Ekphrasis and Representation

Ekphrasis and Representation
Author(s): James A. W. Heffernan

Source: New Literary History, Vol. 22, No. 2, Probings: Art, Criticism, Genre (Spring,
1991), pp. 297-316
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/469040
Accessed: 14-07-2017 11:04 UTC
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/469040?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to New Literary History
This content downloaded from 195.178.227.17 on Fri, 14 Jul 2017 11:04:13 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Ekphrasis and Representation*
James A. W. Heffernan
N THE AVIARY of contemporary critical discourse, ekphrasis is an

old and yet surprisingly unfamiliar bird. The literary represen-
tation of visual art is at least as old as Homer, who in the
eighteenth book of the Iliad describes at length the scenes depicted
on the shield of Achilles. According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary,
the use of the word ekphrasis to denote this kind of description dates
from about the third century A.D., and the OED tells us that by
1715 the word had entered the English language.' Now it has
entered the world of academic conferences. In November 1986, it
was the topic of the Tenth International Colloquium on Poetics at
Columbia University, and just a few months later, it was the topic
of a session at the first International Conference on Word and
Image in Amsterdam. Nevertheless, this ancient term is still s
gling for modern recognition. The Princteon Encyclopedia of P
and Poetics, for instance, offers articles on the eclogue and the
but nothing on ekphrasis even in the enlarged edition of 1974.
while ekphrasis has finally found its way into the subject head
covered by the MLA International Bibliography, only six items
appeared under this heading since 1983.
This does not mean, of course, that scarcely anyone is wr
about the literary representation of visual art; it simply mean
scarcely anyone is using the word ekphrasis to do so-even
discussion of such paradigmatically ekphrastic poems as Keats's
on a Grecian Urn." Thirty years ago, shortly after Earl Wasser
published The Finer Tone, Leo Spitzer took him to task for wr
fifty pages on the ode without ever identifying it as an exam
ekphrasis, and a dozen years later Murray Krieger saluted
for having "profitably taught us" to see the ode in this wa
Spitzer's lesson has not been very well learned. Helen Ven
*My thanks to Stuart Curran and George T. Wright, who made helpful sug
on an earlier version of this essay, and also to Michael Riffaterre, who in
to deliver the original version of it at the Columbia colloquium mentioned
opening paragraph.
New Literary History, 1991, 22: 297-316
298 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
thirty-six-page commentary
odes makes no mention of e
otherwise thoroughgoing ess
peared a few years ago in Stud
of all, perhaps, the word ekph
issue of Word and Image th
poems on pictures.4
All right, it may be asked,
word disturb us? If critics li
illuminating pages on the po
using the word ekphrasis, wh
it with the ancient Greek rhe
answer to these questions is th
and it is difficult if not im
unless we can agree on what t
of a mode that I want to defi
remarkable specimens of it
plications, I want to formulat
more presumptuously--to ske
In the past twenty years, th
articulate a theory of ekphr
"Ekphrasis and the Still Movem
Krieger's essay might also ha
or W. J. T. Mitchell anticipa
seeks to demonstrate is the "g
this end, Krieger elevates ek
erature to a literary princip
imitation, he says, symboliz
relationships which must be s
world to 'still' it" (5). Almos
Urn" serves as Krieger's prim
in rather different poems, suc
the ball, he says, is a "physica
mastery over time" (20). In Kr
"a general principle of poet
assertion of its integrity" (22
Krieger's theory of ekphras
a new lease on life, but actua
breaking point: to the point
any particular kind of litera
for formalism.8 So it has ap
deggerian persuasion, to those
of contingent historicity an
literature to us. In the eyes of
EKPHRASIS AND REPRESENTATION 299
recently observed, Krieger's theory of

seal literature within the well-wroug
spatiality, where the ashes of new cri
glowing, I should probably add).' So K
has been shaken. According to Davids
even by certain kinds of poems about p
Davidson calls "the contemporary pai
contrasts with what he calls the "clas
"about" a painting or work of sculptu
sufficiency of the object. "A poem '
writes, "is not the same as what I am
which activates strategies of composit
pendent on the painting. Instead of pau
from the work of art, the poet reads t
than as a static object, or else reads t
generated by the painting" (72).
Davidson's formulation helps him t
poems as John Ashbery's "Self-Portrait
is based on Parmigianino's painting o
questions the ideas of stability, self-suf
representation that Parmagianino's wor
Yet Davidson hardly formulates a new
thrown out Krieger's ekphrastic pri
diachronic polarity between "classical" a
us with no coherent sense of the synchr
them both, as well as with an oversimpli
which often treats the work of art as co
object. In Homer's account of the scen
Achilles, for instance, many of the scen
The weaknesses of these two theorie
broad, the other too polarized-help
ekphrasis is to be defined as a mode,
enough to identify a certain kind of
enough to reach from classicism to p
to Ashbery. What I propose is a defi
complex in its implications: ekphrasis is
graphic representation.
This definition excludes a good deal
have ekphrasis include-namely literatur
us to distinguish ekphrasis from two oth
and the visual arts--pictorialism and
those two things from ekphrasis is tha
represent natural objects and artifact
resentational art. Of course pictorial
remind us of graphic represent

