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Intermedial Arts:
Disrupting, Remembering
and Transforming Media
Edited by
Leena Eilittä
with Liliane Louvel and Sabine Kim
Intermedial Arts:
Disrupting, Remembering and Transforming Media
Edited by Leena Eilittä
with Liliane Louvel and Sabine Kim
Copyright © 2012 by Leena Eilittä with Liliane Louvel and Sabine Kim and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
Acknowledgements ................................................................................... xv
Disrupting Media
Remembering Media
Transforming Media
Conclusion
Contributors............................................................................................. 213
LEENA EILITTÄ
In recent years, studies concerning the relations between the arts have
become one of the major research areas in literary studies in particular.
This has not only contributed to a growing number of publications focus-
sing on intermedial relations, but also to those studies in which an urgent
need for theoretical re-thinking has been emphasised. Whereas once these
relations were discussed in interdisciplinary or interart terms, the rapidly
changing scene of theoretical discussion has introduced new concepts,
terms and ideas to be reassessed in critical discussion.
The term intermediality is one of the most promising concepts intro-
duced into the present discussion, in which new paradigms and the tradi-
tion of artistic interrelatedness remain interconnected. Perhaps the greatest
merit of intermediality lies in its success in making a “leap” from past uses
of artistic interrelatedness to our contemporary medial age, in which litera-
ture may be understood as a medium. This ambitious undertaking has con-
tributed to the liberation of literature—along with other art forms—from
an isolated position in the established scholarly landscape with its clear-cut
borderlines between disciplines. In this sense, intermediality has a close
affinity with the aims of so-called French theory. Beginning in the 1980s,
Roland Barthes, for example, pointed out that everything, from painting
through objects and practices to people, can be studied as “text.” The in-
fluential theories launched by such thinkers as Foucault, Althusser, Lacan
and Derrida have put forward new ideas about the social production of
meaning, gender differences and language. Julia Kristeva’s notion of inter-
textuality, which focuses on the relations between texts, is the most rele-
vant theory for intermediality. For Kristeva, the text is a dynamic mosaic
of quotations that includes absorptions and transformations of other texts.
Kristeva’s theory develops the ideas of Bakhtin’s principle of dialogicity,
which assumes that words are filled with dialogic overtones and with
echoes and reverberations of other utterances. Bakhtin’s theory allows the
viii Introduction
Works Cited
Elleström, Lars, ed. 2010. Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermedi-
ality. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Müller, J. E. 1996. Intermedialität: Formen moderner kultureller Kommu-
nikation. Münster: Nodus.
Rajewsky, Irina O. 2005. “Intermediality, Intertextuality and Remedi-
ation.” Intermédialités 6: 43–64.
—. 2002. Intermedialität. Tübingen: Francke.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Leena Eilittä
DISRUPTING MEDIA
INTERMEDIAL PROVOCATIONS:
PAUL DURCAN’S DESECRATING
ART GALLERY
LILIANE LOUVEL
Abstract
This article will address some of the key questions of intermedial studies,
taking up the example of Irish poet Paul Durcan’s work. The issue of the
word/image relationship may be tackled in terms of its “apparatus” and
linked to issues of desecration. It is also a question of the erotic linked to
image, and of anachronism and of its reception in “the pictorial third.” The
metaphor of the (fish)net and the riddle will help me structure this article. I
will hold that word and image, put together in the restrained space of text,
of its sieve, “sizzle” or emit a kind of sizzling as a result of their contact.
Image strives for advent and to arise, as it arose for the poet. Is it the
power of the text (still envisaged in its masculine dimension) to give flesh
back to image once again, in order to give it back its life? Or is not the
image’s resistance so great that it inspires text, in a never-ending process?
This is one of the questions intermedial studies may address. Indeed, if
Durcan is “Crazy about Women,” he is also crazy about images.
I will start with an image in keeping with our intermedial field of research:
Parmigianino’s drawing representing Vulcan catching Venus and Mars in
the act, and casting a net over the two culprits while his body testifies to a
strong corporeal reaction to the scene. If, according to the current way of
envisaging the word/image relationship, painting is associated with the
feminine (Venus) and poetry with the masculine (Mars), Vulcan might
then represent the interpreter or hermeneut casting the net of interpretation
over the two godly figures. This is a scene that Paul Durcan would have
relished. It might also represent our task, i.e., to capture in the meshes of
4 Intermedial Provocations: Paul Durcan’s Desecrating Art Gallery
the interpretive net, sieve or riddle,1 the enigma of the word/image relation-
ship, in its irenic and/or antagonistic dimension. Lessing clearly saw the
two arts in gender terms: “[P]aintings, like women, are ideally silent,
beautiful creatures designed for the gratification of the eye, in contrast to
the sublime eloquence proper to the manly art of poetry” (1962: 21). To
see intermedial transposition in terms of an erotic net fits in with Durcan’s
project when writing Crazy about Women: “the intercourse between what
is painted and what is written [is] as reciprocal as it is inevitable” (Durcan
1991: xi).
The “plasticity” of the image and its capacity to arouse emotion are fore-
grounded in assistant director Dr Brian P. Kennedy’s insistence on the
uniquely personal response of the writer, namely, that “Paul Durcan is fas-
cinated by the potential of paintings to offer us a unique and personal
relationship with a visual image.… [Paintings] prompt the entire range of
human emotions and provoke a different reaction depending on our mood
as we view them” (Kennedy 1991: i).
The hiatus between arousal and expression, together with the problem-
atic “statement function” of the visual image, engender a fruitful slippage,
both poetic and fictional, which the viewer/reader may take advantage of
in a true “encounter,” as Blanchot defined it:
This infinite movement which constitutes the experience of meeting itself
(as the event of experience, the present event of the meeting) always
standing on the margin of the interplay and of the moment when it asserts
itself; for it is this very gap, this imaginary distance, where absence is
achieved. (Blanchot 1989: 18)3
This gap is what made Paul Durcan’s book possible. Crazy about
Women was followed by a second publication dedicated to the London
Liliane Louvel 5
National Gallery and entitled Give Me Your Hand (1994). I was intrigued
by this overt example of “word and image” relationship so clearly working
as such and I thought this was indeed a thought-provoking instance of
intermedial studies.
He gives a broader definition a few pages later: “I call apparatus all that
has the capacity to capture, orient, determine, catch, model, control and
direct living beings’ gestures, behaviours, opinions and discourses”
(Agamben 2007: 31). An apparatus then is a way of constraining people,
of wielding power over them. It is also a network. In Durcan’s case, the
apparatus works both ways: It is the answer to a particular constraint, that
of the Gallery commission (the term recalling the architectural structure
which conditions the visitor’s movements), and it also exerts a constraint
6 Intermedial Provocations: Paul Durcan’s Desecrating Art Gallery
Since writing about painting refers to an image created before the ver-
bal text, the critic cannot dispense with anachronism as a precious critical
heuristic tool. This is one of the staples of Georges Didi-Huberman’s criti-
cal stance when he remarks on the absence/presence of the subject in its
representation:
What does it take to understand an image? Experience teaches us that,
while looking at it, we must pay attention to its temporal content, to the
polyrhythmic quality of which it is made up. Yet the standard historical
models—past and present, ancient and new, obsolescence and renaissance,
modern and postmodern—fail to describe this complexity of image. (Didi-
Huberman 2002: book cover)
The picture on my wall, art object and art process, is a living line of
movement, a wave of colour that repercusses in my body, colouring it, col-
ouring the new present, the future, and even the past, which cannot now be
considered outside of the light of the painting. […]
Process, the energy in being, the refusal of finality, which is not the
same thing as the refusal of completeness, sets art, all art, apart from the
end-stop world that is always calling “Time Please!” […] The arts stand in
the way of this doomsaying. Art objects. The nouns become an active force
not a collector’s item. Art objects. (Winterson 1996: 19)
Desecrations
In Paul Durcan’s case, I would argue that some of his poems, the majority
of which were written “after” religious paintings, actually aim at dese-
crating them while revealing their erotic flavour. Durcan’s words are truly
iconoclastic, which is not one of the lesser paradoxes. The reader going
through Durcan’s gallery gradually understands that the new narrative
derived from ancient painting often verges on blasphemy if not on the
absurd. In Profanations, Agamben defines desecration as the act of re-
storing to the profane sphere what had been restricted to the sacred one:
Whereas to consecrate (sacrare) designated the way things used to leave
the sphere of the human law, to desecrate, on the contrary, meant their
restitution to men’s free usage. […] Pure, profane, freed from the sacred
names is this thing which is restored to men’s common use. But use does
not appear here as something natural. On the contrary, it can only be
reached through desecration. So there seems to be a particular relation
between “using” and “desecrating.” (Agamben 2006: 95–96)
crates them. He recycles them into a new work of art, and to make sure the
reader understands the profaning nature of his art, he consistently inscribes
their themes with a mundane iconoclastic momentum. The book with the
reproduced masterpieces belongs to one’s private sphere when perused at
leisure at home. This achieves part of the desecration, for “to desecrate not
only means to abolish and erase separations, but to learn how to use them
in a new way, to play with them” (Agamben 2006: 115).
In Durcan’s case, the intermedial relationship may be seen as an “inter-
course” where painting is imbued with an erotic flavour by the text, a fact
that his iconoclastic poems, written “after” the paintings, show. It is a way
of staging the strong attraction between painting and poetry, of envisaging
their transposition as peaceful while giving flesh to what stood lifeless in a
museum. The poem is the result of this interart negotiation in which the
loser is also the winner, where ekphrasis imparts the text with its enargeia.
Rest on the Flight into Egypt with the Infant St John the Baptist, attributed
to Francesco Granacci (c. 1494); Veneration of the Eucharist by Jacob
Jordaens (1630); and the Portrait of Bishop Robert Clayton and his Wife
Katherine (c. 1740) by James Latham will prove my point. The first two
paintings illustrate a sacred subject with duly registered iconography. The
third, although profane, is nevertheless the portrait of a clergyman in full
garb. The three poems operate on the same “veneration”/“desecration”
mode in which “desecration is the counter apparatus which renders unto
common use what sacrifice had separated and divided” (Agamben 2006:
10 Intermedial Provocations: Paul Durcan’s Desecrating Art Gallery
40). Three aspects of this complex operation will be examined to see how
it emerges from the image to restore its erotic power, once the sacred net
has been lifted.
The poem The Holy Family with St John after Granacci (referring to
the painting’s former title) displays a systematic pattern of reversal. The
traditional treatment of the episode is turned upon its head. The role of the
speaker is attributed to the smallest and humblest character, the rower in
the tiny boat in the background of the picture. His point of view on the
family is given from the back. He gives pride of place to the donkey, one
of the lowest creatures in the animal kingdom (but nevertheless one of the
two which, according to tradition, witnessed Jesus’s birth). He imagines
the donkey deep in conversation with Joseph about his spouse. Thus the
Holy subject is reduced to the level of idle talk. The fact that the speaker
eventually enjoys a good pint of Guinness with a “halo” at “The Judge and
Jury,” shows that the profane has invaded the sacred, when “to use” is to
profane. The Holy Family is demoted to the level of “the human family”
whereas the too-human animal is gifted with speech.
Even iconography is put to the test of common use: the “halo” be-
comes a frisby and the Virgin’s sandals take on the shape of a horsehoof.
Her body is described with the detail of blazon: “her toes, her knuckles,
her eyebrows” emerge as one follows the viewer’s eyes and envisions the
parts evoked. As for St John’s little penis, it “peers out like a bullfinch
from a bough.” The desire to turn values upside down, to debase the sa-
cred with the mundane, is close to blasphemy when the holy image be-
comes “a pretty emotional picture.” The last word is given to the donkey’s
enigmatic thoughts: “what is it that a donkey sees in a man?” Thus the
“apparatus” shows itself as a way of constraining the spectator to look at
the painting in the same manner as the speaker, as the agent of the poet,
would look.
The highest genre of classical painting—historical and a fortiori reli-
gious painting—is also debunked in Jordaens’s The Veneration of the
Eucharist. It is as if the image were once again provoking the poet via the
aesthetic sensual choices of the painter—in the choice of mellow colours,
composition and in bold, sensuous strokes. This time Durcan is provoked
and provokes the spectator/reader in turn by the counteruse of the subject.
The Eucharist is the Holy Sacrament linked to the mystery of the Incarna-
tion, of Christ’s body rendered visible and consumed. A divine sacrifice, it
brings redemption to sinners as a result of God’s infinite compassion. In
the poem, the Holy Communion is transposed into a much more earthly
one. In a systematic way, the newsagent is associated with the church, the
counter with the altar and the after mass plays on aftermaths, complete
Liliane Louvel 11
The pictures he has chosen to write about [are] capable of provoking a rich
and varied personal response which works on many levels, aesthetic, histo-
ric, cultural and emotional. This collection reflects the deeply personal
response of the poet to the many images contained in the Gallery’s
collection. (Keaveney 1991: viii)
Works Cited
Agamben. Giorgio. [2005] 2006. Profanations. Paris: Rivages Poches.
—. 2007. Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif? Paris: Rivages Poches.
Arasse, Daniel. [1997] 2006. Le sujet dans le tableau. Paris: Flammarion.
Blanchot, Maurice. 1989. Le livre à venir. Paris: Gallimard.
Clüver, Claus. 1989. “On Intersemiotic Transposition.” Poetics Today,
special issue on Art and Literature, ed. Wendy Steiner. 10 (1): 55–90.
Damisch, Hubert. 1995. “L’image dans le tableau.” Pp. 39–54 in Actualité
des modèles freudiens: Langage-image-pensée, eds. Pierre Fédida and
Daniel Widlöcher. Paris: Puf.
Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2002. L’image survivante. Paris: Minuit.
Durcan, Paul. 1991. Crazy About Women. Dublin: The National Gallery of
Ireland.
—. 1994. Give Me Your Hand. London: Macmillan.
Fédida, Pierre. 1995. “Théorie des lieux dans la psychanalyse sur la trans-
formabilité métapsychologique du modèle.” Pp. 123–151 in Actualité
18 Intermedial Provocations: Paul Durcan’s Desecrating Art Gallery
Notes
1
The Greek etymology of enigma is “sieve,” i.e., net. A riddle is a coarse sieve.
For an analysis of Parmigianino’s scene, see Arasse 2006.
2
The book consists of 47 poems, 47 paintings and two sculptures.
3
All translations from French are mine unless otherwise stated.
4
The oikonomia of an image was developed by the doctrine of the Trinity in which
each part of the triad was allocated a function.
5
Dis-positio: in French, the word for apparatus is dispositif.
6
The harp is the trademark of the National Gallery of Ireland Publications.
7
Claus Clüver finds more than 40 instances of such poems (see Clüver 1989).
Liliane Louvel 19
8
See Damisch and his theory of the “après coup,” quoting Freud and Didi-
Huberman (1995: 52).
9
We can see that the links between currency, exchange, commerce and transaction
are reaffirmed in this quotation.
10
For the reference to these instances of double “exposure,” see Bernard Vouilloux
(2005: 143).
11
See Yacobi 2005.
12
Hence the loss of aura, and the passage from cultural value to exhibition value.
WHAT ICARUS KNEW:
ON THE INTERMEDIAL MEANING OF OBJECTS
AND EKPHRASIS IN AUDEN AND WILLIAMS
JARKKO TOIKKANEN
Abstract
How is the idea of the “image” currently conceptualised in cultural studies
and, specifically, how do certain practices of visual culture tend to under-
stand its nature? By employing the rhetorical device of ekphrasis to dis-
cuss W. H. Auden’s and William Carlos Williams’s famous poems about
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, a painting long attributed to Pieter Bruegel
the Elder, I intend to show that the discursive method of visual
interpretation developed in contemporary theory actually fails to account
for the intermedial meaning of the objects presented to us by Auden and
Williams. As Icarus comes to know, the image one wants to reach and
subdue can, in the end, resist and defeat any such aim.
“full arsenal of arguments […] required to unseat received ideas once they
have been firmly established” (van den Berg 2004: n. p.). Van den Berg
comments:
With the objective of initiating resistance against [Foucauldian] ocular-
centric “scopic regimes,” we need dynamic, progressive and action-
orientated concepts of the image, appreciating images in temporal and hu-
man terms as bodily events which involve ideologically shaped perform-
ative acts of the imagination that open picture categories to visual display
rhetoric. (2004: n. p.)
Floating About
Acknowledging Stuart Hall’s influence in their well-known book, Prac-
tices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Marita Sturken and
Lisa Cartwright (2009) go on to offer the following definition of how they
understand culture and everything that constitutes a culture:
It is important to keep in mind that in any group that shares a culture (or
set of processes through which meaning is made), there is always a range
of meanings and interpretations “floating about,” so to speak, with regard
to any given issue or object at any given time. Culture is a process, not a
fixed set of practices or interpretations. (Sturken and Cartwright 2009: 4)
This formulation makes it fairly clear that Sturken and Cartwright believe
in the individual’s power to appropriate, by participating in cultural pro-
cesses, “any given issue or object at any given time” for his or her own
purposes.2 The shared social interest becomes obvious not only in an indi-
vidual’s freedom to choose from a whole range of possible significations
but also in the manner in which “meanings are produced not in the heads
of the viewers so much as through a process of negotiation among indi-
viduals within a particular culture, and between individuals and the arti-
facts, images, and texts created by themselves and others” (Sturken and
Cartwright 2009: 4, my emphasis). With a massive variety of interpretive
outcomes available to the cultural subject, or consumer of cultural objects,
to enjoy on their own, the sensitive mind acknowledges the necessary
social dimension involved in the process and realises it must negotiate
with other minds in order to grasp the outcome which suits it best. With
each individual then having established their own meanings in an emanci-
patory fashion—which no one forced on them—the cultural process is
satisfied and will continue to its next issue or object.
From the viewpoint of democratic participation and equality in visual
culture and the rest of society, the foregoing course of action looks very
appealing. After all, it is based on a bottom-up movement of discourse that
allows individuals to forge their own meanings vis-à-vis “the artifacts,
images, and texts” (Sturken and Cartwright 2009: 4) surrounding them and
also confirms that, in order to do so, they must be a part of society. With-
out the negotiation provided by mutual cooperation, both in agreement and
opposition, there is no private identity, and without private identity, there
are no individual subjects to engage in such “acts of imaginative appropri-
ation” as proclaimed by van den Berg. In this sense, the cycle of culture as
a discursive process is a self-sustaining entity which feeds off the objects it
consists of and which it has emptied of all other significance except for
24 Ekphrasis in Auden and Williams
what the discourse has chosen to impose upon them. As Sturken and
Cartwright imagine it, meeting an object (whether visual, verbal, or other)
is therefore similar to encountering a linguistic token which merely waits
for us to pour meaning into it, and the deed is done first by reaching out
for the range of discursive solutions “floating about” and then by satur-
ating the object with whatever we retrieved from there. As a result, the
revived vessel springs golem-like into life, assumes position within the
culture, and stays open to an infinity of similar resurrections. Culture as a
discursive process is thus based on a cycle of continuous reincarnation.
Ekphrasis as Interpretation
The contemporary scholar of art historiography or visual culture appears in
the above description as a devoted apostate in the face of traditional theory
and criticism. With arms excommunicated beyond the visible, and eyes
that squint towards the margin, the figure is in the midst of speaking its
new cultural surroundings into place, calling for others to co-habit its
realm. As you can see, I am creating an ekphrasis, and actually doubly so,
for the word image verbally represents a visual representation based on the
rhetoric of the image provided in the first two sections. And, strangely
enough, as such, it has the power to disrupt its own verbal form and revert
back into a picture, even if only in our minds. Consider next the following
two art objects whose retrieval was predicted in this context:
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
Both Auden’s and Williams’s poems have received much attention over
the years, including the obvious ekphrastic point of view, but, as far as I
can tell, none of these readings have distinguished the rhetorical device as
such an incongruence of two aesthetic media as I am doing here. Instead,
quite a few of the commentators have started out from how it would be
impossible for us to know “Bruegel’s picture had anything to do with the
myth of Icarus unless the painting had been named Landscape with the
Fall of Icarus, and they have then proceeded to ruminate on what the
function of naming images means for our ability to interpret and extract
meaning from artworks.3 As Arthur C. Danto has claimed: “A title in any
case is more than a name or a label; it is a direction for interpretation,” and
this entails the identification of the indexical potential of these hermeneu-
tic objects as their essentially subjective condition: “If it is an artwork,
26 Ekphrasis in Auden and Williams
there is no neutral way of seeing it; or, to see it neutrally is not to see it as
an artwork” (1981: 119). In this case, the naming function introduces an
ironic element into the work. The mythical protagonist is reduced to a
negligible role in the entire composition and as a result both Auden and
Williams come to assume this irony as their starting point for ekphrastic
interpretations of the original work.
One way in which the divergent directions of Auden’s and Williams’s
ekphrases can be made clear is by looking at the very first lines of each
poem. Auden’s interpretation is concerned with a certain theme, namely, it
is “[a]bout suffering,” and he intimates a particular treatment of this theme
in the work of “The Old Masters” who saturated their paintings with such
insight that centuries later we are still able to extract it from the works for
our benefit. In Auden, the verbal representation of the original visual rep-
resentation therefore suggests a moral duty (of caring for those who suffer)
which starts at the top, at the general level of the theme discussed, and
only descends to the level of the painting towards the end of the poem, as a
specific verbal illustration of the larger discourse which it is supposed to
join. In directing his own interpretation (and choice of title) in this manner,
Auden plays on the fact how, ekphrastically speaking, the logic of his
verbal narrative depends on a series of either absent or imagined
sensations—“everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster,”
“the ploughman may / Have heard the splash,” and “the expensive delicate
ship that must have seen / Something amazing.” As we can see, none of
these occurrences can be confirmed as real events within the world
depicted; they are mere conjectures, and so Auden’s strategy of repre-
senting them as particular examples of turning a blind eye to suffering—as
the failure of general moral discourse—comes across as dubious to say the
least. Moreover, as the poem also mixes past and present imaginings with
speculation concerning what is going to happen in the future (Icarus is
destined to disappear in the “green / Water” and the ship has “somewhere
to get to”), the proleptic component completes the ageless theme of suf-
fering, and Auden’s lesson within its discourse appears in full temporal
view: What Bruegel knew and wanted to teach us is perfectly reiterated by
the poet’s complementary words and images. In a manner similar to the
one outlined in the first two sections of this article, the object “Landscape
with the Fall of Icarus” becomes an interpretive token awaiting revival and
appropriation in a preset discourse to fill it with meaning and to show how
it is “always already ideologically infected” (van den Berg 2004: n. p.). In
this way, the scholar (or student) of art historiography or visual culture
becomes the professional diagnostician of society’s moral ills and may
develop his or her remedial rhetoric according to certain needs.
Jarkko Toikkanen 27
However, even if the two art objects called Landscape with the Fall of
Icarus after Pieter Bruegel the Elder and “Musée des Beaux Arts” by W.
H. Auden floated about on a sea of cultural discourses like buoys cut loose
from their traditional moorings, the image of Icarus they present does not
float at all: it is plunging head-first into the depths. Concerning this point,
Mary Ann Caws has analysed the manner in which Williams’s different
kind of ekphrasis of the original painting—also called Landscape with the
Fall of Icarus—makes use of a linguistic “participle system” in order to
“inset” the poem’s climax more emphatically:
That the entire poem should end with the drowning event already prepared
by the system of present participles and its initial recounting impulse: ac-
cording, shows this event to be deliberately set within a systematic, lin-
guistic frame, which stresses its own reading [.…] The innermost point of
the insetting is, in this re-reading, also the most significant, inserted as it is
within the space and time of legend and of the pointed presence of sight.
(Caws 1983: 326–327)
terance is just as valid as the next one and each sighted image packs the
same prospect; the experience of encountering an art object is reduced to
an exercise in one’s ability to interpret. The object, in other words, con-
firms anything I wish to say about it.
A different understanding of ekphrasis suggesting an intermedial
meaning of objects might therefore be initiated by one’s refusal to reduce
experience to a hermeneutic drill. In recent years, there has been quite a
backlash against the dominant discourse of visual culture, in the form of
cognitive poetics and other branches of cognitive science. However, with-
out dwelling on the issue in this context, in their dedication to what they
call an “experiential realism” and their focus on actual mental processes
instead of “[c]ontexts and biographies, influences and allusions, multiple
edited textual variants of literary works and their place in social history”
(Stockwell 2009: 1), some of these studies seem to have gone the opposite
way too quickly.7 For with ekphrasis, it must be noted, language is not the
reflection of a natural reality which the rhetorical device appears to shape
and mould in unexpected ways. If ekphrasis did have this ability to form, it
would be as if to argue that reality stood in unnatural contrast to language,
in which we were stuck imagining and reaching for a prelinguistic state of
pure nature. That kind of state, I might add, would serve only such discur-
sive tokenness as I have criticised. As ekphrasis then, in contrast to this
option, becomes a real imagination as well as an imagination of the real
with no “reality” or “nature” looming in the background except the visual
representation which the verbal representation attempts to imagine, every
last bit of significance involved in the attempt weighs on the unbridgeable
distance between the two media, in the unchartable space of intermedi-
ality. This space cannot be observed as such for it constitutes no measura-
ble plane or void, and its existence does not reflect a reality beyond lan-
guage because language is the reality as which it appears. However, exist
it must, along with its objects, since images are not the same as words and
words are not the same as images: the negative incongruence between the
two aesthetic media is affirmed time and again as they fail to complement
one another and so continue to generate new meaning(s) for the object
which appears in this unimaginable space. And this object, even if we be-
lieved otherwise, awaits nothing and promises nothing but what we bring
to it, enticed and seduced by an unfading shine.
Icarus knew this shine all too well, along with the celestial distance he
would never cross. In the painting, the sun-object is rising and setting at
the same time (we cannot decide which) in the eye of the beholder, but this
hardly matters to Icarus as he, horrifyingly, sees nothing we can see
anymore. It follows that, just as Icarus fails in his own ambition, we as
30 Ekphrasis in Auden and Williams
Works Cited
Allen, Elizabeth. 2008. “The Ghost of Icarus.” Southerly 68 (1): 176–190.
