Yacobi. Pictorial Models

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Pictorial Models and Narrative Ekphrasis

Author(s): Tamar Yacobi

Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 16, No. 4, (Winter, 1995), pp. 599-649

Published by: Duke University Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1773367

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PictorialModels ndNarrative kphrasis

TamarYacobiPoetics ndComparativeiterature,elAviv

Abstract Ekphrasiss an umbrella term that subsumes various forms of render-

ing the visual object in words. This variety is often arbitrarilyrestricted, largely

because some of the forms, though manifest in artistic practice, are not recog-nized in criticism. This essay analyzes two such neglected forms: pictorial modelsand narrative ekphrasis. Their intersection compounds the ekphrasis of a visualmodel (as distinct from a unique artwork)with narrativized (as against descrip-tive, picturelike) effect, though not only within narrative works. The neglect ofboth forms, I point out, relates to theory's doctrinal biases, namely, the insis-tence on interart reproduction ("mimesis")and so on either-or choices (between

epic and lyric, action and description, narrativity and pictoriality). Instead, I

argue for the centrality and the specifically narrative roles of the pictorial model.To enhance the evocability and perceptibility of the visual source, literary texts

often allude to a visual common denominator (e.g., the thematic makeup of"a Madonna with child" or the familiar components of "a Turner seascape").Furthermore, such ekphrastic models often join forces with narrativityto bringthe visual source into distinctively literary play, not least along the time axis.

Thus, when a visual clich6 is transmitted through the subjectivity of an inside

observer, it enters into narrative patterns such as plot and characterization, aswell as point of view. These and various other interplays between the ekphras-tic model and narrativityare illustrated in the second part of the essay, mainlythrough the poetics of Isak Dinesen.

Earlierversionsof thispaperwerepresentedat the FourthIASSCongress Barcelona-Perpignan, 1989), at the Second International Conference on Word and Image(Zurich, 1990), and at Indiana University(Bloomington, 1991).The author thanksthe audiences for their comments, and several readers,particularlyMieke Bal andClausCliiver.

PoeticsToday6:4 (Winter1995).Copyright? 1996byThe PorterInstitutefor Poeticsand Semiotics.CCC0333-5372/95/$2.50.



600 PoeticsToday16:4

1.Source-Targetelations etweenArts:Varieties f Ekphrasis enumbered

The traffic between visual art and literature has alwaysfeatured the allu-

sive (mimetic, thematic, quotation-like) relations between works in thedifferent media. The one work's representation of the world then be-comes the other's re-presentation, a mimesis in the second degree. Thusthe reworking of biblical and mythological tales, details, moments, andthemes (e.g., the Crucifixion or the birth of Venus) in the spatial arts.

Conversely, we have ekphrasis, where the temporal art of literature al-ludes to paintings, statues, urns, or, again, their traditional themes-with the difference that texts like William Carlos Williams's "Kermes"orAuden's "Musee des Beaux Arts" or Dan

Pagis's "Portrait,"whollyde-

voted to a verbal re-creation of visual elements, are comparatively late,

uncommon, and short. Oriented to time, literary discourse will rather

localize the intermedium allusion as an inset motif at some juncture(s).The earliest and best-known case in point is the rendering of Achilles'

shield in midepic, with numberless counterparts across literature since.

For example, Browning opens his famous dramatic monologue with the

Duke's reference to "my last Duchess painted on the wall, / Lookingas if she were alive" and closes it with the monologuist's pointing to a

statue of Neptune, "taming a sea horse, thought a rarity,/ Which Clausof Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!" Likewise, in the course of Henry

James's Daisy Millerthe portrait of Pope Innocentius X by Velazquez is

observed in a Roman gallery; or we find a reproduction of a Kreutzer

Sonata by Prinet hanging in the Haze house in Nabokov's Lolita.In this

respect, as with the demand for a degree of familiaritywith the inset pic-torial work, the intermedium allusion in literature operates much like

the intramedium variety.'Even such a cursory glance reveals the extent of divergence in the

field, for instance, between the allusion to an artwork and to an arttheme, between shorter and longer re-presentational stretches ortexts,between poetry and prose, between description and narration.This goesto show that ekphrasis,he literary evocation of spatial art, is an umbrella

term that subsumes various forms of rendering the visual object into

words--so various, indeed, that both the reference and the sense of the

term in critical discourse leave a good deal to be desired. The range of

phenomena covered by ekphrasisand with it the meaning of the con-

1. Both accordinglyfall within a comprehensive theory of "quotation"as second-order mimesis or re-presentation, exhibiting the set of universals generalized in

Sternberg1982.The argument there has since gained currencyamong theorists of

reporteddiscoursein all its linguisticmanifestations.But note the reasongiventhere

for the extendibilityof the principle to media other than languageand to artsother

than the literary,such as "musicaland pictorial"allusiveness."Twice-removed ep-resentation" orms "aqualitativecommon denominator"and "pointsthe way to an

inter-art heory of quotation-as-mimesis"ibid.: 135 n. 14).



Yacobi* PictorialModelsand NarrativeEkphrasis 601

cept and the use of the device) is ill defined or arbitrarily restricted,

largely because some of the forms, though manifested in artistic prac-

tice, still need to be recognized in principle and theorized along withtheir better-known counterparts.

My concern here is with two such neglected forms, which cofigure in

my title, "Pictorial Models and Narrative Ekphrasis."When these inter-

sect, which they often do across the ages and genres of literary prac-tice, the result is a compounded challenge to theory. We then have the

ekphrasis of a visual model (as distinct from a unique artwork) to nar-rativized effect (as against descriptive, picturelike, or thematic bearing),though not only within narrative works proper. The object and the func-

tion of re-presentation thus vary together, inverting the common theo-retical norm twice over. Modeling and narrativity,it will soon emerge,are actually two related but independent parameters of ekphrasis, bothcentral to my argument as well as to the illustrative corpus, especiallyIsakDinesen's artful story world. I will therefore introduce them in turn,one in this section, the other in the next, exploring their relationship aswe go along.

Let us start with the difference in the re-presented object, between theartwork and the art model as source.

Bythis shift in

level,the allusive

discourse widens and so generalizes its reference from a particular to a

habitual, traditional configuration of elements in the other art or, if youwill, from surface to depth. Take these two examples, which will reappearlater: when Nabokov describes a scene in a Parisian restaurant in termsof The Last Supper or when Isak Dinesen views two embracing sistersas "maidenlyLaoco6ns," they are not alluding to any specific picture orstatue but to a pictorial model, a common denominator, a generalizedvisual image. In what circumstances does such interart dialogue occur,

under what rules, and to what effect, compared with the particularizedvariety?

Strangely, this line of inquiry runs not just beyond but against thecommon conception of ekphrasis. Leo Spitzer's (1962 [1955]: 72) well-known definition locates the ekphrastic genre in "the poetic descrip-tion of a pictorial or sculptured work of art";it "addresses a particularvisual image," Hollander (1988b: 34) emphasizes to make doubly sure.And most analysts focus on the one-to-one relation (numerical as wellas mimetic) postulated between the artworks.They will indeed readily

enough admit, at times even examine, the possibility that "apictorial orsculptured work"may generate more than a single "poetic description."Kibedi Varga (1989: 44) thus spells out the rule that underlies manyanalyses of otherwise different orientations: "Whatcomes first is neces-

sarilyunique; what comes after can be multiplied. One image can be thesource of many texts, and one text can inspire many painters. These sec-

ondary series can become the objects of comparative study,which makes




Table1Ekphrastic elations

VisualSource(representation) VerbalTarget re-presentation)1 one one2 one many3 many one4 many many

us aware of the fact that illustrations and ekphrasis-in fact, all mani-

festations of subsequent, secondary relations--are just different modes

of interpretation."nlimited in number, then, each act of ekphrasis is atext's late, "secondary," interpretation of some artwork, "necessarily"a

unique original. But this one-to-many relationship between source and

target, as we may call it, is usually considered the limit of ekphrasis-excluding the reverse, many-to-one possibility, if only by silent yet firm

omission.Even a promising term like Jean Seznec's (1972: 570) "artisticcliche"

refers in fact to "specific pictures" that "had a sentimental appeal to a

wholegeneration."

The source artworkisagain unique,

and it remains so

even when worn into a cliche by way of repeated verbal evocation. Like-

wise, Kranz's(1981: 377ff.) category of "kumulativesBildgedicht" makes

a welcome change from the norm of the unique art source versus its

ekphrastic reproduction(s). Rather than an ekphrasis of artistic models,

however, his "cumulative"text is one that covers a group (or even the

totality) of works produced by some artist, often as an act of homage.(See also Cliiver 1989: 57-58, esp. 57 n. 2.)

In this regard, then, the holes left by ekphrasis criticism are conspicu-

ous against the scope of theoretical possibilities, as outlined in Table 1.All four possibilities are variations, amply realized in literature, of the

image-to-word transfer. Yet the first two categories, sharing a uniquesource to be rendered into words, have monopolized the study of ekphra-sis. This holds especially for the one-to-one relation, of course. But the

one-to-many variety has also gained some attention in, for example,Marin 1970, on three literarytreatments of a Poussin landscape painting,or Kranz 1973: 77-87 and 1981: 447, on the dozens of poems inspired

by Breughel's Icarus.This is a suggestive departure from the mainstream,

if only because the presence of multiplicity on one side of the inter-art (re-presentational, specifically ekphrastic) fence in effect argues for

the inverse perspective as well. When the multiplicity changes sides, it

would rather come to the fore that Auden's (1976: 146-47) "Mus6e"cites

"Breughel'sIcarus, or instance," as a token illustrative of a pictorial type,"the Old Masters";or that, to bring out "the living quality of / the man's

mind," Williams (1988: 388-89, 505) conflates in "Haymaking"(origi-



Yacobi* PictorialModelsandNarrativeEkphrasis 603

nally titled, for reflexivity and guidance, "Composite") two Breughelpaintings.

The symmetrybetween the re-presentational pluralities should be evi-dent, as is the status of the latter poems as modern classics of the genre.Forbalance, therefore, we need to bring into the picture the last two cate-

gories of interart traffic in ekphrasis. Both are defined by the multiplevisual source chosen for verbal (re)modeling. Only, the many-to-one re-lation consists in a single instance of such modeling; the many-to-many,in a number of traditional or repeat performances, as when a writer, a

school, or an age revisits a certain image (e.g., a landscape topos) com-mon to various paintings. Of the two, again, I want to concentrate on

the former relation, whose status is theoretically crucial and whose work-

ings may easily be extended to the latter, along comparative or historicallines. (Speaking of extension, incidentally, the entire table lends itself toreversal from an ekphrastic network into a map of pictorial imaging of

literary sources.)

2. FromMimetic pace-image o Ekphrastic ynamism

2.1WhereHas heModelGone?LessingetweenAncient

andPresent-Day imeticismsWith the reference of model-oriented ekphrasis delimited, it now re-mains to establish its sense, that is, its rationale, features, operations,resources, effects, in short its poetics. We may best approach the ques-tion by proceeding to ask why t has been so neglected in an otherwise

expanding and increasingly sophisticated field of inquiry. Such neglectcertainly does not correspond to the literary facts, the practices of writ-

ing (already glimpsed) and of reading. Readers, if anything, are oftenmore familiar with art models than with the details of specific artworks;

and what we carry around in our heads has both liberating and con-straining implications for writers across the entire range of ekphrasis.(If you take only the generic imperative of making the visual allusion

perceptible, hence readable, consider how much easier it is for a gener-alized than for a unique reference to meet this need without recourseto special measures, aids to memory, and the like.) At the transmittingend, moreover, references to a "van Gogh landscape," as well as to a"MonaLisa smile," have found their way into ordinary discourse. Whatis it, then, that has so driven analysts towardwork-to-work,rather than

work-to-model, relations between word and image?2

2. The question gains yet sharper point when we compare literary with art criticism,so attentive to borrowed and inherited thematics. As Panofsky (1982: 40-41) puts it,iconography is a necessary tool for the analysis of an artwork's "subject matter," while

iconology serves to interpret its "intrinsic meaning or content." On the correlation ofart history and literary study with units of different scope, collective and individual,respectively, see also Alpers and Alpers 1972 and Steiner 1982: 66-68.




One answer, which in turn leads to others, concerns the widespread

pressures and preference for strict mimesis in ekphrasis. With the rep-

resentational thrust so heavily value-laden, the privileging of the strictand the singular interart transferappears to form a logical chain: If one-

to-one equivalence in re-presentation, then one-to-one equivalence in

number between the re-presented and the re-presenting discourse. This

formula, though never spelled out to my knowledge, has deep roots

in the contemporary approach to the subject and a longer history still

in aesthetics, a rough outline of which is worth tracing. Here Lessing

plays a key role. For he has often been miscast and derogated as a mi-

meticistby, among

others,present-day inquiries

into the sister arts (e.g.,Steiner 1982: 12-14, following Abrams 1953), which themselves betray a

far stronger (inter)mimetic impulse, regarding ekphrasis at least.

A closer inspection makes sense of this incongruity by disclosing the

real point at issue, which could hardly go deeper. In terms of the formula

mentioned above, it bears on the premise ("Ifone-to-one equivalence in

re-presentation") from which the anti-model directive ("then one-to-one

equivalence in number") virtually follows, and much else besides. The

disagreement, in short, concerns the balance between representation

and communication, mimesis andaesthetics or

poetics.Under mimetic

pressure, such latter-daycriticism would reverse-not alwaysin an obvi-

ous fashion, nor alwaysfor the better-Lessing's notoriously restrictive

theory of art. The curious thing is that the notoriety has at times out-

run, and the modern opposition hardened as well as relaxed, his actual

(inter)artistic rules.3

Not that Lessing is permissive about representation, any more than he

is a friend to interart re-presentational affairs, including ekphrasis itself.

So far from licensing mimesis, either that of nature by art or that of one

art by another's, the Laocoon ubjects it to regulation by appeal to a setof higher norms, absolute and comparative. The limits imposed on "the

imitative arts"begin with the object of imitation itself:

Althoughpainting,as the art which reproducesobjects upon flat surfaces,is nowpractised n the broadestsense of thatdefinition,yet the wise Greek

set much narrowerboundsto it. He confinedit strictlyto the imitationof

beauty.... Theperfectionof the subjectmustcharm n his work.He wastoo

greatto requirethe beholdersto be satisfiedwiththe merebarrenpleasure

arisingfroma successful ikenessor from considerationof the artist's kill.

(Lessing1963:8)

3. Compare the reading of the Laocodnn Sternberg 1990: esp. 67ff., where Less-

ing occupies a position midwaybetween Aristotle'splot-oriented poetics and mod-

ernism'smedium- and space-oriented counterpoetics.As will be seen, this helps to

explain the respectiveattitudestowardekphrasis,notably regardingthe question of

narrativity. or a provocativeattemptto refer the dispute to conflicting politicaland

sexual ideologies, see Mitchell1986:95-115 and 1989,also discussedbelow.




