Libro Definitivo

MIMESIS
INTERNATIONAL
LITERATURE
n. 2
FICTIONAL ARTWORKS
Literary Ékphrasis and
the Invention of Images
Edited by
Valeria Cammarata and Valentina Mignano
MIMESIS
INTERNATIONAL
This book is published with the support of the University of Palermo, “Department
of Cultures and Society”, PRIN fund 2009, “Letteratura e cultura visuale”, Prof.
M. Cometa.
© 2016 – Mimesis International

www.mimesisinternational.com
e-mail: [email protected]
Isbn: 9788869770586
Book series: Literature n. 2
© MIM Edizioni Srl

P.I. C.F. 02419370305
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface 9
Michele Cometa
Daniela Barcella
Beings of Language, Beings of Desire:
for a Psychoanalytical Reading of
Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus 11
Michele Bertolini
The Word That You Can See:
Visual and Scenic Strategies in La Religieuse by Diderot 25
Valeria Cammarata
The Impossible Portrait.
Georges Perec and His Condottiere 43
Clizia Centorrino
The Dream-Image in Gradiva’s Gait
from Pompeii to Marrakesh 59
Roberta Coglitore
Moving the Limits of Representation:
Invention, Sequel and Continuation in Buzzati’s Miracles 75
Duccio Colombo
Can Paintings Talk?
An Ékphrastic Polemic in Post-Stalin Russia 87
Giuseppe Di Liberti
Homo Pictor: Ékphrasis as a Frontier of the Image
in Thomas Bernhard’s Frost 113
Mariaelisa Dimino
Between Ontophany and Poiesis:
Hugo Von Hofmannsthal’s Dancing Statues 127
Floriana Giallombardo
The Optical Wonders of an Eighteenth-Century
Microscopist: Geometric Crystals and Gothic Rêveries 137
Tommaso Guariento
Description and Idolatry of the Images:
Roberto Calasso’s Ékphrasis 161
Giuseppe Leone
Awake Your Faith: When Reality Reproduces
the Image of Itself. The Winter’s Tale (V, 1-3) 177
Mirko Lino
The Body Artist by Don DeLillo: Word, Image and
(In)Describability of the Body in Post-Modern Art 197
Danilo Marisclaco
Pazienza in His Limits:
Living Experience and Iconotextual Practice 213
Erica Mazzucato
Parise and the Artisti: The Flash of Description 221
Valentina Mignano
Pictorial Writing:
Intermediality and Ékphrasis in L’Œuvre by Émile Zola 233
Maurizio Pirro
Semantics of the Painted Image
in Hugo Von Hofmannsthal’s Tod Des Tizian 249
Mirela Purgar
Berlin Alexanderplatz:
Images as Film and Images as Narrative Text.
The Novelistic Procedures of Alfred Döblin
in the Light of Bakhtin’s Theory of Intertextuality 261
Nicola Ribatti
The Word and the Ghost: Ékphrasis and Photography
in Spione by Marcel Beyer 289
Maria Rizzarelli
«Actual Images or Word Images»:
Fake Paintings and Nameless Painters
in Leonardo Sciascia’s Novels 301
Alessandro Rossi
The Torch and the Mask: Illustrative Captions for Thought.
An Exemplary Pair of Pictures by Paolo De Matteis 317
Sergio Vitale
The Strange Case of Thomas Leave:
Appendage of Journey in India by Guido Gozzano 333
PREFACE
Michele Cometa
Fictional Artworks aims to introduce some considerations on

the links between literary texts and visual media. It is a matter
of carrying on a research about the transformations that the
latter has produced on the former and, vice versa, about the
contribution that literature has given – at both the poetological
and thematological levels – to the constitution of the cultural and
social paradigms that preside over the genesis of images. This
investigation starts from the ever-increasing role that images
have “for” literature, “in” literature and within the “literary
system”, a process obviously descending from the resumption
of the twentieth-century debate on the “wechselseitige Erhellung
der Künste”, the reciprocal illumination of arts.
The articles here collected come from the investigations of a
team focusing on the (artistic) creative process and on the cultural
dynamics that underlay the balance/objection relations between
literary texts and images.
In the following pages particular attention is paid to the
description of images (ékphrasis), which ended up constituting
an autonomous field of studies. Ékphrasis has found a fertile
terrain in classical studies in Italy (Settis, 1999) and in art
history, eventually developing within the field of literary theory
(Cometa, 2004, 2005 and 2012; Segre, 2003; Mengaldo 2005)
and aesthetics (Härle, 2005). Another important cornerstone of
research is constituted by the Anglo-Saxon studies, above all
American ones, on classical ékphrasis, with particular attention
to the incunabula of descriptions, from Homer to Philostratus,
to Callistratus and Lucian, a tradition that was grafted onto
the dawning one of American “visual studies” interested in a
10 Fictional Artworks
cultural study of ékphrasis, as in the case of W. J. T. Mitchell

and J. Heffernan, who have dwelt on the political and gender
implications of classical descriptions (Mitchell 1994; Heffernan,
1993). Also fundamental is, in this context, the work of Umberto
Eco, whose Les Sémaphores sous la pluie (2002) is endowed
with the enormous value of the horizon of reception, of that
sort of “pact” that the one who describes has to establish with
the spectator, that kind of interpretative “participation” that
Eco places at the centre of his typology of hypotyposis. The
“presence” of the spectator and that of the picture are, in fact,
essential aspects of modern ékphrasis, as, obviously, its absence.
Attention towards particular technical features of ékphrastic
theory is also relevant in this book. Several essays diffusely
deal with the levels of reality that ékphrasis establishes (from
the “mimetic” ékphrasis, based on an artistic object that really
exists or has existed, to the “notional” one, that which “creates”
its own object). Fictional Artworks’ essays investigate ékphrastic
modalities in a wide range of cultural-artistic fields: from
Psychoanalysis to the History of Science, from Visual Arts
(sculpture, classic and modern painting, cinema and photography)
to travel literature and comics. “Corporeal turn” is also one of
the main themes of this volume (particularly in its ability to give
rise to real ékphrastic performances) as well as creativity as a
liminal zone between storytelling and pictorial image. The thread
of this collection of essays is however the relationship between
the unspeakable and the representable: a conceptual starting point
in the attempt to investigate the “limits of representation” and
the modalities through which literature – together with artistic
practices – tries to overcome them.
The starting idea for this book was born on the occasion of
the international conference Beyond the Limits of Representation
(Palermo, September 2012), in which all the authors laid the
groundwork about the modalities through which visual media
influence narrative plots and forms, and viceversa.
BEINGS OF LANGUAGE, BEINGS OF DESIRE:
FOR A PSYCHOANALYTICAL READING OF
RAYMOND ROUSSEL’S LOCUS SOLUS
Daniela Barcella
De se taire parfois riche est l’occasion.

(R. Roussel, Nouvelles impressions d’Afrique)
There are many anecdotes surrounding the extravagant and

enigmatic Raymond Roussel, emphasizing the number of rules
he followed and the almost obsessive care he took in his self-
worship. It is said that he would only wear the same socks once,
the same shirt twice, and the same ties seven times. I believe,
however, that his most interesting habit was the following: when
travelling, Raymond Roussel wished to catch no glimpses of
the places he was reaching and would always draw the curtains
when on board a vehicle. To those who would ask him the
reason for this, he would answer: he did it so as not to lose his
imagination. Indeed, Roussel devoted his whole literary work to
the imagination as a creative faculty; and within this oeuvre, a
crucial role is played by the work revealingly entitled Locus Solus
(1914). Here, through the osmotic relation between imagination
and language, both visual and verbal, the author created an
extraordinary wonderland comprised of amazing imaginary
devices, highly precise machines that may well be described as
installations, and contemporary artworks based on the blending
of natural and artificial, life and automatism. The first-person
narrator and protagonist, along with a few close friends, wander
through this vast solitary place, a genuine musée en plein air.
They are accompanied by the master-inventor who – surrounded
by his pupils – here leisurely carries out scientific research, as
well as experiments through which he creates extraordinary
devices. This man, Martial Cantarel (clearly Raymond Roussel’s
double), is described as a champion of words with a warm and

mellow voice. In this place everything becomes word, everything
is created and lives through language. It is therefore a locus solus
in the sense of a solitary and unique place, as well as a purely
imaginary one, resting on an underlying impossibility: that of
encountering reality (and hence of existing) in a different place
from that of linguistic invention.
Michel Foucault – who wrote a book on Roussel describing
him as “a secret room” because of his intimate approach to the
latter’s work – regarded this locus solus as the space of non-
sense bordering on madness.1 The link between this literary work
and madness cannot be viewed in purely pathographic terms.
In this respect, the close interrelation between psychoanalysis
and the literary and artistic work can provide some interesting
interpretative keys for grasping the kind of impossibility that lies
at the basis of the linguistic machines or “beings of language” (as
Foucault himself termed them) in Locus Solus. That is to say, it
can help to indirectly grasp the kind of impossibility that Roussel
faced throughout his life, down to his death, which occurred in
mysterious circumstances (probably as the result of a suicide
attempt) in Palermo on a warm summer night in 1933.
Inflated Linguistic Machines
Roussel describes the ingenious machines that fill the vast

Locus Solus park with the utmost attention to detail, illustrating
their functioning and mechanisms, along with the history and
meaning of all the various characters which they include –
humans, animals and robots. The processes governing the
movement of these mechanical organisms are complex, based
on scientific discoveries, which Cantarel takes great pride in.
The description provided is therefore a highly accurate one, so
overflowing with details as to appear inflated, excessive and
1 Michel Foucault, Raymond Roussel, ed. by Massimiliano Guareschi (Verona:

Ombre Corte, 2001).
D. Barcella - Beings of Language, Beings of Desire 13
repetitive. Take one of the most fascinating devices described: a

huge diamond that, upon closer inspection, the astonished visitors
discover to be a huge container filled with glittering water.2 At
its centre, fully submerged and dressed in flesh-coloured tights,
is a charming girl called Faustine who takes up sculpturesque
poses and moves her long hair, plucking it like the strings of an
instrument to produce harmonious sounds. Next to her a pinkish,
hairless creature looking like a cat swims, while suspended from
a thread. It is an insubstantial object: «the internal remains of a
human face, with no traces of bone, flesh or skin left»3 – clearly
a brain with muscles and nerves attached that nourish some
tissues, supported by a carcass, in such a way as to reproduce its
original human form. It is later revealed that this is what is left of
Danton’s head, which Cantarel managed to acquire after various
adventures. All around tiny individuals who look like Cartesian
devils, in seven groups, move up and down with a regular but
non-synchronised movement, creating what Roussel describes
as “underground artworks”. After having presented all these
characters, the master focuses on each one of them individually;
he tells their story in detail and explains what the curious
figures represent, illustrating in particular their sophisticated
automatic mechanisms. The centrepiece of narrative, however, is
constituted by the girl and the cat (both of whom are alive) along
with the brain, which are what arouse the greatest curiosity. How
can two living creatures remain immersed in water? Actually,
Cantarel explains, this is a special water he has invented, called
aqua micans: through some powerful oxygenation, it enables
any living creature to live and breathe in it. Even more amazing
is what happens to Danton’s brain: upon Cantarel’s signal, the
cat – electrically charged – touches the cerebral matter through
a metal cone; once electrically charged in turn, the brain starts
producing some nervous impulses that move the muscles and
nerves. The encephalon then starts speaking. And what does
2 Raymond Roussel, Locus Solus, followed by Come ho scritto alcuni miei

libri, ed. by Paola Dècina Lombardi (Torino: Einaudi, 1982), pp. 52-95.
3 Roussel, pp. 53-54.
it say? “Under the mnemonic influence of old habits”, it starts

repeating incoherent fragments of public speeches once delivered
by the eloquent orator, and which now casually and automatically
resurface through his cerebral memory.
Danton’s brain has thus been preserved and it is mechanically
and fictitiously brought back to life through the memories of his
speeches. All Cantarel’s mechanisms, in fact, seek to preserve,
embalm or resurrect through mechanical reanimation or magical
liquids (later on, Cantarel presents other substances he has
invented, vitalium and resurrectine, capable of temporarily
reanimating dead people). The whole park, then, is a second,
artificial nature with which Cantarel surrounds himself in an
attempt to bring what is dead back to life.
This attempt, however, is necessarily doomed to failure:
as Foucault has emphasised, what machines engender is not
resurrections but only mechanical and automatic repetitions,
which is to say a proliferation of doubles (Cartesian devils,
robots, the splitting of life) that in multiplying paradoxically
make the place more and more solus, since it becomes steeped
in failure, impossibility and death. Foucault also stresses how
the configuration of these devices mirrors the narrative method
adopted by Roussel, who creates these imaginary machines by
using a repetitive and overflowing language: he describes them
by fragmenting them into all their various mechanisms with an
excessive listing of details, in order to tell us, later, how they
were conceived, what they represent and the secret way they
run, often through a cyclical narrative structure.4 Language too is
thus intended to contribute to the process of preservation through
the endless repetition of what is said and of its signs; through
its superabundance, this reveals the underlying impossibility on
which it rests.
4 Michel Foucault, La superficie delle cose, in Raymond Roussel, pp. 121-45.

Actually, even before Foucault, Michel Carrouges had spoken of a mise en
abyme between the object described and the narrative in relation to Roussel’s
work; see Franca Franchi, ‘Ballons célibataires’, Cahiers de littérature
française, 5 (2007), 81-90.
Just as Cantarel’s resurrection machines are destined to fail,

so the repetitive and inflated language describing them is never
bound to make contact with the reality it describes. More precisely,
the extremely detailed technical descriptions we are offered do
not help the narrative unfold: they provide excess information,
pure dépense that is perfectly unproductive and an end to itself,
since the devices remain cut off from one another and utterly
infeasible. Language rules supreme here, but in a self-referential
manner, for in this purely imaginary reality words never make
contact with things, and the verbal world, which appears to show
itself, is constantly dispersed:
Everything is luminous in Roussel’s descriptions. […] Yet this

inexhaustible wealth of what is visible has the (correlative and contrary)
property of extending along an infinite line […]. We never come to an
end; the essential perhaps has not been seen yet or, rather, we do not
know whether we have seen it, whether its turn has already come in this
incessant proliferation.5
The theatrical adaptations of the work which Roussel attempted

to make did not achieve the hoped result, probably confirming
his fears. For this very reason, the author never showed much
liking for the Surrealists, who were nonetheless interested in his
work because of his taste for the concealed, the obsession with
the invisible, and the reference to an external and mysterious
reality. Roussel’s language, however, is incapable of transcending
itself: it refers to nothing except what is within itself. So behind
the linguistic gloss there is no hidden meaning to be revealed,
only the hard core of the impossibility to state everything, to
capture and control nature, and to preserve life and memories.
The Locus Solus – both as an imaginary place and as a literary
work – expresses not so much mysteriousness (something dear
to Breton and Aragon), as the sense of the absence of the work
itself which Bataille described: if language does not transcend
itself, the work can only exist as a work on the impossibility
5 Foucault, La superficie delle cose, pp. 133-34. All translations from French
and Italian are mine.
of the work.6 No mystery then, only an explosive encounter –

through linguistic excess – with the inner limits of language and
the non-sense it encloses. The trip through the wonder-filled park,
which the protagonists make under the guidance of Cantarel-
Roussel, cannot be interpreted as an initiatory journey leading to
a formative revelation, since what is engendered in the characters
– as much as in the readers – is rather the constant amazement in
the face of machines serving no purpose. They can only be found
here, in the land of imagination.
The Empty Letter
Locus Solus represents the rule of pure logos over imaginary

creatures. These spring from language and through language are
controlled and set within a tight network of works in which nothing
is left to chance, or pathos, or feelings. Everything is rational,
functional, and controlled. Through the perspective of Lacanian
psychoanalysis we can see Locus Solus as being governed by
what is defined as the Other of the language that comes before
us and, through its laws, creates a symbolic grid enclosing all
subjects. The unconscious itself, according to Lacan’s take on
Freudian theory, is not irrational and chaotic, but structured like
a language; as such, it adheres to the two fundamental laws of
language: metaphor and metonymy.7 Metaphorical condensation
enables the emergence of meaning, while metonymic sliding
enables its constant subtraction; yet, metaphor and metonymy are
still the determinations triggering the function of the signifier.8
6 George Bataille, L’esperienza interiore (Bari: Dedalo, 1978), also quoted in

Marino Guareschi, L’opera segreta, in Michel Foucault, Raymond Roussel,
p. 24.
7 See especially Jaques Lacan, Funzione e campo della parola e del linguaggio in
psicoanalisi, in Id., Scritti, ed. by Giacomo B. Contri (Torino: Einaudi, 1974),
vol. I. pp. 230-316, and Jaques Lacan, ‘L’istanza della lettera nell’inconscio o la
ragione dopo Freud’, in Jaques Lacan, Scritti, vol. I, pp. 501-02.
8 On psychoanalytic account of rhetoric and its implications for literary texts,
see Massimo Recalcati, Il miracolo della forma: Per un’estetica psicoanalitica
(Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 2007), pp. 190-209.
According to Lacan, meaning is not produced – as Saussure would

argue – by the articulation between signifier and signified, but
by a concatenation of signifiers, which in their endless flow can
only provisionally become interlocked, engendering a temporary
capitonnage (pinning down) of meaning. Saussure’s notion of
sign as the arbitrary connection between signifier and signified
is therefore overturned, as it is the myth of the “full word” that
engenders meaning, enabling the subject to find fulfilment.
Reality is caught within the meshes of language, formed by an
ongoing metonymic sliding that prevents any final affirmation
of signification and that makes each subject a severed, split and
divided one, doomed to utter an “empty word” which is invariably
deficient and removed from meaning.
This conception of language is extremely useful in order to
understand Roussel’s work. In this concept we certainly find an
exaltation of the “language” god9 in which Roussel has always
had an unwavering faith, although in the sense of a metonymic
language based on the endless sliding of signifiers. Roussel
himself reveals the linguistic method he adopted for Locus
Solus and other books he wrote in a posthumously published
text entitled How I Wrote Certain of My Books. In this revealing
text, the author exposes the mystery of his method, where by
“mystery” we have to understand a purely “operative” mystery,
not a secret concealed behind the writer’s words. Just from the
beginning, the author states his intentions and describes the
nature of his method:
I have always been meaning to explain the way in which I came to

write certain of my books (Impressions d’Afrique, Locus Solus, L’Etoile
au Front and La Poussière de Soleils). It involved a very special method.
(…) I chose two almost identical words (reminiscent of metagrams).
For example, billard [billiard table] and pillard [plundered]. To these I
added similar words capable of two different meanings, thus obtaining
9 This definition (“il dio-linguaggio”) is provided by Giovanni Macchia in his

article ‘L’ultima macchina di Roussel ovvero la luce, l’estasi e il sangue’, in
Atti relativi alla morte di Raymond Roussel, ed. by Leonardo Sciascia
(Palermo: Sellerio, 1979), pp. 55-81.
two almost identical phrases. (…) The two phrases found, it was a case of
writing a story which could begin with the first and end with the latter.10
Roussel’s texts, therefore, derived from essentially phonetic

language games in which allophone words, differing by only one
phoneme, give rise to ever new and unexpected meanings. First,
then, come phonetic combinations, tiny differences in a signifier
engendering words and sentences that would be repeated, with
the décalage of their differences, through a circular return which
represents a return to something that is both the same and different.
Ultimately this method is related to rhyming, since «in both
cases there is unforeseen creation due to phonic combinations»,11
blending the homophony of language with the semantic splitting
of words and sentences. This mechanism – Roussel explains –
was later further developed: «The process evolved/moved and
I was led to take an unspecified sentence, of which I drew from
the images by dislocating it, a little as if it had been a question
of extracting some from the drawings of rebus».12 In this case,
what is produced is a genuine breakdown of word into several
words preserving some assonance with the former but referring
to different images, in such a way as to create an equation of facts
to be logically solved. Parallels emerge between sentences that
are only apparently casual and automatic; a series of images then
springs which are centred around word games, i.e. language with
its shifting signifiers. This is the creative mechanism that lies at
the basis of the imaginary world of Locus Solus.
Michel Leiris, a friend and admirer of Roussel’s, has provided
what is arguably the most complete overview of this method by
dividing it into three phases: the fashioning of double entendres,
the creation of a logical thread bringing together all unusual and
dissimilar elements, and finally the formulation of these relations
through an extremely rigorous text. According to Leiris, through
this method Roussel created «a special world that takes the place
of the ordinary one», which is to say myths – transpositions into
10 Roussel, Come ho scritto alcuni miei libri, p. 265.

dramatic action of what is essentially a linguistic phenomenon:

«a method of inspiration, a way of stirring the imagination,
something essentially active and not – as is all too often
erroneously believed – a fixed rule for production, or indeed an
aesthetic canon».13
At this stage, within this imaginary proliferation, we perceive
something that puts up some resistance and escapes the linguistic
grid. The perfectly constructed language that engenders machines/
works of art always proves itself to be inadequate with respect to
reality it is intended to represent. The imagery eludes complete
symbolic control and manifests its imaginative power – in this
case, the idea of imagery as stabilizing mirror identification, as
conceived by Lacan himself. The images fashioned by Roussel
are based on language and yet elude it, enclosed as they are
within their land of pure imagination that denies any relation
with reality. Words never establish contact with things. What we
have is no longer an endless sliding of signifiers: the provisional
capitonnage of meaning now gives way to an absence of
meaning, to emptiness and non-sense. Ultimately, Locus Solus
is nothing but a grand construction resting on an inner deficiency
of language itself; so the extreme linguistic exercise which
Roussel applies to an unproductive nothing reveals an elusive
and unnameable element at the heart of the incompleteness and
inadequacy of writing.
It is Lacan’s teaching, in fact, that points us in this direction.
Setting off from a stress on the signifying order, Lacan reached
an awareness of the existence of asemantic signifiers (which he
enunciated using the categories of “letters” and “marks” of the
subject), and then – especially from Seminar 7 onwards – the
idea of the absence of signification and an emphasis on non-
sense as an “extimate” element, i.e. one at the same internal and
external to symbolic structures.14 In other words, the signifying
mesh represented by the Other of language proves itself to be
13 Michel Leiris, Roussel & Co. (Paris: Fata Morgana-Fayard, 1998), pp. 216-17.
14 Jacques Lacan, Il Seminario. Libro VII: L’etica della psicoanalisi, 1959-1960,
ed. by Giacomo Contri (Torino: Einaudi, 2003).
structurally deficient, for a hole in it is made by what belongs

to the order of non-knowledge and escapes symbolisation. This
is what Lacan succinctly enunciates when he claims that «there
is no Other of the Other», i.e. that there is no external signifier
that may lend structural legitimacy to language, which as such
is deficient and limited. Literary works and artworks in general
make this loss of meaning detectable:
This means that the statute governing artworks is not merely based
on the laws of language, metaphor and metonymy, i.e. that it does not
express homology exclusively through the idea of the unconscious
structured as a language; but that it also introduces the traumatic
dimension of the limit of language, of the encounter with reality as that
which pierces the symbolic screen of language.15
What we have, therefore, is no longer an endless opening up of

meaning through always provisional acts of capitonnage, but an
encounter with the opaque inertia at the heart of language itself.
It must be stressed that what makes words possible is the very
encounter with a limit, and that what makes language possible
is an absence in the background. There can be no literary work
without a constitutive and essential deficiency. If language could
perfectly state all things, it would be its “dumb and useless”
double «and hence would not exist».16 Roussel was aware of this
and he took it to the extreme consequences by rejecting concrete
reality and replacing it with a perfectly imaginary one, in which
things remain unreachable. The utmost transparency of linguistic
method adopted and explained by Roussel becomes a form of
opaqueness revealing no hidden world or symbolism, but only
a “flat and discontinuous” universe in which each thing refers
back to itself, as Alain Robbe-Grillet has argued. The writer has
developed a particularly effective simile to sum up the character
of Roussel’s work in the light of the explanations provided in
How I Wrote Certain of My Books: «One gets the impression of
15 Recalcati, pp. 97-98.

16 Foucault, Raymond Roussel, p. 186.
having found a closed drawer and then a key, and that this key
opens the drawer impeccably... and the drawer is empty».17
Celibate Desire
Roussel’s writing illustrates an important critical stage in early

20th-century art and literature: a crucial moment for reassessment
of language’s potentialities, that ultimately puts Roussel in a
different place from his contemporaries. His extreme exercise
on language may suggest a parallel with the work of a writer
who devoted his whole life to the untiring fine-tuning of his style:
James Joyce. Certainly, both novelists show the same obsession
with language and style, in the context of a nagging pursuit of
social acknowledgement as literati. Like Joyce, Roussel sought
to achieve literary glory and to make a big name for himself on
the scene, a goal which – unlike Joyce – he never attained and
which became the cause of the psychological malaise he was
destined to suffer from for the rest of his life.18 As Lacan has
emphasised, in the case of Joyce the imaginary is not presented
as an alternative to the symbolic or real, as literary writing takes
the form of an objective sinthome, which is to say the knotting
together of three otherwise unconnected registers. In the case of
Roussel, by contrast, the imaginary rules out the real and shuns
the symbolical, becoming the only possible domain. Hence the
distinction drawn by Colette Soler between Joyce as faux illisible
and Roussel as vrai illisible: for even after having read How I
Wrote Certain of My Books, we struggle to discern the sense or
signification of Roussel’s texts.19 Likewise, Roussel’s writing
creates an imaginary world enveloping all things, a literary way
17 Alain Robbe-Grillet, Enigmes et transparence chez Raymond Roussel, in

Pour un nouveau roman, ed. by Alain Robbe-Grillet (Paris: Les Éditions de
Minuit, 1963), p. 73.
18 Concerning Roussel’s mental disorders and obsession with unattained glory,
see in particular the work of the psychiatrist who treated him Pierre Janet, De
l’angoisse à l’éxtase (Paris: Alcan, 1926).
19 Colette Soler, Les paradoxes du symptôme en psychanalyse: Lacan sans
paradoxe, in Lacan, ed. by Jean-Michel Rabaté (Paris: Bayard, 2007).
of writing that rules out both sentimental involvement, parody

and estrangement of the sort we find in Kafka.
With Locus Solus Roussel created a self-sufficient universe that
is unique, unitary, solitary: solus, pervaded by a constant tension
towards a unity of meaning that is never attained. Language
seeks the uniqueness of its reuniting with its object, but becomes
scattered and drifts away through a maze of exploratory details
that are always unsuited to this task. The same drive towards
original unity may be found in Antonin Artaud, but with a crucial
difference and a very different outcome. Artaud also loves playing
with linguistic signifiers, with vowels and phonemes, in an
attempt (which may be described as psychotic in psychoanalytical
terms) to reach the original pre-linguistic unity, which is to say to
deny the Other of language, to the point of creating an alternative
language (glossolalia) which interrupts all communications and
is presented as the original mother tongue (according to Lacan,
what we have here is no longer parole but apparole, no longer
langue but lalangue). In Roussel’s case, by contrast, the tension
towards unity is wholly internal to language itself and lies in the
exasperation of language as it discovers itself to be inhabited by
what is different from itself. In the search for a unity of meaning,
a proliferation of multiplicity emerges; in repetition, the constant
addition of differences, which rather than opening up endless
meanings, dramatically bring up the limit of non-meaning.
What we have here is the kind of experience of the irreducible
otherness of the Other of language to which psychoanalytical practice
leads. Indeed, to use a pair of terms dear to Jacques Alain Miller,
psychoanalysis as a “talking cure” turns “signifying amplification”
– the flowing of the subject’s words – into a “reduction” to the point
of suspension of meaning, which is to be analytically understood as
an encounter with the real of the subject’s urges. Reduction is not at
the origins of signifying amplification – as the “mystic” word would
suggest – but is rather its product, since there is no “this side” (or “that
side”) in language. The resulting encounter is that with the foreign
centre of the Other, which is nothing but absence, emptiness.20 This
20 Recalcati, pp. 207-08.

emptiness, this subtraction of the original unity, which cannot be

recovered, engenders a kind of desire similar to the endless yearning
to be reunited with an object (what Lacan calls “the small object” a)
which has always been lost and always will be. Desire and deficiency
are inseparable. The object of desire – which paradoxically is both the
object and cause of desire – cannot be recovered, and yet it inspires
the subject as his irreducible singularity, which resists the grid of
universality. The foreign element which emerges within language
may thus be connected to the very aspect of desire that cannot be
combined with the word “universal”; language lives through the
tension of an impossible unity that can only apparently and indirectly
be attained. This is what emerges from a careful analysis of Roussel’s
writing, as Sjef Houppermans points out in a study devoted precisely
to the relation between writing and desire in Roussel:
Writing is the use of a code which collects, grasps, changes and shifts:
that way it constitutes something strictly concerning desire. Imagination
and process are the two constitutive parts of a same “wanting-desiring
machine”, so writing could be defined as “écriture du désir”.21
Roussel’s writing is thus a great desiring machine, as much

as the imaginary machines it brings to life. The desire which
stirs them, however, is destined to remain forever unfulfilled.
As ends in themselves, these devices are bound to remain self-
referential and celibate, since they cannot be conjoined with
anything; through a kind of reverse mise en abyme, the detailed
description of their parts is not conjoined with the rest of the
text or with the machines described: it is also celibate. «Être
célibataire, c’est manquer l’unité rêvée»,22 in the sense of unity
with the other and with oneself. The subject is dislocated, split
and divided, and the desiring machine implements this act of
becoming a subject through a dispersion where no unity is
possible. As Carrouges notes:
21 Sjef Houppermans, Raymond Roussel: Ecriture et désir (Paris: Librairie José

Corti, 1985), p. 14.
22 Houppermans, p. 322.
Le drame de la machine célibataire n’est pas celui de l’être qui vit

totalement seul, mais celui de la créature qui s’approche infiniment près
d’une créature de l’autre sexe sans parvenir à vraiment la rejoindre. Ce
n’est pas la chasteté qui est en cause, tout au contraire, c’est le conflit de
deux passions érotiques qui se juxtaposent et s’exaspèrent sans pouvoir
parvenir au point de fusion.23
Roussel’s celibate machines are conflict, division, tragedy,

and thus desire. According to Marcel Duchamp’s definition,
these machines bring together a mechanical whole and an
anthropological whole; or, rather, they express the mechanical
solitude of one or more human beings.24
Duchamp actually claimed to have been influenced by
Roussel’s machines in the creation of his great celibate work
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even – evidence
for the complex and productive interconnection between visual
arts and literature in the early 20th century. Also known as The
Large Glass, this work was described by Duchamp himself as a
“machine”. It represents an intensive setting for a movement of
desire destined never to reach its object: a dividing line between
the upper part (the bride) and the lower (the bachelors) marks the
incompatibility and lack of unity between the two. The machine
is celibate because it expresses the dramatic motion of drawing
closer to an impossible goal. Both Duchamp, with his visual work,
and Roussel with his beings of language, provide reflections upon
the split within representational and narrative possibilities and
within each subject. This is the split of desire as what is most
intimate and yet most foreign for us.
Roussel’s world – comprised of language and imagination
– thus illustrates a kind of excess which is difficult to enclose,
and which carries detachment from reality within it. Within this
unbridgeable detachment, on the threshold of representation,
there emerges what escapes all symbolic framing and constitutes
a problem for words and images, and yet for this very reason
animates and enlivens them.
THE WORD THAT YOU CAN SEE:
VISUAL AND SCENIC STRATEGIES
IN LA RELIGIEUSE BY DIDEROT
Michele Bertolini
La Religieuse can be included in Diderot’s project of

dialogue, comparison and reciprocal enlightenment of the arts
of representation. Such a dialogue assigns a predominant role to
the visual dimension, as it is closely linked to the imagination
process at work in the production and fruition of the works of
art. This does set the ground for the comparison of word and
image, of tale and pictures, as, through the tormented story of
Suzanne Simonin, Diderot’s novel stages the feminine body in its
pathetic, desiring, suffering, aesthetic and erotic dimension, and
it becomes the description and institution of paintings and scenes,
in close theoretical connection with the traced path of the Salons.
The complex genesis of the novel leads to an ambiguous
and hybrid literary product: Diderot «alternatively refers to his
novel as mémoires, histoire, roman and conte»,1 presenting an
aesthetically sparkling text thanks to the dark brightness of its
“true lies”, as a baroque work of art.2 Excluded by society, rejected
by her parents because of her illegitimate birth, and confined to a
microcosm, secluded from nature and society as well, invisible to
any external eye, Suzanne’s story follows the steps of an artificial
and aborted3 new-birth into life, senses, and feelings, that recall
1 Huguette Cohen, ‘Jansenism in Diderot’s La Religieuse’, Studies in

Eighteenth-Century Culture, 11 (1982), p. 75. The term conte supports the
philosophical dimension of the work that can be taken as a laboratory of
analysis for analytical observation of human behaviour in artificial conditions.
2 See Jean Terrasse, Le Temps et l’espace dans les romans de Diderot (Oxford:
Voltaire Foundation, 1999), p. 31.
3 On the image of the convent interpreted as a substitute of the uterus in which
Suzanne is brought back by force for the guilt to be born, see Dominique
Jullien, ‘Locus hystericus. L’image du couvent dans La Religieuse de Diderot’,
French Forum, 15 (1990), 133-48.
Galatea’s animation, although upside down, since she is forced

into the denial of sensuality, the negation of sense language by
the perversion produced by life in a convent.
A Novel for Painters. Suzanne’s Gaze
The visualizing function of words in La Religieuse can

be detected on a first level in the lexicon choices, strongly
emphasized by the author’s several adjustments during the long
process of the preparation of the text. The written word’s evocative
capacity, if uttered in the first person, engenders representations
in the listener’s soul, and it is supported by a specific vocabulary
constantly recalling the language of painting. The word “paints”,
“shows”, evokes “pictures” and “scenes”, “represents” and,
working on imagination, gets to replace perceived reality with
an image, sometimes hallucinatory, unreal, generated by its own
enchanting and rhetorical power. In the second part of the novel,
introducing the tableau agréable of the young nuns, altogether in
the room of the convalescent Mother Superior of Saint-Eutrope,
Suzanne refers to her interlocutor, the marquis of Croismare, to
whom the whole content of the mémoires is dedicated, introducing
him as a painting expert4 and therefore particularly sensitive to
the visual force of the word, especially when it is developed into
a story or a narration. As a matter of fact, since the very first page
of the novel, while addressing her interlocutor in order to ask his
intervention, Suzanne defines the story of her misadventures as a
painting of passions: «I depict (je peins) some of my misfortunes,
4 See Denis Diderot, The Nun, trans. and ed. by Russel Goulbourne (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 120: «You know about painting, and I can
assure you, Monsieur le Marquis, that it was quite a pleasant picture to be-
hold». The three versions of the Vandeul collection, discovered by Dieck-
mann, offer the privilege of an autographed manuscript with original correc-
tions by Diderot (probably dating back to the years around 1780, twenty years
after the first drafting), and a third copy by another hand as well; this remark
is an addition and correction by Diderot himself, who often reshapes the text
emphasizing its visual dimension.
M. Bertolini - The Word that You Can See 27
writing with neither skill nor artifice, but with the naivety of a
young person of my age and with my own native honesty».5
The iconic dominant of the novel is moreover clearly stated,
together with the aspiration to reach and touch one of the limits of
representation and fruition by the reader through the interesting
and the pathetic, by Diderot himself, when he writes the
presentation letter of the novel to Meister, placing La Religieuse
in the wake of the ékphrastic enterprise of the Salons, as the final
epigraph reminds us:
C’est la contre-partie de Jacques le Fataliste. Il est rempli de tableaux

pathétiques. Il est très intéressant, et tout l’intérêt est rassemblé sur le
personnage qui parle. Je suis sûr qu’il affligera plus vos lecteurs que
Jacques ne les a fait rire; d’où il pourroit arriver qu’il en désireront
plutôt la fin. Il est intitulé La Religieuse; et je ne crois pas qu’on ait
jamais écrit une plus effrayante satyre des couvents. C’est un ouvrage
à feuilleter sans cesse par les peintres; et si la vanité ne s’y opposoit, sa
véritable épitaphe seroit: Son pittor anch’io.6
Such a programmatic claim, assigning a pedagogical role to the

text, and one that is of creative stimulus for painting, is the mirroring
overturning of what Diderot said in the Salon of 1765, concerning
Greuze’s “pathetic” and “moral” art, true champion of customs
(mœurs) paintings, where the philosophe could at some point see the
dream of a painting-novel:7 «Here we have your painter and mine;
the first who has set out to give art some morals, and to organize
events into series that could easily be turned into novels».8
5 Diderot, p. 3.
6 Diderot, ‘Lettre à Meister du 27 septembre 1780’, in Correspondance, ed. by
George Roth and Jean Varloot (Paris: Éd. de Minuit, 1955-1970), XV
(november 1776-july 1784), pp. 190-91. On La Religieuse as a novel that
reveals, a novel for the “edification of painters”, see Terrasse, p. 36.
7 See Rene Démoris, ‘Ut poesis pictura? Quelques aspects du rapport roman-
peinture au siècle des Lumières’, in Dilemmes du roman: Essays in honor of
Georges May, ed. by Catherine Lafarge (Stanford: Stanford French and Italian
Studies, 1989), p. 277.
8 Denis Diderot, The Salon of 1765 and Notes on Painting, in Diderot on Art, I,
ed. by John Goodman, introduction by Thomas Crow (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 96.
The long redaction of La religieuse can be placed within a period

of critical reformulation of Horace’s paradigm Ut pictura poesis
(see Diderot’s negative formula Ut poesis, pictura non erit9), next
to the transformation of the theory of painting and of the hierarchy
of pictorial genres, through the critique of the allegorical language
of historical paintings, the critique of the dependent relationship
between a painting and the pre-existing literary text, and the
consequent, tiring emancipation of genre bourgeois painting, the
narrative potential of which, as in the paradigmatic case of Greuze,
is thus discovered. Painting, however, within the eighteenth century
theoretical context revolving around the crucial role of the pregnant
instant, refers as punctum temporis to a narrative temporality, but it
cannot directly show it. Diderot’s writing instead (drama, critique
and fiction), claims an ever more authoritative visual space and
aims to incorporate, through the notion of tableau – transversal to
the arts of representation – the visualizing and staging functions
within its narrative mechanisms. Precisely the ambiguous notion
of tableau, theoretical inter-media paradigm applied to Diderot’s
theory of painting, theatre poetics and novel practice, serves as
the moment of interruption of the story’s continuity, breaking the
diegesis in order to condense into a single image the polarized
conflicts expressed by the dialogue, the theatrical gesture or by
the narration. As an expression of virtual narrative,10 the image
sketched by the tableau seems to suspend the specific powers of
writing, asking to the reader or listener an effort of representation,
staging and visualisation of the described situation, pushing the
text to its iconic roots beyond the writing medium itself and the
expressive powers of the récit. At the time of the historical crisis of
the noble genres of theatrical and pictorial representation, as well
as of its mimetical foundations, the description and the narration of
images acquire a central role, as Diderot’s writing testifies.
9 See Denis Diderot, The Salon of 1767, in Diderot on Art, II, ed. and trans. by
John Goodman, introduction by Thomas Crow (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1995), p. 65.
10 See Jay Caplan, Framed Narratives: Diderot’s Genealogy of Beholder
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 89.
Diderot’s claim moreover emphasizes a specific aspect of La

Religieuse fabric: the almost exclusive, monologue concentration
of the story on the main character speaking, reinforced by the
identification between the narrator’s perspective (posteriorly telling
the story at some distance from the events) and the main character’s
perspective (who does actually live the events in the first person, in
the present and from within). The oscillation between distance and
identification, generating a plurality of perspectives in the story,
together with their provisional superposition and identification,
comes together with the theme of Suzanne’s gaze, that is split
into a double point of view, being the internal point of view in the
presented tableau, at the centre of the performance of which she is
the main character, and also being the external eye, looking at her
assembled and staged tableaux, as a painter would do.
We are dealing with a somehow oneiric gaze, as Suzanne re-
experiences the paintings she imagines and of which she is the main
character; such a gaze is highly reversible and reciprocal, since
at the same time it works as the active subject, looking at things
and distancing them, and as a gaze that is perceived as detected
by other people’s views: the Mother Superior of Longchamp and
then of Saint-Eutrope, the director, the lawyer Manouri, and also
the anonymous crowd of the other nuns. The main character’s
need to hide her identity behind the protective authority of her
interlocutor, even more remarkable in a first-person narration,
works as an anti-theatrical strategy, that is able to let Suzanne’s
personal portrait progressively emerges through the perspective
and comments of other characters in the story, or external to it,
including the readers, ideally called to be testimonies to the story.
Suzanne, as the homonym heroin of the Old Testament represented
in paintings several times, can “be seen” by others, named and
judged from the exterior, but she never “reveals herself” in the first
person, she never consciously assumes a mode of self-exposition
of her body or personality, as she is forced to the anonymity of the
herd also by the conditions of the monastic life.11
11 See Anne Coudreuse, ‘Pour un nouveau lecteur: La Religieuse de Diderot et

ses destinataires’, Recherches sur Diderot et sur l’Encyclopédie, 27 (1999),
Moreover, the insertion of the tableaux in the narration is always

mediated by the activation of the gaze of the main character or
other’s, as it is precisely the gaze on one’s self or on the other
characters that triggers the description. Mother Sainte Cristine’s
order to watch ourselves, in tighten relation with Suzanne, pushes
the main character to observe and find herself in a state of disorder
and alteration: «And so I looked at myself and realized that my
dress was in disarray, that my wimple was almost back to front,
and that my veil had fallen around my shoulders».12
Every evoked image requires the formulation both of a gaze and of
a visual support in order to be as such, thus connecting the question
about description within the wider definition of the dominant scopic
regime.13 The night wandering of the Mother Superior of Saint-
Eutrope is a gestural action that becomes tableau when invested by
Suzanne’s gaze, who sees her in the lugubrious nocturnal gloom of
the church where Suzanne seeks comfort in her prays. Her visage
and her hands are enlightened, contoured and framed by the light
of a lamp, according to the apparatus of sublime and nocturnal
vision, pictorial and theatrical in origin, that is well known to the
author of the Salons, who is also the refined theorist of chiaroscuro
in the Essais sur la peinture. In this case the representation has the
character of a frightening apparition, presenting to the young nun
the phantoms of her imagination stimulated by father Lemoine’s
story on the Mother Superior’s demonic nature. Our context is then
very close to the descriptive force of ancient ékphrasis, where the
lacunose memory of father Lemoine is replaced by the liveliness of
the terror effects produced on Suzanne’s imagination,14 the revival
45-46: «Suzanne ne peut acquérir un nom, et une identité, que dans le cadre
du couvent. (…) Elle semble être une non-personne, à qui seuls le discours et
le désir d’autrui pourront conférer une existence réelle».
12 Diderot, The Nun, p. 52.
13 Martin Jay, ‘Scopic regimes of modernity’, in Force Fields: Between
Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (New York: Routledge, 1993);
Michele Cometa, La scrittura delle immagini: Letteratura e cultura visuale
(Milano: Raffaello Cortina, 2012), pp. 35-41.
14 Diderot, The Nun, p. 129: «Now that I come to compare what he said as I have
just reported it to you with the terrible impact it had on me at the time, there
is no comparison».
of which triggers an effect of hallucinatory presence, waiting for

incarnation, thanks to the visual support of light and bodies.15
The assimilation of the narrator’s perspective with the eye of
someone, who observes and describes the several manifestations
of convent life, provides a rich phenomenology of what is
sacred, of the places and people, of gestures, habits, rituals
of the convent, allowing the novel shifting towards an iconic
predominance, expressed furthermore in the sequential structure
of the narration, room by room, carefully separated and arranged
one next to the other.
«The scene of the novel follows the laws of the art of
painting. La Religieuse is a gallery, a Salon, in which appear
several contrasting paintings».16 It is a gallery of mental and
imaginary paintings activated by Suzanne’s memory and gaze,
nevertheless influenced by the memory of sacred paintings and
by the experience of the Salons, starting from the awareness of
the essentially visual, pictorial and spectacular framework of
Christian “mythology”, clearly shown by the work of Diderot
salonnier. The monastic setting, as the historical background of
Suzanne’s sad story, designed by the multiplication of closed and
circumscribed spaces, legitimates on a general base the visual
primacy of the novel. The very scenographical pictorial nature of
Christianity, and particularly of its baroque and Jesuit declination,
justifies the abundant presence in the text of paintings, rituals, that
become theatre and performance, bodies revealing themselves,
and several visual apparatus as the frames of doors, cells, grating,
and the torches lighting.17
15 Diderot, The Nun, p. 131: «��

��
I realised that I had been terrified by a bizarre appa-
rition that my own imagination had conjured up. For she was so positioned with
respect to the lamp in the church that only her face and the tips of her fingers
were lit up and the rest of her was in darkness, which made her look strange».
16 Béatrice Didier, ‘Images du sacré chez Diderot’, Travaux de littérature, VI
(Paris: Adirel, 1993), 193-209 (p. 195).
17 Diderot, The Salon of 1767, p. 296: «Patriotism and fear of God have
stimulated great tragedies and terrifying pictures». On visual apparatus in the
baroque culture, see Michele Cometa, Letteratura e dispositivi della visione
nell’era prefotografica, in La finestra del testo. Letteratura e dispositivi della
visione tra Settecento e Novecento, ed. by Valeria Cammarata (Roma:
Meltemi, 2008), pp. 30-40.
On a further level, the visual primacy is justified by its emotional

and pathetic power, by its presence value and by the efficacy of
the image in relation to the text, as a language of natural signs
that establishes a direct contact between the observer and the
observed subject. The pathetic language is a language of images
and gestures, as Suzanne recalls when she emphasizes the value
of Mother Moni’s portrait, depicting her first mother superior,
and jealously kept on her breast and kissed every morning.18
The passage from text to image, and to the depiction of the
body and its martyrdom, is formulated in the novel through the
crucial narrative event of Suzanne’s destiny: Mother Moni’s
replacement with Mother Santa Cristina as Superior of the
convent of Longchamp. After Mother Moni’s death, who had a
probable Jansenist penchant, and who was the author of fifteen
meditations on death (Les Derniers instants de la sœur de
Moni), Santa Cristina, who has Jesuit and Sulpician sympathies,
takes the Holy Bible away from all nuns in the convent and,
in replacement, gives them the cilice and the scourge for the
mortification and torment of the body and the spirit. The novel
revolves then around such a curious absence of the text (the Bible,
Moni’s meditations), around a void of writing, whose place is
taken by a baroque and lugubrious carnival of scenes of torture
and martyrdom, a succession of pathetic frames culminating in
the simulation of Suzanne’s condemnation to death. «The nun’s
body becomes essentially pictorial and theatrical»,19 opening
«the literary representation to a “removed” level: the female body
as a sensible, sexual, passionate, pathological and pathetic body
(according to the double meaning of the Greek word pathos, at
the same time disease and passion)».20 Diderot’s writing engages
in the restitution of bodies through images, by activating the
desire of bodies translated into the desire of images. Such an aim
18 Diderot, The Nun, p. 48: «Whenever I want to pray but my soul feels cold, I
take the portrait from around my neck, place it in front of me and look at it,
and it inspires me».
19 Didier, p. 198.
20 Anne Deneys-Tunney, Écritures du corps: De Descartes à Laclos (Paris:
PUF, 1992), p. 138.
does not reveal the intention to assimilate bodies to the realm of

language,21 as the sexed bodies. Differently from what happens
in Les Bijoux indiscrets, here the bodies cannot “speak”, however
they express themselves through the mute language of gesture or,
else, in the spasm of a shout. La Religieuse can then be interpreted
as a work on the progressive loss of sense and consistency in
the religious and doctrinal thinking, replaced by the persistence
of images, and by the liveliness of descriptions. The evocation
of images takes the place of the voids and deletions of signs,
to the point that in the last pages the retrospective narrative is
transformed into a present tense diary, according to a sequence of
details and textual notes crossed by empty spaces in the page.22
Suzanne’s amnesias concern mainly words, while the visual
impression of gestures, bodies, physiognomies, conserves its
revived trace and strength also after a while.
Once we have recognized the central position of the story
as a spatial structure in La Religieuse, organizing the narration
according to «a succession of scenes (that produce an extreme
slowdown of temporality, and the condensation of time around
the hysterical body of the woman) and ellipses (that produce the
acceleration of time)»,23 we should now more precisely define
the specific nature of the space, images, and gazes generated by
the narration, in their differences and affinities in relation to the
space and gaze of painting and theatre.
The pathetic tableaux of La Religieuse present a dimension of
temporality that is not icastic, but rather, slowed down, stretched,
progressively frozen in the distance of a scene captured as a
still frame or fading according to Suzanne’s perspective, who
often suffers from fainting and incertitudes concerning her own
memories. The strength of pathetic progression is not given by
the single scene, often evaporating and extinguishing as dream-
like vision, but rather by their sequence position, by their editing
according to the disposition of accumulating frames of violence
21 See W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago-London: The University of

Chicago Press, 1994).
23 Deneys-Tunney, pp. 142-43.
and terror, until they produce such a charge of energy that is

unbearable for the reader. The novel invites the reader to become
spectator in order to overcome one of the limits of representation,
especially in the description of the tortures inflicted on Suzanne
at Longchamp, to the point that the main character herself has to
interrupt in some passages the list of details of the persecutions,
that would make the story cruel and ferocious, beyond any
possible appropriateness.24
La Religieuse can be read as an album of images in sequence,
to glance through, the editing of which follows the order carefully
chosen by Diderot according to a rigorous progressive sequence.
This is why the first illustrators and engravers (for instance in
the 1804 edition) had the idea to condense the story into a series
of main scenes, accompanied by captions. Differently from the
description of real paintings in the Salons, the order of which
follows the dispositions of the Livret, the gallery of paintings
presented in La Religieuse, offering a sequence of moving and
changing scenographies, all meeting and packing around the
permanence of the bodies – fulcrum and focal nucleus of each
scene – is put together through the editing of moving pictures,25 the
final charge of which has to produce a dramatic and pathetic effect
and the main character seems sometimes perfectly aware of it.26
Epiphanies of the Secret: The Display of Intimacy
The strategy of the epiphany of the secret necessarily requires

the activation of a sort of burglary gaze (regard de l’effraction),
that is able to pass the borders of what is hidden, and is somehow
the mirroring and upside-down version of what is achieved in
the descriptive enterprise of the Salons. In the purely ékphrastic
work of the Salons, in the physical lack of works, a public space –

25 Caplan, p. 49.
26 David Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot,
Rousseau and Mary Shelley (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago
Press, 1988), p. 95.
Louvre’s Salon carré – containing little worlds and private spaces

inside is evoked. Diderot approaches images with the modesty of
someone overcoming a temporal, aesthetic, ontological threshold
between two separate worlds, to the point that the description is
presented as the narration of a journey towards an isle of memory,
asking for a modest as well as curious perspective, persistent
as well as conscious of its limits. In the novel where several
rhetorical ékphrastic strategy are introduced (enumeration,
integration), although the description of real works of art is
absent,27 the intrusion in a place by definition hidden from any
glance – the convent, as space of reclusion –, let the bodies of the
nuns, both mystical and carnal, be visible to us, presenting them
in the theatre of a performance of vision.
Moreover, the descriptive and narrative effort of the Salons
can be taken as parallel and convergent with the entire creative
activity of Diderot, writer, play writer, philosophe, that on the
overall can be defined as an ékphrastic enterprise: to make visible
what is temporarily hidden from the glance, starting from the
absent paintings, that keep hiding themselves also when they are
just in front of us, to the bodies in their most secret drives, to the
sacredness of domestic fire and family, celebrated in Le Fils naturel,
so that the mise en scène does not alter or corrupt the nature of the
stolen intimacy or the gaze of the spectator. Within the limits of
such a contradictory dialectics of intimacy and grandeur, display
and secrecy, the evocative powers of the narration and of the story,
reaching the irrepresentable of a representation, are put into play.
Such an effort of monumentalization of intimacy, requiring its
specific gaze, goes through a description and narration in which
pity is the main mediator, i.e. the emotional solicitation of pain and
compassion, that can be stimulated in order to set the story within
precise boundaries. The hypothetical story of seduction and loss
of the virginity lying under the colours of the painting Jeune fille
by Greuze, as Suzanne’s tale to the Mother Superior at the convent
27 We can find in La Religieuse some reference to music (Rameau) and dance

(Marcel), providing a realistic background to the story; the absence of
reference to real paintings is justified precisely by the descriptive effort to
generate mental images.
of Arpajon, are developed from an intense feeling, an affective-

corporeal motor full of hidden erotic implication, that is set free
in front of the body of the nun and of the image of the young girl.
The erotic attention for Suzanne, that drives the Mother Superior
of Saint-Eutrope to madness, actually comes from sensitive
tenderness, in which imagination is stimulated by pity, that is
by a feeling of sympathy and compassion for the misadventures
narrated by the young novice. The Mother Superior’s words
almost offer a paradigmatic insignia to the Eighteenth Century
aesthetic of feeling and to the “pleasure of crying”:
Never fear, I like crying: shedding tears is a delicious state for a sensitive
soul to be in. You must like crying too. You will wipe away my tears, and
I yours, and perhaps we’ll find happiness in the midst of your account of
your suffering. Who knows where our emotions might lead us?28
This is the appropriate feeling for the required taste in the spectator
in order to aesthetically enjoy a work of art, although in the pages
of La Religieuse it largely overcomes its legitimate boundaries, as
the convent of Saint-Eutrope is the place of physical and moral
disorder, where there is «neither true distance, nor measure»,29
but rather a condition of excessive empathic proximity. In the
convent place the aesthetic education of senses seems in the end
just impossible, since the inclination of nature has been diverted
and perverted. The fermentation, through the heat of the feeling,
of imagination approaches the figure of the Mother Superior of
Saint-Eutrope, as well as Suzanne herself, to the definition of
Genius proposed by the Encyclopédie: «In the man of genius, the
imagination goes farther, it remembers with more striking feelings
than when they are made. Because to these ideas are attached a
thousand others which appropriately give rise to the feeling».30
28 Diderot, The Nun, p. 119. On the “pleasure of crying”, see Maddalena

Mazzocut-Mis, Il senso del limite: Il dolore, l’eccesso, l’osceno (Firenze: Le
Monnier, 2009), pp. 48-93.
30 Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers,
ed. by Denis Diderot and others (Paris: Briasson, David L’Aîné, Le Breton,
Durand, 1757), VII, p. 588.
More than frames, La Religieuse provides a rich collection

of oneiric images, on the verge of coming to life or break up,
moving images and inconsistent, going into ruins and building
up again enlightened by the uncertain and shaky light of torches,
of dusk and gloom. The writing finally focuses on the mental
and imaging dimension, awakening the reader’s imagination,
soliciting its strength and virtual charge, opened to several
possible actualizations.31
The Portrait of the Beloved Girl: Between Blason and Body

of Passion
The description produces an effect of visualization, it stimulates

the representation through imagination and pathetic participation,
thanks to its rhetorical strength; at the same time, it is legitimated
and enriched both by the pre-existing iconographic references,
although implicit, and by visual paradigms, expressive stereotypes
that are like a revenant in the pages of the Salons as well as of the
handbooks of theatre aesthetics, defining an expressive grammar
of gesture and mimic, a visual repertory of expression that
pertains to the whole body and not only to the face. The famous
description, both medical and aesthetic of the mad nun, escaping
from her cell in the first pages of the novel, and by which Suzanne
is obsessed, as if she was anticipating the menace of her possible
destiny, presents once more the iconography of desperation,
madness, and rage described in Dorval et moi32 and in the Salons,
enriched from time to time by small gesture variations (the head
thrown back, the half-open mouth, the dismayed look). Also in
this case, Suzanne’s gaze triggers the description, one of the apex
31 See Nathalie Ferrand, Livres vus, livres lus: une traversée du roman illustré
des Lumières (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2009); Jean Sgard, ‘La beauté
convulsive de La Religieuse’, in L’Encyclopédie, Diderot, l’esthétique:
Mélanges en hommage à Jacques Chouillet, ed. by Sylvain Auroux,
Dominique Bourel, Charles Porsel (Paris: PUF, 1991), pp. 209-15.
32 See Denis Diderot, ‘Dorval et moi’, in Paradoxe sur le comédien précédé des
Entretiens sur Le fils naturel’ (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1967), p. 47 and
pp. 60-61.
of the pathetic of desperation, as an emotional communication

pushing the reader to recognize what is presented as performance
within the reservoir of his/her own visual and cultural memory:
I have never seen a sight more hideous. She was unkempt and almost
naked; she was weighed down by iron chains; her eyes were wild; she
tore at her hair, beat her chest with her fists, ran about, screamed, called
down the most awful curses on herself and on everyone else; she looked
for a window to throw herself out of. (…) My mad nun was constantly
on my mind.33
Somewhere else, behind the description and its layering of

different “perspectives”, registers and simultaneous (aesthetic,
medical-scientific, juridical) analyses, sometimes in reciprocal
conflict, it is also possible to detect a precise and exemplary
iconography, as Fontenay suggested concerning the first
description of the Mother Superior of Saint-Eutrope. He indeed
recognized there the evocation of the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa by
Bernini34 (quoted by Diderot himself in the Salon of 176735),
although mixed with another upcoming paradigm, the scientific
analysis discovering the disorder of the feminine body as a
display for the clinical eye of the doctor. The clinical observation
of the effects of madness on the body, the juridical and social
accusation against the damages caused by religious education,
the aesthetic and pathetic description of the tragic beauty of the
bodies tortured in the convent are three modes of gaze-telling, co-
existing, sometimes inconsistently, in Suzanne’s descriptions,36
as they establish their object as a performance for the external
eye. The nuns are therefore some monstra, “monsters” to be
studied and analysed on the physiological, social and aesthetic
33 Diderot, The Nun, pp. 8-9.

34 See Élisabeth de Fontenay, Diderot ou le matérialisme enchanté (Paris:
Grasset, 1982), p. 180. See Diderot, The Nun, pp. 91-92.
35 See Diderot, The Salon of 1767, p. 296. The reference to Saint Therese by
Bernini concerns the visual teaching that it is possible to get around the
potential of a body possessed by a demon or in ecstasy.
36 See Marie-Claire Vallois, ‘Politique du paradoxe: Tableau de mœurs/Tableau
familial dans La Religieuse de Diderot’, Romanic Review, 76 (1985), 164-66.
ground, and the tableaux are as much dramatic scenes as clinical

tables, pathological cases.
Actually, Diderot often recalls, according to a strategy already
presented in the Salons, a series of “possible” pictorial or
theatrical iconographies, thus soliciting a performative response
entailing the visual culture of the addressee as well as his/her
perceptual experiences,37 in the description of images that “act
like frames”, to the point that they present themselves as a model
for the artistic activity of a real painter. The above mentioned
tableau vivant of the nuns gathered together in the room of
the Mother Superior of Arpajon «looks very much like a Salon
painting’s description»,38 so that it could be taken, from the point
of view of its style and descriptive method, as a sort of notional
ékphrasis, i.e. a falsifying fiction generating a real painting, as far
as the imagination of a painting strictly following the rules of art
could really provide true inspiration to a talented painter.39 Such
a complex interplay of overturning imaginative fictions, enriched
by the memory of painting and by the production of real images,
is, furthermore, placed within a novel whose external frame is
the real mystification in relation to the marquis of Croismare,
supporting the whole novel.
The true “portrait” of Suzanne is assembled and accomplished
by the Mother Superior of the convent of Sainte-Eutrope in
Arpajon, at the peak of the pathetic and moving narration of all
the misfortunes and tortures she had to suffer in the convent of
Longchamp, according to an upside down ékphrastic strategy,
that is also parallel to the sensual and erotic description of the
Jeune fille qui pleure son oiseau mort by Greuze in the Salon
of 1765, which entails the revival of a rhetorical technique such
as prosopopoeia.40 In the second case, the slightly ambiguous
37 See Cometa, La scrittura delle immagini, pp. 41-7.

38 Georges May, Diderot et La religieuse: Étude historique et littéraire (Paris:
PUF, 1954), p. 225.
39 See Diderot, The Salons of 1767, p. 67; see John Hollander, ‘The Poetics of
Ékphrasis’, Word & Image, 4 (1988), pp. 209-19; Cometa, La scrittura delle
immagini, pp. 48-53.
40 Diderot, The Salon of 1765, pp. 97-100.
and sensual image of Greuze’s painting trigger the story that

has generated the image, pushing the philosophe to experience
a hardly dissimulated form of erotic excitement, although it is
prohibited by his status of aesthetic public; whereas, in the
first case, the story of Suzanne solicits the Mother Superior to
visualize the image of the torture to the young novice, through
the enumeration of the body parts that have suffered martyrdom
(arms, shoulders, hair, face, mouth, legs), with much more
explicit erotic effects.
The adoration, full of sensuality, that the Mother Superior has
for Suzanne’s suffering and tortured body parts,41 is certainly
one of the most violent, intense, and sarcastic moments of the
détournement and of the “parody” that Diderot makes of Christian
liturgy’s practices and language. In La Religieuse, then, we can
find a principle of structural overturning, through the progressive
assimilation of Suzanne’s body to the body of Christ, the body
of Passion par excellence, scattered and shattered in the discrete
succession of its parts, according to a spiritual exercise, here
subverted, «which requires the believer to visualize every stage
of Christ’s bodily suffering».42 This is not only a stylistic exercise
miming – according to Spitzer – the Biblical style in the form
of a poetic blason, but rather it is a performative movement that
revolves word into gestures, rhetorical invocation into mute action
of desire. Suzanne’s body, as the body of Angelica in Ariosto, is a
described body, captured into the meshes of the narration, that can
take it fragment by fragment, transformed by the eye, thanks to its
isolating virtues, into fetishes. Following the rhetorical strategy
of the classical ékphrasis, well attested in the pages of the Salons
(see the enumeration of the parts of a painted beautiful body),43
the admired description breaks the integrity of the body and of
the image, opening its flank to the erotic infection, that not only
breaks it further, but also reinforces and strengthens it through
41 Diderot, The Nun, pp. 109-11.

42 Leo Spitzer, ‘The Style of Diderot’, in Linguistic and Literary History: Essays
in Stylistics, ed. by Leo Spitzer (New York: Russel & Russel, 1962), pp. 135-
91 (p. 149).
43 Diderot, The Salon of 1765, pp. 12-13.
repetition. The exaltation of such an erotic liturgy goes through

a detailed enumeration, otherwise condemned by Diderot as
descriptive strategy of paintings, if it ends up into a “trituration”
of the image.44 It is instead potentially very fruitful in literature,
as it is made clear by the famous eulogy of the descriptive and
visual detail in Richardson’s novels, where the particular truths,
the multitude of little things, prepare the soul to the strong
impressions of big events, i.e. to the pathetic sublime,45 thanks
to a refine dosage of delays, caution, emotional suspension and
overflowing explosions. The visual detail, upcoming element of
the realist novel, has not only a reality function46 – as it pushes the
language towards the immediacy of daily objects – but it is also
and most of all a stimulus for the activity of imagination in its
tension towards totality, reactivating the phantoms of the ancient
“enàrgheia” and “ékphrasis”.
44 Diderot, The Salon of 1767, p. 202: «The more details one provides, the more
the image evoked in the reader’s mind differs from that on the canvas (…) The
proliferation of detail in a description produces much the same effect as
pulverization».
45 See Diderot, ‘Eloge de Richardson’, in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Jules
Assézat (Paris: Garnier, 1875), vol. V, pp. 211-27.
46 See Michel Delon, Le détail, le réel et le réalisme dans la perspective
française, in Le Second Triomphe du roman du XVIIIe siècle, ed. by Philip
Stewart and Michel Delon (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2009), p. 19.
THE IMPOSSIBLE PORTRAIT.
GEORGES PEREC AND HIS CONDOTTIERE
Valeria Cammarata
The challenge between the representable and the

unrepresentable, between the original and the fake, between the
true and the false is certainly one of the most important questions
of the arts throughout the centuries and in all countries. During
the twentieth century this issue seems to have found a proper
territory in between the realm of the word and that of the image,
not only through reference or citation within the two distinct
and defined systems, but in a deeper exchange of structures.
Thus word and image, which already had a well-established
artistic tradition in the aesthetics of the “sister arts”, as a mutual
exchange, conflagrated in the disputed territory of twentieth-
century representation, in which their relationship waved
between a meeting at infinity and a decisive antimony. Since
both instances “take the word for”, “stand for” something else,
and since that “something else” becomes an object that is hard to
define (or even the unspeakable itself), the relationship between
word and image and its possible products – i.e. ékphrasis – need
to be connected in a unique structure, in which it is difficult to
define where the text ends and the image starts, and in which,
however, the differences are not merged. This is the new frontier
of the “heterology of representation”, whose new means of
expression is the imagetext.
Not only the conflagration between word and image but also
the questioning of representability in literature and in art are the
key features of the work of Georges Perec. He was certainly an
experimenter of writing which he investigated in all its possible
forms, in all its imaginable and unimaginable boundaries, and
whose limitations he tried to overcome. Despite all the efforts,
which led him to produce – as Italo Calvino claims – some of the

greatest literary masterpieces of the second half of the twentieth
century, two major limitations stand insurmountable on Perec’s
scene: memory and identity.
Because of his difficult childhood and of the countered history
as a rootless Jew, Perec attempts to build a stable individuality, an
image of himself that is defined once and for all and that is mostly
unchanging. Not a single image but a structure seems to be the
only one fitting to his personality: the composite, dismantlable
and reconstructable one of the puzzle.
The continuous use of the term “image” should not be
considered a common rhetorical device because it is in the images
of the other that Perec seeks his own portrait, so it is in another art
that Perec searches the mirror of his writing.
This is why his life and his art were characterized by the
invasion of foreign territory, the overstepping of the boundaries of
the self. During the years in which he collaborated with La Ligne
générale, Perec developped a precise reflection on art, particularly
on figurative art. Especially in Defense de Klee, an essay written
for La Ligne générale on August 19th, 1959, Perec makes clear
what should be the task of a work of art: i.e. to build a connection
between man and the world. As observed by David Bellos, in
Perec’s aesthetics «Style, manner, school, degree of abstraction
– all these aspects mattered much less than a work’s success in
achieving the aim of art, which was to provoke in the beholder
some reaction that reduced his alienation from the world, to build
bridges between the self and the other».1 In this perspective the
pictorial work that can achieve this goal better than others is that
of Paul Klee. Klee’s paintings, according to Perec, are due to a
realist style, a style that does not want simply to represent reality,
but also to intensify it, to make it meaningful. In the painting of
Klee, Perec sees the reflection of his own poetics.
However, this is not the only kind of relation between his work
and that of figurative artists. Indeed, of all the possible relationships
1 David Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Worlds (London: Harvill Press, 1993),
p. 243.
V. Cammarata - The Impossible Portrait 45
between visual arts (painting, photography, architecture, sculpture)

and literature, Perec was a real collector. In collecting the rarities
of life and art, Perec was helped by photography, architecture,
painting and drawing, and by the relationships he entertained
with some artists. These were very diverse occasions, for what
concerns the client and the kind of collaboration, which, however,
he never faced as an art critic: «I have never tried – Perec aims
– to make a speech about a painter from the point of view of his
own painting. In fact, I have tried to translate what I feel looking
at the work of an artist, a painter, a photographer, in something I
do from the point of view of my own work».2
Thus began the collaborations with the photographer Cuchi
White and seven painters: Antonio Corpora, Dado, Paolo Boni,
Jaques Poli e Peter Stampli, Fabrizio Clerici, Pierre Getzler. All of
these experiences, which allowed Perec to investigate the limits
of pictorial representation, were traced, by the author himself, to
the field of challenge between art and literature: graphic work
functions as a challenge to the writer; the literary work functions
as a challenge to the painter. A challenge in which, from time to
time, a form of representation forces the other out of its territory to
enter that of the “other”, without, however, getting lost altogether:
the one works as a contrainte to the other. This is the way Perec’s
writing works on painting, for example; this is the way visual art
works on Perec’s writing. The one does not speak about the other,
rather the one forces the other to translate its own speech.
This is the challenge to find a literary form of writing somehow
corresponding to the form that is inside a drawing, an illustration,
a photograph, a painting, etc. In fact, Cuchi White’s trompe l’oeil
photographs, a meta-representative challenge in itself, pose Perec
a problem to solve: to figure out a system of writing that functions
as a trompe l’oeil, but according to its own way.3
2 Georges Perec, ‘Certains peintres...’, Riga, 4 (1993), 62-66 (p. 57), trans.
mine.
3 On the trompe l’oeil genre in Georges Perec and Cuchi White see Valeria
Cammarata, Sfide della rappresentazione: I Trompe l’oeil di Georges Perec e
Cuchi White, in Fototesti: Letteratura e cultura visuale, ed. by Michele
Cometa and Roberta Coglitore (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2015), pp. 9-47.
During his short life, Perec tried to take different directions

and to try different chances: from his incomplete studies at the
Sorbonne – which allowed him to hone his literary bent, but
above all, to know critics such as Barthes, Levinas, Lukács –
to his work at a biology lab – which allowed him to cultivate
his passion for classification, combining and cataloging –, until
his literary experiments within the OULIPO – which enabled
him to establish a challenge between his literature and “other”
arts such as math, chess, painting, photography, sculpture, to
probe the limits of the word in itself. It is just on the field of
this challenge that Perec seems to have found his figure, and his
interest in the visual arts in all his accomplishments had affected
him so much that the interest in contamination between the two
forms of representation becomes more and more intense, as to
continually invade his plans, and in various ways: as “simple”
collaborations with different artists, or in more cryptic forms –
such as that of W or the Memory of Childhood4 in which a key
role in the reconstruction of a memory, albeit distorted, is made
by the camera and the film – until more complex and ambiguous
shapes – such as that of La Vie mode d’emploi,5 with its difficult
and obsessive attempt of producing and reproducing the false
images of a Cabinet d’amateur.6
4 Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance (Paris: Denoël, 1975), trans. by

David Bellos, W or the Memory of Childhood (London: Collins Harvill,
1988).
5 Georges Perec, La Vie mode d’emploi (Paris: Hachette, 1978), trans. by David
Bellos, Life: a User’s Manual (London: Collins Harvill, 1987).
6 Georges Perec, Un Cabinet d’amateur (Paris: Balland, 1979).
Antonello da Messina, Portrait d’homme (Le Condottiere), 1475 ca.
Continuous and more or less veiled references, descriptions,

inventions, images seem, therefore, to characterize the poetry
of Perec. But above all one image is significant not only to his
poetics but to himself: that of Le Condottière, translated in english
as Portrait of a Man.7
On 2012, thirty years after Perec’s death, the last piece of his
literary image was discovered. Actually, it was the first image
of this complex puzzle, the first time Gaspard Winckler, Perec’s
recurrent alter-ego, appeared on the scene. It was the first
“completed” novel that Perec submitted to Gallimard and Seuil
press, between 1959 and 1960, and that both of them refused.
After the delusion, and after having worked so much on this
project, changing titles, reducing the lenght (from 350 to 157),
he wrote to his friend Jaques Lederer: «I’ll go back to it in ten
years when it’ll turn into a masterpiece, or else I’ll wait in my
grave until one of my faithful exegetes comes across it in an
7 Georges Perec, Le Condottière (Paris: Seuil, 2012), trans. by David Bellos,

Portrait of a Man (London: MacLehose Press, 2014).
old trunk you once owned and brings it out».8 Perec has always
struck his readers for his ability in reading the future, but this is
a kind of foresighting!
The novel, carrying already some of the fundamental features
of all the future Perec’s poetry, is told twice, in a way we could
define combinatory and potential, since the two parts – an internal
monologue first, and a confession after – can be read as two single
stories, as two parts, two points of view of and on the same story,
and they can also be read coversely: the second part as the first
and viceversa. This kind of structure will be one of the favorities
in Perec’s writing, and it will have the definitive realization in
W, or the Memory of Childhood, the novel that has very much in
common with Portrait of a Man, both because of the name and
the characteristics of the protagonist – also recurrent in Life: a
User’s Manual, and in Un cabinet d’amateur – and because of its
double structure.
It could be told the story of a double crime: one against
Madera, art dealer and paymaster of Gaspard Winckler; the
second against Le Condottière painted by Antonello da Messina.
Both of them, indeed, stay annihilated between the first and the
second page of the novel. Madera’s heavy body is borrowed up
and down the stairs leading to Winckler’s studio, still bleeding
after Gaspard has slaughtered him. The warlord, the condottière,
il Condottiero stays «crucified on his easel».9 We immediately
know that Gaspard has killed them, on purpose by means of a
razor the first, accidentally by means of the failure of his paint
brush the second. But why did he destroy them? All the novel is
the explanation of the reason why he has “killed” them, and the
reason is, somehow, the same: to get free from them, to get free
from the obscure man who, while promising a wealthy life, has
in fact imprisoned Gaspard exploiting his ability as a forger; and
to get free from the hot blooded, self-confident man who, looking
at him from the portrait, has slammed into his face the failure of
8 Georges Perec, Letter to Jaques Lederer, quoted in David Bellos, Introduction,

in Perec, Portrait of a Man, pp. 6-15 (p. 12).
9 Perec, Portrait of a Man, p. 19.
his art: in front of the ineffable art of Antonello his twelve-years-

long try to make a new, original copy of the Condottière finds an
insurmountable limit. Still there is a way out, that to destroy that
limit, to overcome it by «the first action of the demiurge emerging
from chaos».10
Three main characters stay on the stage of Portrait of a Man:
Gaspard Winckler, Antonello da Messina and the unknown
warlord himself. Behind them stays, of course, Perec, the
“character” into which all the others flow, that they somehow
have built or depicted. And, probably, it is his own image, his
own portrait that Perec is trying to depict through each of them,
by writing of and on each of them.
Perec and Winckler
Gaspard the forger. Gaspard Theotokópoulos alias El Greco.

