The Pictorial Narrator

RESEARCH ARTICLE ABSTRACT In our everyday discourse we make frequent reference to pictorial narratives. We exclaim on the hunt scene in the cave painting, the frenzy unfolding in the graffiti, the adventure of the baby in the book illustration, and the disintegration of a marriage in the oil painting. Yet a more precise question concerning narrators and their relation to these so-called pictorial narratives remains overlooked. Theoretical debates in narratology are still primarily focused on literary narratives and so pictures remain relatively neglected as a class. Kendall Walton is an exception. He argues that the literary narrator is necessary to provide access to the story as ‘he mediates the reader’s access to the rest of the fictional world’. He says that pictorial narratives cannot sustain narrators akin to literary counterparts. But this seems to be at odds with how we understand paintings such as Marriage A-la-Mode, where events are arguably recounted to the viewer with wicked humour. This paper has two main aims. The first is to set out what is meant by ‘pictorial narrators’ by providing a succinct and up-to-date guide to the discussions that have touched on this issue. The second is to explore the possibility that pictorial narratives imply pictorial narrators. The Pictorial Narrator Vanessa Brassey King’s College, UK CORRESPONDING AUTHOR: Vanessa Brassey King’s College, UK [email protected] KEYWORDS: narrator; narrative; pictures; perspective; fiction; story TO CITE THIS ARTICLE: Brassey, Vanessa. ‘The Pictorial Narrator.’ Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics LX/XVI, no 1 (2023): pp. 55–70. DOI: https://doi.org/10.33134/ eeja.316 56Brassey Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.316 In our everyday discourse we make frequent reference to pictorial narratives. We exclaim on the hunt scene in the cave painting, mention the frenzy unfolding amidst a human catastrophe in the graffiti, discuss the adventure of the baby in the illustration, and whisper about the humorous rendition of a devastated a marriage in the oil painting. Yet a more precise question concerning pictorial narrators remains almost entirely ignored. Narratologists are still primarily focused on literary rather than pictorial narratives, the latter remaining relatively neglected along with the putative class of pictorial narrators.1 The philosopher Kendall Walton is an exception. In his paper ‘Points of View in Narrative and Depictive Representation’ he compares literary to pictorial narratives and concludes, sceptically, that pictures do not instantiate narrators. He argues that picture viewers directly access depicted content. By contrast, readers can only represent literary narratives along with a narrator. The literary narrator is crucial because he or she ‘mediates the reader’s access to the rest of the fictional world’. As a result, ‘we know what happens in the fictional world only from his reports about it’.2 Since pictures are accessed directly, they cannot sustain narrators, nor do we require them to apprehend the content. However, this is at odds with our experience of, say, William Hogarth’s celebrated paintings of failing marriages and impecunious fools. In apprehending these pictures adequately, it seems apt to say the viewer is told a story. But what tells the viewer the story? Why think that the viewer spontaneously chooses to ‘tell it to herself’? And why would she tell herself a story when looking at these pictures and not others? This paper has two main aims. The first is to clarify what is meant by ‘pictorial narrators’ by pointing to and discussing some positions in the literature. Since the issue has garnered almost no attention, the groundwork needs to be laid down in this exploratory paper. The second is to argue in favour of the claim that there are pictorial narrators. I will proceed as follows. In Section I, the standard view of narrative is revisited and outlined along with an account of the narrator familiar from novels. The literary case is then roughly mapped onto pictorial cases. This serves to establish the strength of the preliminary claim that pictures manifest something akin to literary narratives. The exercise produces a rudimentary but testable definition of a ‘narrator’. In Section II, I review sceptical and friendly responses to the existential claim, that is, that pictures can or may manifest narrators (akin to literary ones). In Section III, I undermine a key premise in the sceptics’ argument by providing a precise articulation of the role that perspectives play in our engagement with pictures, specifically arising from the way pictures fix their vantage points. The analysis shows that, despite obvious differences in the representational mechanisms used to access pictorial and literary narratives, there are important similarities. In the final Section IV, the claim about pictorial perspectives is developed to provide independent grounds for a claim about pictorial narrators. This is shown to be resilient to a range of objections. 1 Michael Ranta, ‘Stories in Pictures (and Non-pictorial Objects): A Narratological and Cognitive Psychological Approach’, Contemporary Aesthetics 9 (2011), http://hdl.handle. net/2027/spo.7523862.0009.006. 2 Kendall Walton, ‘Points of View in Narrative and Depictive Representation’, Noûs 10 (1976): 50. 