Poetics Today, Vol. 16, No. 4, (Winter, 1995)

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Pictorial Models and Narrative EkphrasisAuthor(s): Tamar YacobiSource: Poetics Today, Vol. 16, No. 4, (Winter, 1995), pp. 599-649Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1773367Accessed: 15/04/2008 10:34

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Pictorial Models and Narrative Ekphrasis

Tamar Yacobi Poetics and Comparative Literature, Tel Aviv

Abstract Ekphrasis is an umbrella term that subsumes various forms of rendering the visual object in words. This variety is often arbitrarily restricted, largely because some of the forms, though manifest in artistic practice, are not recognized in criticism. This essay analyzes two such neglected forms: pictorial models and narrative ekphrasis. Their intersection compounds the ekphrasis of a visual model (as distinct from a unique artwork) with narrativized (as against descriptive, picturelike) effect, though not only within narrative works. The neglect of both forms, I point out, relates to theory's doctrinal biases, namely, the insistence 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 narrativity to bring the 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, as well as point of view. These and various other interplays between the ekphrastic model and narrativity are illustrated in the second part of the essay, mainly through the poetics of Isak Dinesen.

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Fourth IASS Congress (Barcelona- Perpignan, 1989), at the Second International Conference on Word and Image (Zurich, 1990), and at Indiana University (Bloomington, 1991). The author thanks the audiences for their comments, and several readers, particularly Mieke Bal and Claus Cliiver.

Poetics Today 16:4 (Winter 1995). Copyright ? 1996 by The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. CCC 0333-5372/95/$2.50.

600 Poetics Today 16:4

1. Source-Target Relations between Arts: Varieties of Ekphrasis Renumbered The traffic between visual art and literature has always featured the allusive (mimetic, thematic, quotation-like) relations between works in the different media. The one work's representation of the world then becomes the other's re-presentation, a mimesis in the second degree. Thus the reworking of biblical and mythological tales, details, moments, and themes (e.g., the Crucifixion or the birth of Venus) in the spatial arts. Conversely, we have ekphrasis, where the temporal art of literature alludes to paintings, statues, urns, or, again, their traditional themes- with the difference that texts like William Carlos Williams's "Kermes" or Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts" or Dan Pagis's "Portrait," wholly de- 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, / Looking as 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 Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!" Likewise, in the course of Henry James's Daisy Miller the 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 familiarity with the inset pictorial 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 art theme, between shorter and longer re-presentational stretches or texts, between poetry and prose, between description and narration. This goes to show that ekphrasis, the 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 ekphrasis (and with it the meaning of the con-

1. Both accordingly fall within a comprehensive theory of "quotation" as second- order mimesis or re-presentation, exhibiting the set of universals generalized in Sternberg 1982. The argument there has since gained currency among theorists of

reported discourse in all its linguistic manifestations. But note the reason given there for the extendibility of the principle to media other than language and to arts other than the literary, such as "musical and pictorial" allusiveness. "Twice-removed representation" forms "a qualitative common denominator" and "points the way to an inter-art theory of quotation-as-mimesis" (ibid.: 135 n. 14).

Yacobi * Pictorial Models and Narrative Ekphrasis 601

cept and the use of the device) is ill defined or arbitrarily restricted, largely because some of the forms, though manifested in artistic practice, still need to be recognized in principle and theorized along with their 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 practice, the result is a compounded challenge to theory. We then have the ekphrasis of a visual model (as distinct from a unique artwork) to narrativized effect (as against descriptive, picturelike, or thematic bearing), though not only within narrative works proper. The object and the function of re-presentation thus vary together, inverting the common theoretical norm twice over. Modeling and narrativity, it will soon emerge, are actually two related but independent parameters of ekphrasis, both central to my argument as well as to the illustrative corpus, especially Isak Dinesen's artful story world. I will therefore introduce them in turn, one in this section, the other in the next, exploring their relationship as we go along.

Let us start with the difference in the re-presented object, between the artwork and the art model as source. By this 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 you will, from surface to depth. Take these two examples, which will reappear later: when Nabokov describes a scene in a Parisian restaurant in terms of The Last Supper or when Isak Dinesen views two embracing sisters as "maidenly Laoco6ns," they are not alluding to any specific picture or statue but to a pictorial model, a common denominator, a generalized visual image. In what circumstances does such interart dialogue occur, under what rules, and to what effect, compared with the particularized variety?

Strangely, this line of inquiry runs not just beyond but against the common conception of ekphrasis. Leo Spitzer's (1962 [1955]: 72) well- known definition locates the ekphrastic genre in "the poetic description of a pictorial or sculptured work of art"; it "addresses a particular visual image," Hollander (1988b: 34) emphasizes to make doubly sure. And most analysts focus on the one-to-one relation (numerical as well as mimetic) postulated between the artworks. They will indeed readily enough admit, at times even examine, the possibility that "a pictorial or sculptured work" may generate more than a single "poetic description." Kibedi Varga (1989: 44) thus spells out the rule that underlies many analyses of otherwise different orientations: "What comes first is necessarily unique; what comes after can be multiplied. One image can be the source of many texts, and one text can inspire many painters. These secondary series can become the objects of comparative study, which makes


Table 1 Ekphrastic Relations

Visual Source (representation) Verbal Target (re-presentation)

1 one one 2 one many 3 many one 4 many many

us aware of the fact that illustrations and ekphrasis-in fact, all manifestations of subsequent, secondary relations--are just different modes of interpretation." Unlimited in number, then, each act of ekphrasis is a text'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) "artistic cliche" refers in fact to "specific pictures" that "had a sentimental appeal to a whole generation." The source artwork is again 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 "kumulatives Bildgedicht" 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 conspicuous 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 unique source to be rendered into words, have monopolized the study of ekphrasis. 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 literary treatments 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 interart (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's Icarus, for 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-


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

The symmetry between the re-presentational pluralities should be evident, as is the status of the latter poems as modern classics of the genre. For balance, therefore, we need to bring into the picture the last two categories of interart traffic in ekphrasis. Both are defined by the multiple visual source chosen for verbal (re)modeling. Only, the many-to-one relation 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) common to various paintings. Of the two, again, I want to concentrate on the former relation, whose status is theoretically crucial and whose workings may easily be extended to the latter, along comparative or historical lines. (Speaking of extension, incidentally, the entire table lends itself to reversal from an ekphrastic network into a map of pictorial imaging of literary sources.)

2. From Mimetic Space-image to Ekphrastic Dynamism

2.1 Where Has the Model Gone? Lessing between Ancient and Present-Day Mimeticisms

With the reference of model-oriented ekphrasis delimited, it now remains to establish its sense, that is, its rationale, features, operations, resources, effects, in short its poetics. We may best approach the question by proceeding to ask why it has been so neglected in an otherwise expanding and increasingly sophisticated field of inquiry. Such neglect certainly does not correspond to the literary facts, the practices of writing (already glimpsed) and of reading. Readers, if anything, are often more 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 generalized than for a unique reference to meet this need without recourse to special measures, aids to memory, and the like.) At the transmitting end, moreover, references to a "van Gogh landscape," as well as to a "Mona Lisa smile," have found their way into ordinary discourse. What is it, then, that has so driven analysts toward work-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 of art 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 representational thrust so heavily value-laden, the privileging of the strict and the singular interart transfer appears 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 mimeticist by, 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 ("If one-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 and aesthetics or poetics. Under mimetic

pressure, such latter-day criticism would reverse -not always in an obvi- ous fashion, nor always for 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 subjects it to regulation by appeal to a set of higher norms, absolute and comparative. The limits imposed on "the imitative arts" begin with the object of imitation itself:

Although painting, as the art which reproduces objects upon flat surfaces, is now practised in the broadest sense of that definition, yet the wise Greek set much narrower bounds to it. He confined it strictly to the imitation of beauty.... The perfection of the subject must charm in his work. He was too

great to require the beholders to be satisfied with the mere barren pleasure arising from a successful likeness or from consideration of the artist's skill.

