The Unspeakable and the Unimaginable

My teacher at Johns Hopkins, Ronald Paulson, exposed the depths of the so-called “word and image” problem, when he drew a fundamental distinction, located in 18th-century aesthetics and semiotics, between the “emblematic” image and the “expressive”. The emblematic was the image as word, as linked to, determined by, readable in words. The expressive was the obverse—the unreadable, the mute, the indexical—a “regression into primitivism prior to language, or a leap forward to the ineffable beyond language.” ² This distinction then was discovered to inform the spaces of the 18th-century English garden, in its development from “poetic” and allegorical garden spaces to the wilder, more open and de-textualized spaces of the landscape garden and the picturesque.