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Narrate and Describe: The Problem of Ekphrasis*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2012

D. P. Fowler
D. P. Fowler
Affiliation:
Jesus College, Oxford
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Extract

The subject of ekphrasis, and in particular of the ekphrasis of works of art, has recently begun to receive a great deal of attention from classical scholars. As will become clear, I believe that the reason for this is that many of the theoretical issues that are most pressing in classical studies — and indeed in cultural studies in general — are raised by the study of ekphrasis. The purpose of this note on the other hand is modest: I want to say a little about the narratological issues that are raised by set-piece description (I), and to look at one example in the Aeneid (II). But even so I have found it impossible not to offer some thoughts of a frighteningly general nature (III). I shall concentrate on the ekphrasis of works of art for reasons that will again become clear, but some at least of what I shall say will also be relevant mutatis mutandis to the ekphrasis of natural features and events.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Roman Studies , Volume 81 , November 1991 , pp. 25 - 35
Copyright
Copyright ©D. P. Fowler 1991. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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References

1 I am thinking especially of Leach, E. W., The Rhetoric of Space: Literary and Artistic Representations of Landscape in Republican and Augustan Rome (1988)Google Scholar and Bartsch, S., Decoding the Ancient Novel, The Reader and the Role of Description in Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius (1989)Google Scholar, but there are currently two volumes of essays on the subject in preparation from Cambridge, on Greek texts edited by Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne and on Latin edited by J. R. Elsner. Bartsch offers a good general bibliography: see also those in Fusillo, M., Il Romanzo Greco (1989), 83–90Google Scholar and Richardson, S., The Homeric Narrator (1990), 50–69Google Scholar, and add amongst very recent works Slater, N. W., Reading Petronius (1990), 213–30Google Scholar, and Rosand, D., ‘Ekphrasis and the Generation of Images’, Arion NS 1 (1990), 61–105Google Scholar. The standard work remains that of Friedländer, P., Johannes von Gaza und Paulus Silentiarius (1912), 1–103Google Scholar; in Latin, there is an excellent survey by Ravenna, G., ‘L'ekphrasis poetica di opere di arte in Latino: temi e problemi’, Quad. 1st. Fil. Lai. Padova 3 (1974), 1–52Google Scholar (see also his article ‘Ekphrasis’ in the Enciclopedia Virgiliana). The most suggestive discussion is that of Perutelli, A., ‘L'inversione speculare. Per una retorica dell'ecphrasis’, MD 1 (1978), 87–98Google Scholar = La Narrazione Commentata (1979), ch. 2.1 am not concerned here with ekphrasis as an independent genre, as in the ekphrastic epigram: on this see of course Friedländer, op. cit., with the further bibliography in Stevens, S. T., Image and Insight: Ekphrastic Epigrams in the Latin Anthology (Diss. Wisconsin–Madison, 1983)Google Scholar, and Simon Goldhill's ‘Reading, seeing, meaning: the poetics of Hellenistic ekphrasis’, forthcoming in the Goldhill/Osborne collection.

2 I shall refer to some of the modern bibliography on description below: but note the special issues of Yale French Studies 61 (1981), Poétique 43 (1980) and 51 (1982), and Littérature 28 (1980), and the collections by Bessière, J., L'ordre du descriptif (1988)Google Scholar, Bonnefis, P., La Description: Nodier, Sue, Flaubert, Hugo, Verne, Zola, Alexis, Fénéon (2nd edn., 1980)Google Scholar, and Wert-Daoust, Y., Description – écriture – peintre (1987)Google Scholar. Apart from Genette, the most important theoretician has been P. Hamon: see ‘Qu'est-ce qu'une description?’ Poétique 3 (1972), 465–85Google Scholar (trans. Canter, R. in Todorov, T. (ed.), French Literary Theory Today: A Reader (1982)Google Scholar), and especially Introduction à l'analyse du descriptif (1981: an excerpt is translated as ‘Rhetorical status of the descriptive’ in Yale French Studies 61 (1981), 1–26)Google Scholar. Note also Hagstrum, J., The Sister Arts (1953)Google Scholar; Pelc, J., ‘On the concept of narration’, Semiotica 3 (1971), 1–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Barchiesi, M., Il tempoe il testo, studi su Dante e Flaubert (1987)Google Scholar; and van Appeldoorn, J., Pratiques de la description (1982)Google Scholar. There is a large mass of comparative material, which often touches on issues of theory: see e.g. hergmann, E. L., Art Inscribed: Essays on Ekphrasis in Spanish Golden Age Poetry (1979)Google Scholar; Corbineau-Hoffmann, A., Beschreibung als Verfahren. Die Asthetik des Objekts im Werk Marcel Prousts (1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dubois, P., History, Rhetorical Description and the Epic: from Homer to Spenser (1982)Google Scholar; Flaxman, R. L., Victorian Word-Painting and Narrative: Toward the Blending of Genres (1987)Google Scholar; Imbert, P., Sémiotique et description balzadenne (1978)Google Scholar; Kurman, J., ‘Ecphrases in epic poetry’, Comparative Literature 26 (1974), 1–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Perrone-Moisés, L., ‘Balzac et les fleurs de l'écritoire’, Poétique II (1980), 305–23Google Scholar; Race, W. H., Classical Genres and English Poetry (1988), 56–85Google Scholar; Ricardou, J., Problèmes du nouveau roman (1967)Google Scholar; Spitzer, L., ‘The “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, or content vs. metagrammar’, Comparative Literature 7 (1955), 203–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Van Buuren, M., ‘L'essence des choses’, Poétique II (1980), 326–46Google Scholar (on Claude Simon); Vannier, B., L'inscription du corps, pour une sémiotique du portrait balzacien (1972)Google Scholar; Zink, M., ‘Les toiles Agamanor et les fresques de Lancelot’, Littérature 38 (1980), 43–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The Tenth International Colloquium on Poetics held at Columbia University in 1986 was devoted to ‘The Poetics of Ekphrasis’ (see Rosand, above n. 1) but the proceedings have not been published.