This statement involves a complex of principled oppositions and hier-archies of value that go against the premium put on mimeticism by

Lessing's successors to this day, as well as by his predecessors. The scopeof mimesis, theoretically extendible to the entire world "in the broad-est sense," must narrow in response to the demands of "beauty,"the

"supremelaw of the imitative arts"and a visual measure in the plastic arts

(ibid.: 11). Imitation stands to beauty as a means to an end, indeed theend: where aesthetic and factual or realistic value clash, art will opt for

"beauty"and its proper "pleasure,"as science will for "truth"(ibid.: 10).This excludes from pictorial imitation objects such as deformities, mon-

strosities, facial contortions,rage,

anddespair, including

theugliness

ofthe open mouth incurred by Laoco6n's cry (ibid.: 8-14, 153-67). Yet

Virgil "was right in introducing the cry, as the sculptor was in omit-

ting it," because poetry appeals to the ear rather than to the eye (ibid.:20-21). Medium-sensitive, the rule thus works both ways:precisely thatwhich places visual beauty out of reach, and so out of bounds for litera-

ture, except through oblique evocation, qualifies literature for renderingthe auditory (or the spiritual) world, and vice versa. Note also that the

prescriptive-sounding argument is not necessarily or entirely restrictive,

at least not in the framework of interart transfer. Among other impli-cations, this in effect sets free the re-presentational device that Lessingofficially leaves unfocused and even unnamed: ekphrasis may develop(rather than at best parallel, at worst attenuate) the original image, byarticulating the cry, for example.

For Lessing, moreover, "beauty" outranks not only "truth" but also"skill" n mimesis, that is, the drive to conquer or redeem the aestheticliabilities of the represented object through the mode of representation.He has little regard for "manual dexterity, ennobled by no worth in the

subject" (ibid.: 9), for the rise to the challenge known (and elsewhereadmired) as "difficult6vaincue" (ibid.: 26), particularly the difficulty of

making an exact copy of reality itself or of a prior artwork. This rank-

ing accordingly sets new limits to either of the representational arts andto the re-presentational trafficbetween them either way,with historical-evaluative implications to match. Its infringement at the hands of Less-

ing's contemporaries for the sake of "mere barren pleasure" (ibid.: 8)largely explains his invidious comparisons of "moderns"with "ancients"

throughout.

By appeal to this value scheme, Lessing carries the theory of artisticlimits even further: from the domain of signifieds per se to their inter-

play with the signifiers, and from the selection to the combination of

signs proper to the respective arts. Even where roughly the same objectof mimesis is to be presented (or, for that matter, re-presented) withmuch the same effect in view, each art form will best operate in termsof its distinctive signifying conditions. Why, for example, does Laocoon




wear priestly robes in Virgil's epic and nothing at all in the sculpture?Because (Lessing argues against the common view) a poetic "robe is no

robe. It conceals nothing. Our imagination sees through it in every part";and the reminder of priestly status even invests the victim's agony witha sense of desecration. By contrast, given the artist'svisual signifiers, arobe would divest his rendering of the beauty and expressiveness of thesufferer'sbody (ibid.: 39-40). Yet the interart relation between plus and

minus, more representational coverage and less, may also turn roundin other signifying contexts or crosscuts. Lessing thus invokes the dif-ference between "arbitrary" convention-based) and "natural"(iconic)

signs to explain why the poets fail to describe the muses in the painterlymanner.They can dispense with such portrayalbecause the name Uraniais enough to perform the necessary reference to the muse of astronomy;while "in art she can be recognized only by the wand with which she

points to a globe of the heavens" in "dumblanguage" (ibid.: 67-68).

Accordingly, though neither interartistic comparison made by Less-

ing deals with ekphrasis proper, both have significant implications for

it, operationally polar yet logically consistent and complementary. In re-

presenting the two visual images in question, an ekphrastic writer willadd

Laocodn's priestly dress,as well as the

priest's scream,and omit

Urania's trappings. Either way, mimetics in and between the arts is afunction of comparative word/image semiotics under aesthetic control.

As with the choice of signs, so with their combination into an art-

work. Here the Laocoonmakes its famous plea for harmony between the

arrangements of signifier and signified, medium and object of repre-sentation in either art. "Signs arranged side by side can represent only

objects existing side by side," that is, "bodies. Consequently bodies with

their visible properties are the peculiar subjects of painting" as space-

art. Bythe same token, "consecutive signs can express only objects whichsucceed each other ... in time," that is, "actions. Consequently actions

are the peculiar subject of poetry" as time-art (ibid.: 91). Again, this

law of harmony derives not so much from the constraints exerted byeither medium on (re)imaging the world as from the distinctive ends and

options of artistic (re)imaging.For example, if literature privileges "actions"over "bodies,"sequence

over coexistence, narrative over description, this is because art will

alwaysregulate mimesis by the higher value and pleasure of "illusion."

The ability to describe "things as they exist in space," Lessing claims, is"aproperty of the signs of language in general, not of those peculiar to

poetry. The [nonliterary] prose writer is satisfied with being intelligible,and making his representation plain and clear. But this is not enough for

the poet. He desires to present us with images so vivid, that we fancy we

have the things themselves before us, and cease for the moment to be

conscious of his words"(ibid.: 101-2). Thus opposed to mere prosaic in-




telligibility, Lessing'sideal of poetic transparencyso favors narrativeas to

rule out of literature straight description (or, for that matter, ekphrastic

re-description). For such writing must draw notice to itself at the expenseof "the things"written about; the part-whole relations that the beholdertakes in at a glance demand laborious processing from the reader. So the

disharmony in arrangement between temporal medium and spatial ob-

ject would destroy "illusion,"4as Laocoon's crywould pictorial "beauty";both values count as far superior to representation per se, descriptive or

otherwise, easy or difficult, within this aesthetics.Given such premises, it is no wonder that Lessing frequently uses the

term Vorbild, model" inEnglish

translation, for the source(of

whatever

domain, kind, or number) re-presented by either art.Thus, Virgil havingshaped anew the Laocoon group, ancient sculptors may have taken hisversion "as their model" (ibid.: 34-36): numerous graphic returns to a

single literary Vorbild.Conversely, the poet may have worked "after themodel set him by the artists"(ibid.: 42), with the possible (though not

necessary) result of creating some form of ekphrasis (though the trea-tise will not call it so, let alone name the exact subgeneric formation).As these examples indicate, Lessing's "model"differs greatly from mine

in that it covers all source-target permutations and is not reserved forthe many-to-one variety.Yet it does point awayfrom strict mimesis, typi-cally and unmistakably so, if we consider the stress laid throughout onthe features changed (added, omitted, played up or down, transformed)in re-presentation. This is why such mimesis, balancing aesthetic licenseand limit, implies no disparagement to the imitators. "On the contrarythe manner of their imitations reflects the greatest credit on their wis-dom. ... A model was set them, but the task of transferring it fromone art to another gave them abundant opportunity for independent

thought," for equal novelty and glory by way of deviation (ibid.: 42).It is not following the Vorbild s subject matter (in effect, the ekphras-tic writer's only imperative and hallmark) but copying the manner of

representation that degrades interart re-presentation.In its overreaction to Lessing, or to some image of him, the modern

study of ekphrasis more often than not reverts to the practices upheld byhis antagonists and the norms behind them. Such reversion particularlymanifests itself in the reversal of the Laocoon'sattitude toward interarttransfer.Rather than a means to higher aesthetic ends and a function of

comparative semiotics, the mimesis of the visual by the verbal then be-

4. Even without any self-focusing or what we call "reflexive" measures (e.g., frag-mentation and apostrophe) adopted by anti-illusionist writing, of the kind Hollander

(1988a) approvingly associates with ekphrastic poetry. To Lessing, they would onlyworsen the evil of disharmony. Either way, however, mimesis varies with the poeticgoal, and the extras build or trade on the medium's constant givens vis-a-vis the

object.




comes again an end in itself: the closer the re-presentation and the more

difficult it is to achieve, the better-across all differences in signifying

conditions between source and target.Observe, for example, the frequent occurrence of "reproduction" and

the like as a definitional feature of ekphrasis, or the term's replacement

by "icon(ic)" in Hagstrum's (1958: 18 n. 34 and passim) influential work

The Sister Arts;5 or the insistence on its forming "an exact description

meant, to a certain degree, to evoke and substitute for the painting itself"

(Kibedi Varga 1989: 44). No less suggestive is the need often felt for di-

rect contact between graphic source and literary target in the processof writing, or for their reconfrontation in the reading. Hagstrum (1958:

42-43) thus finds it necessary to distinguish the poet who "reproducedwhat he had seen and responded to firsthand" from the conventionalist

who had not. Others have taken great trouble to identify the original(s)

of, say, Keats's Grecian urn, though Keats himself significantly providedno clue and no incentive to this quest.6

It is not that either the (inter)aesthetic or the (inter)semiotic dis-

parities that stand in the way of strict mimesis in re-presentation have

escaped the notice of moderns. On the contrary, the contemporary criti-

calinsight

into suchdisparities

hasgreatly developed

since the

age

of

Lessing, when these fields were still in their infancy, as has also the art

of interpretation, textual and comparative. To mention only two recent

examples, the array of aesthetic, semiotic, and reading skills brought to

bear by Steiner (1982: 42-47) on E. E. Cummings's "stone children" or

by Cliver (1989: 62-70) on "Starry Night" as translated from van Gogh'scode into Anne Sexton's would be inconceivable in premodern dealingswith ekphrasis. But the more refined the equipment, the more revealingthe all-too-familiar drive toward mimesis against the grain of the target

art, along with the underlying (counter)values. And the very advancein

interpretive skills, best exercised on one artwork at a time, the richer the

better, urges us to compare individual works in or beyond their mimetic

aspect.Indeed, considering the proportion of reading to theorizing in

5. He reservesthe former termfor a poem in which the artworkbreaks nto speech,in the traditionof prosopopeia.Morerecently,Lund (1992:12ff.)divides"ekphrasis"(referenceto apicture)from "iconicprojection" picturelikereference to the world),which in fact arguably ntersectswith ekphrasticmodeling, because its picturelike-

ness may attach to a general feature.The one-to-one bond thus defines the field ofekphrasisagain,persistingacrossvariations n criticalterminologyand (givenLund's

resistanceto normativebias) in value scheme. (I owe this reference to ClausCliiver.)6. If withthe urn he leavesthe originalunidentified,elsewherehe generalizes t into

amodel of the highestabstraction.Thusin a letter to Fanny:"Ishouldlike the window

to open onto the lakeof Geneva-and there I'd sit and readall daylike the pictureof

somebodyreading" Keats1953[1819],2: 46). (I owe this referencetoJoseph Grigely

[pers. com., Conferenceon Wordand Image, 1990].)




ekphrasis criticism, especially in America, one wonders if the zeal for

interpretation would not be enough to keep the model out of sight,never mind its offenses against re-presentation. Compared with eitherthe originals from which it abstracts or their ambitious literary rework-

ings, the model is liable to appear too flat to qualify for exegesis, as wellas for reality-likeness. Naturally, how these counterforces balance variesin the field.

Thus Cliiver (ibid.) begins by listing a variety of ekphrastic crosscuts,and elsewhere he mentions the interest aroused in poets by "an artist'svisual language"as it develops from "workto work"(Cliver 1978: 33). Yetwhat he

singlesout for

analysisis "intersemiotic

transposition"as "trans-

lation," complete with references to its "difficulty" (e.g., Cliiver 1989:

59, 62). For Steiner (1982), whose work is more normative and less wide-

ranging, the difficulty of one-to-one transfer actually dooms ekphrasisto mimetic failure. But then, the failure itself-rather than commend-

ing or at least indicating more feasible alternatives, such as the image asmodel - is exclusively promoted to the status of a thematic, even generic,feature (ibid.: 42, 48). Indeed, where the "definitional failure" is left un-thematized in poetic transfer-from, say,Breughel's ReturnoftheHunters

to Williams's "Hunters in the Snow"-we have instead a case of "struc-tural correspondence," apparently outside the genre of ekphrasis (ibid.:73-90; cf. Hagstrum's"icon"above and n. 5). Playing with labels to drive

away undesirable elements-whatever their claim to re-presentationalequality-makes a typical and transparent exclusionary ploy.

All this goes to explain why,and to what extent, the reaction to Lessingfalls short of liberation. In the process, it has no doubt helped to redeemor rehabilitate other modes of transfer than his, other scales of value andinterest operative in (often, indeed, well beyond) the ekphrastic genre

itself. So far so good, except that in reversing Lessing's dogmas, suchopposition in effect locks ekphrasis into another prison, one both olderand newer, yet with symmetrical limits and losses as well as privilegesand gains.

Hence the counterlimits widely imposed on mimesis in re-presenta-tion, as though ekphrasis at its best could not aim to evoke either moreor less than the original image. This is, for example, whywe need to bearin mind Lessing's insight regarding the extra features that are assumed

by the epic Laocoon (the cry, the dress) but denied to his sculptural

analogue. As with the more particularized reworking, so with the less:on the highest, strategic level, the same counterlimit explains why the

skeletal, abstractive, "modeled" image has suffered neglect as ekphrasisin favor of the full-bodied image, regardless of availabilityor frequencyor artistryor any other empirical evidence (also regardless of plain over-

sight, or the passion for reading). Quite simply, an ideal of one-to-one

correspondence between source and target entails (and privileges) a




one-to-one numerical relation, an encounter of two individual artworks.

The same holds true if the ideal forced on the device grows a competi-

tive edge, so that the encounter becomes antagonistic: ekphrasis as anarena of interart rivalry (foredoomed according to some, more open-ended according to others) over the prize of mimetic fullness. In anycase, the art model would never qualify, because its very form entails

withdrawal (to whatever end) from such fullness and fight; nor would

the less clear-cut arts of abstracting even from a unique visual source,which complete the repertoire of ekphrastic underre-presentation. By

comparison, overre-presentation might somehow pass muster: thoughan equal offense against interart mimesis, and so left untheorized, it at

least makes a bid for outdoing the original's image of the world itself.7As a result, far from having developed anything like a poetics of the

model in literary transfer, we may fail to identify such a model when

it comes our way. In the absence of a determinate pictorial source, the

ekphrastic image may even be considered fictive rather than deliberatelyselective. This befalls Proust's comparison, "One felt the same pleasureas when one sees in a landscape by Turner or Elstir a traveller in a stage-coach, or a guide, at different degrees of altitude on the slopes of a

mountainpass,"

with its unmistakable ors, doubled for extra pictorial

coverage and accessibility. "Imaginaryekphrasis," Riffaterre (1990: 51)nevertheless calls it; a "pseudo-landscape." Here fictionality supposedlydelivers the re-presentation from a threat of lost individuality: better a

unique invented image, as it were, than a composite model grounded on

named historical art sources and alone capable of explaining the text's

features. To escape from the plurality of the object, the critic will if nec-

essary shift the ontology and the meaning, as well as the genre, of the

finished literary product.

2.2 TheDescriptiveersusheNarrative: enres rPowers?HegemonyrRange?The uneven coverage of the map outlined in the foregoing section is

thus no random matter, nor a passing vogue, nor even the outcome of

a methodological (e.g., interpretive) turn. It is a reflex of critical prefer-ences wide and deep, often hidden but always ndefensibly exclusive. The

history of aesthetics, with its alliances across the Laocoondivide, bringsout a principled reason for the unequal attention given to varieties of

transferthat are equally feasible and serviceable in theory, hence equallymanifest in literature, which puts the different forms to different uses.

7. In a relativelydogma-free,corpus-basedaccount, KennethGrossarguesthat texts

featuring ekphrasisaim for more than "mimeticaccuracy"and "willoften reach be-

yond what is given or visible in the worksthey 'describe."'But he hastens to qualifythis Lessingesquestatement:"Equallyworth attending to, however,are these texts'

often oblique waysof returning to the sculpted object," to "whatis given"(Gross

1992:141-42, 145).




