hapter one - unirioja · of sources —from early masterpieces and grand national epics like...

Medina Barco, Inmaculada (ed.): Literature and Interarts: Critical Essays. Logroño: 15

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

LITERATURE, THE ARTS AND THE POETICS OF PERCOLATION

INMACULADA MEDINA BARCO

UNIVERSIDAD DE LA RIOJA

Things men have made with wakened hands, and put soft life into are awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowing for long years. (D.H. Lawrence, from “Things Men have Made”, 1929)

1. Preliminaries

The plethora of artistic intersections nowadays is producing a wealthy

corpus of critical studies which partaking of a long history of analysis (vivid since

Horace, the Baroque dispute of the arts, or Lessing’s paramount Essay), pursues to

develop new nodes of inquiry, angles of research, investigating tools and

multimodal methodologies. This is the origin of this book, which began life in 2009

in the heart of the Black Forest, at a chance meeting of literary scholars. In the

critical debate that ensued, some of us shared a passion for a major critical issue

nowadays: the rich relationships between the arts at the start of a globalized

twenty‐first century, with possibly as vibrant as ever interdisciplinary set‐up. In the

summer of that same year, a stay at Cambridge University resulted in fecund

dialogue with experts and faculty members on central aspects of the current

discourse of interarts which literature belongs into. From that moment, the

Universidad de La Rioja, 2013, pp. 15‐28.


prospect of articulating a study forum at the University of La Rioja started to shape,

which became the Conference ‘Literature and Interarts’: An International Web in

Global Aesthetics (2010), and was coordinated in unison with María Jesús Hernáez.

The ‘interartistic’ trajectory described above finally led to solicit specialised essays

from an appointed group of university teachers and literature/art scholars on any

remarkable aspect within the rich interart casuistry. Being our research centre the

Department of Modern Languages at the University of La Rioja, made it conceivable

that a philological interest would identify the distinctive feature of the volume,

with literature becoming the core around which all other interartistic connections

are explored. The kindness of poet and writer Seán Virgo in writing the opening

words of the book, provides the target issue with the sensitively engaged optics of

the literary creator and is held as a precious testimony to the subsequent dialectics,

which the volume presents in a collection of critical essays with a foreword.

2. Literature and Art Interrelations: A Collection of Critical Essays

The book divides in four parts which cover the conjunctions of literature

with numerous art fields and artworks —of a visual, musical, performative and

intermedial nature. The analysis tackles the art conversions to and from literature,

which will make it inextricable to also peruse the pristine territory of ekphrasis and

some of its historically diverse manifestations. The arrangement of chapters aims

to bring clarification on key issues permeating the disquisition of artistic

interweaving at present. The topics however, broaden to a long‐lived tradition of

creative merging, regarded from contemporary lenses and pioneering

hermeneutics.

Part I deals with an important production nowadays as is the art of book

illustration. Even if the painted image has at times suffered the imposition of

logocentrism, resulting even in iconophobia, the collaborative sisterhood between

literature and painting presents splendid instances from antiquity to the present.

Manuscript illumination is an early expression of that fusion. It lavishes examples

like the Persian miniatures of the Kalila wa Dimna fables (with resonant traditions

like the Hindu Panchatantra and Buddhist Jataka Tales), or Boccaccio’s Decameron

in a translation by Premierfait, illuminated by the Master of the City of Ladies. From

East to West, illuminators have attested the forceful acquiescence of painting,

stylized calligraphy and literature. Chapter two by Leyli Jamali examines that

word/image blend by elucidation of the sibling structures of miniature painting and

Persian literature, from classical times to the present. The analysis draws on

numerous schools and multifarious stages of evolution. It tracks a wide miscellany

of sources —from early masterpieces and grand national epics like Ferdowsi’s

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INTRODUCTION: LITERATURE, THE ARTS AND THE POETICS OF PERCOLATION

Shahnamed or Hafez’s Divan collection, to ‘new’ Schools like the Neo‐Herat/Neo‐

Safavid’s and virtuosos of contemporary miniature like master Mahmoud

Farshchian. Among compelling issues, the essay addresses the dexterous layering

and architectural evocation of stylized landscapes, asymmetry and cross‐sectional

spacing, or figural lifelikeness. These are features in the illuminations which

expand, complement or defy the rich world of signifiers in the sumptuous

collaboration of the twofold synthetic medium.

