Down the Ekphrastic Rabbit Hole

I was at a concert at the Hollywood Bowl over the summer where I witnessed an occurrence that has since been much fodder for both thought and conversation. It was a world music concert and while the ceremony of the concert itself was certainly an event worth witnessing, it was decidedly the music that brought the audience to the amphitheater with the exception of one patron who witnessed the concert in silence. The patron was deaf. I know this only because there was a sign language interpreter to the left of the stage who was illuminated during the entire concert by a large pool of light so that the patron could watch the lyrics being translated into meaningful hand gestures.

I was reminded of the paradox that this sight presented as I read through the discussion of ekphrasis and the debate surrounding the ability of one creative format to accurately represent that which exists in a very different creative format. While my experience at the Bowl was the first of its kind in my extensive concert-going life, the struggle between forms that it presented is familiar. In fact, the battle waged by the word to represent that which it is not can be seen in everyday life when a storyteller gives up on trying to recount an event with an exasperated, “You had to be there.”

Gertrude Stein said, “A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.” The concept of ekphrasis seems to be captured by the first part of this Stein quotation. However, the idea of ekphrasis, even as delineated by Mitchell’s tripartite indifference/hope/fear model, is still inadequate. The question of whether a picture is worth a thousand words may very well be answered with yes but this answer only serves to further complicate the question by necessitating even more questions. Which thousand words are being represented by the picture? And given that both images and words can have multiple meanings and can elicit multifarious responses, can one group of words accurately capture every nuance of a visual, and can the author control the connotations carried by particular words effectively enough so that the visual itself – and nothing more or extraneous – is conveyed?

Both Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts” and Williams “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” use words to describe the Brueghel painting they are viewing and yet the words they use vary both in and of themselves and in quantity. Auden and Williams each speak of the farmer in the painting but only Auden mentions the ship and neither goes into any detail about the landscape or other figures that appear in the painting. Williams chose to speak only of the painting but Auden devotes only a portion of his poem to the painting and instead begins with generalizations about “The Old Masters.” Are they both guilty of reading both more and less into the painting than what appears or was intended?

The same questions can be posed about Homer’s description of the Shield of Achilles. Is ekphrasis possible when two people can read the same words and yet exit the experience with a different visual? By way of example here are four very different renderings of the shield:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6130/6130-h/images/image29.png

http://imagecache5.art.com/p/LRG/29/2943/3GWRD00Z/french-school-the-shield-of-achilles-after-the-description-in-homers-iliad-1815.jpg

http://www.oldworldauctions.com/Auction086/86-444.jpg

http://smcnet.stmarys-ca.edu/academics/collegiate_seminar/images/achilles_big.jpg

Is one more correct than the other? Does Auden, who we may accuse of imposing more on Brueghel than intended, fall short in his description of the shield since there is so much less detail included in his ekphrastic attempt? Or is Auden perhaps more credible since with Homer’s version the reader must rely not only on the author but also on the translator and so finds yet another intermediary imposed between himself and the object?

The interplay between word and image also begs questions about the reader and what is to be expected. For example, is ekphrastic writing to be judged so harshly that each word must individually accomplish the impossible task of making the whole image leap forth or is it sufficient for the writing as a whole to gives life to that which it is describing? And if it is the writing as a whole that must be taken into account then is it the responsibility of the reader to read and re-read until he has gained such familiarity that he is able to hold each word in his mind simultaneously in order to duplicate the full experience of standing before the subject of the ekphrastic piece? Yet this begs further questions because if the responsibility falls on the reader then is the reader’s failure to envision what has been described or his failure to envision it accurately the fault entirely of the reader such that fault cannot be imputed to the author? This seems to make sense except for the conundrum that it allows for an argument that all attempts at ekphrasis are successful and that the shortcomings fall not with the writer but with the reader. Such a result seems absurd.

Perhaps ekphrasis cannot hope to be more than “the intersection of verbal and visual” with the emphasis on intersection. The value of ekphrasis might lie in the ability of the verbal and visual to find exactly one point at which they collide in perfect unison while allowing for the idea that both the verbal and visual each extend beyond that point of intersection.