Guest Author - Daria Przybyla

In Julian Barnes’s Shipwreck, the author enumerates features of a certain historical painting that aim at retrieving the original sense from history. According to Barnes’s analysis of Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa, the visualization of historic(al) events slips traditional conceptions of author-viewer relations. On the one hand, this type of art both physically and ideologically exceeds the frames of authorial intention. It means that there is no guarantee that Gericault’s mark on the meaning of his masterpiece will be timeless. Each and every forthcoming viewer is entitled to put his or her own interpretation on a given work of art and never have their analyses challenged. However, on the other hand, the large number of interpreters doesn’t really amount to diversification of master-discourse in the sense of narrating a multiple stories. The aesthetic experience has been pre-contextualized and is doomed to remain an immobile particle in the sphere encompassing all historical processes.

Much of the attention in the short story is devoted to the position of the painter. Barnes projects Gericault’s situation through the content of his painting as well as the accompanying philosophy of aesthetics which assumes the erasure of historical modalities. The Raft of the Medusa is endowed with a symbolic dimension: it shatters in time just like the discussions and emotions that once erupted around the event in question. In a way, deterioration of the painting announces a closure of discourse on the illustrated aspect of the past. The painting may substitute demands of the imagination for imagination itself and provide historical subjects with a material ready for passive assimilation. Once a historical incident is manifested via visual arts its signification is reduced by the contextual rhetoric progressing and evolving in time. As a consequence, art institutes the scale by which different senses of history appear to interpreters more or less crucial. Not only does art retell events but it also establishes a novel system of values. The organization of the image is already an interpretation which required certain mechanisms of signifying to be applied.

Foreseeing the possible profile of future viewers and the political conditions in which his painting will be displayed, Gericault had to account for a number of factors. First, Barnes writes what the “ignorant eye” may have to say about the image. Since it relies on impressive and irrational stimuli, the character of the painting must be adjusted to a certain mainstream fashion of sensitivity. The system of values and the story told by the image must be directed at an area in which various social discourses have already produced an interpretation. The “ignorant eye” of the viewer is, consequently, expected to unconsciously find an analogy between two or more types of representation. Since the ‘Scene of Shipwreck’ catches only an instant of the tragedy; the ensuing interpretation will be motivated by what the artist chose for his object of painting. The conjoining of human life imperiled by nature’s fury smacks of an archetypical parable: it is an example of some “universal” notion of good fighting against evil. And second, the “informed eye” interferes with those impressions. It is a semi-conscious knowledge drawn from narratives overheard about past periods of history. This knowledge must be reviewed and controlled through an appropriate representation of answers even preceding viewer’s questions. The painter must find out what the general knowledge of history is in his target-audience social circles. Finally, in spite of the viewer’s referring to national or naval history, the painting must address personal purposes the audience may have when they turn to art in order to comprehend or imagine history.