57Brassey Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.316 I. NARRATIVES AND NARRATORS The standard version of narrative is articulated by Gerald Prince, who says that ‘narrative is the representation of at least two real or fictive events or situations in a time sequence, neither of which presupposes each other’.3 Note that, although Prince uses the term ‘fictive events’ to describe a necessary component of narrative, we could equally well use the more general terms ‘events’ or ‘depicted events’. Broad consensus on Prince’s formulation has not prevented further discussion and attempts at refinement by philosophers and narratologists, for example that narrative is a particular form of explanation or that narratives string together events in a way that recounts and renders them intelligible. Of course, improved intelligibility and understanding are not sufficient for turning data into narrative. After all, an antigen test conveys information with understanding. Emma Kafalenos, a contemporary narratologist, has argued that they are constructions of chronologically and causally ordered sequences of events.4 This comports well with work by philosopher J. D. Velleman5 and the linguistic historian Tzetan Todorov,6 who argue that narrative emerges from a represented trajectory of equilibrium to imbalance, to new equilibrium. In other words, narrative amounts to the presence of an organizing principle that provides the sense of events moving forward to an ending or closure.7 Velleman has argued that these events can be presented to an audience as prose, or in other formats, such as through musical refrains. Whether or not understanding narratives involves a distinctive role for the imagination is controversial. Walton has argued that imagination plays a distinctive role.8 Describing imagination’s role in picture-seeing, he says that in the actual world a person looks at a flat piece of canvas covered with pigment, while ‘one imagines of one’s seeing of the canvas to be a seeing of a mill’.9 I pick up on this later in the paper and explore an alternative construal of the way imagination is implicated in depictive seeing. There is interdisciplinary agreement that all literary narratives are created by someone, that is, a flesh-and-blood author.10 Call this the ‘actual author’. Some theorists hold that, while actual authors are metaphysically unproblematic, they are irrelevant to the way readers access the narrative.11 These theorists posit a further implied author or 3 Gerald Prince, Narratology: The Form and Function of Narrative (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1982), 4. 4 Emma Kafalenos, ‘Implications of Narrative in Painting and Photography’, New Novel Review 3 (1996): 54. 5 John David Velleman, ‘Narrative Explanation’, Philosophical Review 112 (2003): 1–25. 6 Tzetan Todorov, ‘La grammaire du récit’, Langages 3 (1968): 94–102. 7 Velleman, ‘Narrative Explanation’, 19. 8 Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 9 Ibid., 301. 10 Walton maintains that something can be a representation regardless of the intentions of its maker, but his view is an exception (ibid., 52). 11 See, for example, Jenefer Robinson, Deeper than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music, and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) and for criticisms see Vanessa Brassey, ‘The Implied Painter’, Debates in Aesthetics 14 (2019): 15–29; ‘The Expression of Emotions in Pictures’, Philosophy Compass 16 (2021), https://doi.org/10.1111/ phc3.12767. 58Brassey Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.316 narrator who provides access to the narrative. As early as Book Three of The Republic,12 Plato argues that any narrative requires an intermediary to provide access to the story. More recently, this intermediary has been identified as the narrating first-person ‘I’. The reader is a second-person ‘you’ and the being or object narrated about a thirdperson ‘they’ or ‘it’.13 The narrator ‘recounts’ the fabula or story (the chronologically ordered sequences of events)14 with an emotional lean that intimates the causes of the unfolding sequence.15 In other words, the fabula is the temporal order in which events occur, and the sjuzhet or version is the specific way in which the sequence is told to the reader. That fabula and sjuzhet can differ considerably is exemplified by novels such as Time’s Arrow and films such as Memento, where the narrative unfolds or is told backwards, yet time is understood to move forwards within the narrative world as it does in the real world. Just as two witnesses may recount two different versions of events, so different narrators may elicit different versions of a fabula.16 Literary narrators are identified using deictic terms (‘now’, ‘here’, ‘yesterday’, ‘tomorrow’, and so on) that fix their spatio-temporal location. Meanwhile, modal terms (‘perhaps’, ‘unfortunately’, ‘clearly’, and so forth) indicate their psychological outlook. This psychologically infused spatio-temporal tracking of the narrator ensures the version’s intelligibility. The relevance of this to the pictorial case is made clear in Sections III and IV. Although many narratives support multiple narrators, as it is in Orman Pamuk’s novel Red, there can be just one who tells us the tale from beginning to end, as it is with Dr Watson