guage effects similar to those c
Faerie Queene, for instance, Jo
focusing, framing, and scan
representing the world with th
representing pictures themse
a pictorial poem can be linked
We know, for example, that
Williams's "The Red Wheelbar
graphs of Alfred Stieglitz and
Sheeler, the American photog
shortly before he wrote the po
reference to Sheeler or Stiegl
their pictures; instead, it use
precision in order to represen
Iconicity is more complicated
sounds and sets of relations as
iconicity, which is what concer
between the arrangement of
they signify, as in Herbert's "E
iconicity usually entails an im
tation. The wavy shape of an ic
for instance, will look much m
like any wave one might actual
iconic literature does not aim to
of pictures in order to repres
These three terms-ekphrasis,
mutually exclusive. An ekphras
to represent a picture and can
the painting that it verbally re
both iconicity and pictorialism
resentation itself. What ekph
must itself be representational
ered a work of art and constr
since it was not created to repr
Crane's The Bridge is no more
Wheelbarrow."'6
When we understand that ekphrasis uses one medium of rep-
resentation to represent another, we can see at once what makes
ekphrasis a distinguishable mode and what binds together all ek-
phrastic literature from Homer to John Ashbery. Comparing such
disparate phenomena as classic and postmodern ekphrasis, recent
critics tend to see only differences between the two. While classic
ekphrasis, they say, salutes the skill of the artist and the miraculous
verisimilitude of the forms he creat

dermines the concept of verisimilitude
Portrait in a Convex Mirror" has been
"a radical criticism of the illusions and
of traditional representation that ins
totalized nature of the copied image
nakedly deconstructive can be found in
shield, but if Ashbery's poem is a "me
than on likeness, as Stamelman says
Achilles' shield is a meditation on bot
verisimilitude and a sustained comment
representation and reality. Describin
Achilles' shield, Homer writes, "The earth darkened behind them
and looked like earth that has been ploughed / though it was gold."'8
Homer thus reminds us that he is representing representation, and
by explicitly noting the difference between representation and reality,
he implicitly draws our attention to the friction between the fixed
forms of graphic representation and the narrative thrust of his
words. Shortly after describing the earth made of gold, Homer tells
us that the cattle depicted elsewhere on the shield were "wrought
of gold and of tin, and thronged in speed and with lowing / out of
the dung of the farmyard to a pasturing place by a sounding / river,
and beside the moving field of a reed bed" (18.574-76).
Homer does two things in this passage: first, he reminds us again
of the difference between what is represented (the cattle) and the
specific medium of representation (gold and tin); second and more
importantly, he animates the fixed figures of graphic art, turning
the picture of a single moment into a narrative of successive actions:
the cattle move out of the farmyard and make their way to a pasture.
From Homer's time to our own, ekphrastic literature reveals again
and again this narrative response to pictorial stasis, this storytelling
impulse that language by its very nature seems to release and
stimulate. That is why I must disagree with Krieger when he treats
ekphrasis as a way of freezing time in space, and also with Wendy
Steiner when she defines ekphrasis as the verbal equivalent of the
"pregnant moment" in art-the literary mode "in which a poem
aspires to the atemporal 'eternity' of the stopped-action painting."'9
The "pregnant moment" of an action is the arrested point which
most clearly implies what came before the moment and what is to
follow it. But as the example from Homer shows, ekphrastic literature
typically delivers from the pregnant moment of graphic art its em-
bryonically narrative impulse, and thus makes explicit the story that
graphic art tells only by implication.20
In fact, since the picture of a moment in a story usually presupposes
the viewer's knowledge of the

tells this story for the benef
well beyond what the picture
A.D. Imagines, for instance,
painting that shows how Herm
how the Horae cared for hi
swaddling clothes and sprin
they turned to help his mo
clothes and walked down the m
graphic art into narrative p
every period. In Dante's Pur
depicted with the Emperor
First Terrace not only conver
him to help her.22 In Childe H
imagines on paper-the whole
Rome's Capitoline Museum a
Convex Mirror," John Ashb
magianino produced his pict
lection of contemporary poe
the poets--as Robert Druce o
by constructing a narrative.24
These examples do not prov
narrative or that language its
Carlos Williams's "Hunters i
to Breughel's Return of the H
the picture actually contains
the persistence of storytelling
very least that ekphrasis canno
On the contrary, the histor
releases a narrative impulse w
resist such an impulse takes
I will return to this point
"Ode on a Grecian Urn." Bef
consider one other strand in t
or the rhetorical technique o
ically, ekphrasis means simply
recall this root meaning is to
by scholars such as Leo Spitzer
link between ekphrasis and s
on ancient statues, tombs, and
still object to identify itself
famous Glauca" (third centu
Xenvares, son of Meixis, upo
clearly reflects the influence of such e