Still engaging with the illustrated page, chapter three by Lesley Clement

centers on a very different imaginative core. Her essay moves from the old ars

illuminandi into the no less tempting domain of recent visual literacies and the

colourful graphic environment of postmodern picture books for children. Dr. Seuss’

On Beyond Zebra serves to signal a main aim of the article, which is to explore the

beyond‐z slots (or sinuous ‘gaps of indeterminacy’) which remain open in the no

longer stable verbal and visual boundaries of the page. Within this genre, novel

framing devices conflate, juxtapose and even collapse the linear divisions of former

conventional models, generating unprecedented imagetexts. The article traces the

fluid liminal spaces amid the peculiar image‐word liaisons, which foster stimulating

reading and a varied network of interpretations. Optical and mental perusal are

also activated by the infants’ interanimating pursuit of decode, with potent

implications on cognition. The study further concerns with the label revision of this

postmodern genre which is known as illustrated story, iconotext, and more

favourably picturebook, amongst designations. The chapter addresses the

symbiotic collaboration often needed between literary authors and visual artists to

generate the resulting image/text composites. All in all, Clement’s essay reveals the

rich synergy existing today among writers, photographers, designers and the so‐

called, pictorializers.

Part II opens up to further visual realms and their interrelations with verse

and narrative. It specifically investigates the integration of painting, drawing and

photography in modernist poetry and hyperrealist fiction. In chapter four, Silvia

Ammary enhances an expressive chiasmus in the work of American poet and

painter E.E. Cummings, who often aligns spatiality with poetry and temporality with

painting, dislodging long‐held associations by means of crisscrossed

experimentalism. Chapter four seeks to investigate the influence on E.E.

Cummings’s picture‐poems of avant‐garde movements like Italian futurism or

Spanish cubism. Alongside the analysis of individual poems like “r‐p‐o‐p‐h‐e‐s‐s‐a‐g‐

r” or “l(a // le / af / fa // ll / s) / one / l // iness”, the scholar examines the visual

refinements that the American writer recuperates from modernist artists like

Cézanne or Picasso, and futurists like Joseph Stella or John Marin. Serpentine lines,

vertiginous curves and perspectival versatility are counted among the effects that

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assail the reader. Filmic flashes, puzzling orthography and directional signifiers

constitute some of the linguistic innovations which signal key incursions into the

new poetic syntaxes of the twentieth century. Overall, the article explores crucial

artistic expressions of the previous century, which superseded traditional

demarcations between drawing, painting and poetry. Indeed late seem the classical

nulla dies sine linea, the Renaissance contest ‘line versus colour’, or the Baroque

dispute of the arts. The new interart expressions bestow a sense of denaturalized

stylistics and novel vraisemblablisations, coupling the once split domains of shade,

picture and word.

Chapter five by María Jesús Hernáez examines how the artistic conceptualisation of hyperrealism (stemming from photorealism), transfers into the narrative territory of Canadian writer Lisa Moore. Her novel Alligator, set in contemporary St. John’s, portrays capitalism through magnifying narrative lenses and still‐life representation. By virtue of it, a glass jar, a Christmas tree, or a plastic bag may be enhanced in increasing proportions, in accord with hyperreal ‘pictorialism’. The book is also regarded as a cross‐sectional depiction of emotional climaxes, purloined from the myriad dramas of individual characters within the social tapestry of an unconventionally drawn Newfoundland. The essay explores the divergent photographic ethics of Susan Sontag or Jacques Rancière and sociologists of the psy sciences like Nicholas Rose or Charles Taylor, to reach the intimations between photography, narration, and human identity. It also puts in perspective the traditional modes to evoke still life through the figural vehicles of metaphor and allusion, with the new hyperrealist affiliations which rather work on amplification —granting even the tiniest object a rotund physicality. The study scopes hyperrealism as a dynamic mode which captures the objecs in movement, (whereby intensified close‐ups of water beads may act as surface vibrations, and white horses are not pictured statically but gallop through blizzards). In the final analysis, the essay evinces the similarities and departures of hyperrealism with a long history of ekphrasis, which participates of James Heffernan’s definition as “the verbal representation of visual representation” and consolidates new artistic intersections, such as mimetic verbal photographism.