(Lessing 1963: 8)

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

ing occupies a position midway between Aristotle's plot-oriented poetics and modernism's medium- and space-oriented counterpoetics. As will be seen, this helps to

explain the respective attitudes toward ekphrasis, notably regarding the question of

narrativity. For a provocative attempt to refer the dispute to conflicting political and sexual ideologies, see Mitchell 1986: 95-115 and 1989, also discussed below.


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 scope of mimesis, theoretically extendible to the entire world "in the broadest sense," must narrow in response to the demands of "beauty," the "supreme law 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 the end: 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, and despair, including the ugliness of the 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 that which places visual beauty out of reach, and so out of bounds for literature, except through oblique evocation, qualifies literature for rendering the 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 implications, this in effect sets free the re-presentational device that Lessing officially leaves unfocused and even unnamed: ekphrasis may develop (rather than at best parallel, at worst attenuate) the original image, by articulating the cry, for example.

For Lessing, moreover, "beauty" outranks not only "truth" but also "skill" in mimesis, that is, the drive to conquer or redeem the aesthetic liabilities 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 elsewhere admired) as "difficult6 vaincue" (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 and to the re-presentational traffic between 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 artistic limits even further: from the domain of signifieds per se to their interplay with the signifiers, and from the selection to the combination of signs proper to the respective arts. Even where roughly the same object of mimesis is to be presented (or, for that matter, re-presented) with much the same effect in view, each art form will best operate in terms of 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 with a sense of desecration. By contrast, given the artist's visual signifiers, a robe would divest his rendering of the beauty and expressiveness of the sufferer's body (ibid.: 39-40). Yet the interart relation between plus and minus, more representational coverage and less, may also turn round in other signifying contexts or crosscuts. Lessing thus invokes the difference between "arbitrary" (convention-based) and "natural" (iconic) signs to explain why the poets fail to describe the muses in the painterly manner. They can dispense with such portrayal because the name Urania is 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 "dumb language" (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 will add 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 a function of comparative word/image semiotics under aesthetic control.

As with the choice of signs, so with their combination into an artwork. Here the Laocoon makes its famous plea for harmony between the

arrangements of signifier and signified, medium and object of representation 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. By the same token, "consecutive signs can express only objects which succeed 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 by either 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

always regulate mimesis by the higher value and pleasure of "illusion." The ability to describe "things as they exist in space," Lessing claims, is "a property 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's ideal of poetic transparency so favors narrative as to rule out of literature straight description (or, for that matter, ekphrastic re-description). For such writing must draw notice to itself at the expense of "the things" written about; the part-whole relations that the beholder takes in at a glance demand laborious processing from the reader. So the disharmony in arrangement between temporal medium and spatial object would destroy "illusion,"4 as Laocoon's cry would 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" in English translation, for the source (of whatever domain, kind, or number) re-presented by either art. Thus, Virgil having shaped anew the Laocoon group, ancient sculptors may have taken his version "as their model" (ibid.: 34-36): numerous graphic returns to a single literary Vorbild. Conversely, the poet may have worked "after the model set him by the artists" (ibid.: 42), with the possible (though not necessary) result of creating some form of ekphrasis (though the treatise 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 for the many-to-one variety. Yet it does point away from strict mimesis, typically and unmistakably so, if we consider the stress laid throughout on the features changed (added, omitted, played up or down, transformed) in re-presentation. This is why such mimesis, balancing aesthetic license and limit, implies no disparagement to the imitators. "On the contrary the manner of their imitations reflects the greatest credit on their wisdom. ... A model was set them, but the task of transferring it from one 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 as subject matter (in effect, the ekphrastic 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 by his antagonists and the norms behind them. Such reversion particularly manifests itself in the reversal of the Laocoon's attitude toward interart transfer. 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 only worsen the evil of disharmony. Either way, however, mimesis varies with the poetic goal, 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 process of writing, or for their reconfrontation in the reading. Hagstrum (1958: 42-43) thus finds it necessary to distinguish the poet who "reproduced what 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 provided no 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 critical insight into such disparities has greatly 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's code into Anne Sexton's would be inconceivable in premodern dealings with ekphrasis. But the more refined the equipment, the more revealing the all-too-familiar drive toward mimesis against the grain of the target art, along with the underlying (counter)values. And the very advance in

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 reserves the former term for a poem in which the artwork breaks into speech, in the tradition of prosopopeia. More recently, Lund (1992: 12ff.) divides "ekphrasis" (reference to a picture) from "iconic projection" (picturelike reference to the world), which in fact arguably intersects with ekphrastic modeling, because its picturelike- ness may attach to a general feature. The one-to-one bond thus defines the field of

ekphrasis again, persisting across variations in critical terminology and (given Lund's resistance to normative bias) in value scheme. (I owe this reference to Claus Cliiver.) 6. If with the urn he leaves the original unidentified, elsewhere he generalizes it into a model of the highest abstraction. Thus in a letter to Fanny: "I should like the window to open onto the lake of Geneva-and there I'd sit and read all day like the picture of

somebody reading" (Keats 1953 [1819], 2: 46). (I owe this reference toJoseph Grigely [pers. com., Conference on Word and 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 either the originals from which it abstracts or their ambitious literary rework- ings, the model is liable to appear too flat to qualify for exegesis, as well as for reality-likeness. Naturally, how these counterforces balance varies in 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's visual language" as it develops from "work to work" (Cliver 1978: 33). Yet what he singles out for analysis is "intersemiotic transposition" as "translation," 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 ekphrasis to mimetic failure. But then, the failure itself-rather than commend- ing or at least indicating more feasible alternatives, such as the image as model - 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 Return of the Hunters 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-presentational equality-makes a typical and transparent exclusionary ploy.

All this goes to explain why, and to what extent, the reaction to Lessing falls short of liberation. In the process, it has no doubt helped to redeem or rehabilitate other modes of transfer than his, other scales of value and interest operative in (often, indeed, well beyond) the ekphrastic genre itself. So far so good, except that in reversing Lessing's dogmas, such opposition in effect locks ekphrasis into another prison, one both older and newer, yet with symmetrical limits and losses as well as privileges and gains.

Hence the counterlimits widely imposed on mimesis in re-presentation, as though ekphrasis at its best could not aim to evoke either more or less than the original image. This is, for example, why we need to bear in 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 ekphrasis in favor of the full-bodied image, regardless of availability or frequency or artistry or 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 an arena of interart rivalry (foredoomed according to some, more open- ended according to others) over the prize of mimetic fullness. In any case, 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: though an 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.7

As 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 deliberately selective. This befalls Proust's comparison, "One felt the same pleasure as 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 mountain pass," with its unmistakable ors, doubled for extra pictorial coverage and accessibility. "Imaginary ekphrasis," Riffaterre (1990: 51) nevertheless calls it; a "pseudo-landscape." Here fictionality supposedly delivers 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 The Descriptive versus the Narrative: Genres or Powers? Hegemony or Range? 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 indefensibly exclusive. The

history of aesthetics, with its alliances across the Laocoon divide, brings out a principled reason for the unequal attention given to varieties of transfer that are equally feasible and serviceable in theory, hence equally manifest in literature, which puts the different forms to different uses.