3 See e.g. Bal, M., Narratology, Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (1985), 70, 76–7Google Scholar.

4 Genette, G., ‘Frontiers of narrative’, in Figures of Literary Discourse trans. Sheridan, A. (1982), 127–44Google Scholar, at 134 (from Figures II (1969): see also New Literary History 8 (1976), 1–13).

5 See especially Buch, H. C., Ut Pictura Poesis. Die Beschreibungsliteratur und ihre Kritiker von Lessing bis Lukacs (1972)Google Scholar. I shall return to Lessing, who has been much discussed in recent years: see the introduction to Laocoon trans. A. E. McCormick (1984) with Wellberg, D. E., Lessing's Laocoon, Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (1984)Google Scholar; Gebauer, G. (ed.), Das Laokoon Projekt (1984CrossRefGoogle Scholar: collection of essays, some translated); and especially Todorov, T., ‘Ésthetique et sémiotique au XVIIIe siècle’, Critique 308 (1973), 26–39Google Scholar = Théories du Symbole (1977), 161–78 (German translation in Gebauer).

6 Lukacs, G., ‘Narrate or describe?’ in Writer and Critic and other Essays, trans. Kahn, A. (1978), 110–48, at 137Google Scholar.

7 Not always ‘almost’: as Fanny Lemoine reminds me, some of the antipathy to description may be more explicitly motivated by a contempt for the things of this world, whether from a Platonic or a Christian standpoint, just as the growth of non-allegorical descriptive poetry in modern times is bound up with Romantic pantheism.

8 Riffaterre, M., ‘Système d'un genre descriptif’, Poétique 3 (1972), 15–30Google Scholar.

9 cf. , Tasso, Discourses on the Heroic Poem, trans. Cavalchini, M. and Samuel, I. (1973), 7–8Google Scholar.

10 cf. Lausberg, H., Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik (1960), 399–407Google Scholar; Zanker, G., ‘Enargeia in the ancient criticism of poetry’, RhM 124 (1981), 297–311Google Scholar.

11 Barthes, R., ‘The reality effect’ in The Rustle of Language, trans. Howard, R. (1986), 141–8Google Scholar, or trans. Carter, R. in Todorov, T. (ed.), French Literary Theory Today (1982), 11–17Google Scholar.

12 idem, 148.

13 Lessing, Laocoon, ch. 16, e.g. trans. McCormick, op. cit. (n. 5), 84, ‘we see in the poet's work the origin and formation of that which in the picture we can only behold as completed and formed’.

14 op. cit. (n. 5), 111.

15 cf. Nisbet, R. G. M., ‘The Oak and the Axe: symbolism in Hercules Oetaeus 1618ff.’, in Whitby, M., Hardie, P., and Whitby, M. (eds), Homo Viator (1987), 243–51Google Scholar.

16 Krieger, M., A Reopening of Closure (1989), 3Google Scholar.

17 A. Halsall, ‘“La Transition”, descriptions et ambiguités narrativo-discursives dans “Victoire” de William Faulkner’, in Bessière, op. cit. (n. 2), 27.

18 Baudrillard, J., Les stratégies fatales (1983)Google Scholar; cf. Kellner, D., Jean Baudrillard, From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (1989), 154–62Google Scholar.

19 Heath, M., Unity in Greek Poetics (1989)Google Scholar: see also The Poetics of Greek Tragedy (1987), 98–111.

20 idem, 155.

21 cf. D. Kennedy, rev. S. J. Harrison, Oxford Studies in Vergil's Aeneid, Hermathena (forthcoming).

22 op. cit. (n. 19), 10.

