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Ekphrasis: an extended definition

"Seeing is believing."--unknown

Ekphrasis: what it is

Ekphrasis, alternately spelled ecphrasis, is a term used to denote poetry or poetic writing concerning itself with the visual arts, artistic objects, and/or highly visual scenes. This style of writing is characteristic in such works as Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and Shelley's "On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery." Given that the Romantic era is characterized by protracted, poetic musings upon the visual aspects of nature, it is not surprising that ekphrasis found a home in Romantic poetry. However, ekphrasis has its origins much earlier -- as far back as the Classical era. The term is found in Aphthonius's Progymnasmata, an early textbook on style. For example, Virgil took great pains to describe the hero Achilles' shield at the beginning of the Aeneid. Furthermore, the end of the Romantic era did not signify the demise of ekphrasis. Indeed, it flourished among the pre-Raphaelite poets. Furthermore, although the slums of London are hardly artistic, they are provocative visual images as depicted in the works of Dickens, George Gissing -- and notably in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which recalls Blake's images of a gray, fetid city. Although poetry about works of art is the most obvious form of ekphrasis, it need not be the only one as, again, ekphrasis can be about any visually powerful scene or subject. Nor need it only be applied to poetry or even traditionally high-brow "classic" literature. Ray Bradbury's short story, "The Veldt," read by high schoolers and college freshman comp students nationwide contains a particularly striking visual description of the grasslands of southern Africa. A sharply contrasting image of simulated sterility in a futuristic Tokyo is found in William Gibson's Neuromancer.

