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Issue 1. Cognitive Narratology

The burden of coherence

Author: Jan Baetens
Published: November 2000

Abstract (E): This article deals with what is it considers the paradox of coherence. Every reading implies the search for coherence, but simultaneously that very attempt engenders new types of complexities which hinder and subvert its achievement. As an example, it uses the bimedial, photo-narrative book "Notte Oscura" (1993) by Normand de Bellefeuille and Alain Laframboise.

Abstract (F): Le propos de cet article est de montrer à quel point la chérence est un défi impossible. D'une part, la cohérence apparaît comme une nécessité de lecture. D'autre part, la recherche même d'une plus grande cohérence crée dans le texte une série de complexités qui sont une entrave à l'idée même de cohérence. L'exemple utilisé est celui de la collaboration entre photographie et écriture dans "Notte Oscura" (1993) de Normand de Bellefeuille et Alain Laframboise.

Keywords: coherence, photonarrative, Bellefeuille, Laframboise

As we all know, the making of coherence is a necessity: in spite of all modern attempts regarding the infinitely open character of texts and meanings, there is no communication possible without a minimum of (agreed) coherence. The making of coherence is also a very hard thing to do: countless difficulties and booby-traps hinder or obstruct the search for a meaningful and unified structure. It is finally something impossible to finish and, thereby, in a certain way impossible to obtain: this topic will be at the heart of the present discussion. The brief examination of one single artistic procedure, the writing and working in collaboration by several authors, shall be the starting point for some methodological reflections on the problematic and nonetheless imperative character of coherence.

The dialectics of blindness and insight

Every collaboration, especially when involving two different media, always raises a crucial problem of coherence. And every modern collaboration, especially when involving text and photography, as in the example I will further use, raises this problem even more, for those works nowadays almost exclusively obey a rhetoric of negation and antagonism. Far from conceiving the image as an illustration of the verbal text or, vice versa, the text as a description of the image, contemporary art forms very often strive to accomplish a new kind of relationship in which verbal texts and images resist one another and develop on the contrary their own specific forms and meanings (Buisine 1988). The few efforts to create a perfect homogeneity between word and image are paradoxically seen as an argument in favor of the very impossibility of such a convergence (Burch 1986). Current photo-and-text fiction books are therefore a good case to test some general ideas on coherence and coherence making.

Notte oscura (1993), for instance, a work by Normand de Bellefeuille (for the texts) and Alain Laframboise (for the pictures), immediately confronts its reader with a curious mix of coherent and incoherent structures and items. On the one hand, every photograph seems merely to illustrate some particular fragment of the text that precedes or follows immediately (in the book there is, grosso modo, one picture for every two pages of text). On the other hand, the illustrative reading of the images quickly appears to be very restricted: the given relationships only link details of the text and details of the image (there is a certain 'rest' one has to deal with in a different manner).

Notte Oscura, cover page

From the very beginning of the reading, the quality of coherence depends on two precise, but antagonistic factors: the capacity of the reader to integrate in a personal framework a more or less great amount of items (this is very near to what coherence studies normally call gap filling, see van de Velde 1992); the capacity to censor those elements of the work which resist integration (this is what different authors, following Eco 1979 call narcotization). Both operations take place simultaneously and must not be considered as (axiologically determined) opposites: both are necessary to the establishment of coherence. Several theoreticians have argued that the 'negative' capacity of narcotization must not be seen as a 'mistake' or an 'absence' of logical thinking (nor as a 'symptom' of unreliable meanings), but as a vital necessity of any 'normal' coherent attitude of the human subject (see, from a philosophical -and more particularly Foucauldian- point of the view, the studies of Veyne (1983) and Rosset 1976) on the apparent and sometimes apparently intentional contradictions in antique and modern interpretation strategies). Without a certain dose or degree of blindness, no durable coherent insight can be established.

A small example of Notte oscura will make clear how this ambivalence of integration and narcotization really works. When reading the first epigraph of the book, a quotation by Simone de Beauvoir on the mystery of lie (and fiction) as truth, one is very intrigued, not by the content of the proposition (a perfect cliché in Western novelistic literature), but by the strange relationship: 1) between the name of the quoted author and that of the author of the text of Notte Oscura ('Beau'-voir proposes the masculine form of 'Belle'-feuille) and, 2) between the name of Beauvoir ('to see well', in an approximate translation) and the visual dimension of the book (which contains many photographs and whose authors have names with strong visual connotations, '-feuille' meaning 'page' and 'framboise' -'raspberry'- referring to a colour). The initial quotation of Beauvoir then, the reader supposes, is there not to draw the attention to a dull stereotype, but to make notice 1) the mixt character of the bimedial work, and 2) its tendency to motivate poetically the normally unmotivated signs of language. Yet this very powerful framework must be abandoned when the reader discovers, later on in the book, three new epigraphs: all of them vigourously insist on the stereotyped content of 'lie' and 'truth', while none of them reactivates the formal and poetic dimensions of the game on the name Beauvoir. In order to create coherence, the reader will have to 'promote' the content level of the four epigraphs and to 'obliterate' their formal level. He will have to narcotize his first integration and to integrate the object of his first narcotization.

Coherence as process

Reading is not only a matter of instant appreciation of texts and images, a matter of dividing a set of given units in a first class of integrated elements and a second group of narcotized items. Since reading is a dynamic and temporally marked activity, the criteria of coherence making can shift (and in practice they continually do so). The rules which permit the partition of a work in narcotized and integrated units often undergo extreme changes.