Botticelli. Gaspard Chardin, Gaspard Cranach the Elder. Gaspard
Holbein, Gaspard Memling, Gaspard Metsys, Gaspard Master of
Flemalle. Gaspard Vivarini, Gaspard Anonymous French School,
Gaspard Corot, Gaspard Van Gogh, Gaspard Raphael Sanzio, Gaspard
de Toulouse-Lautrec, Gaspard de Puccio alias Pisanello … Gaspard
the forger. The smith-slave. Gaspard the forger. Why a forger? How a
forger? Since when a forger? He hadn’t always been a forger…11
This list of false Gaspard, or of coincidences of Gaspard with

the masters he has plagiarized is the better way in which Perec
can represent the first act of the drama of which his alter ego
will be the protagonist through all his works: namely of being
able to produce only fakes, mere reflections of creativity, a
whole gallery but «a gallery without any soul or guts …».12 Nor
Gaspard or Georges, by the way, are simply forgers, infact Perec
poses some questions on the way in which Gaspard is a forger,
questions intended to discover this mystery way to be forger in a

11 Perec, Portrait of a Man, pp. 40-41.
deductive way. Indeed, as we have already said, the whole novel

is structured as a crime novel, in which it is not the crime in
itself to be uncovered from the mystery, we know very well who
is the victim, who is the killer, how did he act. What we do not
immediately know is why he did it. But, above all, what remains
fundamental to be discovered for Perec is what kind of forger
Gaspard (and Georges himself) is.
In Perec’s writings Gaspard Winckler is always a forger: as
a painter, as a remembering orphan, as a puzzler. But each time
– in Portrait of a Man, in W or the Memory of Childhood, in
Life: A User’s Manual, in Un Cabinet d’Amateur – he is a forger
in a different way. Portrait of a Man, in particular is the story
of a forger in crisis: the story of a young painter who suddenly
becomes a successful forger, who is educated to be a forger, who
enters into crisis when he comes face to face with the Condottiero
by Antonello.
Winckler’s story can be traced along this novel just answering
the questions Winckler poses himself. So, why a forger? And since
when? He did not become a forger because he needed money,
nor because he had suffered extortion. He cannot properly say
if he has never liked it. Probably the difficult answer stays in
his young age, and in the easy life the whole forgery equipe he
had encountered – Anatole Madera, the paymaster, Jérôme, the
“forger-master”, Otto and Rufus, Madera’s assistants – promised
him. It appeared to be much more simple to make «desultory use
of a fairly good “hand” to keep boredom at bay (…) copying,
pastiching, copying, imitating, reproducing, tracing, dissecting»13
than to be a real painter. Slowly this easy and high paying job had
become an attraction, the attraction for the incognito, an absurd
will not to exist but under thousands masks, under thousands
deads. As a forger he used to live in a false and non-sense world,
in museums and laboratories, investigating the precise acts other
painters did before him, better than he could do. Trying to reach
an illusory likeness. He sudden became the greatest forger in the
world, which meant he did not exist:

Listen. I did not exist. Gaspard Winckler was a name without

content. No police force was out to get me, nobody even knew who I
was. I had no country, no friends, no aims. Once a year I did a genuine
restoration job for the Art Museum in Geneva. I was supposed to be
off sick for the rest of the time. Where my money came from nobody
knew. I was allegedly on Rufus’s payroll as the picture restorer at his art
gallery, but everyone knew that the Koenig Gallery hardly ever needed
to do restoration work on its holdings. I was the world’s greatest forger
because nobody knew I was a forger … That’s all. That’s enough …
Enough to be dead.14
Moreover, if Gaspard is a forger is because of Jérôme, the first

forger employed by Madera, who becomes his master. They first
met when he was seventeen years old and he had just finished
the school, in Switzerland. He was not Swiss (we do not know
his actual nationality), but his parents had sent him there because
of the Second World War,15 which was almost ended when the
encouter with Jérôme ocurs.
What kind of forger, then, he was? Till he encountered
Antonello’s Condottiero, he used to work like all other forgers
work, like Van Meergeren, like Icilio, like Jérôme: after having
choosen three or four works by whomever, he selected some
pieces here and there, he mixed up, and he built a puzzle.
This very image of the puzzle maker is, of course, particularly
important in Perec’s writing. It is, in some way, the embrional
stage of what Gaspard Winckler will become in his masterwork,
Life: a User Manual.
However Antonello was different. At the beginning he
started, as usually, from some preconceptions, some issues he,
like anyone, knew about the sicilian painter: «His stiffness, his
almost obsessive precision, the sparseness of his settings, a

15 The story of the young Gaspard, before he becomes a forger, in relation to his
parents is particularly close to that of Perec. Significantly, the last memory the
character has of them is set in a train station, when he choose not to follow
them on their way to escape and to remain in Switzerland. It is very similar to
the last time little Georges saw his mother, on the train to Switzerland, where
she sent him to escape from nazis. She was eventually captured from nazis,
and died in Auschwitz.
more Flemish than Italian distribution of mannerisms and, so to

speak, an admirable command of the subject or, more exactly,
a way of portraying command itself».16 But the problem came
when he arrived to the Condottiere, since it is different from
all others Antonello’s portraits: «the only portrait Antonello did
that is so powerful».17
The new challenge with Antonello, in fact, is a breaking
point, for he tries to forge the heritage of the past in order to
make something new.18 But still this “new” is not something to be
brought toward the future, rather to be brought back in the past
again. Since this powerful portrait gives him no starting point for
a puzzle. It is impossible to make a puzzle from the Condottiero,
for that stiffness means sincerity, and he needs to understand that
face to be able to paint it again. Again but in a different way, in a
new way. This is the idea he had: to pretend to be a real painter.
But the attempt is too hard, and he failed:
What was the illusion he had cherished? That he would be able to

cap an untarnished career by carrying off what no forger before him
had dared attempt: to create an authentic masterwork of the past, to re-
cover in palpable and tangible form, after a dozen years’ intense labour,
something far above the technical tricks and devices of his trade such
as mere mastery of gesso duro or monochrome painting – to recover the
explosive triumph, the perpetual reconquista, the overwhelming dyna-
mism that was the Renaissance.19
The Condottiere is the breaking point of Winckler’s forger

profession because of the arrogance it instills in Winckler:
to make the warlord anew. But something got wrong and this
inspiration became a failure, the dream became a nightmare, the
studio became a prison, the creative impulse of the painter turns

17 Ibidem.
18 It is not secondary that this breaking point coincides with the encounter with
Mila, the woman he will eventually fall in love with. As Perec himself says:
«For the first time in his life he had a sudden urge, just like that, to stop
playing the game. To be himself (…) Loving a woman, was that being himself?
Did he love her?», Perec, Portrait of a Man, p. 43.
into killing gesture of no one but a forger: «I wasn’t ready … I

wasn’t good enough. Was looking for something that didn’t match
anything inside me, that didn’t exist in me (…). But Antonello
wasn’t joking».20
His kind of forgery questions the modern concept of art as
made of both formal and material complex, which together give
the work an autorial authenticity. No doubt, Winkler is able to
accomplish the formal preparation and creation of a masterpiece
ascribable to Antonello da Messina, another version of the well
known portrait kept at the Louvre. He studied for almost twelve
years Antonello’s technniques of preparation of the canvas and of
painting itself. He is a perferct master in the technique of gesso
duro. The material feautures of the work are perfectly comparable
to that of the renaissance master, but still the formal aspect is very
far from the original. It is a failure, it is not false because of its
material properties, but because of a pretended identity it cannot
in any way pretend.21
It could still remain unclear what is at the basis of this failure,
of this failed identity. What scared Winckler that morning in his
studio, at the very end of his twelve-years-work on the Condottiere,
what made him crazy as much as to kill his paymaster and to
destroy his masterpiece. It was the final awareness that the image
he was looking for, was not that of the unknown warlord portraied
by Antonello da Messina, but his own image. Moreover, the
most scaring discover for him was the absence of that image, the
disappearing of his face, the discover of an absence, of a hollow.
He was no one: a man without a past, without true memories
giving him material to make art, without real experience of
the real world. That real world that was fighting its hardest
war, while he was passing his childhood in a safe, neutral,
inexistent country, without parents, without religion, without
a mother tongue, without “History”: «A life with no roots and
no connections. With no past beyond the abstract, mummified

21 See Umberto Eco, ‘Falsi e contraffazioni’, in U. Eco, I limiti dell’interpretazione
(Milano: Bompiani 1990).
past of the world, like a museum catalogue. A paltry universe. A

camp. A ghetto. A prison».22
An artist at the desperate research of his own image to be
discovered through the images and the memories of other artists.
An artist fated to constantly discover an absolute absence. An
artist called Georges Perec.
Perec, Antonello and the Warlord
At the center of the novel stands the warlord, the Condottiere.

After the first part – narrated in a stream of consciousness, devoted
to Gaspard’s attempt to escape his studio/prison, and from Rufus
and Otto, who certainly want to punish him for Madera’s death –,
before the second part – narrated as a confession to his Yougoslav
friend Streten, a sort of flashback of all his entire life – stay two
little chapters introducing us straight to the warlord’s portraits, the
one by Gaspard Winckler, and the one by Antonello da Messina,
deeply involved one in each other.
The Condottiere, the warlord is first introduced through
Winckler’s «clunky reproductions»,23 within the microcosm of
his studio, now become a prison. It is not actually described in
particulars, but in few words Perec gives us the quintessence of
Antonello’s portrait: «a face of triumph and control».24 The real
description is devoted, per converso, to its ill-matched reflections,
condensed in the final failed “forgerpiece”, ironically described
in all its material and less significative parts:
the living image of failure on the unfinished panel set on its special
easel with its four corners protected by a triple sheath of cotton wool,
rag cloth and metal angle-piece at the carefully contrived focal point
of six small spotlights: it didn’t show unity restored, the mastery of
the world or inalterable permanence, but instead, a mere frozen flash
– as if catching sight of itself in a moment of clarity – portraying

24 Ibidem.
the fundamental anguish of blind force, the sourness of cruel might,

and doubt.25
Carrying on his irony, Perec traces in the Renaissence genius the

cause of all the failures to come. It is like Antonello had expressed
in nuce one of the fundamental question of twentieth century
philosophy: the expression of all the «anguished contraddictions
of consciousness».26 That face becomes the mis-matched mirror
of a controversal world, which the warlord overcomes with his
proud and straight gaze, and that the painter re-organizes in his
«eternal and rational stability»27 of a Renaissance structure. That
model, that face, his gaze would not have been possible any more.
After the Condottiere any look would have become cloudy, any
will «flimsy and fleeting», no more strenght and completeness.
After Antonello no painters would have included «the world and
his own self in a single glance».28 The perfect structure had turn
into a fragile, caotic organization, the demiurge had turn into
a demon, the truth into doubt. The only way for art to express
all this was that of falsification, of pastiche, beyond any model,
beyond any possible representation.
What, then, the Condottiere had become? The portrait depicted
by Perec, as a new Picture of Dorian Gray, is a distortion of
the original model, it is the mirror of all viciousness humanity
has misrecognized in the self and has assigned to the realm of
represetation. This is the apotheosis of notional ékphrasis:
Impassiveness had turned into panic, the relaxed firmness of the

muscles had come out as lockjaw, the look of confidence had become
arrogance and the firmness of the mouth now expressed revenge. Every
detail was no longer an integral element of an irreducibly transcendent
totality, but just a flimsy and fleeting trace of a man’s will strained to
breaking point, a will that was itself rendered untrue by its development,
wearing ever thinner as the superficial impression of completeness gave

27 Ibidem.
way to distorting elements which by virtue of their power and ambiguity

undermined, point by point, the apparent harmony of the ensemble.29
And what about the painter? As it had already happened to

Balzac’s Frenhofer in The Unknown Masterpiece,30 who had
experienced the limits of pictorial and had tryied to overcome
them by looking for a new paradigm. In his attempt Frenhofer had
fallen in what Diderot considered the risk of his own madness:
the vanity of showing his own expertise, as much as not to being
able to stop his brush at the surface, ending up with slaughtering
his figures.31 But, the most hard limit, both for Frenhofer and for
Winckler, was the face, namely a torture for the modern painter
«And more must they be embarassed by the human face, that
moving canvas which changes in form and colour with all the ever-
varying feelings of that subtle breath that we call the soul».32 Like
Frenhofer, Winckler has challenged these true limits of modern
painting, of modern representation as a whole, and like him he
has destroyed his masterpiece, since all his techniques – all the
glues and plaster, the gesso duro, the brushes, the pencil sketches
– did only show the futility of his project: «From the center of
the painted panel shone forth sacrilegious self-satisfaction. In the
now empty laboratory the failure had been entire».33
The face of that warlord had really been a torture for Winckler,
incapable of grasping that gaze, that sneer, that true espression.
That face, and all the other faces and the heads he studied to
compose his new impossible Renaissance puzzle, popolated a
whole horror gallery, described in a pure denotative way in one of
the numerous lists of painters and works which enrich the novel.
But, the true description of Antonello’s Condottiere rises from
the ashes of Winckler’s Condottiere at the second turning point of

30 Honoré de Balzac, Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu (Paris: 1831), trans. by Richard
Howard, The Unknown Masterpiece (New York: The New York Review of
Books, 2001)
31 Denis Diderot, Diderot’s Thoughts on Art and Style: With Some of His Shorter
Essays, trans. by B. L. C. Tollemache (Remington: 1893).
32 Diderot, p. 49.
the narrative structure. Gaspard has just met Streten, and he has
just began to tell what he did, the crimes he has committed, but
before beginning the story of his entire life a new pause stops his
discourse, and «the sense of presence» of that face finally appears
through the words of Perec:
You were taken in by that oxlike mug, that admirably oafish face, that
spectacularly thuggish snout. But what you had to recover was the strong
and simple relationship (a peculiarly simplified relationship, moreover)
that this personage – who was in the last analysis little more than a tarted-
up barbarian – was able to afford to have with the world. Were you able
to understand it? Were you able to understand why or how it occurred
to this mere soldier of fortune to have his portrait painted by one of the
greatest artists of his day? Could you grant that in place of unbuttoned
gaudiness (with loosened doublet and aiguillettes fixed on any old how)
he wore only an admirably neutral tunic with no decoration apart from
a barely visible mother-of-pearl button? Could you understand the
absence of a necklace, medals, or fur, the barely visible collar, the lack
of pleats in the tunic, the exceptional strictness of the skull-cap? Did you
grasp that the almost impossible sobriety and severity of dress had the
direct consequence of leaving the face alone to define the Condottiere?
Because that’s what it was about. The eyes, the mouth, the tiny scar, the
tensing of the muscles in the jaw were the exclusive means of giving
consummate and utterly unambiguous expression to the social status,
history, principles and methods of your character…34
Merely a face, a face you need to know very well, as well as the
world he belongs to, to be able to portrait it. There is no need to
study particulars: you have to know that soldier, to have seen his
eyes, his mouth, and to be that painter, belonging to the same world,
or at least belonging to whatever world. But Gaspard is not a painter,
he does not belong to any world. There is no Van Eyck behind him.
Gaspard Winckler got lost in searching the true Condottiero,
but what he did not understand – he will eventually understand at
the end of his story – is that the warlord does not exist. The only
man who did really exist was Antonello. It was not the action or
the challenge of the warlord what he saw on the canvas, but that

of Antonello a man in search of order and coherence, of truth and

freedom by means of his art.
Antonellus messaneus eum pinxit, and no other could paint
him again. Le Condottière is not only the portrait of an unknown
soldier, it is a window on Antonello’s world, it is a mirror of
Antonello himself. Thus, the forger who have realized the world
gallery of all the times, falls down in front of Antonello and his
Condottiere, he falls in front of the unrepresentable, for Gaspard’s
warlord could be nothing but himself, his own mirror, but since
Gaspard Winckler is no one – he is a forger, one of a thousand
masks – the warlord is no one. Gaspard Winckler doesn’t exist,
and the Condottiere is the image, the face of what doesn’t exist:
A monumental ambition. A monumental mistake. A vast recycling

scheme. Trying to gather the central elements of your life in that
face. Harmonious conclusion. Necessary conclusion. The universe
of potential broached at last, beyond masks, beyond play-acting. The
ambition of seeing his face emerge slowly from the wood panel, with
its strength, power, and certainty.35
By the way, Gaspard Winkler is also Georges Perec, once again

the reflection of someone who not having memory, not having
memory images, does not exist. The mystery warlord is the image
of oblivion. This is why Winckler fails, because he knows that
he cannot, nor he wants, to remake Antonello’s Condottiere, but
another Condottiere: «a different one, but of the same quality».36
To some extent Portrait of a Man, Perec’s first novel, is the
opposite of Cabinet d’amateur, Perec’s last novel. Even though
this last novel is about forgery, as much as the first is, it is the
demonstration that each original art work is the copy of another
art work. Portrait of a Man is rather the celebration of fake as an
artistic expression of novelty and authenticity. This is why it is so
difficult to succeed in forgery.
Once again self-portrait and autobiography coincide in Perec
who writes the authentic portrait of a false “self”.

THE DREAM-IMAGE IN GRADIVA’S GAIT
FROM POMPEII TO MARRAKESH
Clizia Centorrino
Dreaming in Pompeii
Wilhelm Jensen, a Danish writer and poet renowned in

Germany in the end of the 19th century, is best remembered in
particular for his short tale Gradiva: A Pompeian Fancy. Before
enrolling at the Faculty of Philosophy in Munich, the writer
attended medical school for just one year. In Munich he began to
frequent literary and artistic circles and graduated in Philosophy
in 1860. The short tale Karin von Schweden, not Gradiva, would
make him a renowned writer in his time.
Jensen lived in the German world in the latter part of nineteenth
century, the same world where psychoanalysis has begun to spread.
Luigi Russo proposes that readers and scholars treat Gradiva
from both an aesthetic and psychoanalytic point of view:
So it’s reasonable to think that in this intellectual climate, marked

by romantic medicine and fed by the problems of animal magnetism,
[Freud] would have highlighted what he considered to be the pregnant
psychoanalytic themes in Jensen’s tale and omitted the other aesthetic
elements. One must keep in mind these overlooked elements.1
Freud’s analysis, an interesting study about the interpretation

of invented dreams, was a determining factor of the work’s
success. The protagonist of Jensen’s tale, Norbert Hanold, is an
archaeologist who makes a grand tour in Italy. Probably during
a visit to Rome, he discovers a bas-relief of a walking woman in
1 Luigi Russo, La nascita dell’estetica di Freud (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1983), p.

134, all translations by the author.
the Vatican Museum. Norbert is struck by the sculpture, by «[the]

grace which gave the impression of imparting life to the relief».2
A particular detail of the low relief attracts his attention: it is the
feet in the act of walking. The left foot has advanced, and the
right, about to follow, touches the ground only lightly with the tips
of the toes, while the sole and heel are raised almost vertically. It
is precisely because of this peculiarity that he decides to call her
Gradiva — that is, «the girl splendid in walking».3
Jensen’s prose makes it quite evident that Norbert has
immediately become obsessed with his Gradiva, «his observations
caused him annoyance, for he found in the vertical position of the
lingering foot beautiful, and regretted that it had been created by
the imagination or arbitrary act of sculptor and did not correspond
to reality».4
Hanold persuades himself that the profile of the woman has
Greek origins. He tries to find Gradiva’s way of walking in
other women, women of his time, but in vain. His monothematic
dreams start, all of them are centred on Gradiva.
The first dream takes place in Pompeii on August 24th of the
year 79 (AD), the day of the Vesuvius eruption:
The pebbles and the rain of ashes fell down on Norbert also, but,
after the strange manner of dreams, they did not hurt him […] As he
stood thus at the edge of the Forum near the Jupiter temple, he suddenly
saw Gradiva a short distance in front of him. Until then no thought
of her presence there had moved him, but now suddenly it seemed
natural to him, as she was, of course, a Pompeiian girl, that she was
living in her native city and, without his having any suspicion of it,
was his contemporary (…) when Norbert Hanold awoke, he still heard
the confused cries of the Pompeiians who were seeking safety, and the
dully resounding boom of the surf of the turbulent sea.5
2 Sigmund Freud, Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva: An Interpretation

in the Light of Psychoanalysis of Gradiva, trans. by Helen M. Downey (New
York: Moffat, Yard & Company, 1922), p. 14.
3 Freud, Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva, p. 1.
C. Centorrino - The Dream-Image in Gradiva’s Gait 61
Norbert continues his journey and arrives in Rome, where

he is tormented by the presence of young bridal couples; in the
guesthouse he dreams for the second time. He is in Pompeii again:
Apollo lifts up Venus and he places her safely, maybe, upon a
carriage. It is strange that Apollo and Venus speak in German, not
in Greek, exactly like the young bridal couples who torture him.
The scene changes:
Absolute silence took the place of the confused sound, and instead
of smoke and fire-glow, bright, hot sunlight rested on the ruins of the
buried city. This likewise changed gradually, became a bed on whose
white linen golden beams circled up to his eyes, and Norbert Hanold
awoke in the scintillating spring morning of Rome.6
Hanold decides to return to Naples as soon as possible. When

he realises that the young bridal couples invade Naples, like as
they did in Rome, he gets away. He takes off for Pompeii.
During a walk through the ruins of the ancient city, he catches
sight of Gradiva, but «again [she appeared as] a noonday dream-
picture that passed there before him and yet also [as] a reality».7
Norbert silently follows Gradiva’s steps until she arrives at the
house of Meleager, when she suddenly disappears. He falls asleep
and Gradiva appears again. Hanold finds the courage to speak to
Gradiva and decides to address her in Greek. But Gradiva does
not understand and asks him to speak in German. This is the first
of many meetings. Hanold takes an asphodel8 to his loved one
and she shows her way of walking. He sees that below the raised
gown she wears, not sandals, but light, sand-colored shoes of fine
leather, modern shoes. Her name is now Zoe.
Hanold begins to ask himself questions; he starts to think that
Zoe-Gradiva is a projection of his mind. He is disappointed and

8 The asphodel is the flower associated with death and Gradiva directly
expresses this concept: «One must adapt himself to the inevitable and I have
long accustomed myself to being dead; but now my time is for to-day; you
have brought the grave-flower with you to conduct me back» (Freud, Delusion
and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva, p. 70).
worried. He sets off for the city, after a meeting with a lizard-
hunter. In town he finds a host (but also a forger) who sells him a
metal brooch. Anecdotes say that this brooch supposedly belongs
to a Pompeiian couple who died during the Vesuvius eruption in
a firm, harrowing embrace. Hanold is at first very skeptical about
this story, but now he is convinced that the object belongs to Zoe-
Gradiva, so he buys it for an exorbitant amount.
When he returns to his room, he falls asleep and begins to
dream in a new dream «remarkably nonsensi[cal]» fashion:
Somewhere in the sun Gradiva sat making a trap out of a blade of

grass in order to catch a lizard, and she said, Please stay quite still-my
colleague is right; the method is really good, and she has used it with
the greatest success. Norbert Hanold became conscious in his dream
that it was actually the most utter madness, and he cast about to free
himself from it. He succeeded in this by the aid of an invisible bird, who
seemingly uttered a short, merry call, and carried the lizard away in its
beak; afterwards everything disappeared.9

The next day, at midday, Hanold joins Gradiva into the house
of Meleager. With fear and trepidation he asks her if the brooch
belongs to her. Now he is afraid that Gradiva is dead. This is
an illogical thought mechanism, but he needs to be reassured.
His confused state of mind is evident. The aspect of the modern
Gradiva scares him because he is afraid that Gradiva remains a
ghost. He needs to know that Gradiva is a woman of flesh and
blood. He reasons that the only way to know it is to touch her.
He finds a pretext: a fly lands on the cheek of Zoe/Gradiva. He
discovers the reality, but Zoe, teased, thinks that he is crazy.
Hanold does not meet a Pompeiian ghost, but a childhood love.
It all starts from the last name of Zoe, Bertgang, which has the
same etymology of Gradiva: “the girl splendid in walking”. There
is an evident physic similarity between the two:

A merry, comprehending, laughing expression lurked around his
companion’s mouth, and, raising her dress slightly with her left hand,
9 Freud, Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva, pp. 78-79.

Gradiva rediviva Zoë Bertgang, viewed by him with dreamily observing

eyes, crossed with her calmly buoyant walk, through the sunlight, over
the stepping-stones, to the other side of the street.10

To introduce the first dream, Jensen writes clearly «he had, one
night, a dream which caused him great anguish of mind”.11 It is
well known that Freud extensively analyzed “dreams of anguish”
like that mentioned in this sentence in The Interpretation of
Dreams. Furthermore, Freud’s analysis proposes that «the third
and the most remarkable and incomprehensible peculiarity of the
memory in dreams, is shown in the selection of the reproduced
material, for stress is laid not only on the most significant, but
also on the most indifferent and superficial reminiscences».12
Indifferent and superficial details of Hanold dreams are: lizard,
a young woman’s way of walking and her last name (in the dream
she is called Gradiva).
It is hard to associate the detail “lizard” to Zoe Bertgang, until
the woman recalls to the protagonist that she is the daughter
of a zoologist. He shows an interest in Lacerta faraglionensis,
subspecies of Podarcis sicula, which only lives in the Faraglioni
of Capri. The lizard hunting (the manifest dream content),
conducted by the Zoe’s father, is connected to Gradiva hunting of
Hanold; in this way, the image of the bird who catches the reptile,
unconsciously assumes an erotic meaning (sense). The Hanold
oneiric life is the medium which makes him able to understand
his unsatisfied needs and desires.
Gradiva’s Film
After twelve years of cinematographic inactivity, Alain Robbe-

Grillet decided to work on a new project, C’est Gradiva qui
vous appelle, a movie loosely based on Jensen’s tale. He first

12 Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams (New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1913), p. 13.
presented Gradiva in 2006 to the “Horizons” section audience

at the 63rd Venice Film Festival. Robbe-Grillet’s screenplay for
the film C’est Gradiva qui vous appelle dates from 2002, and
was published by Éditions de Minuit. After an open heart surgery,
Robbe-Grillet was obliged to edit the movie in a hospital. Under
these circumstances the director and his assistant editor finished
the project in an assembly hall arranged in the clinic. According
to the French director the movie is about:

A young art critic, John Locke, who loves painting and in particular
painting as object: art object, erotic object, object d’amour fou (…)
he decides to live in a small villa in the ruins of the Moroccan Atlas
mountains, following the path of Delacroix, who is also his subject of
study. Conducted by a man pretending to be blind, he falls into the
clutches of a forger, Anatoli, who leads him to a clandestine cabaret to
view some sado-masochist spectacles. Under the pretext of giving him
drawings made by Delacroix in Morocco, Anatoli (…) accuses John of
a sexual crime, which is actually committed by another man.13

The protagonist is named John Locke, but, according to
Robbe-Grillet, this is not an allusion to the British philosopher.
Robbe-Grillet denied this theory during an interview released
to The Guardian in his response to the explicit question «Is his
film’s hero, John Locke, named after the English Philosopher?».
Robbe-Grillet answered:
No, he’s named after a character called John Locke in Antonioni’s

The Passenger. Antonioni was one of the few geniuses of cinema. The
story is about a man [played by Jack Nicholson] who steals the identity
of a dead man, hoping that it will solve all his problems. Actually, it just
makes matters worse, and he gets pursued by the dead man’s pursuers.14

However, Antonioni movie’s hero is in fact named David
Locke, not John, as Robbe-Grillet purports. Nevertheless The
13 Caterina Taricano and Claudio Di Minno, ‘Il gioco del piacere, il piacere del
gioco. Il cinema di Robbe-Grillet’, Mondo Niovo 18-24 ft/s, 3 (2006), p. 12.
14 Stuart Jeffries, ‘French force’, Guardian, 15 September 2007, www.guardian.
co.uk/film/2007/sep/15/2.
Passenger’s plot and setting contain many latent similarities

to Robbe-Grillet’s filmic choices. In Gradiva we follow two
stories: part of Jensen’s tale and Delacroix’s journey to Morocco
in 1832. Over the course of this journey the painter completed
hundred of drawings, which now are in Delacroix Museum in
Paris. Delacroix’s works reveal how much the North-African
population and natural environment clearly impressed and
fascinated him.
John Locke is in Morocco to study Delacroix and, in the first
scene, we see him watching slides of Delacroix’s drawings. (The
slides also contain sketches of horses. In fact the abundance of
horse sketchings in the painter’s sketchbooks kept during the
journey, which are contained in Delacroix Museum, underline
the painter’s fascination with this animal. One must understand
the symbolic use of horses in Robbe-Grillet’s film as a direct
reference to Delacroix’s journey to Morocco).15 The first element,
which connects the film to the book, is the reference to the
vertical position of the foot, which is framed for a long time by
the camera. The woman is suddenly introduced into the movie:
her appearance fascinates and hypnotizes the spectator. The foot,
in a particularly high-arched position, is framed two times and
then Gradiva appears in the movie.
As in Jensen’s tale, the first meeting between John and the
woman occurs in the house of Meleager (this time in a Moroccan
version). Gradiva-Leïla roams the streets of Marrakesh in a
transparent white dress. In the following scene Locke learns of an
anecdote that the ghost of a woman named Leïla roams through
the city streets. She was punished because she felt in love with
an Occidental tourist (Eugène Delacroix) and was killed with a
dagger. This element becomes very emblematic. In fact Delacroix
brought back from his trip to Morocco a lot of objects; one of
these is a large sabre or nimcha. This object further demonstrates
the importance of the French artist’s presence in the film.
The viewer learns that Gradiva’s gracious gait is not perceptible
to the human ear. It was Delacroix who named her Gradiva and
15 Guy Dumur, Delacroix et le Maroc (Paris: Herscher, 1988).

in his drawings he insisted on her foot position. Locke becomes

obsessed with this woman, who comes to haunt his dreams.
The forger Anatoli invites John to his house, where he gives
him a medication purported to alleviate his toothache, but which
has hallucinatory effects. Having entered into a semiconscious
state of mind, Locke sees [00:28:54] Leïla spread out and chained
in the vein of the Delacroix painting the Death of Ophelia—we
see the same body position and melancholic, absent look.
Bloody “odalisques”, victims of torture, inhabit his dream.
Locke is introduced to the Club du Triangle d’or, at the entrance
of which he receives a dagger. In his room (room number 13)
there are two doors. He opens the right-hand door and falls asleep
on the bed, where he dreams about the forger’s servant, Claudine
who is tortured with a dagger.
He awakens distraught and opens the other door: Gradiva-Leïla
is chained on the sofa, stabbed. He has his hands full of blood and
is holding the dagger. A camera clicks and a flash goes off. He
runs out of the room, anguished and scared; in the corridor he sees
Belkis, disguised, who shouts and runs away. Indeed, Belkis, who
is Locke’s ambiguous servant, appears in many of the scenes which
are set outside of the villa. This fact forces us to generally reflect.
The girl [Belkis] acts in the tableaux vivants, which take place in
the forger’s and Madame Elvira’s house, but also tortures and whips
others girls and works to satisfy paying guests’ desires. It may be
that all scenes set in the house of Anatoli are part of his dreams.
The sequences where Gradiva-Leïla appears are very interesting:
in the first [00:43:25] she runs with a splendid white horse; in the
second [00:46:00] Gradiva sings by the moonlight in a place which
reminds one of a Pompeiian atmosphere.
There is a dialogue between Locke and Gradiva-Leïla where

she explains that she is the ghost of the woman seduced by
Delacroix and punished for this love. In the next scene Belkis
and John sleep side by side. The servant wakes up, and she says:
«I have had a horrible nightmare!». But the answer is almost
desecrating: «Don’t dream, it’s out of fashion!».
The next dream [01:00:03] takes place in the afternoon. Locke

goes out to get some fresh air, whereupon Gradiva appears
followed by two black horses, Belkis seated upon the second.
She is chained and stabbed (exactly like Gradiva in the Club).
A mysterious man leans her on the same place where Locke had
met his “oneiric lover.” Perhaps it is a premonitory dream for
the end of the movie—we aren’t able to determine the dream’s
meaning before the end of the film.
Locke meets Claudine, who models on the beach for a
photography service. When he arrives in a cafeteria John meets
Hermione, an actress in the Anatoli’s tableaux vivants. The
resemblance with Leïla is striking. The exchange between Locke
and Hermione reveals this: «I’m a dreams’ comedienne […] as the
name reveals: I play in people’s dreams […] the dream’s world is
as real as wakeful life. Don’t you know that, Mr. Locke?».16
It seems that Hermione acts in John’s dreams, and otherwise
as she says: «The dreams’ world is so similar to the other one. It
is an exact double, a twin. There are characters, objects, words,
fears, pleasures, tragedies. But everything is more violent».17
The French director’s point of view filters through the word
of Hermione, a character who assumes different personalities. Is
it perhaps true that dreams, exactly like cinema, can transpose
desires into images? Can dream and reality coexist, or even
merge? Only an objet or a person can keep one firmly fixed
within the real world. This is the function of Belkis, Locke’s
servant, who has genuine, passionate and unrestrained feelings
for her master.
Robbe-Grillet’s movie wants to leave the spectator in constant
doubt. Such unresolved questions remain: who writes the
story and who truly lives the protagonist’s story? Is it perhaps
16 Alain Robbe-Grillet, C’est Gradiva qui vous appelle (Paris: Les Éditions de
Minuit, 2002), p. 118: «Je suis comédienne de rêves […] comme le nom
l’indique: je joue dans le rêves des gens […] Le monde des rêves est aussi réel
que celui de la vie éveillée. Ne le saviez-vous pas, Monsieur Locke?».
17 Alain Robbe-Grillet, C’est Gradiva qui vous appelle, p. 118, «Le monde des
rêves ressemble d’ailleurs beaucoup à l’autre. C’est son double exact, son ju-
meau. Il y a des personnages, des objets, des paroles, des peurs, des plaisirs,
des drames. Mais tout est infiniment plus violent».
Hermione the actress, who wants to pass her story onto posterity?
Or is Locke, who has fallen in love with a ghost, a chimera?
But in dreams there are limits. Not all is allowed; the so-called
onirographes, the playwrights assigned to the draft of dreams’
stories, supervise and enforce the moral law. We could name
them “dreams’ guardians”. They are destined to the Freudian
censorship and in the deformation of the oneiric content.
The dialogue continues and some clues suggest clear
references to the Freudian dream theory. Hermione, in particular,
becomes the messenger for Freudian thought by uttering the
sentence «Every true dream is erotic» («Tous les vrais rêves
sont érotiques»). So actors become passionate about their
profession. However, according to Robbe-Grillet’s conception
of dreams, they have neither latent nor manifest content. Drifting
through two universes, the oneiric and the real, they develop into
fantasies and embody the protagonist’s conscious fears.
Dreaming of the servant Belkis as a sacrificial victim, laid on
an altar and stabbed, Locke reveals to himself the fear of losing
the only real love. This love remains always disguised, which is
conveyed in the detail of Belkis’ different-coloured hairs.
To the question: «Do you think adapting movies from works of
literature is always a losing bet?», Robbe-Grillet answers:
More precisely, I think it is possible to make movies from works

of literature but it is important to consider the specificity of the each
form respective materials: this is extremely important in art. It is not
the same sculpture when we use the clay as when we directly engrave
stone. Similarly, there is a relationship between the cinematographic
story structures and a written story structures, but their materials are
very different: in the novel we are in front of phrases and words, in the
movie we are in front of images and sounds.18
The director’s analysis clarifies some choices made to direct

Gradiva, his last and favorite feature film. It is needless to say
that the tale is well-suited to Robbe-Grillet’s directorial method:
a land profaned by modernity as background (in Jensen’s tale by
18 Taricano and Di Minno, p. 36.

young bridal couples; in Robbe-Grillet’s movie by bailing out

delinquents), a platonic love inspired by the ghost of a woman, and
a real love with two different endings. Robbe-Grillet’s ending does
not consist in love triumphing. Like Hanold’s delirium, Locke’s
blows over, but the causes are different. Hanold reconnects with
reality by touching his beloved’s cheek while Locke understands
he has lost the only chance to be happy when he realizes that
possibility is gone.
Belkis approaches the record player and listens to Puccini’s
Madama Butterfly (maybe it is not a coincidence that this opera
was finished by the musician exactly in 1903, year of the Gradiva’s
publication). The music warns the spectator; it is a presage of
death and tragedy. The servant does not use the dagger like Cio-
cio-san, she uses a common revolver (gun) to accomplish her
harakiri. Belkis has not any more hopes; she is afraid that Locke
remains the victim of his crazy dream.
The part of Puccini’s opera, which Belkis listens to in a
crescendo of lyricism, is Un bel dì vedremo.19 The content of the
soprano’s aria is renowned and is full of meanings: most notably
evoking first Madama Butterfly’s false hopes to be still loved, the
desperation and the melancholia of this character.
Robbe-Grillet’s directing style does not leave anything to
chance. In fact in this moment of the opera, Madama Butterfly
confides to her handmaid Suzuki her dreaming/imagining about
the return of his husband Pinkerton. That dream materializes in
the movie, when Belkis looks at the bed, the cradle of love and
the refuge where she completely gave herself to her master John
Locke, and she hopes in vain for his return. When she listens to
the aria, it seems that Belkis shares Butterfly’s pain; her illusion
is the same. Until the end she hopes that her “bridegroom” comes
back home, but the presence of Gradiva-Leïla-Hermione becomes
too much insistent.
Robbe-Grillet’s Gradiva is only a chimera, a dream which
remains a dream, a ghost of John’s heart. Belkis is Jensen’s Zoe,
19 Giacomo Puccini, Madama Butterfly (New York: G. Ricordi & Company,

1906), p. 39.
the woman which could bring back the protagonist to reality,

saving him from his delirium, which in this case changes into
crime and murder. Belkis obeys that voice, that death’s call,
which she has forbidden John to listen to. Thanks to her sacrifice
John experiences a real emotion: the pain, not the joy, of meeting
up again with a woman loved since childhood.
Jeffreis asks Robbe-Grillet two questions apropos of Gradiva
that many spectators would undoubtedly like to pose for every
one of his feature films. The first is: «Are we supposed to make
sense of this story?», to which Robbe-Grillet answers:
Yes, but not by establishing a clear and unambiguous order of events.

In that sense there is a continuity with my novels. My narratives are
often composed in such a way that any attempt to reconstruct an external
chronology results in a series of contradictions. More intelligent critics
have called what I do temporal irony.20

The second question is as follows: «But does it upset Robbe-
Grillet that his film got such a poor reception in his homeland?».
The director’s answer is applicable to all of his auteur films: «It
didn’t surprise me. I make films to please myself and a few others.
This is the cinema of auteurs, not of spectators. I make films of
the same kind as Antonioni and your Peter Greenaway».21
Murder in a theatre. In a private auditorium, frequented in particular

by European customers, a sex maniac stubbed a young actress last
night. During these last years the beautiful Hermione Gradivetski was a
special servant of an antique dealer renowned in our town. […] Police
has had suspicions about an art critic, also known as Eugenio Della
Croce, a transparent pseudonym. This orientalist used to go to this
exclusive club. He suffered from hallucinations, in any case he was
considered inoffensive.22
20 Jeffries.
21 Jeffries.
22 «Meurtre au théâtre. Dans une salle de spectacle privée, fréquentée surtout par
une clientèle européenne, une jeune actrice a été poignardée la nuit dernière
par un maniaque sexuel. La belle Hermione Gradivetski avait, ces dernières
années, servi d’assistance particulière à un antiquaire en renom de notre cité.
[...] Les soupçons de la police se sont d’abord portés sur un critique d’art,
Employing the names of Hermione and Eugenio della Croce

(whose name immediately conjures up that of Eugene Delacroix),
it seems that Robbe-Grillet whispers to our ears the solution of a
big enigma.
It is a bas-relief that impels Hanold, the solitary academic, to
feel natural emotions, human emotions which draw him closer
to reality. The problem of discerning reality from fantasy arises
when the dream changes into delusion, or rather into diurnal
apparition. This passage happens exactly in the same way in the
movie: Locke sees Gradiva for the first time during the night on a
horse. Then, the next day, walking through the stalls, he glimpses
her in the streets of Marrakesh.
With his detailed and descriptive prose, Jensen develops the
protagonist’s sense of instability. What does Hanold see? Does
he see a ghost, a dream or a woman in flesh and blood? The
doubt persists. By not employing fading, Robbe-Grillet creates
a double universe where dream invades reality and vice versa,
like the Deleuzian vigilambule’s world; the spectator remains
unable to clearly distinguish one from the other. Gradiva tells her
story, Leïla’s tragic end, but Leïla is also Hermione. This triple
personality, then, coexists in a single time.
Gradiva-Zoe seconds Hanold’s delirium, because she believes
she is able to free him from it («no other course is open; by
opposition, one would destroy that possibility»23). Does Belkis
choose the same approach? At the beginning she forbids John
to listen to the voice, death’s voice, but the film’s protagonist is
obstinate. He continues to investigate; he wants to understand
what it is happening.
In conclusion, if it is true that «the motive forces of fantasies
are unsatisfied wishes, and every single fantasy is the fulfillment
connu sous le pseudonyme transparent d’Eugenio della Croce, qui fréquentait

ce club très sélect. Sujet à des crises de délire hallucinatoire, cet orientaliste a
cependant été reconnu inoffensif par la faculté», Robbe-Grillet, pp. 157-58,
translation by the author.
23 Sigmund Freud, Creative Writers and Daydreaming: Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. by James Strachey
(London: Hogarth, 1953-74), vol. 9, p. 143.
of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality»,24 then we ought

to start from this assumption to analyse both Gradiva and every
single oeuvre.
Freud states the close relationship between nocturne dreams
and diurnal fantasies:
Our dreams at night are nothing else than fantasies like these, as we
can demonstrate from the interpretation of dreams. […] If the meaning
of our dreams usually remains obscure to us in spite of this point, it is
because of the circumstance that at night there also arise in us wishes
of which we are ashamed; these we must conceal from ourselves, and
they have consequently been repressed, pushed into the unconscious.25
In Jensen’s tale the basis of Norbert Hanold’s shame is love, a

feeling that the protagonist consciously condemns, considering
futile and childish. The delusions and dreams are caused by
unsatisfied desire, that lack which Norbert only unconsciously
can represent, transfiguring into actions and characters: «The
psychological novel in general no doubt owes its special nature
to the inclination of the modern writer to split up his ego, by self
observation into many part-egos, and in consequence to personify
the conflicting currents of his own mental life in several heroes».26
In Robbe-Grillet’s film the sadistic eroticism puts Locke on
the wrong track, like Jensen’s senseless dreams. It distances him
from reality and from his sincere love for the servant Belkis.
In fact the object of his erotic fantasies is a fictitious woman
[Gradiva]. If Robbe-Grillet and Jensen are to be considered
daydreamers in the Freudian sense, their artistic fantasies appear
to be disturbing. These fantasies leave an impression, repel us,
and awaken anguish and a sense of loss. In Robbe-Grillet there is
not censorship. Eroticism, the predominant subject of the oneiric
dimension, does not leave room for love.
24 Freud, Creative Writers and Daydreaming, p. 144.

The poets Jensen and Robbe-Grillet live their respective

individual dreams and in turn universalize them. If the tale pleasantly
captivates the reader, the film violently seduces the viewer.
Freud concludes that if «our actual enjoyment of an imaginative
work proceeds from a liberation of tension in our minds… not a
little of this effect is due to the writer’s enabling us thence forward
to enjoy our own day-dreams without self-reproach or shame».27
This is the uncensored world where the reader/spectator lives
when he reads/watches Gradiva. Robbe-Grillet’s erotic fantasies
are made like tableaux vivants to overthrow the omnipresent and
insurmountable obstacle between our shame, our modesty and
the condemnable thoughts which populate our mind.

MOVING THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION:
INVENTION, SEQUEL AND CONTINUATION
IN BUZZATI’S MIRACLES
Roberta Coglitore
Dino Buzzati’s The Miracles of Morel Valley is actually a

“sequel” of a previous work of the author.1 The beginning and
the end of the last Buzzati’s iconotext are brought backwards
and forwards to prolong the phases of the artistic genesis and to
substantiate in the double mediality its raison d’etre.
The original core of the work is composed by thirty-four
votive panels dedicated to the miraculous intervention of Saint
Rita in Morel Valley, accompanied by short texts, displayed in
a solo exhibition in 1970 and collected in its catalog entitled
Unpublished Miracles of a Saint,2 together with a short frame
story entitled Explanation. In the following edition published by
Garzanti in 1971, a second expanded and more complex version
of the introductory story presents the narrative background that
has generated, in an imaginery way, the pictorial creation using
a fantastic guise and the first person narrative. The realization of
yet another panel devoted to Saint Rita was exposed post-mortem
in Limana in 1973, in a little chapel specially built at the request
of the mayor in honor of the writer, who loved walking in the
1 Gerard Genette, Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré (Paris: Seuil,

1982). See the difference between “continuation”, as a completion of the
unfinished or suspended work by a different author (chapter XXVIII ff.), and
“sequel”, as a re-launching of the original project beyond the work of the
author him- or her-self (chapter XXXVIII ff.).
2 At the series of thirty-four panels of Unpublished Miracles of a Saint (Venice:
Del Naviglio, 1970) should be added five more panels (The Colombre, The
Mammon Cat, The Giant Robin, The Martians, Fall of the House of Usher)
and the introductory explanation at the volume entitled The Miracles of Morel
Valley (Milano: Garzanti, 1971).
valleys around Belluno. It later became pilgrimage destination

for curious and mountain enthusiasts as well as admirers of
Buzzati, representing the pictorial “sequel” and the architectural
“continuation” towards an expansion of artistic forms.
A literary practice invents, therefore, both the original
images, the real ex-voto – that is three-dimensional objects
offered “for grace received” –, and the votive paintings – that is
two-dimensional pictures that Buzzati says he observed in the
votive paintings made by the caretaker of the shrine of Valmorel
and then disappeared along with the entire chapel at his second
visit with his grandchildren after the war. In the literary fiction
introduced by the frame story, Buzzati’s paintings are nothing
but the reproduction of images de visu observed by the author
in the shrine and of those copied from a sketch found in his
father’s library. According to Genette it is a “sequel” pretending
to be a “continuation”.
The iconotext comes from the imaginery disappearance of
the images and of the sanctuary – once as a catalog, once as an
illustrated book –, and then also a shrine after the will of the
mayor of the city of Limana, for whom Buzzati paints a final
table depicting Saint Rita and the misfortunes she has to face. It is
a fake “continuation” of the work of other authors and by means
of different media, but also a real, even if partial, “sequel” present
in the statements of the author.
Two inverse trails that branch off in two opposite directions,
those of writing and painting, but contributing together to invent a
pseudo hypotext and a real hypertext, relaunching the production
of the work beyond its initial design.
A notional ékphrasis invents the three-dimensional and then
the two-dimensional works of art; the same way as the production
of an additional painting, the last of Buzzati, gives credibility and
makes real the invention of the Miracles. Literature invents the
artistic background that generated the iconotext, and painting
provides evidence to the reality of imagination.
R. Coglitore - Moving the Limits of Representation 77
Advanced Genetics
Because of the composition of the two arts The Miracles of

Morel Valley could be considered as a metanarrative, where a
frame story includes thirty-nine micro-tales illustrated by the
same author,3 or they could be analyzed as a catalog of paintings
accompanied by an extensive caption or even as a modern
emblematics.4 From the point of view of the locations they have
been appreciated as a tribute to the place of origin of the author,
an anthropological rewriting, with images and words, of his own
traditions.5 Considered in their subversive drive they are a “joke”,
as the author liked to call them,6 or in an autobiographical reading
an attempt to show, while conceiling them, his innermost thoughts7
3 On the importance of the paratext see Marie-Hélène Caspar, ‘A propos du

paratexte buzzatien’, Studi Buzzatiani, 5 (2000), 27-46 (p. 27): «It is a text or
more exactly a number of texts composed as micro-stories, but their unit, their
consistency is not immediately manifest. And this is why the paratext becomes
a necessity».
4 Zugni Tauro does not agree on the assimilation to the emblematic form. In
order to strengthen the internal logic in the succession of panels and especially
the strong link between the two elements of expressive images and captions
he writes: «the marginal explanations of Buzzati are not for the image what
the motto is for the emblem, rather they play a modern and original echo that
cannot be dismantled», Anna Paola Zugni Tauro, ‘L’affabulazione fantastica
ne «I miracoli di Val Morel»’, in Il pianeta Buzzati, ed. by Nella Giannetto
(Milano: Mondadori, 1992), 341-73 (p. 342).
5 Patrizia Dalla Rosa, ‘Geografia e onomastica de “I Miracoli di Valmorel”’, in
Dove qualcosa sfugge: lingue e luoghi di Buzzati, Quaderni del centro Buzzati,
3 (2004), 101-11; Zugni Tauro says that «the “Oedipal relationship” with San
Pellegrino is the basis of his original tone, of his atmosphere, of his writing
and painting, rather than the Italian twentieth-century “magical realism”, to
which the work of Buzzati can be juxtaposed but not organically connected»,
Zugni Tauro, p. 344.
6 Emilio Pozzi, ‘Dino Buzzati a Radio Lugano: l’ultima intervista’, Studi
Buzzatiani, 7 (2002), 101-11 (p. 108): «No, there was no intention to imitate
the classic ex-voto: my intention was to make them all-new, telling a story in
each one, a mostly fantastic and also, let’s face it, unlikely story. So... there is
no need to take these ex-voto seriously, from the point of view of the
chronicle!».
7 Marie-Hélène Caspar, ‘Les Miracles de Val Morel. Un bestiaire fantastique?’,
Chaiers Dino Buzzati, 3 (1979), 139-72 (p. 172): «So when considering the
Miracles as the anarchic reappearance of ghosts and obsessions of the
unconscious ego, it is better understood the systematic use of the brouillage
or to avert his own death.8 In the view of an iconotext theory they

could be an example of a compensatory poetics,9 or they could play
as a pastiche of the ex-voto religious genre, denouncing in a new
formula the metariflexive need of the two arts.
The ex-voto are offered to Saint Rita, evoking the well-known
religious tradition of votive images, to show gratitude for solving
small and big troubles of the inhabitants of Morel Valley. The
intervention of the saint, a regular feature of votive paintings,10
occurs in two ways: Saint Rita in action along with the other
main characters of the scene or shown in a frame that stands her
out, for nature and moment, from the scene represented. In both
cases, through the lines of the drawing and the kind of action, the
different nature, ultramundane and miraculous, is still depicted
next to the mundane and plagued one of the other characters.
One year after the exhibition Unpublished Miracles of a Saint,
Buzzati publishes the book with the title The Miracles of Morel
Valley, with thirty paintings and as many stories. Each table is
accompanied by a page with a number, a title and a narrative part,
micro-narrative or substantial caption, with different functions
from time to time or multiple within the same verbal text. The
verbal part can tell the episode to which assists the protagonist
technique in Buzzati. The obscurity of the text, its ambiguity, its hard
decipherability are nothing but the camouflage of the innermost and haunting
thoughts of the author». Caspar, p. 45: «It is therefore, in some way, a
testament-book that contains numerous obsessions of Buzzati, his unconscious
ghosts and a writing technique refined over time». See also Marie-Hélène
Caspar, Fantastique et mythe personnel dans l’oeuvre de Dino Buzzati (La
Garenne-Colombes: Erasme, 1990).
8 Lorenzo Viganò, Postfazione: Dino Buzzati e il miracolo della vita, in Dino
Buzzati, I Miracoli di Val Morel (Milano: Mondadori, 2012), pp. 93-110.
9 To be understood not only in a synchronic but also in a diachronic way. As
Crotti claims, painting in Buzzati recovered «that fantastic deviation and that
clear imagination that characterizes the first narrative production. It is what
happens in The Miracles of Morel Valley, one of the best works of the late
Buzzati precisely because it seems to approach a dazzling and clear color
component, a fairy and surreal tone, a sense of the fantastic that had been
gradually running out in the narrative». Ilaria Crotti, Dino Buzzati (Milano: La
Nuova Italia, 1977), p. 105.
10 Only in one of the thirty-nine panels, n. 6 entitled A kidnapped girl, Santa Rita
is not represented.
of the scene, the background or the conclusion; it can describe

the image represented or even integrate and reconstruct the
legend that gravitates around the episode more or less known to
the inhabitants of the valley of Belluno; it can even revive the
emotions felt in front of the observation of the ex-voto, but also
the doubts and uncertainties felt by the extradiegetic narrator for
what is represented and the news stories of the valleys. It can
also provide more than one of the functions now listed, mixing
the discourse of faith with that of information, the folk with the
erotic one.11
In addition to the thirty-nine notes Buzzati adds a frame story,
entitled Explanation, which reconstructs the background to the
pictorial creation. The grandfather and the father of a certain Toni
Della Santa were the keepers of the votive offerings in honor of
Santa Rita, gathered in the sanctuary of Val Morel. The father
of Dino Buzzati had kept a notebook full of notes in a «pure
language, ungrammatical and intensely dialect»12 on a long series
of miracles performed by the saint until 1909, and witnessed by
the ex-voto panels gathered in the sanctuary. In 1938, after the
discovery of the notebook, Buzzati went searching for information
on the sanctuary and a friend of his father, the architect Alberto
Alpago-Novello, suggested that it was just a literary joke. The
priest of Limana, on the contrary, indicates the site of an aedicule
where pilgrims stop and pray attributing «extraordinary powers
to an image of Saint Rita, from immemorial time placed in one of
those tiny chapels, open to the winds and the rain».13
Then the meeting occurs with Toni Della Santa, who tells him
that the notebook and the tables in the sanctuary are the result of
his work, a work done to give testimony of the power of the Saint:
11 On the eroticism in Buzzati’s images Radius comments: «Mostly a sexual

education for adults, started from rough to reach the natural. It is certain that
the eroticism of Buzzati coincided with the wave of eroticism and pornogra-
phy that has fallen on the so-called quietly civil world. He didn’t help to an-
ticipate it: he followed it», in Enrico Radius, Leggendo i suoi quadri, in Buz-
zati pittore, ed. by Raffaele De Grada (Milano: Mondadori, 1991), pp. 18-
104 (p. 98).
12 Buzzati, I miracoli di Val Morel, p. 7.
There came poor and gentlemen to ask the most amazing graces,
to pay tribute to the great Saint Rita. Even abroad, he said, even from
distant continents. They brought hearts, legs, heads, arms, portraits
of silver (I had a box nearly full) and they explained him the story,
commissioning him a proper ex-voto to be painted, the modest art that
his grandfather and father transmitted him. He had written the notebook
on his own initiative, once he had know that my father was interested
in “important” things of the Valley around Belluno. And, if I wanted, he
would have reported other miracles that occurred after 1909, when the
written account stopped.14
When, a few years after the meeting with Della Santa, in 1946,
Buzzati comes back in Valmorel with his grandchildren in search
of the sanctuary he does not find anything:
The path leading to the “sanctuary” no longer existed. I looked

for it at length. I asked information. Nobody knew anything. No one
had ever heard of a shrine of Saint Rita. No one had ever known Toni
Della Santa. It seemed to find myself in the shoes of Rip Van Winkle.
Centuries had passed since then? Was I in the grip of a drug? In a spell?
Yet I carried with me the notebook, now yellowed, and the notes taken
eight years earlier.15
Once again the strategies of the fantastic confuse the planes of

reality. How is it possible that Buzzati keeps the notebook with the
drawings of the ex-voto copied by the hand of the author himself,
if there is no trace of the sanctuary, and it seems to belong only to
the realm of dreams? Where did Buzzati meet his benefactor and
at what level of reality does he belongs to?
In his Explanation Buzzati presents Toni Della Santa as a nice
“old man” of fifty-seven:
He was a strange man, who apparently had got a screw loose, but
expressing an extraordinary openness, humility and goodness; also a
certain fantasy, which is rare in people of none or minimal culture [...]. I
was surprised by the light coming from those eyes. Was a saint himself?
14 Buzzati, I miracoli di Val Morel, pp. 10-11.

15 Buzzati, I miracoli di Val Morel, pp. 11-12.
Was he – as I asked myself repeatedly – a sort of inspired pixie, kind of

magician of our mountains?16
Character in-between the world of fantasy and reality, that

appears and disappears, making fantastic the story and the
discovery of the boards, Della Santa is a kind of alter ego of
the author. Some years later Buzzati tries to repeat with his
grandchildren what Della Santa had done according to the family
tradition: making ex-voto to be dedicated to the Saint. Della Santa
mixes reality and fiction as well as the main character and the
narrator of the frame story, being a fictional character confused
with the real-life of Buzzati himself. The two grandchildren,
characters of the Explanation, are those for which Buzzati has
already written The Famous Invasion of Bears in Sicily.17 They
are readers willing to believe in fairy tales, as well as the places
where the action is set mingle with the real ones of the valley
around Belluno. Imagination and reality are perfectly mixed, as
in the most classic fairy tales.
However, the Miracles have also had a second life. After the
successful publication of the work, local authorities asked Buzzati
himself to paint a panel dedicated to Saint Rita to be displayed in
a shrine built on purpose:18
What is great is that, since it is life that imitates art, not vice versa,
after my exhibition in Venice, a professor in Belluno suggested parish
priest of Limana to build in a place similar to the one I described a
chapel devoted to Santa Rita, where presumably the testimonies of who

17 Dino Buzzati, La famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia (Milano: Rizzoli, 1945).
18 As evidenced by Nicoletta Comar “local notables” «prayed Buzzati to create
a painting that would have been shown in a specifically designed aedicule.
Thus the Capital of Val Morel was born, opened September 3, 1973 and still
on-site, […] in the capital is now a copy of the work, while the original is kept
in the Municipality of Limana. Precisely because of this joint initiative, in
order to make known the places that inspired the artist, “Buzzati Path” was
created in 2002. It starts from the Sanctuary of Madonna Parè and reached the
small village of Valmorel», Nicoletta Comar, ‘I miracoli di Valmorel: le
scatole della realtà’, in Dino Buzzati: Catalogo dell’opera pittorica (Gorizia:
Edizioni della Laguna, 2006), pp. 32-35.
knows how many miracles she performed would come. If they really
do that, it will be for me, a writer and painter, the greatest satisfaction.19
The devotion expressed in the votive panels and the hope placed
by the author in the Explanation found an architectural achievement
in the sanctuary devoted to Saint Rita and in the last votive painting
added to the corpus made of thirty-nine panels that Buzzati seems
to anchor to the reality of religious practice in Veneto and Italy.
The last votive panel that Buzzati painted for the sanctuary
sums up all the miracles that Saint Rita could have miraculously
made in the everyday life of the Venetian lands: shipping and
railway accidents, rescue from a burning house or an automobile
robbery.20 Nothing comparable to the imaginary votive paintings
designed for the exhibition and then republished in the book. No
transfiguration of the evils of man and of his ancestral fears but a
portrait of Saint Rita in the foreground, with a halo and roses, and,
at the four corners of the picture, some variants of her probable
and real interventions. This representation, being ideally situated
at the end of the sequence of votive panles, gives the whole work
a religious tone, even a truthful one, allowing the beholder to read
differently the irony of the earlier paintings as well.
The second sequel, therefore, is a pictorial sequel within the
architectural continuation (characterized by a religious and
tourist vocation) of a work initially introduced in a pictorial
sequence, and that in his first sequel had taken an iconotextual
form in the book.
True Descriptions All Too Fake
Thus, the Explanation had provided personal testimonies and

the factual evidence of the pictorial genesis of the whole work;
19 Maria Teresa Ferrari (edited by), Buzzati racconta: Storie disegnate e dipinte
(Milano: Electa, 2006), p. 85.
20 The devotion to Saint Rita was also common to his friend and painter Yves
Klein. I would refer to my Storie dipinte: Gli ex voto di Dino Buzzati (Palermo:
Edizioni di Passaggio, 2012).
the fortieth votive painting of Saint Rita had consecrated its

truthful vocation even in an atmosphere of firm religious beliefs;
now the notes alongside the reproductions of the panels in thirty-
nine iconotexts forming the volume emphasize the necessity of
the dual artistic experience of the author, in addition to the variety
of relationships between the two arts.
Compared to the chance of reviving the work beyond the limits
it has originally imposed on itself (namely the representation
in painting of organic ex-voto, as we are told by the author in
the frame story following the work) the notes represent another
form of “sequel”, an “intermedial” one, since it revives the work
through a different art, from painting to writing. Almost as if
Buzzati’s Doppelbegabung could fully express itself only by
giving a verbal sequel to its own visual work.
In this case it is actually a sequel produced by the same author
and published according to the rhythm of the double-page of The
Miracles book. However, the writing in this brief note is so varied
to simulate different enunciators, not coincident with the painter
of the next page.
Generally, the function of the notes is to provide evidence of
the truthfulness of the scene represented, achieving this goal in
different ways and writings. Buzzati’s notes are therefore literary
hypertexts inasmuch they deform high-value or popular stories
already existing, but even inasmuch they take non-fictional prose,
including pseudo autobiographical or journalistic prose; they are
extraliterary hypertexts inasmuch they resemble administrative
or archive reports; they could be considered artistic metatexts
inasmuch they comment the picture next to them, or extra-artistic
metatexts inasmuch they take popular or materials pictures that
are not part of the artistic tradition, such as comic books and photo
story; and they are also iconotextual metatexts inasmuch they
objectively and subjectively comment real episodes, the stories
that come after them and the images representing or deforming
other iconotexts by Buzzati.21
21 It works for the informative notes as well.

Another variation should be added to this already complex

hypertextual and metatextual, the description. If we consider the
description of the images a way of narrating events, a series of
routes that the narrator can make through narration in his eyes or
a chain of episodes in sequence, or even the story of the making
of the artifact, then ékphrasis can be considered a hypertextual
amplification as well, and in turn an opportunity to give a pictorial
comment, and therefore a meta-artistic opportunity.
Within iconotects, the forms of description have the ability to
move the limits of representation, from one art to the other, both
in the case of the “mimetic” ékphrasis and of the “notional” one.22
In the first case the sequel of the pictorial work traditionally
extends in the field of art criticism, thus moving writing borders
towards the territory of the critical language trying to restore an
unreachable vividness, while the original painting reproduced by
its side is falsified and de-materialized by the words that represent
an extension of the image in the other half of the iconotext. In the
second case the description not only quotes or alludes to most
famous writings and images, rather it transforms them and invents
new artistic or ordinary ones. In this way it obeys the attempt to
make true something that has never existed at all or that has gone
lost, and that in any way it tries to link to reality.23
Thus, a complex paratextual strategy is drawn, which removes
the original painting to be described while trying to prove its
authenticity. It had already happened in the fictional background
about the former organic ex-voto and the paintings of Della Santa,
no more existing.
All ékphrasis pretend to be mimetic within each iconotext, for
they provide minute details, emphases of missing details in the
22 ��
Hollander defined the difference between mimetic ékphrasis and notional ék-
phrasis, the one concerning works of art never existed (Hollander, ‘The poet-
ics of ékphrasis’, pp. 209-19).
23 Michele Cometa claims: «Every mimetic ékphrasis can be regarded as the
“falsification” of an original, its de-essentialism, its de-materialization in a
verbal form, and, conversely, every notional ékphrasis is a kind of “making
true” a fake, a picture never existed (or lost) that literature simply makes
“real” with its means», Michele Cometa, La scrittura delle immagini (Milano:
Raffaello Cortina, 2012), p. 53.
paintings by their side, or even stages of their creative genesis.

They are in fact notional descriptions, providing documented
evidences of the truthfulness of the picture beyond the picture
itself, looking for proofs in the reality of the Venetian community
and in the heritage of legends or facts that constitute the collective
memory of its inhabitants.
CAN PAINTINGS TALK? AN ÉKPHRASTIC
POLEMIC IN POST-STALIN RUSSIA
Duccio Colombo
Aleksandr Gerasimov, the president of the Soviet Academy of

Fine Arts, purportedly refused to meet Pablo Picasso (this must
have happened in 1956, when the latter was expected in Moscow
for the opening of his exhibition; the trip could not take place
because of the Hungarian crisis):1
- I don’t know such an artist, – deceitfully answered Gerasimov. (…)

- How can you say such a thing, Aleksandr Mikhailovich! A world
famous artist, a partisan of peace.
- Then let the Peace Committee meet this peace fighter. What has the
Academy of fine arts to do with that?2
Could Gerasimov’s fictional incarnation, Mikhail Gerasimovich

Kamyshev, have met (or rather refused to meet) Picasso’s
fictional friend, Jusep Torres Campalans? The question is not an
easy one: it affects the diversely ambiguous fictional status of the
characters involved.
The texts in which Campalans and Kamyshev appear are
completely different; yet they share a tendency to blur the
distinction between notional and actual ékphrasis, to challenge
the current idea of what fiction is and what it is not. Campalans, as
is well known, is the hero of Max Aub’s playful, witty, somewhat
experimental novel bearing the hero’s name as its title; Kamyshev
is one of the main characters in Ivan Shevtsov’s Tlia (The Louse
or, better, The Aphid) – an infamous novel-pamphlet denouncing
1 See Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya
Ehrenburg (London and New York: Tauris, 1996), p. 297.
2 Ivan Shevtsov, Tlia. Sokoly: Roman, ocherki (Moskva: Golos, 2000), pp.
276-77.
the purported take-over of Soviet artistic institutions by a bunch

of “rootless cosmopolitans” aiming to substitute Russian realist
traditions with Western avant-garde, to finally undermine Russian
patriotism – a violently reactionary text, complete with easily
recognizable anti-semitic undertones.
When it appeared in 1964 (just a few years after Aub’s novel),
Shevtsov’s opus was met with horrified remarks from both Soviet
progressive and Western criticism, and since then it is only quoted
as an example of bad, overtly tendentious, malignant literature.3
Apart from a legitimate curiosity to know what the bad guys
(no question, bad) were writing (a whole body of literature by
Soviet conservatives and/or nationalists is practically unknown
to scholars), the reason for a study of what is clearly a poor
piece of writing lies in its peculiar use of ékphrasis: the whole
novel can be read as a gallery – twenty paintings are described at
length, the rest consisting mostly of what could be interpreted as
a historical commentary (discussions between painters, reports
of exhibition openings and of debates, newspaper articles...) and
merely the skeleton of a love triangle to try to hold this material
together in novelistic form. What is more, the polemical aim of
the work concerns, more or less overtly, the actual possibility of
ékphrasis – in other words, the ability of a painting to speak, the
relationship between the image and the spoken word is at the core
of the discussion.
The Aphid came out in 1964; in the foreword to the 2000
edition, the author claims it was written in the early fifties but
its publication was hampered by censorship when contracts
had already been signed with the publishing house Molodaia
gvardiia and the journal Neva, and it was left in a drawer «for
twelve years» until the notorious Manège scandal of December
1962 (when Khrushchev, while attending the Moscow Artist’s
Union anniversary exhibition, was enraged by the “modernist”
works he saw there, and immediately launched a massive purge):
«Then I took the manuscript out of my archive, I quickly wrote
3 See, for instance, Maia Kaganskaia, ‘Shutovskoi khorovod’, Sintaksis, 12

(1984); Igumen Innokentii (Pavlov), ‘Tragikomediia tserkovnoi
sovremennosti’, Kontinent, 120 (2004).
D. Colombo - Can Paintings Talk? 89
down the epilogue, and after three days I took it to the director
of the Soviet Russia publishing house...».4 According to this
version, therefore, the novel would have been completed by
1950, or 1952 at the latest. This clashes with a number of clues
disseminated in the text; to mention only the most self-evident:
an article written by one of the leading cosmopolitan critics,
Semen Vinogradov, but not actually signed by him (the plot in
several chapters revolves around this article and his signature)
is entitled On Sincerity in Art5 – and, if this were not enough
to prove the allusion to Vladimir Pomerantsev’s famous On
Sincerity in Literature (Novii Mir, December 1953), we are told
that the text mentions, just like its real-life model, an opposition
between “sermon” and “confession” (propoved’ and ispoved’); in
one dialogue one of the negative characters, Boris Iulin, speaks
enthusiastically about the novel Whose Bread Do We Eat? (about
a prospector), which appeared in Novii mir; it is impossible not
to recognize Vladimir Dudintsev’s Not by Bread Alone, about an
inventor, which appeared, once again, in Novii mir, but only in
late 1956. Pomerantsev’s and Dudintsev’s are two of the most
representative works from the period of the Thaw; and the term
thaw itself is mentioned twice in Shevtsov’s novel – notably,
for the first time, in Vinogradov’s speech at a debate about an
All-Union exhibition: «The thaw has finally come, and artists
can now create following their hearts’ dictates»:6 Ehrenburg’s
novella, which was to become eponymous for the period, was
published in 1954. The epilogue comes, in fact, after a sudden
cut in the story line, but the events described in the last chapters
preceding it might be placed around 1955-1956.7 The novel is
simply not worth archival research aiming to determine the exact
4 Shevtsov, pp. 4-5.

5 Shevtsov, p. 178.
6 Shevtsov, p. 201.
7 In the eleventh chapter out of fourteen, actually, a character recalls «that
American donkey who painted with his tail» – the story about a picture painted
by a donkey and exhibited in Baltimore comes from a December 1962 issue
of Literaturnaia gazeta – after the Manège affair; see Tlia. Sokoly, p. 201 and
Gian Piero Piretto, Il radioso avvenire: mitologie culturali sovietiche (Torino:
Einaudi, 2001), p. 270.
timing of its composition; what matters is that its polemical

pathos is addressed to the cultural-political situation of the Thaw.
In Stalin’s time, in fact, such a belligerent book could hardly have
been imagined. The backdating of the novel, in the 2000 foreword,
evidently serves two purposes: firstly, to testify to the power of
what the author is finally not afraid to refer to as the “Zionist”
or even “Jewish-masonic” mob who, in his words, had already
deviously occupied strongholds in the Soviet power structure
in the early fifties; secondly, to justify the ill-famed, official,
anti-cosmopolitan (read, once again, anti-semitic) campaign of
the late forties-early fifties as an act of self-defense. In the first
chapters, clearly set in the late forties,8 we see Shevtsov’s young
artist heroes, Vladimir Mashkov, Okunev, Eremenko, Vartanian,
struggling for the survival of the Russian realist tradition under
the cosmopolitan yoke, until the old, patriarch-like Kamyshev,
undeterred by the enemy’s devious attempts, publishes in Pravda
a flamboyant article ‘On the Aesthetic9 Tendencies in Visual
Arts’, which gives these artists a breath of fresh air. The head
of the enemy camp, the critic Ivanov-Petrenko, though, is not
afraid: «We must admit our mistakes. And wait. No panic. (…)
It’s only another campaign. In a couple of years they will forget
about it».10 In 1949, Aleksandr Gerasimov (who was then not
just a famous, respected, elderly artist, but the president of both
the Soviet Academy of Arts and the Organization Committee of
the Soviet Artists’ Union) published an article in Pravda, ‘For a
Militant Theory in the Visual Arts’, coming at the height of the
anti-cosmopolitan campaign and denouncing a group of critics,
most of them of Jewish origins, who were almost all arrested
shortly afterward (at least one of them, Nikolai Punin, never
came back from the prison camp).11
8 Chapter eight is dedicated to an exhibition, held at the Tret’iakov gallery,

which has much in common with the ‘Thematic exhibition of works by Soviet
artists’ which opened on december 21st 1949.
9 Read “aestheticizing” – Soviet official language of the period shows a
tendency to confuse these terms.
10 Shevtsov, p. 170.
11 See Matthew Bown, ‘1945-1954’, Realismi socialisti: Grande pittura
sovietica 1920-1970 (Ginevra-Milano: Skira, 2011), p. 84.
It should be clear by now that the novel enjoys a rather complex

relationship with actual historical facts. The hints are countless,
and their status somewhat puzzling. Are they merely traces of the
author’s inspiration, or are they there to be grasped by the reader?
A number of them surely are, but not in every instance can the
right answer be easily found. Consequently: what is the status of
the ékphrasis? Are they to be considered “actual” or “notional”
ékphrasis of existing paintings?
The word “pamphlet” seems to indicate that the writer had
concrete targets in mind; and, for instance, Andrei Siniavskii’s
early review repeatedly points out that it is easy to recognize
who those targets are.12 In one of his essays, however, Shevtsov
recalls that, at a meeting with Dmitrii Polianskii (one of the main
sponsors of the nationalists, of the so-called Russian Party within
the higher spheres of the Party Central Committee),13 the latter
«started to ask questions about the prototypes of Barselonskii,
of Pchelkin... I eluded an answer, saying that they are collective
images».14 Could this possibly mean that there are concrete
prototypes, but he did not wish to mention them? Pchelkin, as we
shall see, could in fact be a somewhat composite character. There
is no doubt about Barselonskii, nor about Kamyshev: the easiest
to identify are not the main characters in the plot, but the most
representative figures in both camps. Kamyshev is Gerasimov (if
his patronymic Gerasimovich is not enough, a parallel reading
of the pages where Kamyshev is introduced in the novel and of
Shevtsov’s essay on Gerasimov will get rid of any possible doubt),
and Lev Mikhailovich Barselonskii is Il’ia Ehrenburg. Once again,
no misunderstanding is conceivable. Barselonskii’s last name is
weird enough – it reads like “from Barcelona”, not a common
name for a Russian, even for a Russian Jew; it probably refers
to Ehrenburg’s involvement, both as an Izvestia correspondent
and as a political activist in the Spanish civil war. Barselonskii’s
12 Andrei Siniavskii, ‘Pamflet ili paskvil?’, Literaturnyi protsess v Rossii

(Moskva: RGGU, 2003), pp. 52, 55.
13 See Nikolai Mitrokhin, ‘“Russkaia Partiia”: Fragmenty issledovaniia’, Novoe
literaturnoe obozrenie, 48 (2001), p. 277.
biography closely follows Ehrenburg’s; he emigrated to Paris

before the revolution (though, contrarily to the prototype, no
mention is made of political motives), there became a well-
known artist, he traveled through Europe and America, and came
back to the Soviet Union in the early thirties, «after he had tried
every pictorial “ism” from impressionism to constructivism».15
He had problems adapting to Socialist Realism, but during the
war he received definitive recognition from the Soviet people:
he did not lock himself up in an ivory tower, but worked with
passion and energy, drawing posters and caricatures (a clear nod
to Ehrenburg’s enormously popular journalistic activity during
the war)... In the opening of the epilogue, we are told that three
volumes of his memoirs have been published16 – an unmistakable
allusion to the very well-known People, Years, Life.
The pair are well chosen: just as Gerasimov was a natural leader
of conservative artists (he was forced to resign from the presidency
of the Academy after the XX-th congress), Ehrenburg was regarded
as a leading propagandist of progressive views, not only in the field
of literature, but in visual arts as well, using his unquestionably
strong position within the establishment to protect nonconformists
and to promote the diffusion of Western modern art (q.v. his role
in the organization of the Picasso exhibition in Moscow in late
1956 and, a few months later, of an exhibition of reproductions of
French impressionist masterpieces).17 After the Manège affair he
also came under attack from the Party cultural functionaries.18
Other characters are less clearly identifiable. Nikolai
Nikolaevich Pchelkin is maybe the clearest example. An aged
painter who made himself a name with wholesome realistic
pictures, he used to be regarded by the young heroes as a mentor
of sorts, but he is driven by cowardice – and by the malign
influence of his young Jewish wife19 – into the enemy camp. As
17 Rubenstein, pp. 296-99.
18 Ibidem.
19 That Jews were training attractive young women to marry powerful people
and thus extend their malicious influence, was a widespread myth within the
a result, his artistic talent begins to wane. Pchelkin, in the first

chapters, is the leader and organizer of a brigade working on a
collective painting (he promises his young friends that this easy
job will gain them official prizes); both the good Okunev and
Vartanian and the bad Iulin are part of this brigade, who will
show the work at the Tret’iakov gallery (at the exhibition we
might suppose to be the 1949 one). In 1950, Vasilii Efanov was
granted a second-level Stalin prize for the collective work on the
painting Leading People of Moscow at the Kremlin, together with
his co-authors Stepan Dudnik, Viktor Cyplakov, Iurii Kugach
and Konstantin Maksimov. This seems to indicate Efanov as
the prototype for Pchelkin, while Iulin – a younger painter, and
a Jew, making a career for himself thanks to the support of the
cosmopolitan critics – should be Cyplakov (in a topical scene, we
will find Iulin painting erotic pictures; in a note by the Culture
section of the Central Committee the showing of openly erotic
pictures at Cyplakov’s personal exhibition is lamented).20 In the
novel, however, two other paintings by Pchelkin are mentioned.
The first, exhibited in the same room as the brigade work, is titled
Gorkii on the Volga, and is described at length when Mashkov
visits Pchelkin in his atelier:
Gorkii was depicted in profile. He was standing on a high green

river-bank with little birches, and looking thoughtfully into the distance,
at the Volga. A dry, tall, angular figure in a white Russian shirt, dark
trousers and heavy boots. His jacket hanging over one shoulder. His
hair was long, thick, falling over his temples and his hair at the back of
his head in a heavy mane.21
Russian nationalist camp; see Nikolai Mitrokhin, ‘Etnonatsionalisticheskaia

mifologiia v sovetskom partijno-gosudarstvennom apparate’, Otechestvennye
zapiski, 3 (2002). In a later novel Shevtsov even depicts an Israel-based
‘Institute for fiancées’.
20 Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura: 1953-1957: Dokumenty (Moskva: Rosspen,
2001), p. 259.
Viktor Cyplakov, A. M. Gorkii on the Volga, 1945.