Auden, W. H. [1976] 2007. Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson. New
York: Random.
Berg, Dirk J. van den. 2004. “What is an Image and What is Image
Power?” Image and Narrative: Online Magazine of the Visual Narra-
tive (8). http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/issue08/ (accessed
2 April 2011).
Brennan, Teresa, and Martin Jay, eds. 1996. Vision in Context: Historical
and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight. New York: Routledge.
Caws, Mary Ann. 1983. “A Double Reading by Design: Breughel, Auden,
and Williams.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 41 (3): 323–
330.
Cole, David W. 2000. “Williams’s ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.’”
Explicator 58 (3): 151.
Danto, Arthur C. 1981. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Phi-
losophy of Art. Cambridge; MA: Harvard University Press.
Fairley, Irene R. 1981. “On Reading Poems: Visual and Verbal Icons in
William Carlos Williams’ ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.’” Studies
in Twentieth-Century Literature 6 (1–2): 67–97.
Fludernik, Monika. 1996. Towards a “Natural” Narratology. London:
Routledge.
Heffernan, James A. W. 1996. “Entering the Museum of Words: Brown-
ing’s ‘My Last Duchess’ and Twentieth-Century Ekphrasis.” Pp. 262–
Jarkko Toikkanen 31
Notes
1
Standard works that may be consulted for recent uses and definitions of ekphra-
sis, as well as other word and image matters, include Hollander (1995), Mitchell
(1994), Heffernan (1993), and Krieger (1992).
2
For further background on such cultural processes see, for instance, Mirzoeff
(2009) or Brennan and Jay (1996).
3
See, for example, Mikkonen (2005: 79–88), and shorter texts by Jarniewicz
(2007), Nemerov (2005), Cole (2000), Heffernan (1996), and Fairley (1981).
Moreover, Elizabeth Allen’s essay “The Ghost of Icarus” (2008) provides a special
32 Ekphrasis in Auden and Williams
RALUCA LUPU-ONET
Abstract
Dedicated to collaboration and the ideal of breaking down ontological
barriers, Belgian artist and poet Christian Dotremont co-founded the short-
lived but widely influential CoBrA movement in the late 1940s. Known
best for its composite experimental artworks, CoBrA also played with the
very medium of visual art’s creative space: the canvas. CoBrA’s pluralistic
approach is evident in Dotremont’s much later experiments, beginning in
1962, with the invention of visual poems that he called logograms. I use
these encounters between text and image to contextualise my analysis of
the relationship between poetry and painting in Dotremont’s own work. I
examine how the intermedial praxis of logograms, via Dotremont’s explo-
rations of the materiality of language, causes a major change in the inter-
pretative paradigm of both poetry and the process of reading.
The new paradigm of the historical avant-garde was based on the critique
of two fundamental concepts: the institution of art, and aesthetic experi-
ence as a social practice. In fact, these two points of reference are the so-
called negative origin of avant-garde movements, according to Peter Bür-
ger, author of the well-known Theory of the Avant-Garde, first published
in 1974. Bürger profoundly highlights the importance of the avant-garde’s
attack on the institution of art, which served to mediate between art and
society. Bürger examines how such concepts as “institution,” “art”/ “work
of art” (and the related avant-garde practices of “collage” and “montage”),
and “autonomy” interrelate. By showing how institutions act to mediate art
for bourgeois society, Bürger makes clear that the art institution itself
34 Christian Dotremont’s Logograms
serves as the essence of art in precise and historical ways. Based on this
intimacy between art and society, avant-garde works are above all a sub-
versive social practice; they subscribe unconditionally to a political (in the
general sense of the word) and thus social and aesthetic programme. At-
tacking the institution through their art, avant-garde artists commit them-
selves to a disruptive process of change. And one of the most popular
disruptive practices was without a doubt the combinatorial and heteroge-
neous Surrealist “objects” such as collages, which exploited several artistic
languages in order to create confusion and to destabilise audience expecta-
tions. Therefore, the avant-garde involves a new literacy: Its main objec-
tive is to enable the implosion not only of traditional art production, but
also of its reception, both being reliant on an aesthetics of transgressing
borders. Beyond the boundaries between disciplines, at the crossroad of
arts and media and in the midst of new artistic and writing forms, the col-
lage, the photomontage and the book object prove to be open to the en-
counter and mixture of text and image, of the literal and figural.
Surrealism to a large extent involved a dialogue between artists and the
arts that crossed national boundaries. Inspired by the concepts which Sur-
realism represented, but wishing to more strongly emphasise collaboration
and the ideal of breaking down ontological barriers, the experimental Bel-
gian poet and painter Christian Dotremont (1922–1979) took Surrealist
principles a step further by founding the CoBrA movement (1948–1951).
Based on an acronym designating the cities of its members (Copenhagen,
Brussels and Amsterdam), the name CoBrA itself testifies to the goals of
the new aesthetic movement, which sought to redefine Surrealism and
extend its influence beyond Paris. Through CoBrA, Dotremont continued
the Surrealist legacy of distrust of art’s institutionalisation. At the same
time, Dotremont profoundly transformed this scepticism: The work defy-
ing artistic codes and doxa yielded results within the first Surrealist gen-
eration which inspired Dotremont to link art and life; more precisely, link-
ing his art to his life with the invention of a new way of using language.
The encounters between text and image in a single work allowed him to
exploit the relationship between poetry and painting, between signifié and
signifiant. This truly becomes a reinvention of poetry in Dotremont’s
logograms, hybrid poems destined to redefine the text as a visual object.
Raluca Lupu-Onet 35
36 Christian Dotremont’s Logograms
mont’s logograms are a hybrid work of art, combining text and image (of
text). These in-between artistic objects are at the same time fundamentally
linked to poetry: Logograms are poems—albeit they comprise another
type of concrete and physical, as well as visual, poetry. But their original-
ity consists of their “physical,” thus illegible, dynamism (see Fig. 1). The
dialogue between text and image is therefore inherent in the creation of
logograms. The interartistic dialogue between painting and poetry trans-
forms logograms into relational objects. They privilege such concepts as
heterogeneity, dialogism and transgressing frontiers (of artistic language)
and are considered the paradigm of Dotremont’s poetic programme. It is
this fundamental condition which explains and characterises Dotremont’s
iconotextual poetry as intermedial object. His logography is hybrid, plural
and dialogical and consists of an artistic process that is complete and com-
pleted only as a dynamic and relational object. Instead of writing the
poem, Dotremont paints it, and his page and pen are replaced by the
painter’s canvas and brush. In other words, the poet draws the poem and
the logograms thus arise from the poet’s gesture.
Fig. 1: “Chanter jusqu’au cri / Crier jusqu’au chant”
Christian Dotremont, Logogrammes (1964: n. pag.).
Raluca Lupu-Onet 37
This definition clarifies the hybrid nature of logograms: text and drawing
of text. In addition to its genre as “in-between” (iconotextual), Dotremont
emphasises the twofold algorithm of logography. According to Dotremont,
the initial stage consists of the immediate realisation of inspiration, which
translates as spontaneity in creation (“first draft,” “extreme spontaneity”).
This consists of drawing as direct action, in which unpremeditated gesture
is enabled by total forgetfulness and oblivion of codes or the traditional
and conventional canons of communication (“regardless of ordinary pro-
portions” and “regardless of legibility”).
This first step results in the pictorial version of the logogram, which is
illegible. Thus, the initial immediate transposition of imagination must be
realised by sacrificing the legibility of the text, which is, it must be em-
phasised, the origin, inspiration and fundamental nature of logograms.
Dotremont never separates himself from poetry; his logograms are beyond
any doubt poems. The text would otherwise never have been rewritten
legibly underneath the drawing. However, his poems produce their mean-
ing in the very link that I mentioned between his life and his work. In fact,
Dotremont’s drawings copy the rhythm of the poet’s body, because the
poet exchanged his pen with the paintbrush and his white page with can-
vas. This is the fundamental condition under which the text becomes draw-
ing. All this effort is aimed at a single artistic objective: The capture of
singularity and the capture of the presence of the artist himself. The white
38 Christian Dotremont’s Logograms
page records and shows (makes visible) the movement of the one who is
creating/writing the text “regardless of ordinary proportions and regular-
ity” (Dotremont 1975: 5). However, in order to be shared with others, this
first spontaneous, and thus illegible, manifestation of singularity through
the drawing of texts has to be translated into a language that is comprehen-
sible. In other words, the incommunicable (the sign and trace of singular-
ity) becomes communicable in the rewriting by hand of the original text.
This second step is one of remediation of the original sacrifice of legibil-
ity. The in-between of logograms can be interpreted as this continuous
two-way dynamism, a playfulness sustained by the legible and illegible
elements of the poetic texts. Dotremont’s logography stipulates an initial
intermedial transformation: The poet becomes artist (a painter of texts) by
changing his creative instruments and posture. But this first metamorpho-
sis enables a second one.
The writing becomes drawing. Through a composite method of creat-
ing visual poems, Dotremont undertakes the work of de-instrumentalising
writing itself, more precisely a work of “desautomatization” of the word.
Defined by Viktor Shklovsky (1965), the concept of desautomatisation,
very similar to the Surrealist techniques of diversion/détournement and
often translated as “defamiliarisation,” encompasses all acts intended to
block the mechanism of convention and to make language unexpected and
surprising. The new paradigm of writing is motivated by an attempt to
reconsider the creative force of words as visual—or audible—forms. In
other words, the meaning of a text is equally composed of materiality and
content. All these changes are needed in order to produce a new and origi-
nal look at the world (and the word). The result is that what was once
reflex or habit becomes singular and original through this new approach.
By de-automatising writing, it becomes “scription,” a language perceptible
in its physical/visual presence: writing as “trace.” Thus, the invention of
the poem’s own visible writing in the logogram inspires the invention of
Dotremont’s own aesthetic programme—the de-instrumentalisation of wri-
ting and its transformation into pictorial and poetic matter.
Raluca Lupu-Onet 39
40 Christian Dotremont’s Logograms
fier and signified. This first metamorphosis of the poem, based on the
importance of the medium as something visual in the creation of poetic
texts, determines a new spectatorship paradigm: The reader becomes a
viewer, because the legible is first encountered as the visible. Conse-
quently, the logogram is the figuration (the capturing) of the poet–artist’s
presence and the image and text of his own existence (see Fig. 2).
It is obvious that for Dotremont the logography tends to “expose” the
poetic text to a pictorial environment. The majority of his logograms were
to appear as exhibitions and only a few were published. The intermedial
nature of the exhibited logograms is of course evident: The transformations
in poetic invention and their influence on reception qualify the logograms
as true intermedial (border-crossing) constructions. The question of their
intermedial nature has to be asked in relation to Dotremont’s logographic
books, specifically his Logogrammes II, published in 1965, following two
other books of this type (Logogrammes, in 1964 and Logbook, also in
1964).
Raluca Lupu-Onet 41
42 Christian Dotremont’s Logograms
Fig. 3: “une Irlandaise? à quel sujet?”
Christian Dotremont, Logogrammes II (1965: n. pag.).
Raluca Lupu-Onet 43
44 Christian Dotremont’s Logograms
Raluca Lupu-Onet 45
46 Christian Dotremont’s Logograms
[I suggest that you see, in its exaggeratedly natural and excessively free
writing, the drawing (non-materialist, of course, but still material) of my
cry or my chant or of both together; then and only then may you read the
text that always appears in small, visible letters, calligraphic, written in
pencil underneath the logogram.]
Before being able to enter the logogram world, the spectator first needs to
see it, to be engaged by his or her ability to identify a deformed pictorial
writing (“exaggeratedly natural writing” which is “the non-materialistic
[…] but material drawing”). Only afterwards is one allowed to become a
reader of the text that inspired this experience of verbal materiality. This
mechanism is determined by what I call the paradigm of presence: The
logogram offers to make a fragment of physical presence visible and dura-
ble in a language which is more a spontaneous, ephemeral or even her-
metical language than a coherent, codified system. Actually, for the spec-
tator to be able to decipher the meaning(s) of Dotremont’s logograms and
to perceive the crying (“mon cri”) or singing of the poet (“mon chant”),
the spectator’s own transformation is required, because the person encoun-
tering the logograms needs to lose his or her point of reference. Before
communication takes place, the logograms offer a true communion with
the viewer–reader which cannot be limited to ordinary language. The logo-
grams create an archive of vital rhythms: The body of text is the enactment
and proof of the poet’s body. This archive, a creative gesture expressed in
space, is destined to be his spectator, as a witness of the artistic experience
of the logogram. Creating a logogram is a true act of sharing, beyond com-
mon language and what cannot be shared; i.e., singularity.
In his Logbook ([1964] 1975), Dotremont receives the name of Logo-
gus, the one who is constantly searching for Lautre (The Other), and the
logogram comprises this open dialogue between Logogus and Lautre. Here
is the new literacy of logograms. It is the literacy of the in-between: be-
tween artist and poet, writing and drawing, legible and illegible, or even
legible and visible, viewer and reader. Dotremont succeeds in creating a
dynamic œuvre which relies on a cross-boundary and hybrid communica-
Raluca Lupu-Onet 47
tion. The meaning of the visual poem is in the movement itself, in the
constant transfer from one entity to another. The main aesthetic intention
of this truly intermedial work is to leave marks not only on the ground, the
snow, the mud or the white page, but mostly on the memory of those who
enter the logographic adventure.
As a heterogeneous art object, the logogram is based on a conflicted re-
lationship with language perceived as a constrictive matrix of the human
and as an oppressive (because prescriptive and codified) pattern of life and
expression. Logogus therefore wants to transgress the limits of language.
Everything is contained in this feeling of violence which is also transmit-
ted to the spectator as a refusal to obey the restrictive influence of lan-
guage as organiser of our vision of the world. Dotremont is searching for a
way to express what words are incapable of conveying: The logogram
drawing translates his interiority, the intimate “cry” of the poet who is
exorcising his personal catastrophe.4 In the meeting between Logogus and
Lautre, the initial moment is that of the shock of failure to communicate
through language. The encounter starts out as a confrontation inside an
artistic space which undermines the comprehensible. However, a legible
text is transcribed below the drawing. This part of the logogram testifies to
the duality of the poet–painter and to his indecision in attacking language
only from inside language.
In fact, the legibility of the text copied under the drawing is another
testimony of the “cry” of the artist who is torn between his subversive
work against language and his desire to communicate. As the drawing is
the consequence of this rebellion, the legible text is the remedy for this
violence. Dotremont considered himself in search of a new language in
which writing, colour and drawing would not be divided and where mean-
ing would be created on the spot, liberated of all constraint. To access this
universally comprehensible language, we need to give up the articulated
one. Thus drawing is not a simple work of representation, even less an ill-
ustrative or figurative one. Creating logograms means forcing language to
its own catastrophe. Drawing the words of a logogram is spontaneous and
depends on the movement of the poet’s hand and body. The logographic
drawing is thus driven by a velocity which profoundly affects legibility:
Et un jour, je me suis levé parce que j’avais décidé d’écrire sur des feuilles
beaucoup plus grandes et je n’ai plus pu travailler assis mais debout et
c’est devenu une danse vraiment de mon corps tout entier, une
chorégraphie, oui, et c’est ainsi que j’arrive à dessiner parce que je suis
incapable de dessiner [….] Et je crois que le rythme du dessin vient du
rythme de mon corps, c’est-à-dire de cette danse naturelle, spontanée, qu’il
m’est vraiment impossible de prévoir. (Dotremont 1981: 132–133)
48 Christian Dotremont’s Logograms
[And one day, I stood up because I decided to write on much larger sheets
of paper; therefore I could not keep working sitting down but had to stand
up and it truly became a dance of my entire body, a choreography of some
sort, yes, and this is how I stopped drawing; because I am incapable of
drawing [….] And I believe that the rhythm of my drawing comes from
the rhythm of my body—I mean of this natural and spontaneous dance
which is impossible for me to predict.]
Raluca Lupu-Onet 49
The key function of manuscript writing is to grasp the singular event of the
poet’s expression and to simultaneously welcome the presence of the un-
known writer. Defined as “first-draft manuscripts” motivated by “an inter-
action between graphic invention and verbal invention” (Dotremont 1981:
132), the logograms represent a new iconotextual genre by the tension
maintained between the legible text and the materiality of the manuscript
graphics. For Dotremont, logograms create a new form of poetry because
they are a new form of visual art capable of unifying the meaning of words
with their materiality as signs—in order to create an original and playful
work of creation–interpretation that is, in fact, intermedial.
Works Cited
Bürger, Peter. [1974] 2004. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Michael
Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Caws, Mary Ann. 1989. The Art of Interference: Stressed Readings in
Verbal and Visual Texts. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Dotremont, Christian. 1945. La terre n’est pas une vallée de larmes. Brus-
sels: La Boétie.
—. 1964. Logogrammes. Tervuren: de la revue Strates.
—. 1965. Logogrammes II. Tervuren: de la revue Strates.
—. [1964] 1975. Logbook. Turin: Yves Rivière.
—. 1981. Grand hôtel des valises — Locataire: Dotremont: Les entretiens
de Tervuren, poèmes, manuscrits, photographies, collected and introd.
Jean-Clarence Lambert. Paris: Galilée.
—. 1990. Le grand rendez-vous naturel. Caen: L’Échoppe.
—. 1998. CoBrAland. Brussels: La Petite Pierre.
—. 2004. J’écris pour voir. Paris: Buchet Chastel.
Genette, Gérard. [1982] 1997. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second De-
gree. Trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinski. Lincoln: Univer-
sity of Nebraska Press.
50 Christian Dotremont’s Logograms
Nougé, Paul. 1980. “La naissance des images.” Pp. 233–234 in Histoire de
ne pas rire. Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme.
—. 1981. “L’écriture simplifiée.” Pp. 27–142 in L’expérience continue.
Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme.
—. 1995. Fragments. Brussels: Labor.
Shklovsky [Chklovski], Viktor. 1965. “L’art comme procédé.” Pp. 76–97
in Théorie de la literature: Textes des Formalistes russes, ed. Tzvetan
Todorov. Paris: Seuil.
Notes
1
Unless otherwise noted, translations are mine.
2
“Langage du langage” is the title of an essay in La terre n’est pas une vallée de
larmes (1945), later published in L’Estaminet 5, 1994, ed. Joseph Noiret.
3
In the history of Belgian Surrealism, Paul Nougé and René Magritte defined and
created these “objets bouleversants” (disruptive objects); see Nougé 1980; 1981;
1995.
4
Catastrophe is a key word in Dotremont’s literary and artistic work. The term
translates his insatiable desire for love, his immense affection for poetry, but also
his poverty, his insecurity and mostly his illness.
5
“La poésie doit se lever, ne pas dormir dans les livres” (Dotremont 1990: 29).
MOVING LETTERS AND COMPLEX MEDIAL
LIMITATIONS IN DIGITAL POETRY
Abstract
Works of concrete poetry often highlight the problematic limitations of
different art forms and media. In this article I ask if concrete poetry is a
type of literature that acts like visual art, i.e., does it stretch its own medial
limits? Or does it merely combine two different art forms? In contemporary
digital poetry such questions are becoming ever more complex, seeing as
digital poems combine several different media and thus describing the ex-
act mixture of art forms becomes practically impossible. This article draws
on Lars Elleström’s model of media modalities, which suggests that while
all media share certain modalities, each medium is individually defined by
the specific combinations of modalities. This model is productive, not only
as a way of defining the new, differing modal compositions in digital
poetry, but also as an analytical tool.
Introduction
In 1766, Lessing defined poetry as the temporal medium, arguing that
since words appear one after the other, poetry is time-based and, hence, a
medium for actions. In contrast, visual art functions in space and depicts
objects—not actions—according to Lessing, who likely was not able to
imagine how contemporary poetry could be time-based in a more radical
way: The words actually move on the digital screen. The term digital po-
etry denotes a poetic movement of language-based digital art, thus consti-
tuting a genre of its own that is influenced, among others, by the poetic
avant-garde, by visual and concrete poetry and by software art. In digital
poems, for instance, words can move, perform and interact.
52 Moving Letters and Complex Medial Limitations in Digital Poetry
Mette-Marie Zacher Sørensen 53
54 Moving Letters and Complex Medial Limitations in Digital Poetry
Digital Poetry
Intermedial relations are becoming increasingly complex in the digital
medium, in which it is possible to blend almost all kinds of media. Thus,
digital poems are always already media combinations, but not in the sense
that the phenomenon can be defined as a specific type of art, such as the-
atre or cinema (multimedial genres, defined as media or art forms with
their own limitations). Digital art and digital poems will probably never
stabilise and present a coherent mix of different media—every single work
is a new genre in itself. One distinct quality, however, is the potential of
moving letters.
“La série des U” is a digital poem composed by the French poet
Philippe Bootz. 2 It comprises moving words which say things like:
Le pas
Le passe
Elle passe
Elle passe le fil
Elle passe le fil d’leau
Le fil d’leau passe
L’eau passe
Passe.3
(Bootz 2006)
Other factors contributing to the poem are soft piano music, tubular bells,
and “painting” in blue and red nuances, and the work thus consists of both
media-combining components and components which I would define as
media-imitating. We might say that some of the work’s components are
inseparable and others are not. In fact, important issues are first revealed
when one consults the programming. Initially, the music, which was com-
posed especially for this work, fits very well with the soft, moving letters,
but its programming is aleatoric, which means that every user of the work
gets her individual, instantaneous bite of music. Furthermore, the visual
background is constructed so that former users’ movements with the cur-
sor construct a new layer of drawings and paintings. In a complex sense
the poem thus establishes a form of constructed continuity, a sense of
materiality, even though it is complicated to talk about presence and ma-
teriality within the digital. The page is always new and it does not exist
anywhere, unless it is activated by a user. It is a structural potentiality, but
not a material object.
In a close analysis of the work, one has to take into account the visual
component, the music, and also, as mentioned, the strategy of program-
ming, which is invisible on the surface. “La série des U” articulates a
Mette-Marie Zacher Sørensen 55
problem concerning digital poems and their ephemeral status (see Saem-
mer 2009). The work has been overtaken by its own theme, because if you
were to experience it through the Internet today, it would run much faster
than when it was made and, therefore, the work is no longer alive on the
Internet, but archived. On several levels, the work speaks in collaboration
with its own text, generating an awareness of materiality, the possibilities
and problems concerning its own technical medium, which are, for instance,
coincidence, invisibility, perishability and imprint.
Let us focus on the words and their concrete movement in the poem,
which do not simply emphasise the semantic content—the movement is
the condition of the play with words. With its permutations on the level of
words, “La série des U” can be compared to the concrete poem “Como o
vento” by the Brazilian poet Ronaldo Azeredos:
Como o vento
comovido
com o ouvido
como o vivo
locomovido
ou vindo
(Azeredos 1967)
The difference between “Como o vento” and “La série des U” is that the
movements and permutations in the latter could not exist on paper. “La
série des U” begins with a lone word, “Le.” It quivers, because we antici-
pate that other words might arise (as opposed to a book where words do
not suddenly turn up), but also because “Le” cannot stand alone, seeing as
it has no meaning of its own—its only function is as the definite article,
masculine, singular. This masculinity suddenly attains content when a play
with the word “elle” is established. This is so, because the letter “e” disap-
pears, leaving “l” to stand alone; in French, the pronunciation of the letter
“l” is “elle” (Saemmer 2009). These slow intimations happen on the visual
level as well when the word “Le” flies around and is somehow mirrored,
indicating the formation of the word “elle.” “Le” becomes “Le pas” and
“Le Passe,” until the letters “E” and “l” come flying in and create the sen-
tence “Elle passe.” The sentence “Elle passe le fil de l’eau” gradually
changes as the sequence “le fil de l’eau” moves over “elle,” which then
disappears and we are left with the sentence “le fil de l’eau passe.” There
is a lot of concrete movement in the poem: There is a sense of soft move-
ment as well as waves, the colour blue, the word “water” and so on. In the
end, only “passé” stands alone, until it passes—a “concretistic” disappear-
ance.
56 Moving Letters and Complex Medial Limitations in Digital Poetry
Mette-Marie Zacher Sørensen 57
fixation, the activation of different senses, the semiotics and so on). When
we have defined what a work is, we have to analyze what it does: how the
modal composition affects the experience of the work. In this sense, the
model developed by Elleström is a meta-definition of media, as Jørgen
Bruhn puts it in “Medium, Intermedialitet, Heteromedialitet” (2010). It is
thus pre-descriptive. Why should one then use a pre-descriptive model for
the modalities of media in an analysis? It would never make sense to do so
in a traditional novel where the modal composition is more or less the
same every time, but with digital poetry, every piece of work is almost a
new genre. The variety of modalities change from time to time, therefore,
the analysis of the modal composition is not simply a question of what the
work is, but also what it does and how this affects reception. For instance,
we might analyse the effect of the moving words in the reception of the
poem. When the spectator “waits” for a word, she experiences suspense
but also some form of frustration, since she cannot control the speed of the
reading as she is used to with regular poems.
Another important issue is that when we analyse a poem like “La série
des U,” we have to take into account the fact that the poem was written on
a complex surface. It can be compared to the famous Scottish poet Ian
Hamilton Finlay’s garden “Little Sparta,” where he wrote on trees, stones,
and other natural materials which then developed over time (gradually
changing, growing, becoming darker, more fragile and so on). In the digi-
tal sphere, however, the material is much more complex, since the techni-
cal medium is not merely a transparent medium, displaying certain con-
tent. According to N. Katherine Hayles, “[i]n informatics, the signifier can
no longer be understood as a single marker, for example an ink mark on a
page. Rather it exists as a flexible chain of markers bound together by the
arbitrary relations specified by the relevant codes” (1999: 31). We might
say that the machine needs its own position in the communicative struc-
ture, a third space, perhaps, or an artificial intelligence? This epistemo-
logical question concerns the digital and its ontology, and so far I am un-
able to answer the question.
