Ekphrasis and memory

In this post I return to my recent critique of ekphrasis with a more sophisticated historical and theoretical context. Supposedly. It's longer, anyway.


An attack on ekphrasis is one of the central themes of G. E. Lessing's Laocoon (1766), a circumambulatory and much-celebrated essay on the arts, marking something of an anticipatory watershed between the neoclassic and romantic eras of German taste. Lessing's core argument was that painting and poetry are not equivalent art-forms—a view he ascribes to several of his contemporaries—because the first deals with things side-by-side in space, and the second deals with things one after the other in time.

I do not deny to speech in general the power of portraying a bodily whole by its parts. . . but I do deny it to speech as the medium of poetry, because such verbal delineations of bodies fail of the illusion on which poetry particularly depends, and this illusion, I contend, must fail them for the reason that the co-existence of the physical object comes into collision with the consecutiveness of speech, and the former being resolved into the latter, the dismemberment of the whole into its parts is certainly made easier, but the final reunion of those parts into a whole is made uncommonly difficult and not seldom impossible.

Lessing's critique of ekphrasis is focused around Vergil's description of the demise of Laocoon in the Aeneid, which Lessing compares negatively to the Laocoon statuary, pictured above. He quotes the Mantuan: 'Bis medium amplexi, bis collo squamea circum / Terga dati, superant capite et cervicibus altis' (2.218-219), and claims that the imagination is able to see 'now only the serpents and now only Laocoön', rather than the whole picture together. When we return to Brueghel and his poetasters, we find the same problem: here we are able to see, in all its jewelled beauty, the painting which those labourers suffer so miserably to describe. All four poets enumerate one thing after the other, and yet are unable, by the very nature of their medium, to present the enchanting whole all at once—what I called its 'perfect ordonnance'. Each poem distends the image through time, abandoning the intricate relation of parts which gave the original its beauty. And so it must be.

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150 years after Laocoon, Irving Babbitt, conservative 'humanist' and enemy of Mencken and Hemingway, published The New Laokoon (1910). The book begins as a calm, measured analysis of Lessing's work, and of artistic confusion in the Renaissance and neoclassic (or 'pseudo-classic') periods; by its finale it has descended, inexorably, into a titanic rant against the decadence of modern times. Its polemic shows through at every turn—Babbitt's good American Protestantism: the Italian aestheticians who seek to impose Aristotelian formalism on poetry are compared to the Jesuits, who 'in order to strengthen and centralize the principle of authority, were ready to multiply their minute rulings on moral "cases" even at the risk of suppressing spontaneity in the religious life'. (Pascal has left his mark!) And Babbitt's good American masculinity: he lambasts Romantic criticism as 'intended primarily for women and men in their unmasculine moods'. And so on.

(A digression on the joy of marginalia—I discover a combative pencil on the pages of my library's copy. Babbitt writes 'If all the arts are thus restless and impressionistic, the reason is not far to seek: it is because the people who practice these arts and for whom they are practiced are themselves living in an impressionistic flutter', alongside which a young Derridean has scribbled: 'Oho! Then the medicine fits the patient? Well, what's the odds? Why pray for a change of diet?'—the same wag, demonstrating a most noble contempt, later annotates a passage on man's inferiority to Nature, almost mediaeval in its snivelling humility, with the snarl, 'Wholesome yet detestable modesty'.)

Babbitt, like Lessing, is against 'word-painting'—but he attributes this vice more to the naturalism of the Romantics than to the neoclassical fallacy of ut pictura poesis. The Romantics, or 'Rousseauists' as he scornfully designates them, were so empty of serious ideas that they scrabbled to describe every insignificant thing they could get their hands on, aiming not for ideas but merely for suggestiveness:

Alfred de Musset insinuates that all this minute lingering over the senses of childhood was a convenient way of producing the maximum amount of "copy" with the minimum expense of intellect.

Babbitt is right to note the great rise of word-painting or ekphrastic poetry after Lessing. I think his condemnation of poetic suggestiveness is also on the mark. As I have remarked more than once, so much poetry is content merely to describe. And this is the other problem of the ekphrases: not only do they lose the spatial harmony of Brueghel's painting, but they are relentlessly superficial, in a way that painting can afford to be, but literature not. Lessing and the Romantics collapsed poetry onto music, but words are not purely musical, purely temporal—they have meaning, semantic content—and this is what makes literature so much richer and more important than the other art-forms. Exegesis is the way we respond intellectually to art, and it is fundamentally verbal: analysis of painting and music can only be a pale reflection of the analysis of words, of texts. This is what is meant by a coherently linguistic world-view. To find our poets abandoning the interpretive richness of language, and treating words like colours, completely superficial, and content only to describe without creating—that is the banality of decadent impressionism, and it is a Romantic excrescence.

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A postscript on Lessing's legacy. Writers in the 20th century wrestled with the problem of overcoming the temporal nature of texts. Joseph Frank ('Spatial Form in Modern Literature', 1945) famously cited Ulysses as an archetype of spatial literature, arguing that the novel is not read but only re-read, creating not a linear temporal sequence in the mind but rather a 'system' or arrangement of objects in space, transcending time—Dublin, Thursday June 16, 1904. What is ultimately important is not the music of the words read aloud, but the picture built up by the intellective process. One might read Proust the same way, with its temporal worm-holes generated by Marcel's memorative activities, cutting against the flow of time. Or, indeed, Wordsworth's Prelude, especially in its 1850 form, where the shallow Romanticism of the original has indurated and become cold with the passage of many years.

Like Frank, Northrop Frye (The Critical Path, 1970) emphasises the internal over the external aspects of art: how the reader reads, the viewer gazes, and so forth. He demonstrates how linearly we can 'read' paintings—and Hunters in the Snow is a good example, with its diagonals that force the eye—and how spatially we can read music, as notes on staves. In the more famous Anatomy of Literature (1957), Frye essays the interpretation of poems as structural (spatial) wholes, just as Aaron Haspel did a few days ago with Ben Jonson's 'To Heaven'.


To continue in this vein, we speak of memory. Frank refers to a process of constructing a picture in the mind, which is a function of the memory; and to this we relate the work done by Yates and Carruthers on the ars memoria, the classical mnemotechnic mapping of a speech (ideas in succession) onto the rooms of a palace, or later the cells of a grid, in a spatial layout. At the climax of Yates' book is the work of Giordano Bruno, whose mystical Latin treatises promise more than mnemonic devices, becoming instead meditative manuals for the absorption of the entire world into the confines of a man's mind, the spatial microcosm. Compare this, finally, to a passage I once wrote about the Egyptian Book of the Dead (above), supposedly memorised by the believer before death so as to overcome obstacles in the afterlife:

The dead man prays to the 21 columns of the mansion of Osiris, to the four rudders of heaven, to the 42 chambers of judgement, and to the parts of his own body—which we are to identify with the parts of divine bodies, and with the parts of the underworld itself, taken as a configuration in space of architectural elements.

The text as a whole, when memorised, possesses almost no temporal qualities whatsoever; it constitutes itself a metaphorical space, huge and obscure, timeless, exactly like the space of the underworld which it describes. And perhaps to the early Egyptians, the memorisation of this text, with its attendant structuring of the mind, provided some comfort from the terrifying vision of their impending death. In acquiring themselves, like the text, spatial rather than temporal mentalities, they may have attained a sense of immortality even before trial.