Can you talk a little about how ekphrasis has evolved over
time, especially how contemporary poetry has expressed it?
What are new possibilities in writing ekphrastic poetry in
light of things like video art, installation art, etc?
Last Friday at the Latino Art Now!
Conference in Washington D. C., I began my talk by mentioning that ekphrasis is
a Greek term which derives from the Greek verb ekphrasein, meaning “to speak
out,” “to tell in full, “to describe in detail.” At the height of classical Greek and Romans
times it meant, within the field of rhetoric,
a “speech that brings the subject matter vividly before the eyes.” And that is the way it was understood for some
time until about the third century of the Common Era when Philostratus the
Younger, a Greek itinerant teacher and intellectual, wrote a book titled
Eikones, meaning “images,” where he suggests that ekphrasis should be limited
to describing in vivid detail paintings, sculptures, and buildings such that
the reader would be able to “see” them.
This is important to note because in so doing, he took ekphrasis out of
the province of rhetoric and claimed it for art commentary.
In modern times, ekphrasis has been
described, for example, as “an expository speech which vividly […] brings the
subject before our eyes” (Princeton Dictionary of Literary Terms (1993). Such definition borrows from Greek handbooks
on rhetoric. On the other hand, critic
Leo Spitzer in 1955 defined it three ways in an article on John Keats’ “Ode on
a Grecian Urn”: “the poetic description
of a pictorial or sculptured work of art”;
“the verbal representation of a visual representation”; and “words about an image.” Forty years later Professor James A. W.
Heffernan used Spitzer’s second definition verbatim and wrote a book called A Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to
Ashbery (1993). I have likewise
taken this definition, but have tweaked it a bit. To my thinking, ekphrasis is “the verbal and
literary representation of a visual representation.” That is, if you write a poem about a
painting, you are practicing ekphrasis.
I include into my working definition the literary reference to
distinguish the kind of ekphrasis that journalistic prose and expository art
commentary engage in. Art criticism
practices ekphrasis, but this type of writing does not fall within what most
critics would consider “literature.”
So if we accept the latter definition
of the term—the verbal and literary representation of a visual
representation—the first time ekphrasis appears in western literature is when
Homer describes the shield of Achilles in Book 18 of The Iliad. There he
describes, in a straight forward kind of way, page after page, the art work
that Hephaestus, the Greek god of the forge, fashioned on Achilles’ bronze
shield. Hephaestus embossed it with
different images: the constellations
(the sun, moon, the stars); there is a
wedding scene; a man is plowing a
field; you see cattle; you see two lions being attacked by a
bull; grape pickers are in a
vineyard; men and women are dancing on a
dance floor; and on and on. It is an astonishing number of images that he
beats and shapes into the bronze shield.
You might say that ekphrasis has ancient roots. It is almost 3,000 years old, and thus,
almost as old as writing itself.
In more modern times Miguel de
Cervantes—the father of the modern novel—in
Don Quijote, Part One, Chapter
IX, tells us of a battle scene in a fake history book which recounts the
exploits of Don Quijote and Sancho. This
well-known episode contains a “lifelike picture” of the battle between Don
Quijote and the Biscayan. Cervantes says
there is an illustration that accompanies the verbal description, and proceeds
to describe the latter—an ekphrastic moment in the novel. In both instances, however, as much Homer as
Cervantes, there is a straight verbal depiction of the images on the shield and
in the history book drawing. At no point
do these authors make any subjective appraisal of what they are
describing. They do not add personal
comments on the images; they do not
dialogue with them nor critique them. At
no point do they tell us their experience with those images. This comes later in the XIXth century, and
what comes to mind are: John Keats’
“Ode on Grecian Urn,” Percy Bysshe Shelly’s “Ozymandius,” and Robert Browning’s
“To My Last Duchess.”
It is not until the XXth century that
we get an abundant body of ekphrastic poems worth mentioning. I limited
myself to three: W. H. Auden’s “Musée
des Beaux Arts,” where he comments on Breughel’s Landscape with The Fall of
Icarus. X. J. Kennedy’s “Nude Descending
a Staircase,” referring to Marcel Duchamp’s cubist painting by the same
name. And John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait
in a Convex Mirror” based on Giorgio
Parmigianino’s painting by the same name.
In all three poems we have the authors painting with words and
describing these paintings in their own subjective way. They, the three authors, give voice to an
otherwise mute object, something the trope of ekphrasis allows them to do. They engage the art work, and transform each
of the paintings, and go on to make subjective assessments of these three
works; they reply to the works of
art. Ekphrasis grants each writer a
poetic license, the artistic freedom to go beyond giving a mere mirror image of
the image.
As for ekphrasis addressing video art
and installations, most certainly.
Ekphrasis, you will recall, is the verbal and literary representation of
a visual representation. I wrote a whole
book of 21 poems titled Scene from the
Movie GIANT (1993), and the same is considered an ekphrastic-type of work
that centers on the next-to-the-last scene from the 1956 movie, Giant, with
Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, and Dennis Hopper. The visual representation can be in the form
of paintings, drawings, illustrations, photographs, films, postcards, statues,
calendars, etchings, tourist brochures, tapestries…any work of art that
represents something recognizable that exists in our surrounding
three-dimensional world, including a video or an installation. The verbal and literary representation can be
any of the literary genres: a poem, a
[segment of a] short story, a drama, a [segment of a] novel.
A clarification on ekphrastically
approaching an installation: In my view,
if an installation includes mannequins (representing people), let us say, or
faux trees (representing real trees), stars of any material (representing real
stars), etc., these would be subjects for an ekphrastic description. But if an installation contains a lamp, a
rope, shoes, a telephone, a bottle, a desk, a sink, etc., then these items are
not representing anything. They
represent themselves. Similarly, as
Professor Heffernan points out in his book, the well-known long poem by Hart
Crane, “The Bridge” is not an ekphrastic poem, because the bridge does not
represent anything. It is a bridge; it does not represent anything. It represents itself.
That said, know that there are critics
that widen the definition of ekphrasis, and would include describing an
installation an ekphrastic exercise.
Their definition of ekphrasis would be that it is “art about art,” a
very sweeping, over-all, general umbrella term.
Under this definition one could write, for instance, a musical piece
based on a painting, or paint a painting based on a musical piece. One could make a movie out of a novel, out
of an epic poem. In my talk I tried to
narrow the definition—my working definition:
Ekphrasis is the verbal and literary representation of a visual
representation.
[These remarks are derived from a more extensive article, "Imagen y palabra: categorías ekphrásticas de un poemario", Reescrituras y transgenericidades, Milagros Ezquerro, Eduardo Ramos-Izquierdo, Eds. (México / París: RILMA 2 / ADEHL, 2010)]
[These remarks are derived from a more extensive article, "Imagen y palabra: categorías ekphrásticas de un poemario", Reescrituras y transgenericidades, Milagros Ezquerro, Eduardo Ramos-Izquierdo, Eds. (México / París: RILMA 2 / ADEHL, 2010)]
November 12, 2013, Boston
Copyright © 2013 Tino Villanueva