7. In a relatively dogma-free, corpus-based account, Kenneth Gross argues that texts

featuring ekphrasis aim for more than "mimetic accuracy" and "will often reach be-

yond what is given or visible in the works they 'describe."' But he hastens to qualify this Lessingesque statement: "Equally worth attending to, however, are these texts' often oblique ways of returning to the sculpted object," to "what is 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 stronger tradition 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 literature, as between the extremes of epic and lyric thrust, action and description, time and space: narrativity versus pictoriality, in brief. The sharper the focus on interart disparities, Laoco6n-style, the heavier the pressure on ekphrasis (often along with the rest of literature) to follow the narrative route. Conversely, the more value placed on interart mimesis-an immemorial routine, whatever its guise-the stronger the channeling of ekphrasis toward the opposite, static, imagelike pole. By now 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 than a range of ever-available, complementary options.

Lessing (1963 [1766]: xi) thus begins by announcing that under the name 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 of his 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, since its temporality distinctively covers the object as well as the medium of representation. And such double coverage involves maximum harmony and "illusion."

We need not endorse this favoring of narrative, or its grounds, to turn it to ekphrastic account. Nor, having left the dogma behind, need we quibble over the question whether Lessing, at narrativizing, addresses ekphrasis itself. Here as elsewhere, he never refers to it by name, but he does so often and unconventionally in practice, on any half-generous reading, and has been given less-than-due credit by interested parties since.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 Laocoon blurs the line between art's first- and second-order mimesis in its eagerness to put them both under artistic control, for example, in prescribing the extension of the literary object (whatever its origin, or Vorbild) in time to suit the medium.9 Obliquely, but for our purposes importantly, Lessing's

8. The converse also holds true, in other modern arenas, where the Laocoon figures all too prominently, as argued by Sternberg (1981, 1990). 9. Where ekphrasis itself forms the object of inquiry, such a blur may indeed lead to category mistake. For example, to classify under this label the view presented in


emphasis may nonetheless be extended or converted at several points from 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 the divine chariot comes together piece by piece under Hebe's hands, Aga- memnon's dress in the act of dressing, Achilles' shield in the process of its creation (Lessing 1963 [1766]: 34, 95, 113-25). The last of these

examples, considered by Lessing himself the paradigm of description turned narration, has in fact been taken by many as the origin of ekphrasis: it is largely a question of whether or not the shield itself (relative to, 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 suggestiveness; the dynamism that transforms and integrates the Homeric

objects of description into full literary temporality is always available to the second-order, ekphrastic transfer of visual space-items.

So, from the pictorial rather than the poetic side of interart transfer, is the "pregnant moment." Originally recommended to space-artists as an indirect force for temporality, this moment comes just before the climax 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, imagination can neither mount a step higher, nor fall a step lower, without seeing him in a more endurable, and therefore less interesting, condition. We hear 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-way interart movement between source and target-including the narrativization of ekphrasis via "pregnancy." Nor need such pregnancy remain latent here any longer. Why should it, considering that the poet enjoys "the liberty to extend his de-

scription over that which preceded and that which followed the single moment 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 Karenina of 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 sequence and 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, least of all those attached to point of view and to inset-frame interplay. But the 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, poem and poetry usually figure in their narrowest generic sense, bearing particularly on 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-century Lives as ekphrasis with a narrative emphasis, but in a very different, rather peculiar sense of narrative: the rendering of emotion. She even points out "the absence of any indication of the development of narrative" (ibid.: 201). On the other hand, she notes that "Vasari does not differentiate between his characterizations of the same story as told in different paintings by different artists" (ibid.: 201-3), or, in more positive terms, 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's Lives as a grand fictionalized history.) Recently Heffernan (1991) has moved into "narrative" as action, but along the lines already suggested by the Laocoon, though the inevitable return to Achilles' shield (the one-moment picture turned into "a narrative of successive actions" [ibid.: 301]) soon gives way to illustration from short romantic 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, ekphrastic 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 narrative 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 story lines-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 of elevating a figure like prosopopeia or a theme like interart conflict-both manifestly omissible, often omitted -to the status of parity with the forces of narration and/or description, built into ekphrasis as a mode of representing the world. He does not even waste his ammunition on such free variables. Having meanwhile become poetic touchstones, though, they have gained a privileged status in ekphrasis criticism (at least since Hagstrum 1958) at the expense of narrative, and Heffernan (1991) would now 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 representation with a view to maximizing "spatial form." But the additional interart convergence entails a multiple reduction in the possibilities of

divergence 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-presentation 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 larger whole, "quoting" design. Given that such an inset might be no bigger than 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 and the 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 (if not 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-presentation in ekphrasis enables shifts and turns of under-

standing denied to the all-spatial visual source, notably in the frame's movement toward, through, and away from 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 "My Last Duchess," otherwise ekphrastic) part along the 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 opposition to others, is the play along the text-length sequence of ekphrasis itself. Davidson (1983: 69-70) thus introduces his postmodernist corpus as adverse to "any mimetic function"; in its light, he also finds Lessing "an Augustan corrective to the excesses of verbal painting," notably to the modernist rage for self-enclosed spatiality, or "spatial ekphrasis." But "the hermeneutics of existential temporality," which he enlists against modern 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 even

applies 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 on textuality, convention, artistic form, historical knowledge. So this argues more 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 the interart theme. It still remains to discover how and why ekphrasis ranges at will from local to central and overall status, from feature to focus, from specifying to typecasting, from the hermeneutics to the dramatics of existence.

Second, reversing Lessing's generic bias makes matters worse. For the common reduction of literature to poetry, and so of ekphrasis to the short descriptive poem, leaves out narrative-certainly narrativity across the genres-and results in detemporalizing or "spatializing" the object of literary re-presentation as well as the medium. The German for ekphrasis, Bildgedicht, encodes this double bias in the term itself-favoring 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 any sustained narrative" (cf. Lund 1992: 165-66 on a Swedish prose poem). His modernist adversaries go much 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 "stopped moment" 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 the ekphrastic still object: Keats's urn (Spitzer 1962 [1955]: 73) or Thomas Browne's (Krieger 1968: 327-28), or the wreath around Cummings's stone children (Steiner 1982: 44). Each is designed to symbolize the theme 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 outset. To carry this ideal to its logical conclusion, the pregnant moment- far from sought, imported, centralized, or elaborated in the transfer to literature -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 proclaiming itself a rounded object," and Steiner (1982: 48) excludes it altogether for its inevitable reference to temporal flux: "In the novel, this flow is explicit in the sequence of events depicted; in the lyric poem, its absence is 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, the

poetry 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-presentation of 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 spring into 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 through the photographs commemorating highlights of this life. Apart from the

nonepic framework itself and the novelty of telescoped duration, this outreaches the Laocoon in 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)observed birth-to-death action. Another claim to notice lies in the modeling of the visual source, for the said snapshots (from the baby's onward) have been so generalized in the transfer that they may apply to anyone's biogra- phy, Everyman's tale of mutability. Elsewhere, incredible as it may sound, 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 narrative measure. In "The Por- trait," even as the portraitist draws and discourses, the sitter transforms before his eyes from child to old man to corpse:

The child Is not sitting still. ... I draw one line And the wrinkles on his face multiply; ... 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" (Yacobi 1976:

19-22; 1988: 95-98). Appropriately, the last-cited analysis of the poems and 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 encourage it. Indeed, as with the related attempt to freeze the medium, artistic practice cuts across all such limits imposed on the object in the spirit 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 its own peculiar freedoms but even the flexibility that Lessing himself offers 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 "the reader reads a poem, without necessarily perceiving" the other part too (ibid.: 33; my emphasis). He then reserves "narration" for 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 supposedly fall below their visual counterparts and may altogether denarrativize them. After all, painters "have often tried to suggest narration in a single painting; the whole classical debate from Poussin to Lessing hinges in part on whether the art of space should compete with the art of time." But once words appear, narrativity disappears, because they "tend to restrict the possibilities of interpretation" (ibid.: 35-36)." Hence, for ekphrasis to comply with such a rule, it must be an overall ("single") descriptive poem in the first place, rather than an element and so potentially a link within a narrative. Nor is it surprising, therefore, that this taxonomy also makes a point of distinguishing Bildgedicht, "a free verbal variation" on the original image, from ekphrasis as "an exact description meant, to a certain 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 narrative model (were it imaginable, here or elsewhere) would compound.