23 cf. Whitman, J., Allegory, the Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique (1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, with further bibiography: on Theagenes of Rhegium, conventionally made the protos heuretes of allegory, see Pfeiffer, R., History of Classical Scholarship 1 (1968), 9–11Google Scholar.

24 Winkler, J., The Constraints of Desire (1990), 126Google Scholar.

25 For my use here of Genette's ‘focalization’ (and some of the problems with the concept), see ‘Deviant focalization in Vergil's Aeneid’, PCPhS 216 (1990), 42–63Google Scholar.

26 ‘Descriptive limits’, Yale French Studies 61 (1981), 225–43Google Scholar. at 234.

27 Trans. McCormick, op. cit. (n. 5), 91.

28 Levelt, W. J. M., ‘The speaker's linearization problem’, in Longuet-Higgins, H. C., Lyons, J., and Broadbent, D. E. (eds), The Psychological Mechanisms of Language (1981), 305–15Google Scholar.

29 L. Sciascia, 1912 + 1 (1986), 17.

30 cf. Brilliant, R., Visual Narratives: Story-telling in Etruscan and Roman Art (1984)Google Scholar, with bibliography; on some theoretical problems, see Goodman, N., ‘Twisted tales; or, story, study, and symphony’, in Mitchell, W. J. T. (ed.), On Narrative (1981), 99–115Google Scholar.

31 ‘The viewing and obscuring of the Parthenon frieze’, JHS 107 (1987), 98–105CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 , Moschus, Eurvpa, 37–62Google Scholar. Three scenes are described: Io crossing the sea (44–9), Zeus turning her back into a woman (50–4), and the phoenix arising from the blood of the dead Argos (55–61). That is, the order of the scenes chronologically is ACB (or conceivably ABB if the second and third scenes were taken to be contemporaneous). In the last scene, first Hermes is described; then ‘nearby’ Argos with sleepless eyes; then the bird arising (described in the imperfect, exanetellen); then its outspread wings. The temporal sequence in the last scene represents the spatial arrangement on the cup, but in such a way that the temporal sequence in the story that the visual representation supposedly had to delinearize shows through. Reading narrative art is relinearization.

33 On the origins of Morelli's methods, see Ginzburg's, Carlo brilliant ‘Clues: roots of an evidential paradigm’, in Myths, Emblems, Clues, trans. , J. and Tedeschi, A. C. (1990)Google Scholar.

34 See especially the work of Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, e.g. ‘Menace and pursuit: differentiation and the creation of meaning’, in Bérard, C., Bron, C. and Pomari, A. (eds), Images et société en Grèce ancienne. L'iconographie comme méthode d'analyse, Actes du Colloque International, Lausanne 8–11 février 1984 (1987), 41–58Google Scholar, at 42: ‘no sign has a fixed meaning…signs are polysemic … not all the meanings produced by the signifying elements in a signifier contribute to the production of one unified coherent meaning. Some can produce different perspectives, warring discourses, which deconstruct the dominant one.’

35 cf. Preziosi, D., Rethinking Art History (1989)Google Scholar.

36 Lefèvre, E., Das Bild-Programm des Apollo-Tempels auf dem Palatin, Xenia Heft 24 (1989)Google Scholar.

37 ibid., 15: ‘Es wäre zudem absolut widersinnig gewesen, wenn Oktavian im Siegesjubel über die Ägypter an dem Siegesmonument par excellence eine Darstellung zugelassen hätte in den Ägypter als Ehrenträger erschienen.’

38 cf. P. Hardie reviewing Lefèvre in CR NS 40 (1990), 520.

39 op. cit. (n. 36), 16, ‘Turnus ist ein Angreifer, dessen Tat negativ zu bewerten ist: für sie hat er zu büssen. Er kann also nur mit den angreifenden Aegyptus-Söhnen vergleichen werden, deren schändliches Handeln (nefas) ein schmähliches Ende (foede) gefunden hat. Und Pallas ist mit den Danaiden verglichen, insofern er freventlich angegriffen wird. Auf ihn bezogen muss die Aussage der balteus lauten: Pallas wird geräht werden. Man beachte auch die Anspielung: Pallas kommt vom Palatin!’

