Zapping the same old pics
David Nokes
HOGARTH: VOLUME I, THE MODERN MORAL SUBJECT, 1697-1732; VOLUME II, HIGH ART AND LOW, 1732-1750 by Ronald Paulson Lutterworth Press, Volume I, f_35, pp. 441, Volume II, 135, pp. 592 Remember Morris Zapp? He was the American professor in David Lodge's Changing Places determined to have the final word on Jane Austen. Zapp would say `absolutely everything that could possibly be said' about Jane Austen.
The idea was to be utterly exhaustive, to examine the novels from every conceivable angle, historical, biographical, rhetorical, mythical, Freudian, Jungian, existentialist, Marxist, structuralist, Christian-allegorical.. . you name it.
After Zapp 'the rest would be silence'.
Now meet Ronald Paulson. Professor Paulson has been zapping Hogarth for the past 30 years. First came his magisterial two-volume First Complete Edition of Hoga- rth's Graphic Works (1965, revised 1970 and 1989); next, his monumental two-volume biography Hogarth: Life, Art, and Times: (1971), followed by The Art of Hogarth (1975) and countless academic articles. Now Paulson promises us an even fuller three-volume `definitive' biography, Hogarth, of which these are the first two volumes.
To say that Paulson writes with authority would be an understatement; when it comes to Hogarth, Paulson is authority. Yet overfamiliarity with his subject can lead, if not to contempt, at least to care- lessness. As Paulson sets before us for the umpteenth time his account of a life and works he has presented so many times before, a certain sense of déjà lu is inevitable. Historical events like the Jacobite rebellion of 1715 and the South Sea Bubble of 1720, previously recorded in detail, are here skimmed over in summary fashion; and the text of these lavishly illus- trated volumes contains a disturbing num- ber of simple factual errors. William Kent was twelve, not 20 years older than Hoga- rth, Henry Fielding was ten, not 12 years his junior. Mistakes like these indicate lax supervision of the text by a man who has been over this territory too many times before to focus clearly on all its details.
In fact, Paulson's retouched portrait of Hogarth seems deliberately calculated to justify his own constant scholarly revisions and reworkings. He reminds us that Hoga- rth painted not one but six versions of the prison scene from Gay's Beggar's Opera and as he lovingly details changes to hand- gestures, eye-lines or the cock of a hat, we recognise the model for his own critical readjustments. Just as Hogarth will alter perspective or regroup figures, so Paulson will shift his interpretative focus, now high- lighting an Old Testament allusion, and let- ting an historical parallel slip into the background.
For Paulson, Hogarth's paintings and
Pearls of wisdom
engravings are puzzles to be decoded. He zaps the six pictures of `The Harlot's Progress' with 100 pages of exhaustive scholarly exegesis, uncovering biblical sources, classical allusions, historical paral- lels, political innuendoes and satirical ref- erences in every line and gesture. Kate Hackabout, the harlot, emerges as a com- posite allegorical figure containing ele- ments of Eve, the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, Diana of Ephesus and `mere Nature'. Even the dead goose in her basket (plate 1) stimulates Paulson to several para- graphs of scholarly speculation on the his- torical, sociological, linguistic and inconographic significance of geese.
Paulson's painstaking elucidation of the sources of Hogarth's imagery is undoubted- ly impressive and often compelling, but does run the risk of burying the pictures themselves under the weight of the allusions they are made to bear. And while there is clearly a case for reading each of Hogarth's works in terms of its classical topos or ironic ` double gestalt', there are dangers when Paulson attempts to impose the same formulas on Hogarth's own life. Thus, when considering Hogarth's mar- riage to Jane, the daughter of his 'boss' Sir James Thornhill, Paulson gives less weight to motives of personal attraction or even financial self-interest than to iconographic parallels in which Hogarth plays Ferdinand to Thornhill's Prospero, or Macheath to his master's Peachum.
When Hogarth was a child his father was imprisoned for debt. This was the unfortu- nate, though hardly unpredictable conse- quence of his doomed hopes of making a fortune from running a coffee-house which specialised in Latin conversation. For Paul- son this `childhood trauma' is the key to all Hogarth's later work. `No English artist', he writes, `painted more prison interiors than Hogarth'. Even when painting a drawing-room or a boudoir, Hogarth gives his interiors the confined, claustrophobic atmosphere of a prison cell . In `The Rakes Progress' he notes:
The walls get closer and thicker until in his Fleet Prison cell [Rakewell] is surrounded by prisoners whose attempts to escape extend from wings to alchemy to a proposal for pay- ing the national debt. The Rake's only escape from his cell is into madness and the chains of that final prison, Bedlam.
These points, like all Paulson's observa- tions, are well made, but also strangely apposite. For the formidable scholarship of these handsomely produced volumes has itself a powerfully imprisoning effect. Paul- son walls in his subject with precedents, pins him down to sources, loads every image with weighty allusions and confines him to an exercise yard of estab- lished motifs. This is a book for those who like their artists safely under lock and key.
David Nokes is writing a biography of John Gay.
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