Poetry, Photography, Ekphrasis : Lyrical Representations of Photographs from the 19th Century to the Present [1 ed.] 9781781384671, 9781781381908

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Poetry, Photography, Ekphrasis

Poetry, Photography, Ekphrasis Lyrical Representations of Photographs from the 19th Century to the Present

Andrew D. Miller

LI V ERPOOL U NI V ERSIT Y PRESS

First published 2015 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2015 Andrew D. Miller The right of Andrew D. Miller to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-78138-190-8 cased epdf ISBN 978-1-78138-467-1 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Printed and bound by BooksFactory.co.uk

For my wife, Inge, and our daughters, Hannah, Emily and Eva

Contents Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments xi List of Permissions

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Copyright Disclaimer

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A Note on the Presence of Translations and Poems in their Original Languages

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Introduction 1 1 That Which Will Not Perish into Art: the Chronotope of the Photograph

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2 The Ekphrasis of the Cicerone: the 19th Century

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3 The Snapshot Elegy

70

4 The Suppressed Ekphrasis

104

5 The Ekphrasis of Iconic Photographs

136

6 The Ekphrastic Calligram

171

7 The Anti-Ekphrasis: Larry Levis’s “Sensationalism”

217

8 The Speaking Photograph

230

9 The Shadow of the Former Self

250

10 The Photoshopped Image: the Ekphrases of Digital Photographs 290 Coda: Sallie in her Byzantine Mirror

312

Bibliography 318 Index 328

Illustrations Illustrations

1. David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, “Mrs. Elizabeth Hall of New Haven, Scotland,” 1842

10

2. William Kennedy Dickson, “Clip from Kinetoscope of Pope Leo XIII,” 1898

24

3. Secondo Pia, “Negative of the Shroud of Turin,” 1898, Museo Della Sindone, Turin

26

4. Mathew Brady and F. D’Avignon, “John C. Frémont,” lithograph taken from photographic print, 1850, C.E. Lester and M.B. Brady, The Gallery of Illustrious Americans, Containing the Portraits and Biographical Sketches of Twenty-four of the Most Eminent citizens of the American Republic, since the death of Washington. From Daguerrotypes by Brady—Engraved by D’Avignon. Edited by C.E. Lester. New York: C.E. Lester and M.B. Brady, 1850

35

5. Mathew Brady, “General Winfield Scott Hancock,” 1864

42

6. Unknown photographer, “Herman Melville,” 1860

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7. Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), “Self-Portrait,” 1875

51

8. Arthur B. Frost, The Older Son, Illustration from Lewis Carroll, Rhyme? And Reason? London: Macmillan, 1887

56

9. Unknown photographer, “Walt Whitman,” June 1887

61

10. Unknown photographer, “Portrait of Catherine Christ,” c. 1859 84 11. Unknown photographer, “Paper Nautilus”

111

12. Museum Collection Photograph, “Grauballe Man”

124

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13. P.V. Glob, “Grauballe Man’s excavation,” 1952

125

14. Unknown photographer, “The Dying Gaul”

127

15. Gilles Peress, “Northern Ireland, Londonderry, Bloody Sunday,” 1972

133

16. Huỳnh Công (Nick Ut), “The Terror of War (Vietnam, Napalm, Trang Bang),” 1972

140

17. US Army photographer, “Norma Jeane Mortenson (Marilyn Monroe),” Yanks Magazine, 1945

162

18. Arnold Newman, “Marilyn Monroe, Hollywood California,” 1962 163 19. Ander Gunn, “Photograph #35,” Positives, 1966

178

20. Ander Gunn, “Photograph #36,” Positives, 1966

179

21. Nadar, “Charles Baudelaire,” 1857

189

22. Aaron Siskind, “Gloucester 114,” 1944

200

23. Josef Koudelka, “Untitled,” 1968, Josef Koudelka, Gypsies 218 24. Unknown photographer, “Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Goering,” 1943, War Primer 235 25. Unknown photographer, “Helmets,” 1943, War Primer 237 26. Unknown photographer, “Mad Soldier,” 1943, War Primer 239 27. Edward Curtis, “The Women of the Desert,” 1904

241

28. Unknown photographer, “Table Prepared for a Meal”

317

Acknowledgments Acknowledgments

What qualities this book might be said to have originate from diverse sources. In its original form, it was a dissertation submitted through the Department of English, German and Romantic Studies of the University of Copenhagen in the winter of 2009. There, its ideas and eventual content were developed under the supervision of three fine senior scholars, Professor Justine Edwards (University of Surrey), Dr. Lene Østermark-Johansen (Copenhagen University) and Professor Charles Lock (Copenhagen University). Each of them deserves thanks and credit for what appears here; however, special thanks must be given to Charles Lock, whose passion, knowledge and insights have known no bounds. In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder describes the birth of painting as originating in the myth of the potter, Boutades, and Boutades’ daughter. Upon the departure of her lover, the daughter traces the youth’s profile on a wall, so that she can have an image by which she can remember him. After the youth’s death, Boutades comes to this skiagram, fashioning over it a clay relief. Boutades then paints this relief, giving it color, character and expression. Lending this study his passion, insights, knowledge and faith, Professor Lock has been the Boutades to what was in many ways but a shadow. Additional thanks must also be given to the kind assistance of the late John Hollander, who pointed me in the direction of the critic Mary Price. Hollander also suggested I examine the poems of Herman Melville, Lewis Carroll and Richard Howard. Thanks must be extended to Claus Clüver, whom I consulted in the early stages of this study; to Norman Bryson, who first recognized the connection between my study and the acheiropoietos; and to Stephen Cheeke, who gave me a manuscript copy

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of one of the chapters of his own recent book on ekphrasis so that I might employ his critical insights in support of my own. I would also like to thank Professor Tim Kendall and Professor Patricia Rae for their generous comments when they were the opponents of this study in its form as a PhD thesis. One final thanks must be extended to Cambridge University’s Journal of American Studies, which, in 2012, published as an article (in an abbreviated form) the sub-chapter “Favoring Nature: Herman Melville’s ‘On the Photograph of a Corps Commander.’” This meant that the insights of the journal’s peer-review readers also contributed to the quality of that sub-chapter’s discussion. In addition to the scholarly assistance of these supervisors and researchers, I am indebted to the novelist Paula Champa, whose skills as an editor have brought style and grace to this study. Since I began writing the book, readability has been in the forefront of my mind; however, my writing did not live up to that aspiration. Paul Champa lovingly shepherded my often wandering and academic prose and lent to it the precision and rhythm of a novelist’s touch. She gave the study her insights as a creative writer and also her encouragement as a scholar. Thanks must also be given to James Martin for his critical and editorial insights into the chapter about Thom and Ander Gunn’s Positives. James also took on the task of indexing the book, and he did this work with skill and remarkable speed. Finally, thanks go to my family: my wife, Inge, and our three daughters Hannah, Emily and Eva, who sacrificed their time with me and who supported me through many difficulties. I cannot express the gratitude and love I have for them.

Permissions Permissions

Illustrations Figure 1. David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, “Mrs. Elizabeth Hall of New Haven, Scotland,” 1842. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Figure 2. William Kennedy Dickson, “Clip from Kinetoscope of Pope Leo XIII,” 1898. Courtesy of The Library of Congress. Figure 3. Secondo Pia, “Negative of the Shroud of Turin,” 1898, Museo Della Sindone, Turin. Open source image. Figure 4. Mathew Brady and F. D’Avignon, “John C. Frémont,” lithograph taken from photographic print, 1850, C.E. Lester and M.B. Brady, The Gallery of Illustrious Americans, Containing the Portraits and Biographical Sketches of Twenty-four of the Most Eminent citizens of the American Republic, since the death of Washington. From Daguerrotypes by Brady—Engraved by D’Avignon. Edited by C.E. Lester. New York: C.E. Lester and M.B. Brady, 1850. Courtesy of The Library of Congress. Figure 5. Mathew Brady, “General Winfield Scott Hancock,” 1864, Courtesy of The Library of Congress. Figure 6. Unknown photographer, “Herman Melville,” 1860, Courtesy of The Library of Congress. Figure 7. Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), “Self-Portrait,” 1875. Courtesy of the Science and Society Picture Library, London. Figure 8. Arthur B. Frost, The Older Son, Illustration from Lewis Carroll, Rhyme? And Reason? London: Macmillan, 1887. Open source image.

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Figure 9. Unknown photographer, “Walt Whitman,” June 1887. Courtesy of The Library of Congress. Figure 10. Unknown photographer, “Portrait of Catherine Christ,” c. 1859, Courtesy of Geoffrey Batchen. Figure 11. Unknown photographer, “Paper Nautilus.” Courtesy of Super Stock. Figure 12. Museum Collection Photograph, “Grauballe Man.” Courtesy of Moesgaard Museum, Aarhus, Denmark. Figure 13. P.V. Glob, “Grauballe Man’s excavation,” 1952. Courtesy of Moesgaard Museum, Aarhus, Denmark. Figure 14. Unknown photographer, “The Dying Gaul.” Courtesy of Cambridge Archeological Museum. Figure 15. Gilles Peress, “Northern Ireland, Londonderry, Bloody Sunday,” 1972. Courtesy of Magnum Images, London. Figure 16. Huỳnh Công (Nick Ut), “The Terror of War (Vietnam, Napalm, Trang Bang),” 1972. Courtesy of AP Images. Figure 17. US Army photographer, “Norma Jeane Mortenson (Marilyn Monroe),” Yanks Magazine, 1945. Open source image. Figure 18. Arnold Newman, “Marilyn Monroe, Hollywood California,” 1962. Courtesy of Getty Images. Figure 19. Ander Gunn, “Photograph #35,” Positives, 1966. Courtesy of Ander Gunn. Figure 20. Ander Gunn, “Photograph #36,” Positives, 1966. Courtesy of Ander Gunn. Figure 21. Nadar, “Charles Baudelaire,” 1857. Open source image. Figure 22. Aaron Siskind, “Gloucester 114,” 1944. Courtesy of The Aaron Siskind Foundation. Figure 23. Josef Koudelka, “Untitled,” 1968, Josef Koudelka, Gypsies. Courtesy of Magnum Images, London. Figure 24. Unknown photographer, “Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Goering,” 1943, War Primer. Courtesy of Libris Press. Figure 25. Unknown photographer, “Helmets,” 1943, War Primer. Courtesy of Libris Press.

Permissions

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Figure 26. Unknown photographer, “Mad Soldier,” 1943, War Primer. Courtesy of Libris Press. Figure 27. Edward Curtis, “The Women of the Desert,” 1904. Courtesy of Library of Congress. Figure 28. Unknown photographer, “Table Prepared for a Meal.” Open source image.

Texts The following lists only texts where copyrights were required. Open source texts and briefly cited texts are not listed. 1. Adam Thorpe, “Navaho.” Courtesy of Adam Thorpe. 2. Bertolt Brecht, poems from “War Primer.” Courtesy of Libris Press. 3. Ernesto Cardenal, “Prayer for Marilyn Monroe.” Courtesy of New Directions. 4. Ivor Gurney, “Photographs.” Courtesy of Carcanet Press. 5. John Ashbery, “The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers.” Courtesy of Faber and Faber. 6. John Logan, “On a Photograph by Aaron Siskind.” Courtesy of Logan’s Estate. 7. Kate Daniels, “War Photograph.” Courtesy of University of Pittsburg Press. 8. Larry Levis, “Sensationalism.” Courtesy of Levis’s Estate. 9. Marianne Moore, “The Paper Nautilus.” Courtesy of Faber and Faber. 10. Philip Larkin, “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album.” Courtesy of Faber and Faber. 11. Richard Howard, “Charles Baudelaire.” Courtesy of Glen Harley. 12. Robert Penn Warren, “Old Photograph of the Future.” Courtesy of William Morris. 13. Seamus Heaney, “Grauballe Man.” Courtesy of Faber and Faber.

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14. Sharon Olds, “Coming of Age in 1966.” Courtesy of Random House. 15. Tadeusz Dąbrowski, “I scanned my photograph from the first year” and “Resolution.” Courtesy of Tadeusz Dąbrowski and Antonia Lloyd Jones. 16. Thom Gunn, #36 poem of Positives. Courtesy of Faber and Faber. 17. Zbigniew Herbert, “Photograph.” US permission courtesy of Harper Collins. UK permission courtesy of Atlantic Books.

Copyright Disclaimer

If a text that appears in this study is not listed here either it is outside copyright restriction or the owners of those rights could not be contacted. The author has made extensive efforts to contact all the owners of the texts and images that appear. Should an owner of a copyright appear after the publication of this study, the author is prepared to pay a reasonable fee for usage.

A Note on the Presence of Translations and Poems in their Original Languages

Where I believed it to be helpful to my discussion, I have included texts and poems both in their original language and in English translation. When I have opted to cite only a translation, I have done so either because I believe my discussion is not enhanced by examining the original language version or because I did not have the facility to do such an examination. For example, I do not read or speak Polish and, therefore, I do not include the original Polish poems in my discussions of the poems of Herbert, Dąbrowski and Nowakowska.

Introduction Introduction

This book is not about photography, but about the poems that describe it. It is not an examination of photographic images, but rather an exploration of how those images are reconstructed in verse from the 19th century to the present. It is not an investigation into photographic messages, but an analysis of how the residues of those messages influence the poems that evoke them. Fundamentally, then, this book is a study of the ekphrasis of photography. To date, there have been a number of studies of ekphrasis: that is, the literary description of the visual arts. However, little work has been done in examining the ekphrasis of photographs. Why is this the case? In our present visual culture, where photography extends the reaches of our gaze and the recollection of our memories, there is no shortage of works both in prose and poetry that take photography as their subject. Such a study, then, would seem to be a given, and yet literary critics have been more or less silent about the descriptions of photography in poetry. There are a few notable exceptions: John Hollander and Stephen Cheeke include chapters in their examinations of ekphrasis that address some of the issues of photography. In addition, in their studies of the relationship between photography and literature critics such as Jefferson Hunter, Françoise Meltzer, Michael North, W.J.T. Mitchell and François Brunet have dedicated portions of their discussions to the subject of literary descriptions of photographs (see Hollander 1995; Cheeke 2008; Hunter 1987; Meltzer 1987; North 2005; Brunet 2009). However, none of these examinations may be termed comprehensive, for none of them has acknowledged that the ekphrasis of photography is not merely a matter of describing another visual medium. The ekphrasis of photography encompasses the very nature of literary description

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in the post-photographic era. A study of this trope therefore provides insight into the nature of modernity, its visual culture and its concepts of memory, knowledge and experience. The reason why critics have not yet offered a comprehensive study of the ekphrasis of photography would seem to stem from the complexity and relative newness of the photographic message. To date, critics who have sought to address the overall aspects of ekphrasis—that is, to define the entirety of the trope from the poems of Homer to the writing of the present day—have tended to simplify the issues related to photography, suggesting that the comparatively recent ekphrasis of photography is somehow a minor variation of the established ekphrastic trope, rather than a unique version meriting independent critical study. Additionally, critics who discuss the overall relationship between photography and poetry are apt to neglect the issue of ekphrasis altogether in the interest of identifying the influences of photography on poetry or poetry on photography. Such discussions, then, are either focused upon the entire ekphrastic trope, which can be defined in a manner that makes it applicable to all sorts of visual media, or they are committed to the necessary relationships and frictions that exist between visual and verbal media.1 1  A comprehensive bibliography of critical works dealing with ekphrasis (also written as “ecphrasis”) is not possible within the introduction of this study. Here, I mention only those critical voices that have been especially beneficial for me in gaining perspective on the ekphrasis of photography. However, were one to make a greater list of critics, one would need to begin with such persons as Gisbert Kranz, Valerie Robillard, Els Jongeneel, Murray Krieger, to name only a few of the scholars in this field. Indeed, the critical literature on ekphrasis is extensive and capacious. In addition, the boundaries of the trope are difficult to define. This difficulty arises not only from the extensive number of critical works that have addressed ekphrasis directly but also from the even more extensive number of critical works that have entered into examinations of the trope without identifying themselves as examinations of ekphrasis. For example, while in his Image and Word Jefferson Hunter engages in one of the first studies of the ekphrasis of photography, he does not use the term “ekphrasis” in itself. Equally, in his Photography and Literature, François Brunet briefly touches on the trope, but focuses his attentions in another direction. Similar difficulties arise when one realizes that, in its classical definitions, ekphrasis is not relegated merely to literary descriptions of visual images. As Quintilian and other classical rhetoricians describe the trope, ekphrasis is a matter of discriptio (description). Through the use of enargeia or evidentia, the orator or writer creates for the listener or reader a figura mentis (a mental image of that object). Thus, at least among classical authors, the trope involves an intensified descriptive language, which can be applied universally. This problem is not resolved

Introduction

3

However, this study presents a definition of the ekphrasis of photography that entails a departure from other definitions of the trope, and it also distinguishes itself from discussions of the connections and frictions that exist between photography and poetry. In the latter case, this is because the study’s primary focus is on individual poems’ receptions of photographs. Thus, the study is principally a literary analysis. In the case of the former distinction, what is central to this study is the idea that the ekphrasis of photography, more often than not, involves itself in a narrative. This narrative can be distinguished from other ekphrastic narratives, such as those described by James Heffernan in his Museum of Words (1993). Whereas definitions such as Heffernan’s focus on the descriptions of stories occurring within plastic works of art, the narratives that occur in the ekphrasis of photography generally involve themselves in describing stories that occur between poetic speakers and the photographs they regard. In short, recognizing that photographs have the semiotic functions of indexical signs, and thus have the power to point back into the past and to reference their subjects, this study asserts that the ekphrasis of photography very often describes an encounter between the ekphrastic subject and the viewer–speaker who describes this subject. Central to the definition of the ekphrasis of photography is what I term “The Chronotope of the Photograph,” after Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of literary chronotopes, discussed at length in the next chapter. Using a passage from Walter Benjamin’s 1931 essay “A Brief History of Photography,” the chapter outlines what I term “the primal scene of the ekphrasis of a photograph.” This scene centers on the encounter that Benjamin describes between himself and Mrs. Elizabeth Hall, the photographic subject of one of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson’s photographs. Examining this encounter closely, the chapter isolates those elements of the ekphrasis of photography that are unique to this form in modern critical discussions; for example, in his seminal work, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (1992), Murray Krieger also describes the trope as surpassing descriptions of art. For Krieger, ekphrasis is one of the aspects of literary description in general. To extend the difficulties of definition and critical evaluation even further, it must be recognized that ekphrasis is not reserved for literature alone. Rather, ekphrasis figures as well within music, and it is exemplified in such works as Luciano Berio’s symphonic work “Ekphrasis” (1996). These difficulties have inspired me to simplify my critical discussion as much as possible, and to include discussion by those critics who can best inform and enhance my own insights.

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of ekphrasis and reveals how these elements contribute to creating the chronotope of the photograph. What follows that chapter, then, might best be termed a genre study, in that the nine chapters of this book are laid out in such a way as to map the ekphrastic trope when it engages the medium of photography, thereby laying the groundwork for further study of this increasingly prominent aspect of poetic expression. These chapters proceed as follows. The Ekphrasis of the Cicerone: the 19th Century The Chronotope of the Photograph is founded on 19th-century conceptions of photography. Conceptions of the medium in the era of its invention hail the photograph as an essential image, which is capable of documenting both the surface and the depth of its subject. In short, the earliest ekphrases of photographs come to regard photographic images as being evidential of their subjects’ spiritual character. What this means for these poems is that they often engage in a Platonic rhetoric about photographs. As we will see, this Platonism will stay with photography, at least as poets describe it, well into the 20th century. Indeed, it is what will set many of the poems examined in this study at odds with post-modern critics of photography. Critics such as Victor Burgin, for instance, characterize essentialist attitudes toward photographs as “relics” of the primitive past that “obstruct” our view to the manipulated rhetoric of the photographic image (Burgin 1986, 51).2 This study does not set out to debate such issues with critics such as Burgin. Rather, it recognizes that, whether this essentialist attitude may be called a relic or not, it corresponds to those attitudes most commonly expressed in the ekphrasis of photographs. Time and time again, the ekphrasis of photographs comes to celebrate the photograph not merely as a representation but as an essence of the thing itself. I have endeavored to honor this attitude, for, despite modern critical positions, poets as diverse as Herman Melville, John Ashbery and Zbigniew Herbert embrace photography as a means of encountering the photographic subject as though that subject were present. For this reason, the study begins in a somewhat historical manner with the poets of the 19th century. In the first analytic chapter I examine four 2  It is W.J.T. Mitchell who first takes issue with this point of Burgin’s in “Visible Language: The Photographic Essay, Four Case Studies,” which appears in Mitchell 1995.

Introduction

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19th-century poems that invoke this kind of Platonic essentialism: Pope Leo XIII’s “Ars Photographica,” Herman Melville’s “On the Photograph of a Corps Commander,” Lewis Carroll’s “Hiawatha’s Photographing” and Walt Whitman’s “My Picture-Gallery.” What pervades these four poems is an essentialist attitude toward photography: regarding the photographs that they describe as essential, the speakers of these poems posture themselves as interpreters of images. The nature of their interpretations, however, does not entail the surface details recorded by the photographs they describe, but how these photographs have captured the spiritual nature of their subjects. Thus, the first subclass of the chronotope entails a narrative in which the poetic speaker guides the reader through the image. It is as if the reader has entered a lyceum, museum-talk or scientific lecture, in that, while the reader is not mentioned in these poems, our presence is felt, for we are the addressees of speakers who would teach us about the truth in the photographs they are describing. In addressing the reader, these poems involve apostrophes, in that their speakers “turn away” (the traditional meaning of the apostrophe) from us to point to an essential aspect within the photograph, and then turn back to us to explain this detail. I term this subclass the ekphrasis of the cicerone. As the final word in the phrase suggests, the role assumed by these speakers aligns itself with a ciceronian expertise that these poems seek to impart to their readers. The essential qualities that these ciceronian speakers attribute to photographs anticipate the eight other subclasses of the chronotope of the photograph, in that, again and again, later poems return to the kind of Platonic essentialism described in these 19th-century poems. Still, there are distinctions among the different ways that later poems endorse this essentialism, as mapped in the eight other distinct sub-classes examined in depth in the chapters that follow my discussion of the 19th century. These subclasses are summarized below. The Snapshot Elegy In this version of the chronotope, the poetic speakers access the dead via photographs, often resurrecting them by way of describing their images. Such resurrections complicate—even foil—the distancing work of mourning that figures prominently in the elegiac tradition. The chapter examines Ivor Gurney’s “Photographs,” Thomas Hardy’s “The Photograph” and Philip Larkin’s “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album.”

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The Suppressed Ekphrasis Because photography vicariously allows a writer to travel great distances and to examine minute or even microscopic subjects, the camera has become the writer’s eyes, allowing him or her to see things that would otherwise be beyond his or her experience. Yet these pseudo-travels and experiences are themselves foiled if they are exposed as coming from the study of photographs. As this chapter argues, consciously or not, much of modern writing involves suppressed ekphrasis. To demonstrate the means whereby an ekphrasis becomes suppressed, the chapter examines two poems that do not totally obscure their ekphrastic sources, but in some manner allude to them: Marianne Moore’s “The Paper Nautilus” and Seamus Heaney’s “The Grauballe Man.” The Iconic Photograph A number of photographs obtain such a degree of public prominence and familiarity that they can be said to be iconic. When ekphrastic reference is made to such an iconic photograph, the poem addresses its public quality. Its speaker departs from the private realm of the snapshot into a public forum, in which his or her impressions of the image must be weighed against the photograph’s cultural—even pan-cultural—significance. The chapter focuses attention on three poems that describe Nick  Ut’s photograph entitled “Horror of War,” and a fourth poem, Ernesto Cardenal’s “Prayer for Marilyn Monroe.” The Ekphrastic Calligram The late 20th century sees the first examples of ekphrastic poems that are juxtaposed, in print, with the actual photographic images they describe. Such texts can therefore be seen as captioning the accompanying photographs and forming what Michel Foucault terms calligrams (textimage bonds). These bonds alter the function of the poems, shifting away from the work of description and allowing the speakers to address and even interact with the photographic subjects. Thus, such poems are the fullest manifestation of the chronotope of the photograph, in that text and image encounter one other. The chapter examines a section from Thom Gunn’s Positives, Richard Howard’s “Charles Baudelaire” and John Logan’s “On a Photograph by Aaron Siskind.” The Anti-Ekphrasis This subclass involves the unraveling of the calligram that is formed

Introduction

7

between the poem and the photograph. Ultimately, the poem denies the relationship between itself and its ekphrastic source. The anti-ekphrasis serves as a caution, calling our attention to the way representations may be used to misrepresent. The chapter examines the poem “Sensationalism” by Larry Levis. The Speaking Photograph In this subclass of the chronotope, the poet adopts the persona of the photographic subject and addresses the reader directly, rather than assigning to the reader the role of an eavesdropper. The poet thereby engages in prosopopoeia: giving a voice to a silent image. By speaking to the reader as if from a photograph—and beckoning the reader to look at it—the poetic speaker makes an ekphrasis of him or herself. The chapter examines sections from Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer and Adam Thorpe’s “Navaho.” Shadows of the Former Self The works within this subclass engage in a strange psychology, one that would seem to run contrary to the attitudes expressed in other versions of the chronotope: rather than hailing a photographic portrait of the self as having life and presence, the poetic speakers generally shun the photograph of the self, recognizing their own images as threatening them with mortality. The chapter examines: Robert Penn Warren’s “Old Photograph of the Future,” Zbigniew Herbert’s “Photograph” and John Ashbery’s “The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers.” The Photoshopped Image Digital imaging has shifted poetic attention away from the photographic subject and back to the process of making or altering a photograph. Such a change of perspective flies in the face of much of what poets previously celebrated about photographs, for it is the manipulation of the image that now becomes its most powerful evidence of presence. These poems take our present study full-circle, for, having begun with the poems of the 19th century, which celebrate photography as means of enhancing vision and accessing essential truths, the poems of the digital age celebrate it as means of diminishing vision and altering the events of the past. The chapter examines Tadeusz Dąbrowski’s “I scanned my photograph from the first year” and “Resolution,” and Klara Nowakowska’s “Low Resolution.”

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In mapping these subclasses, I have sought to develop a workable set of terms that may allow readers and subsequent scholars to follow and build on my observations without being hampered by rigid theoretical structures. My hope, then, is that the influence of such writers as Aristotle, William James and William Empson can be felt throughout this book. Following the taxonomic approaches of these writers, my goal has been to devise categories that facilitate understanding above all else. Furthermore, as James and Empson recognize at the beginning of their own taxonomies: no category is without exceptions. The same is true here. The poems I have selected are not limited to one subclass. From time to time, there are crossovers. Where these occur, I call attention to them. I have organized the chapters in a way that allows the reader to gain an increasingly complex understanding of the layers of meaning that photography has provided modern poetry. From the first to the last chapter, this book seeks, then, to introduce each subclass as an outgrowth of the preceding one. I have also sought to stay close to the poems themselves. Close reading is the ethos behind all of the examinations here, in that there is no better way of recognizing the representational and cultural complexities of photography than by closely examining how photography affects the language that describes it. The nuances of poetic language delineate these complexities. Such nuances are what this book sets out to describe.

— 1 —

That Which Will Not Perish into Art: the Chronotope of the Photograph The Chronotope of the Photograph

Bei der Photographie aber begegnet man etwas Neuem und Sonderbarem: in jenem Fischweib aus New Haven, das mit so lässiger, verführerischer Scham zu Boden blikt, bleibt etwas, was im Zeugnis für die Kunst des Photographen Hill nicht aufgeht, etwas, was nicht zum Schweign zu bringen ist, ungebärdig nach dem Namen derer verlangend, die da gelebt hat, die auch hier noch wirklich ist und niemals gänzlich in die “Kunst” wird eingehen wollen. (Benjamin 1977, vol II, i. 370) In photography, however, one encounters something (etwas) strange and new: in the fishwife from Newhaven who looks at the ground with such relaxed and seductive shame something remains that does not testify merely to the art of the photographer Hill, something that is not to be silenced, something demanding the name of the person who had lived then, who even now is still real and will never entirely perish into art. (Benjamin 1980, 202) This passage from Walter Benjamin’s essay “A Short History of Photography” (“Kleine Geschichte der Photographie”) is something of a primal scene of the lyrical ekphrasis of photographs. Even while Benjamin’s description of David Octavius Hill’s photograph of Mrs. Elizabeth Hall of New Haven, Scotland (Figure 1), whom Benjamin calls “the fishwife,” is not itself a poem, the passage involves a story that one often encounters in the lyrical ekphrases of photographs. In Benjamin’s passage, the story begins in the comfortable language of description and ends in the admission of the fishwife’s nameless and undeniable

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Poetry, Photography, Ekphrasis

Figure 1  David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, “Mrs. Elizabeth Hall of New Haven, Scotland,” 1842

“demand” (verlangend). Were we to characterize this story at length, we might term it as one in which Benjamin’s language becomes derailed by his inability to encapsulate the message of the image. Indeed, what begins as artistic appreciation ends as astonishment. Benjamin is not alone in this astonishment. Since its invention in the 1830s, photography has repeatedly been the cause of such descriptive derailments, for what initially seems quite simple about photographs soon becomes, upon closer inspection, a far more complex—even nebulous—matter: one that leads writers to employ vague language, such as Benjamin’s use of etwas (something) to the describe the indescribable qualities he encounters. Indeed, when one attempts even to associate Benjamin’s astonishment with one of the many rubrics that literary criticism has at its disposal— the sublime, the uncanny, the queer—one is thwarted, for none of these theoretical concepts corresponds to the story of the fishwife’s “demand.” Initially, we might assign the nature of Benjamin’s story to being

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akin to James Heffernan’s characterization of the ekphrastic story in his Museum of Words (1993). Defining ekphrasis as “the verbal representation of a visual representation” (Heffernan 1993, 3), Heffernan argues that this representation of a representation entails a number of elements that make it unique. The two most significant elements involve the activation of the pregnant moment that is depicted in a still or plastic image, and a representative friction between the ekphrastic language and materials of the ekphrastic object. Heffernan associates the activation of the pregnant moment with the narrative work of ekphrasis. “Ekphrasis,” he writes, “is dynamic and obstetric; it typically delivers from the pregnant moment of visual art its embryonically narrative impulse, and thus makes explicit the story that visual art tells only by implication” (ibid., 5). Heffernan’s notion of the ekphrastic story involves a narrative that acts as a midwife to the pregnant moment depicted. Ushering this moment into a continuum of words, ekphrasis, according to Heffernan, provides such a moment with an anterior and a posterior progression of events. In addition to being the midwife of the visual image, Heffernan’s story also entails “representational friction.” As a principal example of this friction, Heffernan takes Homer’s description of the Shield of Achilles from the 18th Book of the Iliad. On the shield, a farmer is ploughing a field with a pair of oxen. “Describing the ploughman depicted on the shield,” observes Heffernan, “Homer writes (in Lattimore’s translation), ‘The earth darkened behind them and looked like earth that has been ploughed / though it was gold’ (18.548–9 emphasis Heffernan’s). By explicitly noting the difference between the medium of visual representation (gold) and its referent (earth),” Heffernan continues, “Homer implicitly draws our attention to the friction between the fixed forms of visual art and the narrative thrust of his words” (ibid., 4). Thus, the ekphrastic story, according to Heffernan, is self-reflective. It tells the story of the image, and it calls attention to the mimesis at work in that image. In such a story, the poet does not only act as midwife to the visual image; he or she also comes to celebrate the work of its maker. Even while Achilles’ shield is an imaginary object of art, Homer is compelled to praise the ingenuity of its maker (the god Hephaestus). In a great many respects, this study is founded upon Heffernan’s definition and his canonical project. The first to offer a comprehensive history of the trope of ekphrasis, Heffernan provides a clear and tangible working definition of it. However, as seminal as this definition is, it is challenged by the semiotic realities of photography, and this is evident

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when we attempt to apply the definition to Benjamin’s passage. Even while the “relaxed and seductive shame” (lässiger, verführerischer Scham) of Hill’s fishwife may entail an embryo of a narrative (a story of shyness and self-consciousness that would seem to have surrounded the moment Hill captured the woman with his camera), Benjamin’s description does not express an internal narrative, nor does he act as a midwife to Hill’s photograph by placing the fishwife into successive parts of anterior and posterior action. Rather, the nod of the fishwife’s head and the downward cast of her eyes do not figure in a narrative unfrozen by Benjamin’s language. Instead, these few details would seem to express the reality of the woman’s presence: a presence that makes “real demands” and that “will not entirely perish into art.” Thus, the narrative in Benjamin’s ekphrasis is not what occurs inside the frame. Rather, it is a story of the presence of the fishwife reaching out of the frame. Benjamin’s word for this story is an “encounter” (Die Begegnung). The word is apt, because the photograph of the fishwife does not provide an image to be narrated in the sense of literary fiction. It allows for an encounter with the “real” woman. In addition, Benjamin’s ekphrasis does not entail any suggestion of representational friction. Given the nature of Benjamin’s project, this omission would seem doubly strange. In offering us a “short history of photography,” Benjamin does not call our attention to the way in which Hill created his photograph. Even though Benjamin does spend a few sentences testifying as to how the photographer “modestly made” his photographs in a Scottish graveyard, what Benjamin stresses is the way in which Hill’s paintings (which the artist made from his photographs) pale in comparison to these “few studies” that “reveal more about the new medium than that series of heads … ” (Benjamin, 1980, 203). Benjamin’s ekphrasis of the fishwife, then, stresses less the power of Hill (the artist) and more of what Benjamin calls earlier in the essay “the magical value” of photography (ibid., 202). What accounts for the lack of representational friction in Benjamin’s ekphrasis would seem to relate to how, as representations, photographs are traditionally considered to be “taken” rather than made things. I will address this notion at length in the analysis to follow; suffice to state here, however, that, despite how the mimesis of photography has become one of the central concerns of post-modern critics, since its invention the medium has been associated with acheiropoesis: “unhandmadeness.” This quality is what William Henry Fox-Talbot refers to in The Pencil

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of Nature when he recollects how he first conceived of the photograph as a picture “divested of ideas” and created solely by “the exertions of light” (a “light drawing”) (Fox-Talbot, 1993, 77–8). Conceived of in this way, the subject of such an image is without a maker and is composed of no materials that could create a friction between their representation and the language that describes it. We may take issue with this idea in the sense that photographs are traditionally printed on paper or other flat surfaces, and certainly this is something that could cause representational friction, but the reality of such a friction is obviously suppressed in Benjamin’s passage—as it is often suppressed in many other ekphrases of photographs. In my analysis of a number of poems in this study, I address instances when such representational frictions occur; however, what I emphasize here is the surprising circumstance that, more often than not, the majority of ekphrases follow Benjamin’s lead in disregarding the materiality of a photograph in order to hail its subject. In those poems, as in Benjamin’s passage, the acheiropoietic quality of photographs such as Hill’s account in no small way for the sort of encounter that Benjamin describes. What augments the reality of Benjamin’s encounter still further involves the complex relationship of photography to time. In a photograph, that which was formerly temporal becomes that which is spatial, and so that which occurred in the past becomes that which can be seen in the present. If photography has a magical aspect, it stems from this change, which Siegfried Kracauer terms the medium’s power to “metamorphose” an intangible moment into tangible space: the space within its own frame. “Photographs,” writes Kracauer, “do not just copy nature but metamorphose it by transferring three-dimensional phenomena to the plane, severing their ties with the surroundings, and substituting black, gray, and white for the given color schemes” (Kracauer 1980, 259). Albeit somewhat dated in terms of color photography, Kracauer’s conception of a photograph being the metamorphosis of a temporal instant into a plane (or two-dimensional space) allows us to conceive of photographs in spatial terms. In effect, a two-dimensional, 8×10-inch photograph houses a three-dimensional piece of reality. In a great many respects, this is an obvious fact. However, this is also what entails a photograph’s strangeness: its etwas—to use Benjamin’s word, for encountering this two-dimensional space inspires a writer such as Benjamin to perceive the past life of the fishwife and to sense, imaginatively at least, how that life is spatially contiguous with his own. The result would seem a desire

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for ekphrasis: a desire to speak out (the original Greek meaning of the word “ekphrasis”) both to and for those persons and things whose time has been transformed into the photographic space. I will return to the issue of this desire to speak out at the end of this chapter; for now, it is more central to address how the temporal metamorphosis of photography distinguishes the medium from other forms of visual representation. Recognizing the uniqueness of the medium, Charles Sanders Peirce defines a photograph as an indexical sign and uses it as an example of the inherent contact that forms between these signs and what they index. Unlike Peirce’s notion of “the symbol,” which is a sign created out of customary use, or his notion of “the likeness” (what Peirce terms “an icon”), which is a sign created out of imitating appearances, “the index” points to what it signifies and is therefore in proximity with it. But, as Peirce stresses, the nature of this pointing entails more than indication. It entails contact. “Photographs, especially instantaneous photographs, are very instructive,” writes Peirce, “because we know that they are in certain respects exactly like the objects they represent. But this resemblance is due to the photographs having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature. In that aspect, then, they belong to the second class of signs [the index], those by physical connection” (Peirce 1998, 5–6). As an indexical sign, a photograph is inherently contiguous with that to which it points. This contiguity begins with the way a photograph is made. When film or a digital field is exposed to light refracting off a photographic subject, the light works as a stempel. It impresses the subject onto the film or digital field. While this stempel-work occurs at the level of the photon, it is no less a matter of contact. And while the distances across which this contact is made may vary—from the average distance that forms between a camera and the subject of a snapshot, to the vast distance that forms between a telescopic camera and the light of a star—the image is always created by way of contiguity. The effect of this contiguity is to afford photographs the power of supplanting the temporal distance that lies between their subjects and their viewers with a spatial distance. As a result, persons, places and things that may be temporally absent become seemingly contiguous. What this means for photographs is that they have the ability to become substitutes for their subjects, and thus become metonyms. As Charles Lock observes, the very way in which we speak of photographs implies this metonymy: “We remember one absent or deceased by means of, for

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example, a piece of stiff card whose chromatic or umbral dispositions create for us an image that prompts us to say not even ‘this is that,’ or ‘this is an image or likeness of a photograph of Alice,’ but simply: ‘this is Alice’” (Lock 1996, 332). Lock does not make this observation in the middle of a discussion about photography, but in a discussion of Roman Jakobson’s theory of the aspects of language. Recognizing how language is constantly renewing its stock piles of words through catachresis, Lock extends the linguistics of Jakobson to their fullest implications: that the organic nature of language is contingent upon our making living metaphors into dead ones so as to collapse these figures (Lock 1996, 334). As Lock’s example of the photograph of Alice indicates, the catachresis at work in such dead metaphors as the “neck of a vase” and the “trunk of a tree” are equally at work in photography; in seeing Alice’s photograph, we do not come to regard it as “an index of Alice” any more than we come to regard it as “a picture of Alice.” We regard it as “Alice.” In short, the habitus1 that surrounds the viewing of photographs has come to provide us with a visual catachresis that converts a photograph metonymically into the thing itself. The consequence of this catachresis is that the temporal distance that lies between Alice and us vanishes.

1  In using the word “habitus,” I employ Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of this term. “In a society in which the transmission of culture is monopolized by a school,” writes Bourdieu, “the profound affinities that bind together human works (and, obviously, behaviors and thoughts) find their principle in the scholastic institution vested with the function of transmitting, consciously and also, in part, unconsciously, a subconscious knowledge, or more exactly, of producing individuals endowed with this system of subconscious (or deeply buried) schemes that constitute their culture or, better yet, their habitus; in short, of transforming the collective heritage into an individual and collective subconscious. To relate the works of a period with practices derived from a school of thought is to give oneself one of the means to explain not only what they claim, but also what they betray in so far as they partake of the symbolics of an epoch and a society.” [All emphasis Bourdieu’s]. Pierre Bourdieu, “Postface to Erwin Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism,” reprinted in Bruce Holsinger, The Premodern Condition, p. 230. My general premise is that the attitudes often expressed in the ekphrasis of a photograph come closer to the unconscious schemes by which society operates, rather than the critical attitudes of visual theorists, for even while the attitudes of these theorists are taught in scholastic institutions, these institutions are designed to train academics in the development of theoretical metalanguages. Such metalanguages are not part of daily life. Thus, I would go so far as to state that the poetical works examined in this study “betray” the hidden symbolics of non-academic, non-scholastic, visual culture.

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Poetry, Photography, Ekphrasis

Instead of saying, “this was Alice,” we resort to the present tense. Instead of employing the pronoun “that,” so as to indicate the distance between the place and time in which Alice posed for her photograph and the place and time in which we look at the girl’s image, we employ the deictic pronoun “this,” indicating that the girl is here. Benjamin’s encounter with the fishwife is nothing if not a matter of contact, for, by definition, “an encounter” entails contact. This contact is achieved foremost because Benjamin is aware that a photograph has had contact with its subject. Even the photographic reproduction that Benjamin must have studied for his essay must have had contact with Hill’s original negative in order to be copied, for, at least in traditional photography, even a photograph of a photograph still involves the indexical and metonymic contact between a photograph and its subject. The contact between what Hill photographed and what Benjamin sees brings Benjamin into a contiguous relationship with the fishwife: a relationship he experiences in sight, sound and astonishment. He sees the woman and imaginatively hears her demand. The contiguous and metonymic aspects of photography raised by Benjamin’s essay delineate a powerful chronotope. In his essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope of the Novel,” Mikhail Bakhtin defines the literary chronotope as a narrative space in which “time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (Bakhtin 2006, 202). From this definition, Bakhtin categorizes the various types of chronotopes as they have evolved in the Western literary tradition. Among them are “the chronotope of the road,” “the chronotope of the drawing room or salon,” “the chronotope of the idyll” and so on. As Bakhtin relates, each of these chronotopes serves as a scene of narrative action that defines the narrative genre. The quest, for instance, is centered on the chronotope of the road. In this chronotope, each event occurs as a meeting on a journey. The chronotope of the idyll, on the other hand, centers on a particular landscape within which the story of generations occurs. To this list of chronotopes, I would add the chronotope of the photograph, as a narrative site in which this thickening of time and space is doubled. In the chronotope of the photograph, it is not one time or one space that thickens. Rather, two times and two spaces do. The “natural catachresis” that occurs between the photographic subject, its environment and its viewer serves as a catalyst in which the time and

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space of the one merges with the time and space of the other. We have only to return to Benjamin’s passage again to illustrate this: that hour in 1931 when Benjamin gazed into Hill’s image merges with the long pose that the fishwife must have held as Hill’s camera slowly captured her image. Such a merger is what Benjamin indicates with his word “encounter.” Traversing time and space by means of Hill’s image and Benjamin’s gaze, the fishwife meets the writer. What occurs in this encounter comes to form the narrative of this chronotope: a narrative that invariably involves seeing. In Benjamin’s narrative of seeing, he encounters a past emanation. The woman who is long dead is suddenly alive and demanding. As we will see in a number of the poems examined in this study, the inherent pastness that Benjamin encounters in Hill’s image is not always what poets find. Sometimes, as in the case of Herman Melville’s poem, “On a Photograph of a Corps Commander,” the poet encounters a Platonic form: the photograph records the absolute form of its subject. In the case of Marianne Moore’s poem, “The Paper Nautilus,” the poet encounters a distant entity: one that would otherwise be outside the speaker’s environment and immediate experiences. In any event, the chronotope of the photograph thickens these distant realities with the familiar realities of the writer or poetic speaker. This chronotope lies at the heart of the definition of the ekphrasis of photography and is what distinguishes it from other forms of ekphrasis, at least by degree. Foremost, the ekphrasis of a photograph is less “a verbal representation of a visual representation” than it is a verbalization of a spatial index. It is less a celebration of the mimesis of the image-maker (in the form of representational friction) than an endorsement of an acheiropoietic quality of the image. It is less a description of a timeless metaphorical likeness than it is the description of a temporal metonym. What these distinctions allow us to maintain is that the ekphrasis of a photograph is, finally, not an obstetric story told about what occurs within an image. It is a chronotope that describes an encounter between the photographic subject and its ekphrastic viewer. With this definition, we might understand the drama that occurs in the ekphrasis of photographs and how this drama involves the desire to speak to and for photographs. This desire often takes the form of the apostrophe. Coming from the Greek, the term “apostrophe” means, of course, a turning away. In classical rhetoric and traditional English verse, such a turning away occurs when the orator or poet turns away from his or her audience or reader to address an absent personage, as in William Wordsworth’s

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“London 1802,” a poem that begins by declaring: “Milton! Thou shouldst be living at this hour … ” (Wordsworth 1994, 173). However, as we see in Benjamin’s passage about the Hill’s photograph, the apostrophe that occurs deviates from the classical convention. In his encounter with the fishwife, Benjamin does not turn away—as Wordsworth’s speaker does—to a person who is absent and therefore invisible. He turns instead to Hill’s photograph: an image of the absent subject captured with light. Thus, Benjamin mitigates the absence and invisibility of the traditional apostrophe by engaging in an ekphrasis of the absent subject’s image. In addition, Benjamin’s encounter with the fishwife does not involve him speaking to her so much as it involves him acknowledging the failure to speak at all. This is not something universal to the ekphrasis of photographs, for there are any number of poets who directly address the photographs they describe, and others who speak for them by way of prosopopoeia, but generally there is a desire in photographic ekphrases to speak, and to do so in a manner that, as Benjamin does, acknowledges a life within the image in a manner that revisits the medieval or even Byzantine conception of images: conceptions in which an image might embody the essence of its prototype—the trace of its spirit. While post-modern critics of photography greet such an attitude as inherently primitive, it is, as I will argue, one of the central elements that distinguishes the ekphrasis of photographs and the chronotope that it produces. Thus, whether such an attitude is primitive or not, this study endorses it, for there is in the ekphrasis of photography an ancient desire to find life in images. This desire corresponds to the rivalry that occurs between what the Byzantine poet, Michael Psellus, terms the apsychos (lifelessness) and empsychos (life) of the image (Belting 1994, 528–9). More often than not, the ekphrasis of photography involves apsychos, in that the description of a photograph so often involves the description of a thing or person lost in time: something that is lifeless, for it is dead. But it tends to involve an even greater degree of empsychos, in that the description of this lost thing or person invariably entails an ecstatic desire to redeem the life of this thing or person by way of the photograph. This latter desire figures so prominently in the ekphrases of photographs that, if we were to characterize the struggle between death and life as one in which both sides hold equal sway, we would misrepresent the sentiments of most of the poems examined in this study. These are poems whose speakers long for living connections with the photographic subjects they describe. Such longings often outweigh the need to recognize lifelessness.

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Turning to a photographic image, the speakers in poems by Seamus Heaney, John Logan, Philip Larkin and Adam Thorpe seek to see and be seen by these images, to know and be known by them—finally to love and be loved by them. To clarify the matter still further, love is finally what would seem to lie at the heart of many of the best ekphrases of photographs—love and love’s nemesis: loss. “When I open my wallet,” writes John Berger, to show my papers pay money or check the time of a train, I look at your face.

(Berger 2005, 5)

The opening stanza of Berger’s poem entails a declaration of love, but, as all such declarations do, it implies as well an apostrophe to a beloved. Is Berger’s addressee dead or alive? Near or far off? Requiting his speaker’s feelings or spurning them? The poem does not say, nor does it need to. The photograph depicts a beloved who will one day be dead and far off. The poem testifies to this fact in its final line: “And our faces, my heart, brief as photos.” There is much that can be said about the paradox of this final line, juxtaposing the immortalizing power and the ephemeral frailty of photographs. Indeed, the apsychos and the empsychos are both embodied in the image the speaker carries in his wallet. Just as in the speaker’s heart, in the wallet, the addressee is both present and absent. However, most importantly, the paradox does not change the speaker’s sentiments; the image is with him, and so the beloved is with him. Death and life are with him, along with the urge to speak. Can we not ascribe a similar declaration of love occurring between Benjamin and the fishwife? Even while Benjamin’s is not an address, what can we make of his description of the woman’s “shy and seductive shame”? Do these words not embody something rhapsodic? And the word “etwas,” what does it mark? Does it go too far to suggest that the word represents the linguistic stammer that proceeds a kiss? These silences and the words that encapsulate them are the subjects, then, of this study. Denying the death that would seem to be inherent in every photograph, the speakers of the poems examined here are, finally, lovers, speaking to images that “will never entirely perish into art.”

— 2 —

The Ekphrasis of the Cicerone: the 19th Century The Ekphrasis of the Cicerone

Among the innumerable early descriptions of the photographic process, none comes closer to anticipating what we might term “the metaphysics” that were to grow up around photography than those passages from William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature. Credited as being one of the inventors of photography, Fox Talbot allots a considerable amount of his book to describing how he first conceived of the photographic camera. In his account, Fox Talbot expresses the fascination that the invention produced for him and, in doing so, he lays the groundwork for many of the earliest treatises that will address the medium through the 19th century. Fox Talbot writes: It was during these thoughts that the idea occurred to me … how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper! And why should it not be possible? I asked myself. The picture, divested of the ideas which accompany it, and considered only in its ultimate nature, is but a succession of stronger lights thrown upon one part of the paper, and of deeper shadows on another. Now Light, where it exists, can exert an action, and in certain circumstances, does exert one sufficient to cause changes in material bodies. Suppose, then, such an action could be exerted on the paper; and suppose the paper could be visibly changed by it. In that case surely some effect must result having a general resemblance to the cause which produced it: so that the variegated scene of light and shade might leave its image or impression behind, stronger or weaker

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on different parts of the paper according to the strength or weakness of the light which had acted there. (Fox-Talbot 1993, 77–8) As this passage expresses, Fox Talbot’s enthusiasm is not born out of any anticipation on his part for what photography will mean for the empirical sciences, nor does he anticipate the cultural contribution that photography will have in the fields of history, personal memory or geographic studies. Instead, his interest begins and ends with the hope of realizing a “charming” dream of what “could be” if natural things could “imprint themselves durably.” As this phrase suggests, Fox Talbot conceives of photography as a form of printing in which the human hand plays no part. The potency of such a notion—the philosophical dream that it inspired in such 19th-century minds as Fox Talbot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Lewis Carroll and Walt Whitman, to name only the few thinkers and writers studied in this chapter—was that, as a medium, photography had finally allowed humanity to surmount the representational barriers of mimesis. Finally, humanity could produce an image that was “divested of thought.” As such, photography seemingly provided the 19th century with a solution to Plato’s ancient objections to images in general. In one of the most well-known passages from The Republic, Socrates castigates painting, exiling it and its practitioners from his perfect state: “ … when the painter makes his representation, does he do so by reference to the object as it actually is or to its superficial appearance? Is his representation one of an apparition or the truth?” “Of an apparition.” “The art of representation is therefore a long way removed from truth, and it is able to reproduce everything because it has little grasp of anything, and that little is of a mere phenomenal appearance.” (Plato 1974, 598, c.) In a few words, Socrates describes the painter as either a buffoon or a liar and discounts the painter’s skill as nothing more than the making of “a mere phenomenal appearance.” With those words in mind, one imagines Plato’s state as a city of white walls and blank facades. And yet, one is also left to imagine what Socrates might have thought of photography. How might Fox Talbot’s images, which “imprint themselves” and which are “divested of thought,” have altered Plato’s conception of mimesis?

