The Ekphrastic Encounter in Contemporary British Poetry and Elsewhere

David Kennedy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409418801
• eBook ISBN: 9781317034476
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

Examining a wide range of ekphrastic poems, David Kennedy argues that contemporary British poets writing out of both mainstream and avant-garde traditions challenge established critical models of ekphrasis with work that is more complex than representational or counter-representational responses to paintings in museums and galleries. Even when the poem appears to be straightforwardly representational, it is often selectively so, producing a 'virtual' work that doesn't exist in actuality. Poets such as Kelvin Corcoran, Peter Hughes, and Gillian Clarke, Kennedy suggests, relish the ekphrastic encounter as one in which word and image become mutually destabilizing. Similarly, other poets engage with the source artwork as a performance that participates in the ethical realm. Showing that the ethical turn in ekphrastic poetry is often powerfully gendered, Kennedy also surveys a range of ekphrastic poets from the Renaissance and nineteenth century to trace a tradition of female ekphrastic poetry that includes Pauline Stainer and Frances Presley. Kennedy concludes with a critique of ekphrastic exercises in creative writing teaching, proposing that ekphrastic writing that takes greater account of performance spectatorship may offer more fruitful models for the classroom than the narrativizing of images.

PART 1
The Ekphrastic Encounter

Chapter 1
The Ekphrastic Encounter: Representation, Enquiry and Critique

In Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973), travellers meet, first in the eponymous castle and then in the Tavern of Crossed Destinies, after journeying through a forest that has magically struck them dumb. Unable to speak, they tell stories by means of tarot cards. Each story is illustrated with the relevant cards in the margin and with all the relevant cards at the end. But it soon becomes apparent to the reader that the relationship between the two parts of this verbal and visual parallel text is deliberately misleading. The illustrations look as if they are marginal notes on the story, but they are in fact its starting points. The stories are full of the questions we recognize from Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and other ekphrastic poems. But, crucially, they are full of phrases like ‘The first interpretation that this sequence called to mind’ (Calvino 1978: 14). ‘The Waverer’s Tale’ offers at least three narrative interpretations of the card commonly known as ‘The Lover’ or ‘The Lovers’ (Calvino 1978: 52–3). Stories from pictures are, it seems, highly provisional.

The book’s penultimate story, ‘I Also Try to Tell My Tale’, concludes with a long meditation on the relation between images and writing; on paintings of hermits; and on how different paintings portray the same subjects—Saint Jerome and the Lion and Saint George and the Dragon. In the words of Calvino’s narrator, ‘The trick of arranging some tarots in a line and making stories emerge from them is something I could perform also with paintings in museums’ (Calvino 1978: 101). He adds that seeing paintings of Saint Jerome and the Lion ‘gives me satisfaction and security’, not through mere familiarity but through trying to ‘recognize myself there … in the pair together, in the whole’ (Calvino 1978: 101). Calvino’s tarot-inspired tales and his narrator’s extended ekphrastic meditation underline how looking at art prompts us to make up stories and how ekphrasis-as-representation shifts quickly and easily into enquiry and critique. Like the tarot cards laid out in sequence by the various storytellers, one painting and knowledge of it quickly leads to another. Words read images, but they also read images against each other. Calvino’s verbal-visual parallel text, with its misleading presentation, multiple possibilities and continual revisions, seems to suggest that ekphrasis is inherently unstable because it is powerfully associative. The basis of that associative power may be in the painting itself, but it is magnified in the individual spectator. And Calvino’s narrator also has something interesting to say about writing: in response to an image, ‘writing warns like an oracle and purifies like a tragedy’ (Calvino 1978: 99). The image of ekphrasis as both oracle (infallible, mysterious, ambiguous, obscure) and tragedy (the calamitous downfall of the great that is purifying and restorative) should tell us much about the complexities involved in looking at a work of art. It also tells us that we need a subtle and wide-ranging set of critical approaches.

