The Politics and Poetics of Ekphrasis in Nineteenth-Century French Art Novels
of a dissertation at the University of Miami. Dissertation supervised by Professor David Ellison. No. of pages in text. (227) This dissertation explores how literary descriptions of visual artworks affect the narrative and descriptive fabric of a text. The novels I examine operate on three textual levels: the painter's creative struggles, his amorous entanglements with his model and/or the painted women of his canvas, and his aesthetic claims to revolutionize painting. My project argues that ekphrasis is a translational mode that takes two forms: the traditional, "contained" description of a visual artwork; and a mode of writing that pervades the entire text and emulates the characteristics of painting. For example, Balzac's "Le Chef d'œuvre inconnu" and the Goncourts' Manette Salomon successfully adopt the ekphrastic mode of writing, transforming the narrative into a canvas where the boundaries between the media are blurred. On the other hand, Zola's L'Œuvre exploits ekphrasis in order to advance the superiority of literature over painting. At the heart of these Realist and Naturalist texts, the fundamental adherence to the mimetic principle of art is confronted with the nonfigurative experiments of their fictional painters. The female body, as the embodiment of Art and the manifestation of the artist's desire, becomes the symptom of his incursion into abstract painting and the site of the resistance to ekphrasis. Acknowledgment I owe many thanks to my committee members, family, and friends, without whom this dissertation would not have been possible. I would like first and foremost to thank my dissertation director, Dr. David Ellison, for having been a dedicated mentor and advisor throughout my years at the University of Miami. His careful readings, timely feedback, and his intellectual guidance have been invaluable to the completion of this work. I would like to thank Dr. Ralph Heyndels for his continued support. From classes taken with him to informal and formal discussions about this work, Dr. Heyndels’ ability to ask the right questions, point to the gist of the matter, and see beyond the words on the page have been an inspiration. My most sincere thanks go to Dr. Barbara Woshinsky, a careful, attentive, and enthusiastic reader of this dissertation, who helped me edit and refine my arguments. I am also most grateful to Dr. Rebecca Brienen for agreeing to work with me on this project. Her intellectual rigor was challenging and she raised important questions that pushed me to think outside my box. All the faculty and staff at the University of Miami have been kind and generous, helping with administrative and intellectual matters; in particular Directors of Graduate Studies Dr. Gema Perez-Sanchez and Dr. Elena Grau-Lleveria, as well as Keyla Medina. I would also like to acknowledge Dr. Jan Hokenson, my mentor and advisor at Florida Atlantic University. Her support and encouragement during my M.A. years gave me the confidence I needed as a student and her love for literature and literary analysis inspire me to this day.
Pictorial Models and Narrative Ekphrasis
Ekphrasis is an umbrella term that subsumes various forms of render- ing the visual object in words. This variety is often arbitrarily restricted, largely because some of the forms, though manifest in artistic practice, are not recog- nized in criticism. This essay analyzes two such neglected forms: pictorial models and narrative ekphrasis. Their intersection compounds the ekphrasis of a visual model (as distinct from a unique artwork) with narrativized (as against descrip- tive, picturelike) effect, though not only within narrative works. The neglect of both forms, I point out, relates to theory's doctrinal biases, namely, the insis- tence on interart reproduction ("mimesis") and so on either-or choices (between epic and lyric, action and description, narrativity and pictoriality). Instead, I argue for the centrality and the specifically narrative roles of the pictorial model. To enhance the evocability and perceptibility of the visual source, literary texts often allude to a visual common denominator (e.g., the thematic makeup of "a Madonna with child" or the familiar components of "a Turner seascape"). Furthermore, such ekphrastic models often join forces with narrativity to bring the visual source into distinctively literary play, not least along the time axis. Thus, when a visual clich6 is transmitted through the subjectivity of an inside observer, it enters into narrative patterns such as plot and characterization, as well as point of view. These and various other interplays between the ekphras- tic model and narrativity are illustrated in the second part of the essay, mainly through the poetics of Isak Dinesen.
A Painted Lady: Ekphrasis in Anna Karenina
C OMMENTING ON Tolstoy's treatise on aesthetics, What Is Art? (Chto takoe iskusstvo? 1897) John Bayley complained that "all treatises on art are unsatisfactory" (235).' Extending this statement into a Tolstoyan aphorism might yield the observation that "all treatises on art are unsatisfactorily alike; all works of art are treatises on art in their own way." While the current vogue in literary theory emphasizes a perception of the text as self-referential and meta-textual as a whole, there are also specific moments in literary texts that are consciously so. One of these is the topos of ekphrasis, most succinctly defined as a literary description of a visual work of art. The power of the ekphrastic moments in Anna Karenina motivated Bayley to draw the conclusion that Tolstoy's views on art are "expressed more powerfully in the narration of Anna than in his theoretical statements on art" (235). If, as Gary Saul Morson has recently argued, War and Peace is a work concerned with the problems of representation and the formation of false narratives, Anna Karenina may be read as a companion piece, concerned with the creation of false art and vision.