Conclusion
If we return to the concrete poem “Apfel,” we can conclude that it is a
poem and a work that stretches the limits of art forms. On the material
level, “Apfel” can be defined as a two-dimensional work, whose other
levels of modality are also somehow flat. It is hardly temporal, even
though it is a poem; we regard the words (and locate the worm) without
reading them one by one. Furthermore, the poem does not establish any
58 Moving Letters and Complex Medial Limitations in Digital Poetry
Mette-Marie Zacher Sørensen 59
Works Cited
Azeredos, Ronaldo. 1967. “Como o vento.” [P. 13; n. pag.] in An Anthol-
ogy of Concrete Poetry, ed. Emmett Williams. New York: Something
Else Press.
Borsuk, Amaranth, and Brad Bouse. 2010. Between Page and Screen.
Chapbook. Los Angeles: Otis College of Art and Design. Digital book
version available at http://betweenpageandscreen.com/book (accessed
24 Oct. 2011).
Bootz, Philippe, and Marcel Frémiot. 2006. “La série des U.” Electronic
Literature Collection. Ed. N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott
Rettberg and Stephanie Strickland. http://collection.eliterature.org/1/
works/bootz_fremiot__the_set_of_u/ (accessed 11 Dec. 2010).
Bruhn, Jørgen. 2010. “Medium, intermedialitet, heteromedialitet.” Kritik
198: 77–87.
Döhl, Reinhard. 1965. “Apfel.” http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/
bootz_fremiot__the_set_of_u/index.htm (accessed 2 April 2011).
Elleström, Lars. 2010. “The Modalitites of Media: A Model for Under-
standing Intermedial Relations.” Pp. 11–41 in Media Borders, Multi-
modality and Intermediality, ed. Lars Elleström. London: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies
in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Kittler, Friedrich A. 1985. Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900. Munich: Wil-
helm Fink.
—. [1986] 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Geoffrey Win-
throp-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Mitchell, W. J. T. 2005. “There are No Visual Media.” Journal of Visual
Culture 4 (2): 257–266.
Ong, Walter J. [1982] 2002. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of
the Word. New York: Routledge.
Rajewsky, Irina O. 2005. “Intermediality, Intertextuality and Remedi-
ation.” Intermédialités 6: 43–64.
—. 2010. “Border Talks: The Problematic Status of Media Borders in the
Current Debate about Intermediality.” Pp. 51–69 in Media Borders,
Multimodality and Intermediality, ed. Lars Elleström. London: Pal-
grave Macmillan.
Saemmer, Alexandra. 2009. “Ephemeral Passages: La série des U and
Passage by Philippe Bootz.” Dichtung-Digital: Journal für digitale
60 Moving Letters and Complex Medial Limitations in Digital Poetry
Notes
1
You can watch the poem here: http://www.netzliteratur.net/solothurn/bild3.html
(accessed 11 December 2010).
2
It is possible to watch the poem here: http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/
bootz_fremiot__the_set_of_u/index.htm (accessed 2 April 2011).
3
Translation: “The footprint / Passes it / She is going / She is passing the thread /
She is following the current / The current goes / The water goes / Go(es).”
4
The newest tendency, at the time of writing, is to incorporate a webcam into
artworks and poems, thereby including the spectator and the space between a
physical object and the screen. In a digital work called Between Page and Screen
(Borsuk and Bouse 2010), the computer reads book pages and presents words in a
virtual space between the spectator and the screen.
REMEMBERING MEDIA
A CULTURAL POETICS
OF THE PHOTO-DOCUMENTARY:
JAMES AGEE AND WALKER EVANS’S LET US
NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN REVISITED
MARKKU LEHTIMÄKI
Abstract
This article explores the photo-documentary mode in a specific cultural
and historical climate, suggesting that the meaning of works of art cannot
be separated from the context of their production. The article focuses on a
classic verbal/visual text about the Great Depression, Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men, the product of a collaborative project between two artists,
writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans. By juxtaposing text
and photographs, the book discusses its own shortcomings in “realistic”
representation of poor families in the American countryside while simul-
taneously foregrounding itself as an artefact. Agee expresses his frustra-
tion with the incapacity of language to represent the full materiality of the
tenant farmers’ life. On the other hand, the visual and material aspects of
Evans’s photographs can be seen to resist narrativisation. In this article, I
argue that we need to take into account the pragmatic, rhetorical and polit-
ical aspects of photo-documentary processes, and to distinguish visual rep-
resentations from the extra-textual reality, which is always more com-
plicated than any framed image.
I doubt that the straight “naturalist” very well understands what music and
poetry are about. That would be all right if he understood his materials so
intensely that music and poetry seemed less than his intention; but I doubt
he does that. That is why his work even at best is never much more than
documentary. Not that documentation has not great dignity and value; it
has; and as good “poetry” can be extracted from it as from living itself; but
documentation is not itself either poetry or music and it is not, of itself, of
any value equivalent to theirs. So that, if you share the naturalist’s regard
for the “real” but have this regard for it on a plane which in your mind
brings it level in value with music and poetry, which in turn you value as
highly as anything on earth, it is important that your representation of
“reality” does not sag into, or become one with, naturalism; and in so far
as it does, you have sinned, that is, you have fallen short even of the
relative truth you have perceived and intended. (2001: 215, my emphasis)
Here, the authors (both Agee and Evans) present themselves as documen-
tarists whose working ethics must be considered and negotiated by the
readers. What is more, the “nominal” subject of the book—the life of
tenant families—both shapes and is shaped by the “actual” subject, that is,
the flesh-and-blood reality of the real people behind or beyond the text.
We may note that Agee changed the names of the three families, not with
the intention of creating fiction, but to grant them their dignity and indivi-
duality.
Here is how Agee writes about George Gudger, the central character of
his book:
George Gudger is a man, et cetera. But obviously, in the effort to tell of
him as truthfully as I can, I am limited. I know him only so far as I know
him, and only in those terms in which I know him; and all of that depends
as fully on who I am as on who he is. [....] The one deeply exciting thing to
me about Gudger is that he is actual, he is living, at this instant. He is not
68 A Cultural Poetics of the Photo-Documentary
Fig. 1: Untitled. Walker Evans, 1935–1936. Photograph Albums for Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men (FSA-OWI Collection, Prints and Photographs Division,
Library of Congress, Washington, DC).
Markku Lehtimäki 69
While Agee’s medium is, finally, written language, Walker Evans, in his
photograph of George Gudger (Fig. 1) and the other photographs printed
in the book, has to establish the sense of relationship between author and
character without using words. As Reed notes, Evans does so primarily in
two ways: by allowing his subjects to compose themselves, and through
the use of the family photo album genre (1992: 52–53).3 The subtle but
marked aesthetic composition of the photographs adds dignity and strength
to Evans’s subjects, those “marginal” human beings and their inglorious
daily living. These are finally real people in the pictures, not some artist’s
imaginative creations.
in their natural contexts of everyday living; and for the most part he
avoided unnatural angles, preferring to shoot from normal height and
straightforward angles (see Reed 1992: 48). There is simple poetry in
Evans’s silent, unmoving images. The style of Agee’s text is sometimes
similar; sometimes more subjective, angry and polemic.
As John Tagg has argued, instead of a certain manipulative rhetoric of
some of the other Depression-era photographs, which aimed at construct-
ing an explicit meaning through spectacle, irony and symbolisation (e.g.,
the aestheticising art of Margaret Bourke-White), Evans’s poetic images
are more obscure and more difficult to fix within a definite time, place and
event. In Evans’s photographs, “the relationships of image to image are
not those of thesis and antithesis, but of rhyme, repetition, discrepancy,
and reversal,” “the process of reading is not curtailed in advance” and “no
spatial setting is given, no wider explanatory frame, no supporting ground”
(Tagg 2009: 131–132). There is an ontological distance between the hard
material presence of real things and the observing yet subjective photographic
eye. In its demand for realism, photo-documentary art is always limited; it
never reaches “the unforgettable forgotten that does not lend itself to sig-
nification” (Tagg 2009: xxxiv). In Tagg’s phrasing, the “overwhelming
thing” and an “unencounterable real” present continuous challenges to ver-
bal and visual representation (2009: 178). In Tagg’s view, it is precisely
the problem of meaning that is visible in Evans’s photographic art.
There is an obvious allusion to Vincent van Gogh’s famous painting of
peasant shoes (1886) in a picture of a tenant farmer’s shoes taken exactly
fifty years later (see Fig. 2). We may also recall that it was van Gogh’s
painting that stimulated the great, if controversial, German philosopher
Martin Heidegger to produce his famous essay “The Origin of the Work of
Art” (1935–36), written, as we can see, during the very same time period
Evans took the picture. In his poetic essay, Heidegger explains the essence
of art in terms of the concepts of Being and truth. He writes about art’s
ability to set up an active struggle between what he calls earth and world.
While “world” in Heidegger’s terminology is a passive entity, “earth” is
active. The world simply occurs while the earth actively exists. To put it in
Heidegger’s terms, the parts that clarify and unify the work embody its
“world” aspects, while practices that help resist such completion make up
its “earth.” The earth is resistant; it cannot be fully revealed or explained.
This struggle between world and earth takes place within the artwork; but
as soon as meaning is pinned down and the work no longer offers
resistance to picturing, framing, and rationalisation, the struggle is over
(see Heidegger 1971: 39–50).4
72 A Cultural Poetics of the Photo-Documentary
Fig. 2: Untitled. Walker Evans, 1935–1936. Photograph Albums for Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men (FSA-OWI Collection, Prints and Photographs Division,
Library of Congress, Washington, DC).
Markku Lehtimäki 73
The possibility of its earth aspects is due to the fact that the reader of
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is able to connect the photograph of the
shoes to the very particular body and existence of a farmer, namely Floyd
Burroughs (“George Gudger” was the pseudonym Evans and Agee used in
their book), a man whose specific human weight can be felt in these work-
ing shoes. Agee writes of these shoes as if they were a Cubist artwork (and
obscure like Charles Bovary’s hat), and still firmly rooted in the hard work
on cotton fields:
They are one of the most ordinary types of working shoe: the blucher
design, and soft in the prow, lacking the seam across the root of the big
toe: covering the ankles: looped straps at the heels: blunt, broad, and
rounded at the toe: broad-heeled: made up of the most simple roundnesses
and squarings and flats, of dark brown raw thick leathers nailed, and sewn
coarsely to one another in courses and patterns of doubled and tripled
seams, and such throughout that like many other small objects they have
great massiveness and repose and are, as the houses and overalls are, and
the feet and legs of the women, who go barefooted so much, fine pieces of
architecture. [....] The shoes are worn for work. (2001: 241–242)
human being who wears these shoes (see Reed 1992: 47–48). Therefore,
these real objects and the earth they belong to are also artistically
transformed into something other than what they really are or really were.
Still, the contrast between Heidegger’s and Evans’s “readings” of van
Gogh’s painting is illuminating, since whereas Heidegger takes off on a
flight of fancy about universal peasantry (and we should not forget his
“national” interests), Evans’s approach to the painting has the effect of
making it appear more concrete and rooted in a specific life.
Finally, as John Tagg suggests, we need to stress the pragmatic,
rhetorical and political aspects of photo-documentary processes, and to
distinguish visual representations from the extratextual reality, which is
always more complicated than any framed image (Tagg 1988: 4). In
Evans’s pictures, just as in Agee’s prose, we are made to feel the hard
realities and the resistant earth of Depression-era Alabama, even though
neither words nor images really capture that real earth.
Works Cited
Agee, James, and Walker Evans. [1941] 2001. Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men: Three Tenant Families. London: Violette.
Baetens, Jan, and Mieke Bleyen. 2010. “Photo Narrative, Sequential Pho-
tography, Photonovels.” Pp. 165–182 in Intermediality and Story-
telling, eds. Marina Grishakova and Marie-Laure Ryan. Berlin: de
Gruyter.
Barthes, Roland. [1980] 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photog-
raphy. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang.
Batchen, Geoffrey. 1997. Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photog-
raphy. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Brown, Bill. 2003. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Lit-
erature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dickstein, Morris. 2009. Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the
Great Depression. New York: Norton.
Entin, Joseph B. 2007. Sensational Modernism: Experimental Fiction and
Photography in Thirties America. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press.
Evans, Walker. 1935–1936a. [“Burroughs’ Work Shoes”]. Photograph
from photograph albums for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. FSA-
OWI Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Cong-
ress, Washington, D.C.
Markku Lehtimäki 75
Notes
1
In addition to the collaboration between Agee and Evans, the following are worth
mentioning: Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell’s You Have Seen Their
Faces (1937); Archibald McLeish’s Land of the Free (1938), a collection of poems
including the work of various photographers; Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor’s
An American Exodus (1939), and Richard Wright and Edwin Rosskam’s Twelve
Million Black Voices (1941). The influence of the FSA photographs is perhaps also
felt in the narrative style of what may be the most famous of the Depression-era
novels, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Two remarkable studies of
the era are Stott (1973) and Dickstein (2009). See also my earlier article on this
subject (Lehtimäki 2010).
The present article is part of my research project (128066), funded by the
Academy of Finland.
2
Cultural poetics can be defined as an attempt to describe the reflexive relations
between artistic form and cultural context (see Watten 2003: xv, xxv). According
to this practice, the established concepts of literary theory—mimesis, representa-
tion, allusion and the like—seem inadequate in describing contemporary cultural
phenomena in which social energies are charged with aesthetic discourses and vice
versa (see Greenblatt 1990: 146).
3
Marianne Hirsch’s book Family Frames might be an interesting touchstone here.
Hirsch discusses the ways photographs can powerfully shape personal and collec-
tive memory. She speaks of the “continuing power and ‘burden’ of photographic
reference,” and notes that the camera is an apparatus whose “social functions are
integrally tied to the ideology of modern family” (Hirsch 1997: 6, 7).
4
Fredric Jameson somewhat clarifies this by saying that Heidegger’s theory is
“organized around the idea that the work of art emerges within the gap between
Earth and World, or what I would prefer to translate as the meaningless materiality
of the body and nature and the meaning endowment of history and of the social.”
Jameson adds that “Heidegger’s account needs to be completed by insistence on
the renewed materiality of the work, on the transformation of one form of materi-
ality—the earth itself and its paths and physical objects—into that other materiality
Markku Lehtimäki 77
of oil paint” (Jameson 2005: 7–8). Jameson also refers to Walker Evans’s photo-
graph of the tenant shoes in his own analysis of van Gogh’s painting of the peasant
shoes.
5
The photograph is thus connected to the physicality of the past, or, as Roland
Barthes puts it: “In Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there.
There is a superimposition here: of reality and of the past” (Barthes 1981: 76).
HISTORICAL FICTION AND EKPHRASIS
IN LEENA LANDER’S THE ORDER
MARI HATAVARA
Abstract
This article analyses ekphrastic descriptions and their manifold references
in Leena Lander’s historical novel The Order (2003). In historical novels,
the question of referentiality is a prominent feature of the storyworld.
However, the referred past world is temporally unattainable. This forms a
fruitful structural analogy between ekphrasis and historical fiction: In ek-
phrasis, the textual other, the visual object, is always absent from its verbal
imitation. Similarly in historical writing, the temporal other, the past, is al-
ways absent; it is not available to the senses or experience as such. As a
formal difference inherent to ekphrasis, this mode of alienation is crucial
in The Order. In alternating between ekphrastic hope and indifference in
the reader’s perception, Lander’s novel mediates between the past and the
present, thereby suggesting that history is not to be explained by full
narrativisation but rather needs to maintain a tension between the interpre-
ter and the object of interpretation.
tion to the discussion has been Tamar Yacobi’s (2000: esp. 712–717)
study of the analogical structure of fiction and intermedial allusion.
Yacobi remarks that all fiction is a system of embedded discourses: Nar-
rators quote characters, and so on; in many cases, with several layers of
both narrators and characters. She adds that while all cases of quotation
involve the question of whether verbal expression has been modified or
not in the process, ekphrasis inevitably involves the modification of the
visual to the verbal. Therefore, it brings the question of quoting to a head,
and helps investigate the phenomena involved.
In this article,1 I analyse ekphrastic descriptions and their manifold
references in a single novel’s storyworld, along with the reader’s interpre-
tation of it. I concentrate on the genre of the historical novel where the
question of referentiality is prominent: The storyworld connects with
known historical reality (see Maxwell 1998: 545). Yet, this referred past
world is inevitably absent from its representation; it is temporally unat-
tainable. This forms a fruitful structural analogy between ekphrasis and
historical fiction: In ekphrasis, the textual other, the visual object, is al-
ways absent from its verbal imitation (see Mitchell 1994: 158). Similarly
in historical writing, the temporal other, the past, is always absent; it is not
available to the senses or experience as such. Furthermore, the relationship
between the past and history entails both friction and interdependence,
otherness and similarity. In a parallel manner, interpreting ekphrasis
causes both fear and the hope of overcoming the difference between the
verbal and the visual, as well as indifference due to the impossibility of
this intermedial mirroring (see Mitchell 1994: 163). In historical writing,
otherness and difference are temporal and epistemological, while in ek-
phrasis they are medial.
The historical novel I analyse is Leena Lander’s The Order (Käsky
2003).2 Lander is a Finnish author who has published novels, short stories,
plays and radio plays. The Order has been adapted for film (directed by
Aku Louhimies) and theatre (with two dramatisations, one by Lander
herself and the other by Seppo Parkkinen). The novel has a frame narrative
where the narrator introduces herself as the writer of the book. She recalls
a visit at her grandfather’s where she had caught a glimpse of an old
photograph. The narrator does not see much of the photograph or learn
anything more at the moment. The reader is given a short description of
the photograph: “Pudonneen kuvan alta paljastui toinen kuva. Epäselvä,
keskeltä uudestaan liimattu. Lumisesta puusta riippuva pitkä, tumma
mytty” [“From under the fallen photo, another photograph appeared. Un-
clear, glued together from the middle. A tall, dark bundle hanging from a
snowy tree”] (Lander 2003: 9). This photograph, even if unclear and only
Mari Hatavara 81
glimpsed once, functions as an inspiration for the story to come. The nar-
rator regards the photograph as evidence from the past—even if she admits
the possibility of misinterpretation. The short description of this photo-
graph is only the beginning of a chain of ekphrases in the novel which all
refer to the same visual object, the target of the photograph. This ekphras-
tic description of a visual object, along with many others, is crucial to the
reader’s understanding of this historical novel.
The narrator admits that the story she is about to tell might not be true,
but still regards it as important. This open contemplation of the truth value
of the story is typical of contemporary historical fiction (see Hutcheon
1999: 122–123), as well as historical understanding generally. As Markku
Hyrkkänen (2009: 263) has aptly stated, “[a]ll historical events are past
events but not all past events are historical events.” The subjectivity and
relativity of historical writing has been discussed for decades (see, for
example, White 1978: 85–87; Barthes 1970). What is important for the
argument I want to make here is the repeated analogy between historical
writing and pictorial arts when sketched by historians. As they and phi-
losophers of history have become more and more aware of history being a
narrative with a subjective point of view rather than a collection of facts,
they also tend to claim its truth value as resembling a novel, a painting or a
photograph (see, for example, Kellner 1995: 1; Ankersmit 1995: 238–240;
2001: 39–48). What I am about to disclose is the potential of a historical
novel to illustrate history and historical writing by employing certain
intermedial modes where the oppositions and analogies between the verbal
and the visual become highlighted. The relationship between historiogra-
phy and verbal or visual art is far from straightforward, and needs to be
studied in detail, case by case. This is why I shall narrow my analysis
down to a single novel in this article.
I place special emphasis on the way ekphrasis is used as a means of
depicting the past storyworld in Lander’s novel. I want to explore how this
intermedial device enables the rendering of the past storyworld in a man-
ner which both respects the alien nature of the past and recognises the
need and obligation to try and make the past meaningful for the present.
This mediation of the present and the past coincides in The Order with the
mediation of verbal and pictorial presentation. The reader gets involved in
a web of references where ekphrastic allusions help her to approach the
past storyworld. It is through the characters’ ekphrases in particular that
the reader is offered an interpretative position where she can partake in the
process of historical understanding. The narrative mode of the novel is
third-person narrative. The novel operates mostly on character focalisation
where the characters’ perception—vision, hearing and so on—dominates
82 Historical Fiction and Ekphrasis in Leena Lander’s The Order
acters’ own identity project but also, what is more, for the reader’s inter-
pretation of the historical events.
Before going into the novel in detail, I want to point out one more im-
portant aspect of the kind of ekphrastic descriptions The Order includes.
Yacobi (1995: 618–622) argues that in addition to a broad interpretative
domain, ekphrastic reference to a visual model is available for narrative
use too, to serve the story. Traditionally, many of the defining features of
narrative, such as temporal change, events and causality, have been re-
garded as alien to any description or visual representation. Yet it is main-
tained that storytelling requires a certain amount of description in order to
create the illusion of the storyworld, among other things. In many ways,
the connections between the verbal and the visual, rather than their mutual
separation, have garnered more attention during the last decades (see
Wagner 1995: 6–7; Horstkotte and Pedri 2008: 2–5). W. J. T. Mitchell
(1994: 160–161), for example, has argued that, semantically, there is no
essential difference between text and image; whereas the verbal and the
pictorial are different types of modes, both can communicate similar
things and are not, in the end, restricted to the typical dichotomies of spa-
tiality vs. temporality or static vs. dynamic.
I do, however, think that the idiosyncrasies of each representational
medium are essential in the understanding of art—be it verbal or pictorial.
While Mitchell is right in arguing that the strict dichotomies are but a
handicap to research, I believe it is the borderline cases and crossovers that
make the distinctions between media and modes both more interesting and
more significant. Furthermore, I want to illustrate how the storytelling
capacity of ekphrasis becomes evident in Lander’s novel. The novel has
ekphrases and ekphrastic descriptions which are essential to plot and char-
acterisation, and often function on the story level (see Yacobi 1995: 641–
642). Nonetheless, the differences between the media, i.e., the alienation
caused by rendering something visual in a verbal mode, is also significant
in the novel. The differences between the verbal and the visual coincide
with the reader’s interpretative effort to understand the past and history.
novel depicts one such prison camp which also has a court martial. The
place is a former sanatorium for the mentally ill. The characters represent
the opposite sides of the war. To put it plainly: Miina Malin is a captured
female Red soldier, a worker from a low-status family. Aaro Harjula is an
elite soldier of the Whites, a former officer in the German army. The third
part of the triangle—there is a love triangle revolving around Aaro—is
Emil Hallenberg. He is an author and an acting judge of the court martial
at the prison camp. Another character important to my argument here is
Konsta, or Konstantin Martikainen. He is a mentally injured handyman
who used to be a patient at the sanatorium. Konsta is considered harmless
and let to wander freely among both the officials and the prisoners. He has
a fixation with taking photographs—using a camera which the officials
wrongly assume is no longer working. These photographs, and their ek-
phrastic descriptions, carry important metaphorical and formal implica-
tions in the novel.
One of Konsta’s photographs is the one described in the frame narra-
tive. In the following example, Emil is talking to Aaro. He explains how
Konsta found the body of the director of the sanatorium, who had hanged
himself from a tree shortly after his sanatorium had been turned into a
prison camp.
[Just imagine what a horrible sight it must have been: the dead superior
covered in snow flakes, hanging from a branch of a pine. […] The poor
thing [Konsta] has described it to me time and again: how the doctor’s coat
was torn, and curved over the body like a frozen wing. The face blue, stiff-
ened hard as marble. As it happened, Konsta touched it. Poor crazy thing.
That frozen apparition lurking in the snowy forest must have made an im-
pression in the mind of that fool as something frighteningly supernatural,
demonic or biblical, like in the altar-piece we have in the chapel.]
“poor thing” or a “poor crazy thing.” Yacobi (2000: 712–713, 720) has
observed that emotive language in a character’s ekphrasis tells more about
the character who provides the description than about the object of the
description. Here the emotive content is expressed by Emil. Moreover, the
whole communicative situation and not only the sender of the message
should be considered. Emil invites Aaro, to whom he is talking, to imagine
this scene with him (“just imagine”). Neither Aaro nor Emil has actually
witnessed the scene, but Emil relies on Konsta’s description. This invita-
tion to imagine may also be extended to address the real reader of the text:
She is also invited to imagine with Aaro and Emil what a horrible sight
Konsta had seen.
Emil does not know that Konsta has taken a photograph of the dead di-
rector. Later, when this scene turns out to have a photographic equivalent,
it becomes a threat to Emil as evidence of the violence at the prison camp.
Besides acting as evidence of things past (see Barthes 2000: 82–87; Son-
tag 2003: 26), photographs are considered capable of transcending the line
between past and present, as well as the line between life and death (see
Sontag 1979: 15; Hirsch 2008: 115–117; Horstkotte and Pedri 2008: 15).
Konsta’s photograph of the dead director makes it impossible for the de-
ceased matter to remain buried in the past and be simply forgotten about.
The novel includes a third description to complement the two I have
quoted: Miina’s ekphrasis of the altar painting in the chapel. Notably, in
Emil’s ekphrasis, Emil drew a direct parallel between Konsta’s sight and
the altar painting. Towards the end of the novel Miina enters the men-
tioned chapel with Emil and Aaro and looks at the altar: “Joku on tuonut
alttarille kevätkukkakimpun. Sen yllä enkelien kannattelema rujo Kristus
luo vaikeasti tulkittavan katseen heitä [Miina, Aaro, Emil] kohti”
[“Someone has brought a bunch of spring flowers to the altar. Above it a
malformed Christ, held up by angels, gives them (Miina, Aaro, Emil) a
gaze that is hard to interpret”] (Lander 2003: 212). Emil and Miina both
perceive, or at least describe, the altar painting with Christ in a negative
manner. For Miina, Christ is “malformed” and staring at people.
The three ekphrases just analysed, I would like to suggest, form chains
of representation. The novel offers, firstly, the narrator’s description of
what, secondly, turns out to be a photograph taken by Konsta of the scene
he has witnessed which, thirdly, Emil describes to Aaro. In this descrip-
tion, furthermore, Emil refers to the altar painting which, fourthly, is the
object of Miina’s ekphrasis. These four instances of description, each
linking to each other and building a continuum, turn into a plenitude of
representations that is several steps removed from the represented object,
be it the dead director or Christ. The characters make the connection be-
86 Historical Fiction and Ekphrasis in Leena Lander’s The Order
tween these objects, but the reader needs to make the connection between
the photograph mentioned in the frame story and these descriptions. All
along the way, the reader is invited to imagine what and how the charac-
ters perceive.