to Apollo in the painting of Hermes:
about to say to Maia, 'Your son whom
me; for the cattle in which I delight
nor do I know where in the earth. V
deeper than the cattle' " (103).
Sepulchral inscriptions not only in
reaching from passages like this one
urn; they also look forward to some
theory of ekphrasis should at least tou
tried to distinguish ekphrasis from pic
see no reason to close its borders agai
is explicitly concerned with a work of
requires the absence of the thing re
verbal representation of the picture. It
of questions answered by sepulchral i
is it?-and it begins the work of inter
At the same time, it may also begin
picture into a narrative. In 1818, He
Royal Academy a picture with the follow
to hell, discovers amidst the flights of h
hurricane, the forms of Paolo and Fran
permission to address them, and being inf
sent them to that place of torment at once
drops like a lifeless corpse upon the rocks.
This of course is an extreme examp
kind of title that painters of historical
to furnish when they could no longer
the story they tried to depict. Yet mu
a narrative function. Take for instance
used for a seascape showing a small b
'Now for the Painter' (Rope). Passengers
Turner's addiction to puns, the word
once to the artist and--in a nautical s
used to tie the boats together while
Turner's title is therefore doubly narra
depicted with the moment to come f
and for the artist himself. But to think about the moment to come
for the artist is to discover an irresolvable conflict between graphi
stasis and narrative movement. On one hand, the phrase Now f
the Painter anticipates the moment after the one depicted, the mome
when the rope will be attached; on the other hand, the phrase al
designates the impossible moment when the painter will depict the
anticipatory action that is

narratable time could only be
So the title mischievously ask
moving and fixed, patiently p
depict them.
All by themselves, then, pict
ekphrasis so often delivers: a
best known example from o
that Rend Magritte conceive
much like a pipe: Ceci n'est
that this is not a pipe becau
the pipes we see in the real w
in perfect profile or hang su
of support, we must conclude
pipe but rather-as Michel B
a graphic representation of
resented in advertisements
pended in space, and labeled "
which is literally written al
parodies the textbook label
sumptions on which such l
how graphic and verbal rep
resentation. But Magritte's
labels; it also summons up for
of inscription and prosopop
history of ekphrasis. To rea
tradition is to hear the fam
poeially piping: "Je ne suis
If a truly comprehensive t
room for picture titles, as I
itself up to the vast body of w
known as art criticism. Had
could show that art criticism d
as a whole.29 But for now I
is represented in ekphrasti
phrastic traditions can help us
in specific poems. Tradition
rational and prosopopoeial;
graphic art typically check
graphic art to speak. I want t
Urn" and "Ozymandias," Ke
traditions to reflect on repre
of graphic representation, but
Consider first what Keats does wi

prosopopoeia that flows from the s
earlier. He opens the first stanza of
the Grecian urn as a "still unravish
he himself threatens to ravish the b
leaf-fring'd legend," he asks, "haun
The quest for legend not only shows
itself from the very beginning of thi
the urge to envoice the urn, for th
"to be read," and when a sepulchra
a traveler, the inscribed object sp
inscription and refuses to answer t
anticipated and answered by inscrib
gods are these?" the speaker asks. Ins
"I am the tomb of famous Glauca"
the urn speaks only silence, voicing n
facts, saying nothing at all until it p
transcends narrative and circumstanc
beauty" (1. 49).
To think of the poem in terms of timeless transcendence, however,
is to miss the insistent pressure of narrative within it, and the
strength of poetic will required to resist that pressure. We can judge
the strength of Keats's resistance by contrasting the ode with a
sonnet that he wrote two years earlier, "On a Leander [Gem] which
Miss Reynolds, My Kind Friend Gave Me." In this little poem about
an engraved gem representing Leander's ill-fated swim across the
Hellespont, Keats follows the ekphrastic tradition of generating a
narrative from the still moment of graphic art. Just as Byron turns
the sculpture of the dying Gaul into the complete story of his death,
Keats turns the engraved figure of Leander into the complete story
of his drowning, and the very last line of the poem says of Leander:
"He's gone-up bubbles all his amorous breath."3' In the ode,
however, Keats checks the narrative impulse by restricting it to the
world outside the urn. He can tell the story of actual passion because
it changes, moving from desire to consummation and satiety--"a
heart high sorrowful and cloy'd, / A burning forehead, and a parch-
ing tongue" (11. 29-30). But since the lovers depicted on the urn
are figures "above" all human passion, they are also above change,
so that their lives-or rather their mode of existence--cannot be
narrated.
Yet part of what teases us out of thought in this poem is precisely
its narrativity. Even though Keats suppresses the narrative impulse
that ekphrasis typically releases, he does not simply exchange the
language of temporality for