narrating the Holmes mysteries. When there is no explicit reference to a narrator, experts tend to agree that the narrator persists as an ‘effaced’ or implicated ‘I’.17 Philosophers debate whether effaced narrators are (1) implied by the nature of our engagement with fictional narratives,18 (2) required to distinguish narrated worlds from the actual world,19 or (3) to bridge an ontological gap between perceiver and narrated world by providing access for the former to the latter.20 We can remain neutral regarding these finer-grained worries. Noël Carroll, unusually, has rejected the notion of the explicit narrator, preferring to argue that the reader simply follows instructions reconstructed from the intentions of the actual author.21 This solution does not entirely eradicate a consciousness of narratorial voice. Instead, actual or implied authors stand as effaced narrators when there are no explicit character 12 Plato, Republic, 392c–98b. 13 Prince, Narratology, 7. 14 Given the controversy over the definition of ‘story’ I will use the term ‘fabula’ throughout. 15 Manfred Jahn, Narratology 2.3: A Guide to the Theory of Narrative Narratology (Cologne: University of Cologne, 2021), http://www.uni-koeln.de/~ame02/pppn.pdf. 16 Kafalenos, ‘Implications of Narrative’. 17 Prince, Narratology, 7. 18 Gregory Currie, Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 19 David Lewis, ‘Truth in Fiction’, American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1978): 37–46. 20 See Jerrold Levinson, Contemplating Art: Essays in Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). 21 Noël Carroll, ‘Introduction’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67 (2009): 1–3. 59Brassey Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.316 narrators. In Section II, I consider an argument from Robinson for pictorial narrators along similar lines. The interaction between narrators and characters is relevant to the ensuing discussion and so worth mentioning here. In Mimesis and Make Believe, Walton analyses the complex way in which a character’s voice and mood are represented in tandem with a narrator’s.22 His analysis speaks to Gérard Genette’s distinction between a character who is causally efficacious in the version and the narrator’s meta-outlook, which accommodates and elevates character so that it temporarily appears to dominate the recounting. They agree that the narrator’s point of view is always dominant, whether or not it appears to be so.23 George Wilson agrees but puts things this way: versions always subtend to the narrator’s location since we must go through that in order to access the narrative.24 From this we can say that when there is no explicit narrator the question as to the narrator’s particular identity will simply not arise for the reader. All this is pertinent to the arguments given in Section IV. With the literary model in place, we can now ask: does this model smoothly extend to pictures? Experts deny that this is self-evident. Narratives require sequence and duration, and static pictures are not obvious candidates for manifesting such temporality. I shall not aim to give a comprehensive survey of recent work on the metaphysics of the debate. Instead, I will sketch out the two main positions so that those ideas that I take to be of fundamental importance to the argument over narrators can be introduced. This will allow us to briefly consider, and then put to one side, the related question of temporality in pictures. Compatibilists hold that depictions are compatible with narratives. This is the prevailing view among narratologists, but disagreements arise regarding the strength of the claim.25 Strong compatibilists hold that a single (monochronic) picture can imply a narrative by a single depiction of a scene.26 Roughly, the depicted content is understood in the light of a procession of events. For example, in Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait, the viewer understands the man to be raising his hand to greet the couple entering the room, that is, as a duration of experience. But weak compatibilists complain that only single pictures depicting disparate events and persons in the same composition can manifest continuous narratives, such as in Sandro Botticelli’s Three Miracles of Saint Zenobius.27 Some theorists remain unconvinced that single pictures can imply duration, and insist that narrative is manifested from a series of connected 22 Walton, Mimesis, 346. 23 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 146. 24 George Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 25 See Kafalenos, ‘Implications of Narrative’; Wendy Steiner, Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); ‘Pictorial Narrativity’, in Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, ed. MarieLaure Ryan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 145–77; Michael Ranta, ‘(Re-) Creating Order: Narrativity and Implied World Views in Pictures’, Storyworlds 5 (2013): 1–30; Klaus Speidel, ’Can a Single Still Picture Tell a Story? Definitions of Narrative and the Alleged Problem of Time with Single Still Pictures’, Diegesis 2 (2013): 173–94. 26 See Kafalenos, ‘Implications of Narrativity’, Ranta, ‘(Re-)Creating Order’, and Speidel, ‘Can a Single Still Picture Tell a Story?’ 