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[P]ainting and writing have much to tell each other; they have much in common. The novelist after all wants to make us see. (Woolf 22)

Visual art has never been as quantitatively and qualitatively available as in the twenty-first century. Due to its accessibility beyond the traditional gallery walls, art has become a desired, inseparable part of one’s everyday life. It is no longer possible to speak about an artwork being unique, nor is it necessary to go to the gallery to see the original, as “the uniqueness of the original now lies in it being the original of a reproduction” (Berger 21). Not only are the most famous masterpieces copied, photographed and reproduced, but due to the advent of online galleries, they are also visible on a round-the-clock stage. The fact that works of art are reproducible and easily accessible allows for them to be used and recycled in many possible ways. Therefore, it is not surprising that visual art penetrates the works of contemporary writers, whose texts serve as representative examples of intermedial relations between visual works of art (paintings) and narrative texts.

However, the semiotic differences between the two media have given cause for serious concern among scholars: “A great concern with the production and understanding of painting as a visual text to be decoded seems to lie at the heart of the [contemporary] novel, constituting as it does one particular form of a general epistemological questioning” (Wagner, Icons – Texts – Iconotexts 9). This concern demands that the very concept of intermediality be defined. Wolf proposes two definitions of intermediality: an ‘intracompositional’ definition that dislimits intermediality in a narrow sense while focusing on “the participation of more than one medium within a human artefact” (“Relevance of Mediality and Intermediality” 19) and, opposing it, an ‘extracompositional’ definition of intermediality, which, taken in a broad sense, “applies to any transgression of boundaries between conventionally distinct media […] and thus comprises both ‘intra-’ and ‘extra-compositional’ relations between different media” (19). Intermediality in its narrow sense deals with a concrete cultural product and its functions in a literary text, such as in evocative descriptions of a work of art, formal imitation through structural analogies to an artwork, reproduction or re-presentation of a work of art, and discussions about it within a novel (32). Since the ‘intracompositional’ definition of intermediality presupposes directing all attention to the actual subject matter captured directly in both media, it is more suitable for the purposes of the present study, which brings the variety of ekphrastic relationships in contemporary art fiction into sharper focus.

In the same vein, in discussing intermediality, Horst emphasises not only the idea of the “fusion of the different media” (19), but also recognition of the fact that a combination of two media gives birth to something new (19). In general, therefore, it seems that an artefact that integrates two or more medial forms may be regarded as intermedial, and can be expected to produce new meaning in a cultural product in any given medium. However, since each medium carries a dissimilar semiotic system in itself, any combination of media inevitably provides potential for new interpretations. Wolf maintains that in the process of framing and transmitting information, media extend and intensify the message as well as become an integral part of its meaning:

In fact, media inevitably channel and shape information, and in the process of communication this is as relevant for the sender as for the recipient. From the point of view of the sender, this shaping quality of media manifests itself in the fact that, with reference to similar contents, different media can function as limiting filters but can also provide powerful extension and intensification. From the point of view of the recipient, media possess tendencies that prestructure certain expectations. Thus one will not always expect illustrations within the covers of a new novel but would be surprised if a film consisted entirely of moving pictures, sounds and music without verbal text. This shows that media function not only as a material basis for transmission purposes but also as cognitive frames for authors as well as recipients and are therefore not merely a neutral means of communication but, indeed, part of the message itself. (“Relevance of Mediality and Intermediality” 22)

Hence, the value of the form of the medium is enormous; it constructs, develops and regulates the meaning: “Form is constitutive of content and not just a reflection of it” (Eagleton 67). By merging different semiotic forms, the sender transfers the meaning from one semiotic system into another and by doing so disrupts the conventional homogeneous practice of producing meaning; this, in turn, is relevant to each of the forms independently, and bewilders the receiver by applying heterogeneous or multiple perspectives to the construction of meaning. Albers points out that

[…] uniting word and image and merging them into a new type of work will at first have a confusing and even defamiliarising effect on the reader, an effect that will eventually be evened out when new meaning is created from the merged product. This new meaning is unique and impossible to construct from non-intermedial works, which points at the salient possibilities that intermediality can provide. (19)

