SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

Skaldic Poetry and Modern Painting 141
We shall finally see what our specialist Maurice Grosser
has to say about visual punning in modern painting
(p. 167) :
For the painter who wants to make composition the real
subject of his picture, what the picture represents is just an
obstacle; in fact it is the major obstacle. If the picture's
composition is to have its proper emphasis, all reference to the
familiar visual world must be destroyed. Or if this is too
drastic, the objective meaning of the image it presents must at
least be considerably weakened; otherwise the painter is just
where he was before, painting a picture which is well composed,
perhaps, but which is still an anecdote, an illustration. This
difficulty the modern artists avoided by their most brilliant
device - the multiple image or the visual pun. By
multiplying the meaning, by making a picture with layers of
images or layers of meaning, the value of each image can be
weakened, and the mind can be drawn from the picture's sense
to the picture's composition.
Here we have to bear in mind that the multiple image
corresponds to the skaldic kenning. He goes on:
For us in our time, if a thing is to hold attention, one plane of
existence, one level of meaning is not enough. A man must
mean two or three things at the same time. [Was not that
what Egill succeeded in doing in his metaphoric kennings in
Pel hOggr st6rt fyrir stali?13] By these extra meanings it
acquires for us the depth, the back and forth dimension [well
known in the kennings of skaldic poetry], the uncertain position
and the evasive essence which, for us, all real existence has.
It is this multiple meaning [nowhere better paralleled than
in the skaldic kennings] which renders a thing interesting and
keeps it so, whether it be an opera of Mozart or a character in
Proust.
And he goes on:
But for us the parody, the visual pun, the multiple image is
an essential part of all our serious art - our poetry, our music
and our painting. It is characteristic of our humor - the joke
where the situation given by the drawing is contradicted by the
social situation implied by the one line caption.
Grosser denies that the modern double image has
anything to do with allegory, but it seems to me that its
polarity is more similar to the polarity of the kennings or
the cubist paintings. A kenning always displays a double
word image.
13 In Egils saga, ch, 57.
D