The extended multiple ekphrasis given by Calvino’s narrator makes clear that our response to a work of art is a complicated, many-layered encounter. The idea of ekphrasis as an encounter is fundamental to this study. I have chosen to use it not only because of its meanings of an accidental or unexpected meeting, but also because of its sense that as a consequence of such a meeting there is a change of direction. An encounter is also something that takes place as a direct ‘coming upon’. It is face to face and there is, perhaps, a distant connotation of exposure. There are also connotations of conflict or sudden clash. There is no doubt that art can present us with sudden challenges, but we should be cautious about the idea that this means that ekphrasis is inherently paragonal, that is, a struggle between different modes of representation. In Calvino’s tale, the extended, multiple ekphrasis moves quickly through a number of stages or, perhaps more correctly, layers: a personal response; description and comparison of various paintings; reading of paradoxical meanings in them; psychological readings of them; and more generalized reflections on human psychology and the image of the beast. Calvino’s narrator suggests that however we view these paintings, there is always an element of guilt because we know the price for living in the city or achieving solitude (Calvino 1978: 106).

The narrator’s attempts to recognize himself in the paintings or combinations of paintings that he sees and remembers speak to an important aspect of how we respond to art. I do not mean that, like the narrator, we can, in everyday parlance, ‘identify’ with characters or situations. A clearer sense of what recognizing oneself in a work of art might mean can be found in a more recent tradition of painting. The American abstract expressionist Barnett Newman (1905–1970) produced a number of large paintings that featured what he called zips. Zips are the single vertical lines of colour that distinguish well-known paintings such as Onement I (1948), in which a roughly painted vertical stripe of glowing orange-red runs down the centre of a field of dark cadmium red. Newman’s zips can be read in a number of ways: as signs, say, or ideograms. Some critics have even tried to relate them to Newman’s Jewish humanism and thence to the Kabbalah. Newman himself once said that ‘The self, terrible and constant, is for me the subject matter of painting’ (In Anfam 1994: 145). In this context, the effect of paintings such as Onement I is to confront the viewer with what initially looks like fragmentation but turns out to be wholeness. As David Anfam argues, Newman’s paintings ‘await our completion as we become the human focus in a rapport with radiance, darkness or varieties of balance’ (Anfam 1994: 146). Just as the spectator is the associative locus for paintings that are more conventionally narrative or representational, so he or she becomes the place where the play of these abstractions is made concrete and fully experienced.

Newman’s paintings, then, are ‘about’ presence and the present: how are we fully present to ourselves in the present moment? No wonder Newman used titles like Be, Day One, Now, Here, and Right Here, titles which, as Anfam points out, are imperatives, descriptions of states or moments and the offering of choices (Anfam 1994: 156). Many of Newman’s titles are also ‘shifters’—words that change meaning according to the position of the speaker. Another way to describe this is to say that words like ‘now’ and ‘here’ are deictic, that is, they are orientational features of language which relate to the situation of utterance. Deixis encodes in an utterance both the spatio-temporal context and subjective experience of the encoder. Deictic words manage content and also indicate a context for their interpretation—‘now’ implies ‘then’ and ‘here’ implies ‘there’. So Newman’s paintings might be a type of utterance. Titles like Here and Now can also be read as instructions about how to situate ourselves as spectators in the field of ‘here’ or ‘now’ that the painting creates. So Anfam’s idea of completion is not quite right: Newman’s zip paintings seem to be more a question of habitation or shared embodiment. Indeed, one wonders whether Newman’s use of such titles signals an attempt to forge a kind of community that transcends deeply embedded ideas of self and authorship. Such titles can be read as efforts to create a civic model of spectatorship wherein the ‘spectator’ is released from the subordinate role to become an interpreter of the very present moment designated by titles like Here and Now.