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Would the photographer have joined the painter in exile? Or would the city walls of the Republic have been blanketed by photographs? More than likely, Socrates’ attitude would have been mixed: a photograph still reveals the world from only one perspective, and thus the camera, like the other arts and their artists, “is able to reproduce everything because it has little grasp of anything.” Furthermore, Socrates might well have agreed with Victor Burgin’s categorization of photography as an essentially manipulated medium (Burgin 1999, 41). Had Socrates the same insights into photography as Burgin, he might well have regarded photographs as yet another form of mimesis that produces images that are a third remove from Truth. And yet, the reliance of photography upon light—the fact that the camera operates as a small cave into which a ray of sunlight enters and an image from reality is recorded—might well have impressed the Socratic mind, for it corresponds to Plato’s central metaphor: “The Light of Truth” being that light that enters the Cave from the world of forms outside. Such a reliance on light might well have allayed any of Socrates’ fears that the photograph was a manipulated image, for, while he might have accepted Burgin’s premise that a camera is aimed in order to select its subject, and thus is manipulated, he might also have been willing to accept the images of those subjects as being unhandmade, and thus unbridled by the falsehood of mimesis. While we will never know what Socrates and Plato would have thought of photography, an examination of the first ekphrases of photographs reveals that these nascent works generally embraced photographs as being inherently Platonic images; that is, images that are devoid of mimesis. In the previous chapter, I referred to such images as acheiropoietic, which is the Greek word referring to a thing that is not-hand-made. Indeed, it is the acheiropoietic qualities of photography that award it its place of fascination for many of the thinkers and writers of the 19th century. No Fairer Imaging: Pope Leo XIII’s “Ars Photographica” No poem better expresses this acheiropoietic notion of photographs than a Latin lyric written by none other than Pope Leo XIII. Entitling his poem “Ars Photographica” (1867), Pope Leo hails the acheiropoietic aspects of the photograph he describes, celebrating the image as one made from the magic of the sun:

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Ars Photographica Expressa solis spiculo Nitens imago, quam bene Frontis decus, vim luminum Refers, et oris gratiam. O mira virtus ingeni Novumque monstrum! Imaginem Naturae Apelles aemulus Non pulchriorem pingeret. (Pope Leo XIII 1902, 44) Ars Photographica Sun-wrought with magic of the skies The image fair before me lies: Deep-vaulted brain and sparkling eyes And lip’s fine chiseling. O miracle of human thought, O art with newest marvels fraught— Apelles, Nature’s rival, wrought No fairer imaging!

(Ibid. 45)

Published in 1867, “Ars Photographica” was preceded by Herman Melville’s poem “On the Photograph of a Corps Commander” (discussed later in this chapter) by one year. Thus, Leo’s poem is not the first ekphrasis of a photograph, and yet I begin my discussion here, recognizing that the pope’s brief ode is the first to claim that photography is a metaphysical medium capable of revealing the spiritual nature of its subjects. Leo’s words substantiate the semi-sacred nature of photography, acknowledging the medium as participating in the iconographic culture of the Greek and Roman Churches. And who better than Leo to make such a claim? Leo was the pope who embraced the media of sound and motion-picture recordings, becoming not only the first pope to be recorded speaking, but, in 1898, the first pope to be filmed by William Kennedy Dickson’s prototype movie camera, the kinetoscope, a device Leo subsequently blessed (Souto 2007, 8) (Figure 2). With this in mind, we recognize Pope Leo’s poem as something more than a rhapsody on the development of a

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Figure 2  William Kennedy Dickson, “Clip from Kinetoscope of Pope Leo XIII,” 1898

new medium. The poem functions as a benediction of that medium and, as such, it seeks to elevate photography to the level of the sacrosanct. In several respects, Leo’s poem reiterates the views of Fox Talbot: the pope’s line about the “magic of the skies” echoes Fox Talbot’s notion of “light’s exertion.” In addition, Leo’s comparison between the photograph described in his poem and the work of Apelles invokes the age-old distinction between the accuracy of photography and that of painting—a distinction that had become common in the 1860s. By the middle of the 19th century, painting had already moved on, leaving the matters of pictorial accuracy to photography. However, “Ars Photographica” not only reiterates the views of its day but also establishes a place for photography in the traditional philosophical debate concerning mimesis. As I have observed, this is a debate that begins with Plato. Accordingly, Leo’s speaker opens with a declaration about the unhandmade power of photography, implying that there is no techne (skill) to photography; no element of craft; no human tampering; no fiddling or signs of workmanship that could diminish the truth that this “fair” image expresses. This unhandmade quality is what founds the speaker’s assertions that the “fair” image that “lies before” him with its “Deep-vaulted brain and sparkling eyes / And lip’s fine chiseling (“ frontis decus, vim luminum / refers, et oris gratiam”) surpasses the paintings of Apelles, reputed to be greatest of all the classical painters. A clearer view of how Leo’s poem engages in this argument can

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be gained by consulting the Latin original, rather than relying on T.H. Henry’s translation. Translating “ frontis decus, vim luminum / refers, et oris gratiam” as “deep-vaulted brain and sparkling eyes / and lip’s fine chiseling,” Henry unnecessarily imposes upon the poem the suggestion of mimesis, especially in the word “chiseling”, whose Latin equivalent is “scalprum.” As scalprum does not appear in the Latin original, “chiseling” thus serves more to obfuscate how the “ frontis” (forehead), “vim” (strength) and “oris” (mouth) of the photographic subject are depicted by means of the sun itself. It is the fact that the photograph expresses these qualities without the work of human hands (without “chiseling”) that wins Leo his point: photography surpasses the legendary paintings of Apelles, the ancient Greek master who was said to be the first practitioner of the tromp-l’æil, in that a photograph is not a tromp-l’æil—not a trick for the eye. Made from “the magic of the skies,” a photograph is an image of revelation. However, to say that the photograph “surpasses” the painting is in some respects also a misrepresentation, for “surpass” suggests that photography, for Leo, involves some sort of technological improvement to the realms of mimesis, and this is not the case. Instead, invoking the power of the sun and the quality of magic, Leo’s speaker indicates that the photograph he describes is a proto-image. The proto-image is one that does not surpass or supersede the mimesis of an Apelles, because such images have existed long before the art of painting. In Henry’s translation, this suggestion is even more obscured by his emphasis on the human elements at work in photography. In translating “O mira virtus ingeni / Novumque monstrum” for “O miracle of human thought, / O art with newest marvels fraught,” Henry inserts the human mind into the middle of Leo’s argument. Relying upon the word “ingeni” to insinuate the ingenious aspects of human invention, the translation truncates the complexity of the poem’s declaration. “O mira virtus ingeni / Novumque monstrum” translates roughly as “O new born, wonderful and virtuous entity [or monster/creature],” indicating that a photograph is not a man-made thing at all, but rather the result of a power or entity that can self-generate. Such an entity substantiates its own power, inspiring envy in all men, not merely Apelles. The argument put forth by “Ars Photographica,” then, is that photography is an acheiropoietic medium, one that does not correspond to the traditions of painting found in classical Greece or the Renaissance. Instead, Leo’s speaker alludes to the traditions that have grown up around

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the unhandmade relics and icons of the Roman and Greek churches of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Central to all of the traditions that have developed around these images is a story that describes how they were divinely made. Often, this story of divine creation recounts how the acheiropoietos “fell” to earth or how it was found. Local icons or representations of the Madonna often involve these stories. For example, the Black Madonna of the Monserrat Monastery, outside Barcelona, Spain, was said to have been discovered in a cave in the mountain. Accordingly, it was not made but dropped from the heavens to earth. In this way, the Madonna’s image is regarded as an acheiropoietos. However, such stories of discovery constitute only one sort of acheiropoietos. The most potent sort of acheiropoietic images are those whose origins are said to come from direct contact with the divine. Made by the impression left on it by a holy personage, or containing part of that personage’s body (most often in the form of a bone), the acheiropoietos contains a trace of the divine’s presence on earth. One of the most famous examples of such acheiropoieta is the Shroud of Turin (Figure 3), which is said to bear the impression of Christ and to have not been made through an act of mimesis. Paying devotion to such an object, the devotee foremost seeks to have contact with it, for to touch the Shroud of Turin with the hand or the lips means to touch that which has touched the face of Christ.

Figure 3  Secondo Pia, “Negative of the Shroud of Turin,” 1898, Museo Della Sindone, Turin

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As Leo’s poem suggests, the same qualities of unhandmadeness and contact are inherently part of the photographic art. In his account of how the photograph in the poem was created, Leo ascribes to the image the quality of “magic”—and not just any magic, but the “magic of the skies.” In other words, like the acheiropoietos that falls from heaven, the photograph equally falls, at least, out of the light that makes it. While such a suggestion might at first seem fanciful, as Marie-José Mondzain observes, this fancy is part and parcel of the ideological complexities that have grown up around photography and remain part of it to this day, for the medium is cloaked in a sort of scientific spiritualism that verifies its images as “doctrinal matrixes.” Photography functions, writes Mondzain, … as a producer not simply of acheiropoietic images, but ones in which the effect of their “real presence” is accompanied by a rhetoric and scientific system that is wholly unique. At root, the belief in this particular capability of photography is based on the wholesale transfer of a technical vocabulary into a spirited one. Light, developer, darkness, lens—all these terms induce a dreamlike state of being. The same is true of the photographic apparatus as was true for the optical and specular vocabulary of the Renaissance: the technical object is a doctrinal matrix. Here, however, obscurist incompetence and stubbornness of the proselyte no longer have anything in common with an intelligence at work as it attempts to grasp hold of a model of thought intelligibility. The collaboration between the mirror and the system of thought is far from the giddy complicity of fantasy and photograph. (Mondzain 2005, 200) Conceiving of photography as an acheiropoietic medium is far from giddy fantasy, then. Rather, the photograph would seem to be ultimate vera-icona: “the true icon.” In short, photography is a credible magic that exceeds the stories of the sacred relics and images, for, while the acheiropoieta have the dubious distinction of having been “made” by way of alleged contact with their prototypes or by having fallen from heaven itself, any photograph may boast of having been made by way of light’s refraction from the photographic subject. As previously stated, when this light comes through the aperture of the camera, it works as a stempel that impresses the subject onto film, and while this stempel-work occurs at the level of the photon, it is no less an acheiropoietic trace. It is the

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acheiropoietic quality of the photograph described by Leo’s speaker that supports the idea that this image is greater than any human “imagining,” because, without the tampering of human hands, the photograph— and by consequence “the art of photography”—is an art of truths, not imitations or flatteries. Hailing photography as the medium of the unfeigned truth, Leo’s poem is one of reverence. Taking the role of a cicerone of sorts, Pope Leo’s speaker assumes the task of an interpreter or visionary agent. I take the word “cicerone” from Walt Whitman’s poem “My Picture-Gallery” (the final poem examined in this chapter). As we will see, in his poem, Whitman describes the picture gallery of his speaker’s mind as one that is hosted by “a cicerone” “with rais’d figure to each prodigal picture.” There is value in considering Leo’s speaker in the same way, for Whitman’s chosen term identifies his speaker as a just orator who, in a manner corresponding with Cicero’s ethics, employs his rhetorical powers to lead his readers to a greater truth. The work of such a cicerone is more than the work of an ethical connoisseur. It involves what Cicero himself terms “the becoming nature of truth” (Cicero 1887, I, 91, 27), a nature that requires “brave and high-spirited men also good and simple, friends of truth, remote from guile” (ibid., I, 73, 19). By entitling his poem “Ars Photographica,” Leo describes the art of photography as an art that manifests itself in the truth of reality, implying that his speaker is a cicerone equal to Whitman’s: an expert witness to the truth that lies before him. In this way, Leo’s “Ars Photographica” may even be said to advance, in one small way, a new form of poetic discourse, for Leo’s speaker assumes the role of an expert guide. Of course, poets have always performed the work of reporters and guides. The narrative that Dante relates in The Divine Comedy is nothing less than a report from the other side, and the role that the poet Virgil plays in Dante’s poem is that of a supreme guide. In the case of “Ars Photographica,” the speaker’s role calls our attention to the triangular relationship that forms between the poem’s reader, its speaker and the photographic images that are described. The poem suggests that the imaginative aspects of poetic creation are secondary to the informative aspects of the eyewitness’s account. Leo’s speaker is foremost a witness to, not a maker of, the photograph, for, as he relates, such pictures do not require fabrication. They require accurate reporting; he must be true to the image. This obligation to truth distinguishes Leo’s speaker from many previous conceptions of the poet, in which the poet reported the truth only as it transpired in his imagination. Thus,

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in “Ars Photographica,” the esemplastic power that Coleridge assigns to the poetic imagination—the power that “molds unity” into poetic speech (Coleridge 2000, ch. 13, vol. 1, p. 295)—seemingly becomes secondary to the truth of reporting what is recorded in a picture. Leo’s speaker is photography’s reporter, reader, apologist and even its high priest. Given the poet’s position as High Pontiff, the last of these distinctions is, of course, the most tempting to make, for, celebrating this “art with newest marvels fraught,” Leo christens photography as nothing short of an exegesis taken from the fabric of Creation itself. In short, looking into the “rare image” that lies before him, Leo’s speaker hails a new art (dare we say a “new monster”) capable of showing both the surface and the essence of all things. In this way, photography does not record; it reveals “the magic of the skies,” which is nothing less than the magic of the divine. Favoring Nature: Herman Melville’s “On the Photograph of a Corps Commander”1 There is a wonderful insight in Heaven’s broad and simple sunshine. While we give [photography] credit only for depicting the merest surface, it actually brings out the secret character with a truth that no painter would ever venture upon, even could he detect it. There is, at least, no flattery in my humble line of art. Now, here is a likeness which I have taken over and over again, and still with no better result. Yet the original wears, to common eyes, a very different expression …. (Hawthorne 1998, 90–1) Pope Leo’s attitudes toward photography are not unique. Since its invention, photography has inspired enthusiastic commentary, especially in the United States, where it seems to have held a special fascination for Americans and American writers. Americans wrote some of the first ekphrases of photographs, and photography might even be said to be one of the themes of American literature. From Edgar Allen Poe’s essay “The Daguerreotype” (1840) to James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise 1  This section of the chapter was previously published in 2012 in an edited and altered form in Cambridge University’s Journal of American Studies.

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Famous Men (1939) to Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977), American writers have shared Leo’s fascination with the medium, regarding it as Leo does: that is, as a source of an acheiropoietic images imbued with the power to reveal the inner nature of their subjects. One of the first American voices to express this attitude is Holgrave, the protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables. In his monologue on the art of daguerreotypy, Holgrave describes photographs as spiritual sorts of x-rays that allow their beholders to see into the nature of the photographic subject. Directing young Phoebe (his listener in this scene) to look at “a likeness which [he] ha[s] taken over and over again,” Holgrave instructs the girl to see, as it were, into the nature of the duplicitous Judge Pyncheon. In effect, what Holgrave attempts to teach Phoebe is to use the photograph as a method of detection. Here Hawthorne’s allegory reveals itself in Phoebe’s name. Phoebe’s innocent character substantiates her name, which means, of course, “light.” She is pure and innocent. She sees the truth about the Judge. Allegorically, speaking, then, in his instruction, Holgrave is teaching “light” to comprehend its own impressions, as these impressions are recorded in his daguerreotypes. Indeed, as Carol Shloss recognizes, Holgrave is Hawthorne’s answer to the criminal detective, for he is “someone who can find the real culprit” by means of his photographs (Shloss 1987, 42). However, this cannot be accomplished without Holgrave first partnering with “light.” This partnership lies at the heart of Hawthorne’s romance. Holgrave’s power to detect by way of photographs anticipates Leo’s poem by a decade, and, in doing so, comes to express a series of American concerns. While Leo’s poem is an ode of celebration, Holgrave’s monologue expresses a far more pragmatic approach to photography. Even while Holgrave and Hawthorne’s narrator insist on the word “art” to refer to daguerreotypy it is, for both of them, a medium of detection: a method by which depth is accessed and surmised. As Shloss goes on to observe, this notion of photography is implied in Holgrave’s name. He sees “holographically.” Thus, his art involves penetrating the two-dimensional photographic surface. Whilst Hawthorne’s romance is foremost a work of fiction, a similarly pragmatic attitude toward photography permeated antebellum America. As Alan Trachtenberg explains, from the first appearance of daguerreotypes in United States, photography became one of the principle mediums used in the examination and acquisition of “character.” “What was needed,” writes Trachtenberg,

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was confidence that the eye could reliably discern inner character from outer appearance. Some writers on photography articulated it as a system based on the popular fads of phrenology and physiognomy, which claimed to derive knowledge about inner traits from external evidence—in phrenology, from the configuration of the brain as traced by bumps on the skull. Photographers adopted the notion that the exterior of a person might reveal inner character, and conventionalized it in a sentimental repertoire of expressed poses. (Trachtenberg 1989, 27–8) In 19th-century America, the photographic camera becomes, then, an instrument used to read the essential nature of its subject. Photography, as Holgrave describes it, “actually brings out the secret character with a truth that no painter would ever venture upon.” Allied with the pseudo-sciences of phrenology and physiognomy, photographs, then, became objects of empirical measurements that could be catalogued, stockpiled and compared in order to give the pseudo-sciences a body of evidence. In his romance, Hawthorne is not interested in the connection between the pseudo-sciences and photography per se. Instead, his interest in the medium is to employ it as a plot device, and little more. However, Hawthorne’s friend and fellow writer Herman Melville takes up the issue of photography and the pseudo-sciences in his poem “On the Photograph of a Corps Commander” (1866), concerning Mathew Brady’s 1864 portrait of General Winfield Scott Hancock. In this poem, Melville both describes photography as a medium through which such an examination can be performed and hails it as a new sort of spiritual technology. In addition, he renovates older poetic genres by linking them with the new medium of photography. The most central of these genres is ekphrasis, which Melville employs in combination with the antique trope of the epideixis, or the poetic celebration of a heroic personage. Linking ekphrasis and the epideixis in this way, Melville’s goal is both to re-establish the Renaissance tradition of celebrating heroic portraiture and to connect this tradition with photography. Appearing in Melville’s Battle-Pieces, “On the Photograph of a Corps Commander” is almost an exact contemporary of Pope Leo’s “Ars Photographica,” although there is little to suggest that the two poets knew each other’s work.

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Poetry, Photography, Ekphrasis On the Photograph of a Corps Commander Ay, man is manly. Here you see The warrior-carriage of the head, And brave dilation of the frame; And lighting all, the soul that led In Spottsylvania’s charge to victory, Which justifies his fame. A cheering picture. It is good To look upon a Chief like this, In whom the spirit molds the form. Here favoring Nature, oft remiss, With eagle mien expressive has endued A man to kindle strains that warm. Trace back his lineage, and his sires, Yeoman or noble, you shall find Enrolled with men of Agincourt, Heroes who shared great Harry’s mind. Down to us come the knightly Norman fires, And front the Templars bore. Nothing can lift the heart of man Like manhood in a fellow-man. The thought of heaven’s great King afar But humbles us—too weak to scan; But manly greatness men can span, And feel the bonds that draw. (Melville 1924, XVI, 76)

As the formal structure of the poem and its antiquated diction suggest, Melville returns to an older kind of verse: one whose formal structures are employed for honoring a national hero. While such verse was not unheard of in the 19th century (one has only to think of Tennyson’s “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington”), still there remain a number of elements in Melville’s poem that suggest he modeled “Corps Commander” on an older Renaissance pattern. From its sestets to its allusions to Renaissance literature such as Shakespeare’s history Henry V,

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the poem attempts to acclaim the Corps Commander as something of a national paladin. In this way, it models itself on the Renaissance form of epideixis, in which a noble personage is praised by way of his or her portrait. As John Hollander explains, during the Renaissance such ekphrases performed the work of glossing the “Sacrament” of a painted subject: A portrait may look like what its subject looks like, but it is frequently praised in the Renaissance, for example, as looking like—and thereby revealing—what a person is (generating what the Book of Common Prayer calls a ‘Sacrament’, “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace”). A fictional story about an occasion on which trompe l’oeil actually fools a viewer is one thing. Another matter is that of a poem that praises subject and painter together by showing how the artist gets to the character or essence of the subject by means of detail—how the psychological or moral notion is revealed “in” a bit of facial feature, co-existing perhaps with the glossing of emblematic details surrounding the face. (Hollander 1995, 41–2) Hollander’s description of Renaissance ekphrasis calls to mind Holgrave’s art of detecting character. Certainly, reading the Sacrament of a portrait parallels “detecting” the character in or behind a face. Using the visual image as a text, both the reader of a Sacrament and a detective (such as Holgrave) can access the essence of its subject. However, what is lacking both in Hollander’s description of this work and Holgrave’s practice of it is what we might term “a scientific method.” Neither Hollander nor Holgrave relate how such an access should be accomplished. In his poem, Melville would seem to provide an answer to this problem in the form of phrenology and physiognomy. In fact, “Corps Commander” is an extended allusion to these pseudo-scientific disciplines. The poem goes as far as to give a series of instructions designed to educate its reader in the art of reading photographic images. This work begins with the poetic speaker’s insistence that the reader should “look,” “trace” and “scan” the nobility of the Corps Commander in his photograph. Following these instructions, the reader is initiated, so to speak, into the mysteries of photographic reading. Studying the Commander, the reader is instructed where to look for the man’s courage, nobility and ancestral heritage—all of which came together to produce his brave deeds at the Battle of the Wilderness in Spotsylvania, Virginia.

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Poetry, Photography, Ekphrasis Ay, man is manly. Here you see The warrior-carriage of the head, And brave dilation of the frame; And lighting all, the soul that led In Spottsylvania’s charge to victory, Which justifies his fame.

In each of these sentences, there is a departure from the particular into the abstract—the phenomenal to the essential. The poem’s opening line “Man is manly” describes the essential gesture of every sentence that follows it. From this particular man, the reader may abstract the universality of manliness. The Commander’s head is not unique to his person; it hosts instead a “warrior-carriage.” His frame is no mere man’s; it is the very “dilation” of bravery. Foremost, his photograph is lit neither by natural forms of light, nor the artificial lights of a studio. It is lit by the Corps Commander’s soul. This inner light makes Hancock’s image into something of an x-ray: by looking at the photograph, the viewer can isolate his soul as though it were as empirically visible as a bone. The comparison of the x-ray is appropriate here, in that it is in keeping with the scientific jargon of the stanza. The phrases “warrior-carriage of the head” and “dilation of the frame” reflect a similar sort of terminology. But, as may be obvious to 21st-century readers, these terms are not anatomical ones. Rather, they are enlisted from phrenology. Woven into the poem’s panegyric, these pieces of jargon suggest that one does not go to the Commander’s portrait merely to admire it. One goes to this photograph to comprehend a good specimen of a human soul. Such a suggestion aligns Melville’s ekphrasis with one of antebellum America’s preoccupations with photography: “copycat posturing.” As Alan Trachtenberg relates, early 19th-century American photographers “adopted the notion that the exterior of a person might reveal inner character”; thus they began to conventionalize their trade with “a sentimental repertoire of expressed poses” (Trachtenberg 1989, 27–8). These poses were modeled first on portrait paintings and later on photographs of esteemed citizens. One of the best-known sources of such photographic models was Mathew Brady’s The Gallery of Illustrious Americans (1850). The book contains 24 daguerreotype portraits of prominent persons from the antebellum period taken by Brady, which were then copied as lithographs by F.  D’Avignon. The purpose of Illustrious Americans was to provide the Anglo-Saxon, Protestant American public

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Figure 4  Mathew Brady and F. D’Avignon, “John C. Frémont,” lithograph taken from photographic print, 1850, C. E. Lester and M.B. Brady, The Gallery of Illustrious Americans, Containing the Portraits and Biographical Sketches of Twenty-four of the Most Eminent citizens of the American Republic, since the death of Washington. From Daguerrotypes by Brady—Engraved by D’Avignon. Edited by C. E. Lester. New York: C.E. Lester and M.B. Brady, 1850

with models of good breeding and character. Copying the poses of these illustrious men, antebellum Americans could imitate the exterior demeanors of the illustrious, and could then measure themselves against and distinguish themselves from the steady flow of immigrants from Ireland, Eastern Europe and Asia, as well as African slaves (Figure 4). Trachtenberg describes this self-styling and copycat posturing as part of a transformation of a society in which people of less than aristocratic status “learned to see themselves as images.” “The millions of surviving daguerreotypes,” Trachtenberg writes, “mostly unidentified by maker or sitter, show people learning a new way of seeing themselves in the eyes of

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others, seeing oneself as an image. A new form of social identity begins to emerge, to take shape and body, in these earliest photographs” (ibid., 29). The speaker of Melville’s poem celebrates the photograph of the Corps Commander as another portrait of another illustrious American, and this is quite logical when we consider that Brady took the photograph in question. The poetic speaker calls on the reader to perform similar kinds of copycat posing. Just as Brady’s book provided its possessors with racial schema, so the photograph of the Corps Commander provides its viewers with a schema. The suggestion is that, copying the Commander’s pose, men may become, by way of imitation, “manly.” The second stanza of the poem describes how the transformation occurs, in that it attempts to delineate how the spirit of manliness comes into contact with Nature itself. A cheering picture. It is good To look upon a Chief like this, In whom the spirit molds the form. Here favoring Nature, oft remiss, With eagle mien expressive has endued A man to kindle strains that warm. The speaker argues that the photograph reveals the secret workings of the Commander’s nature: a human nature conceived by the spirit’s perfection of Nature itself. Once the viewer comes to understand the manner of this metaphysics, he can then be “cheered” by it. The implication is that, in a manner that corresponds to the imitative rituals employed in the viewing of the Illustrious Americans, the reader may work to recreate a similar kind of molding within himself. The stanza suggests that, should a man with a “remiss” soul “look upon” this “chief,” he might enact a process of self perfection. This process would involve something of a reversal; the Commander’s body is perfected from its inner spirit outwards, but the person who assumes the pose of the Commander would have to perfect himself from the outside in. Assuming the pose of the Commander, the remiss man learns, then, how to “mold” his physical body into a better specimen and thus improve the shape of his soul. It could be argued that this notion of spiritual molding is reflected in the stanza’s rhymes. Completing the interlocking abab rhymes, the word “remiss” in the fourth line may be said to iconographically pose

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in a manner that imitates (by virtue of sound) the position of the word “this.” Is it going too far to suggest that the rhyme enacts the remiss man’s imitation of “this” Commander’s perfection? I suggest at least that the rhyme imposes an outer structure upon the inner workings of the stanza, and that this imposition unites the disparate syntactical units within the sestet. The stanza is divided into two parts, each taking up three lines. The first part addresses the realities of the spirit; the second addresses the outer disposition of Nature. The rhyme between “this” and “remiss” spans the division between these two parts and serves to connect them. Indeed, the acrostic made by these rhyming words may be said to give a sort of instruction: the remiss person seems to be told to imitate “this” personage, and in so doing, unite his imitating body with his compliant soul. What is clearly within the scope of the stanza is the idea of penetrating the surface of the photographic image. Indeed, the stanza argues that looking at the photograph involves seeing into the Commander’s essence, as is made manifest in the prepositions of the second sentence. In the second line, we “look upon a Chief like this.” The preposition “upon” describes how our eyes meet with the surface of the image. They “look upon” it, not into it. However, in the third line, surface changes to depth, as the line reads: “in whom the spirit holds the form.” Here, the prepositional phrase “in whom” calls our attention to how the photograph has become a vessel for the spirit of Commander. In one line, then, we have moved from the physical to the metaphysical realm. Returning to the idea of copycat posing, we see how this move from surface to depth parallels the act of self-styled posturing. In fact, the sentence makes the argument that, should one pose as the Commander does in the photograph, the posture will endow one with similar spiritual nobility. The third sentence of the stanza is muddy and convoluted, and its general intention is to praise the Commander’s facial features: “Here,” in this photograph, states the speaker, Nature (which is often “remiss” in its creations) “ … has endued a man” with an “expressive” “eagle mein,” and these endowments warm the heart. The phrasing might prompt a reader to dismiss the third sentence as an empty panegyric; however, there is one element here that further extends the argument made in the second sentence. It involves the allusion to Nature. While awkwardly presented, the allusion serves to deepen the depths that the photograph is said to reveal. Looking into the photograph, we see the relationship that forms between the physical man, his spirit and the perfected forces of Nature.

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Such a view figures the photograph as a capacious vessel inside which the workings of creation are laid bare from their smallest to their grandest levels. After illustrating the metaphysical aspects of the photograph, Melville moves on in the next stanza to the issues of lineage and bloodline. The suggestion is that, by examining the photograph, one is able to catch sight of the ancestry of the man: Trace back his lineage, and his sires, Yeoman or noble, you shall find Enrolled with men of Agincourt, Heroes who shared great Harry’s mind. Down to us come the knightly Norman fires, And front the Templars bore. Again, a physiognomic reading of the image suggests itself. “Trace back his lineage,” the speaker commands. It is an order that inspires us to imagine the speaker raising his finger to indicate the curvature of the Commander’s brow or to cross-reference the shape of his skull on a phrenology chart. In any event, the photograph remains a surface that elicits depth. What has changed is the physical nature of this depth. Previously, the essential aspects of the photograph were described as elements we had to look into or upon to see. We looked “upon” the commander “in whom the spirit molds the form.” In this stanza, we do not look “upon” or see “in.” Instead, the “knightly Norman fires” and the men of Agincourt “come down” to us. The shift transforms the photograph into a corridor out of which arrives the essential qualities of Anglo-Norman manhood. However, it is at this point in the poem that Melville departs from his own phrenological agenda; unlike a phrenologist who would itemize his subject’s racial pedigree, Melville proceeds with a series of literary allusions. At the heart of these allusions is a reference to the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V. The image that Melville seeks to invoke with this allusion is the “band of brothers” (what, in his speech, Henry V calls himself and his hopelessly outnumbered troops, so as to draw them together before the battle of Agincourt). Melville echoes Henry’s speech in the poem’s final line: “And feel the bonds that draw.” In effect, the line transforms the photograph of the Corps Commander into a silent image that has the same rallying power as Henry and his

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speech. Looking into this image the viewer feels compelled to join such a brotherhood, and, according to the poem, entry into this brotherhood corresponds with the highest level of manly achievement. In fact, the poem references only one individual of higher distinction than the Corps Commander—Christ himself: Nothing can lift the heart of man Like manhood in a fellow-man. The thought of Heaven’s great King afar But humbles us—too weak to scan; But manly greatness men can span, And feel the bonds that draw. The operational word in this stanza is “scan,” which unites the phrenological and literary aspects of the stanza. Foremost, the word pertains to reading, and thus is another allusion to phrenology, with its scanning of the bumps of the skull. Invoking this aspect of the pseudo-science, Melville introduces a somewhat bizarre notion: that of phrenologically scanning Christ (“Heaven’s great King”). While the idea is only hinted at, and then dropped, it both alludes to the work of the phrenologist and also intertextually links the poem with the Second Epistle of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man. Pope begins the epistle with the axiomatic couplet: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of Mankind is Man.” Melville’s speaker continues in the same vein, arguing that (were such an action possible) we can never ascend to a level insightful enough to phrenologically scan Christ. The skills and insights of men are “too weak” for this work. Yet, our limited vision is still worthy of celebration, and, in fact, this stanza places the work of the phrenologist at the highest level of human achievement: one who can read the qualities of the Corps Commander is one who is capable of understanding the workings of Nature and spiritual perfection, as well as the genealogies that these workings have produced. However, the word “scan” has other significance. Originating from the Latin scandere, scanning also relates to “climbing.” In effect, the comparison that Melville draws between the scanning of Christ and the scanning of the Corps Commander amounts to a matter of heights and distances: “Heaven’s King” is “afar” and thus he stands upon a peak too high to reach. The Corps Commander, however, is within reach. He is high up and stands at a distance from most men, who are “remiss” by

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Nature’s work, but he is within reach. The sense of climbing imbues the photograph with yet another sort of physical depth. Previously, it was an image “in” which we could see and then “out” of which generations could “come down.” Here, it is a height “up” to which we must climb, as one climbs to an altar. Melville’s employment of the word “scan” does not end here; playing on the word’s literary significance, Melville parallels the act of looking at the Corps Commander’s photograph with the act of reading (“scanning”) his poem. There is no accompanying photograph to the poem. Scanning the Corps Commander’s face, we can scan only Melville’s meters. This double entendre, then, is more central to the poem than it may first appear. Teaching the reader to scan the photograph, Melville’s speaker teaches his reader to read the poem as a photograph. The matter brings us to one of the central issues of ekphrasis: in order to see the photograph, the reader must read the poem. According to some theorists of ekphrasis, the operation of the genre requires the absence of the visual referent. For example, W.J.T. Mitchell argues that for ekphrasis to work 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. These acts of verbal “conjuring” are what would seem to be specific to the genre of ekphrastic poetry, and specific to literary art in general, insofar as it obeys what Murray Krieger calls “the ekphrastic principle.” Something special and magical is required of language. “The poem,” as Krieger puts it, “must convert the transparency of its verbal medium into the physical solidity of the medium of the spatial arts.” The “solidity” is exemplified in such features as descriptive vividness and particularity, attention to the “corporeality” of words, and the patterning of verbal artifacts. The ekphrastic image acts, in other words, like a sort of unapproachable and unpresentable “black hole” in the verbal structure, entirely absent from it, but shaping and affecting it in fundamental ways. (Mitchell 1995, 158) Mitchell is describing a text–image rivalry in which, were the visual image to appear, it would completely outstrip its ekphrasis. While Mitchell’s description of the “black hole” strikes me as too great a generalization to be applied throughout the genre of ekphrasis (as we will see through the course of this study, there are many instances when texts and images

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appear successfully together), in the case of Melville’s poem Mitchell’s observation is appropriate. Even while “Corps Commander” celebrates the photograph it describes, in order for it to accomplish this, it must itself become the photograph, and thus replace it. This necessity might explain the enigma that the poem presents: why does Melville not name the Commander? By excluding the man’s name, Melville not only conceals Hancock’s identity; he conceals the photograph. There are not even any lines that describe the photograph’s composition. Does, for example, the Corps Commander stand? Is he seated? Is the photograph taken indoors? Or out? Battle-Pieces was not published with lithographic illustrations (the only means in 1866 for reproducing photographs), so no picture accompanies Melville’s poem; therefore, such ekphrastic descriptions are all that would have been available to Melville. In 1866, of course, Melville might have assumed that his readers would know whose photograph he was describing, and he may have been right in making this assumption. By way of the few references the poem makes in its first stanza, possibly Melville’s readers could have identified the leader of the charge at Spotsylvania. The press covered the American Civil War closely, and the names of its heroes were part of everyday parlance. The very mention of Spotsylvania might well have implied the name of this Corps Commander. The possibility seems to be upheld by one of Melville’s biographers, Stanton Garner, who identifies General Winfield Scott Hancock as the subject of the photograph Melville describes (Garner 1993, 325). By way of this identification, we can identify the photographer as either Mathew Brady himself or one of his team of skilled photographers. Garner justifies Melville’s use of the photograph as the poem’s subject by explaining that Melville did not want to suggest he knew Hancock personally, and so he wrote the poem about a photograph of the Commander to avoid suggesting he did know the man (ibid., 326). The assertion seems plausible, but it does not explain why Melville does not identify the photograph as a portrait of Hancock. Nor does it explain why Melville did not identify Brady as the photographer. Hancock was one of the heroes of the Battles of Gettysburg and Spotsylvania, and Brady was well known both for his New York Gallery and his book, The Gallery of Illustrious Americans. Identifying Hancock and Brady would have been quite natural, and it would not have been pretentious on Melville’s part had he entitled his poem “On a Photograph of General Hancock.” Such a title would not have implied that he knew Hancock. Rather, it would

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Figure 5  Mathew Brady, “General Winfield Scott Hancock,” 1864

have invoked an image of a person of distinction. Furthermore, Melville’s actual title seems to go out of its way to stress the anonymity of the Corps Commander. “On the Photograph of a Corps Commander” suggests that the Corps Commander may be any number of generals in the field. Melville’s omissions, then, serve other purposes. The first of these purposes returns us to Mitchell’s notion of the “black hole” of ekphrasis. Inspecting Brady’s actual photograph of Hancock, one is confronted by how very little it corresponds to Melville’s poem (Figure 5). How does the photograph of a man in uniform sitting in a chair symbolize universal manliness? How does the face that stares back at us have “a warrior’s carriage”? What is less “remiss” in his “eagle mien” than in others? Such questions are what the actual photograph inspires. The presence of Brady’s relatively uninspired portrait destroys all the claims the poem makes and, thus, the photograph must be excluded. However, while the needs of ekphrasis dictate this absence, they lead us

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to an inevitable question: Why write this poem at all? If there is no penate from which we might learn how to pose, what does the poem accomplish? The answer is found in the instructive elements of the poem. In effect, Melville’s poem is written to instruct its reader in the work of the pseudo-scientist, and how this work involves scanning the nature of men. Learning this work, the reader learns to regard photographs as objects of “positivistic spiritualism,” capable of revealing more about an individual than the individual himself can express. Thus, “On the Photograph of a Corps Commander” is less about the subject of the photograph and more about the photograph and photography themselves. But, as the word “scan” implies, Melville’s agenda extends beyond a celebration of photography. It is also a shrewd piece of rhetoric that links photography’s ability to reveal the inner workings of its subject with poetry’s ability to celebrate these workings. In other words, the poem is finally a celebration of its own ekphrastic powers: powers that allow it to be photographic. Considered in the light of Pope Leo’s poem and the sacred nature that his speaker applies to photography, Melville’s poem strives to enhance its own potency by basing this potency on a medium whose reputation, at least in 1866, was unimpeachable. He hails photography as an acheiropoietic medium: one that has not been tampered with by hands. Thus, turning to the photograph of the Corps Commander, as the speaker does, he would seem to turn towards Plato’s sun, accounting for the chronotope of the photograph as I have defined it. The poem describes how its readers encounter the photograph, and how this encounter provides them with a vision that no other medium can provide. In effect, the manliness of the Commander corresponds with Benjamin’s etwas: the essential presence of the photographic subject. Unlike Benjamin, Melville is uninterested in expressing in his poem the personal qualities of the encounter. For his speaker, this etwas approaches Platonic form, in that the Commander’s essence would seem to have perfected any remiss of which Nature might have been guilty. The role that the poem “On the Photograph of a Corps Commander” plays in the making of American visual culture is at best a minor one. Struggling at times with its own poetic effects, the poem is often clumsy and rhetorically labored: finally, the minor work of a major writer. However, as remote as Melville’s poem may seem to be from Modern visual culture, it anticipates this culture and illustrates one of its central tenants: knowledge through photography. While poets have moved away

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from such ethically dubious endeavors as phrenology and physiognomy, they have not departed from the hope that photographs can grant their viewers insights into the character of persons and things, whether these persons and things involve historical events, distant sights of interest, celebrities or the horrors of war. In an era of digital telecommunications, it is fair to state that visual culture is largely based on a two-dimensional knowledge, in which viewers of images engage continually in glossing the Sacraments of the illustrious and the remiss that pass constantly before their eyes. As Ducks that Die in Tempests: Lewis Carroll’s “Hiawatha’s Photographing” Melville’s relationship to photography was filtered through the popular and intellectual preoccupations of his day. As such, he shared with Pope Leo and Hawthorne a naive understanding of photographic production, and so his ekphrasis of Brady’s portrait is as much a fiction as are Hawthorne’s descriptions of Holgrave’s daguerreotypes. One wonders what effect it would have had on Melville’s poem had he demonstrated the least understanding of the technical complexity of photography. For instance, would a knowledge of the long exposure time of the early camera—requiring the sitter to pose for as many as 15 minutes—have changed Melville’s insights into the nature of the Corps Commander’s “eagle mien”? Would an understanding of the compositional necessities of such a portrait—necessities relating to lighting, angle and seating— have afforded Melville a different sense of Hancock’s “warrior carriage”? In 1860, Melville sat for a photographic portrait (Figure 6), an experience that undoubtedly gave him insights into these matters; and yet, in his 1866 poem, he declined to acknowledge any of the technical aspects of photography. Perhaps Melville deliberately suppressed this knowledge because, had he alluded to it, such an acknowledgment would have undermined the sort of positivistic spiritualism his speaker propounds. We will never know whether this was the case or not. However, there was a poet who would have understood the complexities of early photography: Melville’s British contemporary, Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson). In addition to prolific authorship, Carroll was an accomplished amateur photographer whose pictures rank with the works of such early masters as Julia Margaret Cameron and David Octavius Hill.

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Figure 6  Unknown photographer, “Herman Melville,” 1860

While Carroll wrote a number of short articles and poems about photography, the most notable of such texts is his poem “Hiawatha’s Photographing” (1887). A satirical piece, Carroll’s poem relates the struggles of the photographer, Hiawatha, as he attempts to photograph the members of a Victorian family. Central to Carroll’s poem is the issue of the “success” or “failure” of Hiawatha’s photographs. Overtly, the issue of success or failure would seem to depend upon the general behavior of Hiawatha’s subjects, who are depicted as a group of foppish pretenders, each seeking his or her own conception of self through Hiawatha’s camera. The antics of these subjects would seem to be what spoils Hiawatha’s pictures, but, as the poem’s ending reveals, in fact, the success or failure of Hiawatha’s photographs relies on the success or

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failure of his camera to capture the essential truth of its subjects. Like Holgrave’s camera, Hiawatha’s has the power to see through whatever veneer its subject would put on, and, in so doing, it becomes an agent of Truth, whether the sitter likes it or not. Carroll’s poem provides a rare opportunity to read a poet who is also an accomplished photographer, and, while we might suspect that such a poet would not endorse the essentialist view of photography (preferring instead to demystify the work of the camera), Carroll’s “Hiawatha” finally supports the conclusion of Pope Leo, Hawthorne and Melville: that photography is an unhandmade medium—more magical than technical. Hiawatha’s Photographing From his shoulder Hiawatha Took the camera of rosewood, Made of sliding, folding rosewood; Neatly put it all together. In its case it lay compactly, Folded into nearly nothing; But he opened out the hinges, Pushed and pulled the joints and hinges, Till it looks all squares and oblongs, Like a complicated figure In the Second Book of Euclid. This he perched upon a tripod— Crouched beneath its dusky cover— Stretched his hand, enforcing silence— Said, “Be motionless, I beg you!” Mystic, awful was the process. All the family in order Sat before him for their pictures: Each in turn as he was taken, Volunteered his own suggestions, His ingenious suggestions. First the Governor, the Father: He suggested velvet curtains Looped about a massy pillar; And the corner of a table, Of a rosewood dining-table.

The Ekphrasis of the Cicerone He would hold a scroll of something, Hold it firmly in his left-hand; He would keep his right-hand buried (Like Napoleon) in his waistcoat; He would contemplate the distance With a look of pensive meaning, As of ducks that die in tempests. Grand heroic was the notion: Yet the picture failed entirely: Failed, because he moved a little, Moved, because he couldn’t help it. Next, his better half took courage; She would have her picture taken. She came dressed beyond description, Dressed in jewels and in satin Far too gorgeous for an empress. Gracefully she sat down sideways, With a simper scarcely human, Holding in her hand a bouquet Rather larger than a cabbage. All the while that she was sitting, Still the lady chattered, chattered Like a monkey in a forest. “Am I sitting still?” she asked him. “Is my face enough in profile?” “Shall I hold the bouquet higher?” And the picture was a failure completely. Next the Son, the Stunning-Cantab: He suggested curves of beauty, Curves pervading all his figure, Which the eye might follow onward, Till they centered in the breast-pin, Centered in the golden breast-pin. He had learnt it all from Ruskin (Author of ‘The Stones of Venice,’ ‘Seven Lamps of Architecture,’ ‘Modern Painters,’ and some others); And perhaps he had not fully Understood his author’s meaning;

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Poetry, Photography, Ekphrasis But, whatever was the reason, All was fruitless, as the picture Ended in an utter failure. Next to him was the eldest daughter; She suggested very little, Only asked if he would take her With her look of “passive beauty.” Her idea of passive beauty Was a squinting of the left-eye, Was a drooping of the right-eye, Was a smile that went up sideways To the corner of the nostrils. Hiawatha, when she asked him, Took no notice of the question, Looked as if he hadn’t heard it; But, when pointedly appealed to, Smiled in his peculiar manner, Coughed and said it “didn’t matter,” Bit his lip and changed the subject. Not in this was he mistaken As the picture failed completely. So in turn the other sisters. Last, the youngest son was taken: Very rough and thick his hair was, Very round and red his face was, Very dusty was his jacket, Very fidgety his manner. And his overbearing sisters Called him names he disapproved of: Called him Johnny, “Daddy’s Darling,” Called him Jacky, “Scrubby School-boy.” And, so awful was the picture, In comparison the others Seemed, to one’s bewildered fancy, To have partially succeeded. Finally Hiawatha Tumbled the tribe together, (“Grouped” is not the right expression), And, as happy chance would have it

The Ekphrasis of the Cicerone Did at last obtain a picture Where the faces all succeeded: Each came out a perfect likeness. Then they joined and all abused it, Unrestrainedly abused it, As the worst and ugliest picture They could possibly have dreamed of. “Giving one such strange expressions— Sullen, stupid, pert expressions. Really any one would take us (Any one that did not know us) For the most unpleasant people!” (Hiawatha seemed to think so, Seemed to think it not unlikely). All together rang their voices, Angry, loud, discordant voices, As of dogs that howl in concert, As of cats that wail in chorus. But my Hiawatha’s patience His politeness and his patience, Unaccountably had vanished. And he left that happy party. Neither did he leave them slowly, With the calm deliberation, The intense deliberation Of a photographic artist: But he left them in a hurry, Left them in a mighty hurry, Stating that he would not stand it, Stating in emphatic language What he’d be before he’d stand it. Hurriedly he packed his boxes: Hurriedly the porter trundled On a barrow all his boxes: Hurriedly he took his ticket: Hurriedly the train received him: Thus departed Hiawatha. (Carroll 1973, 768)

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No discussion of the poem could be complete without acknowledging the debt Carroll’s “Hiawatha” owes to Longfellow’s original “Song of Hiawatha.” Mastering Longfellow’s dactylic tetrameters and stylistic repetitions, Carroll beautifully parodies his predecessor’s poem. However, “parody” is not the word that Carroll uses. Rather, in the note he fixes to the beginning of the piece, he describes his poem as an “imitation.” In an age of imitation, I can claim no special merit for the slight attempt at doing what is known to be so easy. Any fairly practiced writer, with the slightest ear for rhythm, could compose, for hours together, in the easy running meter of “The Song of Hiawatha.” Having, then, distinctly stated that I challenge no attention in the following little poem to its merely verbal jingle, I must beg the candid reader to confine his criticism to its treatment of the subject. (ibid., 768) Carroll is perhaps too humble in this note. Even while Longfellow’s dactyls are distinct and possibly even easy to imitate, the facility with which Carroll moves through them displays something of his own genius. As John M. Shaw has observed, Carroll is such a master of parody that often his parodic poems surpass their originals. The best examples of Carroll’s parodies may be found, of course, in The Alice Books. Such poems as “Speak Roughly,” from the chapter Pig and Pepper, or “How Doth the Little Crocodile,” from The Pool of Tears, have come to eclipse the original nursery rhymes.2 While Carroll’s “Hiawatha” is less well known, his humble suggestion that anyone could compose such verses “for hours together” smacks of a certain disingenuousness. But then, the poem’s “subject” involves boasting and imitation. Boasting or, at least, self-aggrandizing, each member of the family sets out to imitate a personage of stature, culture or elegance. For the father, this personage is none other than Napoleon. For the eldest son, it is “the man of culture,” John Ruskin. For the mother and daughters, it is la belle. Each of these acts of imitation might be compared to the “little verbal jingles” that Carroll claims anyone can do, for, as the family proves, not just anyone can be Napoleon, John Ruskin or la belle of “passive beauty” any more than anyone can write like Longfellow. Carroll’s humility is written with a smile, then, for his “Hiawatha” is proof positive that imitation is a master’s art, not a dabbler’s. 2  For a full discussion of parody in the work of Lewis Carroll, see Shaw 1960.

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Figure 7  Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), “Self-Portrait,” 1875

Nowhere is this fact about imitation made more apparent than in Carroll’s own photography, whose seeming naturalism is, in fact, constructed out of Carroll’s masterful concealment of his own artifice. As Graham Ovenden relates, for Carroll, the mimesis of photographs was an obsession. Carroll exhibited an “almost obsessive need to translate visual experience into potential photographic imagery,” writes Ovenden, and this became “a self-conscious attempt to master the formalities of composition—what eventually was to become a unique strength in his work” (Ovenden 1984, 2). Carroll’s best photographs conceal his obsession with their composition. As Ovenden’s observation implies, Carroll’s mastery of composition perfectly hides itself. The pleasure one has in looking at Carroll’s self-portrait (Figure 7), for example, comes not in recognizing the compositional artifice of this image but in recognizing how, in an age of slow exposure times and stilted poses, Carroll composes himself in a manner that is both painterly and casual. In this way, Carroll’s photograph owes a debt to the organic aesthetics of the Romantics. Hailing Nature as the ultimate artisan, the Romantics

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prepared Carroll and his generation for the naturalism of photography. Even while Carroll’s poem makes no overt reference to this fact, it warrants attention, in that, by elevating Nature to the level of the sublime, Romanticism effectively inverted the role of the maker and his imitations. The poet no longer sought to imitate the artificiality of the human world. He or she turned his attention to imitating the organic perfections of the natural world. Considered in the light of Carroll’s self-portrait, we see how this objective manifests in the utter concealment of affectation. No hint of thought would seem to dictate the composition of Carroll’s image. No ostentation or mannerism is evident. The image appears as though it were a window through which we looked in on Carroll quietly daydreaming, and yet a master’s hand is clandestinely everywhere. Carroll’s desire to conceal his mimesis may well explain why his poem makes little or no reference to the technicalities of photography. There is no discussion of the chemical compounds, the lighting, the angles, etc. In itself, the lack of description is a strange omission, for Carroll, the poet-photographer, wrote a poem whose title includes the word “photographing,” and thus calls our attention to the act of photographic creation. However, practically none of the photographer’s art is described: From his shoulder Hiawatha Took the camera of rosewood, Made of sliding, folding rosewood; neatly put it all together. In its case it lay compactly, Folded into nearly nothing; But he opened out the hinges, Pushed and pulled the joints and hinges, Till it look all squares and oblongs, Like a complicated figure In the Second book of Euclid. This he perched upon a tripod— Crouched beneath its dusky cover— Stretched his hand, enforcing silence— Said, “Be motionless, I beg you!” Mystic, awful was the process. This is the only passage in which Hiawatha is depicted doing the work of photographing. In each of the following verse paragraphs, the attention

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of the poem is turned upon Hiawatha’s subjects, or we are given a glimpse into the workings of Hiawatha’s mind, but as far as the work of the photographer goes, it ends here, and this ending comes with a declaration of mysticism: “Mystic, awful was the process.” The reference to Longfellow’s original is everywhere in this line. Intoning the Native American shamanism that Longfellow imitates in his “Hiawatha,” Carroll introduces into the beginning of his poem something of a ritual. That the ritual is mock-heroic is secondary. What is central is the way the ritual supplants the mimesis of the photographer. Calling for motionlessness, Hiawatha ushers the family into the devotee’s anticipatory state of wonder, or at least he tries to.3 3  In a later version of “Hiawatha” the following lines were added, though they do not appear in the version printed in Carroll’s Complete Poems: First, a piece of glass he coated With collodion, and plunged it In a bath of lunar caustic Carefully dissolved in water— There he left it certain minutes. Secondly, my Hiawatha Made with cunning hand a mixture Of the acid pyrro-gallic, And of glacial-acetic, And of alcohol and water This developed all the picture. Finally, he fixed each picture With a saturate solution Which was made of hyposulphite Which, again, was made of soda. (Very difficult the name is For a metre like the present But periphrasis has done it.) In his discussion of the Collodion Process, Robert Leggat cites some of these lines as accurately portraying the work involved in this process (Robert Leggat, “Collodion Pross” http://www.rleggat.com/photohistory/history/collodio.htm). Thus, at some point, Carroll made an effort to incorporate more technical detail. Yet a review of these lines still shows that they relate little about the means by which photographs are made to produce meaning, and there is nothing in them to suggest that Carroll’s overall conception of photography has changed. He still expresses the idea that the camera can see the nature of its subject, even while there are certain chemical processes involved. In these lines, Hiawatha is not depicted making photographs.

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Whatever type of anticipation Hiawatha is able to create among the members of the family, he cannot create a desire on their part to behave genuinely. In fact, the poem goes on to describe the hopeless gap that is laid bare when genuineness is absent. With the possible exception of the youngest son, each member of the family is a pretender; as such, he or she is a talentless imitator. Carroll’s poem is full of examples of the family’s incompetence. The exchange that occurs between Hiawatha and the Older Son is worthy of special attention, for it not only exemplifies the family’s pretensions but also allows Carroll to allude to the aesthetics of his day and how those aesthetics relate to photography: Next the Son, the Stunning-Cantab: He suggested curves of beauty, Curves pervading all his figure, Which the eye might follow onward, Till they centered in the breast-pin, Centered in the golden breast-pin. He had learnt it all from Ruskin (Author of ‘The Stones of Venice,’ ‘Seven Lamps of Architecture,’ ‘Modern Painters,’ and some others); And perhaps he had not fully understood his author’s meaning; But, whatever was the reason, All was fruitless, as the picture Ended in an utter failure. The delight of this passage is in how it allows Carroll to engage in a discussion of aesthetics without committing his “Hiawatha” to the laborious ruminations of a manifesto or a diatribe. By describing the Older Son as a devotee of Ruskin, Carroll allows for comparisons to be

He is depicted “plunging” the glass plates into the bath, “with cunning hand” making a mixture of acid, fixing each “picture with a solution.” None of this relates anything more than how the images are developed. Finally, the fact that Carroll added these lines later and that they were not kept in the final draft of the poem suggests that they are out of place in “Hiawatha.” This is substantiated by the final lines, which confess how difficult it is to incorporate the name of the various chemicals into the poem’s dactyls.

