Intermedial Metareference Index and Icon in William Gass’s "Willie Masters’ "Lonesome Wife"

John Pier (1)

1 CRAL - Centre de recherches sur les arts et le langage

Literary works in their printed form are subject to double coding, both verbal and graphic. However, the potential consequences of this fact are not systematically exploited by writers, nor are they frequently taken into account by readers. With Gass’s Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife , the latent complexities of this double cod-ing are forced out into the open, revealing the sometimes complementary and sometimes conflictual relations between the verbal and the graphic in a work that is a prime example of the metareferential turn in plurimedial contexts. Based on current research in intermedial relations and on the Peircean concepts of index and icon, this paper examines three dimensions of metaization that contribute to inter- medial metareference in Gass’s postmodern text. First is the clash between verbal and graphic codes in the use of paratextual forms (e. g., footnotes) that produce a ‘salient foregrounding of the medium’ through accentuation of contiguous index- ical relations within the space of the page. Second is the ‘salient iconic use of signs’. Despite the presence of photographs, the ‘imaginal’ or pictorial use of icons is limited. More prominent is ‘diagrammatic iconicity’, the mapping of for- mal relations from verbal onto graphic evocations of the heroine and vice versa. Finally, the third type of iconicity, metaphor, underlies the work’s tropological macrostructure: on the one hand, the plurimedial text is equated with the physical charms of the heroine’s body; on the other, Gass’s work is a postmodern allegory that seeks to ‘eroticize’ the fictional text. These features are implemented in such a way as to trigger ‘increased attention’ to the work at hand, an awareness of the need for an interdisciplinary and transmedial framework of understanding and a ‘conceptual leap’ which, together, contribute to the pervading metareferentiality which renders Gass’s novel a major index of the metareferential turn in the postmodern novel.

Mots clés: metareference; intermediality; William Gass (1968/1989)

Domaines: Littératures

John Pier. Intermedial Metareference Index and Icon in William Gass’s "Willie Masters’ "Lonesome Wife". W. Wolf (dir.). The Metareferential Turn : Forms, Functions, Attempts at Explanation, Rodopi, pp.175-207, 2011. ⟨hal-01229427⟩