Kiev National Museum of Russian Art (Particular)
There exists a painting which this description fits well – so

well, in fact, that the writer could hardly have had anything else
in mind; but it was by Cyplakov, not by Efanov.
Moreover, at the opening of the exhibition comment is passed
on this painting in the “good guys” group in these words: «There
is something of Iulin in it».22
Iulin is represented at the same exhibition by a painting titled
The Komsomol team; Mashkov had known it previously under
the title The working day is over:
Young collective-farm girls were walking back from the fields with
wooden rakes over their shoulders. They wore neat brightly-colored
dresses, high heeled shoes, fine little watches on their wrists, on their
faces, reddened by the rays of the sunset, there was not even the least
trace of weariness. They walked along singing. The rays of the setting
sun played on their colorful clothes, on a distant cloud, on the green
shoots in the field, on the sticky foliage of a young birch-tree.
Vladimir frowned: the composition was too well-known, it reminded
him of Shishkin’s Noon, of Makovskii, of Fedor Vasil’ev... But they
showed life itself, and in this painting...23
The ékphrasis seems, once again, to refer to an existing painting

– Andrei Myl’nikov’s In the Fields of Peace.
Andrei Myl’nikov, In the Fields of Peace, 1950.

Saint Petersburg, National Russian Museum
Thus, Shevtsov links his polemics against “modernists” with

another official campaign, the one (diametrically opposite)
against the “varnishing of reality”, which was launched in
1952 (somewhere else in the novel, Ivanov-Petrenko writes an
article On the Natural Disappearance of Conflict in Life and
Art; Vinokurov’s On Sincerity in Art is planned, with diabolical
dialectical ability, to come immediately after it, so as to shake
Soviet ideology from the other side).
But the original title of Iulin’s picture cannot but remind us
of another of Cyplakov’s works, After a Working Day, which
he showed at the 1955 All-Union exhibition, and which was
described in this way in a note by the Science and Culture
section of the Central Committee: «The picture’s title was used
by him merely as a pretext for depicting bathing women...
collective-farm women are depicted in vulgar attitudes».24 The
same original picture, however, seems to serve as a prototype
for another fictional one; at a debate following the All-Union
exhibition (clearly the 1955 one), Vinokurov praises Pchelkin’s
Women Beach (in another CC note, Cyplakov’s painting is
indicated as The Bathers25) in these terms: «In the long years
of the bureaucrats’ rule in arts, we had forgotten how to feel
and to understand the Beautiful. And today we are enchanted to
24 Apparat TsK, p. 378.

welcome one of the first examples of the Beautiful, the wonderful

Women Beach by Nikolai Nikolaevich Pchelkin».26
From yet another CC note we learn that, at a 1955 debate, the
critic V. Kostin praised a painting, saying that «for the first time
in many years it gives an essentially correct, chaste and highly
artistic representation of the naked body».27 He was not, however,
speaking of Cyplakov’s painting – his subject was, instead,
Arkadii Plastov’s Spring.28
This whirlwind of multiple references is enough to show how
useless it would be to search for a prototype for every object (for
every painting as well as for every character)29 depicted in the novel;
for every painting described it would be possible to find something
similar in the reality of Soviet art, more than a single painting in
most cases. This is due to both the monotony of Soviet art and to
the peculiar quality of ékphrasis. One example can shed light on
the way Shevtsov worked with the material offered by reality. One
of the last works by Aleksandr Gerasimov, A Shot at the People,
depicts Fanny Kaplan’s 1918 attack on Lenin. The novel’s epilogue
begins with Kamyshev in his atelier, looking at his last paintings.
One of these, which he had proposed for an exhibition and been
rejected (a sign of the times!), had a long period of gestation:
He made different versions. Some drafts lay on the shelves, each

one of them interesting in itself. In one Kaplan is shooting at Lenin, in
another Dzerzhinskii is interrogating Kaplan. He finally chose a third
one: Dzerzhinskii at the wounded Lenin’s bedside.30
28 Plastov could doubtlessly expect to also be put by Shevtsov in the enemy
camp; when describing a painting by Barselonskii he probably had his
Partisans in mind: see Tlia. Sokoly, p. 129.
29 The evolution, in the novel, of Mashkov’s career – hampered by the artistic
authorities, rescued by the people’s reaction to his paintings – reminds us of
the story of Aleksandr Laktionov as it was told by his hagiographers (Shevtsov
included); see Oliver Johnson, ‘A Premonition of Victory’: A Letter from the
Front’, The Russian Review, 68 (2009), 408-28. The first name of Ivanov-
Petrenko is Osip, the same as Osip Beskin, the “liberal” director of the journal
Iskusstvo from 1932 to 1940. The search could go on.
Gerasimov, on the other hand, chose the first option, although

Shevtsov recalls not liking the first version of the painting when
he saw it, and that Gerasimov agreed to change the composition,
making it «much better, more disciplined, more harmonious».31
Aleksandr Gerasimov, A Shot at the People, 1961. Moscow,

Central V. I. Lenin Museum
Did Shevtsov describe his idea of what the painting should

have been, and was Gerasimov not smart enough to carry it out?
Or should we interpret this as a disguise, a way of underlining, in
a rather naive way, the fictional quality of the text, a transparent
screen beyond which the reader was supposed to recognize
the prototype? There could be some truth in this. Yet another
explanation is possible. A couple of pages after the first description
we encounter a more detailed one:
Neat as he always was, the knight of the revolution, Felix Dzerzhinskii,

sits in half-profile in front of Il’ich and talks about the preparation for
this monstrous crime against humanity itself, the shooting of Fanny
Kaplan, a blow to the heart of the revolution itself. He relates to Il’ich
that according to the initial plan a professional killer, a hired criminal,
should have shot him. But he could not raise his hand, he refused. The
second one was a white guard. He was also not able to force himself
to do it. Kaplan’s hand did not tremble. It was a poisonous snake, a

slippery and stinking one, an enemy of life, a sower of death.
Kamyshev looks at Lenin, Lenin at Dzerzhinskii or, maybe, at the
artist himself. Il’ich’s look is concentrated, profound, penetrating the
thick layers of the years to come. It seems that Lenin foresees new
gun-shots, at Kirov, Tel’man, at Patrice Lumumba, and all the bullets
poisoned with cynicism, hypocrisy and hatred for mankind. And that he
warns: be vigilant!32
The interplay of looks here has something of a reinforced

standard pattern, and could indeed have something to say about
the power relations implied; but it is inevitably bound to recede
into the background, given the fact that the painting, in this
scene, is literally speaking. It addresses the viewer directly with
the voice of the dead leader: it is a painting with a message, or
more precisely a command, a painting that is supposed to have an
effect, a painting literally, giving orders. However, there are other
words spoken, the words spoken by Dzerzhinskii and addressed
to Lenin, which the viewer is meant to hear (the only way to
do this is to summon up previous knowledge; it is very likely
that the function of the painting is precisely to mobilize, and
through this previous knowledge to communicate its injunction).
In the painting a story is being told, a story comprising the scene
depicted in Gerasimov’s real life version.
In the representational code inherent in Shevtsov’s novel
these lines are, simply, an actual ékphrasis, a valid description of
Gerasimov’s work; the painting implies a narrative – the whole
of it – and, though any single scene depicted can be chosen at any
given moment, this does not really alter the final meaning.
The paintings by the bad guys, accordingly, are not bad because
they tell the wrong story, but because they tell no story. Although
some are actually described in the novel, most of them are simply
impossible to describe: they are mute. Such is, for instance, the
effect of the Barselonskii room, at the first of the two exhibitions:
a whole, well-lighted room where a place is found for «the
watercolors and satirical drawings by Barselonskii, which Ivanov-
Petrenko and Vinokurov had been advertising for a long time

before the exhibition’s opening. Almost the whole of the walls were
covered in watercolor etudes, portraits, flowers and still lives».33
Another example: in a flash-back, Mashkov remembers when he
had been invited to his dacha by Iulin, who still had not revealed his
true nature, and he recalls thinking at the time: «What should they
go to the country for? You can paint still lives here just as well».34
Several documents from the Party and State structures, during
the fifties, show the same attitude. In September 1954 G. F.
Aleksandrov, the Minister of Culture, wrote that
A serious flaw in the exhibitions of visual arts held in recent years

has been that many sketch-like works were shown, devoid of great ideal
content. Plot-based paintings in recent years have been moved to the
background or are realized in a hurry in the form of unripe canvases
painted by brigades.35
In opposition to the «sketch-like works, devoid of great

ideal content», the desired paintings are defined as plot based36
(siuzhetnye). What the Minister wanted was narrative paintings.
36 Although the Russian siuzhet derives from the same Latin root as the English
“subject”, it has hardly anything to do with subject matter; in the 1940 Usha-
kov dictionary it is defined as «The sum of actions and events through which
the basic content of a work of art is disclosed», and the meaning of «Content,
theme of something» is just quoted as a secondary figural meaning (Tolkovyi
slovar’ russkogo iazyka: v 4 t., Moskva: Gos. izd-vo inostr. i nats. slov., 1940,
T. 4, col. 630). Both Ozhegov (Tolkovyi slovar’ russkogo yazyka, 14-e izd.,
stereotip., Moskva: Russkii yazyk, 1983 – first edition 1949 –, p. 699) and the
Small Academic dictionaries (RAN, Institut lingvisticheskikh issledovanii,
Slovar’ russkogo iazyka, 4-��
e��
izd��
��
., ��
stereotipnoe��
, ��
Moskva��
: Russkii��
��
iazyk��
��
, Poli-
��
grafresursy, 1999 – first edition 1957-1961 – t. 4, p. 328) are analogous; only
in��
recent��
��
works��
��
, such��
��
as��
��
the��
��
1992 edition��
��
of��
��
Ozhegov��
��
revised��
��
by��
��
N��
��
. Iu��
��
. Shve-
��
dova (Tolkovyi slovar’ russkogo iazyka, 4-e izd., dopolnennoe, Moskva: Az-
bukovnik, 1999 – first edition 1992 –, p. 786) or the 1998 dictionary directed
by S. A. Kuznetsov does the meaning of «theme, object of depiction in a work
of visual or musical art» appear (Bol’shoi tolkovyi slovar’ russkogo iazyka,
Sankt-Peterburg: Norint, 2000, p. 1300). Siuzhet is the word opposed to fabu-
la in Viktor Shklovskii’s famous studies on narrative.
The Ministry of Culture itself, however, was often accused of

protecting aesthetes, by the Science and Culture department of the
Central Committee, whose language is very close to Shevtsov’s
(his heroes, by the way, repeatedly look for help in the official
sphere; at the Ministry they are always turned away, while they
find assistance at the CC;37 his novel could thus be possibly
read as a move in a game between a “liberal” Ministry and a
“conservative” Party structure). Just before the opening of the
1955 exhibition, a CC department note signaled that the selection
committee «preferred works of aesthetic quality and etudes»38
while rejecting realist paintings; on the same piece of paper a
handwritten postscript stated that the Ministry would undertake
urgent steps to provide the exhibition with «thematic works,
painted in a realist manner»39 (we found an analogous plot in the
novel: Petr Eremenko’s diorama about the Battle of Stalingrad
is rejected; Mashkov appeals to the CC and Eremenko is invited
to bring his work to the Tret’iakov gallery the day before the
opening. This, however, happens in the chapters concerning what
seems to be the 1949 exhibition).40 Yet the CC was not satisfied:
a note comments on the exhibition lamenting the fact that too
much space was occupied by the work of “aesthetes” and, not
content with this, these artists «did not exhibit thematic pictures.
They confined themselves to landscape, still-life, portraits of the
members of their family and of some acquaintances».41 It is clear
from the overall context that by “thematic” paintings, here, the
same “plot-based” ones are intended.
As has often been pointed out, an obsession with the word,
an imposition of a literary code in every field of expression is a
basic characteristic of Stalinist culture and its connection with
its highly ideological mindset. This state of affairs is formulated
precisely by Leonid Heller and Antoine Baudin:
The weight of the literary model, ubiquitous at theoretical (both

ideological and aesthetic) level, causes first of all to deny the other arts
their structural qualities, to subdue their evaluation criteria to obligatory
discursive categories: “verbalization of the image” in the field of visual
arts, primacy of screenplay and drama in those of cinema and theater
– narrative, descriptive or explicative elements flood the pictorial,
musical, or cinematic work. Its function as basic code – no doubt
predetermined by the fact that it is derived from the Verb, and thus from
the ideological Verb – explains the dominant position of literature in the
Soviet system of the arts and the overall “literarization” of the latter.42
This predominance of the verbal descends from the urge to

use every kind of medium in order to convey to the beholder the
same ideological message, basically verbal; however, it comes to
achieve the status of an ideological bone of contention in itself.
This becomes clear in a note dispatched to the CC by Aleksandr
Gerasimov himself in his official position as President of the
Academy of Arts:
The principle of Party spirit in art finds its most prominent

embodiment in plot-based thematic works dedicated to the events in
the life of the people and in their struggle for liberation. Taking for
granted a great mastery of execution, the Party spirit brings to our art
the strength of a powerful weapon in the struggle for the transformation
of the world, in the cause of the education of the masses. This is why
the enemies of the art of Socialist Realism in their yearning to knock
this powerful ideological weapon out of the hands of the Soviet people
often oppose the principle of the Communist-ideal contents of our art
by discrediting plot-based thematic painting and its masters.43
Whereas in the CC Department papers the adjective used

for the requested paintings is thematic, Aleksandrov reunites
the terms: “plot-based, thematic” works are being discredited.
Content is what is needed, and content is narrative. The ability
to paint is a necessary but secondary attribute: the “mastery of
42 Leonid Heller et Antoine Baudin, ‘Le réalisme socialiste comme organisation

du champ culturel’, Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétiques, XXXIV (1993),
3, p. 337.
execution” can be “taken for granted” (pri vysokom masterstve

vypolneniia), it is merely the solution to a technical assignment.
Every attempt to discuss this proposition is equated to a
political diversion.
Aleksandrov’s (and Shevtsov’s) targets are not only the
cautious attempts of young artists to exploit the liberal
atmosphere of the thaw in order to carve out for themselves
some free space in which it might be possible to experiment
with modernist techniques; in the notes from the CC department,
among the “formalists” there appear the names of such painters
as Petr Konchalovskii, Martiros Sar’ian, Grigorii Shegal’, who
had been active since the first decade of the century and had
more or less succeeded in holding on to their status throughout
the roller-coaster years of Stalin, and also Aleksandr Deineka,
Arkadii Plastov, Sergei Gerasimov, who still had strong positions
in the Soviet art establishment.
Recent studies have demonstrated the existence of an
underground struggle going on over the years, behind the
monolithic facade of the unanimously accepted theory of
Socialist Realism; the fighting camps can be roughly identified
with the various pro-communist artistic associations that were
disbanded in 1932 by the CC resolution, which established a
unified Union founded on the unique “method”. Former members
of the AKhRR, the Association of Artists of Revolutionary
Russia (notably, Aleksandr Gerasimov), the faithful disciples of
the nineteenth-century tradition of the Peredvizhniki, confronted
the followers of modern figurative styles, which in the pre-1932
situation formed the OST, the Society of Easel Painters (Deineka)
and the OMKh, the Society of Moscow Artists (Sergei Gerasimov,
Konchalovskii). This “modernist” party never, of course,
challenged the idea of Socialist Realism nor the insistence on a
correct subject matter: the object of the dispute was not what to
paint, but rather how to paint it. The official 1936-1938 campaign
against “formalism” consolidated the positions of the first group,
although in 1939-1940 “naturalism” and the lack of “painterly
culture” (zhivopisnaia kul’tura) became one of the main targets
of often officially sponsored criticism, and the balance was once
again altered;44 in the years of greatest ideological pressure, from

1946 up until Stalin’s death in 1953, the conservative party was
again in power, and during the thaw its antagonists hoped to
regain positions.45 This struggle can be interpreted as a struggle
between fine drawing and color (which could take the form of a
debate on the French impressionists) and is implicit in Shevtsov’s
good artists being constantly mocked by bad critics with charges
of “naturalism” and of painting “color photographs”.
Ehrenburg had taken active part in this feud since the Thirties,
supporting the modern party. His 1954 Thaw, a very cautious
attempt, though hardly his masterpiece, to attack bureaucratic
habits under an impeccable Socialist-realist vest, is now
remembered mostly for the icastic perfection of its title as
eponymous of a whole era.46 When it appeared, however, a fiery
polemic exploded around a secondary plot concerning the visual-
art world, where a cynical careerist, Vladimir Pukhov, who has
sacrificed his talent for success, is confronted by his old school
friend Saburov, living in poverty and painting masterpieces,
ignored by the outside world. This artist character – painter,
musician or writer – is a typical feature in Socialist-realist
novels, and the perfect solution for a writer wishing to include
personalized comments regarding his own sphere of activity.
The Soviet press reacted vehemently – did the writer actually
mean that official art was a sham and that real talent in the USSR
was being neglected?47 The CC Science and Culture department
lamented the bad influence of the novella on young artists.48
When Shevtsov wrote his novel (presumably in the late fifties,
as pointed out above), Thaw was hardly a commonly understood
term for the epoch; quoting the term (as we have seen, in the bad
44 See Susan E. Reid, ‘Socialist Realism in the Stalinist Terror: The Industry of
Socialism Art Exhibition, 1935-41’, The Russian Review, 60 (2001), 153-84.
45 See Susan E. Reid, ‘In the Name of the People: The Manège Affair Revisited?’,
Kritika 6, 4 (2005), 684-90.
46 See Benedikt Sarnov, Sluchai Erenburga (Moskva: Tekst, 2004), p. 402.
47 Rubenstein, pp. 280-81.
guys’ speech) was in all likelihood an allusion to the actual book,

a way of identifying Ehrenburg as one of the polemical targets.
Ékphrasis is the battle-field where the polemics rage. In The
Thaw there is hardly a single painting described; we are told only
that Pukhov paints portraits of people in power, and Saburov
landscapes and portraits of his crippled wife. The very idea that
words are able to describe a painting is under discussion; such
is the topical scene in which Pukhov visits Saburov and sees
his work, an episode marking an abrupt change in Pukhov’s
self-awareness:
Looking at great paintings in picture galleries, Volodya had the

sense of joy and lightness he experienced when gazing lovingly at a
tree in leaf or at the beauty of a woman’s face. In his opinion art had
once existed but had long since vanished. No wonder that in a museum
there was always something a little dead the cleanliness and the faint
cold and the whispering of the visitors. He was profoundly shaken by
Saburov’s work: this, after all, was his contemporary, his schoolfellow.
And what was so difficult to grasp, he had done that landscape in this
slum room, sitting with his cripple, looking out of that small window.
How simple it all was and how far beyond his understanding the full
tones, the depths of the dove-grey and blue sky, the clayey heaviness of
the soil! Saburov showed him his latest portrait of his wife and again
Volodya was overwhelmed. Glasha asked him if it was like her; he
didn’t answer. He only saw the painting (on videl tol’ko zhivopis’) the
ochre of the highlights in the hair, the olive- shadowed face, the green
blouse. And gradually, just as in the landscape nature had revealed
itself in its poverty and splendour the melting snow, the blackness of
the naked brandies, and the light blueness of the sky the miracle of the
northern spring so now he saw a woman in her ugliness and her beauty.
A whole lifetime would not be too much to understand her timid, plain,
unnoticeable smile.49
The actual painting remains undescribed, or, rather, what is

described is only its impression on the observer. The subject matter
is irrelevant, and so is its similarity to the model: “He saw only
the painting” (or, better, the painterliness – zhivopis’), the colors.
49 Ilya Ehrenburg, The Thaw, in A Change of Season, trans. by Manya Harari

(New York: Knopf, 1962), p. 86.
In the work of Ehrenburg’s “real” painter there is nothing to be

described; just as there is nothing to be described, in Shevtsov’s
novel, in the work of Ehrenburg’s incarnation. If there is anything
at all, interpretation is anyway problematic, as in Barselonskii’s
Bad Weather (is the meteorological title an allusion to The Thaw
and The Storm, another of Ehrenburg’s novels?):
... some cheerless, indefinite landscape, it was impossible to

understand in which climatic belt it was located... From a professional
point of view, everything was painted roughly, badly outlined, with
deliberate crudity: the people, the landscape and the horses, everything
was conventional both from the point of view of the drawing and
from that of the painting. In fact, there was no painterly quality at all:
everything was daubed in three colors, just as if the artist never knew
about halftones and nuances.50
One last example: Iulin proudly shows his old (and nearly
lost) friends a book of reproductions of contemporary French
painters. In a painting titled The Catastrophe it is not hard to
recognize Picasso’s Guernica, described from the point of view
of Shevtsov’s heroes: «Scraps of metal, blood, some railing, the
head of a donkey, a crashed wheel, a human hand and something
else that was absolutely impossible to understand, mixed up in
monstrous chaos».51 This is a poor painting because it cannot
be understood, and it cannot be understood because it cannot be
described in words.
In the strategies of both parties, therefore, traditional topoï
of ékphrasis are played out: on the one hand, the muteness of
the picture, the inability of words to express its true quality; on
the other, the deployment of the painting’s narrative potential.
In Shevtsov’s case, however, there is one difference from the
classical pattern. This pattern is described by James Heffernan
as follows:

51 Shevtsov, p. 90.
The “pregnant moment” of an action is the point of arrested which

most clearly implies what came before the moment and what is to
follow it. But as the example from Homer [Achilles’ shield] shows,
ekphrastic literature typically delivers from the pregnant moment of
graphic art its embryonically narrative impulse, and thus makes explicit
the story that graphic art tells only by implication.
In fact, since the picture of a moment in a story usually presupposes
the viewer’s knowledge of the story as a whole, ékphrasis commonly
tells this story for the benefit of those who don’t know it, moving well
beyond what the picture alone implies.52
In The Aphid, as the example of Kamyshev’s painting of Lenin

clearly shows, the reader is expected to know the story from the
beginning, while the painting can (or cannot) be recognized from
the actual description. Heffernan’s definition, in fact, can only
apply to actual ékphrasis; in notional ékphrasis – most surely in
this case – what the reader gets is only the story, and he is left to
picture for himself what the resulting painting might look like53
(another classical feature: ékphrasis tells more of the depicted
scene than of the painting itself) or to recognize an existing one.
In Socialist realism, verbal representation is primary. Works
of visual art must be based on a verbal program: ékphrasis is not
accessory to the painting, it is its indispensable presupposition.
When the verbal representation is at hand, pictures are simply
not necessary.
52 James Heffernan, ‘Ékphrasis and Representation’, New Literary History,

XXII (1991), 2, 301-02.
53 This is, however, a task that does not leave much to the imagination: Socialist
Realism, from this point of view, is probably nearer to the pre-modern
situation as described by John Hollander in his definition of notional ékphrasis:
his model texts, from Homer and Hesiod to Dante, «conjure up an image,
describing some things about it and ignoring a multitude of others which,
particularly before 1400, we might assume were supplied by any reader who
knew what images – there being so few conventional options – looked like
(that is, a style could be said to be assumed by the basic terms of the descriptive
language). And while we might want to suggest that a student in class imagine
the reliefs in Dante as looking rather like a Pisano – rather than Signorelli’s
“illustrations” of them (…) – it is still clear that, at best, we can only adduce
partial or conventional paradigms in actual works of art for notional
ékphrasis». (The Poetics of Ékphrasis, p. 209).
This is why research into the possible prototypes of the paintings

described by Shevtsov is unlikely to arrive at indisputable
conclusions: discussing the ontological status of his ékphrasis is
simply meaningless. Anyone with a good knowledge of Soviet
art could offer many more hypotheses than we have here.
Most of the protagonist’s paintings are hard enough to identify,
not because there is nothing similar in real life, but rather because
– given the notorious monotony of Soviet art – there is too much.
Let us take, for instance, his Russian Spring:
On a hillside huts with faded straw on their roofs, barns, fences with
pots on their stakes. Behind the village narrow multicolored strips:
fields bordered by the blue distance of woods. In the foreground a
skinny horse harnessed to a wooden plow stands and, sadly dropping
its head, bites from under its legs the young green grass shooting up
under last year’s grass. Rooks and crows fly in turn over the freshly
plowed field with a cry. A Russian peasant in a shirt with no belt and
bast shoes stands by the plow, holding out his rough hands at Lenin.
Vladimir Il’ich, simple, well-known, so near that it is almost painful,
stands and caresses with his hand a fair-haired, barefooted boy who had
brought his father his meal and is carefully listening to the “sower and
protector” of Russian land. And it seems that Lenin already sees spring
in the distance with thousands of tractors going out into the endless
reaches of Russia to rebuild the peasants’ life.54
“Lenin among peasants” is the subject of many paintings,

several of which possess elements that bring to mind this
description, but none of them seem to correspond perfectly; no
existing painting can, in any case, incorporate all the information
from the text – the cry of birds and the tractors that Lenin seems
to imagine.
Vasilii Basov, Lenin between the peasants of the village

of Shushenskoe, early fifties
Evdokiia Usikova, Lenin with villagers, 1959
There exists, in fact, a painting that comes very close to

Shevtsov’s ékphrasis, but it was only painted in 1982, eighteen
years after the novel had been published: word is primary.
Engel’s Kozlov, On Life and Land, 1982
Had Engels Kozlov’s On Life and Land borne the title Russian
Spring, and been signed “Vladimir Mashkov”, it would have had,
paradoxically, the same status as the “Campalans” paintings that
were exhibited repeatedly.
This reconstruction seems to suggest an easy conclusion: that
narrative, “speaking” paintings, with their embedded propaganda
content, are, as such, an instrument of totalitarian thinking, while
real progressive art is mute. In Shevtsov’s intentions this was no
doubt the case; and his party’s defense of the ‘plot-based’ painting
is an explicit defense of Stalinism, and even more so – of anti-
semitism as a key component of Stalinism, in opposition to the
liberal hopes of the thaw period. Yet it would be hazardous to
create a generalized law out of this case.
Andrei Siniavskii’s review (one of the last pieces he published
in Novii mir before his arrest) concentrates on revealing the
absurdness in Shevtsov’s representation of the Soviet art-world;
where in real life is this oppression of traditional realists? For
a judgment on «the level of his [Shevtsov’s] aesthetic ideas»,
“one detail” is enough:
The vulgar scoundrel Boris Iulin’s recreation room is decorated with

«color reproductions of naked women: Rembrandt’s Danae, Giorgione’s
Venus, Rubens’ Susanna, Briullov’s Bathsheba and, of course, Renoir’s
young lady sitting with her back to the viewer and gently turning her
head». After enumerating these creations from the genius of the world,
Shevtsov explains to the reader that they helped Boris Iulin to seduce
young girls.
It could be of some use to observe incidentally that the author is
generally inclined to perceive the work on the nude in, let’s say, an
overly utilitarian way.55
Silly as it may seem, Shevtsov’s treatment of the classics

of nude painting is not totally deprived of logic if appreciated
within its own system. Didactic art is in fact often equated to
pornography; a very suitable example can be found in Kenneth
Clarke’s expertise for the Longford committee on pornography:
To my mind art exists in the realm of contemplation, and is bound

by some sort of imaginative transposition. The moment art becomes
an incentive to action it loses its true character. This is my objection
to painting with a communist programme, and it would also apply to
pornography. In a picture like Correggio’s Danaë the sexual feelings
have been transformed, and although we undoubtedly enjoy it all the
more because of its sensuality, we are still in the realm of contemplation.56
Communist propaganda art and pornography have one thing in

common; they do not invite the observer to passively contemplate
the formal qualities of the work (“painterliness”), they want him/
her to identify the subject with its real life prototype and to react
to it. In Shevtsov’s logic, a picture of a wounded Lenin is able
(must be able) to fill the viewer with horror at such a monstrous
crime, which will give momentum to the struggle against the
enemies of the people. In accordance with this pattern, a Venus,
be it Giorgione’s or Correggio’s, is first of all a naked young
woman that might well provoke a reaction just the same.
55 Siniavskii, “‘Pamflet ili paskvil’?”, pp. 58-59.

56 Denis O’Callaghan, Pornography: The Longford Report (London: Coronet,
1972), pp. 99-100.
Can we be so confident that this attitude is simply outdated,

coarse and wrong? In the novel, Iulin has his “color reproductions”
hanging in a backroom of his atelier, a room he uses both to
paint naked models and to seduce them. Feminist criticism has
denounced the «sexual myth of the artist/model relationship»
where «the artist’s female model is also his mistress and the
intensity of the artistic process is mirrored only by the intensity
of their sexual relationship».57 The work of Pierre Bourdieu
has revealed the social relationships implied by the logic of
disinterested contemplation of works of art – the same logic with
which the depiction of a naked body is traditionally deprived of
its sexual connotations by the appreciation of its formal qualities.
None of this is being stated in order to vindicate Shevtsov, who
simply cannot be vindicated; but it can vindicate the interest in his
work as a totally alien view of art, a different point of view from
which a different light can be cast on our own received ideas.
57 Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London and
New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 50.
HOMO PICTOR:
ÉKPHRASIS AS A FRONTIER OF THE IMAGE
IN THOMAS BERNHARD’S FROST
Giuseppe Di Liberti
Strauch, the surgeon from the hospital of Schwartzach, a small

Austrian town on the border with Switzerland, just a few kilometres
from Lake Constance, secretly entrusts a young student – the
narrator, whose name we will never know – to go to Weng, a village
in Upper Austria, to observe the behaviour of his brother, Strauch
the painter. Frost, Thomas Bernhard’s first novel, published in
1963, presents the observations made by the young student during
his twenty-seven-day mission in Weng, a place «so ugly that it’s
characterful; far prettier landscapes have no character».1
«Watch the way my brother, holds his stick, I want a precise
description of it».2 These are the only words of Strauch the
surgeon reported by the narrator, before setting out on his voyage
and before the long ramblings of Strauch the painter prevail over
his ability to observe an undefined illness. This phrase works as
a clue and is directed at the reader at least as much as it is at the
young student of medicine. Indeed, it is not rare for Bernhard to
place “clues” of this sort in early pages.3
1 Thomas Bernhard, Frost (Frankfurt a. M: Insel, 1963), trans. by Michael

Hofmann, Frost (New York: Vintage International, 2008) digital edition, p. 12.
2 Bernhard, Frost, p. 14.
3 In one of his essays devoted to Korrektur, Emilio Garroni writes: «A clue that
the theme [of Altensam, the town where the main characters in the novel were
born] is central can be traced right from the first page of the novel, where it
appears in the reference of the title to a manuscript left by Roithamer, who
committed suicide, which the narrator friend is consulting, alongside other
texts and drawings»: With regard to Altensam and everything which is
connected to Altensam, with particular reference to the cone (Emilio Garroni,
Un esempio di interpretazione testuale: Thomas Bernhard’s Korrektur, in
L’arte e l’altro dall’arte: Saggi di estetica e di critica, ed. by Emilio Garroni
(Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2003), pp. 128-63 (p. 138).
In this way, we have summarised the basic plot of Bernhard’s

novel as well as the three elements at the centre of our brief
analysis: the painter’s stick, the landscape of Weng and the role
of the young student as witness.
This analysis has two main aims: (1) to consider a special mode
of notional ékphrasis, which for the sake of brevity we will call here
“iconoclastic ékphrasis”; (2) to verify how painting representation
methods can be used as a model for the structure of the novel.4
Strauch is a painter who abandoned painting some years
earlier but, despite this renunciation, “cannot but continue to
be a painter”. All his actions – the long walks, his use of the
stick – may be considered as an extension of his painting activity
where the possibility itself of producing images is denied, due
to an inauspicious form of Platonism on one hand and due to the
“flatness” of the landscape on the other. For Strauch, recourse to
verbal description is the inevitable and extreme consequence of the
painting process, and it is in this sense that the ékphrastic process
played out in Frost is seen to be paradoxical and iconoclastic:
he constructs verbal images to state the impossibility and the
failure of the pictorial image. We can read in this way not just the
moments in which Strauch describes what he sees or imagines,
but the whole movements he makes in the landscape of Weng,
and it is in this sense that his irremediably being a homo pictor
offers a narrative structure to the entire novel. In the Preface to
the Italian edition of Frost, Pier Aldo Rovatti writes:
Re-reading Frost, I often had the desire to draw, perhaps with a small
and schematic drawing, the map of the place, as you do when you enter
a new house in order to have an idea of the location and the size of the
rooms, the corridors and the balconies. (…) I would like to be able to
draw this map, which I can see precisely in my head, but I think, then,
that every reader of Frost certainly creates his own one, and that each
one is probably different from the others.5
4 On the various different possible forms of homology between text and image,
see Michele Cometa, ‘Letteratura e arti figurative: Un catalogo’,
Contemporanea, 3 (2005), 15-29 (p. 24).
5 Pier Aldo Rovatti, Contagio, preface to Thomas Bernhard’s Gelo (Torino:
Einaudi, 2008), p. IX.
G. Di Liberti - Homo Pictor: Ékphrasis as Frontier of the Image 115
It is precisely this possibility of mapping the movements of

Strauch which articulate the narrative scheme of Frost.
We can add a third aim which deserves a full, accurate, historic-
literary study which, to which – for reasons of space and non-
relevance – we can only refer here. Not only does Frost represent
one of the best Austrian examples of anti-Heimatroman6 but,
through the use of these three functional elements – and, of
course, not only through these7 – Bernhard clearly overturns
Biedermeier literature not without formative purposes, with
Adalbert Stifter being an exemplary representative. In Old
Masters, it is not a coincidence that Bernhard gives Reger, the
main character observed by a narrator, a ferocious invective
against Stifter: «If ever there was such a concept as tasteless, dull
and sentimental and pointless literature, then it applies exactly
to what Stifter has written. Stifter’s writing is no art, and what
he has to say is dishonest in the most revolting fashion»8 and
continues in this way for a few pages before moving onto the
6 Jonathan J. Long, Bernhard: Frost, in Landmarks in the German Novel (2),

ed. by Peter Hutchinson and Michael Minden (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), 7-24
(p. 9): «The status of Frost as a landmark novel, then, needs to be understood
against a cultural backdrop dominated by a generally provincial orientation
and by modes of dissemination that privileged small-scale ephemera. Beyond
this, it also needs to be seen as a response to a cultural genre whose roots lie
in the late nineteenth century, but which continued to play a major role in the
immediate post-war years: the Heimatroman. The Austrian Heimatroman or
rural novel, as exemplified in the work of the nineteenth-century writers
Ludwig Anzengruber (1839-89) and Peter Rosegger (1843-1918), celebrated
rural and agricultural life, community, rootedness, and tradition, and books by
Heimatdichter sold by the million in 1950’s Austria; […] If Hans Lebert’s
1960 novel Die Wolfshaut is generally identified as the first anti-Heimatroman,
then the second is Bernhard’s Frost». Also see Joseph A. Federico, ‘Heimat,
death and the other in Thomas Bernhard’s Frost and Verstörung’, Modern
Austrian Literature, 29 (1996), H. 3-4, 223-42.
7 For a thorough comparison – to which we will return – between Nachsommer,
Stifter’s famous Bildungsroman and Frost, see Timothy B. Malchow, ‘Thomas
Bernhard’s Frost and Adalbert Stifter: Literature, Legacy, and National
Identity in the Early Austrian Second Republic’, German Studies Review, 28.1
(2005), 65-84.
8 Thomas Bernhard, Alte Meister: Komödie (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1985),
trans. by Ewald Osers, Old Masters (London: Penguin Classics, 2010), 19891,
digital edition.
better known yet no less cruel pages against Heidegger («Just as

Stifter has totally and in the most shameless manner kitschified
great literature, so Heidegger, the Black Forest philosopher
Heidegger, has kitschified philosophy»).9 Within Reger’s bitter
words, however, we find a further useful clue for reading Frost:
Stifter’s descriptions of nature are always extolled. Never has nature

been so misconstrued as in Stifter’s descriptions, nor indeed is it as
boring as he makes us believe on his patient pages […]. Stifter makes
nature monotonous and his characters insensitive and insipid, he knows
nothing and he invents nothing, and he describes, because he is solely a
describer and nothing else, he describes with boundless naïveté. He has
the quality of poor painters.10
Stifter, indeed, was also a painter of landscapes (Der Königssee

mit dem Watzmann, oil on canvas, 1837, Vienna Österreichische
Galerie), urban views (Blick in die Beatrixgasse, oil on cloth, 1839,
Vienna Schubert-Geburtshaus) and ruins (Ruine Wittinghausen,
oil on canvas, 1833-35, Vienna Schubert-Geburtshaus), and for
sure Reger’s invective against his writing could also be extended
to his paintings. As Timothy Malchow has emphasised, Frost
can be read as an inverted Austrian Bildungsroman11 and this
inversion, we may add, is systematic and involves all the levels of
construction of the novel. In particular in Frost, Bernhard defines
9 Bernhard, Old Masters.

11 Timothy B. Malchow, Thomas Bernhard’s “Frost” and Adalbert Stifter, p. 66:
«Frost can be read as an inverted Austrian Bildungsroman. Its unnamed, first-
person narrator is an impressionable young medical student who is sent to
study his supervisor’s deranged brother, the former painter Strauch, in the
Alpine village of Weng and to report back secretly on his condition. The
narrator’s interactions with Strauch so transform him that he finally loses his
very sense of identity. Several scholars have previously noted Frost’s
intertextual allusions to the Bildungsroman genre and to Stifter’s Der
Nachsommer specifically. Bernhard’s appropriation of Der Nachsommer
enabled him to participate in emerging narratives of Austrian national identity
that relied upon Stifter’s work as an iconic artefact. In Frost, Strauch’s
unresolved, unspecified traumas and his concomitant tendency to see butchery
as an irrepressible feature of the Alpine landscape prevent him from forming
a meaningful identity».
a statute of description which will run through all his work and
which, perhaps, finds its best exemplification in Old Masters.
Every two days for about thirty years, Reger goes to the Bordone
Room of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna to look at
Tintoretto’s White-bearded man looking for a “clear error” which
makes looking at it bearable («the complete and perfect are basically
abhorrent to us»).12 Michele Cometa shows how the descriptions of
paintings in Old Masters reveal the relationship between ékphrasis
and narration: «The paintings in this novel are basically a “non-
place”, they exist precisely because words (and music) seems to
never reach them; they act, they “look at” their viewers, (…) but
they communicate nothing».13 If in Old Masters paintings are words,
in Frost they are words that absorb the visual dimension and become
paintings.14 Cometa continues: «Bernhard is careful not to describe,
but it is precisely for this reason that he reveals ‘his’ paintings in
their un-describability, as an unresolved residue within the narration,
referring to them and illustrating them».15 And he concludes:
In the novel we witness the systematic demolition of all the claims of

positive integration between the arts and between the arts and life (…)
and we know (…) that no ontological claim can be satisfied by painting,
either in terms of mimesis, however platonically abhorred, or in terms
of re-creation.16

13 Michele Cometa, Parole che dipingono: Letteratura e cultura visuale tra
Settecento e Novecento (Roma: Meltemi, 2004), p. 153. The contribution
proposed here owes much to the pages which Cometa dedicates to Old
Masters, in the last chapter, with the significant title La visione estinta, of
Parole che dipingono, re-proposed, then, in La scrittura delle immagini. We
refer to this for a rich and accurate analysis of the ékphrastic methods adopted
by Bernhard in Old Masters.
14 Rovatti again emphasises: «Strauch sees the words: this claim, which seems
to be ridiculous, will become a key motif in Bernhard’s subsequent novels,
and will be his famous words written in italics, italics as visualisation of
things» (Rovatti, pp. X-XI).
15 Cometa, La scrittura delle immagini, p. 156. On the relationship between
painting and narrative structure in Old Masters, also see Ingeborg Hoesterey,
‘Visual Art as Narrative Structure. Thomas Bernhard’s Alte Meister’, Modern
Austrian Literature, 21 (1988), 117-22.
16 Cometa, La scrittura delle immagini, p. 166.
And yet, this itinerary for the dissolution of the image already
starts in Bernhard’s first novel: word and image appear to be
irremediably divided and the rambling which follows the loss of
the image cannot be but destined for failure. To borrow the words
of Gottfried Boehm, Bernhard seems to summarise the lesson
of modernity «which consists of the growing distance which
separates word and image».17
If Regen seems to accurately avoid the masterpieces housed in
the Kunsthistorisches Museum to prefer forgotten works, the only
pictorial reference in Frost is, indeed, to one of the masterpieces
of the Viennese museum, «a river landscape by Breughel the
Elder», almost certainly The hunters in the snow (oil on wood,
117x162 cm, 1565).18 This is a work whose reception is not
without interesting contradictions: on one hand, it is an image
used (perhaps too much) for serene Christmas cards,19 on the
other hand, explored by Tarkovskij’s camera in Solaris (USSR,
1972, colour, sound, 165min), referred to in the construction of
the shots of The mirror (USSR, 1975, b/w colour, sound, 108min),
again by Tarkovskij, shot by Lars von Trier in the prologue of
Melancholia (Denmark, Germany, France, Sweden, Italy, 2011,
colour, 130min) to the notes of Wagner’s overture Tristan and
Isolde. Or again by William Carlos Williams who, in the last of
17 Gottfried Boehm, ‘Bildsechreibung. Über die Grenzen von Bild und Sprache’,
in Beschreibungskunst – Kunstbeschreibung. Die Ékphrasis von der Antike
bis zur Gegenwart, ed. by Gottfried Boehm and Helmut Pfotenhauer
(München: Fink, 1995), pp. 23-40; Italian trans. by Maria Giuseppina Di
Monte and Michele Di Monte, La descrizione dell’immagine: Sui confini fra
immagine e linguaggio, in La svolta iconica, ed. by Maria Giuseppina Di
Monte and Michele Di Monte (Roma: Meltemi, 2009), pp. 187-212 (p. 191).
18 Actually, Bernhard, as we will see, does not offer a detailed description of the
painting and the Kunsthistorisches Museum houses, as well as The hunters in
the snow and many other works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, another two
paintings in the series of five Months: The gloomy day or February (oil on
wood, 118x163 cm, 1565) and The return of the herd or November (oil on
wood, 117x159 cm, 1565), both river landscapes. The hunters, as well as
being the only snowy landscape of the three, seems to be the one which best
corresponds to the human condition described by the narrator.
19 See Martin Kemp, ‘Looking at the face of the Earth’, Nature, 456 (2008),
p. 876.
his collections Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems of 1962,

has to dedicate a poem to The Hunters.20
Forgive the long quotation, but this page of Frost, appearing
right in the middle of the novel, manages to bring together many
of the matters discussed here:
Watching him now, I thought a little puff of wind would be enough to

knock him over. When he stopped, he marked the ground with his stick,
Indian signs, he told me, that are incomprehensible to me. Some of
these signs remind me of animals, a cow for instance, a pig; others are
shaped like temples, or the courses of rivers. Circles. Other geometrical
forms. Even up where I was, I could hear him muttering to himself.
Like an old general talking to himself, and then turning to the army
that will always be there in his imagination. And he looked, too, like
someone bending over a staff map, with everything on it down to the
least detail depending on him. He was talking in foreign languages as
well. Asian words and scraps were flying through the air. The whole
scene, with him the focus of it, reminded me of a painting I saw years
ago once in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; I can even
remember the room it’s hanging in: a river landscape by Breughel the
Elder, where people are trying to find distraction from death, in which
they are successful, but only, as the picture seems to be saying, at the
price of infinite torments in Hell. The black of the tree stump, which
shaded into the black of the painter’s jacket, and the black of his pants
and his stick, was finally picked up the black of the mountain peaks.21
The nature which Strauch and the student are passing through
is deeply historical, but in the sense by which, according to
20 «The over-all picture is winter/ icy mountains /in the background the return/
from the hunt it is toward evening/ from the left/ sturdy hunters lead in/ their
pack the inn-sign/ hanging from a/ broken hinge is a stag a crucifix/ between
his antlers the cold/ inn yard is/ deserted but for a huge bonfire/ the flares
wind-driven tended by/ women who cluster/ about it to the right beyond/ the
hill is a pattern of skaters/ Brueghel the painter/ concerned with it all has
chosen/ a winter-struck bush for his/ foreground to/ complete the picture»
(William Carlos Williams, ‘The Hunters in the Snow’, in Pictures from
Brueghel and Other Poems: Collected Poems 1950-1962, ed. by William
Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1962). On Williams’ ékphrasis,
see James Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetry of Ékphrasis from Homer
to Ashbery (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993), pp. 165 ff.
Benjamin, in German tragic drama, when «the hereafter is

emptied of everything which contains the slightest breath of
this world»,22 history dissolves within natural phenomena.23 The
traces of war and its horrors seem to be inscribed in the landscape,
precisely as ruins which escape the linearity of history but never
stop reminding. Not only because the corpses of the soldiers are
still to be found beneath the snow and the pine needles but, above
all, because «Nothing, not one thing, was mute. Everything
continually expressed its pain. The mountains, you see, are great
witnesses to great pain».24 History is rooted in the landscape and
the landscape resists all forms of progress. When, for example,
one of the recurrent characters, an engineer who supervises the
construction of a power station, focuses our attention on the time
of modern civilisation, on the progress of machines and energy
and on the idea of the future, he appears to be extraneous –
especially to the eyes of the painter – to the crystallised time of
the inn in Weng where the painter and the student are staying.
In this landscape, Strauch could disappear at any time. He
himself is a creature in ruins. His obsession for illness, the
constant aspiration for suicide, reveal not so much the desire to
get away from life – which he has already renounced by his exile
to Weng – but the desire to become a corpse, to reduce his very
history to a natural phenomenon of decay. The student “sees”, in
this landscape, Strauch’s end, which he will learn of, as we read
in the final words of the novel, from the pages of a newspaper:
«The unemployed man G. Strauch from V. has not been seen
in Weng or environs since last Thursday. In view of the heavy
snowfalls currently being experienced there, the search for the
missing person, in which members of the police also took part,
22 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. by John

Osborne (London: Verso, 2003), p. 66.
23 Steven D. Dowden cleverly observes: «Bernhardian nature must be understood
as a metaphorical transposition of history» (Steven D. Dowden, Understanding
Thomas Bernhard, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1991,
Chapter 2 Frost and Gargoyles, pp. 11-29, p. 19). To use Benjamin’s terms,
we could say that nature may be understood as an allegorical transposition of
history.
has had to be called off».25 The landscape of Frost is extremely

topographic26 and, at the same time, borderless, without
“orientation”, and thereby denies the very possibility of the visual
representation of memory. «Bernhard’s narrative seems to call up
the founding myth of mnemotechnique, in which death sets off
the work of memory. What is to be remembered in and for the
present is disfigured».27 Just as if the relationship between signs
and meanings was irrevocably broken down.
Strauch uses his stick to draw (indecipherable) signs in the
snow. At times, the stick seems to be a “substitute” for a brush,
at times a real “prosthesis” in the sense given by Jaspers.28
«Without my stick, I most probably wouldn’t be alive!»,29 Strauch
says. The stick is above all the instrument of hypotyposis: it
designs signs of maps,30 it indicates the path or the direction31
or the landscape to be observed. Here we are using the term
hypotyposis in its broadest sense, summarised well in 1830 by
Fontanier: «L’hypotypose peint les choses d’une manière si vive
et si énergique, qu’elle les met en quelque sorte sous les yeux,
et fait d’un récit ou d’une description, une image, un tableau, ou
même une scène vivante».32 As an instrument of hypotyposis, for

26 In a study focusing on the topographic dimension of Frost, Katya Krylova
writes: «The Alpine topography in Frost, far from constituting a Heimat, is
one characterized above all by a sense of Unheimlichkeit» (Katya Krylova,
‘Eine den Menschen zerzausende Landschaft, Psychotopography and the
Alpine Landscape in Thomas Bernhard’s Frost’, Austrian Studies, 18 (2011),
74-88 (p. 76).
27 Bianca Theisen, ‘The Art of Erasing Art: Thomas Bernhard’, MLN, 3 (2006),
German Issue, 551-62 (p. 559).
28 Cfr. Karl Jaspers, Allgemeine Psychopathologie (Berlin-Heidelberg-New
York: Springer, 1959).
31 Bernhard, Frost, pp. 15-16: «If you walk the way I’m pointing with my stick,
you’ll come to a valley where you can walk back and forth for hours, without
the least anxiety’, he said. ‘You don’t have to be afraid of being found out.
Nothing can happen to you: everything has died. (…) It’s like walking
centuries before human settlement».
32 Pierre Fontanier, Des Figures du discours autres que les tropes (Paris: Maire-
Nyon, 1827); repr. Les figures du discours, ed. by Gérard Genette (Paris:
Flammarion, 1968), p. 390.
Strauch, the stick is an identifying element and, in a certain way,

an iconographic element. With his stick, Strauch spatialises the
image, renders it factual, makes it a “thing”. But the signs which
Strauch reveals with his stick are already inscribed in nature. The
extreme attention in tracing the signs in the snow leads him to
«Asian words and scraps were flying through the air». But it is
not so much a case of an Asian language, but the language of
nature: «His powers of invention extend as far as “astonishing
verbal constructions verging on the profound,” which he finds in
the forests and fields, in the meadows and the deep snow».33
The scene with Strauch absorbed drawing with his stick reminds
the student of Brueghel’s The hunters in the snow. A Christmas
card, as we said. A card in which, in a small-sized reproduction,
we lose the minute details of Bruegel the cartographer. To the
left of the hunters and their dogs, there is an inn with a deer sign.
The sign contains the emblem of Saint Eustachius – protector
of gamekeepers –, who converted to Christianity after finding a
crucifix transfixed in the body of a deer. With respect to Dürer’s
splendid engraving of Saint Eustachius from 1501, Brueghel
would appear to expand the perspective, keeping the iconographic
traits. In front of the inn, men at a fire are singeing the pig they
have just finished slaughtering, as shown by the wooden vat. In
the background, on the icy river, other men seem to be playing
on the ice.
Bernhard’s ékphrasis seems to be suspended between the mimetic
dimension and the notional dimension:34 the direct evocation of
the painting overlaps immediately with an interpretation of the
human condition represented and then passes fluidly, through the
“black of the tree stump” to the portrait of the painter observed by
the student. Here in this section, again, Bernhard “dismantles” the
painting to reveal the limits – and the impossibility – of pictorial
representation. Citing the work of Brueghel, Bernhard gives us a
33 Frost, p. 64.
34 Cometa, Letteratura e arti figurative, p. 20: «In the case of literary ékphrasis,
the distinction between mimetic ékphrasis, that is, that which starts from an
artistic product which actually exists or existed and notional ékphrasis, which
‘creates’ its subject for the first time, is also decisive».
false centre using two strategies. Indeed, he does not report the
title of the painting and the description offered could also refer
to other paintings by Brueghel housed at the Kunsthistorisches
Museum, at least to the other two in the Months cycle. But,
above all, the description of the scene portrayed in the painting is
“distributed” within other parts of the novel, including elements
present in the other two paintings of the Dutch master, as if, in
the memory, the three paintings merged. We refer, in particular, to
two other moments in Frost. In the first, after a deliberate fire has
devastated a farm and emergency slaughters of animals, Strauch
himself says he is like a homo pictor:
‘You see’, he said, ‘this tree comes on and says the line I told it to say,
an incomprehensible line of poetry, a line that will turn the world on its
head, a so-called line against God, you understand me! This tree walks
on from the left, the cloud comes on from the right, the cloud with its
softer voice. I view myself as the creator of this afternoon drama, this
tragedy! This comedy! Now listen, the music has come in right on cue.
The music plays on the difference between my words and all others.
[…] Do you see my theatre? Do you see the theatre of apprehension?
The theatre of God’s un-self-sufficiency? What God?’.35
Towards the end of the novel, the scene of the slaughter

returns in a sub-chapter entitled The Animal Rustling Scum in
which Strauch has discovered in the wood traces of blood from
a clandestine slaughter. And he again claims his painting activity
on the landscape:
I want to call the scene ‘slaughter,’ in the moment I beheld it,

everything seemed to soak into the picture. I could clearly see the
butchers’ fleeing footprints. One could see also the tracks of the
livestock they had stolen. One could see the darkness of the planets,
and the low proletarianism of murder. I saw the word ‘innocent’ on
the ground, in the snow, this low code, you must know, and the word
‘meanness’ clearly in the sky.36
35 Frost, pp. 169-70.

36 Frost, p. 246.
The word here “literally” takes the place of the image

and imposes itself as the ultimate consequence of the visual
construction of the scene. The image reveals the vulgarity and
the obscenity of the massacre. At times almost the comicality.
Strauch is divided between word and image as he is divided
between tragic and comic.
In this sense, it appears to be appropriate to speak of an
“iconoclastic ékphrasis”: a description of an image or a visual
work which aims to demonstrate the impossibility for the image
itself to contain the sense of what is represented. The consequence
of this process is that words also become “things” and things to
be seen: inscriptions in nature, natural histories which are ever-
increasingly hard to decipher.
Both the paradoxical statute of ékphrasis and the construction
of Strauch as homo pictor who cannot paint push us, in conclusion,
to ascertain how articulate and complex the structural and
thematic homologies between text and image are in Frost, to the
point of sometimes rendering themes and structure inextricable.
The ontological critique of the nature of the image is combined
with Stifter’s critique of the description of “beautiful nature”,
and translates as a narration which is broken constantly before
the fragmentariness and alongside the immensity of the natural
phenomena. When, for example, Strauch imagines a park in
which «Plants and music would follow in lovely mathematical
alternation», he also reveals the impossibility of crossing it, of
passing from one meadow “island” to the next: «‘In each case,
there is a breadth and depth of water that prevents one from
hopping from one island to another. In my imagining. On the
piece of grass which one has reached, how is a mystery, on which
one has woken up, and where one is compelled to stay,’ one would
finally perish of hunger and thirst. ‘One’s longing to be able to
walk through the whole park is finally deadly’».37
In the same way, Strauch’s topographies design the structure of the

narration of the novel. In this sense, the thematic homologies between
37 Frost, p. 76.
the images dreamed, indicated, constructed verbally, evoked, traced

with the stick and the text also become structural homologies.
«European culture – wrote Boehm – has progressively
increased the collection of images and with this the kingdom of
presence too», gradually doing away with the space of the absent.
«In the beautiful and new world of simulation – Boehm continues
– we are actually working so that one day we can completely
eliminate this space».38 The renunciation of images by Strauch
the painter is an act of revenge aiming to preserve and legitimise
a space of absence. The resulting paradox is that the descriptions,
rather than bringing text and image closer, actually serve to mark
out the limits of representation in both.
38 Gottfried Boehm, Repräsentation-Präsentation-Präsenz: Auf den Spuren des

homo pictor, in Homo Pictor: Colloquium Rauricum, ed. by Gottfried Boehm
(München-Leipzig: De Gruyter Saur, 2001), Bd. 7, pp. 3-13; Italian translation
by Maria Giuseppina Di Monte and Michele Di Monte, Rappresentazione-
presentazione-presenza: Sulle tracce dell’homo pictor, in La svolta iconica
(Roma: Meltemi, 2009), pp. 89-103 (p. 94).
BETWEEN ONTOPHANY AND POIESIS:
HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL’S
DANCING STATUES
Mariaelisa Dimino
On May 1908 Hugo von Hofmannsthal took the first and

only trip to Greece of his life, together with the French painter
Aristide Maillol and his friend earl Harry Kessler, with whom
he had been planning their journey since December of the
previous year. Though the poet’s stay in Greece had not been that
pleasant,1 his experience was later to become subject material
for the three chapters of his Augenblicke in Griechenland. It took
almost ten years for him to write the text,2 testifying its particular
complexity: not being a simple travel report, it attempts mapping
an alien space, which extends beyond the limits of perception.
As in other texts of the same period,3 in his Augenblicke in
Griechenland Hofmannsthal expresses his distrust of a linguistic
1 As explained by earl Kessler in a letter to his sister, Hofmannsthal decided to

come back from Greece before his companions: «Hofmannsthal in Greece
was a failure: il ne se retrouvait pas. He was almost always out of sorts, out of
temper, or out of feeling with the surroundings. After ten days of much suffer-
ings, he left us, to our mutual contentment (…) he said he could not stand the
barrenness of the country (…)», Hofmannsthal/Kessler, Briefwechsel 1898-
1929, ed. by Hilde Burger (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1968), p. 512. In partic-
ular, it is probable that Hofmannsthal was distressed by the ménage à trois:
Kessler had in fact autonomously decided to invite the painter Maillol to join
to the trip. Compare, Bärbel Götz, Erinnerung schöner Tage: die Reise-Es-
says Hugo von Hofmannsthals (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1992),
pp. 69-74.
2 Hofmannsthal wrote the first part immediately after leaving Greece, and was
published under the title of Ritt nach Phokis: Das kloster des Heiligen Lukas
in June 1908 on the Berliner review Morgen; the second part, planned in 1909,
was completed just in 1912 and then published in 1917 together with the third
and last part of the text in the volume of Prosaischen Schriften.
3 See for example Chandos-Brief and other texts written in 1907, such as Die
Briefe des Zurückgekehrten, Furcht, Die Wege und die Begegnungen, Der
Tisch mit den Büchern and Der Dichter und diese Zeit.
dimension which seems no longer able to convey the creative

power of imagination, whereas he gives the task of visualizing the
invisible – of figuratively presentifying the essence of the things
– to his “imaginal” writing which, unfolding with antinomic
motion, pushes itself to the limits of nonverbal languages.
Paraphrasing the title of the text, it could be said that
Hofmannsthal’s Augen-Blicke in Griechnland strives to establish
a poetics of gaze, culminating in the ékphrastic moment.
Hofmannsthal’s encounter with the “ancient Other” of Greece
can only take place in an «inner space of writing»,4 in a climax
of figuration reaching its highest point in the last chapter of the
text, with the ékphrasis of the Korai-statues on display at the little
museum of the Athenian Acropolis.5
Still, the ékphrastic moment, for which the whole text prepares
us, ends up with freeing itself from the very representation from
which it came, and exceeds itself by becoming metaphor of
an empathic reception which, at the same time, coincides with
the poietic act: while at a first sight this passage could seem a
typical instance of actual ékphrasis, in the end it proves to be the
ékphrasis of the poet’s vision of a mystical dance.
In the first part of the text the poet tries to draw the topography
of the Greek natural landscape. It is clear from the beginning that
the encounter with the ancient “other” will be only possible in
the form of an encounter with a «forgotten cultural knowledge»,6
memory as a poietic act can emerge simply from a movement
which, starting from worldly perception, turns back to the
subject’s inner domain and addresses an unconscious, removed
element, which can surface only in a visionary form.
In the second part, Der Wanderer, the emphasis shifts from
physical landscape elements to the human figure. A number of
4 Compare Gabriele Brandstetter, Tanz-Lektüren: Körperbilder und

Raumfiguren der Avantgarde (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1995), p. 116. All
translations are mine.
5 The statues are the Caryatids of the Erechtheion of the Athenian Acropolis. It
must be noticed however, that starting from the simple data of Hofmannsthal’s
text, it is not possible to identify specific characteristics which allow to
distinguish these particular statues from any other Kore-statue.
6 Brandstetter, p. 98.
M. Dimino - Between Ontophany and Poiesis 129
ghosts, of “faces” from the past, arises before the traveller and his
companion on their way to Athens. During their dialogue, they
seem to share in each other’s memories. The conjured images of
their friends seem to stare at the two travellers, in a dimension
in which the visual element becomes pivotal. It is by means of
mutual gazes that the ghosts are given life.
The importance of the faculty of sight and its intimate
relationship with the poietic act emerge from another ghostly
apparition as well: though never overtly mentioned, the two
travellers conjure a figure, which can be identified as Rimbaud,
the voyant poet, who, close to death, resolutely heads towards
his fate. Hofmannsthal emphasises Rimbaud’s rejection of his
own poetry, thus testifying to an ambiguous relationship with the
verbal dimension.
After the appearance of the ghosts, the two travellers meet a
man of flesh and blood, namely the bookbinder from Lauffen
am Salzach. To some extent he can be compared to the figure
of the visionary poet, inasmuch as he also resolutely undertakes
a voyage, which will lead him to illness and death. As Gabriele
Brandstetter points out, after having tried to decipher the signs
of an ancient “other” in the natural landscape, the traveller now
attempts to decipher the story of the subject “other” by reading
the physiognomy and the pathognomy of a “bodyscape”.7 His
attempt, however, fails, since he seems unable to read the signs
of perception.
The landscape topography and the face physiognomy finally
overlap, while the verbal dimension seems unable to express the
unspeakable sense of community that the traveller experiences in
his “moved heart”.
However, it is only in the third part of the text, Die Statuen,
that the subject, at the sight of the Kore-statues in the Athenian
museum, is finally able to overcome the threshold separating the
self and the world and to experience the epiphany of sense on a
visual level.
7 Ibidem.
The arrival on the Acropolis disappoints the traveller, who feels

puzzled when confronted with the irreparable sense of “pastness”
in the ruins of the ancient civilization.
Not even the vision of Plato is able to revive those dead ruins,
and his attempt to read Sophocle’s Philoctetes proves a failure as
well: words are useless and everything seems strange.
Meaningfully, it is only by the crossing of a threshold – the
threshold of the museum room where the statues are displayed
– that the traveller is finally able to experience the imaginary
encounter with the antiquity.
As Brandstetter underlines,8 in Augenblicke in Griechenland
the encounter with the ancient “other” of Greece is mediated by
the Pathosformel of emotional turmoil and deploys the topoi of
the “divine” vision. This latter in Hofmannsthal’s text features
fundamental elements of the ékphrastic discourse: first of all the
inherent ambivalence of ékphrasis, which implies a problematic
relation with the “other”; then the narrative’s penchant towards
temporalizing the spatial nature of images, above all by means
of prosopopeia; the complex relation between the ékphrastic
fragment and the text as a whole; and, finally, the issue of the
very nature of ékphrastic images.9
According to Mitchell, our fascination with the ékphrastic
discourse derives from the fact that it must pass through three
stages: that of the “ékphrastic indifference”, i.e. the «commonsense
perception that ékphrasis is impossible»,10 that of the “ékphrastic
hope”, «when the impossibility of ékphrasis is overcome in
imagination or metaphor»,11 and that of the “ékphrastic fear”,
«the moment of resistance or counterdesire that occurs when we
sense that (…) the figurative, imaginary desire of ékphrasis might
9 These issues have been discussed in William J. T. Mitchell’s text Ékphrasis and
the Other, originally published on the review South Atlantic Quarterly, 91
(1992), 695-719, and then included in the volume Picture Theory: Essays on
Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1994), pp. 151-82; as well as in James Heffernan’s book, Museum of Words:
The Poetry of Ékphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1993).
10 Mitchell, Picture Theory, p. 152.
11 Ibidem.
be realized literally and actually».12 Starting from the sceptical

point of view of the “ékphrastic indifference”, the specific aim
of the ékphrastic discourse is, therefore, the overcoming of the
inherent otherness of the image-text relationship. Such otherness,
according to the scholar, appears by no means to be the result
of the simple phenomenological difference between a speaking/
seeing self and a mute/seen object, but it «takes on the full range
of possible social relations inscribed within the field of verbal
and visual representation».13
Hofmannsthal’s ékphrastic passage represents the relationship
of otherness between the male speaking/seeing self and the
female statues, a kind of relationship that Mitchell defines, among
other things, as an inherent feature of the classical ékphrastic
genre.14 Hofmannsthal’s statues however do not seem to share
the traditional passivity of the female instance. Indeed, on the one
hand they are glanced at, but, on the other hand, they glance back
at the observer:
In that moment something happened to me: a nameless fear; it did

not come from outside, but from somewhere in the immeasurable
distance of an inner abyss; it was like a lightning: a much stronger light
than there really was, instantly filled the room, square as it was, with
its whitewashed walls and the statues that stood there: the eyes of the
statues suddenly were turned towards me and a completely unspeakable
smile appeared on their faces. To me, the actual meaning of this moment
was this: I understood this smile, because I knew: I do not see it for the
first time. In some way, in some world, I have already stood before this,
I have already nursed some kind of communion with this, and since
then everything in me was waiting for such a terror, and so, dreadfully,
I had to touch myself in order to become once again he who I was.15
Mitchell’s stage of ékphrastic fear seems to be represented

here: a nameless fear (aphasia, denial of speech) arises from

15 Hofmannsthal, Augenblicke in Griechenland (Zürich: Im Verlag der Arche,
1949), p. 57.
the sensation that the statues may be endowed with gaze, or, in
other words, that they may appropriate the subject’s identity, thus
turning him into a passive object.
It is only by means of another antinomic opposition that the
ékphrastic discourse can take a turn: the binary relation between
space and time is deconstructed in favour of their synthesis in the
complex unit of “movement”. The tension thus created involves
the seeing subject as well as the seen object, and sets both of them
“in motion”:
I say «since then» and «then», but nothing of the contingency of time
could have an echo in the entrancement wherein I had lost myself; it
had no duration and the substance it was filled with, was beyond time
as well. It was like being interwoven with it, some common flowing
together towards somewhere, a steadily rhythmic movement, stronger
and other than music, towards a goal; an inner tension, a setting in
motion; it was like a trip; (…) somewhere a ceremony was taking place,
a battle, a glorious sacrifice: such was the meaning of this turmoil in the
air, of the expanding and shrinking of space, – this was the unspeakable
exaltation within me, this overflowing sociability, alternating with this
limp death-blown despair: then I am the priest who will perform this
ceremony – as well as the victim, which will be sacrified.16
Once again the poet/observer is in a middle position, since he is

at once both priest and victim of a «glorious sacrifice»: the hint to
sacrifice seems here to establish a connection between a symbolic
dimension and a bodily dimension as the very foundation of the
poietic act.17
16 Hofmannsthal, Augenblicke in Griechenland.

17 In his Rede über Poesie, Hofmannsthal had already made clear that he
regarded the symbolic dimension as the very foundation of all poetry: «Weißt
du, was ein Symbol ist? ... Willst du versuchen dir vorzustellen, wie das Opfer
entstanden ist? (…) Mich dünkt, ich sehe den ersten, der opferte. (…) Daß das
Tier für ihn sterben konnte, wurde ein großes Mysterium, eine große
geheimnisvolle Wahrheit. Das Tier starb hinfort den symbolischen Opfertod.
Aber alles ruhte darauf, daß auch er in dem Tier gestorben war, einen
Augenblick lang. Daß sich sein Da sein, für die Dauer eines Atemzugs, in dem
fremden Dasein aufgelöst hatte. – Das ist die Wurzel aller Poesie (…)», Hugo
von Hofmannsthal, Rede über Poesie, in Ausgewälte Werke in zwei Bänden
(Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1966), p. 137.
In the “ékphrastic indifference” stage that follows, the statues

once again reveal their objectual materiality, thus appearing as
strange figures:
Everything pushes to a resolution, ends up with the overcoming of a

threshold, with a landing, a ‘here’ – with my being here, amongst them:
still, here is the whole present in their fluttering clothes, in their knowing
smile: and all this already dies down in their petrifying faces, it dies
down and is gone; nothing remains, apart from a death-blown despair.
There are statues around me, five, only now I am aware of their
number, strange they stay before me, grave and stony, with their
slanting eyes.18
Once ékphrastic indifference and fear are overcome, the new

stage of the ékphrastic hope begins:
(…) from where else rose in me this foreboding of a departure, this

rhythmic expanding of the atmosphere (…) – which threatens me or
which I can dominate? There is, I answered to myself, infallible like
a dreamer, there is the secret of endlessness in these clothes. Not just
these ruffled clothes, which come down from the shoulders to the knee
– no – the whole surface is clothes and weaving veil, a manifest secret.
Is not the blowing curtain over there a weaving part of mine as well?
Did not I feel invisible limbs, that like in a dream I move? Did not I
feel myself leaving up the veil with unearthly hands, while entering the
temple of eternal life?19
As Brandstetter underlines, «the veil opposes the “dialectics

of inside and outside” to the topos of the body and of the
space as a whole (…) it appears as the border between body
and space, but at the same time it is synonym of a “manifest
secret”, of an interpenetration of inside and outside».20 In this
context the Körperbild21 plays a fundamental role as a symbolic
18 Hofmannsthal, Augenblicke in Griechenland, p. 57.