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drawn between the kind of art Ruskin praises in The Stones of Venice and the kind of art practiced by Hiawatha. However, once Carroll sets up the comparison, he seemingly falls silent, prompting us to ask the question: what is the relationship between Ruskin’s notions of “natural form” and photography? As both writers were at Christ Church, Oxford, Carroll and Ruskin had extensive dealings with one another. Carroll photographed Ruskin in 1874 and made a number of portraits of Ruskin’s ex-wife, Effie Gray, with her new husband, John Everett Millais. Carroll was likely to have been privy to Ruskin’s conceptions of photography and, yet, in “Hiawatha” he is silent about them. The only clue comes in the antics of the family members, and how these antics might compare with Ruskin’s own thoughts on art. “I say,” declares Ruskin, “that the art is greatest which conveys to the mind of the spectator, by any means whatsoever, the greatest number of the greatest ideas, and I call an idea great in proportion as it is received by a higher faculty of the mind, and as it more fully occupies, and in occupying, exercises and exalts, the faculty by which it is received” (Ruskin 2005, Wol. 1, Part 1, Ch. 2, 12). While the Son’s suggestion about capturing “beautiful curves” refers to Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice, Ruskin’s definition of a great picture from his Modern Painters is more pertinent here. What the Son desires is for his portrait to express many great ideas, one of which is his many “curves” (Figure 8). Such an image would acquire a cachet of great artistic ideals. However, as the Son discovers, Hiawatha’s camera cannot communicate such ideas. In fact, photography, at least as Carroll portrays it, does not express ideas. It works to reveal reality, and this runs contrary to Ruskin’s definition of a great work of art. Ruskin’s definition is basically quantative. Even while the great work of art expresses “great ideas,” the central word in Ruskin’s definition is “number.” Ruskin would add up all the ideas that a great piece of art has to offer so as to have a numerical total and, from this total, he would decide upon the image’s greatness. With his “golden breast pin” and his many “curves,” the son would fashion himself into a composite of ideas, and thus his portrait might equate to the image of “a man of culture.” Most of the members of the family express similar desires. The father’s desire to pose like Napoleon, the mother’s desire to sit sideways dressed “far too gorgeous for an empress,” the daughter’s desire to express “a passive beauty”—each of them would create an image of him or herself that expresses a series of ideas. In this way, the family wishes to have their portraits be for them what the painted portraits

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Figure 8  Arthur B. Frost, The Older Son, Illustration from Lewis Carroll, Rhyme? And Reason? London: Macmillan, 1887

of the 18th century were for the landed gentry: icons of affluence and social status. However, in seeking to have such flattering pictures made of themselves, the family has commissioned the wrong artist, for it is the portrait painter who can enhance and improve his subjects with ideas. Hiawatha, or, more accurately, his camera, is wholly fastidious. And this is, of course, a fact that the family is made aware of only after seeing the final group photograph: Then they joined and all abused it, Unrestrainedly abused it, As the worst and ugliest picture They could possibly have dreamed of. “Giving one such strange expressions—

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sullen, stupid, pert expressions. Really any one would take us (Any one that did not know us) For the most unpleasant people!” (Hiawatha seemed to think so, Seemed to think it not unlikely). All together rang their voices, Angry, loud, discordant voices, as of dogs that howl in concert, As of cats that wail in chorus. The one idea that Hiawatha’s camera can express is the true nature of the family, as recorded in the group photograph—the only successful image of the bunch. The nature of the success entails, however, capturing the family at a moment that makes them known. As the passage makes clear, capturing the family involves Hiawatha’s camera “taking” them as a stranger would “take” them (“any one who did not know us”). From this neutral (estranged) position, the camera objectifies the family members, successfully revealing their true natures. In other words, the success of Hiawatha’s photographing involves creating a picture in which a totality is formed between knowing and taking, or between depth and surface. The idea of “knowing” someone involves familiarity. Intimacy, love, friendship or even hatred—all of these are ways in which one is known, and so they are ways in which one is conceptually seen. Seeing someone that we know, we do not see that person so much as we see the conception we have developed around him or her. This conception is in turn tempered by whatever relationship we currently have with the person. “Taking,” on the other hand, appeals to our conceptions of foreignness. It may be said to involve appraisal and the acquisition of knowledge. Encountering something or someone that is foreign, we “take” this thing or person at first as a type: an agent that must be categorized. In short, we speculate and, from this speculation, we take into account what we see empirically and pass judgment based on this empirical information. Thus, we do not see like a lover, friend, brother or acquaintance; we see like a camera. Placing these two verb phrases (“take us” and “know us”) at an end-rhyming couplet, Carroll deftly collapses the distinction between them and calls our attention to the mysterious nature of “a successful” photograph. Such a photograph involves the camera taking its subjects in a way that reveals them, opening them to objective scrutiny: that is, making them known.

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At least in terms of the family’s character, this photographic knowing is ultimately a moral revelation of the sin of pride. In Carroll’s depiction of it, photography is the medium that reveals pride, and this power is what distinguishes photography from other visual media. In his essay “Hic et Ille” from The Dyer’s Hand, W.H. Auden makes an insightful observation concerning the depictions of pride in medieval literature and art. Auden writes: If a painter tries to portray the Seven Deadly Sins, his experience will furnish him readily enough with images symbolic of Gluttony, Lust, Sloth, Anger, Avarice, and Envy, for all these are qualities of a person’s relations to others and the world, but no experience can provide an image of Pride, for the relation it qualifies is the subjective relation of a person to himself. In the seventh frame, therefore, the painter can only place, in lieu of a canvas, a mirror. (Auden 1963, 95) We may link Auden’s observation to the distinction between metaphor and synecdoche, and how these rhetorical figures relate to photography. The portraits of the first six Deadly Sins are metaphorical in nature. Substitutes for actual persons, the personifications of the first six Deadly Sins are caricatures of souls beset by the sins. It is for this reason that depictions of Gluttony, Lust, Sloth, Anger, Avarice, and Envy always appear buffoonish or clownish—as, for example, in Langland’s Piers Plowman, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and Hieronymus Bosh’s painting The Seven Deadly Sins. In those works, we might also make the claim that pride is also successfully depicted as a caricature, but this, of course, is what Auden objects to: caricature and metaphor cannot successfully portray the sin of pride, because pride’s manifestations involve the sinner’s complete self. Thus, while one can characterize the glutton as fat, the laggard as lying down, one cannot characterize the proud person as having any one particular characteristic. The sin of pride is revealed by how the sinner interacts with the world in total, and so pride can be seen in the sinner’s entire relationship to his or her environment. This makes the proud person’s every action a synecdoche of his or her pride. Seen in this way, we might conclude that photography is the medium in which and through which pride is revealed. For a photograph does not embellish or alienate its subjects from their environments. Instead, it records its subjects integrated into their environments, and so it

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becomes the ultimate synecdoche of the subjects’ relationship to these environments. In Roman Jakobson’s terms, then, a photograph shows how its subject is “condemned” to his or her environment. “Show us your environment,” writes Jakobson of Boris Pasternak’s prose, and I will tell you who you are. We learn what he lives on, this lyric hero outlined by metonymies, split up by synecdoches into individual attributes, reactions, and situations; we learn to what he is related, by what he is conditioned, and to what he is condemned. (Jakobson 1987, 313) The prose of Pasternak by no means has a monopoly on such synecdoches and their landscapes. One has only to think of the importance that the Parisian night plays in the photography of Brassaï, that the 19th-century industrial workplace plays in the work of Lewis Hine or that the New York City slums play in the work of Jacob Riis to comprehend how photography isolates its subjects within their environments. The environmental lessons of Pasternak’s prose are, then, the everyday lessons of the commonest snapshot. Recording the instant in which its subject posed, the photograph equally records the environment in which the pose took place and reveals the relationship its subject has to this environment. The mechanism accounts for how pride is revealed in a photograph. Captured in the midst of life, the subjects of photographic portraits are captured in the midst of their pride, at least in Carroll’s poem. In the poem, synecdoche’s triumph over metaphor becomes apparent in the family’s group picture, which reveals their general “unpleasantness.” The mirror that Auden speaks of is within the camera of rosewood. Taking the family members and presenting them for all to know, Hiawatha’s last “successful” photograph achieves what Auden claims the painter cannot. Hiawatha’s achievement does not consist of an image of ideas, per se. It is not an image of flattery. It has nothing in common with the trappings of ostentation. Thus, it has nothing in common with the flattery of the painter, and so it may be said to have nothing in common with the exaggerations that are used to depict the first six Deadly Sins. However, Hiawatha’s photograph does show the family for what they are: proud and conceited together and at home. It does this because it captures them when they are acting naturally and in their natural environment, and thus, to use Auden’s phrasing,

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the photograph “qualifies” the “subjective relation” of the family to themselves. Hiawatha’s success contrasts with the success of Hawthorne’s Holgrave. Hiawatha’s last photograph is not visible evidence of a great spiritual dearth, such as Holgrave finds in Judge Pyncheon. Hiawatha’s photograph is evidence of nothing more than the petty larceny of pretension. And this difference is what distinguishes Carroll’s positivistic spiritualism from Pope Leo’s and Melville’s: while the speakers of Leo’s and Melville’s poems look into the secret nature of the photographic subject, Carroll’s Hiawatha sees only shallowly. What the poem’s speaker, acting as cicerone, “shows” the reader, then, does not rise from the fathomless depth of the soul. Rather, it entails a shallow truth. Revealed in the face of a photographic subject, the spirit may finally be nothing more than a moment of forgetfulness recorded on film. In this moment, the subject’s effort to become a composite of ideas by way of his or her pose succumbs to an instant of unselfconsciousness. Photographed at this particular instant, the subject is taken in a moment at which he or she may be known. Imprints on a Mind of Silver: Walt Whitman’s “My Picture-Gallery” My Picture-Gallery In a little house keep I pictures suspended, it is not a fix’d house, It is round, it is only a few inches from one side to the other; Yet behold, it has room for all the shows of the world, all memories! Here the tableaus of life, and here the groupings of death; Here, do you know this? this is cicerone himself, With finger rais’d he points to the prodigal pictures. (Whitman 1983, 322) A relatively late piece, first published in the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass, “My Picture-Gallery” was written after photography had become well established as the cheapest and most effective means for making portraits. By 1881, Whitman himself had sat for a number of portraits and was famed for having copies of these photographs on-hand for autographing, at a price (Figure 9). Furthermore, the poem was written after it had already become fashionable to write small verses as captions

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Figure 9  Unknown photographer, “Walt Whitman,” June 1887

for photographs. As Geoffrey Batchen observes, the captioning trend began with inscriptions and signatures but soon came to include poems as well. Such amateur verses took the form of dedications, epigrams or even supplications written by the photographs’ subjects below their portraits (Batchen 2004, 41–8). “My Picture-Gallery” was not attached to any one photograph, however, and, in the poem, Whitman’s speaker is not concerned with a particular photograph, or even a number of them. Instead, the poem is the first to recognize the inherent metaphor that photography affords a writer who wishes to describe memory. “My Picture-Gallery” is Whitman’s pseudonym for his memory: a capacious house that much recalls Hamlet’s “nut shell” of the mind, in that the “tableaus of life” and “groupings of death” of Whitman’s gallery are all housed within the

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infinite space of the poet’s head. As such, Whitman’s poem might very well be the first literary description of photographic memory.4 This is not to suggest that Whitman’s speaker claims to have an eidetic memory with total recall. Rather, by figuring memory as a gallery of photographs, Whitman appropriates the popular 19th-century medical metaphor that describes memory as a photographic plate. As Douwe Draaisma relates, in the mid-19th century, Just as doctors introduced the camera obscura in their anatomical papers as an analogy for the eye, photography (in essence a procedure for preserving the images in a camera obscura), developed into a metaphor for memory. In the first articles on photographs, the photographic plate was described as a “mirror with a memory.” This metaphor was quickly to take a new turn, the brain was represented as the neuronal equivalent of a light sensitive plate, an organic medium that preserves a latent trace of light stimuli and reproduces them. (Draaisma 2001, 69) Whether Whitman was aware of the development of this medical metaphor or not, his poem introduces it into literary description, exchanging age-old metaphors for memory such as the wax seal or the book or the storehouse of memory for the photographic plate—or, in the case of the poem, photographic plates, for Whitman’s gallery contains many of them. As Draaisma goes on to observe, in itself, this gallery metaphor also originates in early psychology, which described consciousness as a “gallery, its walls covered with long rows of daguerreotypes and talbotypes, ambrotypes and kalotypes” (ibid., 104). However, the debt that Whitman may be said to owe these early psychological metaphors is secondary to the way in which he modernizes the literary conceptions of memory. This modernization entails not only alluding to photography but also describing the architectural structures used to store photographs and the persons who staff these structures. Coupled 4  I am aware that this point is contestable. For example, in Either/Or (1843), Søren Kierkegaard uses the daguerreotype as a metaphor for the speed of perception and memory. “She cast a shy glance at it without guessing that your eye had already taken up residence there; she blushed when your eye met hers. Things like that you preserve as accurately as a daguerreotype and register just as quickly, just half a minute even in the worst weather, as you know.” Kierkegaard 2004, 385.

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with the photographic aspects of Whitman’s gallery, these elements anticipate many of the 20th-century conceptions of photography that will be addressed in its ekphrasis. To illustrate the significance of Whitman’s gallery, I want to contrast it with one of the earliest literary and philosophical conceptions of memory: St. Augustine’s “palace of memory,” as Augustine describes it in The Confessions: I come to the fields and vast palaces of memory, where are the treasures of innumerable images of all kinds of objects brought in by sense-perception. Hidden there is whatever we think about, a process which may increase or diminish or in some way alter the deliverance of the senses and whatever else has been deposited and placed on reserve and has not been swallowed up and buried in oblivion. When I am in this storehouse, I ask that it produce what I want to recall, and immediately certain things come out; some things require a longer search, and have to be drawn out as it were from more recondite receptacles. Some memories pour out to crowd the mind and, when one is searching and asking for something quite different, leap forward into the centre as if saying “Surely we are what you want?” With my hand on my heart I chase them away from the face of my memory until what I want is freed of mist and emerges from its hiding place. Other memories come before me on demand with ease and without any confusion in their order. Memories of earlier events give way to those which followed, and as they pass are stored away available for retrieval when I want them. All that is what happens when I recount a narrative memory. (Augustine 1998, X. viii (12)) Both Whitman’s and Augustine’s conceptions of memory transform the inscape of the mind into an architectural structure. In the middle of this structure, both writers place a commanding figure. Whitman calls this figure a “cicerone.” (It is a term that I have already used in this discussion and that I will elaborate on in the following pages.) Augustine merely speaks in the first person: for him the self is the archivists and keeper of memory. But, regardless of the manner in which Whitman and Augustine describe their figures, both figures have the power to gesture and thus to indicate which memories they will have. The similarity between these two figures is, however, secondary to their differences and the difference between the structures that they occupy. While Augustine

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conceives of memory as a “storehouse,” in which he has mastered the power to select and discard various memories at will, Whitman conceives of memory as a museum in which every memory is “suspended” as a picture. In this gallery, Whitman’s cicerone does not select and reject memories so much as he relates the particulars of each memory he raises his hand to indicate. This difference between Augustine’s and Whitman’s conceptions of how memory works is also reflected in the difference between the types of architectural structures these writers evoke. For Augustine, the mind is comprised of a great complex of palaces, under which memory is maintained in a cellar. Thus, for him, the mind is an autocratic structure. For Whitman, memory is “a little house” inside which the world decorates the walls, and so it is inherently democratic both in capacity and political stature. Of course, each writer is influenced by the political realities of his day. For Augustine, his reality was an emporium. For Whitman, it was a democracy. But, aside from the political circumstances, the distinction between these two architectural models also reveals the influence of photography on an era such as Whitman’s. Augustine could not have conceived of “a little house” in which the world might be archived. In late antiquity, a library might have contained tens of thousands of volumes, but to conceive of such a structure containing “all memory” and the “world” at once was unthinkable. It is for this reason that Augustine’s memory is located in the cellar: a space that matches the extent of the superstructures above it, so as to parallel the space of the life that fills the upper floors and to complement that life with proportionate storage. In an age such as Augustine’s, one did not go into such a space as one would a gallery; one sent porters to fetch and carry. Photography radically changes this reality. Owing to the size and two-dimensionality of its images, photography allows the world to be compressed and archived in a small space. Equally, the metonymy of photography can include all details, not merely those that are deemed necessary. “The Daguerreotyped plate,” writes Edgar Allen Poe, “is infinitely (we use the term advisedly) is infinitely more accurate in its representation than any painting by human hands” (Poe 1980, 37). Poe’s enthusiasm anticipates the beginning of a new cultural obsession: the obsession for accuracy and accuracy’s counterpart—detail. Within the field it surveys, the camera leaves nothing out, and so, like the democratic spirit, it gives voice to all. Ultimately, the camera is the device of the common man. Even in Whitman’s day, this was the case. By the late

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19th century, virtually anyone with the desire to take photographs could pursue that interest. Certainly, the democratic aspect informs Whitman’s conception of his gallery. Calling for us to “behold” “the world,” Whitman’s speaker indicates the high and the low, the central and the peripheral, the vista and the cranny. And he suggests that his little house is on a par with any number of other houses that fill up the heads of other men. Thus, Whitman’s gallery finds itself in a neighborhood of galleries: one address among many. Whitman’s metaphor of the gallery calls attention to the democratic ideal of the museum space. While the first galleries of the 18th century were those of private collectors, who regarded themselves and their peers as elites versed in the qualities of art, by the late 19th century, the modern museum had already been established both in Europe and the United States. Such public forums allowed anyone access to art. Thus, the museum gave the poet a new metaphor as well. As Barbara K. Fischer has observed in her own examination of ekphrasis, Poets, like artists, approach the museum as an arena of perception, but because the museum is not their primary institution of canonization … they stand at a further remove. They enter the provinces of the visual arts as observers, admirers, and interlopers, and they often tell about their encounters through an established mode in their own medium—ekphrasis. (Fischer 2006, 2) Fischer’s observations about contemporary American poets might find their basis in a poem such as Whitman’s, for Whitman’s cicerone is an “observer, admirer, and interloper.” Whitman’s poem signals, at least, a change in attitude toward images and a growing awareness of the poet’s place in a society moving toward the mass reliance on images. But it is also a critique of the museums of his time, and indeed a critique of the museums of our own. Whitman visited Mathew Brady’s gallery in lower Manhattan in the 1850s. There, he saw Brady’s portraits of the most illustrious men of the day. While Brady’s gallery was created to allow the American public to see these portraits, Brady’s selections effectively made his gallery a house of the elite. As Fischer has also observed, such elitism is intrinsic to the workings of the museum space. The museum, writes Fischer, “removes a work of art from its historical or creative context, holding it up for aesthetic contemplation on a pedestal or in a white cube, even as it

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surrounds that work with governing narratives of its cultural environment and significance, and creates a context of its own … ” (ibid., 4). We might consider Whitman’s poem as a response to the work of the museum: an objection to the decontextualizing effect of the museum space. In short, the gallery that Whitman describes is a hall of contexts. All things flood together there in a universal current of “the world” and “all memory.” The poem’s title indicates a distinction between the exclusive spaces of the gallery and the all-inclusive spaces of his poetic memory. By using the possessive pronoun “My” in the title, Whitman implies a distinction between the elitist aesthetics of a Brady and his selective art—photography—and the democratic vistas of Whitman’s project and his art—poetry. “My Picture-Gallery” is, then, a self-reflective poem, for the finger that Whitman’s cicerone raises up is raised to indicate the entirety of the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass. The matter brings us to Whitman’s choice of the word “cicerone.” Inspired by Whitman’s use of the term, throughout this chapter, I have identified the poetic speakers of Pope Leo’s and Melville’s poems as cicerones, and I have also associated Carroll’s Hiawatha with one. As Whitman’s speaker describes the role, the cicerone reports on the reality recorded in each picture. However, Whitman does not describe exactly what his cicerone would include in his report. We do not know if he would delve into the “deep” spiritual nature of these “tableaus of life” and “groupings of death.” What distinguishes Whitman’s cicerone from Pope Leo’s, Melville’s and Carroll’s, then, is that, while those others are priests of positivistic spiritualism, Whitman’s is a sort of photo-journalist or a historian. His gallery is more of a newspaper than an art space. There, one hears his reports about the contexts of the things and the events recorded in the many suspended pictures. This shift of roles places on the shoulders of Whitman’s cicerone the work of the redeemer, for, as an expert guide, photojournalist or historian reporting on reality, Whitman’s cicerone is also the curator-savior of the “tableaus of life” and the “groupings of death.” We are perhaps not accustomed to recognizing photography as a redemptive medium, for redemption traditionally is a matter of spiritual salvation rather than material record; however, the redemptive agency of photography is something that John Berger recognizes and identifies as a product of 19th-century positivism, a philosophy that was still much in vogue when Whitman wrote his poem. “Memory implies a certain act of redemption,” notes Berger:

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What is remembered has been saved from nothingness. What is forgotten has been abandoned. If all events are seen, instantaneously, outside of time, by a supernatural eye, the distinction between remembering and forgetting is transformed into the act of judgment, into the rendering of justice, whereby recognition is close to being remembered, and condemnation is close to being forgotten. At first, the secularization of the capitalist world during the 19th Century elided the judgment of God into the judgment of History in the name of Progress. Democracy and Science became the agents of such a judgment. And for a brief moment, photography … was considered to be an aid to these agents. It is still to this historical moment that photography owes its ethical reputation as Truth. (Berger 1980, 58) Berger’s notion of redemption implies that photography has usurped the place of the afterlife; heaven, which formerly was diachronically distanced from us in death, has become synchronically contiguous to us in photography. Applied to Whitman’s poem, Berger’s observation grants further insight into the redemptive work of Whitman’s cicerone: that which his cicerone chooses to include in the gallery is saved. That which he excludes is damned. True to Whitman’s overall poetic project, he chooses to save everything and damn nothing. Such all-inclusion is finally un-photographic, for the camera is the instrument of selection. No camera can capture all events all the time, and for that matter, no poem can either. This is what D.H. Lawrence would tell Whitman in the imaginary letter he writes him in the last chapter of Studies in Classic American Literature: “Walter, leave off. You are not HE. You are just a limited Walter. And your ache doesn’t include all Amorous Love, by any means” (Lawrence 1999, 172). However, even while Whitman’s poem cannot finally be any more all-inclusive than it can be photographic, by employing its gallerymetaphor Whitman introduces two new features into poetic discourse. The first is photography as memory, and the second is the poet as the reporter of photographic facts. Thus, “My Picture-Gallery” is something of an achievement. But, while it may be celebrated for these achievements, “My Picture-Gallery” implies as well a cultural loss. In the Pensées, Pascal describes “the infinite abyss” that lies within a man, which, according to him, “can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God himself” (Pascal 1995, Sect. VII 425). What is so compelling about Pascal’s conception of the inner abyss is how this abyss becomes the

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site where the infinite emptiness of a finite being (a man) is filled with the infinite presence of an infinite being (God). Such a union figures each of us as nothing less than a temple inside which we might commune with our Maker. Whitman’s gallery, however, figures a human being as something quite different. Even while his gallery includes “all memory,” and thus all that might have been and all that might be photographed, Whitman’s “house” never contains the infinite. Instead, it is filled with millions of finite and mutable images, each made by means of mechanical reproduction, as though the god of his mind were a Leviathan of photographs. Such a god is both fragmented as well as temporal. Severed from himself by the cropping of the photographic frame, he is made up of the records of the past. That Whitman’s poem introduces such a photographic god into literature confirms his era as one of the first great epochs of what Nietzsche calls the limited Man. The finite and fragmentary sacredness that fills up this Man is what we can expect to find in the ekphrasis of photographs: a sacred pastness in which “the tableaus of life” and “groupings of death” become the forensic evidence of a divine corpse. Poems such as Pope Leo’s, Melville’s, Carroll’s and Whitman’s call attention to a relationship that would seem to exist between photography and poetry, and which cannot be wholly qualified or explained. In each of these works, there is a suggestion that photographs are attractive to these poets not solely because of the truths the photographs relate about their subjects. They are attractive because the truths expressed by the photographs seem to correspond to those truths that have long been ascribed to poems. In short, these poems imply that poets have been writing ekphrases of photographs thousands of years before the first photograph was even taken, for, from Leo’s poem to Whitman’s, the suggestion is that poets are “writers in the medium of light.” This suggestion does not begin or end with these four poems. Rather, by evoking the notion of the cicerone, Whitman calls attention to Cicero’s description of the poet Simonides of Ceo and how he was something of a living camera. Known as one of ancient Greece’s canonical lyric poets, Simonides was famous for his eidetic memory (what we today call “photographic memory”). Simonides saw in pictures, and it was by means of this sight that he became the father of the so-called “art of memory” (Yates 1966, 17). As such, this early poet represents a foundational link between poetry and image-based memory. Such a link is

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further substantiated in the words of Plato’s Socrates, when, in the Ion, Socrates declares: “Now this is perfectly true: a poet is a … winged, holy creature, and cannot compose until he is possessed and out of his mind, and his reason is no longer in him” (Plato 1972, l. 534). As Socrates well knew, the god who was believed to take possession of the poet’s mind is none other than the sun-god, Apollo, the father of poetry. Thus, in this one statement, Socrates links the Light (phos) to the Word (logos). It is a linkage that will figure prominently in the Gospel of John, where the Light is the Word and the Word is the Light. It also figures in Dante’s Divine Comedy, in which the poet receives his words from the light of the stars. With such foundational concepts in place, one is further tempted to declare that the poet is a living camera, for he or she seemingly is possessed by unhand-made or unhand-written words in a manner that parallels the way a camera is filled with unhand-made images. Were we in doubt that such an attitude persists into modern times and is linked with photography, we have but to turn back to these four poems from the 19th century or go on to examine those that follow them in the 20th and 21st.

— 3 —

The Snapshot Elegy The Snapshot Elegy

This photograph was, of course, in common use in their ritual observances, was subjected to daily profanation, for the friend replied in words which were evidently a liturgical response: “Let him stay there. He can’t trouble us any longer. D’you think he’d start whining, d’you think he’d pack you out of the house if he could see you now, with the window open, the ugly old monkey?” (Proust 1922, 167) The ekphrases of the 19th century generally disregard the pastness of photography, and so the poets of photography’s first century make little suggestion of the death implied by the average photograph. We might attribute the neglect to the fact that, when Pope Leo, Melville, Carroll and Whitman wrote their poems, there were few old photographs, and the generations that first came to experience photography had not yet perished into its images. Simply put, the mortal quality that earmarks all old photographs had not yet come to fruition. However, as this passage from Proust suggests, the un-elegiac attitudes of the 19th century became less pervasive in the 20th century. Written some 60 years after the invention of the photographic camera, Proust’s passage summarizes the dynamism that photographs have come to confer upon the act of remembrance, as well as the power humans have to control this remembrance. “Let him stay there,” declares the friend of M. Vinteuil. “He can’t trouble us any longer.” His words, referring to the photograph of Vinteuil’s dead father, are endowed with the power we hold over the snapshot: we can arrange them, hide them, expose them and finally humiliate them by displaying them in places that render them profane.

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But, even as we possess this power, as M. Vinteuil’s friend also relates, the snapshot has the power to threaten us with the past by returning the past to the present in ways that deny us the safety of the present. “‘D’you think he’d start whining, d’you think he’d pack you out of the house if he could see you now, with the window open, the ugly old monkey?’” Such remarks call to mind Walter Benjamin’s comments about the fishwife; like Benjamin, M. Vinteuil’s friend has recognized that there is too much life within a photograph to comfortably escape its subject’s gaze. Proust’s passage returns us, then, to the thickening of time that occurs in the chronotope of the photograph, in that the friend senses how, even while the father is dead, the presence of his photograph in the room brings him into the room: there to be criticized, but also to be suspected of life. I would stress that the attitude is not unique to the scene from Proust’s novel, but figures as one of the more common manifestations of the chronotope of the photograph: a subclass that I term “the Snapshot Elegy.” Unlike other elegies, the nature of the snapshot elegy involves an inherent conflict: examining and describing a photograph of a dead person, a poetic speaker finds him or herself confronted with the death that the image expresses. For “death,” as Roland Barthes observes, “is the eidos of that Photograph” (Barthes 1980, 15). Studying any photographic image, we become aware of the chasm of time that has elapsed between its taking and our present. And while there are types of photography that seek to hide this chasm—pornography, fashion and art photography—the attempt at concealment is rarely so successful that a viewer does not notice a particular antiqueness of style, technique or quality. However, as Proust’s passage relates, the image that figures most prominently in the snapshot elegy is the personal photograph, for it bears the image of the dead whom we knew. There is something Roman about the place that snapshots hold in our lives: something that corresponds to the ancestral worship of the ancient Romans, whose homes had Lararia: rooms in which the busts and statuses of ancestors were held. These lares, or guardian deities, were not merely decorative in function; they were worshiped with the hope that they would provide their descendants with spiritual assistance and protection. The Proust passage expresses the negative sense of this ancestral worship: “This photograph was, of course, in common use in [the family’s] ritual observances, was subjected to daily profanation, for the friend replied in words which were evidently a liturgical response: ‘Let him stay there. He

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can’t trouble us any longer.’” Proust’s rhetoric intuits the religious significance of the photograph for the family. Featured in “ritual observances” and subjected to “daily profanation[s],” even while chastised, the father’s image is spoken of with the air of a “liturgical response.” But, rather than worship the father’s photograph, the narrator, M. Vinteuil and the friend desecrate the father’s ius imaginum, or funerary image.1 The Snapshot Elegy engages in a similar kind of narrative, and, while the narrative does not relate a story of desecration, it does relate one of action. Action is what the Snapshot Elegy has in common with other elegies, for, as Peter M. Sacks has recognized, central to the successful elegy is a narrative of survival. Basing his observations on Freud’s notions of mourning and melancholia, Sacks relates how the elegist seeks an object that may be used in the poem to replace the dead person, and thus allow the elegist to survive the loss of this person. In effect, the substitute becomes a surrogate or prosthesis, and, once it is found, it initiates an implicit or explicit narrative in which the elegist relates how the dead person has been moved out of life into an afterlife. “The emphasis on the drama, or ‘doing,’ of the elegy,” writes Sacks, is thus part of the crucial self-privileging of the survivors, as well as a way of keeping them in motion, ensuring a sense of progress and egress, of traversing some distance. For a stationary poet that distance may be figurative and purely psychological, but it is crucial to any successful mourning …. Indeed, few elegies or acts of mourning succeed without seeming to place the dead, and death itself, at some clear distance from the living. Hence, in part, the sense of distance marked by the progress in elegies or by such related items as the catalogued offering of flowers. (Sacks 1985, 19) As Sacks observes, in the traditional elegy, the substituted object often takes the form of regenerative floral imagery. For such mourners as Ovid’s Apollo and Venus, flowers come to be substitutes for the dead themselves. However, in the elegy that describes a photograph, floral imagery is replaced by the ekphrasis of the snapshot. The poetic speaker no longer

1  For a discussion of the ius imaginum and the ancestral worship of the Romans see: Anthony Bonanno, “Sculpture,” in Martin 1983, 82–3.

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relates how the dead have become—as in the case of Daphne—a tree, or—as in the case of Adonis—a flower. Instead, he or she describes the photographs of the dead. The image is made vivid by means of enargeia. As Ingunn Lunde explains, enargeia is not merely intense verbal description; it is the poet’s attempt to call up the visual by means of language.2 In other words, enargeia is the impossible dream of ekphrasis: an attempt on the part of language to relate the natural sign (Lunde 2004, 49). However, as Proust’s passage suggests, this attempt comes with the consequence of not merely calling up the natural sign of the image but of calling up the life that the image records. The supplantation of flowers by photographs is therefore more complex than a mere exchange. It is what makes the snapshot elegy unique from the traditional elegy, in that, by replacing the flower with the photograph, the poet supplants a metaphorical substitute for the dead person with a metonymic one. The supplantation affects the success of the elegiac mourning. The dead are no longer distanced from the elegist by an object that suggests difference. The dead are now separated from the elegist by an object that suggests their proximity. This type of elegiac substitution is thereby problematic, for the dead may no longer be said to be away from the elegist in the sense of an afterlife. Instead, they are in fact ever with the elegist. Thus, while the ekphrasis of a snapshot may be said to allow an elegist to renovate the genre of the elegy so as to rejuvenate many of its exhausted conventions, this version of ekphrasis also complicates the elegy. It has the effect of turning photographs of the dead into the dead and symbolically resurrecting them. More often than not, then, these poems come to counter their own elegiac project, prolonging mourning instead of ending it.

2  Lunde writes: “‘Enargeia,’ in Latin ‘evidentia,’ may be defined initially as ‘the power of language to create a vivid presence’ of that which is set forth in words. Enargeia amounts to visual clarity, immediacy and strong emotional appeal, whilst what is represented verbally acquires, as it were, ‘its own reality’ (becomes self-evident) in the minds of both speaker and audience.”

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Like Bitter Tokens: Ivor Gurney’s “Photographs” Photographs Lying in the dug-outs, joking idly, wearily; Watching the candle guttering in the draught; Hearing the great shells go high over us, eerily Singing; how often have I turned over, and laughed With pity and pride, photographs of all colours, All sizes, subjects: khaki brothers in France; Or mothers’ faces worn with countless dolours; Or girls whose eyes were challenging and must dance, Though in a picture only, a common cheap Ill-taken card; and children—frozen, some (Babies) waiting on Dicky-bird to peep Out of the handkerchief that is his home (But he’s so shy!). And some with bright looks, calling Delight across the miles of land and sea, That not the dread of barrage suddenly falling Could quite blot out—not mud nor lethargy. Smiles and triumphant careless laughter. O The pain of them, wide Earth’s most sacred things! Lying in dug-outs, hearing the great shells slow Sailing mile-high, the heart mounts higher and sings. But once—O why did he keep that bitter token Of a dead Love?—that boy, who, suddenly moved, Showed me, his eyes wet, his low talk broken, A girl who better had not been beloved. (Gurney 2004, 26) The question that plagues the speaker at the end of Ivor Gurney’s 1917 poem “Photographs” may be considered the very question that has inspired this study: “O why did he keep that bitter token / Of a dead Love?” Is it

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because Gurney’s soldier still believes that his love is waiting for him? No, for he has obviously told the speaker how the love is “dead.” Is it because the girl’s image affords him some fond memory? Gurney’s word “bitter” renders this unlikely. Of course, the answer is simple: the soldier still loves the girl. Via her image, love is not lost nor dead, but in the palm of the hand. And why not? In the trenches of the First World War, to hold such an image was often the closest one could come to love, dead or alive. Indeed, Gurney’s poem is one of poverty, not of wealth, and, in this way, it relates a catalogue of absences, not presences: absences that take the form of photographs: “photographs of all colours, / All sizes, subjects.” Gurney’s list of photographs recalls Whitman’s gallery. Yet, filled with “the tableaus of life,” the poem suggests a gallery located not in the small house of the mind, but in the trenches. There, the entirety of Edwardian life is enshrined on “common cheap” and “ill-taken card[s].” Such images, of course, are as diverse as their possessors’ individual memories, but, while this is the case, the poetic speaker makes clear that all of these images have a collective effect: “O / The pain of them, wide Earth’s most sacred things!” While these phrases do not constitute an independent clause, their juxtaposition suggests the image of a balancing scale. On one side of the scale, there is pain; on the other, “most sacred things.” In the balance, Gurney reveals his metrical skill: placed side by side, the two phrases bear an equal number of beats, for even while the exclamatory “O” ends the preceding line, the sudden enjambment that follows it lends its beat with the syntactical rhythm of the following line. There are, then, almost six beats in the line: six beats divided into two: “O / The pain of them” (first unit of three beats) and “wide Earth’s most sacred things” (second unit). The division of three and three places the “pain” and the “sacred” into a near equal metrical balance, and the equality suggests another sort of balance, as if pain and the sacred were almost equal in the poem. Gurney’s metrical gesture reflects the agonizing prolepsis of the personal photograph: what Stephen Cheeke terms “the as-yet-unharmed” quality of photography. In his own study of the ekphrasis of photographs, Cheeke examines Philip Larkin’s “MCMXIV,” observing how the photograph discussed in Larkin’s poem supplies its speaker with an object of innocence: the naïveté of young men enlisting for the British Army in 1914, a decision that will cost most of them their lives. “It is hard,” writes Cheeke, to say … what kind of “innocence” Larkin is invoking. If this is a

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The expansion and growth of nostalgia that Cheeke observes in Larkin’s poem is not unique to the ekphrasis of photographs. In Hollywood terminology, it corresponds with “the flashback”: that moment when the bureau in the old family home is opened and the family album or hidden set of snapshots is revealed, and with them, the stories of those portrayed in the photographs. In such scenes, old photographs often become portals for nostalgic expansion. Through these portals the viewer gains access to past times of innocence, which are in the present of the narrative distant and now defunct Arcadias of the “as-yet-unharmed.” Indeed, in addition to providing Larkin with just such a flashback to an “as-yet-unharmed” moment in time, the photograph he describes also provides his speaker with a milestone: a place in the past that marks the beginning of an end—an end that proleptically anticipates the losses to come. In her discussion of English elegies written between the First and Second World Wars, Patricia Rae recognizes that there is a tendency in the poems of this era to address what she terms a double sorrow: a proleptic sorrow that mourns loss as well as forecasts future losses (Rae 2006, 213). Indeed, proleptic sorrow is what Cheeke recognizes in Larkin’s poem. However, the presence of the photograph complicates the issue still further. Whereas Rae describes poems written between the wars that mourn losses and anticipate still more losses, Larkin’s poem and Cheeke’s notion of the as-yet-unharmed recognize that all photographs harbor such a sorrow by virtue of their existence. Indeed, a photograph is inherently proleptic, whether it involves war dead or not.

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It is an instant from the past made to record something for a future that continues to die into the past. Looking at the men lining up to enlist, Larkin knows that they are dead, that they will die and that they are still as yet unharmed.3 In his catalogue of photographs, Gurney recognizes such a prolepsis. In fact, it may very well be the case that Gurney’s poem inspired Larkin’s, and thus what Larkin describes is nothing less than an allusion back to “Photographs.” In any case, Gurney’s speaker is aware of the losses that have come, that will come but that have not yet come to the people in the photographs. He understands that harm has been done to himself and to his “khaki brothers,” and he understands that a great part of this harm involves the destruction of the innocence captured in the photographs. We may be able to draw a connection between the speaker’s awareness of these losses and phrasal juxtapositions that comprise the syntax of through the first, second and third stanzas of the poem. There is something chaotic about the poem’s first sentence. Grammatically speaking, the first two and a half stanzas are comprised of one long sentence. The grammatical constitution of the sentence is irregular and fragmentary. Between lines one and five, it maintains its syntactical clarity, but does so only through heavily punctuated phrases. The sentence begins: “Lying in the dug-outs, joking idly, wearily; /Watching the candle guttering in the draught; / Hearing the great shells go high over us, eerily/ Singing; how often have I turned over, and laughed / With pity and pride ….” While the semicolons and commas of this part of the sentence stifle the speed of the lines, the sentence is grammatically sound. A series of prepositional phrases and participles anticipate the subject, which is “I,” and the main verbs, which are “turned” and “laughed.” However, after the prepositional phrase “with pity and pride” that grammatical unity breaks down into a protracted catalogue, which reads as follows: “photographs of all colours, / All sizes, subjects: khaki brothers in France; / Or mothers’ faces worn with countless dolours;/ Or girls whose eyes were challenging and must dance, / Though in a picture only, a common cheap / Ill-taken card; and children—frozen, some / (Babies) waiting on Dicky-bird to peep / Out of the handkerchief that is his home / (But he’s so shy!).” One could argue that here is a list

3  This phrasing is taken from Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, in which he says of the convict Lewis Payne: “he is dead and he will die” (Barthes 1980, 95).

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of double sorrows. Each of these photographs records a better world than the one the speaker and the soldier he describes find themselves in. Thus, all of these photographic subjects look into a future in which they become reminders of loss and forecasters of still more loss. However, what is even more striking about the list is not merely what it contains, but how it presents these photographs as though in a heap. There is something hopelessly disjointed and discontinuous about the images. Like pieces of shrapnel from an exploded world, the photographs pile up as fragments. No categories organize them, and no grammar unifies them into a clear parallel structure. The grammatical breakdown begins with the absence of the preposition “at” in the poem’s fifth line. We would expect the sentence to run “and laughed / with pride and pity at photographs of all colours.” But the word “at” is absent. There is no metrical justification for this. Gurney is regular neither in his beat counts nor his syllables. The exclusion, then, is thematically deliberate. Dropping the preposition, Gurney does not subordinate the list of photographs into a series of prepositional phrases. Instead, the phrases that describe these photographs become paratactical juxtapositions that seem to be balanced against “pity and pride.” Pity and pride seem to be weighed in the balance with “photographs of all colours.” In itself, the phrase is intriguing, for the word “colour” seems so out of place in it. In its more basic sense, of course, the word refers to the various sorts of photographs the soldiers had in the trenches. The list of the photographs is a list of “sorts”—a list of “colours”. However, the word also prompts our awareness of the technological limitations of photography at the time. In 1917, color was not part of the photographic process. This is a fact about photography one hardly needs to mention, and yet Gurney uses this word, and, in so doing, he pairs off the “pride and pity” of the first phrase with the “colour” of the second one. In fact, one could argue that this juxtaposition “colours” the sorts of pride and pity found in the photographs. It figures these emotions as chromatic. Pride and pity are not opposite poles; there is no either–or to them. As the list of photographs shows, they manifest along a diverse scale, mixing life with death as timbres mix in music. One should not forget that Gurney was a composer as well as a poet, and he well understood that such timbres (what are also known as “the colors of music”) form one large part of the emotional tones one finds in a piece of music. To create the tones of pride, pity or any other emotional sentiment in a musical composition, the composer employs color.

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One sees this color in the alliteration of the line. The assonance of the line models a chromatic scale. It moves between the bright diphthong of the “i” in the word “pride” and the dower diphthong of “ou” in “colour.” Also, there is the contrast between the monophthongs of “i” in “pity” and the “o’s” in “photographs.” These contrasting assonant sounds are further augmented by the consonance in the letters “p” in “pride” and “pity.” What makes the consonance even more significant is when one recognizes that there is the presence of a third and a fourth “p” in the word “photographs.” These are not sounded as a “p,” but as “f” sounds, but their presence creates what we might term an eye-rhyme that links these three words together, with the effect of linking the musical with the visional. Indeed, in Gurney’s line (as in the entire poem), we hear and see the colors of pity and pride in photographs. The fact that the list of the photographs is presented in such a grammatical heap figures in this musical coloration. In the Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye goes to some lengths to distinguish between musical and non-musical poets. For Frye, harmony in poetry is not to be found in musical concordance, but in discord. Frye writes: music is not a sequence of harmonies at all, but a sequence of discords ending in a harmony, the only stable and permanent “harmony” in music being the final resolving tonic chord. It is more likely to be the harsh, rugged, dissonant poem (assuming of course some technical competence in the poet) that will show in poetry the tension and the driving accented impetus of music. When we find a careful balancing of vowels and consonants and a dreamy sensuous flow of sound, we are probably dealing with an unmusical poet. (Frye 1971, 256) When we find Gurney’s list of photographs, we are dealing with a musical poet: one who composes music within the catalogue. This music is the sound of the war. Assonants and consonants crash together to create a harmony such as we might find it in the compositions of Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Gurney himself. Thus, the color of this catalogue combines the proleptic sorrow of the visual images with the diverse colors of loss, and it cements this constellation together through the imagery of photographs. However, in exploring Gurney’s employment of the word “colour,” I cannot resist observing how the word is also an allusion to Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 99”:

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Poetry, Photography, Ekphrasis The forward violet thus did I chide, Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells, If not from my love’s breath? The purple pride Which on thy soft cheek for complexion dwells, In my love’s veins thou hast too grossly dyed. The lily I condemned for thy hand, And buds of marjoram had stol’n thy hair, The roses fearfully on thorns did stand, One blushing shame, another white despair: A third nor red, nor white, had stol’n of both, And to his robbery had annexed thy breath, But for his theft in pride of all his growth A vengeful canker eat him up to death. More flowers I noted, yet I none could see, But sweet, or colour it had stol’n from thee. (Shakespeare 2009, 102)

There is a startling parallel between Gurney’s description of photographs and Shakespeare’s description of flowers. Each of Shakespeare’s flowers has “stol’n” an aspect of the beloved, and thus the sonnet is a bouquet of losses, each one taking from the speaker another aspect of his joy. It is a catalogue similar to the one Gurney creates in his list of photographs: each picture with a color corresponding to a scene from a lost world, a scene that inspires pity and pride. This parallel is all the more powerful when we consider it in terms of the theft. Shakespeare uses the word “stol’n” in his final couplet. The beloved has lost color amidst the flowers, or, at least, the flowers have stolen color from the beloved. The same may be said of the photographs, which have stolen their colors from the world they record. However, while these photographs serve the soldiers as markers of a “stol’n” “as-yet-unharmed” world, still his speaker distinguishes them from the photograph of the dead love. The matter returns us to the question that began this discussion: Why keep the photograph? Why keep a dead love in the midst of a world filled with death? It is one of the graces of Gurney’s poem that he does not answer his speaker’s question, and in this way, any attempt to provide an answer is something of a desecration of the poem. However, the urgency of the speaker’s question—the pathos that it exerts into the verse—marks this question with a narrative one senses but cannot easily grasp. Gurney writes:

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But once—O why did he keep that bitter token Of a dead Love?—that boy, who, suddenly moved, Showed me, his eyes wet, his low talk broken, A girl who better had not been beloved. What is the “move” the soldier makes but an apostrophe of sorts? In my discussions of Benjamin’s description of the fishwife and later John Berger’s description of the photograph in his poem “And our faces, my heart, brief as photos,” I observed how photographs seem to inspire these writers to turn away from their readers and toward the photographic subjects. For Benjamin, the turning does not involve an address, such as we would find addresses in traditional apostrophes. In Berger’s poem, it does. In any case, though, the writer turns away from the world and to the photograph. As mentioned before, the original meaning of the word “apostrophe” is “to turn” or “to turn away.” The speaker or orator turns from the present to address those things and people lost in the past. The photographs augment such turnings. They provide their observers with images that replace those persons and things absent. Turning to these images, these writers turn to the light captured inside the photographs, and they attempt to retrieve that light and what it records. In Gurney’s poem, such a turning amounts to the soldier’s move. This move corresponds to the man’s nostalgia—nostalgia, which is also a word of Greek origin, coming from nostos (“homecoming”), and calling to mind the catastrophic nostos of Agamemnon. Gurney’s soldier moves to fetch his photograph. He moves to turn back to it and so to turning back in time. He moves to go home, and yet this move seems somehow fatal—“O why … ” declaims the speaker. It is as if the deed were done at a great cost to the doer—as if death were close: a death caused by a hastily made move. In the trenches, one could not have had much time or space for such moves. Taking cover from the sniper’s cross-hairs or the random shrapnel of a bombardment, a soldier such as this one had little room to move at all. Does his attempt to show the photograph cost him his life? It is another one of the graces of the poem that Gurney never relates the consequence of this move, and yet the tone of the poem—its pathos and urgency—implies the survivor’s anguish. Returning to Sacks’s description of the work of the traditional elegy, we find that the issue of survival is central to the narrative function of the genre. The successful mourner must let go of the dead, or else he or she will be destroyed with them. As Gurney’s poem implies, the

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soldier has not succeeded in this work of survival. Instead, he holds the photograph, and if his move to show it costs him his life, it costs him it because of his refusal to supplant the dead love with something else. Again, it is a matter of metonymy versus metaphor. While Sacks does not directly address the role these figures play in the work of mourning, he observes that successful mourning is dependent upon locating a substitute for the dead; one that is a metaphor, and not a metonym. The distinction is critical, for a metaphor allows for the prospect of distance and difference. The flower under which a person is buried bears no similarity to the dead person. Instead, it is a marker that corresponds to the absence of the dead person, not to that person’s presence. But a photograph does not allow for such distance and difference. Instead, the image indexes the dead, becoming a synecdoche of them. In the dug-out, the soldier engages with such an index, and, for this reason, he keeps the photograph: the image of his dead love is too much a reminder of that love to offer him escape. What Gurney’s poem expresses, then, is the double-nature of the elegy that employs a photograph: By engaging the loss and the pastness that is inherently part of a snapshot, and of photography in general, such a poem might very well sabotage the work of mourning, even as it is used to perform this work. As the end of Gurney’s poem reveals, such an image may be the farthest thing from a substitution. Rather than allowing the speaker some distance, it serves as a sort of haunted mirror into which the soldier and his dead love can both be found. The haunted aspect of such photographs make snapshot elegies akin to what Jahan Ramazani terms “melancholic mourning.” As Ramazani explains, melancholic mourning occurs in modern elegies in which the mourner cannot separate himself from the dead. In such elegies, Ramazani states, “instead of resurrecting the dead in some substitute, instead of curing themselves through displacement, modern elegists practice ‘losing farther, losing faster,’ so that the ‘One Art’ of the modern elegy is not transcendence or redemption of loss but immersion in it … ” (Ramazani 1994, 4). Ramazani’s notion of the melancholic elegy is apt for Gurney’s poem, but this melancholia is not restricted to his poem alone. Instead it figures as one of the defining features of elegies that incorporate the ekphrases of photographs.

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The Enargeia of the Flames: Thomas Hardy’s “The Photograph” Gurney’s poem is not the first elegy to evoke a photograph. Rather, it comes on the heels of a tradition that developed throughout the later part of the 19th century, in which verses were attached to family photographs. Often times, these verses sought to elegize the dead and even to promote the notion that—fixed to the elevated language of rhyme and meter—a photograph could return the dead to life (Figure 10). The literary value of these verses is negligible. Sentimental and clichéd, they fail to encompass the complex ideas one finds in a poem such as Gurney’s. Still, they provide a cultural context for the themes Gurney addresses, in that the verses attached to family photographs share the same sentimentality that Gurney evokes in his descriptions of the photographs in the trenches. Further, the magical quality that these verses ascribe to photographs corresponds with many of Melville’s conceptions of the medium: the idea that the essence of a person can be captured and read from his or her photograph. When Catherine Christ fixed the following verses to her 1859 portrait, her intentions were to speak from beyond the grave, and thus to resurrect herself in words: This is the likeness of Catherine Christ When I am dead and in my grave And when my bones are rotten Remember me When this you see or I shall be forgotten. The grass is green The rose is red here is my name when I am dead (Batchen 2004, 47) Catherine’s words give a voice to her still image and, with this voice, call our attention to the way the temporality of language—when applied to a still image—seemingly inspires that image with life. Like Walter Benjamin before the photograph of Hill’s fishwife, the viewer of Catherine’s photograph encounters an essential demand. What differs between Benjamin’s experience and the experience of those who view Catherine’s photograph is that Catherine has spoken for herself.