27 Werner Wolf, ‘Narrative and Narrativity: A Narratological Reconceptualization and Its Applicability to the Visual Arts’, Word and Image 19 (2003): 180–97. 60Brassey Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.316 compositions, as it is with Hogarth’s Marriage A-la-Mode.28 The outright rejection of pictorial narrative is relatively rare, although not entirely unknown.29 Paul Barolsky’s scepticism is informed by his belief that, since pictures lack temporal ordering, any suggested similitude with literary narratives is misleading.30 A convincing rebuttal to Barolsky’s radical view is found in Kafalenos’s Implications of Narrative in Painting and Photography. In the light of this, I will bracket out further debate on the issue of temporal ordering in pictures for discussion elsewhere. Obviously, the account of compatibilism used as a springboard for the investigation in this paper must be properly neutral regarding the existence of a ‘pictorial narrator’. Unfortunately, this makes the suggestion from Bence Nanay, one of only a handful of philosophers to address the point in print, problematic. He argues that ‘[a] picture is a narrative picture if and only if a suitably informed spectator is supposed to undergo an experience of “engaging with narrative”’.31 Relying on a symmetry claim along the lines Nanay suggests will do more than cover both pictorial and literary cases. By explaining away the apparent asymmetry in the way the verbal and visual mediums are time-sliced and time-sequenced, we end up getting pictorial narrators ‘for free’. For this reason, we should prefer Klaus Speidel’s ordinary language argument, which comports well with the paradigmatic literary formulation and makes no assumptions about the ontology of pictorial narrators.32 Speidel takes ordinary language to be a valuable indicator of the extension of concepts and useful for dissolving philosophical problems, specifically in situations when ‘use in the language’ is essential for the meaning of a word. Since the term ‘narrative’ is not used in primarily theoretical domains (such as ‘quark’ is in particle physics), we should be confident that the word refers to whatever it picks out in ordinary discourse. This more neutral presentation of the case for pictorial narratives enables us to confidently adjudicate between compatibilism and incompatibilism. We can assume the premise that there are pictorial narratives and turn our attention to the claim about pictorial narrators. II. THE ARGUMENTS AGAINST AND FOR PICTORIAL NARRATORS Are there pictorial narrators akin to literary narrators? Kendall Walton denies that there is a ‘counterpart to a narrator in depiction’ since ‘one’s access to the fictional world is not mediated by another (fictional) person’.33 For example, when paintings convey the dementing of souls in the bowels of hell (Hieronymus Bosch), or a fight between two suitors (Hogarth), the viewer does not go through a narratorial ‘voice’ to see events as unfurling. The painting hangs there, we gaze into it, and narrative implicatures follow. 28 Chatman, Coming to Terms. 29 See Paul Barolsky, ‘There Is No Such Thing as Narrative Art’, Arion 18 (2010): 49–62, and Paul Harrison, ‘The Limits of Twofoldness’ in Richard Wollheim on the Art of Painting: Art as Representation and Expression, ed. Rob van Gerwen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 39–59. 30 Barolsky, ‘There Is No Such Thing’, 62. 31 Bence Nanay, ‘Narrative Pictures’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67 (2009): 127. 32 Speidel, ‘Can a Single Still Picture Tell a Story?’ 33 Walton, ‘Points of View’, 50. 61Brassey Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.316 Walton’s scepticism is double-faceted. The first facet is phenomenal: we do not have a sense of going through another fictional person in order to see for example, the chaotic and endless dementing of souls. The second facet is epistemic: there is no logical need to posit a narrator to ‘mediate’ and enable access to the pictorial world, and through whose perspective the chaotic and endless dementing of souls is (in a sense to be worked out) recounted or reported to us the viewer. Reconstructed, the argument is as follows: Scepticism 1. The only reason for positing a narrator is if it would be impossible to access the narrative directly, that is, without a narrator. 2. In the case of depiction, it is always possible to access the narrative directly, that is, without a narrator. 3. Therefore, there is no reason to posit pictorial narrators. Some theorists are friendlier to the possibility of pictorial narrators. Erie Watkins has pointed out that there is a sustained pictorial tradition of depicting characters in narrative pictures who ‘break the fourth wall’.34 Watkins continues to say that these depicted characters function in similar and significant ways to an explicit literary narrator. For example, in Pieter Bruegel’s The Peasant and the Birdnester a figure is placed between the scene and the viewer. This figure establishes eye contact with, and directs, the viewer’s attention toward a human figure climbing the tree in the background. Further examples of fourth-wall-breaker narrators include Nicolaes Maes’s An Eavesdropper with a Woman Scolding and the frank gaze of Manet’s titular figure in Olympia, who has a glint of amusement in her eyes at the viewer’s presupposed discomfort.35 Walton can respond to this by