2.3 Ekphrasis, Description, and Narrative Theory The breakdown of all such exercises in limitation, Lessing's or his oppo- nents', underlines that ekphrastic form and effect range all the way between the warring poles. In terms of genesis, if you will, that range corresponds to the distance between two polar origins of ekphrasis: the exemplary activation of the device by its originator (the Laocoin's Homer) and the etymology of the word (the Greek for "description,"

11. Accordingly, this presents the converse extreme to the pairing of language as such 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 anywhere to the medium?


first coreferential with the rhetoricians' descriptio, then subsumed under it). Conceptually, empirically, genetically, ekphrasis makes an assorted and open-ended bundle of variables, all free except for the constant minimum 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 interart juncture, among which the narratological has most invested in the varieties of world making. One would perhaps expect narratology, therefore, to redress the imbalance caused by the aspiration to imagelike 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 change would in all probability stop short of essentials. For the extended coverage to make a principled difference, some of the field's larger assumptions (oddly akin to ekphrastic criticism'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 "spatial form" while, paradoxically enough, inheriting from Lessing the bias against literary description, especially in narrative. (The latter

tendency is even stronger than the former; for details see Hamon 1981; Yacobi 1991.) So, although descriptive writing has in recent years gained considerable notice, Meir Sternberg is the only theorist who has sys- tematically traced its multifold narrative power: for example, the difference 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 "spatiotemporal dynamics" (Sternberg 1990, with earlier references). Like every other discourse element, this realm works under the "Proteus Principle," whereby "many-to-many correspondences" 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 as a time device, only proves the rule: description-the mimesis of spatial objects -is normally theorized as subordinate to the forward-moving action, rather than as an equal in its own right and sphere, let alone as a potential ally. Thus Genette (1982: 133), an expert on narrative time, places this "too well known" inequality among "the major features of our literary consciousness." "Too well known," doubtless, yet who is in reality covered by the all-inclusive "our"? Certainly not the exceptional spatiotemporalist and the entire range of artistic practice (in or out of ekphrasis, across the genres) that thrives on the interplay between the two axes, the interpenetration of discourse forces. For very different reasons, "our" would no more include the mainstream of interart analysis examined above. The promoters of literary (especially lyric) ekphrasis as description, apparently unknown to the narratologist, assume the reverse hierarchy. But here the polar "literary consciousness[es]" nevertheless meet: in the tendency to associate the elements with opposed values, to insist on an either-or focus, if not choice, and to withhold from each the force deemed proper to its opposite. Genre, value, centrality, power- all supposedly go together, one way or the other.

For Genette (ibid.: 134), though description may be "more indispens- able than narration, since it is easier to describe without relating than it is to relate without describing," it yet remains "a mere auxiliary of the narrative": "ancilla narrationis, the ever-necessary, ever-submissive, never-emancipated slave." Of its two "diegetic" functions-the "decorative" and the "explanatory and symbolic" -the first brackets it with the other figures of style or rhetoric, the second with Lessing's extraliterary "prose" coherence. By implication, then, ekphrasis must share the limited, one-dimensional role and with it the low status assigned to the rest of description in "the" or "our" (i.e., this) literary hierarchy; the rendering of its static object becomes a mere "auxiliary" to the narration of 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 as he fails to consider either option for promoting description within the narrative 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 repress ekphrastic 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 falls on its occurrence as a spatial, indeed antinarrative figure and force in temporal art. For example, Kurman (1974: 1) begins by defining "ecphrasis" as "the description in verse of an art object," thereby traditionally prelimiting it on three axes: the functional, perhaps the formal as well ("description"); the generic, especially in its medial aspect ("verse"); and the mimetic ("an object of art," excluding the art model as source). The generic condition, however, is sufficiently relaxed to admit the cross between "verse" and narrative foregrounded in "Ecphrasis in 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 really supply the omission, far less round out the generic picture, because he in effect kills the narrative for the sake of the "verse"; he assimilates the newly foregrounded corpus and elements of ekphrasis, by relentless violence, not just to the old rule of "description" but to the space-figure prescribed for the lyric ever since the exemplary analysis of Keats's urn by Spitzer (1962). Ancient

epic, we hear, already expresses "the nostalgia for timelessness that was to make the device of ecphrasis so attractive to later poets" (Kurman 1974: 3): crossgeneric in essentials, the thrust only rises to panoramic scale. Throughout literary history, he moreover alleges, a variety of epic differentia, like similes or, incredibly, dreams and prophecies, cooperate to 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," to Edith Wharton's novel The House of Mirth, she carries over the alleged generic role of ekphrasis: "As the topos of the still, transcendent moment," 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 denial of 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 through the operations of "gap-filling."


status in literary traditions such as ekphrasis, topographical poetry, and art writing." But the hesitant wording, "a kind of generic status," ties up afresh with the problematics of space and description in literature and literary theory. Taking up Genette's power ("master-slave") terminology for the relations of time and space in literature, Mitchell regards ekphrasis as one canonical mode of infiltrating "spatial, pictorial values into 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 autonomy and role, there persist the key assumptions of the mimetic heritage: that ekphrasis is always descriptive and that its spatial orientation 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-directed men:

Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn,' the canonical example, brings explicitly into play the multiplicity of [sexual] roles played by literary space: as feminine object of desire and violence ('thou still unravish'd bride'), as rival and com- petitor with the poetic voice (the 'sylvan historian' can tell 'a flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme'), as a 'cold pastoral' which 'teases us out of thought' with its ambiguous eternity of desolation, perfection, and frustration. Keats may call the urn a 'friend to man,' but he treats her like an enemy.

A change is registered here in the ideological force and value (from submissive to subversive, from negative to positive) ascribed to ekphrasis, rather than in its essential allegiance and thrust (no corresponding shift from space to time, from statics to dynamics). In essentials, the traditional poetic role shows itself to be constant across the political variations between Mitchell and Genette. Though meant to privilege and liberate ekphrasis, moreover, its fixture as "the text's Other" ironically denies it the 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 all drawn from poetry?13

13. As are even those in Heffernan 1991, which shift the focus of the narrative impulse from Lessing's epic paradigm, the shield in the genesis, with its prose counterparts since, to the newer favorites, Keats's urn and Shelley's Ozymandias, complete with their nonepic (far less novelistic) elements, such as the poet's recourse to prosopopeia. But contrast Lund 1992, in which international scope and long historical perspective (on "iconic projection") go with a cross-generic range of illustration. De- spite the variance in topic, this wealth of material has indirectly served to retest my theses against examples, even literatures unknown to 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 beyond the respective latitudes taken together. The preference for interart mimesis, reinforced by associated modern norms and scales, doctrinally goes against my two central concerns in what follows: modeling and narrativity in ekphrasis. Where either factor must count as offensive even by itself, their twinning is beyond the pale. Relative to what it has bred since, Lessing's approach (with its aesthetic regulation of mimesis, promotion of literary time, and eye for difference) would in principle encourage such concerns, especially the inquiry into how the narrativizing of the image in transmission makes a distinctive crossliterary resource, a variable 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 own focus of interest lies elsewhere, outside ekphrasis (i.e., in interart com-

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

exegesis; he brings time to bear on the space-object in a manner both local 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 exclusive of literary practice and its problematics, as well as of each other, we therefore need to formulate or reformulate the issues in a larger perspective.

