counteracted by
the comedy of the novel and drained of heartrending force by the lack of physic
depth in the characters. ‘Cold
angularity’ would both give unwanted weight to the necessarily light form of
the novel, and would countermand the curvilinear style that connotes
malleability and mobility, and which implies continuation of the image beyond
its physical borders.
The mobility apparent in the illustration
of the Duke being splashed with water should not be forgotten when looking at
the other caricatures of the Duke. The
overt symbols of mobility may not be as present in the other illustrations of
the Duke, but each is still an obvious caricature, although the exaggeration of
the Duke’s features changes within each drawing. The hyperbolically haughty face, the
elongated fingers and the pencil-thin body—which seems to inflate and deflate
in accord with the Duke’s ego—all work against any consistent presentment of
the Duke. The full-page illustration of
the Duke in his Knight of the Garter regalia is no less an exaggeration than
the drawing of him being splashed with water.
The haughty face is the same with the overstated bridge of the nose, but
the body, visible in part from the waist down, seems to have expanded. The angularity of the column behind the Duke,
which Sam Pickering should have appreciated, is balanced by the flowing lines
of the Duke’s cape. The bold (for
Beerbohm) washes of blue and mulberry contrast sharply with the dull grays and
browns of the other caricature. All of
this continues to point to a strategy of illustration that is self-consciously
constructed in the way that a dandy constructs his wardrobe: consistently
styled yet ever advertising its status as artifice, and, hence, its
susceptibility to change. By adopting
this strategy, Beerbohm prevents the images from ever standing in for the verbal
descriptions of the characters.
Avoiding static modes of illustration, Beerbohm succeeds in preserving the imaginative free-play of the reader. He also retains mobility though his choice of subjects. While a number of the drawings are of the characters, a large number of drawings depict fantastical, tangential, or non-existent scenes from the text. The Duke threatens to call the police, in one instance, which warrants a full-page illustration of Zuleika being taken away by a police officer, with the caption: ‘Some such vision as Zuleika may have for a moment had’—denoting that this is an entirely hypothetical depiction. Two pages later, after a wish that l’esprit de l’escalier befall the Duke, Beerbohm depicts an embodied l’esprit de’escalier walking down the stairs. An off-hand remark earlier in the novel, about how ‘if [the true conjuror] were set down, with the materials of his art, on a desert island, he would be quite happy’,[39] affords the opportunity for a drawing of a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat wearing a hula skirt on a deserted island. There are also other caricatures that are purposefully incomplete. Two back-to-back illustrations of Zuleika begging forgiveness at the Duke’s feet depict, in both, the Duke’s lower legs and Zuleika’s body, minus her head and feet. This partial illustration de-emphasizes the specific features of each character, creating metonymic representations that preserve more free-play in imagining the characters. Still other caricatures are seemingly straightforward depictions of important fantastical moments: the illustration of Beerbohm with fairy wings crowning the busts of the Emperors and the illustration of the gods on Mount Olympus are two such examples. Employing fantasy in both the illustrations and in the text allows the semantic mobility that Tolkien describes when he says, ‘anyone inheriting the fantastic device of human language can say the green sun’.[40] The text of Zuleika enacts this device by blithely disordering expected verbal and stylistic arrangements, while the illustrations continually remind the reader, through their self-consciously performed style and variety of subjects, that everything remains possible within The Illustrated Zuleika.
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Jeremiah
Merceruio is currently pursuing his Ph.D. at the University of St Andrews,
focusing on the intersection of fantasy, Decadence and gender in fin-de-siècle
prose fiction and visual art–particularly the work of Oscar Wilde, Max
Beerbohm, Vernon Lee, John Davidson, Ernest Dowson and Aubrey Beardsley. This
paper was given as part of the Oxford University fin de siècle seminar series,
and we thank both Mr Merceruio and the Convenor of the series,