Part III continues the dialogue between literature and the visual arts, and broadens the range to filmic, musical, and miscellaneous transfers. In chapter six, David Fishelov discusses the post‐biblical adaptations of the Samson‐and‐Delilah story in diverse artistic versions —pictorial, operatic, cinematic and novelistic. The painterly exegetics rely predominantly on the baroque imagination and reflect how diversely can the same thematic model shape on different canvasses. The scholar’s inquiry into the deeds of the Timnath wife as portrayed in the iconographic programmes of Rubens, Van Dyck or Rembrandt, reveals how differently can a paragonal motif be approached in the same representing medium (the painterly) in accord with each artist’s depiction. In this connection, Delilah appears variously

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modelled as a pietà‐like figure, tragic lover or conspirator, depending on the versions. The study also traces the scenic pathos which the woman in the valley of Sorek carries on stage (and alternatively off‐stage, through the praxis of its reception), as performed in the masterful aria versions by Shirley Verrett or Anna Larsson. The investigation into the rhetorical possibilities of the text rendered as song culminates with the musical analysis of Tom Jones’ popular Delilah. The chapter addresses related considerations on the discursive tropes behind the artistic metamorphoses, mostly conveyed by metonymy and metaphor. Adding to this, Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s adaptation is held amongst the most incisively provocative to date, demonstrating how the novelistic form can redimension the biblical territory represented, conferring it a twentieth‐century secular tilt. Cecil B. DeMille’s epic film gives yet another twist to Jabotinsky’s transposition, sponsoring mid‐twentieth century American ethos and Hollywood’s melodramatic air. On the whole, the essay proposes that the aesthetic translation of a verbal artwork falls back on not only the specific potencies (and constraints) of the different metamorphosing media, but also on the particular choices of the transforming artists and the distinctively relevant era.

The cinematic adaptations of literary masterpieces are a favourite concern of contemporary criticism relating to the relationships between the arts. It is less customary however, to find a literary narrative which has been subsequently adapted as a painting, then later transformed into a film, with discernible theatrical features. Elizabeth Drayson’s chapter revolves around these crucial crossroads. Her analysis centres upon the sixteenth‐century Castilian narrative La Vida del Lazarillo de Tormes (reputed to have pioneered the Picaresque genre in Europe), comparing the longaniza episode with a painterly nineteenth century version by Francisco de Goya (listed, 1812), and the twenty‐first century screen translation by Fernando Fernán Gómez —Goya awarded for Best Script Adaptation. The discussion has a bidirectional focus, disclosing the reciprocal ways in which the source and target domains (literature and the threefold pictorial, filmic and stagelike re‐presentations) bring hermeneutic clarification to each other. It shows how the poverty‐stricken arena of the sixteenth‐century narrative is brought alive through the earthen colours of the canvas, its warm underpaintings and dramatic chiaroscuros; how the Renaissance text gets transposed as 2001 movie take, through contrapuntal lighting, costume design adaptation, and reworking of the plot. It explores the ways in which the comic artfulness of its rascally protagonist Lázaro in the pseudo‐autobiography is set to stage, by means of performative film patterns, enlightening flashbacks, and dramatic solo acting. Elizabeth Drayson’s chapter engages with the multimodal idiosyncrasies which make each art specific, and at the same time nuances the intriguing percolations which allow each medium (be it painterly, filmic or theatrical) to capture the essence of the original work of art (in this case, the picaresque text).