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 typical functions 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 as

against 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-writing Danish storyteller Isak Dinesen (as well as, more understandably, the Hebrew poet Dan 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 compare with the singular image in this regard?

In addressing such questions, we must keep the literary repertoire balanced, for a change. It would therefore be counterproductive (and, for me, also repetitive) to work with the examples from poems touched on 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. Models and Spatiality within the Storytelling Poetics of Dinesen

Dinesen, however, offers far more than illustrative balance. The ekphrastic part, I have been arguing, whether a local inset or a virtually text- length stretch, is inseparable from a complex of wholes that regulate and interpret it. Among this complex, the framing, "quoting" discourse and 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 forces in play, especially the ever-shifting balance of the narrative versus the descriptive; to history- and artist-specific designs, frameworks, conventions, innovations, repatternings. My paradigm case richly exemplifies both the interrelations at their most complex and their (re)formation into a determinate poetic unity; or, the other way around, both the hope- lessness of the a priori fixture sought by analysts (even compounded in the "still moment" approach) and the penalty of atomism incurred by the mere anatomizing of the device, taxonomist-fashion. That the ekphrastic part does cohere with its wholes -however intricate the synthesis, or however it varies from one corpus to another-is not the least of the lessons that can be derived from this case. Nor is it the least of my reasons for building the general argument around a master practitioner- a woman at that, and as such alleged by some to reach willy-nilly for the otherness of space fixities, in opposition to man, the time dweller. We will 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 probably her strongest claim to radical originality, as well as her lifelong enterprise, namely, the upgrading and repatterning of the spatial dimension in literature. Among the set of principles involved, those most relevant to my argument bear on four aspects: space as meaning- ful form, as dynamic force, as artistic model, and as interart juncture.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 will later prove, I hope, to extend beyond Dinesen's work. The artist's unique space novelties overlie, and their uncovering brings out, a universal of the literary time-art.

To begin with, space comes to figure prominently as a (if not the) locus of meaning and design. Thus, in a typical metanarrative comment on the arena of "Sorrow Acre," Dinesen's narrator observes that "a child of the country would read this open landscape like a book" (WT, 29, also 30, 37, 60-61).15 Such analogies between nature and book, between physical setting and covert yet readable writing, draw notice to the operations of space as a semiotic system throughout Dinesen's art. Nor does this system provide a mere addition to or substitute for others. As the same narrator comments a few lines before, "The country breathed a timeless life, to which language was inadequate": where words fail, the semiotics of 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 traditionally immobilized in it (sea, land, forest, artwork) 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 being a figure of prosopopeiacal (etymologically, "person-making") speech, generates a new world-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. Having discussed 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, her allusions 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= Winter Tales).


consciousness of models-including their force, traditionality, range of inevitability, and hence problematics for representation-arises with respect to the visual, spatial media as well. Thus the shrewd dialectics voiced by a fictional art connoisseur, Count Augustus in "The Poet":

I have learnt that it is not possible to paint any definite object, say, a rose, so that I, or any other intelligent critic, shall not be able to decide, within twenty years, at what period it was painted, or, more or less, at what place on the earth. The artist has meant to create either a picture of a rose in the abstract, or the portrait of a particular rose; it is never in the least his intention to give us a Chinese, Persian, or Dutch, or, according to the period, a rococo or a pure Empire rose. If I told him that this was what he had done, he would not understand me. He might be angry with me. He would say: 'I have painted a rose.' Still he cannot help it. I am thus so far superior to the artist.... At the same time I could not paint, and hardly see or conceive, a rose myself. I might imitate any of their creations. I might say: 'I will paint a rose in the Chinese or Dutch or in the rococo manner.' But I should never have the courage to paint a 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 object and the beholder. For consciously (like Dinesen) or not (like the naive painter envisaged here), the artist's rendering is always bound by conventions: 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 always summon up against them "the courage to paint a rose as it looks"; and so he will, to some extent, free his "abstract" or "particular" image of a rose from the constraints of the given rose-model. His very blindness-like the acute self-consciousness of a Dinesen in literature, or the equivalent in painting-may radicalize the omnipresent play of mediate and immediate world imaging, pictorial cliche and novelty, tradition and the individual talent. On the other hand, lacking the "courage" as well as the gift for immediate vision, however partial, even the most knowledgeable connoisseur falls below the most naive creator. Were he tempted into shifting sides, he would be reduced 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 analysis. Not satisfied with exploring their theoretical common ground, she draws them together into an actual common life, setting one within the other, by way of ekphrasis, if not one beside the other, in syncretic multi- media form. Her ekphrastic allusions from literature to models of spatial art (much like Pagis's on 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 literature's world were not challenging enough, space comes to double in re-

presentation as interspace: a multiple, interart semiotic system, whereby the signs ("languages") of different media get superimposed on narrative in 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 between Dinesen'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 writer who casts her interart net beyond the pole opposed to her own. Neither value judgment applies here, for reasons to emerge soon, but the givens and 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 extraliterary source media for allusion should turn out to be the spatial arts. (The theater, a more likely source for re-presentation because it crosses the two

polar harmonies into a time-space art, comes only second.) Oriented by definition 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 temporal context. 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 in the 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's versus 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 shape and 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 the interart allusion with narrativity (single-line or, we recall, even multiple) on top of sequentiality. In this regard, though not exclusively, the functions 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 forms in her life: she studied painting but practiced writing. (Her affair with the visual arts actually came early and remained lifelong.) So her twofold expertise makes it especially instructive to trace the meeting and interplay of these polar opposites in her fiction, where one assimilates the other. Since the imaging of the world in painting and sculpture apparently runs counter to narrative in both the object and the medium of representation, how are their spatialities indicated and incorporated in the 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 coherence both in and beyond their spatiality. As a rule, Dinesen refers the particular narrative situation not to an equally particular artwork but to 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, plot vs. state) has various reasons and effects. Three of them stand out: evocability, perceptibility (or accessibility), and assimilability (or maneuverability), especially in the framework of narrative re-presentation. All of these factors being essential not only to Dinesen's poetics but also to model-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 literary interests to point away from 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 unreproducible 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 beyond itself, Dinesen might wonder? Instead of incurring such loss, then, why not generalize the reference (or the re-presentation) in the first place and in the service of less traditional as well as more viable ends? In the critical, instrumental approach to mimesis, if in nothing else, including the 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 already brings us to a constructive role played by the device, namely, as a force for perceptibility in ekphrasis. The question whether or not the reference from word to image is perceptible has far-reaching interpretive and even theoretical consequences. (So, for that matter, has


the pointedness of inverse transfer.) What hangs in the balance is nothing less than the viability (communicability, accessibility, readability) of ekphrasis, which a misconception like Kibedi Varga's (1989) seriously and gratuitously threatens.

When "the artist is inspired by a preexisting image and writes ekphrasis," this critic states, "the reader reads a poem, without necessarily perceiving the other part too." Hence, "this distinction implies that we must argue from the point of view of reception rather than production" (ibid.: 33). Whatever its taxonomic use, the statement is odd to the point of undoing the genre. Of course, readers (though not "the reader") are

always liable to miss "the other 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.'6 Therefore 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 receiver, himself perforce in the know, to another self-contradictory effect.

