will imagine the excitement and terror of the occasion, the power of the lion,
the apprehension of the hunters, and so forth, and so come to understand the
incidents presented“from the inside.”^74 In verbal representation this will
happen by our taking up the point of view, attitudes, and emotional engage-
ments of the authorial intelligence. This may include identification with the
attitudes and emotions of the characters presented, when the author is
sympathetic with them, or it may include such things as horror at the
successes of an unsympathetic character. In musical representation this will
happen through our identification with the development of the melody,
rhythm, and harmony, as we find ourselves“moving”in attention with the
development of the work through its abstract patterns of statement, depart-
ure, resistance, return, and closure. Movies, dance, drama, song, and per-
formance art combine elements of both visual and verbal representation.
In all these cases, when the work goes well there will be an achievement of
engagement of emotion and its expression in the representation, in contrast
with a more routinized statement. In Wollheim’s useful term, the activity of
mark-making or representation-making may itself bethematized,^75 in that
our attention will be engaged with just how the materials and medium have
been worked to present just this subject matter in a significantly new emo-
tional and attitudinal light. We may be successfully invited to become atten-
tive to just how these words or marks or sounds have been chosen to present
just this subject matter in just this emotional light.
Dewey usefully distinguishes in this connection between artistic represen-
tation and ordinary representation, that is, between “expression and
statement.”
[Statement] is generalized. An intellectual statement is valuable in the
degree in which it conducts the mind to many things all of the same kind...
The meaning of an expressive object, on the contrary, is individualized. The
diagrammatic drawing that suggests grief does not convey the grief of an
individual person; it exhibits thekindof facial“expression”persons in
general manifest when suffering grief. The esthetic portrayal of grief
manifests the grief of a particular individual in connection with a particular
event. It isthatstate of sorrow which is depicted, not depression(^74) See Scruton,Art and Imagination, pp. 128–29.
(^75) See Wollheim,Painting as an Art,p.20.
Representation, imitation, and resemblance 51