These chains of representation function in a manner which Mieke Bal
(1997: 5) maintains is especially important in the process of narrativising
visual images; linking and combining images form, according to her, the
basis of meaning-making. What makes these images accessible to the
reader is the model to which they refer, and the more general schema or
script to which it adheres. Bal (1997: 201, 212–213) suggests that a series
of pictures of the same target are especially revealing of their object’s
nature. In Lander’s novel, this series of pictures is not so much available to
the characters in the storyworld, but to the reader who connects the ek-
phrases with one another. Susan Sontag (2003: 85–86) has mentioned that
high emotive involvement with a photograph often results in changes in
the viewer’s opinion of history. In The Order, the ekphrases offer the
reader abundant material for this kind of involvement, both because of the
objects described (suicide and crucified Christ), and because of the char-
acters’ choice of words in the description.
Hidden Pictures
The high emotional involvement of characters is even more obvious in the
next example, where Miina recalls seeing a hidden photograph. The
photograph reveals Miina’s little sister being sexually abused:
[In a short moment she had seen more than the amateur photos could con-
tain. She had seen the legs and the hands and the sweat on the bold fore-
head. She had heard the whimpering of the child and the hard breath of the
old man. And a groan when he came. She had smelled Vaseline and the
little girl's pee and the ammonia of semen. She had seen the child who
waited for her turn. She had heard the clinking of schnapps glasses, can-
dies, rewards for a good girl on the table, and a swishing sound that meant
the removing of the camera’s protective cover.]
Mari Hatavara 87
This ekphrasis surpasses in two ways what the object of description can
technically convey. Firstly, a photograph cannot capture sounds and smells
(like the whimpering of the child or the odour of Vaseline) which Miina
interprets from the image. Secondly, Miina also appears to see things
framed outside of the picture, like the child waiting for her turn. Thus
neither the material limitations of the vehicle (a photograph) nor the origi-
nal choices of selecting and framing apply. Miina’s perception and de-
scription of the photograph transgresses, as the text says, what “the ama-
teur photos could contain”—she overcomes the original choices inherent
in photographic representation (see Horstkotte and Pedri 2008: 13–15).
This ekphrasis, apparently, is able to conjure the reality as a horrible scene
in Miina’s imagination (see Mitchell 1994: 158).
Whereas the dead director was aligned with Christ, this ugly descrip-
tion of child abuse also has a parallel pictorial model. Miina has worked in
a photographer’s studio—which has led to the discovery of the hidden
pictures—where customers have re-enacted classical scenes and motifs.
Miina’s little sister has been involved in one of these scenes and acted as
Cupid, the god of love, who is customarily depicted as a more or less
naked child. These re-enactments have been photographed and the photo-
graphs are public—they are considered art. The public and the hidden
photographs of Miina’s naked little sister thus act as counterparts to each
other. Via the analogy, the pedophilic pictures also refer to the familiar
pictorial model of Cupid, but with a reversed meaning. This is further
illuminated when the little sister herself tells Miina ironically: “[m]eidän
pikku Selma kelpasi esittämään paljapyllyistä amoriinia Fotografisen
Seuran viehkeissä kuvaelmissa” [“our little Selma was good enough,
though, to act as a barebottomed Cupid in the graceful tableaus of the
Photographic Society] (Lander 2003: 97). These graceful tableaus, how-
ever, overlie other, ugly ones where the god of love is reduced to a mo-
lested child.
The theme of Cupid recurs in the novel. Emil, while talking to Aaro
about the post-war situation, looks at and muses on a fountain in the yard.
Emil’s ekphrasis discloses his opinion of the state of things at large.
[Emil looks at the fountain with sadness. The stone angels—or are they
cherubs—of the smaller fountain at the centre are missing limbs, and their
wings are but sordid shreds. Ice and weather have done their deed; the
basin has cracked. There have perhaps been fish in it, small red carp; their
mermaid-like, hypnotic movements have given the lunatics peculiar solace.
Could the fountain be repaired? There must be a way to restore the poor
fountain to its past glory.]
the dead director and child abuse, which may act as physical evidence, are
hidden in concrete ways. They need to be found and made public in order
to correct the public picture of history. People in the storyworld may try,
like Emil, to maintain their illusion of a “past glory” and the possibility of
returning to it. The Order suggests, however, that it is impossible to retain
this illusion, as the remains of the past are present—both materially and
temporally.
Visual History
What do my analyses of Lander’s novel mean in a broader sense? They
allow me to formulate a poetics of the novel, which I understand as an
effort to create a certain kind of visual history. The Order’s abundant ek-
phrastic models, of which I have given two examples, transcend time.
They function within every temporal level of the novel, as Christ and Cu-
pid are known to the characters, the narrator and the reader alike. Through
these familiar models, the character’s experience, the narrator’s explan-
ations and the reader’s interpretative effort coincide, and the boundaries
between different points of time and different narrative levels become
ambiguous—just as the borders between verbal and visual representations
are endangered in ekphrasis.
This ambiguity comes close to what David Herman (1998: 81; 2002:
214–220) calls polychronic narration or omnitemporality. Although The
Order does not include anachronisms that would question the whole tem-
poral order of the story or narrative, it creates an interpretative space open
to agents from all levels of narrative communication. The novel suggests a
mixing of different temporal levels through ekphrastic, interpretative mod-
els. What is introduced in the frame story as a retrospective quest for the
past turns out to evoke a plurality of pasts that still work on the present.
The theme of photography is prominent in the plot of Lander’s novel.
In the end, the photographs Konsta has taken, unbeknownst to anybody,
threaten to uncover the cruelties that have taken place under the command
of Emil. What is more important is the function of individual photographs
in the novel. The two photographs I have introduced as examples of ob-
jects of ekphrasis have a special relation to the past. Marianne Hirsch
(2008: 115) has maintained that “photographic images that survive mas-
sive devastation and outlive their subjects and owners function as ghostly
revenants from an irretrievably lost past world.” She then argues for the
notion of postmemory, referring to the memories evoked not in the minds
of those who experienced the event represented in a photograph but of
90 Historical Fiction and Ekphrasis in Leena Lander’s The Order
later generations who face the photographs as evidence (Hirsch 2008: 107,
111–112).
The Order indeed promotes a kind of “postmemory,” but more specifi-
cally, it offers an illumination of how history is constructed. Thus I would
be more inclined to concur with Sontag (2003: 85–86), as she claims col-
lective memories should not be regarded as memories but as statements or
claims. Lander’s novel makes claims about the past that aim at revealing
new insights into the past. In his The Idea of History (1946), R. G. Col-
lingwood postulates his theses according to which history should be both
concerned with human actions and intentions in the past, and pursued as
interpretation of evidence in the present (1986: 215–218). In The Order,
the characters’ ekphrases highlight the characters’ experience in the past,
and the ekphrastic models used increase the communicability of this past
to the reader. Thus the level of both action and intention and the level of
interpretation are involved and converge in the ekphrastic models.
Silke Horstkotte and Nancy Pedri write that “the photograph superim-
poses a past on a present moment” (2008: 18). They thus argue photogra-
phy is an art of both space and time. In Lander’s novel this superimposi-
tion works in many ways: Not only do the photographs bring about the
past they portray, but they also occur in layers and superimpose different
points of view on each other. For example, the photograph of the dead
director is hidden under another photograph depicting the same era, and
the pedophilic photographs of abused children underlie the sublime classi-
cal scenes staged and photographed in the studio.
The multiplicity of viewpoints is, of course, typical of contemporary
historical fiction (see Hutcheon 1999: 108). The thematisation of pho-
tography does, however, add a new turn. As Horstkotte and Pedri (2008:
20–21) have put it, “postmodernist writers have come to use photographs
as the reverse of representation: as a revelation of the invisible, unseeable,
and, indeed, unknowable.” Thematically, this is what the photographs
mean in The Order. They represent things people want to try to hide or
erase. Therefore, photographs are not as much devices of conserving the
past but of offering revelations about a past that has been suppressed.
An important question in history is, of course, whose history it is that
gets recorded (see Hutcheon 1999: 120). Historical fiction—as well as
historiography proper to some extent—has increasingly turned towards
depicting individuals, not historically known personalities or generally
recognisable representatives of a class or a type (McHale 1987: 90;
Hutcheon 1999: 113–115). This requires other means of familiarising the
reader with the storyworld and helping her find familiar scripts and
schema. The ekphrases in The Order, with culturally shared visual models
Mari Hatavara 91
as their referents, serve the story and interpretation of the past. They char-
acterise not only the characters but also the events within a broader mean-
ing.
In The Order, individual experience (mainly Miina’s and Emil’s) of
war is communicated with the help of references to general imagery
(Christ figure, Cupid). Yacobi (1995: 627) has argued that the ekphrasis of
a visual model (as opposed to an ekphrasis of a single work of art) may
have narrative effects in addition to or instead of descriptive, picture-like
effects. She also maintains that these ekphrastic models allow the reader to
approach the storyworld with the help of pictorial representations familiar
to herself. This narrativisation—and familiarisation—happens in Lander’s
novel for two reasons in particular: firstly, referring to a model rather than
a single image allows for the consideration of several examples of that
model, and, secondly, ekphrases referring to different singular fictional
objects but the same real-life model reveal particular meanings that the
model may adopt. These variations in the meaning of an ekphrastic model
form a set of changes and modifications that follow each other—even if
not causally but temporally—and constitute the minimum definition of a
narrative.
It may be thought that historical narrative in particular is essentially
about a transition. Arthur C. Danto (2007: 235–245) has emphasised that
historical narratives are all about change: that something is different from
one moment to another. The ekphrases in The Order play with alternation
between sameness and change, between recognition and alienation. They
refer to a visual model culturally known to the reader, like Cupid or the
crucifixion of Christ, and contrast them with pictures of abused children
and suicide. This contrasting occurs both in the visual targets and the
verbal representations of these ekphrases. The visual targets of Christ and
suicide, as well as Cupid and the abused child, resemble each other in
figure, and their verbal imitations use the same vocabulary to refer to both
parties of the pairs. Although this narrativisation cannot be complete, the
reader is constantly faced with new references and meanings to which the
past adheres.
Works Cited
Ankersmit, Franklin Rudolf. 1995. “Statements, Texts and Pictures.” Pp.
212–240 in New Philosophy of History, eds. F. R. Ankersmit and Hans
Kellner. London: Reaktion.
—. 2001. Historical Representation. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Bakhtin, Mihail. [1963] 1984. Problems of Dostojevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and
trans. Caryl Emerson. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Bal, Mieke. 1997. The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually. Trans.
A.-L. Milne. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Barthes, Roland. [1967] 1970. “Historical Discourse.” Pp. 145–155 in
Introduction to Structuralism, ed. Michael Lane. Trans. Peter Wexler.
New York: Basic Books.
—. [1981] 2000. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans.
Richard Howard. London: Vintage.
Clüver, Claus. 1997. “Ekphrasis Reconsidered: On Verbal Representations
of Non-Verbal Texts.” Pp. 19–33 in Interart Poetics: Essays on the
Interrelations of the Arts and Media, eds. Ulla-Britta Lagerroth, Hans
Lund and Erik Hedling. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Collingwood, R[obin] G[eorge]. [1946] 1986. The Idea of History: Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press.
Danto, Arthur C. [1983] 2007. Narration and Knowledge: Including the
Integral Text of Analytical Philosophy of History. New York: Colum-
bia University Press.
Fludernik, Monika. 2003. “Natural Narratology and Cognitive Param-
eters.” Pp. 243–267 in Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences,
ed. David Herman. Stanford: CSLI.
Heffernan, James A. W. 1991. “Ekphrasis and Representation.” New Lit-
erary History 22 (2): 297–316.
Herman, David. 1998. “Limits of Order: Toward a Theory of Polychronic
Narration.” Narrative 6 (1): 72–95.
94 Historical Fiction and Ekphrasis in Leena Lander’s The Order
Notes
1
This article was completed during my stay as a Fellow in Residence at the
Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study.
2
Käsky is the original title in Finnish. The novel has not been translated into
English, so the English translations of the quotations are mine. There are, however,
translations of the novel in Swedish (Varghyndan 2005); in Dutch (Het bevel
2005); in Estonian (Käsk 2006); in German (Die Unbeugsame 2006); in French
(Obéir 2006); in Polish (Rozkaz 2006); in Italian (L’ordine 2007); in Lithuanian
(Sakymas 2007); in Norwegian (Den rode fangen 2007) and in Albanian (Urdhri
2008). The film based on the novel has been distributed under the English title
Tears of April.
FORMS OF EKPHRASIS IN D’ANNUNZIO’S
THE CHILD OF PLEASURE
HELENA ESKELINEN
Abstract
Ekphrasis, the verbal representation of visual representation, appears in
many functions in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s novel The Child of Pleasure
(1889). The narrative proceeds as a series of ekphrastic descriptions, with
passages from different sources embedded in the text. As a textual “other,”
ekphrasis draws attention to the implicit meanings of the text. In the pas-
sage from The Child of Pleasure analysed in this paper, ekphrastic de-
scriptions bring forth the tensions between different kinds of masculinity
and between words and images, as well as the theme of possession. The
ekphrastic scene, which takes place in a library, also invites us to reflect
upon the visual images that are the sources of D’Annunzio’s verbal de-
scriptions. An analysis of the “borrowings” makes it evident that the effect
of ekphrasis is twofold: It influences the way we write about visual art,
and it also influences the way we perceive art.
[It (the drawing) was the product of an extraordinary faculty for fantasy:
the dance of female skeletons, under the nocturnal sky, which the flagellant
Death was conducting. Against the immodest face of the moon appeared a
black cloud that was monstrous and drawn with the vigour and skill of Ho-
kusai; the attitude of the grim choirmaster and the expression of her skull,
with its empty orbits, had a touch of marvellous vitality, of vivid realism,
which no other artist has ever reached in the depiction of Death; and all
that grotesque dance of skeletons, with loosened joints and in untied
dresses, under the menace, under the menace of the scourge, revealed the
tremendous fever which had possessed the hand of the draughtsman, the
tremendous folly that had possessed his brain.] 4
Alla parete pendeva il ritratto di Lady Heathfield accanto a una copia della
Nelly O’Brien di Joshua Reynolds. Ambedue le creature, dal fondo della
tela, quardavano con la stessa intensità penetrante, con lo stesso ardor di
passione, con la stessa fiamma di desiderio sensuale, con la stessa prodi-
giosa eloquenza; ambedue avevano la bocca ambigua, enigmatica, sibil-
lina, la bocca delle infaticabili ed inesorabili bevitrici d’anime; e avevano
ambedue la fronte marmorea, immacolato, lucente d’una perpetua purità.
(D’Annunzio 2005: 321)
[On the wall hung the portrait of Lady Heathfield side by side with a copy
of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Nelly O’Brien. And the two women looked out of
the canvas with the same, self-same piercing intensity, the same glow of
passion, the same flame of sensual desire, the same marvellous eloquence;
each had a mouth that was ambiguous, enigmatic, sibylline, the mouth of
the insatiable absorber of souls; and each had a brow of marble whiteness,
immaculately, radiantly pure.]10
Responsive Images
In D’Annunzio’s library scene, the portrait of Elena, which should be an
object of aesthetic admiration, becomes instead a living image. Typically,
106 Forms of Ekphrasis in D’Annunzio’s The Child of Pleasure
Works Cited
Bann, Stephen, ed. 2004. The Reception of Walter Pater in Europe.
London: Thoemmes.
Bàrberi Squarotti, Giorgio. 1992. La scrittura verso il nulla: D’Annunzio.
Turin: Genesi.
Barilli, Renato. 1999. “Il posto di Michetti nella pittura europea fin-de-
siècle.” Pp. 15–18 in Francesco Paolo Michetti: Dipinti, pastelli, di-
segni. Naples: Electa.
Becker, Jared M. 1994. Nationalism and Culture: Gabriele D’Annunzio
and Italy after the Risorgimento. New York: Peter Lang.
Cantelmo, Marinella. 1996. Il Piacere dei leggitori: D’Annunzio e la
comunicazione letteraria. Ravenna: Longo.
Carrier, David. 2003. Writing about Visual Art. New York: Allworth.
Chesneau, Ernest. n. d. La peinture anglaise. Paris: A. Quantin.
Connell, R.W. 1995. Masculinities. London: Polity.
Dijkstra, Bram. 1986. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in
Fin-de-siècle Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
D’Annunzio, Gabriele. [1883] 1996. “Il Voto: Quadro di F.P. Michetti.”
Pp. 92–110 in Scritti giornalistici 1882–1888. Milan: Mondadori.
—. [1889] 2005. Prose di romanzi: A cura di Annamaria Andreoli. Vol. 1.
Milan: Mondadori.
Duncan, Derek. 1997. “Choice Objects: The Bodies of Gabriele D’Ann-
unzio.” Italian Studies 52 (9): 131–150.
Giannantonio, Valeria. 2001. L’universo dei sensi. Letteratura e artificio
in D’Annunzio. Roma: Bulzoni.
Gombrich, E. H. 1960. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pic-
torial Representation. New York: Pantheon.
Heffernan, James A. W. 1993. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis
from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mannings, David. 2000. Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of
His Paintings. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Mitchell, W. J. T. 2005. What Do Pictures Want? Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
—. 1994. Picture Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pater, Walter. 1907. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. New
York: Macmillan.
108 Forms of Ekphrasis in D’Annunzio’s The Child of Pleasure
Notes
1
I use the term “ekphrasis” in the sense proposed by James A. W. Heffernan, as
“the verbal representation of visual representation” (Heffernan 1993: 3).
2
See, for instance, Bàrberi Squarotti 1992; Cantelmo 1996; Giannantonio 2001.
3
My quotations are from a 2005 edition of The Child of Pleasure.
4
English translations are mine, unless otherwise stated.
5
As sources for his study, Dijkstra uses reproductions that appeared in periodicals,
newspapers and exhibition catalogues; in brief, images that the public actually saw.
6
I use the word “masculinity” in the sense promoted by the social sciences (see for
example Connell 1995): as constructed and relational, not as a biological charac-
teristic.
7
The ineptitude of D’Annunzio’s heroes has been pointed out by Pireddu 1997 and
Spackman 1989.
8
In fin-de-siècle discourse, a weak nation is like a helpless male enslaved by a
woman (see Becker 1994: 157; Dijkstra 1986: 211).
9
Barbara Spackman argues that, for a male character, convalescence signifies a re-
turn to childhood and feminisation; see Spackman 1989: 61.
10
This translation is by Georgina Harding and Arthur Symons (1898); available at
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20015 (accessed 20 April 2011). Unfortunately
the English translation of the novel is flawed; for instance, large portions of the
text have been omitted.
11
This was already pointed out by Praz 1972: 410.
12
All the sources used by D’Annunzio have been brought to light by Annamaria
Andreoli in the edition of Prose di romanzi cited; however, many of them were al-
ready pointed out shortly after The Child of Pleasure was published.
13
The Renaissance was not translated into Italian until 1912 (by Aldo de Rinaldis,
see Bann 2004) but Vernon Lee published a translation of the description of the
Mona Lisa in an article featured in Fanfulla della domenica, in 1885, as Giuliana
Pieri points out (Pieri 2007: 46).
Helena Eskelinen 109
14
As mother of Helen of Troy (Leda) and Mary (Saint Anne), the Mona Lisa is
also a figure connecting Elena Muti (Helen) and Maria Ferres (Mary).
15
Interest in Pater in Italy in the nineteenth century coincides with the birth of
English studies, in which such writers close to D’Annunzio as Enrico Nencioni and
Angelo Conti were important (see Bann 2004: 5–7; see also Pieri 2007).
16
“Il Voto: Quadro di F.P. Michetti,” Fanfulla della domenica, 14 January 1883,
reproduced in D’Annunzio 1996: 92–100.
17
For instance, Barilli 1999.
18
I owe this “anthropomorphic” view of images to Mitchell 2005.
CONSTRUCTING MEDIA AT THE TURN
TH
OF THE 18 CENTURY:
PAINTING AND POETRY IN DRYDEN,
ADDISON AND RICHARDSON
TOMMI KAKKO
Abstract
Theories of media have a tendency to reduce various media to a single
master medium, to either a private mental medium or an abstract public
and discursive medium. A brief look at early eighteenth-century thought
informed by John Locke’s philosophy as found in theories of art posed by
John Dryden, Joseph Addison and Jonathan Richardson indicates that the
notion of a master medium was also a central concern in contemporary
criticism of Locke’s philosophy. It suggests as well that a modern concep-
tion of a public master medium inherits many of the Lockean problems if
we conceive of thought as a simple reflection of public discourse. A criti-
cal self-awareness necessary for the creation of modern transmedial theo-
ries of the arts benefits from the study of the arguments that created and
shaped the theoretical field concerned with intermediality today.
as things that share an abstract quality or essence; for example, the quality
of being tools for communication. While the essentially communicative
nature of media has been challenged often enough, W. J. T. Mitchell sug-
gests that there is a paradox built into the very concept of a medium, be-
cause media seem to “occupy some sort of vague middle ground between
materials and the things people do with them” (2005: 204). The paradox
leads to problems, especially when one begins to view media critically and
attempts to define the boundaries of a given medium. The paradox leaves
Mitchell wondering whether the concept of a medium can be redeemed
and finally to argue that all media are in fact mixed media.1 He rejects
attempts to purify concepts of various media as utopian and extends his
view of the inherent intermediality of all media to thought itself by refer-
ring to Wittgenstein’s critique of language, in which thinking does not take
place in some “queer medium” inside the mind. Minds, according to this
view, are also inherently mediated and one assumes that as the mind lacks
a metalanguage of its own, it must resort to the generally available ma-
terial mixed media. This mixing of intermediality and thought warrants
new questions about the viability of the concept of a medium. It also war-
rants the examination of the arguments by which these notions came to be
and the form they took in earlier theories which provide us with much of
the language with which we try to make sense of our media-saturated
modern world.
Discussions concerning the relationship of poetry and painting, in par-
ticular, often begin either with Lessing’s insistence on the limits of the two
media or Edmund Burke’s objections to contemporary notions of poetic
images and the imagination (see, for example, Marshall 2005). Burke and
Lessing are seen as the beginning of a new paradigm that discarded ut
pictura poesis theories, which reached their apex after the first half of the
eighteenth century. The aim of this article is to examine an earlier shift in
aesthetic theory. I attempt to trace what I will call the idea model or idea
theory of aesthetics derived from John Locke’s philosophy in the texts of
John Dryden, Joseph Addison and Jonathan Richardson. I use these
terms—in the spirit of the eighteenth-century philosopher Thomas Reid—
instead of the more conventional copy theory in order to underline the
separation of Wittgenstein’s queer medium of the mind from the artistic
medium. Sketching a picture of this early transmedial theory also suggests
that intermediality as a concept supports the Wittgensteinian objection to
theories involving a private mental medium, but the objection alone does
not present a solution to their inherent problems or solve those inherent in
the notion of any type of master medium to which other media could be re-
duced.
Tommi Kakko 113
Dryden
In the spring of 1695, Dryden published a prose translation of Charles
Alphonse Du Fresnoy’s De arte graphica (1668) and prefaced it with an
essay George Saintsbury famously called “the first writing at any length
by a very distinguished Englishman of letters on the subject of pictorial
art” (Saintsbury 1902: 385). It is clear from the essay that Dryden is not
very familiar with painting, but he was the most eminent poet of his time
and as qualified as anyone to draw parallels between poetry and painting.
After informing the reader of his initial reluctance to write about painting,
he begins the preface with a clear statement of purpose: “The business of
this preface is to prove that a learned painter should form to himself an
idea of perfect nature. This image he is to set before his mind in all his un-
dertakings, and to draw from thence, as from a store house, the beauties
which are to enter into his work” (1962: 183–184). By “perfect nature”
Dryden means a conception of the natural world in its perfect state, an
image of nature as it should be at its best. It is indeed this nature that has to
be imitated in poetry and painting, not the actual world. The concept en-
ables a much more flexible approach to the mimetic arts and a more per-
fect object of imitation than the natural world in its many imperfections
could ever provide.
However, this does not mean that the artist should only present images,
poetic or pictorial, that reflect perfection. Dryden finds exceptions to this
in portraits and drama. In portrait painting, a balance is necessarily struck
114 Constructing Media at the Turn of the 18th Century
What Dryden means by this is that if one maintains the view that a con-
ception of perfect nature is imitated in the best examples of painting and
poetry, the act of comparing the artwork with nature is not the ultimate
source of pleasure in art. Pleasure actually comes from recognizing a high-
er truth in the imitation. As the truths found in perfect nature are, by defi-
nition, the best of nature, art surpasses the truths found in nature herself. In
short, Dryden shifts Aristotle’s emphasis from the process of comparing
the artwork to nature to the discovery of truth in art.
Addison
In some respects, Joseph Addison’s essays on art and the pleasures of the
imagination in The Spectator (1712) carry the abstraction of artistic truth
further, but at the cost of severing the bond between the medium and the
perceiving subject. Addison’s project is related to the eighteenth-century
view of reading poetry and painting as activities involving a number of
psychological and physiological categories that require theoretical explor-
ation and definitions. According to Lee Morrisey, in many critical texts of
the period, reading “is seen as a psychological—or, as we might today say,
‘cognitive’—process” (2008: 13). The description is apt in Addison’s case,
for the aim of the short essays is to define or “fix” the concept of imagina-
tion by modelling the psychological mechanism of aesthetic perception.
Addison’s guide in the essays is Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Un-
derstanding (1689), although it must be said that Addison does not follow
Locke’s argument quite as meticulously as he would like his readers to
think. Even if Addison does misread Locke’s essay, it is clear that Locke’s
distinction between the primary and secondary qualities of matter acts as
the starting point for his speculations. Addison wants to create a rudimen-
tary psychology of aesthetic perception, particularly as it pertains to the
secondary qualities of matter.4 He is aware that the true natures of ideas
and the soul are unknown to science and that all he can do is “reflect on
those operations of the soul that are most agreeable” (1712b: 63). Like
Locke, Addison sees himself as clearing the way for future studies with his
protopsychological aesthetics.