19 Hofmannsthal, Augenblicke in Griechenland, pp. 59-60.
21 The idea of Körperbild (body image) was introduced by Gabriele Brandstetter
as a precious interpretive device of the relationship between the visual and the
verbal. As the scholar writes, «by means of the “body image” formula it is
possible to link the issue of the physical presence and that of the moving body
construction connecting word and image: it becomes a medium

of representation of unspeakable images inherent to a liminal
area of consciousness, thus referring on a symbolic level to
a pre-logical and archaic stage of consciousness, in which the
distinction subject-object is not yet present.
It is only abolishing this difference that the epiphany of the
ancient becomes possible. The veil, which should represent a
demarcation line of inner and outer space, visible and invisible,
male and female, present time and antiquity, textual and visual,
here turns into the sign of the moving body in dance: the dancing
Körperbild becomes therefore the imagetext22 in which otherness
is overcome. Dance indeed represents the complex term,
implying both the modes of time and space in an interdependent
relationship,23 just as it is in the case of literature:24 by means
of a synecdochic substitution the imagetext of the dancing
Körperbild becomes the metaphor of Hofmannsthal’s imaginal
writing – a form of writing which unfolds the imaginative power
representation as a changing sign, which is first of all located in the symbolic

field of the non-verbal and non-discursive, with the research on literary texts
and on writing: inasmuch as we have a semiotic system trying to conjure up
the bodily presentness in the delay of representation. The images of the body
– as a typologically oriented reading grid – make it possible to mediate
between enactment and discursivity». Brandstetter, p. 26.
23 Gallese has explained the relationship between space and time from a
neuroscientific point of view: «the mimetic mechanisms are probably decisive
in allowing the existence of a presumably very ancient form of artistic
expression, maybe the most ancient: dance. Dance puts together, by means of
movement and rhythm, the two aspects which define our worldly horizons:
space and time. The rhythmic articulation and the topology of action
“artistically” unfold in a dimension, which frees the medium of expression,
the body as a whole, from its usual and daily utilitarism». Vittorio Gallese, ‘Il
corpo teatrale: Mimetismo, neuroni specchio, simulazione incarnata’, Culture
Teatrali, 16 (2008), 13-38.
24 See William J. T. Mitchell, ‘Spatial Form in Literature. Toward a General
Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 6 (Spring 1980), 565: «Instead of Lessing’s strict
opposition between literature and the visual arts as pure expressions of tempo-
rality and spatiality, we should regard literature and language as the meeting
grounds of those two modalities, the arena in which rhythm, shape, and artic-
ularity convert babbling into song and speech, doodling into writing and
drawing».
of antinomy,25 and in which the performative act of Zeigen

(showing), typical of ékphrastic discourse, triggers the reader’s
productive act, his/her Vorstellung (imagination).
Moreover, as Brandstetter specifies, «the quotation of Goethe’s
“manifest secret” seems to go back to an artistic-religious frame
of reference».26 Indeed, with a sort of inversion, Hofmannsthal
reveals the visionariness of the description: the epiphany does
not come from outside, it is by no means the result of the sight
of the statues, but emerges from the depths of the subject’s self
just as a déjà-vu or a dream: «I did not even know whether I had
thought this or if it had happened. There is a sleep in wakefulness,
a sleep of just a few breaths, which holds a greater power of
transformation and is more similar to death, than the long deep
sleep of the night».27 Thus, Hofmannsthal’s ékphrastic passage not
only foregrounds the issue of a link between visible and invisible,
i.e. between the sensory experience of sight and the emergence
of endogenous images. Indeed, Augenblicke in Griechenland also
participates in the contemporary debate on the physiological and
psychological nature of visual perception28 and is linked to the
issue of its repositioning in the context of an interpretive act with
symbolic character. Hofmannsthal’s text seems to represent some
sort of reversal of the seeing process, which results in «erasing
seen images by means of inner images».29 These latter seem to
share the liminal and pre-logical nature of hypnagogic vision, but
go far beyond, since it is returned to writing – and to visibility –
through processes of introjection and symbolic interpretation of
the visual element.
25 See Grazia Pulvirenti, La farfalla accecata (Milano: Bruno Mondadori,

2008), pp. 19 ff.
27 Hofmannsthal, Augenblicke in Griechenland, p. 60.
28 It is known from some notes of 1891 that Hofmannsthal was familiar both to
Schopenauer’s essay Versuch über das Geistersehen and to Nietzsche’s
Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, which had been in turn influenced Tylor’s
animistic-anthropological theories as well as by Helmoltz’ theories on the
physiology of vision. See Hubert Treiber, ‘Zur Logik des Traumes bei
Nietzsche’, Nietzsche-Studien, 23 (1994), 1-41 and Pulvirenti, p. 149.
29 Pulvirenti, p. 151.
Thus Hofmannsthal’s writing becomes a «writing of the

invisible», inasmuch as it expresses the «basic paradox of every
process of image creation: making visible in an image something
which did not originate from some sensory perception coming
from the outer world».30
The emphasis on the motif of the chiasmus of the visible, which
implies the idea of a «steadily reversibility between subjective
and objective dimension»,31 suggests the overcoming of sensory
perception, so that the «represented thing enters a new level of
aesthetic presence in which the image materiality is nullified in
favour of an essence which reveals itself in its very appearance».32
The basically notional quality of Hoffmansthal’s ékphrastic
discourse, and maybe, according to Mitchell, of ékphrasis tout
court is thus made clear: as the scholar underlines, «the textual other
must remain completely alien; it can never be present, but must be
conjured up as a potent absence or a fictive, figural present».33
Under this perspective, writing finally moves away from a
merely verbal and descriptive level and acquires the polysemic
qualities as well as the expressive power of a dynamic image: it
evolves into a painting of imagination and, by means of symbolic
thought, allows to swerve to the “other” dimension.
THE OPTICAL WONDERS OF AN
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MICROSCOPIST:
GEOMETRIC CRYSTALS
AND GOTHIC RÊVERIES
Floriana Giallombardo
The Microscope, Scientific Discourse and the Challenge of

the Visible
If the concept of “notional ékphrasis” is closely connected

to the game of falsification, where the dizziness of transmedial
translation undermines questions about the existence of the referent
in literary descriptions1 – this clearly imaginary feature seems to be
incompatible with scientific prose, whose semantic organization
seeks univocal denotation, avoiding the connotative ambiguity
of literary language. Despite the programmatic statements of
stylistic sobriety in scientific communication, which date back
to the Royal Society, epistemology and literary criticism have
highlighted its rhetorical strategies and mythopoetic resonances,
especially, but not only, in the popularization of science.
These rhetorical aspects clearly emerge when scientific
observation crosses the threshold of the invisible: accessing the
microscopic and telescopic worlds, scientists described these
new horizons of visual experience by an unprecedented effort
of literary imagination. In the nascent scientific prose of the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, such descriptions were
a crucial episode, where experimental observation asserted
its epistemological legitimacy through its own modes of
representation, both verbal and visual. The new field of vision
produced by microscopic observation gave rise to the peculiar
1 On the definition of notional ékphrasis by John Hollander complementary to

mimetic ékphrasis see Michele Cometa, La scrittura delle immagini (Milano:
Raffaello Cortina, 2012), p. 48.
phenomena of “visual desperation” (as James Elkins calls it),2

where scientific prose is forced to muster all its analogical and
imaginative resources. The description is then resolved into a
series of rhetorical strategies based on “hermeneutic integration”:
verbal representation faces the challenge of translating visual
experience from the unknown (microscopic morphology) to the
known (visual culture and perceptual experience of the observer
and his audience).3
However, while stretching the analogical tension of the verbal
description, the aim of scientific descriptions is ultimately to
adhere as faithfully as possible to the visual experience. The
imaginative development of these themes belongs more correctly
to the context of literary writing, which seized these new optical
devices and turned them into an inexhaustible resource of topics
and themes, which lasted until the nineteenth-century. In some
scientific writings, however, the “naturalistic description”,
despite the stylistic sobriety of the dominant model, can turn into
an authentic “notional ékphrasis”: in these cases, microscopic
observation was described as an “optical wonder”, enabling
audiences to access the visual experience of microscopy through
descriptions that can be seen as imaginative works of art. The case
at issue, however, belongs to the field of scientific popularization,
and is part of the “daring syncretism” between rhetoric and science
that characterizes the teaching of the scientists of the Society of
Jesus, which was investigated by Andrea Battistini – who placed
an approach to scientific literature within the broader context
of the history of ideas, starting with an analysis of scientific
popularization for the well-educated reader.4
The literary account examined in this work concerns
the development of the optical wanders, namely “vedute
2 James Elkins, ‘On Visual Desperation and the Bodies of Protozoa’,

Representations, 40 (1992), Special Issue: Seeing Science, 33-56.
3 See Cometa, La Scrittura delle immagini, pp. 119, 122-123, 129.
4 Andrea Battistini devotes a chapter of his Galileo e i gesuiti: Miti letterari e
retorica della scienza (Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 2000), pp. 349-66, to the
circulation in the literary sphere of the work of one of the popularizers of
science, Francesco Lana Terzi, whose Prodromo all’arte maestra (1670) had
revived the dream of human flight, a century before the Montgolfier brothers.
F. Giallombardo - The Optical Wonders of an Eighteenth-Century Microscopist 139
d’incantesimo”, unfolding under the gaze of a Sicilian botanist

and microscopist, Filippo Arena, who took part in the complex
eighteenth-century debate on embryonic development, between
the vitalists and the mechanists. The text, though not seen as in
the top ranks of the history of science – his stylistic eccentricity
is one of the grounds for exclusion – enables us, however, to
take a plunge into the visual culture of the time, whose aesthetic
background reappears as scientific discourse that seeks legitimacy
as physico-theology. Finally, it provides access to visual imagery
of long standing which, due to optical devices linked to a persistent
culture of the spectacle, developed rigorous and relentless
theoretical speculation about the reality of appearances.5
The Rhetorical Register in Naturalistic Description
From the essential survey of Italian scientific prose conducted

by Maria Luisa Altieri Biagi, it is possible to infer some of
the “formal and thematic characteristics” of seventeenth and
eighteenth-century naturalistic descriptions, which are largely
focused on the literary representation of microscopic observation.
This author, through an accurate analysis of the terminological
and stylistic characteristics used by Italian microscopists and
scientific communicators (Vallisneri, Magalotti, Spallanzani),
sketches the outlines of what, referring to W. J. T. Mitchell, can
be defined as a strategy of verbal appropriation of the visual.6
The predominant type of naturalistic description had its origin
in the Accademia dei Lincei, whose scientific literature had
become a stylistic model during the eighteenth-century.7 Among
the predominant linguistic features, Altieri Biagi identifies the
5 See Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Aberrations. Essai sur la légende des formes: Les
perspectives depraves- I (Paris: Flammarion, 1995).
6 See Mitchell, Picture Theory, pp. 151-81.
7 Maria Luisa Altieri Biagi, Lingua della scienza fra Sei e Settecento, in
Letteratura e scienza nella storia della cultura italiana, ed. by Vittore Branca
and others (Palermo: Manfredi, 1978), pp. 103-62. The work was then
collected in Maria Luisa Altieri Biagi, L’avventura della mente: Studi sulla
lingua scientifica (Napoli: Morano, 1990), pp. 169-218.
tendency towards analogy and comparison, which obviates the

difficulties in naming the elusive microscopic morphologies
referring them back to precise analogies with the natural and
human world, through circumlocutions and figurative language.
She also points out the setting of a sequence of descriptive
moments, modeled after Francesco Redi’s Esperienze sopra la
generazione degli insetti: habitat, behavior, external forms and
internal structure.8 Moreover, the rhetorical rules for the literary
representation of observation were a topic for scientists’ meta-
linguistic reflection: “description” was one of three levels of
style in which Lazzaro Spallanzani classified scientific prose.
Characterized by «simplicity, sharpness and non-sublimity», it was
provided, however, with «a certain nobility, expressive strength
and propriety», and held an intermediate position between the
essentiality of “definition” and the strong stylistic effort of “natural
history”, modeled on civil history.9 The definition of a specific
rhetorical level for naturalistic description was part of a broader
reflection developed during the seventeenth and eighteenth-
centuries – from Galileo to the Royal Society to Muratori – on
the relationship between literary and scientific language, where,
in the wake of reforms in literary language, scientists sought
to establish the specificity of scientific discourse.10 The new
scientific language, in fact, having greater complexity and the
need for more exactitude than literary language, emphasized its
difference from rhetoric and, in particular, from the poets’ right
to lie. However, scientific essays of microscopic and telescopic
observations of the time, reveal the remarkable rhetorical effort
8 As Altieri Biagi pointed out the remaining typological features in naturalistic

description, are the emphasis on the beginning of the description, indicated by
an unusual word order (in Italian, the inversion of subject-verb); the use of
diminutives, which connote in a domestic and emotional sense a science
whose deep reflections are now applied to everyday objects; synonymic
oscillation that often involves associating a common word to the more
specialized scientific term. See Altieri Biagi, Lingua della scienza fra Sei e
Settecento, pp. 129-31.
9 Lazzaro Spallanzani, as quoted in Altieri Biagi, Lingua della scienza fra Sei e
Settecento, p. 160 (translation by author).
10 Biagi, Lingua della scienza fra Sei e Settecento, pp. 103-62.
used in the descriptions of the lowest rungs of the so-called

Chain of Being, showing a precise awareness of the philosophical
changes induced by the discoveries of “new worlds”.
The minimal immensities revealed by the microscope induced
scientists, despite the frugal style of reports, to unreservedly
express an attitude of wonder, an excitement of the imagination –
in a poetic dismay found across various levels of communication:
scientific texts (Vallisneri, Spallanzani, Bonnet); explanatory
scientific texts for the educated and curious (Baker, Fontenelle,
Algarotti) and their literary counterparts (Swift, Sterne).11 An
image made its way through the lens of the telescope and the
microscope revealing two opposed infinite worlds that irreversibly
put in question the status of man, stimulating the literary
imagination in its fantastic, utopian and satiric developments.12
11 See La finestra del testo, ed. by Valeria Cammarata (Roma: Meltemi, 2008).
12 In the same context in which Altieri Biagi developed his linguistic analysis of
seventeenth-century scientific texts, Ezio Raimondi reconstructed the different
approaches through which literary criticism interpreted the relationship
between the “two cultures” (this contribution is collected in Letteratura e
scienza nella storia della cultura italiana, ed. by Vittore Branca, pp. 9-47).
Raimondi recognized English literary critics as formulating new interpretative
criterion for the reconstruction of the mental habits of an era which Marjorie
Hope Nicolson took into account in her acute analysis of seventeenth and
eighteenth-century English literature, tracing the «constellations of images»
that migrate through different provinces of thought, following the direction
outlined by Lovejoy (Raimondi, 1978, p. 20). The visual experience conveyed
by optical devices had, in fact, an exceptional power to transform the way the
world was seen; its transfer from science to literature generated new poetic
themes, language forms and literary fashions. In the context of contemporary
literary theory, the relationship between the verbal and the visual has become
part of Comparative Literature, which has undertaken a close dialogue with
those disciplines devoted to the study of images, following the iconic turn that
took place in the humanities. Identifying the very foundation of culture in the
intermedial game between word and image, the literary text can be analyzed
as an archive through which one can reconstruct the “scopic regime” of an era,
tracing profound cultural changes in the ever changing interrelation between
“device”, “image” and “gaze” (see generally Cometa, Letteratura e dispositivi
della visione nell’era prefotografica, in La finestra del testo, ed. by Valeria
Cammarata; and Cometa, La scrittura delle immagini). This kind of approach
is effectively applicable to the study of scientific culture, in which both the
role of the imagination in the creative phase of discovery, and the representation
of perception through optical devices, constitute historiographical problems
The Visual Culture of Microscopy
Among those historians concerned with scientific visual culture,

Martin Kemp was the most attentive in highlighting how essays
of the great seventeenth-century Dutch and British microscopists
were influenced by visual associations and representational
problems that were central to the art of their generation. Thus,
in Robert Hooke there is an immediate comparison between a
seed of thyme seen under a microscope and «a very pretty Object
(…) namely, a Dish of Lemmons plac’d in a very little room» –
with implicit reference to the Dutch still life – and with «delicate,
strong and most convenient Cabinets» duly decorated, where
nature has «her Jewels and Masterpieces». Here we find a clear
reference to those collections known as “treasure houses” – also
cited by Constantijn Huygens – in which nature’s and man’s
creation were collected to demonstrate the same careful labour of
the Great Architect.13
These topics develop what Altieri Biagi had already pointed
out concerning the analogical attitude in the language of
microscopists, aimed at putting into words new observations
through circumlocutions, concrete analogies and figurative
language. In addition, they provide clues about the ways in which
writing – also scientific writing, while focusing on a referential
register – appropriates the visual. When describing the unknown,
authors use “forms of integration” that address the habitual
cultural and perceptual experiences of its target audience, in “a
co-operative dimension of interpretation”.14
of long standing. Regarding the latter issue, studies that investigate the verbal
aspect of representation – calling into question the rhetorical mode of language
– show their inevitable reciprocity with those concerned with visual
representation in the sciences. For bibliographical guidance on the subject,
see generally James Elkins, ‘Art History and Images That Are Not Art’, The
Art Bulletin, 77 (1995), 553-71, though mostly focused on English speaking
studies.
13 As quoted in Martin Kemp, ‘Taking it on Trust: Form and Meaning in
Naturalistic Representation’, Archives of natural history, 17 (1990), 127-88
(pp. 131-32).
14 See Cometa, La scrittura delle immagini.
The widening of the visual horizon by these unusual and

bewildering “naturalia”, therefore, is linked to a repertoire of
familiar images, and the game of metaphorical reference, by
proposing comparisons with “artificialia”, implicitly refers to
the cultural experience of Wunderkammern, in which works of
nature are placed in direct continuity (if not in open competition)
with works of art.15 This is a typical strategy in the rhetoric of
wonder present in almost all accounts of seventeenth, eighteenth-
century microscopists (in works such as Hooke’s Micrographia,
1665, and in Microscope Made Easy by Henry Baker, 1744)
whether the authors are amenable to a mechanistic view of the
universe, or not. But this also became a crucial issue within the
physico-theological tradition: the infinite expansion of visibility
allowed by visual devices gave an opportunity to demonstrate
the harmony of creation since even in the most inaccessible
regions of the Chain of Being; this harmony was read through
the filter of collective imagery that consisted also of artistic and
aesthetic preferences.16
Paradoxical Ékphrasis: The Optical Wonders of an Eighteenth

Century Microscopist
The systematic confusion between art and nature, typical of

the literary descriptions of microscopic observations, leads us
15 See Martin Kemp, Seen and Unseen: Art, Science, and Intuition from
Leonardo to the Hubble Telescope (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006),
chap. VI; see also (on the visual culture of Wunderkammern) Horst
Bredekamp, Antikensehnsucht und Maschinenglauben: Die Geschichte der
Kunstkammer und die Zukunft der Kunstgeschichte (Berlin: Wagenbach,
1996); Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, Storia di sei Idee: L’Arte, il Bello, la Forma
la Creatività, l’Imitazione, l’Esperienza estetica, ed. by Krystyna Jaworska
(Palermo: Aesthetica, 2002), for a history of aesthetic thought about art and
nature.
16 See generally Bernard Lightman, ‘The Visual Theology of Victorian
Popularizers of Science: From Reverent Eye to Chemical Retina’, Isis, 91
(2000), 651-80; Cometa, Letteratura e dispositivi della visione nell’era
prefotografica, pp. 31-40 (on the visual rhetoric of natural theology, as a long-
term phenomenon in scientific culture).
into the uncertain territory between the “art of nature” and the
“nature of art”, where the merging of the boundaries between
the two spheres had sparked Baroque aesthetic speculation,
which continued as a basso continuo into the aesthetics of the
Picturesque.17 An example of this kind of paradoxical ékphrasis
in scientific writing is contained in a Botanical text: La natura
e coltura de’ fiori fisicamente esposta (1767).18 The author, the
Jesuit Filippo Arena, is not a leading figure in the history of
science, but his work – as part of an up-to-the minute team of
experimenters working in Jesuit colleges between 1730 and 1760
– bears witness to the high level of Sicilian scientific culture that
animated cultural dialectic both inside and outside the Society of
Jesus. Arena is a knowledgeable scientist, aware of the scientific
literature of his time, an experimenter and a technologist, whose
interests – originally related to optics and astronomy – turned
to the epistemologically more neutral field of botany due to
the changed cultural climate of 1759.19 His work, known to art
historians for his valuable engravings of flower specimens, drawn
17 Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Aberrations: Essai sur la Légende des Forme; also see
Roberta Coglitore, Pietre figurate: Forme del fantastico e mondo minerale
(Pisa: ETS, 2004).
18 Filippo Arena, La natura e coltura de’ fiori fisicamente esposta in due trattati
con nuove ragioni, osservazioni e esperienze: A vantaggio de’ Fioristi, de’
Fisici, de’ Botanici, ed Agricoltori (Palermo: Angelo Felicella, 1767). The
work is divided into three volumes, the third of which consists of illustrations.
For a description of the complex events of its publishing see Giuseppe Lo
Iacono, Le varie edizioni del volume «La natura e coltura dei fiori» di Filippo
Arena, in Filippo Arena e la cultura scientifica del Settecento in Sicilia, ed. by
Oscar Alberghina, Ignazio Nigrelli and others (Palermo: I.L.A. Palma, 1991),
pp. 95-106.
19 See Pietro Nastasi, Filippo Arena: Fisico e Matematico, in Filippo Arena e la
cultura scientifica del Settecento in Sicilia, pp. 107-45 (p. 127). In the general
rethinking of the contributions of the Society of Jesus to scientific culture –
specifically in the spread of Newtonian philosophy – Filippo Arena, within
Sicily, has been the subject of particular historiographical attention, which
found expression in the conference of Piazza Armerina in 1991: see Filippo
Arena e la cultura scientifica del Settecento in Sicilia, ed. by Oscar Alberghina
and others; and La cultura scientifica e i gesuiti nel settecento in Sicilia, ed.
by Ignazio Nigrelli (Palermo: I.L.A. Palma 1992). The first survey of the
scientific production of the Jesuits in the eighteenth-century Sicily was by
Aldo Brigaglia and Pietro Nastasi (Brigaglia-Nastasi, 1986).
by the author himself,20 is apparently a floricultural manual,

but it actually provides an account of the original experimental
experiences conducted by Arena when studying the process of
generation, a crucial scientific issue at that time.21
What is interesting for our purposes here is that the literary
description of microscopic observation is implemented through
an ékphrasis of fictional works of art, placed in the theoretically
most meaningful pages of the text. The observation of common
regularities in the microscopic structures of the organic and
inorganic world – a topos of natural geometry – is expressed
with a soaring rhetoric, transforming the complex structures into
a journey through an enchanted Lilliputian vision, where the
reader’s extradiegetic look is repeatedly led to dwell on fictional
works of art and fantastic architectural landscapes, meticulously
described according to specific stylistic rules. Under the attentive
gaze of the microscopist, the graceful crystallizations of common
salt, show a surface:
nobly framed by quadrilateral frames, parallel to the sides of the

cube, some of these frames are loosely curled, and rippled, while others
are fluent and smooth – one thinks of Rococo cartouches – but all so
20 There are sixty-five chalcographic engravings of botanical subjects, in folio,

partly drawn from Phytanthoza Iconographia by J. W. Weinmann. The
illustrations show a particular attention to the graphic representation of
surfaces, colors and size of the subjects depicted. The engravings, by the hand
of Arena himself, are realized with the help of his confrere Mario Cammareri
– also active at the Collegio Massimo of Palermo, with similar research and
experimental interests.
21 Ignazio Nigrelli states in this regard that Arena’s unconventional position on
such a delicate matter as sexuality, although only of plants, placed him in an
awkward position, due to its innovative theories that could not be appreciated
by the conservative leadership of the Society of Jesus. For Nigrelli then one
should connect this point with the vicissitudes of Arena and his book. La
natura e coltura de’ fiori was allowed to be published after much delay, in
April 1767, shortly before the expulsion of the Company of Jesus from Naples
and Sicily; it was immediately circulated by the publisher, Angelo Felicella,
through two reprints under a false name (attributing it to Ignazio Arena,
brother or nephew of the author). On the other hand, after the expulsion, one
loses track of Filippo Arena, who, during his twenty-year stay in the Papal
States, published only once, a book on physics, and then ceased to publish.
See Nigrelli, 1991, pp. 168-69.
fine, so well arranged, that no art can imitate them. The frames then
adorn, and enclose in the middle a beautiful picture, such as a painting
or bas-relief, which not rarely represents from life what fantasy dictates
to us as more appropriate, now a pleasant landscape, now a colonnaded
atrium, now a gallery of statues, now other pleasant representations.22
Even more amazing are the beautiful perspectives recognized

in alum crystals, where the landscape is expressed with such
naturalness that it seems a wondrous vision.23 The microscopic
landscape is transformed into a fictional urban scene, similar to
an idealized city whose post-baroque urban structure is ordered
according to an orthogonal grid. The movement of the eye has a
topographical view, over a landscape whose features follow one
after the other in an accumulation of precise descriptions:
Here at each point there is something worth seeing, here a delightful

garden, there a pleasant orchard, all planted with excellent design,
with order and symmetry of parts, and distinction of straight avenues,
which, running the entire length and width of the garden, cross each
other at right angles. Elsewhere you may see thick woods, or rugged
forests, of stones, and rocks inlaid with shiny crystal: but elsewhere
you may encounter vast cities, and oh what a beautiful view! What a
noble design of roads, all directed from end to end of the city, cutting
at right angles, all equally distant between themselves, and exactly
parallel; furthermore adorned with long rows of magnificent palaces,
for the most part with uniformly designed railings, with superb temples,
towers, and very tall domes, squares, columns, spires, and anything that
can adorn a noble city.24
22 «Nobilmente scorniciata di cornici quadrilatere, ai lati del cubo parallele; altre

delle quali cornici son vagamente riccie, ed increspate, ed altre correnti, e
liscie ma tutte così fine, così ben disposte, che arte non v’ha, la qual possa
imitarle. Le cornici poi fregiano, e chiudono in mezzo un bel quadro, come di
pittura, o di basso rilievo, rappresentante non rare volte al vivo quel, che ci
detta di più acconcio la fantesia, ora un ameno paesaggio, ora un atrio
colonnato, ora una galleria di statue, ora altre vaghe rappresentanze», Arena,
vol. I, pp. 380-81 (translation by author).
23 See Arena, vol. I., pp. 381-82.
24 «Quivi in ogni punto di luogo v’è da vedere, ove un orto delizioso, ove un
ameno giardino, tutto piantato ad eccellente disegno con ordine, e simetria di
parti, e con distinzione di viali rettissimi, i quali correndo per tutta la
lunghezza, e larghezza del giardino, ad angoli retti s’incrociano. Altrove si
Here we have a paradoxical description that overlaps the

hypotyposis and ékphrasis of fictional works of art, making them
indistinguishable: it is the description itself that establishes the
artistic features of the object. The observer, recognizing artistic
qualities in the work of nature, to the extent of describing it as a
work of art, pushes the use of analogy to a further level: in this
case, we are not dealing only with the use of figurative language
to facilitate the recognition of microscopic forms; Arena rather
takes his cue by natural morphologies to describe invented works
of art, unreal but extremely detailed, with a burst of imagination
that reminds us of notional ékphrasis. The literary references of
such ékphrastic devices are, of course, eccentric when compared
to the scientific prose of the eighteenth-century, and demonstrate
links to those models of Baroque rhetoric taught in the typical
training of Jesuit colleges. Arena prefers the scientific prose of
Daniello Bartoli, a Jesuit scientist of the seventeenth-century,
rather than the Enlightenment authors, which he knew. In fact,
some lexical occurrences in the landscape descriptions in question
can be traced directly back to Bartoli.25
The theoretical positions of Arena, however, are those of an
eighteenth-century scientist who thinks that it should be “natural
causes”, and not “arcane virtues” to form repeated patterns in
the various orders of nature.26 On the other hand, these patterns
were considered the loci classici of natural geometry, which had
veggono delle folte boscaglie, o delle aspre foreste, di sassi, e rupi di lucente
cristallo intarsiate: altrove però s’incontrano delle vaste città, ed oh che bel
vedere! Che nobil disegno di strade, tutte dirette da un capo all’altro della
città, la qual tagliano ad angoli retti, tutte egualmente fra se distanti, ed
esattamente parallele; ornate poi di lunghe filiere di palaggi magnifici, per la
maggior parte a disegno uniforme nella sua ringhiera, di tempj superbi, di
torri, e cupole altissime, piazze, colonne, aguglie, e di tutt’altro, che può far
grandiosa, e adorna una Capitale». Arena, vol. I, p. 382 (translation by author).
25 Arena, v. I, pp. 384-85. The experiences recorded by Bartoli on the coagulation
of ice, especially the passages on Arctic landscapes (where nature or chance pre-
tend to produce urban landscape in ice) provide lexical suggestions that Arena
employs in his descriptions of crystalline landscapes. See Daniello Bartoli, Del
ghiaccio e della coagulatione, trattati del Padre Daniello Bartoli della Compa-
gnia di Giesu (Bologna: Giovanni Recaldini, 1682) pp. 70-71, 99-100.
26 Arena, pp. 389-90.
sparked speculation about the causes – mechanical or mystical –

of these phenomena.27 These aspects were widely found in that
eclectic baroque literature, which employed conceits to describe
natural works of art: for example in Mundus Subterraneus
by Athanasius Kircher (1665) where the mineral wonders of
crystallization, typical of Wunderkammern, were attributed to the
vis imaginativa of natura pictrix.
A. Kircher, Crystal morphologies, Mundus Subterraneus, vol. II, J.

Janssonius van Waesberge, Amsterdam 1678
A. Kircher, Stone with urban landscape, Mundus Subterraneus,

vol. II, J. Janssonius van Waesberge, Amsterdam 1678
27 See generally Martin Kemp, Seen and Unseen, chap. VI.

Crystal morphologies, A. Kircher, Mundus Subterraneus, vol. II,

J. Janssonius van Waesberge, Amsterdam 1678
This paradoxical descriptive method, typical of lapidaria,

implied a lack of distinction between works of art and works of
nature, defined by Michele Cometa as the «nemesis of ékphrasis».28
28 See Cometa, La scrittura delle immagini, pp. 21-24. Not coincidentally, the
blurring of boundaries between the two spheres was revived in the twentieth-
century avant-garde (in the “fantastic aberrations” of Baltrušaitis’, the
“material imagination” of Bachelard, and Caillois’ “mineral ékphrasis”)
However, we must make a distinction between the use Arena

makes of analogy as a rhetorical device, which leads to notional
ékphrasis modeled on those literary precedents, and the heuristic
role that he reserves for it within the scientific method. Regarding
the wondrous occurrences of natural geometry, Arena takes his
distance both from those mystical hermetic theories that attribute
their existence to direct divine intervention, and, in the scientific
field, from the mechanistic theory of spontaneous generation,
for which this kind of phenomena had been a strong argument.
Rather, following Maupertuis, he found in Newtonian theory
the explanatory laws governing such recurring patterns: having
determined a visible analogy between vegetable shapes and the
branching configurations assumed by some inorganic structures
(such as crystals, the coagulation of ice, and metallic vegetation
such as Diana’s tree), the transversality of electrical forces
was invoked to justify these phenomena. Arena’s goal was to
demonstrate, among other things, a theory of generation where
the continuity between the organic and inorganic realm was
mediated by the regulatory intervention of these forces.29 In this
sense, as a device intended to unify the multiplicity of phenomena
in one economic hypothesis, analogies came to form part of the
tools of the scientific method, and as such it was, in fact, used by
Newtonian experimenters.30
where the status itself of the work of art has been put in doubt. See also
Roberta Coglitore, Pietre figurate.
29 See Arena, pp. 388-90, where Arena describes his experiences on branching
shapes produced by organic compounds, hypothesizing their affinity to the
structuration processes of the nervous and venous systems. Please note that
Roberto Graditi documents the presence, at the Museum Salnitrianum in Pal-
ermo, of some studi flebotomici – anatomical preparations where skeletons of
a man, a woman and a fetus, are surrounded by a petrified venous network.
These artifacts, now lost, are similar to those found in the San Severo collec-
tion in Naples, the work of the same surgeon Gaspare Salerno, and still visi-
ble. See Roberto Graditi, Il museo ritrovato: il Salnitriano e le origini della
museologia a Palermo (Palermo: Regione Siciliana, 2003), p. 50, n. 72.
30 Concerning the use of analogy in Maupertuis, disputed by his contemporaries,
see Giovanni Solinas, Il microscopio e le metafisiche: Epigenesi e preesistenza
da Cartesio a Kant (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1967), pp. 70-80. As for the eighteenth-
century debate on the use of analogy in science see also Altieri Biagi, Lingua
della scienza fra Sei e Settecento, pp. 120-24. On the use of analogy in Arena,
In the passage in question, however, Arena imaginatively

extends the analogy between natural orders transforming it into
a long and detailed comparison between the natural and artificial
world, projecting the appearance of works of art onto the regular
structures of the microscopic world. Historiographical judgments
about Arena,31 referring to these rhetorical modes, criticize him
on both stylistic and epistemological grounds: the scientific error,
for his critics, would be to use analogies conjecturally (arguing
his thesis only by simple steps of the imagination), resulting in
a verbose prose style and one prone to rêveries. Such stylistic
modalities are inevitably viewed with suspicion by the scientific
community, in which forms of writing are forms of thinking.32
One might then wonder about the use of this apparently
dysfunctional rhetoric in this scientific argument. Ruth Webb
pointed out the double-register created by the insertion of
ékphrasis in literary texts, which generates a tension between
distancing and identification.33 In the same way one can look at
the text of Arena as a complex set with multiple levels of reading,
cf. Filippo Arena, Physicae Quaestiones novis experimentis et observationibus

resolutae (Roma: 1777), as cited in Nastasi, Filippo Arena: Fisico e
Matematico, pp. 127-28.
31 Arena’s botanical work has recently received credit as a precursor of modern
biology for some of its positions, taking sides in the contemporary debate on
the sexuality of plants and providing original reports on hybridism and polli-
nation by insects. His work, however, fallen into oblivion after the expulsion
of the Jesuits from Sicily in 1767, was rediscovered by scientists in 1897,
when the German botanist Solms-Laubach published a critical review in the
Botanische Zeitung, helping to bring to light Arena’s contribution to Europe-
an botany. See Emilia Poli Marchese, Filippo Arena Botanico, in Filippo Are-
na e la cultura scientifica del Settecento in Sicilia, ed. by Oscar Alberghina
and Ignazio Nigrelli, pp. 45-86.
32 We draw these conclusions from the detailed survey conducted by Emilia Poli
Marchese on the presence of Arena’s work in botanical literature, aimed at
taking stock of both the advances and errors of the scientist. Such an analysis
is intertwined, of course, with the controversial historical judgments on the
political and cultural roles of the Jesuit order as a whole. We note that the dif-
ferent opinions expressed, more or less indulgently, on the work of the Jesuit,
have in common a double level of criticism, both on epistemological and sty-
listic aspects. See Poli Marchese, pp. 56-57.
33 See Cometa, La scrittura delle immagini, p. 149.
addressed to multiple audiences,34 in which the examples of

scientific updating had to pass through the ideological priorities
of the Society of Jesus.35
It should be noted, then, that Arena inserts his imaginative
notional ékphrasis just at that point of the argument where the issue
of generation could be placed ambiguously between the mechanistic
and vitalistic option. The regular structurings of the microscopic
world, which in Hooke’s Micrographia were ascribed to the purely
mechanical causation of spontaneous generation, are connected,
in fact, with a theory of generation that cannot be reduced either
to a purely mechanistic base or to direct divine intervention. In
introducing this innovative position into the basically backward-
looking context of the Society of Jesus, Arena simultaneously turns
his reasoning into a physical theological argument: the notional
ékphrasis that describes the infinitesimal parts of creation as a
harmonious and noble city is, therefore, used to legitimize the role
of “laws of attraction” that, reproducing on a microscopic scale
the hierarchical order of the world, finally guaranteed, in their
regularity, the existence of a divine plan. This is not secondary,
then, to an understanding of what kind of figurative imagery
substantiates the ékphrasis. Its repertoire of aesthetic references
leads us back to the visual culture of Arena and his audience, which
is possible to reconstruct from the optical devices themselves.
34 Arena addressed his work to a diversified public: florists, botanics, physicists,

farmers and artists; to the latter he dedicated the illustrations. His erudite
explanation of curious phenomena, instead, was specifically addressed to
arouse the curiosity of the serious amateur, a growing number of which were
taking an interest in experimental science during the eighteenth-century. But
the work is also addressed to the devout to whom Arena claims to provide
spiritual delight. See Filippo Arena, La natura e coltura de’ fiori fisicamente
esposta in due trattati con nuove ragioni, osservazioni e esperienze, vol. I,
pp. 1-12.
35 The ambiguous positions adopted by the Society of Jesus concerning the
reconciliation of science and faith appeared in the Ratio Studiorum of 1754,
which, while cautiously open to experimental science, nevertheless censored
the Copernican theory, and in every respect reaffirmed the primacy of
theology. Pietro Nastasi explained fully the dramatic consequences of these
positions by tracking the dissembling rhetorical expedients used by Arena,
especially in his works on Physics.
A Spectacle of Crystalline Architecture and a Gothic Rêverie
An experimental attitude goes through all Arena’s text, in

which visual verification through the microscope plays a crucial
role. We know that the device was built by the author himself,36
who added his skill as a technologist to his taste for optical
spectacle, a characteristic of curious science. In this regard, it is
significant that Arena explicitly reports having performed public
demonstrations, where he showed to the hundreds of people,
who attended the microscopic curiosities described in the text,
leaving viewers as if enchanted by the wonder of it all.37 Such
demonstrations took place in the Museum Salnitrianum (the
museum of the Jesuits in Palermo), which, therefore, did not
abandon its taste for turning technical knowledge into spectacle,
based on Kircher’s influential model, though shifting the focus of
interest onto educational and experimental issues.38
Following the path suggested by the emerging culture of optical
spectacle, the framework of reference for the optical wonders
of Arena is not found in the scientific reports of contemporary
microscopists, but in the optical illusionism of catoptric theatres.39
36 See Arena, La natura e coltura de’ fiori, vol. I, p. 85.

37 See Arena, La natura e coltura de’ fiori, vol. I, pp. 382-83.
38 About the history of the two collections, see Roberto Graditi, Il museo
ritrovato; Athanasius Kircher: Il museo del mondo, ed. by Eugenio Lo Sardo
(Roma: De Luca, 2001). Note that Graditi treats in detail the scientific role of
Museum Salnitrianum in Palermo, but never mentions the presence of Arena
as experimenter. For experimental activities involving Arena and other Jesuit
scientists at the museum of Palermo, see Aldo Brigaglia and Pietro Nastasi,
Tentativi di rinnovamento nell’insegnamento delle scienze nei collegi gesuitici
siciliani nella prima metà del XVIII secolo: M. Spedalieri, M. Cammareri, F.
Plata, G. Barca, P. Marino, F. Arena, in La Sicilia nel Settecento (Messina:
Università degli Studi di Messina, 1986), pp. 162-64 (broadly focused on
Jesuit science in Sicily, in comparison with national and European models).
39 ��
Concerning microscopes and catoptric theatres in the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth-century see generally Barbara M. Stafford, Devices of Wonder: From
the World in a Box to Images on a Screen (Los Angeles: Getty Publications,
2001), pp. 205-14, pp. 256-66. A notable example that documents the pres-
ence of such optical wonders in Sicily is the inventory of the rich collection of
Marco Gezio, high prelate of Palermo in the seventeenth-century, published in
Vincenzo Abbate, Wunderkammer siciliana: Alle origini del museo perduto
(Napoli: Electa, 2001), pp. 35-36, p. 300.
Catoptrictheatre, Gaspar Schott, Magiae universalis naturae et artis,

pars I, J. G. Schönwetter, Wurzburg 1658
These instruments of visual amusement, widespread in

seventeenth and eighteenth-century collections – including the
Museum Kircherianum, which owned some complex prototypes
– showed architectural-catoptric perspectives to those who
peered into them. These, in fact, showed in sequence the same
miniature landscapes described in Arena’s paradoxical ékphrasis,
which in this case were painted and illusively amplified thanks to
the magic of reflection. The description given by Gaspar Schott
Magiae universalis naturae et artis (1658) is broadly comparable
to Arena’s text, even in the rhetoric of accumulation: catoptric
chests pleased the eye showing ad vivum wonderful perspectives
of long colonnades, extensive libraries, gardens, rows of trees,
works of art gleaming with gold and precious stones, adorned
with statues and paintings, amazing for the disposition, harmony
and the symmetry of their parts.40 The insistence, both in Schott

and in Arena, on the characteristic concinnitas of these urban
landscapes, resplendent with precious materials and crystal, is
relevant. There is a vast literature on the mystical-theological
culture of the Society of Jesus regarding harmonic proportions
in architecture, diffused through Villalpando’s treatise. Such
culture, towards the end of the seventeenth-century, in some
Jesuit churches in Sicily, found its expression in various peculiar
stone artifacts: altar frontals with architectural views of ideal
cities inlaid in jasper, marble and coloured stones.41
40 The following is a passage from Schott describing the landscapes depicted in

catoptric chests: «Jam enim sylvas pineas atque cupressinas longo elegantique
arborum ordine diductas; jam urbes in suas concinnè plateas distributas,
dominibusque elegantissimis exornatas; paulo post nundinas copiosissimas,
omnique mercium pretiosarum, vasorum paesertim aureorum & argenteorum,
margaritarum, aliorumque oculorum irritamentorum copia instructissimas,
mox Bibliothecam infinits libris affabre compactis, & artificiose dispositis
refertam, aliaque similia multa ostendunt, non omnia quidem simul, sed
successive alia postalia, adeo ad vivum, ut apparitionum fallacia vel ipsis
Catoptricae peritis subinde illudat, imperitis vero imponat penitus; qui
Catoptrico illo phantasmate decepti, non raro manus extendunt, ad
contrectandas rerum species, non sine adstantium risu»: Gaspar Schott,
Magiae universalis naturae et artis, pars I (Würzburg: Johann Gottfried
Schönwetter, 1658), pp. 295-96. The prototype stored at the Museum
Kircherianum displays moreover: «Et haec eo artificio facta, ut in quamcunque
scenicam proiectionem disponi possit, ita ut quis eandem instrospiciat,
ornatissima conclavia, infinitos columnarum architectonico artificio
dispositarum ordines, varia ambulacrorum diverticula auro, argento, omnique
cimeliorum genere fulgentia se videre existimet. Abscedente hac scena videbis
hortos omni florum, plantarum, arborumque specie mirè exornatos, mox
mensas omni cupediarum genere refertissimas, thesauros deinde inexhaustos,
avarorum maximum tormentum» (p. 296).
41 For a historical and iconographical analysis of such altar panels in Sicily see
Maria Clara Ruggieri Tricoli, Il teatro e l’altare: Paliotti “d’architettura” in
Sicilia (Palermo: Grifo, 1992); see also, for the mystical implications in Jesuit
architectural treatises, Rene Taylor, Hermeticism and Mystical Architecture in
the Society of Jesus, in Baroque Art: the Jesuit Contribution, ed. by Rudolf
Wittkower and Irma B. Jaffe (New York: Fordham University Press, 1972),
pp. 63-97; for the mystical implication of the major architectural undertakings
of Jesuits in Palermo and its ornamentation see Maria Clara Ruggieri Tricoli,
Costruire Gerusalemme: Il complesso gesuitico della Casa Professa di
Palermo dalla storia al museo (Milano: Lybra Immagine, 2001).
But these urban landscapes, like the ones painted in Schott’s

catoptric chests, were designed explicitly according to the
rules of classical aesthetics, using traditional orders of classical
architecture.42 Driven by analogical associations, Arena’s
ékphrasis ends, however, with an unexpected stylistic reflection
that pushes it further, towards a later aesthetic taste:
Several times I came across perspectives of cities so similar to

reality, they could be seen as a living painting since they lacked nothing;
sometimes they even had regular or irregular walls or fortifications, as
I reported above. The architecture generally recalls the Gothic, or old
French, which is that of our Cathedral of Palermo, and that of Milan &
c., and of these two noble temples, I saw the images within the alum,
which in wealth, and magnificence of friezes exceeded them.43
In the brief space of this last passage, Arena’s ékphrasis

concludes by stating the nobility of the Gothic style, on the
threshold of his important revaluation, which in Sicily would
took place in the 1780’s.44 But, above all, in ambiguous territory
42 Gaspar Schott, quoting Della Porta about catoptrical chests, wrote: «Unde ex
reciproco speculorum jaculata, tot videbuntur columna, stylobata, &
ornamenta, recto Architecturae ordine servato, ut nil jucundius, nil certe
admirabilius oculis occurset nostris. Perspectiva sit Dorica & Corinthica,
ornata auro, argento, margaritis, gemmis, idolis, picturis, & similibus, ut
magnificentior videatur. Ichnographia eiusmodi erit» (Schott, Magiae
universalis naturae et artis, p. 295).
43 «Più volte mi sono imbattuto in prospettive di Città tanto simili al vero, che
nulla lor mancava, per esserne una viva pittura, e qualche volta neppure desi-
deravasi il ricinto delle muraglie, e delle fortificazioni o regolari, o irregolari,
come sopra ho riferito. L’Architettura corre per ordinario alla Gotica, o Fran-
zese antica, qual è quella del nostro Duomo di Palermo, e quel di Milano &c.,
e di questi due nobilissimi tempj, ne ho io vedute nell’alume le imagini, che
in ricchezza, e magnificenza di fregi li superavano» Arena, La natura e coltu-
ra de’ fiori fisicamente esposta in due trattati con nuove ragioni, osservazio-
ni e esperienze, p. 382 (translation by author).
44 If the celebration of Palermo cathedral was present in some works of local
pride, more generally the appreciation of specific Gothic buildings, although
understood as exceptions in the context of an overall rejection of that style, was
present in some of the most common architectural treatises on classical taste. In
Sicily, in general, the interest in Gothic style was introduced through contact
with European travelers, present from the late 1760’s, while autonomous re-
workings of this theme – in architectural designs and treatises – took place in
between the culture of spectacle and science, it bears witness to

the unexpected archeological trace of a well-known aesthetic
metaphor: that of Gothic architecture as crystallization.45
There is no trace of this idea in the set of illustrations
accompanying La natura e coltura dei fiori, where the only
architectural subject reminds us, at most, of eighteenth-century
models of Garden art. However, crystalline landscapes, used in
Arena’s argument to demonstrate the constancy of the forces of
attraction in the transition from the mineral to vegetable realm
– reusing but modifying a theme dear to hermetic analogical
tradition – lend themselves to speculation that reaches romantic
imagery and beyond. Later, Friedrich Schlegel would speak of a
“crystal cathedral” and “crystal vegetation”, when writing about
Cologne Cathedral, emphasizing the aspect of transmutation with
such a metaphor.46 Viollet-Le-Duc would recall the “system of
the last two decades of the 18th century. In the specific case of Arena, however,
it is plausible to think of an earlier contact with this theme: as a botanist and a
landscape gardener, he should have been familiar with European treatises on
garden art, notorious precursors of the gothic revival in the first part of the cen-
tury. For value judgments about Gothic style in European literature, see gener-
ally Paul Frankl, The Gothic: Literary Sources and interpretations through
Eight Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960). For the role of
European travelers in the spread of Gothic fashion in Sicily see Michele Come-
ta, Il romanzo dell’architettura: La Sicilia e il Grand Tour nell’età di Goethe
(Bari-Roma: Laterza, 1999); Stefano Piazza, Nei tempi di Schinkel. Le radici
del revival medievale in Sicilia, in The time of Schinkel and the Age of Neoclas-
sicism between Palermo and Berlin, ed. by Maria Giuffrè et alii (Villa San Gio-
vanni: Biblioteca Del Cenide, 2006). For re-elaborations of the gothic revival in
Sicily see Maria Giuffré, La Sicilia verso i neostili e le ville dei principi di Bel-
monte a Palermo, in Dal tardobarocco ai neostili: il quadro europeo e le espe-
rienze siciliane, ed. by Giuseppe Pagnano (Messina: Sicania, 2000). On those
architectural treatises widespread in Sicily between the seventeenth and eighte-
enth-century, compare Maria Giuffré, Barocco in Sicilia (San Giovanni Lupato-
to: Arsenale, 2006), pp. 231-38; Francesco Emanuele Gaetani, Dell’architettu-
ra ed architetti (1795-1802), ed. by Diana Malignaggi (Palermo: Giada, 1986).
45 Concerning imagery and metaphors related to Gothic style, the essay by
Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Le roman de l’architecture gothique, is essential reading.
It especially highlights the image of gothic cathedrals as «vegetal architecture»
(always, however, as «petrified forests», the reciprocal image of «mineral
vegetation»): Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Aberrations, pp. 151-91.
46 See Friedrich von Schlegel, Grundzüge der gotischer Baukunst, as cited in
Baltrušaitis, Aberrations, p. 152.
crystallization” to define the stylistic unity of the French Gothic style,

linking this metaphor to the structural logic of its construction.47
This imagery even appears in the expressionist Glasarchitekture,
in which Rosemarie Bletter traced genetic links with the mystic-
esoteric literature on crystal architecture, focusing this time on
metaphors linked with translucency and transformation.48
At this point in the history of the phenomenology of metaphor,
the traces of visual wonder aroused by optical devices would seem
lost. However, in a celebrated catalogue of the fantastic obsessions
of the nineteenth-century, we find again, grouped in a picture, the
phantasmagoria of Gothic architecture as crystallization and the
spectacle of microscopic worlds: it is an illustration of Un autre
monde by Grandville.
Un après-midi au jardin des plantes: Cristallisations, pétrifications, stalactites.

Grandville, Un autre monde, H. Fournier, Paris 1844
47 See Viollet-le-Duc, 1875, ad v. Style (vol. 8); Viollet-le-Duc, 1875, ad. v.

Unité (vol. 9).
48 See R. Haag Bletter, ‘The Interpretation of the Glass Dream: Expressionist
Architecture and the History of the Crystal Metaphor’, Journal of the Society
of Architectural Historians, 40 (1981).
The text, proceeding according to the absurd logic of the

association of ideas, ironically retraces experiences of romantic
rêverie, highlighting the bad faith of this experience through
the alienating atmosphere of its illustrations. Such illustrations
reflected, in the themes and figurative solutions, the typical
interest of nineteenth-century culture for optical amusements,
which were, by then, quite widespread: broadly speaking, the
same visual technologies that, in the past, had permitted science
to become a spectacle in the Jesuit Colleges, inspiring eighteenth-
century fantasy literature – such as Gulliver’s travels, illustrated
once again by Grandville – continued to trigger the imperturbable
logic of the imagination. Through the lens, the scientist’s imagery
of wonder was able to pass to other territories, transforming itself
into the daydreaming of his uncanny double, the rêveur.
In conclusion, the ékphrastic tear in the fabric of Arena’s text,
leading the analogical implications of scientific lexicon to a second-
level complexity, resonates with a long-term aesthetic metaphor.
The aesthetic or scientific origin of this phantasy of crystallization
is not knowable; finding traces of the mutual, subtle connection
between these two dimensions, is the task of an approach to the
history of culture, which, in the footsteps of Bachelard, brings
out the imaginary framework within which scientific reason is
immersed, in order to raise doubts about its hypostatization.
DESCRIPTION AND IDOLATRY
OF THE IMAGES.
ROBERTO CALASSO’S ÉKPHRASIS
Tommaso Guariento
The directly lived returns. It burns the images, their

inexhaustible, shielded dream. They carry you off. The bodily
eye does not see beyond the precincts of the square, but the
sadness reaches farther, deep into the plains behind, into the
forest, the bald hillocks, into the dusk, the imaginary, it will
not return home, it will stay there, looking for something, yet
that something has been destroyed, and afterwards, it must
take leave under the light of the shattered skies.
(Gottfried Benn, Sämtliche Werke)
Origin
The history and works of Roberto Calasso are inextricably

connected with the history of one of the most important Italian
publishers: Adelphi.1 Since the beginning of his career the
connection between literature and image has a crucial role on his
production. He graduated in fact with a thesis on the hieroglyphs
of Thomas Browne with Mario Praz, author of a fundamental
study on the parallel between literature and visual arts.2 It is
possible to read this study in different ways. At a first glance the
text shows a collection of relations/struggles between literates
and painters from classical Greece up to the Avant-gardes. A less
naïve and attentive reader can discover some references hidden
1 Roberto Calasso, Lila Azam Zanganeh, ‘Roberto Calasso, The Art of Fiction
No. 217’, Paris Review, 202 (2012).
2 Initially published in English: Mario Praz, Mnemosyne: The Parallel Between
Literature and the Visual Arts (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), and
subsequently translated into Italian (Mnemosine: parallelo tra la letteratura e
le arti visive (Milano: Abscondita, 2012).
among the footnotes (Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale and

Barthes’ Fashion System), which allow us to understand in deeper
way the method of the Italian Anglicist.
This double interpretation, confirmed by Gombrich’s review
of the text,3 allows us to sketch some of the main themes of
Praz’s visual culture that we will find in the literary production of
Calasso. According to Praz, the point of comparison between the
arts is defined by the ductus,4 or that peculiar element that attests
the individuality of a calligraphy.
For Praz the ductus functions as a sort of “distinctive
element”, similar to those identified by Foucault and Deleuze in
their philosophy of history.5 Thus we can find an analogon of
Praz’s methodology in the study devoted by Gilles Deleuze to
Baroque culture. They both try to formulate a principle which can
express the culture of an epoch through the definition of a single
structural element that resonates in different disciplines. In the
case of the Baroque epoch, the fold or “serpentine line” echoes
from mathematical analysis to painting, and from philosophy to
architecture and fashion.6
Calasso has similarly tried, in La Folie Baudelaire, to put
in evidence an element that works as a link between decadent
literature and visual culture: this gravitational center is not,
however, a stylistic form or an aspect of fashion; it is instead the
very persona of Baudelaire. Following Benjamin,7 Calasso does
not hesitate to designate Paris as the capital of the 19th century:
at its center stands the figure of Baudelaire with his women, his
painters, his love for Poe, Orientalism and Dandyism. But there
3 See Ernest H. Gombrich, ‘Review of Mario Praz, Mnemosyne: The Parallel

Between Literature and the Visual Arts’, Burlington Magazine, 114 (1972),
345-346.
4 Praz, Mnemosyne, pp. 32-33.
5 See Michel Foucault, Les Mots et Les Choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966); Gilles
Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. by Paul Bains (London-
New York: Continuum, 2003).
6 Praz, pp. 94, 134; Deleuze, p. 141.
7 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, trans. by
Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Massachusetts &
London: Belknap, 1999).
T. Guariento - Description and Idolatry of the Images 163
is more: at the heart of this crowd of peoples, names of streets,

Passages, revolutions and disillusions Calasso places a dream,
something archaic that smells of ancient Greece. In the center of
this dream: the images.
An entire gallery of images that culminates with the encounter
of a living being that, anciently, had been a god and his simulacra.8
Summarisches Überblicken
La Folie Baudelaire can be considered a fragment of a

triptych which also includes Tiepolo Pink9 and The Marriage of
Cadmus and Harmony.10 Each volume contains texts and images:
technically speaking, they are “iconotexts”. In each of the three
volumes, writing invents images and images describe the writing
process. Two statements of Calasso can be useful to clarify the
mélange of images and words in his works: the first is contained
in an interview of Antonio Gnoli for the Italian newspaper La
Repubblica,11 the other appears in the appendix to The Marriage of
Cadmus and Harmony, entitled as a literary fragment of Gottfried
Benn, Summarisches Überblicken.12 The Marriage belongs to a
particular literary genre, mythography, and it is a long and erudite
narration of stories and variations on the themes drawn from
Greek mythology. In this study we consider the Italian edition
of the book, published in 2008, in an in folio edition, enriched
with 384 images spacing from photos to frescos, from sculptures
and Greek vases to the painters of the School of Fontainebleau
and Rembrandt. The aspect of “material culture of the book” is
fundamental to understanding the editorial and literary operation
of Calasso. The editorial model of The Marriage is in fact that
8 Calasso, La Folie Baudelaire, pp. 173-203.

9 Calasso, Il rosa Tiepolo (Milano: Adelphi, 2006).
10 Calasso, Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia (Milano: Adelphi, 2009).
11 Antonio Gnoli, ‘Quando il mito creò l’immagine: Le nuove nozze di Calasso’,
La Repubblica, 13 October 2009. The text can be found at this address: http://
ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2009/10/13/quando-il-
mito-creol-immagine.html?ref=search.
12 Calasso, Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia, pp. 483-86.
of the Hypnoerotomachia Poliphili by Francesco Colonna, first

volume printed by the publisher Aldo Manuzio in 1499.
That model has been for me of immense help. I have taken the
format and the mirror of page. And each of the twelve parts of the
book is introduced by an image of the Hypnerotomachia connected
with the histories that are narrated. In that book there are 26
different possibilities to arrange the woodcuts on the page and I have
rigorously follow these combinations. In this way, inside a mirror of
page of magnificent proportions, it is possible to make an enormous
number of variations which produce a continuous and unpredictable
series of changes.13
The Hypnerotomachia tells the story of Polifilo who pursues the

nymph Polia in dream through a long sequence of architectures,
inscriptions, hieroglyphics; at the end he reaches the extreme
moment of possessing her, but he loses his beloved and wakes up
again.14 Whoever has had the opportunity to scan, even vaguely,
the beautiful pages of this book will realize that the volume is an
exaltation of ékphrasis in all of its forms. In addition to a very
vast series of notional ékphrasis15 describing bas-reliefs, friezes,
architectures and hieroglyphics, one has also to consider that the
very “contents” of the story (which are developed through a mise en
abîme of overlapped dreams) are rendered through the juxtaposition
of textual narration and the presence of innumerable woodcuts.
13 Gnoli.
14 A similar narrative structure can also be found in the final part of Lynch’s The
Lost Highway. The masculine main character, after having entered an
hallucinatory dream that allows him to forget the homicide of his wife, pursues
through all the dream her specular double, never possessing her completely.
Before his return to reality, the image of his wife announces him the end of
illusion telling that he will never succeed in possessing her (You’ll never have
me). In this precise moment there is a brusque return to reality (Slavoj Zizek,
Lacrimae Rerum: Cinq Essais Sur Kieslowski, Hitchcock, Tarkovski Et Lynch,
trans. by Christine Vivier (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2005), p. 228.
15 In order to understand the distinction between mimetic ékphrasis (which is
referred to the practice of describing existing works of art) and notional
ékphrasis (which pertains to “non-existing images” created by literature), see
Hollander, ‘The Poetics of Ékphrasis’, pp. 209-19.
Pages from Hypnerotomachia Poliphili by Francesco Colonna, 1499 (woodcuts)
The presence of in-text illustrations makes, if possible, even

more intricate the attempt to sketch the function of the description
of images.16 The illustrations “in the text”, as Michele Cometa
claims in La scrittura delle immagini, must be considered as part
of the scopic regime. A comprehensive analysis of ékphrasis must
considers: 1. the material production and diffusion of images
in a precise historical period; 2. the meaning of their presence/
absence in a literary text; 3. the relations between these elements.
Image and text contribute to the creation of a disorder among
levels (meta-narrative function) so the reader may confuse the
notional ékphrasis with the narrative level, since the woodcuts
represent equally the “plot of the novel” and “the objects of
description”. Moreover, the end of paragraphs are filled with
16 Cometa, La Scrittura delle immagini, p. 75.

typographic solutions similar to those of the tecnopaeginia;

rebus-like hieroglyphic are juxtaposed to their Latin translations/
interpretation in other circumstances.17 Calasso not only reuses
the “typographic model of Hypnoerotomachia” for the in folio
editions of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony and La Folie
Baudelaire (those with additional images): Hypnoerotomachia
becomes also a source of inspiration for the contents of narration.
But what is indeed the content of The Marriage? Inside the
curious bibliography of the volume we can find mostly Greek and
Latin classical authors, in conjunction with studies of German
and French philology. The older edition of the book (1988) was
published without images; nevertheless, according to Calasso’s
statements, during the writing process textual and visual sources
had the same status:
While I was working on the book [The Marriage of Cadmus and

Harmony] textual and iconic sources were on the same level. With the
new edition, part of the pictorial texture that was implicit and implied in
the text since the beginning appears on surface. But I have discovered
other images during the twenty years that have passed from the first
publication. Further images, finally, have been chosen during the
publication of this book, a work that, perhaps because it took place in a
hurry and mingled in the final stages of a book with pictures has a lot to
do (La Folie Baudelaire), has thrown me in a kind of rapture.18
It is quite difficult to place Calasso’s books within a theory of

literary genres. The Marriage combines philology, philosophy,
and art history but it also speculates on the function of myth
and novel; and moreover it contains a historical study of rites in
Greek culture. The meta-analysis on the nature of the book that
the author added in the appendix of the new edition (the one with
images) under the title Brief glance19 is therefore crucial. Here
Calasso introduces what could be defined as «a theory of literary
17 Inside a constellation of the possible relations between text and image, these
two examples belong to the category of iconism (See Cometa, ‘Letteratura e
arti figurative: un catalogo’).
18 Gnoli.
19 Calasso, Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia, pp. 479-89.
production as inter-medial translation» through a quotation of

a fragment by Gottfried Benn. Calasso claims as “his method”
the technique of the “brief glance” used by Benn in the writing
of The novel of phenotype. Calasso quotes a passage from the
German writer in which are exposed the “rules of production” of
a literary text with the aim of visual sources. Benn tells us that
after having scanned a volume of art history entitled The Beauty
of Feminine Body (which encompasses around two hundred
images of painters like Botticelli, Veronese, Rubens) he found
himself taken by a sort of “rapture”, then he began to write a text
that is the “confused translation” of what he has just seen. We
report a quotation from the text:
Just brief glances, turned pages, now and again, make him feel
slightly exhilarated. Venuses, Adrianes, Galateas, rise from their
cushions under arcades, pick fruit, gloss over their grief, drop violets,
send a dream. Venus with Mars; Venus with Amor, reaching out to a
white rabbit on her thigh, two doves at her feet, one light colored, the
other dark, before a landscape which fades away.20
This peculiar method, that we find both in The Marriage

and in other Calassos’s works, can be explained according to
the Freudian logic of “condensation”, described by Michele
Cometa as:
(…) a breathtaking assemblage of details drawn by different images,

as in the figurative dynamics of dreams. Here the words evoke and
assemble figurative details picked from paintings of pictorial tradition
which produce a tertium never existed, but absolutely likely.21
What is the relation between the “first” version of The

Marriage and the more recent one, which has been augmented by
an iconographic supplement. If some images already belonged
to the compositional process of the first edition, why they have
20 Benn, Sämtliche Werke 4, Prosa: 2, p. 406, English translation in Benn,

Double Life, p. 107.
21 Cometa, La Scrittura delle Immagini, p. 60.
not been included in the first edition?22 A possible interpretation

of this “censure of the visual in favor of the verbal” could be
underlined with the aim of the three levels of the ékphrastic
practice conceptualized by W. J. T. Mitchell in Picture Theory.23
The relationship between images and their descriptions is shaped
by a continuous exchange of “indifference”, “hope” and “fear”
towards the suppression of the difference among visual and
verbal. The presence of images in the flowing of the text would
make less effective the “inventive force of the verbal”, because
“it would disclose” the visual sources of inspiration that were
initially adumbrated. Nevertheless the case of Calasso does not
confirm this situation because one cannot verify the links among
the text and the images accompanying it is always oblique: there
is not an unbalanced relation in favor of the visual or the verbal,
because both are echoed by the very source of “myths”.
Idolatry
The image can save only those who have already been
poisoned. Essential is however the separation, the passage to
image, the ability to move away the gaze from the snake that
crawl and bite and to look on the metallic snake, brandished in air.
In this separation it is implicit death (…) Moses’s gesture, when
it brandished a bronze serpent told the murmuring Jews to look
at it, was the discovery that the evil can be cured by its image.24
If one opens the Old Testament on the Book of Numbers and looks
for the chapter 21, verses 4-9, one finds a rather puzzling episode.
Here is written that God sent poisonous snakes to punish the Jews,
than, begged to stop his wrath, he orders to Moses to build a brazen
serpent. Anyone who is bitten, looking at the snake, will be cured.
22 Keeping in mind that, as editor, Calasso has devoted a specific study on the
importance of bibliography as a form of “hidden” autobiography: see Roberto
Calasso, La Follia che viene dalle Ninfe (Milano: Adelphi, 2005), p. 103.
23 Mitchell, Picture Theory, pp. 152-54.
24 Calasso, Il rosa Tiepolo, pp. 179, 190.
Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel, particular, 1511 (fresco)
The episode in point, brought by Calasso both in Tiepolo Pink

and in La follia che viene dalle ninfe,25 works as a paradigm
to understand the “philosophy of the image” that moves his
literary project.
In The Marriage Calasso tries to re-narrate stories of Greek
mythology, creating some narrative frames that actually
are hidden ékphrasis, otherwise, in Tiepolo Pink all the
descriptions of images are “mimetic”. Specifically, the second
chapter (Meridian Theurgy) is a detailed description of the
work of Tiepolo as engraver, consisting of ten Capricci and
twenty-three Scherzi. Calasso in this case “does not invent
anything”, he is rather the interpreter of “the indescribable”.
Scherzi is in fact a work without commission, a personal one,
it does not represent episodes of classical mythology or the
Bible. The facts here narrated have the appearance of strange
ceremonious rites, the figures that appear in the sequences have
similar physiognomies and seem to perform gestures that have
lost sense.
25 See Calasso, La follia che viene dalle ninfe.

Giambattista Tiepolo, Capriccio, 1775-78 (etching)
How to make sense of what happens in these engraves?

Calasso reads Tiepolo’s engraves as an enchantment of the
image, which does not describe, but rather “produces effects”.
For this reason he recalls the myth of the Brazen Serpent26 as the
Urszene in order to understand the function of images. For him
Tiepolo’s images, as well as the whole mythological narratives,
don’t have a “mimetic function” but a “performative force”.27
26 The Scherzi are full of snakes: changing locations, lying on the ground or
twisted round a wood beam. There is also a drawing by Tiepolo that
probably depicts the biblical scene: La folla e i serpenti (Calasso, Il rosa
Tiepolo, p. 190).
27 The same concept of “operational images” can be found in Agamben’s
characterization of “signatures”: «What is the meaning of these enigmatic
This is confirmed by the fact that when he comes to find a

philosophy of image adequate to his “idolatrous” interpretation,
Calasso evokes the Warburg’s lecture on the ritual of the snake.28
It is interesting to relate the biblical scene of the iconoclasm, so
to say Moses’s “destruction” of the Golden Calf built by Aaron29
(Exodus 32: 1-35), with this scene of “idolatry”, in which God
himself orders the construction of a simulacra. What do Calasso’s
pictures want? Not only to be looked at, but, through their gaze,
to be able to cure.
La clef des songes
On March 13 1856 Baudelaire had a dream, in which he has

come forth through the “gate of horn”.30 Before the early morning,
he hastily recorded some notes of what he has seen and sends to
his friend and art critic Charles Asselineau.31 The content of this
figures so precisely recorded in the manuscripts illustrations? Unlike the

constellations, they in no way refer to the figures that the stars seem to draw
in the sky, nor do they describe any properties of the zodiacal signs to which
they refer. Their function becomes clear only when we place them in the
technical context of the production of charms or talismans that Picatrix calls
ymagines. Whatever the matter of which they are made, the ymagines are
neither signs nor reproductions of anything: they are operations through
which the forces of celestial bodies are gathered and concentrated into a point
in order to influence terrestrial bodies (ymago nihil aliud est quam vis
corporum celestium in cotpotibus irifluencium)» (Giorgio Agamben, The
Signature of All Things: On Method, trans. by Luca D’Isanto with Kevin
Attell (New York: Zone Books, 2009), p. 55.
28 Calasso, Il rosa Tiepolo, pp. 37-43. It should be noted that, in addition to
having studied at the Warburg Institute during the writing of his thesis, as
editor Calasso published Warburg’s conference A Lecture on Serpent Ritual,
Aby Warburg, A Lecture on Serpent Ritual (London: Warburg Institute, 1938),
and also the works of Wind and Baltrušaitis.
29 For the conceptualization of the scene of Aaron as topos of the Visual Culture
see William J. T. Mitchell, ‘What Do Pictures “Really” Want?’, October, 77
(1996), 71-82.
30 To quote a well-known passage from the Odyssey (XIX, 560-569), where we
can find a description of the two doors of dreams. Dreams that come through
the gates of horn tell the truth, unlike the dreams of ivory door that are false.
31 Charles Baudelaire, De L’amour (Paris: Société anonyme d’édition et de
librairie, 1919), pp. 180-85.
dream is relevant for the theory of “notional ékphrasis” because

it describes, through the oracular language of dreams, a kind of
bizarre architecture, halfway between the cabinet d’amateur, a
brothel and a science museum.
Which kind of images did Baudelaire see in his dream? Obscene
pictures, but not only: there are also architectures, Egyptian
figures, sketches, photographic prints. The content of the latter
are birds with flashy colors, and with “lively eyes”. Sometimes
they are representations of amorphous beings, as fallen from the
sky. The pictures are all dated and titled, and the authors are the
same girls that frequent this unusual place. Toward the end of
the dream Baudelaire meets a living being, of ambiguous form,
with a long appendix that falls from his head. The two talked at
length about their unfortunate condition, and finally the dream
fades, interrupted by the companion of the poet.32 In La Folie
Baudelaire33 Calasso collects this dream from the correspondence
of the poet34 and places it at the center of the volume, presenting it
as a short story. What is the meaning of the images in Baudelaire’s
dream? Which logic is unfolded in the notional ékphrasis of the
dream? According to Yacobi,35 we can consider various types of
32 The museum, as well as the gallery and the cabinet d’amateur are “apparatuses”
in the sense that Giorgio Agamben and Michele Cometa give to this term
«(…) the apparatus is never something completely real (an architectural
space) but it shapes, even in the very architectural frame, a constant transition
between metaphor and reality, between the verbal and the visual (…) And we
must say immediately that the so-called real spaces are always mental spaces,
built metaphors, transitions of logos and stone» (Cometa, La scrittura delle
immagini, p. 73).
33 Calasso, La Folie Baudelaire, p. 173.
34 More likely the source is Michel Butor, Histoire Extraordinaire: Essai sur un
rêve de Baudelaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1988). Even if the text never quotes it
expressly, from a comparison of the quoted letters and from some you
postpone intertestuali it results evident that Calasso has consulted the volume.
35 Tamar Yacobi, ‘Pictorial Models and Narrative Ékphrasis’, Poetics Today 16,
4 (1995), p. 602. The relation between the logic of dreams and the composition
of images is also sketched in Didi-Huberman’s Confronting images, precisely
in the chapter entitled The Image as Rend and the Death of God Incarnate
(Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting images: Questioning the ends of a
certain history of art, trans. by J. Goodman (University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2005), pp. 139-219.
relationships between the ékphrasis and the object: not only the
distinction between truthfulness or fictiveness of the described
work, but also their quantity. We can identify in Baudelaire’s
dream a series of “rhetorical operations” as “condensation”,36
leading to a complex relationship with the description of images.
Calasso helps us to understand the logic of condensation acting in
the dream, through a detailed reflection on the poetic and critical
works of the French poet. In a certain way Calasso recognizes in
Baudelaire the same method of composition (the brief glance)
that he had used to write The Marriage:
The greed of the eyes, nourished by the innumerable objects of

art sifted and scrutinized, was a powerful stimulus for the prose
of Baudelaire. He trained his pen to “to fight against the plastic
representations”. And it was a hypnerotomachia, a “strife of love in
dream”, rather than a war. Baudelaire wasn’t passionate in invent from
scratch. He always needed to elaborate a preexisting material, some
ghost seen in a gallery, in a book or on the road, as if writing were first
of all a work of transposition from a register to another. In this way
some of his perfect sentences were born, which are left to contemplate
at length, and leave soon forget that they could be also a description of
a watercolor.37
Once again the same reference to the volume of Francesco

Colonna, guiding the work of Calasso as a source of literary
inspiration. As in the case of The Marriage, we have consulted
the in folio edition of La Folie Baudelaire, enriched by a wide
iconography. In this volume the variety of the sources is much
wider: it goes from Greek sculpture to Impressionist paintings,
newspaper’s photos and sketches. Differently from what happens
in Tiepolo Pink the ékphrasis in La Folie are both notional and
mimetic. Then there is a “third type” of ékphrasis, defined by
Calasso as “reverse”, and that describes the logic of condensation
of a book into a single image:
36 See infra and note 21.

What was supposed to be that image on the cover? The reverse of

ékphrasis – I would try to define it today (…) Ékphrasis was the term
that was used, in ancient Greece to indicate the rhetorical procedure
that consists in translating in words the works of art. There are works –
as The Images of Philostratus – only devoted to ékphrasis. Among the
modern, the virtuoso of ékphrasis was Roberto Longhi (…) But, beyond
Longhi, the unmatched teacher of the ékphrasis remains Baudelaire (...)
Now, when an editor chooses a cover – knowingly or not – he is the
last, obscurest and humblest descendent of the lineage of those who had
practiced the art of ékphrasis, but this time applied in reverse, trying to
find the equivalent or analogon of a text in a single image.38
More than the Hypnoerotomachia, the image that inextricably

links the three books taken in analysis is that of the Orphic god
Phanes. The Nachleben of this Orphic and Mithraic divinity,
studied by Panofsky in a chapter of his Studies in Iconology,39
and mentioned by Calasso in The Marriage, which contains an
entire chapter on this image40 «four eyes and four horns, gold
wings, heads of ram, bull, lion and snake placed on a young and
human body, a phallus and a vagina, hoofs».41
38 Roberto Calasso, ‘In copertina metteremo un Beardsley’, La Repubblica, 28

December 2006. The text can be found at this address: http://ricerca.
repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2006/12/28/in-copertina-
metteremo-un-beardsley.html.
39 The chapter is devoted to the iconology of Father Time. The divinity that
Calasso identifies as Phanes (the one who appears) is identified by Panofsky
both as Aion, or the representation of the time as inexhaustible creation, and as
with the Mythraic cults. «On the other hand, the exact opposite of the “Kairos”
idea is represented in ancient art, namely the Iranian concept of Time as
“Aion”; that is, the divine principle of eternal and inexhaustible creativeness.
These images are either connected with the cult of Mithra, in which case they
show a grim winged figure with a lion’s head and lion’s claws, tightly enveloped
by a huge snake and carrying a key in either hand, or they depict the Orphic
divinity commonly known as Phanes, in which case they show a beautiful
winged youth surrounded by the zodiac, and equipped with many attributes of
cosmic power; he too is encircled by the coils of a snake», Erwin Panofsky,
Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance
(London: Westview Press, 1972), pp. 72-73. For the iconology of Mithra see
Franz Valery, Mary Cumont, The Mysteries of Mithra, trans. by Thomas Joseph
McCormack (Chicago: Open Court Pub. Co., 1910), pp. 104-50; 209-29.
40 Calasso, Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia, pp. 252 ff.
41 Calasso, Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia, p. 256.
We find the same image in Tiepolo Pink, within the ékphrasis

of the Tiepolo’s Crono affida Cupido a Venere.42 Finally Phanes
is identified by Calasso with the living idol that is found to
the center of the Baudelaire’s dream which presumably is the
double of the poet himself, since he found himself awakened,
he rolled up in the same position.43 In the interpretation of the
dream proposed by Calasso the museum becomes the place
of a “vivification of the image”. From “pure representations”
(obscene drawings and architecture), it passes to “inanimate
artifacts” (drawings of fetuses, photos), then to portraits of “birds
with livingly eyes”, and finally it appears a “totally alive being”,
which comes in the form of an ancient pagan deity. The monster
is, of course, Baudelaire himself, most developed product of the
phantasmagoria of the XIX century, created by the accumulation
of images by positivism and again, ancient idolatrous soul.
Lost image
One last ékphrasis draws our attention in La Folie: it is actually

a hybrid between notional and mimetic description. The image
in question is a daguerreotype which reproduces two paintings
by Ingres, one known and the other one lost, probably a portrait
of his ex-wife.
The daguerreotype, when viewed without knowing anything about

these circumstances, immediately appears as one of the most erotic
images from the beginning of photography. Its remarkable strangeness
is given by the position of the woman, who is lying on the bed and
not resting on its side, but has reached a balance that seems unlikely
at the same time resting almost vertically on the side in front of the
observer and relaxed. The effect is given by a certain angle formed by
42 «The mother, who perhaps is not the mother, gives the child to an old man,
which is perhaps the real father. In both paintings the gesture is maternal,
Time is protective towards the little Eros, holding him in his arms. Venus only
shows herself, with her chest exposed. It is the Appearing himself, as in
ancient times Eros, as Phanes» (Il rosa Tiepolo, pp. 268-69).
the body, which creates the illusion of a double posture. You will look
in vain in history of painting an optical mixture so successful of one
reclining nude and the other lying on one side. But there was a reason to
choose that angle? One can only say that this posture shows the greatest
possible surface of the body and all the same, soft lighting value, while
the focus of the light goes transversely between the right breast and the
left side of the abdomen. The center of the composition is the navel of
the woman, whose eyelids are lowered, suggesting a sentence of Ingres,
“the navel is the eye of the torso”. The effect is that of a total vision,
which it would have if it contemplates the body from above. While here
the body bended towards the observer.44
On one hand this description is based upon a “reproduction”,

from the other hand the original has disappeared. This image
perfectly corresponds to the “phantasmatic logic” of “melancholia”
as a form of disappearance of the object-cause of desire and its
reconstruction in phantasy. Images do not completely disappear:
only materials are consumed. So it is possible to find in the dream
of a poet of the XIX century an Orphic and Mithraic simulacrum,
and it is also possible that the image, in a time even more remote,
was worshiped as the concrete presence of Gods.
44 Calasso, La Folie Baudelaire, p. 133.

AWAKE YOUR FAITH: WHEN REALITY
REPRODUCES THE IMAGE OF ITSELF.
THE WINTER’S TALE (V, 1-3)
Giuseppe Leone
A Theatrical Ékphrasis
The plot of The Winter’s Tale (1611), set in the kingdoms of Sicily
and Bohemia, masterly ties King Leonte’s love for Queen Hermione
to his pernicious and unmotivated jealousy towards Polixenes,
sovereign of Bohemia. Yet, it is known that the psychological
drama of jealousy is followed by an unpredictable conclusion that
transforms the text into a fully balanced tragicomedy.
Analyzing the plot, it is clear that it presents a perfectly
bipartite scheme. In particular, the first three acts seem to prelude
a catastrophic end. Leontes breaks first the “terrestrial codes”: he
repudiates his wife, reneges his friend Polixenes and banishes his
daughter Perdita from the kingdom. Later on, he also breaks the
“heavenly codes”: the violation begins when the King disowns
the veracity, and hence the holy and predictive power of the
oracle of Apollo, interrogated to decree Hermione’s innocence
or culpability. As a consequence of Leonte’s atrocious acts there
comes first Mamillius’s death then that of Antigonus, and finally
Hermione’s “disappearence”. The plot, thus, seems to move in
the direction of an intricate and well-defined tragedy. However,
starting from act IV, the violence of the play is gradually mitigated
by several events which eventually lead to restoration of old
friendships, to the rejoining of the family members and to the
formation of new couples and so of new life.1
1 According to this perspective, it is not by chance that the third act closes with
a line full of good proposals, able to presage the propitious shifting of the
dramatic action: «’Tis a lucky day, boy, and we’ll do good deeds on’t» (The
Winter’s Tale, 3, 3, 132)
Most relevant to this essay, leaving aside the plot development,

is that, in act V, an extraordinary product of art is put on stage:
a sculpture representing Hermione (whose death had been
previously announced by Paulina) able to reproduce the Queen’s
very “nature”. In a few words, the Shakespearian play “invents”
a statue so well sculpted by the Italian master Giulio Romano that
it seems provided with the faculty of speech:2
that rare Italian master [...]

so near to Hermione hath done Hermione that
they say one would speak to her and stand in hope
of answer.3 (5, 2, 95-100)
The lines which describe the plastic perfection of the statue,

skilfully incorporated in the plot, act both as a verbal legacy and
as a fundamental descriptive completion, placing themselves in
between the notional ékphrasis, illustrated by John Hollander,4
and the “synaesthetic integration” to which Michele Cometa
refers.5 It is known that the ékphrastic process is to be considered
among the oldest rhetorical devices: there are several image
descriptions in aesthetical essays,6 or in poems or in novels.7 Yet
now the ékphrasis is produced in a playhouse, it becomes a verbal
2 It must be underlined that Giulio Romano, who was a painter not a sculptor, died
in 1546. Therefore this can be considered an evident anachronism: in fact
Shakespeare stresses, by way of Paulina, that the statue was recently completed by
the artist, but actually The Winter’s Tale (1660-1611) is set in pre-Christian period.
3 References to Shakespeare’s play are drawn from the Arden Shakespeare
edition, John Henry Pyle Pafford (ed.), (London: Arden, 1999).
4 As is known, John Hollander defines notional the description of inexistent
works of art; an example of notional ékphrasis is the famous description of
Achilles’ shield in Homer’s Iliad, see Hollander, ‘The Poetics of Ékphrasis’
(1988), pp. 209-19.
5 For a thorough analysis of synaesthetic, hermeneutic, associative or
transpositive integrations, see Cometa, La scrittura delle immagini (Milano:
Raffaello Cortina, 2012), pp. 116-42.
6 See Winckelmann’s Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and
Sculpture; or Lessing’s Laocoon or, to furnish another example, Foucault’s
description of Velázquez’s Las Meninas.
7 There are several examples: the famous Homeric description of Achilles’
shield (later on evoked by Auden in his The Shield of Achilles, 1952), but it
can be mentioned also Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819), or The Unknown
G. Leone - Awake your Faith 179
appendix to the onstage presentation of a work of art. The theatre

resounds with “iconic speeches”: observation of the statue mixes
with ékphrastic elocution. Oral and visual overlap, incorporated
in the simultaneity of the dramatic action.
The accurate descriptions of Hermione’s statue recall to the
observers an emotive experience which completes the cold
inspection of the gaze. Leonte’s sentences definitely hark back
to the olfactory and tactile memory of Polixenes and Perdita
who rushed, with the King, to see the sculpture. Their previous
knowledge is driven by a word that aims at evoking their
respective earlier information.8 Thus, on the stage the details of
the vision blend with the uneasiness of the remembrance, whereas
the phenomenon of recognition starts:
Leontes: O royal piece!