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Figure 10  Unknown photographer, “Portrait of Catherine Christ,” c. 1859

Regardless, the fact that words are called in to fill the silence of the photograph and that they express a demand—if not for resurrection, then at least for remembrance—calls our attention to how photographs seemingly resurrect the dead. The resurrection occurs by way of the cooperation between poetry and photography. At least, writers such as Roland Barthes, Benjamin, Gurney and Catherine Christ sense that, if left to their own silence, photographs perpetuate the absence caused by death. However, once they have been “turned to” (in the sense of an apostrophe), and thus embroiled in language, photographs seem to bully themselves and their subjects back to life. This elegiac resurrection is what Gurney’s contemporary Thomas Hardy reacts against in his poem “The Photograph” (1917). The narrative of Hardy’s poem is complex, in that we enter it in media res. Before our entrance, the speaker has cast an old snapshot of a woman (possibly an old lover or beloved relative) into a fire. As he relates, he did this believing that the action meant nothing. In fact, we might conceive of his action as one taken by a so-called modern 20th-century man who disdains sentimentality and superstitious attitudes that suggest photographs have some sort of life. However, upon the opening lines of the poem, already the speaker is confronted by his sudden belief that burning the photograph does indeed have some malignant effects upon the woman. And this belief is compounded by the fact that the speaker begins to feel

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her agony. Hardy’s poem, then, describes a startling revelation: a moment when a modern, empirical agnostic (such as Hardy often describes himself) is confronted by his own primitive superstitions: superstitions that call to mind the voodoo doll of sympathetic magic. In the poem, the conflict between the speaker’s so-called modern and primitive attitudes does not end in a stalemate; the speaker’s modernity does not withstand his surge of primitivism. Rather, modernity is humbled, even toppled, by an unsuspected faith in the life of the photograph. Hardy’s “The Photograph,” then, is a poem of Sturm und Drang: a lyrical confession in which the poet anticipates and concedes to Bruno Latour’s declaration that “we have never been modern” (Latour 1993, 47). The Photograph The flame crept up the portrait line by line As it lay on the coals in the silence of night’s profound, And over the arm’s incline, And along the marge of the silkwork superfine, And gnawed at the delicate bosom’s defenceless round. Then I vented a cry of hurt, and averted my eyes; The spectacle was one that I could not bear, To my deep and sad surprise; But, compelled to heed, I again looked furtivewise Till the flame had eaten her breasts, and mouth, and hair. “Thank God, she is out of it now!” I said at last, In a great relief of heart when the thing was done That had set my soul aghast, And nothing was left of the picture unsheathed from the past But the ashen ghost of the card it had figured on. She was a woman long hid amid packs of years, She might have been living or dead; she was lost to my sight, And the deed that had nigh drawn tears Was done in a casual clearance of life’s arrears; But I felt as if I had put her to death that night! …

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Poetry, Photography, Ekphrasis —Well; she knew nothing thereof did she survive, And suffered nothing if numbered among the dead; Yet—yet—if on earth alive Did she feel a smart, and with vague strange anguish strive? If in heaven, did she smile at me sadly and shake her head? (Hardy 1976, 469)

The poem prompts a question: “What motivates the speaker’s destruction of the photograph?” The speaker claims merely to be engaged in springcleaning; the photograph is one of many of “life’s arrears” that he is in the process of settling by destroying. However, as the poem’s imagery reveals, these arrears amount to more than the average debt. For the speaker, the photograph is a threatening image, one that attacks him as a wild animal or an assassin: “She was a woman long hid amid packs of years.” Springing like a wolf out of “a pack of years” or like an assassin with his knife “unsheathed,” the photograph strikes at the speaker, and is burned in an act of self-defense. Likely, part of the blow that it deals to the speaker comes in the form of a powerful memory. The photograph elicits a sense of nostalgia or regret. But, in addition to this memory and the sense of loss it would seem to entail, the photograph also inflicts on the speaker a deeper wound: one that cuts to the heart of his own sense of self and the faiths on which that self is founded. Unexpectedly, Hardy’s speaker comes to realize his own belief in the life of images. Seeing the fire destroy the photograph, he comes to see how the photograph is alive. This complicates his motivations for burning the image—or at least for watching the image being burned—for it prompts the question: “Why not attempt to save the photograph and thus save the woman, rather than go on gazing at the ‘gnawing’ flames?” Of course, had the speaker saved the photograph, his heroism would have deprived us of one of its greatest descriptions of fire in modern poetry. Hardy’s poem is nothing if not an enargeia of fire itself. Rarely has the avid hunger of flame so thoroughly paralleled the act of writing. It is as if flame crept along behind Hardy’s hand as it moved across the page. But then, even this description is insufficient; fire does not merely follow after Hardy’s pen. As Hardy’s words creep “line by line” down the page, “line by line” the fire “creeps up” the photograph. The description of fire is allegorical: it amounts to an account of how one medium (photography) is supplanted by the other (writing). Hardy’s attention to the description of fire relegates the ekphrasis

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of the photograph to secondary status in the poem. While he vividly narrates the work of the fire, Hardy describes little of the woman in the photograph. There is no account of her face and only a cursory description of her body. However, while ekphrasis does not figure centrally in “The Photograph,” the poem does engage in one of the oldest aspects of the trope. It must not be forgotten that the tradition of ekphrasis is based on a poem’s “speaking out” or “speaking for” a visual image. As originally used, this speaking out amounted to prosopopoeia: the verbal medium of poetry gave voice or spoke for the visual media. But this “speaking out” entailed as well an “out-speaking”: a rival attempt on the part of the poet to surpass the visual image with his or her words. In Hardy’s poem, the rivalry further suggests an anxiety of influence. Harold Bloom describes the anxiety of influence as the anxiety on the part of a younger writer over the influence of his or her poetic forebears. However, the term might also be used to describe the anxiety of one medium (poetry) over the influence of another (photography). Hardy’s poem relates such an anxiety and responds to it by vividly describing the destruction of the other medium: The flame crept up the portrait line by line As it lay on the coals in the silence of night’s profound, And over the arm’s incline, And along the marge of the silkwork superfine, And gnawed at the delicate bosom’s defenceless round. In his effort to “out-speak” the photograph, Hardy supplants the verisimilitude of the snapshot with language that is rich in sonorous effects, transforming the visual motion of the fire into an interplay of alliterations and rhymes. Both internally and at the ends of the lines, Hardy’s rhymes map the progress of the fire. Notice how “flame,” “line,” “arm’s incline” and “superfine” all ring with the nasal hum of cinders. Also, note the way this singular humming turns to a series of glottal sounds that suggest the photograph is being devoured by such words as “along,” “profound,” “round” and, most startling of all, “gnaw.” In the word “gnaw,” the nasal easiness of the “n” is engulfed by the word’s yawning diphthong “aw.” Scattered throughout the stanza in this way, these alliterations and rhymes enact the motion of the fire. In addition to the double imposition of fire and words, the poem comes to enact a meeting of fire and words. As the words of the poem

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run down the page and the fire creeps up, they meet in the description of the speaker’s spiritual anguish in the poem’s third—and central— stanza: ‘Thank God, she is out of it now!’ I said at last, In a great relief of heart when the thing was done That had set my soul aghast, And nothing was left of the picture unsheathed from the past But the ashen ghost of the card it had figured on. There are no accidents here. The indented line marks the moment of the snapshot’s annihilation and the speaker’s paroxysm, as though the fire and the words collided, and, in this collision, the speaker’s soul was “set” aflame by anguish. Before this point in the poem, the snapshot retains its form. After this point, the image becomes a ghost. Hardy’s poem enacts what W.J.T. Mitchell terms “the creative destruction of iconoclasm.” Recognizing that the iconoclastic destruction of images endorses not an image-free reality but rather an alternative kind of imagery, Mitchell writes: “Iconoclasm is more than just the destruction of images: it is a ‘creative destruction,’ in which a secondary image of defacement or annihilation is created at the same moment that the ‘target’ is attacked” (Mitchell, What Pictures Want, 2005, 18). Mitchell associates creative destruction with the asymmetry between iconoclasm and idolatry. “Secondary images” formed by way of the destruction of the “target” image become themselves idols for the iconoclast. Relating a story of iconoclasm, Hardy’s poem is an example of creative destruction in the form of an elegy for a woman, possibly dead, but possibly not. This creative destruction supersedes the power of the visual. In destroying to create—an idea favored by Nietzsche—the poem becomes a sort of supermedium, an over-medium, if you will. Without the wholesale destruction of the snapshot, there could be no poem, because the theme of the poem is the image’s destruction. However, it is also the memory of the woman. Watching her image burn, the speaker is forced to speak poetically and also to recount who she was. The destruction of one medium for the creation of another accounts in part for the speaker’s contrition over the destruction of the photograph, and this contrition comes with a tragic note. Like a tragic hero, Hardy’s speaker finds himself compelled to act against his will. He destroys the photograph because seemingly it threatens to destroy him, and because

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doing so enables Hardy to write his poem. Both of these motives seem to be embroiled with some sort of nemesis. However, to compare the actions of an Orestes or an Othello with the actions of Hardy’s speaker is to immediately recognize the trifling nature of the speaker’s tragedy. Does the burning of a photograph amount to Orestes’ killing of his mother and Aegisthus or to Othello’s murder of Desdemona? Aristotle tells us that tragedy is the story of men who are “better” than those of the present day, while comedy is the story of those who are “worse” (Aristotle 1972, Ch.1, Section A, 2, (b) 1448, 2). Certainly, the tragedies of Orestes and Othello are the stories of “better” men. But the murder of a photograph by Hardy’s speaker is a story of—if not a “worse” man—then, at least, a comedic one. The insignificance of the speaker’s action is not the only aspect that appeals to the comedic. In Aristotelian terms, there is always something comedic about photography. It is not that photographs cannot depict tragic events, but that, as indices, photographs are inextricable from their contexts. There is always a “where” and a “when” to a photograph: a “where” and a “when” that make a photograph’s subject temporal and contextual. Despite what Melville may claim in his panegyric of General Hancock, no photograph portrays the “better” man, for it is always engaged in indexing the actual one. As Aristotle implies, tragedy is not embroiled in such metonymies. Stepping on stage, the tragic hero steps, as it were, out of time. Hardy’s poem, then, is a comedy in the sense of both the speaker’s deed and the medium upon which it is carried out. Casually tossing the photograph into the fire, the speaker regards himself as an ordinary man engaged in spring-cleaning, but the action would seem to trigger a startling joke. Burning to ash, the image has the last laugh, in that it suddenly shows itself as being alive and shows the speaker as anything other than an ordinary man. Watching the snapshot burn, the speaker unwittingly transforms it into something that calls to mind a voodoo doll. As is commonly known, voodoo dolls are effigies. They are made in order to gain control over their subjects. Stick a pin in the leg of a voodoo doll, and it is said that the person whom the dolls resembles feels pain in his or her leg. Destroy the doll, and the subject is destroyed. Part of the comedy of Hardy’s poem is that it parodies this sort of sympathetic magic. Burning the photograph puts the woman “to death.” However, while Hardy’s poem is comedic—at least in the Aristotelian sense—it also has a tragic strain. Burning the snapshot may amount to eradicating the last record of the woman on earth. The possibility

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reveals the true potency of the poetic speaker’s act, and it is what inspires his anguished cry. Unlike a public photograph—one that has been reproduced many times—Hardy’s snapshot is presumably the only one of its kind. Burning it, then, annihilates the last trace of the woman’s existence. The seeming cruelty of the act doubles back on the speaker in the form of guilt and personal anguish. Seeing her burn, he feels pain. Thus, the voodoo doll is finally an effigy of himself. However, the finality of the destruction is only part of the poem’s gravity. The other part comes in the speaker’s sadistic fascination with how the fire burns the image: Then I vented a cry of hurt, and averted my eyes; The spectacle was one that I could not bear, To my deep and sad surprise; But, compelled to heed, I again looked furtivewise Till the flame had eaten her breasts, and mouth, and hair. Were we to defend the speaker in a trial in which he was indicted for the murder of the woman’s image, we might quote the first three lines of this stanza to vouch for his remorse and “sad surprise.” Such lines testify to nothing more than a case of criminal negligence. The speaker sets the woman’s photograph on fire innocently believing that her image has no life, no way of feeling the “gnawing” flames. However, as shrewd defense attorneys, we would not quote the stanza’s last two lines, which reveal the speaker’s true motives for crying out, for to allow a jury of the speaker’s peers to hear how he is “compelled to heed” and “again” to “look furtivewise” at the burning image would allow a jury to come to the realization that, while Hardy’s speaker feels regret, a greater part of his discomfort comes from the seeming glee he experiences in watching “the spectacle” of the fire’s teeth. The psychological conflict in Hardy’s speaker recalls the story of Leontius, which Plato relates in The Republic. Confronted with the sight of the corpses of executed thieves lying outside the gates of Athens, the youth Leontius is swept up in an inner conflict. Knowing he should not look, as such a spectacle is repugnant and spiritually debasing, he is forced to look by his own eyes’ shameful need to see. For Socrates, the boy’s conflict marks the division between desire and reason, and it serves to illustrate the point that the follower of justice must adhere to reason and deny himself such morbid spectacles, even when the eyes demand

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to see them. Dramatizing a similar conflict between reason and desire, Hardy’s poem sets modern rationalism up against sadism, idolatry and even a belief in magic. The speaker does not want to believe in the life of the photograph, nor in the pain he inflicts on it, nor does he want to relish the torturous death of this photographic life, but he comes to indulge these beliefs and to relish this destruction, so, like Leontius, he seeks the “spectacle.” As this spectacle is foremost achieved through the writing of the poem, the speaker’s guilt over his sadistic desire to watch the fire gnaw the photograph parallels Hardy’s feelings about writing a poem that vividly realizes and recounts such destruction. For the speaker, the irrational desire to look equals Hardy’s irrational desire to write the poem. “The Photograph” is a testament to guilty, irrational and even sinister pleasures. The story it tells is one in which a rational agnostic becomes an irrational “primitive.” The transformation from the rational to the irrational affects the elegiac aspects of Hardy’s poem, for the form of reason to which Socrates appeals to is the same form that Freud appeals to in his discussion of healthy mourning. “Just as mourning impels the ego to renounce the object by declaring its death, and offers the ego the reward of staying alive,” writes Freud: each individual battle of ambivalence loosens the fixation of the libido upon the object by devaluing, disparaging and, so to speak, even killing it. There is a possibility of the process in the unconscious coming to an end, either once the fury has played itself out or after the object has been abandoned as worthless. We cannot tell which of these two possibilities brings melancholia to an end, either in all cases or in most, and what influence this termination has upon the further development of the case. The ego may enjoy the satisfaction of acknowledging itself to be the better of the two, and superior to the object. (Freud 2005, 217) The battle that plays out in the mind of Hardy’s speaker is one of these “ambivalences.” The speaker is torn between acknowledging the uselessness of the photograph and experiencing the life of the image. Burning the photograph, the speaker would seem to engage in healthy mourning, at least in the sense of his attempt to separate himself from the woman. However, in being compelled to believe in the life of the

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woman’s photograph and to watch her burn, he falls into the spectacle of melancholia: a spectacle that scorches him with his own profligacy. As stated at the beginning of this discussion, Hardy’s conflict is not one that ends in a stalemate; reason and desire, mourning and melancholia are not deadlocked at the end of the poem. Instead, the rational succumbs to the irrational. The agnostic speaks of heaven. —Well; she knew nothing thereof did she survive, And suffered nothing if numbered among the dead; Yet—yet—if on earth alive Did she feel a smart, and with vague strange anguish strive? If in heaven, did she smile at me sadly and shake her head? There are no answers to the questions that end Hardy’s poem. There is nothing to provide his speaker comfort, nor do the questions themselves afford him a stable metaphysical conception of life or death. He is left with possibilities, and while one of these possibilities appeals to reason (that the woman is still alive and so “knew nothing” of the fire), the other two are wholly irrational. Either the woman is in heaven, or she felt the “smart” of the flames. That these irrational possibilities end the poem is a sign of their potency and determination. Against them, the speaker’s reason is helpless. Instead of resisting them, he comes to speculate about an all-too-Christian heaven from which the spirit of the woman looks down. It is a cartoonish vision to be sure, but one that ends the poem too soundly to be merely ironic. The alternative to this heaven is equally unthinkable for Hardy, for if the living woman should feel the “smart” of the fire, then Hardy himself is none other than a witch doctor. Or, if she is dead, he is possibly even the devil, damning her to hellfire. As Delmore Schwartz has observed, Hardy in many respects esteemed himself a representative of a new era and its shift from faith to fact. Hardy himself attests to this, declaring in such texts as The Dynasts his agnosticism as well as a disbelief in an intelligently designed universe. But, as Schwartz recognizes, in Hardy, such declarations are never clear-cut. Instead, they are issues of conflict, doubt and struggle. “Thus Hardy’s state of mind,” declares Schwartz, is one example of the conflict between the new scientific view of life which the 19th Century produced and the whole attitude toward life which had been traditional to Western Culture. Hardy is a partisan of

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the new view, but acutely conscious always of the old view. He holds the two in a dialectical tension. Indeed there are moments when it seems that Hardy is merely taking the Christian idea of God and the world, and placing a negative prefix to each of God’s attributes. The genuine atheist, by contrast, is never so concerned with the view which he has rejected. Or if he is so concerned, he is, like Hardy, a being who is fundamentally religious and essentially possessed by a state of mind in which an old view of Life and a new one conflict without conclusion. (Schwartz 1985, 60) Sadly, Schwartz has nothing to say about “The Photograph,” but his observation comes from his study of poems that stand on the adjacent pages to “The Photograph” in Hardy’s Collected Poems. Examining such poems as “The Oxen,” Schwartz sees this conflict as a deep undercurrent in the actions of the poem. Certainly, such an undercurrent is detectable in “The Photograph” as well. While an underlying conflict between the rational and the irrational might be considered unique to Hardy, “The Photograph” anticipates the position of a social theorist such as Bruno Latour. For, as Latour maintains: At the very moment when the twin Enlightenments of Marxism seemed to have explained everything, at the very moment when the failure of their total explanation leads the postmoderns to founder in the despair of self-criticism, we discover that the explanations had not yet begun, and that this has always been the case; that we have never been modern, or critical; that there has never been a yesteryear or an Old Regime (Mayer, 1982); that we have never really left the old anthropological matrix behind, and that it could not have been otherwise. (Latour 1993, 47) Hardy’s poem anticipates Latour by some 60 years. Fraught with melancholic ambivalence and cornered by his own unsuspected superstition, the speaker of “The Photograph” finds himself confessing to accidently practicing black magic. But, as the poem makes most clear, the true subject of this black magic is not the woman, but the speaker himself. As if it were possible to burn a mirror, setting the woman on fire “line by line,” Hardy relates how the voodoo doll that his speaker comes to burn is a depiction of himself.

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Prosthetic Heavens: Philip Larkin’s “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album” If Hardy’s poem is to be taken seriously, then snapshots are dangerous. Springing from “packs of years,” they wait like patient assassins, ready to ambush their viewers with rapacious memories. But memory is not the only weapon of the snapshot. It is also armed with longing. As this longing invariably entails a desire for something or someone that has been lost to the past, whatever desire the snapshot affords can never be satisfied. Such is the hopeless longing that Philip Larkin describes in his poem “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album” (1974). Here, Larkin comes to address both the young lady and the medium of photography. Turning first to the lady, Larkin then turns to the medium. But while this double address would seem to suggest a double apostrophe, in fact, Larkin’s poem is a single apostrophe, for the poem ultimately comes to recognize that the lady and her photographs are one and the same. Thus, the longing for the lady becomes a longing to see—even to possess—the photographs. Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album At last you yielded up the album, which, Once open, sent me distracted. All your ages Matt and glossy on the thick black pages! Too much confectionery, too rich: I choke on such nutritious images. My swivel eye hungers from pose to pose— In pigtails, clutching a reluctant cat; Or furred yourself, a sweet girl-graduate; Or lifting a heavy-headed rose Beneath a trellis, or in a trilby hat (Faintly disturbing, that, in several ways)— From every side you strike at my control, Not least through these disquieting chaps who loll At ease about your early days: Not quite your class, I’d say, dear, on the whole.

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But O, photography! as no art is, Faithful and disappointing! that records Dull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds, And will not censor blemishes Like washing-lines, and Hall’s-Distemper boards, But shows the cat as disinclined, and shades A chin as doubled when it is, what grace Your candor thus confers upon her face! How overwhelmingly persuades That this is a real girl in a real place, In every sense empirically true! Or is it just the past? Those flowers, that gate, These misty parks and motors, lacerate Simply by being over; you Contract my heart by looking out of date. Yes, true; but in the end, surely, we cry Not only at exclusion, but because It leaves us free to cry. We know what was Won’t call on us to justify Our grief, however hard we yowl across The gap from eye to page. So I am left To mourn (without a chance of consequence) You, balanced on a bike against a fence; To wonder if you’d spot the theft Of this one of you bathing; to condense, In short, a past that no one now can share, No matter whose your future; calm and dry, It holds you like a heaven, and you lie Unvariably lovely there, Smaller and clearer as the years go by. (Larkin 1974, 13–14) Larkin’s diction weaves the high rhetoric of the ode together with casual chitchat. Contrast, for example, the exclamatory “O” that begins

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the fourth stanza with the parenthetical phrase that begins the third (“Faintly disturbing, that, in several ways”). Such phrasing mixes the epistolary wit of a Pope or a Dryden with the modern cadence of the British middle class. Mixing high rhetoric with the colloquial, Larkin bridges the “gap” between the photographs that fill the album and the eye of his speaker, and he transforms the metonymic link of gazing into the equally metonymic link of a vocal address in a way that suggests the formality of an ode and the informality of a conversation. In short, Larkin’s speaker is rhapsodically chatting up the lady. The success of this flirtatiousness accounts for the success of the poem’s principle illusion, which figures Larkin’s poem not as a soliloquy but as an address or monologue. Engaging the “you” while studying the photographs, the speaker sounds as though he were an old friend or clumsy late-life lover, someone who “at last” has received the supreme privilege of looking into the long-withheld album. But the nature of the monologue is less certain than it first appears. While the “you” of the first three stanzas suggests that the speaker addresses a living listener, the speaker’s monologue is, in fact, a soliloquy spoken over the silent images in the album. In the first stanza, such phrases as “yielded up” and “all your ages” imply the death of the lady. The phrasing seems almost biblical: “And when Jacob had made an end of commanding his sons, he gathered up his feet into the bed, and yielded up the ghost and was gathered unto his people” (Genesis, 49:33, AV). Larkin’s use of the phrase “yielded up” strikes a similar chord to this passage from Genesis. The lady has yielded up the album in a way that equates to her yielding up her ghost. “All [her] ages” are held in the album, which Larkin describes as being “like a heaven.” In this analogy to heaven, Larkin evokes the ancient trope of the heavenly album. As E.R. Curtius relates, the trope of “the heavenly album” began in late Antiquity and rose to prominence in the Middle Ages. “In the late Roman prose,” writes Curtius, “we find a new book metaphor: the album. Originally this is the white tablet for official notices, then a register of officeholders (e.g., senators). In Apuleius, Jupiter opens an assembly of the gods with the words, ‘Dei conscripti Musarum albo’” (Curtius 1953, 309–10). Into the whiteness or blankness of the album are placed the names of the gods and, as such, in The Golden Ass, the album becomes The Book of Heaven. As Curtius goes on to relate, this book-metaphor reaches its ultimate form in Dante’s Paradiso:

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Oh abbondante grazia ond’io presunsi ficcar lo viso per la luce etterna, tanto che la veduta vi consunsi! Nel suo profondo vidi che s’interna legato con amore in un volume, ciò che per l’universo si squaderna: sustanze e accidenti e lor costume, quasi conflati insieme, per tal modo che ciò ch’i’ dico è un semplice lume. (Dante Alighieri 1962, Paradiso XXXIII, 82–90) O grace abounding, whereby I presumed So deep the eternal light to search and sound That my whole vision was therein consumed! In that abyss I saw how love held bound Into one volume all the leaves whose flight Is scattered through the universe around; How substance, accident, and mode unite Fused, so to speak, together, in such wise That this I tell of is one simple light. (Dante Alighieri 1962, Paradiso XXXIII, 82–90) From this passage of the Paradiso, Curtius concludes: Here Dante’s mystical vision is consummated. It shows him a spiritual cosmos held together by the bond of love. What he sees is at once a simple light and the wealth of all ideas, forms, and beings. How is he to describe it? Once again and for the last time, in the highest and most sacred ecstasy, Dante employs the symbolism of the book. All that has been scattered throughout the entire universe, that has been separated and dissevered, like loose quaderni, is now “bound in one volume” by love. (Curtius 1953, 332) Larkin’s poem renovates Dante’s bound volume. Supplanting the topos of “writing” with “light-writing,” Larkin describes the photo album as the

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volume in which all the separated and dissevered events of the young lady’s life are bound. From her standing with the “reluctant cat” to “balancing on a bicycle” to posing with a group of young suitors, the album contains the substance, accidents and modes of “all the ages” of the young lady. Of course, with its 18th-century rhetorical devices and modern palaver, the poem is as much a parody as an heir of Dante’s volume. “Swivel-eyed” and urbanely admonishing the lady for running with a crowd of boys who “are not quite [her] class,” the speaker is the caricature of Larkin himself: a balding, bifocaled librarian, too well versed in parlor talk to know the thoroughfares of Paradise. And yet, even while “Lines” is farcical and cartoonish in places, the ecstasy of its speaker and the way in which this ecstasy takes form speak genuinely of his longing: My swivel eye hungers from pose to pose— In pigtails, clutching a reluctant cat; Or furred yourself, a sweet girl-graduate; Or lifting a heavy-headed rose Beneath a trellis, or in a trilby hat (Faintly disturbing, that, in several ways)— From every side you strike at my control, Not least through these disquieting chaps who loll At ease about your early days: Not quite your class, I’d say, dear, on the whole. What is the “hunger” that drives the speaker? And what is “the control” that these quotidian scenes “strike at”? For all its drollness, the passage is still lit with Dante’s “simple light.” And while Larkin’s speaker would seem to be “all-together-English” about this experience, he is no less subject to it—no less passionate about it. What distinguishes the lady’s album from the Heavenly Album is time. The vision of the holy album that ends Dante’s epic is a vision of eternity. Dante sees that which lies outside of time and also that which awaits him in death. The vision afforded Larkin’s speaker by the photo album, however, reveals only the past. There is no future to the photographs in the album, and so all the longing that the album provokes in him is a longing laced with mourning. In such a vision as Larkin’s, Eros and Thanatos are not rivals. Instead, Larkin’s speaker experiences desire and death as the obverse aspects of

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a single gaze. These obverse aspects inform the entire poem, rendering much of it ambiguous. Note, for example, how the speaker never reveals the type of “control” he fears losing, nor the consequences of its loss: “From every side you strike at my control.” Is the speaker on the verge of weeping? Or do the pangs of love “strike” at him? We cannot say. Note, too, that, at the end of the poem, while the speaker mourns how the lady’s snapshots grow “clearer and smaller as the years go by,” he also steals the one of the lady “bathing.” Such is the legerdemain of a man mourning while longing, and longing while mourning. The double action of longing and mourning also figures in the syntax of the poem, as can be seen in the final two stanzas:               So I am left To mourn (without a chance of consequence) You, balanced on a bike against a fence; To wonder if you’d spot the theft Of this one of you bathing; to condense, In short, a past that no one now can share, No matter whose your future; calm and dry, It holds you like a heaven, and you lie Unvariably lovely there, Smaller and clearer as the years go by. A master of the pentain, Larkin brilliantly uses this form of stanzaic structure here. These two pentains contain a single sentence that is honeycombed with embedded clauses. These clauses are significant, for they allow the poet to speak simultaneously of his mourning and of his longing. Stripping the sentence of these clauses allows us to recognize their function: “So I am left to mourn … you; … [in a past that] holds you like a heaven, and you lie unvariably lovely there ….” Stitched together by semicolons, the sentence consists, in fact, of three independent clauses, but, in themselves, these clauses do not modulate in tone or theme. They are all mournful. However, such parentheticals as: “balanced on a bike against a fence” come to express the less mournful sentiments. They express desire. This combination of desire and longing accords with the state of coveting: to want what one does not have and to continue wanting it by way of a gaze—this is the sorrowful hunger of coveting. In Larkin’s poem, this sorrowful hunger culminates in the embedded clause:

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“No matter whose your future ….” Here, the word “whose” strains the sentence’s grammatical construction to the limit, reaching beyond the poem’s direct address to hint at a narrative that hangs in the backdrop of the poem, a narrative posing the question: “Who owns the lady’s future?” Certainly not the speaker. The possibility that the lady may be forbidden fruit (that is, another man’s wife) implies as well that she has become for Larkin’s speaker the subject of his own vision of Eros. The speaker may be viewed as a sort of Petrarchan admirer: one who spied his Laura after she was wed, and so never revealed his affections. Unlike Petrarch, however, Larkin’s speaker is able to achieve a form of physical contact with the lady by handling the photographs of her. Whereas Petrarch and Dante portray Laura and Beatrice respectively as untouchable personages of virtue, Larkin does not engage in such idealizations. The young lady is real, as photography “faithfully” reveals, and, as such, she is not a goddess or a saint, but a woman whose images inspire irresistible romantic desire. This is made all the more apparent when Larkin’s speaker steals the photograph of her bathing. Such a theft is the culmination of his desire to touch the lady. In short, stealing the photograph entails a frisson of impropriety on the speaker’s part: an impropriety that echoes with the “faint disturbance” he experiences upon seeing the photograph of the young lady in “a trilby hat.” While Larkin is altogether vague on the details of his image, the suggestion is that it elicits what Lord Byron termed “the nympholepsy of some fond despair”: a nympholepsy that culminates in the theft of the photograph (Byron 2001, Child Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV, 1.115, 143). Larkin employs the word “gap” to describe this nympholepsy, iconographically representing the gulf across which the speaker’s words would reach:          We know what was Won’t call on us to justify Our grief, however hard we yowl across The gap from eye to page. So I am left To mourn (without a chance of consequence) You, In these lines, Larkin demonstrates his mastery of form, in that the line-breaks always entail precision. The break between the penultimate

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and final stanzas creates “the gap” between the eye and the page. The “we” that “yowls” does so from the far side of the whitest separation, and what word does this yowl reach? “The gap.” The gap answers anguish. The gap receives longing, the implication being that no matter what amount of anguish the speaker might feel at seeing the photographs of the “sweet girl graduate,” his outcry reaches no one. However, the iconographic representation of “the gap” calls our attention to the fact that, even while the speaker’s “yowl” reaches no one, it does manifest as part of Larkin’s poem. Standing on either side of the crevasse that forms between the “yowl” and the “gap” are the final two stanzas. In this way, Larkin’s poem calls out and hears its own calling. Thus, the poem is an amalgamation of its speaker, the lady and the gap that lies between them. However, the “gap” is iconographic of yet another aspect of the poem and its subject, for the empty space that the word “gap” marks between the penultimate and final stanzas of the poem corresponds as well to the gaps that form between the various snapshots that fill the lady’s album. The implication of this iconicity is that all of the stanzas of the poem operate as snapshots, the gaps that form between them being the gaps that circumscribe a photo album’s page. “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album” is itself a photo album, or, at the very least, it behaves as one. The photographic behavior of Larkin’s poem corresponds with the admiration its speaker comes to express toward photography in general: But o, photography! as no art is, Faithful and disappointing! that records Dull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds, And will not censor blemishes Like washing-lines, and Halls’-Distemper boards, But shows the cat as disinclined, and shades A chin as doubled when it is, what grace Your candor thus confers upon her face! The fourth stanza begins the second address of the poem: the one to the medium of photography itself. While it is tempting to regard this shift as another apostrophe—an apostrophe different from the first—in fact, the two addresses are one. The singleness of this address derives from the fact that, as we have discussed, the lady and her snapshots are one

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and the same. And so, in a sense, the longing that Larkin’s speaker has for the lady culminates in the admiration that he has for the medium: it is photography that brings the lady to him. Still, while the lady and her photographs are one, the lady and photography are not, and so the speaker’s address to photography differs from his address to the lady. In addressing the lady, the speaker focuses on her activities—what she does in the snapshots. Whereas, in addressing photography, the speaker focuses on what photography is. The difference is central, for it suggests that the truly rhapsodic aspects of the poem are those written to the medium. Calling photography “faithful” and “disappointing,” full of “dull days,” “hold-it smiles” and, above all, uncensored “blemishes,” Larkin hails the medium as both a good friend and also as sort of Pandarus, closer in time and sentiment than the lady herself, but also licentious and less fulfilling. This personification of photography is foremost a description of Larkin’s own aesthetic: an aesthetic that manifests throughout The Less Deceived (1955). It is for this reason that “Lines” opens Larkin’s collection, which Robert Lowell described as being comprised of “a homely, sophisticated language that mixes description with a personal voice” (Larkin 1974, flyleaf). Like the snapshots that “Lines” describes, the poems of The Less Deceived do not blandish or flatter. Instead, they turn their attentions to homely things, and they recognize how these things make up the aesthetics of true experience. “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album” establishes this idea at the beginning of the collection, and it extends it by aligning Larkin’s poems with snapshots, whose subjects are almost always homely. Larkin cements the connection in the rhymes of the poem itself. Note, for example, how the phrase “as no art is” rhymes with “blemishes.” Playing with the acrostic formed by the rhyme may afford us an insight into the poet’s wit. It may also give us an idea about the collection’s aesthetic thrust. The acrostic links art with a blemished world, and so it suggests how Larkin has linked his art with photography’s frank and homely vision. It is, after all, the blemishes of reality that figure in the backgrounds of the snapshots as well in the lady’s imperfect beauty. These blemishes take the form of “Hall’s Distemper Boards” and “washinglines.” The latter is unquestionably a pun that plays on the poem’s title as well as its seemingly homely poetic lines. The mention of these things testifies then to the kind of poems we will find in The Less Deceived in general: poems, we might say, of blemishes.

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Thus, “Lines” establishes the aesthetic and the overall tenor of The Less Deceived. In his own examination of the poem, Jefferson Hunter describes it as a sort of tutorial for the reader of the collection, providing the reader with insights into the development of the entire book (Hunter 1987, 167). Hunter’s insight is keen in this respect, for “Lines” does come to teach us the inherent belatedness that informs all of the poems in The Less Deceived: a belatedness that can be traced through to the collection’s final poem and its final lines: “Only the groom, and the groom’s boy, / With bridles in the evening come,” says the speaker of “At Grass.” The belated arrival of the groom corresponds to the belated arrival of so many of the collection’s speakers. From the speaker who receives a photo album of a young girl after that girl is dead or gone, to the speaker who creeps into “the serious house” of a church only “once [he is] sure there’s nothing going on,” to the groom and his boy, The Less Deceived is a book of aftermaths. Poem by poem, its lines display a blemished world of longing and loss that is informed by the belatedness of the snapshot. “Every one of the poems clicks with me,” writes Robert Lowell (Larkin 1974, flyleaf), and his employment of the word “click” is not unadvised. Intuiting the photographic aspects of Larkin’s collection, Lowell must have sensed how each poem of The Less Deceived describes a picture of a past that is revisited only when everything else is gone. The previous discussion of Gurney and Hardy revealed that the ekphrasis of personal photographs involves a personal act of mourning. Gurney’s speaker mourns both for the lost world of pre-war Britain and for the soldier who clings to an image from that world. Hardy’s speaker’s relationship to the woman in the snapshot that he burns is one involving magic and mourning. We could draw a similar conclusion concerning Larkin’s speaker and the lady depicted in the album, for, certainly, Larkin’s speaker mourns the lady’s death or absence. However, unlike Hardy, Larkin does not allude to the magical properties of photographs. Instead, he illustrates another facet of The Snapshot Elegy: such poems can entail a nympholepsy that circumscribes the illicit. In short, the privacy of snapshots allows for private thoughts and private deeds. Larkin’s poem depicts this privacy.

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The Suppressed Ekphrasis The Suppressed Ekphrasis

By the turn of the 20th century, photography had become so much the standard by which the world was seen and recorded that the camera, and its images were thoroughly incorporated into modern thought and aesthetics. This was especially true of movements in modernist art and literature. As Michael North has recently observed, in the art of the modernists, whenever the issue of faithful mimesis is raised, the example of photography is apt to be influential, in a positive or a negative way. It is also clear that the habit of seeing photographically has affected modern experience to such an extent that certain oddities of the camera, especially its tendency to frame particular points of view and to isolate one moment from another, have become second nature for human observers as well. Recent studies of photography and literature have therefore shown in some detail how camera vision affects the motives and perhaps even the perceptions of influential modern writers. (North 2005, 3) As we have seen, the issue of faithful mimesis does not begin with the trends that North addresses, but can be found in the enthusiasm of Hawthorne, as well as in poems such as Melville’s and Carroll’s. What is distinctive about the role photography comes to play in 20th-century literature is photography’s universality, and how this universality is appropriated into the modernist conception of the image. The image, as Ezra Pound conceives of it, is highly photographic: “The image is a radiant node or cluster; it is … a VORTEX, from which, and

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through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing” (Pound 1970, 92). What is Pound’s vortex but the spiroflex lens of a mental camera? Like the mechanical iris of that lens—an iris “from which and through which and into which” any object may be captured and isolated—the modernist image aims at being objective. In short, the modernistic image would express what László Moholy-Nagy called “the hygiene of the optical.” Moholy-Nagy writes: Men still kill one another, they have not yet understood how they live, why live; politicians fail to observe that the earth is an entity, yet television (Telehor) has been invented: the “Far Seer”—tomorrow we shall be able to look into the heart of our fellow-man, be everywhere and yet be alone; illustrated books, newspapers, magazines are printed—in millions. The unambiguousness of the real, the truth in the everyday situation is there for all classes. The hygiene of the optical, the health of the visible is slowly filtering through. (Moholy-Nagy 1973, 38, emphasis in the original) For Pound and Moholy-Nagy, vision is clarified by the image. Literature, art, society and politics are purified through it, and thus, at least for Moholy-Nagy, the greater the access to images, the greater the purification. It is for this reason that Moholy-Nagy hails the invention of television: television extends the range of visual purification. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, we have inherited the modernist’s notions of the image and, while aesthetic tastes in poetry and literature generally have shifted, the image and its hygiene have remained central elements of post-modern literature. However, it is not the image alone that we have appropriated from modernism. Indeed, Moholy-Nagy’s vision of a future dependent upon ‘far-seeing’ has also become part of our legacy. As the peoples of the 20th and 21st centuries, we see across great distances, and we do this by way of cameras; because photographic far-seeing has become central to late modernity, it has blended into what we might term “real or lived experience.” Photographic seeing that takes us beyond the limits of our immediate environments melts into the actual scenes of those environments until we claim to know a world by virtue of having seen its distant places through images. The same can be said of contemporary writers. Most writers of the 20th and 21st centuries have come to appropriate photographic experience as though it were lived experience. In Fiction in the Age

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of Photography, Nancy Armstrong recognizes the development as it formed in the Victorian novel. As Armstrong argues, the influence of photography on Victorian fiction was so strong that it gave rise to a partnership between realism and photography: The critical tradition may ask us to think of photographic realism as one of many subvarieties of Victorian realism, but I am convinced it is more accurate to think of realism and photography as partners in the same cultural project. Writing that aims to be taken as realistic is “photographic” in that it promised to give readers access to a world on the other side of mediation and sought to do so by offering certain kinds of visual information. What is more, the writing we now call realism provided this information in such a way that the reader would recognize it as indeed belonging to the objects and people of the world themselves. The same equation held true even when a novel did not offer much in the way of visual description; before long, it was enough to invoke the stereotype and give it a few new details. A Victorian author could write about almost any situation and—so long as that author acknowledged the visual stereotypes of race, class, gender, and nation—assume that a diverse readership could “see” that situation in approximately the same way he or she did. (Armstrong 1999, 26) Armstrong’s argument may as well be applied to any number of examples of 20th-century writing, for the trove of stock images that we have come to understand as “types” is accessed time and time again by the media of modern fiction, television, film and poetry. However, while Armstrong’s study concentrates on the nascence of photography’s influence on literature, it must be noted that the appropriation of photographic experience has since become a universal phenomenon; the photograph is no longer merely the representative image of “the type.” It is now the hallmark for our modern understanding of the world. We live in the belief that we know a world beyond our immediate experience because we see this world through the medium of the camera. In his Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan describes such knowledge as being founded on “pseudo-events”: events that are not lived experiences but rather experiences by way of technological media such as photography (McLuhan 1968, 212). As McLuhan relates, these pseudo-events are so commonplace that they have become part of the

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modus operandi of modern knowledge. We know, for instance, the bust of Nefertiti from only one side, the side from which it was photographed; know the Spanish Civil War by Robert Capa’s photograph “Death of a Loyalist Soldier”; know the ocean bottom and deep space from submergible and satellite cameras; know cities that are distant to us by photographs and films showing iconic landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower and the Sydney Opera House. What is central to this kind of knowing is that, in claiming to have knowledge of these things, we suppress their photographic sources. We do not claim, for example, to know about “pictures of the Kremlin,” we claim to know about “the Kremlin”; nor do we claim to know about “pictures of sharks,” we claim to know about “sharks.” The photographs of these distant and foreign entities come to us as the things themselves. In literary terms, such suppressed knowledge of photographs corresponds with “Suppressed Ekphrases”: that is, verbal descriptions that are based on photographs but that do not acknowledge these photographs as their sources. In many respects, the term “suppressed ekphrasis” may be considered synonymous with modern writing. What modern art historian has not written about a piece of art without the aid of its photographic reproduction? What historical novelist has not written about a 19th- or 20th-century event by consulting photographs of said event? What memoir-writer has not described his or her childhood by way of old snapshots? Suppressed ekphrasis is invisible, then, as the photographic source becomes synonymous with a text’s accurate description. Thus, these instances of ekphrasis are difficult to map, for, in the absence of any form of acknowledgment, they are woven into the fabric of the discourse. And yet, there are a number of markers that point to such suppressed ekphrases, the most telling of which entails Moholy-Nagy’s notion of the “hygiene of the optical” and how this hygiene “captures,” “isolates” and brings into close proximity things and persons that otherwise cannot be captured, isolated or brought into close proximity with the writer. In this chapter, I will examine two suppressed ekphrases: Marianne Moore’s “The Paper Nautilus” and Seamus Heaney’s “The Grauballe Man.” In terms of the suppressed ekphrasis, the value of these poems relies on the fact that neither of them completely suppresses its ekphrastic source, and both acknowledge their sources in ways that make them part of the thematic development of the poems.

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Seeing like Herodotus: Marianne Moore’s “The Paper Nautilus”          like Herodotus I have not seen except in pictures (Moore 1951, 87) This brief and seemingly insignificant statement from Marianne Moore’s poem “Land Unicorns and Sea Unicorns” reveals much more than one would initially guess about Moore’s poem, the work of this poet and perhaps modern poetry in general. In this line and a half, Moore reveals the source of her vision in some many of her poems. And more than this: Moore invokes the very circumstances of modern sight. Like Herodotus, we moderns see by way of pictures. In fact, we may claim to surpass the Father of History in this respect. We see more pictures than he ever did, and this is due to photography. Whereas Herodotus’ Histories is based foremost upon legend, myth, history and hearsay, more often than not a modern understanding of the world begins with the photographic image. No poet has described this kind of knowledge better than Moore herself, for the precision of Moore’s imagery stems, in large part, from her descriptions of the photographs she saw in magazines and illustrated newspapers. We know this to be the case, because, unlike many of her contemporaries, Moore was scrupulous in annotating her poems. The last pages of her Collected Poems (1951) consist of a litany of references and notations attesting to the inherent relationship between Moore’s verse and its inspirational sources. These sources came, of course, with photographs and so, even while Moore makes little or no reference to photography in her poems, her poems may be described as being highly photographic. In his own examination of Moore’s animal poems, W.H.  Auden writes: “Moore’s animal poems are those of a naturalist; the animals she selects are animals she likes … and nearly all of her animals are exotic, to be seen normally in zoos or photographs by explorers; she has only one poem about a common domestic pet” (Auden 1963, 303). In the observation, Auden succinctly identifies the ekphrastic nature of Moore’s work: She uses photographic images as a means for achieving access to the animals “that she likes.” This use entails in part the suppression of photography. Moore’s poem “The Paper Nautilus” is exemplar of this photographic quality. While Moore does not acknowledge any photographic source for the poem, her attention to detail figures the poem as being part of

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modern photographic seeing. In fact, the poem invokes the genre of the animal documentary, in that it seemingly introduces its readers to the world of the nautilus in a manner that calls to mind a documentary film. As the documentary takes its viewers into the realms of the animal world, so Moore’s poem takes its readers into the world of the nautilus. The Paper Nautilus For authorities whose hopes are shaped by mercenaries? Writers entrapped by teatime fame and by commuters’ comforts? Not for these the paper nautilus constructs her thin glass shell. Giving her perishable souvenir of hope, a dull white outside and smoothedged inner surface glossy as the sea, the watchful maker of it guards it day and night; she scarcely eats until the eggs are hatched. Buried eight-fold in her eight arms, for she is in a sense a devilfish, her glass ramshorn-cradled freight is hid but is not crushed; as Hercules, bitten by a crab loyal to the hydra, was hindered to succeed, the intensively watched eggs coming from the shell free it when they are freed— leaving its wasp-nest flaws of white on white, and close-

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One might object to the classification of “The Paper Nautilus” as a suppressed ekphrasis. Moore’s interest in zoology unquestionably led her to such zoological accounts of the nautilus as those of Frederick McCoy and his descriptions of nautili in his Natural History of Victoria (1885–1890). Certainly, such descriptions as McCoy’s are vivid in their explanation of the nautilus’s ability to separate itself from its shell. Moore’s account of how the nautilus lays its eggs inside its shell and then guards this “fortress” until the eggs have hatched must be derived from a scientific account of the process. In addition, Moore’s poem may be said to make a literary allusion to what might be termed “the motif of the nautilus” in the Western poetic tradition, and the poem itself fits into this tradition. Beginning in Antiquity, the nautilus motif originates in Oppian’s “Halieutics.” Indeed, in the English tradition, the nautilus finds its way into Pope’s Essay on Man (1733) and Lord Byron’s “The Island” (1823). Also, Oliver Wendell Holmes’s poem “The Chamber Nautilus” (1857) describes the animal and, in that poem, Holmes celebrates the shell of the nautilus, using such images as “lustrous coil” and “stately mansions”—images that anticipate Moore’s “fortress.” However, these zoological and literary sources do not negate the important role that visual images play in supplying Moore with her imagery. While Moore undoubtedly had access to such textual sources and was inspired by the poetic tradition of the nautilus, she had access as well to pictures. In part, these pictures undoubtedly took the form of such non-photographic images as Lowell Reeve’s 1841 illustrations or Otto Spamer’s 1874 lithographs, which vividly depict the nautilus. Still, while hand-drawn images such as Reeves’s, Spamer’s and others’ were common in the 1930s, it is impossible to believe that Moore’s poem does not find its own exactitudes within the medium of photography. If nothing else, Moore would have been well aware of Edward Weston’s photographs of nautilus shells from the 1920s, but, even more likely,

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Figure 11  Unknown photographer, “Paper Nautilus”

Moore would have seen William Longley’s and Charles Martin’s 1927 full-color photographs of coral reefs, reproduced in the January 1927 issue of National Geographic beside Longley’s article “Life on the Coral Reef.” While the nautilus is not featured in this issue, the invention of underwater color photography as early as 1927 attests to documentary photography’s access to the oceans. Such historical circumstances place Moore’s poem—originally published in What Are Years? (1941)—well inside the era of underwater documentary photography. It seems inconceivable, then, that the poem does not find its origins in the photographic medium as well, and, while the evidence for this influence may be merely circumstantial, the texture, details and themes of Moore’s poem challenge any overt rejection of the possibility. Indeed, the realities of paper nautili (Figure 11) were outside of Moore’s immediate experience, because their natural habitat is the open sea.4 And yet, the intense visual details of Moore’s poem lend it a documentary specificity. 4  Unlike most species of octopi, the paper nautilus (Octopoda, Argonauta) does not inhabit the sea bottom, but rather fashions for itself a shell whose “paper, boat-like shape” allows it to be used as “a buoyancy chamber.” Floating in this chamber, the female nautilus lays her eggs. Macmillan Concise Encyclopedia, s.v. “Nautilus.”

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Whereas Moore’s predecessors move from observation into metaphor, Moore instead calls on her readers to keep watch over the intricate actions of the animal, and to never lose sight of them. While this attention does not negate her use of metaphor, it always hails the visual experience of regarding the nautilus. None of these circumstances ensure that Moore’s poem is a suppressed ekphrasis of a photograph, but then this uncertainty substantiates, in one great respect, the point I make by examining the poem: suppressed ekphrases are invisible or, if visible, are made apparent only by faint traces. Indeed, this is their chief agency. Seeking out such ekphrases amounts to chasing ghosts. To find further traces of Moore’s use of suppressed ekphrasis in “The Paper Nautilus” (before examining the text itself), it is instructive to turn to another of Moore’s poems: “When I Buy Pictures” (1935). Here, Moore opens with a revisionist’s statement designed to clarify her title. The speaker states: “when I buy pictures / or what is closer to the truth, / when I look at that of which I may regard myself as the imaginary possessor … ” (Moore 1951, 55). The statement may be said to describe the psychology not just behind the ownership of images but behind suppressed ekphrasis as well. The suppression of the photographic source allows a writer “imaginary possession” of the photographic subject: the ownership of the thing itself and the seeing of that thing, as is the case in Moore’s “Paper Nautilus.” Rather than involving some sort of dishonesty on Moore’s part, the suppression, then, would seem to be unconscious. In describing the nautilus, Moore does not describe looking at photographs, per se. She looks through photographs so that she might describe what she would possess or access. The act of looking through photographs contributes to the facility with which Moore’s poem lends itself to her readers. “The Paper Nautilus” is not printed as a caption to a photograph of the animal, yet readers have no difficulty in understanding what Moore is writing about. Reading the poem, we are immediately aware that she is describing an animal: one that is exotic and so may inspire us to look up its picture in an encyclopedia, or—as is the case in the 21st century—to look for a picture of the nautilus by searching on the Internet. The facility with which we can perform these tasks is the facility by which Moore’s poem becomes understandable to us—a facility that is grounded in a visual culture based on photography. In fact, the way Moore looks through photographs distinguishes her poem from the poems of Pope Leo, Melville, Carroll and Whitman. Just

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as it was impossible for these earlier poets to recognize the death that is harbored in photographs—and thus they did not write the kinds of elegies we examined in the previous chapter—so it was also impossible for them to ignore photography as a medium. Because Moore writes in an era when photography’s newness has passed, she treats photographs as reality. They do not call attention to themselves as pieces of representation so much as they present exotic subjects to be written about. Furthermore, the omissions in Moore’s poem, such as the name of the photographer or what technical means were involved, do not trouble us or even seem notable, as Melville’s omissions did. The fact that Moore makes no reference to the name of the photographer or the photographs she uses to observe the nautilus seems of little consequence. One hardly expects to be supplied with this kind of information. However, it would be a mistake to overemphasize the differences between Moore’s poem and these earlier poets. Instead, it is valuable to consider Moore’s poem as the logical next step in the ekphrasis of photography, for the trope that begins with the poems of Pope Leo, Whitman, Melville and Carroll continues in Moore’s poem. For instance, Moore’s “nautilus” realizes one of Whitman’s “tableaus of life.” The life of the nautilus and the care it takes of its eggs become part of Moore’s own gallery: a gallery in which her speaker is a cicerone-naturalist. Like Whitman’s cicerone, she is responsible for reporting on the facts that comprise the life of this animal. The fidelity with which Moore expresses these facts implies her speaker’s sense of obligation to represent things truly: an obligation that Whitman takes up in his poem. Furthermore, as Melville engages in the scientific jargon of the phrenologist, Moore’s speaker engages in the scientific precision of the naturalist: Giving her perishable souvenir of hope, a dull white outside and smoothedged inner surface glossy as the sea, the watchful maker of it guards it day and night; Unlike Melville, Moore is not interested in “sounding” like a scientist. Rather, she is interested in science’s exacting descriptions of phenomena.

