Pictures and Make-Believe

Abstract

P EOPLE, objects, and events are pictured, or depicted, in representational paintings. In novels, by contrast, such things are described. Novels employ verbal symbols, whereas (we might say) paintings and other pictures use ones. This difference is both obvious and elusive. That there is a distinction of a fundamental sort between depicting and describing seems beyond question. But the difference threatens to vanish when we reach for it. In reading a novel to ourselves we look at the print on the pages. We examine a copy of Brothers Karamazov with our eyes in order to find out about Alyosha, as we visually investigate the canvas in order to learn about the peasants in Breughel's painting Haymaking. Why then don't the marks on the pages of the novel count as symbols, and the novel as a art? Of course novels, unlike pictures, can be heard as well as seen, when they are read aloud. Does that mean that the novel is, indifferently, an aural or a visual art? The trouble is that novels seem not to be perceptual at all, in some sense in which paintings (and sculptures) are perceptual, despite the fact that novels, or copies or readings of them, are to be perceived. A too easy explanation is that paintings, or parts of them, look like or resemble what they picture-Haymaking looks like fields, peasants at work, haystacks, and so forth. But a copy of Brothers Karamazov does not look like the people and events it describes, nor does any of the print it contains. And neither do the sounds of an oral reading of the novel sound like what is described. There are serious difficulties in this proposal, some

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