Carlos Williams does in "Hun
represent the lovers as figu
them into life as his audito
speaks a language of tempora
affirmed by denial. If the p
tation enables us to see read
it, we can only conclude that
figures on the urn. For the m
figures they represent, we m
action signified by the pregn
viding a narratable answer to
arrested act provokes: "Wha
which is conspicuously miss
in the first stanza, the onl
negation of narrative would
the answer Keats gives. On
narration--or more precisely
in the absence of change. In o
lessness. In place of the actu
by the pregnant moment rep
to figures simultaneously qu
What will and must happen
beauty-is that the lovers wi
Bold lover, never, never cans

Though winning near the g
She cannot fade, though th
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
(11. 17-20)
These lines are profoundly self-contradictory. To imagine the figures

on the urn as lovers caught in a state of permanently arrested desire
is to expose them to the strain of time even as we profess to exempt
them from it. To tell the lover not to grieve is to endow him with
the capacity to do so, and thus to imply that he will do so forever,
for by the very nature of graphic representation, the lover is power-
less-both physically and psychologically--to do anything other than
what he is already doing. If by chance he is grieving in the eternal
now of the moment represented, he can never obey the speaker's
command. He can never stop grieving.
The prohibition of grief is just one ill

language excites the expectation of ch
celebrating the beauty and joy of cha
the melodist are "for ever new" (1. 2
be different, or at least played differen
the lovers face the prospect of "mor
happy love!" (1. 25), they are simultan
their happiness and reminded that chan
at all-simply more of what they now p
than what they do not now and ther
happiness "still to be enjoyed" (1. 26).
I have ventured this far into Keats's o
may learn by reading it as a specimen o
represents the arrested moment of g
its fixity in words but rather by releasi
impulse. Keats's poem simultaneously
impulse, fully exploiting all the expec
desire provokes, yet building up against
an impregnable wall of negatives: "Bo
thou kiss, / Though winning near the g
explicit what all ekphrasis implicitly
representation and misrepresentatio
phrastic conversion of graphic art in
the totality that is just fractionally r
sented-by graphic art; on the other h
narrative overrides--and hence misrep
can be experienced in a single instant, o
forever if, as Kenneth Burke suggest
process of becoming into the eternal
Keats's own language defines the bein
as process. Though "far above" all bre
are also said to be "For ever panting
out-the essential act of life as we kn
conflict between graphic and verbal rep
see that neither one of them can ev
matter how near the goal they come.
The conflict between graphic and verb
a generally neglected way of interpreti
statement: beauty and truth. In treat
symbolic action, Kenneth Burke equ
"truth" with "scene," the universe in w
since the poem repeatedly threatens to
of graphic art with the langu

can be read as a final commen
Up to the very moment wh
seems to tell us that we cannot have both at once, that we must
choose between the narratable truth of a passionately mutable life
and the immutable beauty of graphic art. We must sacrifice one to
the other just as the lives of the lovers must be sacrificed to the
beauty of the poses they hold forever in marble, and just as the
life of the little town must be sacrificed to a ritual from which none
of its inhabitants will ever return. Recall the final line of the stanza:
"O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede / Of marble men and
maidens overwrought" (11. 41-42). The brilliant puns here work like
the ambiguous drawing of the duck-rabbit. Because each aspect of
the drawing negates the other, we can see the drawing as either a
duck or a rabbit but not both at the same time. Likewise, the words
"brede" and "overwrought" can signify either a living breed of men
and maidens overwrought with unbearably prolonged desire, or a
decorative braid of unbreeding marble figures done in bas-relief on
an urn that is thus embroidered or "overwrought" with them. Instead
of fusing truth and beauty, the puns ask us to choose between them:
between the narratable truth of living desire, which may in time
become overwrought, and the timeless beauty of graphic art, which
turns human figures into well-wrought formal patterns.33
In equating truth and beauty, then, the urn affirms what the
poem has so far denied. By the very act of speaking, the urn crosses
the line between graphic and verbal representation, between the
fixed, silent beauty of graphic stillness and the audible movement
of speech. By the very act of speaking, the urn boldly declares that
graphic art can speak, that graphic and verbal representation are
one, that language achieves its greatest beauty and highest truth
when it transcends narrative, when it represents not what has been
and what will be but what is. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." In the
second half of this chiastic utterance, the verb drops away, so that
language assumes the juxtapositional effect of graphic art. Entering
and envoicing the mute still object, language abandons its narrative
impulse and gives itself up to graphic stasis.
Keats thus subsumes a radical critique of graphic representation
within a work of iconophilic homage. Having repeatedly shown the
conflict between the beauty of graphic stasis and the narratable
truth of action, he dissolves the conflict by taking graphic art as
the model for a language of transcendence that aspires to represent
being rather than becoming. Yet verbal representation does not
thereby dissolve into graphic representation, for the work of graphic
art on which Keats finally models his lan