pointing out that we do not ‘go through’ these depicted narrator’s eyes to see the action. Rather, these characters function like arrows in a PowerPoint presentation, ensuring the viewer attends to the relevant part of the picture. So, we should treat these as depicted characters whose ‘voices’ are temporarily dominant. Watkins can insist that these depicted figures do qualify as pictorial narrators since we miss elements of the story when we do not pay attention to what these characters endeavour to show us. Furthermore, while we may not see the pictorial world ‘through the eyes’ of the depicted figure, we do see the pictorial world afresh by the depicted character indicating what we should prioritize or make salient in our grasp of the work. The problem is that Watkins overclaims on this point by saying that ‘the location of those persons seems to coincide with our own [and so] we are left with the illusion that we see the depicted world from their point of view’.36 The phenomenology as described by Watkins is false if the suggestion is that we have a trompe-l’oeil kind of experience with these fourth wall breakers. We do not see the Bruegel painting or Édouard Manet’s Olympia from the spatial perspective of the peasant or the courtesan. This leaves his claim vulnerable to the accusation that he has merely identified elevated and dominant characters. 34 Eric Watkins, ‘Point of View in Depictive Representation’, Noûs 13 (1979): 379–84. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 383. 62Brassey Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.316 To justify the claim about narrators, what needs to be shown is that pictures can and do instantiate the ‘narrating I’ recalled from the earlier section. These are distinguished from elevated characters and belong, however peripherally, to the world of the fabula, regardless of how infrequent the instances of self-reference. Jenefer Robinson’s approach shows more promise in this respect, although we need to reconstruct her view since it sits primarily in the debate concerning pictorial expressiveness rather than narration. Robinson has argued for a class of implied artists one step removed from the actual artist psychologically and conceptually.37 Implied artists are said to cohere and unify what a picture conveys, leaving a psychological trace of the actual artist who created them in the pictorial world.38 Viewers are said to experience the picture from their point of view or perspective. There have been several criticisms of Robinson’s notion in print and Robinson has conceded the point on several of them.39 These criticisms damage the model independently, but a further concern is that Robinson’s implied painter ends up in the wrong location, that is, in the actual world rather than the picture world. This means that the pictorial narrator qua implied painter is merely augmenting rather than providing access to the narrative. It would require further argumentation to secure the claim that the expression of personality, mood, or psychological perspective in a picture is sufficient for the presence of a narrator, and it is not possible to reconstruct this from Robinson’s papers. One way to advance the central claim is to challenge premise three of Scepticism, and to show that it is not possible to access pictorial content directly. This will establish the possibility of a mediating gateway or object that enables a viewer to adequately apprehend a picture. This is the work of the final two sections. III. PICTORIAL PERSPECTIVES In this section I clarify how perspectives play their role in depictive seeing. This clarification is put to work in the final section to defend the claim about pictorial narrators. So far, we have compared literary narrative to pictorial narrative to elucidate the representational structure of the latter. Here I begin by asking a more basic question: how do we see? Suppose I look out of the window and see my neighbours in the street. It is uncontroversial that whatever x I am seeing, I am seeing x from my actual perspective. This is because, when I see, what I see is seen from the spatio-temporal location I currently occupy. Perspectives, while contentless in themselves, structure the way content (x) is represented. My actual perspective is from ‘here and now’ and it conduces to represent the neighbours as ‘over there, now’ in relation to ‘me’. A perspective determines what aspect or which bit of x is most prominent or salient within the visual field. For instance, I only see the facing parts of the neighbours not 37 Robinson, Deeper than Reason. 38 I am conflating a conceptual question concerning pictorial narrators with the debate in respect of implied or hypothetical painters here. Robinson’s model has been extensively criticized; see Dominic McIver Lopes, ‘The “Air” of Pictures’, in Sight and Sensibility: Evaluating Pictures (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005), 49–90; Brassey, ‘Implied Painter’. 39 See Lopes, ‘“Air” of Pictures’; , ‘Implied Painter’; and Jenefer Robinson, ‘Response to Critics’, Debates in Aesthetics 14 (2018), https://debatesinaesthetics.org/response-tocritics. 