Читать книгу Revisiting Renoir, Manet and Degas - Lyutsiya Staub - Страница 9

The amplitude of functions of ekphrasis has raised many questions among scholars as to how to approach and analyse ekphrastic texts. Taking into consideration all the alternative and experimental ways in which literature exploits visual arts and intertwines visual images and verbal texts, the question of how to categorise so many interactions is bound to arise. This section will review several attempts that have been made to establish systematic categories that identify, explain and help to analyse the diversity of ekphrastic interactions in literature.

Varieties of ekphrastic relations are thoroughly studied by Yacobi, whose work has been mentioned previously. Yacobi examines “interart traffic” (“Pictorial Models” 603) and attempts to classify the range of texts belonging to ekphrastic writing, suggesting a theoretical framework of four possible ekphrastic relations exhibited in literature, as illustrated in Table 1:

	Visual Source (representation)	Verbal Target (re-presentation)
1	one	one
2	one	many
3	many	one
4	many	many

Table 1.

Four possible ekphrastic relations exhibited in literature (Yacobi, “Pictorial Models” 602)

The first two types, one-to-one and one-to-many relationships, are defined by a single visual source that is rendered into words by either one or many verbal targets. Additionally, the latter provides “re-presentational pluralities” (603). Yacobi points out that while these ekphrastic relationships have received due scholarly attention and been systematically studied, the other two – many-to-one and many-to-many relationships – have been broadly overlooked. Both the many-to-one and the many-to-many relationships make use of multiple visual sources for “verbal (re)modelling” (603). The many-to-one relationship “consists in a single instance of such modelling” (603), whereas the many-to-many “consists in a number of traditional or repeated performances, as when a writer, a school, or an age revisits a certain image […] common to various paintings” (603). This generalised visual image is what Yacobi calls the “ekphrastic model” (603), such as well-known scenes from the Bible, including the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, the Madonna and child etc. According to Yacobi, allusion to a familiar pictorial model “enables an author to be brief and yet inclusive, to re-cover much in little” (“The Ekphrastic Model” 27). In other words, a pictorial source can be re-covered either partially or entirely via only a single common detail, Mona Lisa’s smile, for example, or Monet’s lilies. At the same time it produces multiple interconnections and cross-references. Yacobi points out that the ekphrastic model works to “identify and integrate the inter-media transfer within the verbal discourse” (27). While the chances are greater of a reader overlooking a verbal allusion to a single visual work in one-to-one ekphrastic relationships (especially if this work is less popular or well-known), many-to-one ekphrastic relationships provide the reader with general references to common themes or features of artworks, thus ensuring “accessibility, familiarity, and uptake” (28). This theoretical framework of inter-art encounters in literature is invaluable for identifying and classifying ekphrastic texts in general, and it will be taken into account when developing categories of intermedial relations for further analysis of contemporary art fiction.

As far as pictorial sources are concerned, ekphrasis can be notional (Hollander, “The Poetics of Ekphrasis” 209) or actual (Heffernan 7). Notional ekphrasis is “the description, often elaborately detailed, of purely fictional painting or sculpture that is indeed brought into being by the poetic language itself” (Hollander, The Gazer’s Spirit 4). Hollander extends the realm of notional ekphrasis by including those ekphrastic passages which “may or may not describe some actual, but totally lost, work of art” (“The Poetics of Ekphrasis” 209), thus suggesting that notional ekphrasis describes what either never existed or does not exist anymore and therefore is not accessible in any visual form. The most widely-known examples of notional ekphrasis in classical literature are the Shield of Achilles in Book 18 of the Iliad and the Shield of Aeneas in Book 8 of the Aeneid. Both shields exist only in textual form, yet Krieger recreates the shields by translating their verbal descriptions into a visual form, which he calls reverse ekphrasis (Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign xiii). According to Krieger, both attempts “seek to create what is, in effect, a reverse ekphrasis in that they seek in the visual arts to produce an equivalent of the verbal text instead of the other way round” (xiii). At the same time Krieger emphasises that the pursuit of visual representation of the shields is “ingenious” yet “vain” (xiii), concluding that “to look into ekphrasis is to look into the illusionary representation of the unrepresentable” (xv). Actual ekphrasis, on the other hand, is based on an extant work of art, that is, a work of art that can be seen in a museum or available as a reproduction. According to Heffernan, one the one hand, “the availability of a painting represented by a poem should make no difference to our experience of the poem” (7, emphasis in original), but, on the other, “the availability of the painting allows us to see how the poem reconstructs it, how the poet’s word seeks to gain its mastery over the painter’s image” (7). Therefore, actual ekphrasis implies analysis of the way the visual source is used – reconstructed, represented and reinterpreted – in an intermedial product. Indeed, writers use visual art in their works differently: “sometimes, they model the features of the characters, or their attitudes, after paintings; sometimes, they see the characters themselves, as it were, through old masters’ portraits” (Seznec 573). They may also choose to base the narrative on “a real work of art, which then acquires a symbolic value” (573) or make “the painter himself […] become a hero in fiction” (573). According to Seznec, “sometimes a picture seems to provide simply a springboard for the writer’s imagination […], sometimes a poem builds explicitly upon a canvas, a woodcut, or a statue […], sometimes […] what pictures provide is a mood, an atmosphere” (572). Similarly, in discussing a highly differentiated variety of literary transformations of pictures, Lund points out the following:

Firstly, transformation can apply to an exclusive work of art as well as to a popular-mass-produced picture. The picture in question may be actually existing or fictitious. The text may describe the picture in detail or briefly allude to it. The text may focus on individual pictorial elements isolated from a unified whole, or it may try to capture the picture as a compositional whole. It may emphasize the static character of the picture or it may interpret the picture as a dynamic scene or a dynamic structure in a way that does not only emphasize the movement per se, but also involves senses other than sight. The text as a whole may be bound to the picture; however, it may also connect select pictorial elements to spheres entirely or partially outside the structure and semantic space of the picture. The text may further be an attempt at shaping a spatial quality or at transforming characteristic elements from the iconic sphere of an epoch or by one or more pictorial artists. Actually with no direct connection to any actual or fictitious picture, it may even try to convey the structuring principles of the characteristics of style from pictorial art to the verbal form. (10)

Mindful of heterogeneous ekphrastic relationships, Lund suggests four types of literary transformations of pictures: ahistorical, epochally based, individual and associative. Ahistorical relations are based on the assumption that “pictorial art and literature have parallel or comparable structures, both governed by the same controlling aesthetical principles” (17);1 epochally based relationships express the idea of the parallelism between arts that share the same timeframe; individual relationships allude to “direct and concrete connections between texts and pictures” (19);2 associative relationships refer to a “private associative reading” (19) of the passages that include references to some artworks. The main weakness of the associative type is that it cannot be entirely separated from either epochally based or ahistorical relationships, as it “requires a consciousness about the historical situation in which certain pictures were interpreted and certain texts were written as well as a knowledge about possible analogies between the modes of expression used in literature and pictorial art” (19). The associative type of ekphrasis lacks functional transparency, as it is dependent on the reader’s knowledge and ability to recognise links to works of art; hence, the perception of the intermedial nature of the text through the associative category is rather subjective. On the one hand, Lund’s framework considers possible conditions for intermediality, such as structural parallelism between the arts driven by the same aesthetical conventions, and chronological parallelism between pictorial art and literary movements; on the other, it distinguishes between direct and indirect referencing of visual sources.

The idea of structural and chronological parallelism between the arts is also explored in Torgovnick’s research into the development of an interdisciplinary model for the novel. Although not designed as a typology of ekphrasis per se, Torgovnick’s work examines the effects of art movements on fiction. It is argued that the way in which writers conceive of and use theories of artistic movement in their writing is more important than the influence of a singular artwork (11). Torgovnick traces the relationship between the arts of a given period by comparing quintessential techniques of the particular art movement to the style of writing.3 In order to classify the degrees of involvement of the arts, Torgovnick suggests using “the visual metaphor of a continuum” (13). This continuum is divided into several segments: decorative, biographical, ideological and interpretive uses of the visual arts (the latter subdivided into perceptual and hermeneutic) (13). The continuum starts with decorative use, which applies to passages of description that are “influenced by the visual arts and suggest a particular [artistic] movement or an actual work” (14), in other words, when the historical work of art, artist him/herself or art movement are explicitly referred to. Interestingly, Torgovnick chooses to use the term “decorative” to refer to novels in which characters are either painters or sculptors themselves yet “their vocation has virtually no consequence or felt influence in the novel” (17) the only proviso being that if a character’s profession as an artist “reflected elements of the novel’s themes or form […], the use of the artist figure would probably not be just decorative but would fall further on in the continuum” (17). Thus, the decorative use of visual arts defines the minimum degree of involvement with them. The second segment of the continuum is biographically motivated use, which involves “explaining the author’s psyche or […] showing how a given involvement with the visual arts shaped that psyche so as to influence aspects of the author’s fictions” (18).4 Consequently, this category implies research into the author’s life and education. The next segment of the continuum is the ideological use of visual arts, which