There’s magic in thy majesty, which has
My evils conjured to remembrance, and
From thy admiring daughter took the spirits,
Standing like stone with thee. (5, 3, 38-42)
Vision and listening, simultaneity and recalling, work together

to create a dimension of the gaze that is no longer merely physical.
Observation is now an emotive, passionate event. The spheres of
listening and watching participate at the same time in an admiring
identification process while the stage is filled by experiences of
perception that involve both the senses and the imagination:
Leontes: See, my lord:

Would you not deem it breathed? and that those veins
Did verily bear blood? (5, 3, 64-66)
The consciousness is deeply influenced by the suggestions

of the gaze. As a consequence the representation conveys all its
Masterpiece (1832) by Honoré de Balzac. All of them are obviously examples

of notional ékphrasis.
8 See Umberto Eco, “Descrizione con richiamo alle esperienze personali del
destinatario” in Id. Sulla letteratura (Milano: Bompiani, 2002), see in
particular the chapter entitled Les Sémaphores sous la pluie, pp. 191-214.
power of “presentification”.9 Instinctive impulses of passion,

yearning and wonder intervene during the examination of the
motionless image, meanwhile a “synaesthetic ékphrasis”10 also
reports on the perception of the vital warmth:
Polixenes: Masterly done:

The very life seems warm upon her lip. (5, 3, 67-68)
Image and word meet and face up to each other. Representation

exposes itself to description, and the latter, as a rhetorical
technique, grasps and communicates details able to overcome
the information provided by the eyes: ékphrasis becomes
an indispensable factor to “complete”11 the work of art, thus
revealing the insufficiency of the gaze. And as a matter of fact,
as Cometa states, the connection between literature and visual art
has always provoked a lively and ceaseless discussion:
Painting [or sculpture] and literature have played the leading role in an
endless conflict regarding the power of the visual in comparison with the power
of the verbal, regarding also the limits and interferences between visual and
verbal signs, and the irreducible gap between the expressible and the visible or,
more exactly, between the inexpressible that painting claims to show and the
invisible that literature claims to represent.12
The act of watching is now enriched by the description and, in

some way, modified and influenced by it. All this happens thanks
to the capacity of the spoken word of changing and adapting itself
to the sense that it wants to express. Moreover, the description, so
the word, has the specific faculty of reproducing itself endlessly, of
reappearing each time potentially different, renewed. Prerogative
which is not permitted to representation that can only furnish a
unique account of itself. This account is always immutable, it is
9 For further information, see Michael Foucault Les Mots et les Choses. Une ar-
chéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966).
10 See Cometa, La scrittura delle immagini, pp. 116-42.
11 The reference is to the well-known Peter Heinrich von Blanckenhagen’s
definition; for further information, see Cometa, La scrittura delle immagini, p.
39.
12 Cometa, La scrittura delle immagini, p. 52 (translated by the author).
of course eternal, but it is always limited to the same shape, to the

same outline. Furthermore, it must be underlined that ékphrasis
has the capability to ‘move’ the vision, to transform and to
animate it; to permit, in other words, a “dynamization” process13
which allows the image to expand itself in the space, an image
that without this process would remain immobilized in its fixity.
The report of the perception of a breath coming from the marble
furnishes a perfect demonstration of the dynamizing aptitude of
the verbal process:
Leontes: Still, methinks,

There is an air comes from her: what fine chisel
Could ever yet cut breath? (5, 3, 78-80)
The line triggers a fictitious process of vivification of the block

of marble: now the sculpture seems to produce a motion of lung
contraction and the observer can almost hear the noise of the
expelled breath; he can nearly see the statue moving. According
to Leontes, the representation of life is so perfectly reproduced on
the statue that life itself seems to be present:
Leontes: The fixture of her eye has motion in’t,

As we are mocked with art. (5, 3, 65-66)
The King’s words fully express admiration for an expiratory

process that seems to be carved in the marble, giving powerful
evidence of a sense of verisimilitude which deceives the gaze.
Even Less Than the ‘Minor Truth’: the Deceived Art
The representative vitality of the sculpture strongly raises the

topic of the fraudulent verisimilitude of art that many centuries ago
was investigated by Pliny in his tale on the grapes drawn by Zeuxis
13 The image dynamizing process is exhaustively pointed out by Cometa in La

scrittura delle immagini, pp. 90-115.
and the curtains painted by Parrhasius.14 Yet now, as through an

upside/down shift, each process of art production and observation
is inverted. The sculpture is actually an extraordinary falsehood:
a representation within the representation.15 Hermione’s statue
is in fact Hermione herself. Truth now pretends to be an image.
The original material becomes imitation, a false otherness. The
objective reality cancels every difference between itself and its
representation. The subject is no longer different from its depiction:
the Queen is simultaneously flesh and image, reality and fiction.
Didi-Huberman, in L’image ouverte, points out that painting
has often been considered a “moins-être: travail de l’apparence”;
“‘qui dit peindre dit feindre’”, he adds.16 This theoretical concept
can be obviously applied to the whole area of the plastic arts.
Each representation can be considered a pretence or, more
exactly, the account of a “minor truth” – a truth “on a scale” – that
tries to establish a verisimilar relationship between the object, as
it appears to the eye, and the reproduction which is made of it.
Yet, now Hermione’s statue, in its prominent originality, can be
considered as an imperfect reproduction: it is even less than the
minor truth, even less (or much more) than the appearance. The
sculpture of the Queen, as an artistic product, is to be judged as a
betrayal of the image,17 as a counterfeiting practice.
Analyzed from this point of view, the statue shows itself,
quoting from Fabio Bazzani, as an “insufficiency of truth and a
14 See Adam Max Cohen, Transalpine Wonders: Shakespeare’s Marvelous

Aesthetics, in Michele Marrapodi (ed.), Shakespeare and Renaissance
Literary Theory (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 89.
15 It is worth remarking that the scene triggers a process of theatrical mise en
abyme. Hermione herself, in fact, is not but an actress who plays the role of a
Queen. Moreover, at Shakespeare’s time there were only male actors playing
female parts. Thus the statue arouses the very complex question of analogy
between human existence and theatrical performance.
16 “minor-being, a work of appearance”; “who says painting says faking”; the
translation is mine. See Georges Didi-Huberman, L’image ouverte: Motifs de
l’incarnation dans les arts visuels (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), p. 78. ��
Among oth-
ers, Didi-Huberman also quotes Isidoro di Siviglia’s famous statement:
«Pictura autem dicta quasi fictura» (Etymologiae, XIX.16).
17 The reference to Magritte’s 1929 painting La Trahison des images. (Ceci n’est
pas une pipe) is not a chance one.
need for truth”.18 It is insufficient in truth because of its shamming

nature, because it pretends to be a work of art. Consequently, it
expresses a demand for truth just because it is a fake, a mock
copy, though paradoxically real.
It is better to move with due caution: the relationship between
the image rendered by the statue and the reality is still present,
but now it is not based on truth, it could be said on good faith,
anymore. The statue still represents the Queen, it describes her
with precision; each detail is well carved in the “marble”; the
language of the representation obtains excellent results, the
viewers are astounded and the impression is long-lasting:
Paulina: I like your silence, it the more shows off

Your wonder (5, 3, 21-22)
Nevertheless, that representation lies. It belies the viscera,

no more inert marble but pulsating flesh irrigated by dynamic
and nourishing liquid. It belies the gaze, burdened by emotions
yet forced into a controlled and fixed pose, into a glassy look. It
belies the body’s rigidity, simulated with a physical effort and
with a remarkable power of endurance. And each lie contributes
to the creation of a theatrical reality that is a perfect appearance
inside the appearance. The regal carriage, as much as the colour of
the lips, flawlessly help to present a perfect image of the Queen.
Thus, Nature can find in this work of art, immobile beyond the
curtain brought down by Paulina, a perfect mould:
Paulina: prepare to see the life as lively mocked as ever

Still sleep mocked death: behold, and say ‘tis well! (5, 3, 18-20)
But, actually, the sculpture does not refer to an external image,

just because it is itself the image it wants to reproduce.19 The
18 “Insufficienza di verità ed esigenza di verità”; see Fabio Bazzani, Introduzione, in

La questione dello stile. I linguaggi del pensiero, ed. by Fabio Bazzani, Roberta
Lanfredini, Sergio Vitale (Firenze: Clinamen, 2012), p. 8; translation by the author.
19 ��
Thus��
, quoting from Foucault, “l’équivalence��
entre le fait de la ressemblance et l’af-
firmation d’un lien représentatif��
” disappears.��
The translation is mine. See��
M. Fou-
cault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe (Fontfroide-le-Haut: Fata Morgana, 1973), p. 42.
deceit is triple because it involves all of the three elements of the

representation: the model, the product of art and the ékphrasis.
Or, in other words, the cosmos, the reproduction of the cosmos
and its description. Now, the relationship between art and truth
that until then had characterized each marble carve, or better each
work of art, has been altered. As a consequence the ékphrastic
deal between the description and the object of art has also been
altered. The breaking of the deal is provoked by the fact that the
description does not have a direct relationship with a copy of
Nature, but with Nature itself.
The deception acts in primis on the bystander’s gaze. A gaze
that, laying on the image, erects and shapes the work of art, a
gaze that “creates” the work of art. Leonte’s stare, in particular,
slides on the marble to fixate itself, rapt and incredulous, on
the statue’s face. The image he sees is identical to the one he
kept in his memory. So, trusting the vision, the King mortifies
the real thinking of it as a copy; he considers the flesh as an
image, the model as a work of art; he confuses pulsating life
with the depiction of the vital pulsation. He is totally trapped in
the intentional misrepresentation. The King of Sicily, as well as
Perdita or Polixenes, certain that they are in front of an object
of art, in reality stare at its origin, at its source. Their gazes fall
into an enduring imposture. Thus, the ékphrasis, the meticulous
description of the artefact, reveals itself as nothing more than the
certification of a perfect trickery. Now it is no longer sufficient to
determine a relation of likeness between the object of art and its
original model to identify a work of art:20 in The Winter’s Tale,
Hermione’s statue is presented on the stage as a product of art, it
is considered as a product of art, it is described as a product of art,
but actually it is living flesh, animated simulacrum, deception.
20 See Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe. See also Keir Elam, “Look here upon
this picture”: Shakespeare e i paradossi tragici del sembra, in Susan Payne,
Valeria Pellis (ed. by), Il Teatro inglese tra Cinquecento e Seicento. Testi e
contesti (Padova: Cleup, 2011), pp. 153-79; and Claudia Corti, “The Winter’s
Tale tra ‘speaking pictures’ e ‘dumb poesies’”, in Payne, Pellis, Il Teatro in-
glese, pp. 267-88.
Hermione: Before and Beyond the Representation
It has been highlighted that Hermione, as an object of art,

can be considered an inauthentic article. A totally different
consideration must be made reflecting on the Queen as a living
body that pretends to be a statue. In this case, the Truth, Hermione,
is simultaneously model and copy: she is “before and beyond the
representation”. She is “before” the representation because she
pre-exists it and determines it: she is the guide and the matrix
of the representation.21 The Queen “precedes” the representation
because she embodies the reality to which the sculptor must
refer to in order to fulfil his task. The artist has to manipulate
the raw material according to the sovereign’s silhouette to obtain
the similitude, which is the necessary condition to define as
successful an artistic object conceived with mimetic purposes.
Hermione’s outline and the expression of her face represent the
framework to carve on the marble. The final result will be perfect
only if every part of the statue, every marble inch, is able to call
to the observer’s mind the Queen’s equivalent bodily feature.
A similar observation can be made referring to the shape of the
hands and the volume of the arms. In sum, the living flesh of the
sovereign, her figure, will be the criteria to judge any duplicate.
Yet Hermione is also “beyond” the representation since
she surpasses it because of the perfection of the features and
because of her condition of being a “real” image, absolutely
independent of any iconic reproduction. Her body is not an
inert statue, but a motionless figure acting as a statue. And
probably the Queen would not remain in that position for an
indefinite or very long period, or even for a very short time
considering the curiosity of the observers, who cannot avoid
touching it and perceiving, through the fingers, the sculpture’s
perfect roundedness, and even kissing it. Moving closer and
closer to the simulacrum is an instinctive act, just as the tactile
identification is the expression of a deep veneration which it
is hard to oppose. Both Leontes and Perdita will try more than
21 Hermione, in sum, exists before than any representation of Hermione.

once to brush against the marble. Only Paulina’s interventions

will prevent them from touching the statue:
Leontes: Let no man mock me,

For I will kiss her.
Paulina: Good my lord, forbear.

The ruddiness upon her lip is wet:
You’ll mar it if you kiss it, stain your own
With oily painting. (5, 3, 79-84)
Hermione is “beyond” the representation because she is

physically alive, real in her perishability. The passing of time has
actually lined her body: creases make an attempt on her beauty,
attacking her face. Leontes is the first to notice the wrinkling of
the skin, perhaps because more than the others he can remember
the smooth charm of his wife:
Leontes: But yet, Paulina,

Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing
So aged as this seems. (5, 3, 26-29)
Also Polixenes seems bewildered in front of a statue

which, despite being absolutely similar to its original, looks
incomprehensibly older. Once again it is Paulina who, continuing
the cheating plotted with Hermione, will find the right answer
to solve the Kings’ doubts. And answering, Paulina will trot out
the sculptor’s great ability to refer to Nature imitating even the
effects of the flowing of time:
Paulina: So much the more our carver’s excellence,

Which lets go by some sixteen years and makes her
As she lived now. (5, 3, 30-32)
In point of fact, it is that “As she lived now” which supports

the entire deception. The betrayal of the depiction is in the
“naturalness” of the artistic object. Art and Nature thus equally
participate in the Shakespearian mise-en-scène.
Even before in the text, the relationship between Nature and

Art,22 i.e. between the truth and its duplicate, had been presented
thanks to a dialogue between Perdita and Polixenes. The
opportunity was given by a brief dispute on the possibility for
man to improve Nature through the use of grafts. The hypothesis,
as is known, was smartly rejected by Perdita who still deemed Art
an imitation of Nature, or a form of understanding reality, and not
as a form of experimentation or overcoming of Nature:
Perdita: For I have heard it said

There is an art which in their [of the grafts] piedness shares
With great creating Nature.
Polixenes: Say there be;

Yet nature is made better by no mean
But nature makes that mean: so, over that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes. [...] This is an art
Which does mend nature – change it rather – but
The art itself is nature. (4, 4, 88-97)
Apart from the quarrel, however, quite prophetically, the

quick dialogue between young Perdita and the King of Bohemia
seems to give clues to the next appearance on the stage of
Hermione’s statue that, from this point of view, is nothing but
Nature that becomes Art.23
22 The Nature versus Art debate is very frequent in the Renaissance period, as
is pointed out, among others, by Harold S. Wilson. See, Harold S. Wilson,
“Nature and Art” in W. Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, Kenneth Muir (ed.
by) (Houndmills-Basingstoke-London: Macmillian Press, 19889). So, for
example, the Nature versus Art question is examined by Sidney in An Apol-
ogy for Poetry (1595), by Spencer in “Bower of Bliss” in The Faerie Queene
(II, xii, 42-87) or by George Puttenham in The Art of English Poesy (1589).
For further information, see Edward W. Tayler, Nature and Art in Renais-
sance Literature (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1964)
and R. Headlam Wells, “Civility and Barbarism in the Winter’s Tale”, in
Michele Marrapodi (ed.), Intertestualità shakespeariane (Roma: Bulzoni,
2003), p. 277-92.
23 With reference to the close relationship between Nature and Art in The Winter’s
Tale, the considerations made by Northrop Frye are of great interest: «Hermione,
like Thaisa in Pericles, is brought to life by the playing of music, and references
Awake Your Faith
An ambiguous relationship between appearance and presence

is therefore set up on the stage. But since literature, like art, is
nothing but a search for truth, every simulation, every insincerity
that is an obstacle to this goal must be removed. The figural
disguise must be denounced and unmasked. And in order to
obtain it, in order to complete the dramatic path, the sacrilegious
act par excellence must be carried out: iconoclasm. The statue
must be broken, destroying its representative intention. The
image must be “opened”, removing any fetishism to achieve the
truth. Didi-Huberman well explains this concept by analyzing a
text by Baudelaire:
Baudelaire, better than anyone else, formulated the concept of opened image
in all its cruel logic: you need to look inside to understand, you need to open to
see inside, but to open you need to destroy.24
However, now, iconoclasm is followed by an event different

from destruction: now the marble, after the undoing, lives. The
reproduction, proving itself to be false, gains more strength
than the evocative and symbolic power given to the icon. The
sculpture is no longer a representative substitute, it is no longer
a fetish, compelled to recall to mind an image, a person, but
becomes authentic existence. The image does not reproduce
anymore, but “is”; it is now consubstantial with the original.
Realism becomes reality. Destruction, in this case, is an act of
knowledge. It is necessary that Hermione’s statue is “opened” to
reveal its alétheia, its intimate nature, its truth. It is just in order
to reveal this truth that Paulina asks Leontes for an act of faith:
to the art of magic follow. Art, therefore, seems part of the regenerating power of
the play», in “Recognition in The Winter’s Tale”, in W. Shakespeare, The Winter’s
Tale, K. Muir, (ed.), p. 190; see also Northrop Frye, “Romance as Masque” in
Carol McGinnis Kay and Henry E. Jacobs (eds.), Shakespeare’s Romances
Reconsidered (Lincon & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1978).
24 See Georges Didi-Huberman, L’image ouverte, p. 58. Didi-Huberman refers
to a text by Charles Baudelaire entitled Morale du joujou (The Moral of the
Toy). For further information, see also G. Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout
(Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 2003).
Paulina: It is required
You do awake your faith. (5, 3, 96-97)
Henry Van Der Weyde, Mary Anderson as Hermione, 1887
The dissolution of the image, the recognition, will be possible

merely thanks to a “faith” which permits the simulacrum’s
annihilation. So substitution will take the place of destruction,
consequently there will be a vivification of the effigy. Faith is
necessary to let representation coincide with reality.25
According to the Christian notion of life in the simulacrum, of
the Truth in the reproduction, after Paulina’s intervention, form
25 In this way “inner experience” will change into external experience, into
a physical involvement, into a mutual, active exchange of feelings. For the
concept of expérience intérieure, see Didi-Huberman, L’image ouverte,
pp. 25-27.
changes into presence, “metaphor becomes metamorphosis”.26

Yet, now, everything happens in a way inverse to the Christological
process. In this case, in fact, it is the icon that “generates” a
living body, whereas in the Christian doctrine it is Christ’s death
which determines the proliferation of images charged with a holy
meaning and a theological presence. In both cases, however, icon
and presence, appearance and flesh, belong to the same vortex of
the evocative substitution.
Hermione comes back to life and, as by an unexpected prodigy,
every appearance will recover its authenticity. Hermione will be
the Queen of Sicily again: the portrayed person will rescue herself
from representation, disentangling herself from between the two
natures (the figural and the corporal), once again becoming a wife
and mother. Obviously, this happens while a deep, collective,
sense of wonder strikes all the characters of the romance, and of
course all the audience. As Michele Marrapodi has pointed out,
in fact, the viewers too are fully deceived:
For the first time in the canon, Shakespeare infringes his dramatic rule of
always informing the audience, by means of aside or soliloquies [...] In The
Winter’s Tale he uses an effective strategy to make the audience believe in the
fiction of Hermione’s death.27
Here, Shakespeare proposes on the scene a variant of arte-viva

dramatic topos, which is in actual fact a holy-mythic traditional
heritage. Even not considering the examples coming from the
holy hypostasis of the divine images of the Christianity,28 there are
several precedents able to testify the recurrence of the theme. We
can consider, for example, Medusa’s cut-off head set in Athena’s
26 See Didi-Huberman, L’image ouverte.

27 Michele Marrapodi, Of That Fatal Country: Sicily and the Rhetoric of
Topography, in Shakespeare’s Italy: Functions of Italian Locations in
Renaissance Drama, ed. by Michele Marrapodi and others (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 19972), p. 223.
28 See, for example, Hans Belting, Das echte Bild. Bildfragen als Glaubensfragen
(München: C. H. Beck, 2005), but see also H. Belting, Bild und Kult. Eine
Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (München: C. H. Beck,
1990) and Belting, An Anthropology of Images. Picture, Medium, Body,
translated by Thomas Dunlap (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
aegis;29 or the living statue moulded by Hephaestus;30 or finally

the lady carved in ivory by Pygmalion and later on transformed
into a living woman by Venus31 who, thus, permitted the young
artist, who has fallen in love with his creature, to have a loving
affair with the simulacrum now made of flesh and blood. Like
Pygmalion, Leontes too can join his Queen, until then believed
to be a sculptural product. At the same time, of course, Perdita
may well start a filial relationship with her mother who is ready
to return to life accepting the invitation of her loyal accomplice:
Paulina: descend; be stone no more; [...] come away,

Bequeath to death your numbness, for from him
Dear life redeems you. (5, 3, 99-103)
Thoroughly analyzing the line, Paulina’s exhortation seems

to be loaded with the power described in the myth of Genesis.
It has the typical connotations of the supreme performative
act, correspondingly to the fiat lux that belongs to the Christian
tradition and that reveals the creating power of the highest Will.
Now the word is knotted to a prodigious and peremptory gesture:
now the logos does not communicate anymore but immediately
acts, thus undertaking a sacred role, a vivifying function, i.e.
transforming into living flesh the inanimate substance (or at least
judged to be inanimate). Paulina’s invitation to life has the same
power of resurrection as the formula used by Christ to rescue
Lazarus32 or Jairus’ daughter.33 In any case, regardless of the
theological power of the exhortation, the Queen responding to
29 See Ovid, Metamorphosis, IV, 790-803. It is worthwhile to remark that

Metamorphosis must be considered a fundamental source for the Shakespearian
play; see Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1993): pp. 233-39; see also Leonard Barkan, ‘Living Sculptures: Ovid
Michelangelo and The Winter’s Tale’ in Journal of English Literary History,
48/1981, pp. 639-67.
30 For example, consider Talos, the giant man forged in bronze to protect the
island of Crete, or the creation of Pandora, the first woman formed out of clay.
31 The myth of Pygmalion was described by Ovid in Metamorphosis, X, 243-97.
32 John, 11, 17-45.
33 Matthew, 9, 18-26. See also Mark, 5, 21-43 and Luke, 8, 40-56.
Paulina’s stimulus recovers her corporality: the object becomes

subject and the deception disappears.
From Picture to Image
As a consequence, Hermione’s enlivening transfiguration,

the resurrection, gives her back the status of an “image”, an
entity that can be represented and can become, once again, a
“picture” if reproduced by a medium34 (and it can be granite, or
wood, or canvas). Hermione recovers flesh and motion, freeing
herself of marble fixity. The return to life and the disclosure
of identity permit the Queen to transform herself from “a false
artistic representation” into a real “potential artistic model”. She
changes from “picture” to “image”. The artistic production path
inverts again. At the beginning, the Queen’s body and features
assumed a fictitious rigidity to look like an artefact (the “image”
becomes “picture”). Now that same body and that semblance
are transformed again into a living form: the exhibition of
the simulacrum is abruptly interrupted. The verification
process coincides with the crisis of the representation, with
the infringement of the icon; it coincides with the not merely
symbolic demolition of the “picture”.
34 See W. J. T. Mitchell, Pictorial Turn, ed. by Michele Cometa (Palermo:

duepunti edizioni, 2008), pp. 9-11.
Joseph Durham, Hermione, 1858
On the other side, it begins a resurrection process of the

“image”, a regeneration which arises from the iconic ruins.
Therefore, Paulina has not taken a sculpture away from art35 but
she has accompanied a woman to life. In this way, the Queen
recovers a presence on the stage and melts away the evocative
task that art had momentarily assigned to her. The mimetic
function, that is to say the function of representative haziness,
dissipates after the statue’s annihilation. Nature becomes Nature
again, re-establishing its legitimacy and its autonomy from Art.
And almost as if to ratify her return to the living status, Hermione
regains the power of speech, and thus she blesses her daughter
and gives explanation for her actions:
35 Compare Apelles’ gesture related by Ausonius, by Pliny the Elder and by

Plutarch and well analyzed by Didi-Huberman in L’image ouverte, pp. 89-95.
Hermione: You gods, look down,

And from your sacred vials pour your graces
Upon my daughter’s head! [...] for thou shalt hear that I,
Knowing by Paulina that the oracle
Gave hope thou wast in being, have preserved
Myself to see the issue. (5, 3, 122-128)
Nor can the return to life be considered a fortuitous event. The

Winter’s Tale, in fact, was conceived and written in the concluding
part of Shakespeare’s dramatic production; a period to which
there belong the last “romances” i.e. – besides The Winter’s Tale
– Pericles (1607-1608), Cymbeline (1607-1610) and The Tempest
(1611). And all the romances’ dramatic plots, after an opening
sequence of sorrowful events fit for a cruel tragedy, bend towards
a happy unexpected ending,36 in keeping with the hybrid use of
literary genres theorized by Geraldi Cinthio, who first presented
the notion of tragedia di fin lieto.37 It has already been underlined
that Shakespeare’s last period, the one in which it is possible to
observe the coexistence of both tragic elements and of a final
happy solution, must be considered, quoting Agostino Lombardo:
“expression of a dramatic and human experience that, on the one
hand, reached its highest plenitude and maturity and, on the other
hand, is enlivened by an experimental passion which is one of
36 See Louise George Clubb, Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time (New

Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989); Robert S. Miola,
Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca (Oxford: OUP,
1992); G. Melchiori, Shakespeare: Genesi e struttura delle opere (Bari:
Laterza, 1994); Michele Marrapodi, The ‘Woman as a Wonder’ Trope, in M.
Marrapodi (ed. by), Shakespeare and Renaissance Literary Theories
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).
37 See Michele Marrapodi, Introduction: Shakespeare against Genres, in M.
Marrapodi (ed. by), Shakespeare and Renaissance Literary Theories, pp.
2-22. Also very famous, at that time, was the pastoral tragicomedy Il pastor
fido (1590) by Giovan Battista Guarini, which was later adapted by Fletcher
in The Faithful Shepherdess (1610). In any case, it is worthwhile to
remember that The Winter’s Tale main source is Green’s Pandosto (1588)
from which the Shakespearian play takes inspiration. Among The Winter’s
Tale source must be listed also Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590-1596),
Sydney’s Arcadia, but also Aeneid, Odyssey and, as previously mentioned,
Ovid’s Metamorphosis.
the constant elements of Shakespearean art”.38 During this period

Shakespeare expresses the purpose of representing a society ruled
by the ethical values of reconciliation and forgiveness, conceiving
a plot in which all bitterness and all complexity are resolved; a
play, all told, where every antagonism slowly vanishes.
Therefore Hermione’s resurrection perfectly fits into this
renewed Shakespearian organization of the plot. Hermione’s
rebirth can be considered a paradigmatic example of the route that
leads from loss to reunification, from falseness to authenticity or,
more generally, from tragedy to “romance”.
The archetype, i.e. Hermione, comes to heal the imposture of
the imitatio, to guide the text to a final harmony and to a goal of
truth, accordingly to the precepts of Shakespeare’s last production.
Nevertheless, as if by a paradoxical “nemesis of the false”,
the statue, the “imitation”, will find a continual reproduction.
It will often be presented as an artistic object to all intents and
purposes. In the centuries to come, there will indeed be carved
statues of Hermione [fig. 2] and real canvases depicting the
Queen in her sculptural pose will be painted [fig. 3]. Sometimes,
the subject will be impressed on a surface different from marble,
but in all cases the “image” will be fixed on an iconic stand.
The effigy will be transferred to a evocative medium, finally
becoming “picture”. It will regain the rule, temporarily usurped
by Hermione, of original work of art, released from the archetype:
completely true in itself.
38 «espressione di un’esperienza teatrale e umana giunta, da un lato, alla sua

massima pienezza e maturità e animata, dall’altro, da una passione sperimen-
tale che è tra i segni costanti dell’arte shakespeariana». See Agostino
��
Lombar-
do, Il trionfo del tempo, la vittoria sul tempo, in Shakespeare, Il racconto
d’inverno (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2011), p. V; the translation is mine.
William Hamilton, Leontes Looking at the Statue of Hermione, 1790
THE BODY ARTIST BY DON DELILLO:
WORD, IMAGE AND (IN)DESCRIBABILITY
OF THE BODY IN POST-MODERN ART
Mirko Lino
What happens to literary writing when it employs its tools

(i.e. words) to seize hold of a body on stage in a performance
of body art? Can literature reconstruct this complex artistic
representation, in which the body has become a reflection of the
society producing it?
This essay will try to investigate this fascinating literary
challenge by analyzing the novel The Body Artist by the
American writer Don DeLillo, incorporating it with certain issues
relating to ékphrasis, a literary genre encompassing a variety of
interpretative possibilities, here it is to be understood as a space
in which literature reflects on its own representational limitations
when attempting to describe the visual aspects of figurative art.
To discuss ékphrasis entails, first of all, tackling the complex
issue of the relationships between word and image, time and
space, movement and stasis within Western culture; inside the
refined literary workshop whole worlds are built up from words,
in order to vividly convey to the reader’s imagination the literary
form and the creative process, as well as the feelings aroused in
experiencing a work of art. Some of the most relevant contemporary
reflections regarding “ékphrasis” are vented in the intense pages
of DeLillo’s novel, which assigns to the word the arduous task of
restoring to the reader certain visual experiences, subsequently
connected to other sensorial worlds of smell and sound. The novel
introduces the categories of the fictitious through the invented
filmography of a director who has never existed, using scraps
from reviews that exist exclusively in the space of the words; it
concentrates its attention on the creative process of a body artist,
and the description (also, in this case, via a newspaper article) of
the (again, in this case) imaginary performance by the protagonist

Laureen Hartke. This type of artistic performance enables one
to shift the traditional attention of the ékphrasis from the static
figures depicted in painting and sculpture to the moving figure
in body art; what is often a provocative art plays with the actual
limitations of the tradition with which the concept of “artistic” is
defined, whilst updating, in the system of art, a series of cultural
issues such as look, body and gender.
The Body Artist poses a series of questions commonly
encountered in contemporary theories regarding ékphrasis, as
developed by scholars such as John Hollander, Murray Krieger,
James Heffernan and W. J. T. Mitchell, whilst including the
literary genre of verbal description of a work of art within the
figurative representations of post-modernism. In addition,
through its descriptive passages, DeLillo’s novel provides food
for thought regarding literary creation itself, focusing on a
continual confrontation of the word with its own limitations and
other areas of artistic representation, as an exercise in the word’s
survival in cultural contexts that have jeopardized its standing.
Interferences: Body and Words
DeLillo’s The Body Artist recounts the intimate thoughts of

Laureen, a young female performer of body art, after her husband,
the elderly film director Rey Robles, has committed suicide. After
Rey’s suicide, Laureen decides to cut herself off from surrounding
reality, remaining alone in an old rented house in the country in
an unspecified area outside New York. Her days are marked by a
ritualistic monotony; she watches birds from the window, carries
out complicated aerobic exercises, depilates her body-hair, listens
to messages from her friend Mariella Chapman on the answer-
phone, stares intently at internet images of an anonymous road
in the town of Kotka in Finland. Her days are suddenly disrupted
by the appearance of an unknown character, Mr. Tuttle (perhaps
her husband’s ghost or a hallucination), in one of the rooms in
the house. After this discovery, Laureen establishes a complex
M. Lino - The Body Artist by Don DeLillo 199
relationship with this figure, consisting of hesitant conversations

and questions without an answer, observations, considerations and
recorded dialogue; subsequently these would become the basis for
an engrossing artistic performance, Body Time. This is described
in the novel employing the style and form of an article for a
specialized magazine, written by her friend Mariella Chapman.
DeLillo’s powerful and elegant writing illustrates her
loneliness, and in doing so, heads towards the contorted paths of
deep reflection on contemporary art; this sees in the body not only
an object of worship, but a fundamental vehicle for restating the
presence of death as a constant element of existence, and as such,
something to be exorcised and developed through representation:
on the first level, a body art performance, and on the second level,
literary creation or performance.
The latter is involved by this process as an artistic operation
that is able to describe the art object at the heart of the novel,
and consequently, is able to represent the painful and mournful
creative process underlying Laureen’s performance. From the very
first pages one has the impression that the word is mainly being
carried forward to a confrontation with its own representative
limitations, so as to describe to the reader sensorial experiences
(smells and sounds) that fall within the sphere of the “barely
speakable” and the “barely describable”.
For the purposes of our discussion three instances, or narrative
passages, can be individuated in the novel. In the first, certain
problems emerge that can be traced back to the capacity of the
word to depict strikingly what other sensorial systems (smell
and hearing) render it difficult to describe. In the two subsequent
instances, the description of Rey’s films and Laureen’s body
art performance respectively, one finds oneself faced by what
(according to the distinction made by John Hollander) might
refer to a notional ékphrasis, i.e. a description of a work of art that
does not exist in reality (thus imaginary), opposed to the mimetic
ékphrasis,1 which is the description of an existing work of art
that the reader can actually encounter in the real world. DeLillo’s
1 Hollander, The Poetics of Ékphrasis, pp. 209-19.

descriptions, which are analyzed here, carry this ékphrastic

distinction, because of its difficult resolution, to more fertile
terrain; although these are imaginary artistic instances, a reader
sensitive to the worlds of cinema and contemporary art cannot
fail to recognize direct references to films and performances of
body art as part of the vast range of contemporary artistic forms.
The first instance to be considered is Laureen’s breakfast with
her husband in their house outside New York, on the last morning
before Rey’s suicide. From the very first exchanges this takes on
the flavor of a daily ritual where inconclusive dialogues between
spouses are instrumental in giving greater emphasis to gestures,
body position and their actions in the confined space of the kitchen:
It happened this final morning that they were at the same time, in
the kitchen, and they shambled past each other to get things out of
cabinets and drawers and then waited one for the other by the sink or
fridge, still a little puddle in dream melt, and she ran tap water over
the blueberries bunched in her hand and closed her eyes to breathe the
savor rising. He sat with newspaper, stirring his coffee. It was his coffee
and his cup (…) «I want to say something but what». (…) she reached
into the near cabinet for a bowl and shook some cereal out of the box
and then dropped the berries on top. She rubbed her hand dry on her
jeans, feeling a sense somewhere of the color blue, runny and wan (…)
«Yes exactly. I know what it is», he said. She went to the fridge and
opened the door. She stood there remembering something. She said,
«What?» Meaning what did you say, not what did you want to tell me.
She remembered the soya granules. She crossed to the cabinet and took
down the box and then caught the fridge door before it swung shut. She
reached in for the milk, realizing what it was he’d said that she hadn’t
heard about eight seconds ago.2
The vividly described details provided by DeLillo add

something more to a description of a simple breakfast; it
transforms it into an artistic performance. Moreover, as a result
of one small detail, a hair that finds its way into Laureen’s mouth
and which belongs neither to her nor her husband – «She held the
strand of hair between thumb and index finger, regarding it with
2 Don DeLillo, The Body Artist (New York: Scribner, 2001), pp. 10-11.
mock aversion, or real aversion stretched to artistic limits»3 – the

constant artistic tension of the performer is revealed, resulting
in the banality of the breakfast ritual that sees a dance involving
bodies grappling with gestures, articulated in such a synchronized
manner as to take up the whole of the kitchen. The transformation
of the everyday and its banality into works of art is a recurring
motif in contemporary art. In their sphere artists such as La Ribot
and Bobby Baker adopt the commonplace in art as a symptom
of daily changes in psychological structure, breaking down the
barriers between interior emotionality and exterior physicality.
Ribot overturns artistic conventions in dance by rejecting
the codes of the spectacular, whilst repeating commonplace
gestures such as opening and closing a seat in Chair (2000), and
loading them up with a powerful and compelling physicality.
Baker, in her videos, for example Kitchen Show (1991), refers
to the spectacle of physicality in the everyday, using tools and
instruments with which one usually does the cooking in an
extravagant, unusual and grotesque manner. In the performances
by these artists, who use various devices (dance, video) for their
representational purposes, actual words can be muted in order to
increase the power of the gestures (as in the case of Chair) or can
extend throughout the duration of the performance in an excess
of explanation (as in Kitchen Show). In this latter case it ends
up highlighting the gesture (throwing bits of fruit whilst keeping
them in one’s hand) and presents it as an emphatic moment in
which it is the onlooker’s imagination that creates meaning so
that he can better enjoy the sensations that the artist is conveying.
DeLillo actually prefers to make his words stutter, to make them
limp along until they are concealed behind other experiences of
sense and feeling; this emerges in the dialogues between Laureen
and Rey, providing space for an extreme descriptive search that
is not a pursuit of the figurative, but of smell and sound. While
she is preparing breakfast Laureen is struck by the smell of soya,
and DeLillo does not fail to describe the world of sensations that
this smell arouses in the artist, and consequently, in the writer,
3 DeLillo, The Body Artist, p. 3.

involving directly and significantly the corporeal dimension (the

smell of feet), which is fundamental to the artistic creation of the
body artist:
She took the soya granules back to the table as well. The soya had a
smell that didn’t seem to belong to the sandy stuff in the box. It was a
faint wheaty stink with feet mixed in. Every time she used the soya she
smelled it. She smelled it two or three times (…) she poured granules
into the bowl. The smell of the soya was somewhere between body odor,
yes, in the lower extremities and some authentic podlife of the earth,
deep and seeded. But that didn’t describe it […] nothing described it.
It was pure smell. It was the thing that smell is, apart from all sources
(…) it was as though some, maybe, medieval scholastic had attempted
to classify all knows odors and had found something that did not fit into
his system and had called it soya.4
In the same way, sounds, in their phonetic breakdown, thwart a

complete linguistic description: «The birds broke off the feeder in a
wing-whir that was all b’ s and r’s, the letter b followed by a series
of vibrato r’s. But that wasn’t it at all. That wasn’t anything like it.»5
Words are therefore not enough; they suggest and leave the field
to the imagination. DeLillo de-functionalizes them and withdraws
them, only to re-launch them towards a “perfect descriptive
imperfection”. For the reader, the breakfast scene between Laureen
and Rey beckons to the world of artistic representation that sees
the body as an active protagonist, communicating directly with
the personal and cultural experiences of the end-user.
Following in the footsteps of Umberto Eco, in the words of
Michele Cometa, in the implicit complicity that is created between
writer and reader «there is at stake the capacity of the target
audience, the end-user, to fill in the gaps in the description using
one’s imagination and senses, much more often, applying one’s
own artistic and cultural pre-knowledge».6 DeLillo’s descriptive
efforts when faced with the unclassifiable smell of soya and the
phonetic uncertainty of the beating of birds’ wings, fascinates the
4 DeLillo, The Body Artist, pp. 14-18, emphasis added.

5 DeLillo, The Body Artist, p. 19, emphasis added.
6 Cometa, Letteratura e arti figurative: Un catalogo, p. 18.
reader, because it fires the reader’s imagination and experience;

these everyday events, within easy sensorial range, are part of
the catalogue of post-modern arts in which the futile and the
commonplace become themes of social and political import.
In this case it is difficult to argue the distinction between actual
and notional ékphrasis as proposed by Hollander, because one
is confronted by a description of an “occasional” work of art,
a daily performance from marital life or existence itself («She
took the kettle back to the stove because this is how you live a
life even if you don’t know it»7) not explained or recognizable if
not by the vibrancy of DeLillo’s writing and the reader’s cultural
baggage. From the very title of the novel the reader understands
the central theme of the narrative: the body and artistic creation.
The other instances or spaces taken into consideration show
the novel’s tendency to confuse the two types of ékphraseis
in a more direct manner than in the afore-mentioned case. In
fact, both cases propose a typical interference in the regular
narrative flow as proposed by the novels’ chapter headings. The
ékphrastic description was considered by Murray Krieger8 to be
a moment for pause or narrative stasis; the scholar recognizes in
the ékphrasis a spatial function that triggers a procedure where
the word that is describing takes on a plastic dimension typical
of figurative art, consequently interfering with the narrative
flow. It is within this “plastic pause” that the narration presents
itself as a space for inner-reflection, in which the artist and the
writer, albeit indirectly, reflect on the language of their art and its
representational potential.9

8 Murray Krieger, Ékphraseis and the Still Movement of Poetry, or Laokoön
Revisited, in The Poet as Critic, ed. by Frederick P. W. McDowell (Evanstone:
Northwestern University Press, 1967), pp. 3-6.
9 It was James Heffernan’s merit to have acknowledged in the ékphrasis the
function-pretext for reflecting not only on the object being described, but
also on the actual representation. The French scholar Philippe Hamon also
comes to similar conclusions, concentrating mainly however on the ékphrasis
as a self-representation of the writer and his craft; Philippe Hamon, La
description littéraire: De l’antique à Roland Barthes. Une antologie (Paris:
Macula, 1991).
The news of Rey’s suicide is reported in the first and second

chapters of the novel Rey Robles, 64, Cinema’s Poet of Lonely
Places, which initates the style of a newspaper or magazine
article. In this section the difficulties in the artistic life of
Laureen’s husband are summed up from his first steps, through
his successes to his artistic decline. All the elements that create
the effect of veracity are present (film titles, critical reviews,
very brief synopses); an attentive reader cannot fail to spot their
reference to a pre-existing literary case, whilst acknowledging a
particular cinematographic poetry:
He directed eight features in all. The third of these, My Life for Yours,
a French-Italian co-production about a wealthy woman kidnapped
by Corsican bandits, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. It was followed
by Polaris, a tense American crime drama with an undercurrent of
Spanish surrealism. The film developed a cult following and ran for
extended periods in a number of art houses in this country and abroad.
«His work at its best extends the language of film», wrote the critic
Philip Stansky. «His subject is people in landscapes of estrangement.
He found a spiritual knife-edge in the poetry of alien places, where
extreme situations become inevitable and characters are forced toward
life-defining moments».10
The literary case to which DeLillo seems to be referring is

that of the filmography of the director James O. Incandenza,
invented by David Foster Wallace in the novel Infinite Jest.11
In this masterpiece of post-modern literature seventy eight
imaginary films are invented, accompanied by synopses and
design specifications elaborated to the last detail. It is worth
remembering that the two writers knew each other’s works12

11 David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (New York: Back Bay Books, 2006), pp.
985-93.
12 In his interesting essay on the relationship between television and post-
modern literature, E Unibus Pluram (1990), Wallace quotes a long passage
taken from DeLillo’s White Noise (1985). Moreover, the theme of garbage
and refuse disposal in DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) is already actually present
in Wallace’s Infinite Jest (which had come out a year earlier).
and that they corresponded by letter.13 Moreover, as evidence of

Wallace’s influence on DeLillo, the case of Ray Robles clearly
brings to mind that of J. O. Incandenza, since both these fictional
directors committed suicide. By including the newspaper article
about Rey, DeLillo exploits the expedient that Wallace has already
used in his novel Found Drama; invented reviews lend weight to
a film for the simple reason that a critic appears to have written
them. The application of this verbal ploy on DeLillo’s part is
certainly very different from the extreme and captivating ploy
adopted by Wallace, but the purpose behind this literary gesture
can be clearly deemed very similar; the relationships between
word and image, between narrative and cinema, are being taken
to extremes in a typically post-modern artistic context, where the
two representative forms are overstepping each other’s territorial
boundaries. The cinematographic references that emerge in the
descriptions of Rey Robles’s fictitious films include a clear allusion
to Andrej Tarkovskij’s visionary Solaris (1972); this is explicitly
substantiated by the title Polaris; in the same way the reference
to the act of “redrawing the boundaries of cinematographic
language”, insisting on the otherness of places as an existential
metaphor, seems to refer precisely to the cinematographic poetry
of Werner Herzog. Moreover, DeLillo has never disguised his
passion for the cinematographic medium; from his very first
novel, Americana14 (1971), up to his latest, Point Omega15 (2010),
the cinema has always represented a narrative motor and terrain
to be explored, as demonstrated by the vast range of references in
his novels to movies both existing and imaginary.
The ékphrastic description of Body Time also interrupts the
linear progression of the novel’s chapters with an insertion:
Mariella Chapman’s article, Body Art in Extremis: Slow, Spare
and Painful. The description of Laureen’s performance provides
a wealth of allusions to both classical and social theorization
regarding ékphrasis, and re-proposes, as in the previously
13 At least one exchange of written correspondence was documented, in 1995;

Also see: http://perival.com/delillo/ddwriting.html.
14 DeLillo, Americana (Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1971).
15 DeLillo, Point Omega (New York: Scribner, 2010).
analyzed narrative instance, an interesting interference between

the notional and actual. The object of the artistic description
leads the ékphrasis back to the classical debate in which stasis
is opposed to movement. Traditionally ékphrasis has been
interpreted as verbal art capable of giving birth and movement
to static bodies in painting and sculpture, but DeLillo updates
and, as a consequence, problematizes this issue, since the object
described is not a static image, but a body in motion within the
confined space of the stage. Whereas ékphrasis was classically
capable of making the static bodies in painting and sculpture
move, in DeLillo’s post-modern world the body in motion is
frozen; the word does not generate action, but petrifies the body.
Chapman’s description seems to be a sequence of frames or
snapshots that freeze the moment, interrupting the visual fluidity
of the artistic performance and the continually changing shape
of the artiste’s body; in fact, in the first lines it actually seems as
though the style of the article is transforming the sequences of the
performance described into an act of leafing rapidly through an
exhibition catalogue, glancing swiftly at the images:
Hartke is a body artist who tries to shake off body – hers anyway.
There is the man who stands in art gallery while a colleague fires bullets
into his arm. This is art. There is the lavishly tattooed man who has
himself fitted with a crown of thorns. This is art. Hartke’s work is not
self-strutting or self-lacerating. She is acting, always in the process of
becoming another or exploring some root identity. There is the woman
who makes paintings with her vagina. This is art. There are the naked
man and woman who charge into each other repeatedly at increasing
speeds. This is art, sex and aggression. There is the man in women’s
bloody underwear humps a mountain of hamburger meat. This is art,
aggression, cultural criticism and truth. There is the man who drives
nails into his penis. This is just truth.16
In the pages of this catalogue, which have been leafed through or

swiftly described, it is quite easy to recognize a series of aesthetic
and formal references to contemporary body art (Matthew
16 DeLillo, The Body Artist, pp. 106-07.

Barney, Pina Bausch, Marina Abramović, Veronika Bromová,

Hayley Newman, to name but a few) as an art of provocation,
with regard to social relationships, and criticism of the cultural
institutes themselves. These provocations and reflections find
in the body of an artist or performer (such as Laureen Hartke)
a place where one can express oneself and tackle wide-ranging
cultural issues, obviously without neglecting the dimension of
self-representation in the artistic process and an examination
of intimate psychological and existential issues. Chapman’s
description continues by articulating the phases of the artistic
performance:
Hartke’s piece begins with an ancient Japanese woman on a bare

stage, gesturing in the stylized manner of Noh drama, and it ends
seventy-five minutes later with a naked man, emaciated and aphasic,
trying desperately to tell us something (…) through much of the piece
there is sound accompaniment, the anonymous robotic voice of a
telephone answering machine delivering a standard announcement.
This is played relentlessly and begins to weave itself into the visual
texture of the performance. The voice infiltrates the middle section in
particular. Here is a woman in executive attire, carrying a briefcase,
who checks the time on her wristwatch and tries to hail a taxi. She
glides rather formally (perhaps inspired by elderly Japanese) from one
action to the other (…) the last of her bodies, the naked man, is stripped
of recognizable language and culture. He moves in a curious manner,
as if in a dark room, only more slowly and gesturally. He wants to tell
us something. His voice is audible, intermittently, on tape, and Hartke
lip-syncs the words.17
From Lessing18 onwards, ékphrasis has expressed the verbal

capacity to render the static nature of the art object, especially
the body in painting and sculpture, more dynamic, thus bringing
these figures to life. On the other hand, DeLillo’s ékphrastic
usage seems to be leading the reader towards a representation
that is opposed to vitalism, which is to say funereal: the removal
17 Ibidem.
18 G. Ephraim Lessing, Laokoön, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. by Karl Lachman and
Franz Muncker (Berlin-New York: de Gruyter, 1979), XIII.
of stasis from movement. This reversal of the ékphrastic

tradition, the passage from death-life to life-death, is reconfirmed
in Chapman’s allusion linking Laureen’s performance to the
mourning for Ray’s suicide. However, this reversal again gives
the impression of breaking down the solidness of the word;
therefore the word does not suffice to go beyond the denotative
level in describing what has been observed on the stage:
How simple it would be if I could say this is a piece that comes

directly out of what happened to Rey. But I can’t. Be nice if I could say
this is the drama of men and women versus death. I want to say that but
I can’t. It’s too small and secluded and complicated and I can’t and I
can’t I can’t.19
The body, with its continual metamorphoses, comes to represent

the collapse of time in a spatial dimension from which it cannot
free itself. This carnal trap cannot fail to reflect on the word,
which is once again saddled with the onerous task of actually
describing this process. In the pages preceding Chapman’s article,
DeLillo accurately describes the aerobic exercises that Laureen
usually carries out in an empty room in the house and recounts
the transformation of her carnality into an empty substance. The
performer de-constructs her own body, removing all body hair,
smearing depigmentation cream over her body, peroxiding her
hair, cleansing her skin of dead cells, until she feels terrible; in any
case, in the words of DeLillo describing her physical preparation
as if it were a rite of passage, from the too full to the too empty:
«this was her work, to disappear from all former venues of aspect
and bearing and to become a blankness, a body slate erased of
every past resemblance».20
The body, object and instrument of Laureen’s art, is painfully
approaching its own level-zero, transforming Baudrillard’s
appealing definition of the body as a «mass grave of signs»21
19 DeLillo, The Body Artist, p. 110-11, emphasis added.

21 Jean Baudrillard, L’échange symbolique et la mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1976),
p. 42.
into the exact opposite, i.e. an empty sign. In this way the verbal
dimension cannot help spinning around vertiginously on itself,
representing at the same time the vanity of Laureen’s artistic
body/object and restoring the complex creative process of her
performance. Spaces framed by a continuous babble of words
are established, a search for her level-zero: for example, the
dialogues (perhaps real, perhaps imaginary, between Laureen
and Mr. Tuttle) several times restate phrases like “say some
words”, considerations regarding the weakness of language
and the juncture between language and the perception of space
and time. The verbal sphere therefore produces interference:
the interruption of the diegetic progression on the part of the
ékphrasis as a moment detached from the rest of the narration
and the mysterious appearance of Mr. Tuttle (perhaps a ghost
or a hallucination ascribable to Rey) as personification of the
competitive and conceptual preparation of the artist to produce
his/her own art object and the emptying out of language.
It seems evident how Chapman’s article describing Body
Time is only on the surface an interference with the time of
the narration in the novel, and instead becomes the moment in
which (coherently with what Grant Scott22 wrote following in the
footsteps of Mitchell and Heffernan) the description recaps the
elements scattered throughout the text and represents the cultural
context in which the novel finds its niche. As a consequence it
becomes interesting to note how in the description of Body Time
the traditional distinction of gender is demolished, the distinction
that Mitchell23 spotlighted in his interpretation of ékphrasis as a
social custom. The description of the art object is interpreted as a
strategy permitting an object to pass from one representative code
to the other, creating a comparison with a semiotic otherness with
consequences for a social structure in which issues of gender and
looking intervene. The American scholar reflects on the tendency
to identify the ecfrastic technique with observation of an image
22 Grant F. Scott, Sculpted Words: Keats, Ékphrasis and the Visual Arts (London-
Hannover: University Press of England, 1995).
23 Mitchell, Picture Theory.
that finds its scopic equivalent in the female figure as the object
of the male gaze; moreover, from this point of view, one might
consider how the female body has been traditionally seen as the
incarnation of a threatening otherness for the male, in virtue of
the subconscious danger of castration.24 This is equivalent to
considering the male gaze and its tradition in words, as a political
strategy to keep these threats under control in the face of scopic
power and typically male and patriarchal social consequence. It
is therefore clear how problematic issues force their way into the
theories of ékphrasis; these issues are linked to the representative
tensions that comprise the structures of desire, fear, control and
politics. Laureen breaks with this scopic tradition because she
manages to transform her own body into a multiplicity of sexually
varied subjects and because, at the same time, the gaze describing
her is not that of a male, as used to happen in the scopic tradition,
with which art has always had to compare itself, but of a female,
that of Laureen’s friend, Mariella.
DeLillo, therefore, activates the verbal mechanisms of the
“notional ékphrasis” by combining it with the mimetic, through a
series of references to contemporary art that can be recognized by
the end-user; in this way he indicates precisely Hollander’s basic
idea, which is that “notional ékphrasis” is the rhetorical area
where modern narrative experiments converge, and we might
add, with regard to the post-modern ones, that they take it upon
themselves to represent a work of art:
Notional ékphrasis inheres in modern poetry’s actual ékphrasis, and

provides a thematic microcosm of a basic paradox about poetry and
24 The visual pleasure when confronting an artistic object, often coinciding with
the depiction of a female body, is explained by Mitchell as follows in Mitchell,
Picture Theory, p. 163: «If a woman is pretty as a picture (namely silent and
available to the gaze), it is not surprising that the pictures will be treated as
feminine objects in their own right and that violations of the stereotype
(ugliness, loquaciousness) will be perceived as troublesome». Moreover the
author, in the same text, takes up again, as an example of this mechanism, the
extreme case of the danger of the effeminate, via a description by Percy
Bysshe Shelley of the Medusa by Leonardo Da Vinci and Freud’s description
of the Medusa by Caravaggio.
truth. Ékphrastic poems that are always representing poetic process,

and the history of poetic readings of works of art, can by those means
get to say rather profound things about the works of art in question.
By constructing some fictional versions of them, they put powerful
interpretative construction of them, construe them with deep effect.25
The notional ékphrasis within the post-modern cultural system,

where the true and false, the real and fictitious tend to evocatively
confuse their respective boundaries, prods the reader’s
imagination, binding it to frameworks of what has already been
seen and what has already been read. The writer who creates
figurative works of art can but play with variations on the existing
material, in such a way that the fictitious elements described
are recognizable both as invention and citation. In accordance
with the ideas of Heffernan, ékphrasis is the representation of a
representation, «verbal representation of graphic representation»26
and if one recognizes the shift between representative modes
of departure and arrival one will attain in the reading a type of
fulfillment that we might define as “second level”, which in any
case will not affect the gratification of an imagination that is
unaware of the semiotically re-elaborated citation.
In conclusion, to quote a famous work by Heffernan, what
DeLillo constructs is a museum of bodies restored to experience
through the written word. By visiting this museum it is possible
to perceive the survival of verbalism in a cultural system such as
the post-modern, which favours extra-verbal systems to represent
itself socially. The insistence in DeLillo’s novel, on making
explicit a limitation («not being able to describe» certain sensorial
experiences such as the smell of soya, and certain existential
experiences such as death), becomes instrumental in attaining the
highest degree of expressivity and brilliance of the word.
25 Hollander, The Poetics of Ékphrasis, p. 209.

26 Heffernan, Museum of Words, p. 3.
PAZIENZA IN HIS LIMITS:
LIVING EXPERIENCE
AND ICONOTEXTUAL PRACTICE
Danilo Mariscalco
“Patience has a limit, Pazienza no!”

(A. Pazienza)
The analysis of the relationship between verbal and visual

textualities can find a favored object of study in the comics: an
“iconotextual” device characterized by features comparable to
other traditional artistic works – in order to limit ourselves to the
“narration by images” mechanically copied we can think about
the “moral series” by William Hogarth, not to mention but the
“narration through (mechanically copied) images”, it shows. In
the comparison between its figurative elaboration and at least
a meaningful part of its verbal solutions, comics show some
differential specificities: beyond the inscription of the words in
the balloon – with voices and thoughts of the represented subjects
–, the writing often attends the images with an evident descriptive
intention – irreducible to the didactic “reason” – in this way
configuring themselves as a form of ékphrasis wherein the
correspondence with the other medium doesn’t limit itself only to
its relationship with an effective or imagined picture – as in each
case of “modern” ékphrasis1 (“actual” or “notional” ékphrasis2 –,
1 On the modern conception of ékphrasis and its relationship with the classical
meaning of the term and the “crisis” made by the contemporary artistic
practices see Cometa, La scrittura delle immagini, pp. 11-23.
2 On the distinction between actual ékphrasis and notional ékphrasis see
Hollander, The Poetics of Ékphrasis, pp. 209-19. On the unsolved problems of
those definitions see Cometa, La scrittura delle immagini, p. 48: «It is clear –
and Hollander soon realizes this – that the borders between the two forms are
constantly put in crisis precisely by the linguistic creativity of the authors, who
or to the coincidence between the writer and the visual artist (in
other occasions already emerged and found in other occasions3),
but it involves also the lead time of the two texts.4 The antagonism
between writings and images (or pictures), that is the continuous
redefinition of the respective limits and borders, in the objects
that will be analyzed right there, and in many other not considered
objects, solves itself in the space and lead time of a single work.
It expresses itself in a single (re)production, showing, from a
certain perspective, the ambiguities and the meaningful tensions
of a complex unity articulated in many ways.
The cultural experience of Andrea Pazienza, totally
characterized by a constant practical and theoretical comparison
with the expressive possibilities and limits of the different
figurative and verbal media, acquires in this view a paradigmatic
feature. The conceptualization of the “limit”, in particular, obtains
a theoretical centrality, confirmed by Pazienza himself in some
autobiographical fragments, which proves the intentional and
radical exercise of a subjectivity exceeding the traditional forms
of the representation by pictures:
Before writing comics I used to paint denouncing pictures. It was

a period wherein I couldn’t avoid doing that. But my pictures were
bought by pharmacists who put them in their bedrooms. The picture
kept on pulsing in that atmosphere: I considered this fact not only as
a contradiction but also as an enormous limit. My desire of writing
comics starts from that.5
were interested since the classical antiquity to show the rhetorical potentiality
of their description which programmatically exceed the artwork. Moreover it is
just the mimetic modern ékphrasis that seems to be the place where the
rhetorical models, tested by the ancients, are recovered. It is hard to distinguish
between the two ékphrasis, already in Filostrato» (translation is mine).
3 It is also the case of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “double works”: see Maryan Wynn
Ainsworth, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Double Work of Art (New Haven: Yale
University Art Gallery, 1976); see also J. Hillis Miller, ‘The Mirror’s Secret. Dante
Gabriel Rossetti’s Double Work of Art’, Victorian Poetry, 29 (1991), 333-49.
4 The time, according to Hillis Miller, is irrelevant in the mutual “overwriting”
relationship between the two media. See Miller, p. 335.
5 Andrea Pazienza, ‘Il plesso solare e la tecnica del fumetto’, Il Grifo, 23
(1993); reprinted in Andrea Pazienza, Paz: Scritti, disegni, fumetti, ed. by
Vincenzo Mollica (Torino: Einaudi, 1997), p. 47.
D. Mariscalco - Pazienza in His Limits 215
The adhesion to the comics, that is the adhesion to the production

of cultural objects characterized by a high communicative potential
– determined by the “inexpensive” mechanical reproduction, by
the specificity of a device which combines visual and verbal facts –
corresponded to the participation to the “autonomous” movement
emerged in Italy during the Seventies;6 in fact it guaranteed a
partial “overcoming” of the contradiction which, at least in
Pazienza hypothesis, existed between the traditional artistic
activity and the political exercise, even if, meanwhile, it offered
further occasions of comparison with the specific characteristic
– with the limits and possibilities – of the representation and its
forms, as in the last page of the first episode of Le straordinarie
avventure di Pentothal (1977-1981), a realistic and dreamy
narration, adherent to material conditions, experiences, needs
and desires of the social antagonism emerged in particular in
Bologna in 1977.7 This page was added substituting a previous
page unknowing the facts of the March 1977: the murder of the
militant Francesco Lorusso, the correspondent conflicts between
the police and the demonstrators and the raise of the radical
praxis;8 through it Pazienza exalted the happened resolution of
a certain retard, recognized by himself, of the cartoon device
compared to the living process and in particular to the practices
of the autonomous movement. The page shows the protagonist
(Pazienza’s alter ego) a radio which reproduces the tactical
information promulgated by “Radio Alice” («Comrade! Don’t
scatter tonight, at the end of the various meetings», don’t scatter),
an alarm clock in front of the only visible Pentothal’s eye, a flag
which affirms Lorusso’s political and ideal survival («Francesco
is still alive and he fights with us!»). Omitting an iconological
interpretation, the element which suggests considerations about
6 See Mauro Trotta, Andrea Pazienza o le straordinarie avventure del desiderio,

in Settantasette: La rivoluzione che viene, ed. by Sergio Bianchi and Lanfranco
Caminiti (Roma: DeriveApprodi, 1997), pp. 204-11.
7 Le straordinarie avventure di Pentothal was published on the magazine Alter
since April 1977.
8 See In ordine pubblico, ed. by Paola Staccioli (Roma: Associazione Walter
Rossi, 2003), pp. 93-104, and pp. 165-66.
the specific characteristics of representation is the expression of

protagonist’s thoughts: «Expelled… I’m totally expelled». This
assumption – also related to the political “infertility” of the comic
illustrator detected and stigmatized by the most traditional fringe
of the movement – starts from the admission of the “limits” of
the comics determining the above-mentioned gap art/life and
consequential extra-artistic efforts, as affirmed by Pazienza in the
endnote of the page:
When I was working to these pages in February 1977 I believed

I was drawing a flash, being totally in error because instead it was a
beginning. If I had had this presentiment, I would have waited for this
beautiful March and I would have drawn it. So I don’t know what I have
to do. Twenty days ago I gave all the material to Linus, but – God! –
many things have changed during this time and many other things will
change till the day wherein the comic book will be published; I feel bad
and idiot because I haven’t thought about it. Drawing a comic isn’t not
like writing for a daily paper, if you understand what I mean. So I draw
this page and try to give it to Linus to replace the last original page with
it, hoping to make it on time. The last original page had the sentence
«so it’s the end» – in place of the typical “end” placed in the lower right
corner – which now has the wrong overtones. Good Heavens! I swear
you, I believed it was a flash, instead it was a beginning. Yeah! Andrea
Pazienza, March 16th 1977.9
In this writing Pazienza compares the temporality of his

own practice with the practice of the “daily paper”, but similar
considerations can emerge also during the analysis of the texts of the
1977 movement which attests the radio supremacy – metaphorically
attested in Pentothal with the representation of an ever updated
“Radio Alice” – over the other textual, “clean” and “paralyzing”
practices – different from the real “dirtiness” found by Hans Magnus
Enzesberger10 – traditionally used in the antagonist political activity:
9 Andrea Pazienza, Le straordinarie avventure di Pentothal, in L’arte di Andrea

Pazienza (Roma: Panini, 2004), p. 32.
10 See Hans Magnus Enzensberger, ‘Baukasten zu einer Theorie der Medien’,
Kursbuch, 5 (1970); partially reprinted in Piccole antenne crescono:
Documenti, interventi e proposte sulla vita delle radio di movimento ed. by
Paolo Hutter (Roma: Savelli, 1978), p. 129.
To break every demand of cleanliness, the delay of writing in

comparison to the real process: the (clean) text speaks about the
Movement, but only to paralyze it, to crystallize it, to show it motionless
inside categories which – made in the past – want to constrain the
present to retrace the past. To write, in this way, a dirty text. A dirty
book about Radio Alice, like so “Radio Alice” broadcasts dirty texts.
The “moving” text is dirty because it contains much a part of real
experience which cannot be reduced within formalized categories,
within linguistic codes universally understandable. The code, this
common denominator of the comprehensibility, is called into question;
outside the code, we comprehend ourselves only from another common
denominator of comprehensibility, that is the participation to a process,
that is the collectivized experience. Radio Alice broadcasts in Bologna
since February 9th 1976. The premise on which the collective worked
for more than a year, before starting transmissions, is the analysis
of the obsolescence of the written language, of the codified media
– within the political code, too – rather than the transformation of
the needs of the Movement. It’s not possible to propose an analysis
of the “metropolization” of the figure of the social class using a so
such a “clean”, slow and ritual medium: the flayer. This one played
an extraordinary role when a vanguard had to extend and develop in
the masses a revolutionary intention during the Sixties. But when the
levels of knowledge raise, and especially when the circulation of the
experiences uses communication channels more persuasive than the
flyer (for example the internal demonstration, the exemplary act), it is
necessary to transform the language of the Movement.11
Other limits of the representation – which guide ourselves

to the hypothesis about the “self-referring” and “simultaneous”
ékphrasis described in the introduction – are explored in some
pages of Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeo (1984-1986), a diary
through images and words, an autobiographical but at the same
time “personal and political” work about a generation of activists
during the years of the so called “reflux”:12
11 Collettivo A/traverso, Alice è il diavolo: Sulla strada di Majakovskij: testi per

una pratica di comunicazione sovversiva, ed. by Luciano Cappelli and Stefano
Saviotti (Milano: L’Erba Voglio, 1976); reprinted with the title Alice è il
diavolo: Storia di una radio sovversiva, ed. by Franco Berardi and Ermanno
Guarneri (Milano: ShaKe, 2002), pp. 112-13.
12 Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeo was published in the magazine Alter since 1985.
the “full” pages of Pompeo deal with everyone, through the expedient
of the autobiographical tale. They deal with the vices and the virtues of
who is looking for his own direction. They deal with the tragedy of a
generation that lived the arrival of the heroin in the territory.13
In Pompeo (the last Pazienza’s alter ego) the visualization of the

experience and in particular of the protagonist’s drug addiction is
often accompanied by a third person description which reinforces, by
words, what the pictures show or could show; namely it is accompanied
by an ékphrasis – its lead time is inseparable from the lead time of
drawing – of “artistic” images, realized or realizable, produced or
suggested by the writer-describer himself. This correspondence
between description and material and ideal figurative representation
accompanies the narration to the last picture: Pompeo-Pazienza,
recently survived a heroin overdose and fled in the countryside,
shows himself chained to a birch and knelt near a ravine. Upward a
text describes and interprets gestures and thoughts:
He was sitting there and he thought. He thought they were his last
thoughts. And to whom he could dedicate them to. He felt his face, the
wind and the ground. He smiled. A puff from his lips swept away a little
insect from the chains… There, the chains scared him. Some tears, in
order to take a little bit of time?14
But the suicide, revealed only in its intention by the drawing,

doesn’t materialize itself in a picture, which backs away leaving
the burden of representation to the words: «He threw himself as
if he had been, suddenly, pushed».15 The “final” image, between
the two options of representation offered by comics, namely
picture and writing, obtains a visual form in the words, through
the description of an imagined “scene”, necessarily “artistic” –
considering that it is a story about a drawn “actor”16 – but unrealized.
13 Davide Toffolo, Lo strano complotto, in Andrea Pazienza, Pompeo (Roma:

L’Espresso-Panini 2006), p. 11.
14 Pazienza, Pompeo, p. 131.
15 Ibidem.
16 A specificity of the comics, in the light of an ékphrasis theory, maybe the
“structural” relationship between the image evoked by the description and its
The hypothesis about the subjective “reasons” pertaining to this

scene could evoke Lessingian ghosts17 to which the intention of
this work substitutes, exorcizing them, a comparison between the
real Pazienza’s experiences and the Pompeo’s (re)produced story.
This one, in the pages which precedes the imagined death, shows
practices and effects of a failed suicide through the representation
of an intentional and lethal heroin intake:
The following morning Pompeo was using two big syringes of 5cc,
both of them plunged in his right arm. There were dissolved more than
four grams of heroin. It was a lethal dose. Wasn’t it? Now the problem
is to be able to press entirely the pistons of the syringes at the same time
without losing immediately consciousness.18
Surviving the overdose he will find, in another way and in

other “forms”, his end. An its “mimetic” description – without
artistic metaphors and practices, only in part different by from the
artistic objectification, even if it is unrealized; in particular, the description of

a not drawn image have to lead to a picture in the imagination of the author
and the reader.
17 ��
«If the artist, out of ever-varying nature, can only make use of a single mo-
ment, and the painter especially can only use this moment from one point of
view, whilst their works are intended to stand the test not only of a passing
glance, but of long and repeated contemplation, it is clear that this moment,
and the point from which this moment is viewed, cannot be chosen too happi-
ly. Now that only is a happy choice, which allows the imagination free scope.
The longer we gaze, the more must our imagination add; and the more our
imagination adds, the more we must believe we see. In the whole course of a
feeling there is no moment which possesses this advantage so little as its high-
est stage. There is nothing beyond this; and the presentation of extremes to
the eye clips the wings of fancy, prevents her from soaring beyond the im-
pression of the senses, and compels her to occupy herself with weaker imag-
es; further than these she ventures not, but shrinks from the visible fullness of
expression as her limit. Thus, if Laocoon sighs, the imagination can hear him
shriek; but if he shriek, it can neither rise above nor descend below this rep-
resentation, without seeing him in a condition which, as it will be more endur-
able, becomes less interesting. It either hears him merely moaning, or sees
him already dead», G. E. Lessing, Laokoon (1766), trans. by Edward Calvert
Beasley, Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, with an in-
troduction by T. Burbidge (London: Longman-Brown-Green-Longmans,
1853), pp. 16-7.
18 Pompeo, p. 107.
figuration but adherent to the concrete – will be offered, ex post,

by the “real” report: Andrea Pazienza, drawer and “autonomous”
like Pentothal-Pompeo, died due to a heroin overdose in his
location in the Montepulciano country on June 16th 1988.
PARISE AND THE ARTISTI:
THE FLASH OF DESCRIPTION1
Erica Mazzucato
The arrival of Goffredo Parise in Rome in 1964 coincides with

his acquaintance with Giosetta Fioroni and consequently with the
artists known as “Scuola di Piazza del Popolo”: here, the author
returns to the starting point of the figurative arts, which attracted
him when he was a teenager, allowing him to express his vocation
through the pictorial medium, before leaving the brush for the
pen.2 This turn left unforgettable marks in his style, characterized
by a strong visual element, especially when he depicts the bright
images of Sillabari.3
Today it is impossible to find an up-to-date edition of these
texts: this lack needs to be integrated through the revaluation
of these writings not only for their theoretical importance, thus
giving a chance to fully understand the production of this author,
but also because they can represent an example of an interesting
methodology of interpretation. The aim of these works in fact
1 Artisti was published in 1984 by Le parole gelate, and then again in 1994 by
Neri Pozza, ed. by Mario Quesada. This article is based on the collection
contained in Goffredo Parise, Opere (Milano: Mondadori, 1987), vol. II,
edited by Quesada too. All the following translations from Parise are mine.
2 We know of this crucial decision thanks to a statement contained in Goffredo
Parise, ‘Natura d’artista’, Eidos, 1 (1987), p. 5, that is the transcription of a
conversation between Parise and Enrico Parlato, broadcasted on the radio
station Radio3 on april 20th and the august 31st 1986, also quoted in Vito
Santoro, L’odore della vita. Studi su Goffredo Parise (Macerata: Quodlibet
Studio, 2009), p. 62.
3 The current translations from this edition distinguish Sillabario n. 1 from
Sillabario n. 2 (originally published in 1972 and 1982): Abecedary, trans. by
James Marcus (Evanston: The Marlboro Press/Northwestern University Press,
1998), and Solitudes, trans. by Isabel Quigley (Evaston: The Marlboro Press/
Northwestern University Press, 2006). Here we will consider only the Italian
edition contained in Parise, Opere.
is not the mere critical assessment: Parise admits that he does

not have the necessary authority, but he also specifies that he
is not interested in judgements, defining his relationship with
the pictorial arts as unjustified intrusions, which belong to
the universe of that “colpo di tosse montaliano”, the aesthetic
emotion tout court, which either does or does not arise, without
any apparent reason.
Obviously, these aspects do not exempt him from elaborating a
personal theoretical approach, expressed by subdued descriptions
through which sketches profiles of few artists and their works
of art, bound together by the hic et nunc lace, and preferred by
Parise for their particular way of walking, of moving, of being.
The ékphraseis contained in Artisti are so important because
they fit into the author’s aesthetics, which is entrenched in a
full and synesthetic sensoriality. Parise believes that any human
being should learn to reach it, falling into a sort of addiction, in a
«vice of recognizing things, which becomes a part of a moral in
code, because things can express the relationship between human
being and the physical world».4 Thanks to the sensory experience,
according to the writer, the instant of contemplation becomes
the suitable ground for the development of an interrogative
confrontation between subject and object.5 This relationship,
in the author’s words, is called “sentimental” and, with the
support of Merleau-Ponty, it should be better to say that an object
“perceives itself in me”, rather than “I perceive”, because we are
in the world, and we recognize ourselves in it.6 For this reason
the leitmotiv of “the feeling” continuously emerges in the texts,
4 According to Ricciarda Ricorda the expression «vizio di riconoscere le cose»

(habit of recognising things) is extracted from the article Vecchia Italia dagli
odori buoni – in Gli oggetti nella narrativa di Parise, in Goffredo Parise, ed.
by Ilaria Crotti (Firenze: Olschki, 1997), p. 217 – published in Corriere della
Sera, 9 February 1985, and contained in Opere, pp. 1583-87, where Parise
defines honor as the ability of giving importance to the sensorial gave towards
everything; a honor that, in turn, has got a flavour and a smell.
5 From an interview contained in Claudio Altarocca, Goffredo Parise (Firenze:
Nuova Italia, 1972), p. 7.
6 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard,
1945). Italian translation by Andrea Bonomi: Fenomenologia della percezione,
(Milano: Bompiani, 2003), p. 277.
E. Mazzucato - Parise and the Artisti 223
especially in Sillabari, when the union between the subject and

the environment becomes absolute; in these reviews (Artisti), “the
feeling” discloses the osmotic relationship not only between the
artists and their works, but also between them and the universe in
which they work. Thus, thanks to the “feeling of art”,7 Guttuso’s
Vucciria becomes not only a representation of Italy, but Italy itself;
the same happens with De Pisis, who is able to give the “feeling of
Paris and Venice” through some little dots of paint, usually pink.8
The oil paintings, exhibited at the De Martiis’ Tartaruga, through
their trompe l’oeil, produce «emphasis, nostalgia, ecstasy and the
rhetoric of painting», which «cheats the heart through the eye»,
thus creating the «feeling of Baroque».9
Therefore, it is now clearer how Parise chooses the artists of
his very personal anthology: he strongly believes in the power
of senses, or rather the “feeling of senses” of the customary and
synesthetic contemplation, through which it is possible to express
the world in the particular connection with ourselves. According
to Parise, this intelligent but also intuitive approach is the unique
mean he has to convey vitality through representation, and not
through “caption”:
There is a wide difference and another quality in this distinction. It

is the same distinction and the same difference in quality that happens
when two persons are lying on a Ionian beach, enjoying the breeze.
One of them sensually keeps quiet, releasing his sensuality through this
silence, the other instead feels the need to say “Such a nice wind” (O2,
p. 1210).
We will see how this particular visual approach, instead of

deforming things, perceives them for what they are, thus blending
with them.
Following a circular way, the same occurs when the spectator
watches the work of art: in the pictorial experience, the gaze
opens the doors of perception and, lingering for another second
7 Parise, Opere, p. 1197.

on the work of art, «becomes sharper, voracious and willing to be

possessed by the spell of art».10
«Don’t try to understand, you just have to watch» says
Guttuso’s Vucciria, using a prosopopoeia in which the primeval
desire of the spectator reemerges: in this process (well-described
by Spitzer) a sudden yearning attacks the spectator when he sees
the work of art, and invades him with the desire to drink at the
source of truth, before the ideological usurpation of the experts.11
This happens in the representation of Italy by Guttuso, where Italy
itself teaches Parise the importance of the simplification achieved
by his perceptual system: regaining a contemplative wonder is
necessary to be unfamiliar with the world and, thanks to this
unfamiliarity, to see its transcendence.12 The personification of
Italy guides the observer in its exploration: the result is a mimetic
ékphrasis, with an insistent enumeration of terms, held together
by asyndeton, which intensifies the belief that things are the only
“thing” that matters, beyond any useless ideology:
I have seen fish, lots of fresh fish: slices of swordfish, heads of

swordfish with the erect sword, and parsley in their mouth. A very
big and red rockfish, some striped tunas, shining gilt-head bream, sea
basses, cods, octopuses, squids, prawns. Then I have seen sun dried
apricots, white and black olives and stacked jars of jam. Then, some
men and women, twelve in total, almost buried in vegetables and fruits,
[…] a young lady in the foreground, facing backwards and hanging
some shopping bags, with hair, hips and bottom which are typical of the
whole Italian population from north to south [...].13
In this respect, it is important to highlight Parise’s natural

ability in showing a dynamic view through description: as in his
narratives, the frequent descriptions do not have the topical role

11 Leo Spitzer, The Ode on a Grecian Urn or Content vs. Metagrammar, in Essays
on English and American Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1962), p. 89.
Also see Cometa, La scrittura delle immagini, pp. 119-21 (here the author
identifies prosopopoeia as typical device of the synaesthetic integration, which
causes a constant transgression of the limits between reality and fiction).
12 Merleau-Ponty, p. 24.
of slowing down the rhythm of the prose, on the contrary they

show how gaze can be a primary source of action.14
The particular perspective that privileges the sensory
expression produces, as a direct consequence, the rise of the
sheer truth of things. This process is apparent in the description
of Cornell’s L’Egypte:15 a fine wooden box, covered on the inside
by an antique paper, filled by small glass bottles of mysterious
contents. Even in this small box, and quite surprisingly to Parise
(who in that moment is in New York), «an enormous trash can but
simultaneously marché aux puces of the European culture and
soul»,16 it is possible to find things reduced to their basic and
fundamental essence:
It was the case of that tiny and sublime knick-knack that was there,
in front of my eyes: L’Egypte. It was all in those twelve bottles filled
with a mysterious, and forever inexplicable, content. Egypt? L’Egypte.
Was it possible to lock the whole Egypt – Pharaoh’s bandages,
perfumes, ointments, lacquers, mummy’s irises and corneas, papyri
and palms, camels, including illustrated post cards with Pyramids and
Sphinx, atmospheric pressure and Nile – in six wooden bars smoothed
by an anonymous Yankee artisan (Dutch? Irish?) as much American as
European? Yes, it was possible.17
We saw how Vucciria’s details are meant to satisfy, equally

and completely, the observer’s senses, so as to create Italy. It is
the same for these fragments trapped in Cornell’s box, which give
life to Egypt. For this reason, tagging Guttuso’s art as “socialist
realism” is inappropriate: this particular kind of visual approach
highlights things merely in their thingness, without the necessity
of explanatory norms, and at the same time it shows their intrinsic
transience, which becomes their deepest beauty:
14 On ékphrasis as an incarnation of gaze dynamism and on the reductive theories

of description, see also Cometa, La scrittura delle immagini, pp. 110-43.
15 De facto, the complete title is L’Egypte de Mlle. Cléo de Mérode cours
élémentaire d’histoire naturelle.
«Were men dead or alive?»