The art model has simply fallen between two doctrinal stools: that of

Lessing, who would generally minimize interart contact, to the wholesale

(if nominal) neglect of ekphrasis, and that of the longer and strongertradition that would mimeticize it into one-to-oneness.

Nor does the model alone show the consequences of doctrinal bias.For much the same reason, so do the workings of all ekphrasis in lit-

erature, as between the extremes of epic and lyric thrust, action and

description, time and space: narrativityversus pictoriality, in brief. The

sharper the focus on interart disparities, Laoco6n-style, he heavier the

pressure on ekphrasis (often along with the rest of literature) to fol-low the narrative route.

Conversely,

the more value

placed

on interartmimesis-an immemorial routine, whatever its guise-the stronger the

channeling of ekphrasis toward the opposite, static, imagelike pole. Bynow it should not be very surprising to find the camps actually divided

along these lines, as if there were again an either-or choice, rather thana range of ever-available,complementary options.

Lessing (1963 [1766]: xi) thus begins by announcing that under thename of "poetry"he has allowed himself "sometimes to embrace those

arts, whose imitation is progressive," that is, narrative art at large. In

practice, he goes even further, drawing most of his literary (and all ofhis paradigmatic) examples from narrative, especially Homeric and Vir-

gilian epic. This coheres perfectly with his drive to delimit the arts. Of all

genres of "poetry,"narrative is the farthest removed from painting, sinceits temporality distinctively covers the object as well as the medium of

representation. And such double coverage involves maximum harmonyand "illusion."

We need not endorse this favoring of narrative, or its grounds, to turnit to ekphrastic account. Nor, having left the dogma behind, need we

quibble over the question whether Lessing, at narrativizing, addressesekphrasis itself. Here as elsewhere, he never refers to it by name, buthe does so often and unconventionally in practice, on any half-generousreading, and has been given less-than-due credit by interested partiessince.8 (When it comes to a hard-line mimeticist like Hagstrum [1958],nobody would deny him relevance just because he prefers "iconic" to

"ekphrastic"nomenclature.) The trouble is only that the Laocoonblursthe line between art's first- and second-order mimesis in its eagernessto put them both under artistic control, for example, in prescribing the

extension of the literary object (whatever its origin, or Vorbild)n time tosuit the medium.9Obliquely, but for our purposes importantly, Lessing's

8. The converse also holds true, in other modern arenas,where the Laocoonfiguresall too prominently,as argued by Sternberg(1981,1990).9. Where ekphrasisitself forms the object of inquiry,such a blur may indeed leadto categorymistake.For example, to classifyunder this label the view presented in




emphasis may nonetheless be extended or converted at several pointsfrom representation to re-presentation in literature-above all, to the

dynamic transformation of pictorial space.Take the narrativizing of description proper, according to Homer's

method, whereby the elements of the "body"are projected into the flow

of story time, rather than enumerated in spatial coexistence. Thus thedivine chariot comes together piece by piece under Hebe's hands, Aga-memnon's dress in the act of dressing, Achilles' shield in the processof its creation (Lessing 1963 [1766]: 34, 95, 113-25). The last of these

examples, considered by Lessing himself the paradigm of descriptionturned narration, has in fact been taken by many as the origin of ekphra-sis: it is largely a question of whether or not the shield itself (relativeto, say, the chariot) counts as an artwork. However, its generic status or

label vis-a-vis the rest is less principled than their common generic sug-

gestiveness; the dynamism that transforms and integrates the Homeric

objects of description into full literary temporality is alwaysavailable to

the second-order, ekphrastic transfer of visual space-items.So, from the pictorial rather than the poetic side of interart trans-

fer, is the "pregnant moment." Originally recommended to space-artists

as an indirect force for temporality, this moment comes just before theclimax in order to "allow free play to the imagination," that is, to the

beholder's story-making imagination. "The more we see the more we

must be able to imagine; and the more we imagine, the more we must

think we see." Hence the need for the artist to choose that moment with

care; and, we might add, the ekphrastic poet's license to follow suit in

his re-presentation. Thus the paradigm case: "When, for instance, Lao-

coon sighs, imagination can hear him cry; but if he cry, imaginationcan neither mount a step higher, nor fall a step lower, without seeing

him in a more endurable, and therefore less interesting, condition. Wehear him merely groaning, or we see him already dead" (ibid.: 16-17).This interart comparison between literary cry and sculptural sigh, again,

readily widens in principle into a two-wayinterart movement between

source and target-including the narrativization of ekphrasis via "preg-

nancy."Nor need such pregnancy remain latent here any longer. Whyshould it, considering that the poet enjoys "the liberty to extend his de-

scription over that which preceded and that which followed the singlemoment represented in the work of art; and the power of showing not

only what the artist shows, but also that which the artist must leave to the

Anna Kareninaof Anna's portrait and of Kitty "travelling to her estate, framed by the

window of her carriage" (Mandelker 1991: 16) is to conflate two distinct orders of

mimesis: the re-presentational, alone ekphrastic, and the representational. The latter,

if picturelike, as implied by the window framing, belongs to what Lund (1992) would

call "iconic projection." Any continuities between the orders, or instances of them,

therefore operate on the topmost, shared level: that of (visual-directed) mimesis.




imagination" (ibid.: 99)? So the ekphrastic writer, as time-artist, is free,in effect urged, to spell out the narrative implications of the image into

actual narrative discourse with a determinate extension and sequenceand plot.'0

Of course, Lessing himself does not reserve either strategy (the

description-transforming or the pregnant-making and -actualizing) for

ekphrasis, as distinct from space reference in general; nor, we shall see,does he by any means cover the repertoire of narrativizing options, leastof all those attached to point of view and to inset-frame interplay. Butthe possibilities I have already outlined would at least accord with the

constructive, enlarging side of his aesthetics. It is this side that more or

less disappears, and indeed reverses into counterdogma, in most recent

approaches to ekphrasis. Here, poemand poetryusually figure in theirnarrowest generic sense, bearing particularlyon lyric verse with a strong

(re)descriptive thrust. This apparently serves to tighten the equivalence

10. Alpers (1960) treats the descriptions of paintings in Vasari's sixteenth-centuryLives as ekphrasis with a narrative emphasis, but in a very different, rather peculiarsense of narrative: the rendering of emotion. She even points out "the absence of anyindication of the development of narrative" (ibid.: 201). On the other hand, she notes

that "Vasari does not differentiate between his characterizations of the same storyas told in different paintings by different artists" (ibid.: 201-3), or, in more positiveterms, he reduces them to what I call a model. Taken together, then, the two features

mean that his ekphrasis specializes in psychologizing (rather than plotting) visual

models; their emphasis does not shift from space to time en route to verbal discourse.

(In another context, Barolsky [1991, 1992] offers a fascinating analysis of Vasari'sLives as a grand fictionalized history.) Recently Heffernan (1991) has moved into "nar-rative" as action, but along the lines already suggested by the Laocoon, though theinevitable return to Achilles' shield (the one-moment picture turned into "a narrative

of successive actions" [ibid.: 301]) soon gives way to illustration from short roman-tic poetry. Where the analysis departs in essentials from Lessing, to whom it makes

a single passing and uncomplimentary reference (ibid.: 309), the outcome is not

exactly an advance. Thus, Lessing knows better than to associate literature, ekphras-tic and otherwise, with the "narrative impulse" and "language by its very nature"with the "release" of that supposed impulse. On the contrary, never mistaking his

poetic ideal for either the potential or the actual practice of literature, his treatise

expressly challenges the "mania" for description that had overtaken literary narra-tive itself, against Homer's example. And by the same token, Lessing (1963 [1766]:

chap. 17) explictly points out, language is evenhanded; it can naturally serve either

representational purpose -"description of bodies" as well as development of storylines-only that literary language should nevertheless confine itself, by poetic fiat, to

rendering what best suits its time-medium. Nor would Lessing commit the error ofelevating a figure like prosopopeia or a theme like interart conflict-both manifestlyomissible, often omitted -to the status of parity with the forces of narration and/ordescription, built into ekphrasis as a mode of representing the world. He does noteven waste his ammunition on such free variables. Having meanwhile become poetictouchstones, though, they have gained a privileged status in ekphrasis criticism (atleast since Hagstrum 1958) at the expense of narrative, and Heffernan (1991) wouldnow coprivilege them with narrative. To these, as to related issues of principled and

practical variability, across the single constant of re-presentation, I will return.




between word and image, which converge on a static object of repre-sentation with a view to maximizing "spatial form." But the additional

interart convergence entails a multiple reduction in the possibilities ofdivergence accessible to and widely realized by verbal art. The loss, to

theory and to the sense made of literary practice, is twofold and often

cumulative, even beyond Lessing's terms of reference.

First of all, like the visual image re-presented, ekphrastic re-presenta-tion then tends to cover the entire work-a short, lyric one at that-

rather than form a part inserted by means of quotation into a largerwhole, "quoting" design. Given that such an inset might be no biggerthan a single line or phrase, it negatively resembles the model (even if it

isn't one, which it may be) in its distance from both strict mimesis andthe interpretive, self-contained ideal. Nor are the consequences of mar-

ginalizing it less serious. Where work-length ekphrasis has established

itself as the binding or exclusive rule, the orientation to it is liable (ifnot anxious) to erase a major feature of arrangement peculiar to liter-

ary qua temporal art, namely, that the medium invests its discourse with

extension, direction, and hence also processing force. No matter how

frozen the re-presented object itself-the existent, posture, landscape-its linear

re-presentationin

ekphrasisenables shifts and turns of under-

standing denied to the all-spatial visual source, notably in the frame's

movement toward, through, and awayfrom the inset. Even an actionless

world then goes with an eventful discourse. But the norm of overall lyric

ekphrasis would rule out this interplay of (ekphrastic) part with (non-

ekphrastic or, as in "MyLast Duchess," otherwise ekphrastic) part alongthe whole sequence, to the point of playing them off against one another:

undermining or counterpointing the "quoted"image in the sequel, for

instance.

What some contemporary approaches might admit, or value in oppo-sition to others, is the play along the text-length sequence of ekphrasisitself. Davidson (1983: 69-70) thus introduces his postmodernist corpusas adverse to "anymimetic function"; in its light, he also finds Lessing"anAugustan corrective to the excesses of verbal painting," notably to

the modernist rage for self-enclosed spatiality,or "spatialekphrasis."But

"the hermeneutics of existential temporality," which he enlists againstmodern criticism, does not carry over to less extensive occurrences, to

more storied uses, to the genre as a whole, or to postmodernist verse

at large (unless, again, circularly defined). One doubts whether it evenapplies to the whole ekphrastic repertoire of Ashbery, the parade ex-

ample, much less to the finest contemporary space-time poet I know,

Dan Pagis (1981), who neither encloses space, pictorial or earthly, nor

meditates on time, but revitalizes the former to retell and deautomatize

the latter's stories (see Yacobi 1976, 1988, 1990a). At most, the "herme-

neutic" counterthrust uncovered by Davidson actually operates within




the severe limits of the postmodernist all-ekphrastic text: to trace the

poet's "encounter with a temporality that had been lost or forgotten,"

say, or his destabilizing a pictorial image into a series of reflections ontextuality, convention, artistic form, historical knowledge. So this arguesmore against interart mimeticism than in favor of sequential dynamism,least of all as triggered by the passing reference to an image or a model -

by the inset allusion within a discourse that need not even focus on theinterart theme. It still remains to discover how and why ekphrasis rangesat will from local to central and overall status, from feature to focus,from specifying to typecasting, from the hermeneutics to the dramaticsof existence.

Second, reversing Lessing's generic bias makes matters worse. Forthe common reduction of literature to poetry, and so of ekphrasis tothe short descriptive poem, leaves out narrative-certainly narrativityacross the genres-and results in detemporalizing or "spatializing"the

object of literary re-presentation as well as the medium. The German for

ekphrasis, Bildgedicht,ncodes this double bias in the term itself-favor-

ing a text-length piece of verse -elsewhere assumed or conceptualized.Even Davidson's(1983: 73) postmodernist ekphrasis, in its appeal to time"lost or

forgotten,"works to "defeat

anysustained narrative"

(cf.Lund

1992: 165-66 on a Swedish prose poem). His modernist adversaries gomuch further, perhaps none more so than Krieger (1968,1992), followed

closely by Steiner (1982: 42-50).Here, literature's alleged yearning for imagelike simultaneity, round-

edness, permanence, eternal return-in short, deliverance from time-finds its quintessential expression in the "still movement" or "stoppedmoment" captured by ekphrasis. Given this all-important object of

(re)description, the anti-Lessing critics tell us, everything else serves to

heighten its effect. Hence, for example, the frequent circularity of theekphrastic still object: Keats'surn (Spitzer 1962 [1955]: 73) or ThomasBrowne's (Krieger 1968: 327-28), or the wreath around Cummings'sstone children (Steiner 1982: 44). Each is designed to symbolize thetheme of enclosure, as opposed to temporal closure, and to enable paral-lels on other levels, such as the circling back of the language to the out-set. To carry this ideal to its logical conclusion, the pregnant moment-far from sought, imported, centralized, or elaborated in the transfer toliterature-should be avoided or reduced to stillness, denarrativized.

Accordingly, one can also predict what becomes of narrative:Krieger(1968: 343) judges "prose fiction" to be handicapped "in proclaimingitself a rounded object," and Steiner (1982: 48) excludes it altogether forits inevitable reference to temporal flux: "In the novel, this flow is ex-

plicit in the sequence of events depicted; in the lyric poem, its absenceis definitional. Instead, the lyric pretends to represent one now-point ...a suspended moment." Even in terms of this generic difference, itself




questionable, the marriage between ekphrasis and the lyric or the still

moment does not follow, nor, correspondingly, does its divorce from

narrative and narrativity.To revert to my earlier counterexample, thepoetry of Dan Pagis (otherwise, e.g., in sound play, nothing like the

prosaic or novelistic mode) falsifies all these generic requirements at

once: the difference, the marriage, and the divorce. In its re-presentationof graphic artworks, as in first-order representation, this poetry dyna-mizes the object on every possible level. The world re-presented, the

re-presentational discourse event, the viewpoint, the reading-all springinto life, and in the service of the mutability theme at that.

"Leafing through an Album" (Pagis 1981: 89-90), for instance, accel-

erates time so as to synchronize existential with perceptual development:the running out of the hero's life with the beholder's running throughthe photographs commemorating highlights of this life. Apart from the

nonepic framework itself and the novelty of telescoped duration, this

outreaches the Laocoon n at least two strategic respects. One consists

in the appeal to subjective, perspectivized, temporality: the observation

(or literary re-observation) unrolls, indeed mixes, with the (re)observedbirth-to-death action. Another claim to notice lies in the modeling of the

visual source, for the saidsnapshots

(from thebaby's

onward) have been

so generalized in the transfer that they may apply to anyone's biogra-

phy, Everyman'stale of mutability.Elsewhere, incredible as it maysound,the act of visual portraiture itself (apparently anterior by nature to lit-

erary ekphrasis, because supposed to generate the "original"object for

re-presentation) gets thrown in for good narrativemeasure. In "The Por-

trait,"even as the portraitist drawsand discourses, the sitter transforms

before his eyes from child to old man to corpse:

The child

Isnot sittingstill.... I drawone lineAnd thewrinkleson his facemultiply;... his hair whitens.