Notte oscura, second "marbled page"

Indeed, since the integration and narcotization of units is not automatically achieved (sometimes things withstand our manipulations), the reader will always try to find other and more satisfying interpretation frameworks. This capability, again, can be practiced in two different directions.

On the one hand, the reader can reject an already integrated element and narcotize what at first glance seemed perfectly coherent (that is, congruous with the surrounding text elements): the devaluation of the primitive reading of "Beauvoir" has already provided a good example of such a strategy of permanent adjustment.

On the other hand, the reader can also try to recuperate, i.e. to reintegrate at another level the gradually narcotized elements (or the immediately narcotized elements which other readings will remember him of). Notte oscura also reminds many speaking examples of this strategy. Let us take for instance the division of the book in three parts ('Rome'/'Florence'/'Milan'). During the first reading of the work, this division seems so strong that no other way of organizing is even taken into account. Due to the fact that the three parts of the book are titled and numbered, due also to the fact that those parts share certain fundamental aspects (displaying the same characters, using the same set of major themes, etc.), due finally to the fact that their differences also follow comparable patterns (every part is located in a new but analogous place, for instance), the triadic structure of Notte oscura plays a basic role in the making of coherence. It helps the reader to find certain ways of arranging the heterogeneous photographic material of the book and to discover stylistic differences in the sequential structure of the three groups of images (as the reading continues, one has the impression that the ordering of the photographs becomes more and more narrative). New readings, however, provide evidence for the hypothesis that the organization principles of the visual parts of the book are not (or not only) those of the triadic structure of the text, but (also) those of the palindrome virtually contained within the material basis of any book, the host medium of the work (apart from any content, a book always displays a formal relationship between its beginning and its end, between its first and last peritextual units, between its front cover and back page, see Baetens 1993). Some of the first images of the work, indeed, are repeated in a reversed order in the second half of the work, whereas the opposition between the full page photograph of the front cover and the totally black space of the back page is exactly reiterated in the middle of Notte oscura (during the first reading, the black picture in the center of the book was only interpreted as the final term of a panoramic sequence approaching slowly to the darkness of a forest).

As a result of these changes, the reader can decide to stress the binary structure of Notte oscura, thus strenghtening in the text those elements which obey the same logic as the photographs. Such a decision, of course, will give rise to both the narcotization of yet integrated triadic elements and the reintegration of neglected binary and palindromic structures (as, for instance, the name of the Florentine gallery -'I Tatti', a pretty fine palindrome- where the second part takes place). But he can also decide to stress after all the first, triadic structure, and to minimalize the palindrome. Or he can choose to look for further evidence, or choose to avoid any preference, and so on.

How to stop the making of coherence?

This process is endless. But it has also limits.

The first boundary, at the 'bottom' of the process, is defined by the constitution of 'monostructured' or minimalist works, in which the constraints that guide the interpretation are so strict that only one reading of them can or should be made. This solution, which is of course utopic (and maybe not even desirable), is less simplistic or uninteresting than it seems (see Calvelo and Hamel 1986). The advantage of minimalist works and their systematic refusal of any aleatorics is indeed that, paradoxically enough, they do not reduce but increase the activity or participation of the reader. For the perfect understanding of the structure of a minimalist work makes it possible that the reader understands not only the message but also the way the message has been produced, and this knowledge will help him to take the place of the artist and to start producing himself (or at least -because we all know that every decoding is also a new encoding- doing it in a more active and self-conscious way).

The second frontier, at the 'top', concerns then the end of interpretation and rewriting. When a new integration and narcotization is no longer possible, one generally admits that the creative reception of the work will come to its natural end. It is often said that the great masterpieces of literature, for instance, escape from this ending by offering infinite meanings. This is of course true, but only if there is in them already a certain coherence, a certain readability and, why not, a certain minimalism.

Coherence making -the simultaneous production of integration and narcotization- is thus not to be seen as a move towards greater purity and clearness. Every effort of (re)integration always produces a (new) rest, which can even be, for instance, an element first strongly integrated. And reading is not the progressive elimination of the text's incoherencies. It is on the contrary the creation of new incoherencies, of new rests, the production of which is the motor of interpretation. The reading process progresses spirally, not one way as the emptying of the class of incoherencies and the filling up of the class of coherent units.

The interest of art and literature, with respect to coherence, is then to make us sensitive to this process and to its stimulating and unescapable violence.

WORKS QUOTED

Jan BAETENS (1993), 'Qu'est-ce qu'un texte 'circulaire'?', in Poétique , n°96.

Normand de BELLEFEUILLE & Alain LAFRAMBOISE (1993), Notte oscura . Montréal, éd. du Noroît.

Alain BUISINE (1988), 'Tel Orphée', in Revue des sciences humaines, n° 210.

Noël BURCH (1986), Une praxis du cinéma. Paris, Gallimard, coll. Folio/Essais.

José CALVELO and Patrice HAMEL (1986), 'Vues imprenables', in Conséquences, n° 9.

Umberto ECO (1979), The Role of the reader. Bloomington, Indiana UP.

Clément ROSSET (1976), Le réel et son double. Paris, éd. de Minuit.

Roger VAN DE VELDE (1992), Text and meaning. Berlin/New York, De Gruyter.

Paul VEYNE (1983), Les Grecs ont-ils cru à leurs mythes? Paris, éd. du Seuil.

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