“My Own Portrait in Writing” Self-Fashioning in the Letters of Vincent van Gogh

Patrick Grant

Art historians, biographers, and other researchers have long drawn on Van Gogh’s voluminous correspondence—more than eight hundred letters—for insights into both his personal struggles and his art. But the letters, while often admired for their literary quality, have rarely been approached as literature. In this volume, Patrick Grant sets out to explore the question, “By what criteria do we judge Van Gogh’s letters to be, specifically, literary?” Drawing, especially, on Mikhail Bakhtin’s conceptualization of self-awareness as an ongoing dialogue between “self” and “other,” Grant examines the ways in which Van Gogh’s letters raise, from within themselves, questions and issues to which they also respond. Their literary quality, he argues, derives in part from this “double-voiced discourse”—from the power of the letters to thematize, through their own internal dialogues, the very structure of self-fashioning itself. Far from merely reproducing the narrative of the artist’s personal progress, “the letters enable readers to recognize how necessary yet open-ended, constrained yet liberating, confined yet unpredictable, are the means by which people seek to shape a place for themselves in the world.”

This volume builds on Grant’s earlier analysis of Van Gogh’s correspondence, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh: A Critical Study (AU Press, 2014), a study in which he approached the letters from a literary critical standpoint, delving into key patterns of metaphors and concepts. In the present volume, he provides instead a literary theoretical analysis of the letters, one that draws them more fully into the domain of modern literary studies. In his deft and keenly perceptive reading, Grant deconstructs the binaries that surface in both Van Gogh’s writing and painting, discusses the narrative dimensions of the letter-sketches and the recurring themes of fantasy, belief, and self-surrender, and draws attention to Van Gogh’s own understanding of the permeable boundary between words and visual art. Viewing the letters as an integrated body of discourse, “My Own Portrait in Writing” offers a theoretically informed interpretation of Van Gogh’s literary achievement that is, quite literally, without precedent.

This is an exciting and inspiring book: it is both intellectually ambitious and humanly challenging. Ideally, in my view, it could stimulate an effort to work towards a revised and reinvigorated curriculum with Van Gogh's letters being read alongside some of the writers the great artist most admired.

Garry Watson, author of Opening Doors: Thought From (And Of) the Outside

About the Author

Patrick Grant, professor emeritus of English at the University of Victoria, is best known for his studies on literature and religion. He is the author, most recently, of Imperfection and Literature, Rhetoric, and Violence in Northern Ireland, 1968-98.

Reviews

A deep and creative inquiry suggesting meaningful structures for understanding the richness of the artist’s life and work. Grant succeeds in bringing Van Gogh’s letters into the domain of modern literary studies, and demonstrates that the effort opens exciting new ways of understanding the radical tensions, puzzling transformations, and internal frustrations expressed by the artist in writing, drawing, and painting.

University of Toronto Quarterly

Table of Contents

  1. List of Illustrations
  2. Preface
  3. Introduction: The Dialogical Structure of Self-Fashioning
    1. Van Gogh Old and New: Reading the Letters as Literature
    2. What Is Literature Anyway? Cultural Codes and Timeless Truths
    3. Bakhtin, Dialogue, and the Self Interrupted
    4. Embodied Intentions: The Textual Dynamics of Self-Fashioning
    5. Conclusion: Van Gogh’s “Double-Voiced Discourse”
  4. Chapter 1. The Painterly Writer
    1. Dissolving Boundaries: Word-Painting and the Sister Arts
    2. Ideal Space, Existential Time
    3. Drawing and Painting: From Morality to Aesthetics
    4. Thinking About Colour and Seeing Beyond It
    5. Conclusion: Dialogical Means and Personal Ends
  5. Chapter 2. Binaries, Contradictions, and “Arguments on Both Sides”
    1. Contradiction, Paradox, and the Shaping of Commitment
    2. Half-Measures and Negative Contrasts
    3. Deconstructing the Binaries
    4. The Sower: A Dialogue of Life and Death
    5. Conclusion: Contradiction and the Quest for Meaning
  6. Chapter 3. Reading Van Gogh’s Letter-Sketches
    1. The Letter-Sketches and the Letters
    2. Narrative Dimensions
    3. Representing the Sacred
    4. Homo Viator
    5. Conclusion: Enhancing the Text
  7. Chapter 4. Imagination and the Limits of Self-Fashioning
    1. Open Sea and Enchanted Ground: The Perils of Commitment
    2. Imagination: “Impossible Windmills”
    3. Imagination: “That’s Rich, That’s Poetry”
    4. Safe Enough to Let Go: On Perseverance and Spontaneity
    5. Conclusion: Managing the Dialogue
  8. Conclusion: Envoi
  9. Notes / Index

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). It may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that the original author is credited.

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