Instead of a binary taxonomy, production and reception necessarily make two sides of a communicative affair. Within a theory of ekphrasis as such, whatever the performances of individual readers/receivers commit or omit, "the reader/receiver" as well as the producer must by definition 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"? What measures does the (or a certain) literary producer contrive to ensure, standardize, sharpen, channel (etc.) our awareness of the cross-reference

necessary for the working of ekphrasis, for the desired generic communication 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 favorably with the alternative variety. Dinesen's avoidance of definite in favor of generalized reference to artistic practice works as a safety mea-

sure, because it virtually ensures the reader's familiarity with 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, at what place on the earth." Instead, if the reader has not viewed one particular artistic image of Laocoon, or Diana, or the Adoration, then he has viewed another. And even if he has encountered none, or no longer recalls any with confidence, the chances are that his repertoire of mental schemata includes the appropriate topoi for the discourse to activate in the process of reading.

As we advance from mimesis in re-presentation to accessibility in communication, then, the negative reason for Dinesen's method joins forces with a major positive; the dismissal of the unreproducible comes with perceptual gain. In Ehrengard, typically, both reasons motivate a fictional painter's evasion of the request to verbalize spatial reality: "You ask me for a description of Schloss Rosenbad. Imagine to yourself that you be quietly stepping into a painting by Claude Lorrain" (E, 31). Like his creator, 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 many of the pictures, and hence far more amenable in transfer to the reading directive "Imagine to yourself."17

In certain quarters, such provision for salience, access, and contact with the audience may be regarded as a concession unworthy of high literature -a flattening of ekphrasis to the lowest common denominator with a view to the widest appeal. Let me therefore emphasize that Dinesen's recourse to the model, complete with the poetics (or, if you like, the problematics) of readability behind 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 Sire de Maletroit, "were like those of one of Leonardo's women." Rossetti (1985: 130), looking through the train window, registers scenes "by Hans 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 Pictura Poesis is 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 references across 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 awkward bridegroom 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 original finds its complement in the reverse one-to-many relation. Before the

close-up on the one named artwork, Auden (1976: 146-47) pays collective tribute to the insight into "suffering" displayed by

The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just 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 the snapshots in Dan Pagis'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


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 restaurant by reference to The Last Supper-just as when Dinesen (WT, 142-43) evokes the Laocoin in the embrace of two tragic sisters-he alludes not to any specific picture or statue but, again, to a pictorial model, a generalized visual image, with one difference. The referent has long become 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 whole attitude, the position of his parted hands, and the faces of his table companions all turned towards him reminded me in a grotesque, nightmarish way of something I did not quite grasp, but when I did so in retrospect, the suggested comparison struck me as hardly less sacrilegious than the nature of his art itself. He wore a white turtle-neck sweater under a tweed 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

memory at the time. Yet he counts on his reader to reconstruct the unnamed 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 gazing at him. And the narrator can safely assume our reconstruction, though he 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 the ancient sacred image "in a grotesque, nightmarish way"-the narrator does not expose us to, let alone trick us into, anything like the same be- wildering fullness at second hand. On the contrary, his discourse picks out from the original scene a minimal cluster of identifying items that runs 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 their common literary original, so that we encounter a mimesis in the third degree and on two mutually reinforcing levels of abstraction: the interart chain goes from the New Testament to the paintings (one-to-many) to a work of literature that focuses them in turn (many-to-one) on a writer of novelistic literature.


Nor does perceptibility exhaust or even head the model's constructive recommendations in ekphrasis, certainly not in Dinesen's. Rather, most important of all (and, accordingly, my chief concern in what follows) 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 departicularized in 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 scaling characteristic of the model does more than rule out the tensions that loom so large in criticism, namely, the interart struggle for the honors of mimesis 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 emulating the original artwork in its rage for description-as theory would have us expect-but a part within the storytelling whole, and a drastically reduced 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 particularized narrative and the richer its contribution to narrativity as 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 just cited-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 narrative than metanarrative, designed to advocate a certain poetics by artistic

analogy; Auden's serves to extrapolate a valued idea of life, Nabokov's to draw a portrait, Proust's a 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 to such maneuvering stops well short of the developmental extreme: Nabo- kov's hide-and-seek game operates on an existent (who's being 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 through it with the wisdom of hindsight, as might any puzzle maker.


It is not at all (pace Lessing) that such uses are inferior, untypical, or unartful in modeling, or that the users are incapable of changing or widening their means-end combinations; rather, and significantly, Dinesen puts the narrative turn first. As we shall see, the departicularized 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 the hero's view ("modeling") of himself in its terms.

As with the describers above, so with the fellow story makers here: observe the distinctiveness of both kinds of crossart maneuver, together or apart, from alternative narrativizing options, of both the Lessing and the one-to-one variety. On the one hand, neither Dinesen-type maneuver overlaps, or so much as intersects, with those adumbrated in the Laocoon and 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 the set piece, the local and virtually detachable unit of representation: how a bundle of singular descriptive features can get narrativized (the dress into a ceremony of dressing, the shield into a tale of its genesis) to comply with "illusion" and pass literary muster, without regard for the work as a whole. (So Kurman [1974] can proceed to detemporalize, in effect to redescriptivize, the unit by treating it as a retardatory moment along, or against, the overall epic sequence. Likewise see Mandelker 1991: 2 on local novelistic suspension via ekphrasis.) But Dinesen's is an art of relations, and the ekphrasis springs to life within and for it alone, often to decisive effect. For ekphrasis to destabilize the plot ahead of time, especially 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 character's field of vision, self-vision, re-vision, which we ourselves observe as part of the represented world at large. However small-scale, unmoving by itself as well as unspecific, in contrast to, say, Achilles' shield in the making, the structured pictorial inset here comes to dynamize the larger frame, as the shield does not: to affect in little the fulfillment of the only necessary and sufficient conditions for verbal storytelling. These, on the other hand, might indeed draw equal energy from the reworking of a particular artwork (think again of "The Portrait" multilinearized), but not with equal economy. The difference (whether judged an aesthetic and operational plus, with Dinesen, or, with the admirers of dificulte vaincue, a minus) persists and matters, as does the still more clear-cut one in our aliveness to the original in art history. So, above all, Dinesen's intertextual 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 only the roles of modeling and the ways to story making in ekphrasis but also how and where they come together. Among the various possibilities, as I likewise hope to have established by now, those favored by Dinesen are the least known to theory, though not to fellow practitioners across literature, and would repay more detailed tracing and comparison. Let us therefore explore the two, often converging lines of transformation 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. Pictorial Models in Narrative Transformation; or, Dynamizing the Static A common denominator of visual and verbal structure, perspective yet acts 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, include the factor of gaze. In one death scene, for instance, the survivors

remained quite still around him [the dead man]. The figure of the old Prince, lying immovably on the ground, still held the center of the picture as much as if he had been slowly ascending to heaven, and they his disciples, left behind, gazing up toward him. Only Nino, like one of those figures which were put into sacred pictures as the portrait of the man on whose order they were painted, kept somehow his own direction. ("Roads round Pisa," SGT, 208)

The dead Prince appears in a double focus. Within the imagined ("as if... like") reality of the "sacred picture," he as a Christ figure ("slowly ascending") literally holds the center of the other participants' gaze (the one 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 ekphrasis. 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, The Last Supper's perspective 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.19 Under 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-neither of them harmonious compared with, say, Rossetti's "van Eyck"-like Bel- gian landscape-significantly part ways. The former shows, if not much the greater, then the more localized and coexistent harmony in disharmony, as befits the portrait's descriptive 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 rest of the "disciples," which typifies Dinesen's strategy at its least complex.