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Moore’s almost prosaic attention to the structure of the nautilus’s shell— its “white outside and smooth- / edged inner surface / glossy as the sea”— reads like a description of the animal that might be found in a volume on marine biology. However, Moore’s poem far exceeds the writing of the average marine biologist, for the empirical quality of the poem’s descriptions are always elevated by lyrical counterpoints and thus lifted into the diction of verse. Moore’s syllabic lines dart from her exact description of how the nautilus “constructs its thin glass-like shell” to such lyrical moments as “her perishable / souvenir of hope ….” This is not scientific prose cut into lines of verse, but verse making superb that which scientific prose generally conveys without lyricism. Moore does not merely engage in empirical descriptions; she makes empirical descriptions poetic. That is to say, her poem engages in an empirical essentialism that can be distinguished from the essentialisms of Melville and Carroll: while the earlier poets concern themselves with the depth of the photographic subject and how this depth is revealed through photography, Moore’s essentialism is purely a matter of reading the surface of the thing itself so as to record exactly what that surface expresses. In other words, there is nothing of the intrinsic in Moore’s descriptions of the nautilus. Rather, hers is a poem that identifies the external activities and characteristics of the animal as examples of a greater truth. Moore’s attention to the extrinsic is something that Randall Jarrell has recognized in his own examinations of Moore’s poems: Miss Moore realizes that there is no such thing as the Ding an Sich, that the relations are the thing; that the outside, looked at hard enough, is the inside; that the wrinkles are only the erosion of habitual emotion. She shows that everything is related to everything else, by comparing everything to everything else; no one has compared successfully more disparate objects. She has as careful and acute an eye as anybody alive, and almost as good a tongue: so that when she describes something, a carrot, it is as if she had taken the carrot’s cries in some final crisis, cries that hold in themselves a whole mode of existence. (Jarrell 1953, 164–5) While Melville and Carroll may be said to acknowledge and to describe Kant’s conception of the Ding an Sich (ie. the intrinsic or essential qualities of a thing), as Jarrell recognizes, Moore discovers the nature

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of a thing in its extrinsic aspects. The discovery process accounts for Moore’s scrupulous attention to detail. For her, in every tiny operation of the nautilus, a greater truth is expressed. Moore’s empirical essentialism would seem to be inspired by the essentialism of the animal documentary, which selects one member of a species, describing the various aspects of its behavior as exemplifying the behavior of the whole species. This kind of essentialism does not involve the intrinsic aspects of one individual, but rather manifestations of the specimen’s instincts and how these instincts may be generally found throughout the species. Adopting the documentary’s tactic, Moore includes nothing in her poem to suggest that the nautilus she describes is one particular nautilus in one particular location. There is no narrative here, nor any sense of occasion. Instead, it is suggested that this nautilus inhabits the general habitat that all nautili inhabit, the open sea, and that its activities are the activities of all female nautili. Moore’s vision is symptomatic of yet another facet of photography’s influence on 20th- and 21st-century thought. Allowing visual access to the minute and foreign realities of the animal world, photography allows humans to consider that world in relation to our own. Unlike the fable, which is the projection of a human ethics onto the universe of animals, or the romantic vision, which is a projection of a human conception of the idyllic into the animal world, a poem such as Moore’s involves locating in a world that is wholly un-human that which resembles human activity, and drawing a parallel between the un-human and the human. This is Moore’s naturalism. The nature of this parallel is reflected in the way Moore describes the act of seeing—or, more accurately, the fact that she makes virtually no reference to sight at all. Moore’s handling of sight may be better understood by comparing it with Melville’s descriptions of “looking,” “tracing” and “scanning.” Through the four stanzas of his poem, Melville instructs his reader to see in these three different ways. Such instructions suggest that Melville would offer his reader a catechism in empirical analysis, but, as we have already observed, the irony of Melville’s catechism is that the poetic speaker spends more time instructing than he does describing, and, as there is no photograph accompanying his instructions, his poem is finally more of a rhetorical exercise than any real catechism. The reason for this is, of course, because Melville is finally uninterested in the surface of Brady’s photograph. He is interested in what lies beneath the surface. Like the force that lies

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behind the White Whale in Melville’s Moby Dick, the force that lies behind the Corps Commander is finally the Ding an Sich that accounts for the physical countenance of the man. Moore’s attitude toward seeing differs greatly from Melville’s. This is foremost the case because Moore’s poem does not call on her readers to look. Instead, her speaker describes what there is to be seen. In this way, she implies the kind of sight she would have us engage in: an intense and scientific vision that pays heed to every detail. By advocating this intense vision, Moore’s poem is also a catechism on seeing. That Moore does not interrupt this catechism by bidding her readers to look only serves to enhance the lesson. And this lesson is to watch, for Moore’s “The Paper Nautilus” is foremost a meditation on “watching”: as Hercules, bitten by a crab loyal to the hydra, was hindered to succeed, the intensively watched eggs coming from the shell free it when they are freed— leaving its wasp-nest flaws of white on white, and closelaid Ionic chiton-folds like the lines in the mane of a Parthenon horse, round which the arms had wound themselves as if they knew love is the only fortress strong enough to trust to. The key phrase in this passage is “intensively watched,” for, as the paper nautilus intensively watches its eggs, so Moore intensively watches the nautilus, and, as we join her in the vigil, we share in the watching of watching. One of the implications of this process is that sight becomes a framing agent; the gaze of the poet creates a frame around the nautilus just as the gaze of the nautilus creates a frame around its eggs. Is it conceivable that its eggs watch something as well, and so create a frame around that thing? We are not told this, but there is a sense of a

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continuum of observation: a continuum that suggests another parallel between the human world and the nautilus. The parallel that Moore draws between human watching and the watching of the nautilus radically departs from the Judeo-Christian perspective of humanity and its relationship to animals and to God, and this departure further distinguishes Moore’s poem from Melville’s. Melville founded his vision on a traditional Christian idea of the universe. In this conception, one does not look to Nature as a source of perfection. Rather, one turns to liturgical models. Christ is the model for human perfection, as alluded to in Melville’s poem. Thus, in this traditional model, the animals inhabit the lowest level of spiritual perfection. According to Moore, however, this is not the case. Rather, perfection is to be found in the instinctual intensity of the animal world. The nautilus is not one representative of one aspect of love. It is the animal of love. Presenting the animal in this way, Moore subscribes to an Emersonian view in which one gains wisdom from the world by watching it “under the light of an idea”: The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common. What is a day? What is a year? What is summer? What is woman? What is a child? What is sleep? To our blindness, these things seem unaffecting. We make fables to hide the baldness of the fact and conform it, as we say, to the higher law of the mind. But when the fact is seen under the light of an idea, the gaudy fable fades and shrivels. We behold the real higher law. To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of fables. (Emerson 1981, 49) Moore’s poem is a testament to Emerson’s conception of wisdom and facts. By studying the paper nautilus with the intensity she does, Moore would describe the “real law” that the actions of the nautilus express. Moore does not merely seek to equate the watching of the nautilus with human watching. On the contrary, the “watching” of the watchful nautilus surpasses our ability to watch and, possibly, even to love, in that it performs both of these acts with an instinctual “intensity.” We whose “hopes / are shaped by mercenaries … entrapped by / teatime fame and by / commuters’ comforts … ” are feeble watchers compared with the nautilus. Our desires and what we see correspond with Emerson’s conception of “fables.” In some sense, we might accuse Moore’s poem of being overly simplistic in the distinction that it makes between the human world and the nautilus’s. There is an air of instruction that simplifies the complexity

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of human relationships, suggesting that the mercenaries and tea times of the human world are circumstances of man’s utter foolishness. Like the family in Carroll’s poem, humans are fops compared with the nautilus. We might even be said to be poor Christians, unable as we are to keep the vigil Christ calls on us to keep, at least in comparison with the nautilus. However, while Moore’s poem suggests these human deficiencies, her own intense study of the nautilus implies that humanity’s ability to watch is not entirely foiled by inattention. The catechism that Moore’s poem calls on its reader to engage in involves an intense watchfulness. This watchfulness entails a mystical sort of vigilance, which may be related to the vigilance described by Meister Eckhart: We should make good use of our reason in all our works and in all things and have a clear understanding of ourselves and our inner nature, grasping God in all things and in the highest possible manner, for we should be as our Lord told us: “You should be like those who at all times watch and wait for their Lord.” Truly such a vigilant people are alert and on the watch for their Lord for whom they wait; they look to see if He is not by some chance concealed in what befalls them, however strange it may be to them. So we should consciously look out for our Lord in all things. This demands much effort, and must cost all of what our senses and facilities are capable of. But this is the right thing for us to do so that we grasp God in the same way in all things and find him equally everywhere. (Eckhart 1994, 12–13) Moore’s poem may be said to instruct its readers in a way that is similar to Eckhart’s instruction to his pupils. In the minute world of the nautilus, Moore recognizes something pure and, in some sense, sacred. What is the nautilus but the avatar of the Virgin? And what are her eggs but the infant Christ? In this observation, we may extrapolate beyond the bounds of Moore’s own poem, and yet we are not so far afield. In their purity, the Virgin and Christ are to the Christian the ultimate personages of watchfulness and love. The fact that humanity has invented a device (the camera) that enables us to keep the vigils that Eckhart and Moore describe demonstrates the extent to which humanity has been engaged in enhancing its ability to watch. While it begins with a critique of human inattention, then, Moore’s poem is an implicit celebration of human vision, and possibly even of the invention that has extended human vision far beyond that of any

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other animal: photography. Relating the watchful love of the nautilus, Moore relates as well how such a love can be observed through the watchful magnifications of a camera. Though Moore makes no allusion to the medium that her poem celebrates, her attention is fixed on the message of this medium. As Marshall McLuhan so famously maintained, “the medium is the message.” Applied to Moore’s poem, McLuhan’s declaration allows us to understand how the celebration of a message is also a celebration of the medium that delivers it. By appreciating how Moore’s poem is dependent upon the medium of photography, we can appreciate suppressed ekphrasis as a subclass of the chronotope of the photograph. Like Benjamin before the fishwife, Melville before the Corps Commander or Larkin before the young girl’s album, Moore’s speaker encounters the nautilus. However, we must distinguish Moore’s poem from these encounters as well. While Benjamin and the speakers of Melville and Larkin may be said to experience both the space and the time of their subjects, Moore experiences only the nautilus’s space, because there is no sense of time in this poem, and for good reason: the images of an animal documentary are inherently timeless, at least in the sense of human time and its history, for animals live outside of the consciousness of human history. Staring into their photographs, we stare into timeless examples of specimens and thus we come to share in their timelessness. This timelessness may be said to distinguish Moore’s vision from a vision such as Melville’s, and, for that matter, from the vision of most of the poets dealt with in this study. Moore’s speaker looks through photographs to escape time. Even Melville’s description of the spirit of the Corps Commander does not escape time so thoroughly, as the poem is a panegyric for a hero, and so naturally must allude to the history of the hero’s deeds. The timelessness of Moore’s poem also accounts for its impeccable ethics, for suppressed ekphrases are at risk of encountering ethical problems when they engage in descriptions of photographs that record human history. As we will see in the following section’s discussion of Seamus Heaney’s “The Grauballe Man,” when a poem describes such photographs, it runs the risk of simplifying what they record and diminishing complex historical facts by reducing them to mere surface details. Moore never runs this risk, as her suppressed ekphrasis of the nautilus presents an animal that cannot be historically misrepresented and whose surface details, as recorded by a camera, provide Moore with a powerful metaphor for love and watchfulness: one that contrasts with “mercenaries” and “teatime fame.”

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Seeing Through an Opaque Repose: Seamus Heaney’s “The Grauballe Man” As acknowledged in the previous section, a poem such as Moore’s “Paper Nautilus” suppresses its ekphrastic sources to claim the experience of watching the subject firsthand. In itself, such a suppression does not necessarily entail any form of deceit on the part of the writer. Rather, it corresponds with modern practices of seeing, as these practices have become mediated through photography. Furthermore, a poem such as Moore’s can be regarded as something of a quest for a timeless innocence: an innocence that is conveyed by suppressing the medium that afforded the poet access to it. However, the suppression of photography and its ekphrasis is not always reserved for photographs of animals and their timeless innocence. Often, images from the human, historical world are ekphrastically suppressed. In such cases, the writers who describe the photographs claim the content or experiences represented by these images as lived-experiences. Unlike Moore’s poem, such suppressed ekphrases are problematic, in that they allow a writer to perform the work of a witness without having been present for whatever he or she claims to have witnessed. Of course, to suggest that a writer must be present at the event he or she describes is absurd. Homer was not present at Troy, nor Shakespeare at Agincourt, and these facts do not hinder the immense value of the poets’ works. Yet, in the literature of the 20th and the 21st centuries, the role of the writer-witness has become synonymous with the authenticity and sincerity of the text. And nowhere is this more the case than in poetry. As our fascination with the poets of the First World War and the Holocaust attests, the emotional impact of a work is often enhanced by the reader’s knowledge that the work is autobiographical. In itself, the fact is problematic: would the revelation that Wilfred Owen and Paul Celan used photographs to write about the trenches and the concentration camps lessen the quality of their poems? One hastens to answer “no,” recognizing that to suggest a writer must relate only his or her own lived experience places absurd restrictions upon what Wallace Stevens terms “the supreme fiction,” reducing this fiction to a level of firsthand reportage. Nevertheless, suppressed ekphrasis remains at odds with authenticity in the way that voyeurism remains at odds with participation. The issue creates a tension that can be traced through any number of literary works, but, for the sake of this study, I want to concentrate

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on Seamus Heaney’s poem “The Grauballe Man.” The poem belongs to a sequence of poems that have collectively become known as Heaney’s “Bog Poems.” Published in Heaney’s 1975 collection North, The Bog Poems feature descriptions of Iron Age mummies that were exhumed from peat bogs in Denmark and Northern Germany. In themselves, the mummies are rich subjects; the circumstances of their deaths involve the practices of human sacrifice in one of the earliest cultures of Europe. In his poems, Heaney describes the historical significance of these sacrifices, but, in addition, he also uses the mummies as emblems of the political situation of his own Northern Ireland in the 1970s. In this way, The Bog Poems draw a parallel between the earliest manifestations of Northern European culture and the more recent. While The Bog Poems have attracted a surfeit of critical attention, what is of interest in the context of this study is the way that the poems are, in fact, suppressed ekphrases of photographs. “The Grauballe Man” and the other Bog Poems describe the mummies as they appear in P.V. Glob’s book The Bog People. Heaney acknowledges this fact in the essay he wrote about the composition of the poems, “Feelings into Words” (Heaney 1980, 59). With this in mind, one might term the entire sequence of The Bog Poems suppressed ekphrases, and so one might select any of these poems for examination here; however, I have chosen to focus on “The Grauballe Man,” for the poem is not entirely a suppressed ekphrasis. Rather, it is the only one of The Bog Poems that acknowledges the medium by which Heaney saw the mummies. The poem is, then, something of an admission. Revealing the source of Heaney’s vision, it also reveals that Heaney used Glob’s photographs in a manner similar to Moore’s possible use of the photographic images of the nautilus. Like Moore, Heaney sees through these images. Unlike Moore’s case, however, what Heaney sees and what he comes to claim about this vision raises certain problems of authenticity. Comparing photographs of the mummies with the Hellenistic sculpture The Dying Gaul and also with the victims of the revenge killings of his own Northern Ireland, Heaney would construct a pantheon of GallicCeltic victims. His poem attempts to be a vessel inside which the history of the Gallic-Celtic culture can be reviewed. However, this project runs the risk of reducing the significance of each victim by describing all these victims collectively as beautiful. While such aesthetic reductions are not necessarily the product of seeing by means of photographs, it may be the case that the medium tempts such a reduction. Heaney’s

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speaker would seem to have studied not only Glob’s photographs of the Grauballe Man but also the photographs of The Dying Gaul that appear in T.G.E. Powell’s book The Celts, as well as David Jones’s essay, “The Dying Gaul.” He would also seem to have studied press photographs of the violence in Northern Ireland, and, in so doing, the poetic speaker is able to juxtapose the various images in ways that render them ­aesthetically comparable. The Grauballe Man As if he had been poured in tar, he lies on a pillow of turf and seems to weep the black river of himself. The grain of his wrists is like bog oak, the ball of his heel like a basalt egg. His instep has shrunk cold as a swan’s foot or a wet swamp root. His hips are the ridge and purse of a mussel, his spine an eel arrested under a glisten of mud. The head lifts, the chin is a visor raised above the vent of his slashed throat that has tanned and toughened. The cured wound opens inwards to a dark elderberry place.

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Who will say ‘corpse’ to his vivid cast? Who will say ‘body’ to his opaque repose? And his rusted hair, a mat unlikely as a foetus’s. I first saw his twisted face in a photograph, a head and shoulder out of the peat, bruised like a forceps baby, but now he lies perfected in my memory, down to the red horn of his nails, hung in the scales with beauty and atrocity: with the Dying Gaul too strictly compassed on his shield, with the actual weight of each hooded victim, lashed and dumped. Much may be said of the similarity between Moore’s “Nautilus” and Heaney’s “Grauballe Man.” Like Moore’s descriptions, Heaney’s are scrupulously precise. Glancing at a photograph of the mummy (Figure 12), one is struck by the way the first 40 lines of Heaney’s poem illuminate the mummy’s every detail. From Heaney’s descriptions of the mummy as being “poured in tar” with “the ball of his foot like a basalt egg” to the wound in the mummy’s throat like “an elderberry place,” Heaney presents us with nothing less than the most vivid enargeia. What accounts for this lushness is the way Heaney weaves together

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Figure 12  Museum Collection Photograph, “Grauballe Man”

the metaphorical with the synecdochic. Each of Heaney’s comparisons and analogies stems from recognizing the similarity between the mummy and part of the environment from which it was exhumed. As discussed in the examination of Lewis Carroll’s poem, such synecdoche is symptomatic of the ekphrasis of photography. In that discussion, I cited Roman Jakobson’s examination of the prose of Pasternak, specifically Jakobson’s observation that Pasternak’s fiction is dependent upon synecdoches, as these figures allow him to illustrate how his characters are “condemned” to their environments. Studying Glob’s photographs of the exhumation of the mummy, Heaney had insights into how the mummy was condemned to the bog. The access allowed him to make the most compelling description of the poem of the mummy’s “birth” from the peat: And his rusted hair, a mat unlikely as a foetus’s. I first saw his twisted face in a photograph, a head and shoulder out of the peat, bruised like a forceps baby …

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Figure 13  P.V. Glob, “Grauballe Man’s excavation,” 1952

It hardly seems accidental that in the middle of this description of how the mummy was born “like a forceps baby” Heaney should allude to the photographic source of his vision. The image of the birth is displayed quite vividly in one of the photographs from Glob’s book (Figure 13). Like Moore’s poem, Heaney’s is something of a celebration of watchfulness. Heaney’s attention to detail and metaphorical similarity recognizes the mummy as an object whose extrinsic elements express a greater truth. Furthermore, like Moore and Melville, Heaney also invokes a scientific field in which to ground his observations—archeology. Describing the mummy precisely, Heaney’s speaker becomes something of a forensic expert on its remains, observing in them the influences of the environment from which the remains were exhumed. The approach inspires yet another comparison, this time with Whitman’s poem: in his capacity as archeologist, Heaney’s speaker figures as yet another cicerone of yet another gallery, or, should we say, he figures as a cicerone of an archeological museum. Inside this museum, Heaney’s ciceronearcheologist guides us through the bog people’s “groupings of death,” to use Whitman’s phrase. In addition to taking the part of an archeologist, Heaney’s speaker also takes the part of a police detective who relates the forensic evidence documented in a photograph from a crime scene. Reporting about the mummy as if it were a murder victim puts it on a par with the murder victims of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Heaney’s description of

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how the mummy lies on the peat alludes to the way a modern-day victim lies on the streets of Derry or Belfast. But the photographs of the mummy are not merely images from a crime scene; they are also photographs that engage in what Roland Barthes terms as “horror.” For Barthes, horrific photographs are those of corpses, because such photographs “certif[y] that the corpse is alive, as corpse: it is the living image of a dead thing” (Barthes 1980, 79). Heaney’s poem activates this horror, in that, through its rhetoric, it strives to reanimate the mummy. The reanimation is accomplished in part by the poem’s description of the mummy’s “birth” from the peat, but it is equally accomplished by the speaker’s challenge to the reader: Who will say ‘corpse’ to his vivid cast? Who will say ‘body’ to his opaque repose? Here is another instance of the sort of apostrophes we have seen in the writings of Benjamin, Berger, Gurney and Hardy: intensely describing Glob’s photograph, Heaney turns from the reader. Then, he seems to turn back to us again. In this turning back, he defies us to contradict his assertions about the mummy’s life. The complexity of the stanza derives from its ability to both introduce the challenge and simultaneously win the argument that the challenge initiates. The feat is managed by way of the stanza’s two rhetorical questions. As with all rhetorical questions, each of these allows only one answer: “No one may call the mummy a ‘body’ or a ‘corpse’,” for Heaney’s description and perspective leave no room for such objections. But, beyond the strategic use of these questions, Heaney skillfully employs a linguistic precision that implies the life of the mummy. Notice how the noun phrases that end the stanza’s second and fourth lines imply this life. The first of these phrases is “his vivid cast.” Such a phrase is loaded with double entendre. The word “vivid” alone connects with the notions of life (Latin vivere) and sight (Latin videre). Hence, the word suggests that, in vividly seeing/imagining the mummy, our eyes/ imaginations lend it life. The suggestion is furthered by the word “cast.” The ambiguity of the word marks what might be the greatest moment in the poem, for the word “cast” is used both to describe the action of casting

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Figure 14  Unknown photographer, “The Dying Gaul”

a bronze sculpture and the name that is applied to such a sculpture once it is completed. The implication is that the mummy is the “cast” from which a bronze form is realized as well as the realization of such a cast. The allusion to sculpture is less fanciful than it might first seem. By alluding to the realization of such bronzes, Heaney is describing, in fact, the leathery bronze-colored skin of the actual mummy: its “cast.” In itself, the description is gorgeously precise, but we should not relegate it to mere ekphrastic detail. The allusion to sculpture prepares us for the parallel Heaney draws between the mummy and The Dying Gaul (Figure 14) in the last stanzas of the poem. Today, The Dying Gaul is known as a Roman marble, but the original sculpture was a Hellenistic bronze (now lost): a bronze that would have been cast and that afforded Roman antiquity with a model to copy in marble. The implication of Heaney’s word “cast” is that the Grauballe Man might be said to have “cast” himself into art and thus to have become an acheiropoietic object. Furthermore, in the final stanzas of the poem, Heaney suggests that, like the Roman copies of the original bronze, the victims of the Troubles are themselves copies of the Grauballe Man: copies “cast” from the mummy’s original mold. The word “cast” has one further significance. It invokes the image of dice, and thus alludes to chance. Chance is also involved in the mummy’s creation. The Iron Age peoples did not practice formal mummification. Rather, the corpse of the Grauballe Man happened to be “dumped” (“cast”) in a locale that could preserve it (the bog). The mummy is the agent of chance as well as fate. Whoever the Grauballe Man was, he

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was undoubtedly selected for death by some form of chance, whether it entailed a drawing by lot or the bad luck of being taken as a prisoner of war. As Glob relates, often these sacrificial victims were prisoners of war, and so their sacrifice also entailed the misfortunes of war. Their situation corresponds with that of the modern-day victims of Heaney’s own country. The random circumstances of the Grauballe Man’s death parallel the circumstances of the victims of the violence in Northern Ireland: victims whose fate Heaney documents in other poems in North, such as “Casualty,” which relates the circumstances surrounding the death of innocent bystanders. Of course, the word “cast” also signifies movement: a thing that can “cast” itself is a thing that can move, as, for example, “I cast myself upon the floor.” To suggest that the mummy “cast” itself implies that it is alive. This suggestion is furthered in the stanza’s second question with its equally complex noun phrase: “opaque repose.” Such a phrase presents the idea of stilled action. The mummy is not dead; it is at rest, for the dead do not “repose”: they lie, and, in their lying, the dead do not move. Heaney is cunningly aware of this distinction, as he is equally aware of the vitality of the prefix “re-” in the word “repose.” “Re-” is the prefix that engenders such words as “rebirth,” “resurrection” and “redeem.” Coupled with the word “pose”—a word that applies to photographic portraiture— the prefix figures the Grauballe Man as having been revived through Glob’s photographs of him. Thus, challenging us to call the reposing Grauballe Man a “body” amounts to challenging us to deny that the mummy poses for its photograph. To these close readings, I would add one more observation. This pertains to the adjective “opaque.” I would contrast the adjective with Melville’s various descriptions of the Corps Commander. Melville relates how the photograph of the Corps Commander provides a vista into the Sacrament of the man. The implication, then, is that the man’s photograph is something of a spiritual x-ray. Studying the image, Melville sees through its surface into its depth. In his poem, Heaney makes no such suggestion. Rather, the opacity of the mummy denies Heaney access into whatever Sacrament might be within it. However, even while Heaney relates how he cannot see into the mummy, he does not deny the possibility that there might be some essence within it. As Helen Vendler recognizes, Heaney is attempting to lend to the bog people “the reliquary air of the preserved and exhibited bodies of Catholic saints” (Vendler 1988, 43). Like the bones of saints laid to rest

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in medieval reliquaries, the mummies are for Heaney representatives of a world beyond this one: a passage or doorway into the darkness of the bog. As such, their physical remains are linked to a spiritual essence that Heaney’s poems celebrate as a demiurge of violence that is not universal but regional. Heaney’s endeavor to describe this opacity and the demiurge that it encrypts supports his overall project in The Bog Poems: to provide a greater context for the modern violence of Northern Ireland. This greater context surpasses the realities of political and religious sectarianism and the random killings that such sectarianism produces. Heaney’s poems, therefore, liken this violence to the human sacrifices of Iron Age religion. As Glob’s book relates, the Iron Age peoples performed sacrifices in order to pay homage to their gods: gods who, upon receiving their victims, repaid the community by granting it a good harvest. These sacrifices, then, were conceived of as a mechanism of rebirth: the victim was reborn in the form of the harvest in the way the Fisher King and Adonis are reborn. The death of the Iron Age victims, then, was a benefit to the community as a whole (Glob 1969, 144–67). Heaney’s poems would re-enact such sacrifices in words. His re-enactment applies both to the mummy and the modern victims. Describing how the Grauballe Man is born from the peat, Heaney describes how the mummy becomes an acheiropoietos for all victims of such violence; thus, the mummy provides the community of Northern Ireland with the benefit of a cultural emblem: an emblem replete with a heritage in which the modern-day victims become, in some sense, descendants of the mummy. Heaney expands on this theme by invoking elements of the Gallic tradition to establish the mummy as being part of the Gallic heritage of culture and art: but now he lies perfected in my memory, down to the red horn of his nails, hung in the scales with beauty and atrocity: with the Dying Gaul too strictly compassed

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The key words in this passage are “scales” and “shield,” in that these two words provide Heaney with a pair of concrete images for the tradition that he is alluding to: a tradition that, as David Jones observes, begins in Book VIII of Virgil’s Aeneid, in which Virgil describes one of the scenes on the Shield of Aeneas. In the passage, Virgil relates how the early Roman Republic was assaulted by Gallic tribesmen, who carried war shields: Then Rome was poor; and there you might behold The palace thatched with straw, now roofed with gold. Silver goose before the shining gate There flew, and by her cackle saved the state. She told the Gauls’ approach: the approaching Gauls, Obscure in night, ascend and seize the walls. (Dryden 1997, vol. 6 The Aeneid, lines 869–74) In his essay “The Dying Gaul,” Jones makes much of this passage, recognizing that the Gallic people have always been described as a warlike race that, time and time again, has been defeated by the expanding Latin and Anglo-Saxon races. Jones describes “The Gallic Defeat Tradition” (Jones 1978, 50–8) as being manifest throughout the history of the Gallic peoples. However, where he finds it best exemplified is in The Dying Gaul, the Hellenistic sculpture from the 3rd century BC. Praising T.G.E. Powell’s book The Celts, Jones recognizes that Powell’s photographs of the sculpture are some of the few to have photographed it from above, and thus are some of the few to have shown the war shield that The Dying Gaul lies on (Figure 14). It is this image of the shield that enables Heaney to draw the simile of the scales. In effect, the shield becomes equated with one side of a balancing scale, and thus the “turf” on which the Grauballe Man reposes becomes the other side of that scale. In comparing the Grauballe Man with a photograph of The Dying Gaul, Heaney both reiterates, then, Jones’s conception of the defeat tradition and provides the tradition with yet another emblem: the mummy

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itself. Arguably, Heaney may be said to have identified a truer emblem than The Dying Gaul. While King Attalos of Asia Minor commissioned a non-Gallic artist to make the original bronze in the 3rd century BC, the Grauballe Man and the other mummies are objects made of and by the Gallic people themselves. Including the modern victims in the comparison, Heaney includes them also in the larger Gallic tradition, suggesting that they are one more aspect of the greater defeat the Gallic peoples have been experiencing since antiquity. Finally, as the poem makes these connections and, in some sense, can be said to mourn these defeats, it also canonizes the various emblems of the tradition by describing these emblems via ekphrasis. This canonization creates, of course, another allusion; with its interlocking quatrains of accentual trimeters, “The Grauballe Man” echoes another Gallic work: William Butler Yeats’s poem “Easter 1916.” In his poem, Yeats elegizes the leaders of the Easter Rebellion: another instance of Gallic violence, in which, in 1916, Irish nationalists attempted to seize control of inner-city Dublin only to be captured by the British army and executed. As Yeats’s poem relates, from the deaths of leading Irish Nationalists “a terrible beauty is born” (Yeats 1996, 180–2). In his description of this beauty, Yeats suggests that Irish culture does forge some art from its violent nature. Like Heaney, Yeats makes no attempt to judge this culture, only to relate the consequences of its violence. In many respects, Heaney’s problematic comparisons are but a continuation of Yeats’s, as Heaney’s elegy for the “next victim” is but a continuation of Yeats’s elegy for the Nationalists. Thus, “The Grauballe Man” becomes a conduit or verbal shrine for the Gallic tradition. Inside this shrine, the Bog People, Virgil’s Aeneid, Yeats’s poem, Jones’s essay and the modern victims of the Troubles come together in an aggregate of cultural significance. Heaney’s poem, then, is something of a tour de force. However, perhaps it is the verbal dexterity and polish of the poem that leads to my chief observation about “The Grauballe Man” in the context of suppressed ekphrasis: while there can be little question about the quality of Heaney’s poetic effects, the parallels drawn in the poem between the prehistoric and the contemporary deaths are ultimately problematic. They prompt such questions as: in what sense do the deaths of these modern victims compare to the death of the Grauballe Man? The motivations of the Iron Age peoples were founded on a belief that one death resulted in life for all. The tit-for-tat killings of

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various Protestant and Catholic factions in Northern Ireland are, at best, killings done under the circumstances of a civil war; at worst, killings for killing’s sake. Furthermore, while the Iron Age peoples conceived of human sacrifice as leading to the regeneration of Nature, what rebirth is afforded these modern victims? And, for that matter, for the mummy itself? Is the Grauballe Man reborn from the bog? And thus is it “a terrible beauty”? Or is it nothing more than the twisted remains of an exhumed corpse? Finally, does Heaney imply that one day in a future era someone will exhume the bodies of the victims from Bloody Sunday and place these corpses on display as being emblematic of Northern European culture? The poem may provoke such questions in its readers, but it is not designed to answer them. However, even while the poetic speaker may assume the role of a provocateur, the sense of resolution that finishes the poem obscures the degree to which these provocations are presented. Invoking the image of the “scales,” Heaney suggests that there is a balance that weighs all Gauls as equals. I would argue that the convenience of this series of comparisons stems not from the Gallic tradition so much as from the poem’s ekphrastic sources: “I first saw his twisted face / in a photograph … / but now he lies / perfected in my memory …,” admits the speaker. This disclosure calls our attention to the nature of the comparisons Heaney makes between the mummy, the statue and the modern victims: looking at Glob’s photographs of the Grauballe Man, as well as, presumably, Powell’s photographs of the sculpture and press clippings from the newspapers, Heaney’s speaker recognizes that the victims are similar in appearance. As a brief examination of the photographs of victims from the Bloody Sunday massacre reveals, the dead of 1972 resemble the mummy and the statue, if only in the respect that they are all fallen figures, all dead or dying and all Gauls. I make this observation not to suggest that Heaney had not experienced the Troubles of Northern Ireland firsthand, nor to suggest that he did not see The Dying Gaul or the Grauballe Man firsthand. However, his speaker’s admission that he first saw the mummy in a photograph opens the door for other possibilities. Certainly, Heaney is aware of David Jones’s essay, so much so that his poem is one protracted allusion to it. Evoking Jones’s essay, the poem engages in the same practice: that is, it engages in the ekphrasis of photographs, for, just as Jones describes Powell’s images, so Heaney describes Glob’s. With these ekphrastic aspects in the background of the poem’s composition, it is not difficult

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Figure 15  Gilles Peress, “Northern Ireland, Londonderry, Bloody Sunday,” 1972

to conceive of a third ekphrastic source: one such as Gilles Peress’s photograph of a fallen victim from Bloody Sunday (Figure 15). As Susan Sontag observes, photography naturally lends itself to reductive aesthetics. Regarding the Surrealist experiments of the 1920s as failures compared with the effect of “straight photography,” Sontag observes that placing two “straight photographs” of two unlike things side by side replaces the original significance of each of these subjects, creating a surreal confluence that invariably comes to be aesthetic. “It is photography,” writes Sontag, “that has best shown how to juxtapose the sewing machine and the umbrella, whose fortuitous encounter was hailed by the great Surrealist poet as an epitome of the beautiful” (Sontag 1989, 52–3). The beauty that Sontag describes calls to mind what is troubling about Heaney’s poem: like the sewing machine and the umbrella, the photographs of the Grauballe Man, The Dying Gaul and the modern victims can be said to form “the epitome of the beautiful.” This phenomenon corresponds to the ethical concerns about Heaney’s poem expressed by Edna Longley. In her description of what she terms “Heaney’s voyeurism,” Longley observes that, in the poem, “beauty on the whole has outweighed atrocity … ” (Longley 1985, 76).

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Longley’s concern seems justified. “The Grauballe Man” is embroiled in an ethical dilemma involving the issue of authenticity versus suppressed ekphrasis, and it prompts the questions: Does Heaney misrepresent the historical circumstances in his poem? Are the modern victims reduced to art? In one respect, my questions are meant to interrogate “The Grauballe Man” alone. But, in another, they apply to the ethical aporia that lies at the heart of Western literature after the invention of the camera. Photography teaches us to understand by sight and explain by comparison. Such a constellation of understanding and explanation is inherently positivistic and limiting. One has only to consider Edward Steichen’s famous 1955 photograph exhibition, The Family of Man, to recognize how dynamic and widespread such thinking has been and is in the West. Showing some 500 photographs of people living and working in 68 different countries, The Family of Man sought to “mirror of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world” (Steichen 1955, 31). While touching in themselves, Steichen’s aims are reductive, for they oversimplify the complexities of class, race, religion and history, suggesting that the ethos that stands behind such exhibitions is shared by one and all. Heaney’s poem presents something of the same danger, for it suggests a “family of Gauls” whose history and cultural tendencies are the same. If one can make a generalization about suppressed ekphrases, then, it might be that using photographs to see the world diminishes our ability to distinguish between individual objects and events. Sontag alludes to this problem throughout On Photography: “The vast photographic catalogue of misery and injustice throughout the world,” writes Sontag, “has given everyone a certain familiarity with atrocity, making the horrible seem more ordinary—making it appear familiar, remote (‘it’s only a photograph’), inevitable” (Sontag 1989, 21). There is something of this familiarity with atrocity in suppressed ekphrases such as Heaney’s: an implication that no matter how horrific the next victim’s body may be, it is only a photograph in a newspaper in the way that the image of The Dying Gaul is only a photograph in an art history book and the image of the Grauballe Man mummy is only a photograph from an archeological study. Heaney certainly did not set out to diminish the horrific. In writing the poem, he undoubtedly struggled to unite the Gallic tradition, art and history into a lyrical space. However, “The Grauballe Man” derives its final comparisons from visual similarities. Celebrating its

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profundity, then, we may be guilty of celebrating our own oversimplified understanding of the world: oversimplified because, like the poem, this understanding is based on suppressed photographs. The role that suppressed ekphrases play in contemporary literature cannot be underestimated. These suppressions amount to a suppression of the very elements by which modernity sees. In her examination of photography’s influence on Victorian fiction, Nancy Armstrong addresses the issue of suppression, recognizing it as involving a reversal of “the traditional relationship between image and object observed,” because, as she goes on to write, “the so-called material world to which Victorians were apparently so committed was one that they knew chiefly through transparent images, images which in turn seemed to bring them conceptual and even physical control over that world” (Armstrong 1999,  4). Recognizing this reversal as having fundamental effects on Victorian fiction, Armstrong founds her arguments on three propositions: Proposition 1: By the mid-1850s, fiction was already promising to put readers in touch with the world itself by supplying them with a certain kind of visual information. Proposition 2: In so doing, fiction equated seeing with knowing and made visual information the basis for the intelligibility of a verbal narrative. Proposition 3: In order to be realistic, literary realism referenced a world of objects that either had been or could be photographed. (Armstrong 1999, 7) To this list, I would add a fourth proposition: that in order to maintain the illusion of realism, the literature of the 19th century propagated the suppression of the medium it referenced, namely photography. For, if the medium were alluded to in any way, “the intelligibility of a verbal narrative” would have been compromised. As this chapter demonstrates, the situation may not have changed. Modern and contemporary literary output seemingly continues to suppress its photographic methods of seeing.

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The Ekphrasis of Iconic Photographs The Ekphrasis of Iconic Photographs

Marilyn Monroe, Adolf Hitler, the atomic blast over Hiroshima, the Hindenburg disaster, the assassination of John F. Kennedy—such people and events are known to us by way of iconic photographs. However, we generally suppress this fact. Like the speakers of Moore’s and Heaney’s poems, we may choose, subconsciously or not, to ignore the sources of our knowledge and describe images of such people and events as though they were part of our personal experiences, part of our memories. We live, therefore, it might be said, in a continual state of suppressed ekphrasis. However, there is an irony to this situation: an irony that distinguishes our attitudes toward iconic photographs from the attitudes expressed by the speakers of Moore’s and Heaney’s poems. In incorporating iconic imagery into our storehouse of personal references, we simultaneously form a bond with every other person who does the same. We take part in the collective memory of visual culture, which functions both historically and symbolically. Disseminated through books, newspapers, magazines, television and the Internet, photographic representations have become part of a global visual repertoire. Thus, our private understanding of them is joined with that of a worldwide public. Over the past decades, the term “visual culture” has become an increasingly common way of referring to global society’s present-day preoccupation with images. Ours is a visual culture, and thus it is an iconophilic one. However, the term originates from the work of such critics as W.J.T. Mitchell, who use it in an anthropological sense. Mitchell in particular employs the term to describe “the whole set of mediations that make [social] relations possible”:

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Raymond Williams suggests we think of society as designating the whole realm of relations among persons, classes, groupings, i.e., so-called face-to-face relations, or immediate relations. Culture is the structure of symbols, images, and mediations that make a society possible. The concepts are interdependent: you could not have a society that did not have a culture, and a culture is an expression of social relations. However, the culture is not the same thing as the society: society consists in relations among people, culture the whole set of mediations that make those relations possible—or (equally important) impossible. Visual culture is what makes possible a society of people with eyes. (Dikovitskaya, 2005, 57) The distinction that Mitchell makes between society and culture allows us to understand a culture as a system or matrix in which certain traditions, discourses and symbols enable individuals to interact. As Mitchell implies, every culture requires its members to have access to the mediations that allow it to function. Obtaining access to and understanding of a culture establishes an individual as a member of it. In terms of visual culture, seeing provides admittance. Particularly with the instant, round-the-globe dissemination of news and images in the Internet age, seeing is unhindered by the barriers of language, making visual culture seemingly universal culture. As this culturalseeing matures, it achieves an iconological knowledge. And, as members of visual culture, we do more than merely see images; we internalize markers of shared cultural experience. For example, the name “Che Guevara” invokes the 1960 Alberto Korda photograph of the Marxist revolutionary in his starred beret. This is the iconic image of Che: the one that is popularly known, and thus is collectively shared. Appearing in the windows of head-shops, on t-shirts and in history books, Korda’s photograph is synonymous with revolution, heroism and even sex appeal. One might easily make a list of other iconic images; however, what is important is the recognition that iconic photographs such as Guevara’s function as the cultural mediations that Mitchell describes. They secure for visual culture collective markers of memory, abstraction and symbolism. They unify our society of “people with eyes.” The ekphrases of iconic photographs celebrate and rely on the power of such images to unite us. Poems that engage in the ekphrasis of iconic photographs describe what we might term a shared sight, in that their speakers share the same mental image with their readers, and, often times,

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readers come to the photographic image with a shared understanding of its cultural significance. Such ekphrases also allow us to recognize two distinct types of iconic photographs: events and personages. Describing an iconic photograph of an event, such as a famous moment in history, the poem takes the form of a narrative in which the speaker learns to negotiate personal experience via historical circumstances. Often, poems of this type are ekphrases of traumatic images: tableaus that shocked the world. Such images typically serve as markers for rites of passage. Seeing them for the first time or meditating on their significance, the speakers of these poems describe a change in their lives: a change brought on by witnessing the photograph. The second kind of iconic photograph is a portrait of a personage. The photographic portrait inspires altogether different sorts of ekphrases than photographs of events, in that iconic portraits are rarely looked at as though they were memories. Instead, the ekphrastic gesture is not unlike what we saw in Melville’s “On the Photograph of a Corps Commander.” Like Melville’s speaker, the speakers in these poems step forward as public eulogists who would acclaim or denounce the personages described. What distinguishes these poems from Melville’s, however, is that Melville’s poem might be said to make—or to attempt to make—a photograph iconic rather than celebrate pre-existing iconic photographs. In 1866, the population of the United States might very well have known who General Hancock was, but they could not have universally known him by way of his photograph. The medium of photography had not advanced to the point where photographs were mass-produced and mass-disseminated as they are in the 21st century. The following chapter is divided between explorations of the ekphrases of iconic photographs that record events and of iconic photographs that eulogize personages. The first section examines three poems about the event depicted in Nick Ut’s photograph “The Horror of War”: Sharon Olds’s “Coming of Age, 1966,” Kate Daniels’s “War Photograph” and Louis de Paor’s “Changeling.” As I argue, each of these poems enacts one of the rites of passage that occur in visual culture. Using Arnold Van Gennep’s theories about rites of passage, I illustrate how Olds, Daniels and de Paor describe the role that Ut’s photograph plays in collective memory and cultural participation. The second section examines the ekphrasis of iconic portraits through the example of Ernesto Cardenal’s “Prayer for Marilyn Monroe,” in which the speaker elegizes the actress by way of her photographic images.

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The discussion returns to the issues raised in Chapter 3, on Snapshot Elegies, in that many of the same themes and concerns about mourning reoccur in Cardenal’s poem. However, what distinguishes the ekphrasis of an iconic portrait from a snapshot is the lack of personal narrative, and this presents us with something of a reversal. In snapshot elegies, the poetic speakers make their personal mourning public. They bring their sorrow to the reader by describing an otherwise individual and personal image. The ekphrasis of an iconic portrait describes how a public image is transformed into a private source of mourning. Thus, the public and the ekphrastic become aspects of the speaker’s personal experience, as that experience comes into contact with global culture. The Horror of War: Sharon Olds’s “Coming of Age, 1966,” Kate Daniels’s “War Photograph” and Louis de Paor’s “Changeling” Long before I knew the historical circumstances recorded in Nick Ut’s photograph “The Horror of War” (Figure 16)—long before I even knew the photograph’s title—whenever I encountered the image, I could hear the scream of the naked girl who figures in the center of the picture, and could hear the roar of the war planes dropping the napalm that burned her, the explosion of its canisters and the sounds of a battle that must have been taking place somewhere behind her scalded shoulders. But even greater than this auditory sensation was the sensation of a physical reaction. Seeing the girl’s arms held away from her naked body, I sensed the burns that covered her, and, feeling them, I was left scalded with contrition at being unscathed, at being approximately her age and coming from the nation that had manufactured her agony. Now, even after having learned the history recorded by the image—having learned that the girl’s name is Phan Thị Kim Phúc, that what she is crying out is “nong qua, nong qua” (“too hot, too hot”) (Chong 2001, 68), that the South Vietnamese village she lived in was Trang Bang, that it was bombed accidently on June 8, 1972 by South Vietnamese warplanes coordinated by the American air-command—after having learned this series of facts, which relegate Ut’s photograph to a specific historical context—even now, looking at the photograph, I still hear the roaring, the screaming, the gun fire and, most significantly, I feel the blistering heat that has never touched my arms. I am not alone in the way I experience the photograph. As Denise

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Figure 16  Huỳnh Công (Nick Ut), “The Terror of War (Vietnam, Napalm, Trang Bang),” 1972

Chong writes in her account of the photograph’s history and legacy, Ut’s image conveys a state of anxiety that “concentrates the mind of us, the viewers, simultaneously dispatching each of us into our own personal history of darkness. We privately flail at our human limitations, failings and self-indulgences in the face of the chaos and wrongdoing of war. We who live in places that are ‘safe’ feel chained by our individual helplessness to aid those who live in places that are not” (ibid., 364). In her observation, Chong recognizes how Ut’s picture severs us into two states of mind. One involves an inner, private struggle with “our human limitations, failings and self-indulgences.” The other is a public state: what Chong calls “the mind of us,” a mind that the photograph “concentrates,” drawing each of its viewers into a fellowship of recognition. If Chong is correct, then, Ut’s photograph demands that we go into ourselves, and “simultaneously” it forces us out of ourselves into history. Another way to describe this severance is to term it as a moment of “maturity.” Encountering a photograph such as Ut’s becomes a traumatic event in our lives, because the image and images of similar power force

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us to grow up—to face the realities of atrocity, to accept the indirect roles we play in these realities. In On Photography, Susan Sontag describes such a moment when she writes about the first time she saw photographs from Bergen-Belsen and Dachau—photographs “which [she] came across by chance in a bookstore in Santa Monica in July 1945 ….” “Nothing I have seen—in photographs or in real life—” writes Sontag, “ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was 12) and after, though it was several years before I understood fully what they were about” (Sontag 1989, 19–20). Chong and Sontag describe the same thing: a severance in personal consciousness, in which the realities of the event recorded in a photograph become part of the reality of the viewer of that photograph. When the photograph in question is iconic—when it is internationally famous, as Ut’s is—this severance is something that the viewer shares collectively with everyone who knows the image. In anthropological terms, such severances may be related to rites of passage. While looking at Ut’s photograph or photographs from the Nazi death camps does not constitute a ritual act, and so lacks the official quality of a “rite of passage,” confronting the images nevertheless marks a transition from one stage of life into another. As Sontag attests, one is not the same after seeing such images, and thus seeing them entails a passage into another kind of knowledge. This knowledge is one that will inevitably find us, for—unless one lacks the power to see—in a visual culture such as ours, who will not encounter photographs of these atrocities or others that have followed? And so, who will not experience such a rite of passage? Images like “The Horror of War” wait for us just as the Bar Mitzvah and the First Communion wait, just as the Sweet Sixteen and the Graduation wait. If there is a difference, it is the lack of a set date. We do not schedule seeing these images—do not put on formal clothes to go to them. Instead, like Sontag in the bookstore, we find ourselves in their presence (a web page loads on our screen, a television lights up), and we see, for the first time, Ut’s photograph or Bergen-Belsen or the effects of the atomic blast at Hiroshima. The ritual potency of such images is what makes them iconic. We experience them in ways that surpass our experiences of other photographs. How this difference occurs is impossible to isolate. Perhaps all one can say about images such as Ut’s is that they easily lend themselves to abstraction. Not only do they record an event, they become essential signs relating seemingly universal truths. Hans-Michael Koetzle

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explains this effect when he describes iconic photographs as achieving the “victory of abstraction”: “Where television, video or internet at best produce a visual ‘surge’,” writes Koetzle, “the conventional photographic picture—as the ‘victory of abstraction’—is alone in having the power to take root in our memory and engender something akin to memory” (Koetzle 2001, 7). Koetzle’s conception of “the victory of abstraction” corresponds with what Vincent Alabiso writes about Ut’s “Horror of War” when he describes the photograph as one that “illustrate[s] the nature of all war” (Alabiso 1996, 172). It functions iconically, making not one memory of a war, but a prototypical, essential and collective memory of all war. What happens when a poet describes such an iconic image? What occurs to the chronotope this study has been examining? Do the speakers of these poems come to encounter a photographic subject such as Ut’s in a way that parallels those encounters we have seen in other poems? In short, they do not. Rather, as such poems as Sharon Olds’s “Coming of Age, 1966,” Kate Daniels’s “War Photograph” and Louis de Paor’s “Changeling” illustrate, when a poet opts to describe an iconic image, he or she involves his or her speaker in a negotiation. This negotiation occurs between an individual consciousness with its personal memory and a public consciousness with its collective—even global—memory. Additionally, this negotiation is paralleled by a negotiation between a particular event and the abstraction it represents. Thus, what the poems are describing is a cultural passage. Their speakers experience iconic photographs as totem-like images marking the rite of passage into a culture that is not local but global. With this in mind, it is instructive to analyze these poems in terms of Arnold Van Gennep’s 1909 monograph Rites of Passage. For, as we will see, Olds’s, Daniels’s and de Paor’s poems include examples of the three types of ekphrases commonly written about iconic photographs. In turn, these link with the three principal rites of passage described by Van Gennep: the initiation rite, in which an individual passes into maturity, the incorporation rite, in which an individual integrates into a group within a society and, lastly, the separation rite, in which an individual learns to release or is released from a group. In popular usage, the phrase “rite of passage” has become associated with the transitional rites of adolescence, specifically the events that signal the end of childhood. However, in his study, Van Gennep relates how rites of passage occur throughout the stages of life. Still, the importance

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of adolescence with respect to these rites cannot be underestimated, for the passage from childhood to adulthood invariably involves tests of endurance, isolation and even torture. In the West, these tests have largely disappeared, and yet visual culture still retains certain aspects of them, at least on the psychological level. Confronting the realities of atrocity is—as we have heard from Sontag—part of leaving the naïve world of childhood behind. In terms of ekphrasis, no poem better expresses this than Sharon Olds’s “Coming of Age, 1966” (1999), a poem that relates the maturation of the speaker into visual culture. Coming of Age, 1966 When I came to sex in full, not sex by fits and starts, but day and night, when I lived with him, I thought I could go crazy with shock and awe. In Latin class, my jaw would go slack, when I would remember the night, the morning, the in, the out, the in, the long torso of the beloved lowered, lifted, lowered. When he wasn’t there, when he worked 36 On, 8 Off, 36 On, 8 Off, I’d sit myself down to memorize Latin so as not to go mad—my brain felt like a planet gone oval, wobbling out of orbit, pulling toward a new ellipsis, I learned a year of Latin in a month, aced the test, made love, wept, when he was working all night I’d believe that a burglar might be climbing the wall outside my window, palm to the stone rosette, toe on the granite frond, like the prowler who’d scaled the first storey next door, been peeled from the wall and kicked in the head. And every time I tried to write of the body’s gifts, the child with her clothes burned off by napalm ran into the poem screaming. I was a Wasp child of the suburbs, I felt

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The ekphrastic elements of Sharon Olds’s poem are suppressed. Invoking Ut’s image, her speaker does not identify it as a photograph, nor does she make any reference to the news services that undoubtedly communicated it to her. Instead, she relies on her reader to know which girl she is speaking of. This reliance is significant, for, even while Olds’s strategy calls to mind the suppressed ekphrases of Moore and Heaney, the poem does not seek to conceal its ekphrastic source. Instead, it anticipates that the reader shares with the speaker a collective memory that includes Ut’s photograph. In other words, Olds’s poem is written for a particular community. Understanding the poem means being part of this community—being part of visual culture in the West. This community is further defined through the speaker’s description of her daily life. Her world is comprised of those things that are common to middle-class educated Americans: that is, school tests, long work schedules (“36 On, 8 Off, 36 On, 8 Off”), domestic romance, prowlers and news of distant wars. In short, the community that Olds’s poem is written for lives in what Chong describes as “places that are ‘safe’.” Such a community corresponds to 1966’s white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America. However, the reasonable safety of this America is jeopardized by Ut’s photograph. “The Horror of War” severs the speaker from her “erotic” “ease” and the “pleasure” of her WASPy life. The severance is realized in the structure of the poem. “Coming of Age” is split into two parts: one before the ekphrasis of Ut’s photograph, and one afterwards. Running into the middle of the poem, the screaming girl effectively ends the speaker’s youth, forcing her to recognize her artistic and political responsibilities. No longer can she merely celebrate the “body’s gifts” in her

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poems. She must allow Kim Phúc to enter, screaming. No longer can she merely remain home to make love, she must “march.” In this way, Olds’s speaker joins Chong and Sontag in expressing the power of iconic photographs. Relating how she felt “connected to the girl running, her arms / out to the sides, like a plucked heron … ” and also how she sometimes marched, her “heart aching with righteousness,” the speaker describes what Chong describes: the experience of being driven inward to face her own “human limitations, failings and self-indulgences,” and also outward to face to the role she plays in history. Like Sontag in the bookstore, Olds’s speaker has been “robbed” of her youth. In its place, there is a liminal maturity: one that anticipates an adulthood that has not yet been achieved. It is this liminal state that justifies the anachronism of Olds’s poem. Although the title sets the speaker’s process of maturation in 1966, the poem ekphrastically references a photograph that was not taken until 1972. I call attention to this fact not to find fault with Olds’s poem but to recognize that the poem is not merely a portrait of a maturing young mind of 1966; it is a portrait of a mature mind of the late 20th century: a mind that consolidates the experiences of a lifetime in order to interpret its own history and to assign symbols to this history. This cannot be done in a linear fashion, because coming to such a level of maturity is not accomplished in one moment but many, and the awareness of these moments does not come until they have passed. In assigning her experience to Ut’s photograph, then, Olds’s speaker gathers her collective experiences under the aegis of one image: “The Horror of War.” Indeed, this is what an iconic photograph is for, and what its ekphrasis must relate. Olds’s poem enacts a rite of transition, then. In it, her speaker moves into history by way of seeing Ut’s photograph. As the poem relates, the narrative of this transition is a beginning, not an end. Olds’s speaker is learning what it means to be part of a global culture. Olds’s poem anticipates future rites of passage: rites in which the individual is incorporated into a visual culture. The individual comes to have an understanding of what that culture entails and what the many iconic photographs that exist inside of it symbolize. Such incorporation implies the development of knowledge, in that an incorporated individual is one who has learned, in a sense, what is necessary to be part of the group. In the West, the best examples of such incorporation are associated with educational institutions. For instance, we graduate from university, and thus are designated as being qualified to “profess”

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our knowledge. In terms of visual culture, qualification comes in the form of cultural allusions. We use visual culture as a series of tools for explaining and orchestrating our lives, and, more centrally, we use it to establish a commonality between ourselves. We use it to describe “us.” A gathering of colleagues in a coffee room or a group of high school students sitting over a lunch table use references from popular television, the Internet and the cinema to describe everyday events. The practice is so commonplace that reality and representation become inverted. A car crash in a movie is not like reality; an actual car crash in reality is described as being like in a movie. The tough talking policeman on the street does not inspire the dialogue in movies such as Dirty Harry; Dirty Harry films inspire him. Such inversions reveal a significant aspect of modern life: media representations are part of the fabric of our consciousness. Having these images as a stockpile of allusions in our collective memory is what we achieve after we have been incorporated into global media culture. Indeed, we have already seen how these allusions work in Olds’s poem, in that the speaker relies on our own collective memory to identify the photograph she describes. However, while Olds’s poem relies on its readers being incorporated into visual culture, it does not testify to the incorporation—it does not describe who “we” are. A poem that engages in this definitive work is Kate Daniels’s “War Photograph” (2002): War Photograph A naked child is running along the path toward us, her arms stretched out, her mouth open, the world turned to trash behind her. She is running from the smoke and the soldiers, from the bodies of her mother and little sister thrown down into a ditch, from the blown-up bamboo hut from the melted pots and pans. And she is also running from the gods

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who have changed the sky to fire and puddled the earth with skin and blood. She is running—my god—to us, 10,000 miles away, reading the caption beneath her picture in a weekly magazine. All over the country we’re feeling sorry for her and being appalled at the war being fought in the other world. She keeps on running, you know, after the shutter of the camera clicks. She’s running to us. For how can she know, her feet beating a path on another continent? How can she know what we really are? From the distance, we look so terribly human. (Daniels 1989, 50) Visual culture allows a poet such as Daniels to employ the plural firstperson pronoun “we” in a manner that is more than merely rhetorical. It is definitive. Describing an image that harbors what we might term a universal truth, “War Photograph” describes what “we” collectively see. In such poems as Daniels’s, the rite of passage does not occur by way of endurance or torture, then, it occurs through a testimonial. Incorporated into visual culture, the speaker testifies on behalf of all. In this way, the poem’s speaker assumes a role that is familiar to us by now. She is another version of Whitman’s cicerone. Her words set out to establish Ut’s photograph as one of the “tableaus of life,” to use Whitman’s phrase again. However, there is also a difference between the speaker and the cicerone that Whitman describes. While Daniels’s speaker guides readers through the photograph, her testimonial includes readers in this guided tour. The speaker is not instructing us. We are joining her in her recognition. In this way, Daniels’s speaker assumes the role of a coryphaeus: the leader of the classical chorus.