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Part IV closes with Stephen Butler’s chapter on the theatrical transfers discernible in the oeuvre of Irish novelist and Man Booker Prize winner, John Banville. The study considers the fictional merging of various art fields like painting, music, dance and architecture. It also conspicuously centers on the debt to the Commedia Dell'Arte and the ways in which this improvisational form of theatre, popular in sixteenth‐century Italy, permeates Banville’s fiction in novels like The Sea, Eclipse, or Athena, from a larger corpus which the essay examines. The analysis establishes connections with the stylized world of the fête galante, as well as with the the conceitful motif of the mask. Also, with the playful impersonations of ‘Pierrots’, ‘Arlecchinos’ and ‘Colombines’ which can be traced in Banville’s characters, embroidering the themes of love, deception, erotics or voyeurism. The chapter disentangles leading conceptual axes within Banville’s fiction, like the psychological rhetoric of ‘deindividuation’, the Nietzchean innuendoes concealed in the mask, or the influence of Diderot’s Paradox of Acting. The study moves from the metaphysical and existential focus to more empirical grounds of the Commedia, which envision theater as street entertainment, somersault, and improvised road scenario. In so doing, Butler’s research foregrounds the narrative conversions of what is today a discernible line of theatrical innovation, which has rescued traditional scenic forms, implemented by directors like Edward Gordon in England, Vsevolod Meyerhold in Russia, Jacques Copeau in Paris, and companies like the San Francisco Mime Troupe.

3. A Luminous Interart World: The Literature of Seán Virgo

An overview of Seán Virgo’s fictional universe may alight key fusions

between literature and a myriad of arts and serve as guide to introduce the

thematic axes of the following chapters. His oeuvre, recognized by the CBC, BBC

and National Magazine awards for short fiction and poetry (and yet “criminally

under‐recognized”, as Brian Brett has recently stated), is a magnificent interartistic

lattice. His narrative reveals prodigal ways in which visual, performative, musical

and intermedial artworks integrate into literature, illustrating central aspects of

contemporary interart poetics. It also shows the innovative nature of ekphrastic

discourse nowadays, which broadens out from the classical ut pictura poesis into

new artistic alignments, embracing the conjunctions of literature with painting but

also with postmodern photography, film travelling, aboriginal art, or musical

exotism, amongst a rich array of creative expressions. The literary goal remains the

same: to render the art object vivid (as if sub oculos subiectio), as did the

Hermogenic enargeia or the Quintilian evidentia. But new interart connections are

emerging, fostered by a worldwide net of disciplines which braid aesthetically and

pave the way towards new rhetorical formulations, figural inventiveness, and

multimodal comparisons.

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In Seán Virgo’s literature the visual arts gravitate with bright pictorialism: his

tales include watercolors, landscape painting, portraiture, Tyrian frescoes,

hieroglyphs, cave painting, etc. His short fiction reveals a fascination for Flemish art

which becomes visible in the recent story “Ciao, Father Time”, where the whole

spatial illusion is settled upon the translation on the page of 17th century models of

architecture painting and Dutch perspectikas. The narrative technique shows the

anamorphic ways in which the architecturally scaled interiors of Flemish canvasses by

Johannes Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch accommodate to the black‐and‐white

territory of signifiers granting full atmospheric reliance and illusional puncture (fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Pieter de Hooch. Couple with a Parrot. c. 1675. Wallraf‐Richartz‐Museum, Cologne.

“When J.J. looked in at the office door, Mr Dyce was standing by the window, gazing down at the yard and the wet streets beyond and so absorbed by his thoughts that the room lay in slumber behind him… He had watched a long time, without moving his eyes, as you’d enter the general world of a

Flemish painting, till at last he had fixed on one detail, in the foreground, close to his face through the rain‐mottled panes.”

“Through the window, by the tawny interior light, the family was caught, as though by a Vermeer or de Hooch. The father’s hands raised in appeal, the mother’s stern, highlit features, the indifferent girl

in her bathrobe. Mr Dyce stared in as he passed, with compassion and envy.” (Seán Virgo. “Ciao, Father Time”, Begging Questions, 2006)

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Seán Virgo’s stories may enliven the infatuating scenario of Parisian

femmes by evoking Modigliani’s uniquely erotic female portraits through fictional

focalization (fig. 2), or show aerial views of a rising sun in Montparnasse by recall of

Cézanne’s patched roofscapes (fig. 3). In a way, it can be said that his iridescent

prose forms an ekphrastic Catalogue Raisonné. It is also a study in changes which

equates the potency of words with the Leonardo‐like acrobatics of sketch, ink and

charcoal. The ancient totem —be it mortuary pole, sculpture, or lime spatula—,

records deep spiritual dimensions of primeval cultures both in his verse and fiction

—Irish, Melanesian, native Canadian (Kwakiutl, Tsimshian, Tlingit, and very

intensely, Haida (fig. 4)).