language. The urn is as imaginary as the l
religious ritual depicted on it; we cann
through Keats's words.34 Keats pays hi
object created by language, or more preci
representation, which language alone ex
For this reason, Keats's tribute to grap
finally be separated from his critique of
potential that ekphrasis has always poss
tion and challenge the art it ostensibly sa
this potential because, I think, we have too
Lessing's view of ekphrasis as the mere
an act of homage demeaning to the freed
of literature.35 Keats's poem makes the
critique, a verbal demonstration of all
make the idea of graphic representation a
This critical strain underlying the osten
ode subtly connects it with another consp
ekphrasis: Shelley's "Ozymandias." But
iconoclastic. While Keats demonstrates t
graphic art in the very act of paying hom
step further, undermining the assumptio
pay lasting and unequivocal homage to
poem is short enough to be quoted in f
I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said--"Two vast and trunkless leg
Stand in the desart .. . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."''36
Shelley's sonnet questions what Keats's ode takes wholly for granted:
the imperishability of graphic art. While Keats confidently predicts
that the urn will survive the wasting of the present generation as
of so many others that came before it, Shelley foresees the ultimate
dissolution of the statue. And to signify the imminence of this
dissolution, Shelley complicat

and narrative movement in an
petuates a moment in the his
enduring greatness, it is gradu
it at a pregnant moment of t
tration: the standing legs r
original monument while the
to its final oblivion-its ulti
sands."
In the sestet of this sonnet, Shelley follows ekphrastic tradition
by recording the words on the pedestal and thus envoicing the
statue, which resoundingly declares, "Look on my works, ye Mighty,
and despair." But these words simply accentuate the transitional
status of the monument. The single meaning they originally conveyed
has disintegrated into a double meaning that looks backward and
forward in time. Like the statue on which they are inscribed, the
words at once recall the invincible assurance of Ozymandias and
foretell the coming dissolution of his works.
The expression fixed on the shattered, half-sunk face, therefore,
cannot serve as the pregnant moment of a narrative to be ekphras-
tically inferred or furnished about the life of Ozymandias himself.
Instead, the fixity of the expression signifies the rigidity of Ozy-
mandias's despotic arrogance, which has petrified his face in a "sneer
of cold command" that the sculptor has at once imitated and obeyed,
since he undoubtedly worked under orders from the ruler himself.
Ozymandias sought to perpetuate his power through the medium
of sculpture, through "lifeless things" that would permanently rep-
resent his personality. But the sculptor's hand mocks the passions
that it represents, and time in turn mocks any aspirations that the
sculptor might have had for the immortality of his art. Forever
committed to one unchanging expression, neither Ozymandias nor
the sculptor can command or control the leveling effects of time,
which convert the face of power into an object of ridicule or-as
with the grandiloquent inscription--impose upon its twisted features
a meaning radically different from the one originally intended, so
that what were once the frown and wrinkle and sneer of absolute
authority become at last the marks and signs of desperation.
Shelley thus reveals that in spite of its claims to permanence, bo
the matter and the meaning of graphic art can be fundamenta
changed by time, reconstituted by successive interpretations. A
William Freedman has recently shown (see note 3), the whole poem
is a study in mediation. After the opening words it is spoken n
by the poet himself but by a "traveller" he has met, which is
course Shelley's way of personifyi

yet definitely identified literary sou
of the traveler from the text just as
voice of Ozymandias from the insc
each case the relation is mediated.
the traveler reports his reading of an
Before quoting the inscription an
a whole, however, the traveler rea
visage. Its "frown, / And wrinkled li
he says, "Tell that the sculptor well t
survive, stamped on these lifeless t
them, and the heart that fed." The
resents the expression of the living r
passions that the sculptor has infer
the sculpted face and the actual on
pretive act of the sculptor, who kn
to represent them in stone so that
can tell us what they signify. Yet th
about the sculptor's ability to read O
himself. As a result, we are led to
of the ruler with the inscription-the
and his works.
To compare the graphic representation and the verbal self-re

resentation is to see that each corroborates the other. Ozymandias's
statement can be read as a comment on the statue-clearly one o
his most stupendous works-and the statue can be read as a graph
response to the statement, a way of interpreting it in stone. Neith
statue nor statement, however, communicates what Ozymandias pr
sumably intended by them both: an immutable assertion of h
power. The meaning of both changes radically as the all-too-pe
ishable medium in which they are wrought disintegrates.
The fact that the inscription will disintegrate along with the statu
should cause us to question an inference that Shelley's iconoclas
tempts us to draw-which is that language surpasses graphic art
its power and durability. Paraphrasing what Horace said of his odes
Shelley might have said of this sonnet, "Exegi monumentum pe
perennius"--I have built a monument more lasting than stone
Raising up his own little tower of words to mark the inexorab
leveling of the ancient statue, Shelley makes manifest what virtual
all ekphrasis latently reveals: the poet's ambition to make his word
outlast their ostensible subject, to displace graphic representati
with verbal representation. Yet the fate of everything wrought an
inscribed by order of Ozymandias should prompt us to ask ho
long any work of represent