Addison begins by situating the faculty of imagination into a hierarchy
between the senses and the understanding: “The pleasures of the imagina-
tion, taken in the full extent, are not so gross as those of sense, nor so
refined as those of the understanding” (1712a: 57). In modern parlance,
this tripartite division could perhaps be mapped onto material, perceptual
116 Constructing Media at the Turn of the 18th Century
and conceptual sensory and mental processes. The primary pleasures arise
when actual objects are perceived and after this point the material medium
is no longer relevant to perception. The rest of the process is transposed to
the level of ideas; differences between actual media can be overlooked as
all perception becomes the stuff of the mind. The secondary pleasures of
the imagination function through the independent operations of the imagi-
nation and this also explains how poets and painters are able to dream up
creatures that were never present in the senses. When certain ideas in the
mind are called forth, they are reproduced in the imagination as images
that recreate the pleasure the mind experienced when they were first per-
ceived.
Addison notes that there need not be a strict resemblance in the art-
work and the original idea to bring pleasure: “It is sufficient that we have
seen places, persons, or actions, in general, which bear a resemblance, or
at least some remote analogy with what we find represented. Since it is in
the power of the imagination, when it is once stocked with particular ideas,
to enlarge, compound, and vary them at her own pleasure” (1712d: 73). In
comparing the ideas that arise from the object, the spectator gains pleasure
from a quasi-Aristotelian comparison between the idea and its representa-
tion. Addison speculates that this activity has its roots in what modern
readers might regard as an evolutionary function: It helps to “quicken and
encourage us in our searches after truth” (1712d: 75). But art for Addison
is too stylized to produce images that only raw nature can achieve: “There
is something more bold and masterly in the rough careless strokes of na-
ture than in the nice touches and embellishments of art” (1712c: 66). In
short, art is too artificial to trigger the ideas nature produces naturally.
Words, however, have great power over the imagination in Addison’s
model: “Words, when well chosen, have so great a force in them, that a
description often gives us more lively ideas than the sight of things them-
selves” (1712d: 75). He thinks that this may be “because in the survey of
any object we have only so much of it painted on the imagination as comes
in at the eye; but in its description the poet gives us as free a view of it as
he pleases, and discovers to us several parts that either we did not attend
to, or that lay out of our sight when we first beheld it” (1712d: 76). From
this one can derive yet another three-fold hierarchy in Addison’s thinking.
Pictorial art is limited in its scope because it is confined to minor repre-
sentations of ideas which can exert more power on the imagination when
they are retrieved by poetry. Poetry, in turn, is dwarfed by nature. The fact
that every reader does not necessarily receive the same ideas from de-
scriptions Addison explains by saying that different ideas may be attached
to the same words and that inborn qualities and education have an influ-
Tommi Kakko 117
ence on the way art is perceived. Much like Dryden, Addison speaks of the
“perfection of imagination” (1712d: 76) and artistic education as a pre-
requisite for enjoying the pleasures of the imagination on any higher level.
His account of the pleasures of the imagination is confused and con-
fusing, because it tries to maintain a distinction between a homogeneous
collection of ideas in the mind, a division of primary and secondary oper-
ations that work on the imagination and a division between the senses,
imagination and understanding. It is difficult to see how the distinction
between, say, a line of poetry and an actual landscape could be sustained
when they both end up inhabiting the same space of ideas and both work
through the sense of sight. The strength of the model, on the other hand, is
that it is a fully psychologized theory of aesthetic perception on the ab-
stract level of Locke’s idea theory.
Richardson
Jonathan Richardson probably had a bigger impact on painting as a writer
than through his chosen profession of portrait painter. In 1715, he pub-
lished his influential Essay on the Theory of Painting and followed it later
with The Whole Art of Criticism in Relation to Painting and The Science of
a Connoisseur in 1719. In his Essay, Richardson retains the distinction
between poetry and painting, but sees painting as just another means of
communication: “And thus it must be ranked with these, and accordingly
esteemed not only as enjoyment, but as another language, which completes
the whole art of communicating our thoughts” (1725: 2–3).5 In other
words, he turns the arts into discourse and makes them all a matter of
communication. This gives his theory of the arts the distinction of a human
agent and an intentionality lacking in Addison’s view of natural works of
art. However modern Richardson’s view might seem, he is not conducting
a linguistic turn of the eighteenth century. He clearly states in the Essay
that thought and language “are two distinct excellencies” (1725: 228).
Nevertheless, his view of the language-centred nature of pictorial art gives
his approach surprisingly modern characteristics.
The painter’s education is of great concern to Richardson and in the
Essay he assigns him, among other things, a course in poetry: “A painter
should therefore read the best books, such as Homer, Milton, Virgil, Spen-
ser, Thucydides, Livy, Plutarch, etc., but chiefly the Holy Scripture”
(1725: 201). Behind the prescription lies the notion that the painter’s char-
acter must be shaped to prepare him for his art. Poetry and painting, as
they were understood at the time, do have a common source in nature, but
they must be channelled through the painter and his judgement must be
118 Constructing Media at the Turn of the 18th Century
moulded to suit the gravity of his work. Richardson writes that, in a way,
“painters paint themselves” (1725: 218) and an aesthetic education in the
arts and sciences is essential to create an artist worthy of the art he wishes
to create. Thus his paintings will have a poetic quality by virtue of his
education.
The highest level of artistic achievement, according to Richardson, al-
ways involves the sublime, “the greatest, and most beautiful ideas, whe-
ther corporeal, or not, conveyed to us the most advantageously” (1725:
248). He claims perfection can be reached much more easily in poetry than
in painting, that “there are sublime passages in writers where the words are
not only the most apt, and proper, but the most beautiful” (1725: 254), and
what these passages are and how they achieve perfection can also be de-
scribed quite easily. In painting, however, perfection is unattainable.
Richardson says: “[Y]ou can never see, I say not an entire picture, or fig-
ure, but even a single head without at the same time feeling something
amiss” (1725: 255). Even the best pictures have defects, but the aesthetic
impact of the sublime makes these defects redundant when the painter has
succeeded in creating a harmonious composition. To describe the sublime
in painting, however, is impossible. Richardson has little faith in the pow-
er of ekphrasis and laments the fact that descriptions of paintings are al-
ways inadequate compared to the originals. Writing may achieve perfect
sublimity; painting is always incomplete and descriptions of paintings, in
turn, are always less than the paintings they attempt to describe.
In The Art of Criticism, Richardson continues to follow the idea model,
but he does have some reservations. Rather than a firm theoretical stance,
Richardson seems to use the theory for the purposes of describing the
workings of the faculty of invention and as he follows the reasoning of the
theory, he notices a problem:
In making an original our ideas are taken from nature; which the works of
art cannot equal: when we copy ’tis these defective works of art we take
our ideas from; those are the utmost we endeavour to arrive at; and these
lower ideas too our hands fail of executing perfectly: an original is the
echo of the voice of nature, a copy is the echo of that echo. (1719: 177)
copier set to work on a substandard work of art and did his job well, surely
the final product should be another substandard copy of nature. But this is
not the case and a master can produce a great work of art using ideas the
original copy only suggests. In Addison’s interpretation of Locke’s theory,
this is indeed possible through rough analogies, but only on the level of
ideas.
In the final pages of The Art of Criticism, Richardson discusses a re-
lated problem in Locke’s theory when he turns to the subject of the con-
noisseur. The question he is struggling with is how to distinguish between
two copies that are very much alike. Richardson is pragmatic on this point
and says: “If there are a thousand circumstances relating to two things, and
they agree exactly in all but one of them, this gives us two as distinct ideas
as of any two things in the universe” (1719: 206). The same applies to
actions: When one analyses one’s actions there are always circumstances
that lead to a specific action rather than some other action. Richardson
then refers to Locke’s Essay (Book 4, Ch. 10) and his failure to prove the
logical necessity of God. In brief, Locke argues that from the Cartesian
cogito we know something exists for certain, namely we do, and therefore
we must know that an eternal being exists from the intuitive a priori cer-
tainty that something cannot come from nothing. A timeless universe of
nothing is for Locke impossible and, therefore, “from eternity there has
been something” (1849: 476). Modern philosophers have often noted that
Locke’s argument is flawed and that the sentence “from eternity there has
been something” relies on equivocation.6 Richardson mockingly gives the
role of the critic to his 12-year-old son. He gives Locke’s proof to the boy
to read and when the latter is asked what he thinks of Locke’s demonstra-
tion, the child declares: “Supposing the world to have been created in time
this is a demonstration, otherwise ’tis not” (Richardson 1719: 207). It is
safe to say that Richardson sees problems in Locke’s idea theory on a fun-
damental level. If the theory was valid, it would create a closed system
that does not allow the spontaneous creation of mimetic novelty. As a
flawed argument, on the other hand, it can only accept divine autonomy as
a hypothetical point of origin and hence the theory is groundless.
Beyond Ideas
Both Addison and Richardson are nevertheless clearly in the patrimony of
John Locke and idea theory. This is indicative of the explanatory power of
the theory and also tells of a fundamental shift in aesthetic theory and
eighteenth-century thought in general. Perhaps through ignorance or sim-
ply by belonging to an earlier tradition, Dryden manages to create a more
120 Constructing Media at the Turn of the 18th Century
less uplifting terms, in the case of criticism: “The writer feels his way like
a blind man without seeing for certain where the writing is going” (2008:
561). No doubt, as Mitchell (2005: 209) also notes, theoretical expositions
of media are also guided by established discourses and the specific lin-
guistic expressions they carry. This is what often seems to be missing from
ideational and similar reductive theories of art: the strange and wonderful
realisation that the movements of the brush have created something of
their own accord, or that the sculptor’s marble has created a form for him
even before work has begun. Dryden saw in it the truth in art and we as
moderns might view it as a quality in the medium, but whatever we call it,
we can see that it sometimes leads us to designs we could not expect to
find in the mind. One of the theoretical aspects of intermediality, then,
should involve resisting the temptation to reduce all media to a predictable
master medium, private or public. It should also include the continued
preservation of the concept of an autonomous medium and thus the possi-
bility of intermediality itself. Whether we view this as a theoretical prob-
lem or an opportunity remains our decision, provided that the critical me-
dium allows us to view criticism as a form of art dependent on past argu-
ments, and ourselves as critics perched on the shoulders of our critical
predecessors.
Works Cited
Addison, Joseph. [1712a]. Pp. 56–59 in The Spectator 411 (Sat. June 21),
reprinted in Smith 1898.
—. [1712b]. Pp. 63–65 in The Spectator 413 (Tues. June 24), reprinted in
Smith 1898.
—. [1712c]. Pp. 65–68 in The Spectator 414 (Wed. June 25), reprinted in
Smith 1898.
—. [1712d]. Pp. 73–77 in The Spectator 416 (Fri. June 27), reprinted in
Smith 1898.
Dryden, John. [1686] 2001. “To the Pious Memory of the Accomplished
Young Lady Mrs Anne Killigrew, Excellent in the Two Sister Arts of
Poesy and Painting.” Pp. 214–219 in Selected Poems, eds. Steven N.
Zwicker and David Bywaters. London: Penguin.
—. [1695] 1962. “Preface of the Translator, With a Parallel of Poetry and
Painting.” Pp. 181–208 in Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Es-
says, ed. George Watson. London: J. M. Dent.
Gelber, Michael Werth. 1999. The Just and the Lively. Manchester: Man-
chester University Press.
122 Constructing Media at the Turn of the 18th Century
Notes
1
I refer the reader to Mitchell’s “ten theses on media” (2005: 211) and especially
theses five (“All media are mixed media”) and six (“Minds are media, and vice
versa”).
2
In addition to philosophers like Leibniz, George Berkeley and of course David
Hume, the Scriblerians mocked the scientific pretensions of the Royal Society and
Locke’s psychology in satirical literature. The Laputa episode of Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels is perhaps the most read of these today. Other famous
Scriblerians included Alexander Pope, Thomas Parnell, John Arbuthnot and John
Gay.
3
For discussion of Dryden’s development as a critic, see Gelber 1999.
Tommi Kakko 123
4
Addison believes Locke and contemporary philosophers have proven that light
and colours, as secondary qualities of matter, are a product of the ideational
mechanisms of the mind and have no real existence outside the realm of ideas. He
is concerned with sight in particular and follows Locke’s view that ideas in the
mind must arrive through the senses; the mind can then call up these ideas as it
pleases, either through reflection alone or by being reminded of them by an exter-
nal object or by a description. Berkeley’s philosophy would push this aspect of
Lockean metaphysics to its logical conclusion.
5
In The Future of the Image, Jacques Rancière comments on Richardson’s view of
the relationship between language and painting by noting that Richardson “rec-
ommended to painters that they first of all write the story of the painting in order to
know whether it was worth painting” (2007: 78). Rancière argues that modern
painting and its concern with the materiality of the medium instead of representa-
tion is in fact “not the separation of painting from words, but a different way of
conjoining them” (2007: 76).
6
See for example Jolley 1999: 96–97.
7
See Dryden 2001: 214–219, ll. 106–107.
TRANSFORMING MEDIA
MASTER AND MARGARITA:
FROM NOVEL TO INTERACTIVE
AUDIOVISUAL ADAPTATION
NUNO N. CORREIA
Abstract
Master and Margarita is an audiovisual work by Portuguese new media
art collective Video Jack that adapts Mikhail Bulgakov’s Russian mod-
ernist novel. This article studies those aspects of intermediality that resul-
ted from this particular adaptation. Video Jack’s project, in contrast to oth-
er similar audiovisual artworks, does not aim to follow an abstract “visual
music” aesthetics but rather takes an innovative narrative approach. Inter-
medial aspects bring into focus Video Jack’s non-literal “borrowing” from
the novel.
Intermedial Borrowings
In order to discuss in detail how the adaptation from Bulgakov’s novel to
Video Jack’s interactive audiovisual project was accomplished, it is neces-
sary to recall those nine chapters of Bulgakov’s novel that were adapted
for this project. In the chapters “Never Talk to Strangers” and “The Sev-
enth Proof,” Bulgakov introduces the character of Woland, a devil who
goes to Moscow and engages in a theological discussion about the exist-
ence of Jesus Christ with two members of the local literary elite. Woland
predicts the imminent death of one of his interlocutors; his prediction
comes true shortly after. In the chapter “Black Magic and Its Exposure”
(adapted in two parts), Woland and his associates, including the man-cat
Behemoth and the choir master Koroviev, stage a magical and mystical
show in Moscow. The main show, which is preceded by the performance
of the Giulli family of acrobats, defies the audience’s expectations, and
exposes not the black magic as was announced, but the greed and corrup-
tion of the audience. A later chapter, “The Hero Enters,” tells the love
story of the Master and Margarita, from their meeting to their separation,
narrated by the Master to Ivan Homeless while they are both at a mental
health institution. Besides the romance aspect, the chapter also focuses on
the Master’s struggle to get his novel published, which culminates in
frustration. In the subsequent chapters, “Azazello’s Cream” and “Flight,”
Margarita strikes a deal with the Devil in order to find her lost lover, and
to avenge him, gaining supernatural powers in the process. Eventually, in
the chapter “The Great Ball at Satan’s,” Margarita fulfils her part of the
deal with Woland, becoming his companion at an extravagant and surreal
ball. The chapter “The End of Apartment No. 50” depicts the local police
attacking the apartment where Woland and his partners were hosted, fol-
lowing the chaos caused by the group in Moscow. Finally, the chapter
entitled “It’s Time, It’s Time” brings the novel to a close, with the death of
the Master and Margarita, and the departure of their “ghosts” (the book is
very ambiguous here) from Moscow together with Woland and the rest of
his entourage. In the following, I want to show in detail, through an analy-
sis of three selected chapters from the project, how the adaptation from the
novel to an interactive audiovisual project was created.
The lateral animations depict the vegetation of Patriarch’s Ponds that act
as a background for the action (although in this case the “background”
often becomes the foreground: It can appear on top in the top animations).
The last animation is an exception: A jet of blood conveys the violent
ending to the chapter.
The animated icons complete the visual interpretation of the chapter.
One represents the traffic light which warns Berlioz of the oncoming tram:
“He turned […] and was just about to step across the rails when a red and
white light splashed in his face. A sign lit up in a glass box: ‘Caution!
Tram-Car!’” (Bulgakov 2006: 59). Another animation represents the blood
and violence, present across all layers of animation (top, lateral and
lower). An additional animated icon represents the religious discussion
surrounding the existence of Jesus: “Bear in mind that Jesus did exist”
(Bulgakov 2006: 19). The last animated icon is more ambiguous, and
brings to mind both a target and the wheels of the oncoming tram.
The music points implicitly to the anxiety, madness, oppression and
emotional confusion depicted. One loop portrays rather clearly one of the
narrative elements—the motion of an oncoming tram. The music helps to
complete the “picture,” contributing to the psychological and emotional
elements and to the atmosphere of confusion that prevails in this chapter.
136 From Novel to Interactive Audiovisual Adaptation
While some details from the book become amplified in the visual in-
terpretation (for example, the poodle-head knob), other elements disap-
pear. The characters of Ivan Homeless and Azazello, for example, are re-
ferred to but do not appear as such. References to the religious sub-plot are
omitted, with the exception of an animation with a symbolic cross. The
commentary on the Moscow literary scene is also left out. However, the
chapter’s two crucial elements are represented: the introduction of Woland
and the death of Berlioz. More importantly, the dense atmosphere of the
chapter is captured with images and sounds. There is a magnification of
certain elements of the book, on the one hand, and a simplification, on the
other. To a degree, it can be said of Video Jack’s Master and Margarita as
a whole that it foregrounds certain literary aspects while simplifying other
parts of the novel.
Another animation depicts the Giulli woman: “On a tall metal pole
with a seat at the top and a single wheel, a plump blonde rolled out in
tights and a little skirt strewn with silver stars, and began riding in a
circle” (Bulgakov 2006: 163). The woman’s short skirt is merely sug-
gested by a few grey strokes. An additional animation presents the child
performer: “[F]inally, a little eight-year-old with an elderly face came
rolling out and began scooting about among the adults on a tiny two-
wheeler furnished with an enormous automobile horn” (Bulgakov 2006:
163). The detail of the horn is amplified in the animation.
The next animation introduces Bengalsky (Fig. 4), the master of cere-
monies, one of the main characters in this chapter. In the background, the
curtain and its reddish glow are depicted as suggested by their description
in the book:
A moment later the spheres went out in the theatre, the footlights blazed
up, lending a reddish glow to the base of the curtain, and in the lighted gap
of the curtain there appeared before the public a plump man, merry as a
baby, with a clean-shaven face, in a rumpled tailcoat and none-too-fresh
138 From Novel to Interactive Audiovisual Adaptation
shirt. This was the master of ceremonies, well known to all Moscow—
Georges Bengalsky. (Bulgakov 2006: 167)
The last top animation showcases the audience, and their excited response
to the first spectacles of the main attractions of the night (which will be
further developed in Part Two): “[R]apturous shouts came from the wings”
(Bulgakov 2006: 170).
One of the animated icons also focuses on the audience response.
Stylised clapping hands mimic the “unbelievable applause” (Bulgakov
2006: 170) from the public. Two other animated icons refer to the card
tricks that will also appear later in Part Two, as well as to the notions of
gambling and “easy money.” The last animation represents a flash, which
will be occurring later in the chapter as well, quite literally: “[T]he pistol
was pointed up […] there was a flash, a bang” (Bulgakov 2006: 171). The
flash also relates to the theatre lights.
The lighting in the theatre is further presented in one of the lateral ani-
mations. A bicycle wheel is represented in another, a reference to the
Giulli family. The deconstructed, only partially dressed, female bodies in
two of the animations point towards the fashion extravaganza in the sec-
ond part of the chapter, when the “women disappeared behind the curtains,
leaving their dresses there and coming out in new ones” (Bulgakov 2006:
178).
Sounds recreate the vaudeville atmosphere of the chapter. One of the
sound loops represents the “alarming drum-beats of the orchestra” (Bul-
gakov 2006: 163). The sound of the orchestra has a tribal, pagan character
in tune with the “black magic” theme. Another conveys the sounds of the
audience—“there were gasps of ‘ah, ah!’ and merry laughter” (Bulgakov
2006: 171)—as well as clapping and feminine agitation: “[F]rom all sides
women marched on to the stage […] general agitation of talk, chuckles
and gasps” (Bulgakov 2006: 178). An additional sound is a piano melody,
somehow naive, delicate and feminine, conveying the seductive appeal of
the visions conjured by Woland. The remaining sound loop is more mys-
terious and ethereal, suggesting the magical atmosphere.
The top animations in the second part of “Black Magic and its Expo-
sure” represent the characters of Behemoth, the devilish cat with semi-
human behaviour, and the choir master Koroviev (also known as Fagot,
which is Russian for “bassoon”); these animations all refer to Bulgakov’s
description in the novel: “but most remarkable of all were the black magi-
cian’s two companions: a long checkered fellow with a cracked pince-nez,
and a fat black cat who came into the dressing room on his hind legs”
(Bulgakov 2006: 165).
Nuno N. Correia 139
In the animation, Koroviev is also depicted with devilish red eyes, but the
cards are merely suggested, as outlines. The animated icons complete the
picture, providing a more literal representation of playing cards.
The last top animation shows Behemoth cutting off Bengalsky’s head,
and putting it back again, as described in the book. First, the head is re-
moved: “Growling, the cat sank his plump paws into the skimpy chevelure
of the master of ceremonies and in two twists tore the head from the thick
140 From Novel to Interactive Audiovisual Adaptation
neck with a savage howl […] blood spurted in fountains from the torn
neck arteries” (Bulgakov 2006: 173), and then it is put back: “The cat,
aiming accurately, planted the head on the neck, and it sat exactly in its
place, as if it had never gone anywhere” (Bulgakov 2006: 174). Although
in the book these two events are not presented as a continuous action
(there is a discussion with the audience in between), in the animation it
becomes a repeating loop, and Bengalsky is (appropriately) no longer
smiling.
The lateral animations repeat motifs from the first part of this chapter
and from “The Seventh Proof ” which include the spotlight, curtains and
blood, although differently coloured than those earlier animations. Two of
the animated icons contain the U.S. dollar and euro symbols, surrounded
by moving circles. They represent the greed and consumerism of the audi-
ence members, and also the money that literally falls upon them: “[I]n a
few seconds, the rain of money, ever thickening, reached the seats, and the
spectators began snatching at it” (Bulgakov 2006: 171).
Regarding sound, one of the loops continues the tribal, ritualistic per-
cussive sound of Part Two with added aggressiveness, mirroring the
sounds of the orchestra in the theatre: “[T]he orchestra … hacked out some
incredible march of an unheard-of brashness” (Bulgakov 2006: 182). In
another sound, distorted noises from present-day slot machines can be
discerned, representing the “easy money” and gambling theme of the
chapter. An additional sound is a distorted and harsh synthetic melody,
representing the violent and bloody aspect of the text. The last sound is a
recording of sheep, illustrating the notion of materialistic “herd behaviour”
demonstrated by the fervent race towards money and luxury goods offered
by Woland and his accomplices.
The music in both parts of this chapter is particularly ironic, fitting the
tone of Bulgakov’s cartoon-like descriptions of the black magic “séance.”
The animations cover most of the action, either in a more literal way or by
suggestion—with the exception of the dialogues established between char-
acters.7 These are difficult to convey using the style of animation adopted
for the project. The money magic trick and women’s fashion extravaganza
are only suggested by more symbolic animations. Woland, a less important
character in this chapter, does not appear in the animations here, and Be-
hemoth, assisted by Koroviev, becomes the main character instead. Be-
cause of its division in two parts, and consequently having twice the num-
ber of animations and sounds, this is one of the most comprehensively
adapted chapters of Bulgakov’s novel within the Video Jack project.
Nuno N. Correia 141
This chapter also contains fewer animations than the others. In one of
the top animations, the Master sees Margarita pass by in a Moscow street,
carrying yellow flowers: “[S]he was carrying repulsive, alarmingly yellow
142 From Novel to Interactive Audiovisual Adaptation
flowers in her hand […] and these flowers stood out clearly against her
black spring coat” (Bulgakov 2006: 192). Margarita looks distant and sad:
“I can assure you that she saw me alone, and she looked at me not really
alarmed, but even as in pain. And I was struck not so much by her beauty
as by an extraordinary loneliness in her eyes” (Bulgakov 2006: 192–193).
The other top animation depicts the Master’s anxiety as he awaited
Margarita’s visits to his basement apartment: “[M]y heart would pound no
less than ten times before that”; and “when her hour came and the hands
showed noon, it wouldn’t even stop pounding until […] her shoes would
come even with my window” (Bulgakov 2006: 195). The second half of
this animation shows Margarita’s steps coming towards the Master, from
the perspective of his window.
The Master’s anxiety regarding the time of the meeting with his be-
loved is also reflected, albeit in a more iconographic way, by one of the
animated icons, i.e., a heart-shaped clock, beating fast. An additional ani-
mation represents both the Master’s brain (literally) and his creativity
(figuratively, via a light bulb). This has a double connotation—indicating
his feverishly creative period in the basement in the past, and his affected
Nuno N. Correia 143
sanity at the madhouse in the present (see Fig. 7). Another animation is
more symbolic, a flash, conveying the effect of love upon the couple:
“[L]ove leaped out in front of us like a murderer in an alley leaping out of
nowhere, and struck us both at once” (Bulgakov 2006: 194). One last ani-
mation, a snow crystal, relates to the Master’s winter period of loneliness
before meeting Margarita: “[I]n the winter it was very seldom that I saw
someone’s black feet through my window and heard the snow crunching
under them” (Bulgakov 2006: 191).
The same image of winter is conveyed by the snow in one of the lateral
animations. Another one shows a multitude of passersby: “[B]efore my
meeting with her, few people came to our yard—more simply, no one
came—but now it seemed to me that the whole city came flocking here”
(Bulgakov 2006: 195). One more animation again depicts the Master’s
brain, although here the speed of the moving brain and the strong colours
convey a sense of dementia. The last animation, a flower, recalls the mo-
ment of the first encounter between the Master and Margarita.
