Iconic Realism in Three Different Centuries of Art: 13th, 16th, and 20th

13th century: depiction of Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose (photo from Google Images)

 16th century: Pieter Breughel's painting, The Fall of Icarus (photo from Google Images)

20th century: Salvador Dali's Rose (photo from Google Images)

The above paintings, from top to bottom: an illustration from the medieval poem, Roman de la Rose, Breughel's Fall of Icarus and Dali's Rose, are examples of artistic renderings of this theory. The function of semiotic representation is the reflection of the society in which both the artist and the audience reside. However, the artistic rendering does not necessarily reflect the standard of that community, for the intention of the artist may well be to create a piece that jolts the audience into a need for cultural change. This would be the reason for an artist employing the use of iconic realism, assisting the audience to become adroitly aware of that aspect of the culture with which they are familiar and its need for transformation.

In Jean de Meun's epylion, Roman de la Rose, a young man is attracted to a 'rose' representing a young woman. The iconic image is the rose, living in a guarded tower. This rose becomes the object of the young man's desire and purpose, but not until he first receives much advice from wise allegorical characters on how to win her heart. The realistic environment in which this wild rose lives illustrates that creating a fortress around those natural impulses only causes the impulse within one's heart to become more instinctively determined.  

In Pieter Breughel's painting, The Fall of Icarus, the spirit of rebellion reveals young Icarus, falling into the sea while the local community turns their attention away from his plight. Here, the self-absorbed society's rejection of the obvious need illustrates a necessity for humanity to attend to others' frailties when they are obviously seeking genuine help. 

Rose by Salvador Dali illustrates an iconic image of a rose, suspended in mid-air above an arid landscape. A small, barely visible and iconic young couple, hold hands amid this arid landscape. This positioning demonstrates that the outer revelation of love can occasionally become even greater, more lovely than those experiencing this emotion could imagine. 

Iconic Realism in the Medieval Narrative Poem, Roman de la Rose

“The Dance in the Garden”

by Pavane, illumination from Roman de la Rose, Toulouse, early 16th century, 

in the British Library (Harley MS 4425, fol. 14v)

From my book, The Theory of Iconic Realism..., p. 47:

The medieval poem Roman de la Rose, written by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun in the 13th century, takes place in a medieval garden and represents the experience of love and desire through the dream of a twenty-year-old man. The authors use allegorical characters such as Reason, Envy, Genius, Old Age, Fair Welcome, and the god of Love to advise this young lover, as he discovers his inner motivation and develops needed courage to seek the desire of his heart in the form of a beautiful rose. Within the poetics of Roman de la Rose the writers have interwoven ideals that pertain to intuitive thought by associating visual iconography with the lexicon it illustrates. 

The rose represents a young woman in the setting of a realistic medieval castle. Although the authors create an aristocratic presentation of courtly love by the placement of the rose in this garden as a young man’s desirous fantasy, the reality is that a young man would not likely fall in love with a flower. However, the writers situate a sense of game playing with the semantics of the text and image, transporting the telling of this tale as a primary source of entertainment and enlightenment of designated cultural restraints within an aristocratic community, utilizing iconic realism as a source of enlightenment for their audience. This enlightenment involves the medieval male audience recognizing the sensitivities and complex thinking of the women in their lives, particularly with regard to love. 

Blade Runner and Iconic Realism

Photo from Google Images

The 1982 film, Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott, screenplay written by Hampton Fancher, is based on the novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. In the film set in a futuristic Los Angeles, Harrison Ford’s character, Deckard, has a mission to terminate 4 replicants. 

However, his iconic character of the rugged cop experiences a change of conscience as emotional turmoil enters his stark reality. This film contains several illustrations of iconic realism through the use of iconic images overlaid with obscure, futuristic settings that bring the audience to an awareness of the ambiguous reality faced by humans as we deal with various forms of strength and weakness. Moreover, this film offers questions surrounding the applications of artificial intelligence, which, at the time of this writing, have very little connection with human consciousness.  

Alice McDermott's novel, 'At Weddings and Wakes' and Iconic Realism: Doors

As my #37 bus passed by this section of Dublin, these doors always intrigued me.

From a paper presented at the American Conference for Irish Studies, Emory Univ., Atlanta, Georgia: 

Alice McDermott incorporates the iconic figure of a door, as a primary trigger of childhood memories in her novel, At Weddings and Wakes. Usually, a door is the iconic representation of a threshold, transporting either the characters or the reading audience to a new episode or revelation. However, McDermott’s doorways represent stability, a way for a child’s mind to capture a moment in time and hold it in place to reminisce or perhaps learn about oneself or the influential people who enter and leave via the strategically placed doors. For example, she begins the book with a vivid description of the narrator’s childhood front door: 

Twice a week in every week of summer except the last in July and the first in August, their mother shut the front door, the white, eight-panel door that served as backdrop for every Easter, First Holy Communion, confirmation, and graduation photo in the family album, and with the flimsy screen leaning against her shoulder turned the key in the black lock, gripped the curve of the elaborate wrought-iron handle that had been sculpted to resemble a black vine curled into a question mark, and in what seemed a brief but accurate imitation of a desperate housebreaker, wrung the door on its hinges until, well satisfied, she turned slipped away from the screen as if she were throwing a cloak from her shoulders, and said, “Let’s go.”   