«Alive but, due to that nature doomed to perish, and to that lightness
and that blood, I had the feeling that the destiny of man consists in
spoiling and dying, like the destiny of that hanging ox, of that rabbit, or
of that swordfish and all those beautiful, fresh, colourful and summery
vegetables, portrayed during the warmer time of the year. In other words
what I have seen, so beautiful and colourful and living, is inexorably
drifting towards death».18
This method is therefore necessary to understand the intrinsic

precariousness of things and it is the only approach that is able
to disclose a unique and total beauty to the spectator, at the
precise moment when he realizes that decline is forthcoming.
The secret of Gauguin, who lets the scraped painting express
«the beginning and the end of matter, as it happens for everything
and everyone»,19 as well as Guttuso’s ripe fruits and vegetables,
are examples of how art is able to express the ephemeral of life.
When gaze elicits the spectator to merge into the work of art, he
becomes aware of his own decadence, which is specular to the
decline of the illustrated objects. This deep consciousness of the
imminent twilight causes melancholia, but also an extreme thrill
given by the majesty of life, which shines in its precariousness:
When we, lucky observers of a “pictorial memory”, walking by a

Pompeian wall, lightened by the summer sun […], there, where some
plaster of the ancient painting persists, which is now faded into a sort
of a mere pictorial ghost, of a pale skeleton, at that point we feel a great
emotion: not only the emotion of the ephemerality of history, suggested
by the ephemerality of the pictorial matter which was spread on that
wall thousands of years ago, but also the ephemerality of the matter that
forms our body, and therefore, the ephemerality of all things.20
Intensity of contemplation, sudden revelation of truth and

beauty before its vanishing: all belong to a theoretic universe that
is peculiarly oriental; a philosophical and religious universe Parise

became acquainted with during his travel to Japan – which inspired

L’eleganza è frigida – but also after the biological mutation of his
body in 1965: obviously, the disease and the awareness of the
impending death shaped his gaze. In particular the instantaneous
illumination, reached after an adequate contemplation, seems to
leave a deep mark on Parise’s aesthetics: what the Japanese calls
satori (from satoru: “be aware of”) a sudden epiphany, a sort of
loss of consciousness, where «the suspension of senses» creates
a «complete, immediate and fleeting comprehension that belongs
to the whole Zen mindset».21
Satori, as well as all his preferred aesthetic categories, is
pursued in art, the quintessential eschatological nucleus: it
should not be surprising that his descriptions of works of art try
to convey as clearly as possible the brief and fleeting pleasure
reached through gaze, even if «that instant, that shadow, that
illusion, means everything».22
It is now clear why Parise is interested in these artists: Fioroni
and her way to touch reality through rapidi istinti; the visual flash
of the neurotic painters from Verona, who reminds him Mazzoli’s
and Chucchi’s rips, which are also seized in a short-lived instant.23
The aesthetic of satori perfectly corresponds to another
category, defined by Parise as “living”,24 the «purest and most
perfect art, the physical appearance in a specific moment, and
never again».25 We will see how “living” becomes crucial in
these reviews, given the premises that, in his opinion, the artist
and his work of art are never separated: unlike a writer, who
expresses himself indirectly, a painter is direct, because «he
looks at reality and lets the artistic expression flow directly
21 Parise, Opere, p. 1548. This is explained in Troppo occidentale per l’enigma

Giappone, where Parise criticizes Barthes’ Empire of Signs defining this
work excellent but paranoid and useless, since Japanese culture can be
understood only through an «almost infinite series of electroshock», which
is precisely satori.
23 Parise, Opere, pp. 1221-39.
24 English in the original.
25 Goffredo Parise, Lontano (Cava de’ Tirreni: Avavgliano, 2002), p. 33.
from his unconscious».26 This is exactly the Zen way to produce

art, where the artist is not “in search of”, but he finds himself
when he begins the quest.27 Parise does not cease to repeat that
painter and painting are not unrelated.28 When he is writing
about Ceroli and his particular wood-craft, Parise explains how
there is not any mediation between the creator and his material,
except for the instruments, which are merely extensions of the
artist’s hand, invented by humans to institute this mysterious
(almost mystic) relationship.
Such an artistic creation is endowed with ineffability: another
common feature with the Japanese aesthetic, whose categories
are highly resistant to defining classifications for they cannot be
understood through definitions but only through illuminations.
The shock caused by the artistic experience leads Parise to say
that he cannot or that he is not able to write about it accurately.
He often specifies that he is not a critic, but he lies when he
declares his failure in the conclusion of many of his texts: his
biggest talent lies in fact in his peculiar ability to investigate the
human sensitivity, watching it closely, in all its expressions. This
is a sort of empathy, arisen from careful contemplation, similar to
the pictorial experience: apropos of which Zanzotto talked about
«ethology (fantastic ethology)», thanks to which he «carries out
surveys on the human being, as he used to do with animals and,
above all, insects».29 This is an interest he shares with one of his
favorite authors, Nabokov, who, as it is known, was a notable
entomologist. Once Parise, questioned about his poetics, replied:
«carefully watching things of life and their details, and also
people’s physical details, in order to disclose, if possible (but with
friendship and tenderness, not with severity), their nature and
feelings».30 Electing the methodical study of the human being to a
26 Parise, Natura d’artista, p. 50.

27 From a letter of december 1st 1984, transcribed in Andrea Gialloreto, La
parola trasparente: Il “Sillabario” narrativo di Goffredo Parise (Roma:
Bulzoni, 2006), p. 145.
29 From Prefazione in Opere, pp. XVI-XVII.
30 Translated by the interview contained in Altarocca, Goffredo Parise, p. 11.
personal poetics makes Parise’s descriptions evolve to something

different from the mere live description of the work of art. We
have seen previously how gaze moves along the image, shaping
a perfect mimetic ékphrasis and showing how words can flow
parallel to the picture.31 Following Parise’s preferred approach to
human observation, we can move on to a realm whose features are
similar to the notional ékphrasis, using the definition Hollander
coined to designate the poetic representation of imaginary works
of art, also valid for works that existed once and are not available
anymore.32 When the focus moves from the creation to the creator
(strictly related), through an unchanged gaze, the object of interest
becomes the artist’s human figure, magnificent in its “living” and
as perishable as his material. Here, indeed, lies the originality of
these reviews: while, thanks to the technical reproducibility, it is
possible to find the artistic product and to recall it to mind (this is
why Parise is not sure about the loss of the aura), nobody tries to
capture the other side of the artistic process, the maker, in all his
movements and features.
When the imaginary interviewer asks Parise to talk about
Schifano and his works, he replies that they are the same thing:
«Mario Schifano “is” his paintings, so watch his paintings and
you’ll know Schifano». This belief will lead to a comparative
and applied anatomical approach, and the interviewer will have
to observe the representations while he listens to Parise talking
about the painter’s body, resting or moving:
Well, Schifano is a thirty years old man, with Mediterranean, or

even Arabic, features. When still, his body measures about one metre
and seventy centimetres, and weights forty-five kilograms. First of
all, if his body is seen from different perspectives, it expresses a
feline languor, harmless and astonished. Just like a little puma, whose
musculature and reflexes are unsuspected. I have said astonished, can
you hear me? Astonished is the word that is also related to the painting
that you are watching.33

32 Hollander, The Poetics of Ékphrasis, p. 209.
Moreover, it is interesting to note that in the making of this

particular kind of ékphrasis Parise can operate both on the
synchronic and on the diachronic level, or better, how he can
intertwine these two fields.
Concerning the first case, the “living” description seems
to fit perfectly in Steiner’s “pregnant moment”, meaning the
equivalent (in literature) of the pregnant moment in figurative
arts, able to seize the instant that implicates what came before
that moment and what follows it. According to this theory, the
verbal would aspire to the timeless eternity of the action that was
captured in the painting.34 If we read some descriptions of Artisti,
it is actually possible to “observe” how Parise is able to outline
perfectly this sublimation of the instant. The result of this style
of writing, based on visuality, is the creation of another work of
art, or rather a meta-picture, for example when Parise depicts De
Pisis while he is painting:
He was sitting on the gondola, wrapped in a pink shawl, I think,

covered by a little baize tippet where a roosted parrot stood (the little
tippet was necessary to protect the shawl from the parrot’s excrements).
He was wearing a blue gondolier-cap with a red pom-pom, and smoking
a clay pipe made in Chioggia. I was fourteen years old and he really
amazed me. People were passing by and someone was laughing, others
recognised him and spoke ill of him and of his homosexuality. But his
person astounded me: his face and his way of painting. He was really
sweated and he stopped painting just for few instants. He was continuously
staring at the canvas with a sort of erotic voracity, with half-closed eyes,
and never-ending movements of his hands and brushes, which were
jumping from the canvas to the palette with a very light and flying agility
which, I perfectly remember even if I don’t know why, made me think of
the greed and distraction of a pecking sparrow or of a thrush.35
The same illumination occurs in the description of Ontani:

instead of delineating the artist when he performs as a tableau
vivant, Parise focuses on his bizarre figure, on his plain existence,
34 Wendy Steiner, Pictures of Romance: Form Against Context in Painting and

Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 13.
on his body covered in multicoloured and bright fabrics, on his

eccentric garments, or on his strange house, full of magic and
disturbing objects. Here Parise’s goal, i.e. seizing the eternal
moment, becomes clear. At the end of the ékphrastic itinerary, the
author reveals: «I envy him for his ability to walk on this earth
with a lot of irony and agility, wearing his shoes made of boa
skin, with enormous soles. I am not talking about the irony of
reality, but about the metaphysical one, which is far more subtle
and, with the best intentions, eternal».36
The creation of a verbal painting is therefore possible thanks
to the crystalisation of the pregnant moment, which concerns
the artist himself, on the paper; a moment that eventually will
be expanded, thus inspiring the narrative. The interweaving of
the synchronic and diachronic is possible when ékphrasis frees
its traditional narrative impulse: according to Heffernan, this
prerogative is limited to figurative arts.37
We have already seen how “living” description develops into
the creation of a new work of art: however, it is not just a way of
painting a new picture through language, but a process aimed to
exploit the narrativeness of the image for the creation of a new
narrative, unrelated to the starting ékphrasis.
This happens in Sillabari when Parise, with the entomologist’s
curiosity, observes his characters. For example, he dedicates the
tale Eleganza to Schifano, wistfully applying the “anatomy” to
the artist, who is not young anymore, and precisely remembering
his ill-tempered features and his fitful movements.
The overflow of visuality becomes clearer in Fioroni’s ékphrastic
development, starting from her recognizable presence in the tale
Eleganza: the nameless protagonist bows to «pick up a little stone,
a plume, a twig» that other people can’t see.38 In Artisti instead she
picks up some leaves, some grass, a four-leaf clover, a nightingale’s
feather:39 a continuum from visuality to written word that offers a
clear evidence of the fundamentals of Parise’s art.

37 Heffernan, Ékphrasis and Representation, p. 302.
PICTORIAL WRITING: INTERMEDIALITY
AND ÉKPHRASIS IN L’ŒUVRE
BY ÉMILE ZOLA
Valentina Mignano
Published in 1886, L’Œuvre by Émile Zola is a novel in which

the text and pictorial images enter into a kind of cryptic game of
narrative, aesthetic and meta-textual cross-referencing, building
up a literary tableau of the cultural scene in Paris at the time of
the Second French Empire. Zola’s text is strewn with pictorial
images and in this paper I shall be analyzing the text starting
from the relationship these pictorial images have with the relative
ékphrastic forms. The general idea underlying this is to sketch an
outline of the mutual links between literature and the figurative
arts, and in particular the intermediality that merges image and
text in Zola’s work, given that «in the intermedial game one is not
only wagering on artistic creativity, but on the very foundations
of culture itself».1
Plein air
I shall go straight to the heart of the matter by beginning with

one of the fundamental paintings in the work. Of all the canvases
introduced in the novel only two are described more than once
and are subsequently interlinked and developed within the
advancement of the plot. The first large canvas by Claude Lantier
that Zola shows us is entitled Plein air:

It measured about sixteen feet by ten, and was entirely painted

over, though little of the work had gone beyond the roughing-out. This
roughing-out, hastly dashed off, was superb in its violence and ardent
vitality of colour. A flood of sunlight streamed into a forest clearing,
with thick walls of verdure; to the left, stretched a dark glade with a
small luminous speck in the far distance. On the grass, amidst all the
summer vegetation, lay a nude woman with one arm supporting her
head, and though her eyes were closed she smiled amidst the golden
shower that fell around her.2
Zola’s “faithful painting” represents a condensation of several

paintings; because of its setting, as well as its size and the light,
this canvas intimates to the reader several of the actual features of
Déjeuner sur l’herbe; as well as sharing with Manet’s painting,
which so scandalized the general public at the Salon des Refusés
in 1863, a striking and improvident, scornful tone, the canvas
by Zola’s artist possesses the same sylvan setting and the same
chromatic features. If we look closely at the woman lying naked in
the grass, the figure is much more similar to Manet’s Olympia than
the woman in the foreground of Déjeuner. Further interpretations
suggest that Lantier’s canvas resembles more closely La Lutte
de l’amour by Paul Cézanne, with the additional male figure in
civilian clothes.3 From this latter painter Plein air takes, above
all, several of the thematic features of both Nouvelle Olympia and
Enlèvement.4 This initial overview gives us an idea of how the
novel is permeated with allusions to the “logic of recognition”;
2 Émile Zola, L’Œuvre (Paris: Charpentier, 1886), trans. by Ernest A. Vizetely,

His Masterpiece (London: Chatto & Windus, 1902), p. 22.
3 Patrick Brady, ‘La Peinture de Claude Lantier. Contribution à l’étude de Zola,
critique d’art’, Revue des Sciences Humaines, 101 (1961), 89-101. See also
John Rewald, Cezanne et Zola (Paris: Sedrowski, 1936).
4 We must note that there are some differences in the number and positions of
characters: in Manet’s real picture we find two men talking together with the
woman in the foreground and one only girl in the background, in Zola’s literary
picture there is a only male figure close to the woman in the foreground and two
female characters fighting farther: exactly what we can find in La Lutte de
l’amour by Cézanne. On the debate about visual sources of Plein Air you can see
P. Brady, L’Œuvre de Émile Zola. Roman sur les Arts, manifeste, autobiographie,
roman a clef (Genève: Libraire Droz, 1967); Robert J. Niess, ‘Another view of
Zola’s L’Œuvre’, The Romanic Review, 4, XXXIX (1948), 282-300.
V. Mignano - Pictorial Writing 235
the paintings described in the Oeuvre are, to an extent, inspired by

real canvases, but none of the images described in the novel are
completely faithful to actual existing representations; as soon as
we think we know which painting the author has in mind, we are
immediately thrown into confusion by further details alluding to
other paintings. One might say that the pictorial images described
here stand halfway between the mimetic level and the notional
in Hollander’s definition;5 residing precisely in this liminal zone,
the verbal images in Zola’s novel create a sort of “uncertainty”
that «renders ékphrasis attractive as a device that relativizes
the predominance of the verbal over the visual, and vice versa,
insisting on the ontological ambiguity of art»,6 which, moreover,
often makes use of a dizzying range of details drawn from various
images, resulting in “condensations” that are simultaneously
faithful and visual. To render the experience more complex, or, in
other words, to enhance the experience of decoding on the part of
the reader, Zola effects an actual fusion of the works by Manet and
Cézanne, which are stimulated by the ékphrastic game to re-evoke
the details of his own experience of pictorial vision. The fact that
Zola decides to include in a single painting details and references
from other paintings leads us to conclude that we are in the
presence of a “textual metapicture”,7 which synthesizes, disguises
and assembles the work of an artist in a new representational
form; to quote Umberto Eco: «for the hypotyposis to be realized,
the text must induce the reader to collaborate with references to
personal visual experiences»8 of the addressee; this is the position
that the novelist assumes the moment he combines in the same
ékphrasis (exactly halfway between the mimetic and notional) the
heterogeneous elements of a complex visual discourse. Lantier’s
painting embraces multiple levels, something which is made
5 John Hollander, The Gaze’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art
(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995).
7 William J. T. Mitchell, Four Fundamental Concepts of Image Science, in
Visual Literacy, ed. by James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2008).
8 Umberto Eco, ‘Les sémaphores sous la pluie I e II’, Golem. L’indispensabile,
http://www.docsity.com/it/umberto_eco_les_sémaphores_sous_la_
pluie/501484/ (30.10.15).
feasible mainly through the collaboration of the reader, who is

literally caught up in the textual mise en abyme of the large canvas;
in this case the painting is a device for highlighting the writer’s
skill in bringing to life a fresh and unprecedented synthesis of a
whole range of images already familiar to the reader.
The relationship between textual-pictorial depiction and the
observer is further intensified by the dynamic features in Plein
air, by the relationship between background and subject; in fact,
another striking aspect in this first hypotyposis is the vitality of
certain pictorial shapes and the capacity that some of these possess
to actually leap off the canvas; this is somehow echoed by certain
shapes on the canvas retracting into the distance along the dark
road. From the strictly medial point of view this ékphrasis provides
the literary image with a three-dimensionality very similar to that
deriving from the artistic technique of trompe-l’oeil. Here, in fact,
the reader/observer finds himself in what is almost a proxemics
relationship with the description; he is encouraged to interact with
it, to take a step back when certain features “emerge”, and then to
virtually penetrate into the substance of the painting in the instant
that his gaze is invited to follow «the dark road that fades into the
distance». In this ékphrastic game it can be seen how the observer/
reader of the description is lured into the work; he is urged to
concentrate his attention on the shapes projecting from the canvas
in order to then penetrate the depths, to cross the threshold of
depiction and wander around in fictional space. It seems clear that
the novel has as its theme the relationship between the arts of space
and the arts of time and is aiming to break down the boundaries that
have been traditionally defined by Lessing: here the narration avails
itself of ékphrastic projection and incarnates the “typical” spatiality
of painting; in fact ékphrasis allows us to move about inside the
picture frame of the actual canvas by dynamizing our gaze, which
is transformed from extradiegetic to intradiegetic. It should also
be noted how, in Zola, the ékphrastic process is “outbound”; the
features of the painting on many occasions emerge “from”9 this.
9 Several literary devices in Zola’s novel let something arise “from” paintings
“to” characters («se dégageaient de l’ébauche», Zola, L’Œuvre, p. 32; «et la
In the whole first part of the novel, at least, the descriptions of

pictorial works are allotted mostly to the narrator rather than to
dialogues between the characters; moreover these descriptions are
often correlated to moments of manifest and explicit silence on the
part of the subjects of the narration, who are unspeaking observers
of the kaleidoscope of canvases described by the author. In this
way Zola overlays our purely extradiegetic scrutiny with that of the
characters10 within the narrative structure; as soon as silence descends
a particular type of contemplative perception of the pictorial images
is set in motion in these characters, as if the long gaze into the depths
of the canvases has entered an inversely proportional relationship
with the dimension of silence. Far from constituting a narrative
digression ékphrasis in these cases enhances the novel’s architecture,
constituting visual appendices in which the characters, together with
the reader, become silent and motionless observers of the images
«allowing themselves to be included in a common “vision”».11
The novel takes us through the various phases of painting; in
the artists’ studio we are present during the painting’s birth-pangs
and then we observe the work-in-progress, the painter changing
his mind, the criticism and encouragement from friends, and
finally the reaction of the general public and the critics. In the
part of the work with which we are dealing, for example, the
author explains to us how the first draft of Plein air had been
thrown together unpredictably, in one go, in a “dynamizing of
the creative process” that helps us to understand the enthusiasm
of which Claude Lantier is capable when he is getting down
to starting a new work. On the same theme Zola lingers over
the reasons for some of the protagonist’s pictorial choices: the
gentleman in a velvet jacket in the canvas is, in this case, the
solution to a need for a dark juxtaposition.12
tache sombre du dos s’enlevait avec tant de vigueur», Zola, L’Œuvre, p. 51).
10 Zola, L’Œuvre, p. 51: «Un long silence se fit, tous deux regardaient,
immobiles», p. 32; «Puis, tous deux regardèrent, de nouveau muets», p. 51;
«Il s’interrompit, devant le silence du peintre, qui s’était retourné vers sa
toile», p. 60.
11 Cometa, Il fantasma delle immagini, in Filostrato, Immagini, ed. by Andrea L.
Carbone (Palermo: Duepunti Edizioni, 2009), p. 130.
12 Ima N. Ebin, “Manet and Zola”, Gazette de beaux-arts, 27 (1945), 357-58.
After the initial description of Plein air, Zola adds a second one
in which the dynamizing and the three-dimensional scansion of
the painting direct one’s thoughts, in a manner that is occasionally
Gestaltic, towards the perceptive experience of figures wafting
across the surface of a screen:
The gentleman in the velveteen jacket was entirely roughed in. His
hand, more advenced than the rest, furnished a pretty fresh patch of flesh
colour amid the grass, and the dark coat stood out so vigorously that the
little silhouettes in the background, the two little women wrestling in the
sunlight, seemed to have reteared further into the luminous quivering of
the glade. The principal figure, the recumbent women, as yet scarcely more
than outlined, floated about like some aerial creature seen in dreams.13
One might note in this second description of Plein air

the synaesthetic involvement associating our sight with the
“freshness” that the tones of the canvas manage to assume;
moreover, this clever use of the ékphrastic technique means that
once again the limits of the canvas reach out towards the reader/
observer. Thus this leads us (from Filostrato to Diderot) “inside”
the spatial scansion of the canvas, which the eye, as Filostrato
teaches us, has to “penetrate”,14 so as to learn «to distinguish the
various planes of the painting whilst the observer passes across
them with his own body».15 In the descriptions of Plein air the
figures stand out from the background and seem to move about in
the space of the representation. Zola’s enthusiasm for the painter
Manet, at least initially,16 is almost total, mainly because of the
13 Zola, His Masterpiece, p. 37, emphasis added.

14 Filostrato, p. 26.
16 At any rate in the sixties Zola and Manet lived a strong and mutual intellectual
consideration. It is a well-known the fact that the novelist stood up for the
painter’s work from official critics of that age. But the situation will be quite
different in 1880, when the writer «voiced negative opinions concerning the
impressionists whose illogical, incomplete and powerless art did not find an
expression in a single masterpiece» (Ebin, Manet and Zola, pp. 372-73) no
artist belonging to this group did manage to realize in a striking way what in
Zola’s mind was the en plein air way of painting: a kind of painting strictly
close to real life (realist), that had to correspond visually to his naturalistic
way of writing.
painter’s skill in rendering so simply the reality of all things, and

in this new painting:
every object takes its place, Olympia’s head stands out in a “sharp
relief” against the background, the bouquet becomes a wonder of bril-
liance and freshness (…) the painter has proceeded by luminous mass-
es, by large stretches of light, like nature herself, and his work gains the
slightly rough and austere aspect of nature.17
In this explicit ékphrasis of Manet’s work the link between

Plein air and Manet’s nude is clear; this is principally because
the painting in question imitates the reality of all things, in the
same fashion as literature of a naturalistic bent. In this novel it is
sufficient to distance oneself appropriately from the threshold of
the representation in order to penetrate the vitality of its features:
«He ceased speaking and drew back a few steps to judge of the
effect of his picture (…) and then resuming (…) “We, perhaps,
want the sun, the open air, a clear, youthful real light”».18 Of
course, the perceptive effect sought by Lantier had to make the
painted figures seem to be “on the point” of coming to life and
starting to move about; this is why ékphrasis in this case «recounts
an episode that addresses our imagination, as if it were happening
before our very eyes».19
Salon des Refusés
Salon des Refusés described in the novel coincides with the

scene in which Claude, in presenting Plein air, encounters
ruinous failure for the first time. In this narrative section we
encounter a series of ékphrasis in which few essential features of
the paintings at the exhibition are described, what here emerges
17 Zola, Édouard Manet, étude biographique et critique (Paris: Charpentier et

Fasquelle, 1893), p. 358, emphasis added.
is a chaotic multitude of bad pictures,20 so Emilie Sitzia can say

that «L’Œuvre is the child of aesthetics’ crisis of XIX century».21
Zola’s Salon is made of a literary proliferation of images which
seems to forecast the representation’s crisis of twentieth century
with its flood of visual images, a crisis that Zola also recognizes
in Mes Haines when he quotes Hyppolite Taine: «We are living
in full anarchy, and, in my opinion, this anarchy is an odd and
interesting show».22
According to Liliane Louvel, it is fundamental to study the
relationship between the frequency with which the image
described is encountered in the text and the actual temporality of
the narration, in order to examine the inclusion of paintings «as
they interact with their textual manifestation».23 With regard to
Salon des Refusés, the writer begins with descriptions of several
canvases initially encountered at a certain distance from each
other in the narrative; then the frequency is gradually increased
and becomes relentless until finally a series of “visual events” is
listed, ending up in «a multiplicity of events that, by filling up the
space, evoke the space that they are invading».24 Above all, when
the rhythm of the paintings being described becomes frenetic,
the novel throws up several very synthetic sketches of paintings
juxtaposed with each other:
20 Even in the description of the last Salon in which Claude presents a picture,
Zola emphasizes a pictorial chaos: «Ah! Those three thousand pictures!
Placed one after the other alongside the walls of all the galleries, including the
outer one, deposited also even on the floors, (…) they were like an inundation,
a deluge, which rose up, streamed over the whole Palais de l’Industrie, and
submerged it beneath the murky flow of all the mediocrity and madness to be
found in the river of Art» (His Masterpiece, p. 262).
21 Emilie Sitzia, ‘De Manet à Moureau: ’évolution artistique des tableaux de
Claude Lantier dans L’Œuvre’, Revue-Textimage, 3 (2011), p. 19.
22 Zola, M. H. Taine artiste, in Id. Mes haines: Causeries littéraires et artistiques
(Paris: G. Charpentier et E. Fasquelle, 1893), p. 215.
23 Liliane Louvel, L’Oeil du texte: Texte et image dans la Littérature de langue
anglaise (Toulouse: PUM, 1999), and Texte/Images: Images á lire, textes á voir
(Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2002); trans. by Laurent Petit,
Poetics of the Iconotext, ed. by Karen Jacobs (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), p. 62.
24 Eco, Les sémaphores sous la pluie.
An abomination of Chaîne’s, a Christ pardoning the Woman Taken in

Adultery, made them pause; (…) But close by they admired a very fine
study of a woman, seen from behind, with her head turned sideways.
The whole show was a mixture of the best and the worst, all the styles
were mingled together, the drivellers of the historical school elbowed
the young lunatics of realism, (…) A dead Jezabel, that seemed to have
rotted in the cellars of the School of Arts, was exhibited near a Lady in
white, the very curious conception of a future great artist; then a huge
shepherd looking at the sea.25
Given the ékphrastic fragmentation of the rhythm of the

narrative, it might be suggested that these descriptions of the
Salon are mimicking in a structural homology, the pictorial genre
of the cabinet d’amateur, in which the juxtaposition of a series of
visual elements gives rise to excessive stimulation of our visual
experience. In this textual cabinet we do however note a particular
descriptive style: the basic features of the paintings are revealed
very swiftly, somehow mimicking the staccato brushstrokes of
impressionist painting. In the words of Robert Niess, with regard
to the descriptions of paintings appearing in the novel: «not
many are described in detail and rarely does Zola go beyond a
short indication of subject and a line or two about technique or
light effect».26 Might we therefore find in these aspects traces
of a form of impressionistic writing? After all, how could Zola
have gone into minute detail with regard to the paintings strewn
throughout the novel, if, in impressionism, the details are absent
by definition? We might note a form of structural homology
between the paintings and the way in which they are described:
incomplete, sketched, imprecise, through fleeting visual
impressions. Niess continues: «L’Oeuvre was clearly intended to
exemplify in prose the practice of the Impressionist school, (…)
Light effects are everywhere, and they are Impressionist light
25 Zola, His Masterpiece, p. 114, emphasis added: here Zola goes on with this
random accumulation of pictures: «nothing execrable was wanting, neither
military scenes full of little leaden soldiers, nor was antiquity, nor the middle
ages, smeared, as it were, with bitumes».
26 Niess, ‘Another view of Zola’s L’Œuvre’, p. 244.
effects».27 Even when Plein air is pilloried by a general public

incapable of understanding the explosive potentialities, Claude
looks on in dejection, but still firmly convinced of the originality
of his painting: «but on the other hand what a pretty general tone,
what a play of light he had thrown into it, a silvery gray light,
fine and diffuse, brightened by all the dancing sunbeams of the
open air. (…) and the sun came in and the walls smiled under that
invasion of springtide. The light note of his picture, the bluish
tinge that people had been railing at, flashed out among the other
painting also».28
However, we clearly cannot speak of an impressionistic style
tout-court in the novel and the writings of Zola the naturalist,
«whose sense of method and desire for “finish” made him
rebel at the very idea that a painting could be anything like an
impression»;29 what we can say is that in this section the novel
certainly demonstrates an “ékphrastic impressionism”, and this is
especially evident in the structural homologies that the naturalist
novelist’s writing establishes with an impressionistic style in
the frames of the precisely described paintings. Zola applies a
swift narrative “touch” in this novel and his “pictorial” writing:
«suits its subject well: he uses a vocabulary rich in colour and
suggestions of light, and applies successive layers of paint in
the impressionist manner, with the extensive use of disjointed
phrases».30 Claude occasionally produces varying images of the
same scenery captured at different times of day and in different
periods of the year, obtaining essential visual sensations: «the
idea of capturing the passing of time – the seasons and the hours
– in one’s own visual expression, is essential to the impressionist
conception of scenery».31 Zola manages to «link images with
words by faithfully replicating the speed and rhythm of the
images that he evokes, whilst integrating time and space».32

28 Zola, His Masterpiece, p. 120.
30 Sitzia, ‘De Manet à Moureau’, p. 14.
31 ‘De Manet à Moureau’, p. 14.
32 ‘De Manet à Moureau’, p. 14. Also see Louvel, Texte Image.
La Cité de Paris
The last painting by Claude Lantier described in the novel, in

the same way as Plein Air, is a complex collage of other paintings
«intermingled with descriptions of authentic paintings»,33 and is
a landscape of the Cité of Paris, which had one day enchanted
Claude Lantier so utterly, a magical vision, bursting with life, and
a variety of layers, details and hues: such an emblematic scene of
modernity as to captivate his vision for ever.
The heart of Paris, had taken full possession of him. (…) There
were patches of vivid light, and of clearly defined shadow; there was
a brightness in the precision of each detail, a transparency in the air,
which throbbed with gladness. And the river life, the turmoil of the
quays, all the people, streaming along the streets, rolling over the
bridges, arriving from every side of that huge cauldron, Paris, steamed
there in visible billows, with a quiver that was apparent in the sunlight.34
In these lines Zola uses terminology closely linked to the

dynamics of movement, reproducing the feverish energy of city
life bursting out before Claude’s eyes in the very instant that he
vainly decided to depict it.
Claude’s vision, had it been fixed in that precise moment,
would have enabled him to realize his dream of «a painting
capable of showing life», a wish he had clearly expressed when,
years before, talking to his friend Sandoz, a writer with many
of the characteristics of Zola himself, he had declared his need
to be able to:
see and paint everything. (…) Life such as it runs about the streets,
the life of the rich and the poor, in the market places, on the race-
courses, on the boulevards (…) and every trade being plied, and every
passion portrayed in full daylight.35
33 Louvel, Poetics of the Iconotext, p. 62.

34 Zola, His Masterpiece, pp. 200-01, emphasis added.
35 Zola, His Masterpiece, pp. 36-37.
In its final painting the artist includes several features that

were to scandalize more than a few of his long-time friends:
a naked woman on the prow of a boat, her skin burnished like
precious metal, the area where her belly should be depicted
with flowers; these clearly symbolist features are far removed
from all his previous production, and the descriptions of this
unfinished picture in Zola’s writing are quite different from the
Claude’s impressionist period ones: here the novelist «denies
naturalist aesthetisc and submerges his writing in a world made
of artificiality and decadence».36 Christine, the protagonist’s
long-time partner, takes charge of defining the new painting in a
jealousy outbrust:
And you love what? A nothing, a mere semblance, a little dust, some
colour spread upon a canvas! But once more, look at her, look at your
woman up yonder! See what a monster you have made of her in your
madness! Are there any women like that? Have any woman golden
limbs, and flowers on their bodies? Wake up, open your eyes, return to
life again.37
In this violent words Zola is maintaining his complete adhesion

to the realistic aesthetic. Is not a chance that Claude committed
suicide whilst standing before the unfinished painting of the
“heart of Paris”, an extreme act which drove him to participate
in his own failure; perhaps this was the only way Lantier had
of irreversibly exalting his obsession, of conjoining with his
inability to depict “the vision” that had struck him one afternoon
when beholding “the heart” of Paris. In fact, Claude’s failure lay
in his inability to vanquish what it was that really captivated him,
the city of Paris in its urban fabric and from all its perspectives,
and not managing to do it with the instruments he possessed.
This aspect of the novel is symptomatic of what, according
to Louvel:
36 Sitzia, ‘De Manet à Moureau’, p. 17.

often constitutes the artist’s quest: to get close to the thing, to

represent it, while at the same time feeling that it is ineluctably slipping
away. Conversely, this is also what explains the feeling of loss in front
of the object that Georges Didi-Huberman condenses in the phrase: “It
is there (…) and yet, it is lost”.38
The tragedy occurs because of his failure to capture the

appearance that the Ile de la Cité had assumed on that particular
afternoon. After that vision he returns to the same spot many
times in an attempt to unearth the original vision, but he is
hampered by his total inability to depict his visual obsession; this
is because the vision that he would like to capture is dwarfed
by all those times in which that scene subsequently reveals
itself to him, always in the same way and yet always slightly
different. This experience of loss and an unceasing search for the
instant characterizes the whole final part of the novel and echoes
Baudelaire’s evocative declaration to his transient “Passer-by”;
it had in some way already been pre-announced in the initial
part of the narrative, when, in a dialogue between two friends
of Claude’s «a landscape, “dwindling away” in the distance»
is described, «a bit of melancholy road (…) and then a woman
passes along, scarcely a silhouette; on she goes and you never
meet her again, no, never more again».39 In other words we are
being shown what destiny has in store for the painter, who, like
Baudelaire, will find himself in the condition of experiencing the
loss of something transitory that will become a “fleeting” vision.
Christine is portrayed in the initial stages of their relationship
as a «fleeting, regretted vision, a charming silhouette which had
melted away in space, and would never be seen again»;40 but in
the final painting, the artist’s objects of desire, the woman and
the city, coincide and Claude finds himself in the impossible
situation of wanting to return, via pictorial representation, to the
moment that “has been”. Rather than a pictorial vision, therefore,
Zola is thematizing the need for a vision that is principally
38 Louvel, Poetics of the Iconotext, p. 20.

40 Zola, His Masterpiece, p. 80.
photographic, with Claude vainly trying to reproduce the instant

that so bewitched him. In this sense, the surface of the canvas,
along with the whole range of paints and brushes that invariably
accompany him in his work, is revealed to be an instrument that
is ontologically inadequate for assuaging his creative obsession.
We are faced by the painter’s ontological shortcomings, with
the “heart of Paris” scenarios, variously capable of catalyzing
his gaze, revealing themselves under conditions of continually
changing light, colour and mood; these copious and evanescent
visions overlap with each other kaleidoscopically, clogging up
his mental and visual experience. His frenzied approach to this
work renders the artist incapable of depicting in definitive fashion
something that had once represented an utterly ecstatic vision. In
the final part of the novel Ile de la cité is described repeatedly
as if to mirror Claude’s obsession as he goes off time after time,
in search of that vista and the exaltation that it had originally
aroused in him; yet he always finds altered situations, all equally
captivating and all capable of over-exciting his, by now ailing,
creativity.41 This aim of reproducing on canvas the variety of
colours, shapes, movements and tones that the ile manages to
flaunt is not only spectacularly difficult, it is impossible. The
outcome is a mass of paint applied and scraped off, layer over
further layer of paint on the canvas, which turns into an object
brutalized by sudden hysterical bursts vented violently on its
surface; the canvas support is broken up, torn into shreds, only to
be immediately and remorsefully sewn together again.
On reflection, it is the logic of the still photo that prevails here;
Claude is thoroughly incapable of painting “his” landscape using
the artist’s “box of tools”. In its final part the novel thematizes
the «modifications that scopic regimes are gradually undergoing
in relation to the development of visual technology».42 The
development of this topic hinges on the fact that, in order to
reproduce this variety, it might have proved more appropriate
41 Zola, His Masterpiece, p. 219: Claude is here compulsively in need to see that
place: «He beheld it also at noon (…) He beheld it, moreover, beneath the
setting sun».
to utilize a technique capable of rendering diachronically the

passing of the days and hours, with the chromatic variety that
characterizes every instant in a place of such dazzling sunsets;
Zola also suggests the need for a «filmic vision, where one does
not so much describe what one is seeing, something fixed in time
once and for all (like the Apollo of the Belvedere or the Venus
of Milo), but a dreamlike sequence, where things are in a state
of continual transformation».43 The painter is obsessed with a
place that has captivated his soul, but it is impossible to assuage
his passionate needs because painting a place means subduing it
and annulling its volatility, thus denying it its “true” nature. To a
certain extent His Masterpiece is a novel recounting the failure
of pictorial representation. In this character’s physical struggle
against the limitations of the canvas, Zola is describing a hero
who is both titanic and impotent: the “painter of modern life” who
finds himself existing at a very delicate moment of our cultural
history, a phase in which, in European life, there is an upsurge of
new media full of potential and yet to be explored. In these early
stages, for example, photographic technique is starting to render
superfluous (almost ingenuous) the challenge that painting has
set itself in tackling reality. It is for these reasons that the novel,
with its crisis of classical depiction, carves its niche in the literary
tradition; and yet it does so in such a way as to represent a shrewd
compendium of the aesthetic conscience of the time, highlighting
contradictions, anxieties, passions and failures of an artistic age
that continues to cast its shadow on the present day.
43 Eco, Les sémaphores sous la pluie.

SEMANTICS OF THE PAINTED IMAGE
IN HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL’S
TOD DES TIZIAN
Maurizio Pirro
In Tod des Tizian (1892), the second of the verse plays that
form the basis of the precocious literary output of Hugo von
Hofmannsthal, the painted image and its verbal evocation carry
out a rather relevant function of poetics. The supremacy of the
visual senses in the characters’ perceptive activity is already
explicit from the introductory words spoken by the page, who
illustrates his own state of aesthetic hypersensitivity by placing
it in relation to the suggestion conjured up by «alte Bilder / Mit
schönen Wappen, klingenden Devisen, / Bei denen mir so viel
Gedanken kommen / Und eine Trunkenheit von fremden Dingen,
/ Daß mir zuweilen ist, als müßt ich weinen…».1 At the centre
of this brief drama there is a climate of feverish expectancy,
generated in Titian’s disciples by the news that the master, now
approaching death, has with enthusiastic determination set to
work on a last painting; the subject is unknown and it can only
be confusedly reconstructed through the testimony of the girls
who had been summoned as models. Although the subject and
the details of the work remain obscure, this painting still has the
effect of representing from a new perspective (and, therefore, in a
certain sense, invalidating) all Titian’s previous production. Struck
by a moment of enlightenment about the unity of all living things,
Titian decides to revoke all his main works. The canvases that are
1 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Der Tod des Tizian, in Gesammelte Werke in zehn
Einzelbänden, ed. by Bernd Schoeller (Frankfurt am Main: Fisher, 1979), vol.
I: Gedichte – Dramen I. 1891-1898, p. 247. For an analysis of the prologue,
see Sandro Zanetti, ‘Lyrisch aus der Kulisse der Historie treten. Vergangen-
heit und Vergänglichkeit in Hofmannsthals Der Tod des Tizian’, Hofmannst-
hal-Jahrbuch, 20 (2012), 141-160.
then carried off to the pupils’ circle (most likely Baccanale degli
Andrii and Venere di Urbino) are in fact stigmatized as products
of a formal culture lacking, in its superficial perfection, the vital
spirit aroused by grasping the basic principles of being.
It is clear that we are here dealing with a theme deeply rooted
in the aesthetic program of the young Hofmannsthal, in the hope
of justifying the exercise of art through a spiritual bedrock that
might recover the function of praxis without conforming with
its fortuitous character, but by revealing its secret and non-
perishable substance. The construction of totality is an issue
that is repeatedly raised in his essays from the 1890s, in which
Hofmannsthal denotes a sort of half-way term between the
extremes of a pure and simple formalism (a long way from the
reality of life) and of the phenomenology of existence applied
to the mere probing of appearance and, as such, lacking any
possible principle of necessity. In fact, in writing about Stefan
George’s Bücher, dated 1896, the merits of the work reviewed
are identified in its dissociation from a typical bad habit of the
«schlechte Bücher unserer Zeit», in other words the uncritical
and indirect adhesion to a fortuitous cause: «eine lächerliche
korybantenhafte Hingabe an das Vorderste, Augenblickliche hat
sie diktiert. Zuchtlosigkeit ist ihr Antrieb, freudlose Anmaßung
ihr merkwürdiges Kennzeichen».2 Remaining faithful to the
inflexible measure of impersonality typical of his own poetics,
George succeeded in his objective of conquering life without
negating it, whilst revealing its innermost unity: «dem Leben
überlegen zu bleiben, den tiefsten Besitz nicht preiszugeben,
mehr zu sein als die Erscheinungen».3
Moreover, in Hofmannsthal, this impulse towards a form
supported by a sort of reciprocal empowerment of life and
art takes on an eminently aesthetic configuration in which
it ends up rediscovering the specific duty of the aesthetic
individual. Especially in the context of the great processes of
2 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gedichte von Stefan George, in Gesammelte Werke

in zehn Einzelbänden, vol. viii: Reden und Aufsätze I. 1891-1913, p. 215.
3 Gedichte von Stefan George, p. 218.
M. Pirro - Semantics of the Painted Image 251
modernization that involved European society between the

19th and 20th centuries, the artist’s formative potential could
only take concrete form in the reunification of that which tends
to separate itself irreversibly: Man and his style (according to
the expression employed by Hofmannsthal himself in his essay
on Maurice Barrès).4 In other words, Man and a higher-level
form that contains his entire existence and reveals his greater
determination, without, however, suppressing the material details.
Hence the controversy with regard to the model of existence of
the aesthete, who rejects life, perceiving it as abandoned to chaos
and disorder, and is incapable of replacing it with any other form
because he exalts life as an object of mere idolatry, as a pure
and simple instrument of defense from the pitfalls of life. This
theme is widely documented in all Hofmannsthal’s works, from
the description of Claudio’s sentimental desert in Tor und der
Tod (1893) to the judgments regarding Gabriele D’Annunzio in
the three essays, between 1893 and 1895, dedicated to the Italian
writer; this theme also very strongly influences Tod des Tizian,
where Titian’s disciples seem to lapse into a condition of sterile
and paralyzing dilettantism.
It is precisely the search for a footing outside the formal
structure of the work of art that propels Hofmannsthal in the
direction of a medial paradigm that is different from the verbal
one. The pull towards general semantics of the aesthetic state,
which Hofmannsthal attempts to observe with formulations of
poetics based not on techniques of fictional coding, but on praxis
of an existential character (e.g. “pre-existence”, but also the
4 «Uns pflegt Glaube und Bildung, die den Glauben ersetzt, gleichmäßig zu
fehlen. Ein Mittelpunkt fehlt, es fehlt die Form, der Stil. Das Leben ist uns ein
Gewirre zusammenhangloser Erscheinungen; froh, eine tote Berufspflicht zu
erfüllen, fragt keiner weiter. Erstarrte Formeln stehen bereit, durchs ganze
Leben trägt uns der Strom des Überlieferten. Zufall nährt uns, Zufall lehrt uns;
dankbar genießen wir, was Zufall bietet, entbehren klaglos, was Zufall entz-
ieht. Wir denken die bequemen Gedanken der andern und fühlens nicht, daß
unser bestes Selbst allmählich abstirbt. Wir leben ein totes Leben. […] Diesen
Zustand nannten die heiligen Väter das Leben ohne Gnade, ein dürres, kahles
und taubes Dasein, einen lebendigen Tod», H. von Hofmannsthal, Maurice
Barrès, in Gesammelte Werke in zehn Einzelbänden, pp. 118-19.
utopia of a “thought from the heart” elaborated in Chandos-Brief,

1902), finds a mode of preferential articulation in the probing of
expressive systems of lower-index denotation, such as painting
and music. By the term totality Hofmannsthal generally implies
a state that surpasses the level of verbal expression, since its
superabundance of signs can only be adequately contained within
a structure of semantization extended to the multiple fields of
the “human”. The poet is evidently moving from a traditional
conception of totality resulting from the correlation between
general and particular, macrocosm and microcosm, he is operating
in a system of romantic derivation that is already inclined to see, in
the connection between the arts, a reinforced mode of elaboration
of meaning.5 However, into this line of thinking, an unprejudiced
tendency is inserted to grasp the semantic fecundity nestling in
the pragmatics of human relations and activity, even when these
have no connection to the sphere of the aesthetic.
In the Letter from Lord Chandos the situation of crisis evoked
is intensified not only by the deterioration of the instruments
of “aesthetic representation” of reality, but also, and above
all, by the weakening of the subject’s capacity to “understand
comprehensively” reality itself, that is to say, to understand it as
a unitary whole, in which every manifestation of the “human”
is oriented towards an overall design. It is not by chance that, in
this sense, the shortcomings of these capacities are juxtaposed
to circumstances, such as a political speech or pedagogic talk in
a familiar context; here the use of the verbal medium appears
deprived of any potential aesthetic intent, and, in addition, intuition
5 In the essay entitled Philosophie des Metaphorischen (1894), which is a re-

view of the homonymous book by Alfred Biese, Hofmannsthal defines the
condition of readiness to comprehend the character of interrelationship of all
that exists as the «seltsam vibrierender Zustand, in welchem die Metapher zu
uns kommt, über uns kommt in Schauer, Blitz und Sturm: diese plötzliche
blitzartige Erleuchtung, in der wir einen Augenblick lang den großen Welt-
zusammenhang ahnen, schauernd die Gegenwart der Idee spüren, dieser gan-
ze mystische Vorgang, der uns die Metapher leuchtend und real hinterläßt, wie
Götter in den Häusern der Sterblichen funkelnde Geschenke als Pfänder ihrer
Gegenwart hinterlassen», H. von Hofmannsthal, Philosophie des Metaph-
orischen, in Gesammelte Werke in zehn Einzelbänden, p. 192.
of a recovery of those impaired faculties is engendered when in

contact with still mainly desemanticized forms of objectivity, as
in the celebrated passage dedicated to several objects casually
glimpsed in a field and from which the subject anticipates a surge
of knowledge regarding the secret nature of things.6 In Briefe
des Zurückgekehrten (1907) this skill in blending form and
praxis, and in discovering how far each of these will allow the
other to emerge into the light more incisively, takes on a fully
culturological character, since the “eye” in Returnee, introduced
as a businessman generally inclined towards a conception of
existence in the aesthetic sense, endeavours to understand
relations of form in fields as far-removed as possible from art,
as long as there is that condition of happy sprezzatura that he
defines as “guter Zug”:
The whole man must move at once
wenn ich unter Amerikanern und dann später unter den südlichen
Leuten in der Banda oriental, unter den Spaniern und Gauchos, und
zuletzt unter Chinesen und Malaien, wenn mir da ein guter Zug vor die
Augen trat, was ich einen guten Zug nenne, ein Etwas in der Haltung,
das mir Respekt abnötigt und mehr als Respekt, ich weiß nicht, wie
ich dies sagen soll, es mag der große Zug sein, den sie manchmal in
ihren Geschäften haben, in den U.S. meine ich, dieses fast wahnwitzig
wilde und zugleich fast kühl besonnene »Hineingehen« für eine Sache,
oder es mag ein gewisses patriarchalisches grand air sein, ein alter
weißbärtiger Gaucho, wie er dasteht an der Tür seiner Estancia, so ganz
er selbst, und wie er einen empfängt, und wie seine starken Teufel von
Söhnen von den Pferden springen und ihm parieren, […] wenn etwas
der Art mir unterkam, so dachte ich: Zuhause!7
The subject seems interested in a model of material totality

capable of rendering itself visible not so much in the achievements
of those individuals possessing it, as in their system of sign
6 For the ample spectrum of imaginal typologies implicated in Brief see Sabine
Schneider, ‘Das Leuchten der Bilder in der Sprache. Hofmannsthals medien-
bewußte Poetik der Evidenz’, Hofmannsthal-Jahrbuch, 11 (2003), 209-248.
7 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Die Briefe des Zurückgekehrten, in Gesammelte
Werke in zehn Einzelbänden, vol. vii: Erzählungen – Erfundene Gespräche
und Briefe – Reisen, pp. 546-47.
language, in the equilibrium and self-control that filters out from

their sensitive presence in the world.8 The holistic paradigm
announced by the introductory proposal, which the Returnee claims
to have heard from a fellow patient in the hospital in Montevideo
(«einer von denen, die weit gekommen wären»),9 demands to
be applied in a real and personal dimension, linking with Man’s
capacity to appear as if in a state of complete alignment with
himself, a state of compact and sealed-up self-referencing. The
je ne sais quoi that holds together the overshadowed construction
of totality in Briefe des Zurückgekehrten is a principle of formal
capacity that cannot be codified, but is recognizable intuitively
in the conduct of whoever possesses it, like a sort of mark of
reinforced humanity.
This condition of perfect mastery of style (which is here coupled
with the tradition of the courtier, but is linked elsewhere to other
typologies such as that of the gentleman) presupposes a supreme
level of reticence and linguistic restraint, since it is based on a
strategy of aplomb and control of one’s passions, which aspires
to manifest itself directly through its effects, without recourse to
mediation.10 The search for a code of totality that might render
the return to Wilhelmine Germany more bearable for the subject
of Letters, ends most coherently in the discovery of painting and,
in particular, the encounter with the hyper-connotative semantics
of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings. Contemplation of the paintings
is liberated from their fictional character and introduced into a
declaredly existential perspective; they end up carrying out a
therapeutic role, in a relationship which to Hofmannsthal must
8 On Briefe des Zurückgekehrtensee see Ursula Renner, Die Zauberschrift

der Bilder, in Bildende Kunst in Hofmannsthals Texten (Freiburg i. B:
Rombach, 2000), pp. 387 ff., and Sabine Schneider, Verheißung der Bilder.
Das andere Medium in der Literatur um 1900 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer,
2006), pp. 221 ff.
9 Die Briefe des Zurückgekehrten, p. 546.
10 See Gerhard Austin, Phänomenologie der Gebärde bei Hugo von Hof-
mannsthal (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 1981), pp. 71-81 and
Brian Coghlan, ‘The whole man must move at once. Das Persönlichkeits-
bild des Menschen bei Hugo von Hofmannsthal’, Hofmannsthal-Forschun-
gen, 8 (1985), 29-47.
seem to represent close continuity with the ethical nature of

his conception of poetics. The effect aroused in the onlooker
on discovering van Gogh clearly responds to the issue raised
in Letter from Lord Chandos: the need for a non-verbal form
capable of illustrating the mysterious, dynamic continuity that the
subject feels between himself and the objects bordering along his
perceptive horizon.11 The wonderful description of the psychic
disturbance brought about by the painted landscape is, in reality
actually, the story of sudden spiritual healing:
Wie kann ich es Dir nahebringen, daß hier jedes Wesen – ein Wesen
jeder Baum, jeder Streif gelben oder grünlichen Feldes, jeder Zaun,
jeder in den Steinhügel gerissene Hohlweg, ein Wesen der zinnerne
Krug, die irdene Schüssel, der Tisch, der plumpe Sessel – sich mir
wie neugeboren aus dem furchtbaren Chaos des Nichtlebens, aus
dem Abgrund der Wesenlosigkeit entgegenhob, daß ich fühlte, nein,
daß ich wußte, wie jedes dieser Dinge, dieser Geschöpfe aus einem
fürchterlichen Zweifel an der Welt herausgeboren war und nun mit
seinem Dasein einen gräßlichen Schlund, gähnendes Nichts, für immer
verdeckte! Wie kann ich es Dir nur zur Hälfte nahebringen, wie mir diese
Sprache in die Seele redete, die mir die gigantische Rechtfertigung der
seltsamsten unauflösbarsten Zustände meines Innern hinwarf, mich mit
eins begreifen machte, was ich in unerträglicher Dumpfheit zu fühlen
kaum ertragen konnte, und was ich doch, wie sehr fühlte ich das, aus
mir nicht mehr herausreißen konnte – und hier gab eine unbekannte
Seele von unfaßbarer Stärke mir Antwort, mit einer Welt mir Antwort!12
The fictional image, with its deliberate reduction in points of

reference, settles in the psyche of whoever contemplates it as
a medium for ensuring the existence of a circular relationship
between the individual and the world; thus, it positions itself
right in the centre of that conception of poetics based on the
conciliation and reciprocal innervation of art and life that had
dominated Hofmannsthal’s output ever since his very first works.
11 See Claudia Bamberg, Hofmannsthal: Der Dichter und die Dinge (Heidel-
berg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2011), pp. 263-79.
12 Die Briefe des Zurückgekehrten, pp. 565-66. See Ethel Matala de Mazza,
Dichtung als Schau-Spiel: Zur Poetologie des jungen Hugo von Hofmannst-
hal (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995), pp. 16 ff.
In Tod des Tizian the dying master is evidently sustained by

this very ideal. According to the testimony of Gianino (the young
aesthete and bearer of a candid instinct for truth unimaginable
to the other pupils), the statement with which Titian bursts into
ecstatic enthusiasm in setting his hand to his last painting («Es lebt
der große Pan»),13 aims to indicate, as the principal element for
legitimizing supreme style, possession of intuitive enlightenment
regarding the character of totality of everything that exists; at the
same time, it also seeks to introduce the non-verbal semantics of
the painted image as a medium electively destined to render this
enlightenment effective.
Titian’s depiction of stylistic sovereignty cuts across his
depiction of the charismatic sovereignty that he exercises in
the small community of followers gathered together under his
guidance. This aspect also targets Hofmannsthal’s interest
in practical and ethical elements concerned with aesthetic
existence, since it involves the sociability of the primacy held
of verbal expression, but on the de-structured and polysemic
code of communication through by a great artist. By testing a
model of communication based on the master’s suggestive power
and charismatic conditioning of his pupils, the author evidently
intends to put to the test a paradigm of non-linear semiotic
relations, based not on the formalized code sign-language.
The creation of a restricted but solid group of companions
sharing a common conception of art, responds, moreover, to an
exceedingly widespread trend in the sociology of symbolic forms
between the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries,
when the circle establishes itself as a system of protest and
reaction with regard to processes of transformation in collective
living at the threshold of Modernity. As with Tod des Tizian,
Hofmannsthal had recently personally experienced the force and
also the destructive potential of a system of discipleship founded
on suggestive persuasion promoted by an individual equipped
with elements of distinction and determined to use them in
authoritarian fashion.
13 Der Tod des Tizian, p. 250.

Between 1891 and 1892 one of the most notorious episodes

characteristic of the whole fin-de-siècle Europe took place
in Vienna, when Stefan George, four years older and already
engaged in the constitution of the primitive structure of the
Kreis, had made Hofmannsthal the object of such a pressing and
aggressive recruitment campaign that it aroused his suspicion and
eventually led to a firm rebuttal.14 The equivocal and problematic
character of the relationship with George, who in any case did not
hamper Hofmannsthal’s regular contribution to the first issues of
Blätter für die Kunst, is substantiated by the poet’s tendency to
see the danger, in aesthetic existence, of a shortfall of sociability
that is incompatible with the universal/human nature of art. In the
play, Titian’s disciples seem paralyzed by the prospect of losing
their master and allocate a merely exorcistic consideration to the
form, whilst focusing an expectation of distinction on it, aimed
at deactivating the danger that they feel emanating from material
existence (their distancing from the city, achieved by concentrating
all school activities in a house in the country, is several times
thematized during the play).15 The reduction in formative tasks
as part of aesthetic existence and the subordination of a passive
14 For hints of the relationship with George in Tod des Tizian see Bernhard
Böschenstein, Verbergung und Enthüllung. Georges Präsenz in der Fortset-
zung zum Tod des Tizian, in Verbergendes Enthüllen. Zu Theorie und Kunst
dichterischen Verkleidens. Festschrift für Martin Stern, ed. by Wolfram
Malte Fues and Wolfram Mauser (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann,
1995), pp. 277-87.
15 For example, in the teaching that Desiderio tries to impart to Gianino, putting
him on his guard against the ugliness and vulgarity that would dominate the
anti-aesthetic environment of the city: «Siehst du die Stadt, wie jetzt sie drunt-
en ruht? / Gehüllt in Duft und goldne Abendglut / Und rosig helles Gelb und
helles Grau, / Zu ihren Füßen schwarzer Schatten Blau, / In Schönheit lock-
end, feuchtverklärter Reinheit? / Allein in diesem Duft, dem ahnungsvollen, /
Da wohnt die Häßlichkeit und die Gemeinheit, / Und bei den Tieren wohnen
dort die Tollen; / Und was die Ferne weise dir verhüllt, / Ist ekelhaft und trüb
und schal erfüllt / Von Wesen, die die Schönheit nicht erkennen / Und ihre
Welt mit unsren Worten nennen… / Denn unsre Wonne oder unsre Pein / Hat
mit der ihren nur das Wort gemein… / Und liegen wir in tiefem Schlaf befan-
gen, / So gleicht der unsre ihrem Schlafe nicht: / Da schlafen Purpurblüten,
goldne Schlangen, / Da schläft ein Berg, in dem Titanen hämmern – / Sie aber
schlafen, wie die Austern dämmern», Der Tod des Tizian, pp. 253-54. For the
position of the disciples see Schneider, Verheißung der Bilder, pp. 186 ff.
relationship with a supreme individual, reduce the pupils to the

angst of an epigonal condition. Their deprived spiritual condition,
which is reflected in their incapacity to experience life and art in
a relationship of organic continuity, renders the survival of the
master’s doctrine beyond death impossible; in other words it will
not survive beyond the limitations of the individual and personal
relationship.
From this perspective, Gianino is the key character in the
whole work, since he is the only one of the companions that does
not waste his life cultivating the residual sense of superiority
generated in the group by Titian’s presence, and appears to be
beleaguered by imaginal fantasies that are fully coherent with the
flashes of illumination that suggest to the master his final painting.
The long interlude taken up by the story of the vision experienced
by Gianino during a nocturnal vigil at Titian’s bedside, hints at
the content of the painting to which the artist will devote his final
hours; at the same time it prepares the interpretative framework
required to clarify its significance, integrating the meagre clues that
will be provided by the three female models in the final scene. The
words of the young disciple shape a composition of a Dionysian
character, based around the depiction of nature pervaded by an
orgiastic reawakening of vitality. This primitive roaming energy
does not bring about a slump in the formal cohesion of the image
evoked by the boy, since Gianino’s vision coalesces around a
solidly structured unity; in fact it inclines towards stability of a
monumental order that powerfully brings to mind the paintings
of Arnold Böcklin, omnipresent author in the figurative culture
of modern-day poets. To mention but two of the many possible
examples, Stefan George dedicated to Böcklin a lyric poem of a
programmatic character, inserted in the section Zeitgedichte of
Siebenter Ring (1907), and Hofmannsthal himself earmarked a
revised version of Tod des Tizian, which was performed on the
occasion of a commemoration for the painter held in Munich in
February 1901.16 The most ideologically marked feature of the
fantasy overshadowed by the character, however, coincides with
16 With regard to the Böcklinian weave in Tod des Tizian, see Renner, pp. 161-76.
the elaboration of a visual link between the world of nature, to

which images developed in the first part of the monologue pertain,
and the world of the city, in which Gianino’s imagination finds
its ultimate fulfillment.17 Setting his presentiment of the higher
unity of existence18 in the realm of the metropolis, the disciple
impulsively by-passes the reservations espoused by the other
pupils regarding the sociability of the concept of poetics applied
in the group and begins to outline the universal/human curvature
that characterizes Titian’s final painting.19
The testimonies of the young girls who have just emerged
from the master’s studio do not provide an overall picture of the
subject painted; reconstructing the way in which Titian dressed
up and positioned each of the models, this does however consent
one to infer quite clearly the aesthetic goal that governs the
composition of the image. The allegorical arrangement linked
to the presence of Venus, who is portrayed with conventional
attributes, is subjected to a shift of focus by the enigmatic
depiction alongside her of the god Pan, who takes on the hyper-
symbolic form of a blindfolded marionette, clutched in the
hands of one of the models. The fact that it is the girl herself
who unhesitatingly provides an interpretation for the figurine,
in accordance with the artist’s wishes («Denn diese Puppe ist
der große Pan, / Ein Gott, / Der das Geheimnis ist von allem
Leben. / Den halt ich in den Armen wie ein Kind. / Doch
ringsum fühl ich rätselhaftes Weben, / Und mich verwirrt der
17 See Claude Foucart, La mort du Titien: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, l’écriture

magique des images, in Écrire la peinture entre XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Clem-
ont-Ferrand: Presses de l’Université Blaise Pascal, 2003), pp. 475-85.
18 «Ich war in halbem Traum bis dort gegangen, / Wo man die Stadt sieht, wie sie
drunten ruht, […] /Da aber hab ich plötzlich viel gefühlt: / Ich ahnt in ihrem
steinern stillen Schweigen, / Vom blauen Strom der Nacht emporgespült, / Des
roten Bluts bacchantisch wilden Reigen, / Um ihre Dächer sah ich Phosphor
glimmen, / Den Widerschein geheimer Dinge schwimmen. / Und schwindelnd
überkams mich auf einmal: / Wohl schlief die Stadt: es wacht der Rausch, die
Qual, / Der Haß, der Geist, das Blut: das Leben wacht. / Das Leben, das leb-
endige, allmächtge – / Man kann es haben und doch sein vergessen!...», Der
Tod des Tizian, p. 253.
19 See Rolf Tarot, Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Daseinsformen und dichterische
Struktur (Tübingen: Neimeyer, 1970), pp. 57-84.
laue Abendwind»),20 shifts interest in the scene from the plane

of allegorical decoding to that of co-operation and symbolic re-
creation. The power of the image, and its actual motivation, are
not subordinated to comprehension of its narrative logic, but
rather to the pragmatic sharing of its existential meaning, which
clearly alludes to the Dionysian intuition of the profound totality
of being.21 The sightlessness inflicted on the marionette Pan thus
alludes to the need to preserve this affirmation from contact with
the contingency of chance circumstances and, instead, to direct
it towards an appreciation of the fundamental laws of existence,
which at the approach of Titian’s death, leads us back, via the
mediation of one of the girls, to the ever constant rhythm of the
building-up and dismantling of forms.22
20 Der Tod des Tizian, p. 258.