However, the combination of the verbal and visual elements has not always been treated as a mutually profitable alliance. The most eminent supporters of the idea of disruption of the unity of arts are known to be Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1482) and Lessing (1766). Both set clear limits to the verbal and the visual: da Vinci delineates an opposition of eye and ear; Lessing suggests the dichotomy of space and time, which correspond to painting and literature respectively. Their oppositions contradict Horace’s tradition of ut pictura poesis (“as a painting, so a poem”) and, as a result, deny analogies between painting and literature. Moreover, da Vinci and Lessing believe in the inferiority of one of the arts to another – da Vinci subordinates literature to painting, whereas Lessing subordinates painting to literature. The latter refers to the visual arts as fundamentally spatial in that their “signs or means of imitation can be combined only in space” (Lessing 90). Furthermore, he defines the verbal arts as fundamentally temporal due to the fact that their signs “can express only objects which succeed each other … in time” (90). In other words, the natural barrier between visual arts and literary texts is manifested through the unequal nature of the method of the perception of ultimate artefacts. In effect, one is perceived simultaneously in space, the other successively in time. Although Lessing’s distinction between space and time has been challenged by a number of art critics and art historians, its validity cannot be denied – one art can never faithfully mirror another: “Writing cannot represent the visible, but it can desire and, in a manner of speaking, move towards the visible without actually achieving the unambiguous directness of an object seen before one’s eyes” (Said 101). Speaking to the profound difference between words and images, Mitchell sees their relationship as essentially paragonal, a contest for dominance between the visual and verbal arts:

[D]ifferences between words and images seem fundamental. They are not merely different kinds of creatures, but antithetical kinds. They attract to their contest all the dualism that takes as one of its projects a unified theory of the arts, an “aesthetics” which aspires to a synoptic view of artistic signs, a “semiotics” which hopes to comprehend all signs whatsoever. […] Words and images seem inevitably to become implicated in a “war of signs” (what Leonardo called a paragone) in which the stakes are things like nature, truth, reality, or the human spirit. (1)

Comparative work in the field of intermedial studies of literature and art aims to breach the historical boundaries between verbal and visual arts by focusing on the complementary function of different forms of art. As Mukařovský notes: “the real development of art shows that every art sometimes strives to overstep its boundaries by assimilating itself to another art” (207). Even if arts do not assimilate to one another, they do complement each other by offering new productive approaches and additional resources, thus enriching each other. Unity and complementary interrelation of arts is what interests Hagstrum, who uses the metaphor of kinship when referring to word and image relationship as sister arts. By the same token, Meyers points out the advantages of aesthetic analogies between literature and the visual arts:

Aesthetic analogies express this inherent relationship of the arts, and add a new dimension of richness and complexity to the novel by extending the potentialities of fiction to include the representational characteristics of the visual arts. The novel is essentially a linear art, which presents a temporal sequence of events, while painting fixed reality and produces simultaneity of experience. Evocative comparisons with works of art attempt to transcend the limitations of fiction and to transform successive moments into immediate images. (1)

Although both painting and text may recount stories, the key difference between visual and verbal forms of representation remains. While a painting is capable of visualising subject matter and transmitting its basic content by illustrating detectable objects, a literary text commits to commenting on and interpreting their meaning by contextualising these objects in narrative through the use of ekphrastic descriptions. Even though an image suggests a narrative interpretation through its title, such an interpretation is fairly limited. A verbal representation of the image, on the other hand, allows it to be read narratively; that is, it provides information about the scenery, depicted details or models, their relationship, their life before, during and after the sitting, their reaction to the artwork and the artist’s intentions. As such, the text provides the image with an extended storyline that, instead of being guessed at, develops temporally. Wagner argues that to a reader a painting will “always be more attractive than a text; and yet in order to mean something, it needs mendacious and/or distorting words: a title, an epigraph, a signature, an ekphrasis” (Icons – Texts – Iconotexts 31). Hence, ekphrastic continuation of the story of a painting allows paintings to trespass the spatial-temporal border and turns them into “new verbalised intermedial products” (Albers 22). An implication of the synthesis of two such media, therefore, offers the possibility of a direct encounter between – and open interaction among – spatiality and temporality. Of course, the nature of a given intermedial product, as well as its effect on the reader, may be qualitatively different, depending on how the visual artforms are manifested within a literary text.