One of the sound loops, an unsteady beat, represents a broken mecha-
nism, a clock moving at an irregular speed. Another sound is a recording
of bells, illustrating the passage of time. The two remaining sound loops
are more musical and melodic, conveying romance, although the melody is
bittersweet and melancholic, reflecting the longing for an absent lover.
The first part of the chapter, the dialogue between Ivan Homeless and
the Master, is not adapted, since the adaptation focuses on the Master’s
recollections of his love story with Margarita. Some elements from the
novel are omitted, particularly those related to the activity of writing the
book, the problems surrounding its publication, the burning of the manu-
script, and even several locations such as the apartment and the streets. But
the first meeting of the couple, the city atmosphere, the romantic mood
and the anxiety of the Master while waiting for his next meeting with
Margarita are well conveyed by the animations and music. This is a chap-
ter in which the elements are suggested rather than presented directly,
which matches the fragmented poetic recollections expressed by the Mas-
ter in the novel.
Conclusion
In this article, I have tried to show that Video Jack’s Master and Mar-
garita is not strictly an adaptation of Bulgakov’s novel, but a work in-
spired by it and from which it “borrows” key elements (to use Andrew’s
terminology [Andrew 1984]). As in Klimowski and Schejbal’s graphic
novel The Master and Margarita, Video Jack’s interactive audiovisual
144 From Novel to Interactive Audiovisual Adaptation
project simplifies Bulgakov’s book. Some elements from the novel have
been left out and others such as the political and social elements are only
suggested by the music, whereas the religious elements are suggested by
means of a few animated icons. Still, those who have read the novel will
recognise the main characters and events, particularly the devilish incur-
sion in Moscow, the love story between the Master and Margarita, and
Margarita’s Faustian transformation. To those who have not, Master and
Margarita could serve as an introduction to the book, enticing them to
read the novel.
Nevertheless, even if Master and Margarita is not a full adaptation of
the letter of the novel, it aims to be true to its spirit—its irreverence, in-
tensity, stylistic diversity, irony and use of multiple layers of meaning. It
conveys the particular artistic vision of its creators and therefore it is not
only an interpretation of Bulgakov’s work, but also an autonomous and co-
herent work of its own. The approach taken to the integration of sound,
animation and graphic user interface establishes a clear connection with
the authors of the project and their previous works.8 Additionally, new
meaning is contributed to the novel, such as the animations and sonic ele-
ments, which comment on twenty-first century society.
What remains in the conversion are these elements: the contrasting vio-
lent and romantic aspects of the novel; the supernatural and magical ele-
ments; the emotional tension; the wit; the multiplicity of layers; the styl-
isation of expression and the openness to interpretation of the work. Both
Master and Margarita and the novel it adapts are “written in code”; they
have elements that require decoding in order for the full meaning to
emerge. In the novel, the coded elements pertain particularly to the politi-
cal dimension. In the adaptation, many elements of the book (mainly nar-
rative but also emotional) are symbolised in iconic animations and sounds,
and the user/viewer/listener is expected to create meaning by connecting
these different elements. All these aspects contribute to the meaning: the
sounds and animated icons, together with the more literal animations—the
distinct branches of art combine in a “common message,” in “reciprocal
agreement and cooperation,” as Wagner stated in his description of the
ideal Gesamtkunstwerk (2001: 5). Therefore, while Master and Margarita
simplifies Bulgakov’s literary work, it also expands upon it, by opening
the potential to generate new meaning, and an engaging experience, by
means of an interactive multi-sensorial approach.
Nuno N. Correia 145
Works Cited
Andrew, Dudley. 1984. Concepts in Film Theory. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Ascott, Roy. 1990. “Is There Love in Telematic Embrace?” Pp. 305–316
in Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, eds. Multimedia: From Wagner to
Virtual Reality, 2001. New York: Norton.
Bulgakov, Mikhail. [1966] 2006. The Master and Margarita. Trans. Lar-
issa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear. London: Penguin.
Correia, Nuno N. 2010. “Heat Seeker: An Interactive Audio-Visual Project
for Performance, Video and Web.” Pp. 243–251 in Proceedings of the
IADIS International Conference on Computer Graphics, Visualization,
Computer Vision, Image Processing and Visual Communication, eds.
Yingcai Xiao, Roberto Muffoletto and Tomaz Amon. Freiburg: IADIS
Press.
Milne, Lesley. 1998. “The Master and Margarita.” Pp. 202–203 in Refer-
ence Guide to Russian Literature, ed. Neil Cornwell. Chicago: Fitzroy
Dearborn.
Moritz, William. 2004. Optical Poetry: The Life and Work of Oskar
Fischinger. Eastleigh: John Libbey.
—. 1997. “The Dream of Color Music and the Machines that Made it Pos-
sible.” Animation World Magazine. April.
http://www.awn.com/mag/issue2.1/articles/moritz2.1.html (accessed 8
June 2011).
Mukherjee, Neel. 2008. “The Master and Margarita: A Graphic Novel by
Mikhail Bulgakov.” The Times. May 9.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/
books/fiction/article3901149.ece (accessed 8 June 2011).
Paul, Christiane. 2003. Digital Art. London: Thames and Hudson.
Sonne, Paul. 2005. “Russians Await a Cult Novel’s Film Debut With Ea-
gerness and Skepticism.” The New York Times. December 19.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/19/arts/television/19mast.html (ac-
cessed 8 June 2011).
Van Campen, Cretien. 2008. The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia in Art and
Science. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Video Jack [André Carrilho and Nuno N. Correia]. [2008] 2009. Master
and Margarita. Interactive audiovisual artwork. Web version found at:
http://www.videojackstudios.com/masterandmargarita/
Video of performance version:
http://www.masterandmargarita.eu/en/05media/videojack.html
146 From Novel to Interactive Audiovisual Adaptation
Notes
1
Video Jack is composed of André Carrilho and Nuno N. Correia. The Internet art
version of the project, which can be found at http://www.videojackstudios.com/
masterandmargarita, is described in this article. A performance version was also
created by Video Jack.
2
A closer precedent would be a previous Video Jack work, Heat Seeker, available
at: http://www.videojackstudios.com/heatseeker/. As in Master and Margarita,
Heat Seeker also combines (mostly) narrative animations with music (Correia
2010). In the case of Heat Seeker, however, the different narratives that compose
the project are unrelated, and are not adapted from any previous work.
3
The novel was written between the late 1920s and Bulgakov’s death in 1940, and
only published for the first time in 1966, a quarter century later.
4
In each chapter, the number of top and lateral animations vary but there are al-
ways four animated icons, or lower animations.
5
They often include abundant empty space, allowing the graphic elements under-
neath to show through (top animation or colored background). When characters are
included in lateral animations, they are represented in a less realistic way than in
top animations. Lateral animations are descriptive and contextualising rather than
action-oriented.
6
Their default size is smaller than that of the other animations. They are positioned
on top of the remaining animations (top and lateral animations).
7
For example, the dialogue between Koroviev and Arkady Appolonovich, chair-
man of the Acoustic Commission of Moscow Theatres, is left out.
8
The connection to the earlier Video Jack project Heat Seeker is particularly evi-
dent.
THE HYPOTHETICAL STRATAGEMS
OF BORGES AND BERTOLUCCI
HENRY BACON
Abstract
David Herman developed the notion of hypothetical focalisation for the
purposes of analysis of literary narratives, but it can be illuminatingly
applied to the study of film as well. The conceptual adjustments this en-
tails can be rewardingly explored through the study of cinematic adapta-
tions of literary works in which hypothetical aspects loom large. Bernardo
Bertolucci’s The Spider’s Stratagem, a cinematic rendering of Jorge Luis
Borges’s “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” is a particularly intriguing
example of such intermedial adaptation. By means of a subtle and highly
intertextual film style, suggestive change of historical setting and partial
transformation of the story material, Bertolucci has transposed the extra-
ordinary mode of the original text into his own medium and created a story
with its own highly unique quality of hypothetical narration.
Film is by its very nature the most intermedial of arts, and adaptation is an
intermedial act par excellence. However, just as film style all too often
relies unimaginatively on the norms of classical film narration, adaptation,
in the words of John Ellis, is typically merely “a process of reducing a pre-
existent piece of writing to a series of functions: characters, locations,
costumes, actions and strings of narrative” (1982: 3). But when Bernardo
Bertolucci used Jorge Luis Borges’s “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero”
as the starting point for his film The Spider’s Stratagem, he developed
astonishingly ingenious filmic ways of rendering the themes of the literary
original. This involved stretching the intricate web of intertextual refer-
ences woven by Borges to cover other arts as well. Above all, a further
148 The Hypothetical Stratagems of Borges and Bertolucci
Irrealis Modality
The notion of hypothetical focalisation was developed by the literary
scholar David Herman to refer to a variety of ways of suggesting what
might be the diegetic status of story information. It covers a range of strat-
egies that can be used to question the nature of the fictional truth of both a
scene or an entire story. Few authors exemplify such hypothetical modes
as well as Jorge Luis Borges. His “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” is
particularly intriguing in this respect, containing as it does embedded lev-
els of narration, the status of which are in different ways hypothetical.
The term focalisation was used by the French literary theorist Gerard
Genette to describe how the flow of story information in a novel may be
constrained and shaped by being conveyed as if by the narrator, one or
more of the characters or some more or less hypothetical entity. Focalisa-
tion is an important narrative device as regards both dramatic development
and epistemic concerns. From a dramaturgical point of view, focalisation
is needed to control the flow of story information; say, for the purpose of
creating mystery, suspense and surprises. When the narrative structure
contains embedded levels of narration, it might have a key function in def-
ining what the reader or spectator knows in respect of the different charac-
ters. Even more intriguingly, focalisation can also address issues of epis-
temology, such as how certain things can be presumed to be known at all.
In any form of storytelling we might have what Genette referred to as
zero focalisation. It is roughly equivalent to what is commonly referred to
as third-person narration. David Herman sees this as “just a name for an
epistemic stance in which a focalizer has absolute fate in the veracity, the
actualness or the actualizability, of the states of affairs detailed in the nar-
rative” (2002: 326). While zero focalisation expresses firm reliance on the
unequivocal narratability of events, a storyteller working in any medium
has at her disposal a range of expressive means to express both specific
subjectivity as well as general epistemic uncertainty concerning how well
things can be known. Multiple focalisation offers embedded or layered
belief contexts. This serves detective-type narrative structures well, in
which a character seeking to find out what has happened earlier on has to
assess what other characters tell her about past events, in the process try-
ing to take into account how what they believe and say may be condi-
tioned or distorted for one reason or another. They may be reliable or un-
Henry Bacon 149
reliable, depending on their vested interests and their more or less well-
grounded attitudes and beliefs.1
At the opposite end of the scale, there is the kind of narration which
casts doubt on not only whether a given expression or formulation about
the storyworld is fictionally true or not, but whether there was or was not,
or even possibly could have been, someone perceiving and witnessing a
presumed state of affairs. Furthermore, there might be a more or less se-
vere mismatch between the expressed world and the reference world, be-
tween what is being said and what we are likely to assume to be the way
things are or have been. These are instances of hypothetical focalisation.
According to Herman, “there is an analogy, more or less exact, between
models of focalization and propositional attitudes,” and thus, “focalization
itself can be described as the narrative transcription of attitudes of seeing,
believing, speculating and so forth, anchored in particular contexts or
frames, that is, particular modes of the way the world is” (2002: 325, 325–
326). With the notion of hypothetical focalisation, Herman further extends
the range of focalisation to cover speculation on the veracity of what any
given point of view might offer for our perception and understanding as
well as the reliability of the world view that frames it. Thus he discusses
narratives “that prompt speculation about focalizing activity that someone
who actually exists in the storyworld may or may not have performed”
(2002: 309). Such hypothetical focalisation can be used to “encode differ-
ent degrees of certainty with respect to objects, participants, and events in
the storyworld” (Herman 2002: 310). Hypothetical focalisation is above all
a matter of narrative indecision about how things are in the diegetic world.
By virtue of this metafictional quality, hypothetical focalisation can be
employed to probe fundamental epistemic issues, such as in what ways
and to what extent do the world and our lives really open up to our at-
tempts at making sense. Herman also refers in passing to what linguists
have termed irrealis modality. It is a modality which “encompasses all the
semantic resources that enable language users to signal that they are not
fully committed to the truth of a proposition about the world” (Herman
2009: 133).
Standard cinematic narration has a certain inbuilt quality of hypotheti-
cal focalisation. In his scheme of hierarchical levels of narration, Edward
Branigan develops the notion of an implicit diegetic narrator, which he
defines with the linguistic formulations: “If a bystander had been present,
he or she would have seen […] would have heard ” (1992: 111–112). That
is, an implicit diegetic narrator is a metafictional notion that refers to
perception as if taking place in the storyworld. Branigan’s very phrasing
suggests hypothetical focalisation: Though a bystander was not present,
150 The Hypothetical Stratagems of Borges and Bertolucci
we presume such a person could have been there (and might have been
dramatised by the text). Furthermore, the functioning of Branigan’s
implied author refers to a hypothetical quality on a different level. As an
example, Branigan analyses the opening of Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man
(1958) and mentions the shots where “Manny is overtaken by two
policemen who seem to walk on either side of him as if to take him into
custody, but in fact they do not walk on either side of him and do not (yet)
take him into custody” (1992: 111–112.) Thus, whereas the diegetic
narrator conveys perceptual information from the diegetic world as if he
were an online connection to the immediate narrative moment as such, the
implied author is in charge of the hypothetical implications of that
information and the retrospective and prospective meanings which emerge
from the immediate situation as a part of the narrative whole, as well as
the various satisfactions and expectations to which it gives rise. Both can
be thought of as varieties of hypothetical focalisation.
Traitors as Heroes
Few authors offer such rich examples of hypothetical focalisation as Jorge
Luis Borges. A certain hypothetical attitude pervades most of his oeuvre,
emerging as a foundational mode of trying to make sense of the world. He
is one of the greatest masters of the irrealis modality. The short story
“Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” (1944) is an excellent example of
this. The story is in a sense set in the form of an account of what suppos-
edly has really happened, as if in a detective novel. But before relating the
actual story, the narrator warns us:
In my idle afternoon I have imagined this story plot which I shall perhaps
write some day and which already justifies me somehow. Details, rectifi-
cations, adjustments are lacking; there are zones of the story not yet re-
vealed to me; today, 3 January 1944, I see it as follows: […]. (Borges
1970: 102)
The narrator is even uncertain where his story is to take place, but then
opts “(for narrative convenience) Ireland; let us say in 1824” (1970: 102).
He then proceeds to name a narrator, Ryan, whose attempt to account for
the assassination of his forefather, the revolutionary hero called Fergus
Kilpatrick, serves as the basis for the story being told. As Ryan explores
Kilpatrick’s life, he makes strange discoveries. A parallelism emerges be-
tween the assassination of Caesar and that of Kilpatrick. At first Ryan is
about to resort to circular ideas of history to explain this. But then, “he is
rescued from these circular labyrinths by a curious finding, a finding
Henry Bacon 151
which then sinks him in other, more inextricable and heterogeneous laby-
rinths: certain words uttered by a beggar who spoke with Fergus Kilpatrick
the day of his death were prefigured by Shakespeare in the tragedy
Macbeth” (Borges 1970: 103).
Ryan continues his investigation, although the narrator of Borges’s
story admits in brackets: “(this investigation is one of the gaps in my
plot)” (1970: 104). The “truth” that emerges—if one may use such a word
in the context of so many embedded uncertainties—is that Kilpatrick was
actually a traitor to the cause. As this was revealed by the very same per-
son Kilpatrick himself had ordered to discover the traitor, Kilpatrick
agreed that he himself should die. However, he begged this to be arranged
so that the struggle to free the country would not be harmed—he was, after
all, thought of as a national hero. Thus Kilpatrick’s elimination was staged
as an assassination. The plot was designed by somebody called James
Alexander Nolan—yet another imbedded narrator—who in his haste had
to plagiarise Shakespeare in order to come up with a narrative that would
catch the imagination of the nation. Many people participated in realising a
drama that would “endure in the history books, in the impassioned mem-
ory of Ireland” (Borges 1970: 105). Finally, the drama takes place in “a
theatre box with funeral curtains prefiguring Lincoln’s” (Borges 1970:
105). But how, then, could this story be related? It is not even supposed to
be available to us, since Ryan has resolved to keep his discovery silent.
Borges concludes his story: “He [Ryan] publishes a book dedicated to the
hero’s glory; this too, perhaps, was foreseen” (1970: 105).
“Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” does not contain hypothetical fo-
calisation in the strictest sense of evoking attitudes of seeing, believing or
speculating by a hypothetical observer, as all these activities are accom-
plished by given characters anchored in particular contexts or frames.
However, Borges at several points suggests—not to say insists—that we
are reading a highly hypothetical account that is not even supposed to
exist. There surely appears to be a severe mismatch between reference
world and expressed world within the main fictional (already embedded)
frame, as a real-life account is discovered to be false because it resembles
fiction too closely. The one-step-higher fictional frame acquires a degree
of truthfulness, but only because it appears more plausible than the first
one. Here Ryan functions as an embedded focaliser, whose inquiry—to
employ Herman’s definitions quoted above—“encode[s] different degrees
of certainty with respect to objects, participants, and events in the story-
world” (Herman 2002: 310). In a rather tenuous sense, there does appear
to be a fictional truth which Ryan discovers, yet this is undermined be-
cause it is just as much an instance of circular labyrinths as the false story
152 The Hypothetical Stratagems of Borges and Bertolucci
focalised on the narrating person. But we are typically not cued to pay
attention to this discrepancy. As often happens in art-cinema narration,
things get much more complicated in The Spider’s Stratagem.2 There is,
for example, a flashback that is first motivated by what Athos Jr. is told by
one of his father’s cronies, but which at the end of the flashback appears to
be told by another friend. This could be interpreted as an indication of how
well the band sticks to its version of the events long past, and we might
assume that we see what Athos Jr. has put together on the basis of two
accounts he has heard separately. But the question of the possible degree
of subjectivity also emerges, possibly even of wild fantasy intruding into
their accounts, as when the cronies serve Athos Sr. a platter with the head
of a runaway lion they have apparently captured, killed and cooked in his
honour. This further emphasises the phantasmatic quality of what this
band of brothers is up to. Though Athos Sr.’s reasons for the betrayal are
never made explicit, one possible hypothesis would be that he simply
become exasperated by their silliness in attempting to change the course of
history by a single shot. In many scenes, they appear a bit like the tradi-
tional buffoon character of Italian comic opera.3 Are these people really as
silly as they appear to be in the flashbacks motivated by their own ac-
counts, or is what we see more like how Athos sees them—and which
Athos, at that?
Even more perplexing is a scene where Athos the son encounters for
the second time the statue of his father placed in the middle of a square in
the town: The statue has the father’s red scarf round its neck and its eyes
are painted white, as if he had been blinded. Even more strangely, the
statue appears to rotate as if to keep track of Athos as he circles around it.
We might at first think of this as the son’s subjective, distorted vision. But
even this does not quite suffice in explaining this sequence, as at one point
Athos starts to move in the opposite direction while the statue keeps on
rotating in the original direction—at this point, the camera, constantly
faced by the statue as they both rotate, is also following Draifa walking
towards Athos in the background. A comic parallel of sorts appears in a
slightly later scene between Draifa and her first Athos, as she makes him
rotate in order to put a bandage round his torso. As this scene continues, he
turns his back on her and the camera to look outside at where a lion hunt is
taking place. At this point, Draifa faces forward and appears to be telling
Athos Jr. what happened that day when she last saw his father alive. Here
we have multiple focalisations within a single shot, and we may well ask
which of these focalisations are hypothetical, and in what sense. For one
thing, the time structure of the narrative seems to have momentarily col-
lapsed.
Henry Bacon 155
the traitor, but the narration seems to return to the present as the former
companions tell Athos about the events which led to the assassination of
his father. Here and a bit later on, as Athos the son addresses the towns-
people, we see flashbacks of how the assassination was planned, as well as
of other events related to his father’s past. Some of these he could not
possibly have witnessed, and presumably could not even have heard about,
such as Draifa accusing the elder Athos of cowardice. We do not see what
is happening on the stage, but we may assume that the music we hear
emerges—or emerged—from an operatic performance, witnessed by an
audience at some point in time. As Kolker points out, there seems to be a
parallel of sorts between twists of the opera plot and the plot that has been
staged in the auditorium; between Athos’s pursuit of the truth about his
father and Gilda’s word to her father: “Tell your poor daughter. / If there is
some mystery […] reveal it to her […] / Let her know about her family.”4
In addition to it becoming ever more difficult to distinguish exactly
which point in time we are witnessing, we are not given sufficient basis for
determining whether what we see is what actually did happen or merely
another instance of (embedded) story-weaving. Throughout the film, we
constantly have to make hypotheses about the diegetic status of what we
see—while being again and again cued to wonder whether it is possible to
do so at all consistently. In good Borgesian fashion, Bertolucci leaves the
level of the inquiry equivocal. As Athos Jr. hears about his father’s per-
fidy, he has to decide whether he wants to be a part of the Athos Magnani
story. It might be difficult for a person with his name to do otherwise. He
decides to keep up the false image of the heroic anti-fascist, but he does
this at a cost. As he finally decides to leave Tara, he hears that no news-
papers have arrived there. The salesperson sighs: “Sometimes they entirely
forget that we exist.” With this, Draifa’s earlier comment, “Time stopped
here when your father was murdered,” gains new weight. The final images
suggest that Athos has indeed ended up locked into the past. There is no
way out of the story for him, however hypothetical it may be.
The Spider’s Stratagem is a masterpiece of intermedial adaptation. By
means of a subtle and highly intertextual filmic style, suggestive change of
historical setting and a fairly high degree of narrative transformation,
Bertolucci has created a cinematic counterpart to the literary excellence of
Borges’s “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero.” Bertolucci has succeeded
in transposing the extraordinary hyperhypothetical mode of narration of
the original text into his own medium, thus creating a work of art that is
fascinating in its own right.
Henry Bacon 157
Works Cited
Bordwell, David. [1985] 1988. Narration in the Fiction Film. London:
Routledge.
Borges, Jorge Luis. [1964] 1970. “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero.” Pp.
103–105 in Labyrinths. Trans. André Maurois. London: Penguin.
Branigan, Edward. 1992. Narrative Comprehension and Film. London:
Routledge.
Ellis, John. 1982. “The Literary Adaptation: An Introduction.” Screen 23
(1), May/June: 3–5.
Herman, David. 2002. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narra-
tive. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
—. 2009. “Beyond Voice and Vision: Cognitive Grammar and Focaliza-
tion Theory.” Pp. 119–142 in Point of View, Perspective, and Focal-
ization: Modeling Mediation in Narrative, eds. Peter Hühn, Wolf
Schmid and Jörg Schönert. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Kolker, Robert Phillip. 1985. Bernardo Bertolucci. London: BFI.
Filmography
Notes
1
This account of different types of focalisation is by no means exhaustive and it
only serves the purposes of the present case study.
2
For a Formalist analysis of the flashback structure see Bordwell 1988: 90.
3
One is reminded of a line Alida Valli has in Luchino Visconti’s Senso (1954): “I
like opera. But not when people behave outside the scene as if they were characters
in a melodrama.”
4
Actually, the words are virtually impossible to discern, as there is significant
dialogue going on at the same time.
INTERMEDIALITY AND THE REFUSAL
OF INTERDISCIPLINARITY
IN STRAVINSKY’S MUSIC
PETER DAYAN
Abstract
Intermedial studies has often concentrated on parallels, transpositions or
translations between different media. However, in the century after Wag-
ner, many of the artists, poets and composers whose reputation stands
highest today have refused this dynamic. They would never allow a strict
parallel between the work they create and work in any other medium.
They reject the possibility of translation—of meaning being transmitted—
between the arts. Stravinsky provides a particularly complex, subtle and
fascinating illustration of this refusal. He repeatedly asserted that music is
solely music, and has no function analogous to that of either words or
pictures. But how can one square this stubborn refusal of interart transla-
tion with Stravinsky’s lifelong interest in word-setting, and with the unde-
niable fact that much of his vocal music is consistently received as sup-
porting and expressing the sense of the words being sung? This paradox is
at the heart of Stravinsky’s “musical poetics.”
Ce qui me séduisait dans ces vers, ce n’est pas tant les anecdotes, souvent
truculentes, ni les images ou les métaphores toujours délicieusement im-
prévues, que l’enchaînement des mots et des syllabes, ainsi que la cadence
qu’il provoque et qui produit sur notre sensibilité un effet tout proche de
celui de la musique. Car je considère la musique par son essence, impuis-
sante à exprimer quoi que ce soit: un sentiment, une attitude, un état psy-
chologique, un phénomène de la nature, etc. L’expression n’a jamais été la
propriété immanente de la musique. La raison d’être de celle-ci n’est
d’aucune façon conditionnée par celle-là. (Stravinsky 2000a: 69–70)
[What seduced me in this verse was not the anecdotes, savoury though they
often were, nor the images and metaphors, always deliciously unpredic-
table; rather, it was the concatenation of words and syllables, and the sense
of cadence it produced, which affects our sensibility very much in the same
way as music. For I consider music, in its essence, powerless to express
anything at all: a sentiment, an attitude, a psychological state, a natural
phenomenon, etc. Expression has never been the immanent property of
Peter Dayan 161
music. The “raison d’être” of the latter is absolutely not determined by the
former.]
Literally dozens of critics have quoted and worried over the second of
these sentences. Why should the composer of The Rite of Spring and The
Soldier’s Tale say that music is powerless to express anything? Is that not
outrageous? It would indeed be outrageous. However, it is worth pointing
out that although readers have always assumed Stravinsky is here ex-
pressing the opinion that music cannot express anything, this is not exactly
what he says. What he actually says limits that generalisation in two vital
ways. It is that he considers music by its essence powerless to express
anything. Which implies firstly that he is giving us his point of view,
which may not be the only one (and there he is certainly right); and sec-
ondly, that while music has a non-expressive essence, it may also have
non-essential properties which do allow it at least to appear to express.