More often, and yet more integral to narrative technique -as distinct from the rule of ekphrasis as such -we find the viewpoint on or through the art form mediated, split, problematized, and so dynamized to match in interart transfer. The invocation of ekphrastic models then comes not or not only in the narrator's own name but through the perspective of fictional observers, dramatized and less than reliable, who themselves view their reality in such artistic terms. We must then distinguish between two typically narrative and often incompatible viewpoints on the relevant model: from within the fictive world and, simultaneously and more intricately, from without, where the storyteller communicates with the 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 cherubs 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 primarily to "make the reader see" them through the visual vehicle, with a view to portraying both their character and their appearance. Despite the attendant danger to the "little rosy" things, the impression given is one of static tranquility, for it is the habit of such fearless cherubs to

19. Likewise with entire subsets of ekphrasis, usually discussed under another, more unique-looking rubric. For example, Hollander's (1988a) tradition of reflexive ekphrasis, culminating in modernist poetry, not only makes an extreme variety of anti-illusionism, as suggested in note 4 above. It also thematizes a certain clash of perspectives between the arts, or their instances, qua representations: the first-order and world-directed mimesis of the picture as against its inset and discourse-focusing mimesis within the poem, or, in short, objective versus reflexive, hence "subjective," artistry. So (re)perspectivized, this style shows itself to be no more, and no less, than a well-defined variant of the all-ekphrastic law, one choice among many perspectival interplays available-not excluding the bid for "illusionist," objective-to-objective accord, a la Lessing.


tame "the mighty lord of the desert." As one of the pictorial models utilized early in this Gothic tale, moreover, the "cherubs of old Relievi" convey the seemingly idyllic nature of the world, where children might ride lions.

On the other hand, the interart reference loses its stability along with its authority (or, in other words, modulates into narrativity proper) when Childerique, the heroine, frames herself within an ekphrastic model. Here, the ironies of narrative versus visual perspective, as of narratorial versus figural vision, become a dynamic and complex tool. For the heroine's unreliability in her act of self-framing and self-imaging sharply contrasts with the narrator's sure hand, insight, foreknowledge. Accusing her half-brother of dishonorable treachery, Childerique complains: "Is it for ever, then, the task of the women to hold up the houses, like those stone figures which they call caryatids? And are you now... going to pull down all the stones of our great house, upon your own head, and upon mine, and the heads of all of us?" (LT, 132-33). Notice that in importing the 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 invoked space-art with clues to time and hence with potential narrativity. Unlike the heroine, the reader already knows that she is incestuously married to her brother. So the threat to the honor and integrity of a

great house actually arises from her side. Our superior knowledge enables 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 probably bring 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 interekphrastic chain 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 resemblance 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 stone

caryatids inverts the parallel into contrast. Again, Childerique does not at all resemble, not even for a moment, Steiner's (1989: 290) Lily in The House of 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's art would 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-image is manifest early in the plot, and its falsity exposed in advance, it leads us 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 the end. 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 in the picture than the youngest Magus of the adoration" (SGT, 215). On the 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 the statics of the other; the conflict has apparently been settled and a point of 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 the model 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 hardly the closure, far less an enclosure, circular or otherwise, so valued by the Spitzer group. Given the balance of power within this twofold view, the cross-reference to Joseph does not even perpetuate the friction between outcomes, as does Keats's to the "still unravish'd bride," caught forever between virginity eternally preserved and imminently lost, between art's moment and life's movement. Instead of freezing the end in space, the double-edged pictorial analogy launched by Carlotta ironically heightens our sense of ongoing temporality, of the narrativity of narrative.

In both cases, the self's appeal to an ekphrastic model generates a tension much like that between tenor and vehicle in a far-fetched, jarring metaphor, except that its incongruity points inward (to character) and forward (to reversal). At times, indeed, the model even takes the surface form of an overt linguistic metaphor, or simile, as when Childerique in 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 ominous dissimilitude (the caryatid into a destroyer, the placid Joseph figure into a restless sexualJanus) in the higher, more informed narrative outlook.

But such tension between source and target may become so extreme as 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 stronger variation peculiar to narrative, the hero changes his image of himself and/or others in the course of the plot; the irony surfaces through the character'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, literary or otherwise, much less of their replacing one another in psychodramatic sequence, would yet find the dynamics highly appropriate. For "nothing obliges 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 plotted chain of visual (self-)images featuring the Laocodn naturally recommends 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's austerely plaited 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 glorious 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 way into a picture, some classical Italian painting, that suited him well" (WT, 139). This is, of course, an incongruous place for a nineteenth-century Danish 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 reliability of his spatial allusions. No longer blinded and constrained by the initial, wishful image for his own position vis-a-vis the others (as if their color harmony merged with the classical Italian painting), Axel realizes the complexity of the situation from a distance: "The two tragic sisters in the wood, their red locks emblazed by the 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-


rability of the sisters but also its destructive effect on his love; hence the metamorphosis of the redness vis-a-vis the overall composition in the two images of the red-haired sisters. Initially he tries to fuse two pictorial harmonies, one purely formal (the "glorious" red mixture of paint) and the other thematic as well (the "classical Italian painting," with its "perfectly still, . . . golden" afternoon). But the continuity through classical color norms proves unsuitable. Instead, the "red locks" compose with "the deadly coils of the serpent": harmony in terms not of color but of round form and pattern. At the same time, repetition cuts across variation; the classicism of the different pictorial models and techniques implies the anachronism of the ideal for which the two sisters are willing to sacri- fice both present and future. In narrative terms, the Danish nobleman thus finds himself excluded not only from the spatial configuration they project but also from the temporal zone they would occupy.20

In turn, the future-the main narrative potential of the allusion-recalls but goes beyond the Laocoon's famous use by Lessing, namely, as an exemplar of the "pregnant moment," chosen by artists in order to circumvent 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, as well as setups, goes not to neutralize or transcend either component but again to reinforce the features of the narrative system. By an apparent paradox, the storyteller (against literature's capability, or Lessing's advice) leaves the sculptor's moment itself intact in transfer and, if anything, immobilizes it in the modeling process; that the Laocoon family dies, and will go on dying forever, only underlines by way of contrast how 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 narrative gains depth and complexity from the tense combination of the formal pictorial elements with the thematic model of the Laoco6n. For the impression of static calm 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 external to inner drama. The possibly simple portrayal of the sisters is enriched by the (positive, at least pathetic) implications traditionally associated with the Laocoon group; for example, the fatal embrace, the estrange-

20. It is interesting that, genetically, this tale was inspired by Courbet's painting of two women on a balcony (see Hannah 1971: 20). In the narrativizing process, however, the unique genetic art source gave way to a sequence of conflicting models from various periods and places, in line with the poetic rule.


ment from society, and the agony of the death scene carry over from the 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 characters in 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, circumstances) in the subjective manner of the experiencing-I, to the relatively detached, 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 expectations at the outset, as when Childerique models herself on a caryatid; they may lay bare the threat to and below the apparent stasis of the end, as with Carlotta identifying herself with Joseph at the Adoration. Most

energetically, as with Axel, they come at the pivotal moment of recognition 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. Specific Works as Models: From Metaphorical to Literal and Iconic Images