21 G. Brandstetter talked of a theatralization of the image in the final scene of the
play, Dem Bild entsprungen. Skripturale und pikturale Beziehungen in Texten
(bei E. T. A. Hoffmann, Honoré de Balzac und Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in
Zwischen Text und Bild. Zur Funktionalisierung von Bildern in Texten und
Kontexten, ed. by Annegret Heitmann and Joachim Schiedermair (Freiburg i.
B.: Rombach, 2000), pp. 223-36. See also Márta Gaál Baróti, Hofmannsthals
Der Tod des Tizian als intermedial orientiertes Netzwerk, in Verflechtungen:
Intertextualität und Intermedialität in der Kultur Österreich-Ungarns, ed. by
Wolfgang Müller-Funk and Magdolna Orosz (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang,
2003), pp. 149-59.
22 ��
«Im bläulich bebenden schwarzgrünen Hain / Am weißen Strand will er be-
graben sein: / Wo dichtverschlungen viele Pflanzen stehen, / Gedankenlos im
Werden und Vergehen, / Und alle Dinge ihrer selbst vergessen, / Und wo am
Meere, das sich träumend regt, / Der leise Puls des stummen Lebens schlägt»,
Der Tod des Tizian, p. 258. According to Gerhart Pickerodt the link between
Titian’s intuition and his imminent death places the wisdom contents implicit
in the vision of the unity of everything, in an irremediably subjective and non-
socializable sphere; this is linked to direct communication between the master
and his pupils and can no longer be tapped in his absence. See Pickerodt, Hof-
mannsthals Dramen. Kritik ihres historischen Gehalts (Stuttgart: J. B. Met-
zlersche, 1968), pp. 23-33.
BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ: IMAGES AS FILM
AND IMAGES AS NARRATIVE TEXT.
THE NOVELISTIC PROCEDURES OF ALFRED
DÖBLIN IN THE LIGHT OF BAKHTIN’S
THEORY OF INTERTEXTUALITY
Mirela Ramljak Purgar
Introduction
In his book Povijesna poetika romana Viktor Žmegač draws

attention to “cinematic style” (Kinostil) that was programmatically
established by Alfred Döblin in his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz,
all in the name of “objectivity”:
Döblin himself has been emphasizing how modern prose needs

to achieve “objectivity” by completely removing a narrative
commentator (…) and surrendering to a torrent of images that invade
our consciousness on a daily basis. He too uses a notion of “cinematic
style” (originally Kinostil), wishing to convey that descriptions have
to act like documentary images, made by a photographic or a film
camera, and how their substantiality has to appear suggestive, though
not statically but rather in movement, in a quick exchange that displays
perceptional superficiality of modern media reality.1
1 Viktor Žmegač, Povijesna poetika romana (Zagreb: Grafički zavod Hrvatske,

2004), p. 275, acc. to Alfred Döblin, Aufsaetze zur Literatur (Olten-Freiburg
im Breisgau: Walter, 1963), pp. 17-18. A syntagm of “documentary images” –
a mode of supposed functioning of descriptions – can be placed between two
poles of Döblin’s theorizing. On one hand there is Döblin’s invention of the so
called “Döblinism” (as opposed to Marinetti’s futurism). Žmegač says:
«Döblin reproaches his Italian contemporary for not being radical in the
application of his futuristic principles, his prose often falling prey to old
rhetorical molds, as he’s using comparisons which, despite being unusual,
remain a part of the old rhetorical apparatus, remain – in Döblin’s words –
“literature”». Žmegač, Povijesna poetika romana, p. 273, acc. to: Der Sturm,
115/151, March 1913. On the other hand, acc. to “Berliner Programm” (An
Romanautoren und ihre Kritiker), published in Der Sturm in the same year, «a
strict border between art and other forms of life practice should be abolished»,
A content of Döblin’s novel should be viewed as operating

alongside a method for outlining a new, different subject matter;
as a unique, «truly singular attack on the certain poetological
traditions of European literature». Attacking the traditional novel
for being absorbed in the erotic and the “feminine”, Döblin
focuses at a different engagement with life as a narrative source.
The new prose epic will break away «from quotidian human
experiences (like sexual love) and move towards supra-individual
occurrences concerning historical turns, technical inventions,
adventures, conquers, natural disasters».2
Written in 1929, Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz captivates
by the richness of its narrative procedures, that was early on
compared with visual contextualization by the critics. Not only
the author insisted on the above mentioned Kinostil, but critics
have also discovered a path that directly connects his writing with
cinematic procedures. However, this essay will endeavour to
widen the already familiar insights by attempting to systematize
literary procedures, which happen to border with authentic visual
connoting, and therefore specifically realize the theoretical
problem of intertextuality.
We shall attempt to demonstrate that the montage procedure of
“cinematic writing”, as proposed by Ekkehard Kaemmerling, is by
no means unambiguous. The problem will be further considered
through a theoretical prism of Konstantin Seitz, who proposes
the notion of “inter-multimedia epic” and does so in the name of
allowing for the bigger autonomy of text, therefore also for the
literary procedures, instead of the cinematic ones. Examining the
in other words, a measure of «creativity» is a «novelty of a human endeavor,

whether an esthetic creation or a technical project». This should be expanded
by opposing «the psychological ambitions of older novel» in the function that
«novel’s epic character» plays in acknowledging the ancient past: «It is
important that we know that a crucial task of the prose is to come to grips with
the reality of modern times and to sing about “reality deprived of soul”, in
other words, the reality grasped in its naked substantiality and not refracted
through a prism of subjective moods experienced by oversensitive literary
characters». Žmegač, Povijesna poetika romana, pp. 274-75.
2 Žmegač, Povijesna poetika romana, p. 278, acc. to: Alfred Döblin,
Bemerkungen zum Roman (1917), in Schriften zu Ästhetik, Poetik und
Literatur, ed. by Erich Kleinschmidt (Olten: Walter, 1989).
M. Ramljak Purgar - Berlin Alexanderplatz 263
example of Mihail Bakhtin, his theory of novel and “dialogism

of word”, we shall attempt to reveal the multidimensionality of
literary procedures that lead towards, as we’re about to propose,
“simple” and “complex” inner transitions from one language into
another language.
Ekkehard Kaemmerling and “Cinematic Writing”
In 1975 Ekkehard Kaemmerling wrote a critical essay on

Berlin Alexanderplatz, titled Cinematic Writing.3 The essay
starts by describing a notion of “montage” as “space” (ein Raum)
that appears as the comprehensiveness of «simultaneity of all
the events, states of things, peculiarities and relations». Montage
is the initial descriptional notion which Döblin uses in «the
countless fragments of narrative, dialogue fragments, riveting
descriptions of places, excerpts from official reports, newspapers
clips and poster texts». So called “systemic succession of
images” (systematische Abfolge von Bildern), stemming from
consideration of the subject of metropolitan life (that penetrates
«the finest syntactic and semantic structure of literary portrait»,
whose «order pushes the individual towards communicative chaos
and opposes the linear, discursive course of description») results
in an attempt to stop “for a moment” (für einen kurzen Moment
aufzuhalten), while images «flow in reader’s eye as they do in a
film».4 The author concludes: only “cinematic writing” (filmische
Schreibweise) could achieve «aesthetic experience of seeing/
writing i.e. reading/representing». Only such writing enables
the abolishing of «separation existing between immovability of
pictorial artwork, that has to be experienced in all of its parts at
the same moment, and mobilizing of the written text, which is
experienced during reading».5 Regardless of introducing a new
3 Ekkehard Kaemmerling, Die filmsiche Schreibweise, in Materialien zu Alfred

Döblin Berlin Alexanderplatz, ed. by Matthias Prangel (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1975), pp. 185-98.
4 Kaemmerling, pp. 185-86.
5 Kaemmerling, p. 186.
manner of reading the novel’s text, namely simultaneous reading

and pictorial comprehension through words, the author seemingly
raises a more important question: isn’t there an analogon in
“cinematic” technique for each narrational mode, irrespective of
the time in question?
The answer is symptomatic and guides us to keep reading
Döblin’s novel in a manner that will be developed further on
in this essay: Kaemmerling points at «the attitude of altered
reading» (die Haltung eines veränderten Lesens). That is: «The
technique of film has established forms and possibilities of
human cognition in the moment when the novel ceased to follow
a mode of writing that was overcome in the second half of the 19th
century».6 Cognitively, novel could no longer track the changes
in environment, hence the relation to film, as well as seeing and
describing that are congenial to film, became novel’s ownership.
The author’s essay endeavours to explore which «aesthetic,
historical and cognitive – critical functions» adopt the film
technique in mediating the cinematic writing within a linguistic
structure of a narrative text, i.e. novel. This is not the matter of
an ordinary imitation of film, neither it is about the «law of the
primacy of the image».
Which are the procedures listed by Kaemmerling? Primarily,
the camera movement. In a narrative text it is imposed as an
interrupted sentential flow, and there is no “expanse of descriptive
arch”. On the other hand, the author outlines an excerpt offering a
total of six differing frames: in this way the text is translated into
«an enclosed frame succession, wherein a conflict is rendered
through the opposition of frames».7
7 Kaemmerling, p. 188. What ensues is a specific film experience of time: so
called pictorialized reductions or extensions of time, thereupon the pictorial-
izable recurrence of one narrative course and the alternation of sequences
within a certain narrative course. What changes here is not only the time, but
also the actual «observer’s meaningful experience of duration and temporal-
logical narrative course». Briefly, narratives that are so described return to the
reader’s cinematic experience and «aesthetic moment is doubled in a linguis-
tic depiction of cinematic narrative». Kaemmerling, p. 189. Here we have an
interesting emphasis on the importance of film industry in the 1920s, as it in-
However, the largest part of Kaemmerling’s essay considers

the issue of montage. He argues that Döblin based «the structural
principle of his writing» on the knowledge of theoretical
foundations of «Russian revolutionary film», i.e. on being familiar
with Pudovkin’s and Eisenstein’s montage techniques. Strictly
separating «the types of montage» (Pudovkin) from «the types of
conflict» (Eisenstein), Kaemerling creates a glossary of concepts,
by considering exclusively the first notion, and neglecting the
latter. In this manner he commits to «the differentiation of single
images and their integration into a consolidated film system»,
which occurs through «structural relations between a frame, a
scene and an episode» all with the aim of adequately formulating
the connections between the wholes of «different levels of film
narrative».8 Therefore, by neglecting a conflicting relation within
the actual frame to the advantage of what lies between frames,9
fused the experience of linear time with montaged links between past or future
and present narratives. Further on, time “loop” means that human movements
are exchanged for machine motion; this became historically possible when
something could be described after it previously became visible. On the other
hand, it could have been described in such a manner, since the writer became
capable of transferring a metaphor into the very manner of writing (in die Sch-
reibweise selbst). And while, on one side, the writer attempts to stretch lan-
guage by using time, his other procedures attempt to shorten, quicken the
time: «Change of place (Ruck, sind sie in Freienwalde) does no longer seek
the natural motion of man, but merely the motion of film reel». Kaemmerling,
p. 190. Finally, let us bring attention to another general place. On one hand,
the author lists «the turn of procedure as the turn of “depiction” of procedure».
On the other hand, «film shows an exchange of narrative’s components as an
exchange of images/frames of narrative’s components». In this sense the au-
thor analyses paragraph «Dann wollen wir nachher in der Gegend rumfahren,
mits Auto. Das will Karl, Reinhold und Mieze, rueckwaerts Mieze, Reinhold
und Karl, und auch Reinhold, Karl, Mieze, alle miteinander wollen es». Al-
fred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz (Muenchen: Deutscher Taschenbuch,
1987), p. 307. The sentence’s first part refers to the other one, hence the logi-
cal structure of sentence, rendered in cinematic writing (of movement in var-
ious directions: driving, backwards, then all together, and at the same time
montage of frames), points at the sentential meaning.
9 Kaemmerling outlines what is characteristic of Eisenstein’s type of montage;
it encompasses «graphical conflict, volume conflict (Volumen-Konflikt),
conflict of time, thematic conflict (Sache-Konflikt), and point-of-view
conflict» (Gesichtspunkt-Konflikt). Kaemmerling, p. 192.
and neglecting the “idea” to the advantage of the “description”,

Kaemmerling consciously purges his analysis from the issue
of mindfulness of “conflict in an observer’s awareness” (des
Zuschauers) and is concerned with Pudovkinian division into
contrasting, comparative, symbolizing and synchronous montage.
And while in the first, “contrasting” type, Pudovkinian “analysis”
consists of the oppositional “alteration of the perceptual forms”,
as the intelligible content is contrasting the sensual content (that
is, a narrator, on behalf of a character, goes from observing a
landscape onto observing a herring),10 “parallel montage”
establishes a relation between an individual (Franz Biberkopf)
and the historical context:
Only through a conquered distance that enables the reconnection of

spatially separated political and social events, can we still experience
history. However, the experience of simultaneity of individual action
and historical events seems forever lost, as different levels of action
feature different representational notions of its historical i.e. temporal
character, while its mediation is no longer possible.11
It is clear that Kaemmerling warns of defamiliarization,

which, though not treated as a problem, is evoked by apposing
the historical facts («Am Abend des 9. Februar 1928, an dem in
Oslo die Arbeiterregierung gestuerzt wurde…») and the fictional
“experience” of main character (an deisem Abend stand Franz
Biberkopf am Alexanderplatz an einer Liftfasssaeule und studierte
eine Einladung der Kleingaertner von Treptow-Neukoelln…).12
Unlike the stated “synonymous parallelism”, “oppositive
parallelism” appears in text’s excerpt, where the eyes of main
character glide over a newspapers article, whose image we are
10 In this matter it is important to mention that Kaemmerling parenthetically

concerns himself with a reader’s position. In this case a reader “reconstructs”,
by linguistic expression, that which an observer experiences in film, that
which in film he “can observe simultaneously”. Thus a reader is deprived of a
true cinematic experience, and is forced towards a recurrent reading
(Zurücklesen), towards identifying the meaning due to a disturbance produced
by contrast between images. Kaemmerling, p. 193.
12 Döblin, Berlin-Alexanderplatz, pp. 150-51.
“reading”, while a character’s comment refers to something

else completely, namely the wonder because of money offered
for participation in robbery. This disproportion between images
fixated by eyes and newspaper headlines and character’s
expression speak in favour, says Kaemmerling, of the main
character’s grave psychic condition, wherein «seeing and
speaking became two domains, mutually unrelated».13
“Symbolizing montage” is analyzed on the example of
alternating the “objective” account telling of the manner of
slaughtering a calf, and short statements on relation between
female and male character who is going to kill her.14 “Synchronous
montage” speaks of refuting the possibility of realizing the
relations in simultaneous storylines.15 At the beginning, the stated
cinematic writing comprises other expressive style means as well.
Kaemmerling titles this chapter: «The novel as a shooting script»
and begins with so called scene directions. This includes listing
the people and objects in external space, ending up with narrator’s
“double perceptual distancing”, as we read the following: «Franz
laesst seinem Blick drueber gehn». The narrator takes a description
of realistic event and blends it in, concluding it in a manner which

14 This connects so called “symbolizing” narrative with “symbolic” narrative.
15 Synchronous montage points at refuting the possibility to realize a relation
in simultaneous narratives: while Mieze does not succeed to seduce a fat
passerby, her partner Franz Biberkopf lies mutilated (by the hands of his
other partners) in another part of the city. We find it symptomatic that Kaem-
merling does not succeed in escaping the interpretation of this paragraph’s
idea and of “montage” based on that same interpretation. Because, he says:
«The irony of this synchronous montage consists in a fact that a narrative’s
section in which Mieze attempts to end both the time flux and a hunched ac-
cident, is followed by an undeferrable state of things, only few lines
ahead…» Kaemmerling, p. 196. Namely, the synchronicity of montage lies
not only with simultaneous events in two parts of the city, in the cases of two
main characters, but also with the fact that they are connected by the life
flux and further rely on each other, fatefully and unbreakably, as far as the
novel is regarded. Mieze’s powerlessness to prevent a single thing regarding
Franz’s tragic suffering is later on developed in opposite direction: Franz’s
hardship is but a start of later suffering of Mieze herself, actually thanks to
Franz and his mind-boggling naivety.
suggests it is seen by the character himself. Kaemmerling speaks

of “artificial” (Künstlichkeit) in description:
As a sentence refers to its origin in a shooting script, whose easier

readability demands strict graphic separation between image and
tone/dialogue, this manner of writing transforms objects and figures
into decoration (Dekor). A single object becomes a typical object, an
American becomes a typical American, and a single place turns into a
place of sentence in a book.16
Here, Kaemmerling does no longer speak of montage. However,

it seems that this is the ideational montage in practice, and the
author approaches it from another position, seeking a foothold
in conventions of film media. Because, that which the author
speaks of – the change of something into its typical counterpart,
that is, the transformation of something real into something seen
and experienced, happens only in the reader’s eyes, in his or her
consciousness.
Of course, it first happens in the eyes of the main character, and
then, one should say, through “double perceptual distancing” in
our eyes as well.
This objectivity is recognized by Kaemmerling in same terms
as used when talking of Neue Sachlichkeit, a German visual arts
phenomenon from the late 1920s. Without a special reference,
Kaemmerling recognizes this objectivity as he returns to the
film media, in “film dialogue”: there are no words that denote
a description of characters’ speech, there are just colons. Yet
here, as well, Kaemmerling notices the unavoidable reader’s
experience: «A dialogue seeks its own movement (attitude) and
shows no more traces of those individuals that make up the actual
dialogue by their speech».17
Concluding his essay, Kaemmerling focuses at the problem of
a way by which we reach insight; if this is a cinematic mode
translated over into the writing, then he is looking for the new
ways of reading a literary work. On one hand, this reveals how

important is the position of text’s reader, as one who translates

the cineaste’s experience into a text. On the other hand the author
renders literary shape to his own experience of film:
The cinematic writing recreates the reading as a film vision in reading

a written text. Resultantly, cognition occurring during the reading
becomes an aesthetically and technically doubly mediated experience,
since that which is cognized is hardly separable from a manner in
which the experience has been produced. The construction of aesthetic
meaning represents the reconstruction of film in a text, through a mode
of writing.18
Konstantin Seitz and “Inter-Multimedia Epic”
In his research titled Exploring “film writing” in relation to

Berlin Alexanderplatz Konstantin Seitz attempts to refute the
significance of film as a paragon for Döblin’s novelistic writing.19
«A young film media was admittedly “the key notion of dynamic
and simultaneous depictions of reality” of a confusingly altered
world, but finally proved as merely one of many factors to
influence Döblin’s style».20 Therefore, Seitz argues that it is
justified to doubt the theses which claim that Döblin consciously
wrote his novel in a cinematic way, perhaps primarily because the
notion is “insufficiently unambiguous” (nicht eindeutig genug)
in relation to «the author’s experiential reality».21 He objects
Kaemmerling for failing to precisely differentiate between
literary and film montage. The difference «appears clear, when
later on we see a derivation of the single parts of montage.
While in film montage the author (director, cameraman, actor,
etc.) arranges sequences from consciously designed /edited
18 Ibidem.
19 Konstantin Seitz, Untersuchung zur “filmischen Schreibweise” in Bezug auf
Alfred Döblins Berlin Alexanderplatz (München: GRIN, 2007), pp. 2-17.
20 Seitz refers to a text by Matthias Hurst: Erzaehlsituationen in Literatur und
Film. Ein Modell zur vergleichenden Analyse von literarischen Texten und
filmischen Adaptionen (Tübingen: Niemayer, 1996), p. 259; Seitz, p. 12.
21 Seitz, p. 10.
and shot images»,22 in literary montage, especially in Berlin

Alexanderplatz, the randomly associated content gets divided
according to those qualities that make up isolated parts, instead
of following previous spatial-temporal logic. Further on, Seitz
refers to Harald Jaehner, establishing how text cannot be read as
usual. Instead, the «associative parts of montage elements do not
wish to get out of our minds so quickly, opposing the current of
linguistic flux».23 Therefore, Seitz concludes, the result cannot
be that separation between immovable image and a mobilized
text is abolished, as argued by E. Kaemmerling. More probably,
regarding the involvement of montage parts with a peculiar linear
course, their volume «based on inherent associations, establishes
the slow, dotted emergence of an image in front of reader’s eyes,
similar to puzzle or collage».24
Therefore, a syntagm of “cinematic writing” covers the
expressionist, Dadaist and futurist descriptions of how a modern
man experiences time, in contemporaneity, as well as the man’s
awareness of contemporaneity i.e. jitteriness of universalism, as
mediated by the technique.25
In order to arrive to an analysis of issue regarding the
multitude of voices and the position of narrator (Stimmenvielfalt
und Erzählerstandort), Seitz reminds us of the film’s universal
value, therefore excluding a specific value, in the case of Döblin’s
novel: «Each narrative sentence can thus be divided into film
frames, since every descriptive sentence or excerpt, as a rule,
describes some reality’s fragment».26 Seitz refers to the specific
excerpt from a novel’s beginning: «Der schreckliche Augenblick
22 Seitz, acc. to Jaehner: Erzaehlter, montierter, soufflierter Text: zur Konstruktion

des Romans Berlin Alexanderplatz von A. Döblin (Frankfurt a. M.-Bern-New
York-Nancy: Lang, 1984), Europaeische Hochschulschriften: Reihe 1, Dt.
Sprache und Literatur, Bd. 757, pp. 140, 141; Seitz, p. 11.
23 Jaehner, p. 142, in K. Seitz, p. 11.
24 Jaehner, p. 142.
25 Seitz, p. 12. In this deduction Seitz joins quotes from several sources: from
Döblin’s “Worttechnik”, from Hurst’s (p. 258) and from Hauser in Hurst (p.
256).
26 Hurst in Seitz, p. 13.
war gekommen (schrecklich, Franze, warum schrecklich?), die

vier Jahre waren um».27 And then he continues:
Though an omniscient narrator is reporting here, it is Franz who

speaks during the subjective estimation of the terrible; a recurrent
question is intended for himself: coming from himself, from a reader,
from the narrator, from one of his acquaintances (who would be the
first to call him Franze?).28 By using this multitude of voices, Döblin
surpasses the possibilities of cinematic writing in a single sentence.
Such openness in a written text can be translated into film only through
director’s interpretation; a director has to opt for one of the possible
variables.29
Referring to Döblin,30 and later on to C. Zalubska,31 Seitz

arrives to a conclusion that this is no more about «narrator or
narrator’s positions». Rather, it is through «the destruction of
authorial narrator», through the multitude of voices «that is not
always definable» that one recognizes “narrative situations”.32
This is the matter of alternating the narrative variants, based on
27 Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, p. 8.

28 Original says: «schrecklich, Franze, warum schrecklich?», in Seitz, p. 13.
29 Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, pp. 13-14.
30 Seitz quotes Döblin: «Entselbstung, Entaeusserung des Autors, Depersonation’
sind Forderungen Döblins an Romanautoren, die in BA ueber weite Strecken
umgesetz werden». Acc. to: Alfred Döblin “An Romanautoren und ihre
Kritiker. Berliner Programm”. In A. D., Aufsaetze zur Literatur (Ausgewaehlte
Werke in Einzelbaenden. In Verbindung mit den Söhnen des Dichters edited
by Walter Muschg (Freiburg im Breisgau: Olten, 1963), pp. 15-19 (p. 19).
31 Acc. to Cecylia Zalubska the novel features «the frequent change of
perspectives, in which process the unity of narrative situation was given up,
while a depiction leaps from one place into another, between authorial,
personal and neutral mediation». See: Zalubska, Döblins Reflexionen zur Epik
im Spiegel ausgewaehlter Romane, Poznan 1980. (Seria Filologia germanska
Nr. 21), p. 110; In Seitz, p. 14. Seitz does not agree with terms, therefore
suggesting “neutral” to be replaced by a notion taken over from H. Jaehner:
«the objectification of autonomous linguistic substantiality in texts», see:
Jaehner, p. 139, in Seitz, p. 14.
32 While «the destruction of authorial narrator» is taken over from Helmuth
Kiesel, Literarische Trauerarbeit: Das Exil-und Spaetwerk Alfred Döblins
(Tuebingen: Niemeyer, 1986); “Studien zur deutschen Literatur”, Bd. 89, p.
297, in Seitz, p. 14), a syntagm of “narrative situations” is taken over from M.
Hurst; see: Hurst, p. 247, in Seitz, p. 14.
literary montage and unstable narrative forms and perspectives

(inner monologues, stream of consciousness, experienced speech,
character’s and author’s narrative situations, montages texts,
quotes), of the associative technique and the conscious mixing
between perceptual levels and reality. All of these procedures
result in “the dissolution of stable narrative perspective”. Quoting
Harro Segeberg, Seitz arrives to a peculiar conclusion on specific
«ultra-cinematographic writing mode», a conclusion he shares
with Hurst (according to Bazin).33 Quick shifts in perspectives, as
well as «quickening and dissolution of stable narrative situation
in the process of dynamization»34 present “literary forms of film
design that are more extreme” than the actual cinematic writing.35
Finally, the author proposes a syntagm of “inter-multimedia
epic”, derived from Schaerf’s syntagm of “multimedia epic”,
which the latter relates to a notion of “mythical technoimage”.36
In this manner Seitz allows for Döblin’s notion of Kinostil which
describes mutuality between media of novel and film, “on the
border between writing and audiovision”. Seitz invites the help
of Mookyu Kim and media theory. Namely, pictoriality and
literarity do not alternate merely textually but also as media,
since transformation of old media conditions gives rise to new
33 See Harro Segeberg, “Die Schriftsteller und das Kino. Zur Literatur- und
Mediengeschichte der Weimarer Republik”. In: Tiefenschaerfe online 1/2002.
Ed. Universitaet Hamburg: «Ueberall dort, wo (wie in Döblins Welterfolg
Berlin Alexanderplatz 1929) aus dieser Mischung aus filmnaher Zeichen-
Repraesentation und dezidiert literarischer Schrift-Aufzeichnung ein
literarischer Mehrwert entsteht, ist der Uebergang zu ultrakinematographischen
Schreibweisen vorgezeichnet», Hurst, p. 262, in Seitz, p. 15.
34 Hurst, p. 262.
35 Ibidem.
36 See Christian Schaerf, Berlin Alexanderplatz: Roman und Film. Zu einer
intermedialen poetik der modernen literatur (Stuttgart: Steiner 2001), p. 14.
Acc. to Seitz, p. 16. «“Mythical technoimage” connects Döblin’s pre-Homeric
understanding of the mythical with Flusser’s notion of technoimage»,
technoimage represents «a depiction from beyond the culture of text, an image
whose arising is based completely on texts and should serve to negotiate the
impenetrable amount of texts, i.e. to reduce the complexity», Schaerf (p. 10)
in Seitz, p. 16.
media forms.37 Seitz connects them to all of the reality fragments

(Wirklichkeitssplitter) which we “read” in Döblin: visible, aural,
tactile, gustatory, olfactory.
The Cubism of Image and Text with Mihail Bakhtin
In his theoretical work The Dialogic Imagination38 Mihail

Bakhtin speaks of a single language39 and a language stratified into
“social-ideological languages”. He argues that «centripetal forces»
act constantly along with «centrifugal forces», and that «parallel to
verbal-ideological centralization and unification, the uninterrupted
processes of decentralization and disunification go forward»:
And this stratification and heteroglossia, once realized, is not only

a static invariant of linguistic life, but also what insures its dynamics:
stratification and heteroglossia widen and deepen as long as language is
alive and developing.40
Novel is a specific place of such linguistic activity: «The novel

as a whole is a phenomenon multiform in style and variform in
speech and voice» or: «the style of a novel is to be found in the
combination of its styles; the language of a novel is the system of
its “languages”».41 Further on,
37 Mookyu Kim, Mediale Konfigurationen: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie der

Intermedialität (Konstanz: Diss, 2002), p. 10, in Seitz, p. 16.
38 Mihail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1981).
39 Outdated stylistics are familiar with a definition of unique language as it was
known by linguistics and philosophy of language in regard to rhetoric, and
which comprised a union of language (system of common linguistic norms)
and a union of individuality. Opposing such understanding of unique language,
Bakhtin proposes a somewhat different understanding: «We are taking
language not as a system of abstract grammatical categories, but rather
language conceived as ideologically saturated, language as a world view, even
as a concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of mutual understanding in all
spheres of ideological life» (Bakhtin, p. 271).
40 Bakhtin, p. 272.
41 Bakhtin, pp. 261-62. The author lists the characteristic types of compositional
and style unities with which “an investigator” in a novel as “variform in
Every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point

where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear. The
processes of centralization and decentralization, of unification and
disunification, intersect in the utterance; the utterance not only answers
the requirements of its own language as an individualized embodiment
of a speech act, but it answers the requirements of heteroglossia as
well; it is in fact an active participant in such speech diversity (…)
Every utterance participate in the ‘unitary language’ (in its centripetal
forces and tendencies) and at the same time partakes of social and
historical heteroglossia (the centrifugal, stratifying forces. Such is
the fleeting language of a day, of an epoch, a social group, a genre, a
school and so forth.42
Speaking of a space of such utterance, Bakhtin speaks of

“dialogized heteroglossia”, which is nameles and social “as
language”, but concrete, content-saturated and emphasized as
individual utterance. In order to find an adequate example for
such a use of language, he commends medieval French and
German literateure, fabliaux and Schwaenke, which tell
of street songs, folk sayings, anecdotes, where there was no

language-centre at all, where there was to be found a lively play with
the “languages” of poets, scholars, monks, knights and others, where all
“languages” were masks and where no language could claim to be an
authentic, incontestable face.43
In these “lowly” examples heteroglossia
was not merely heteroglossia vis-à-vis the accepted literary language

[…] but was a heteroglossia consciously opposed to this literary language.
speech” “is confronted”: «1. Direct authorial literary-artistic narration (in all
its diverse variants); 2. Stylization of the various forms of oral everyday
narration (Skaz); 3. Stylization of the various forms of semiliterary (written)
everyday narration (the letter, the diary, etc); 4. Various forms of literary but
extra-artistic authorial speech (moral, philosophical or scientific statements,
oratory, ethnographic descriptions, memoranda and so forth); 5. The
stylistically individualized speech of characters».
42 Bakhtin, p. 272.
43 Bakhtin, p. 273.
It was parodic, and aimed sharply and polemically against the official
languages of its given time. It was heteroglossia that had been dialogised.44
How can we apply dialogized heteroglossia to Alfred Döblin

and his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz? We shall begin by turning
once again to Viktor Žmegač’s text, especially the part where the
author speaks of Döblin’s opposition to the actual laws of writing
i.e. actual debates on benefits of changing the traditional writing.
Namely, besides resisting the traditional domination of love
narrative (which we’ve already stated), he wishes to remove «a
narrative commentator and surrender to a torrent of images that
invades our consciousness daily».45 Also, in accord with accepting
the so called Kinostil, he wishes to realize «the contemporary
extensive epic permeated by Homeric spirit, one opposed to the
analytical intellectual psychologism of the nineteenth century».46
This text, deprived of a traditionally comprehended narrative
(Döblin «thinks of that type of a developing narrative action that
incites reader’s tension and stimulates identification»),47 adopts
the intimacy of behaviourism «that records concrete behaviour,
its modalities and yields a phenomenal image of events, without
aspiring to internationalization».48
As opposed to previous features, that were isolated based on
Döblin’s texts which concern writing, Žmegač outlines three
foundational procedures, that ensued from his own textual insight:
the application of cinematic technique, already announced in “Berlin

programme”, simulated documentariness present in the extensive
record of contemporary realities and, finally, unexpected return to the
game featuring a transcendental narrator.49
Since he united the narrative procedures that are not traditionally

united, such as transcendent narrator and documentary procedures,
44 Ibidem.
45 Žmegač, p. 275.
46 Žmegač, p. 274.
47 Žmegač, p. 276.
48 Žmegač, p. 280.
49 Žmegač, p. 281.
Döblin arrived to entirely new wholes, which, following Bakhtin’s

theoretical consideration we shall read as «heteroglossia that had
been dialogized». Žmegač argues that montage is one of the ways
to unite these characteristics:
Documentariness is based on a presumption that literary text acquires

both special character and special meaning from a communicational
context, wherein the literary works is being realized. A particular
element (fragment) that is achieved, for example by montage, carries an
information that engages in an immediate relation with other fragments
i.e. information, and this cluster then immediately confronts a recipient.
Documentariness has been purged of meta-textual procedures and
therefore of the consciousness’s signals which present an artwork to
be a result of spiritual game. The transcendental narrator is one of the
manifestations of that consciousness.50
This implies at least three things: that the author intents to bring
documentariness into literary procedure, that montage procedure
counts in this matter, and that one cannot grasp the importance
of first two procedures without reader’s active consciousness.
Namely, Bakhtin, speaks of «the internal contradictions inside
the object itself» («the dialectics of the object are interwoven
with the social dialogue surrounding it»),51 and of «contradictory
environment of alien words»:
in consciousness of the listener, as his apperceptive background,

pregnant with responses and objections. And every utterance is oriented
toward this apperceptive background of understanding, which is not
a linguistic background but rather one composed of specific objects
and emotional expressions. There occurs a new encounter between the
utterance and an alien word, which makes itself felt as a new and unique
influence on its style.52
50 Žmegač, p. 282.
51 Bakhtin, p. 278, italic added. In relation to this matter, Bakhtin speaks of
“orientation of discourse” as a phenomenon peculiar to «any discourse. It is
the natural orientation of any living discourse. On all its various routes toward
the object, in all its directions, the word encounters an alien word and cannot
help encountering it in a living, tension-filled interaction». Bakhtin, p. 279.
52 Bakhtin, p. 281, italic added. On this subject, the author says the following:
«Thus an active understanding, one that assimilates the word under
However, both of these statements «of internal dialogism of

the word» can mutually intertwine: style analysis practically
cannot discern between them, says Bakhtin. Peculiar to novel,
the «internal dialogization» becomes «a crucial force for
creating form»
only where individual differences and contradictions are enriched by

social heteroglossia, where dialogic reverberations do not sound in the
semantic heights of discourse (as happens in the rhetorical genres) but
penetrate the deep strata of discourse, dialogize language itself and the
world view a particular language has (the internal form of discourse) –
where the dialogue of voices arises directly out of a social dialogue of
“languages”, where an alien utterance begins to sound like a socially
alien language, where the orientation of the word among alien utterances
changes into an orientation of a word among socially alien languages
within the boundaries of one and the same national language.53
Therefore, this is about languages, not a language – and in that

matter of horizon, the immediate expressive space of object within
a word and its orientation to listener/reader; it encompasses those
«specific points of view on the world», «forms for conceptualizing
the world in words».
consideration into a new conceptual system, that of the one striving to

understand, establishes a series of complex interrelationships, consonances
and dissonances with the word and enriches it with new elements. It is
precisely such an understanding that the speaker counts on. Therefore his
orientation toward the listener is an orientation toward a specific conceptual
horizon, toward the specific world of the listener; it introduces totally new
elements into his discourse; it is in this way, after all, that various different
points of view, conceptual horizons, systems for providing expressive accents,
various social ‘languages’ come to interact with one another. The speaker
strives to get a reading on his own word, and on his own conceptual system
that determines this word, within the alien conceptual system of the
understanding receiver…». Bakhtin, p. 282. «Alien word», as we see it, is
equally present in «dialogical relationship», «in object», as well as in the
«horizon of the listener».
53 Bakhtin, pp. 284-85.
Therefore they are all able to enter into the unitary plane of the novel54
which can unite in itself parodic stylizations of generic languages,
various forms of stylizations and illustrations of professional and
period-bound languages, the languages of particular generations, of
social dialects and others…55
Put differently:
For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an

abstract system of normative forms but rather a concrete heteroglot
conception of the world. All words have the “taste” of a profession,
a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a
generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the
context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life; all
words and forms are populated by intentions. Contextual overtones
(generic, tendentious, individualistic) are inevitable in the word.56
Hence, this is not just about the diversity of languages, but

about the integration with historical and social processes,
which in every moment lament a word, “alien” until writer
actively engages it.57 Here, a parallel with cubism is imposed
in and of itself.
Namely, Bakhtin imagines the intention of word, “directionality
toward the object” to be as fair, therefore
54 The dialogic diversity («a diversity of social speech types» and of «individual
voices») is actually most completely realized in a novel: «The dialogic
orientation of a word among other words (of all kinds and degrees of otherness)
creates new and significant artistic potential in discourse, creates the potential
for a distinctive art of prose, which has found its fullest and deepest expression
in the novel», Bakhtin, p. 275.
55 Bakhtin, p. 292.
56 Bakhtin, p. 293.
57 A semi-alien word (“is half someone else’s”) is the word. «It becomes ‘one’s
own’ only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own
accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and
expressive intention», Ivi, p. 293. And: «Language is not a neutral medium
that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s
intentions; it is populated – overpopulated – with the intentions of others.
Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a
difficult and complicated process». Bakhtin, p. 294.
the living and unrepeatable play of colours and light on the facets of
the image that it constructs can be explained as the spectral dispersion
of the ray-word, not within the object itself, but rather as its spectral
dispersion in an atmosphere filled with the alien words, value judgments
and accents through which the ray passes on its way toward the object;
the social atmosphere that surrounds the object, makes the facets of the
image sparkle.58
Simple and Complex Inner Transitions
Let us read the novel. To begin with, let’s consider an example

of simple cubist multitude of voices:
Der schreckliche Augenblick war gekommen (schrecklich, Franze,

warum schreclich?), die vier Jahre waren um. Die schwarzen eisernen
Torfluegel, die er seit einem Jahre mit wachsendem Widerwillen
betrachtet hatte (Widerwillen, warum Widerwillen), waren hinter ihm
geschlossen.59
Apparently, this not just about multitude of voices, as introduced

by Konstantin Seitz. This is the inner blending of narrative
perspectives, so that we no longer can tell whose voice is talking,
that is, we cannot discern when one voice transits into the other.
Though the first part of the sentence «Die schwarzen eisernen
Torfluegel, die er seit einem Jahr mit wachsendem Widerwillen
betrachtet hatte…» is easily ascribed to the omniscient narrator,
the bracketed text (Widerwillen, warum Widerwillen) influences
the ensuing part («waren hinter ihm geschlossen») and in this
manner the narrated content transits into the content that is
«thought» by the main character, since we are inclined to ascribe
the bracketed text to the actual character. Here we sense «a scent»
of «certain man», «day», «moment». Now that we know the text,
let’s us go backward and reconstruct its history. It concentrates
around an «object» and a certain historical moment. The novel
was written in 1929; the narrator introduces us to a narrative by
58 Bakhtin, p. 277.
briefly retelling the plot, revealing that we are about to follow a

story of Franz Biberkopf in Berlin, after the latter served a four
years sentence for murdering Ida, a woman he used to live with.
We learn of a dual fateful game which almost killed him. It is dual
because the narrator warns us both of objective circumstances
and of the subjective features which have lead the main character
to his ruin and nearly his death as well:
Und (das lag) zwar an ihm selbst, man sieht es schon, an seinem
Lebensplan, der wie nichts aussah, aber jetzt ploetzlich ganz anders
aussieht, nicht einfach und fast selbstverstaendlich, sondern hochmuetig
und ahnungslos, frech, dabei feige und voller Schwaeche.60
It is impossible to interpret the context which is revealed

in such a retrospective, without realizing it was intended for a
reader, since it is reader’s consciousness that becomes aware
of context’s polysemy, as blending of three languages, three
«special worldviews». What remains as a cubist painting after
the reading is our survey of narrative situation, which we become
aware of as a new image, «object – expressive background of
understanding». In this matter “alien word” is embodied by
the bracketed text – raising questions in brackets – as to whose
voice, text, word this is about. In this place Bakhtin would
say: «The speaker breaks through the alien conceptual horizon
of the listener, constructs his own utterance on alien territory,
against his, the listener’s, apperceptive background».61 If every
utterance simultaneously belongs to both a single language and
to «the social and historical speech diversity», being presumably
«the language of day, epoch, social group, genre, trend», than
at the very beginning of the novel we are familiarized with the
author’s conception of novel, set in space and time: at the very
beginning we know what will happen to the character and why.
In the penultimate chapter, the subchapters are titled with a date
(«Saturday, September 1st», while the paragraph begins with a
statement saying «it is Wednesday, August 29th 1928»). This is

61 Bakhtin, p. 282.
also the narrator’s language, signifying something that is related

to reality, like a didactic manual for a contemporary of Franz
Biberkopf (hence Döblin as well), and is intended for a reader
who could be stricken with a similar fate, if he or she repeats the
mistakes committed by the main character:
Das furchtbare Ding, das sein Leben war, bekommt einen Sinn.
Es ist eine Gewaltkur mit Franz Biberkopf vollzogen. Wir sehen am
Schluss den Mann wieder am Alexanderplatz stehen, sehr veraendert,
ramponiert, aber doch zurechtgebogen.
Dies zu betrachten und zu hoeren wird sich fuer viele lohnen, die wie
Franz Biberkopf in einer Menschenhaut wohnen und denen es passiert
wie diesem Franz Biberkopf, naemlich vom Leben mehr zu verlangen
als das Butterbrot.62
The previous example could be referred to as “the simple inner

transition” (from language to language). Let us now analyze “the
complex interior transition”. This is an example of language
becoming independent, with the aim of following the main
character’s stream of consciousness: joining dialogue with a
discourse that possesses no unique connotation, only a reference
to a reality’s fragment, occupying a place where we expect a
stream of consciousness. All of this happens after the author
denoted, in the paragraph’s first part, that the main character
has ceased speaking and is now thinking. It is the paragraph
describing a meeting between Franz and a sister of a woman that
Franz had killed:
Und gluppscht sie an und steht auf: Weil sie mich rausglassen
haben, bin ich eben da. Mich haben sie schon rausgelassen, aber wie.
Wie, will er sagen, aber kaut an seinem Zwirnsfaden, die Trompete ist
zerbrochen, es ist vorbei, und zittert und kann nicht heulen und sieht
nach ihrer Hand. «Was willst du denn, Mensch. Ist denn was los?».
Da sind Berge, die seit Jahrtausenden stehn, gestanden haben, und
Heere mit Kanonen sind druebergezogen, da sind Inseln, Menschen
drauf, gestopft voll, alles stark, solide Geschaefte, Beanken, Betrieb,
Tanz, Bums, Import, Export, soziale Frage, und eines Tages geht es:

rrrrrr, rrrrrr, nicht vom Kriegsschiff, das macht selber hops, – von unten.
Die Erde macht eienn Sprung, Nachtigall, Nachtigall, wie sangst du so
schoen, die Schiffe fliegen zum Himmel, die Voegel fallen auf die Erde.
«Franz, ich schrei, was, lass mich los. Karl kommt bald, Karl muss
jeden Augenblick kommen. Mit Ida hast du auch so angefangen».63
This is not just about the montage of dialogue and narrator’s

discourse. The author first makes it clear that he is following the
main character’s consciousness («Wie, will er sagen...»), and then
mixes the voices of respectively the character and the narrator («...
aber kaut an seinem Zwirnsfaden»), after which he continues as if
writing on behalf of them both: «...die Trompete ist zerbrochen,
es ist vorbei, und zittert und kann nicht heulen…» The return
to reality is denoted by a female character’s replica, following
which we expect a sort of reaction from the main character.
What ensues is a language of specific world, maybe “language
of a day” or “language of an epoch”, uniting the guidelines of
contemporary world with the guidelines of war, all in the service
of pointing out the main character’s consciousness. After he failed
to quench his lust in previous sexual encounter, here he finally
manages it. So, when the author writes «Die Erde macht einen
Sprung, Nachtigall, Nachtigall, wie sangst du schoen, die Schiffe
fliegen zum Himmel, die Voegel fallen auf die Erde», it denotes
that Franz successfully reached bliss. This can be drawn from
a female character’s comment that closes the chapter. Different
times merge: time of meeting, time of main character’s inner life,
and time which is tentatively ascribed to the main character, as
the narrator glides over the notions which we link to reality, both
immediately precursory (war) reality and contemporary reality.
Therefore, this cannot be the unambiguous voice of neither the
character nor the narrator.
The situation becomes even more clear as, in continuation, the
narrator includes a movement of train:
Minna kann ihre Hand nicht loskriegen, und seine Augen sind vor
ihren. Son Mannsgesicht ist mit Schienen besetzt, jetzt faehrt ein Zug

drueber weg, sieh mal, wie der raucht, der faehrt, FD, Berlin/Hamburg-
Altona, 18 Uhr 5 bis 21.35, drei Stunden 30 Minuten, da kann man
nichts machen, solche Maennerarme sind aus Eisen, Eisen. Ich schrei
Hilfe, Sie schrie. Sie lag schon auf dem Teppich.64
Now everything is clearer, since this is the female character’s

consciousness. But neither this is unambiguous: what occurs is
language’s independence («sieh mal wie der raucht, der faehrt…
da kann man nichts machen, solche Maennerarme sind aus Eisen,
Eisen»), which borders with recording the stream of consciousness
of a female character, but does not completely dwell in it. Perhaps
this is the place to speak of Bakhtin’s focus on answering, where
“each word is directed”: «Forming itself in an atmosphere of
the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by
that which has not yet been said but which is needed and in fact
anticipated by the answering word. Such is the situation in any
living dialogue».65 Namely, in Döblin’s text, in coexistence of
various languages, there is no immediate connection within the
actual writing, but only in reader’s consciousness. Hence the
author is necessarily oriented at reader’s “understanding”, which
matures «only in the response. Understanding and response are
dialectically merged and mutually condition each other; one is
impossible without the other».66
However, it seems this chapter also features the intertwining of
“dialogic relationship” «toward an alien word within the object
and the relationship toward an alien word in the anticipated
answer of the listener».67 Not only the chapter describes something
which we relate to reality (...solide Geschaefte, Banken, Betrieb,
Tanz, Bums, Import, Export, soziale Fragen…), but we also
experience a difficulty in connecting this text to the speaker. As it
functions in a place where we expect character’s consciousness,
we cannot completely agree to “exit” from the narrator’s text.
We could say that “dialogic reverberations” «penetrate the deep

65 Bakhtin, p. 280.
66 Bakhtin, p. 282.
67 Bakhtin, p. 283.
strata of discourse, dialogize language itself and the world view

a particular language has (the internal form of discourse) – where
the dialogue of voices arises directly out of social dialogue of
“languages”, where an alien utterance begins to sound like a
socially alien language…».68 Fragment of a text in which the main
character and narrator distance themselves from the precursory
text, does not have its own independence or – has nothing but
its own independence. If it belongs only to itself, than we have
to search for its meaning within the phenomenon of absurdity.
However, the fragment is being repeated in the text, before the
fragment with train, hence its meaning can be read only based on
this contextualization.
An excurse – a documentary fragment – probably a newspaper
clipping
Was ist eine Frau unter Freunden wert? Das Londoner

Ehescheidungsgericht sprach auf Antrag des Kapitaens Bacon die
Scheidung wegen Ehebruchs seiner Frau mit seinem Kameraden, dem
Kapitaen Furber, aus und billigte ihm eien Entschaedigung von 750
Pfund zu. Der Kapitaen scheint seine treulose Gattin, die demnaechst
ihren Liebhaber heiraten wird, nicht allzu hoch bewertet zu haben.69
is followed by a partial repeating of the fragment:
Oh, da sind Berge, die seit Jahrtausenden ruhig gelegen haben, und
Heere mit Kanonen und Elefanten sind druebergezogen, was soll man
machen, wenn sie ploetzlich anfangen, hops zu machen, weil es unten
so geht: rrrrrr rumm. Wollen wir gar nichts dazu sagen, wollen wirs nur
lassen. Minna kann ihre Hand nicht loskriegen, und seine Augen sind
vor ihren.70
The narrator manifests self-consciousness (Wollen wir gar

nichts dazu sagen…), while Berge, Jahrtausende, Heere, «weil
es unten so geht: rrrrrr rumm», manifest a return to the already
said. Therefore, we internally revisit the main character’s
68 Bakhtin, pp. 284-85.

70 Ibidem.
previous associative field, aware that this is not a mere image

of his consciousness, but the mutual blending of narrator,
documentarism and character’s awareness. By saying that
something sounds as «socially alien language», we allude to the
ambivalence in the actual text fragment with «hills, millenniums,
armies» etc. It is therefore not the case that montaging various
languages is merely an evident blend of languages. Actually,
the very language comprises «dialogism of words», which
compels us to reflect, and consider the uncertainty regarding the
conclusion we have thus arrived at.71 Moreover, by returning
to the documentary excerpt, maybe we could draw on another
Bakhtin’s thought, namely one referring to «extra-artistic prose
(everyday, rhetorical, scholarly)», when «dialogization usually
71 We could consider a possible comparison with the so called “intellectual

montage” that Eisenstein spoke of. In his book, titled Theory of Film, Andrew
Tudor discusses an essay by Sergei Eisenstein, dating from 1929 and titled
“Dialectical approach to film form”. Besides metric, rhythmic, tonal and
montage of overtones, Eisenstein discuses the intellectual montage, that was
closest to the function of reader in relation to the junction of social-historical
and subjective-expressive worlds, whose reading is offered by Bakhtin. «A
frequently referred sequence features a range of images portraying various
religious idols, starting with temporally close Christian figures to the most
primitive tribal figures. The intention was to drag… the notion of God back to
its origin, leading an observer towards the intellectual grasp of this
“progression”». Indirectly, this sets up opposition to the said tenets on
cinematic writing by E. Kaemmerling. Eisenstein in Tudor, p. 19. See: Tudor,
Teorije filma (Beograd: Institut za film, 1979). Bakhtin delivers definition of
the so called “heteroglossia” as: «another’s speech in another’s language,
serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way. Such speech
constitutes a special type of double-voiced discourse. It serves two speakers at
the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the
direct intention of the character who is speaking, and the refracted intention of
the author. In such discourse there are two voices, two meanings and two
expressions. (…) Examples of this would be comic, ironic or parodic
discourse, the refracting discourse of a narrator, refracting discourse in the
language of a character and finally the discourse of a whole incorporated
genre – all these discourses are double-voiced and internally dialogized» In:
Bakhtin, p. 324. However, this is not just a parody, but also the problem of
motif, concern, topic: «…the internal dialogism of double-voiced prose
discourse can never be exhausted thematically (…); it can never be developed
into the motivation or subject for a manifest dialogue, such as might fully
embody, with no residue, the internally dialogic potential embedded in
linguistic heteroglossia». Bakhtin, p. 326.
stands apart, crystallizes into a special kind of act of its own and
runs its course in ordinary dialogue or in other, compositionally
clearly marked forms for mixing and polemicizing with the
discourse of another…».72
In the midst of already fragmented narrative which describes
a meeting between Franz and Ida’s sister Minna, the author
inserts a documentary fragment, in order to express his method
of simultaneism, apposing and opposing various texts, languages,
levels of consciousness and worldviews. This quickens the rhythm
of reading and suggests content’s polysemy: again a reader is the
one who has to know how to manage such textual approach.73 In
this matter the author remains «distanced from the language of his
own work» or, perhaps, this insistence on mixing the languages
is actually the author’s language. In the service of montage and
simultaneism, a documentary excerpt seems as if the author «merely
ventriloquates».74 In this manner the narrator approaches the “alien
speech”, forming heteroglossia by opposing “the special horizon”
to those horizons against whose background it is perceived.75
72 Bakhtin, p. 284.
73 Bakhtin also establishes a division on the text’s other side, one where the author
is standing. He says the following: «certain aspects of language directly and
unmediatedly express (as in poetry) the semantic and expressive intentions of the
author, others refract these intentions; the writer of prose does not meld completely
with any of these words, but rather accents each of them in a particular way –
humorously, ironically, parodically and so forth; yet another group may stand
even further from the author’s ultimate semantic instantiation, still more
thoroughly refracting his intentions; and, there are, finally, those words that ware
completely denied any authorial intentions: the author does not express himself
in them (as the author of the word) – rather, he exhibits them as a unique speech-
thing, they function for him as something completely reified». Bakhtin, p. 299.
74 Bakhtin, p. 299: «a prose writer can distance himself from the language of his
own work, while at the same time distancing himself, in varying degrees, from
the different layers and aspects of the work. He can make use of language
without wholly giving himself up to it, he may treat it as semi-alien or
completely alien to himself, while compelling language ultimately to serve all
his own intentions. The author does not speak in a given language (from
which he distances himself to a greater or lesser degree), but he speaks, as it
were, “through” language, a language that has somehow more or less
materialized, become objectivized, that he merely ventriloquates».
75 This is Bakhtin’s subject in a chapter dedicated to English humorist novel,
where he details the narrative procedures of forms and the degrees of “parody
After reading the text by Alfred Döblin, perhaps we could

disagree with Kaemmerling and conclude that, by no means,
a separation between immovable image and mobilized text
is abolished. However, is this not about a puzzle or a collage?
Certainly this is the matter of complex narrative situations, and
the problem pertaining to the multitude of voices and narrator’s
positions.
Besides, the novel features the examples of rather extreme literary
form of cinematic shaping, dissolution of stable narrative perspective
and, truly, the participation of all the reality fragments, such as those
visible, aural, tactile, gustatory and olfactory ones. However, thanks
to Bakhtin, we have arrived at a new place for all that is mixed,
diverse, polysemic, simultaneous, omnipresent, social and historical:
“the inner dialogism of word” enables unity in ambivalence between
the unique (grammatical, linguistic) and that which is present both
socially and historically. This is the union not only between literally
heterogeneous elements of experiential reality, but the heterogeneity
in the sense of “alien word” of author, narrator and character. It is the
heterogeneity which we recognize within an otherwise homogeneous
whole. Heterogeneous languages (in both “simple” and “complex”
inner transitions) form a cubist image around an object and within
a reader, hence there is no unambiguity or single connotation, but
merely the constantly emerging meaning. «The prose art presumes a
deliberate feeling for the historical and social concreteness of living
discourse, as well as its relativity, a feeling for its participation in
historical becoming and in social struggle...»76 Bakhtin proposes a
syntagm of «the image of a language».77
stylization” which, especially for the amount of diverse languages used in the
text, are close to Döblin’s novel.
76 Bakhtin, p. 331.
77 Bakhtin, p. 336.
THE WORD AND THE GHOST
ÉKPHRASIS AND PHOTOGRAPHY
IN SPIONE BY MARCEL BEYER
Nicola Ribatti
In recent years, the panorama of German culture has been

dominated, both in theoretical and in literary realm, by the theme
of memory and transgenerational transmission. On one side, the
passing of eye witnesses of a historical caesura such as the Shoah
has created the necessity to consolidate communicative memory
in cultural memory.1 On the other side, the events connected to
the Wende have called for a revisitation of the entire Germany
history of the 20th century and have shown the necessity to
create a memory shared between the two Germanies. Thus, it’s no
surprise to see the spread of Familien- or Generationenromane2
in which the members of second and third generation confront
themselves with the historical reconstructions and memoirs
of their parents and grandparents. It is interesting to note how
in many of these authors the reflection on memory and history
weaves a tight connection with the role of “mediator of memory”
carried out by photographic images, which can be directly inserted
in the textual continuum, thus creating literary “photo-texts”, or
evoked indirectly through the literary process of the ékphrasis.
In these texts, the photographic images, and in general the
metaphorical plexus of visuality activate a complex and articulated
metatheoretical reflexion concerning the possibility and the limits
1 For more on these themes, see Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis:
Schrift: Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (München:
Beck, 2002); and Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und
Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (München: Beck, 2006).
2 For more on Generationenromane, see Elena Agazzi, Erinnerte und
rekonstruierte Geschichte: Drei Generationen deutscher Schriftsteller und
die Fragen der Vergangenheit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004);
and Friederike Eigler, Gedächtnis und Geschichte in Generationenromanen
seit der Wende (Berlin: Schmidt, 2005).
of historical representation through the linguistic medium and

the visual medium. Particularly interesting is the trilogy by the
German author Marcel Beyer, comprising the novels Flughunde,
Spione and Kaltenburg,3 in which the author carries out a charged
confrontation with the National Socialist past investigating the
media mechanisms inherent in every mnestic process. While in
Flughunde the accent is placed on the auditory media dimension,4
in Spione5 the author proposes a comparison between the capacity
of the visual medium (photography) and the verbal medium to
access the past: in this comparison, a central role is assigned to
the ékphrasis of the photographic images. The novel tells of the
Easter Vacation which an adolescent, anonymous first-person
narrator passes in the company of his cousins Nora, Paul e Carl.
During this period, the youth tries to reconstruct their family’s
past, about which they know very little, because past events have
3 See Marcel Beyer, Flughunde (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 1996); Spione

(Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 2000), and Kaltenburg (Frankfurt a. M.:
Suhrkamp, 2008).
4 The novel tells of a sound technician, Karnau, who participates in the tortures
perpetrated by the Nazis in order to record the voices of the victims: his
objective is to chart a complete “topography” of the human voice in order to
capture its ultimate secret.
5 For more on the novel, see: Silke Horstkotte, Literarische Subjektivität und
die Figur des Transgenerationellen in Marcel Beyer’s Spione und Rachel
Seiffert The Dark Room, in Historisierte Subjektivität – Subjektivierte
Historie: Zur Verfügbarkeit und Unverfügbarkeit von Geschichte, ed. by
Stefan Deines, Stephan Jaeger, Ansgar Nünning (Berlin-New York: De
Gruyter, 2003), pp. 275-93; Stefanie Harris, ‘Ima(gin)ing the Past: The Family
Album in Marcel Beyer’s Spione’, Gegenwartsliteratur, 4 (2005), 162-84;
Silke Horstkotte, Nachbilder: Fotografie und Gedächtnis in der deutschen
Gegenwartsliteratur (Köln: Böhlau 2009); Lorella Bosco, Ricomporre la
storia ricordando le storie: Fantasmi della memoria e segreti di famiglia in
«Spione» (Spie) di Marcel Beyer, in Il segreto nella letteratura moderna, ed.
by Patrizia Guida and Giovanna Scianatico (Lecce: Pensa Multimedia, 2010),
pp. 119-52; Anne Fuchs, Phantoms of War in Contempary German Literature,
Films and Discourse: The Politics of Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010); Meike Herrmann, Vergangenwart: Erzählen vom
Nationalsozialismus in der deutschen Literatur seit den neunziger Jahren
(Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010), pp. 254-62; Kai Marcel Sicks,
‘Die Latenz der Photographie. Zur Medientheorie des Erinnerns in Marcel
Beyers Spione’, Monatshefte für deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur,
102/1 (2010), 38-50.
N. Ribatti - The Word and the Ghost 291
undergone a radical process of repression by family members.

The grandfather, even though he lives close by, has in fact broken
off all contacts with his adult children and his grandchildren,
while these same adult children avoid any questions about the
past. The family’s history is thus characterized by a generational
gap in communication and collective memory, as declared by the
first-person narrator: «Secret has marked our family, right from
the start».6 The chance to reconstruct the family’s past comes
by the unexpected discovery of a family photo album, through
which he hopes to obtain sure information about the past. Instead,
the photographs prove to be difficult to be “read”. The images
are not arranged in a chronological-rational way, but rather «here
are only single images, placed here and there in the album, as
if they had been attached in the album at a later time».7 Many
images are «blurry»8 and the faces contained within are often
«barely recognizable».9 The images have very generic captions
(«jotted down on the back of the photo only the place, date,
and occasion»)10 and there are no family members present for
contextualizing the photos in a narrative. From this «epistemic
instability»11 of the photo album derives the necessity to fill the
gaps «with imagination, suppositions and suspicion».12 Taking
a cue from the images, the youth turn to their own imagination
and fantasy in the attempt to “re-construct” their own past by
creating stories that often go far beyond what is showed in the
photographic images. They decide, in a substantially arbitrary
manner, that the soldier represented in numerous photographs
(dating from the Nazi era) must be the grandfather; starting with
a caption present on the back of one of the images («return from
Spain, summer 1937»),13 the youth elaborate a real spy-story
in which the grandfather secretly participated, as a member of
6 Spione, p. 93.
7 Spione, p. 42.
8 Ibidem.
9 Ibidem.
10 Spione, p. 50.
11 Fuchs, p. 65.
12 Spione, p. 91.
13 Spione, p. 135.
the Condor legion, in the bombings of several Spanish cities

during the civil war. The youth also look for the photo of their
deceased grandmother, who, again according to their imaginary
reconstructions, was a famous Italian «Opera singer»14 from
whom they inherited certain facial features, the mysterious
“Italian eyes”,15 that unite them while also distinguishing them
from the other neighbourhood youth. In any case, in the album
there is no Porträt that clearly shows the face of the woman. While
initially the youth think that the grandmother simply avoided
being photographed, soon they develop a new story in which the
grandfather’s second wife, indicated in the course of the story
as «the old woman»,16 removed all traces of the first wife and
kicked out her children from the house, threatening them with an
axe. The descriptions of the “old woman”, at times presented as
a novel reincarnation of the witch of fairy tales, at other times as
an authentic «Ghost»,17 clearly reveal the imaginative character
of the “re-constructions” developed by the youth, who, starting
from the photographic image, develop stories following precise
“narrative models” such as the spy-stories (the grandfather as
secret member of the Condor legion, fairy-tales (the grandmother
as a ghost or witch who banishes her stepchildren) or the romance
(the love story between the grandfather and his first wife).
The novel, born from the uncontrolled «Fabulierlust»18 of the
protagonists, is thus constituted for the most part by imaginative
reconstructions developed starting with the observation and focus
on of the photographic images: the novel thus has its grounding
structure in the ékphrasis of the photographs.
Through the allusion to well-consolidated narrative model,
Beyer actually suggests an allegorical interpretation of the novel,
representing the efforts of the third generation (here represented
by the youth) to come closer to the past removed by their family
14 Spione, p. 45.
15 Spione, p. 42.
16 Spione, p. 95.
17 Spione, p. 96.
18 Horstkotte, Nachbilder, p. 203.
through the use of fictional and “postmemorial” forms.19 In this

way, Beyer proposes a metaliterary reflection centering on the
confrontation between the photographic and linguistic media.
Despite the “iconic-indexical” function traditionally assigned to
photography, this device, in the course of the novel, is not able
to provide a steady, sure access to the past, instead constantly
making references to something which cannot be fully recovered:
the photography is a trace20 (Spur) of a mysterious past which is
latent within21 and which must be deciphered, but this process
of deciphering proves to be substantially infinite: «We never
would have thought that each of these photos hides a secret, that
each piece of information can hide yet another».22 Each trace
necessarily refers to other traces, but this process does not lead to
that which Derrida defines as «archi-trace»,23 that is, the original
reference.24 Thus, in Beyer’s novel, photography is not a medium
able to encourage a sure, objective conscience of the past;
photography does not produce an «effet de reel»,25 but rather an
«effet de secret»:26 it alludes to a secret which is present within,
to a dimension of other which unavoidably escapes. In this way,
19 On postmemory see Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography,

Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
20 On this theme in Beyer’s work see Sicks, and Eleni Georgopoulou, Abwesende
Anwesenheit. Erinnerung und Medialität in Marcel Beyers Romantrilogie
«Flughunde», «Spione» und «Kaltenburg» (Würzburg: Königshausen &
Neumann, 2012).
21 See Sicks.
22 Spione, p. 87.
23 Jacques Derrida, De la Grammatologie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967), p. 90.
24 Referencing the ideas of Derrida, Weingart affirms that in photographic
images there is an interaction between «referenzielle mit differenziellen
Spuren» (Brigitte Weingart, Bildspur, in Spuren, Lektüre. Praktiken des
Symbolischen Bildspur, ed. by Gisela Fehrmann, Erika Linz, Cornelia Eppig-
Jäger (München: Fink, 2005), pp. 227-42, p. 234. On photography as a trace,
see Peter Geimer, Das Bild als Spur: Mutmassungen über ein untotes
Paradigma, in Spur: Spurenlesen als Orientierungstechnik und Wissenskunst,
ed. by Sybille Krämer, Werner Kogge, Gernot Grube (Frankfurt a. M.:
Suhrkamp, 2007), pp. 95-120.
25 R. Barthes, ‘L’Effet de réel’, Communications, 11 (1968), pp. 84-9, p. 84.
26 J. Derrida, Être juste avec Freud: L’histoire de la folie á l’âge de la
psychoanalyse, in Id., Résistance de la psychoanalyse (Paris: Galilée, 1996),
pp. 90-146, p. 116.
in photography, as Kai Sicks observes, «The past emerges not in

its photographic depiction, but as the Other of depiction».27
In the course of the novel, the iconic-indexical status of
photography is repeatedly cast into doubt. A particularly
significant example of it consists of the photographs taken by the
grandfather during the bombing of the Spanish cities: these photos
show «gutted streets with columns of vehicles (….) buildings
in flames and the numerous craters just created, but no dead».28
The photographic images are not able to capture the authentic
dimension of war: Death. It is to this crisis of the indexical function
of photography that can be attributed the interest manifested
by the first-person narrator in the Geisterphotographie which,
permitting a vision of that which is not visible to the human eye,
refers to a latent dimension, present but not visible.
If the past is something hidden and latent in the photographic
image, then the act of remembering is equivalent to a process
(potentially infinite) of research and deciphering of traces that can
be carried out only through words. For this reason, the ékphrasis
of the images takes on a fundamental role in the novel. Among
the many descriptions, particularly significant is the ékphrasis of
the photograph which shows the grandfather seated in a theatre
box. This description, located not by chance at the beginning of
the first chapter, takes on a “generative function”29 because it is
from the description of this image that the entire narrative takes
its cue. The ékphrasis of this photograph returns multiple times
in the text,30 according to a constantly changing focalization. In
the first description, the grandfather, seated in a theatre box at the
opera, observes the spectators near him and, through the use of
the “Opera binoculars”, looks for the Italian eyes of the singer
who would later become his wife:
27 Sicks, p. 40.
28 Spione, p. 128.
29 I’m referring, here and subsequently, to the taxonomy proposed by Cometa,
La scrittura delle immagini, pp. 81-166.
30 Spione, pp. 16, 21, 53, 58, 68, 77.
He has an acceptable income, he’s dressed in his new evening

wear and a fresh shirt, he can let himself be seen at the Opera. And he
possesses something that few here among the audience have: a secret.
(…) The officers up on stage. How they sit, how they speak, how they
look at the audience, below the light goes out. (…) The musicians play.
He takes his program. The musicians play again. He has discovered an
image which unmistakably shows his woman. The musicians play a
final time, the lights go out, he takes out his opera binoculars from their
case. Already, during the course of the Overture, his gaze will search for
the Italian eyes, he cannot wait.31
Next there is the description of the moment in which the

grandfather, at the end of the performance, goes backstage to the
dressing rooms to meet the woman.
Note how in the cited text, the focus oscillates from the
point of view of the anonymous first-person narrator («He
has an acceptable income...») and that of the character, whose
thoughts are reproduced in Erlebte Rede («How they sit, how
they speak...»). But the most interesting fact is that the reader
only later understands that the part read so far is not part of the
narrative diegesis but is the description of the photography given
by the narrator. The first ékphrasis is thus above all the result of
a “dynamization of the image”: in fact, there is the description
of «the actions which have lead to the punctum temporis
predetermined by the artist and possibly also the continuation
of the action».32 The dynamization concerns not only the image,
which can be said to be brought to life in the eyes (mental) of the
reader, but also the “intradiegetic” gaze of the character and the
“extradiegetic” gaze of the reader. The description follows, in an
extremely detailed way, the gaze of the character, which pauses
now on the officials present in the theatre, now on the stage, on the
search for his future wife, now on the dressing room of the singer.
In this way, thanks also to the internal focus of the character,
the gaze of the reader and of the narrator are “projected” inside
the image itself. Furthermore, the ékphrasis reveals forms of
31 Spione, p. 72.
“synesthetic integration” and is clearly the fruit of “hermeneutic

integration”: the first-person narrator, in describing the musical
and theatrical setting, must necessarily make use of his own
“encyclopaedic knowledge”. Similar procedures are present in
the second ékphrasis of the same photograph:
In this picture our grandfather has a concert program on his knee,

his head inclined, as he stares into the dark without any movement (…)
He is looking for something. He takes his opera binoculars and looks
down towards the stage, he focuses the binoculars, then he lets them
drop again. He looks anew at the photo with attention and squints as if
he were missing his glasses.
Now he is at peace again. For a moment, his gaze strays far from the
stage, he knows this part note for note and now he has the impression
that the female singer’s words are directed at him.
In this long moment he has the impression that the singer is addressing
him alone, as if she had fixated on this figure in the audience, the young
man with his binoculars in front of his eyes and the concert program on
his knee.33
Initially, the ékphrasis seems to present itself as a form of

“denotation”, as the zero grade description of an image. In reality,
there are clear signs present which reveal a process of “synesthetic
integration”: the first-person narrator underlines, in a paradoxical
way, how the photograph shows the immobile position of the
grandfather (how else could he be in a photograph?) in a moment
in which there is no music in the scene (but how can this be
deduced from a photograph?). These are details which usher in
a new dynamization, carried out with an almost cinematographic
technique, in which the grandfather, from being an object of
observation, becomes once again a subject which observes. But
gradually there is the introduction of an additional point of view,
in which the character imagines that it is now the singer who is
observing him in this pose, captured by the photographic image,
which opens and closes this second ékphrasis.
From this situation rises up a narrative mechanism of chinese
boxes which fit together three different levels of focus (narrator,
33 Spione, pp. 21-22.

grandfather, actress) following a model which returns in the next

ékphrasis. The idea of the exchange of gazes is clearly thematized
here; once again there is the passage from the perspective of the
grandfather to that of the woman who secretly observes him
through a “peephole” located in the wings of the stage:
But there is a peephole. Before the intermediate space becomes dark,

when the audience members look for their seats (…), this is when the
singers can look at the audience through a hole devised in the closed
curtain (…) every evening she can observe him very well through the
peephole, only for a brief moment. But this is enough.34
The theatrical scene, with continuous references to the

exchange of gazes between characters who reciprocally observe
each other in secret, represents, if carefully considered, a mise
en abyme of the actions of the protagonists of the story, when
they view and describe the photographs in the family album, or
when the first-person narrator describes his custom, dating back
to his childhood, to observe through the peephole (Spion) of the
door. Here emerges the meaning of the German word Spion that
gives the title to the novel. The term has in fact a double meaning
that in the course of the novel takes on an evident allegorical
meaning. On the one hand, it indicates the activities of the
spies who reveal and decipher possible secrets: this is what the
youth do as they try to interpret the photographs of the album
to discover the mysteries of their family past. The word also
refers to “visual devices” such as the peephole, the Opernglas,
the Guckloch (and also the very same lens of the photographic
apparatus) which on the one hand allow one to see without being
seen, but on the other hand allude to a separation, to a boundary
between inside/outside, present/past, near/far. The understanding
of the past through the photographic images, according to this
double metaphorical valency, is represented on the one hand as a
form of deciphering of mysterious traces, on the other as a kind
of spionieren that reveals the tension in coming closer to what is
found above and beyond the surface of the image, but which at
34 Spione, p. 78.
the same time shows the insurmountable distance which separates

the observer from the observed:
«Through the peephole – affirms the first-person narrator
– everything is at once near and fleeting».35 The photographic
image, far from being a window on the past, presents itself as
a sort of barrier separating past and present. Nevertheless, the
theme of the intertwining of gazes underlines the strong ties
which exist between past and present: the awareness of the past
is indissolubly tied to the demands of the present, while life in the
present cannot help but to remember the past.
The ékphrasis of the photograph in the theatre, with its
references to memory and to the spionieren, thus possesses
a “metaliterary function” because it embodies the central
themes of the novel, but at the same time it carries out a central
“metapoetic function” because it proposes a theory of narration
itself, in relation to the visual. In fact, at the end of the novel, the
photograph of the grandfather reveals itself to be an invention,
fruit of the imagination of the first-person narrator. It’s the cousin
Carl who confirms this fact in the course of an interview with the
narrator which takes place in adulthood. The cousin states that
this photo probably never existed, also considering the technical
impossibility to take it. Furthermore, he admonishes his cousin
for a regressive-infantile behaviour consisting in an inability to
distinguish the past from the present, the true from the false, the
dead from the living. According to the cousin, the first-person
narrator himself has in this way become the character in a story
that he himself has invented. Thus, from here derives the appeal to
abandon all infantile make-believe and finally become an adult.36
After this return to the “principal of reality”, the first-person
narrator must admit that not only the photographic image of
the grandfather at the opera is the fruit of his imagination, but
that the entire novel is nothing more than «An invented album
of family photos».37 Having reached the end, the novel seems
35 Spione, p. 9.
36 Spione, pp. 298-301.
37 Spione, p. 365.
to annul itself and subtract from the ékphrasis, even if in the

rhelm of the “ekphrastic pact” which is created between author
and reader, all objective foundations: there is no longer any
distinction between “factual” and “notional” ékphrasis.38 But it’s
precisely in overcoming this distinction that lies the interpretative
key to the novel. According to some scholars39 the novel shows
the dangers faced by those who rely too much on their own
imaginations, confusing them with reality. Considered carefully,
it’s precisely through means of the literary pretense, through a
“narrativization” of the past that the past may be recovered: the
dead (in the final analysis, this is the central theme of the novel)
may be re-evocated in that fantastical Zwischenwelt which only
the literary word is capable of creating. In an essay dedicated
to the La chambre claire by Roland Barthes, Monika Schmitz-
Emans proposes several observations that are relevant to the
novel by Beyer. In this scholar’s opinion, in the second part of
the essay by Barthes, centered on the search for the real image
of the mother, the accent is placed not on the photograph itself,
but on the narration that this search has generated. In the essay,
the photograph itself, irreversibly separated from its reference, is
not central, rather central is the capacity of the word to indirectly
evoke that which the photograph is not able to show. The accent
is here placed on «the power of words»40 and on its capacity to
bring the dead back to life, even if in a gespentisch manner.
These considerations are also useful for interpreting Beyer’s
novel, in which the topos of the (missing) photography showing the
grandfather’s face constitutes a clear allusion to Barthes’s essay.
Also in Beyer the accent is place on the power of the word. The
narrator expressly declares that it’s precisely words that generate
and bring to life the ghosts of the past: «Whoever wishes to wake
the dead or make the living disappear needs nothing other than
words».41 The necromantic act is an exquisitely verbal act: thus
38 See Hollander, The Poetics of Ékphrasis, pp. 209-19.

39 Monika Schmitz-Emans, ‘Literatur-Photographie – Erinnerung’, Der
Deutschunterricht, 75 (2005), 63-72 (p. 67).
40 Spione, p. 299.
41 Spione, p. 102.
it is the literary word, and not the photograph, which configures

itself as an authentic Phantombild in which the past can reveal
itself, even if in a gespentisch manner. The «surplus value»42 of
the photographic image consists not in its documentary value,
but in the narrative movement that it sets in motion around itself.
There should be no surprise at another dramatic turn of events
at the end of the novel in which the narrator declares to have
met the grandmother in Rome, even though the youth believed
she had been dead for some time. The grandmother claims to
have intentionally erased all traces of herself in order to keep
her grandchildren from knowing of her existence. This story,
told by a narrator who has become unreliable, must instead be
understood as a metaphor of the capacity of the word to “shed
light” on the past and evoke the dead. The ékphrasis “dynamizes”,
renders “mobile” and active to the (mind’s) eye of the reader/
observer what is fixed by «the dead gaze»43 of the camera. The
ékphrasis is thus an allegory of a narration which, contrary to
the photographic image, is able to bring the dead back to life, to
recover the past, even if in a fictitious way. Indeed, it’s precisely
this fictitious aspect that allows the literary word to draw near
to the past. The ékphrasis of the photo in the theatre thus has, as
we’ve said, a “metapoetic function” because it proposes a theory
of literature seen in antithesis to photography. If the latter, despite
of its indicative function, both sets and conceals the past, the
former, thanks to its fictitious nature, is able to give speech and
life to that which had been considered dead. It’s no accident that
this “performative” component of the literary word is underlined
by constant references to the theatrical scene which becomes in
turn a metaphor for literature. It’s in this Zwischenwelt, where all
distinctions disappear between past and present, document and
fiction, identity and difference, that the grandchildren can finally
meet their grandparents.
42 Mitchell, The Surplus Value of Images, p. 1.

43 Gerhard Plumpe, Der tote Blick: Zum Diskurs der Photographie in der Zeit
des Realismus (München: Fink, 1990).
«ACTUAL IMAGES OR WORD IMAGES»:
FAKE PAINTINGS AND NAMELESS PAINTERS
IN LEONARDO SCIASCIA’S NOVELS
Maria Rizzarelli
Leonardo Sciascia’s narrative work, in confirmation of his

great passion for the languages and the arts of vision, offers an
extraordinary range of examples of figurative quotations that,
more or less explicitly, innervate themselves in the diegetic
structure of his novels. From the reference to Guttuso and Picasso
in Il giorno della civetta, to the tableaux vivants that in Il consiglio
d’Egitto take as a model Boucher’s paintings, to the constant
comparison that in Il cavaliere e la morte the main character
establishes with Dürer’s engraving that suggests the title of
Sciascia’s second-last novel, the author’s narrative plot stages a
subtle, constant dialogue between visuality and verbality. In this
perspective, Il contesto and Todo modo represent two particularly
interesting “case studies”, that here I shall analyse, also with the
aim of showing how the interplay between words and images
turns out to be strictly connected to the complicated dialectic
between truth and falsity enlivening the plot in these crimes with
no solution.1 They undoubtedly represent a turning point in the
author’s fictional trajectory,2 also because starting from the early
70s the mimetic representation of reality goes through a deep
metamorphosis and the relationship between literature and reality
radically changes: one does not reflect the other anymore, on the
1 Leonardo Sciascia, Breve storia del romanzo poliziesco, in Opere 1971-1983,

ed. by Claude Ambroise (Milano: Bompiani, 1989), p. 1196.
2 Although Paolo Squillacioti maintains a continuity between Il contesto and
the previous A ciascuno il suo: Note ai testi, in L. Sciascia, Opere: Narrativa.
Teatro. Poesia, I (Milano: Adelphi, 2012), vol. I, pp. 1828-1834, this novel
most certainly represents a watershed in Sciascia’s work: see Massimo Onofri,
Storia di Sciascia (Bari: Laterza, 2004), p. 138; Giuseppe Traina, Leonardo
Sciascia (Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 1999), p. 84.
contrary it appears in competition with it, because it is considered

as the most authentic source of the truth.3
Fake Masters
Il contesto (1971) marks already a change through the choice

of an intentionally abstract setting, in which the story of detective
Rogas inquiry is placed. The detection of Sciascia’s anti-hero,
grappling with a serial killer who murders a dozen of judges guilty
of making a judicial error that led to his wrongful imprisonment
of five years, already in the subtitle (Una parodia) produces a
clear metatextual dimension.4
In the first part, as in the conclusion, the main character chases
Cres, the murderer, almost forestalling his moves as he is somehow
aware of the logic behind the architecture of the perfect crime5
perpetetrated by him. Inside this complex diegetic mechanism
the dialectic between appearance and reality, between truth and
fiction often turns out to be given in a purely visual dimension.
Cres’ story and criminal design fully measure themselves with
the ambiguities of the statute of the image, that crosses the theme
of identity in the novel’s pages. Since his first mention, Cres
character seems created by Rogas’ imagination as the last step
of his accurate reading and re-reading of the trial documents,
confirmed by the faces and the testimony of two other suspects.
For Rogas, having the man before him, talking with him, getting
to know him, counted more than clues, more than facts. “A fact is an
empty sack”. One had to put the man, the person, the character inside
the sack for it to hold up. What kind of man was this Cres, sentenced to
five years for attempted homicide (…)?6
3 See Onofri, p. 174.

4 On the metatextual dimension of Sciascia’s narrative work, on which the
critics largely dwelled, see Attilio Scuderi, Lo stile dell’ironia. Leonardo
Sciascia e la tradizione del romanzo (Lecce: Milella, 2003).
5 See Il contesto, p. 633.
6 Leonardo Sciascia, Equal Danger, trans. by Adrienne Foulke (New York: The
New York Review of Books, 2003), p. 31.
M. Rizzarelli - «Actual Images or Word Images» 303
Paradoxically Rogas would never fill that “empty bag” with a

direct knowledge of Cres (except maybe towards the end of the
novel), because the latter arranged his own escape removing any
trace of his face, hiding any picture that might reveal his features,
in his house, the prison archives and in the passport office.
The blurring of the last pictures, recovered from newspapers
published at the time of the trial, metaphorically seems to
confirm the invisibility gained by Cres carrying out his plan.
Their description reveals exactly the new physiognomy of the
character, by now faceless: «In one Inspector Contrera appeared
in focus, and in the other the defense lawyer; in both, Cres was like
a shape behind smoked glass».7 To read through this opacity and
recognize Cres, towards the conclusion, Rogas would not even
need the description of the picture that the fugitive removed from
his frame and that a friend of Cres, doctor Maxia, reconstructs by
memory:
The empty portrait frames in the house sparked a sudden seizure of

awareness in Maxia. He remembered very well one of the vanished
photographs. It was of Cres standing and leaning slightly, in an attitude
of affectionate concern, toward his seated mother; the old lady holding
an open fan in one hand, was all intent than the camera’s eye should
capture that gesture of abiding flirtatiousness. Why had Cres removed
it? Obviously because he did not want a likeness of himself to fall into
the hands of the police.8
The identikit, traced by the Police drawer on the basis of some

generic information from doctor Maxia himself, doesn’t allow to
recover this picture now irreparably taken away from the Police
together with the character himself, because «the artist eventually
produced a portrait the distribution of wich would have risked
causing harassment to a celebrate film star».9 Thus when Rogas
meets Cres, carrying out the last act of his revenge and about to
murder the President of the Supreme Court, he “recognizes” him
7 Sciascia, Equal Danger, p. 43.

