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1. This definition of ekphrasis as "the verbal representation of visual representation is also the basis for James Heffernan's article, "Ekphrasis and Representation," New Literary History 22, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 297-316. See also Heffernan's The Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1994).Back
2. Nelson Goodman,Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), p. 231. Back
3. For a good survey of this scholarship, see Grant F. Scott, "The Rhetoric of Dilation: Ekphrasis and Ideology," Word & Image 7, no. 4 (October-December 1991): 301-10. Back
4. The pun in "cite"/"sight" above might be cited (or sighted) as an example of a "literal" (that is, conveyed by letters") intrusion of visual representation into verbal representation. Back
5. The iconic character of radio "sound images" is a nonverbal form of ekphrasis. These images (onomatopoeic thundering, studio sound effects) might be said to provoke visual images by metonymy, or customary contiguity. Back
6. Jean Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 18. See also Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 42-43, for an account of ekphrasis as literature's nostalgia for the visual arts. Further page references will be cited in the text. Back
7. George Saintsbury, quoted in Hagstrum, The Sister Arts , p. 18. Back
8. Murray Krieger, "The Ekphrastic Principle and the Still Moment of Poetry; or Laokoon Revisited," in The Play and Place of Criticism (Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967). This essay, which has without question been the single most influential statement on ekphrasis in American criticism, has now been incorporated by Krieger into a booklength study, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). Back
9. The doctrine can, of course, expand even further to become a general principle of effective rhetoric or even of scientific language, where it appears under the rubric of clear, "perspicuous" representation, modeled on perspectival, rationally constructed imagery. More typical, however, is the use of ekphrasis as a model for the power of literary art to achieve formal, structural patterns and to represent vividly a wide range of perceptual experiences, most notably the experience of vision. The graphic, pictorial, or sculptural models for literary art range from the quasi-scientific claims of perspectival realism, to the grand patterning of architecture, to the focusing of a literary work in a single image, whether an emblem, a hieroglyph, a landscape, or a human figure. Back
10. On the distinction between "image/text," "image-text," and "imagetext," see chapter 3, footnote 9. Back
11. Those who saw Bob and Ray's television debut on "Saturday Night Live" know that their humor loses much of its force when they cease to be invisible voices and are revealed as what we always knew them to be: two very ordinary-looking middle-aged men. Back
12. Gotthold Lessing, Laocoon , translated by Edith Frothingham (1766 New York: Noonday Press, 1969), pp. 68-69. Back
13. For Lessing, arbitrary visual signs (emblems, hieroglyphs, pictographs) such as, for instance, serpents that signify divinity, are well on their way to being a form of writing. See my essay, "Space and Time: Lessing's Laocoon and the Politics of Genre," chapter 4 in Iconology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Back
14. Francoise Meltzer, Salome and the Dance of Writing: Portraits of Mimesis in Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 21. Back
15. Lessing traces "adulterous fancy" among the ancients--especially women--to the use of serpents as "emblems of divinity" on ancient statues. Not just the phallic shape of the serpent, but its impropriety as an arbitrary sign attached, like language or voice, to a properly "beautiful" and mute statue, is the provocation to adultery. See Lessing, Laocoon , pp. 10-11. Further page references will be cited in the text. Back
16. For further discussion of romantic iconophobia, see chapter 4, pp. 114-20. Back
17. For a more extended account of Jameson on the ideologeme and his use of the categories of space and time, see Jameson's The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 87, and my essay "Space, Ideology, and Literary Representation," in Poetics Today 10, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 91-102. Back
18. As Marcelin Pleynet puts it, "The objective of the text of art criticism . . . is for me to place myself . . . before something that implies another discourse, a discourse that will not be in the text.... " (Painting and System , translated by Sima Godfrey [1977; Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984], p. v). Back
19. John Hollander proposes a distinction between "notional" ekphrases of "imaginary" or lost works of art and descriptions of visual representation that refer to familiar, widely reproduced, or even present objects of visual representation See "The Poetics of Ekphrasis," Word and Image 4 (1988): 209-19. I want to suggest, however, that in a certain sense all ekphrasis is notional, and seeks to create a specific image that is to be found only in the text as its "resident alien," and is to be found nowhere else. Even those forms of ekphrasis that occur in the presence of the described image disclose a tendency to alienate or displace the object, to make it disappear in favor of the textual image being produced by the ekphrasis. The art history slide lecture is a perfect illustration of this point. A fixed convention of the slide lecture is the declaration that the image projected on the screen is a totally inadequate representation (the colors have faded, the lighting was poor, the texture has all been lost). Even when the lecture is performed in the presence of the object itself, the commentator is never at a loss for strategies of displacement and upstaging, the most obvious being a discourse that removes the object from the museum or gallery and situates it in some other, more authentic or appropriate place (the site of its original display or production, the artist's studio, the artist's mind, or--best of all--the mind of the commentator) . Back
20. The claim that they do take on iconic characteristics, achieving verbal artifacts that "resemble" at some level the visual form they address, is one of the central claims of ekphrastic hope. Back
21. Krieger, Play and Place of Criticism , p. 107. Back
22. Another way to put this is to note that the ekphrasis of a work of visual art need not produce either an "iconic" effect (though this is certainly a possibility) or any other "literary" feature. Ekphrastic prose is an equally available possibility, and the presence or absence of iconism or "literarity" in this prose is not preordained by its reference to a visual representation. Ekphrasis and verbal iconicity are, in short, independent features. Back