... He is gone.(Ibid.:85)

The poem is macabre, yet remarkable for its multifold dynamism in the

smallest compass. Nothing keeps "still."As I have analyzed elsewhere,

no fewer than three processes, each sufficient by itself to despatialize

the "sitting"object, converge on it here: "The speaking barely manages,and the painting utterly fails, to keep pace with the living" (Yacobi1976:

19-22; 1988: 95-98). Appropriately, the last-cited analysis of the poemsand their implications has been published in a special issue on narrative

theory.A complete antipole to the still-moment lyric, whether qua replica or

qua rival of the art source, this dismisses its privileging even within the




subfield of ekphrasis that may appear to accommodate it best, if not en-

courage it. Indeed, as with the related attempt to freeze the medium,

artistic practice cuts across all such limits imposed on the object in thespirit of modernism, allegedly, and often in the name of liberty, too.

Actually, those gratuitous restrictions would fix ekphrasis at the extreme

opposed to the pregnant moment and the like: they deny literature not

just itsown peculiar freedoms but even the flexibility that Lessing himselfoffers to the artworks that it re-presents.

We also find the two limitations otherwise compounded to the same

effect, as in Kibedi Varga's(1989) word-and-image taxonomy. He starts

by dividing the emblem, where "the beholder is struck by words and

images at the same time,"from ekphrasis, where "thereader reads apoem,without necessarily perceiving" the other part too (ibid.: 33; my empha-sis). He then reserves "narration" or the serial as against the single work:for comics and cartoons versus the emblem or, for that matter, versus

ekphrasis. In this regard, if anything, single verbal objects even suppos-edly fall below their visual counterparts and may altogether denarrativizethem. After all, painters "have often tried to suggest narration in a singlepainting; the whole classical debate from Poussin to Lessing hinges in

parton whether the artof

spaceshould

competewith the artof time."But

once words appear, narrativitydisappears, because they "tend to restrictthe possibilities of interpretation" (ibid.: 35-36)." Hence, for ekphrasisto comply with such a rule, it must be an overall ("single") descriptivepoem in the first place, rather than an element and so potentially a linkwithin a narrative. Nor is it surprising, therefore, that this taxonomy alsomakes a point of distinguishing Bildgedicht,"a free verbal variation" onthe original image, from ekphrasis s "an exact description meant, to acertain degree, to evoke and substitute for the painting itself" (ibid.: 44).

This is another of the many terminological attempts to divide the indivis-ible, to keep out undesirable features which the narrativemodel (were it

imaginable, here or elsewhere) would compound.

2.3 Ekphrasis,Description,and NarrativeTheoryThe breakdown of all such exercises in limitation, Lessing's or his oppo-nents', underlines that ekphrastic form and effect range all the waybetween the warring poles. In terms of genesis, if you will, that rangecorresponds to the distance between two polar origins of ekphrasis:the

exemplaryactivation of the device

byits

originator (theLaocoin's

Homer) and the etymology of the word (the Greek for "description,"

11. Accordingly, this presents the converse extreme to the pairing of language assuch with the narrative impulse, a tie-up that may be found in narratology itself (e.g.,Scholes 1974: 17) and has recently migrated to one semi-Lessingesque approach to

ekphrasis (see n. 10). But why should either representational string attach anywhereto the medium?




first coreferential with the rhetoricians' descriptio,hen subsumed under

it). Conceptually, empirically, genetically, ekphrasis makes an assorted

and open-ended bundle of variables, all free except for the constantminimum of literary reference to visual reference to the world. The de-

scriptive bent (or its inverse) is here no more criterial, or even more

typical, than any of the features that the system accommodates: verse,

figuration (notably prosopopeia), uniqueness, particularity, enclosure,existential thematics, interart and intersexual power struggle, or their

respective opposites.But the key term's etymology also reaches beyond origins. "Descrip-

tion" has meanwhile been practiced and studied in fields other than the

interartjuncture, among which the narratological has most invested inthe varieties of world making. One would perhaps expect narratology,therefore, to redress the imbalance caused by the aspiration to image-like verse within the study of ekphrasis. Yet to date little of the kind

has happened, and not just because ekphrasis usually remains associated

with poetry, in disregard for its abundant manifestations in storytelling.Were the routine tie-up with one genre of writing broken and the device

carried over at long last to this field of inquiry-if only as a marked,interart

descriptive subtype-the changewould in all

probability stopshort of essentials. For the extended coverage to make a principled dif-

ference, some of the field's larger assumptions (oddly akin to ekphrasticcriticism's)need to change.

Thus hampered, narratology in its present state could not help much

to repair the omissions pertaining to the temporalities of ekphrasis-not even indirectly, by reference to the master category of description.For narrative theory all too often shares the modern anti-Lessing drive

to "spatialform" while, paradoxically enough, inheriting from Lessing

the bias against literary description, especially in narrative. (The lattertendency is even stronger than the former; for details see Hamon 1981;

Yacobi 1991.) So, although descriptive writing has in recent years gainedconsiderable notice, Meir Sternberg is the only theorist who has sys-

tematically traced its multifold narrative power: for example, the differ-

ence made by preliminary exposition to our sense of the whole (Stern-

berg 1978: 23-55, 183-235); the sequencing of coexistent reality-items

(Sternberg 1981); the art of the proleptic epithet, state, or stative clause

(Sternberg 1985: 321-64; 1992: 527-28); or, more generally, how, in the

descriptive realm as elsewhere, space and time compose into "spatio-temporal dynamics"(Sternberg 1990, with earlier references). Like everyother discourse element, this realm worksunder the "ProteusPrinciple,"

whereby "many-to-manycorrespondences" necessarily show between lin-

guistic form (e.g., description vs. narration as given on the surface) and

representational function (e.g., descriptive and/or narrative meaning).No wonder, then, that when it comes to the Laocoin, Sternberg (1990)finds its argument all too wanting, rather than excessive, in its orienta-




tion toward the temporalities of literary discourse and their effect on

spatial design.

But the exception, which does have consequences for ekphrasis asa time device, only proves the rule: description-the mimesis of spa-tial objects-is normally theorized as subordinate to the forward-movingaction, rather than as an equal in its own right and sphere, let alone asa potential ally.Thus Genette (1982: 133), an expert on narrative time,

places this "too well known" inequality among "the major features ofour literary consciousness." "Too well known," doubtless, yet who is in

reality covered by the all-inclusive "our"?Certainly not the exceptionalspatiotemporalist and the entire range of artistic practice (in or out of

ekphrasis, across the genres) that thrives on the interplay between thetwo axes, the interpenetration of discourse forces. For very different rea-

sons, "our"would no more include the mainstream of interart analysisexamined above. The promoters of literary (especially lyric) ekphrasisas description, apparently unknown to the narratologist, assume the re-verse hierarchy. But here the polar "literaryconsciousness[es]" never-theless meet: in the tendency to associate the elements with opposedvalues, to insist on an either-or focus, if not choice, and to withhold fromeach the force deemed

properto its

opposite. Genre, value, centrality,power- all supposedly go together, one wayor the other.For Genette (ibid.: 134), though description may be "more indispens-

able than narration, since it is easier to describe without relating thanit is to relate without describing," it yet remains "a mere auxiliary ofthe narrative": "ancillanarrationis,the ever-necessary, ever-submissive,

never-emancipated slave."Of its two "diegetic"functions-the "decora-tive" and the "explanatory and symbolic"-the first brackets it with theother figures of style or rhetoric, the second with Lessing's extraliterary

"prose"coherence. By implication, then, ekphrasis must share the lim-ited, one-dimensional role and with it the low status assigned to the restof description in "the" or "our" (i.e., this) literary hierarchy; the ren-

dering of its static object becomes a mere "auxiliary"to the narrationof dynamic movement. In fact, by way of mirror image to the interart

camp, the freezing and downgrading of the descriptive in this modern

approach even exceed Lessing's again. For Genette, in his turn, does not

acknowledge so much as the possibility of dynamizing and so integrat-ing spatial objects in the very action, Homer-style. Nor does he explain

why the "decorative"thrust cannot govern a narrative text. And just ashe fails to consider either option for promoting description within thenarrative whole, so he even more curiously denies the existence of self-contained descriptive genres (ibid.: 134). From all quarters, whether to

mutually or multiply exclusive effect, approaches converge to repressekphrastic versatility, in the face of its actual manifestations as well as its

potentials, both "protean."Within interart study, again, references to ekphrasis in narrative have




lately begun to (re)appear here and there. Yet the emphasis still fallson its occurrence as a spatial, indeed antinarrativefigure and force in

temporal art. For example, Kurman(1974: 1)begins bydefining "ecphra-sis" as "the description in verse of an art object," thereby traditionallyprelimiting it on three axes: the functional, perhaps the formal as well

("description");the generic, especially in its medial aspect ("verse");andthe mimetic ("an object of art,"excluding the art model as source). The

generic condition, however, is sufficiently relaxed to admit the cross be-tween "verse"and narrative foregrounded in "Ecphrasisin Epic Poetry,"from Homer through the Renaissance to Mickiewitz.A promising shift,

given the neglect (duly noted) of the epic manifestations relative to the

lyric. And yet, Kurman does not reallysupply the omission, far less roundout the generic picture, because he in effect kills the narrative for thesake of the "verse";he assimilates the newly foregrounded corpus andelements of ekphrasis, by relentless violence, not just to the old ruleof "description" but to the space-figure prescribed for the lyric eversince the exemplary analysis of Keats's urn by Spitzer (1962). Ancient

epic, we hear, already expresses "the nostalgia for timelessness that wasto make the device of ecphrasis so attractive to later poets" (Kurman1974:

3): crossgenericin

essentials,the thrust

onlyrises to

panoramicscale. Throughout literary history, he moreover alleges, a variety of epicdifferentia, like similes or, incredibly, dreams and prophecies, cooperateto reinforce this ekphrastic effect: "to frustrate time," or to "remove the

reader for a time from the main action," or to pass from "a story that

exists primarily in time to an event ontogenetically situated in space"(ibid.: 3-13). Unsurprisingly,we find the Laocoon"classic,"epic reference

and all, dismissed without explanation in the last note.'2

Similarly with prose fiction. When Steiner (1982: 42-49; 1989: 279)

turns from a poem by Cummings, with its "still-movement topos," toEdith Wharton's novel TheHouse of Mirth,she carries over the alleged

generic role of ekphrasis: "Asthe topos of the still, transcendent mo-

ment," it "opposes the contingency of plot flow and temporal progres-sion." Thus the novel's heroine, Lily, having gained "ekphrastic power"from her description, comes to "stand outside time, as part of an 'eternal

harmony' . . . a pure, beautiful visual object, cut off from the world of

causality and contingency" (Steiner 1989: 290).On a more theoretical level, we find W.J.T. Mitchell (1989: 92) explic-

itly instancing the ekphrastic genre to counter Genette's sweeping denialof descriptive autonomy: "[Description] does attain a kind of generic

12. Compare its overt dismissal in Hagstrum 1958: 19-20 as an antidescription trea-

tise; see also Auerbach 1973 [1946]: 3-23 on Homer's eternal present. Contrast the

dynamic reading of such features (simile, prophecy, and dream, inter alia) in Stern-

berg 1978: 56-128, whereby they all assume narrative power and coherence throughthe operations of "gap-filling."




status in literary traditions such as ekphrasis, topographical poetry, andart writing." But the hesitant wording, "a kind of generic status," ties

up afresh with the problematics of space and description in literatureand literary theory. Taking up Genette's power ("master-slave")termi-

nology for the relations of time and space in literature, Mitchell regardsekphrasis as one canonical mode of infiltrating "spatial,pictorial valuesinto literary forms," where they play "the role of the text's Other, its

negation or death, figured as the object of utopian desire and anxiety"(ibid.: 92-95; cf. the "poetic Otherness" suggested earlier by Hollan-der [1985: 15-16]). So below the surface disagreement about generic

autonomyand role, there

persistthe

key assumptionsof the mimetic

heritage: that ekphrasis is alwaysdescriptive and that its spatial orienta-tion as "the text's Other" goes against the grain of the verbal medium.

Only, Genette's "slave"has become Mitchell's (1989: 97) active antago-nist: a rebel against the master, an undercover force for subversion, or

(in the most loaded metaphor) a woman in the land of time-directedmen:

Keats's Ode on a GrecianUrn,'the canonicalexample,bringsexplicitly nto

play the multiplicityof [sexual]roles playedby literaryspace:as feminine

objectof desire andviolence('thoustill unravish'd ride'),as rivalandcom-petitorwith the poeticvoice(the'sylvan istorian' antell 'aflowery alemore

sweetly han ourrhyme'),as a 'coldpastoral'which'teasesus out of thought'with its ambiguouseternityof desolation,perfection,and frustration.Keats

maycallthe urn a 'friend o man,'but he treatsher like anenemy.

A change is registered here in the ideological force and value (from sub-missive to subversive, from negative to positive) ascribed to ekphrasis,rather than in its essential allegiance and thrust (no corresponding shiftfrom space to time, from statics to dynamics). In essentials, the tradi-

tional poetic role shows itself to be constant across the political variationsbetween Mitchell and Genette. Though meant to privilege and liberate

ekphrasis, moreover, its fixture as "the text's Other" ironically denies itthe narrativizing resources granted to description by Lessing himself,the supposed conservative in life and art. Finally, is it an accident that,while Mitchell (ibid.: 97-101, on space in Bronte) sometimes argues his

larger thesis by reference to the novel, his examples of ekphrasis are alldrawn from poetry?13

13. As areeven those in Heffernan1991,whichshift the focus of the narrativeimpulsefrom Lessing'sepic paradigm,the shield in the genesis, with its prose counterpartssince, to the newer favorites,Keats'surn and Shelley'sOzymandias,complete withtheir nonepic (far less novelistic) elements, such as the poet's recourse to proso-popeia. But contrast Lund 1992, in which international scope and long historicalperspective(on "iconicprojection")go witha cross-genericrangeof illustration.De-spite the variancein topic, this wealth of materialhas indirectlyserved to retest mytheses againstexamples,even literaturesunknownto me before, namely,the Scandi-




In summary,the range of ekphrastic forms and effects, I would argue,stretch beyond the limits drawn by either polar approach and even be-

yond the respective latitudes taken together. The preference for interartmimesis, reinforced by associated modern norms and scales, doctrinallygoes against my two central concerns in what follows: modeling and nar-

rativityin ekphrasis. Where either factor must count as offensive even byitself, their twinning is beyond the pale. Relative to what it has bred since,

Lessing's approach (with its aesthetic regulation of mimesis, promotionof literary time, and eye for difference) would in principle encouragesuch concerns, especially the inquiry into how the narrativizing of the

imagein transmission makes a distinctive

crossliteraryresource, a vari-

able second to none. Yet the actual aid and tools it could offer for the

purpose remain all too limited. This is not only because Lessing's ownfocus of interest lies elsewhere, outside ekphrasis (i.e., in interart com-

parison rather than in transference from visual to poetic art). Even if itwere otherwise, some holes and counterthrusts would persist at a deeperlevel. For Lessing never shows much interest in image models as distinctfrom unique artworks;he could not anticipate (what with his nostalgiafor the epic) the refinements of modern storytelling, theorizing, and

exegesis; he brings time to bear on the space-object in a manner bothlocal and immediate (e.g., the shield transformed into a shield-making

episode, digressive from the main story line) rather than on its points of

contact with the framing tale; and, an aesthetician of harmony, he would

always object to the tension between the descriptive and the narrative

that is built into all ekphrasis (by force of its reference to the world,albeit the art world) as a mode of what Sternberg calls "spatiotemporal

dynamics."The neoclassicist versus modernist extremes being so exclu-

sive of literary practice and its problematics, as well as of each other,

we therefore need to formulate or reformulate the issues in a largerperspective.

