ABSTRACT
Under what circumstances can illustration of literature be taken seriously as interpretation? Graphic illustration of literature, since the rise of the modern printing industry at least, is not credited as ambitious visual art, much less intelligent exegesis. I challenge this prejudice while exploring how illustration contributes insights opaque to literary critics and theorists approaching a difficult text. To do so, I examine two sets of images accompanying the first 1898 magazine publication, in Collier’s Magazine, of Henry James’s Christmas ghost story “The Turn of the Screw.” James thought of this work as a fairy story, but it has caused great controversy over the last century, less about the work’s deeper meaning than the very literal acts recounted in the narrative. Like literary critics, artistic interpretation, ranging from Jack Clayton’s 1971 film to the watercolors of Charles Demuth disagree whether the haunting at the heart of the story took place at all or is a figment of the narrator’s imagination. Putting John La Farge’s frontispiece in dialogue with Eric Pape’s narrative lithographs and Eric Voegelin’s remarkable philosophical commentary on the story, I argue that any workable reading of James’s tale must preserve the logical complexity of the original. Doing so requires keeping in tension 1) our exclusive reliance on the narrator’s perceptions and 2) our ultimate ignorance of the nature of the mystery she tries to unravel. The payoff is coming to see in the tale less a paradigm of physical horror, or unreliable narration, than of the theoretical horror of not knowing. Another is recognizing in illustration an instrument of thought, able to register precision and vagueness as the text demands.