23. See Gerard Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse , translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 136. George Saintsbury's account of ekphrasis as a "set description" reflects this desire to "frame" or "set off" description as a separable feature. See footnote 7 above. Back
24. Texts may , of course, achieve spatiality or iconicity, but the visual object invoked does not require or cause these features. Back
25. The strange irreality of these "gifts" does not, of course, prevent us from giving them and from thinking of the whole ekphrastic gesture as a kind of ritual of exchange. One of the most frequent sites of ekphrasis in classical poetry is the singing contest between two shepherds who describe and exchange artifacts as tokens of mutual esteem (see, for instance, Theocritus' Idyll, Virgil's Eclogue V). "The art objects used as gifts or prizes may be read as the rewards poets should receive for their productions . . . and the ekphrastic description asserts poetry's worth by showing that poetry can indeed 'capturew in and receive such valuable things" (Joshua Scodel, correspondence with the author,1989). The Shield of Achilles is a gift from the hero's goddess mother, and the ekphrasis of this shield by Homer is a gift from his muses that is, in turn, given to the reader/listener. I am very grateful to Joshua Scodel for his extended response to early drafts of this essay, and I will be quoting from his letters to me throughout this essay. Back
26. In fact, a moment's reflection suggests innumerable instances where pictures stand in for words and whole speech acts. Linda Seidel has shown, for instance, that Van Eyck's famous Arnolfini portrait is best understood as something like a marriage contract, and the "cave canem" inscription on the fierce dog mosaics at Pompeii (often cited by Gombrich as examples of "apotropaic" imagery) seems redundant in view of the image. See Seidel "The Arnolfini Portrait," Critical Inquiry 16, no. 1 (Fall 1989): 54-86, and Ernst Gombrich, "The Limits of Convention," in Image and Code , edited by Wendy Steiner (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1981), pp. 11-42. Back
27. Oliver Sacks, New York Review of Books , 23 October 1986, p. 69. Back
28. See Daniel Tiffany's essay, "Cryptesthesia: Visions of the Other," The American Journal of Semiotics 6, nos. 2/3 (1989): 209-19. Back
29. See chapter 1, "The Pictorial Turn." Back
30. I take this to be Jacqueline Rose's point when she says "the link between sexuality and the image produces a particular dialogue which cannot be covered adequately by the familiar opposition between the formal operations of the image and a politics exerted from outside" (Sexuality in the Field of Vision [London: Verso, 1986], p. 231). Needless to say, the positioning of racial otherness within the field of vision would display complex intersections with and differences from the image/text as a gendered or sexual relation See Toni Morrison on "The Alliance between Visually Rendered Ideas and Linguistic Utterances in the Construction of the Color Line," in Playing in the Dark (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 49. Back
31. Cp. also Toni Morrison's short story, "Recitatif" (1982), with its dehberate confusing of the verbal/visual signs of racial identity, reprinted in Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women , edited by Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) and Amina Baraka (New York: William Morrow,1983) pp. 243-61. Back
32. The Slave's Narrative , edited by Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. xxvi. For more on this subject, see chapter 6, "Narrative, Memory, and Slavery." Back
33. From the foreword to Michel de Certeau's Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. xiii. Back
34. I am grateful, once again, to Joshua Scodel for pointing out that this matter was not sufficiently thematized in early drafts of this essay. Back
35. One might think of the psychoanalytic process of dream interpretation as a staging of the ekphrastic scene in which the manifest visual content of the dream is the ekphrastic object, the analysand is the ekphrastic speaker, and the analyst is the reader/interpreter. Back
36. Joshua Scodel, correspondence with the author. Back
37. Kenneth Atchity, Homer's Iliad: The Shield of Memory (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), p. 158. See also Marc Eli Blanchard, "In the World of the Seven Cubit Spear: The Semiotic Status of the Object in Ancient Greek Art and Literature," Semiotica 43, nos. 3/4 (1983): 205-44. Back
38. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions (1781), translated by A. M. Cohen (New York: Penguin Books, 1953), p. 109. See Marcelin Pleynet, Painting and System , p. 153, for a suggestion that Freud's analysis of the relation between narcissism, scopophilia, and auto-eroticism "merits formalization within the field of an approach to painting." Cp. Freud, "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," in Collected Papers (London: Hogarth, 1949), vol. 4, p. 66. Back
39. "Fetishism" ( 1927) in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , translated by James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1961), 21: 152-57. Back
40. "The foot or the shoe owes its preference as a fetish--or a part of it--to the circumstance that the inquisitive boy peered at the woman's genitals from below, from her legs up" (Freud, Complete Works , 21:155). Back
41. I've always found Kenneth Burke's rewriting of this line as "Body is turd, turd body" the best antidote to Keats's ending. Back
42. See Carol Jacobs, "On Looking at Shelley's Medusa," Yale French Studies 69 (1985): 163-79, for a good reading of this passage. Back
43. See Neville Rogers, "Shelley and the Visual Arts," Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin 12 (1961): 16-17. Back
44. See Jerome McGann, "The Beauty of Medusa: A Study in Romantic Literary Iconology," Studies in Romanticism 11 (l972): 3-25. Back
45. Neil Hertz, "Medusa's Head: Male Hysteria Under Political Pressure," Representations 4 (Fall 1983): 27-54. Back
46. "Medusa's Head," in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love , p. 212. quoted in Hertz, p. 30. Hertz notes the reenactment of female exhibitionism as a revolutionary weapon in the Paris uprisings in June 1848. Back
47. My thanks to Joshua Scodel for pointing this out. Back
48. Cedric Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 205. Back
49. See chapter 3, footnote 14, for a discussion of image-text suturing. Back
50. The indicatives cited here are the ones singled out by Lessing as "cold and tedious" (Laocoon, p. 116). Back
51. See Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition , and Atchity, Homer's Iliad: The Shield of Memory . Back
52. Cp. Marc Eli Blanchard, "World of the Seven Cubit Spear," p. 224: "The plot of the Iliad , underscored by the manufacture of the shield, has now become a decorative episode on the surface of the metal." Back