Images of Crisis as Cultural Code

George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University

[From Chapter One, "Images, Situations, and Structures," Images of Crisis: Literary Iconology, 1750 to the Present, Boston and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982, pp. 15-16. WWW version by Marisa Castagno, University of Turin, Italy, 1997.]

ecognizing that various apparently different situations, such as the destruction of Pompeii and the shipwrecked mariner, share a common structure has much to offer the student of cultural history, ideas, the arts, and the relations among them. For example, when one perceives that literary and artistic presentations of shipwreck, invasion, avalanche, the Deluge, and the last days of Pompeii contain the same basic pattern or structure, they appear as equivalents or transformations of one another. Such a recognition, which makes it possible to identify the culturally important elements in each structure, also permits one to identify both the unifying themes of an age and the relation between various culturally dominant themes, ideas, and metaphors.

Artists and audiences dearly took such situations of extreme crisis to be relevant because they could see them as analogous to their own situations in some way. Thus, Turner's imagined avalanche in the Alps and Bulwer-Lytton's imagined history of Pompeii's last hours were understood to exist not solely as either works of art or recreations of fact. Rather, they were perceived as referring beyond themselves, for they were interpreted as paradigms, synecdoches, analogies, and metaphors -- as representative images or codes that conveyed something of importance to artist and audience alike. Such transformations of a literal thing (or event), or something within a work of art that purports to be such, permitted the situations of avalanche, shipwreck, and Pompeii to serve as cultural codes. They permitted, in other words, members of a particular society to communicate something of interest to one another. Obviously, one can learn much about a society, nation, or age both by examining the situations and structures its members adopt as codes or figurations and by observing how they manipulate, qualify, and adapt them.

By thus perceiving that certain basic structures function as cultural codes that communicate culturally relevant information, one can begin to construct an archeology of imagination capable of at least partially re-creating the way artists and audience experienced the paintings, novels, poems, political speeches, and sermons of an age. Such a proposed archeology of imagination would proceed by showing how apparently opposed or disparate images or situations might be seen as unified, and at the same time it would permit the modern student of an earlier culture -- or of his or her own -- to differentiate more precisely than otherwise possible apparently similar applications of such structures. Although such an approach would permit us to enter the imaginations of another age by making us sensitive to its voices, codes, and inflexions, it would not fall prey to essentially unsupported and unsupportable generalizations about the mind of an age or its Zeitgeist.

Furthermore, treating such structures as codes that can be manipulated and qualified permits us to study the interesting problems of tradition and innovation. Such an approach permits one, for instance, to inquire how avalanches, Pompeii, and shipwrecks became so popular, how they relate to earlier cultural codes, and how they function within individual paintings and literary works. In fact, the structure of crisis that lies at the heart of so many popular nineteenth- and twentieth-century metaphors, situations, and images turns out to be a transformation of a previously dominant cultural paradigm. As Borges has suggested in his essay on Pascal, perhaps universal history is the history of the diverse " intonation of a few metaphors". The journey of life is one of those few metaphors whose variations should command the attention of the student of Western culture. The notion that life is a journey has provided one of the most ervasive commonplaces of Western thought for two and a half millennia, and it is easy to see why. The figures of voyage, progress, or pilgrimage all enable us to spatialize and hence visualize -- our existence. (I had almost written that they enable us to spatialize our movement through time, or our existence in it, so difficult is it to escape using the forms of space to express those of time, quality, and abstract idea.)

• Into the Moment of Crisis
• Equivalent Structures
• John Martin and the Religious Sublime
• Pompeii Destroyed
• Bulwer-Lytton Punishes Pompeii
• Images of Crisis and Interarts Criticism
• Images of Crisis as Cultural Code
• Pre-Modern Images of Crisis; or Shipwrecked in the Sight of God
• The Shipwreck Image and Situation as Paradigm
• Static versus Kinetic Images of Crisis
• Crises of Christianity and Images of Crisis
• Ambiguous Images and Crisis
• Shipwrecks Literary, Literal, and Opaque

Last modified 28 December 2004