Looking at Newman’s paintings in this way suggests something else: that, to a greater or lesser extent, all art casts us as the human focus of itself and challenges us to find a rapport. It is a challenge because Newman’s paintings and their titles work to destabilize an important conceptual relation between art and literature. Wendy Steiner notes that the idea of ‘the pregnant moment in painting has generated a literary topos in which poetry is to imitate the visual arts by stopping time’. For Steiner, this is the essence of ekphrasis, and she terms it ‘the still-moment topos’ (Steiner 1982: 41). It would be easy to describe Newman’s zips as a very late version of the pregnant moment, but his titles seem to demand that the spectator identify and locate himself or herself as the still moment. It is almost as if Be and Day One and Now and Right Here invite such deep reflection on flux, impermanence and temporality that they function as ekphrases of the paintings they designate. To return to Calvino’s narrator, what we might recognize in a Newman painting, and in more straightforwardly narrative paintings, too, is the possibility, albeit fleeting, of what John Ashbery’s poem ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ calls the ‘undivided present’ (Ashbery 1987: 209). To borrow Steiner’s words, the spectator of a Newman painting becomes, briefly, as much ‘an iconic embodying of stillness’ (Steiner 1982: 41) as the work of art. And this suggests that all art casts us as its focal act and challenges us to recognize ourselves. We are art’s pregnant moment. Even an abstract painting challenges us with a ‘story’ about humanity and with possible roles for the self.

We have already seen that Calvino’s narrator regards the story of writing as a combination of oracle and tragedy. He goes on to describe engravings and paintings by, among others, Dürer, Rembrandt, Antonello da Messina, Carpaccio and Botticelli, and tries to read them psychologically and psychoanalytically. He also says that ‘painters and writers’ share a way ‘of believing in a story that has gone through many forms, and with painting and repainting, writing and rewriting, if it was not true, has become so’ (Calvino 1978: 104). Calvino, through his narrator, might almost be describing criticism of ekphrasis, because there is a real sense in which each new critical account of, say, Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ not only rewrites the poem but repaints Breughel’s picture. Each new account reinforces both the meaning of the poem and the ethical challenge of the painting. At the same time, Calvino’s narrator finds that his readings of various depictions of Saint Jerome and Saint George have had a paradoxical effect. They have emphasized the connections between the hermit Saint Jerome and the world at large, and portrayed the heroic Saint George as an introvert battling his darkest impulses. However, it is worth reminding ourselves that, as in Frank O’Hara’s ‘Why I Am Not a Painter’, ekphrastic poetry is not a humour-free zone. As we shall see, one of the enduring fascinations of ekphrastic poetry is its mix of registers. For example, Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ is tragic on one level but on another feels comic, almost even absurd, because of the play of scale and all the narrative elements competing for our attention with the falling figure. In a similar way, John Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ refuses to be seduced by its own occasionally mournful notes of loss by reminding itself that ‘the way of telling /[...] somehow [intrudes], twisting the end result / Into a caricature of itself’ (Ashbery 1987: 209).

Looking and Writing: Some Historical Examples

The word ‘historical’ underlines that what follows is concerned with literary and art history, but this section is not a comprehensive survey of the origins of ekphrasis. Such surveys can be found elsewhere. Instead, I want to examine some classical and early modern examples of ekphrasis to show that the complex encounter I have sketched above has always been a part of it. Ekphrasis is made from the Greek words ek (out) and phrazein (tell, declare or pronounce). In the ancient world, ekphrasis had meanings of ‘telling in full’, drawing out’ and ‘making clear’, and its origins lie in rhetoric. Ekphrasis was one of the last exercises taught to students of rhetoric and required them to convey the experience of a person, a place or an object to an audience. Conveying this experience involved not only the careful description of telling details but also a sense of what encountering the person, place or object felt like. Ekphrasis combined, therefore, what was observable in the physical nature of the ekphrastic object and what was suggested by its physical nature. It appears in composition handbooks like Aphthonius’s Progymnasmata, written in the fourth century AD. Aphthonius says that ‘one should proceed […] in describing things, from what precedes them, what is in them, and what tends to result from them; in describing times and places, from what surrounds them and what is contained in them’ (13).