On their odyssey through the city transportation system, the mother and her children encounter the subway entrance, described to reflect the child’s perspective: “And then bars, prison, bars, a wall of bars, and, even more fantastically, a wall of revolving doors all made of black iron (pp. 6-7).”  As they reach the Brooklyn apartment, another vivid description of doors provides the reader with a sense that this memory is one that the child paints in her mind to recall the important relationships of her mother. They connect the mother’s memory with that of the child’s: 

Key in hand, they climbed the steps again and let themselves in through the double glass door framed in heavy wood, across a tiled vestibule that held the cool stone smell of a church, and then into the dim hallway where the air was brown with the reflection of the dark wooden floor and the staircase, with the odor of stewing beef and boiled onions… 

One flight and across a narrow hallway with silent doors on either end, another flight, their mother’s shoes tapping on each tread and the dull yellow light now passing through an opaque lozenge of white skylight. An identical hallway (voices from behind the far door, again those rushed incomprehensible syllables struck throughout with startling exclamations), another flight, the light growing stronger until it spread itself like a blurred hand over the tops of each of the dulled and hazy light there was only a single door and the hallway on either side of it was filed with a clutch of cardboard boxes and paper bags…. (p. 1)

The single door gave off the purr and rattle that made it seem thick and animate to the children, with an internal life all its own. There was the scratch of the delicate chain, the metallic slither of its bolts, the tumble and click of its lock, and then, slowly, the creak of its hinges…. The face that appeared between the door and its frame was thinner than their mother’s and so, for the children, offered no resemblance – despite the same pale blue eyes and light skin and narrow mouth that was, as was their mother’s, fighting to resist a grin. ( pp. 12-13) 

Toward the end of the memoir, the father’s presence reveals a sense of humor in relation to a door, all the while, creating a puzzle in the children’s minds as he points out: 

She and her brother passed the corner parking lo of the Presbyterian church, crossed another side street, and then the catty-cornered doorway of a small bar (about which their father would say, with the same consistency that he made his cemetery joke but with a far more serious air, “ in all the years that we’ve lived here I’ve never passed through those doors,” filling his children with a vague admiration and a cautious sense of gratitude for what it was he had managed to avoid). (p. 151)

The iconic doors lend a sense of spirituality in McDermott’s novel as each door seems to have a personality of its own, a stability that intrigues and stimulates the childhood imagination that seems absent in the adults’ consciousness. This cognizance carved within the various slabs of wood, configured to keep out and keep in, actually create an experiential plane perceived by the children through their senses of sight, smell and especially sound, albeit occasionally, a dissonant harmony prevails between the squeaking movements of the doors’ hinges. 

James Joyce's 'Ulysses' and Iconic Realism through Cognitive Dissonance

This is an excerpt from a paper presented at the American Conference for Irish Studies, 2022:

The semiotic theory of iconic realism is the placement of a realistic iconic element within a realistic setting in which that element is not usually associated, to bring about the recognition of change that needs to occur in society. Throughout his novel, Ulysses, James Joyce illustrates iconic realism through cognitive dissonance by means of language that contains semantic components directly correlating with his characters and their settings. In turn, the readers interpret those linguistic features according to knowledge of the language and the manner in which the semantic elements align with their personal experience. 

The spirit of Joyce must navigate between what is expected of Leopold Bloom as a Jew and what his Dublin neighbors expect of him as an Irishman. This spirit first reveals itself in the chapter, entitled, "Telémachus" through Stephen Daedalus, as he experiences an internal conflict of his mother’s death, with visions of her appearing to him as did the ghost in Hamlet. This type of cognitive dissonance continues through the Homeric episodes. 

Moreover, Leopold Bloom also experiences personal and religious revelations through each inhaling and expelling of air. One such vivid example is in the chapter, entitled, Aéolus. Here, Joyce uses the heaving air of a pompous society’s fickle response to Bloom’s Jewish culture. In this chapter, we are introduced to various comparisons between Jesus Christ, Stephen Daedalus, and Bloom: their dissonant placements in their individual societies and how each has dealt with these discrepancies. Joyce describes the editor as having a ‘scarlet beaked face,’ a ‘comb of feathery hair’ and a harsh voice, similar to that of a cock crowing, once again referring to the Biblical reference of Peter rejecting Christ on the morning of his crucifixion (Blamires 49). Such reflections illustrate the iconic realism that Joyce incorporates in this novel, as he uses these iconic images within Bloom’s mind, occasionally audibly articulated by Bloom, but mostly present only in his mind, to bring the audience in alignment with the dissonance present in Bloom’s, and Joyce’s, Dublin. Through Bloom’s cognitive experience, the reader understands the ‘cross’ that he must bear. 

Another example of this use of the inhaling and expelling of air exists in the Scylla and Charybdis  chapter with the obnoxious expelling of high verbiage between Stephen Daedalus and the other scholars. Here, once again, Joyce employs the use of linguistic empowerment of those who have against those who have not…or very little. Joyce, through Stephen, refers to those who do not understand the human spirit as the ‘vegetable world.’ He decides to stay firmly planted in the present, “through which all future plunges to the past” (Blamires 77). Here, Joyce unknowingly reveals an interesting foreshadowing of worldly events with which only the current reader can relate, for within 25 years of this writing, the world will revisit Joyce’s own recent past of WWI through the lens of WWII. 

Blamires, Harry, The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide through Ulysses, Routledge, New York: 1997.