Thus, where the verbal image is reduced to a common denominator

of the visual and/or incorporated into the temporality of discourse, not

excluding plot itself, some interesting questions arise. How does the re-

presentation of a pictorial world in language, time, and movement affect

the respective images, taken singly and together? What are the typicalfunctions of alluding to an extramedium model rather than to any of

its instances? What is its influence on the (re)cognition and reliability

of the various parties involved: the observer within the fictive world asagainst the author and the reader in the frame, the "beholders" of the

literarized picture (and of its dramatic observer) on the rhetorical level?

navian. It is therefore also of interest that my own paradigm case, the English-writingDanish storyteller Isak Dinesen (as well as, more understandably, the Hebrew poetDan Pagis), does not feature in the book.




Where exactly do the narrativizing potentials of ekphrasis come from?How do they meet - if necessary, override - the descriptive thrust of the

re-presented original? And again, how does the source model comparewith the singular image in this regard?

In addressing such questions, we must keep the literary repertoirebalanced, for a change. It would therefore be counterproductive (and,for me, also repetitive) to work with the examples from poems touchedon above or even, as usual, from poetry alone. Instead, I will illustrate

mainly from Isak Dinesen, a born storyteller, a student of painting, and,across the arts, a master of pictorial modeling in language.

3. ModelsandSpatialitywithin heStorytelling oeticsof Dinesen

Dinesen, however, offers far more than illustrative balance. The ekphras-tic part, I have been arguing, whether a local inset or a virtually text-

length stretch, is inseparable from a complex of wholes that regulateand interpret it. Among this complex, the framing, "quoting"discourseand the source, original artwork(s)enter most immediately into the part-whole web of relations. But the immediate structures (textual, cross-

textual, intertextual) depend in turn on wider parameters, from the

medium and genre of the respective works;through the discursive forcesin play, especially the ever-shifting balance of the narrative versus the

descriptive; to history- and artist-specific designs, frameworks, conven-

tions, innovations, repatternings. My paradigm case richly exemplifiesboth the interrelations at their most complex and their (re)formationinto a determinate poetic unity; or, the other wayaround, both the hope-lessness of the a priori fixture sought by analysts (even compounded inthe "stillmoment" approach) and the penalty of atomism incurred by themere anatomizing of the device, taxonomist-fashion. That the ekphras-

tic part does cohere with its wholes -however intricate the synthesis, orhowever it varies from one corpus to another-is not the least of thelessons that can be derived from this case. Nor is it the least of my rea-sons for building the general argument around a master practitioner-a woman at that, and as such alleged by some to reach willy-nillyfor theotherness of space fixities, in opposition to man, the time dweller. Wewill find her belying the sexual polarity, no less than the rest, and with a

vengeance.In Dinesen's poetics, the allusion to visual space-models closely relates

to what is probablyher strongest claim to radical originality,as well as herlifelong enterprise, namely, the upgrading and repatterning of the spa-tial dimension in literature. Among the set of principles involved, thosemost relevant to my argument bear on four aspects: space as meaning-ful form, as dynamic force, as artistic model, and as interartjuncture.14

14. For Dinesen's poetics of space see my previous papers (Yacobi 1989, 1990a, 1991).




Their bearing on ekphrasis will emerge from the briefest outline and willlater prove, I hope, to extend beyond Dinesen's work.The artist'suniquespace novelties overlie, and their uncovering brings out, a universal ofthe literary time-art.

To begin with, space comes to figure prominently as a (if not the) locusof meaning and design. Thus, in a typical metanarrative comment on thearena of "SorrowAcre,"Dinesen's narrator observes that "achild of the

country would read this open landscape like a book" (WT, 29, also 30,37, 60-61).15Such analogies between nature and book, between physicalsetting and covert yet readable writing, draw notice to the operationsof

spaceas a semiotic

system throughoutDinesen's art. Nor does this

system provide a mere addition to or substitute for others. As the samenarrator comments a few lines before, "The country breathed a timeless

life, to which language was inadequate": where words fail, the semioticsof space comes to the rescue. Itself a dimension of the fictional world, in

short, space works to organize and interpret that world into a pattern of

significance along various lines.One major line is implied by the very sentence "The country breathed

a timeless life." An apparent personification, this states a literal fact

within the Dinesen universe. According to the grand design of her world,space and the objects traditionallyimmobilized in it (sea, land, forest, art-

work) not only assume a life of their own but may even secretly manipu-late human life, for good or for ill. In startling, ideological opposition to

anthropomorphism old and new, things thus rise to the status of animacy,

agency, not excluding determinate personality.Their rise, far from beinga figure of prosopopeiacal (etymologically, "person-making") speech,

generates a newworld-picture.What is more, speech is the only feature of

personhood that Dinesen withholds from extrahuman reality-not least

from artworks,for example, statues qua re-presented objects/subjects-as if to make the cleanest break with the tradition of prosopopeia. Havingdiscussed the details in my "Plots of Space" (Yacobi 1991), I shall now

generalize their relation to the strategy of ekphrasis. For Dinesen, cross-

ing the traditional value-laden lines between space and time, still and

mobile existence, description and narration, is a matter of high realism

as well as experimental art.

Again, with space as with other patterns, Dinesen is acutely aware of

the models through which reality is mediated, transmitted, perceived

in literature and art at large. Her staging of professional tellers, herallusions to Scheherazade, her play on conventions of the most diverse

kinds and ages, her stylized plots, figures, setups, language--all flaunt

this awareness in regard to literary manner and matter. But the same

15. For simplicity and interlinkage, all references to Dinesen's works include an ab-

breviated title (e.g., WT= WinterTales).




consciousness of models-including their force, traditionality, range of

inevitability, and hence problematics for representation-arises with re-

spect to the visual, spatial media as well. Thus the shrewd dialecticsvoiced by a fictional art connoisseur, Count Augustus in "The Poet":

I have learnt thatit is not possibleto paintanydefiniteobject,say,a rose,sothatI, or anyotherintelligentcritic,shallnot be able to decide,within wentyyears,at whatperiod it waspainted,or, more or less, at whatplace on theearth.Theartisthas meantto createeithera pictureof a rosein the abstract,or the portraitof a particular ose; t is never n the least his intentionto giveus a Chinese, Persian,or Dutch,or, according o the period, a rococo or a

pureEmpirerose. If I told him that thiswaswhathe haddone, he wouldnotunderstandme. He mightbe angrywithme. He wouldsay: I havepaintedarose.'Stillhe cannothelp it. I am thus so farsuperior o the artist.... At thesame timeI couldnotpaint,andhardly ee orconceive,a rosemyself. mightimitateanyof theircreations. might say: Iwillpainta rose in the ChineseorDutchor in the rococo manner.'ButI should neverhave the courage o painta rose as it looks. For how does a rose look? (SGT,382-83)

The speaker divides the producer from the consumer of art. On the pro-ductive side, not only the artist but also his art mediate between the real

objectand the

beholder. For consciously (like Dinesen) or not (like thenaive painter envisaged here), the artist'srendering is alwaysbound byconventions: a school, a period, a style, a culture, "Chinese, Persian, or

Dutch, or... rococo." Yet the artist, no matter how blind or even resis-tant to the forces of convention, will alwayssummon up against them "the

courage to paint a rose as it looks"; and so he will, to some extent, freehis "abstract"or "particular" mage of a rose from the constraints of the

given rose-model. His very blindness-like the acute self-consciousnessof a Dinesen in literature, or the equivalent in painting-may radicalize

the omnipresent play of mediate and immediate world imaging, picto-rial cliche and novelty, tradition and the individual talent. On the other

hand, lacking the "courage"as well as the gift for immediate vision, how-ever partial, even the most knowledgeable connoisseur falls below themost naive creator. Were he tempted into shifting sides, he would bereduced to imitating particular "creations"or the traditional "manner."For how does a rose look?

That this credo appears in a tale entitled, and focused on, "The Poet"

suggests literary analogues. In Dinesen, however, the arts involved also

enter into much closer relations than meta-artistic or comparative analy-sis. Not satisfied with exploring their theoretical common ground, shedraws them together into an actual common life, setting one within theother, by wayof ekphrasis, if not one beside the other, in syncretic multi-media form. Her ekphrastic allusions from literature to models of spatialart (much like Pagis'son a poem-length scale and a different worldview)then become part of the operations of space in the discourse as a whole,




themselves uncanny, with the result of compounding the problems and

inspiring original syntheses.

Here, as though representing such coexistence at work in or on litera-ture's world were not challenging enough, space comes to double in re-

presentation as interspace: a multiple, interart semiotic system, wherebythe signs ("languages")of different media get superimposed on narrativein words. Superimposed, I say, because the elements brought together

appear to be anything but harmonious, even less so than within the

genre of lyric or descriptive poetry (where critics usually find ekphrasis).For the built-in tension escalates toward diametric opposition betweenDinesen's narrative art and the arts it draws on and alludes to-between

target and source media. Nothing would be more deplorable to Less-

ing, nothing more desirable to the anti-illusionists, especially in a writerwho casts her interart net beyond the pole opposed to her own. Neithervaluejudgment applies here, for reasons to emerge soon, but the givensand choices on which either would pounce do come to the fore. Con-

sidering the multiple temporality of her target medium, which unfolds

story lines in time sequences, it is remarkable that her main extraliterarysource media for allusion should turn out to be the spatial arts. (The the-

ater, a more likely source for re-presentation because it crossesthe

twopolar harmonies into a time-space art, comes only second.) Oriented bydefinition to space, painting and sculpture as sign systems distinctively

arrange signifiers and signifieds alike side by side rather than in a line:

they render states through sign configurations, not (or not primarily)actions through sign sequences.

This immediately raises the question of their integrability in temporalcontext. To be sure, this question arises wherever the art forms brought

together pull against each other because they extend in different ways.

Yet nowhere (e.g., in language's descriptive re-imaging of a still life, or inthe transfer from the midway art of theater to either extreme) does the

tension present such a challenge to overall integrity as in narrativized

ekphrasis, with its doubled double extension: the original'sversus the re-

working's. Narrativized, I insist, because the difficulty of synthesis varies

not according to the text's genre by itself but according to the shapeand function with which the text invests the ekphrasis. Prose narrative

may and often does opt for the descriptive variety, least inharmonious

due to the object-to-object correspondence across the media; conversely,

poetry, the lyric included, is free to radicalize matters by charging theinterart allusion with narrativity (single-line or, we recall, even multiple)on top of sequentiality. In this regard, though not exclusively, the func-

tions involved outrank or crosscut the genres of literature at ekphrasis,and, crossgenerically, the descriptive type makes a simpler case than the

narrative turn. In integrability, the former even reduces to the latter-




which subsumes its problem of assimilating an import, of linearizing a

graphic configuration -but not vice versa.

As it happens, Dinesen combined the source and the target art formsin her life: she studied painting but practiced writing. (Her affair withthe visual arts actually came early and remained lifelong.) So her two-fold expertise makes it especially instructive to trace the meeting and

interplay of these polar opposites in her fiction, where one assimilatesthe other. Since the imaging of the world in painting and sculpture ap-parently runs counter to narrative in both the object and the medium of

representation, how are their spatialities indicated and incorporated inthe most time-bound (because storied) of all mimesis?

The generality of reference in ekphrasis is, among its other services,a central means to this end: it helps the writer exploit, and the reader

grasp, objects imported from pictorial space, so that they gain coher-ence both in and beyond their spatiality.As a rule, Dinesen refers the

particular narrative situation not to an equally particular artwork butto some traditional model or theme of spatial art: Lacoon, Diana and

Acteon, the adoration of the Magi, the Madonna with child, and so on.This rule of inequality in specification (target vs. source, word vs. image,

plotvs.

state)has various reasons and

effects. Three of them stand out:evocability, perceptibility (or accessibility), and assimilability (or maneu-

verability), especially in the frameworkof narrative re-presentation. Allof these factors being essential not only to Dinesen's poetics but also tomodel-oriented ekphrasis as such, in relation to work-directed varieties,let me introduce them in turn.

For one thing, Dinesen's expertise in both arts combines with her liter-

ary interests to point awayfrom the mimetic tradition, not least from its

objective regarding ekphrasis. To her, such one-to-one interart mimesis

is not much more appealing than feasible. A portrait or statue is un-reproducible in words, owing to the variance between the two media,so that any attempt to detail, let alone rival, such an object would not

only court failure but distract attention. And to what purpose beyonditself, Dinesen might wonder? Instead of incurring such loss, then, whynot generalize the reference (or the re-presentation) in the first placeand in the service of less traditional as well as more viable ends? In the

critical, instrumental approach to mimesis, if in nothing else, includingthe values and priorities of literature, Dinesen would side with Lessing

against the copy-making tradition.Indeed, the second reason for generalizing the interart allusion into

model range alreadybrings us to a constructive role played by the device,namely, as a force for perceptibility in ekphrasis. The question whetheror not the reference from word to image is perceptible has far-reachinginterpretive and even theoretical consequences. (So, for that matter, has




the pointedness of inverse transfer.)What hangs in the balance is noth-

ing less than the viability (communicability, accessibility, readability) of

ekphrasis, which a misconception like Kibedi Varga's (1989) seriouslyand gratuitously threatens.

When "the artist is inspired by a preexisting image and writes ekphra-sis," this critic states, "the reader reads a poem, without necessarily

perceiving the other part too." Hence, "this distinction implies that wemust argue from the point of view of reception rather than production"(ibid.: 33). Whatever its taxonomic use, the statement is odd to the pointof undoing the genre. Of course, readers (though not "the reader") are

always iable to miss "theother part,"the source image. In such readings,however, ekphrasis as a word-image relation simply vanishes to leave an

ordinary "poem";and they are accordingly not just partial but incompe-tent readings by generic rule.'6Therefore the argument for an approach

through "reception rather than production" does not follow, either. On

the contrary, were the choice between them necessary or generically

imaginable at all, then the receiver's possible ignorance and blindness

would force us to approach ekphrasis from the well-informed viewpoint,the producer's--except that "us" would then denote just another re-

ceiver,himself

perforcein the

know,to another

self-contradictoryeffect.

Instead of a binary taxonomy, production and reception necessarilymake two sides of a communicative affair.Within a theory of ekphra-sis as such, whatever the performances of individual readers/receiverscommit or omit, "the reader/receiver" as well as the producer must bydefinition be aware of the ekphrastic bond of word-to-image reference.

The only question left open- and it makes a variable of high importance,as well as of great explanatory power-is what happens in (inter)artistic

practice. Given the variations in pictorial expertise among readers, how

can we establish a common ground that will define "the reader"?Whatmeasures does the (or a certain) literary producer contrive to ensure,

standardize, sharpen, channel (etc.) our awarenessof the cross-reference

necessary for the working of ekphrasis, for the desired generic commu-

nication between the parties to take place and effect? Where, in short,

does the key to generic perceptibility lie in this or that text, corpus,school, manner, or any other crosscut of the field?