embodies major themes of the fiction – especially its views of politics, history, society or, more generally, of “reality” – in descriptions, objects, metaphors, artist figures, or scenes based upon the historical visual arts or in the same aspects of fiction conceived and experienced pictorially. (19)

Ideological use suggests that common motives and the symbolic value of historical visual arts recur in fiction; hence, the transferral of political, historical and socio-cultural themes of the visual arts into a literary narrative produces a more intense relationship between the verbal and the visual. The final element of the continuum is interpretive use, which is divided into two sub-categories: perceptual or psychological use, which “refers to the ways in which characters experience art objects or pictorial objects and scenes in a way that provokes their conscious or unconscious minds” (22, emphasis in original); and hermeneutic use, which alludes to the ways in which “references to the visual arts or objects and scenes experienced pictorially stimulate the interpretative process of the reader’s mind and cause him to arrive at an understanding of the novel’s methods and meanings” (23, emphasis in original). Thus, the interpretive use emphasises perception and interpretation of an artwork by both the characters of the novel and the reader.

For the present purpose Torgovnick’s continuum is of special interest as it spotlights comparative analysis of two media in prose narratives with reference to historical artists, art movements and actually existing works of art. Similar to Torgovnick’s continuum, Robillard develops two frameworks of intermedial interaction that are based on degrees of involvement of the verbal and the visual, predominantly in poetry. The first model is called the “Scalar Model”, consisting of such categories as communicativity, referentiality, structurality, selectivity, dialogicity and autoreflexivity (56).5 The communicativity category refers to “the degree to which the artwork is marked in a text” (57), ranging “from vague allusions, to a direct reference in a title, to explicit marking in the body of the text” (57). Referentiality refers to “the extent to which a poet actually uses an artwork in the text” (58, emphasis in original). According to Robillard, a text will not reach a high degree in referentiality if the only reference to an artwork is “some form of basic communicative marking” (58). By structurality Robillard means the poet’s “attempt to produce a structure analogue to a picture” (58). The category of selectivity refers both to “the density of pictorial elements which have been selected, either from one painting/sculpture or from several works by the same artist” (59) and to “the transposition of certain topics, myths, or norms and conventions of particular periods or styles of pictorial representation” (59). Dialogicity addresses “the manner in which the poet creates a ‘semantic’ tension between the poem and the artwork by casting the latter in a new, opposing framework” (59). Finally, autoreflexivity is the extent to which the author “specifically reflects on and problematizes the connection between […] his own medium and that of the plastic arts” (59). Robillard herself sees the main criticism of the Scalar Model in the fact that although it provides an overview of intermedial interaction, it does not explain quantitative and qualitative gradation of ekphrastic texts or “the extent to which particular texts are ekphrastic” (60). Robillard thus develops the second “Differential Model”, which aims to make a distinction between degrees of ekphrasis (56). Within the Differential Model there are three categories – depictive, attributive and associative (61) – and each of them has further sub-categories that Robillard illustrates schematically, as shown in Table 2:

Table 2.

The Differential Model (Robillard 61)

This typology moves horizontally and indicates a decreasing degree of ekphrastic relationships not only in the main categories but also in their sub-categories. The first category is depictive. It encompasses texts that explicitly portray a visual source, either through analogous structuring or description. The sub-category of analogous structuring is found furthest to the left in Robillard’s typology because it presupposes “a high degree of structural similarity to the artwork” (61); description is located more to the right since an ekphrastic text “may focus on small as well as large sections of an artwork” (61). Texts that fall under the central attributive category indicate their pictorial source either by “direct naming in the title or elsewhere in the text […]; by alluding to painter, style or genre […] or through indeterminate marking” (61, emphasis in original). This category has two functions (indicated by arrows). One of the functions is ensuring that texts that aspire to be ekphrastic indicate their pictorial sources; hence, this function is linked to the depictive category. The other indicates the importance of intertextual relationships. For example, when a text refers to a painting but does not otherwise use it “in any other perceivable way” (62) or pay “attention to any of the picture’s structural aspects” (62), it possesses associative elements and is therefore linked to the associative category, which includes texts that refer to “conventions or ideas associated with the plastic arts, whether they be structural, thematic, or theoretical” (62). The Differential Model helps to identify and determine the quantitative and qualitative differences between ekphrases and is applicable not only to the analysis of ekphrastic texts that depict works of art “as vividly as if they were viewed in situ” (62), but also of those that indicate just a slight presence of a visual source.