That latter possibility is something he later took up when commenting on
this passage; he is perfectly willing to admit that music almost always
appears to the listener to express something, and furthermore that music
certainly can, indeed generally does contain pegs on which listeners hang
their conviction that they are hearing something expressed. What
Stravinsky is concerned to do is to maintain that there is an essential
quality of music which is not dependent on that sense of expression. And
if I may allow myself to jump forward a few steps in the argument before
returning to the above text, the reason for this is as follows.
It is quite plain, and Stravinsky insists on this, that different listeners
will hear different expressions, often completely different expressions, in
the same piece of music, and that in cases where people all hear roughly
the same expression, this is normally because they have all been told in
words—in words, not in music—what to listen for. Examples of this are
well known to music historians. Most notably, there are many pieces of
purely instrumental music, from Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata to Cop-
land’s Appalachian Spring, whose titles were given by people other than
the composer after their composition, and yet which are generally taken as
descriptive of the scene to which that title alludes. Someone who does not
know those words will not hear the same expression. The expression,
therefore, cannot define the essence of the music, cannot tell us what gives
the musical work its unique and proper identity. So what does constitute
the identity of the work? According to Stravinsky, it is not what it says,
but what it is; not what it signifies, expresses or communicates, but itself
as object within the musical medium. We should not look, in music, for
what it represents or imitates outside it; we should look for what it consti-
tutes as a unique reality.
162 Intermediality in Stravinsky’s Music
And perhaps one could say the same about poetry. Returning to our first
quotation: If one reads the whole passage carefully, one can see that the
point Stravinsky is trying to make actually concerns poetry, not music.
The well-known sentence about music’s essential inability to express be-
gins with “Car,” a word which indicates that its function is to explain what
has been said in the previous sentence. And what had Stravinsky said in
that previous sentence? That the poetry he had been working with affected
him in the same way as music. He knows that in this he is different from
most readers, but the fact is that for him it is the material and formal fea-
tures of words, their physical presence as organised sound that matters; not
their meaning, which could perfectly well be nonsense. As a matter of fact,
a good proportion of the Russian popular poetry in question did indeed
belong to the genre generally known as nonsense. Stravinsky was very
fond of nonsense poetry, as we shall see; and that is hardly surprising
given his inclination to look in poetry, just as in music, not for what it
says, not for what it expresses, but for what it is. It cannot be enriched by
what it refers to, any more than music can.
Unfortunately from Stravinsky’s point of view, not all composers
realise this, though all the good ones do. Some nineteenth-century com-
posers committed the crime of trying to write music that expressed the
sense of words. In Stravinsky’s opinion, this meant that what they wrote
simply was not music. He thus describes the deplorable evolution of vocal
music since the golden days of polyphony:
Le chant, de plus en plus lié au mot, a fini par devenir une partie de rem-
plissage, affirmant ainsi sa décadence. Dès lors qu’il se donne pour mis-
sion d’exprimer le sens du discours, il sort du domaine musical et n’a plus
rien de commun avec lui. (Stravinsky 2000b: 91)
[The vocal line, increasingly tied to words, came to purely serve to fill a
pre-defined space, thus demonstrating its decadence. When it conceives of
its mission as expressing the meaning of words, it leaves the realm of
music; it no longer has anything in common with music.]
Peter Dayan 163
words with music most famously at the end of his Ninth Symphony, where
he set, of course, a poem that was already well known: Schiller’s “An die
Freude.” I think I can safely say that Beethoven’s music has always been
seen by the general public as magnificently expressive of the poem’s
meaning. Stravinsky, of course, cannot accept this. Which leaves him,
logically, with two possible approaches to that music. Either he says that
the music does not really express the meaning of the poetry at all, in which
case it may remain essentially musical; or else he maintains that the music
does express that meaning, in which case it cannot really be music at all.
In fact, he takes advantage, alternately, of both these possibilities. He
writes that “the words even of the Ninth Symphony can be reduced to
nonsense without affecting the meaning of the music” (Stravinsky and
Craft 1972: 290). If the meaning of the words has no connection with the
meaning of the music, then the music plainly does not express the meaning
of the words, and it is safe. But Stravinsky is equally capable of saying
that this same music, the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, indeed
attempts to express the meaning of the poetry; in which case, like all music
that follows poetry or expresses meaning, it must be bad music: “[T]he
greatest failure is in the ‘message’; hence, if you will pardon the expres-
sion, in the ‘medium.’ For the message of the voices is a finitude greatly
diminishing the message of the wordless music” (Stravinsky and Craft
1972: 169).
In sum: Beethoven’s setting of “An die Freude” is either a failure be-
cause it expresses the message of the words it sets, or else it is a success
because it does not express the message of the words. In practice,
Stravinsky can see it as either. This confirms that music is only music
when it is taken as essentially non-expressive. It also implies that the per-
ception of the quality of Beethoven’s music is not a given; it depends on
point of view. Music has an essence that no expression can reach; but that
essence is not necessarily what a listener hears, even when that listener is
Igor Stravinsky.
In the musical tradition of the century in which Stravinsky was born,
word-setting was not the only way in which poems were associated with
music. There was another, and for Stravinsky even more pernicious, way
of pegging one to the other: the tone poem, or “poème symphonique.” This
was of course anathema to Stravinsky. Here is what he has to say about the
“poème symphonique”:
164 Intermediality in Stravinsky’s Music
[this type of composition, whose career was quite short, cannot be taken
into consideration in the same way as the great symphonic forms, because
it presents itself as entirely dependent on elements foreign to music. In this
respect, the influence of Berlioz was more aesthetic than musical; in Liszt,
Balakirev, and the youthful Rimsky-Korsakov, that influence does not af-
fect the essence of their works.]
Here, again, Stravinsky, just as he did in the famous passage from Chro-
niques de ma vie with which I began my argument, distinguishes carefully
between the essential quality of music, which expresses nothing and is
unrelated to literature, and other qualities, undefined by him, which, he
allows us to believe, may be related at least provisionally by the listener;
and just as he can save Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony by asserting that the
connections between poem and music do not essentially concern the
music, so he saves the tone poems of Liszt and Rimsky-Korsakov by tell-
ing us that they are not in essence tone poems. Essentially, they are music.
***
How, then, can one sum up the relationship between poetry and music, as
it appears in Stravinsky’s writings? From one point of view, the two arts
are fundamentally similar; from another, they have nothing to do with each
other. They are similar in that both a poem and a piece of music are, for
Stravinsky, to be valued as formal constructs whose dynamics operate
within their own concrete medium, and not as expressions of anything
outside that medium. But precisely for that reason, there can be no com-
munication between them. Music and poetry cannot lend meaning to each
other, nor can they borrow meaning from each other. An understanding of
poetry cannot help us to understand music, and vice versa.
Nonetheless, in the famous passage from Chroniques de ma vie that I
would like to quote once again, Stravinky does suggest that poetry can
affect us in a way that might be considered analogous to music:
Ce qui me séduisait dans ces vers, ce n’est pas tant les anecdotes, souvent
truculentes, ni les images ou les métaphores toujours délicieusement im-
prévues, que l’enchaînement des mots et des syllabes, ainsi que la cadence
qu’il provoque et qui produit sur notre sensibilité un effet tout proche de
celui de la musique. (Stravinsky 2000a: 69)
Peter Dayan 165
[What seduced me in this verse was not the anecdotes, savoury though they
often were, nor the images and metaphors, always deliciously unpredic-
table; rather, it was the concatenation of words and syllables, and the sense
of cadence it produced, which affect our sensibility very much in the same
way as music.]
166 Intermediality in Stravinsky’s Music
one might have thought that in fitting words to music, Stravinsky and
Ramuz would have aimed to make the verbal accents fit the musical ac-
cents. That, however, is precisely what they did not do. They were aware
of the issue; but they carefully avoided straightforward correspondence
between the rhythm of words and the rhythm of music. Ramuz describes
them deliberately not resolving:
[the famous and insoluble question of word stress and its coincidence, or
non-coincidence, with musical accents. When coincidence is too regular, it
is boring; it satisfies in us only the spirit of measure and metrics. It would
have been completely opposed to the intimate nature of this music (…).]
Poetry and music thus stay carefully out of phase, and it remains impos-
sible to say how or why the one fits with the other. Stravinsky described
his discovery of this principle of non-coincidence of accents with a rather
splendid metaphor:
Peter Dayan 167
French, where accents are created by the meaning of words more than
anything else. So there is a limit to the extent to which one can take
Stravinsky at his word when he says, as he so often did, that he was not
interested, musically speaking, in the meanings of words, but only in their
sounds. The fact is that the most important element of that sound, the
rhythm, depends on the meaning. And Stravinsky indirectly recognises
this when he comments that the work Renard, for example, is “phoneme
music” (Stravinsky and Craft 1962: 120–121). A phoneme is not merely a
sound; it is a sound considered as a structural element of a language. It is
in point of linguistic fact defined, not just by its sound, but by its role in
the construction of signifiers. Thus meaning creeps back into poetry, after
having been cast out. However, this meaning, as it returns to poetry, ac-
quires no direct access to music. On the contrary: Stravinsky’s pleasure is
in keeping the musical rhythm deliberately non-coincidental with the rhy-
thm that the meaning of the words dictates. At the same time, the very
non-coincidence ineluctably depends, in turn, on the composer of the mus-
ic being aware of the meaning of the words, and taking that meaning into
account as he composes his own musical rhythms.
The relationship between words and music that this compositional dy-
namic sets up is not a static one. It constantly enacts a small-scale drama.
We see words and music brought together. Stravinsky’s instinct is to deny
that there is any relationship between the meaning of the words and the
meaning of the music. This, however, turns out to be untenable: The truth
is that, in the process of composition, verbal meaning indeed plays a part.
Having acknowledged this fact (usually as tangentially as is compatible
with honesty), Stravinsky then engages in a manoeuvre designed to save
music from words, a kind of move which I shall henceforth refer to as the
Stravinsky gesture. He allows for a relationship between music and verbal
meaning on the level of the individual’s interpretation of the music, whe-
ther the individual concerned be the composer, the translator or the listen-
er; but he then distinguishes between that level of individual interpretation,
and what the music essentially, unchangingly, is, its objective identity,
independent of interpretation; and it is only the latter quality that he allows
to be strictly musical.
This little drama is played out particularly clearly when Robert Craft
confronts Stravinsky with the plain fact that the composer associated cer-
tain passages of his Symphony in Three Movements with images of war,
images that Stravinsky is perfectly well able to describe in words.
168 Intermediality in Stravinsky’s Music
I.S.: I can say little more than that it was written under the sign of them. It
both does and does not “express my feelings” about them, but I prefer only
to say that, without participation of what I think of as my will, they excited
my musical imagination. (Stravinsky and Craft 1968: 50)
We should not be surprised by the “does and does not,” nor by the “scare
quotes” around “express my feelings.” We have seen how Stravinsky
describes music as essentially powerless to express, but in practice always
caught up with a provisional sense that it does express something. Nor
should we be surprised to hear that, of the two ways of considering music,
as provisionally expressive or essentially inexpressive, he prefers to talk
about the latter, the inexpressive. He gives the clear impression that he
does not want to enter into details of the associations that clearly exist in
his own mind, independently of what he thinks of as his will, between his
music and the events of the war. And yet, having said he can say little
about them, and that he prefers not to talk about them, he does talk about
them, for a page and a half. Particularly, he talks about a number of films
of the war that he had seen, which had left him with images in his head
that he associated with various parts of the symphony. This clearly con-
stitutes what one might call intermedial enrichment between cinema and
music. For example, Stravinsky tells us that a documentary film about
“scorched-earth tactics in China” “inspired” the first movement of the
symphony, and that the middle part of that movement: “was conceived as
a series of instrumental conversations to accompany a cinematographic
scene showing the Chinese people scratching and digging in their fields”
(Stravinsky and Craft 1968: 52). We should note that even in his remarks
here, Stravinsky is careful to allow for a certain distance between the mus-
ic, and the scene from the film. The music does not describe, illustrate,
translate or express the scene; it is a “series of instrumental conver-
sations”—so the essential dynamic remains internal to the music, between
the instruments—to “accompany” the scene. But even this indirect assoc-
iation, allowing for no rigorous analysis of intermedial transfer of meaning
between music and cinema, cannot be allowed to stand. The Stravinsky
gesture sweeps it away:
But enough of this. In spite of what I have said, the Symphony is not pro-
grammatic. Composers combine notes. That is all. How and in what form
the things of this world are impressed upon their music is not for them to
say. (Stravinsky and Craft 1968: 52)
This might seem to be sheer hypocrisy. Stravinsky says it is not for com-
posers to say how the “things of this world” are impressed on their music.
Peter Dayan 169
But has he not done just that? Perhaps not. He has admittedly told us what
images were in his head. But he has not told us that there is an essential
link between those images and the music. He has admitted that the two ex-
isted together, the images and the music, and in his own head at the time
there seemed to be a link. However, how and in what form that link oper-
ated, he cannot and does not say. The association may exist in his head,
but that is personal to him. It is merely his interpretation. It does not con-
cern the essence of the music. The Stravinsky gesture initially allows that,
for individuals including himself, associations exist between music and
phenomena outside music. Then it dismisses the association as something
that does not touch the essence of the music. The invariable conclusion to
the gesture is: “Composers combine notes. That is all.”
Once one has learnt to identify that gesture, one finds it, sometimes
entire, often very compressed, and frequently fragmented, everywhere in
Stravinsky’s writings. Its logic explains many well-known Stravinsky lines
that might otherwise appear baffling. Why, for example, should a man
who composed many songs, and more than one piece that is at least in
some sense an oratorio, say “vocal recitals are torture for me” (Stravinsky
and Craft 1962: 55) and “Lent and oratorios, they deserve each other”
(Stravinsky and Craft 1962: 63)? Why did the composer of so many ballets
say that “The Firebird did not attract me as a subject”? He goes on to
claim: “Like all story ballets it demanded descriptive music of a kind I did
not want to write” (Stravinsky and Craft 1962: 128). These are all
examples of the latter part of the Stravinsky gesture, the part that says
“Composers combine notes. That is all.” But that latter part of the gesture
would be unthinkable without the first part, which acknowledges that to
any human being taken as an individual, music does, on an unavoidable
surface level, appear to express something.
Certainly, there is a paradox at the heart of the Stravinsky gesture. It is,
however, one that Stravinsky himself fully assumed. Indeed, he affirmed it
as a principle in the following interview:
I.S.: [As far as regards] transformation, I do not admit the idea because I
am unable to understand what the cognates would be. Obviously the phen-
omenal world is refractable in music, or represented in it. The point is
simply that I don’t understand the mirroring (or the transforming) chem-
istry. (Stravinsky 1968: 69–70)
170 Intermediality in Stravinsky’s Music
Let us be clear: The point is not that Stravinsky is trying and failing to
understand “the mirroring (or the transforming) chemistry.” The point is
precisely that he does not understand. It is certainly not because of any
lack of critical intelligence that he does not understand. It is because this
must not be understood. That is difficult for critics to accept, because
critics, like academics and students, always want to understand everything.
But Stravinsky’s point is that there is something that has to escape our un-
derstanding for art to function; and he situates the borderline of what we
do not understand precisely in that place where the musical meets the
“phenomenal” world. The two are related; but we must not understand
how, or music itself would cease to exist. The paradox, then, is not a prob-
lem; it is the very structure that preserves music.
As far as I know, there is not a single piece of music by Stravinsky that
is not linked by Stravinsky himself, via title, anecdote, description or some
other way, to something outside music. There is no absolute Stravinsky
music in that sense; nothing like Beethoven’s Second and Eighth sympho-
nies, which Stravinsky so much admired, and which remain so purely
musical, so uncontaminated by words. The very composer who most reso-
lutely maintained that music is essentially only itself, incommensurate
with any other medium, constantly associated it with other media. Why?
The answer is given by the necessity of the drama behind the Stravinsky
gesture. Music is essentially only itself. But it is never initially perceived
as only itself. We all, like Stravinsky himself, lend it meanings. To allow
music to return to its essential purity, Stravinsky must not ignore this fact;
he must actively engage with it. He must do battle with the meaning in
music, and vanquish it. He must allow the enemy to enter the citadel be-
fore he can conquer it.
Intermediality thus becomes a necessary dynamic component of
Stravinsky’s art. It allows him to perceive meaning as a property not of
music, but of the other media associated with it. He can then deny that the
association signifies any essential identity between music and the other
media; and through that denial, meaning can be cast out, to allow music to
remain in its inexpressive purity. Certainly, this gesture is not without its
duplicities. But it defines with extraordinary clarity, it seems to me, an
aesthetic which one recognizes as more widespread the more one thinks
about it, and which therefore deserves careful consideration. Within that
aesthetic, interdisciplinarity as a critical strategy is of very limited useful-
ness. Intermediality, on the other hand, plays, as we have seen, a decisive
role. That role, in the end, however, is a tragic one: The other media are
destined to die in music, to be dismissed by Stravinsky when he becomes,
not himself as an individual, but a composer of music. I will allow myself
Peter Dayan 171
to conclude by once more quoting the statement that sums up the final,
irredeemably monomedial stage of the Stravinsky gesture: “Composers
combine notes. That is all.”
Works Cited
Ramuz, Charles-Ferdinand. [1929] 1978. Souvenirs sur Igor Stravinsky.
Lausanne: L’Aire.
Stravinsky, Igor. [1935–1936] 2000a. Chroniques de ma vie. Paris:
Denoël.
—. [1942] 2000b. Poétique musicale. Paris: Flammarion.
Stravinsky, Igor, and Robert Craft. 1968. Dialogues and a Diary. London:
Faber and Faber.
Stravinsky, Igor, and Robert Craft. 1962. Expositions and Developments.
London: Faber and Faber.
Stravinsky, Igor, and Robert Craft. 1972. Themes and Conclusions.
London: Faber and Faber.
SABINE KIM
Abstract
New media technologies of the nineteenth century such as the phonograph
offered a way to reconceptualise one’s relation to time and space in the
shrinking globe of modernity. Far from being instruments that neutrally
carried voices, electricity and sound, the “speaking machines” were me-
diators that, in their very alteration of how one conceived one’s own voice,
seemed to suggest the potential of bridging not just two persons on either
end of a continent but of joining those in other realms as well. Through a
reading of Emily Dickinson’s poem “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—”
as a figuration of the rupture of ordinary time and space, I would like to
suggest that Dickinson, though scarcely published in print form in her
time, was someone deeply attuned to the potentialities of media that could
store voices and sounds and release them at a later time, detached from
their authorising bodies. Although Dickinson composed her work before
the commercial rise of Edison’s phonograph, this article will suggest that
certain of her poems about death and dying inscribe a phonographic logic.
Sound takes on phonographic traits, becoming something which momen-
tarily ruptures ordinary experience and produces an excess which alters the
way in which history, memory and understanding might organise the rela-
tions between past, present and future.
Death and dying in much of Emily Dickinson’s writing are states that
never seem quite finished or complete. Her poems often stage such mo-
ments as being both in proximity and simultaneously far away, a happen-
174 Emily Dickinson and the Phonograph
ing that is both charged with the present and yet also already aware of
itself as something with a radical finitude. Mortality as well as the sense of
time, space, and presence were on the one hand all phenomena being re-
conceptualised in nineteenth-century America by media such as the tele-
graph, the telephone, and the phonograph. On the other hand, these media
were themselves bound up with already existing social desires. In the case
of the phonograph, at a moment of increasing industrialisation and the
separation of leisure from labour time, phonographic recording seemed to
enable the reversibility of time with its ability to play back sounds that had
previously been fleeting and to play them at will, separated from the
objects and bodies that had produced them in the first place. Thus the
phonograph offered a manipulable media archive for preserving memory,
personality, and ideas; for a vast ideal archive of sounds that could shore
up cultural memory against the ephemerality which sound usually repre-
sents—conceptualisations that shaped the ways in which such technologies
of sound communication could be imagined in the first place. I maintain
that Dickinson’s writing, starting with her very particular and constantly
changing approaches to composing, often stages a kind of “sonic excess”
in order to draw attention to the radical possibilities of communication—
for example, across the realms of the living and the dead—seemingly
embodied by media such as the phonograph and thereby stages her own
poetics as the intermedial process in-between.
In discussing the reconceptualisations of media in nineteenth-century
America, I argue that it was the capacities of the phonograph, in particular,
for recording sounds and preserving them for transmission at a later point,
regardless of whether the owner of the voice was present, which contri-
buted to the development of new concepts of presence, temporality and the
relationship to one’s own mortality. However, these new subjectivities
were not purely a result of new media technologies so much as an intensi-
fication of already existing ideas in nineteenth century America. Using the
example of the 1862 poem “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—” (Dickin-
son 1999b), I would like to suggest that Emily Dickinson uses tropes of
technological hearing in a way that foreshadows Edison’s “speaking ma-
chine.” In doing so, I also hope to demonstrate ways in which her poetic
practice relies on a performative notion of sound as something which
changes the ways in which we can think of media processes; i.e., as events
which escape ordinary notions of time and space.
Sabine Kim 175
176 Emily Dickinson and the Phonograph
The radical nature of the fragments, some not much larger than the
space of a postage stamp, produces questions about how they “fit” in rela-
tion to the poems and letters as such. Some fifty years after Thomas H.
Johnson included some of the fragments as footnotes in the Harvard Uni-
versity Belknap Press edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Marta L.
Werner’s approach in Radical Scatters, her digital archive of Dickinson’s
fragments, is more akin to “critic and translator” than editor (see Werner
2007: 45). She reads the fragments as Dickinson’s final and most radical
rejection of print publication and its attendant fixing of textual meaning:
[N]either residents nor aliens, neither lost nor found, these trace fragments
are caught between their attraction to specific, bounded texts and their re-
sistance to incorporation. […] [T]hey require that we attend to the mystery
of the encounters between fragments, poems, and letters, listening espe-
cially to the ways in which, like leitmotifs, the fragments both influence
the modalities of the compositions in which they momentarily take asylum
and carry those leitmotifs beyond the finished compositions into another
space and time. (Werner 2007: 29–30, my emphasis)
Sabine Kim 177
This inability to fix the source or nature of the sound can lead to a vague
irritation, as Macho furthermore contends, linked to the anxiety arising
from the fact that the sound seems to be emanating from a non-place, and
is not attached to a specific body.4 This irritation, I would like to suggest,
lends sound the nature of an event.
When sound is located in a specific body, or can be traced as originat-
ing from a particular place, or can be conceptually located as part of a
larger meaning, the threat of autonomy is contained, but sound neverthe-
less always carries with it an unexpectedness, which might be called its
character of “eventfulness” as that which introduces newness or the un-
known. Sound can be obstreperous, both contributing to semantics but at
the same time hinting at an “outside” that makes meaning precarious.
Sound has the potential of introducing something unknown. Conceptuali-
sations of sound, from theorists as various as Aristotle (see Connor 2007),
psychoanalytic cultural critic Mladen Dolar (2006), and film scholar Mary
Ann Doane (1980) nevertheless agree in this respect: that sound has a
threshold quality that causes it to be capable of mediating across states that
otherwise and under normal circumstances are taken to be oppositions.
Roland Barthes conceptualised “idyllic communication” as the trans-
fers of memory which take place without anything disrupting the process
of transformation which occurs between an event and its remembrance
(see Barthes 1974: 145). In this ideal situation, an utterance passes directly
from the one speaking to the one listening, without anything outside this
frame of perfect communication. Yet this scenario does not account for
temporality, much less for the workings of accident, misfortune, chance or
creativity and hence Barthes refers to what he calls “noise” as the privi-
leged form of certain literary texts, which is always a process of mediation
with the constitutive possibility precisely of interference, also understood
as “counter-communication” (contre-communication, Barthes 1974: 145).
Here the concept of voice brings oppositions into a dialogue of pleasurable
friction. Rather than the disturbance of noise being alien to reading and
writing, Barthes conceives of literature as precisely this kind of jouissance
associated with voice itself. Thus the effect of counter-communication
produced by such ever-revisable texts
results from two voices, received on an equal basis: there is an interference
of two lines of destination. [. . .] In relation to an ideally pure message (as
in mathematics), the division of reception constitutes a “noise,” it makes
communication obscure, fallacious, hazardous: uncertain. Yet this noise,
this uncertainty are emitted by the discourse with a view toward a com-
munication: they are given to the reader so that he may feed on them: what
the reader reads is a counter-communication; and if we grant that the
178 Emily Dickinson and the Phonograph
double understanding far exceeds the limited case of the play on words or
the equivocation and permeates, in various forms and densities, all classic
writing (by very reason of its polysemic vocation), we see that literatures
are in fact arts of “noise”; what the reader consumes is this defect in com-
munication, this deficient message; what the whole structuration erects for
him and offers him as the most precious nourishment is a counter-
communication; the reader is an accomplice, not of this or that character,
but of the discourse itself insofar as it plays on the division of reception,
the impurity of communication. (Barthes 1974: 145)
Sabine Kim 179
180 Emily Dickinson and the Phonograph
Sabine Kim 181
182 Emily Dickinson and the Phonograph
Sabine Kim 183
184 Emily Dickinson and the Phonograph
Poetic Transfers
Voice has been called the paradigmatic example of performativity. For one
thing, just as in a performance, the event is finished the moment that the
voice stops uttering. Yet writing itself acts as a sort of media archive, and
Dickinson’s writing stages this transfer of cultural memory—from the oral
to the written and back again—as the intermedial operation of poetry
itself. The fragments, writes Werner, are “Dickinson speaking-writing in
extremis. The seminal readings of Dickinsons’s language—her broken
grammar and syntax, her strange use of the sonic qualities of language—
are evident in her late manuscripts, whose visual qualities underscore,
even double, her verbal experimentation” (2007: 32). The palimpsestic
condition of such writing, in which Dickinson’s words literally overwrite
other words or are overwritten by them, suggests the ways in which her
writing underwent a change in compositional practice towards an inter-
mediality that grasped media not as transparent vehicles for carrying over
meaning but rather as modalities of radically other possibilities.