63Brassey Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.316 currently obscured by other parts of them, or other objects in the street. And, unless the neighbours move, I will need to change my actual perspective on them, perhaps by moving to another window, to see different bits of them. In summary, when we see, we do so from the actual perspective that we occupy. But, when we see depictions, what we see is seen from a spatio-temporal location implied by the facing parts of the objects-as-depicted. We see the people from above, the chair from the right, and the café from the street to the left. One might say that seeing the depicted contents in pictorial space is like peering through a hole of a box, which acts as a tiny window onto the depicted scenario. But this misses out a significant fact about the way the perspective plays its role. Typically, we are looking at the painting about a metre or so back from it. We are not peering through a pinhole to see the picture. How then do we align the actual perspective we have on the painting (qua canvas hanging on the wall) with the pictorial perspective on the depicted content? We must be simultaneously co-ordinating the two types of perspectives, actual and imagined. Because, unlike the actual perspective, which is spatial (here) and temporal (now) and sensitive to changes in one’s location, the pictorial perspective can be from the left, the right, above, or below, as implied by the facing parts of the depicted objects. It is insensitive to small changes in the viewing subject’s location and often turns out to be non-coincident with their actual perspective. How does the viewer ‘see’ from this perspective? The answer is that they must represent the perspective in their imaginations. They imagine a spatio-temporal perspective from which the marks they see on the canvas makes sense. This clarification about the seeing appropriate to pictures (and paintings in particular) is consistent with the phenomenon of so-called ‘twofoldness’.40 That is, of attending to both the configuration of the surface (from the actual perspective) and the recognition of objects (from the pictorial perspective). These two aspects, or folds, are said to permit simultaneous perception.41 The viewer manages to sustain seeing the brushstrokes as brushstrokes, while at once having a sense of the pictorial depth they create.42 All this provides grounds for challenging the consensus in the literature that we ‘directly’ see depictions, that is, that we clap eyes on depicted objects just as we clap eyes on the objects they depict. The consensus ignores how the perspectives involved in seeing and pictorial seeing play their roles differently, and that, while depictive seeing is perspectival, it is also essentially indirect. In other words, all depictive seeing requires the viewer to represent an imagined perspective that mediates access to the depicted object. Interestingly, Walton has also commented on this: What is it for a depiction to depict things from a certain point of view? One sense is obvious. The point of view consists in the perspective from which, fictionally, we perceive when we examine the depiction. Fictionally we see Hobbema’s red-roofed mill from a point a couple of hundred yards downstream on the left bank of the river.43 40 ‘Twofoldness’ is a term of art due to Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects: With Six Supplementary Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 41 Ibid., 213. 42 Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 62. 43 Walton, Mimesis, 337. 70Brassey Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.316 TO CITE THIS ARTICLE: Brassey, Vanessa. ‘The Pictorial Narrator.’ Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics LX/XVI, no 1 (2023): pp. 55–70. DOI: https://doi.org/10.33134/ eeja.316 Submitted: 04 January 2022 Accepted: 03 February 2023 Published: 15 March 2023 COPYRIGHT: © 2023 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/. Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Helsinki University Press in cooperation with the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague. Steiner, Wendy. ‘Pictorial Narrativity.’ In Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan, 145–77. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. ––––––. Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Todorov Tzetan. ‘La grammaire du récit.’ Langages 3 (1968): 94–102. DOI: https://doi. org/10.3406/lgge.1968.2355 Velleman, John David. ‘Narrative Explanation.’ Philosophical Review 112 (2003): 1–25. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-112-1-1 Walton, Kendall. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. DOI: https://doi. org/10.2307/2108134 ––––––. ‘Points of View in Narrative and Depictive Representation.’ Noûs 10 (1976): 49–61. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/2214475 Watkins, Erie. ‘Point of View in Depictive Representation.’ Noûs 13 (1979): 379–84. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/2215106 Wilson, George. M. Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:o so/9780199594894.001.0001 Wolf, Werner. ‘Narrative and Narrativity: A Narratological Reconceptualization and Its Applicability to the Visual Arts.’ Word and Image 19 (2003): 180–97. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2003.10406232 Wollheim, Richard. Art and Its Objects: With Six Supplementary Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. ––––––. Painting as an Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 1987.