Here, all other things being equal, model-directed ekphrasis compares

favorablywith the alternative variety. Dinesen's avoidance of definite in

favor of generalized reference to artistic practice works as a safety mea-sure, because it virtuallyensures the reader'sfamiliaritywith the referent

(topos, posture, setup, theme) invoked. In all that regards ease of spot-

ting and deciphering and patterning, it has the advantages of a stereo-

16. Cf. Cliiver 1989 on the difference between reading an ekphrastic text as an

"original" and as a "translation."




typed allusion, a pictorial cliche. Catching the reference to such a model

presupposes nothing like the expert's encyclopedic knowledge or like

Count Augustus's ability, in the face of any given artwork, "to decide,within twenty years, at what period it was painted, or, more or less, atwhat place on the earth." Instead, if the reader has not viewed one par-ticular artistic image of Laocoon, or Diana, or the Adoration, then hehas viewed another. And even if he has encountered none, or no longerrecalls anywith confidence, the chances are that his repertoire of mentalschemata includes the appropriate topoi for the discourse to activate inthe process of reading.

As we advance from mimesis inre-presentation

toaccessibility

in com-

munication, then, the negative reason for Dinesen's method joins forceswith a major positive; the dismissal of the unreproducible comes with

perceptual gain. In Ehrengard,ypically,both reasons motivate a fictional

painter's evasion of the request to verbalize spatial reality: "Youask mefor a description of Schloss Rosenbad. Imagine to yourself that you be

quietly stepping into a painting by Claude Lorrain"(E, 31). Like his cre-

ator, herself with a foot in either art, the character does not so much

depict as recall the object in bare outline; nor does his recall point to

any specific Claude Lorrain but to the model of nature underlying manyof the pictures, and hence far more amenable in transfer to the readingdirective "Imagine to yourself."17

In certain quarters, such provision for salience, access, and contactwith the audience may be regarded as a concession unworthy of highliterature-a flattening of ekphrasis to the lowest common denomina-tor with a view to the widest appeal. Let me therefore emphasize thatDinesen's recourse to the model, complete with the poetics (or, if youlike, the problematics) of readabilitybehind it, has its equivalents among

other sophisticated writers, classical and modern.Here are a few telegraphic cross-references. "The taper, sensual fin-

gers," R. L. Stevenson (1952: 205) writes about Alain, the old Sirede Maletroit, "were like those of one of Leonardo's women." Rossetti

(1985: 130), looking through the trainwindow, registers scenes "byHans

Hemmling andJohn van Eyck."Or witness howJohn Ashbery (1986: 26,95, 235) brings a model to bear on a scene from "a long novel," where"each snowflake seems a Piranesi";or on being left "alone and skinless,a drawing by Vesalius"; or on poetry ('And," the title reminds us, "Ut

PicturaPoesis s her name"), whose writing throws the mind's "extreme

17. And further, a model institutionalized in literary pictorialism since the neoclassi-cal age; hence a model with a whole tradition of modeling behind it, as interart topos,so to speak. For a short overview of Lorrain's fortunes see Lund 1992: esp. 90ff., and,for contrast, see ibid.: 36-39 on the markers needed to identify specific referencesacross the arts.




austerity" into collision "with the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire

to communicate."

Less telegraphically, George Eliot, commenting on the realism of her

"simple story," Adam Bede, multiplies pictorial analogues, contrastive and

like-minded. She expresses her delight in "many Dutch paintings," where

I turn, without shrinking, from cloud-borne angels, from prophets, sibyls, and

heroic warriors, to an old woman bending over her flower-pot, or eating her

solitary dinner ... or I turn to that village wedding, kept between four brown

walls,where an awkwardbridegroom opens the dance with a high-shouldered,broad-faced bride, while elderly and middle-aged friends look on, with very

irregular noses and lips. (Eliot 1956 [1859]: 173)

In defense of her novelistic art of "truthfulness," Eliot thus appeals not

to masterpieces but to models from the sister art: to what "an old woman

bending . . . or eating" and "an awkward bridegroom . . . bride . . .

friends" share (or equally lack) vis-a-vis "cloud-borne angels" and their

genre. The distinctive low verisimilitude is now pronounced interartistic

on top of intrapictorial, a model of models, in fact, not unlike Dinesen's

Lorrain, only more abstractive still. But if "lofty-minded people despise"this common denominator, they will know it as well as the admirers.

Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts" may appear to be a strange com-panion piece, if only because it is so celebrated for its (modernistic and

"particular" [Hollander 1988b: 34]) ekphrasis of Breughel's Fall ofIcarus.

However, this re-presentation of the painting stands anywhere but alone,

or even first, in literary history; and its traditional bearing on the origi-nal finds its complement in the reverse one-to-many relation. Before the

close-up on the one named artwork, Auden (1976: 146-47) pays collec-

tive tribute to the insight into "suffering" displayed by

The Old Masters:how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes placeWhile someone else is eating or opening a window orjust walking

dully along,

thus leading up to "Breughel's Icarus, for instance" in the next stanza.

Compared with Adam Bede, and with the later Proust hillscape, every-

thing has changed in the transfer except the procession of "or's" (here

underlined by the climactic "for instance") unique to language and in-

crementally exemplifying a shared pictorial quality. This procession also

recalls the serialization of thesnapshots

in DanPagis's poem, except

that

his series coheres along a different illustrative line ("modeling") -tem-

poral rather than existential. Where would one find the ordered story

of humanity's mutability if not in an album, and a crosscutting model of

existence if not in a museum?

Again, between the studied anonymity of "many Dutch paintings" or

"the Old Masters" and the titling of Icarus, as between the distilled visual



Yacobi* PictorialModelsandNarrativeEkphrasis 631

attribute ("truthfulness," "suffering") and the singular case in point,there lies the topos identifiable from its relative, foregrounded or en-

coded detail. Thus, when Nabokov describes a scene in a Parisian res-taurant by reference to The Last Supper-just as when Dinesen (WT,

142-43) evokes the Laocoin in the embrace of two tragic sisters-he al-

ludes not to any specific picture or statue but, again, to a pictorial model,a generalized visual image, with one difference. The referent has longbecome a stock figure. So, in "Spring in Fialta," Nabokov does not, and

need not, explicitly identify the model. His narrator watches a novelist

"presiding" at a long table and comments:

For a moment his wholeattitude,

theposition

of hisparted hands, and thefaces of his table companions all turned towards him reminded me in a gro-

tesque, nightmarish wayof something I did not quite grasp, but when I did soin retrospect, the suggested comparison struck me as hardly less sacrilegiousthan the nature of his art itself. He wore a white turtle-neck sweater under atweed coat; his glossy hair was combed back from the temples, and above it

cigarette smoke hung like a halo. (Nabokov 1967: 16)

The narrator dramatizes the theme of perceptibility in his own belated

recognition of "the suggested comparison," due to the failure of his

memoryat the time. Yet he

counts on his reader to reconstruct theunnamed model or field of allusion from the given and interrelated in-

gredients: a Christ figure, signified by the halo above him; his central

position emphasized by his parted hands and by the disciples all gazingat him. And the narrator can safely assume our reconstruction, thoughhe himself "did not quite grasp" the origin of the pattern, except "in

retrospect." For his momentary lapse alerts and triggers our memory;and we are also in a better position to make the interart connection

("comparison") because he mediates and pinpoints it for us in the telling.

Himself confronted at the time with a dense and heterogeneous reality -the modern profane scene that encloses, crisscrosses, and so blurs theancient sacred image "in a grotesque, nightmarish way"-the narratordoes not expose us to, let alone trick us into, anything like the same be-

wildering fullness at second hand. On the contrary, his discourse picksout from the original scene a minimal cluster of identifying items thatruns through many specific works, styles, periods, and schools of visual

art.'8 For good measure, the alluder even throws in such loaded give-aways as the evaluative "sacrilegious" or the interpretive, metaphorical

"halo." His selective modeling does duty for naming The Last Supper.

18. Indeed, their own imagings, however distinctive, recognizably select from theircommon literaryoriginal, so that we encounter a mimesis in the third degree and ontwo mutually reinforcing levels of abstraction: the interart chain goes from the NewTestament to the paintings (one-to-many) to a work of literature that focuses them inturn (many-to-one) on a writer of novelistic literature.




Nor does perceptibility exhaust or even head the model's construc-

tive recommendations in ekphrasis, certainly not in Dinesen's. Rather,

most important of all (and, accordingly, my chief concern in what fol-lows) is a third reason for the generalized reference from literary tale

to visual topos: the effect on our sense of priorities and plenitude. The

borrowed sign (Laocodn, the Magi, etc.) is not just left unparticularized,under the pressure of verbal re-presentation or communication or both,but is intentionally departicularizedin their favor. The very disparity in

the scale of representation between the source and the target arts is

enough to establish a generic scale of importance. This twofold scalingcharacteristic of the model does more than rule out the tensions that

loom so large in criticism, namely, the interart struggle for the honors ofmimesis or stillness or just dominance, sibling or sexual. Conflict gives

way to a means-end nexus of the inset-frame variety.The ekphrasis here

forms, not an entire work, much less a poem, least of all one emulatingthe original artwork in its rage for description-as theory would have

us expect-but a part within the storytelling whole, and a drastically re-

duced part by any comparative standard at that. The less particular the

visual image, the more evident its function as an aid, not a rival (Other,

enemy, counterforce),to the

particularizednarrative and the richer its

contribution to narrativityas to everything else in time.

Thus, instead of settling for one variant or treatment or reading of the

spatial model in art history, as with the ekphrasis of unique artworks,Dinesen exploits them all; the entire tradition (possibly including works

yet unpainted at the time) comes to bear on the individual tale, with

enormous gains in the range of reference and suggestiveness. Nor do all

those gains follow automatically: the principle or potential is one thing,the use made of it another, variable in thrust and extent. By the logic of

departicularization, much the same rescaling affects the equivalents justcited-from the novel, from poetry, from the short story-except that

the ends there are not primarily narrative, not even within the narrative

works among them. Rather, they pursue ends that belong to discourse

in general, descriptivity included. George Eliot's modeling is less narra-

tive than metanarrative,designed to advocate a certain poetics by artistic

analogy; Auden's serves to extrapolate a valued idea of life, Nabokov's to

drawa portrait, Proust'sa landscape. None would therefore constitute a

tale by and for itself, or dynamize the march of the framing tale, if any,

or even our expectations about it. Observe how the closest approach tosuch maneuvering stops well short of the developmental extreme: Nabo-

kov'shide-and-seek game operates on an existent (who'sbeing drawn as

what?)rather than an event, unfolds along the sequence of linguistic tell-

ing rather than of lifelike happening, and is articulated by a teller who

has already experienced the enigma and now guides the reader throughit with the wisdom of hindsight, as might any puzzle maker.




It is not at all (paceLessing) that such uses are inferior, untypical,or unartful in modeling, or that the users are incapable of changingor widening their means-end combinations; rather, and significantly,Dinesen puts the narrative turn first. As we shall see, the departicular-ized allusion then sheds its original descriptive thrust to gain narrative

maneuverability, in the service of plot dynamics and/or point of view.For example, such allusion may retain enough accord with ongoing de-

velopments to foreshadow the sequel-possibly behind the characters'backs and against their expectations-or enough discord to ironize thehero's view ("modeling") of himself in its terms.

As with the describers above, so with the fellowstory

makers here: ob-serve the distinctiveness of both kinds of crossart maneuver, together or

apart, from alternative narrativizingoptions, of both the Lessing and theone-to-one variety. On the one hand, neither Dinesen-type maneuver

overlaps, or so much as intersects, with those adumbrated in the Laocoonand sufficiently elucidated by now. In fact, the respective logics strategi-cally contrast, complementing each other to make up for our benefit an

ekphrastic repertoire of transformation. Lessing's interest focuses on theset piece, the local and virtually detachable unit of representation: how

a bundle of singular descriptive features can get narrativized (the dressinto a ceremony of dressing, the shield into a tale of its genesis) to com-

ply with "illusion"and pass literary muster, without regard for the workas a whole. (So Kurman [1974] can proceed to detemporalize, in effectto redescriptivize, the unit by treating it as a retardatorymoment along,or against, the overall epic sequence. Likewise see Mandelker 1991:2 onlocal novelistic suspension via ekphrasis.) But Dinesen's is an art of rela-

tions, and the ekphrasis springs to life within and for it alone, often todecisive effect. For ekphrasis to destabilize the plot ahead of time, espe-

cially if otherwise stable-looking, it must integrate into the overall plot;for perspectival impact and subjectivity, let alone incongruity, the art

object it re-presents (in whatever shorthand) must enter into the char-acter's field of vision, self-vision, re-vision, which we ourselves observe as

part of the represented world at large. However small-scale, unmovingby itself as well as unspecific, in contrast to, say, Achilles' shield in the

making, the structured pictorial inset here comes to dynamize the largerframe, as the shield does not: to affect in little the fulfillment of the onlynecessary and sufficient conditions for verbal storytelling. These, on the

other hand, might indeed draw equal energy from the reworking of aparticular artwork (think again of "The Portrait"multilinearized), butnot with equal economy. The difference (whether judged an aestheticand operational plus, with Dinesen, or,with the admirersof dificultevain-cue,a minus) persists and matters, as does the still more clear-cut one inour aliveness to the original in art history. So, above all, Dinesen's inter-textual or, rather, interart play of meaning in ekphrasis operates under




this rule: minimum allusion from word to image for maximum inclusion

and integration of imagery.

This bird's-eye view will for the moment suffice to indicate not onlythe roles of modeling and the ways to story making in ekphrasis but

also how and where they come together. Among the various possibili-ties, as I likewise hope to have established by now, those favored byDinesen are the least known to theory, though not to fellow practitionersacross literature,and would repaymore detailed tracing and comparison.Let us therefore explore the two, often converging lines of transforma-

tion into narrativity:via plot and perspective, the movement of the tale

itself and the management of the telling (especially where the authorial

teller clashes with some dramatized, self-deceiving or otherwise fallible

reflector).

4. PictorialModels nNarrativeTransformation;r,Dynamizinghe Static

A common denominator of visual and verbal structure, perspective yetacts on the inset models as a powerful narrativizing factor, due to the

superior perspectival resources of the framing text. To begin with a fairly

simple (or simple-looking) transfer,many of the allusions, though short,

includethe factor of

gaze.In one death

scene,for

instance,the survivors

remainedquitestill aroundhim [thedeadman].Thefigureof the old Prince,

lyingimmovably n the ground,still held the centerof the pictureas muchas if he had been slowlyascendingto heaven,and theyhis disciples, eft be-

hind,gazingup towardhim. OnlyNino, like one of thosefigureswhichwere

put into sacredpicturesas the portraitof the manon whose ordertheywere

painted,keptsomehowhis owndirection. "Roads oundPisa,"SGT,208)

The dead Prince appears in a double focus. Within the imagined ("asif... like") reality of the "sacredpicture," he as a Christ figure ("slowly

ascending") literally holds the center of the other participants'gaze (theone exception among the "disciples," Nino, emphasizing the unity of

the rest). And he likewise dominates the show within the verbal report,where the narrator organizes around him the space of her own fictional

arena by casting it in terms of visual point of view and direction built

into a familiar model, so familiar as to offer a ready-made descriptive

metaphor.Not a special case, except in detail, this exemplifies the law of ekphra-

sis. For ekphrastic re-presenting (as a subcategory of quoting in general)

entails not just re- but multiperspectivizing, if only into a twofold view,namely, the original's (now inset in transfer) and the frame's; for ex-

ample, TheLast Supper's erspective on Christ and its Nabokovian mod-

eler's on his novelist as Christ figure, or that embodied in the bronze

statue of Neptune, "taming a sea horse," and that smuggled into its

mention by the Duke as wife tamer, self-made widower, and prospective




bridegroom.19Under this law,the only differences are in the number, the

congruity, and the role of the viewpoints brought together. In regard to

viewpoint, even the two examples from Nabokov and Browning-neitherof them harmonious compared with, say,Rossetti's "vanEyck"-like Bel-

gian landscape-significantly part ways.The former shows, if not muchthe greater, then the more localized and coexistent harmony in dishar-

mony, as befits the portrait'sdescriptive thrust; while the latter plays on

the disharmony between the sculptor and the monologuist's intent to

generate dramatic tension, a sense of conflict past and newly approach-ing with the remarriage: narrativity,in short. So, to return to Dinesen's

old Prince, does the noncoincidence in"gaze"

between Nino and the restof the "disciples,"which typifies Dinesen's strategy at its least complex.