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In classical drama, the coryphaeus stands out from the rest of the chorus, in that he or she steps forward, addressing the protagonist of the play as a representative of the collective body of the chorus. However, by stepping forward in this manner, the coryphaeus does not take a position that is contrary to the rest of the chorus. Instead, he or she leads the rest by means of a superior eloquence. In her poem, Daniels’s speaker assumes a similar leadership role. Drawing us into a collective body, she leads us toward a definition of who we are when faced with Ut’s photograph: All over the country we’re feeling sorry for her and being appalled at the war being fought in the other world. She keeps on running, you know, after the shutter of the camera clicks. She’s running to us. Statements such as these exemplify the authority of the speaker. They relate her knowledge about the event that is recorded in the photograph and the events that follow it. This passage also expresses the authority that the speaker has over “us,” in that she knows our general sentiments—at least the sentiments that we had circa 1972. In a sense, she professes our collective understanding: an understanding gained via the image. Another term for this collective memory is what Gerard Hauser terms “the public sphere.” According to Hauser, the public sphere is “a discursive space in which individuals and groups congregate to discuss matters of mutual interest and, where possible, to reach a common judgment” (Hauser 1998, 86). In its speaker’s attempt to define who and what “we” are, Daniels’s poem draws its readers into such a sphere; whether readers agree or disagree with the speaker’s definition of “us,” the poem calls on them to accept or reject its definition. In doing so, the poem draws its readers into an imaginary debate and persuades them to participate. However, debate is not the only function of the public sphere. There is a further action of inclusion: Daniels’s speaker incorporates Kim Phúc herself into the public sphere. This inclusion is accomplished through the descriptive positioning within the poem. Unlike the description of the girl in Olds’s poem, Daniels’s poem describes her as running “to us.” In Olds’s poem, the girl runs through the speaker’s words, and the

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effect of this running-through figures the reader’s imaginary perspective differently than what we find in Daniels’s poem. Kim Phúc may be said to pass before Olds’s speaker: to exist in a parallel reality to hers. In Daniels’s poem, the poetic speaker experiences the photograph as Ut must have experienced the girl at the time he took it: she is running to us. What this achieves is the suggestion that “we” receive the girl and the collective sentiments broadcasted by her image. This makes us actively involved in the photograph. We are forced to meet the horror of war head-on, and to face whatever responsibility we have for this horror. The difference, then, between the poems is a matter of control. Olds’s speaker is not in control of her circumstances. Instead, she suffers almost passively, witnessing the girl running naked into her words, instead of facing her there. In Daniels’s poem, the dynamic is different. In order for Daniels’s speaker to lead us and define who we are, she must bring us into confrontation with the image. The depiction calls to mind again Benjamin’s encounter with the fishwife, and it dramatizes a startling aspect of the chronotope of the photograph. The speaker is confronted with no vague demand. Kim Phúc pleads, and the speaker must acknowledge. This confrontation and the acknowledgment it forces from Daniels’s speaker substantiates Van Gennep’s notion of the rite of incorporation. This rite occurs on many levels. Foremost, it occurs in the way Daniels’s speaker strives to establish herself as a leader of a collective visual consciousness. As our coryphaeus, she incorporates her readers and herself into a single word—“we.” But, in addition, she positions “us” in a manner that readies us to receive Kim Phúc into our midst. Thus, the rite of incorporation includes the hurt girl as well. She is running toward our humanity. Only an incorporated adult can, in turn, accomplish such incorporation. While Olds’s speaker may be termed a liminal adolescent struggling to come to terms with Ut’s image, Daniels’s has reached the fruition of the struggle. She is an adult. However, the rite of incorporation is less straightforward than it first appears, because, in her description of the girl running toward us, Daniels’s speaker shifts points of view. Until the very last lines of the poem, she speaks about who “we” are. Then, suddenly, she speaks about how we appear to the girl: “From the distance, we look / so terribly human.” The shift that occurs in the final two lines of the poem is one in which the speaker has effectively inverted her own perspective. She is no longer looking with “our” eyes into the photograph. She is looking through Kim Phúc’s eyes out of it. The shift is disorienting, and, in another poem, it

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might even be regarded as an abandonment of the reader. However, in “War Photograph,” Daniels’s speaker makes the shift to incorporate Kim Phúc into the public sphere not as a disparate element of this sphere but as part of the collective “we.” In other words, seeing through the girl’s eyes still entails seeing through our own, for the girl is part of us. By way of this shift in perspective, Daniels substantiates the moral of her poem, for the poem has a moral. Functioning as a collective testament, the poem seeks not only to define who and what we are but also forces us to re-evaluate our understanding of ourselves as members of humanity. In this way, Daniels’s poem returns us to the Western ideologies that were behind the war itself: ideologies in which figured the attitudes of the American leadership toward Vietnam and its people. We find these attitudes expressed in Peter Davis’s 1974 documentary film, Hearts and Minds. In the film, Davis interviews US Army general William Westmoreland, who commanded all US military operations in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968. It is in this interview that Westmoreland makes the statement: “Well, the Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient” (Grosser 1990, 273). Such statements as Westmoreland’s awaken us to how the war was perceived by many in the American leadership: as a conflict between humans and sub-humans. The Vietnamese were, in the eyes of Westmoreland, unequal to Americans in terms of their humanity. Westmoreland’s attitude was not an isolated one. Rather, it reflected the general position of those leaders who favored continuing the war. From this position, we can well understand how, among the American leadership, a photograph such as Ut’s fell on blind eyes, for the horrors it presents were seen as somehow less significant than those horrors suffered by American servicemen or Americans in general. By reversing our final perspective, Daniels’s poem challenges this racist position. Instead of the reader watching the horrors that Kim Phúc experiences from the “safe” position of a “human” observer, we are made into the objects of the girl’s speculation. She watches us, and to her, we “look so terribly human,” but there is nothing in these final lines that confirms our humanity, “terrible” or otherwise. The moral aspect of the poem returns us to the severance of the self. Coming among us, Kim Phúc forces us to see her and simultaneously to see ourselves through her eyes; and, thus, the poem asks us to consider if it is not we, the “safe” and “terrible,” whose lives are cheap. Olds’s poem charts the rite of passage of an individual’s entrance into visual culture and Daniels’s poem charts the rite of incorporation into

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that culture. However, as Van Gennep observes, there remains a third class of rites of passage: the rite of separation. As Van Gennep relates, the separation rite involves such aspects as a child’s maturation and separation from a parent, a mourner’s separation from a dead person or an individual’s separation from a social status or occupation (Van Gennep 1960, 11). In terms of the ekphrasis of iconic photographs, one poem that would seem to use Ut’s photograph for this third type of rite is “Iarlais” or “Changeling” (1997), by the Gallic poet Louis de Paor: Iarlais Chuir sí a dhá láimh in airde go humhal gur bhaineas di a geansaí róchúng is d’imigh de chromrúid ar chamchosa ag sciorradh an an urlár sleamhain don bhfolcadán. I bhfaiteadh na súl ghaibh an iarlais uimpi cló muirneach m’iníne is rith isteach sa tsíoraíocht uaim ar bhóthar gan ceann i Vietnam Thuaidh chomh lomnocht le súil gan fora, gan luid uirthi a cheilfeadh a cabhail tanaí ar mo shúil mhillteach nuair a chaoch an ceamara leathshúil dhall uirthi mar seo. Nuari a nocthtann tú chugam ag scréachaíl le tinneas

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Poetry, Photography, Ekphrasis tá taise a cló buailte ar do chraiceann fliuch loiscthe ag an uisce fiuchta ag allas scólta mo shúl. Changeling She did as she was told putting her arms above her head as I pulled off the tight-fitting jumper, then ran crookedly on bow legs slipping and sliding across the wet floor heading for the bath. In the blink of an eye the changeling took on my daughter’s body running for all eternity down a narrow unending road somewhere in Vietnam naked as an unlidded eye without a stitch to protect her wizened body from my evil eye when the camera winked at her like this. When she comes back screaming with pain the mark of that tortured ghost is branded on her dripping skin scalded by the hot water sweating from my unshuttered eye. (de Paor 1997, 60–1)

De Paor’s poem contrasts with the other poems examined in this chapter, for it does not involve a rite of passage leading to maturity, nor does it relate the kind of incorporation that Daniels’s poem describes. The

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speaker here is mature, and he is incorporated in modern visual culture as well as the Gallic folklore tradition, from which the “changeling” myth partially comes. However, de Paor’s poem also invokes Ut’s iconic photograph and, in so doing, describes the separation between the poem’s speaker and his child. The narrative that de Paor employs to describe the separation is a mythical one. “Changeling” describes the “wink” of “an evil eye”: a wink that magically transforms the speaker’s daughter into the girl in Ut’s photograph. In this way, “Changeling” does not merely document the influence of modern visual culture on its speaker. It also links this modern culture with Gallic folklore. The effect of the linkage figures the poem as a conjunction of antique and modern cultures. I am tempted to describe this conjunction as a double exposure of sorts, in which— coming down the hall—the daughter is doubly exposed, first by her own nakedness and second by the naked body of Kim Phúc, which her body resembles. This double exposure of the girl is what inspires fear in the speaker. Certainly, the image of double exposure is what de Paor seeks to express when he writes: When she comes back screaming with pain the mark of that tortured ghost is branded on her dripping skin scalded by the hot water sweating from my unshuttered eye. The concept of “a tortured ghost” substantiates the effect of a double exposure in a photographic image. Ut’s photography seems to be transposed over the daughter. In some respect, such a transposition would seem to be only a matter of resemblance: a flash of recognition comes and then goes. But, as the poem suggests, the transposition is permanent—not because the daughter does not “come back” (the final stanza of the poem informs us that she returns), but because the vision suggests a lesson of pain that cannot be dismissed. The notion of a lesson is, of course, appropriate for all rites of passage, and de Paor’s ekphrasis allows for this. Here, there are two lessons, in fact: one for the daughter and one for the father. The former is not discussed at length; however, we may extrapolate how the child has been “scalded by the hot water” and thus has been marked (“branded”) by the

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burn. She has learned, then—as Kim Phúc learned—that it is “Too hot!” But the daughter’s lesson is secondary to the lesson taught to the speaker. Separation, helplessness and even the self-incriminating awareness of the girl’s budding physical maturity—all of these seem part of his lesson. Separation and helplessness manifest themselves in ways that call to mind Olds’s and Daniels’s poems. In recognizing the similarity between his daughter and Kim Phúc, the speaker recognizes, as Olds’s speaker does, his inability to protect the “wizened body” of either child. This helplessness materializes in the myth of the changeling, which is in fact a cautionary tale against parental vanity. In Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, W.B. Yeats describes the Irish version of the changeling myth as one that addresses the sin of parental pride. In the myth, if a parent comes to express envy or pride in the beauty of his or her unbaptized child, he or she risks losing it to the fairies, who are ever listening and ever prepared to take a child whose beauty is coveted by a parent (Yeats 1986, 47). Such myths, of course, are euphemistic, in that they personify the forces of nature that produce such realities as cradle-death: forces that are out of the parent’s control. In invoking the myth, de Paor renovates it. The fairies do not represent the natural forces they once did. Instead, the fairies take the form of photographic doubles, and what they represent are such forces as warplanes that drop napalm. By association, then, the fairies are any of the modern forms of terror and/or destruction. While such dangers usually threaten the lives of those who live in unsafe places, as a poet writing in the Irish Republic in the 1990s de Paor is well aware of his proximity to such incursions. One cannot help but think that “Changeling” is as much a reaction to the Troubles in Northern Ireland as it is to the war in Vietnam. However, de Paor does not only renovate the changeling myth. He also employs it to illustrate the rite of separation. Describing the magical “wink” that transforms the daughter, the speaker describes what Van Gennep terms “the pivoting” of a “magic circle,” by which an individual passes from a profane identity into a sacred one. Van Gennep writes: The ‘magic circles’ pivot, shifting as a person moves from one place in society to another. The categories and concepts which embody them operate in such a way that whoever passes through the various positions of a lifetime one day sees the sacred where before he has seen the profane, or vice versa. Such changes of condition do not

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occur without disturbing the life of society and the individual, and it is the function of rites of passage to reduce their harmful effects. (Van Gennep 1960, 13) De Paor’s poem describes this pivoting in what we might term a double action. At once, the daughter is magically transformed from a profane person to a sacred or magical personage—the changeling—and, at the same time, the speaker’s powers of recognition are also changed. He is able to perceive this sacred transformation. And it is the second part of the double action that renders him most helpless, for the speaker not only expresses a feeling of helplessness to protect the child—there is also the suggestion that he must protect her from himself. Relating how the bodies of his daughter and Kim Phúc (which are one and the same at this point in the poem) cannot be protected from “my evil eye / when the camera winked / at her like this,” the speaker collapses the distinction between his eye and Ut’s camera, likening the shutter-action of the lens to a lurid wink. Except that “lurid” is not the word de Paor uses in his translation; it is “evil,” which is less particular, and which alludes to the age-old notion of the curse. However, the image of a winking eye carries with it an unseemly element, and it reminds us that both the daughter and Kim Phúc come forward “without a stitch” of clothing to protect them. I call attention to this because the rite of passage that is described in “Changeling” involves not only teaching the father a sense of helplessness but also teaching him the separation of genders. As Van Gennep argues, the division of males from females is one of the primary purposes of the separation rite (ibid., 2). In recognizing the similarity between his daughter and Kim Phúc, de Paor’s speaker recognizes how the girl has entered into a tabooed state. This taboo may be said to resonate through Ut’s photograph: how the image is iconic of “all war” because it relates a gamut of violations that includes voyeurism. The dynamics of and strictures against such voyeurism need not be reiterated here. It needs only to be observed that de Paor’s speaker makes us aware of the fact that “The Horror of War” is not only a photograph that inspires outrage but is also one that can fall before “evil eyes.” It is this reality that runs like a shockwave through the poem’s second stanza, and it is this element that perpetuates the separation between the father and the daughter in the third. In the third stanza, the daughter has changed, as indicted by the direction in which she is running. Like Daniels, de Paor is very careful to

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invoke the directionality of Ut’s photograph, and how this directionality affects his speaker. At the beginning of the poem, the father witnesses the daughter running away from him. He is behind her, supporting her, as the soldiers may be said to back up the children running in Ut’s image. But, in the third stanza, the father is in front of the girl. In this position, he witnesses her the way “we” viewers of Ut’s photograph witness Kim Phúc. Thus, he is the world, and possesses the world’s culpability. The poem ends in an ironic movement: although the daughter returns to the father, the rite of separation has occurred, for the speaker can never again “shutter” his cursed eye. One of the punishing facts about iconic photographs such as Ut’s is that they transmit traumatic experience. Recording the historical facts of a single moment that occurs during a single day at a single event, these images implant the event into the lives of their viewers in ways that make what they record unforgettable and essential. It is difficult to isolate what makes a particular photograph capable of initiating this kind of transmission and transformation. For example, there are other photographs (and motion picture footage) of Kim Phúc and her family running down the road that day in 1972, but none of them has the essentially iconic power of Ut’s photograph. Whatever causes this power, it is instantly recognizable. On the evening after Ut took his photograph, the Associated Press photo editor in Saigon, Horst Faas, decided to send it to the AP’s New York office despite the fact that it shows full-frontal nudity. Until that point, the American press had refused to print photographs of this type. However, as Denise Chong relates, recognizing the power of Ut’s image, Faas sent it anyway, expecting that the New York bureau would reject the photograph (Chong 2001, 7). But the bureau ran it. “Why?” In one respect, we might answer as Vincent Alabiso does: “The Horror of War” “illustrate[s] the nature of all war” (Alabiso 1996, 172). However, while the statement may be true, what the poems of Olds, Daniels and de Paor relate is that the photograph does not just “illustrate the nature of all war.” It transmits the events of war into the lives of others. The ekphrasis of an iconic photograph participates in this transmission and extends it, making it into a process of education and maturation. The ekphrasis of an iconic photograph does not accomplish this work by making Kim Phúc’s experience our own. It does this by making Nick Ut’s experience our own; seeing as the photographer saw, we learn as he photographed, and thus are forced to receive “a child with her clothes burned off by napalm.”

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A People’s Prayer: Ernesto Cardenal’s “Prayer for Marilyn Monroe” A people’s voice! we are a people yet. (Tennyson 1991, l. 151 282) Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington” functions as a public declaration of national unity. Written in 1853, the poem elegizes Wellington, listing his victories and relating his status as Britain’s hero of the Napoleonic Wars; however, as this line from the poem suggests, in addition to working as an elegy, the poem identifies the duke as a personage whose death calls all Britons together, allowing the poetic speaker to assume a “people’s voice.” In this way, Tennyson’s ode operates as do Herman Melville’s “On the Photograph of a Corps Commander” and Kate Daniels’s “War Photograph.” Like Melville’s speaker, Tennyson’s is a cicerone. Leading his readers through tableaus of the duke’s life, he engages in the praise-rhetoric of ceremonial oratory. In addition, Tennyson’s speaker acts as a coryphaeus in a manner that recalls Daniels’s poem: the speaker does not merely guide the reader through the duke’s life, he speaks as one of “us”—or, more specifically, he speaks as a citizen of Britain. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the role of public poems such as Tennyson’s has declined. At present, it is rare for a poet to speak as a national representative. The reason for this undoubtedly has to do with the marginalization of poetry in present-day culture as well as the ambiguous sentiments toward nationalism that have grown up in the aftermath of World War Two. In the post-modern condition of today—to use Lyotard’s phrase—the master narrative of the public voice has been challenged and, where it is used, its rhetoric is generally met with distrust. Still, the national public voice is not the only public voice available to a poet. As observed in the previous section of this chapter, visual culture has manifested itself as a cultural structure in which such artifacts as iconic photographs figure as markers both for the culture and its collective experience. While few contemporary poems strive to be national orations like Tennyson’s, it is not uncommon for poets to write public poems that address the populace of visual culture. In effect, the “we” that Tennyson uses to gather together the Britons is now a “we” used to gather together “a society of people with eyes,” to use W.J.T. Mitchell’s phrase again. As previously discussed, Kate Daniels’s “War Photograph” employed

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such a “we.” In that poem and in the poems of Olds and de Paor, the emphasis was on photographs of iconic events: events that transmit collective memories to this society of people with eyes. In the present chapter, the emphasis is on the ekphrasis of the iconic, photographic portrait. The following examination of Ernesto Cardenal’s poem “Prayer for Marilyn Monroe” not only isolates the features of this sort of poem but also identifies how Cardenal’s prayer functions in a similar manner to Tennyson’s ode, in that Cardenal’s speaker assumes the role of a representative for all, speaking in the voice of visual culture. As we will see, what distinguishes Cardenal’s poem from Tennyson’s is the issue of social elevation. In his poem, Tennyson celebrates Wellington as a member of Britain’s elite class. Tennyson suggests that Wellington is a personage who warrants a ceremonial oration corresponding with the ancient Greek trope of the epideixis: the celebration of an elite, national hero. While Monroe’s fame may be said to have equaled Wellington’s in his day, the speaker in Cardenal’s poem does not attempt to elevate her to an elite level. Instead, Cardenal’s prayer has a double function. First, it strives to establish Monroe as a social equal to the reader. She is first and foremost, the poem explains, “a shopgirl.” After the poem establishes Monroe on this level, it then functions as a traditional elegy, designed to commend her soul unto God. As we will see, this second function is dependent upon the first, for without assimilating Monroe into the same general class as the reader, the poem could not assume the responsibility of praying for her, and thus it could not transfer her into the world of the dead. Prayer for Marilyn Monroe Lord receive this young woman known around the world as Marilyn  Monroe although that wasn’t her real name (but You know her real name, the name of the orphan raped at the   age of 6 and the shopgirl who at 16 had tried to kill herself) who now comes before You without any makeup without her Press Agent without photographers and without autograph hounds, alone like an astronaut facing night in space.

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She dreamed when she was little that she was naked in a church (according to the Time account) before a prostrated crowd of people, their heads on the floor and she had to walk on tiptoe so as not to step on their heads. You know our dreams better than the psychiatrists. Church, home, cave, all represent the security of the womb but something else too … The heads are her fans, that’s clear (the mass of heads in the dark under the beam of light). But the temple isn’t the studios of 20th Century-Fox. The temple—of marble and gold—is the temple of her body in which the Son of Man stands whip in hand driving out the studio bosses of 20th Century-Fox who made Your house of prayer a den of thieves. Lord in this world polluted with sin and radioactivity You won’t blame it all on a shopgirl who, like any other shopgirl, dreamed of being a star. Her dream just became a reality (but like Technicolor’s reality). She only acted according to the script we gave her —the story of our own lives. And it was an absurd script. Forgive her, Lord, and forgive us for our 20th Century for this Colossal Super-Production on which we all have worked. She hungered for love and we offered her tranquilizers. For her despair, because we’re not saints, psychoanalysis was recommended to her. Remember, Lord, her growing fear of the camera and her hatred of makeup—insisting on fresh makeup for each  scene— and how the terror kept building up in her and making her late to the studios. Like any other shopgirl she dreamed of being a star. And her life was unreal like a dream that a psychiatrist interprets   and files.

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Her romances were a kiss with closed eyes and when she opened them she realized she had been under floodlights as they killed the floodlights! and they took down the two walls of the room (it was a movie set) while the Director left with his scriptbook   because the scene had been shot. Or like a cruise on a yacht, a kiss in Singapore, a dance in Rio the reception at the mansion of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor all viewed in a poor apartment’s tiny living room. The film ended without the final kiss. She was found dead in her bed with her hand on the phone. And the detectives never learned who she was going to call. She was like someone who had dialed the number of the only friendly voice and only heard the voice of a recording that says: WRONG  NUMBER. Or like someone who had been wounded by gangsters reaching for a disconnected phone. Lord whoever it might have been that she was going to call and didn’t call (and maybe it was no one or Someone whose number isn’t in the Los Angeles phonebook) You answer that telephone! (Cardenal 1975, 85) The poem’s structure and function correspond with the structure and function of the traditional elegy. Asking God to receive Monroe into heaven, Cardenal’s speaker would move her from the world of the living into the world of the dead, in accordance with the work of traditional elegies as cited by Peter M. Sacks and discussed in the earlier section of this book on “Snapshot Elegies.” In mourning the dead, the speaker of the poem strives to place them into a location (an afterlife) and at the same time to distance them from the living. It should be noted as well that the work of elegy, at least as Sacks describes it, parallels the rite of separation discussed in the previous section of this chapter. Like the separation rite, the elegy releases the dead person from the group and establishes him

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or her somewhere else. As Van Gennep asserts, the process is one of the central actions of the funerary rite, and thus we can understand the elegy as a poetic extension of this rite (Van Gennep 1960, 148). However, more than merely observing the parallel that exists between elegiac mourning and the rite of separation, we can recognize the criteria for such rites as established by Cardenal in his poem. Cardenal describes Monroe as belonging to “us.” Represented by the speaker, “we” have the right to pray for Monroe and, so, we have the right, it would seem, to ask God to find a place for her in heaven. Having this authority, the speaker and the members of the visual culture that he represents have ascended to a social and spiritual level that either places us over Monroe or figures her as one of us. As the general democratic sentiments expressed in the poem imply, the latter would seem to be the case. By way of her iconic photographs, Monroe has become ours, and, because of her humble beginnings, she has always been one of us. It is for this reason that Cardenal focuses on Monroe’s past as a shopgirl “like any other shopgirl”: Lord in this world polluted with sin and radioactivity You won’t blame it all on a shopgirl who, like any other shopgirl, dreamed of being a star. Her dream just became a reality (but like Technicolor’s reality). She only acted according to the script we gave her —the story of our own lives. And it was an absurd script. Forgive her, Lord, and forgive us for our 20th Century for this Colossal Super-Production on which we all have worked. Much might be made of Cardenal’s disdain for dreams such as Monroe’s: how her dreams of stardom are part of a “Technicolor’s reality” and how this reality has transformed the real world into the stuff of 20th-Century Fox. But while such themes surface in this passage, more critical to our purpose is the way the stanza puts Monroe and the reader on the same social level. Only when she is established as our equal can our mourning for her be meaningful. As the poem makes clear, in our sorrow over the actress’s death, we do not mourn a personage; we mourn a person—a shopgirl, like so many of us. In identifying Monroe as a shopgirl, Cardenal’s speaker relies on the

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Figure 17  US Army photographer, “Norma Jeane Mortenson (Marilyn Monroe),” Yanks Magazine, 1945

information that has been communicated to him through a 1954 issue of Time magazine, which featured an exposé on Monroe’s early life. This exposé contains photographs from the actress’s childhood, as well as shots taken from her early work as a model. In these photographs, Monroe appears much the way Cardenal describes her: as a shopgirl (Figure 17). With her hair undyed and her nose unfixed, she is pretty but virtually unidentifiable and, thus, she is one of us: that is, anonymous. However, calling to mind Monroe’s origins as a shopgirl is not the only means by which Cardenal establishes the actress on a common social level. The work also requires the speaker to select and isolate certain aspects, facts and events from the actress’s life, as recorded in the various iconic photographs that document them. These are the principal ekphrastic elements of the poem, for “Prayer for Marilyn Monroe” is a suppressed ekphrasis constructed around a series of ekphrastic allusions. Most of these suppressions involve ekphrases of what we might term the images of Monroe “behind the scenes,” specifically Arnold Newman’s

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Figure 18  Arnold Newman, “Marilyn Monroe, Hollywood California,” 1962

portrait of Monroe: “Marilyn Monroe, Hollywood California, 1962” (Figure 18). Taken in the year of her death, Newman’s portrait is, in fact, a detail of a larger double portrait of the actress visiting the aging Carl Sandberg. In the original image, Monroe sits listening to the poet talk. However, it is the cropped close-up that has become iconic, in that it would seem to record an exhausted Monroe, distant and introspective, wholly shed of the coquettish posing that characterizes her more famous images. Newman’s iconic portrait has become one of the pieces of evidence that seemingly reveals the inner character of the actress: a disillusioned spirit tied to a beauty and a fame that obscure it. Such is part of the legend that has grown up around Monroe. “Prayer for Marilyn Monroe” elaborates this aspect of the legend, and it could only be photographs like this one by Newman—versus the equally iconic image of Monroe standing over a subway vent (from The Seven Year Itch, 1955), her dress billowing up and around her—that inspire such lines as these from Cardenal’s poem:

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She hungered for love and we offered her tranquilizers. For her despair, because we’re not saints, psychoanalysis was recommended to her. Remember, Lord, her growing fear of the camera and her hatred of makeup—insisting on fresh makeup for each  scene— and how the terror kept building up in her and making her late to the studios. While one cannot insist that this stanza is a direct ekphrasis of Newman’s photograph, the lines perfectly delineate Newman’s portrait. Naked of any pose, Monroe appears in the photograph as the poem describes her: tranquillized, sad and expressing an inner terror. Once the poem establishes Monroe on a level equal to its readers, it becomes a sort of linguistic space—a “temple”—inside which we as readers and members of visual culture are gathered to mourn one of our own: She dreamed when she was little that she was naked in a church (according to the Time account) before a prostrated crowd of people, their heads on the floor and she had to walk on tiptoe so as not to step on their heads. You know our dreams better than the psychiatrists. Church, home, cave, all represent the security of the womb but something else too … The heads are her fans, that’s clear (the mass of heads in the dark under the beam of light). But the temple isn’t the studios of 20th Century-Fox. The temple—of marble and gold—is the temple of her body in which the Son of Man stands whip in hand driving out the studio bosses of 20th Century-Fox who made Your house of prayer a den of thieves. The heads that are bowed before Monroe are ours. As members of visual culture, we come to Monroe’s image as worshippers do to a temple; however, before we can do her honor, she must first be purified. To dramatize the purification, Cardenal reconstructs the scene from the Gospels in which Christ runs the money-changers (“pack of thieves”) from the temple. The temple is Monroe’s body, and Hollywood

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(20th-Century Fox in particular) figures as the money-changers. Christ remains himself. In this capacity, he is a proletarian redeemer. He drives out the capitalist world, returning the shopgirl to us as he redeems Mary Magdalene. After this, Monroe’s body becomes “marble and golden”: an allusion as well to the temple of Jerusalem, but also perhaps to the actress’s complexion and possibly even to the number of nude photographs taken of her in the 1950s. Such an allusion as this one suggests parody. Cardenal sanctifies the actress, while sullying the biblical story. In any case, the message is clear. Monroe and the visual culture from which she comes are our new faith. Having her returned to us as Christ returns the temple to the lowly of Jerusalem, we are given the opportunity to participate in Cardenal’s prayer and, thus, like Tennyson’s audience, we become one people. The unity of the audience is vital for Cardenal’s prayer, which is Catholic in its nature. Knowing that suicide is a mortal sin, and that Monroe may be damned for this sin, Cardenal’s prayer would seem to call upon one of Christ’s promises: “ … where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:29, A.V.). Representing the members of visual culture, Cardenal’s speaker petitions the Lord on behalf of the actress’s soul by working the theological loophole in Christ’s promise: Christ must hear, if we speak together. In this way, “Prayer for Marilyn Monroe” functions in part as a requiem, in the sense that it is a requiescat in pace (“rest in peace”). Usually sung during the introit of the Catholic mass, the requiescat in pace operates both as a blessing and a petition. The congregation blesses the dead person and then petitions God to fulfill its blessing by receiving the dead person into heaven. The second part of this structure is fulfilled in the poem’s final line “Lord, answer that phone”, which can be read as the speaker’s petition for God to forgive the actress, if in fact she took her own life. The reference to Monroe on her deathbed suggests itself to be another ekphrasis. However, to my knowledge, there is no photograph that corresponds to the scene, only written reports. However, the lack of an actual photograph does not deprive the final stanza of its ekphrastic quality, for the poem ends with what John Hollander terms “a notional ekphrasis”: an imaginary photograph (Hollander 1995, 4). I make this assertion by comparing the stanza with the one that precedes it, which describes Monroe’s manner of kissing with her eyes closed: an ekphrasis of not one but many photographs of Monroe. Cardenal seems to end the

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poem with a juxtaposition of two contrasting photographs, one real and the other imaginary: Her romances were a kiss with closed eyes and when she opened them she realized she had been under floodlights as they killed the floodlights! and they took down the two walls of the room (it was a movie set) while the Director left with his scriptbook because the scene had been shot. Or like a cruise on a yacht, a kiss in Singapore, a dance in Rio the reception at the mansion of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor all viewed in a poor apartment’s tiny living room. The film ended without the final kiss. She was found dead in her bed with her hand on the phone. And the detectives never learned who she was going to call. She was like someone who had dialed the number of the only friendly voice and only heard the voice of a recording that says: WRONG  NUMBER. Or like someone who had been wounded by gangsters reaching for a disconnected phone. These stanzas call to mind Larkin’s poem “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album.” In the discussion of that poem, I noted that Larkin iconographically suggests that each of his stanzas is a photograph in an album. Cardenal makes the same suggestion. Indeed, both of his poem’s final stanzas are photographs and, as such, they contrast scenes of sad beauty from the actress’s life with the possibility of her redemption in death. What makes the juxtaposition all the more potent is the brief portrait of visual culture itself that figures at the end of the poem’s first stanza. The lines like a cruise on a yacht, a kiss in Singapore, a dance in Rio; a reception at the mansion of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor all viewed in a poor apartment’s tiny living room enumerate how the Hollywood world of Monroe is seen and by whom.

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From the tawdriness of cheap apartments, the glitz of that world comes alive, but, as the stanza relates, even while this life may seem to be alive, it is an illusion created in the aftermath, for they took down the two walls (it was a movie set) while the Director left with his scriptbook, because the scene had been shot. Thus, the life of the starlet is one great finished event, which cannot be experienced by the viewers of her stardom because it is all hidden by the lights that make her “Technicolor real.” What the poem suggests is real—that is to say, what it suggests can be experienced—is that which lies beyond the images that record this life: the spirit. In other words, as the spotlights go out on Monroe, she becomes severed from her body, which is claimed by the glitz of the Hollywood world. What the speaker would have us believe, then, and what he would speak for, is that our prayer recovers what Hollywood can no longer possess: the soul. In this way, “Prayer for Marilyn Monroe” is something of an iconoclastic work. In hailing the spirit of the actress and petitioning God to receive that spirit into heaven, the speaker focuses his attention in a way that parallels the focus of Melville’s speaker. He would use the photographs of the actress to access her depth. However, as was the case in Melville’s poem, such access is problematic, if only in that it would surpass the only means available for “knowing” this soul. We cannot know Marilyn Monroe without the images that depict her. In a sense, this is the damnation of the actress: she is immortalized by the camera she was terrified of, and so the photographs of a life that drove her to an early death are finally all that we have to know her by: all that we have to mourn. Cardenal’s poem both alludes to this fact and would seem to deny it, for, in its petition for the actress’s soul, the poem must project the presence of that soul onto the actress’s iconic images, even while castigating many of the ways in which she became known. The irony is substantiated in the opening stanza of the poem, in which the speaker describes Monroe in death as going into God’s presence “without any make-up / without her Press Agent / without photographers and without autograph hounds / alone as an astronaut facing night in space.” What these lines describe is the sloughing off of an earthly body: the soul of Monroe is rid of what she sought to become rid of, presumably by way of suicide. But even in describing her entering the bodiless void of death, Cardenal engages in

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yet another suppressed ekphrasis: the astronaut in outer space, known throughout visual culture via photographs of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon in 1969. Iconic photographs, such as those of Monroe, and ekphrases that celebrate them, such as Cardenal’s prayer, call to mind what Melville sets out to achieve in his poem “On the Photograph of a Corps Commander,” in that Cardenal glosses the Sacrament of Monroe’s images just as Melville glosses the Sacrament of the Corps Commander’s portrait. In the discussion of Melville’s poem, I cited John Hollander’s description of this sort of ekphrastic glossing of the Sacrament, one Hollander describes as coming out of the Renaissance tradition. In the Renaissance tradition, a poet celebrates a personage by way of his or her portrait, relating how the painter captured the dynamic character of his subject. Melville brings this tradition to photography, and Cardenal continues it into the 20th century. What is so striking about the continuation of the tradition is that both poems not only gloss the Sacrament of the subjects that they choose but also enumerate how the work corresponds with uniting reader and subject in a familial bond. Just as the Sacrament of the Corps Commander expresses “the bonds that draw” all men together, so the photographs of Monroe express the social bonds that figure the actress as one of us: that is, as one of the shopgirls of the world. By establishing such familial or social bonds, these poems call our attention to the ability of iconic portraits to function as modern-day totems. In Totem and Taboo (1918), Freud recognizes that the central function of a totem is to delineate the members of a clan or family. “What is a totem?” asks Freud: As a rule it is an animal, either edible or harmless, or dangerous and feared; more rarely the totem is a plant or a force of nature (rain, water), which stands in a peculiar relation to the whole clan. The totem is first of all the tribal ancestor of the clan, as well as its tutelary spirit and protector; it sends oracles and, though otherwise dangerous, the totem knows and spares its children …. The character of a totem is inherent not only in a single animal or a single being but in all the members of the species …. The attachment to a totem is the foundation of all the social obligations of an Australian [aboriginal]: it extends on the one hand beyond the tribal relationship, and on the other hand it supersedes consanguineous relationship. (Freud 1946, 5–6)

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Freud’s scholarship is based in part on the work of Sir James Frazer, who studied totemism in aboriginal peoples. In his own work, Freud not only relies on the scholarship of such anthropologists as Frazer but is equally guilty of their ethnocentrisms. Employing such words as “savages” and “primitive,” Freud castigates totemism as being an activity that is otherwise beneath the advanced European societies of his day. But, as poems such as Melville’s and Cardenal’s allow us to recognize, totemism carries on in modern culture through iconic portraits, and it functions in ways that parallel Freud’s definition of it. The images of personages such as General Hancock (famous in 1866) and Marilyn Monroe delineate the modern, socio-economic clans to which their viewers belong. At least according to Melville, Brady’s photograph of Hancock is a totem of masculinity, while, according to Cardenal, portraits such as Arnold Newman’s of Monroe are totems of a proletariat blinded by the bread and circuses of Hollywood. In both cases, these images are described as having the power to unite the members of visual culture who gravitate to them into a tribe or a congregation. The totemic aspects of these photographs—at least as they are described in the poems—accounts for why neither of these poems relates any sort of sexual fetishism. As Freud explains, there is no place for sexuality in totemism, for one’s totem is an ancestral spirit. “Almost everywhere the totem prevails,” writes Freud, “there also exists the law that the members of the same totem are not allowed to enter into sexual relations with each other; that is, they cannot marry each other” (ibid., 7). Of course, to celebrate the Corps Commander as a sexual fetish is almost unimaginable, but it is easy to imagine how photographs of Monroe might be celebrated in this way. Monroe herself posed for erotic photographs, which have lent themselves to sexual and fetishistic purposes. Yet these are not the types of photographs alluded to in Cardenal’s poem. Instead, in his prayer, there is no place for such longing. Describing such iconic portraits as totems, then, allows us to recognize one of the central functions of these sorts of ekphrases: poems such as Melville’s and Cardenal’s describe a desire for members of a culture to bond and thus belong under the aegis of the image. The ekphrasis of an iconic portrait—be it a painting or a photograph—may require of its poet that he or she not violate this taboo. While such statements are dangerous generalizations, ever open to exception, I cannot find an ekphrasis of an iconic portrait that engages in sexual longing. True, there are any number

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of ekphrases of private photographs that engage in it, but one struggles to find the ekphrasis of an iconic portrait that does. In their poems, what Olds, Daniels, de Paor and Cardenal finally create are portraits not of specific photographs but of the readers who encounter them. As members of visual culture, we are a people united by visual markers that have come to be collectively known. Photographs such as Ut’s and Newman’s are abstractions that express for us and to us the nature of various aspects of our lives. In this sense, we might describe them as the paper (or electronic) currency of our knowledge. In his well-known 1859 essay “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” Oliver Wendell Holmes makes a bizarre suggestion: “We must have,” writes Holmes, special stereographic collections, just as we have professional and other special libraries. And, as a means of facilitating the formation of public and private stereographic collections, there must be arranged a comprehensive system of exchanges, so that there may grow up something like a universal currency of these bank-notes, or promises to pay in solid substance, which the sun has engraved for the great Bank of Nature. (Holmes 1980, 81) To conceive of a photograph as a “bank note” of “Nature” suggests that each image may redeem a subject of equal value. For example, Marilyn Monroe’s images might be exchanged for the substance of another woman. In the exchange, one essence is as good as another. Naturally, one comes to object to the idea. Monroe’s iconic photographs do not correspond in value to the life of a shopgirl’s, and yet, the function of iconic photographs such as Ut’s and Newman’s lend themselves to this very idea of exchange—not because they can be exchanged for other images or for human beings, but because they have already been exchanged for a collective understanding that has long been consolidated in the society of people with eyes. Horror, beauty—such abstracts are what these images buy for us. Thus, their ekphrases are, in fact, assessments of the value of these images. Olds’s, Daniels’s, de Paor’s and Cardenal’s poems enumerate the cost that these images exact on the lives of their speakers and, by consequence, the cost they exact on our own lives, for we know these pictures, and so buy and sell them in the marketplace of what we term knowledge.

— 6 —

The Ekphrastic Calligram The Ekphrastic Calligram

As the previous two chapters have demonstrated, suppressed ekphrasis has become one of the norms of modern writing. In some cases, such as Moore’s and Heaney’s poems, suppressed ekphrasis manifests itself as a means for the writer to see through to the world that lies beyond his or her immediate experiences. In other cases, such as the ekphrases of iconic photographs found in the poems by Olds and Cardenal, suppression takes the form of allusions to images that have become part and parcel of visual culture. But these suppressions and the norms they illustrate prompt the question: if photography has become an invisible medium, one that modern writers regularly see through rather than see, and thus write through rather than write about, what motivates a writer to acknowledge the medium? What reason would one have for identifying his or her writing as an ekphrasis of a photograph, rather than suppressing the medium, as Moore and Heaney do? Initially, the logical answer to this question is that such acknowledged ekphrases seek to associate themselves with actual visual representations, acting to caption the corresponding images with lyrical commentaries. As such, these poets engage in a work that recalls the work of Whitman’s cicerone, in that they guide their readers through the images that figure in their own galleries. Also, like Melville’s poem, with its drive to be a caption of Brady’s image, these poems strive to be captions. However, what distinguishes these acknowledged ekphrases from older, 19th-century poems such as Whitman’s and Melville’s is that modern poems include overt references to the photographs that they describe. While Melville obfuscates who the Corps Commander is and who the photographer was who took the man’s portrait, poets such as Thom Gunn, Richard Howard

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and John Logan clearly identify who the subjects of the photographs they describe are and who the photographers were who took these pictures. Furthermore, these poets write with the intention of having their poems appear beside the photographs that they describe. While Melville’s poem merely suggests itself as a caption, but finally obscures its source, Gunn, Howard and Logan forge between their poems and the photographs they describe what Michel Foucault terms “calligrams.” Originally a term coined by Guillaume Apollinaire to refer to a poem in the shape of its subject, the calligram, for Foucault, describes the bond formed between illustrations and their attached “legends” (Foucault 1983, 22). When Foucault speaks of the calligram, then, he is speaking of an imagetext alloy that fuses the two media into one. As an example of this alloy, Foucault turns to the school-primer in which images of objects appear above their names. According to Foucault, when the child sees a picture of an elephant above the word “elephant,” this creates “a double cipher” in which meaning is trapped between the image and the text. “Pursuing its quarry by two paths,” writes Foucault, the calligram sets the most perfect trap. By its double function, it guarantees capture, as neither discourse alone nor a pure drawing could do. It banishes the invisible absence that defeats words, imposing upon them, by the ruses of a writing at play with space, the visible form of their referent. Clearly arranged on a sheet of paper, signs invoke the very thing they speak …. (ibid., 21–2) Considered in terms of acknowledged ekphrases, Foucault’s calligram may be said to describe the bond that forms between the photograph and the poem that would caption it. Between these two media, the “invisible absence that defeats” the words of the poem is “banished” by the visible presence of the photographic image. In making this comparison between such poems and Foucault’s calligram, I acknowledge that there are important differences. In his examinations, Foucault stresses that the success of the calligram is based on the proximity of the image to the text. Also, this success is due in part to a lack of textual rhetoric, for the “legend” beneath the image is usually little more than a phrase (ibid.). Given the length of the poems we will examine in this chapter (each being a page or longer) as well as these poems’ proclivity for metaphor, the relationships between these poems and the photographs that they describe do not perfectly accord with

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Foucault’s calligram; much displacement occurs between the text and the image. However, even while this is the case, Foucault’s conception of “the trap” of the calligram affords us a valuable way to describe the alliance that occurs between these photographs and poems—an alliance we might term as an intermedial intimacy. That is, in each of these poems, there is an iconophilic drive that strives to link the poem with the photograph. Such a link ultimately comes to suggest contact between the poem and the photograph, and this contact accords with the chronotope of the photograph I have been describing. In point of fact, in these calligrams, words encounter images just as poetic speakers encounter their photographic subjects. Thus, the imaginative and material aspects of these media parallel each other. However, in addition to this intimacy and the chronotope it forges, there is as well a rivalry between the text and image: just as these poems strive to bond with the photographs that they describe, they also express a resistance to these images. The rivalry and its resistance correspond with Foucault’s definition of the calligram, for, in his examinations, Foucault focuses the majority of his attention upon what occurs when a calligram is “unraveled.” Foucault’s principal example of an unraveled calligram is René Magritte’s painting Ceci n’est pas une pipe. Observing the way that the words written beneath Magritte’s painting of a pipe deny the image its claim to being a pipe, Foucault describes this denial as being the opening of the calligram. “It is there,” writes Foucault, on these few millimeters of white, the calm sand of the page, that are established all relations of designation, nomination, description, classification. The calligram absorbed that interstice; but once opened, it does not restore it. The trap shattered on emptiness: image and text fall each to its own side, of their own weight. No longer do they have a common ground, nor do they have a place where they can meet, where words are capable of taking shape and image of entering into lexical order. (ibid., 28) In the acknowledged ekphrases of photographs, we find such “unravelings,” in that, once these poems have established “all of the relations” of “designation, nomination, description and classification,” often they come to refute these relations. This unraveling takes various forms. In Thom Gunn’s poem, it is not present. As his poems narrate the events depicted in his brother Ander’s

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photographs, the poetic speaker has the authority of a novelist, and he connects the disparate images together into one overriding assemblage. However, in Richard Howard’s poem “Charles Baudelaire,” for example, Howard engages in a conversation with the French poet by means of a portrait of him taken by the French photographer Nadar. The conversation forms a calligram: one that speaks Baudelaire back to life. But Howard’s poem also involves an unraveling of the calligram, in that it allows Baudelaire himself to speak, and, in this speaking, the French poet objects to Howard’s ekphrastic resurrection. Denying Howard’s project, Baudelaire denies the calligram that Howard’s poem forges between itself and Nadar’s image. Equally, John Logan’s poem “On a Photograph by Aaron Siskind” seeks to forge a calligram between itself and Siskind’s photograph “Gloucester 114,” elevating Siskind’s photograph to the level of the sacrosanct. But Logan’s poem is also a mournful account of the death that is harbored within Siskind’s image: a death that suggests both Logan’s death and Siskind’s. Thus, while the poem celebrates Siskind’s image, it shuns it as a memento mori. There is, then, in both poems a double action. Howard and Logan ravel their calligrams together in the midst of their unraveling them. All in the Rubbish Heap Now: Thom and Ander Gunn’s Positives The intermedial intimacy of the calligram takes many forms. However, what is central to its success is a formal sort of mutual dependency between the text and the image: the messages that they create together are formally cooperative. In using this word, I am selective, for the success of the calligram, as Foucault explains, requires that the media co-operate. Whatever limitations or deficiencies that may exist in one medium are to be made up for by the form of the other, so that, were the text and image separated, one would sense a disintegration of their greater combined significance. Without the photograph, the poem would seem obscure. Without the poem, the photograph would seem insignificant. There is no better example of this formal cooperation than Thom and Ander Gunn’s 1966 book Positives. Consisting of some 36 poems that respond to 40 adjoining photographs, Positives charts the experiences of mid 20th-century urban British life. In fact, the book may be said to map the odyssey of life unto death. Beginning Positives, one is greeted

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by baby pictures and pictures of small children at play. Then, there are scenes of street life, teenage rock musicians, weddings, office girls on their ways to work, motorcyclists, street cleaners, middle-aged men in pubs, pensioners sitting on park benches and, lastly, the decrepitly aged. In all these photographs, however, there is a frenetic energy. The images come to us seemingly at a glance, and this corresponds to their power. Nothing in them seems studied, nor do many of the subjects pose. Instead, the photographs allow us to see the rhythms of the lives of their subjects suspended in mid-motion, and they inspire one to imagine the ongoing stories that began before Ander’s camera shot and that must have carried on afterwards. It is for this reason that Thom Gunn’s adjoining poems satisfy. Rough, free verse pieces, coming to us without titles, the poems dovetail with the photographs’ imagistic spontaneity. They caption each image with a lyrical narrative whose rhythms match the unstudied immediacy of the photographic subjects. Indeed, there is a quick—even a dashed-off quality—to the verse, which can be characterized by sudden enjambments and irregular verse paragraphs. The calligramic success of Positives is so apparent that it leads me to make a concession about my definition of the ekphrasis of photographs. In the introduction to this study, I distanced my definition from James Heffernan’s general definition of ekphrasis. There, I cited how Heffernan defines ekphrasis as “typically deliver[ing] from the pregnant moment of visual art its embryonically narrative impulse ….” For Heffernan, the ekphrastic delivery “makes explicit the story that visual art tells only by implication” (Heffernan 1993, 5). As I explained in the introduction, my reason for moving away from Heffernan’s definition was that photographs seem to inspire encounters between their viewers and their subjects— encounters such as we have seen in many of the poems I have examined thus far. I argued that ekphrases of these encounters are fundamentally different from the ekphrastic narratives Heffernan describes, because his definition focuses on narratives that occur specifically inside the visual images. Generally, I do not retreat from this position; however, Positives is different. In a way that corresponds to Heffernan’s definition, Thom’s poems work to narrate stories that seemingly remain within the photographic images. Ander’s photographs offer their viewers pregnant moments, and the poems deliver these moments. However, in returning to Heffernan’s definition, I hasten to observe that there remains a difference, if only a difference by degrees. If we

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consider the degree to which Homer describes the Shield of Achilles or Williams and Auden describe the pictures of Brueghel, we recognize that those poets work to assemble or reassemble these visual images in verse. Enargeia is used to make the ekphrastic objects vivid, so as to make the narratives that rise out of these objects equally vivid. Thom does not do this in his poems, and the matter would seem to involve the sort of delivery that Ander’s photographs call for specifically and also that photography calls for in general. In his definition, Heffernan invokes Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoön, in which Lessing introduces the phrase “pregnant moment.” Lessing distinguishes between the description of a painting and a poem by distinguishing between the single moment of the former and the progressive imitations of the latter. Lessing writes: Painting, in its coexistent compositions, can use but a single moment of an action, and must therefore choose the most pregnant one, the one most suggestive of what has gone before and what is to follow. Poetry, in its progressive imitations, can use but a single attribute of bodies, and must choose that one which gives the most vivid picture of the body as exercised in this particular action. (Lessing 2005, 92) Having made the distinction between painting and poetry, Lessing famously states the rule that the painter must not strive to imitate the poet, and the poet must not attempt to imitate the painter. “The rule is this,” writes Lessing: “that succession in time is the province of the poet, co-existence in space that of the artist” (Lessing 2005, 109). Such a rule would seem to castigate ekphrasis in general, and yet, ironically, Lessing affords Heffernan an ideal metaphor to describe ekphrasis: the pregnant moment. However, it is not this irony that I would call attention to. Rather, the distinction I would make involves the sort of pregnant moment one finds in a photograph. This moment seems to inspire a different sort of imitation. The ekphrasis of a painting involves the description of an image that was constructed by a painter to express a message about the painting’s subject. The painter glosses—in a manner that recalls John Hollander’s notion of the Sacrament—his or her subject. The gloss may be said to involve creating a pregnant moment in the painting: fashioning a narrative kernel within the visual scene. But, as we have already seen in Carroll’s “Hiawatha’s Photographing,” the photographer does not do this. Instead, a photograph captures life in mid-action, and it is this capturing

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(“taking”) that we find the photograph’s pregnant moment. Indeed, as an indexical sign, a photograph points to one instant from a seemingly infinite number of instants of life, and this semiotic difference mandates a different sort of delivery, at least in terms of Thom’s poems. Thom does not so much reconstruct Ander’s images as he ruminates on the life that the photographs suspend in mid-motion. The poems, then, thematically extend the photographs. They do not recreate them. Thus, in accordance with Lessing’s rule, Thom’s poems do not imitate Ander’s photographs, but maintain poetry’s province: the session of time. The poems affix to the photographs anterior and posterior times and further adjoin to the images abstractions and psychological meditations. They narrate where Ander’s subjects may have come from and where they may be going to, and they postulate about what thoughts they may have. The work corresponds to the cooperation of the calligrams one finds in Positives. Using the photographs as foundations, the poems construct their narratives seemingly beyond the images, but these constructions (their ruminations, imagery and even grammatical structures) are dependent upon the photographs. For example, there is often a lack of referential specificity to Thom’s pronouns, many of which have no clear antecedents and so seem jarring and disconnected. However, the photographs immediately allay these obscurities. Equally, Thom’s speakers provide narratives to the images, but their narrative attentions are often eccentric. In fact, speakers rarely point into the photographs. But, again, the photographs augment these narratives. Appearing on the facing page, each photograph focuses the narrative, providing it with a subject and situation. The position of the photographs allows the speakers, then, to escape the laborious work of the prose narrator. Instead, Thom’s verses may remain associative, probing and even whimsical without the danger of obscurity. Indeed, the poems are so dependent upon the photographs that the photographs demarcate the beginnings and endings of each of the poems. Just as Ander offers us no titles to his images, Thom offers us no titles or clear section breaks to the poems. In one sense, this problematizes discussing any one poem in the book. In a very real sense, Positives could be described as one long associative poem. However, as the book progresses, the sequence of the photographs categorizes and focuses the lyrics. With each image, there is a sense of readjustment on the part of the speaker. His tone and focus change, and the changes mark the beginnings and endings of the poems.