His example is a description of the temple in Alexandria, together with the Acropolis, and recreates the experience of a visit by moving from the approach roads, up the 100 steps and into the interior. To this he adds facts beyond the building’s physical qualities: its library ‘[stirs] up the whole city to mastery of wisdom’; it took 12 masons to build it; and its ‘fountain [is] better than that of the Peisistratids’ (14). He finishes by saying that the temple’s full beauty cannot be put into words; that his description may be unequal to the amazement the temple inspires; and that he has omitted what couldn’t be described (14). However, an ekphrasis was not something composed in isolation: it was secondary to the goal of a longer oration. The powerful images conjured by an ekphrasis were designed to play on an audience’s emotions and so make listeners more receptive to an analytical or narrative account of the oration’s main subject. In this context, ekphrasis is clearly allied with energeia, which is variously defined as vigour, activity or purposeful movement. There is also a connection with the idea of image which Longinus, writing in the middle of the first century BC, defined in On The Sublime as ‘passages in which, carried away by your feelings, you imagine you are actually seeing the subject of your description, and enable your audience to see it as well’. The result is that ‘the argument lies below the surface of the accompanying brilliance’ (Longinus 1965: 121, 124).

Classical ideas of ekphrasis as an image which is part of an argument, as an account of a thing and the experience of it, and as a description of both tangible and intangible qualities suggest not only the complexities of representation per se but also that ekphrasis contains within itself the impossibility of treating an ekphrasis as mere representation. Some of this complexity and impossibility is to be found in Pliny’s famous letter (Book V., vi) to Domitius Apollinaris, in which he describes his country house and estate in Tuscany. Pliny does not announce that he is going to write an ekphrasis, but makes clear that he is writing one through a number of comparisons. Pliny’s account moves from a description of the climate and the landscape to the setting of the house and ends with a detailed description of the house itself. Pliny portrays his house and estate at different times of year. Like Calvino’s tarot-inspired tales, these passages are full of possibilities and revisions: ‘there waves—or I might have said ripples—a bed of acanthus’ (Pliny 1963: 140). In the context of the classical models of ekphrasis surveyed above, Pliny elides physical description with the experience of being there. So, for example, ‘an ornamental pool [is] a pleasure both to see and hear’ (Pliny 1963: 141); and in a small alcove ‘you can lie and imagine you are in a wood, but without risk of rain’ (Pliny 1963: 143). There is perhaps something of the ‘mimetic ideality’ suggested by Richard Meek (2006: 391), albeit in reverse, when Pliny says the landscape is more like an exceptional painting than a real landscape (Pliny 1963: 140). Pliny’s penultimate paragraph is worth quoting at length:

I should have been trying long ago not to say too much, had I not suggested that this letter should take you into every corner of the place. I don’t imagine you will find it tiresome to read about a spot which could hardly tire you on a visit […] You know the number of lines Homer and Vergil devote to their descriptions of the arms of Achilles and Aeneas: yet neither passage seems long because both poets are carrying out their original intention. […] I am trying to set my entire house before your eyes, so, if I introduce nothing irrelevant, it is the house I describe which is extensive, not the letter describing it. (Pliny 1963: 143–4)

It is clear, then, that, like Aphthonius in his description of the temple in Alexandria, Pliny wants to recreate the actuality of visiting the place he describes. But the passage also shows how the letter elides rhetorical conventions, Pliny’s own narrativized description, and epic poetry. The shields of Achilles and Aeneas fulfill particular roles in, respectively, the Iliad and the Aeneid: the former’s stories of dispute and siege seem to figure the larger story of Homer’s poem, while the latter’s conquests and triumphs foretell the future of the Rome that Aeneas will found. Both shields portray complex forms of life, and this is what Pliny’s letter also does, starting with a description of the Tuscan climate and ending with an observation that even his servants are healthier here. This is partly why he says it is the ekphrastic object that is extensive and not the description. Indeed, if description always ends up describing a form of life, then language is always going to fall short because all available forms—rhetorical oration, letter, epic poem—are finite. But Pliny is also being a little disingenuous. A later reference to his description as a digression—and one that is comparable to the two shields—reminds his readers that his letter is at once, like the shields, a virtuoso episode and, unlike them, a piece of writing whose virtuosity is to be judged by its fidelity to nature.

