THIS ESSAY IDENTIFIES AND EXPLORES a prominent plot pattern in realist fiction, a “structure of knowing” that I propose to call anamorphic by analogy with the practice of anamorphosis in visual art. In what follows, I demonstrate how this pattern functions as an immanent critique of some of the basic presuppositions underlying the narrative-ideological shape of the realist novel. I also situate this formal figure within the wider field of novelistic conceptions of socialization, distinguishing the anamorphic plot from the plots of desiring ambition, dialogic perspectivalism, and ascent to maturity in order to show how it exposes the sinister obverse of these “enlightened” narratological principles. First, however, a few words are in order about the nature and extent of the analogy itself. In Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedia anamorphosis is defined as “the projection of an unnatural image or a distorted representation of an image which is made on a plane, and which, nevertheless, seen from a certain viewing point appears normal and executed with the correct proportions.” Hans Holbein’s famous double portrait The Ambassadors (1533) is a particularly revealing instance of this practice. The French art historian Jurgis Baltrušaitis suggests that the painting was to be hung following precise instructions that would allow it to be experienced in two stages. First, the viewer sees two imposing figures against a background of objects that allegorically represent the Quadrivium of the liberal arts. In the midst of the pomp and luxury, however, a strange object at the bottom of the painting remains undecipherable and disturbing. Both impressed by the vividness of the portrait and disconcerted by the unreadable blot, the viewer is about to exit the room through a door on the right when she casts one last glance at the painting, and everything becomes clear. The formerly unreadable object is suddenly visible as a skull, an allegory of vanitas, while the rest of the painting is reduced to a blur. Death emerges as the truth of wealth, stature, and modern science.

Except for the anamorphic stain in the middle, The Ambassadors is a straightforwardly representational painting.  In the stain we are confronted with an unreadable element that disturbs our vision of what appears to be reality. Here, in Stephen Greenblatt’s words, “death is affirmed not in its power to destroy the flesh . . . , but in its uncanny inaccessibility and absence.” Greenblatt goes on: “What is unseen or perceived as only a blur is far more disquieting than what may be faced boldly and directly, particularly when the limitations of vision are grasped as structural, the consequence more of the nature of perception than of the timidity of the perceiver.” The need to know arises as a consequence of this disjunction and tension between linear and anamorphic perspectives, between apparent representational plenitude and a blatant flaw within it. The viewer of The Ambassadors is encoded into the logic of the painting as a protagonist to whom something happens in time. In the sequential acts of perceiving and then deciphering the blot, the viewer replaces the depicted figures as the painting’s true hero. Looking at a partially anamorphic image, the viewer is, as it were, split into two: called upon to seek an answer to a riddle on the one hand and, on the other, to remember the riddle when the answer is received. In this sense, the viewer must fulfill the double task required of readers—namely, to join the protagonist’s movement through narrative and to make sense of that movement in its entirety.

Anamorphosis understood as a truth discourse in narrative fiction refers to the process whereby an illegible textual instance, something altogether incomprehensible to the hero, emerges as the very truth-object for which the hero had been looking elsewhere. Something—an event, a fact, another character—fails to make full sense within the context of the protagonist’s otherwise intelligible experience. It is not a matter of misprision but rather of a confrontation, however brief and painless it might initially be, with utter senselessness: the protagonist looks on and doesn’t see, hears sounds but doesn’t grasp their meaning. Just as in the anamorphic painting it is impossible to decipher the stain from the same position from which the rest of the painting makes sense, so in narrative it is only with the shift of perspective (enabled in the character by the passage of time) that meaning emerges out of the sole indecipherable element in the otherwise coherent story.  And when this meaning, having absorbed and outlasted the hero’s ignorance throughout the narrative, finally emerges to the surface, it is elevated, at the moment of anamorphic revelation, to an ultimate and death-dealing truth.

The anamorphic stain in Holbein’s painting is readable, from the proper place, as the death of the viewing protagonist and as the destruction of the social and natural world to which the protagonist can no longer be anchored. As we shall see, nineteenth-century anamorphic narrative also involves death and isolation. But while the deathblow in Holbein’s painting is delivered from the very same place (the stain) from which the social world is destroyed, anamorphic realism stages death and devastation through the final recognition that a structure of otherness underlies the solipsistic self of the hero.