First and foremost is the question of whether an artwork referred to in any given text is real or fictional, in other words, whether the text can be supplied by a reproduction of a given image or not. The re-presentation of an existing piece of art might trigger the reader’s curiosity to consult the image (by flicking through the pages to find the reproduction, looking at the book cover, if it contains the image, or even viewing a reproduction of the painting online), which would naturally increase the intensity of intermedial experience. Then again, the way the painting is re-presented in contemporary art fiction – be it through direct or indirect referencing, through the selection, association or interpretation of an artwork, or through individual, complimentary or collective relationships that the artwork develops with other art objects mentioned in the text – influences the level of intermedial sophistication. Indeed, the aesthetic experience of an intermedial hybrid will bear little or no resemblance to the isolated experience of either just looking at a painting or reading a narrative text. New meaning emerges from the combination of two different semiotic systems. According to Albers:

Whereas visual art works are usually claimed to only represent on a surface level, they in fact do create something similar to what narratives achieve in the reader’s minds, and the gaps that appear through the static representation of the painting are then filled in by the beholder. (23)

As a matter of fact, both a reproduction of an image and a narrative text contribute substantially to the general perception of an intermedial artefact by filling in visual as well as textual gaps that might be left open in art fiction. In the case of ekphrasis of an extant artwork, the reader has an opportunity to examine visual and verbal evidence; hence, the reader is no longer expected to rely solely on his/her imagination. A work of art translates a story into a visual form, while pictorial descriptions of an art object allow a back-translation from verbal into visual. Therefore, pictorial elements introduced in a literary work merge intermedial boundaries. Krieger points out the advantages of incorporating a work of art into a literary text:

If an author is seeking to suspend the discourse for an extended, visually appealing descriptive interlude, is he not better off – instead of describing the moving, changing, object in nature – to describe an object that has already interrupted the flow of existence with its spatial completeness, that has already been created as a fixed representation? Surely so: if he would impose a brief sense of being, borrowed from the plastic arts, in the midst of his shifting world of verbal becoming, the already frozen pictorial representation would seem to be a preferred object. His ekphrastic purpose would seem to be better served by its having as its object an artefact that itself not only is in keeping with, but is a direct reflection of, that purpose. Further, if one justification for the verbal description is to have it – for all the uncertainties of its words and our reading of them – complete with the visual object it would describe, the comparison would seem to be stabilized on one side by fixing that object so that, as an actual artefact, it can be appealed to as a constant, unlike our varying perceptual experiences of objects in the world. (“The Problem of Ekphrasis” 8)

Confronted with a representation of an artwork in intermedial form, the reader is therefore exposed to a new, as it were contemporary, experience of producing intermedial meaning, the characteristic feature of which is the possibility of multiple interpretations. As noted by Eco, “every reception of a work of art is both an interpretation and a performance of it, because in every reception the work takes on a fresh perspective for itself […] like the components of a construction kit” (4). Furthermore, McLuhan points out that the moment two media are merged is “a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born, […] a moment of freedom and release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by them on our senses” (55). Therefore, the binary semiotic form of an intermedial product influences the perception of a given re-presentation and leads to diverse re-interpretations. The question is bound to arise as to whether such a hybrid work challenges conventional doctrines of the disciplines involved. With regard to narrative and the visual arts in particular, this challenge might presumably face art historians by urging them to consider intermedial artefacts as possible perceptual and interpretive models of a piece of art. Moreover, as Albers points out, a narrative text can, as a part of a verbal-visual hybrid, “shed additional light on aesthetic topics in that it employs art as taking on different forms and carrying various functions within and beyond the narrative [and can] address several of the reader’s senses through its spatio-temporal extension” (26). In other words, by making an artwork ‘speak’ a narrative text raises pertinent questions not only about the elements of art (line, shape, form, colour, value, texture and space) but also about the meta-textual aspects of painting, such as socio-historical and cultural issues, as well as the functional value of an artistic creation. Consequently, art fiction transfers historical knowledge into fictional discourse and, at the same time, offers a potential re-interpretation of the work of art, which in turn may enrich its original meaning.

The ways visual arts can be incorporated into a verbal medium are myriad. The most common practices of registering the co-presence of text and image in an intermedial artefact based on an extant work of art, however, can be reduced to the following three possibilities: 1) the integration of image reproductions that establish the physical co-presence of the medium; 2) ekphrastic re-presentation through direct or indirect referencing (the description of all or of selected details and association to, e.g., a particular art movement); 3) interpretation given by a story’s actants, whose perception of art not only classifies them into various types of viewer (by revealing their attitudes and opinions) but can also be seen as a meta-commentary on both a specific work of art and, e.g., art movements in general. By considering these intermedial practices, the present study suggests a framework of three categories of intermedial relations. However, before examining perception, re-presentation and interpretation of an artwork in the field of intermediality, it is necessary to make explicit what exactly is meant by ekphrasis and ekphrastic re-presentation, the central concepts in the study of the interaction between verbal and visual media. The following section provides a brief overview of the diachronic evolution of the definition of ekphrasis and the diversity of the intermedial relationship it produces.