Turning now to another part of my introduction, let me further develop the argument that rendering unique versus generalized images and in-

vesting them with narrative versus descriptive force are two independent parameters of ekphrasis. I have already briefly 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 key to Auden's "Musee" of Breughel ("Icarus, for instance") and other "Old Masters" wise in the ways of "suffering," all poem-length. In light of the

foregoing argument, however, it will be hard to adduce a more revealing test case than the practice of Dinesen, who sometimes does allude (in midtale, again) to specific artworks as 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 the Laocoon will bear on a genuine, historical art

object; even mention of a nonhistorical statue or picture will at least create an imaginary equivalent, a particular fact within the fiction. On the other hand, Axel's reference to "a classic group, two maidenly Laoco6ns" evokes an image that has no existence in the real or artistic world (except as a type, topos, or schema, subjectified at that) and only metaphorical existence within the fiction by way of allusive analogy to fictional entities, the two sisters. It is a figure's, or elsewhere the frame's, figure of thought about the world. (Recall the explicit markers of figuration: "as if," "like," in the comparison of 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 remarkably in Dinesen's

poetics. These meet both in the ways they aid perceptibility and in their more substantive roles (plot movement, character portrayal, psychological insight, clues to interpersonal relations, etc.), not to mention their intersemiotic twists and turns.21

Consider such literal statues as Psyche with Lamp, or a trio of equestrian 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, and hence also easily integrated. From the reader's viewpoint, then, their existence 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's semiotic montage, with a notable difference in the mode of interrelation and signification. For while the "metaphorical" model-images signify as such primarily by virtue of epitomizing recurrent cultural objects and/or themes, the artworks existing in the tale's world draw their significance mainly from their similarity to unique individuals in it. Psyche is, genetically, a replication of the sculptor's beautiful wife-though not an official representation, as the painting in the Browning dramatic monologue is of the Duchess-while the success of the three childish equestrian figures depends on whether their future owners recognize themselves in them. The former captures the woman's image only to signify the goddess; the latter both image and signify the children who have been portrayed in

21. The differences between two- and three-dimensional art as allusive or modeling systems 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 devil who invented a third dimension. Thus are the words 'straight,' 'square,' and 'flat' the words 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 than that between the Christ figure and the Prince in death or the caryatids and Childerique in house propping. So the difference between the art source's metaphorical and literal existence in the re-presenting fiction correlates with a shift of emphasis from metaphorical to iconic (or at least near-iconic, quasi-iconic) resemblance to fictional creatures.

In turn, this difference extends from our semiotic process of making sense 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 recognized as such by the dramatis personae, leading them 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 figures 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's urge, 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 agents for 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 a detective story; or, more widely, as a bone of contention. (On his very deathbed, Browning's "bishop orders his tomb" so that "Gandolph ... shall see and burst.") Even at their most earthbound and instrumental, 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 perfect accord 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 existence, including life in time. Traditionally regarded as spatial, inanimate

things, fit only for human contemplation and description, or contention, analytic or acquisitive, such artworks are narrativized by Dinesen to the extent that they uncannily ascend to the top of the scale of being; they claim 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 ekphrasis must of course also lead individual lives, parallel to their human counterparts. Each features as an existent in the world itself, the story's or history's own, not as a model abstracted by the storyteller's discourse from pictorial imagings of the world. Only thus can the ontological fellowship escalate from the distinctive but unremarkable coexistence on the same level (as reality-items, comparable to the Duke and the late Duchess's

portrait, "looking as ifshe were alive") all the way to the uncanny network of correlatedness (as dramatis personae on a reality-wide stage).

In "The Cardinal's Third Tale," for instance, the statue of St. Peter in the Vatican directly changes the life and character of Lady Flora; it mars her health and looks, by infecting her with syphilis, but reconciles her

through illness to the human condition. This reversal goes with a multiple analogy between the reversing and the reversed agents. To begin with, the statue bears a physical and a mental correspondence to the tall, "immovable," "denying" heroine (LT, 89-90). Again, as in the case of the Laoco6n, the history of the saint (denial followed by dedication) plays an important role in the analogy with the woman who follows the same path. As Peter to Christ, so Lady Flora to St. Peter. The history of 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 first encounter, rather, the lady is myste- riously attracted to St. Peter's statue, visiting it again and again. As always in this pattern, the beholder's own eye for similitude (the thematic self- recognition in the icon of the other) clinches matters; it wears down her resistance to the point that she kisses the statue, which in turn leads to her sickness and metamorphosis. So the icon's multiple reference in story and history-to Jove, St. Peter, and Lady Flora herself-elevates it from 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 when the adolescent Peter suddenly likens his cousin Rosa to a ship's figurehead:

Now Rosa [standing on the window sill], in her stockinged feet, with the skirt of her blue frock caught back by the cross-bar of the window, was so like the figurehead of a big, fine ship that for an instant he did, so to say, see his own soul face to face. Life and death, the adventures of the seafarer, destiny herself, here stood straight up in a girl's form. (WT, 259)

As with Lady Flora, only by way of simile rather than icon, the observer finds his own self ("soul") in the other's three-dimensional image. The network 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 tautness of her frock. Then the model of a stylized wooden effigy reveals itself as 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 reveals Peter's love for the girl. Whether she, who at once betrays his 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 wonder, 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 a story "of a skipper who named his ship 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 ("just like 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 couple of precious blue stones that echo Rosa's "blue frock"), the jealous wife blinds the ship, which sinks with her husband, while she herself literally turns 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 draws the 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 inset tale (the fiction within the fiction), leading to self-discovery and catas-

trophe in the frame as well. From the reader's vantage point, the twofold or two-level role of this "moving object" radicalizes the actional force exerted by similarity links in Dinesen's universe. Where does (visual) art end and (story) life begin? All this gives a new twist to the relations between the dynamics of plot and the statics of ekphrastic objects within the narrative arena: the two interpenetrate as never before.

The fact, mentioned earlier, that of all human traits this interpenetration excludes voice-the art objects always keep silent, along with the rest of their order-may therefore be duly appreciated now as well. This conspicuous absence pulls the artworks all the more forcefully apart from 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 a silent commentary on ekphrastic practice and theory, framed within the overall realm of mimesis.

One way of refining the difference would be to consider her writing against the background of the "Moving Statue" tradition recently ex-

plored by Kenneth Gross. For now, let me quote his reference 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 that is 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 matters almost 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 argument about the variability of those features goes to prove her, in systematic reversal, the better theorist, the all-around counterbalancer.

6. False Sexual Arrest Let me end by giving the argument a socioartistic turn. Unhappily, the age-old critical bent for imprisoning the protean dynamism of literature's forms in preconceived formulas shows signs of extending its juris- diction from the representation to the representer. Both lines of arrest, I would therefore point out, are countered by the above analysis. It not only illustrates the rich play among dimensions of genre (ekphrasis/poetry/narrative), structure (space, time, space-time) and interart mimesis (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:

What happens, we must ask, when the strategies of literary spacing are appro- priated by a female writer? I suggest two hypotheses: that the genre in which women conquer literary space is principally the novel, and that this conquest is manifested in the frequent occurrence of the heroine or female narrator as painter or keen-sighted viewer, a "seeing" as opposed to a "speaking" subject, a dweller in space rather than in time.

This is well intentioned, no doubt, yet it reduces women ("female writer" of literature or "heroine or female narrator as painter or keen-sighted viewer" 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 "Plots of 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," the "sublime" or "divine art"; precisely because, among other reasons, she would restore the primacy of the "speaking" subject, the telling voice. "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-vis the 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 prominently figure among her archetypal, as well as occasional, storytellers. They range from her Arabian Nights ancestress, 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 follows 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 of

segregating the "literary" sexes 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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Poetics Today, Vol. 16, No. 4, (Winter, 1995)

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