Moving forward over a thousand years to the Italian Renaissance, we find evidence of a vigorous debate about the relation of text and image. Leon Battista Alberti’s Della Pittura (1436) instructs painters that while their starting point must always be imitation of nature, the highest form of painting is historical painting. Painters should therefore become familiar with those who represent historical subjects in other forms: poets, orators and men of letters. Painters can also learn from poets’ use of allegories, which are not only pleasing in themselves but become even more so when translated into painting. Alberti also reminds his readers that Homer inspired classical painters and sculptors (In Howard 1909: 46). In contrast, the first part of Leonardo da Vinci’s Libro di Pittura (written in the late fifteenth century but not published until 1651) argues that although poetry and painting proceed from imitation, poetry is never more than descriptive and is suitable only for reproducing the words of men. The painter is superior because he gives his ideal an objective reality. Poetry reproduces shadows, painting the objects and bodies that cast those shadows (In Howard 1909: 47–50). Other writers made more sympathetic comparisons of poetry and painting. Giovanni Giorgio Trissino begins his Poetica (1529) by likening the poet’s use of language and rhyme to the painter’s use of composition and colour. Lodovico Dolce’s Dialogo della Pittura, intitolato l’Aretino (1557) tells painters that if they need the perfect model of a beautiful woman, they need look no further than Ariosto’s stanzas on the fairy Alcina. Like Alberti, Dolce advises painters to read poetry and seek out the company of poets (In Howard 1909: 51, 56).

By the time Dolce published his Dialogo, the idea of poetry as inspiration for painting was well established. In 1477, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’Medici purchased a villa with a working farm attached at Castello, and the following year he commissioned Botticelli to paint the Primavera. Charles Dempsey’s description is as good as any: ‘Spring is shown in two phases: from its beginning with the blowing of the west wind (Favonius, or Zephyr) to its fullness in the month of April, represented by Venus; and from April to its end in May, presided over by Mercury’ (Dempsey 1968: 254). The painting actually moves from right to left: Zephyr blowing; Flora scattering flowers; Venus in the centre with Cupid flying above her head; the Three Graces, who are both Venus’s attendants and the Horae of spring; and Mercury, his back turned to the other figures, raising his wand. Botticelli’s composition draws in great detail on literary sources, as Aby Warburg’s research revealed in the 1890s, and the painting can be read as a selective synthesis of a number of classical sources. Dempsey points to

the extraordinarily literary quality of the programme of the Primavera […] Catullus, Horace, Lucretius, the Fasti, Pliny’s sections on the rustic calendar, the Scriptores rerum rusticarum […] The Primavera’s sources were not randomly chosen. They are in fact profoundly related and were brought together in a manner which betrays the penetrating judgment of a first-rate textual critic. (Dempsey 1968: 262)

Dempsey, drawing on Warburg, argues that this textual critic, the author of the programme, was the poet Angelo Poliziano, who, five years after the Primavera was painted, published Rusticus (1483). Rusticus was an attempt to write a contemporary Latin poem and clearly draws on the painting’s imagery. Arnolfo B. Ferruolo has argued that the Primavera, together with two other Botticelli paintings, Birth of Venus and Venus and Mars, actually derives many features of its imagery from Poliziano’s Stanze per La Giostra (Ferruolo 1955: 17). Paul Holberton reminds us of Warburg’s thesis that the Primavera represented Venus in the Garden of Love, and draws on a range of literature—pages in Boccaccio’s Filocolo, sections of Petrarch’s Rime, as well as Poliziano’s Stanze—to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: ‘The Shape of Time’: Ekphrasis and the Contemporary Moment
• Part 1 The Ekphrastic Encounter
• Part 2 The Contemporary British Ekphrastic Poem
• Part 3 Ekphrasis and the Female
• Part 4 Beyond Painting
• Part 5 Ekphrasis and Creative Writing
• Works Cited
• Index