endure. If words cut into s
words written on paper or
own poem last as long as the
well over a thousand years
in the first century B.C.?38
Shelley's sonnet leaves us wit
raised by Keats's ode. Thoug
Shelley iconoclastic, each in h
between rival modes of repre
gains absolute victory over th
graphic stasis can fully repre
can make absolute claims to p
two ekphrastic poems, then
resentation of graphic art as
of all representation.
DARTMOUTH COLLEGE
NOTES
1 In what is probably the earliest definition of the term, which was

used by Greek rhetoricians of the first five centuries A.D., it is calle
descriptive account bringing what is illustrated vividly before one's s
Bartsch, Decoding the Ancient Novel: The Reader and the Role of Description
and Achilles Tatius [Princeton, 1989] p. 9.) In the Greek rhetorical handbo
and paintings were treated among the objects suitable for ekphrastic desc
only after the fifth century did ekphrasis come to denote the descript
art exclusively (Bartsch, p. 10).
2 See Leo Spitzer, "The 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' or Content vs. Meta
Contemporary Literature, 7 (1955), 208, and Murray Krieger, "Ekphrasis
Movement of Poetry; or, Laokodn Revisited," in The Poet as Critic, ed.
W. McDowell (Evanston, Ill., 1967), p. 8; hereafter cited in text.
3 Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, Mass., 1983)
William Freedman, "Postponement and Perspectives in Shelley's 'Ozymand
in Romanticism, 25 (1986), 63-73.
4 See Word and Image, 2 (1986).
5 Murray Krieger calls ekphrasis "a classic genre" ("Ekphrasis," 5), but
put it on a par with epic and tragedy. Since no formal or syntactic feature
the literary representation of visual art from other kinds of literature,
can appear within any recognized genre from epic to lyric, it may be more a
termed a mode, like pastoral or elegy. But while those two can be larg
by their subject matter, the subject matter of ekphrasis requires us to
terms of representation.
6 See n. 2 above. In "Words on Pictures: Ekphrasis," Art and Antiques (
80-91, John Hollander surveys examples of ekphrasis from Homer to o
and makes some suggestive comments on them, but he does not attempt
a theory of ekphrasis as a literary mode. In a

Poetics of Ekphrasis," Word and Image, 4 (1988
phrase "notional ekphrasis" (209) to designate p
works of art.
7 See Joseph Frank, "Spatial Form in Modern Literature," first published in Sewanee
Review, 53 (1945) pp. 221-40, 433-56, 643-53; and W. J. T. Mitchell, "Spatial Form
in Literature: Toward a General Theory," in The Language of Images, ed. W. J. T.
Mitchell (Chicago, 1980), pp. 271-99.
8 Krieger repeatedly denies that he is subjecting poetry to a static formalism. "In
resistance to the ekphrastic impulse," he says, "it cannot be too often urged that the
aesthetic desire for pure and eternal form must not be allowed merely to freeze
the entity-denying chronological flow of experience in its unrepeatable variety"
("Ekphrasis," 24). But if the "ekphrastic impulse" is a formalizing tendency that must
be resisted, can the "ekphrastic principle" embrace both fixity and movement? More
recently, in Theory of Criticism: A Tradition and its System (Baltimore, 1976), Krieger
has written that "the critic's descriptions of the object in formal and spatial terms
... are his weak metaphors, which, if he takes them too seriously, will distort-by
freezing-the object" (p. 39). If ekphrasis is simply a weak metaphor for poetic
integrity and a continuing threat to poetic vitality, its critical value is minimal. To
maximize its critical value, we must first identify the distinguishing features of
ekphrasis as a literary mode.
9 Michael Davidson, "Ekphrasis and the Postmodern Painter Poem," Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 42 (1983), 71; hereafter cited in text.
10 In a paper on "Postmodern Ekphrasis" delivered at the Columbia Colloquium,
Linda Hutcheon applied the term ekphrasis to such postmodern phenomena as the
incorporation of newspaper articles in the novels of Julio Cortazar and John Fowles.
Likewise, in a dissertation titled "Figures in the Carpet: The Ekphrastic Tradition
in the Realistic Novel" (Rice University, 1981), Mack L. Smith broadly defines ekphrasis
as the introduction of any work of art-whether verbal or literary-into another
work of art, so that his examples range from the discussion of portraiture in Anna
Karenina to the debate about Hamlet in Ulysses. My own definition of ekphrasis rests
upon what I believe to be a fundamental distinction between writing about pictures
and writing about texts.
11 John M. Bender, Spenser and Literary Pictorialism, (Princeton, 1972), pp. 40-80,
pp. 105-48.
12 See William Marling, William Carlos Williams and the Painters, 1909-1923 (Athens,
Ohio, 1982), pp. 80-83.
13 Iconicity has come to mean any "natural" or "motivated" similarity between words
and what they signify, so that it includes not only onomatapoeia and texts with
visually significant shapes (concrete poetry) but also certain kinds of syntax. Roman
Jakobson, for instance, sees iconicity in Caesar's "I came, I saw, I conquered" because
the order of the clauses corresponds to the chronological order of the events they
signify. See Roman Jakobson, Word and Language, vol. II of Selected Writings (The
Hague, 1971), pp. 345-59. For extensive discussion of iconicity in literature, see the
entire issue of Word and Image, 2 (1986), especially the introduction by Max Nanny
(pp. 197-208).
14 I am thinking particularly of Ian Hamilton Finlay's "XM poem" (1963), which
appears in An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, ed. Emmet Williams (New York, 1967),
n. p. (poems printed in the alphabetical order of the authors' names).
15 See for instance W. D. Snodgrass, "W. D. Assists in Supporting Cock Robin's
Roost," in Word and Image, 2 (1986), 74-75.
16 Crane himself tried (unsuccessfully) to use one of Joseph Stella's paintings of
the Brooklyn Bridge as a frontisp

