Michael Fried
         The Structure of Beholding in Courbet's Burial at_Ornans
         The first thing to stress is that although the orientation of the
            grave implies a point of view somewhere to its left, the
            attenuation of illusion in the rendering of the grave makes that
            implication anything but conspicuous. Consequently, a beholder who
            approaches the Burial by centering himself before it (our natural
            impulse before an easel painting, and the Burial, for all its size,
            is simply that), and in so doing exposes himself to the full force
            of its solicitations toward merger (still more on those in a
            moment), will very likely not even notice that the grave is skewed
            relative to the picture plane (if it has been noticed, it
            hasn't been deemed worth mentioning). Furthermore, the fact
            that the point of view posited by the orientation of the grave lies
            opposite the most active and, at first glance, the most confusion
            portion of the composition also serves to forestall an awareness
            that such a point of view may be held to exist.
            Here it is useful to compare the finished painting with the
            preliminary drawing. In the latter the grave is at the far left; a
            single procession, to be joined by the pallbearers, makes its way
            across the sheet; and two figures, the crucifix-bearer and the
            hatless man at the center (and perhaps a third figure as well, the
            officiant in a conical hat slightly to the right of the crucifix-
            bearer), appear to gaze out of the drawing as if at a spectator
            centered before it. In the finished painting, on the other hand,
            various processional units are shown converging precisely there;
            and yet not only does no outward gaze place the beholder directly
            before the grave, it appears that a deliberate effort has been made
            to keep the center of the composition blank, as if to install at
            the ostensible heart of the painting a formal/ontological
            equivalent to the unemphatic emptiness lying open below it. Thus
            both the gravedigger and (an inspired touch) the dog turn their
            heads away from the vicinity of the grave; the mourner to the right
            of the gravedigger weeps facelessly into a handkerchief; and a
            barely modulated expanse of black pigment looms like a great blind
            spot ("Je travaille à l'aveuglette") between the
            gravedigger and the two veterans of '93. It is as though the
            Burial's curiously indeterminate affective atmosphere (Clark
            comments aptly on its "peculiar, frozen fixity of
            expression" and uses terms like "distraction,"
            "inattention," and "blankness" to
            characterize both the states of mind of the mourners and the
            overall mood of the image) comes to a head in this portion of the
            canvas, which as we have seen bears the principal burden of
            facilitating the merger of painting and beholder.47 And of course
            the avoidance of overt address to the beholder that such a strategy
            implies also helps to reduce the risk of conflict between the
            generally centering character of the composition as a whole and the
            slant orientation of the grave.
             
            47. Clark, Image of the People, p.81.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
         The "Blackness of Blackness": A Critique of the_Sign_and_the
            Signifying Monkey
         Perhaps only Tar Baby is as enigmatic and compelling a figure from
            Afro-American mythic discourse as is that oxymoron, the Signifying
            Monkey.3 The ironic reversal of a received racist image of the
            black as simianlike, the Signifying Monkey he who dwells at
            the margins of discourse, ever punning, ever troping, ever
            embodying the ambiguities of language is our trope for
            repetition and revision, indeed, is our trope of chiasmus itself,
            repeating and simultaneously reversing in one deft, discursive act.
            If Vico and Burke, or Nietzsche, Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom, are
            correct in identifying "master tropes," then we might
            think of these as the "master's tropes," and of
            signifying as the slave's trope, the trope of tropes, as
            Bloom characterizes metalepsis, "a trope-reversing trope, a
            figure of a figure." Signifying is a trope that subsumes
            other rhetorical tropes, including metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche,
            and irony (the "master" tropes), and also hyberbole,
            litotes, and metalepsis (Bloom's supplement to Burke). To
            this list, we could easily add aporia, chiasmus, and catachresis,
            all of which are used in the ritual of signifying.
            The black tradition has its own subdivisions of signifying, which
            we could readily identify with the typology of figures received
            from classical and medieval rhetoric, as Bloom has done with his
            "maps of misprision." In black discourse
            "signifying" means modes of figuration itself. When one
            signifies, as Kimberly W. Benston puns, one "tropes-a-
            dope." The black rhetorical tropes subsumed under signifying
            would include "marking," "loud-talking,"
            "specifying," "testifying," "calling
            out" (of one's name), "sounding,"
            "rapping," and "playing the dozens."4
             
            3. On Tar Baby, see Ralph Ellison, "Hidden Man and Complex
            Fate: A Writer's Experience in the United States,"
            Shadow and Act (New York, 1964), p. 147, and Toni Morrison, Tar
            Baby (New York, 1981). On the black as quasi-simian, see Jean
            Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans.
            Beatrice Reynolds (1945; New York, 1966), p. 105; Aristotle
            Historia Animalium606b; Thomas Herbert, Some Years Travels (London,
            1677), pp. 16-17; and John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human
            Understanding, 8th ed., 2 vols. (London, 1721), 2:53.
            4. Geneva Smitherman defines these and other black tropes and then
            traces their use in several black texts. Smitherman's work,
            like that of Claudia Mitchell-Kernan and Abrahams, is especially
            significant for literary theory. See Smitherman, Talkin and
            Testifyin: The Language of Black America (Boston, 1977), pp. 101-
            66. See also nn. 13 and 14 below.