40 Aeneid 1.441–93. The bibliography is predictably large: see especially Williams, R. D., ‘The pictures on Dido's temple (Aeneid 1.450–93)’, CQ NS 10 (1960), 145–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stanley, K., ‘Irony and foreshadowing in Aeneid I, 462’, AJP 6 (1965), 276–77Google Scholar; Szantyr, A., ‘Bemerkungen zum Aufbau der virgilianischen Ekphrasis’, MH 27 (1970), 28–40Google Scholar; Horsfall, N., ‘Dido in the light of history’, PVS 13 (1973–1974), 1–13Google Scholar = Harrison, S.J. (ed.), Oxford Readings in Vergil's Aeneid (1990), 127–40Google Scholar; Johnson, W. R., Darkness Visible (1976), 99–114CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Segal, C. P., ‘Art and the hero: narrative point of view in Aeneid l’, Arethusa 14 (1981), 67–84Google Scholar; Thomas, R. F., ‘Virgil's ekphrastic centrepieces’, HSCP 87 (1983), 175–84Google Scholar; Clay, D., ‘The Archaeology of the temple to Juno in Carthage (Aen. I, 446–93)’, CP 83 (1988), 195–205Google Scholar; Leach, op. cit. (n. 1); O'Hara, J. J., Death and the Optimistic Prophecy in Vergil's Aeneid (1990), 35–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 op. cit. (n. 32), 314.

42 Trans. D. West (Penguin, 1990). I use West's new version here and below because his attempt to make the description unambiguous for the reader underlines how Vergil leans the other way. For some criticism of this as a method of translation, see my forthcoming ‘Brief Notice’ in G&R 1991 (2).

43 On the use of the pluperfect, see Szantyr, op. cit. (n. 32) and especially Ravenna, op. cit. (n. I), 34–46, quoting Servius on 1. 484: ‘ingenti arte utitur verbis: nam hoc loco, quia pingi potuit, praesens tempus posuit, superius, quia pingi non potuit, sed referri, perfecto exsecutus est tempore dicendo “raptaverat” non “raptabat”.’

44 On ex ordine and similar expressions, see Ravenna, op. cit. (n. 1), 16–17.

45 Horsfall, Stanley, Johnson, Clay, Leach, O'Hara, opp. citt. (n. 32) (with very different emphases!),

46 Horsfall, op. cit. (n. 32), 138.

47 Clay, op. cit. (n. 32). 197.

48 idem, 195–6. The story is told of Aristippus in Vitruvius VI.I, and of Plato in Cicero, Rep. 1.29: see Giannantoni, G., I Cirencaci (1958), 213Google Scholar (Aristippus frr. 42–3).

49 op. cit. (n. 32), 276–7.

50 cf. Ravenna, op. cit. (n. I), 14–16, Genette, R. Debray ‘La Pierre descriptive’, Poétique II (1980), 293–333Google Scholar on Heliodorus v. 14, which self-consciously plays with the convention.

51 cf. Iliad XXIV. 76, 119, 137, 146–7, 175–6, 195–6, 228–37, 367, 381–2. 435–6, 502, 555, 579, 594, 685–6. I owe this point to Alessandro Barchiesi, who comments: ‘It is too easy to forget that ransom, and gold, plays a role in Homer's narrative too. If Aeneas was a reader of the Iliad (and in a sense he is) he could still point out exactly the same points: cruelty, golden ransom, the gesture of a father. This would be a selective, and tendentious, reading, but understandable from a Trojan point of view; Priam in Aeneid 2 provides a counterbalance.’

52 ct. PCPhS 216 (1990), 42–63.

53 This point might be strengthened by Richard Thomas' suggestion, op. cit. (n. 32), that the presence of the peplos at the centre of the ekphrasis (479–82) constitutes a sort of mise en abyme in the light of the tradition of ekphrastic peploi.

54 op. cit. (n. 32), 323–3.

55 Bartsch, op. cit. (n. 1); Lesky, A., ‘Bildwerk und Deutung bei Philostrat und Homer’, Hermes 75 (1940), 38–53,Google Scholar at 45 = Gesammelte Schriften (1966), 11–25, at 17.

56 See e.g. some of the pieces in the collection edited by Krieger, M., The Aims of representation (1987)Google Scholar, especially D. LaCapra, ‘Criticism Today’.

57 op. cit. (n. 1).

58 The choice is ironic in the light of Zeitlin's, FromaUnder the Sign of the Shield: Semiotics and Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes (1982)Google Scholar.

59 CQ NS 24 (1974), 82–93, at 88 = Collected Essays (1983), 159–70, at 165.

60 Words and the Poet (1989), 68.

61 It is interesting to observe how Lyne the ‘English empiricist’ comes close to the terms in which a modern French critic, L. Perrone-Moisés, has discussed description in Balzac, op. cit. (n. 1). Distinguishing between ‘static’ description, ‘à fonction redondante, qualificante, explicative ou emphatique’ and ‘dynamic’, ‘à fonction de déplacement, de compensation, de défoulement’, she comments that whereas the first ‘renvoie circulairement a un déja-dit du récit’, the second produces another level of narrative: ‘la description apparaît ici non comme un arrêt du récit (pour renseigner, reposer, distraire ou convaincre le lecteur), mais comme le suit du récit à un autre niveau’.

62 Conte, G. B., The Rhetoric of Imitation (1986), 38–9Google Scholar.

63 Conte is discussing the allusion to the opening of the Odyssey in Catullus 101.