explicitly pictorial terms, speakin
interdependence of its sections to t
Chapel; see John T. Irwin, "Fore
Vision of Origins in Hart Crane's
But however much Crane's poem
any other work of art, the bridge t
it is an object serving a practica
recognize the considerable differ
and the minimalist focus of "The
here is that while each poem may
in the strict sense I have propose
17 Richard Stamelman, "Critical R
'Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,' "
cited in text.
18 Homer, The Iliad, tr. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago, 1951), 18.548-49, emphasis
added; hereafter cited in text. See also Virgil's description of the shield of Aeneas:
"The pictured sea flowed surging, all of gold" (Virgil, The Aeneid, tr. Robert Fitzgerald
[New York, 1983], 8.671).
19 Wendy Steiner, Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature
(Chicago, 1988), pp. 13-14.
20 I do not mean here that a picture cannot tell a story, or that it cannot tell a
story without the aid of a text, or that pictures differ essentially from texts because
texts tell self-sufficient stories while pictures do not. Since a poem such as "Leda
and the Swan" does not tell a self-sufficient story while a painting such as Gains-
borough's Two Shepherd Boys Fighting does, I am not speaking categorically about
what pictures and texts can or cannot do. I merely describe what ekphrasis traditionally
does with graphic art.
21 Philostratus the Elder, Imagines, tr. Arthur Fairbanks, Loeb Classical Library
(London, 1931), 1.26.101-5. According to Philostratus, the painting also shows how
Hermes playfully hides Apollo's cattle, dons his swaddling clothes again to seem
innocent, and then steals Apollo's weapons (105). The painting here described may
consist of several distinct panels representing successive phases of the story, as
Renaissance frescoes would later do, but Philostratus makes no mention of panels;
he speaks only of what is "in the painting" (ev -ui ypaoqi).
22 See Dante, Purgatorio, 10.73-93.
23 See George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, vol. III of Lord
Byron: The Complete Poetical Works (Oxford, 1980), p. 171, 4.1252-69.
24 See Word and Image, 2 (1986) and Robert Druce's "A Foreword to the Poems,"
p. 46.
25 I quote the first statement from an epigram of Theocritus in vol. II of the
Greek Anthology, tr. W. R. Paton (New York, 1917), 145, and the second from Paul
Friedlander and Herbert Hoffleit, Epigrammata: Greek Inscriptions in Verse (Berkeley,
1948), p. 9. See also Spitzer 221-22n. and Jean Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition
of Literary Pictorialism in English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago, 1958), pp. 22-
23. pp. 49-50. (For reasons given in 18n., Hagstrum calls the verbal representation
of graphic art "iconic" rather than "ecphrastic.").
26 "The unique purpose of titling," writes John Fisher, "is hermeneutical; titles
are names which function as guides to interpretation." ("Entitling," Critical Inquiry,
11 [1984], 288.) This is particularly obvious in the case of Renaissance emblems,
which are scarcely intelligible without their titles. Thus the legend PRUDENZA tells
us how to construe the quattrocento relief of an old man with three faces-one
young, one middle-aged, one old-as signify