More often, and yet more integral to narrative technique -as distinctfrom the rule of ekphrasis as such -we find the viewpoint on or throughthe art form mediated, split, problematized, and so dynamized to matchin interart transfer.The invocation of ekphrastic models then comes notor not only in the narrator'sown name but through the perspective offictional observers, dramatized and less than reliable, who themselves

view their reality in such artistic terms. We must then distinguish be-

tween two typically narrative and often incompatible viewpoints on therelevant model: from within the fictive world and, simultaneously andmore intricately, from without, where the storyteller communicates withthe reader alone.

On the rhetorical level, when the narrator of "The Caryatids:An Un-finished Gothic Tale"wishes to transmit the fearless spirit of the heroine's

children, she compares them in her own voice (or so it appears) to cher-ubs of old Relievi, "who are represented riding on lions, spurring the

mighty lord of the desert with their little rosy heels" (LT, 114). Reliable,

because authorial, this imaging of the children in outline functions pri-marily to "make the reader see" them through the visual vehicle, witha view to portraying both their character and their appearance. Despitethe attendant danger to the "little rosy" things, the impression given isone of static tranquility, for it is the habit of such fearless cherubs to

19. Likewisewith entire subsets of ekphrasis,usuallydiscussed under another,more

unique-looking rubric. For example, Hollander's(1988a) tradition of reflexive ek-

phrasis, culminating in modernist poetry, not only makes an extreme variety ofanti-illusionism,as suggested in note 4 above. It also thematizes a certain clash of

perspectivesbetween the arts,or their instances,qua representations: he first-orderand world-directedmimesis of the picture as againstits inset and discourse-focusingmimesis within the poem, or, in short, objectiveversusreflexive,hence "subjective,"artistry.So (re)perspectivized, his style showsitself to be no more, and no less, thana well-definedvariant of the all-ekphrastic aw,one choice among manyperspectivalinterplaysavailable-not excluding the bid for "illusionist,"objective-to-objectiveaccord,a la Lessing.




tame "the mighty lord of the desert." As one of the pictorial modelsutilized early in this Gothic tale, moreover, the "cherubs of old Relievi"

convey the seemingly idyllic nature of the world, where children mightride lions.

On the other hand, the interart reference loses its stability along withits authority (or, in other words, modulates into narrativityproper) when

Childerique, the heroine, frames herself within an ekphrastic model.

Here, the ironies of narrative versus visual perspective, as of narratorialversus figural vision, become a dynamic and complex tool. For the hero-ine's unreliability in her act of self-framing and self-imaging sharply con-trasts with the narrator's sure hand, insight, foreknowledge. Accusingher half-brother of dishonorable treachery, Childerique complains: "Isit for ever, then, the task of the women to hold up the houses, like those

stone figureswhich they call caryatids?And areyou now... going to pulldown all the stones of our great house, upon your own head, and uponmine, and the heads of all of us?"(LT, 132-33). Notice that in importingthe sculptural model and willingly situating herself within it by a kind

of self-identification or role playing, Childerique, the fictional agent, ex-

presses her sense of self-satisfaction, if not, or no longer, well-being and

harmony.She is

caryatid-like,as it

were,and the

caryatid (alleged"to

hold up the houses") represents stability.Yet behind her back, on the

rhetorical level, the static image of stability bristles with tension, the in-

voked space-art with clues to time and hence with potential narrativity.Unlike the heroine, the reader already knows that she is incestuouslymarried to her brother. So the threat to the honor and integrity of a

great house actually arises from her side. Our superior knowledge en-

ables us to discern the narrative instability of the static caryatid model,and even to predict events: once Childerique takes the initiative, in the

belief that she is safeguarding her ancestral "house," she will probablybring it down. And in retrospect, its downfall comes to threaten even the

idyll that the earlier ekphrasis spun around the children of the house.

Regardless of any intermediate changes in the world, the interekphrasticchain reaction is enough to remold our understanding and expectancies,to reperspectivize the model on the entire story front, in brief.

Therefore, if the glance at carved lion-riding cherubs bore some re-

semblance at the time to Cummings's "stone children" as analyzed in

Steiner (1982: 42-48), minus the mimetics and sense of failure vis-a-vis

the original universalized there by analytic fiat, the allusion to the stonecaryatids inverts the parallel into contrast. Again, Childerique does not

at all resemble, not even for a moment, Steiner's (1989: 290) Lily in The

Houseof Mirth,because her two-edged "ekphrastic power" has an effect

antithetical to fixture "outside time, as part of an 'eternal harmony'... a

pure, beautiful visual object, cut off from the world of causality and con-

tingency."Indeed, Lily herself might be profitably reviewed in the light




of her Dinesen counterpart, whereby she, her ordeal, and Wharton'sartwould all be released from the stasis imposed on them against the grain

of novelistic discourse.By a further turn of the narrative screw, such transformation may

occur in closure or in retrospect. Thus, since Childerique's self-imageis manifest early in the plot, and its falsity exposed in advance, it leadsus to envisage her painful route from ignorance to knowledge and self-

knowledge. In "Roads round Pisa," however, Carlotta's unreliable self-

portraiture, charged with the tension of incongruity, comes as late as theend. When she accepts her fate and makes her peace with her grand-daughter, she is described from within as "having taken for herself the

part of Joseph," while the real father is left with "no greater part inthe picture than the youngest Magus of the adoration" (SGT, 215). Onthe face of it, the ekphrastic allusion to the well-known pictorial model

signals that the dynamics of one art, Dinesen's, has now given way to thestatics of the other; the conflict has apparently been settled and a pointof rest and closure achieved. But the divergence between the heroine's

(or inset reflector's) and the author's (or the text's) perspective on themodel complicates the effect. While believing that she has found new

harmony,Carlotta now identifies herself with the male role of a

pseudo-father, Joseph: a sign that her problematic sexual identity, dramatized

throughout, remains unresolved. This is hardlythe closure, far less an en-

closure, circular or otherwise, so valued by the Spitzer group. Given thebalance of power within this twofold view, the cross-reference to Josephdoes not even perpetuate the friction between outcomes, as does Keats'sto the "stillunravish'dbride," caught forever between virginity eternallypreserved and imminently lost, between art's moment and life's move-ment. Instead of freezing the end in space, the double-edged pictorial

analogy launched by Carlotta ironically heightens our sense of ongoingtemporality, of the narrativityof narrative.

In both cases, the self's appeal to an ekphrastic model generates a ten-sion much like that between tenor and vehicle in a far-fetched, jarringmetaphor, except that its incongruity points inward (to character) andforward (to reversal). At times, indeed, the model even takes the sur-face form of an overt linguistic metaphor, or simile, as when Childeriquein her blindness reserves for women the duty "to hold up the houses,like those stone figures which they call caryatids."No matter how it is

conveyed, the interart similitude drawn by the hero turns into ominousdissimilitude (the caryatid into a destroyer, the placidJoseph figure intoa restless sexualJanus) in the higher, more informed narrative outlook.

But such tension between source and target may become so extremeas to force itself on the visualizer's own eyes in midadventure, with active

consequences for his character, drama, even fate, as well as for our

understanding and expectations of all these from the outside. The cross-




reference enters the arena, the mind's and the world's. In this strongervariation peculiar to narrative, the hero changes his image of himself

and/or others in the course of the plot; the irony surfaces through thecharacter's movement from casting himself in some pictorial role to

working out a very different model, usually the hard way. As the art-

directed perspective evolves, or revolves, so does the plot in (fictional)life; the two axes become indissoluble. Lessing, though he neither treats

ekphrasis as such nor dreams of mental, subjective images in art, literaryor otherwise, much less of their replacing one another in psychodramaticsequence, would yet find the dynamics highly appropriate. For "nothingobliges the poet to concentrate his picture into a single moment...

Every change, which would require from the painter a separate picture,costs him but a single touch; a touch, perhaps, which, taken by itself,

might offend the imagination, but which, anticipated, as it had been,

by what preceded, and softened and atoned for by what follows, loses

its individual effect in the admirable result of the whole" (Lessing 1963

[1766]: 22, also 58-61). Over and above carrying the principle to an

extreme, Dinesen reshapes it to suit her own existential, narrative, and

aesthetic concerns.A

plottedchain of visual

(self-)images featuringthe Laocodn

naturallyrecommends itself as an example. In "The Invincible Slave Owners,"Axel Leth first senses the rapport between a young girl he loves and her

duenna, expressing it in terms of traditional pictorial harmony: "The

elder woman'sausterelyplaited hair had in it a faded reflection of the red

within the girl's floating locks. It was as if the artist had found a little of

the colour left upon his pallet and had been loath to waste such a glori-ous mixture" (WT, 131). Later on, coming to feel at one with his world,Axel also integrates himself into such pictorial harmony: "The afternoon

was so perfectly still, so golden, that he felt as if he had found his wayinto a picture, some classical Italian painting, that suited him well" (WT,

139). This is, of course, an incongruous place for a nineteenth-centuryDanish nobleman in Baden-Baden to project himself into, as he himself

learns once his beloved proves to be an impostor and her duenna her

sister and accomplice.With the breakdown of his romantic illusion comes a switch in the

nature, the distance, and the reliabilityof his spatial allusions. No longerblinded and constrained by the initial, wishful image for his own position

vis-a-visthe others (as if their color harmony merged with the classicalItalian painting), Axel realizes the complexity of the situation from a dis-

tance: "The two tragic sisters in the wood, their red locks emblazed bythe sun, in their very contortions had been so harmonious that he saw

them as a classic group, two maidenly Laocodns, locked in one another's

arms, and in the deadly coils of the serpent" (WT,142-43). Through the

Laocoon model, Axel expresses in miniature not only the tragic insepa-




rabilityof the sisters but also its destructive effect on his love; hence the

metamorphosis of the redness vis-a-vis he overall composition in the two

images of the red-haired sisters. Initiallyhe tries to fuse two pictorial har-monies, one purely formal (the "glorious"red mixture of paint) and theother thematic as well (the "classical Italian painting," with its "perfectlystill, . . . golden" afternoon). But the continuity through classical colornorms proves unsuitable. Instead, the "red locks" compose with "the

deadly coils of the serpent": harmony in terms not of color but of roundform and pattern. At the same time, repetition cuts across variation; theclassicism of the different pictorial models and techniques implies theanachronism of the ideal for which the two sisters are

willingto sacri-

fice both present and future. In narrative terms, the Danish noblemanthus finds himself excluded not only from the spatial configuration theyproject but also from the temporal zone they would occupy.20

In turn, the future-the main narrative potential of the allusion-re-calls but goes beyond the Laocoon'samous use by Lessing, namely, asan exemplar of the "pregnant moment," chosen by artists in order tocircumvent the static nature of spatial art, while articulated by writers

(at original work or at reworking) into the movement suitable to their

medium. In Dinesen's tale, the interpenetration of arts and media, aswell as setups, goes not to neutralize or transcend either componentbut again to reinforce the features of the narrative system. By an appar-ent paradox, the storyteller (against literature's capability, or Lessing'sadvice) leaves the sculptor's moment itself intact in transfer and, if any-thing, immobilizes it in the modeling process; that the Laocoon familydies, and will go on dying forever, only underlines by way of contrasthow Axel's adventure soon moves into another new phase (which, again,owes much to the merging of media). At the same time, the ekphrastic

model, perceived from the outside, operates to defamiliarize and aes-theticize the charged psychological situation (cf. Langbaum 1965: 164-

67) without simplifying it. On the contrary,the narrativegains depth and

complexity from the tense combination of the formal pictorial elementswith the thematic model of the Laoco6n.For the impression of staticcalm given by two analogous female figures, done in the same color and

implying "classical"harmony, is undercut by the tremendous narrative

power of the Laocoon model; and that power stretches from externalto inner drama. The possibly simple portrayal of the sisters is enriched

by the (positive, at least pathetic) implications traditionally associatedwith the Laocoon group; for example, the fatal embrace, the estrange-

20. It is interesting that, genetically,this tale was inspiredby Courbet'spainting oftwo women on a balcony (see Hannah 1971:20). In the narrativizingprocess, how-ever,the unique genetic artsourcegavewayto asequence of conflictingmodels fromvariousperiods andplaces, in line with the poetic rule.




ment from society, and the agony of the death scene carry over fromthe ancient to the modern figures. Notwithstanding both their origin in

a static surface structure and their compounded literary fixture there,generally speaking, the ekphrastic models bring out (deepen, suggest,forward,interpret) the emotional and psychological life of the charactersin Dinesen's stories.

Applied to the sisters, the shifting visual images make for "roundness"

or complexity in the process of their disclosure. With regard to Axel,the image maker himself, the transition from the first to the last model

traces character dynamism as well. His perspective, moreover, develops

along with his personality; we witness his modulation from an involved

agent, who encounters and interprets the world (events, people, circum-

stances) in the subjective manner of the experiencing-I, to the relativelydetached, more objective, and so narrator-like observer of others. In

terms of the ongoing action, again, the change of pictorial models at-

tends and reflects the hero's moment of discovery (anagnorisis), which

in turn rechannels the subsequent flow of the plot. Indeed, the visual

space-metaphors in Dinesen are as a rule located, and certainly replaced,at central plot junctures. They may heighten or complicate our expec-

tations at the outset, as when Childeriquemodels herself on a

caryatid;they may lay bare the threat to and below the apparent stasis of the end,as with Carlotta identifying herself withJoseph at the Adoration. Most

energetically, as with Axel, they come at the pivotal moment of recogni-tion that leads through a change of model, attitude, and direction (all at

once) to the unexpected end: anagnorisis followed by peripety, modern-

style, with ekphrasis projected into a key role throughout the narrative

sequence.

5. SpecificWorksas Models:FromMetaphoricalo Literal ndIconic

magesTurning now to another part of my introduction, let me further developthe argument that rendering unique versus generalized images and in-

vesting them with narrativeversus descriptive force are two independent

parameters of ekphrasis. I have alreadybriefly illustrated the point from

such one-to-one re-presentations as Dan Pagis's three-track "Portrait,"

suggestively contrasting with the accelerated but humanity-wide tale told

by his "Album,"which in turn nicely contrasts with the descriptive keyto Auden's "Musee"of Breughel ("Icarus, or instance") and other "Old

Masters"wise in the waysof "suffering,"all poem-length. In light of theforegoing argument, however, it will be hard to adduce a more revealingtest case than the practice of Dinesen, who sometimes does allude (in

midtale, again) to specific artworksas well.