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Figure 19  Ander Gunn, “Photograph #35,” Positives, 1966

To illustrate these dynamics, I turn to the final poem in Positives, which begins with the line “The mould from baked beans that.” The line does not provide us with a sufficient title, but then, as I have observed, titles are unnecessary and actually replaced in the book by the photographic images. In the case of the final poem, two images of an aged tramp rummaging in front of an abandoned house provide the rubric for the poem (Figures 19 and 20). The poem reads as follows: The mould from baked beans that even she can’t eat edges onto the damp sticks, netting, bones, leaves, slabs of rust, felt feathers,

The Ekphrastic Calligram

Figure 20  Ander Gunn, “Photograph #36,” Positives, 1966

all disintegrating to an infected compost. The infection in it is slow, slight, deep, and it has certain needs, for see, it responds to warmth. Outside the abandoned house where she slept on old papers she stirs in the sun. Poking around the rubbish, she can’t find what she wants.

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Poetry, Photography, Ekphrasis Near Maidstone once, hop-picking with the four babies and Tom, she worked all day along the green alleys, among the bins, in the dim leafy light of the overhanging vines. In the village, shopkeepers put cages on their counters to prevent snatching. But Tom took something! What was it? All in the rubbish heap now, some rotting, most clean vanished. Something approaches, about which she has heard a good deal. Her deaf ears have caught it, like a silence in the wainscot by her head. Her flesh has felt a chill in her feet, a draught in her groin. She has watched it like moonlight on the frayed wood stealing toward her floorboard by floorboard. Will it hurt? Let it come, it is the terror of full repose, and so no terror.

(Gunn 1966, 76–8)

Perhaps the best way of appreciating the textimage bonds of the calligram is to try to imagine Thom’s poem without the photographs at its side. Were we able to do this, we would recognize the dependency of the text on the images. Without the photographs, the poem becomes referentially unsound. Its narrative loses much of its specificity. In fact, without the photographs, the poem loses any semblance of deixis. For example, we could not understand who “she” is or where these “damp sticks” are without Ander’s images. The poetic speaker makes no attempt to provide such information. Instead, he begins with a backstory about the beans,

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which do not figure in Ander’s photographs, and, from here, he goes into generalities that accord with the conditions of the woman’s surroundings: “all disintegrating to / an infected compost.” The lines appeal to the overall theme of the book: the progression of life that has been charted through Positives has come to a state of disintegration and infection. All is collapsing or preparing for collapse, but this thematic reference does not correspond to the work of ekphrasis. In fact, the first ten lines of the poem do little to describe the photograph. However, these are not deficits in the poem. On the contrary, they are extensions and developments that exist by virtue of the calligram. While the decrepit tramp stands like a weird sister in her ill-fitting clothes and crushed hat, her images allow the reader’s eyes to dart from the image to the poem and back again. The relationship alleviates the referential uncertainties created by the poem. In fact, it valorizes them. Had Thom’s poem attempted to describe the photographs in detail, it would have revealed its verbal limitations. Freed from this work, the poem can then develop a narrative sequence that draws the character of the woman. Thus, in a manner that recalls Heffernan’s definition, Thom’s speaker narrates a piece of the time from before the scene, and then he provides his readers with abstractions that the photograph is pregnant with: disintegration, infection. Providing the images with meaning is essentially the work of the calligram, but the work also calls on the poem to pull away or depart from the concretion of the images in order to introduce abstract ideas. The speaker of Thom’s poem takes the departure to the limit. In fact, we may take issue with how far the poem departs from the photographs in the third stanza. Here the imagery becomes enigmatic in a way that seems to abandon the photographs altogether: The infection in it is slow, slight, deep, and it has certain needs, for see, it responds to warmth. What is infected? The mould in the beans? Possibly, but “infection” is not usually the word one uses to describe mould. In fact, the poem makes no attempt to clarify the matter, and the photograph records no obvious infection. The poem adds, then, the idea of infection without any support from the image. Were we to seek some referential object in the photographs to

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substantiate the idea of infection, we might look to the woman’s actions in the first of the two photographs. In the first image, she studies her hands (Figure 19). Is the infection there in the hands? Is the speaker narrating the woman’s inspection of them? We have no way of knowing, but we can recognize how the speaker directs us to “see” something as the woman seems to see it: “for see, it responds to warmth.” What responds to warmth though? The infection obviously, but where is it? Who sees it? Furthermore, who says this? And to whom? Having no immediate reference in the photograph, the passage seems to abandon the work of ekphrasis; however, as it seemingly does this, it brings us into a close psychological proximity to the woman. The obscurity seemingly parallels her private meditations. Her thoughts and the speaker’s narrative briefly fuse. Thus, what preoccupies her attention comes to preoccupy the speaker’s. Understood in this manner, the passage seemingly clarifies itself, and it also reveals the true nature of its ekphrasis. The pregnant moment of Ander’s first photograph seems to lie in the woman’s fixed meditation on her hands. This aspect of the photograph seemingly fosters what Roland Barthes famously calls the photograph’s “punctum.” For Barthes, the punctum is an aspect of a particular photograph that prompts fascination. He terms it as a “‘sting, speck, cut, little hole’ and also a cast of the dice,” and Barthes goes on to write: “A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me.)” (Barthes, 27). Thom’s speaker seems to be equally pricked by this woman’s meditation on her hands in the first photograph, and his response to this punctum is to enter, so to speak, into the “little hole” of this punctum and to narrate from that place. Doing this, his perspective becomes hers. The word in the poem that endorses this narrative move is the verb “stirs,” which figures in the following verse paragraph. Outside the abandoned house where she slept on old papers she stirs in the sun. Poking around the rubbish, she can’t find what she wants. Unlike the passage that precedes it, this verse paragraph is the most ekphrastic. The lines objectively describe Ander’s second photograph (Figure 20), which has a wider angle than the first, and so more includes the house behind the woman. It also comes closer to depicting her

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“poking around the rubbish.” This poking may be said to align itself with the woman’s stirring. In the actual sense of the word, the woman has stirred and woken in the rubbish, but there is also a figurative function to the word. This involves collapsing the woman and the idea of infection together. They both “respond to warmth” in the form of sunlight. They both seem “slow,” “slight” and “deep.” In fact, the word seems to superimpose the two photographs, because in the first image, the woman seems to “poke” her (possibly) infected hand the way she is said to poke the rubbish. Such a stirring together of things allows Thom to suggest a continuous narrative. His ekphrasis is not simply the description of one photograph after another; it involves putting the two photographs into motion. His speaker narrates a sequence of events that move from the first image to the second just as they move from the subjective perspective of her thoughts to the objective perspective of ekphrasis. In a purely narrative way, this move entails describing how the woman first looks down to her hands (in the first photograph) and then looks up to gaze at something beyond the frame (in the second photograph). The success of this narrative depends again upon the calligram. Thom’s story is powerful in how it departs from Ander’s photographs only to return to them with a story that unites them into one continuous action. As we have seen, this story depends on psychologically narrating the woman’s ruminations in the first image (effectively creating the story of her thoughts), then constructing the metaphor of infection, as a unifying agent. Once this is accomplished, the photographs function as imagistic poles. The narrative traverses the distance between them. Thus, without the photographs, there could be no imagistic source for the story, but without the poem, there could be no narrative sequence ordering the first photograph after the second. This narrative sequence allows Thom to create a story in which the woman’s attention shifts from one gaze to another, and this shift corresponds to the shift from life to death. In the ekphrasis of the first photograph, she is speculative and reflective on things in this world: beans, infection, rubbish. She does not find what she wants, nor do her thoughts reflect a person aware of greater reality. They are microscopic. In the ekphrasis of the second photograph, her awareness shifts to greater realities. First, there is the obscure memory of Tom “taking something.” Then, there is the awareness of death itself. Again, Ander’s image provides a concretion for this narrative. In the second photograph, the woman

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gazes reflectively beyond the right edge of the frame. Her gaze suggests recognition. As the poem relates, something is coming. In the second photograph, she seems to cringe, but also she seems to stand her ground. The encroaching presence of death is paralleled by another idea that relates to photography. Once again, we return to the idea of “taking.” In the following section about Richard Howard’s poem “Charles Baudelaire,” I will discuss the idea of photographic theft at length, but here it is important to recognize it as a theme that corresponds to the taking powers of death, and photography. Indeed, death and Ander Gunn both take the woman. Both stand outside the photographic frame and snatch her up, as Tom “took” something in the poem. The theme of taking is something that Thom includes in his narrative as a comment on photography and its relationship with death. Narrating the woman’s recollections, the poetic speaker introduces a character named “Tom,” who stole something. What he stole is never recalled and so never revealed, but the theft foreshadows the “stealing” approach of death that the woman sees. One cannot help but feel there is some private joke afoot in this constellation. Thom Gunn (the poet) speaks of the character “Tom” stealing something, and Thom (the poet) does this in response to his brother’s photograph, which—like all photographs—was taken (or figuratively stolen?) from an instance of the woman’s life. The idea of Tom “stealing” something that was not his to take corresponds to the idea behind the creation of such a book as Positives. The Brothers Gunn went into the world to snatch from its tableaus of life. Gathering the images they took together and captioning them with poems, Thom and Ander transform the people in the photographs into thematic representatives, who become links in a narrative and metaphorical chain. In terms of the woman, what Thom and Ander snatch seems to be the very end of her life. Her face seems taken at her last hour. This photographic theft is honored by the vagueness of the pronoun “it.” The antecedent of the pronoun points to Tom’s petty theft. Later, it points to Death, but it is hard to identify when the referential shift occurs. In any case, the vagueness of the pronoun may also be allotted to the calligram formed by the text and image. Indeed, what was taken and what will be taken—these merge, and the product of the merger is what gets trapped between the photograph and the poem. In fact, the beauty of the calligram can be found in the way the poem assigns to the woman’s face this final significance.

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Let it come, it is the terror of full repose, and so no terror. These lines tell us what the woman’s face means. They ennoble her frailty and disintegration, in that they come to define or substantiate the essence of death. In doing this, the poem aligns the woman’s face with an existential heroism—“let it come.” The penultimate line of the poem would seem to counter this heroism by using the word “terror,” but this is equally countered by the notion of “full repose.” Death is the last sleep, and sleep is what her face seems to long for. In any case, here is where Thom extends the pregnant moment of Ander’s photograph beyond its photographic present. His ekphrastic narrative has now entered the future, which is death. Indeed, the move corresponds to the progressive structure of the book and the calligrams it creates. The poem must apply its progressive imitations to the single moments of each photograph (lending each one a past and a future) to chart the progression Positives takes from birth to death. The opening poem of the collection studies a one-year-old child bathing, and states: She has been a germ, a fish and an animal; even now she is almost without hair or sex. But the body is feeling its way        feeling: The opening lines echo the book’s final ones. “Feeling” that which is beyond life, either before it or after it, is central. Just as the child feels its body, so the old woman feels hers. The child intuits its pre-existent state. The woman intuits her death. Indeed, there is something Whitmanesque in the suggestion. The child has been “a germ, a fish, an animal.” Such statements call to mind Whitman’s great notion of reincarnation, in which life never stops. The suggestion colors, perhaps, the old woman’s final notion of an ultimate repose, implying that there might never be such a repose, but, instead, the drive of life returns us again and again: we are germs, fish, animals and human beings. Whatever we might make of the suggestion, such speculations are not vital to our appreciation of

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Positives, for finally they miss the central point of the calligrams the book creates, and the point is this: photographs cannot express feeling. They can only inspire that state of mind. To express feeling, we must have words, and these words take the form of Thom’s lyrics. The poems unite Ander’s photographs into a collective development of feelings. In a large sense, then, delivering the pregnant moments of Ander’s photographs amounts to responding to the demands of their photographic subjects. Though they rarely suggest the sorts of encounters between Thom’s speaker and Ander’s subjects as we find between Benjamin and the fishwife, they do recognize feelings that would seem to be encrypted in each image. In one way, we could take issue with such responses. Unlike Benjamin before the fishwife, Thom’s speakers add fictional life to non-fictional people and scenes. After identifying Hill’s photograph and its subject, Benjamin falls dumb. But Thom does not seem shy about writing a life for Ander’s subjects—snatching them from the world, and making it his own. Thus, Thom imposes ideas onto real things and persons: ideas that might never have been there to begin with. Regardless of how real his or her subjects are, the painter invents a painting. In alignment with John Ruskin’s definition of great art, the painter puts in ideas, and so, the painting may be safely interpreted as a source of ideas and fictions, but, as the ekphrases of the 19th century imply, a photograph calls for study, for whatever essential qualities it might reveal are qualities we may infer from the real world. In discussing Heaney’s poem, I called attention to the problems of reducing photographic subjects by comparing them to other photographic subjects. It seems only fitting to acknowledge a similar problem in Thom’s poems: they do add fiction to the real. I make this observation not to unduly criticize Positives. On the contrary, one of the great values of the book is the way the calligrams forge bonds between reality and lyrical fictions. Thom’s poems are subtle, graceful and, finally, attentive to the precision of Ander’s photographs. In fact, one is tempted to ascribe a brotherly love to the book, for it is not just that the two artists are brothers, but also that their collective work—their book-length calligram—affords us a sort of intermedial agape in which the poems and photographs come together to form a single meaning, and, while the meaning may involve fictional inventions, its ultimate goal is to affirm life. Photographing the most quotidian aspects of daily life and writing poems about them, Ander and Thom Gunn create positives. The play on the term, which refers, of course, to the development of photographic positives from their negatives, is in every way appropriate,

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for the book is finally a positive celebration of life, even as it charts the approach of death. Looking Hard at Things: Richard Howard’s “Charles Baudelaire” After Thom and Ander Gunn’s Positives, few poets have come closer to forging calligrams between photographs and their poems than Richard Howard. In his homage to the French portrait photographer Nadar, Howard has written two sequences of poems that are wholly dependent upon Nadar’s photographs. Comprising the centerpieces of two of Howard’s collections, Misgivings (1979) and Lining Up (1984), Howard’s “Nadar Poems” are ekphrases of Nadar’s portraits of such persons as George Sand, Jacques Offenbach, Richard Wagner and Nadar himself. In part, what accounts for the success of these poems and the calligrams that they forge with Nadar’s portraits is the proximity of the poems to Nadar’s images. Appearing on the pages adjacent to each other, the poems and the photographs imply relationships between Howard’s speakers and Nadar’s subjects. Glowering from the left-hand pages of Howard’s two collections, Nadar’s subjects become listeners to the poems: a fact that only serves to bolster Howard’s project, for Howard’s poems address these subjects directly. In this way, the poems engage in conversations that range from the philosophical to the banal. The effect of these conversations is that the poems and the photographs become mutually dependent, in a manner similar to Thom’s poems and Ander’s photographs. Appearing as though they were listening to Howard’s poems, Nadar’s subjects seem to comprehend Howard’s every word, absorbing the various places where the verse becomes over-referential or obscure. Equally, the poems come to name and describe the lives of Nadar’s subjects, celebrating such personages as Richard Wagner and Victor Hugo in the manner of odes. In a sense, these poems are also ekphrases of iconic photographs, for Nadar’s portraits are some of the only images we have of these artists. However, while the speaker in a poem of iconic ekphrasis such as Cardenal’s steps forward to be a representative voice for all members of visual culture, Howard’s poems work to create hermetically sealed spaces around their icons. Between the right margin of the photographs and the left margin of the poems, the imaginative contact that allows Howard’s speaker to address Nadar’s sitters is paralleled by the material contact that

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forms between the image and the text. The contact may be considered as the ultimate fulfillment of the apostrophe we observed in other poems. Turning to Nadar’s photographs, Howard’s speakers turn away from the reader, indulging in an insider’s talk that makes little attempt to clarify itself. As readers, even while we are occasionally included via a plural first-person pronoun (a “we” or an “us”), we enter these poems in the way a child might have crept into Nadar’s studio while he was photographing. Obscured behind the speakers in Howard’s poems, we eavesdrop, gleaning what we can from Howard’s argot of jokes, allusions and whispers. Even while the exclusivity makes the poems at times difficult, these difficulties are always counterbalanced by the sense of an actual conversation going on: a conversation in which all is understood. No example is more representative of Howard’s Nadar Poems than “Charles Baudelaire.” Describing the French poet by way of the portrait Nadar took of him at the time of the publication of Fleurs du Mal in 1857 (Figure 21), “Charles Baudelaire” exhibits the various poetic strategies that Howard uses throughout both collections. Charles Baudelaire You were the hero inherent in Eros— “Builder of cities” all right but saboteur as well—wherefore you despised such indispensable prey as readers who failed, despite your example, to pluck themselves a garden from the garbage of the past. If we look hard at things they seem to look back; out of a writhing great coat you stare at us with that splendid impatience which is the deepest French virtue, “taken” by your lifelong friend between hyperboles—at one extreme lilac gloves and black curls to your collar, at the other Jeanne’s insulted beauty and

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Figure 21  Nadar, “Charles Baudelaire,” 1857

bald paralysis—but here implacable holding fast to a passion for exactitude. Today you published ten poems you wanted to call Lesbiennes until advised by Hyppolite Babou to name them Fleurs du Mal … Why not? you are so busy with your current Poe translations and puzzled by favors to be curried from George Sand, “poor dear dreadful little lady always having a crow to pick with Jean-Jacques!” You look at things, though, look until

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Formally constructed in stanzas, the poem recalls Melville’s “On the Photograph of a Corps Commander.” Like Melville, Howard employs the formal elements of the ode and augments the formality with the traditional form of address and its epithets. Baudelaire is the “hero inherent in Eros,” “builder of cities,” “arbiter / of ennui.” But whereas Melville never departs from this elevated convention, Howard’s poem is a collage of the high and the low. Juxtaposed with these epithets is the chitchat of lines such as: “Today / you published ten poems you wanted to call / Lesbiennes until advised / by Hyppolite Babou to name them Fleurs du Mal … / Why not? you are so busy / with your current Poe translations.” Such shifts in diction undermine the rhapsodic formality of the poem. Howard’s speaker changes from being a distant admirer of Baudelaire to speaking as though he were part of the poet’s intimate circle. While the poem offers no indication as to the speaker’s physical conditions (where he sits, his movements, etc.), such chitchat recalls the attitude one displays towards the Penates and Lares that typically adorn the writing desk: those picture-postcards or miniatures of illustrious artist-fathers and -mothers who watch over a younger writer. Such images become the objects of this type of address, shifting from being the visages of famous persons to being the familiar faces of colleagues and even fellow gossips. In Howard’s poem, the camaraderie centers on the “look” that passes

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between the two poets. The power of this “look” is in its original response. Forming an axis of sight between the speaker and the impatient leer of Baudelaire, the “look” goes in two directions: “things seem to look back.” This looking hinges on the pronoun “you”—a word that begins the poem with a clear antecedent and then becomes increasingly ambiguous. Referring to Baudelaire in the poem’s first line, the pronoun initiates the address. It clearly divides the speaker from Baudelaire, but the division becomes unstable by the tenth stanza. Here, the “you” becomes too expansive to refer to any antecedent: “You look at things, though, look until // you don’t know if they are you / or you they ….” In such lines, who is “you”? And who says “you” to whom? Who is seen and who is being seen? The suggestion is that Howard’s speaker is both the subject and the object, as Baudelaire has become both the object and the subject. The “look,” then, is transformed into a linguistic space. At each end of this space is a “you” that slides between indicating Howard’s speaker and Baudelaire, and that seems capacious enough to refer to both. However, the “look” and the pronoun are not the only linguistic elements that the two poets share. Howard’s poem is something of a collage, in that he weaves into it phrases from Baudelaire’s journals. Howard’s allusion to George Sand, for example, is taken almost verbatim from Baudelaire’s Journaux Intimes (XVI–XVII) (1868) (Baudelaire 1983, 32–8). George Sand, “poor dear dreadful little lady always having a crow to pick with Jean-Jacques!” Incorporating these lines from Baudelaire’s journal, Howard collages the French poet’s words together with his own, allowing the two poets to share more than mere pronouns. The poem’s linguistic space becomes capacious enough for two voices, so that we might ask: who is speaking here? Of course, the lines read as though Howard’s speaker were quoting from Baudelaire, but the matter is not certain. Baudelaire himself might be said to interject these words into the middle of Howard’s monologue, transforming the monologue into a conversation. While the passage about George Sand is the longest of these citations, the most significant one comes in the form of the word “taken,” which appears inside quotation marks at the end of the second line of the fourth stanza:

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As in the passage about George Sand, the quotation marks suggest that the word “taken” is Baudelaire’s own. But whereas the George Sand passage is gossipy, here, the word “taken” is loaded with deeper significance. Placing the word in the salient position at the end of the second line of the stanza, Howard allows Baudelaire to interject a brief comment concerning his attitude toward the art of his “lifelong friend” Nadar. As brief as this comment is, its implication of theft implies Baudelaire’s overall contempt for photography, which is well documented. “In these deplorable times,” writes Baudelaire in his essay “The Modern Public and Photography,” a new industry has developed, which helped in no small way to confirm fools in their faith, and to ruin what vestige of the divine might still have remained in the French mind. Naturally, this idolatrous multitude was calling for an ideal worthy of itself and in keeping with its own nature. In the domain of painting and statuary, the present day credo of the worldly wise, especially in France (and I do not believe that anyone whosoever would dare to maintain the contrary), is this: “ believe in nature, and I believe only in nature.” (There are good reasons for that.) “I believe that art is, and can only be, the exact reproduction of nature.” (One timid and dissenting sect wants naturally unpleasing objects, a chamber pot, for example, or a skeleton, to be excluded.) ‘Thus if an industrial process could give us a result identical to nature, that would be absolute art.’ An avenging God has heard the prayers of this multitude; Daguerre was his messiah. And then they said to themselves: ‘Since photography provides us with every desirable guarantee of exactitude’ (they believe that, poor madmen!) “Art is photography.” From that moment onwards, our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on the metallic plate.” (Baudelaire 1980, 86) Baudelaire’s attack is as venomous as it is eloquent. In it, while relating how the French public has misconceived photography as art, Baudelaire implies his own conceptions of art. In his view, art is not a product of Nature. Rather, art transcends Nature, finding in Nature sources for

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itself but ultimately surpassing the transitory aspects of these sources. As photographs are images that “guarantee” “exactitude,” these images are merely “taken” from Nature in its transitory state. Thus, they are not art. Baudelaire’s viewpoint may be clarified if considered in the light of his poem “Le Guignon” (“The Artist Unknown”), in which Baudelaire states that the process of poesis requires a “Sisyphean patience”: Pour soulever poids si lourd, Sisyphe, il faudrait ton courage! Bien qu’on ai du cœur à l’ouvrage, L’art est long et le Temps est court. (Baudelaire 1982, 198–9) Flesh is willing, but the Soul requires Sisyphean patience for its song. Time, Hippocrates remarked, is short And Art is long. (Baudelaire 1982, 20–1) For Baudelaire, artistic creation has nothing to do with “taking” a moment from the “shortness” of time. The struggle to create is a struggle for the eternal. Thus, as photography, according to Baudelaire, merely copies the objects of Nature exactly, its images cannot be said to engage in creating the eternal, nor can the photographer be termed an artist. With this in mind, it is easy to conceive of how angry Baudelaire would have been at the thought that a poet such as Howard (one of Baudelaire’s most successful English translators) would stoop to writing a poem in praise of a photograph. But then, such is one of the jokes that the two poets share. Howard’s poem is something of an irreverent prank played on his poetic forefather. The substance of this joke may even be said to parallel Baudelaire’s relationship with Nadar: a relationship that must have been filled with such jokes, in that it was a relationship that consisted of one of photography’s greatest proponents (Nadar) taking pictures of one of its greatest antagonists (Baudelaire). The joke notwithstanding, the word “taken” implies as well an accusation of theft—an accusation that calls to mind Thom Gunn’s use of the words “snatched” and “took” in his poem. In Howard’s, Baudelaire is allowed to accuse his “lifelong friend” of stealing his “virtues” by way of photography. Such photographic thefts recall the cameraphobia that has often been

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attributed to aboriginal peoples: the fear that one’s soul can be stolen by way of a photograph. Howard invokes such a fear, allowing Baudelaire to accuse Nadar of taking his “virtue” and exhibiting this “virtue” in an image. But Nadar’s theft is seconded closely by Howard’s own, for the word “taken” also implies Baudelaire’s indictment of Howard’s speaker. This speaker has taken Baudelaire in, as though the French poet were one of his own acquaintances. This does not merely entail a theft by way of image, but a theft by way of memory, for Howard’s speaker sounds as though he knows—and thus remembers—episodes from the life of Baudelaire. The issue of such taken memories returns us to the issue of photographic memory and how this form of memory contrasts with traditional conceptions of memory. As stated in the discussion of Whitman’s poem, what I mean by “photographic memory” does not involve an eidetic memory with total recall, but rather a memory that has become surrogated by photography. In the discussion of Whitman’s poem, a comparison was drawn between Whitman’s photographic memory and St. Augustine’s conception of the palace of memory. Here, it is valuable to draw a similar comparison between Howard’s method of taking Baudelaire’s memories and Augustine’s conception of taking in memories. While the word “take” has become part of the nomenclature of photography, becoming the word we use to describe what a photographer does (he or she takes a picture), the word has long been associated with the action of memory, for it is to be remembered that the word “taken,” or at least its Latin equivalent (capere), figures prominently in Augustine’s description of how memory works: “When these things were present, memory took (cepit) images of them, images which I could contemplate when they were present and reconsider in my mind when I recollected them even though absent from me” (Augustine 1998, X. xvi (25)). Augustine’s memory operates like a camera. It takes in images that are presented before Augustine, and it keeps these images for him to recollect later. However, the images of Augustine’s memory cannot be shared in the way that photographs can be shared. In short, photography renders memory external and transmittable, allowing a photographer, present in the past, to take a photograph that might work as a memory does and to transmit this photograph on to someone else in the future. And, as this taken memory may be transmitted to anyone, the transmission takes what belongs to one memory and passes it on to another. In the discussion of Moore’s and Heaney’s poems, such transmissions were demonstrated to be at the heart of modern writing. The modern writer experiences places, persons and things that are distant from

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him- or herself by looking at photographs. These images become part of the writer’s memory, even while what they record might not be part of the writer’s lived-experiences. The result of these transferred experiences is the suppression of photography and its ekphrasis. The writer comes to see through photographs, not see them, and so he or she writes through them rather than writing about them. Such suppressions may also be problematic, in that, as in the case of Heaney’s poem, the resulting text can be overly reductive. In “Charles Baudelaire,” while Howard does not suppress Nadar’s portrait, he does suppress the mimetic aspects of its portrait, choosing to ignore it as a piece of representation so as to take Baudelaire’s image for the man himself. It is this choice that the Baudelaire of Howard’s poem objects to, and so, in a sense, Baudelaire accuses Howard of suppressing his ekphrastic source. However, the objection of Howard’s Baudelaire does not stop with these personal thefts. Rather, it extends to Howard’s poetic composition and how it engages in practices that are similar to the practices of photography, namely Howard’s use of citations. Howard quotes Baudelaire and, while this fact might not immediately seem to be photographic in nature, in fact, as John Berger recognizes, quotation and photography are closely related: The arguments, put forward from the 19th Century onwards, about photography sometimes being an art have confused rather than clarified the issue because they have always led to some kind of comparison with the art of painting. And an art of translation cannot usefully be compared to an art of quotation. Their resemblances, their influence one upon the other, are purely formal, functionally they have nothing in common. (Berger 1995, 111) If we consider Baudelaire’s conception of art in light of Berger’s distinction, we recognize that what Baudelaire requires of an artist is that he or she operates like a painter, not like a photographer: the artist should translate reality into timeless visions, not cite from it. Howard’s poem, however, is not written as a painter translates, but as a photographer quotes. Going into the past of Baudelaire’s life and writings, Howard performs the work of a verbal photographer: taking passages from Baudelaire’s journals and transferring these passages, as a ­photographer does photographs, on to the future. But the ramifications of Baudelaire’s objections do not stop with

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an indictment of Howard’s compositional practices. As the conclusion of Howard’s poem relates, these objections would seem to extend to post-modernity itself, and how post-modernity suffers from an ­impoverishment of the new:            Arbiter of ennui, you rummage on: Mexican idols, a gilded Buddha, rag dolls might as well be our true God, offensive concretion of the temporal process. We cannot erect the New Jerusalem until we destroy Babylon; what do we use in the building, you asked, but the same damned stones? It is useful to contrast Howard’s lines with Baudelaire’s sonnet “Les Correspondances,” observing how these two poets find themselves in utterly different aesthetic circumstances. La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers. Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité, Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté, Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent. II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d’enfants, Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies, —Et d’autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants, Ayant l’expansion des choses infinies, Comme l’ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l’encens, Qui chantent les transports de l’esprit et des sens. (Baudelaire 1982, 193)

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The pillars of Nature’s temple are alive and sometimes yield perplexing messages; forests of symbols between us and the shrine remark our passage with accustomed eyes. Like long-held echoes, blending somewhere else into one deep and shadowy unison as limitless as darkness and as day, the sounds, the scents, the colors correspond. There are odors succulent as young flesh, sweet as flutes, and green as any grass, while others—rich, corrupt and masterful— possess the power of such infinite things as incense, amber, benjamin and musk, to praise the sense’s raptures and the mind’s. (Baudelaire 1982, 15) Walter Benjamin describes the transcendent images of Les Correspondances as those images arising from “prehistorical data.” As Benjamin states, Baudelaire’s poem is made of “the stuff of childhood” (Benjamin 2007, 178). Baudelaire sees the “ forêts de symboles” with the eyes of a child and, more importantly, these symbols return his gaze with equally childlike innocence. Along the axis of these returned gazes, Nature unveils itself in “raptures” that finally derange the poet’s senses, in that “odors” become “succulent as young flesh, / sweet as flutes, and green as any grass ….” Howard’s poem is quite different, and this is foremost the case because the poem’s images do not arise from “pre-historical data.” Instead, its images are taken from post-historical data. Unlike Baudelaire’s forest of symbols, which is synonymous with the “pillars of Nature,” Howard’s list of objects (the rag doll, the Buddha, the Mexican idol, as well as Nadar’s photograph) entails whatever pillars or pilasters we might ascribe the world of human representation. The difference corresponds with the different sources of each poet’s vision and their different methods of composition. In a vision comprised of pre-historical data, such as Baudelaire’s, no image comes in the form of a re-presentation, for nothing in this vision is seemingly reused. Because there is no history out of

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which a thing might be used again or substituted by a representative, the objects that fill up Baudelaire’s poem are the stuff of the eternally new. But in a vision founded upon the post-historical data of representations, such as Howard’s, everything is reused, for all representations are, by definition, responses, surrogates, substitutes, copies or ekphrases of what came before them. In such a reality, the most one might say of the new is that it manifests in “a new record.” However, even while Howard’s objects are not new, these objects do share something with Baudelaire’s symbols: the doll, the Buddha, the idol and Nadar’s portrait all have eyes. As such, they are all given to “remark our passage with accustomed eyes,” to use Baudelaire’s phrase. However, these eyes differ from the eyes of Baudelaire’s symbols. Rather than sharing in Baudelaire’s childlike vision, they share in Howard’s adult one. This vision is one given to bouts of uncertainty and distrust, a fact that is expressed in the word “seem,” as it figures in Howard’s third stanza: “If we look hard / at things they seem to look back ….” The weakness of the verb expresses the adult nature of the speaker’s vision, for the word is something of a codicil: a piece of fine print in which the speaker certifies and acknowledges that, as much as he claims to have contact with Baudelaire, he may only be engaging in fancy or, worse yet, fetishism. But such an acknowledgment relates as well to the nature of Howard’s composition and its relationship to the act of taking, for by acknowledging that he might be indulging in fetishism, Howard’s speaker implies that there may be no other means for transcending the world of representations. All there is left to do is to make still more representations and to rearrange these representations into different fetishistic structures. The final lines of Howard’s poem allude to and enact these rearrangements, for the pessimism of the poem’s conclusion echoes the pessimism of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal. Howard takes from Fleurs du Mal, rearranging Baudelaire’s words to make yet another arrangement—yet another Babylon “of the same damned stones.” In this way, the word “taken” serves Howard’s poem in a manner similar to how the phrase “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” serves Magritte’s painting, for this one word denies the conversation that Howard would have with Baudelaire, unraveling the calligram that Howard seeks to forge with Nadar’s portrait. Instead of speaking with Baudelaire, Howard’s speaker is caught out. The poem is not a conversation but an act of ventriloquism that takes Baudelaire’s portrait into the proximity

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of Howard’s words, and, at this close range, rearranges his portrait so as to have it listen and speak. However, there is an irony to this unraveling. Allowing Baudelaire the opportunity to indict the calligram in this way, Howard does allow the Frenchmen to speak. Calling into question Howard’s project, Baudelaire comes as well to endorse it, for the fact that Baudelaire can speak in the middle of Howard’s poem endorses the bond that would seem to have formed between Nadar’s image and Howard’s poem, raveling this bond even as it unravels. A Sacred Exposure: John Logan’s “On a Photograph by Aaron Siskind” The success of Richard Howard’s Nadar poems is based on the way they create an air of understanding between their speakers and Nadar’s subjects. Howard’s speakers address Nadar’s sitters in the manner of good conversationalists. At times, the speakers praise the sitters; at times, they taunt them; at times, they embroil them in the shop-talk of art or even the banalities of gossip. That Nadar’s photographic subjects would seem to be engaged in this talk—would seem to be listening and possibly even responding—also accounts for the success of Howard’s poems, and yet there is one element that Howard’s poems do not engage in: the prospect of physical contact between their poetic speakers and Nadar’s subjects. Engaged in the niceties of conversation, Howard’s speakers never suggest that they physically approach persons such as Baudelaire. Instead, the propriety of urbane talk maintains relationships that are hands-off. I make this observation not to fault Howard’s poems, but rather to isolate what distinguishes them from John Logan’s poem, “On a Photograph by Aaron Siskind” (1976). In this poem, Logan describes having a physical union with Aaron Siskind’s photograph “Gloucester 114” (Figure 22). This union calls to mind the mystical tradition and its visions of God and Eros, in that Logan comes to see Siskind’s photograph first as a sacred image and then as a beloved one. What distinguishes Logan’s poem from traditional mystical texts and their descriptions of such visions is that Logan’s speaker experiences the vision by way of a photograph, and so he experiences it as a vision tainted by pastness. We have already examined Pope Leo XIII’s poem “Ars Photographica,” recognizing how Leo portrays photography as a sacred medium. Certainly, no poem has more in common with

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Figure 22  Aaron Siskind, “Gloucester 114,” 1944

Logan’s than Pope Leo’s, in that both texts describe photographs as functioning like sacred icons. However, whereas Pope Leo ignores the temporality of photography, Logan confronts it. The sacred and beloved essences that his speaker espies in “Gloucester 114” are proleptic of death. Yet this deadly element does not prevent Logan from seeking some sort of union with Siskind’s photograph. As the poem closes, Logan describes a bodily union between himself and the image: a union that corresponds with Georges Bataille’s definition of the erotic, in that Logan’s speaker dissolves into the photograph. The dissolution comprises another version of the ekphrastic calligram. Unlike Gunn and Howard, Logan extends this calligram beyond being a mere trap of meaning. In Logan’s version of it, the trap becomes a physical fusion. This fusion is performed thematically and also, in the structure of the poem’s final section, it is suggested iconographically.

The Ekphrastic Calligram On a Photograph by Aaron Siskind 1. After some miserable disaffection of the only human heart and human hand we’ll ever have, we move to this pictured glove or hand (ghost by absence) of Aaron Siskind, a small spirit by image, able to shape eloquently in the air—as though to tell, “a man stands here”—able to meet a handsome and beloved guest, or turn so tenderly on a wife’s face and breast. Thus this glove, flecked with white paint that glints like the unnatural light of an angel’s scale brushed off at Jacob’s crippling, desperate fall … Pale froth on the wrist and palm of a proud youth … Or the pearls that whisper through the Doge’s hand. It is the left glove, the hand of The Magis, of all who come late or by devious ways oblique to honor Christ, all who have stopped to see the sure, more customary king, having set some ridiculous gift apart— as frankincense or myrrh, gold for the child, art. 2. The glove’s backed by grained wood it is in some light held molded at the lid as the arm of a Saint in amber or glass in another cast it rests laid by with the love of a man to be caught up again or it will float out toward us from that rich wood like the hand of him who draws life

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Poetry, Photography, Ekphrasis deep into the massive limbs of Adam gesturing to name all the gorgeous animals of earth. I know it is this hand or glove of God that teases us so that we must change our life. 3. Yet in certain lights it is a melancholy hand sloughed off with the body’s green flesh. It is the stone glove of Keats, its thumb and first finger fast angled in that last, inexorable geometry, unable to tell a quill or fix the rush of wine that has made the reader mad and left him graced again, his face caught in a gentle, momentary peace. Ah Christ where is that grave hand this glove has left behind? Once it held a brush heavy with the hope of beauty. 4. It is a hand that has already waved good-bye. By it we know we have missed our joy. The glove is waste, relic of a little work long since done. The fingers bend stiff upon the palm for it lays doubled on them as it dried, a dead hand of Nietzsche’s dying god. Ghost of the Master’s hand! Glove of Aaron Siskind! I feel your canvas touch flicked with lead spots of paint upon the cold point of my heart. This picture is a fist. I feel it is a thing Siskind had cut out of my quivering chest— out of my huge furred stomach.

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It is a fist. It is a face in the mirror I no longer watch; and its light flecks have now the glint of tears I have never wept out of the tender, bald knuckles of my eyes. (Logan 1981, 86–8) Logan’s poem is unique in a number of ways, but foremost in that it pays homage to the photographer, Siskind. Of all the poems we have examined thus far, only Logan’s acknowledges in any direct way the maker of the photograph he describes. (While Howard refers to Nadar in his poem, he does not name him.) In part, Logan’s attention to Siskind is due to the history of the poem’s composition. Written for the collaborative book Aaron Siskind Photographs, John Logan Poems, “On a Photograph by Aaron Siskind” originally appeared adjacent to “Gloucester 114,” a juxtaposition Logan might have anticipated at the time of the poem’s composition in deciding to address both the image and its maker. However, Logan’s acknowledgment of the photographer does not include a description of Siskind’s mimesis. Nowhere in the poem does Logan pay homage to Siskind’s camera techniques and lighting; nor, for that matter, does he make much comment on the photograph’s composition. Instead, “Gloucester 114” is regarded as a dynamic entity: “a glove or hand,” worn or owned by such personages as a Doge, a saint, God, Adam or Death. The multiplicity of Siskind’s image and the sacred aspect that Logan ascribes to it are not merely products of Logan’s poetic imagination. Logan identifies himself elsewhere as a Roman Catholic—an influence on his conception of images—and Logan’s vision would seem to be equally informed by an intimate understanding of Siskind’s artistic project, at least as Peter Turner describes this project in his introduction to Siskind’s collection Aaron Siskind: Photographs 1932–1978. Turner writes: The images, written in the elegant calligraphy of decay, were transformations. Gifts of tension and poetry, they toy with photographic fact but left the literal to fend for itself in a battle with the metaphysical. Abandoned, mutilated leavings of man and nature, seen suspended in an inescapable dimension; forward movement blocked by surface, retreat into perspective no longer allowed. Subject matter stilled, we are left with the drama of confrontation—tone against tone, element

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against element, gesticulating; goading us toward meaning. Life and Death struggle in these works, God and Man, heaven and hell. They are as rich as any primitive totem or medieval allegory and as detailed as the camera can make them. (Turner 1985, 1) Turner’s description of Siskind’s work reads like a quiet allusion to Logan’s poem, and this may even be the case. But whether Turner is alluding to Logan or Logan is responding to Siskind’s photography in a way that corresponds with Turner’s impressions of it, Logan’s poem describes “the drama of confrontations” in “Gloucester 114” by personifying the many wearers of the glove. The result is a catalogue of wearers, each coming to replace the next. The word that facilitates this catalogue is the conjunction “or.” To my knowledge, no modern poem employs the conjunction as deftly as Logan’s “On a Photograph by Aaron Siskind.” Appearing four times in the first section of the poem, the conjunction punctuates Logan’s catalogue. “Gloucester 114” is either “a glove” or “a hand;” it either reaches to meet a “beloved guest” or tenderly “turns” on a “wife’s breast;” it either shows the “pale froth” of the wrist of a proud youth or the pearls “that whispered through the Doge’s hand”; it is either the hand of those “who came late” or “by devious ways” to “honor Christ.” What is most singularly vital about Logan’s use of the conjunction is how the virtuosity of “or” becomes the metaphysical drive of the poem’s first section. I am not referring to the role “or” plays in existentialist thought, for the poem’s opening section has little to do with existentialist choice. Instead, I am referring to the conjunction’s incantatory effect as it syncopates the section’s list of epiphanies and supplantations. Each wearer of the glove is made immediate when Logan imagines his hand within the glove. The drive of this section of the poem is not description, then, but cataloguing. But the resulting catalogue is different from the usual poetic catalogue, as might be found, for example, in one of Whitman’s poems. Logan’s catalogue does not strive to include as many elements as possible. It is not a list of all of the wearers of the glove. Instead, it is a description of how each wearer dons the glove and then is supplanted by the next wearer. Logan’s catalogue is finally a catalogue of possibilities—possibilities that are each negated by still more possibilities. The optimal conjunction in such a catalogue is “or,” for, unlike the conjunction “and,” “or” both anticipates the next possibility and simultaneously negates the previous one.

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The implication in the first section of the poem is that, were the catalogue allowed to go on, the list of wearers would go on ad infinitum. The same, however, cannot be said of the poem’s second section, which once again relies upon the conjunction “or,” but which employs the conjunction in a Christian existentialist context: The glove’s backed by grained wood it is in some light held molded at the lid as the arm of a Saint in amber or glass in another cast it rests laid by with the love of a man to be caught up again or it will float out toward us from that rich wood like the hand of him who draws life deep into the massive limbs of Adam gesturing to name all the gorgeous animals of earth. I know it is this hand or glove of God that teases us so that we must change our life. As discussed, in the first section of the poem “or” punctuates a potentially endless catalogue whose development reflects the poet’s stream of consciousness. There is neither temporal flow nor rational argument; instead, randomness becomes the product of Logan’s ecstasy. In this second section, a clear development may be seen and a logical pattern forms around the conjunction “or,” which figures centrally at the beginning of the eighth line in this 15-line section. Here, the word is a pivot, marking the point when the poetic speaker makes Kierkegaard’s leap of faith. This leap of faith involves a choice between the material lifelessness of the glove or the numinous potency of it. The glove is either a material, lifeless object, “laid by with the love of a man … //, or “it will float out toward us … like the hand of him who draws life / deep into the massive limbs / of Adam ….” The either/or choice, however, is not one for the reader to make. Instead, the poem makes it for us, leaping from the observation of the image’s materiality to accepting its sacredness without hesitation. The conjunction “or” marks, then, the moment of the photograph’s incarnation. Before it, the

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glove is secular and lifeless. After it, it is divine and vibrant, “floating,” “gesturing” and “teasing.” However, foremost among these oppositions is the one between “the arm of a Saint in amber or glass” and “the hand or glove of God” himself. Logan’s allusion to sacred objects and the divine image relates to what Marie-José Mondzain terms as “the living linkage” that exists between the sacred relic or icon and the sacred personage it represents. Discussing the theological developments of the 8th-century Byzantine Church, Mondzain describes this linkage as entailing a spiritual economy that “sets the visible and the invisible in relation to each other” (Mondzain 2005, 3). “In order to be able to envisage a world radically founded on visibility, and starting from the conviction that whatever constitutes its essence and meaning is itself invisible,” writes Mondzain, it proved essential to establish a system of thought that set the visible and the invisible in relation to each other. This relation was based on the distinction between the image and the icon. The image is invisible, the icon is visible. The economy was the concept of their living linkage. The image is a mystery. The icon is an enigma. The economy was the concept of their relation and their intimacy. The image is eternal similitude, the icon temporal resemblance. The economy was the theory of the transfiguration of history. (ibid.) The second section of Logan’s poem establishes a spiritual economy in a way that corresponds with the economy Mondzain describes. By the eighth line of the section, Siskind’s photograph has become an icon that has “a living linkage” to God. Studying the visible enigma of the photograph, Logan is able to perceive the invisible image of God as God performs the ultimate act of creation: the creation of humankind, represented by Adam. But this is not all. In addition to forming a living linkage with God and Creation, Siskind’s photograph allows Logan to see the image of Adam in the act of naming “the gorgeous animals.” In itself, such an image is potent enough, but, when considered in relation to God’s Creation, this image of Adam comes to define “Gloucester 114” as an icon of poesis. God is seen in the act of creation and in the act of passing his creation on to Adam, who, in turn, passes this creation on to the world by naming the animals. Thus, God, the first poet, who creates the world with

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the Word, is seconded by Adam, the second poet, who names the world with words. Presenting Siskind’s photograph in this way allows Logan to trace a line of descent from these first poets down to himself: a line of descent that includes Rainer Maria Rilke and John Keats. The last line of the second section borrows from Rilke’s sonnet “Archaïscher Torso Apollos.” There, Logan paraphrases Rilke’s line “you must change your life” (Rilke 1989, 60–1). The second allusion comes in the form of the word “teases,” which is in the penultimate line of the section and which alludes to John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and that poem’s description of how the urn “teases us out of thought” (Keats 1959, 208). Both of these allusions suggest a powerful chronotopic encounter with Siskind’s image. Like Benjamin confronted by the fishwife, Logan’s speaker is astonished. He must change in a manner that corresponds to Rilke’s command. This is what he notes by way of his allusion to Rilke, but what he gains by way of his allusion to Keats is something greater still, for the latter allusion calls to mind Keats’s celebration of the urn’s ability to confer immortality on those forms of life and art that are all too vulnerable to time. The procession and the lovers on the urn are locked in an eternal pastness, but also preserved, as the glove is preserved in the photograph. In this way, the urn and the glove “tease us from thought,” in that they call us from reflections on death and confront us with the eternal truth of their beauty. Such a departure of thought calls to mind the work of sacred images such as Mondzain describes; such images are not created as pieces of art to consider. They are created as portals to the prototypical spirit of their subjects. For example, one does not kiss an icon with eyes open, nor with thoughts of its artistic significance, but with a mind to contact what Rudolf Otto calls “the numinous.” It is “the numinous” that teases Keats out of thought. Both allusions allow Logan to associate his poem with these earlier poems, which are both ekphrases and which both come to celebrate the objects they describe as being sublime. What is established, then, is a literary tradition that originates in Genesis and is carried forward to Logan’s poem. The tradition might also be said to include Siskind as well, for, as the section implies, while God was the first poet, he was also the first photographer, in that he made light—the stuff of photography. By the conclusion of the poem’s second section, Logan has established a powerful calligram between his poem and Siskind’s photograph. Trapped between the text and the image are God, Adam, humankind

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and the essence of the poetic tradition. This calligram corresponds with Logan’s poem’s version of the chronotope of the photograph: the time and space of “Gloucester 114” have thickened to match Logan’s speaker’s time and space in a theandric instance where he experiences a vision of divine creation. However, just as there has been a shift between the poem’s first and second sections, Logan creates another shift between the second and third sections of the poem. The epiphanies of God, Adam and poesis are supplanted here by the epiphany of death. Even while the conjunction “or” does not figure in the transition between the second and third sections of the poem, this transition entails something of the exclusivity of the conjunction. The leap of faith that figures so prominently in the second section would seem to be negated: Yet in certain lights it is a melancholy hand sloughed off with the body’s green flesh. It is the stone glove of Keats, its thumb and first finger fast angled in that last, inexorable geometry, unable to tell a quill or fix the rush of wine that has made the reader mad and left him graced again, his face caught in a gentle, momentary peace. Ah Christ where is that grave hand this glove has left behind? Once it held a brush heavy with the hope of beauty. The presence of death in the section is made overt by the poem’s allusion to Keats’s hand. It references Keats’s poetic fragment, “This Living Hand”: a poem in which Keats’s speaker makes the promise that his dead hand will So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again. (ibid. 250) Such promises haunt the third section of Logan’s poem, unraveling the calligram established in the second section by recognizing how Siskind’s image hosts another manifestation of Patricia Rae’s notion of a double sorrow. In the discussion of Gurney’s poem, I defined Rae’s notion of the double sorrow as being inherently proleptic. According to Rae a proleptic sorrow mourns a loss as well as forecasts future losses (Rae 2006, 213).