Fig. 2. Amedeo Modigliani. Nude Sitting on a

Divan (La Belle Romaine). 1917. Private Collection.

Fig. 3. Paul Cézanne. L’Estaque with Red Roofs. c. 1885. Private collection.

“He had always been a small boy in Paris. At sixteen he had spent afternoons over coffees and ordinaires. Watching the whores through some Modigliani filter of glamour. And had had his first woman that way… That armour of innocence had never quite left him.” (Seán Virgo. “Guess who I saw in Paris”, White Lies and Other Fictions,

1980)

“He slipped from the iron‐framed bed over to the window and pushed out the heavy wooden

shutters. Taking in the rooftops of Montparnasse —across in the angling sunlight and still as he remembered it; a separate, spreading world panelled in old red and blue and grey like a fiction from Cézanne’s palette knife.” (Seán

Virgo. “Guess”, White Lies, 1980)

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Fig. 4. Haida artist, Bill Reid. Children of the Raven.

“On the wall, above the vinyl seats and formica table tops, is a picture of the Creation. It is in felt appliqué, white and black and red, a quaint and clumsy rendering twelve feet long of the Raven,

hatching first man and first woman from the clamshell out on North Beach.” (Seán Virgo. “Les Rites” (winner of the CBC literary competition, short story, 1979), White Lies and Other Fictions, 1980)

Book illustration becomes another kernel in Virgo’s creation. It evinces the

collaborative ways in which authors nowadays work closely with visual artists,

rendering insightful image/text configurations. The picturebook has full force in

Virgo’s literature, from Harold Boyd’s dreamlike drawings to his early little book

Vagabonds, to recent graphic stories like Eggs in a Field (which fuses the fairy‐led

rhythms of Irish storytelling with original drypoint prints by Ryan Price). His

children’s iconotexts often dislodge conventional prodesse et delectare formulas

and implement reading density, adult cognition, and problematization of

contemporary issues —like human foibles, moral collapse or the ecological

destruction of wildlife. Experimental photography is also traceable in the fictional

refractions. Seán Virgo, who has praised the revolutionary modern photographer

Diane Arbus in a recent conversation, also conspicuously explores the dynamics of

cut and shot through his verbal aesthetics. His is a literature of surprising angles

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and penetrating snapshot. One which can zoom into a cedar stump on close

camera focus or record a miniature forest of moss and crimson elf‐ caps, as in

Wormwood (fig. 5).

Fig. 5. Diane Arbus. Self‐portrait.

“The boy was focusing his camera on the cedar stump… In the lens’s close‐up he saw the miniature forest of moss as his eyes would never have: orange and crimson elf‐caps stood up at him, the mats and curlicues beneath them were an endless labyrinth. The scale of things made him almost dizzy.”

(Seán Virgo. “Wormwood”, Wormwood, 1989)

The visual arts are eloquently intertwined with the performing arts in his

fiction. Virgo’s early craft as a playwright resulted in productions based on Dylan

Thomas’ works, Albert Camus’ or Noh drama classics, among others. His adaptation

of the medieval play by Kan’ami, Sotoba Komachi, was set to stage by means of

inventive rehearsal, ingenious stylization and utter respect for the mask, bridging

synergically past and present. The imprint of the theatre becomes visible in the

play‐acting of his fiction, which often becomes a live choreography of mimicry and

masks —Tibetan or Japanese (able to turn an adolescent hunt for roaches in a

farcical mime kabuki, in Selakhi) (fig. 6); also expressionist and pantagruelesque

(allusive of Edvard Munch’s psychodrama or James Ensor’s street carnivals, in

Begging Questions). His tales may similarly draw on Commedia dell’Arte types,

endowing his nostalgic universe of romance with the funambular presence of blue

Picassian Pierrots, dexterous marionettes, graceful dancers or motley jesters.

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Fig. 6. Utagawa Toyoharu. View of a Kabuki Theater, 1770.

“So, in the white silence, Darien begins his ritual; rehearsing the nine masks of his kabuki‐mime...

