ABSTRACT

Pictorial allusion is one of the modes of the "pictorial third" manifestations. The pictorial third resonates with a visual syncopation as much as with a dynamic arrangement of time and space, the visible and the legible. A synthesis of the existing critical viewpoints will allow one to set the basis for a phenomenological approach of the text/image reception, or, in other words, the reception of the pictorial appearing in the text. This chapter explores the question of allusion, particularly the "pictorial" type of allusion and its impact once it appears in a literary text. It distinguishes it from the conventional allusion, and examines the effects of double seeing and double understanding that it performs on the text. The actualizations are innumerable: no text has its proper image, no image its proper text. But when an actualization occurs—which one could call, in either case, an interpretation—there is indeed soul and body, that is, form and intensity.