future. (Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visua
29.) In Renaissance emblem books, the title
prosopopoeia, with the picture made to ans
significance: under the woodcut of a naked lad
of the sea in Geoffrey Whitney's A Choice of Em
New York, 1969), for instance, we read: "What c
On whirling wheele declare why dost thou stan
froe." [The emblem is reproduced in Rosema
(London, 1948), p. 2.] It may be objected tha
not represent the picture so much as they den
the objection gathers force when applied to m
Head of a Woman (1938), which simply depicts a
fat bird. If we follow Nelson Goodman's theory
of Art [Indianapolis, 1976], pp. 27-31), we w
represents the head of a woman as a bird, just
prudence as a three-headed man and Whitney
opportunity) as a lady at sea on a wheel. The
title or legend, however, is not unidirectional bu
the picture quite as much as it guides us to se
well known to anyone who has ever looked f
again, title and picture can each serve as signifi
the ultimately minimalist title "Untitled," as Ha
a viewer, and it seems to presume to teach by n
("Titles, Titling, and Entitlement To," Journal of A
13). In balking our desire to be told what the
us to consider what the word "Untitled" represen
signifies.
27 Cited in Annals of the Fine Arts, ed. James Elmes (London, 1817-20), III, 292.
28 Michel Butor, Les Mots dans la peinture (Geneva, 1967), p. 77. See also Michel
Foucault, This is not a Pipe, ed. and tr. James Harkness (Berkeley, 1982).
29 Michael Baxandall explicitly connects art criticism to ekphrasis in the introduction
to his Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven, 1985),
pp. 1-11. See also Svetlana Alpers, "Ekphrasis and Aesthetic Attitudes in Vasari's
Lives," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, 23 (1960), 190-215.
30 John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," in The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack
Stillinger (Cambridge, Mass. 1978), p. 372; hereafter cited in text by line.
31 John Keats, "On a Leander which Miss Reynolds, My Kind Friend Gave Me,"
in Stillinger, p. 94.
32 Kenneth Burke, "Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats," in his A Grammar of
Motives (Berkeley, 1969), p. 449; hereafter cited in text.
33 Nancy Goslee argues that Keats uses the contrast between the sculpturesque
and the picturesque to symbolize the opposition between the timeless, objective
serenity of classic culture and the restless, time-bound subjectivity of modern or
"romantic" culture (Uriel's Eye: Miltonic Stationing and Statuary in Blake, Keats, and
Shelley [Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1985], p. 5). Keats's "Urn," which Goslee does not treat,
aptly illustrates her central point. Though the urn is sculpted marble, as the final
stanza plainly indicates, the restless probing for specific answers in the opening stanza
suggests the picture of a specific time and leaf-fringed place, and the situation of
the youth "beneath the trees" is likewise picturesque. But while these picturesque
qualities of the urn provoke the speaker's curiosity and sympathy with the mood of
an erotic moment, the sculpturesque qualities of the urn-the timeless serenity of
its "cold marble"--leave the speaker

34 The line about "marble men and
urn is sculptured marble rather than
been positively identified. From th
Keats composed his urn from a variet
and the paintings of Claude Lorrai
(Oxford, 1967), pp. 217-19.
35 Lessing does not use the term ekp
of graphic art as nothing but copyin
poet] imitates an imitation and give
man's genius rather than his own." (L
Poetry, tr. Edward Allen McCormic
36 I quote from Shelley's Poetry and
(New York, 1977), p. 103.
37 The text that Shelley's traveler m
century B.C. description of a statue
been proposed; see Freedman, pp.
38 Similar questions arise from Yea
fall, where the marble handiwork of
evocation of "draperies that seemed
31-32), and where the figures carve
dents, cracks, and discoloration. Bu
broken statue into a history of grad
grating lapis a narrative of renewal:
that build them again are gay" (11.
discoloration in the lapis may be r
and may thus signify devastation and
(1. 27), the poet imagines the climbin
house sweetened by "plum or cherry
where "mournful melodies" (1. 53) rej
of the two Chinamen. (W. B. Yeats,
Richard J. Finneran [London, 1984

Ekphrasis and Representation

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Ekphrasis and Representation

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Ekphrasis and Representation

Author(s): James A. W. Heffernan

N THE AVIARY of contemporary critical discourse, ekphrasis is an

New Literary History, 1991, 22: 297-316

recently observed, Krieger's theory of

remind us of graphic represent

verisimilitude of the forms he creat

the viewer's knowledge of the

clearly reflects the influence of such e

anticipatory action that is

Consider first what Keats does wi

language of temporality for

Bold lover, never, never cans

These lines are profoundly self-contradictory. To imagine the figures

The prohibition of grief is just one ill

of graphic art with the langu

art on which Keats finally models his lan

I met a traveller from an antique land,

dissolution, Shelley complicat

course Shelley's way of personifyi

To compare the graphic representation and the verbal self-re

long any work of represent

1 In what is probably the earliest definition of the term, which was

a theory of ekphrasis as a literary mode. In a

the Brooklyn Bridge as a frontisp

young, one middle-aged, one old-as signify

its "cold marble"--leave the speaker

You might also like