Ekphrasis: what it does

Ekphrasis, since it is defined as representative of not only tangible pieces of art but also any expressly visual scene, can also be used to describe that which we see in our imagination. William A Covino, in a discussion of the magical qualities of literacy, devotes a number of pages to phantasms -- those random, yet intensely visual images that our mind creates. These emanate from various situations: memories, dreams, fantasies, fleeting glimpses, imaginings. While many of these are not in fact actual (even memories can be distorted, and often they are), they nevertheless represent a form of "truth" and/or "reality" in that our eyes have "seen" them. A consideration of Aristotle is helpful here, in that he wrote extensively on both the visual and the truth in conjunction with rhetoric -- which he defined as "an ability in each case to see the available means of persuasion" (On Rhetoric 1.2.1)
Some other statements from Aristotle also can illuminate this point, so to speak:
--"Persuasion occurs through arguments when we show the truth or the apparent truth from whatever is persuasive in each case" (1.2.6).
--"Since few of the premises from which rhetorical syllogisms are formed are necessarily true (emphasis mine)....and since things that happen for the most part and are possible can only be reasoned on the basis of other such things, and necessary actions from necessities, it is evident that [the premises] from which enthymemes are spoken are sometimes necessarily true [only] for the most part" (1.2.14).
--"...people do everything they do for seven causes: through chance, through nature, through compulsion, through habit, through reasoning, through anger, through longing" (1.10.7).
--"...and the source of the metaphor should be something beautiful; verbal beauty, as Licymnius says, is in the sound or in the sense, and ugliness the same..." (3.2.13).
As Aristotle points out in various places throughout On Rhetoric, we tend to believe what is reasonably possible and what is effectively argued. Stories abound of 19th century frontier families taken in by quacks, who traveled from town to town hawking miracle cures for every disease imaginable -- and distributing, in exchange for varying amounts of money, medicinal-looking bottles filled with sugar water. The latter 20th century and early 21st century equivalent would be the handsome, charming man who entices single, wealthy women to allow him to sweep them off their feet, then run off with their cash as soon as he has convinced her that she is making a good investment by lending him fairly large amounts of money. Chances are, those who have been deceived did not completely trust those who have wronged them -- since absolutes are near-impossible in a world that revolves around qualifiers on a daily basis-- but since they chose to give others the benefit of the doubt, they acknowledged enthymemes that they perceived to be necessarily true. In both cases, these charlatans have represented themselves physically and rhetorically as honest people. They have presented "verbal beauty" through conveying an apparent truth. Furthermore, Aristotle points out, those who appear truthful are more likely to persuade than those who ado not -- actual truth is not at issue here, only that which is perceived (seen).
A second example of deception based upon a combination of spoken rhetoric and visual cues can be found among those who fabricate and/or exaggerate, either to others or to themselves. More than a few plain, plump women have sought remedies through plastic surgery, makeovers, and the like. They wish to persuade themselves and those who see them that deep down, there is a woman who is cat-like in appearance, poise, and bearing. I can attest to this, as I have in my bedroom a full-length mirror that I am convinced makes me look 30 pounds lighter than I actually am because it is vertical and because I have learned to stand in just the "right" way in order to pull off this effect. Certainly, while I can fool myself at home, as soon as I walk away from the mirror and leave the house, the truth comes out. But really, what is this "truth"? If I wish to fool others, I can simply wear a body shaper, put on a long shirt with vertical lines, suck in my stomach -- and voila! Because I look thinner, I can be thinner -- I have demonstrated an apparent truth. Of course, I have done so through longing to look thinner and through rationalizing that if I take certain steps, I can convey a non-truth as a truth or at least a relative truth. If I really wanted to push it, I could drive down to the space camp in Birmingham, AL, hop into a simulated moon walk, and weigh 20 pounds because we weigh so much less in a "weightless" atmosphere. I could pick up the phone, call my mom, tell her I weigh 20 or 80 or whatever pounds....and in that particular rhetorical situation, it has become necessarily true. Aristotle would consider this an example of a fallacious topic in that action has been "amplified" and I have not sufficiently accounted for the altered circumstances that led to such exaggeration (2.24.4).
Another interesting occurence in our everyday lives is that of suggestion. As a child, I was fascinated by flying saucers and aliens. Consequently, everything that seemed in the very least out of the ordinary -- as my visual perception of ordinary was at that time -- had to be as a result of an impending alien landing on Earth. That's what was on TV, anyway, and my favorite TV shows at that time were syndicated episodes of Lost in Space (apparent fiction) and the news (apparent fact). And movies such as Star Wars, Aliens, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind were raking in the bucks. One summer evening when I was eight or nine, I looked up at the sky -- and I saw rotating lights. I ran in the house and yelled for my mom to come outside because there was a flying saucer. Mildly annoyed that I'd interrupted her in the middle of The Rockford Files, she shuffled outside with me. I pointed out the orb, resplendent with rotating, flashing lights. She yelled something resembling "Hah!" and explained that what we were looking at wasn't a flying saucer but an airplane with one of those scrolling-light marquees. "They use those for advertising," she told me. Needless to say, I was disappointed -- but even my child self was able to recognize that this approach was successful because it had gotten my attention. And it really did look like a flying saucer. If there were actual words scrolling around in a circle, they were too small to read; nevertheless, because the lights conveyed something wondrous -- and beautiful, as Aristotle terms it -- the approach was successful. Had I known of Aristotle and his rhetoric, I could have argued that because my mom could not see that what was in the sky was an airplane (we could only see the lights that simulated a flying saucer), she could not prove me wrong. My contention, therefore (and according to Aristotelian logic), might have been valid because the "truth" of the flying saucer was apparent.
"Have you ever had the feeling you've been here before?" We call that deja vu. Most of us have, at least once, been driving down a road we've never traveled before -- and have suddenly thought, or actually said, "I've seen this place before!" If it happens on an interstate highway, it's to be expected since there are so many standards: green road signs marking exits, blue for rest areas, yellow for road construction, some trees here and fields there. And desert highways look even more alike for their lack of landmarks. But what happens when the trees form a military-style gauntlet on either side of the road and drape in a way that's just so. You could be driving in Michigan, for example, and think you're back home in Tennessee because there's a road that runs a mile from your house....and along a certain stretch of that road is a group of trees on either side of the road that drape in a way that's just so. Memory in this case has been transplanted into new experience -- and our eyes have convinced us through relative truth that we have been here before when we actually have not. Aristotle might well contend that this situation has arised for several of the seven reasons we have for doing everything we do; in this case it could be through chance (we just happened to notice and to make the connection between the two), through habit (we travel the road back home so often that anything anywhere else that looks even remotely similar will "take us back home"), and -- perhaps -- from an unconscious longing to be back home where the image "belongs" or to remove it from the place in which we now see it.
Lastly, there are those images we conjure for ourselves due to visual conditioning. For example, it's likely that if we ask someone to describe Jesus, he or she will tell us that Jesus is a bearded man of medium-build, about 6 feet tall, with long brown hair parted in the middle, wearing a calf-length white robe trimmed with blue and brown leather sandals. What if that description is correct, but with some of the facial features different -- and Jesus resembled Charles Manson? What if such description were totally inaccurate and Jesus actually looked like Charles Barkley (a tall, chubby black guy with a shaved head)? Perhaps Jesus was a red-headed dwarf. Those who are deeply religious would call such sentiment blasphemous -- and when George Burns portrayed God in the film, Oh, God, at least a few did protest. Was it because the producers of Oh, God represented the title role as a funny guy who smoked cigars and sounded a bit curmudgeounly in his older, yet still hilarious, years, instead of a more benevolent-seeming presence? Or was it because this God didn't look anything like the God we've been conditioned to see: a bearded guy with long white hair parted in the middle, wearing a calf-length white robe trimmed with blue and brown leather sandals -- in other words, someone who looks like Jesus' father? And that's assuming that one, or both, are male or even resemble humans.... Such perceptions of Jesus and God would stem from habit, according to Aristotle. Furthermore, the Christian church has long been a persuasive influence on large blocks of the American population -- and that, as Aristotle would see it, is sufficient to earn those particular representations of Jesus and God the distinction of "truth."
Ekphrasis: what it signifies
Ekphrasis, as we have seen, is at once art and life. It need not represent actual art work, or anything tangible for that matter. Those visions (objects) in our heads are themselves art in that they are created and that they represent our vision (world view). Covino discusses the latter as being phantasms. While an ekphrasis may or may not be a phantasm, a phantasm is an ekphrasis. Although most definitions of ekphrasis emphasize poetry or poetic writing, we can certainly extend the definition to include poetic thought if it is represented by a combination of images and words (signifieds and signs) produced by an individual's (signifier's) imagination. Indeed, Covino believes that since phantasms, visual or otherwise, are housed among the stars and released into the soul at birth, they are of both the physical and spiritual world (33). He asserts, "As a process for determining and producing human language; for mystical contemplation and philosophical speculation; and for generating vivid speech (enargeia), phantasy is closely and explicitly connected with both magic and rhetoric" (33). Thus, ekphrasis is connected with truth via this same magic and rhetoric.
Furthermore, as Covino points out, "we are looking at the process of inducing belief and creating community, and asking how the mind creates impressions and controls their powers and effects" (33). This process is represented by phantasms, which are forms of ekphrasis, and by rhetoric -- "an ability, in each [particular] case, to see the available means of persuasion. Some of these available means, as illustrated throughout this essay, are based upon that which is generally accepted as truth; others, through skillful representation of non-truths as truths through the use of several rhetorical and emotional appeals.