Of special interest are those, most often statues, that exist as part of

the fictional world: on the same ontological level as the characters who

refer to them. Having real, literal existence within Dinesen's fiction, these




artworks would seem to contrast with the model-images discussed so far.For example, mention of theLaocoonwill bear on a genuine, historical art

object; even mention of a nonhistorical statue or picture will at least cre-ate an imaginary equivalent, a particular fact within the fiction. On theother hand, Axel's reference to "a classic group, two maidenly Laoco6ns"evokes an image that has no existence in the real or artistic world (exceptas a type, topos, or schema, subjectified at that) and only metaphoricalexistence within the fiction bywayof allusive analogy to fictional entities,the two sisters. It is a figure's, or elsewhere the frame's, figure of thoughtabout the world. (Recall the explicit markers of figuration: "asif," "like,"in the

comparisonof the old Prince's death to the Ascension or of Chil-

derique to a caryatid.) Yet the distance between the "literal" and the

"metaphorical"occurrences of visual art shrinks remarkablyin Dinesen's

poetics. These meet both in the ways they aid perceptibility and in theirmore substantive roles (plot movement, character portrayal, psychologi-cal insight, clues to interpersonal relations, etc.), not to mention theirintersemiotic twists and turns.21

Consider such literal statues as PsychewithLamp,or a trio of eques-trian figures in clay ("The Cloak," LT, 29; "Of Secret Thoughts and of

Heaven," LT, 54, 62). Rhetorically speaking, they all prove to be model-dependent (as variations on a familiar artistic theme and/or on one

another), verbalized in outline rather than in exhaustive detail, andhence also easily integrated. From the reader's viewpoint, then, theirexistence within the fictional world does not yet render them inacces-sible and so break or even limit the Dinesen rule of "perceptibility."Furthermore, they too serve to link two media or languages in Dinesen'ssemiotic montage, with a notable difference in the mode of interrelationand signification. For while the "metaphorical"model-images signify as

such primarily byvirtue of epitomizing recurrent cultural objects and/orthemes, the artworksexisting in the tale's world draw their significancemainly from their similarity to unique individuals in it. Psyche is, geneti-cally,a replication of the sculptor'sbeautiful wife-though not an official

representation, as the painting in the Browning dramatic monologue isof the Duchess-while the success of the three childish equestrian figuresdepends on whether their future owners recognize themselves in them.The former captures the woman's image only to signify the goddess; thelatter both image and signify the children who have been portrayed in

21. The differences between two- and three-dimensional art as allusive or modelingsystems within this corpus fall beyond the scope of this essay. A clue to the difference

possibly appears in "The Monkey," where the Prioress maintains that "it was the devilwho invented a third dimension. Thus are the words 'straight,' 'square,' and 'flat' thewords of noblemen, but the apple was an orb, and the sin of our first parents, the

attempt at getting around God. I myself much prefer the art of painting to sculpture"(SGT, 115).




clay; yet both equivalence links manifestly involve a relation other thanthat between the Christ figure and the Prince in death or the caryatidsand Childerique in house propping. So the difference between the artsource's metaphorical and literal existence in the re-presenting fictioncorrelates with a shift of emphasis from metaphorical to iconic (or atleast near-iconic, quasi-iconic) resemblance to fictional creatures.

In turn, this difference extends from our semiotic process of makingsense with the aid of the respective visual images to their dramatic force

of making or motivating plot. If the interart play of imagery affects the

reader, then the iconicity of the fictionalized statues comes to be recog-nized as such

bythe dramatis

personae, leadingthem to action, reaction,

and perception. The icon's very genesis (even if previously hidden, mar-

ginalized, unseen, far from dramatically enacted, Homer-style) forces

its way to notice, to meaning, to the center of storyhood. If you will,the original mimesis (in the iconic sense, i.e., as visual representation,not directly as literary re-presentation) turns dynamic. For instance, the

seemingly accidental fact that the statue of Psyche has been patterned

upon the sculptor's wife becomes, by force of likeness, the Aristotelian

"moving element" that initiates and sustains the action in "The Cloak."

Or, in a final move toward self-recognition, the three equestrian fig-ures suggest themselves to the artist-protagonist as an image for his own

"triple" nature, pulling him different ways throughout life in various

roles and periods. The course of events, as well as our understanding of

it, thus turns on the artwork'surge, and the fictional observer's eye, for

resemblance.As agents of plot, moreover, the statues existing within the fictional

world will not be reduced to objects: not even to objects used by agentsfor propulsive ends, as when an art object serves to encode the Duke's

admonitory message to his future bride; or as the murder weapon in adetective story; or, more widely, as a bone of contention. (On his verydeathbed, Browning's "bishop orders his tomb" so that "Gandolph ...

shall see and burst.") Even at their most earthbound and instrumen-

tal, I believe, such roles must have their place in any comprehensive

theory of ekphrasis; but our corpus gives them a strategic, existential

twist, revolutionizing their plot value and much else besides. In perfectaccord with the ontology of Dinesen's story-world, unparalleled for its

all-embracing dynamism in the modern or even the Western tradition,

the statues rather acquire the powers and honors of full-fledged exis-tence, including life in time. Traditionallyregarded as spatial, inanimate

things, fit only for human contemplation and description, or contention,

analytic or acquisitive, such artworksare narrativized by Dinesen to the

extent that they uncannily ascend to the top of the scale of being; theyclaim nothing less than equality with the human cast, whose fortunes

they affect by their similarity, along with their contiguity, to its members.




Animacy, agency, subjecthood, neighborship, iconicity: to assume this

complex of statuses and roles, the art objects singled out for ekphrasismust of course also lead individual lives, parallel to their human counter-

parts. Each features as an existent in the world itself, the story's or his-

tory's own, not as a model abstracted by the storyteller's discourse from

pictorial imagings of the world. Only thus can the ontological fellowshipescalate from the distinctive but unremarkable coexistence on the samelevel (as reality-items, comparable to the Duke and the late Duchess's

portrait, "looking asifshe were alive")all the wayto the uncanny networkof correlatedness (as dramatis personae on a reality-widestage).

In "The Cardinal'sThird Tale,"for instance, the statue of St. Peter in

the Vatican directly changes the life and character of LadyFlora; it marsher health and looks, by infecting her with syphilis, but reconciles her

through illness to the human condition. This reversal goes with a mul-

tiple analogy between the reversing and the reversed agents. To beginwith, the statue bears a physical and a mental correspondence to the

tall, "immovable,""denying"heroine (LT, 89-90). Again, as in the caseof the Laoco6n, he history of the saint (denial followed by dedication)

plays an important role in the analogy with the woman who follows thesame

path.As Peter to

Christ,so

LadyFlora to St. Peter. The

historyof

the actual statue (transformed from the Roman Jove into the Christian

saint) even foreshadows her direction of change, by force of precedent.Nor is the strange analogy wholly reserved for us outsiders. Overtaken

by a sense of kinship from their firstencounter, rather, the lady is myste-riously attracted to St. Peter'sstatue, visiting it again and again. As alwaysin this pattern, the beholder's own eye for similitude (the thematic self-

recognition in the icon of the other) clinches matters; it wears down herresistance to the point that she kisses the statue, which in turn leads

to her sickness and metamorphosis. So the icon's multiple reference instory and history-to Jove, St. Peter, and Lady Flora herself-elevates itfrom inanimacy to a humanlike state, if not to superhuman action.

In "Peter and Rosa,"we even witness how a purely metaphorical model

reappears as a statue-agent within the fictional world. It all starts whenthe adolescent Peter suddenly likens his cousin Rosa to a ship's figure-head:

Now Rosa[standingon the window ill], in herstockinged eet, withthe skirtof herblue frock

caughtback

bythe cross-bar f the

window,was so like the

figureheadof a big, fine ship that for an instanthe did, so to say,see hisownsoul face to face. Lifeanddeath, the adventures f the seafarer,destinyherself,here stoodstraightup in a girl's orm.(WT,259)

As with Lady Flora, only by way of simile rather than icon, the observerfinds his own self ("soul") in the other's three-dimensional image. Thenetwork of analogy unfolds as a chain of equivalences, moving from the




human to the inanimate-sculptural to the psychic domain. First the girl,"her blue frock caught back by the cross-bar of the window,"is cast as a

wooden effigy, typically blue and also undetailed, owing to the tautnessof her frock. Then the model of a stylized wooden effigy reveals itselfas a figure for the immaterial self. From the viewpoint of a boy who has

decided to run away to sea, the figurehead analogy is a way of giving a

physical, tangible existence to a yearning. At the same time, it also re-

veals Peter's love for the girl.Whether she, who at once betrayshis secret

dream to the grown-ups, deserves or repays this love is another matter,which the narrative will soon bring to the fore. At the moment, "seen"

through Peter's imaging eyes, Rosa is the anima to his masculinity; the

spirit (placed, literally and figuratively,high above him) to be admired;the realization of the moving power that impels him to abandon the

confines of his present existence for the ocean's endless space. No won-

der, then, that on their next meeting, "the sea had become [for Peter] a

female deity, and Rosa herself as powerful, foamy, salt and universal as

the sea" (WT,267). He can hardly distinguish between the two.The figurehead simile having done its work, a genuine iconic counter-

part follows to complicate and complete the effect. Peter tells Rosa

astory

"of askipper

who named hisship

after his wife. He had the

figurehead of it beautifully carved, just like her" (WT, 274). This does

not simply double or even merely realize the image, but animates it,too. Hitherto leading a figurative existence, the wooden figurehead now

transforms into the humanlike third side of a love triangle, since the

wife mistakes the iconicity ("justlike her") for substitution, as if the icon

really replaced her in her husband's heart. This counterreading of the art

sign, performed against its visible iconicity and its owner's intent, there-

upon leads to a countermovement that annihilates the entire triangle,

appropriately by visual violence. Stealing the figure's "eyes" (a coupleof precious blue stones that echo Rosa's "blue frock"), the jealous wife

blinds the ship, which sinks with her husband, while she herself literallyturns blind. Misunderstood, the iconic relation proves destructive within

the inset tale. In the frame, however, as Peter recounts the wife'sjealousy,

treachery, and final punishment, Rosa (herself figurehead and sea rolled

into one) perceives with horror the analogy between her own betrayal of

Peter's secret plan to escape and the wife's betrayal of the skipper.This

insight brings about her decision to die with Peter rather than let him

live and discover her guilt.Here, then, the figurehead is first evoked as a pure visual metaphor by

a hero who, like Axel or Childerique, consciously drawsthe comparison.But he remains unconscious of its effect on his emotions, on his actions

(confiding his secret to the girl, telling her about her female analogue),and, through her reaction, on his fate. In the process, the figurehead




simile assumes real existence, agenthood, even pathos within the insettale (the fiction within the fiction), leading to self-discovery and catas-

trophe in the frame as well. From the reader'svantage point, the twofoldor two-level role of this "moving object" radicalizes the actional forceexerted by similarity links in Dinesen's universe. Where does (visual) artend and (story) life begin? All this gives a new twist to the relations be-

tween the dynamics of plot and the statics of ekphrastic objects withinthe narrative arena: the two interpenetrate as never before.

The fact, mentioned earlier, that of all human traits this interpene-tration excludes voice-the art objects always keep silent, along with

the rest of theirorder-may

therefore beduly appreciated

now as well.

This conspicuous absence pulls the artworksall the more forcefully apartfrom the immemorial line of prosopopeia, inside ekphrasis and outside

it, as voice transfer to the domain of muteness: they are figures in life,not figures of literary speech. Here again, Dinesen's work reads like asilent commentary on ekphrastic practice and theory, framed within theoverall realm of mimesis.

One way of refining the difference would be to consider her writingagainst the background of the "Moving Statue" tradition recently ex-

plored by Kenneth Gross. For now, letme

quote hisreference to two

cases in point: "Something in their tropes is worth pausing over, for each

struggles to find a voice and a mode of consciousness for the statue thatis fitted to its peculiar history, ontology, and use as a statue, rather than

simply as the image of a human being. The statue speaks but it speaks(impossibly) as a statue" (Gross 1992: 145). Dinesen reverses mattersalmost point by point, from the troping to the utterance to the statuelike-ness multiply divorced from humanlikeness. In terms of origins, she thus

rejects both of the etymologies from which critics have often derived,

selectively orjointly, their privileged features of ekphrasis: (mimetic) de-scriptiveness and/or (fantastic, if figurative)voice-lending. My argumentabout the variability of those features goes to prove her, in systematicreversal, the better theorist, the all-around counterbalancer.

6. FalseSexualArrest

Let me end by giving the argument a socioartistic turn. Unhappily, the

age-old critical bent for imprisoning the protean dynamism of litera-ture's forms in preconceived formulas shows signs of extending itsjuris-

diction from the representation to the representer. Both lines of arrest,I would therefore point out, are countered by the above analysis. Itnot only illustrates the rich play among dimensions of genre (ekphra-sis/poetry/narrative), structure (space, time, space-time) and interartmimesis (text/image/model). As the work of a woman, Dinesen's art also

questions the more recent, fashionable drive to literary fixture: that of




marrying theoretical and sexual categories. Thus Mitchell's (1989: 97)bid for linking ekphrastic (and related) poetry to sex, within what he

calls the "politics"of literary space:

Whathappens,wemustask,whenthe strategiesof literary pacingareappro-priatedbya femalewriter? suggesttwohypotheses: hat the genrein whichwomenconquer iterary paceis principallyhe novel,and that thisconquestis manifestedn the frequentoccurrenceof the heroine or female narrator s

painteror keen-sighted iewer,a "seeing" sopposedto a "speaking"ubject,a dweller n spacerather hanin time.

This is well intentioned, no doubt, yet it reduces women ("femalewriter"of literature or "heroine or female narrator as

painteror

keen-sightedviewer"within literature) to one-dimensionality, reminiscent of that at-

tributed by a philosopher of yesterday to "Man."Even beyond the dy-namization of ekphrastic images, neither hypothesis, about the female's

novelistic writing or about her space-dwelling, applies to our corpus(or to others like it). A full demonstration of how and why they break

down would involve rehearsing much of my argument in "Plotsof Space"(Yacobi 1991). Here I can only touch on some relevant facts.

For one thing, Dinesen rejected the novelistic genre in favor of the

"story,"he "sublime"or "divineart";precisely because, among other rea-sons, she would restore the primacy of the "speaking"subject, the tellingvoice. "Stories have been told as long as speech has existed" (LT, 23ff.).With prosopopeia categorically ruled out, moreover, this primacy also

takes on existential significance. Far from dividing women from men,

"speech" unifies humanity vis-a-visthe nonhuman order, speechless at

its most humanlike.

For another thing, in the world of Dinesen (though herself a painter)the roles of pictorial artists are reserved for men, while women promi-

nently figure among her archetypal, as well as occasional, storytellers.They range from her ArabianNightsancestress, the much-admired Sche-

herazade, to the old woman who makes a parable of storytelling in "The

Blank Page."No wonder, then, that Dinesen's practice of ekphrasis fol-

lows her general poetic rule. The tale would not "conquer" space but

bring it to life in new ways;it aims not to deliver the heroines (any more

than the heroes) from the prison house of their sex-much less at the

cost of reimprisoning them forever elsewhere -but to deliver the world

of coexistent entities from stasis. In ideological as well as in artistic terms,

this looks like the more liberated and liberating strategy. The idea ofsegregating the "literary" exes proves false, at any rate, another myth of

ekphrasis. But if we must bring sexual variables into the field of poetic

representation, the choice is clear. Either we keep our correlations flex-

ible and empirical -so as to accommodate the spectrum of arts wielded

by "female writers," among the rest-or we consider Isak Dinesen, if




not a freak of nature, then perhaps a male alter ego of Baroness Karen

Blixen.

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