Humbaba... Baluba... Chipwingo... Echoatlan... Tanuki... Reynaldo... Krop‐Hedin... Shuleimon... A rasp comes like an express train under the tonsils. Quietus, then the mask of peace —Mortali. Darien greets Darien in the reversing glass; they dance a small jig of release, take a bow.” (Seán Virgo.

Selakhi, 1987)

Due to his experience with the art of the stage, Virgo envisions the

cinemascope often theatrically. The scenic quality of the screen is surely a reason

of his professed admiration for Ingmar Bergmann’s films, like The Seventh Seal

which partly inspired his medieval story Vagabonds. In this sense, his fictions often

incorporate either staged elements or careful tracking which make them look so

like a film, as the prison décor in “The Hanging Man”, with its white stone and black

iron corridors and the steps to the last room, prior to execution. Virgo’s characters

cast as movie soldiers, movie Indians, movie heroes… inspired by beer commercials,

horror movies, or heartbreaking film documentaries —like Davey Hammond’s Falls

Roads which resonates in the forceful tale “Dusty Bluebells”. Throughout,

Hollywood fillums are echoed, with erotic dancers starring as Hollywood pouts in

Waking in Eden, or references to the visual industry of poster art in movie classics

like Ben Hur or Spartacus (fig. 7).

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Fig. 7. Ben‐Hur. Original Film Poster by Reynold Brown.

“I always saw a wall, a cliff face of figures and letters and images… all the plastic flash and offal of my culture and my life, the great whoredom of material distraction, looming there like a totalitarian monument, like the lettered cliffs in the posters of Hollywood epics —Ben Hur or Spartacus or, for that matter, The Life of Brian.” (Seán Virgo. “The Scream of the Butterfly”, Begging Questions, 2006)

Music also plays as a pervasive backdrop on the scene and the narrative. It

chorally encompassed Komachi’s entry to the Shiday rhythms in the play, or Mr

Dyce’s singing of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado in “Ciao, Father Time”. This tale,

which belongs to the recent collection Begging Questions, also recalls the jazz and

blues of Billie Holliday or Dinah Washington, scoping the psycho‐emotive swings of

the fictional peripetia. Virgo’s taste for music is boundless. His poetic ear is lyrically

attuned to the tonal variations of Homeric dactyls as it is to native Anglosaxon

alliteration but also literally, to the buzzsaw arpeggios of electric guitars, Satie’s

piano, Teddy Wilson’s jazz, or Mendelssohn’s overtures, from an opulent corpus.

The integration of music in his fiction, regardless of its belonging to a non‐

representational and less decipherable sign system (amply studied at present by

critics like Claus Clüver and Siglind Bruhn), does not deter the author from

introducing it in fluid narrative ways: by means of emplotting, intertextual quoting,

description of extra‐musical stimuli on characters, etc. Also distinctly, through the

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perhaps less familiar integration of visual partitures into the laconic body text of his

short fictions or by bewildering cognitive associations in his novel, which reveal the

interweaving of key semantics through the subtextual merging of notes and

signifiers (fig. 8).

Fig. 8. Seán Virgo, Selakhi, 1987.

4. Concluding Commentaries

The preliminary considerations reveal the profuse global interconnections

which mould the contemporary discourse of the arts and its intriguing percolations

into literature. One aim of this volume is to convey the spirit of the age, showcasing

novel cores and new interart correspondences in the historical context. It also

envisions the intensely dialogic nature of new interartistic approaches, which often

come out as products of collaborative artistry and aesthetic consensus among

writers and graphic artists, photographers, musicologists, filmmakers, playwrights,

etc. The reflections focus on affinity but also acknowledge the issue of boundaries

and limits within each field of representation, attesting the specific tools, resources

and rhetorical suitability of each medium to effect the artistic conversions. Above

all, the volume seeks to highlight emerging projections in the current discussion of

literature and the arts. To that effect, it embraces a venerable history of ekphrasis,

yet also emphasizes pioneering fusions and artistic incursions which have

transcended previous modes of enargeia, giving rise to new multimodal

convergences and opening up new avenues of exploration.

hapter one - unirioja · of sources —from early masterpieces and grand national epics like...

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