To pursue this idea of communication across impossible distances, it
would be helpful to consider the work of contemporary German media
philosopher Sybille Krämer. In a recent study of mediality, Krämer refers
to the figure of the messenger (der Bote) to conceptualise the sense of both
mediating presence (such as the voice and writing) and of process; she also
proposes a type of mediality in which the media are invisible as mediating
agents, namely in the case of viruses, post, money, and the witness. In
either case, the fundamental characteristic of the medium is that it
disappears once it has successfully “delivered” the thing with which it has
been entrusted. In a sense the very obsoleteness of the figure of the
messenger in the current preponderantly digital age underscores two
important propositions, namely, that “there is always an outside to media,”
and “much of our communication is not dialogic” (Krämer 2008: 10, my
translation). In other words, messengers are in principle figures who arrive
from outside; they are heteronomous and directed towards that which is
foreign, strange, and unfamiliar. For Krämer, media always have an
exteriority to them, and in that sense, they should not be regarded as
autonomous agents. Moreover, the concept of media as messengers puts
the popular communication model into question, since the nature of mess-
aging tends not to be dialogic but rather (“at least initially”) “unidirec-
tional and asymmetrical,” i.e., carried out by one party (Krämer 2008: 10).
The non-dialogic tendency is partly a result of the fact that messengers are
needed precisely in those cases when dialogue fails, is overly mediated, or
is otherwise impossible.
Sabine Kim 185
Conclusion
In “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—,” voice becomes detached from its
body not only in space but also in time, creating a temporality which
unsettles time and appears capable of playing events in reverse. That the
body is not left behind is fully clear from the presence of the fly, which
186 Emily Dickinson and the Phonograph
Works Cited
Attali, Jacques. 1985. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Trans. Bri-
an Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Babbage, Charles. [1837] 1838. The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. 2nd ed.
London: John Murray.
Barthes, Roland. 1974. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Farrar.
Brophy, Gregory. 2011. “Writing the Disaster: Babbage and the
Black Box.” The Floating Academy: A Victorian Studies Blog. Posted
by Gregory Brophy on 10 May 2011. http://floatingacademy.
wordpress.com/2011/05/10/writing-the-disaster-babbage-and-the-
black-box/ (accessed 25 May 2011).
Cameron, Sharon. 1992. Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson’s Fascicles.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Christensen, Lena. 2008. Editing Emily Dickinson: The Production of an
Author. New York: Routledge.
Connor, Steven. 2007. “Whisper Music.” Symposium paper. Take a Deep
Breath. Tate Modern. (Text available at http://www.stevenconnor.com
[accessed 7 Jan. 2011]).
Sabine Kim 187
188 Emily Dickinson and the Phonograph
Notes
1
Thomas H. Johnson, for example, appended some of them as footnotes in the
1955 Belknap Press edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson.
2
Dickinson’s letters create an interesting problem of genre, since the letters were a
means of sharing her poems with correspondents, and also because the notes often
contained objects to which the lines made reference, including “ads, dead crickets,
valentines, stamps, Poetess verse, pressed flowers, printed paper cut-out birds”
(Jackson 2005: 235).
3
Because Dickinson chose to circulate her writing via letters rather than print
publication, the materiality of the manuscripts has drawn much critical attention,
especially concerning Dickinson’s handwriting, her dashes, and her alteration of
standard spellings. See Cameron 1992 on Dickinson’s variants; Werner 1995 on
the fragments; Smith 1987; 2000 on the way in which Dickinson’s correspondence
was edited by her brother before publication in order to excise references to her
relationship to Susan Dickinson Gilbert.
4
My translation. See Macho 2007: 130.
5
Dickinson did not give titles nor did she number her poems but I follow the
convention of many Dickinson scholars who refer to the poems by the order given
Sabine Kim 189
by either Johnson, who in the 1950s eliminated the rather Victorian titles created
by other editors and for the first time published the poems in chronological order,
or Ralph W. Franklin, who re-ordered the poems in the sequence in which they
appear in the fascicle groupings. For an overview of the editing history, see
Christensen 2008. Here, I refer to Franklin’s 1999 reading edition.
6
For a brilliant reading of Dickinson’s orthographic poetics as a telegraphic mode,
understood not only as metaphor but as ontology, see McCormack 2003; for an
argument about how Dickinson’s misspellings are part of a strategy of double-
voiced quotation, in which Dickinson simultaneously pays homage to her literary
forebears and also “frames” them within her own contexts, see Messmer 2001, esp.
Chapter 5.
7
Voice in Dickinson’s poetry is often a means of address: Brita Lindberg-Syersted
calculates that the “I” or other references to the first person occur in about one out
of every five of Dickinson’s texts (see Lindberg-Seyersted 1968: 32).
8
Dickinson did not date her poems, so the composition dates are rough and in this
case are based on an analysis of her various handwriting styles.
9
Edison was working on research relating to the telephone and electric telegraph
when he developed the principles of phonography. Being hard of hearing, he was
aware that sound is “heard” not only by the ears but by the entire head, as
vibration. Working from the idea of sound as a force striking the air, he tested the
transmission capacity of sound by using his own head as resonating chamber, and
used wooden sticks held between his teeth, which would “register” sounds through
impression. Thus “Thomas Edison’s bitemarks” can be seen on many of his early
phonograph prototypes (Sterne 2006: 834).
10
This phrase is Jacques Derrida’s in his discussion in Archive Fever: The
Freudian Impression (1996).
11
See Enns 2010.
CONCLUSION
REMAINS TO BE SEEN:
INTERMEDIALITY, EKPHRASIS
AND INSTITUTION
JAMES CISNEROS
Abstract
Over the last thirty years, the university has shifted away from the field of
humanities, and the priority it accorded to national literatures, to turn
towards interdisciplinary studies of emergent media practices and technol-
ogies. This article analyses the concept of intermediality as both symptom
of and participant in this historical shift through a comparison with the lit-
erary figure of ekphrasis. I ask how these distinct ways of associating vis-
ual and textual arts speak of the historical difference separating them:
While intermediality is gaining steam in the new interdisciplinary land-
scape, ekphrasis belongs to a discipline that is increasingly marginalised in
today’s university. These lines of continuity and difference will allow us to
give greater historical density to intermediality’s emergence.
[Can intermedial research and practice follow the traces of these ongoing
changes, or do they constitute yet other traces, moments of crystallisation,
places of expression for these stakes of our modernity?]
tion than to a process of learning that inculcates the subject with rules of
thought so that “knowledge acquisition becomes a freely autonomous ac-
tivity, part of the subject” (Readings 1996: 67). University teaching im-
plies a specific temporality and spatial system, a chronotope where the
state projects itself as a nation to produce subjects and/as citizens. This
teaching ethos organises itself around national literature, the central disci-
pline that at once distinguishes itself as the safeguard of an organic iden-
tity, binding individual and nation, and demonstrates progress in the ac-
quisition of knowledge (for the subject) and power (for the state). Taking
over from philosophy, national literature becomes the ordering principle
for the university’s cultural purpose, attaining disciplinary status once it
occupies “a museal or canonical space of rational historical understand-
ing” (Readings 1996: 73) that offers a unified account of linear progress.
While the call for national literature’s preeminence was first articulated
by Friedrich Schlegel, it was in England, under the influence of Matthew
Arnold, that culture would become a primarily literary undertaking. Ar-
nold, and F. R. Leavis after him, presented a notion of culture by which an
organic community conceived along ethnic lines could overcome the op-
position of technology, whose growth had greatly exacerbated industriali-
sation’s threat of fragmentation and “anarchy.” Culture was to be a ram-
part against the external effects of industrial civilisation and was meant to
slow the professional slide towards mechanical specialisation. Further-
more, Readings adds, culture would make technology a centralising force
around which a greater expanse of (colonist or colonised) people could
assemble: “Culture turns technology into the mode of self-knowledge of a
people, and it turns the organicism of the lost community into a living
principle of identity rather than a closed system” (1996: 82).
This university is now in ruins. With the nation-state in decline and
national culture on the run, the university has been divested of both its
privileged relation to institutionalised power and its mandate of cultural
transmission. Instead of the guiding ethos of culture, the university now
devotes itself to what Readings, in a fine study of current university ad-
ministration-speak, refers to as “excellence.” This catchall term indicates
that the university has lost its idea, or that its purpose is an idea without
content. “As a non-referential unit of value entirely internal to the system,
excellence marks nothing more than the moment of technology’s self-
reflection” (Readings 1996: 227). Gone, then, are the external referent of
the state and the pedagogy of subjective development, and in their place is
a reference to “nothing more than the optimal input/output ratio in matters
of information” (Readings 1996: 227); instead of an idea of cultural
knowledge, information efficiently circulated. Readings attributes the
James Cisneros 197
outside of it” (Readings 1996: 171). Intermediality can make legible those
anachronistic remains, allowing us to think our place within them and their
place between us. It can, in Simon Wortham’s words, help us think the
university while “letting the remains remain, letting them survive as re-
mains” (1999: 175).10
This calls for anachronistic thinking that projects intermediality be-
yond the institutional juncture of which it is a symptom, uses it to explain
situations once removed from those it confronts and takes the explanation
as a sign of thought. It means making it turn back on its own purpose as
the sign of a ruin it can make legible, a task for which the reflexive figure
of intermediality seems particularly apt. It is in this sense that we might
consider ekphrasis as a possible precursor to the concept of intermediality:
Both figures hover around the interface of text and image, both situate the
media in an inter- or transdisciplinary space and both carry a reflexive
delay in their respective movements. The parallel, itself anachronistic, can
illustrate how intermediality might help make the ruins come into view.
Ekphrasis, after all, comes to us through classical rhetoric, a disciplinary
branch that is quite obviously in ruins. It also holds an unexpectedly
privileged place in the history of the university, having been in high cir-
culation when the modern disciplinary division first began to develop, and
thus occupying a place vis-à-vis a nascent disciplinary landscape that is
similar to intermediality’s place before the shifts that herald its end. Its
apogee with the Romantics coincides with the beginning of the modern
university whose end is now signalled by intermediality.
A comparison of the two figures will bracket the historical poles of the
university’s disciplinary divide, marked at one end by ekphrasis and at the
other by intermediality. It is of course not my intention to overlook their
differing history in relation to disciplinary knowledge, as if the kind of
ekphrasis cultivated by the Romantics at a time when it held greater ap-
plicability could be equated to today’s intermediality. Instead, I would like
to suggest that the comparison can open a potential site of resistance for
intermediality insofar as it emphasises a temporal tendency proper to the
rhetorical figure. This involves relaying two senses of anachronism: the
first is historical, oscillating between the beginning and the end of the dis-
ciplinary divide; the second is figural, exploring a peculiar temporal dy-
namic shared by ekphrasis and intermediality. The first allows us to think
of ekphrasis as a kind of ruin that marks one of intermediality’s own exte-
rior limits. Thinking back to ekphrasis hence implies accounting for the
changes in the disciplinary landscape and the ruined university, and adds
urgency to a reflection on the rise of inter- and transdisciplinary move-
ments as symptoms of greater changes that intermediality’s place “entre
James Cisneros 201
les saviors” might resist. The second, figural sense allows us to think of
intermediality in terms of an inner difference which, in the manner of ek-
phrasis, points to what remains before or beyond a single medium.
According to its etymology, ekphrasis originally means to make an
object “speak out” and has since come to refer to a literary imitation of a
plastic work of art. Its specificity comes from the extra-discursive refer-
ence, which is no more than the literary trace of a foreign element that
maintains a degree of autonomy from the discourse conveying it, and is no
less than a mark of exteriority and temporal precedence that the described
object transfers to the verbal images. These are the qualities that constitute
ekphrasis and not, as is sometimes assumed, the written text’s supposed
relation to an actually existing object, which remains a mere pre-text—in
every sense of the word—for the verbal rendition. The peculiar relation
that ekphrasis holds to its own limitations explains why it has been closely
bound to the trope of the ruins, which also derives from a temporal interval
that lags between reference and referent. This relation to its own boundar-
ies has also set it apart from other devices of discursive description, mak-
ing it a key term in the debate on artistic limits.
G.E. Lessing’s famous argument on the sister arts pivots on a case of
ekphrasis that it handles with the gloves of incipient disciplinary know-
ledge. His rejection of this figure in favor of well-defined artistic fields
anticipates the disciplinary division of the modern university that, accord-
ing to Readings, organises a national culture whose decline coincides with
the rise of interdisciplinary concepts such as intermediality, another figure
that oversteps a single field or medium. As is well known, Lessing’s Lao-
coön divides the cultural field into the arts of time and the arts of space,
arguing against all hybrid artistic forms and arguing for a strict internal
coherence for each art within limits that are defined by its neighbouring
media. Lessing articulates this aesthetic position with a geo-political dis-
course that divides the sister arts into distinct “provinces” or “realms” that
are clearly separated by “borders” (Mitchell 1986: 95–115).11 This dis-
course is evident in the opening pages of Lessing’s seminal work. Re-
minding his readers that the Greeks subjected art to a civil code, Lessing
claims that during his own time the “plastic arts in particular—aside from
the inevitable influence they exert on the character of a nation—have an
effect that demands close supervision of the law” (Lessing 1984: 14–15).12
Although one could argue that the priority he attributes to national char-
acter is of a general nature, and that he is referring to the social force of art
in collective organisation, E.H. Gombrich has shown (1958: 142) that a
similarly directed geo-political ethos informs the criticisms that Lessing
202 Remains to be Seen: Intermediality, Ekphrasis and Institution
levies against other art theorists, particularly the French, who could also be
the target of his attack on religious motifs or intentions in art.13
Without lingering on the implied national chauvinism, it is perhaps not
surprising that this parcelling into realms and provinces should lead to a
hierarchical organisation of the arts. Poetry not only has “a wider range”
than painting, having “beauties at its command that painting is never able
to attain,” but can also handle “inartistic” as well as “artistic” beauties
(Lessing 1984: 50). Following the parallel that Lessing crafts between
politics and artistic media, poetry’s greater reach can only be interpreted in
terms of a national culture’s intrinsic complexity. Within this discourse of
national character, the priority he gives to poetry amounts to the privileg-
ing of linguistic specificity for the elaboration of a “wide range” sensi-
bility that transcends artistic beauty. This greater reach is also temporal, of
course, since the national character hinges on a history that shows the per-
sistence of indigenous characteristics. Images, meanwhile, can comple-
ment the grand narrative but, being universally accessible and thus more
volatile, finally remain bound to the space of “art.”
Lessing’s firm rejection of ekphrasis should be understood within his
parallel preoccupation with national character and each art’s intrinsic nature,
where artistic hybridity would be correlative to the blurring of national
identity. This is confirmed in a suggestive reading by W.J.T. Mitchell,
who studies how Lessing’s interpretation of the prototype of ekphrasis, the
excursus on Achilles’s shield in the Iliad, rejects its descriptive mode by
subsuming it to the epic’s greater narrative movement. The rhetorical fig-
ure endangers the narrative’s bond to a specific and restrained image of the
community. Ekphrasis shows, within a privileged topos, everything that
remains outside the epic poem’s own delimited universality, making visi-
ble the social difference and heterogeneity that fissure the total space and
time of the epic community’s identity. Instead of narrative linearity, ek-
phrasis presents circularity or cyclicity, and instead of a seamless com-
munity that is evenly integrated into a single identity, ekphrasis presents a
model where the inside and outside are reversed, making visible what re-
mains beyond the epic’s scope—what Achilles will never see.14 Narrative
identity’s organicity and linearity15 correspond to the epic image of a total
community, both of which are endangered by ekphrastic description.16
The priority Lessing gives to the community’s integrity in his treatise
on artistic limits thus in important ways anticipates the modern university:
a secular national space within which artefacts are produced and evalu-
ated, and where cultural production takes on meaning according to a hier-
archy of arts or disciplines. This space would eventually host the national
literatures as conceived by the Romantics and especially by Schlegel, for
James Cisneros 203
the poem’s formal cause, the source of its structure and shape.17 The urn
has been shown particular favour and is perhaps, as Murray Krieger notes
(Krieger 1992), the ekphrastic object par excellence. At once a nativity
and burial vessel, it expresses cycles of creation and temporal complexity
that raise it beyond “the linear chronology of life’s transience.”18
To better understand this difference in repetition we turn to John
Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” possibly the most studied example of
ekphrasis. Its scenes unfold as an observer circles the urn to gradually per-
ceive a “mad pursuit” and a “struggle to escape” from an eternal time of
suspended amorous and ritual action. In a perpetual spring, the acts of lov-
ers forever young are ever begun and never accomplished. In the opening
stanza the observer questions the urn about its images and stories, and,
with particular interest, about the written legend that circles the vase:
Met with silence, the seeker circles the “still unravish’d bride of quietness”
and describes her images, wondering who is depicted and what town they
have emptied with their departure. By the final stanza, the observer has
completed the circuit around the vessel and, having deciphered the legend,
manages to make the urn speak:
The epigram on truth and beauty comes into view in the poem’s closing
moment, when love passes into death. Opening with the eve of marriage
and sexual union followed by images of frolicsome courtship and wild
ecstasy, the ode gives way to scenes of sacrifice and desolate towns, to
wilted love and the overwrought maidens of a “Cold Pastoral.”
The famous closing aphorism is as circular as the urn itself, curling
around the objet d’art with exemplary order and symmetry. Its inverted
repetition encapsulates ekphrasis’s circularity, while its neoclassical bal-
ance deliberately introduces an anomaly into the poem’s dominant Ro-
James Cisneros 205
mantic style, an “anachronistic” quality that sets apart the phrase as though
in a museum.19 The figure is constituted by this differential temporal pull
where a generation wastes between Eros and Thanatos, while the urn,
“sylvan historian,” remains. As the poem’s climactic moment, the differ-
ence in the closing stanza braids together the three variations of “the re-
mains” that develop independently throughout the narrative. The ode first
shows us the ruins of another era, a cultural artefact that will remain after
time’s inexorable advance. It then considers the urn as a historical agent
that can be made to speak, a mute witness around which historical dis-
course gravitates, a historical remain that engenders stories. Its ekphrasis
finally culminates when the urn speaks and when the vessel, now ravished,
unveils the secret that was still borne in its quietness—it climaxes when
we penetrate the urn’s virginal outer casing and de-crypt its inner burial
contents, making legible or visible the remains within. If, as Krieger sug-
gests, the poem seeks “to perform in a way similar to the way the urns
themselves, as sepulchral receptacles, sometimes sought to perform”
(1992: 269), its legibility hinges on the reader’s sensitivity to a specific
kind of historicity and on a receptive performance that can hear and see
the object’s anachronistic remains.
Reading the remains pivots on a questing movement that leads the
subject back to itself. The questioning with which the ode begins brings
the observer full circle. The answer, which comes into view once the urn is
orbited, is as circular as the vessel it dresses. Upon returning to the point
of departure, the observer has gained nothing more than the experience of
posing questions and an enigmatic phrase that repeats the object’s form, a
reversible epigram that echoes the inquiring voice in the hollow of the
vase. This echo, a trace of exteriority that is proper to the ode’s imitative
structure, indicates that the poem can repeat but will never coincide with
the object. Like the observer who circles the urn to return to the point of
departure, the experience of the trajectory makes this repeated position an
echo of the first, thereby giving a distant origin to the speaker’s own voice.
“What wild ecstasy?” we hear in the first stanza, a question that anticipates
how the last stanza will project the subject outside of itself, its voice be-
coming confused with that of another—an other’s voice that is made visi-
ble to the reader in the quotation marks that retain the oral breathing
rhythm originally signalled by the commas they invert (see Agamben
1998: 93). Like the shield that ekphrasis turns inside out to show what
remains beyond the epic community’s narrative, the urn turns inside out to
show what escapes the subject, presenting the remains to be seen. The re-
mains inside the vessel, and the urn itself as a ruin come into view simulta-
neously.
206 Remains to be Seen: Intermediality, Ekphrasis and Institution
Balance, symmetry and circularity in form and style are the primary
qualities that ekphrasis makes evident before pointing back to the funda-
mental imbalance between the linear text and the circular object. If the text
takes its shape from the images it describes as it circles the vase, the in-
stance of hermetic closure, when we return to the point of departure,
nonetheless includes a delay that accounts for the observer’s trajectory.
Something remains, before or beyond the verbal vessel’s threshold, that
ekphrasis indicates without articulating and shows without saying. Some-
thing besides the “leaf-fring’d legend” is still “haunting about” the ode’s
shape, a lingering doubt about the message it conveys. The subject, inhab-
ited by doubt, also haunts about the vessel.
Although the subject who asks the questions and the one who receives
the answer occupy an identical space, the delay produces persistent ves-
tiges of another time. This returns us to our discussion on the university’s
role in inculcating individuals with a kind of knowledge acquisition that
institutes them as subjects of (and for) the nation-state. Ekphrasis trumps
this process, as its questioning haunts the progressive, parallel course
which binds the state to the subject. Samuel Weber, through a close analy-
sis of Readings’s University in Ruins within the greater context of mod-
ernity (Weber 2001), describes the delayed movement of this questioning
as a splitting and doubling undertaken by the subject. Weber argues that
the non-referential “excellence” which is thought to mark nothing but
technology’s self-reflection nevertheless “remains […] a form of refer-
ence” (Weber 2001: 230, his emphasis), and hence fractures the informa-
tion network’s closed system of mirrored inputs and outputs. This frac-
tured reflection echoes the form of reference that surfaces with Descartes,
where a similar epistemological fault line runs through the ground of cer-
tain knowledge. The Cartesian ego at once splits off from and reflects on
itself, attaining certitude through a process of doubting that, undertaken by
the subject, remains without any determinate content concerning that
which is being doubted; this kind of performativity is, for Weber, “not so
very different from that ascribed by Readings to the notion of ‘excel-
lence’” (Weber 2001: 231). Yet this movement of splitting and doubling
can only be imagined to come “full circle,” he continues, “if its circularity
is supposed to transcend distinctions of space and time and thereby to
move around the timeless center of a pure Ego, an instance of pure and
immediate presence that does not require memory, recollection, repetition
in order to be present to itself.” If this “enables an I to doubt everything
except the fact that it is ‘I’ who am doing the doubting,” Weber adds, then
the temporal sediment of repeated mediation can potentially problematise
the center, pointing back to a differential fracture, referring to something
James Cisneros 207
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Paris: Christian Bourgois.
Brooks, Cleanth. 1947. The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of
Poetry. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock.
Cisneros, James. 2007. “Remains To Be Seen. Intermediality, Ekphrasis,
and Institution.” Pp. 15–28 in Intermédialité et socialité: Histoire et
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ster: Nodus.
Del Buono, Luigi, Cristophe Gaubert, et al. 2003. Universitas Calamita-
tum: le livre noir des réformes universitaires. Paris: du Croquant.
Dirlik, Arif. 1997. The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the
Age of Global Capitalism. Boulder: Westview.
Freitag, Michel. 1998. Le naufrage de l’université et autres essais
d’épistémologie politique, Montreal: Nota Bene.
Gombrich, E.H. 1958. Lessing (Proceedings of the British Academy for
1957). London: Oxford University Press.
Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. 2003. “Why Intermediality — If At All?”
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James Cisneros 209
Notes
1
An earlier version of this paper was published in Intermédialité et socialite: His-
toire et géographie d’un concept, edited by Marion Froger and Jürgen Müller (see
Cisneros 2007).
2
This citation comes from the call for papers for the fifth international conference
hosted by the Centre de Recherche sur l’Intermédialité (CRI) (“Histoire et géogra-
phie d’un concept. L’intermédialité entre les savoirs,” Montreal, 1-4 October
2003), organised by André Gaudreault, Livia Monnet and Yvonne Spielmann, as
does the suggestion that ekphrasis is a “concept” that “gravitates around the
question of intermediality.”
3
Readings describes this in terms of the ethos of ‘excellence’: “quality is not the
ultimate issue, but excellence soon will be, because it is the recognition that the
210 Remains to be Seen: Intermediality, Ekphrasis and Institution
13
Gombrich (1958: 142); he shows how Lessing weaves various traditions with
“the classic distinction between the sublime and the beautiful, and these categories
in turn are seen in terms of political and national traditions, liberty and tyranny,
England and France. Shakespeare is free and sublime poesy, Corneille rigid if
beautiful statuary.” Cited in Mitchell (1985: 106), who extends this reading to
Lessing’s secular attack on religion as a place for either art or artistic knowledge:
“‘Religious painting’ is a contradiction in terms for Lessing.”
14
Mitchell 1994: 180. See the chapter “Ekphrasis and the Other.” The shield
“shows us the whole world that is ‘other’ to the epic action of the Iliad, the world
of everyday life outside history that Achilles will never know. The relation of epic
to ekphrasis is thus turned inside out: the entire action of the Iliad becomes a
fragment in the totalizing vision provided by Achilles’s shield.” Mitchell shows
that the everyday life is one that depicts conflict within the community.
15
On narrative identity see Ricœur 1985. Ricœur sees excessive description as a
danger—“une mise en péril”—for narrative action.
16
Again anticipating Schlegel, who saw in the Greeks the pure origin of literature,
one that represents an organic community to itself and gives it continuity over
time, Lessing ties a form of narrative identity to the image of a collective group.
As Readings points out, the Greeks were to the Germans what Shakespeare was to
the English: “[F]or Arnold […] Shakespeare occupies the position that the German
Idealists ascribed to the Greeks: that of immediately representing an organic
community to itself in a living language. […] Schlegel praised the Greeks as the
pure origin of literature, as the people who created literature ex nihilo without any
historical antecedent […]” (Readings 1996: 78).
17
Spitzer 1962. On the differences between classical and Romantic ekphrasis see
Scott 1994: 1–28.
18
Krieger 1992: 269. Krieger culls his many examples from Brooks 1947.
19
Scott 1994. “For many critics, [the] phrase’s incongruity is an impediment to the
poem’s successful conclusion. Its language cannot be reconciled with the language
in the rest of the ode. Yet this anachronistic quality is precisely the point. The
epigram is meant to be anomalous, a rhetorical trump Keats has kept up his sleeve
all along” (148).
CONTRIBUTORS
Intermedial Arts 219
220 Index of Names
Intermedial Arts 221
SUBJECT INDEX
Intermedial Arts 225