Adapting Robillard’s Differential Model to prose narratives and their screen adaptations, Sager Eidt suggests four categories of ekphrasis: attributive, depictive, interpretive and dramatic. Attributive ekphrasis refers to “the verbal allusion to pictures in description or dialog of a text […] in which artworks are […] mentioned, but not extensively discussed or described” (46). Sager Eidt argues that passages in which the pictorial source is mentioned are both quantitatively significant since an artwork receives attention not only as a whole but also via its relation to other objects or characters (46), and also qualitatively significant, as they add to “the signification of the text […], or to the characterization of the protagonists” (46). Although this type of text contains neither a description nor a narrative of an image, it quotes an artwork, and by implication makes reference to its creator. Such references serve as indicators of an intermedial artefact to the reader, who, relying on memory or imagination, may already at this point start re-creating the artwork in question. In contrast, in depictive ekphrasis images “are discussed, described, or reflected on more extensively in the text or scene, and several details or aspects of images are named” (47). Compared to Robillard, Sager Eidt’s descriptive category narrows down the use of ekphrasis to a descriptive function that is integrally related to the ekphrastic re-presentation of a pictorial source. Thus, the depictive category includes ekphrastic texts containing a traditional break in the narrative for descriptions of small or large sections of works of art. Interpretive ekphrasis provides interpretive “verbal reflections on the image” (50). Sager Eidt points out that just as in depictive ekphrasis, “several details of the picture can be mentioned, but […] the degree of transformation and additional meaning is higher” (50). Interpretive ekphrasis introduces not only the interpretation and verbalisation of the painting itself but also reflections that “go beyond its depicted theme” (51). As such, the intensity of meaning production and its transformation make the depictive and interpretive categories qualitatively different. Finally, in dramatic ekphrasis the images are “dramatized and theatricalized to the extent that they take on a life of their own” ( 56). Having the highest degree of enargeia, this category is the most visual of all four. According to Sager Eidt:

[T]exts […] have the ability to evoke or produce the actual visual images alluded to in the minds of the readers […] while at the same time animating and changing them, thereby producing further, perhaps contrasting images. […] [T]he images can be represented in full or significant details, but the dramatization can also take the images apart, take its characters out of the original context of the picture, and allow them to move beyond the picture’s frame. (56-7)

The dramatic type therefore presupposes both the idea of an art object constructing a developing action and transforming objects or figures from the painting into actants in the narrative. By letting the figures step off the canvas, writers give life to characters that “speak and act for themselves, thus reflecting on and interpreting the image they come from in the light of their new quotation context” (57). In general, it seems that, in a manner similar to the three-dimensional representational principle on which quotation and ekphrasis are based, the fictionalisation of painted figures becomes a third-order re-presentation of visually represented models that the artist has chosen to depict. The characters that are also illustrated in the image proper provide yet another perspective on the artwork – the intricacies of their lives frame the context of the image and expand the meaning of the story that is depicted in the artwork itself. At the same time, the presence of models posing for the painting in an ekphrastic text implies the potential company of an artist. Dramatic ekphrasis is therefore considered a sound foundation for art fiction, the main concern of this study. Sager Eidt’s framework, as well as other typologies examined in this chapter, emphasises the fact that it is usually the case that an intermedial artefact borrows from more than just one category, and thus presents a direct and considerable challenge to the qualitative analysis of works of art fiction. Scholars agree that when dealing with the actual ekphrastic texts it is no longer possible to see clear boundaries between the categories: the extreme diversity of intermedial relations, the heterogeneity of ekphrases, and the writer’s use of visual arts force scholars to approach every literary work as an individual case, customizing their analyses accordingly.