9 Ibidem.
although he had removed any trace of his face, because the opaque
glass hiding the murderer’s shape has turned out into a “mirror”.
The dazed atmosphere in which the fleeting scene of the meeting
takes place, however, leaves the reader facing the enigma of a re-
cognition taking place without a previous “cognition”.
Like a sleepwalker, Rogas found himself once again in the elevator;

in the entrance hall, as the gates swung quickly open, he had the
sensation for a moment of finding himself before a mirror. Except that
in the mirror was another man.10
Apart from the game of the double that, as in many famous

Sciascia’s couples of characters, supports also this story,11 the most
interesting aspect in this case is that the recognition is mediated
by the mirror reference, which allows to go beyond the limits of
“invisibility” that the character had previously gained. However
Rogas becomes, by Sciascia’s own admission, Cres’ “alter ego”.12
In other words, the “vision” allows to go beyond the “sight”: So
Rogas identifies Cres even without having met him because the
man standing in front of the lift has the same characteristics of
the wanted man’s description, but also because he is a character
generated by his imagination. Thus Cres becomes “a mask” on
his own face, charged of rendering justice as he can’t, that is, of
murdering the President of the Supreme Court and thus foiling
the coup d’état he is planning. The last act of Cres’ revenge takes
place at the end of the novel at the same time as Rogas’ death.
The conclusion, however, offers three possible interpretations:
the official “truth” filtered by the news images and the speaker’s
voice announcing the finding of the detective’s body together
with Amar’s one (the secretary of the Revolutionary Party, whom
Rogar met in order to tell him his suspects), is overlapped by the
version of the story revealed by the vice-secretary to the writer

11 See Giuseppe Traina, Leonardo Sciascia, pp. 82-85. On the theme of the
double see Massimo Fusillo, L’altro e lo stesso: Teoria e storia del doppio
(Modena: Mucchi, 2012).
12 Il contesto, p. 707.
Cusano, friend of the detective whom he had given his written

record. But the latter, reporting the most reliable version, remains
hidden between the pages of Don Chisciotte. The truth “attained”
by Rogas’ detection thus seems to die with him in a scene where
Sciascia places the ultimate sense of his story and that takes place
in a museum, in which the writer puts two “fake” paintings.
The toothachy face of the newscaster dissolved (Cusan was now

standing before the TV screen). Next appeared the entrance to the
National Gallery, the stairway, the succession of exhibit rooms. Room
XII. A dark mass at the feet of a standing portrait. “The body of Mr Amar
was found under a famous portrait by Velàsquez.” Room XI. “The body
of the Inspector of Police, under the painting of the “Madonna of the
Chain”, by an unknown fifteenth-century Florentine artist.13
The fact that Velázquez never painted a portrait of Lazaro

Cardenas and that there isn’t any Madonna della Catena with
angels and saints painted by a Florentine painter of the 15th century
cannot be explained only through the parodic play in the novel.14
As Michele Cometa has pointed out, even the mere denomination
of a work of art can be anything but an innocent method.15 The
“fake masters” drawn by Sciascia’s pen through a “notional”
ékphrasis16 made more complicated through the filter of the
television, that shows them both to the character and to the reader
as second-level images, refer not only to the fake truth reported
in the news. As one of the first readers of this novel had rightly
understood, we must solve the allegory by drawing a comparison
between the names of Lazaro Cardenas and Velázquez. In other
13 Sciascia, Equal Danger, p. 93. Note that by expunging the reference to Laza-
ro Cardenas, english translation misses precisely the “notional” ékphrasis.
14 See Scuderi, pp. 76-77.
15 See Cometa, La scrittura delle immagini, p. 85.
16 ��
Here I use the well-known distinction made by John Hollander between “no-
tional” and “actual” ékphrasis, the first one referring to never existed works of
art, the other one to real ones (John Hollander, ‘The Poetics of Ékphrasis’,
209-219. However, my analysis also draws on the important remarks provid-
ed by Cometa on the limits of this distinction and on the complex true-false
dialectic involved in the ekphrastic strategies (Cometa, La scrittura delle im-
magini, pp. 48-62).
words, «the winning Mexican revolutionist who became president

of an essentially immobile Mexico foreshadows the eventual fate
of Amar».17 The famous Velázquez’s Portrait of Lazaro Cardenas
and the Madonna della Catena by an anonymous Florentine of
the 15th century, hide in their faking process a deepest meaning.
The invention of their names then appears as the form assumed
by truth in a particular “context”, such as the years of the terrorist
outrages in Italy, full of shadows and mysteries. The first one
refers to the homonymous Mexican revolutionary passed away
in 1970, while the second one recalls the church of Madonna
della Catena in Piazza Marina in Palermo (a topos with a high
symbolic meaning for Sciascia); they both allude – as it has
already been pointed out18 – to the death of any subversive spirit
and the persistence of an inquisitive atmosphere, that seems
to be the most reliable conclusion of the «a fable about power
anywhere in the world»19 given to the novel’s pages. The fake
paintings at the bottom of which the author places the dead
bodies of Amar and Rogas play as a distorting mirror, as the one
making the meeting with Cres possible, proving itself able to lead
to the recognition of truth. The false denomination at the origin of
the creation of these pictures “reflects”, thus, the most authentic
among the paradigms represented by the two characters: Amar
and the historical compromise he prepared, alias the death
of revolution; Rogas, a lonely man executed by an Inquisition
perpetuating itself through the centuries.
17 These are extracts (quoted in Note ai testi, in Sciascia, Opere, p. 1842) of the
correspondence with Italo Calvino, whose interpretation Sciascia confirms
(my translation).
18 See Giovanna Jackson, Nel labirinto di Sciascia (Milano: La Vita Felice,
2004), pp. 188-89; Thomas O’Neill, Sciascia’s Todo Modo: La vérité en
peinture, in Moving in Measure: Essays in Honour of Brian Moloney, ed. by
Judith Bryce, Dough Thompson (Hull: Hull University Press, 1989), pp. 215-
28; Giuseppe Traina, Una problematica modernità. Verità pubblica e scrittura
a nascondere in Leonardo Sciascia (Acireale-Roma: Bonanno, 2009), pp.
140-41.
A Crime with an Onlooker
In Todo modo, the counterpart of Contesto,20 the figurative

passion of the Sicilian writer reaches its acme through the figure
of the anonymous painter, the main character, witness to the dark
plots of the power of the Democrazia Cristiana. Giuseppe Traina,
in his attempt to discover the real name of the artist hiding behind
the mask of anonymity, has correctly proposed Renato Guttuso
and Fabrizio Clerici as the main suspects, and has pointed out the
visual implications derived from this choice.21 In other words,
the narrator’s voice can be immediately seen as a “narrator’s
gaze” through which the story is filtered and in which the several
figurative quotations seem to allude to a constant, paradoxical
imitation of the works of art by the reality represented. Using
a painter as first-person narrator,22 complicates the typical thick
intertextual scheme of Sciascia’s narrative works, enriching it with
visual references already shown from the paratextual apparatus.
The cover image of the novel’s first edition is Tentazione di
Sant’Antonio by Rutilio Manetti, whose copy – as Sciascia tells
in Todo modo – is held in the crypt of Zafer hermitage chapel,
the location of the story. The ékphrasis of Manetti’s painting,
placed in one of the first dialogues between the painter and his
antagonist, don Gaetano, introduces in the novel’s pages the play
of ordine delle somiglianze23 with the works of art, that would
appear again later in more than one occasion.
…And then there was this painting… he pointed. I hadn’t noticed it

till then: a dark-skinned bearded saint with an open book before him and
a devil, sanctimonius and mocking, whose red horns were like flayed
flesh. But what struck me most forcibly in the devil was the fact that he
20 See Leonardo Sciascia, ‘Non obbedisco a niente e a nessuno’, interview by

Giovanni Giuga, La Fiera Letteraria, 14 luglio 1974, quoted in Squillacioti,
Note ai testi, p. 1889.
21 See Traina, Una problematica modernità, pp. 139-50.
22 About the choice of the first-person narrator see Francesco Pontorno, Io
Sciascia: Appunti su Todo modo, in Antonio Motta (ed. by), ‘Leonardo
Sciascia vent’anni dopo’, Il Giannone, 13-14 (2009), 159-72.
23 See Sciascia, L’ordine delle somiglianze, pp. 987-93.
wore glasses – black-rimmed pince-nez. Moreover the impression that

I’d seen something of the sort without being able to remember when or
where gave the bespectacled devil an aura of mystery and dread – as
though I’d seen him in a dream or in a terrifying childhood vision.24
While don Gaetano explains the meaning of the legend of the

devil with glasses, just using the detail revealing the diabolic
nature of «any contrivance wich enables us to see clearly»,25 the
painter realizes that the priest’s pince-nez eyeglasses are very
similar to the ones represented in the painting. Beyond from the
easy identification of the luciferin aspect of the character of don
Gaetano,26 what appears particularly interesting is his description,
in his conversations with the painter, of the nature of temptation.
But now we need to go off the novel’s pages and refer to the
essay Sciascia dedicated, only one year before publishing Todo
modo, to Fabrizio Clerici, who however had been a witness and
mentor in Sciascia’s discovery of Rutilio Manetti’s painting.27 In
this work Sciascia traces back Clerici’s metaphysical style to the
symbolism of Odilon Redon. In his engravings, in to the series of
Tentation de Saint-Antoine, of Apocalisse and of Songes, Sciascia
identifies «the logic of visibility at the service of invisibility».28
I believe that the same sense of the enigma characteristic of
Sciascia’s most complex crime novel can be found in the cryptic
elegance of his writing dedicated to the “mysterious beauty”
of Redon’s painting (and, as we will see later, of Clerici). In
24 Sciascia, One Way or Another, trans. by Sasha Rabinovitch (Manchester-New

York: Carcanet, 1987), p. 27.
25 Sciascia, One Way or Another, p. 29.
26 On this subject, see the re-reading of Ivan Pupo that questions this easy
identification: Ivan Pupo, Passioni della ragione e labirinti della memoria:
Studi su Leonardo Sciascia (Napoli: Liguori, 2011), p. 72.
27 See Sciascia, ‘Clerici e l’occhio di Redon’, Galleria, XXXVIII, (1988), 240-
45; Fabrizio Clerici, ‘Gli occhiali del diavolo’, Nuove Effemeridi, 9, iii (1990),
p. 86, in which the painter tells how, during Sciascia’s visit during the summer
of 1973, in a small church in the Tuscan countryside, the writer looked a copy
of Rutilio Manetti’s work held in S. Agostino church in Siena.
28 Sciascia, Clerici e l’occhio di Redon, p. 240 (the English translation is by Sil-
via Greenup. I should like to thank her for the translation of the quotations of
this essay).
this essay we find, through the reference to Redon’s gaze, the

perspective dimension through which the writer checks the
perverted system of the “microphysics of the power”29 (already
observed through the deforming lens of the parody of Contesto
and which would be the central theme in the pages of Affaire
Moro). The intertextual chain connecting Clerici and Redon
right to Todo Modo’s pages, passes through the visual quotation
in Flaubert’s Tentation (which, among other things, is indirectly
implicit also in Manetti’s Tentazione). In his essay in honor of
Clerici and his “Redonian” gaze, Sciascia compiles a brief and
personal “anthology of the eye” that ranges from the “flaubertian-
redonian”30 texts, through the Bible, to Machado and Borges. The
Flaubertian and Redonian flaming pupils («partout des prunelles
flamboient»), the eyes floating like molluscs («Et que des
yeux sans tête flottaient comme des mollusques») allude to the
hopeless look breaking against the inaccessible horizon («Mon
regard que rien ne peut dévier, demeure tendu à travers les choses
sur un horizon inaccessible»)31 drawn inside the “Lager”32 of
Todo modo. Moreover in Sciascia’s critical imaginary Redon’s
and Clerici’s eyes are connected by their common attention to the
space and its architectonic dimension.
So, to discuss Clerici let us begin with Redon (…); this on account
of their being architects at the service of invisibility, from within. Let
me explain: symbolist, surrealist and metaphysical painting is filled
with squares and avenues, porticos and colonnades, bifurcations and
crossroads; but the eye that takes them in, the eye from which the lines
depart and towards which they converge – the eye, in other words, of
De Chirico, of Magritte, of Delvaux – is outside, occupying a specific
position. Redon’s eye (which of course is not only Redon’s eye) is
instead within the architectures, within the buildings, which cannot be
29 See Onofri, p. 138.

30 See Clerici e l’occhio di Redon, p. 242.
31 The extracts from Flaubert’s Tentation de Saint Antoine are mentioned by
Sciascia in Clerici e l’occhio di Redon, p. 242. The drawings to which the
writer hints refere to several series of illustrations created by Redon (1888-
1896) for Flaubert’s work: see La Tentation de Saint Antoine de Flaubert,
illustrations de Odilon Redon (Paris: Les Peintres du Livre, 1969).
32 See Traina, Una problematica modernità, p. 147.
said to sing, but rather to entrap, within no specific spot: like a bat flitting
fretfully against the walls, moving from one object to the other (…). In
Clerici there occurs something like a doubling and a metamorphosis:
on the one hand there is the point-of-view-eye of Piero della Francesca
and Magritte, an eye which irradiates and gathers perspectives both
minute and obsessive; on the other, there is Redon’s bat-eye, which at
times is uncovered and sectioned as in an anatomical table, at others
camouflaged, petrified, a stone among the stone ruins. This eye may yet
come sparkling into life, carbuncle-like, unleashing a deathly ray, aimed
directly at exploding and blinding some other eye, placed in the head
of those simulacra of sacred and mythical beasts which are portrayed as
engaging in a sort of indecipherable “conversation” outside of time”.33
This long quotation is essential to understand the sense of the

reference to Clerici, hidden behind the anonymity of the main
character. As Clerici/Redon’s, the painter’s gaze in Todo modo
observes the space (surreal and too real at the same time) in
Zafer’s hermitage staying at the same time inside and outside. His
role of external spectator becomes more and more compromised
as he little by little gets into the vision through the conversations,
with don Gaetano (his alter ego), almost surrendering to the
temptation of metaphorically picking up his glasses, and his
cynical and amused gaze on the massacre game developing in
front of their eyes. Since the very first pages of the novel, the
painter himself describes his ambivalent visual condition in a
landscape in which he is at first, through his room’s window, a
distant observer of the hotel’s yard where he would witness the
coming in of the notables of the Democrazia Cristiana going to
attend the spiritual exercises; later an onlooker ready to take a
seat in the stalls made up of deckchairs which «They recalled,
on account too of the colours – natural wood and widley striped
blue and red canvas – some early de Chirico. I entered into the
picture».34 But his gaze does not really move from the outside to
the inside, because, as the narrator’s voice adds, he never gives
up a metaphysical perspective:
33 Sciascia, Clerici e l’occhio di Redon, pp. 241-42, translation by S. Greenup.

anyone looking out of one of the windows would have taken me

for a mannequin abandoned on a chair (I experience the paintings of
others more than my own – expecially the work of those painters most
different from me).35
Here the reference to De Chirico’s iconography has value

particularly in the hermeneutical perspective expressed by
Sciascia in the essay already mentioned, in which Surrealism and
Metaphysics are to be interpreted as metahistorical categories,
helping the author’s voice in drawing that architecture “at the
service to invisibility” inside which he would place the show of
the infernal bedlams of his present.
Before analysing the other passages of the novel showing the
ability of the main character to let live and live inside someone
else’s paintings, we need a last explanation about the complicity
he discovers with don Gaetano’s eyes. Already since his first
appearance, the character of the priest is marked by an enigmatic
visual dimension,36 that the author himself feels an obligation to
justify through an explicit interference in the story:
Here I want to explain why, when describing Don Gaetano’s

departures, how he leaves or has left, I use the word’s “vanish” or
“diaspear” – and shall go on using them and perhaps others such as
“fade away”, “dissolve”. To do so I must resort to the memory of a
game we palyed as children: we would draw on a sheet of paper a
completely black figure with a single white spot counting up to sixty,
then shut our eyes or look up at the sky – and we still saw that figure,
but now white, transparent.37
The silhouette play thus helps, as a further visual reference,

to give the sense of sdoppiamento (“duplication”), of sfera
dell’ipnosi (“hypnotic sphere”),38 of a perceptive method got as
a kind of infection through don Gaetano’s gaze. Therefore, the
painter appears to be aware that the spiritual exercise proposed to
35 Ibidem.
36 Sciascia, Todo modo, pp. 846-47.
38 Sciascia, Todo modo, p. 851.
him is more than just a visual exercise: it deals with a particular

way of looking at reality, turning one’s back on it as Redon
did, so that, by closing one’s eyes, all that remains in the eyes
is the memory of an unclear and invisible life.39 Don Gaetano,
being in his own way also «architect at the service to the logic
of invisibility», proves himself a sympathetic spectator, amused
by the show the painter is going to witness. As a matter of fact,
he claims to be the third one (together with the cook and the
painter) who enjoyed the scene of the Rosary;40 and as the priest
is also the actor and the director of the infernal choreography, as
well as the main character is the narrator’s voice in his painting,
the scene contemplated by their eyes continuously confuses and
overlaps «actual images or word images».41 The picture of the
Demochristian power system, mentioned in the conversations
among the notables reunited in the hermitage, coexists with the
fantasmagory of the silhouettes that they leave in the painter/
writer’s eyes, in his memory fed with images and words, whose
purpose is to go beyond the horizon of the visible «like x-rays»,42
and to catch its most absurd inconsistency and its macabre dance
towards death.
Thus in the repeat of the show of the telling of the Rosary
the colours of the scene change: from the ironic representation
of the first evening we move to a grotesque and tragic one «the
absurd to-ing and fro-ing like caged animals, their hovering and
lingering in the half light and their quicker terrified scurrying
towards the dark»,43 where a gun shot, together with a clear spot,
appears. And the crime is registered by the eyes of the narrator
onlooker, too, inside the painting drawn by his voice:
The lights came on in three waves – a blinding crescendo. At the

far end of the esplanade the dead body, foreshortened in my angle of
vision, seemed more dead than before. Then two waiters, dropping
39 See Sciascia, Clerici e l’occhio di Redon, p. 240.

40 Sciascia, Todo modo, pp. 873-74.
a sheet over it, turned it into a little mound of snow. The night was
suddenly filled with a dense ballet of midges, with geckos streaking
across the walls towards the glaring lamps. It was as though a horror,
till then unperceived, had been unexpectedly exposed.44
The Last Painting
Therefore, when in the middle of the novel the scene turns

red, the character of the painter reveals clearly his connection
with the author’s vision, but the impression is that the detective
plot joining the story has here, just like in Contesto, a parodic
dimension and that the solution to the enigma is to be found
especially from the point of view of the visionary, hypnotic
look “serving to the logic of the invisible” revealed to the main
character in his conversations with don Gaetano. From this point
of view, the several figurative quotations play an important
role. The presence of a narrator’s voice “compromised” with
the figurative representation encourages, as already noticed, the
writer to provide a diversified range of ekphrastic strategies: those
with “actual” features, such as the description of Rutilio Manetti’s
Tentazione di Sant’Antonio, or of Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa,
a perfect metaphore of the deviation to cannibalism by the
Church and by the political party connected with it;45 those with
“notional” features, dealing with the main character’s drawings,
such as the ugly nude of a woman that he gives as a gift to the
prosecutor Scalambri and the portrait of Jesus Christ, painted as
a surrender to don Gaetano’s temptation. Actually there is no real
description of the last two paintings, but only of their creative
process. However, Sciascia’s figurative disposition expresses
itself especially in forms of hybridization and dynamization,46
using the most diversified pictorial references in order to place
the invisible “in the logic of the visible”.

45 See Sciascia, Todo modo, pp. 875-76.
46 On the ékphrastic rhetoric about the dynamization of the images see Cometa,
La scrittura delle immagini, pp. 90-115.
One of the first scenes of the novel is set up as a tableau vivant,

where the main character, walking in the wood around Zafer’s
hermitage, glimpses the Demochristian notables’ mistresses,
lying under the sun, who would shortly afterwards appear: «It
was a vision. Something mythical and magic. If one pictured
them completely naked (wich required no effort of imagination),
the result was a painting by Delvaux».47
“The order of likenesses” allows Sciascia to prefigure the
context in which the story he is going to tell is set, somehow
suspended between reality and imagination, between a physical
and a metaphysical scenery, in a setting balanced towards
surreality. The reference to Delvaux suggests to the author «The
manner in wich they were disposed, the perspective from which
I perceived them was pure Delvaux. As well as what couldn’t be
represented but which I knew».48 But once again the metaphysical
perspective preveals, the look from a certain distance, before
meeting don Gaetano, whose eye on the contrary – as we tried
to show – is used to scan the infernal processes from inside, in
accordance with the “Redonian” perspective described in the
essay on Clerici.
Even the coexistence of both points of view, of the double
perspective (inside and outside the painting) through which
the story is told, is represented again using precise figurative
references, which in the author’s hands become the result of
his own original creation, manipulating these sources for his
own purposes. Thus, for example, when “painting” the scene of
praying the Rosary, the main character portrays himself as a De
Chirico mannequin; and to suggest to Scalambri to reconstruct
the layout of the “beleavers” praying in the crime scene, he sends
him a drawing in Steinberg’s style «I took out my sketch-pad and
sketched, in the manner of Steinberg, the ranks of the faithful.
Underneath I scribbled: “The ranks should be reconstituted”».49
In this case as well, in imitating the American artist, he portrays
himself inside the painting, or, at least, the reference to Steinberg

48 Ibidem.
49 Sciascia, One Way or Another, pp. 56-57.
indicates that the area where the praying people are situated might
include the author’s hand or pencil. The “order of likenesses” with
the works of art, the interchange between reality and imagination,
goes on until the last painting, in which the narrator’s voice
seems to free itself and leaves don Gaetano’s gaze, which had
tented it to lean out towards «the edge of the abyss, inside us
and outside us».50 Accepting the challenge of going beyond
Antonello, Rouault and Redon,51 after drawing his Christ (whose
description, however, is not available), the painter “paints” with
his own voice the portrait of the priest as a dead man:
He lay in disarray and as though out of joint. His legs, almost at

right angles, stretched his cassock which had been rucked up as he
slipped exposing his thick white woollen socks. And all eyes focused
on those socks because they contrasted sharply with the black shoes and
the black cassock and because they were winter socks and it was high
summer. After the socks one’s gaze, or at least mine, was drawn to his
glasses which, from the cord attached to his breast, hung down on to a
root where they rested at an odd angle to a sunbeam filtering through
the foliage – it was like the detail of a painting by a minor pupil of
Caravaggio. And I say minor because everything about the dead Don
Gaetano and his surroundings was minor – diminished, reduced, low-
key in relation to what he’s been alive.52
In the studied direction of the eyes laying on the painting,

in the winking balance of black and white, the narrator’s voice
celebrates in this “dying painting” his requiem for the character
through which he had pointed his eyes at the horror of Power. The
ray of light falling on the glasses is a tribute to Caravaggio, but at
the same time it is a quotation from Fabrizio Clerici and his «dritto
raggio di morte, che va ad esplodere e accecare un altro occhio».

51 See Sciascia, Todo modo, pp. 924-25. An in-depth analysis of the theme of the
christological image in Sciascia’s works, considering its complex implications,
cannot be carried out here; on that see the important works by Hans Belting,
Das echte Bild. Bildfragen als Glaubensfragen (München: Beck, 2005), and
Georges Didi-Huberman, L’image ouverte: Motifs de l’incarnation dans les
arts visuels (Paris: Gallimard, 2007).
Sciascia like in Clerici, inside of him there is an “enlightened”53

side making him abandon the look inside the painting. We have
the impression that, if it is true that Christ revealed himself once
and for all to Redon «must truly have had such features and the
once only, centuries later. He revealed them to Redon»,54 it is also
true that the hell of our Seventies found in Todo Modo its most
authentic interpretation, and in Sciascia an admirable «architect
at the service to the logic of invisible» setting which was under
everybody’s eyes and which, a few years later, would reveal the
effet de réel of the Affaire Moro.
53 Sciascia, Clerici e l’occhio di Redon, p. 243.

THE TORCH AND THE MASK: ILLUSTRATIVE
CAPTIONS FOR THOUGHT. AN EXEMPLARY
PAIR OF PICTURES BY PAOLO DE MATTEIS
Alessandro Rossi
In order to describe an image, there are two basic possibilities:

above all, one needs to see it, or having seen it (mimetic
ékphrasis), or, if this is not possible, it has to be invented (notional
ékphrasis). When there are instructions for creating an image, as
was often the case with patrons and painters, there emerges a third
possibility, which at once inverts and combines the two kinds
of ékphrasis we have just cited. The painter, who must respect
the patron’s indications, will in fact have to invert the concept
of mimetic ékphrasis and represent what the words say, that is,
translate verbal requirements into an image. At the same time,
such requirements will describe an ideal image that does not yet
exist, remaining in a state of potentiality that stands in opposition
to that which contains images “invented” by literature (notional
ékphrasis), precisely because the latter already exist, perfectly
complete, within the terms of their description, and have no value
as projected concepts. The instruction communicated verbally or
in writing by the patron to the painter whom he wishes to realize
the image the former has in his mind, will in turn have to combine
itself with the image prompted by such a description in the mind of
the painter, who will make it objectively visible initially through
sketches, then small-scale models and finally the painting itself.
Between one stage of artistic realization and the other, further
comments will appear, modifying the final visual outcome. Often
the patron’s instructions will refer to a written text, usually a
literary classic, and thus the painter will have to create an image
drawn from a text mediated by the words of the patron, who will
select the episode and indicate how to represent it. An exemplary
case of this multi-ékphrastic process, or «dynamic treatment
of the compositional process»,1 is offered by the relationship

between the English philosopher Anthony Ashley Cooper, third
Earl of Shaftesbury, and Paolo De Matteis, a painter from Cilento,
an Italian geographical region of Campania district.
Towards the end of 1711, the seriously ill Lord Shaftesbury
journeyed to Naples to enjoy the mild Mediterranean climate.
There he composed a small treatise entitled A Notion of the
Historical Draught or Tablature of the Judgement of Hercules,
which consisted of precise precepts about the choice of attitudes
and feelings, the importance of individual figures in reciprocal
compositional interactions, and the moral significance and unity
of time a painter ought to observe in the translation of a subject
into painting.2 These rigorous standards on how to transfer a story
or fable onto canvas through drawing and colour, combined with
Classicising taste and the Platonic notion of the moral unity of
Beauty and Truth, as well as the Aristotelian principle of the unity
of time, space and action, were far from abstract considerations,
being expressly directed to the painter Paolo De Matteis, so he
could paint scenes drawn from Classical mythology according
to an appropriate criterion of aesthetic decorum. The treatise was
originally written by the Earl of Shaftesbury in French, that is,
in a language also known to De Matteis.3 The artist thus found
himself obliged not only to observe simple suggestions from his
patron, but an actual series of theoretical precepts specifically
written so they could be put into practice without their meaning
being misunderstood.4 As the title of the treatise itself suggests,
1 Michele Cometa, La scrittura delle Immagini, pp. 100 ff.

2 A Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature of the Judgement of Hercules
was first published in French with the title Le Jugement d’Hercule in the
Journal des Sçavans (November 1712), and was then reprinted in English as
a pamphlet in 1713, subsequently appearing in the volume Characteristicks of
Men, Manners, Opinions and Times in 1714 (repr. Cambridge Univeristy
Press, Cambridge 1999).
3 The Foreword to the 1713 edition of A Notion of the Historical Draught states
that the treatise was originally communicated in manuscript form to a foreign
painter, in French.
4 Lord Shaftesbury writes: «To preserve therefore a just Conformity with
Historical Truth, and with the Unity of Time and Action, there remains no
other way by which we can possibly give hint of any thing future, or call to
A. Rossi - The Torch and the Mask 319
the specific mythological subject to which Lord Shaftesbury’s

aesthetic theories should be applied was the episode of Hercules
at the Crossroads between Vice and Virtue.5 The work painted by
De Matteis in accordance with such precepts is The Choice of
Hercules
Paolo De Matteis, The Choice of Hercules, 1712
now housed in the Ashmolean Museum, site in Oxford, in which

the Aristotelian unities of space, time and action are strictly
observed.
mind any thing past, than by setting in view such Passages or Events as have
actually subsisted, or according to Nature might well subsist, or happen
together in one and the same instant. And this is what we may properly call the
Rule of Consistency» (A Notion of the Historical Draught, n.p., 1713, I, 9).
5 The subject was by Prodicus of Ceos, and was transmitted by Xenophon in the
Memorabilia Socratis.
Apollo and Daphne
The relationship between the Italian painter and the English

philosopher with respect to the creation of this painting has already
been properly studied by Livio Pestilli.6 The scholar extended his
research to other paintings by De Matteis, believing that contact
with such a cultivated and demanding patron constituted a stylistic
watershed for the artist – that is, that De Matteis’ painting and his
way of composing, after he had worked for Lord Shaftesbury,
was profoundly and almost indelibly marked by this association;
indeed, that recognizing the presence of the philosopher’s canons
could be used to date works attributed to the painter, according
to the customary ante and post quem parameters. The test case
for this criterion is offered by two distinct versions of Diana
and Actaeon painted by De Matteis (Munich, Alte Pinakothek
and England, private collection) and a canvas with Apollo and
Daphne7 (Berkeley, James A. Coughlin collection).
Paolo De Matteis, Apollo and Daphne, 1702 ca.
6 Livio Pestilli, ‘Lord Shaftesbury e Paolo de Matteis: Ercole al bivio tra teoria
e pratica’, Storia dell’arte, 68 (1990), 95-121.
7 The subject is drawn from Ovid, Metamorphoses, I, pp. 452-567.
The latter painting provides the starting-point for our

considerations on ékphrasis. In the absence of external
documentation, the work itself becomes the sole witness to its
own circumstances, motivations and function; describing it, in
fact, is the sole method of comprehending it and placing it in
context. We may now come to our case study so as to verify what
we have said, bearing in mind – as Michael Baxandall has written
– that the descriptions / explanations we discuss, or which we
ourselves will give, refer «to the effect the picture has on us»
more than to the painting itself.8
In the Berkeley Apollo and Daphne Pestilli recognises an
example of what was abhorred by the English philosopher,
the «ridiculous anticipation of metamorphosis», since what is
shown in the painting is a transformation that occurs before
«the execution of that act in which the charm consists».9
Our description of this picture, instead, proceeds in another
direction: according to the way we see it, the painter seizes and
suspends the beginning of the metamorphic process, showing
the transformation of Daphne’s fingers and tresses into laurel
branches and leaves. In this case, De Matteis’ painting captures
a precise moment of the narration; he does not visually describe
the temporal anticipations of the narrative sequence.10 This
is not a montage of several scenes but a precise shot – or, in
keeping with the cinematic metaphor – a freeze-frame of a
process of transformation. In this canvas, De Matteis captures,
one may say, the Aristotelian unity of time, space and action
8 Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of

Pictures (New Heaven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 11.
9 Livio Pestilli, ‘Ut Pictura Non Poesis: Lord Shaftesbury’s Ridiculous
Anticipation of Metamorphosis and the Two Versions of Diana and Actaeon
by Paolo de Matteis’, Artibus et Historiae, 27 (1993), p. 137.
10 Paolo De Matteis thus follows the precepts expressed in paragraph 7 of the
first chapter of A Notion: «It is evident, that every master in painting, when he
has made choice of the determinate date or point of time, according to which
he would represent his history, is afterwards debarred the taking advantage
from any other action than what is immediately present, and belonging to that
single instant he describes (…)».
requested by Lord Shaftesbury.11 The same painting is thus seen

and interpreted in two opposing ways, which will naturally have
consequences of an art-historical kind, as we shall see.
This description, which essentially recognises the painting
as a representation of the instantaneous nature of metamorphic
movement, has its origins in a comparison and contrast (according
to a hermeneutical integration of the gaze12) with the description
that could be given of another painting, also taken from the
Metamorphoses of Ovid, Pan and Syrinx13 (Milan, private
collection)
Paolo De Matteis, Pan e Syrinx, 1725 ca.
11 In the first paragraph of the Conclusions of his A Notion, Lord Shaftesbury

writes that the painter can describe no more than one action at a time, and that
seeking to understand two or more actions or parts of a story within a single
painting is ridiculous: «The painter is a Historian at the same rate, but still
more narrowly confin’d, as in fact appears; since it wou’d certainly prove a
more ridiculous Attempt to comprehend two or three distinct Actions or Parts
of History in one Picture, than to comprehend ten times the number in one the
same Poem».
12 Cometa, La scrittura delle immagini, pp. 116 ff.
13 The subject is drawn from Ovid, Metamorphoses, I, 689-712.
Correctly recognized by Federico Zeri as a work by Paolo De

Matteis and as a pendant to the painting in Berkeley,14 in part
because of the same dimensions (101.5 x 177.5 cm), this picture
expresses a mode of depicting metamorphosis in a way that is
diametrically opposite to that of its pendant, Apollo and Daphne.
Let us try first to describe the painting of Pan and Syrinx, and then
to look at these two pictures together, since as they are pendants
they were and should be contemplated together.
Pan and Syrinx
The co-existence on the surface of this canvas of three

represented elements (the fleeing nymph; the bundle of reeds
grasped by the satyr; the musical instrument hanging from Pan’s
shoulder), notionally distant in time from one another in the
temporal succession of the events narrated by Ovid, would thus
rule out the contextuality of one with the others, since the presence
of any one of the three automatically excludes the other two;
and this leads us to reflect on the pictorial devices governing the
representation of temporal succession implied by the narration of
any metamorphosis in a static, painted image. Pan grasps a bundle
of reeds which, in the story, is the nymph herself, transformed
through the intercession of her sister nymphs, whose help Syrinx
sought in order to escape from Pan (I, 703-706). In De Matteis’
depiction, Syrinx still has the semblance of a woman escaping
from her bestial pursuer: she therefore appears twice in the
painting, in both the “before” and “after” of her metamorphosis,
that is, in the form of a woman and that of a bundle of reeds.
As for Pan, he carries his characteristic instrument, slung from a
14 ��
A copy of the expertise, dated 16 May 1993, is filed in the photographic li-
brary of the Fondazione Federico Zeri in Bologna (entry no. 63392, series
“Pittura italiana”, folder no. 0588). As regards the authorship of the painting,
Zeri writes: «The author of this canvas, which is in perfect condition, is the
Neapolitan artist Paolo De Matteis, born in Piano del Cilento in 1662 and died
in Naples in 1728. The attribution is absolutely certain. Moreover this canvas
has a companion piece with Apollo and Daphne, now in a private collection
in Berkeley, California».
shoulder – the syrinx, or pan-pipe, which as Ovid tells us (I, 710-

712) was created by the cutting and reshaping (by Pan himself)
of a part of that same bundle of reeds that the satyr had grasped,
panting. So, here too, the reeds are shown contemporaneously
“before” and “after” their transformation, as a bundle of plants
and as a musical instrument. At the same time, the painter
shows us the triple transformation of the nymph, presenting her
contemporaneously in the forms she subsequently assumes, in
time: woman, plant, musical instrument.
The painting is thus crossed by a double movement: one
from right to left, with the satyr pursuing the nymph as she
heads towards her sisters, who will ensure her salvation through
transformation – reflecting the proper movement of the narrative
– and the other from left to right, following the progress of the
metamorphoses, in which nothing is shown in transformation,
but rather fully transformed. What is seen, what is offered as
visible for the spectator, is fiction and deceit. The co-existence
in the beholder’s gaze of “before” and “after” at once reveals
and dislocates several successive episodes of Ovid’s text on the
canvas, consciously placing them under the eloquent symbol of
the mask, carried and displayed by the winged cherub.
Whether metamorphosis, and the inevitable temporal sequence
it implies, can be shown in painting, becomes even more
complicated if (as in our case) we consider Pan’s point of view. As
he grasps the reeds, in De Matteis’ admirable rendering, the goat-
god still has the image of the sensual, fleeting forms of Syrinx
in his gaze. Indeed the much-desired body of the nymph seems
to appear to him like a sudden flashback of the precise moment
in which the satyr was convinced he had finally seized her flesh.
For Pan, the instrument, too, which would be named after Syrinx,
represents nothing more than the melancholy memory of the
sound produced by his gasping before the body of the nymph, now
changed into reeds. In embracing what no longer exists, unless
it were within his imagination or illusion, and already bearing
the instrument of his consolation, the figure of Pan evokes the
hidden depths of desire, memory and action across the surface of
the canvas, enabling the painter to achieve the challenging task
of spatially articulating the temporal coordinates of past, present

and future, in an attempt to reconcile “representation” and
“narration”. The painting thus depicts a single sequence within
whose unitary realm there move characters and objects involved
in the moment of the nymph’s flight, and contemporaneously
involved in its dual metamorphic outcome. This simultaneity
lends the painting a peculiar “iconic density”15 that allows De
Matteis’ picture to acquire (in the words of Giovanni Careri)
«the necessary independence needed to open an authentic
“dialogue with the text of the poem”»16 by Ovid, although this is
a programmatic contradiction of elements dictated by the English
philosopher, such as the Rule of Consistency (I, 9), the Law of
Truth and Credibility and the Law of Unity and Simplicity of
Design (I, 13), which impeded the artist from depicting any type
of Anticipation and Repeal (I, 12)17 within the given episode.
A Paradigmatic Pair of Pictures
If we accept that the canvases in question are pendants – that

is, that they were conceived as a pair for the same patron, to
be enjoyed together – and if we agree that the emphasis placed
on two distinct modes of painting the metamorphosis is telling
evidence of a special interest in this question, we may associate
the commission of the two works with someone who would have
wanted Paolo De Matteis to depict aesthetic speculations on the
modes of translating poetic narrative into images, and recognise
15 “Iconic density” is the expression used by Gottfried Boehm with respect to the
categories of “transition” (Übergang), “simultaneity” (Simultanität) and
“potentiality” (Potentialität). See Boehm, Per una ermeneutica dell’immagine,
in Estetica tedesca oggi, ed. by Riccardo Ruschi (Milano: Unicopli, 1986),
pp. 189-217.
16 Careri’s expression refers to the relationship between Nicolas Poussin’s
Rinaldo and Armida (Paris, Musée du Louvre) and Torquato Tasso’s poem La
Gerusalemme liberata: in Giovanni Careri, La fabbrica degli affetti. La
Gerusalemme liberata dai Carracci a Tiepolo (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 2010),
p. 202.
17 A. A. Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, A Notion.
the canvases in Milan and the United States as pendant pictures

commissioned by Lord Shaftesbury himself. In this case we would
to have ask ourselves why the English nobleman would have
had his favourite painter create two pictures that are apparently
similar, but profoundly different with respect to their syntactic
structure. The possible response to this is surely to hang the two
canvases on the same wall so as to highlight the different modes
of representing metamorphosis in painting, and thus the visual
narration of movement: one according to norms of acceptability
and decorum, which has to maintain the Aristotelian unities of
space, time and action (Apollo and Daphne), and another that
should instead be recognised as incorrect and inappropriate, if
not quite ridiculous, in which different temporal sequences co-
exist contemporaneously within a single scene (Pan and Syrinx).
A telling clue that supports such an interpretation for this pair
of paintings is that the Apollo and Daphne, the canvas that
represents the “correct” way of expressing the composition, is
placed under the sign of light (a cherub with a torch, the light
of truth in the fable), whereas the scene of Pan and Syrinx is
placed, as we have already noted, under the sign of the mask, a
symbol of falsehood. The two paintings would thus represent a
manifesto of what to do and what not to do in painting according
to Lord Shaftesbury, or better, of how the passage from poetic
narration to pictorial representation should be managed by the
painter following criteria of decorum, which in the specific case
of metamorphoses could lead to their being eluded, resulting in
«ridiculous anticipations».18 In the case of the Pan and Syrinx,
such anticipations are so obvious that they could end up being
counter-paradigms, to be avoided. Considered one at a time,
the cherubs – bearing a torch here, a mask there – draw little
attention, and can thus be reduced to little more than decoration,
yet in these reassembled pendants they almost become the double
caption of what the two paintings seek to express, together.
Reading Apollo and Daphne as a work inconsistent with the
aesthetic precepts of Lord Shaftesbury leads Pestilli to consider
18 See Pestilli, Ut pictura non poesis, p. 137.

it to have been painted before De Matteis’ contact with the

philosopher, that is, before January 1712, while our hypothesis
proposes that De Matteis executed both pictures under the
supervision of the Englishman, who provided the theoretical
line followed by the two specific compositional structures of
the paintings before us, probably just after the completion of
the last version of The Choice of Hercules (Oxford, Ashmolean
Museum), shortly after 22 March 1712.
The Torch and the Mask
To attempt to support our interpretation, which considers the

pair of paintings in question to be pendants – at once literary and
theoretical, theatrical and philosophical – that can be recognised
as a paradigm of a normative representation of visual narrative
in painting according to Lord Shaftesbury, it would be well to
explore the possibility that the two cherubs in the paintings could
plausibly assume the illustrative function in the sense we have
described above. Winged cherubs (with bird or butterfly wings)
appear frequently in De Matteis’ paintings; if they carry some
object in their hands, it can often refer to the attributes of the
principal character in the scene who is accompanied by these
creatures. In his painting of Apollo and Daphne, for example, the
torch, a symbol of light, held aloft by the little cherub, is to be
associated with Apollo as God of the Sun, and in fact in the Aurora
and the Chariot of the Sun (Schloss Pommersfelden) two cherubs
armed with torches guide the chariot of Apollo-Sun.19 However,
the torch held by a winged cherub is also used by De Matteis
as a symbol of amorous passion in certain depictions of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, such as Alphaeus and Arethusa (Verona, private
collection), Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (private collection)
19 Another meaningful example is the cherub at the feet of Zeus, his arms held
high and bearing the thunderbolts of the father of the Gods, in another painting
by De Matteis, the Allegory of a Hoped-For Alliance between France and the
Kingdom of Naples (Mainz, Landesmuseum).
and indeed the Berkeley Apollo and Daphne.20 Yet in his Pan and
Syrinx De Matteis decides to give less emphasis to the aspect of
passion in the story, placing a mask in the cherub’s hands, perhaps
because – following the instructions of his philosopher-patron –
he had to make explicit, through a clear, unmistakable emblem,
that such a composition constituted an incorrect, deceitful and
incongruous pendant. Following Lord Shaftesbury’s precepts,
we should understand this form of deceit not only as present
within the narrative episode but also according to its “incorrect”
figurative representation.
De Matteis’ familiarity with the adoption of these symbols
is also displayed (hardly fortuitously) in the Allegory of Divine
Wisdom Crowning Painting as Queen of the Arts (Los Angeles,
The J. Paul Getty Museum; signed and dated 168…), in which two
little cherubs are depicted, one holding a mirror (the traditional
symbol of Truth, and similar in some respects to that of the torch)
and the other a mask (symbol of Deceit). The fact that De Matteis
wanted to include precisely these two symbols in an allegory of
the primacy of painting – a mirror and a mask carried by two
cherubs, representing the aspects of truth and fiction that painting
contains within itself – might suggest that our painter wished to
retain, even many years later, this iconographical element, which
was certainly rhetorical, but about which he felt strongly, and had
made his own, so that he could meet his patron’s needs without
giving up his own congenial iconographical vocabulary. In other
words, the artist would have interacted with the philosophers’
theoretical language through his own figurative, with a certain
craft and symbolic awareness of his own.21 Besides, it was the
20 On the symbolic meaning of the torch in this sense, see. Vincenzo Cartari, Le
immagini de i Dei e de gli Antichi, Venice 1556 (repr. edited by Caterina Volpi,
De Luca Editori d’Arte, Roma 1996), p. 435.
21 If it is true that Lord Shaftesbury considered De Matteis as a mere main docile
of the philosopher-virtuoso, as L. Pestilli reminds us, it is also true that our
painter was known for being «most eloquent in speech, and very learned in
fables and histories; with a most faithful memory he recited the Aeneid of
Virgil, the Metamorphoses of Ovid and the Jerusalem of Tasso, other than
many citations and sayings of the philosophers, and clever mottoes with
which he would pepper his speeches» (Lord Shaftesbury e Paolo de Matteis,
patron himself (or at least the one we have proposed for our pair
of pictures) who established the need for a sober adoption of
certain emblematic elements in order to better clarify the function
of the figures represented here, and therefore the subject of the
painting itself. In the chapter of A Notion entitled Of the Casual
or Independent Ornaments (VI, 1), Lord Shaftesbury rejects the
idea of crowding the scene with elements that are external to the
characters, since these accessories would go against the principle
of Simplicity that must govern the images, and they would
distract beholders’ gazes and confuse their judgement. In order to
recognize Vice and Virtue in the painting The Choice of Hercules
commissioned from De Matteis, the philosopher indicates only a
few specific portable ornaments as legitimate and apt: the helmet,
the bit (or bridle) to emblematically express the characteristics
of Virtue such as “resistance” and “support” (helmet), and
“tolerance” and “abstinence” (bit or bridle), as well as gold
historiated vases and drapery thrown down carelessly, to express
the lascivious feminine characteristics of Vice (or Pleasure).22 The
torch and the mask depicted in our two paintings should thus be
understood precisely as this kind of portable element (and in fact
they are carried by two small cherubs): not external to the scene
and not disturbing the comprehension of the episode’s content,
but on the contrary, simple and unmistakable elements capable of
creating a greater understanding of not only each single episode
but also the reading of the two canvases when seen together. It
was, moreover, Lord Shaftesbury himself who declared that «my
own designs (…) run all on moral emblems (…) it must be I that
must set the wheel agoing, and help raise the spirit».23
p. 114); («eloquentissimo nel parlare e molto erudito nelle favole, e nelle

istorie, e con una memoria fedelissima recitava l’Eneide di Vergilio, le
Metamorfosi di Ovidio, e la Gerusalemme del Tasso; oltre a molte sentenze, e
detti de’ filosofi, e motti arguti con cui solea condire i suoi discorsi»): B. De
Dominici, Vite dei pittori, scultori ed architetti napoletani, (Napoli:
Tipolitografia Trani, 1846), vol. IV, p. 345.
22 Earl of Shaftesbury, A Notion, chapter VI, pp. 4-5.
23 Benjamin Rand (ed. by), The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical
Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury (London: Sonnenschein & co.,
1900), p. 468. Commenting on the illustrations in Lord Shaftesbury’s
The Beholder of the Pendants as Hercules at the Crossroads
The “wheel” referred to by Lord Shaftesbury is to be understood

as a device that can directly link the emblematic elements and the
spectator, who is to read their moral as well as aesthetic sense.
For example, as regards how a spectator might look at The Choice
of Hercules, the work, if well-conceived, would be transformed
from a simple decorative item to a useful exercise for: «a Royal
Youth, who shou’d one day come to undergo this Trial himself; on
which his own Happiness, as well as the Fate of EUROPE and of
the World, wou’d in so great a measure depend».24
For the Earl of Shaftesbury, the pedagogical value that art
should have seems to proceed from a total identification with
the work itself; that is, the relationship between the interior and
the exterior of the work must be porous and dynamic. Evidence
for such a view is provided on a couple of occasions: one when
the philosopher states in a letter of 23 February 1712 that the
likeness of Hercules, though he remains an allegorical figure,
is not an abstract one but coincides with the appearance of his
young friend Thomas Micklethwayt;25 the other when he gives
De Matteis the instructions for his portrait, and indicates that
he should be depicted with his gaze directed at the eyes of the
beholder, lying on a bed in his study full of books, sculptures
and drawings, and with an amanuensis busy taking notes of his
reflections. Shaftesbury adds that the sentiment one should have
while looking at this painting is that of a family setting, in which
the spectator enters with his gaze and words that interrupt the
sitter’s moment of meditation.26 The philosopher himself thus
Characteristics (1711), Felix Paknadel notes how the difference between

good and evil was illustrated with the (emblematic) opposition between two
frontispieces, between the right and left sides of the same figure, or between
the central and lateral figures (Felix Paknadel, ‘Shaftesbury’s Illustrations of
Characteristics’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 37 (1974),
p. 312).
24 Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions and Times,
vol. III, p. 409.
25 Pestilli, Lord Shaftesbury e Paolo de Matteis, p. 119, note 101.
26 Pestilli, Lord Shaftesbury e Paolo de Matteis, p. 114.
makes explicit the necessity of a creative act on the part of the

person looking at a painted work in order to give meaning to
the beauty of the painting, which does reside in itself, but in
the individual observing it through an intellectual participation
that is capable of elevating the contemplative spirit from the
aesthetic level to the moral one. Indeed Lord Shaftesbury writes
that beauty is «the beautifying not the beautified»,27 or that «it
is in the creative act, and not in what is created, that beauty can
be found».28
Basing ourselves on what has been said thus far, we can
contemplate a superimposition of the two figures (the beholder
and Hercules) in our pendants – that is, the person looking at
our pair of pictures of metamorphoses ought to feel morally like
a Hercules at the crossroads, to whom a choice is given – not
only an aesthetic one – between two distinct representations of
Ovid’s myths: one permissible and correct, the other misleading
and wrong.29
Describing the device that connects beholder and the pendants,
as we have done, means recognising in the observer’s attentive
gaze a symbolic practice and a ritualization of theory, and
recognising a three-dimensional quality in the emblematic
thinking of Lord Shaftesbury, primarily based on a play of
oppositions, as is clear not only in The Choice of Hercules but
also in the frontispiece of the first volume of his Characteristics,
in which an enthroned figure sits between two groups: on the
left, herms and Dionysian bacchantes (dependent on Pan), on the
right, poets and philosophers (dependent on Apollo).30
27 Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions and Times,

vol. II, p. 335.
28 Pestilli, Lord Shaftesbury e Paolo de Matteis, p. 97.
29 For Lord Shaftesbury the crossroads represents the fulcrum of the moral and
pictorial action in The Choice of Hercules, and this is demonstrated by his ap-
proval of the small-scale copy (Leeds, City Art Gallery and Temple Newsam
House) he commissioned from De Matteis to give to Micklethwayt. Consider-
ing this version, the philosopher appreciated the stronger lighting of the cross-
roads, precisely because it gave greater emphasis to the point occupied by
Hercules as he ponders and chooses between the alternative lives presented to
him. See Pestilli, Lord Shaftesbury e Paolo de Matteis, p. 112.
30 See Paknadel, p. 69, fig c.
Conceived thus, the pendants discussed here would mean

that any ékphrasis concerning them would be an essentially
anthropological phenomenon, since these images proceed from,
pass through and return to an individual, whether a patron, author,
narrator or spectator.31
31 Compare Hans Belting, Bild-Anthropologie. Entwürfe für eine

Bildwissenschaft (München: Fink, 2001), trans. by Thomas Dunlap, An
Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2011).
THE STRANGE CASE OF THOMAS LEAVE:
APPENDAGE OF JOURNEY IN INDIA
BY GUIDO GOZZANO
Sergio Vitale
At the beginning of 1912 Guido Gozzano, as is well known,

embarks on a trip to India, officially conducted for health
reasons, but, actually, it appeared as an opportunity to test and
fulfill various aspirations.1 First of all the endurance of a exotic
myth, cherished since childhood, and cultivated in a latent
manner throughout his work. Even before any concrete travel
hypothesis, exoticism is a theme variously scattered in Gozzano’s
poetic writing: let’s just remember the classic example of one
of his poems, though ironic and irreverent, Paolo e Virginia. I
figli dell’infortunio.2 The real journey is outlined as a sort of
extension to the past, in which Gozzano had failed to satisfy
his search for remote, into the deep dream dimension, which, in
many cases, his desires seem to be moving: «Exoticism in space
seems to grant him enough exocitism in time too; to drift him
away from the past that often appears different, neither more
magnanimous nor miserable than the present time he struggles
to live».3 Something which draws the poet to India is also the
possibility to further expand and experiment his poetics of
the shock in a place always been considered the center of the
cultural origins and the quintessential symbol of all possible
1 Henriette Martin, Guido Gozzano, 1883-1916 (Milano: Mursia, 1971), pp.

91-96.
2 As is well kown, for the poetry Paolo e Virginia: I figli dell’infortunio (1910),
Gozzano was inspired by the namesake exotic novel Paul et Virginie (1787)
written by Jacques Herny Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. See Carlo Calcaterra,
Note ai testi, in Guido Gozzano, Opere, ed. by Carlo Calcaterra and Alberto
De Marchi (Milano: Garzanti, 1948), pp. 1215-16.
3 Lorenzo Mondo, Storia e natura in Guido Gozzano (Roma: Silva, 1969),
traslation by the author, pp. 85-86.
otherness. A place where «the most miscellaneous presences

juxtapose, gather, bump into each other: it reigns anachronism
and paradox».4 This is why the idea of travel is also closely linked
to its possible literary exploitation, so that when Gozzano sails
from Genova to India he has in his pocket two press passes: one
released “The Moment”, the other by the “Il Resto del Carlino”.5
In fact, as far we learn from his Indian correspondence, the
exciting initial plans are gradually downscaled to the point of
complete renunciation. On one hand, the growing disillusionment
with the initial expectations, and the other hand the dazzling
splendor of exotic landscape where the dreams and nightmares
are equivalent, will prevent him from finding a stylistic code
capable to ensnare and organize Indian materials.6 As a matter
of fact, against his will, Gozzano will be forced to disregard
all the commitments engaged with periodicals.7 Only once to
returns home, in the complete quietness of the Canavese region,
away from the «luxuriant and nameless flora» he will be able to
reassemble the fragments of that dream and peacefully disposed
to writing. As is known, in fact, the letters from India, despite
the name, were composed in Agliè, in the province of Turin, or
in the Riviera Ligure where he used to spend the winter. It is in
these places that he fantastically recreates his journey, in which
India gets back to the island of Paul and Virginia, the distant land
of the novels of adolescence trip:
4 Edoardo Sanguineti, Guido Gozzano: Indagini e Letture (Torino: Einaudi,

1966), traslation by the author, p. 135.
5 Gozzano’s cards as journalist are still kept at the Study Centre of literature
Guido Gozzano – Cesare Pavese in Piemonte, initialed respectively AG IX 1
(«The Moment») and AG IX 6 («Il Resto del Carlino»). See Mariarosa
Masoero, Catalogo dei manoscritti di Guido Gozzano (Firenze: Olschki,
1983), pp. 49-50.
6 Giorgio De Rienzo, Guido Gozzano (Milano: Rizzoli, 1983), p. 161.
7 Guido Gozzano (1912), Epistolario, in Poesie e Prose, ed. by Alberto De
Marchi (Milano: Garzanti, 1961). In his letter to his sister Erina (3 April
1912), Gozzano writes «I will be in Turin on 6-7th May. What do we do?
We’ll go straight to Agliè? It is best, even for escape to friends and newspapers
to which I promised correspondence of all kinds – for cards – and I did not
send a single word», traslation by the author, pp. 1361-62.
S. Vitale - The Strange Case of Thomas Leave: 335
Everything is untouched in British India, it is the same as it appears

in books or oleographs: bayadere dances, colossal temples, fakirs’
crew; woe to somebody who can’t stand the fallacies or who misses the
unusual things; at this point the literatus suffers from high regret, as it
occurs when reality imitates literature.8
Gozzano’s perception of India of is symbolically contained in

these few lines, all implied in a sort of interplay: «approach and
compare India as it really appears and India of exoticism as the
writer may imagine before going it through, India of fallacies
developed by adventure and travel literature, India of widespread
oleographs».9 A game where the poet gets a taste for paradox, for
an impact of shrill things, which is the basis of its poetic irony,
though what result from it is frustration and disappointment at
the inability to realize the desire to escape into a world where,
due to the pressures of incipient tourism, very little exoticism is
left. This attitude, typical of the traveler/writer of the twentieth
century, which later Levi-Strauss summarized in these terms:
Trips, magic chests full of great promises, will not show the
untouched beauty. A proliferating and overloaded civilization unsettles
the silence of the seas indefinitely. The scent of the Tropics and the
freshness of human beings are compromised by a stench that mortify
our wishes condemning them to decaying memories (...) How could
escapism be able to show us the upset things of our historical being?10
For too long time now have been identified texts and authors
that Gozzano drew to use as sources, in some cases of plagiarism,
in order to artificially rebuild and recreate his journey: from
Theôfile Gautier to the fundamental Jules Verne, from Pierre Loti
to Ernst Haeckel, just to mention some. Through these readings
the itinerary gets better balanced and more varied, taking on the
characteristics of a pilgrimage from Bombay, India’s doorway he
8 Guido Gozzano, Le torri del silenzio, in Opere (2013), traslation by the author,
p. 173.
9 Sanguineti, Guido Gozzano, traslation by the author, p. 149.
10 Claude Lévi-Strauss, A World on the Wane (New York: Atheneum, 1973), pp.
35-36.
reaches Benares, cradle of civilization, but it is – it should be

remembered – a «literary pilgrimage».11 Indian prose works are,
according to Saba, «brainwave». Gozzano is a liar and knows
how to lie. For this reason he decide to give his letters the form
of a diary, for each stage marking the date of stay, although these
last, of course, were false.12 Rather than a scrupulous account of
the journey, the account Verso la cuna del mondo is presented
as a literary invitation au voyage. A work of prose in which the
rhetorical modes typical traditional Hodoeporics, such as the use
of deictics word to involve the reader, insist on using synesthesia
to verbally convey the unknown, the accumulation of images13
(i.e. the same strategies variously employed also by ekphratic
tradition) are constantly bent to overturn the objective point
of view in a subjective point of view. Gozzano, as other travel
writers of modern times, does not describe unknown places or
virgin lands accurately but rather his rhetorical strategy focuses
on showing the reader the known images as an epiphany.14
In other words, Gozzano’s Indian prose writings are an
“improper” reportage, in which, according to Pancrazi’s
stigmatization, «images on reasoning’s stead, impressions are
worth more than logic».15 A type of writing which in part takes
into account the documentary needs, whereas, instead, it pushes
his gaze beyond the limits of the seen or viewed as far as the
territories of vision. Lettere dall’India can be associated with
another article by Gozzano, a sort of travel appendix, entitled Il
fotografo dei tre magi and published on “Il Resto del Carlino”16
on January 7th 1914 (the same month and same year as the first
11 Guido Gozzano, Verso la cuna del mondo: Lettere dall’India, ed. by Alida
D’Aquino Creazzo (Firenze: Olschki, 1984), traslation by the author, p. VI.
12 Martin, Guido Gozzano, p. 96.
13 Vincenzo Matera, Raccontare gli altri: Lo sguardo e la scrittura nei libri di
viaggio e nella letteratura etnografica (Lecce: Argo, 1966), pp. 54-58.
14 Giacomo Debenedetti, Il romanzo del Novecento (Milano: Garzanti, 1981), p.
326-27.
15 Pietro Pancrazi, L’inviato speciale, in Id., Della tolleranza (Firenze: Le
Monnier, 1955), pp. 116-18.
16 The article was published on January 7th 1914. See Franco Contorbia, Il
sofista subalpino: Tra le carte di Guido Gozzano (Cuneo: L’Arciere, 1980),
pp. 115 ff.
publication of the Indian prose work). The article is not one of

the best things written by Gozzano, but it has the advantage of
rarity because it is one of the few writings in which the author
confronts himself directly with the world of the visual arts and
the relationship between verbal and visual. The title, due to the
paradoxical comparation/association of photographic techniques
with the biblical figures of the Magi, is already indicative about
the theme and the nature of the writing, where, in addition, if
any were needed, the taste of squeaky things is never missing.
Summing up, Gozzano is telling us about his meeting with an
American painter, Thomas Leave, during the navigation of the
Red Sea.17 This painter was sent to the Middle East «to know
biblical places directly so as to write thirty, forty explanations
for a short poem for children».18 It is these illustrations, inspired
to a realistic painting technique, and the aesthetics that supports
them, that provoke Gozzano’s reactions. As Ajello supposed, the
American painter mentioned in the article is to be considered
«entirely non existent», a mere pretext19 to better argue his
thoughts about the value and function of art. The reason of the
article is, in fact, insisted comparison between painting and
photography, or rather, between imagination and mimesis and
the role they play in these aspects of artistic creation. Since its
incipit it is clear how much and what is the distance between the
aesthetics the two artists represent:
Nothing harms poetry as the certainty, nothing is approving as the

absolute ignorance. (...) Now it is terrible: who seeks the truth he often
finds it. The truth is – certainly – awful.
17 Gozzano, Epistolario, Letter to Sister Erina (February 28th 1912): «Dear

Erina, here we are at the end of this long sea crossing (which lasted from Suez
almost eight days) was longer than the famous Jewish, but I think it was more
fun we have had the most pleasant emotions, from the biblical Mount Sinai to
which we passed very close to that patriotic Massawa (...). Tonight at 10 we
arrive in Aden where I’ll set this and hope to find your news», traslation by the
author, p. 1356.
18 Gozzano, Il fotografo dei tre magi, in Contorbia, pp. 126-36, traslation by the
author.
19 Epifanio Ajello, Il racconto delle immagini: La fotografia nella modernità
letteraria italiana (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2009), traslation by author, p. 74.
The painter Leave found the real path, the unique down the steep
valley where the travellors went through and he portrayed their passage
with an outstanding accuracy worthy of a sharp advertisement about a
new silver bromide paper.20
Forward in the text Gozzano’s thinking is better pointed out

through the typical method of eckfrastica doctrine, that one of
“instructions for the painter” but sometimes exchanged. In the
article in fact the American painter, explaining his work’s genesis,
reveals the writer his “cold artist” poetics:21
Why don’t we make use of archeology and history? Why don’t

we make The Three Wise Men become the enduring Medieval king,
a Renaissance prince, a sultan of Costantinopoli? Why don’t we
portray them as accurately as possible and exactly where they passed
through? Nothing has changed – the cold painter pointed out – nothing
has changed in this everlasting East: neither habits nor customs nor
landscapes. It’s not hard to find the Christ’s contemporary.
(...) Observe the Three Wise Men’ types and costumes. I hired a
whole caravan. You have never done something so true...22
Faced with such coldness, made tougher by the absolute

insensitivity with which Leave approaches the sacred theme
that intends to represent, Gozzano’s judgment can only be
absolutely ruthless. Hence, when the painter Leave submits to
the Italian poet his representation of the Epiphany, Gozzano, by
means of a completely negative ékpharasis, returns a description
which, focusing on the details of the hardness and aridity of
the geographical location, causes in the reader an effect of total
absence of sympathy:
This in front of me is desolate, authentic, ugly Judea: with its

volcanic rocks more dazzling and barren than the sun; with its cursed
sands where any stalk doesn’t grow up; in this burning heat’s view three
Arabian people move forward, wrapped in their “baraccano”, solemn
sitting on twisted legged camels; behind them a caravan of horses and
20 Il fotografo dei tre magi, pp. 126-27.

21 Cometa, La scrittura delle immagini, traslation by the author, pp. 100 and ff.
22 Il fotografo dei tre magi, p. 127.
mules and everything is so true under the light of the relentless sun that
I would not be amazed at seeing someone covered with a veil and a
helmet, Cook’s modern follower...No! In Europe and in Italy nothing
is so true not even on cinema’s mural advertisement; and your picture,
lucky painter, is more accurate than an enlarged frame. Nevertheless it
is devoid of poetry; I prefer dreaming, during this poetic day, about the
Gospel.23
For this reason Gozzano compares and contrasts the “pure

archeology” and the “exact science” to the Gospel’s words, to
which the poet recognizes a fundamental metanarrative power,
the only «on which our imagination may conceive the mysterious
wayfarers as it pleases». In other words, Gozzano thinks that «the
ability to dream up, to read or to interpret, therefore to make poetry
is prevented by realism of Leave’s photographic illustration filling
up images and not allowing further digression».24 So just starting
from the parenthetic «as you like it best», the author carefully
evokes some of the most significant artistic representations
inspired, in fact, by the Holy Book’s words. Thus, under the
reader’s gaze, an extraordinary sequence of “picture” unfolds:
from the Byzantine bas-relief of the fifth century Basilica of San
Vitale in Ravenna, to the scenes of the Nativity and of Flemish and
Florentine Epiphanies, from medieval to Renaissance depictions.
Images that Gozzano summarizes with accurate descriptions that
highlight the variability of ways and methods of representation at
various times, focusing in particular on «the marvel of features
and colors» which is the Viaggio dei Magi (Journey of the Magi)
(1459) by Benozzo Gozzoli:
Among all the epiphanies that one by Benozzo Gozzoli is worthy of

mention, in Palace Riccardi, Florence. The Italian Renaissance, as well
known, follows the cult of living reality, contemporary world and the
Three Wise Men will follow it; they will show not only the costumes of
that time but also the historical portrait of it.
So on the walls of the Chapel of Florence, on the huge ride crossing
a hill and winding a valley with thin trees, you may recognize the

24 Ajello, Il racconto delle immagini, p. 77.
Medici court; you may mention, the cardinals, the bishops, the knights,
the lords who hunt the hawk, the heron flying over the rigid cypresses,
the umbrella pines and palm trees... Manuele Paleologo, Giovanni
II patriarch of Costantinopoli; behind in the crowd Pietro II Gottoso
and Salviati; besides the famous Plato’s editor: Marsilio Ficino, the
grammarian Argiropulo, Platina the jurist...25
An ékphrasis, a mimetic one this time, that, lingering on

aspects of the natural landscape and the historical characters
represented, as well as their clothes, is the exact opposite of
the of the American painter Leave’s Epiphany. Finally, with an
elegant game of mirrors that fully involves writing and images,
Gozzano concludes the article with another literary quotation,
«eternal epiphany you know by heart», contained in a sonnet
by José-Maria de Heredia. Thus reaffirming, in this respect, the
importance of imagination in artistic creation based on “absolute
ignorance” mentioned by Gozzano at the beginning of his article,
which becomes the essential quality through which you can or
cannot write poetry. Regardless of the representation technique,
be it writing, photography or painting, the domain of this quality
relates to the inner world of the artist, is the state of mind by
which he approaches the object that is meant to represent. A
more modulated poetic statement of this theory is found in a
letter addressed by the poet to Candida Bolognino during his
stay in Ceylon:
I observed India from a poet’s point of view, I didn’t analyze it

deeply, but I enjoyed it superficially... I didn’t come here endowed with
that knowledge of scholars, archaeologists. I am ignorant of archeology,
I don’t go deeply into things. I live on their beauty, I enjoy it, I make it
mine, I try to spread it through my letters, my lines, but then I realize
that I had to say to Carducci “ma picciol verso or è”. If I come again to
India I will be more endowed with historical knowledge... May I enjoy
it again? Maybe less than now as I travel like an ignorant but my soul
is greedy for beauty.26

26 Gozzano, in Martin, p. 96.
Leave’s brush fails to capture beauty, since he is insensitive to

it, does not possess «the gift of wonder».27 He is exactly like the
visitors to the World Expo in Turin in 1911 «indifferent to any
aesthetic perception, ignorant of the cult of beauty through dazed,
astonished and satisfied eyes (...) unable to see, to feel if Baedeker
doesn’t feel it». American painter’s hyper-realistic illustration is
far from rendering the “real” scene of the arrival of the Magi,
actually getting the opposite effect, because if it is true that
«nothing has changed in this unchanging East», it is equally true
that Palestine, like many other places of pilgrimage, had become
part of: «A world dominated by tourism where the authentic
exoticism is rare by now, dying out, to be replaced successfully
by a defeated exoticism: a world where Cook, the Ritz hotels,
the Baedeker and the similar figments of the increasing fiscal
pressure have won their long-lasting battle».28
Just because he understands all the contradiction inherent in
the phenomenon, Gozzano would not be surprised, in fact, «at
seeing someone covered with a veil and helmet, Cook’s modern
follower…», ironically admitting the failure of that mimetic
attempt which the closer to reality, the more it returns an
artificial image. Photography, or better the photographic vision,
characterized in too a mechanistic way by Leave, is therefore
only the metaphor of the feeling and viewing attitude of modern
industrial society, which leaves no space for imagination and
in which art is degraded and humiliated: «the criterion replaces
the model, the decorative replaces the mode».29 What emerges
is a still aristocratic conception of art, represented in decadent
regressive way, which enhances the value of personal intelligence
and imagination the artifex. A concept that new ways of artistic
reproduction, due to their alleged mechanical materiality, were
27 Gozzano, Il dono della meraviglia, in Id., Un vergiliato sotto la neve: Scritti

sull’Esposizione Universale di Torino 1911, ed. by Giovanna Finocchiaro
Chimirri (Catania: Tringale, 1984), traslation by the author, p. 134.
28 Sanguineti, pp. 141-42.
29 Philippe Hamon, Exposition: Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-
century (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), p. 30.
seriously calling into question. Gozzano will soon distances30

himself from it, emphasizing the antinaturalistic ways already
present in his writing:
Art is surely the most outstanding matter as possible experience of

life – A theory that lasted until the twentieth century to the detriment
or rather thanks to Nihilism – a truth that, at the end of a path
beginning with Romanticism, appears as a complex and rigorous
aware forging’s strategy.31
Hence Gozzano’s rhetorical strategies, in which more

insistent becomes the metaphor: «the vision, the dream, the
image pointing out the limits about seeing: perception of the past
beyond aesthetic features; it fails to become tension of research
(...) memory that finds, traced back to the past, the depth of
psychic contents of awareness».32
If, in conclusion, Il fotografo dei Tre Magi, for obvious
reasons, considered one of the minor things Gozzano, certainly
cannot be considered a paradigm of notional ékphrasis,
however, far from an essentially logo-centric context, its value
actually lies in offering itself a likely referent in the litmus on
the ekphrastic forms of writing in the Italian literature of the
early twentieth century.
30 Mauro Sarnelli, L’ironico (disin)cantore, in Gozzano, La sceneggiatura del

San Francesco ed altri scritti, ed. by M. Sarnelli (Roma: De Rubeis, 1996),
pp. 9-43.
32 Gigliola De Donato, Guido Gozzano scrittore in prosa, in Guido Gozzano. I
giorni, le opere: Atti del Convegno Nazionale di Studi, Torino, 26-28 ottobre
1983 (Firenze: Olschki, 1984), traslation by the author, p. 419.
MIMESIS GROUP
www.mimesis-group.com
MIMESIS INTERNATIONAL
www.mimesisinternational.com
[email protected]
MIMESIS EDIZIONI
www.mimesisedizioni.it
[email protected]
ÉDITIONS MIMÉSIS
www.editionsmimesis.fr
[email protected]
MIMESIS COMMUNICATION
www.mim-c.net
MIMESIS EU
www.mim-eu.com
Printed by Booksfactory – Szczecin (Poland) in November 2016

Libro Definitivo

Cargado por

Copyright:

Formatos disponibles

Libro Definitivo

Cargado por

Información del documento

Derechos de autor

Formatos disponibles

Compartir este documento

Compartir o incrustar documentos

Opciones para compartir

¿Le pareció útil este documento?

¿Este contenido es inapropiado?

Copyright:

Formatos disponibles

Libro Definitivo

Cargado por

Copyright:

Formatos disponibles

MIMESIS

© 2016 – Mimesis International

© MIM Edizioni Srl

Fictional Artworks aims to introduce some considerations on

cultural study of ékphrasis, as in the case of W. J. T. Mitchell

De se taire parfois riche est l’occasion.

There are many anecdotes surrounding the extravagant and

double), is described as a champion of words with a warm and

Inflated Linguistic Machines

Roussel describes the ingenious machines that fill the vast

1 Michel Foucault, Raymond Roussel, ed. by Massimiliano Guareschi (Verona:

repetitive. Take one of the most fascinating devices described: a

2 Raymond Roussel, Locus Solus, followed by Come ho scritto alcuni miei

it say? “Under the mnemonic influence of old habits”, it starts

4 Michel Foucault, La superficie delle cose, in Raymond Roussel, pp. 121-45.

Just as Cantarel’s resurrection machines are destined to fail,

Everything is luminous in Roussel’s descriptions. […] Yet this

The theatrical adaptations of the work which Roussel attempted

of the work.6 No mystery then, only an explosive encounter –

The Empty Letter

Locus Solus represents the rule of pure logos over imaginary

6 George Bataille, L’esperienza interiore (Bari: Dedalo, 1978), also quoted in

According to Lacan, meaning is not produced – as Saussure would

I have always been meaning to explain the way in which I came to

9 This definition (“il dio-linguaggio”) is provided by Giovanni Macchia in his

Roussel’s texts, therefore, derived from essentially phonetic

10 Roussel, Come ho scritto alcuni miei libri, p. 265.

dramatic action of what is essentially a linguistic phenomenon:

structurally deficient, for a hole in it is made by what belongs

What we have, therefore, is no longer an endless opening up of

15 Recalcati, pp. 97-98.

Roussel’s writing illustrates an important critical stage in early

17 Alain Robbe-Grillet, Enigmes et transparence chez Raymond Roussel, in

of writing that rules out both sentimental involvement, parody

20 Recalcati, pp. 207-08.

emptiness, this subtraction of the original unity, which cannot be

Roussel’s writing is thus a great desiring machine, as much

21 Sjef Houppermans, Raymond Roussel: Ecriture et désir (Paris: Librairie José

Le drame de la machine célibataire n’est pas celui de l’être qui vit

Roussel’s celibate machines are conflict, division, tragedy,

La Religieuse can be included in Diderot’s project of

1 Huguette Cohen, ‘Jansenism in Diderot’s La Religieuse’, Studies in

Galatea’s animation, although upside down, since she is forced

A Novel for Painters. Suzanne’s Gaze

The visualizing function of words in La Religieuse can

C’est la contre-partie de Jacques le Fataliste. Il est rempli de tableaux

Such a programmatic claim, assigning a pedagogical role to the

The long redaction of La religieuse can be placed within a period

Diderot’s claim moreover emphasizes a specific aspect of La

11 See Anne Coudreuse, ‘Pour un nouveau lecteur: La Religieuse de Diderot et

Moreover, the insertion of the tableaux in the narration is always

of which triggers an effect of hallucinatory presence, waiting for

15 Diderot, The Nun, p. 131: «�������������������������������������������������������

On a further level, the visual primacy is justified by its emotional

does not reveal the intention to assimilate bodies to the realm of

21 See W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago-London: The University of

and terror, until they produce such a charge of energy that is

Epiphanies of the Secret: The Display of Intimacy

The strategy of the epiphany of the secret necessarily requires

24 Diderot, The Nun, p. 71.

15 Diderot, The Nun, p. 131: «��