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Like Keats’s hand, which writes a poem anticipating and confirming the poet’s death, Siskind’s image confirms the finality of its photographer’s work, and thus anticipates the death of its creator. The suggestion recalls the Phaedrus, in which Socrates observes that a written text is always lifeless, for it cannot answer us but only repeat itself. In the third section of his poem, Logan suggests the same is true for a photograph, in that a photograph cannot provide us with an immediate vision. It can only show what the camera has recorded. The pastness of the photograph is what Logan is referring to when he writes of the “certain light” of Siskind’s photograph. The phrase is an echo of a phrase from the poem’s second section, where Logan writes of “some light” in which the glove is “molded.” In themselves, these phrases can hardly be termed as “images,” in that their colloquial nature reads like the banter of casual association: “in some light” also means “in some way” or “in some manner of speaking,” just as “in a certain light” means “in a certain way.” But, as much as these phrases would seem to be parts of poetic dumb-lines, considered in the context of the poem they have an imagistic quality. The “some light” of the second section is The Light in which one has faith, and in which one makes a leap of faith. This “some light” is the light that Meister Eckhart conceives of when he describes how “the light of the soul” “apprehends God without medium, without concealment and nakedly, just as he is in himself. Indeed, it apprehends him in the act of begetting” (Eckhart 1994, Sermon DW 48, W 60). The “some light” of the poem’s second section is unmediated light: the unmediated light of Siskind’s photograph, which captures God “in the act of begetting.” However, in the poem’s third section, the light of the photograph has additional significance, and this significance is more final. Employing the word “certain,” Logan as much as maintains that, regardless of the divinity one might find in the photograph in “some light,” the image contains as well the “certain light” of death. In the third section of the poem, Siskind’s photograph becomes a harbinger of death, and, more than merely death, it becomes the sign that indicates the grave of God himself. This fact is stated in the poem’s fourth section, but “the certain light” of the image and the way that this light would involve “the stony hand of Keats” are written of as early as the third section. Logan’s poem, then, springs from a celebration of the life in the photograph to a mournful recognition of what Eduardo Cadava has termed “the very principle of photographic certitude”: that is, that “the photograph is a cemetery”:

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Like the paintings of Charles Meryon, which, in the words of Gustave Geffroy, “are taken directly from life” but nevertheless “give an impression of expired life, of something that is dead or is going to die” (CD 88 /GS 1: 592), photographs bring death to the photographed. The conjunction of death and the photographed is in fact the very principle of photographic certitude: the photograph is a cemetery. A small funerary monument, the photograph is a grave for the living dead. It tells their history—a history of ghosts and shadows—and it does so because it is this history. As Roland Barthes explains, if the photograph bespeaks a certain horror, it is because “it certifies that the corpse is alive, as corpse: it is the living image of a dead thing.” (Cadava 1997, 10) The corpse that Logan’s poem discovers in “the certain light” of Siskind’s photograph is the corpse of God himself and the poet—Keats. It is this discovery that would seem to unravel the calligram that Logan has forged in the second section of his poem, and that would seem to carry over into the poem’s final section, which begins with a tone hailing the victory of death: It is a hand that has already waved good-bye. By it we know we have missed our joy. The glove is waste, relic of a little work long since done. The fingers bend stiff upon the palm for it lays doubled on them as it dried, a dead hand of Nietzsche’s dying god. Ghost of the Master’s hand! Glove of Aaron Siskind! I Feel your canvas touch flicked with lead spots of paint upon the cold point of my heart. This picture is a fist. I feel it is a thing Siskind had cut out of my quivering chest— out of my huge furred stomach. It is a fist. It is a face in the mirror I no longer watch;

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and its light flecks have now the glint of tears I have never wept out of the tender, bald knuckles of my eyes. If the poem’s second section ravels a calligram and its third second unravels it, then this final section ultimately might be thought of as reraveling it, for even as Logan declares that “we have missed our joy”— and the text and image are finally disconnected—he also describes in this final section an entirely different kind of union: one that does not become a calligramic bond between text and image so much as a physical union between the speaker’s body and Siskind’s photograph. Such a union might be described as the ultimate intermedial intimacy, for it suggests contact between the medium of an image and the medium of physical touch. This unity begins with a rhapsodic address not unlike the address we find in Howard’s poem: “hero inherent in Eros” and “Builder of cities.” These epithets have similar effects as Logan’s “Ghost of the Master’s hand! / Glove of Aaron Siskind!” Unlike Howard, however, Logan does not engage Siskind’s photograph in a conversation. Rather, the speaker addresses the photograph as a beloved and proceeds to describe a corporal union between himself and the image. The union is characterized by an unintellectual turn in the poem. Even while the section alludes to Nietzsche’s dead God, the allusion is quickly passed over for an ecstatic phrasing that is without cognitive or visual verbs. In this section, the speaker does not “see,” as he did in the first section, nor does he “know,” as he did in the second section. Instead he “feels.” It is a word that is repeated twice. In addition, as the speaker states outright, he no longer “watches” the image, even though it has become “a mirror.” Thought and vision are supplanted by sensation and connection: I feel it is a thing Siskind had cut out of my quivering chest— out of my huge furred stomach. In terms of Siskind’s photograph, these lines are visually unspecific. The speaker’s “quivering chest” and his “furred stomach” are visual images, but their imagery contrasts with the glove in the photograph, which is now described only as a “thing.” The word “thing” marks a sort of visual breakdown on the speaker’s part. He is not looking at the photograph

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any longer. He has turned his attention to his body, and this change is significant. It corresponds with the development of the poem, or, more precisely, it corresponds to the changing relationship the speaker has with the photograph. Contrasted with the first section of the poem, which is ekphrastically rich, the vagueness here indicates a change from sight to touch. In the first section of the poem, the catalogue of wearers is visually detailed. Indeed, sight and seeing are central to that part of the poem. In the second section, cognition is central. The speaker “knows.” Here, however, touch replaces sight and thought. Logan’s speaker no longer visually describes what Siskind’s image reveals, nor does he pretend to comprehend it. Instead, he describes the sensation of coming into physical contact with the glove. This contact equates to bonding with the photographic subject and, in this way, these lines dramatize how the speaker’s body has become valorized through this touch. In religious terms, such a valorization occurs inside a ritual space, especially the ritual space of the Christian icon. It is to be remembered that Christian icons differ greatly from post-Renaissance works of art. In much of Christian, pre-Renaissance religious art, physical contact between an icon and a worshipper is central. The sight and thought are secondary. Sight is specifically negated by the fact that a worshiper closes his or her eyes at the moment of contact. Thought becomes relegated to religious introspection. Touch, however, is central, and so the body is valorized. In his description of this sort of valorization, Charles Lock likens the union between the worshiper and the icon with Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of maximal proximity. “Maximal proximity,” writes Lock, dissolves the categories of modern cognition. It is not a question of a subject viewing an object: in the presence of an icon, the subject does not cease to be a person, present in his or her own material body, present as one’s own image. We should speak of contiguity, the metonymic sanctification of the ground of the icon by virtue of the sanctity of the image, and vice versa. Above all, after the Incarnation, there can be no matter without the sign, no ground without figure, because all matter is a figure of the Incarnation, as all ground is a sign. (Lock 1997, 17) The contact that Logan comes to describe in the poem’s final section involves the metonymic satisfaction of which Lock writes. This satisfaction is anticipated in the poem’s second section, where Logan celebrates the

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photograph as a vision of God himself, and where the speaker’s time and space thicken and would seem to merge with God’s own. There, however, the experience of the vision is a matter of thought: “I know,” states the speaker in that section’s 13th line. In the poem’s final section, there are no such cognitive tags. Instead, thought is forgone in favor of touch and feeling. Indeed, touch, in this way, calls to mind Keats’s reaction to the urn, for, like the urn, the photograph has teased Logan “out of thought.” In addition, it has also teased him out of looking. I hasten to add that, whereas Lock describes the union between a devotee and a sacred image, in Logan’s final section, the union is more akin to a union between two lovers. The photograph no longer affords the speaker a vision of God. It affords him a vision of Eros. This vision of Eros recalls Georges Bataille’s conception of the erotic. “The whole business of eroticism,” writes Bataille, is to strike to the inmost core of the living being, so that the heart stands still. The transition from the normal state to that of erotic desire presupposes a partial dissolution of the person as he exists in the realm of discontinuity. Dissolution—this expression corresponds with dissolute life, the familiar phrase linked with erotic activity. In the process of dissolution, the male partner has generally an active role, while the female partner is passive. The passive, female side is essentially the one that is dissolved as a separate entity. But for the male partner the dissolution of the passive partner means one thing only: it is paving the way for a fusion where both are mingled, attaining at length the same degree of dissolution. The whole business of eroticism is to destroy the self-contained character of the participators as they are in their normal lives. (Bataille 1987, 16) Logan’s “On a Photograph by Aaron Siskind” concludes by dramatizing Bataille’s conception of the destruction of the “self-contained character.” The collapse of the self and the dissolution into the lover is the collapse of Logan’s speaker’s rational cognition. The photograph becomes a “mirror” in which the speaker engages in a subject-to-subject relationship: the speaker’s eyes become the knuckles of the glove. However, the vision of Eros and the dissolution that it entails are paralleled by a vision of death and separation. This parallel so potently informs the end of the poem that one is tempted to term “On a Photograph by Aaron Siskind” a testament to cleaving, in that the word “cleave” offers

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us an oxymoron capable of expressing the double action of the poem’s final section. Logan’s speaker both cleaves to and is cleaved from “Gloucester 114.” And this cleaving would seem to correspond with the cleaving of the speaker’s mental capacities from his physical sensations. Notice how the line “It is a fist. It is a face … ” becomes choppy, as though a face and hand had been hacked off by the ecstasy of the speaker’s encounter with the photograph. Also notice the way Logan’s enjambments come to fragment his syntax: “Ghost of the Master’s hand! / Glove of Aaron Siskind! I / feel your canvas touch ….” The inclusion of “I” at the end of the second line indicates both unity and disunity. In this enjambment, the poem iconographically expresses the fusion between the photograph and the “I” speaker. But the enjambment also expresses the disunity of the speaker. He is severed into parts belonging to the photograph. Thus, the speaker’s body has become like the sentence itself: a head or subject cleaved from its body or predicate. The effect of this cleaving is a calligram that unravels while it ravels, for even as Logan comes to negate the textimage bond that the poem’s second section forges with Siskind’s photograph, the poem does not completely unravel that calligram, at least not in the way that Foucault describes such unravelings. In his discussion of Magritte’s painting, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, Foucault never considers what might have occurred had Magritte written below his picture: “This is not a pipe, it is a painting.” Such a statement would not constitute an absolute unraveling of Magritte’s calligram. Instead, it would constitute a clarification or redirection; something to the effect of: “Viewer, you are mistaken to see a pipe, and not a painting.” That Foucault does not take up this issue betrays his own obsession with absolutes, but, that aside, I would argue that what occurs in the end of Logan’s poem constitutes such a redirection, in that Logan adds to the epiphany in the second section the observation that the hand of God, such as the speaker sees it in the photograph, is the hand of God in the past. But this pastness does not negate the longing for God’s hand. In fact, it corresponds that much more with the traditional description of what in mystical terms is called “the vision of Eros.” The vision of Eros is always framed in the visionary’s inability to obtain his or her beloved. As Beatrice is to Dante and Laura is to Petrarch, and even as Dulcinea del Toboso is to Don Quixote, so “Gloucester 114” is to Logan’s speaker: an object of desire beyond reach, but an object of desire nonetheless. Much might be made of the psychology of Logan’s speaker. His

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longing for the glove and his merger and separation from it recall Freud’s conception of scopophilia, with its emphasis on the gazer. In the final section of the poem, Logan’s speaker becomes a synecdoche of the photograph; he is it, or part of him is part of it. Such a subject-to-subject relationship fits with Freud’s conception of sight. However, rather than invoking scopophilia and its terminology to describe the poem, I would describe “On a Photograph by Aaron Siskind” in relation to Jacques Lacan’s discussion of desire and the impetus one has to name desire: That the subject should come to recognize and to name his/her desire, that is the efficacious action of analysis. But it isn’t a question of recognizing something which would be entirely given, ready to be coapted. In naming [desire], the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world. He introduces this presence as such, and by the same token, hollows out an absence as such. It is only at this level that one can conceive of the action of interpretation (Lacan, 1988, 228–9). In her translation of Lacan’s 2nd Seminar, Sylvana Tomaselli carefully preserves Lacan’s biblical allusions. “To bring forth” (“ fait surgir”) can be read as a reference to Genesis 1:11 as well as to John 12:24. In Genesis, God says: “Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after its kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.” Christ reiterates God’s declaration in John: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, ‘Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.’” For Lacan, desire is this “bringing forth.” Like the Creator and like His Son, desire calls life from nothing. Logan’s poem engages in calling forth life, for the struggle of the poem is a struggle to name the different wearers of the glove as these wearers appear to the poetic speaker. For Logan, Siskind’s photograph is an impossible Rorschach test: he does not see one thing, but instead is confronted with a vortex of things. Out of this vortex, the objects and personages of the past, present and the atemporal reveal themselves, only to be eclipsed by still other such objects and personages. Thus, the photograph is equally an agent of creation, for, with each change of wearer, a new wearer is named and thereby a new portrait is created. Each time the wearer of the glove is renamed, the “portrait” is renamed, recaptioned—Logan is trying to bring forth names to trap inside his

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calligram. The urgency of Logan’s poem involves, then, the poet’s need to keep pace with these creations, and this pacing corresponds with the poem’s bringing forth of names. In various ways, the poems of Gunn, Howard and Logan exemplify the subclass of the chronotope that I have termed the Ekphrastic Calligram. In these poems, the times and spaces of the poetic speakers merge and are subsequently trapped with the times and the spaces of the photographic subjects, whom the speakers address. These mergers afford the speakers the sensation of contact. Each speaker expresses how he finds himself in the presence of the photographic subject, and how being there allows him some sort of contact. Such a contact corresponds to what Roland Barthes terms the “ justesse” of a photographic subject (Barthes 1980, 70). The justesse is nothing less than the essence of the person in the photograph. In short, the photograph proffers itself as a possible site into which the spirit of its subject may enter, as the fishwife’s etwas seems to enter into Hill’s photograph. Thus, we might be able to make the argument that the photographs these writers describe serve as what Mircea Eliade describes as “images of opening.” In his discussion of the sacred and the profane, Eliade describes such images as affording their devotees with locales or passageways into which or through “which the gods can descend to earth and man can symbolically ascend to heaven” (Eliade 1957, 25–6). In a profane sense, the photographs that these poems describe figure them similarly. We go too far if we describe Gunn’s and Howard’s speakers as having had theophanies. While Logan’s poem does describe this sort of religious contact, these poems do not. But regardless of how these photographs are portrayed, Ander Gunn’s photograph of the old woman, Nadar’s photograph of Baudelaire and Siskind’s “Gloucester 114” function as sites into which the justesse of each photographic subject descends. However, as these poems also illustrate, the contact is never permanent. Rather, the calligram comes apart (unravels) even as it comes together.

— 7 —

The Anti-Ekphrasis: Larry Levis’s “Sensationalism” The Anti-Ekphrasis

If the apostrophe turns away from the reader, then the meta-fiction turns back. As the former trope amounts to a disenfranchising shoulder, the latter amounts to a face that greets us with a confession: “I have been inventing this,” admits the meta-fictionalist writer. “Into your imagination, I send a construction, a chimera, a lie.” The confession is all the more revealing when it involves the ekphrasis of photographs— and the calligrams that form between poems and the photographs that they describe—for this sort of meta-fiction amounts to the unraveling of any would-be calligrams. A poem that engages in such a meta-fiction is Larry Levis’s “Sensationalism” (1985). Describing Josef Koudelka’s untitled photograph of a man with a horse (Figure 23), Levis’s speaker postures as a naive observer who would relate a story of atrocity, entailing the Nazi persecution of Gypsies during the Second World War. The story establishes a vivid and powerful calligram between Levis’s poem and Koudelka’s photograph, even though the photograph does not appear in the published version of the poem. The story that the poetic speaker relates would seem to be “the truth” of Koudelka’s image. However, as Levis’s meta-fiction reveals, the story is nothing more than a sensational invention. The revelation unravels the calligram that Levis’s poem would form, and it calls into question the reliability of all such calligrams—as well as the ethics of mimesis in general. The resulting effect is that Levis’s ekphrasis is finally an anti-ekphrasis: that is, a poem that comes to deny the relationship between itself and its ekphrastic source.

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Figure 23  Josef Koudelka, “Untitled,” 1968, Josef Koudelka, Gypsies

Sensationalism In Josef Koudelka’s photograph, untitled & with no date Given to help us with history, a man wearing Dark clothes is squatting, his right hand raised slightly, As if in explanation, & because he is talking, Seriously now, to a horse that would be white except For its markings—the darkness around its eyes, muzzle, Legs & tail, by which it is, technically, a gray, or a dapple gray, With a streak of pure white like heavy cream on its rump. There is a wall behind both of them, which, like most walls, has No ideas, & nothing to make us feel comfortable …. After a while, because I know so little, & Because the muted sunlight on that wall will not change, I begin to believe that the man’s wife & children Were shot & thrown in a ditch a week before this picture Was taken, that this is still Czechoslovakia, & that there is The beginning of spring in the air. That is why The man is talking, & as clearly as he can, to a horse.

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He is trying to explain these things, While the horse, gray as those days at the end Of winter, when days seem lost in thought, is, after all, Only a horse. No doubt the man knows people he could talk to: The bars are open by now, but he has chosen To confide in this gelding, as he once did to his own small Children, who could not, finally, understand him any better. This afternoon, in the middle of his life & in the middle Of this war, a man is trying to stay sane. To stay sane he must keep talking to a horse, its blinders On & a rough snaffle bit in its mouth, wearing Away the corners of its mouth, with one ear cocked forward to listen, While the other ear tilts backwards slightly, inattentive, as if suddenly catching a music behind it. Of course, I have to admit, I have made all this up, & that It could be wrong to make up anything. Perhaps the man is perfectly Happy. Perhaps Koudelka arranged all this And then took the picture as a way of saying Good‑bye to everyone who saw it, & perhaps Josef Koudelka was Only two years old when the Nazis invaded Prague. I don’t wish to interfere, Reader, with your solitude— So different from my own. In fact, I would take back everything I’ve said here, if that would make you feel any better, Unless even that retraction would amount to a milder way Of interfering; & a way by which you might suspect me Of some subtlety. Or mistake me for someone else, someone Not disinterested enough in what you might think Of this. Of the photograph. Of me. Once, I was in love with a woman, & when I looked at her My face altered & took on the shape of her face, Made thin by alcohol, sorrowing, brave. And though There was a kind of pain in her face, I felt no pain When this happened to mine, when the bones Of my own face seemed to change. But even this Did not do us any good, &, one day, She went mad, waking in tears she mistook for blood, And feeling little else except for this concern about bleeding Without pain. I drove her to the hospital, & then, After a few days, she told me she had another lover …. So,

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Walking up the street where it had been raining earlier, Past the darkening glass of each shop window to the hotel, I felt a sensation of peace flood my body, as if to cleanse it, And thought it was because I had been told the truth …. But you see Even that happiness became a lie, & even that was taken From me, finally, as all lies are …. Later I realized that maybe I felt strong that night only Because she was sick, for other reasons, & in that place. And so began my long convalescence, & simple adulthood. I never felt that way again, when I looked at anyone else; I never felt my face change into any other face. It is a difficult thing to do, & so maybe It is just as well. That man, for instance. He was a saboteur. He ended up talking to a horse, & hearing, on the street Outside that alley, the Nazis celebrating, singing, even. If he went mad beside that wall, I think his last question Was whether they shot his wife & children before they threw them Into the ditch, or after. For some reason, it mattered once, If only to him. And before he turned into paper. (Levis 1985, 84–6) Levis’s speaker is distinguished from the speakers of the other poems this study has examined by a seeming poverty of knowledge. Unlike such speakers as Melville’s and Moore’s, Levis’s speaker does not claim “to know”; he “believes.” The distinction between knowing and believing aligns Levis’s speaker with his reader. Inserting an address to the reader into the middle of the poem, Levis creates a fraternal bond with his reader: a bond seemingly founded on mutual ignorance. Confessing “I have made all this up” and “It could be wrong to make up anything,” Levis as much as declaims “mea culpa.” Such an attitude recalls the Christian tradition of the address: a tradition that Erich Auerbach describes as an “interweaving of accusation and self-accusation, earnestness and humility, the superiority of the teacher and brotherly love” (Auerbach 1993, 298). The tradition can be found throughout Christian literature, but it is perhaps best exemplified in the Pauline Epistles, in which the apostle derides himself with such statements as “For the good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do” (Romans 7:19, A.V.). Like Paul, Levis’s speaker is a sinner among sinners, and thus his authority is only as great as it may serve others.

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The revelation of the speaker’s ignorance amounts to a shift in poetic strategies. Whereas enargeia plays only a secondary role in the poems of Gunn, Howard and Logan, in Levis’s poem, enargeia is central. Unable to relate the historical circumstances recorded in the photograph, Levis’s speaker can proceed only by describing the image in detail. From these details, he deduces a story that he “begins to believe.” The work of deduction and description amounts to a sort of detective work: as if the image were a vital and cryptic piece of evidence, Levis would leave no detail out. Specifying, labeling and even relabeling, the speaker describes the color of the horse as “technically, a gray, or a dapple gray.” The description of the man is no less exact: his hand is raised “slightly”; he “squats”; he is “talking seriously now.” This attention to detail reinforces the gravity of the story that the speaker comes to believe. The man in the photograph has suffered the unthinkable. Having witnessed the summary execution of his wife and children, he speaks to the horse “to stay sane.” According to the speaker, Koudelka’s photograph testifies to this. As a witness to the struggle against madness, the image would seem to counter Paul Celan’s dark pronouncement that “No one / bears witness for / the witness” (Celan 1971, 241). In the speaker’s account, Koudelka’s photograph does bear witness for the witness. Like one of the scenes from Goya’s Los Desastres de la Guerra, the image marks an atrocity; it is a residue of horror. Its every detail, then, would seem to be an aspect of brutality and the struggle to stay sane after witnessing such brutality being carried out on one’s family. The gravity of the theme accounts for the humility of the speaker. Before such an image and such, a story one is naturally humbled, and thus one speaks precisely and simply: The color of the horse is “a gray,” or “a dapple gray.” However, as seemingly powerful as the story of the man and the horse is, the speaker comes to reject it. Engaging in a meta-fictional confession in the lines that directly follow the story, the speaker admits: I have made all this up, & that It could be wrong to make up anything. Perhaps the man is perfectly Happy. Perhaps Koudelka arranged all this And then took the picture as a way of saying Good‑bye to everyone who saw it, & perhaps Josef Koudelka was Only two years old when the Nazis invaded Prague. I don’t wish to interfere, Reader, with your solitude— so different from my own. In fact, I would take back everything

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I’ve said here, if that would make you feel any better, Unless even that retraction would amount to a milder way Of interfering; & a way by which you might suspect me Of some subtlety. Or mistake me for someone else, someone Not disinterested enough in what you might think Of this. Of the photograph. Of me. There is a Platonic anxiety in Levis’s meta-fiction: a suspicion that mimesis itself “interferes” with the reader and that, if the speaker were Platonically just, he would take no “interest” in the reader at all, and so he would relate nothing. Such an attitude is Platonic justice in the strictest sense. Above all else, minding one’s own business is the duty of the citizen of Plato’s Republic (Plato 1974, V, 4, iii, d.).1 The story the speaker relates about the man and the horse violates this justice in two ways. Figuratively positioning himself between the reader and Koudelka’s photograph (an image that was not published with the poem), Levis’s speaker has first “made up” a story and, second, used this story to obfuscate an object of fact: the photograph. The difference between these two forms of misrepresentation may seem slight. However, given how the speaker has sought to bear witness to the events behind the image, the second misrepresentation is more egregious than the first. In making up a story, Levis’s speaker merely creates an artistic untruth. As art relies upon such untruths, the speaker is only guilty of mimesis. However, by assuming the role of a witness to Koudelka’s photograph, the speaker vouches for that image. He associates his words with its photographic accuracy. As the poem implies, using this accuracy to seduce the reader into “believing” in a false story amounts to taking “interest” in the reader, and taking “interest” in this way amounts to 1  “ … We must remember that each us will be just and perform his proper function only if each part of him is performing its proper function.” It is noted that Plato’s theory of justice is far more complex that a mere matter of non-interference. I take into account that Justice, for Plato’s Socrates, is a state of inner nature (divided by way of the three-part spirit of a man), which establishes this individual as a mereotic part of the social whole (a part that reflects the whole). As a part of this whole, the individual finds his function and remains in that niche. It is the artist’s audacity, according to Plato, that he would employ mimesis in order to represent objects and works that are outside of his own expertise. This is the reason for the banishment of the poets from the Republic (607). Levis’s poem would seem to suggest a similar kind of moral.

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sensationalizing the image for the purposes of propaganda, advertising and other forms of deceit. This sensationalism becomes all the more apparent when Koudelka’s photograph is examined. A close inspection of the photograph reveals that there is nothing in it to substantiate the story that Levis’s speaker initially tells. Crouching beside the horse, the man shows no signs of mourning or persecution. One even detects a level of bonhomie between the man and the horse, and, given the animal’s cropped tail and decorative riding blanket, and the man’s fedora, the two seem more like circus performers than commiserators. In short, Levis’s speaker spins a tale of melodrama that is absent in the photograph: a ready-made story of Nazi barbarity and the Second World War. The meta-fictional turn of the poem owns up to this sensationalism. But, in this turn, the speaker confesses to more than “making up things”; he divulges how he has obscured facts. One of the more significant of these facts is that he does not know how old Koudelka was when the Nazis invaded Prague. He decides arbitrarily to place him there as an adult. This alone calls attention to the speaker’s sentimentality and voyeurism: a sentimentality and voyeurism that feed off of the Second World War while obscuring other instances of 20th-century barbarism. In fact, Koudelka’s photographs attempt to document one of these other instances: the forced assimilation of Eastern European Gypsies under the communist regime in Czechoslovakia during the 1960s. In obscuring this history, the speaker is guilty of miscaptioning the photograph. In Susan Sontag’s final essay on photography, Regarding the Pain of Others, she takes up the issue of the misuse of captions. Discussing how both sides of a conflict can use the same photograph of war victims, Sontag observes: To the militant, identity is everything. And all photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions. During the fighting between Serbs and Croats at the beginning of the recent Balkan wars, the same photographs of children killed in the shelling of a village were passed around at both Serb and Croat propaganda briefings. Alter the caption, and the children’s deaths could be used and reused. (Sontag 2003, 10) What distinguishes Levis’s poem from the propagandist’s caption is the poem’s meta-fictional confession. The speaker admits to what he has done, and so he unravels the figurative calligram that the poem has

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seemingly forged with the photograph, ending any possibility of linkage between his poem and Koudelka’s image. Effectively, the confession creates an apophatic space: a blankness in which the “real story” resides. The real story is never made part of Levis’s poem. Honoring the silent truth of Koudelka’s photograph, the speaker never relates anything about the rise of collectivization and communism in Eastern Europe. Such a truth belongs to the silent image, and the poem leaves it unsaid. Such an apophatic silence makes Levis’s poem an anti-ekphrasis. By leaving the actual story out of his poem—leaving it unsaid—Levis suggests that language has no power to address what photography can record. Any true knowledge the reader may gain is gained by negation. In place of the real story behind Koudelka’s photograph, Levis’s speaker leaps to what would seem an altogether unrelated narrative: that of a failed love affair. But as seemingly unrelated as the second story is, in fact, it is a continuation of the speaker’s meta-fictional confession. Having exposed his own misrepresentation of the photograph, the speaker reveals what motivates this misrepresentation. Once, I was in love with a woman, & when I looked at her My face altered & took on the shape of her face, Made thin by alcohol, sorrowing, brave. And though There was a kind of pain in her face, I felt no pain When this happened to mine, when the bones Of my own face seemed to change. But even this Did not do us any good, &, one day, She went mad, waking in tears she mistook for blood And feeling little else except for this concern about bleeding Without pain. I drove her to the hospital, & then, After a few days, she told me she had another lover …. So, Walking up the street where it had been raining earlier, Past the darkening glass of each shop window to the hotel, I felt a sensation of peace flood my body, as if to cleanse it, And thought it was because I had been told the truth …. But you see Even that happiness became a lie, & even that was taken From me, finally, as all lies are … The transition into this second story is sudden. It is not marked by a phrase such as “I begin to believe.” Rather, the second story occurs as

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though it had motivated the first, and, indeed, this is the case. The first story is an allegory of the second; standing in proxy for the lover and the speaker are the man, his family and the horse. In Unclaimed Experience, Trauma, Narrative and History, Cathy Caruth describes such proxy stories as traumatic parables. Basing her work on Freud’s studies of traumatic neurosis, Caruth describes trauma as a mental wound. This wound is caused by the suddenness and inexplicable nature of a traumatic event. Generally, when a person suffers from such a mental wound, it is because he or she has come through a traumatic event physically unscathed. The body bears no marks. In addition, because of the suddenness of such events, the mind has little comprehension of what occurred. Confusion, surprise and shock eradicate comprehension and so make the memory of the event fragmentary: something occurred, but there is no mark or memory to narrate what occurred. Thus, writes Caruth, trauma “simultaneously defies and demands our witness” (Caruth 1996, 3–5). According to Caruth, the means for witnessing trauma is the “parable of traumatic experience.” As traumatic experience cannot be “transmitted” or “theorized” directly, the parable allegorizes the experience (ibid.) Caruth affords us a powerful hermeneutic in her notion of the trauma parable; however, at least in the sense of Levis’s poem, I would suggest that terming the story of the man and the horse a “parable” is misleading. Generally, a parable is an educational story, not a replacement narrative. In using the story of the man and the horse to replace or allegorize the love affair, Levis’s speaker engages in the act of making a prosthesis of sorts: his first story is a traumatic prosthesis of the gap created by the second. After the love affair, the speaker finds himself on the other side of an event that he could not entirely comprehend. The only means by which he can make sense of this event, then, is by inventing a prosthetic story to fill in the apophatic space that this event caused: the story of the man and the horse. I have used the words “allegory,” “proxy,” “parable” and “prosthesis” to describe the role that Levis’s first story has in relation to the second. However, I might just as easily use the word “representation,” for representation is finally the overall function of the two stories in relation to each other. As a parable for the love affair, the story of the man and the horse represents what actually occurred. This distinction is important, because, by contrast, the poem’s second story is lived experience, at least within the imaginative context of the poem. The figure Levis uses to express

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this lived experience is his description of the speaker coming to share the lover’s face.          … when I looked at her My face altered & took on the shape of her face, Made thin by alcohol, sorrowing, brave. And though There was a kind of pain in her face, I felt no pain When this happened to mine, when the bones Of my own face seemed to change. The story of the man and the horse is one loaded with representatives. The horse is spoken to as a father-confessor, and thus the animal becomes a proxy for such a confessor, just as the man’s wife and children were used as proxies to punish his work as a saboteur. In the second story, however, there are no such representatives. Instead of representing or being a proxy of the lover, the speaker becomes the woman; a description of his face is a description of hers. The difference highlights the distinction between metaphor and synecdoche. Whereas the story of the man and the horse serves as a metaphor of substitution (or parable or prosthesis), the story of the lovers is one of synecdoche and its contiguities. The opposition of the first story and the second parallels, then, the opposition of metaphor and synecdoche. The first story is metaphorical of the second. It replaces it. The second story relates how it is, in fact, part of the speaker’s actual experience. It is to be remembered that synecdoche is the figure of parts. It distinguishes itself from metaphor by the fact that it does not entail comparisons between present and absent things: a synecdoche does not describe how the man and the horse resemble the speaker and the lover. Synecdoches describe how a part or a name of an object or a person (its metonym) reflects the nature of that object or person. The synecdoche for my presence is my reflection in a mirror, for example. Describing it, someone describes a part of me that reflects me and could only do so by being contiguous to me. As the speaker relates, during the love affair, he shares his lover’s face, but, after it, he “never felt that way again.” I never felt that way again, when I looked at anyone else; I never felt my face change into any other face. It is a difficult thing to do, & so maybe

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It is just as well. That man, for instance. He was a saboteur. He ended up talking to a horse, & hearing, on the street Outside that alley, the Nazis celebrating, singing, even. If he went mad beside that wall, I think his last question Was whether they shot his wife & children before they threw them Into the ditch, or after. For some reason, it mattered once, If only to him. And before he turned into paper. After the loss of such a love and the innocence that would seem to have couched it, the speaker can no longer be or be part of the woman. Thus, the synecdoche of their relationship is gone, and he can only find proxies for her in the form of representations. The story of the man and the horse is such a representation. Making a parable of them, the speaker is able to express the trauma of loss. Representation, then, is a matter of adult consciousness. Therefore, even while Levis’s poem is something of a cautionary tale, in that it calls our attention to the way representations can be used to misrepresent, the poem also recognizes that adult experience needs metaphorical representation. This is chiefly because adult experience would seem founded on various degrees of trauma, which make this experience incomprehensible without representative forms of expression. These representative forms create what Maurice Merleau-Ponty terms artistic screens: “Literature, music, the passions,” writes Merleau-Ponty, but also the experience of the visible world are—no less than is the science of Lavoisier and Ampère—the exploration of an invisible and disclosure of a universe of ideas. The difference is simply that this invisible, these ideas, unlike those of that science, cannot be detached from the sensible appearances and be erected into a second positivity. The musical idea, the literary idea, the dialectic of love, and also the articulations of the light, the modes of exhibition of sound and of touch speak to us, have their logic, their coherence, their points of intersection, their concordances, and here also the appearances are the disguises of unknown “forces” and “laws.” But it is as though the secrecy wherein they lie and whence the literary expression draws them were their proper mode of existence. For these truths are not only hidden like a physical reality which we have not been able to discover, invisible in fact but which we will one day be able to see facing us, which other, better situated, could already see, provided

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that the screen that masks it is lifted. Here, on the contrary, there is no vision without the screen: the ideas we are speaking of would not be better known to us if we had no body and no sensibility; it is then that they would be inaccessible to us. “The little phrase,” the notion of the light, are not exhausted by their manifestations, any more than is an “idea of the intelligence”; they could not be given to us as ideas expect in a carnal experience. (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 149–50) Levis’s “Sensationalism” relates this carnal knowledge—not merely because the poem invents a story about the man in the photograph, but because the poem demonstrates that, without the first story, its speaker cannot communicate the second one. It is for this reason that the poem concludes by returning to the story of the man and the horse: That man, for instance. He was a saboteur. He ended up talking to a horse, & hearing, on the street Outside that alley, the Nazis celebrating, singing, even. If he went mad beside that wall, I think his last question Was whether they shot his wife & children before they threw them Into the ditch, or after. For some reason, it mattered once, If only to him. And before he turned into paper. In his return to the first story, the poetic speaker would seem to have forgotten about his earlier meta-fictional confession. However, the return does not involve artistic bad faith, for the key phrase in this passage is “for instance.” Whereas at the beginning of the poem the man and the horse are parts of a fantasy, at the end they are an example: a parallel narrative buoyed by the speaker’s need to return to representation, whether it produces truth or not. Of course, such a conclusion does not vindicate mimesis and ekphrasis. The Platonic anxiety related in the early parts of the poem remains, but the anxiety becomes accepted as part of adult experience, and the poem concludes on the note that there is no distinction between misrepresentation and representation, because, wherever the adult mind goes, it creates levels of meaning through representation. Meaning, then, is a misrepresentation, for to make an experience mean something is to embroil it in the decontextualizing of thought and thought’s material realizations: representations. This recognition earns Levis’s “Sensationalism” its final

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image; the man’s transformation “into paper” is not merely synonymous with his becoming the subject of Koudelka’s photograph. The man “turns into paper” because he becomes a representation in a general sense. Indexed through Koudelka’s 35mm lens, the man’s life is transformed into a metaphor. It is not a metaphor that relates to his life and his time, but to the life and times of Levis’s speaker, and to the poet, for the man and the horse finally transform “into paper” in the form of Levis’s poem. Levis’s anti-ekphrasis shares much in common with the unraveling calligrams of Howard and Logan, in that “Sensationalism” both reaches out, as it were, to embrace Koudelka’s photography but also abstains from connecting with it in a manner that recalls the double action of Howard’s and Logan’s poems. But the double action of the anti-ekphrasis differs, in that Levis’s poem does not appear with Koudelka’s photograph, so it does not form a textimage bond. Furthermore, Levis’s poem works as something of a cautionary tale that finally warns against the textimage bonds that Gunn, Howard and Logan describe. Just as it becomes impossible for the face of the speaker to become again the face of the lover and, for that matter, to become the face of anyone else, so Levis’s poem seems to warn against any such merger between one form of representation and another. Words are not images, and images are not words anymore than one man’s political history can be represented by another’s metaphor for failed love, and so what the poem calls for is a separation of things: a separation that is finally the only way in which one can mature and seek justice.

— 8 —

The Speaking Photograph The Speaking Photograph

Know; to the spectres, that they bev’rage taste, Scenes of life recur, and actions past; They, seal’d with truth, return the sure reply, The rest repell’d a train oblivious fly. (Homer, Odyssey XI, 180–3, translated by Alexander Pope) .

The ancient beverage of the dead is blood. Imbibing the gore of the ram, the shades that crowd around Odysseus’ sacrifice are “unsealed” from their silence. Once unsealed, they can “return the sure reply” and so impart the “truths” they share with silence. The story of the dead rising up to speak occurs again and again throughout Western literature. From Homer to Dante to Eliot, the dead reply and impart their truths. Over time, what has changed in the story is the location of the dead and the matter of their payment. For Homer and Virgil, the dead must be approached and paid. Odysseus and Aeneas must journey into the underworld with gifts. Later, Dante makes a similar journey, but, while his journey into the afterlife is more extensive, he passes through Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso empty-handed. To him, the dead confess, plead and petition with little prompting, and where payment is mentioned, its emolument takes the form of messages passed from the shades to the poet so that he may in turn impart these messages to the living. As the story of the speaking dead enters into modern literature, its journey becomes increasingly shortened, and there is no more talk of payment. Encountering the shade of William Butler Yeats, the speaker of T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding” does not journey into the “infernal night” of the underworld, but the “infernal

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night” of the London Blitz. Encountering the shade of James Joyce at the end of his sequence Station Island, the speaker of Seamus Heaney’s poem does not go underground. Instead, Joyce meets him on the street. In such encounters as these, the dead are not sought, but seeking, and they do not ask for payment, only that the poet listen. One of the most recent versions of the story involves photographs— specifically, a type of picture that I term “The Speaking Photograph.” In this subclass of the chronotope of the photograph, the dead, instead of rising as specters from the underworld, manifest themselves within their own photographic images, and, from these vantage points, they speak. In rhetorical terms, this speaking enacts the concept of prosopopoeia: the giving of voice to a silent object. In terms of this study, I would emphasize the difference between this given voice and “personification.” Too often, the figure of prosopopoeia has been conflated with personification. In the one sentence allotted to the figure in The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, prosopopoeia is defined as nothing more than a term “used to mean personification” (Cuddon 1991, s.v. “Prosopopeia”). Such a reductive definition ignores the figure’s principal significance. Coming from the Greek and meaning “to give face,” prosopopoeia is a figure of presence, in that it gives a face or gives a mask to that which is absent. As Quintilian observes, there is a difference between personifying a thing and granting it a face and a voice. “This figure [prosopopoeia],” writes Quintilian, gives both variety and animation to eloquence, in a wonderful degree. By means of it, we display the thoughts of our opponents, as they themselves would do in a soliloquy, but our inventions of that sort will meet with credit only so far as we represent people saying what it is not unreasonable to suppose that they may have meditated; and so far as we introduce our own conversations with others, or those of others among themselves, with an air of plausibility; and when we invent persuasions, or reproaches, or complaints, or eulogies, or lamentations, and put them into the mouths of characters likely to utter them. In this kind of figure, it is allowable even to bring down the gods from heaven, evoke the dead, and give voices to cities and states. (Quintilian 1966, Book 9, ch. 2, 30–1) As Quintilian defines it, prosopopoeia is more extensive than mere personification. It does not involve ascribing life to inanimate objects so

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much as it entails giving or returning a voice and face to entities (gods and men) who are absent; prosopopoeia is the talk, then, of gods and shades. In the English tradition, no critic better understands the function of the trope than Sir Philip Sidney. In praising the Psalms of King David in “An Apologie for Poetrie,” Sidney writes: For what else is the awaking of his musical Instruments, the often and free chaunging of persons, his notable Prosopopeias, when he maketh you as it were see God comming in his maijestie, his telling of the beasts joyfulnesse, and hils leaping, but a heavenly poesie, wherein almost he sheweth himselfe a passionate lover of that unspeakable and everlasting bewtie, to be seene by the eyes of the mind, onely cleared by faith? (Sidney 1965, 99) David does not personify God; he makes us “see” God “comming in his maijestie.” Ostensively, the “speaking photograph” performs a similar function. It gives face to the photographic image. Of course, the notion of giving a photograph “a face” would seem at the very least redundant. A photograph of a person generally shows that person’s face; thus, one does not need to give or give back a face to the image. However, the speaking photograph does not merely speak for the image; it speaks for what the image cannot disclose. As Ephraim Gotthold Lessing reminds us in the Laocoön, the progressive imitations of language are temporal (Lessing 2005, 92). To speak requires movement and animation. However, the photograph is anything but an object of movement and animation; the speed of the average 35mm film or of a digital camera is one-hundredth of a second faster than the time it takes to enunciate the shortest phoneme. Thus, for the speaking photograph to speak, it must speak before and after the pregnant moment of the photographic instant. It is this before and after that the speaking photograph gives face to, or, we might say, that it gives other faces to: other expressions, other moments. This subclass of the chronotope of the photograph functions not as mere personification. It is making absences present: the absences of those instants that the photograph does not record. In addition to making present the before and after of the photographic instant, these poems suggest that there is a non-temporal infinity or eternity to the photographs they describe: that is, in these poems, the

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photograph is both a temporal record and an eternal space. The speaking photograph gives a face and voice to this eternal space. The manifestation of this space varies from poem to poem. In Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer, for instance, this space has a moral, political dimension. Brecht’s speakers do not ask us to gaze, they ask us to understand a greater political truth: a truth that is outside of time but that their photographs imply in time. In Adam Thorpe’s “Navaho,” the eternal space manifests as a numinous field inside which his speaker watches those who gaze at her photograph as they pass over her image in a museum catalogue. In addition to giving face and voice to the photographic subject, the speaking photograph also gives face and voice to the reader. In all of these poems, the subject–object relationship has been reversed. No longer is there a poetic speaker who is gazing down at a photograph and reporting what he or she can see. In these poems, the poetic speakers are inside the photographs, and we, the readers, are the objects of their gazes, if only imaginatively. In this way, we find ourselves in the role of Benjamin before the fishwife. The photographic encounter is ours. We are the addressees in these poems, and thus we are “given a face” by the gaze of these speakers, to whom, in return, we give a voice by reading the poems. Thus, in this ekphrasis of photographs, it is finally our “blood,” spilled in the symbolic form of our voices, that unseals the dead. The Helmets of the Vanquished: Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer Written to caption the various press photos that he collected during the years of his exile from Nazi Germany, the poems of Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer (Kriegsfibel) (1955) are characterized by frankness and a circumstantial concreteness. Edgy and politically minded, the poems treat the press photographs as Aesopian images requiring morals. Brecht puts these morals into the mouths of his speakers, making the persons in the photographs confess to the roles they played in the Second World War. From the foot soldier to Hitler himself, the speakers of War Primer come to relate their historical and political significances, at least as Brecht sees these significances through his own communist ideology. I should note, however, that not all of the poems of War Primer are speaking photographs, but, arguably, the collection’s speaking photographs are its strongest poems. This is principally because, even while Brecht likely

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would object to the comparison, the speakers of War Primer’s speaking photographs resemble the shades of Dante’s Comedy in relating something of their spiritual completion. In fact, Brecht’s speakers relate how this completion is documented in the photographs from which they speak. In his discussion of the role that spiritual completion plays in Dante, Erich Auerbach explains how Dante’s shades represent the active fulfillment of God’s design: In relationship to this design earthly phenomena are on the whole merely figural, potential, and requiring fulfillment. This also applies to the individual souls of the dead: it is only here, in the beyond, that they attain fulfillment and the true reality of their being. Their career on earth was only the figure of this fulfillment. In the fulfillment of their being they find punishment, penance, or reward. (Auerbach 2003, 196) As Auerbach goes on to observe, this notion of fulfillment comes out of an Aristotelian–Thomist concept of form in what E. Gilson calls the “notion complète de leur propre individualité”: the completed man (ibid.). As Brecht presents his speaking photographs, these poems act as testaments made by spiritually completed individuals. In this way, the poems are less interested in giving detailed accounts of the photographs that they caption than in describing the political realities of these images and the political, ideological essences of the persons who figure in them. No poem better illustrates this constellation than the 32nd poem of the collection: a poem that captions a press photograph of Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Goering having a conversation (Figure 24).2 “Joseph, ich hör, du hast von mir gesagt: Ich raube.”—“Hermann, warum sollst du rauben? Dir was verweigern, wär verdammt gewagt. Und hätt ich’s schon gesagt, wer würd mir glauben?” (Brecht 1988, 183) 2  Note that the numbering of Brecht’s poems varies depending on the edition. In Brecht’s Complete Works (1988), this photograph and the poem that accompanies it are labeled #27. However, in Willett’s translation, the photograph and poem are numbered only according to page, which in this instance is page 32. Thus, for the purposes of this study, I refer to this photograph and its poem using Willett’s page numbers. I will do this for all Brecht’s poems that follow.

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Figure 24  Unknown photographer, “Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Goering,” 1943, War Primer

“Joseph, I’m told you’re saying it’s a fact I loot things.”—“Hermann, looting’s not for you. Who’d grudge you what you want? They’d have more tact. And if I said it, who’d believe it’s true?” (Brecht 2001, 32) This conversation is not characterized by naturalism. It may even be said to violate Quintilian’s rule concerning prosopopoeia, for it is unlikely that the Nazi Germany’s arch-minister of propaganda and the head of its Luftwaffe would speak this way about themselves, at least not in public, and yet Brecht’s intention is not to render Goering and Goebbels as realistically as possible, but rather to render them as spiritually complete as possible. Written before Goebbels’s and Goering’s suicides, Brecht’s poem has already consigned these Nazis to Hell, and, in the little inferno of his quatrain, Brecht has Goebbels confess the crimes of both men outright. The nature of such a confession bears still further resemblance to Dante’s shades, in that the shades in the Inferno willingly go to their assigned realms of punishment and there confess their sins. The process is part of their completion, as it is part of Brecht’s poem. What distinguishes Brecht’s sort of damnation from Dante’s is that Brecht’s belongs to this world. Damnation, for Brecht, amounts to public disclosure. His poem gives face and voice to two men who would be loath to find themselves saying such things. However, it must be recognized that, while Brecht is interested in exposing the essential villainy of Goering and Goebbels, his political and social agenda presents us with an ethical dilemma: Brecht fights Goebbels’s propaganda with his own. We encountered a similar dilemma

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in Levis’s poem. There, I observed how Levis applies meta-fiction in order to expose his own misrepresentation of Koudelka’s photograph. In Levis’s poem, misrepresentation of the image is tantamount to injustice. Applying prosopopoeia to the “heres” and “nows” of these press photographs, Brecht engages to some extent in this form of injustice. No matter what the spiritual natures of Goering and Goebbels may have been, Brecht miscaptions their image to serve his own political agenda. In an attempt to exonerate Brecht from the charge of being a propagandist, Jefferson Hunter points to the way in which Brecht’s book aims to teach its readers how to read photographs. The book, writes Hunter, “teaches, first, that reading [photographs] is tricky and, second, that one photograph may generate alternative readings. The view of photographs to be inferred from Brecht’s actual treatment of the pictures in the collection is that they are as interpretable as poems, not translatable as hieroglyphs” (Hunter 1987, 170–1). If Hunter is correct, we might term Brecht’s miscaptioning as a matter of interpretation. In short, Brecht has Goering and Goebbels interpret themselves. Brecht employs similar tactics in his plays. In his dramatic works and his theories about theater, alienation figures centrally: alienation that drives Brecht’s characters to interpret themselves in the midst of the dramatic action. This self-interpretation has the effect of alienating the characters from the audience; it works to dispel for the audience the illusion of theatrical fiction by calling attention to this fiction. Such awakenings are designed to engage the audience at the level of the intellect, not on the level of the emotions. Thus, such plays as Mother Courage and Her Children and The Caucasian Chalk Circle are political morality plays. But the strategy also serves to depersonalize Brecht’s characters. Brecht’s heroes often sideline personal interests so that they may consider the greater social good. This depersonalization runs through Brecht’s work, but it is perhaps best represented in Brecht’s adaptations of such classical works as Sophocles’ Antigone and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. In Brecht’s versions of these plays, the personal and familial motivations of the protagonists are excised. What motivates Brecht’s Antigone and Coriolanus are thoughts of greater social significance. These characters’ analyses of themselves, then, entail analyses of their societal situations. Alienation and depersonalization are also to be found in the 32nd poem of Brecht’s collection. Here, the personal lives of Goering and Goebbels are suppressed in favor of their greater social significance. It does not matter if their talk is realistic or emotively engaging, nor does

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Figure 25  Unknown photographer, “Helmets,” 1943, War Primer

it matter if the tenor of their talk is that of great friends or vehement enemies. What matters is the way in which both men expose themselves as nefarious. Brecht’s poem, then, is something of a cabaret duet in which Goering and Goebbels sing in tandem, center stage. In Brecht’s collection, no speaking photograph better expresses this suppression of the personal than the 41st quatrain. Here, Brecht gives voice to the dead German soldiers whose lost helmets lie in a rain puddle on an obviously war-torn street (Figure 25). Seht diese Hüte von Besiegten! Und Nicht als man sie vom Koft uns schlug zuletzt War unsrer bittern Niederlage Stund. Sie war, als sie folgsam aufgesetzt. (Brecht 1988, 243) Look at the helmets of the vanquished! Yet Surely the moment when we came undone

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Like the 32nd poem, the 41st does not seek to describe the actual circumstances that comprised the photographic moment. We do not know where these helmets lie. Is this Russia? Poland? Italy? France? Nor do we know of the individuals who once wore the helmets. There are four helmets in the picture, and so we understand that, somewhere beyond the photographic frame, four bodies lie. But even while the poem gives voice to these dead men, it does not give individual voices to them. Rather, they speak in chorus. As such, their pathos is universalized. If they are the completion of themselves in death, they are the completion of all the soldiers of the Third Reich in death: all those who “undid” themselves in service to the Nazi cause. But the 41st poem of Brecht’s collection is more than a mere chorus of the dead. There are other poems in the collection that speak for photographs of the soldiers of the Reich, but few so beautifully capture photography’s power to depict synecdoches. Lying in the puddle, the helmets of these dead men have become these dead men. Indexically, they represent their wearers in a way that is posssible only with a photograph. To return again to Jakobson’s conception of metonymy and the role that metonymy plays in the ekphrasis of a photograph: as Jakobson relates, in realist fiction, the hero is “condemned” to his environment, for his environment defines him (Jakobson 1987, 313). Such is the case in Brecht’s poem. The environment recorded by this photograph implies no less. The topography depicted illustrates the environment to which these soldiers were condemned. It provides us with photographic evidence of the deaths of these men via the synecdoche of their helmets: the helmets have fallen, so the soldiers are fallen. Brecht’s poem honors this synecdoche as the last link in a chain of causation that begins with the “undoing” decision of these young men to follow Hitler’s fife and drum. And this synecdoche explains the impersonal nature of their chorus. For Brecht, the decision to enlist entails a decision to abandon thought, and so to abandon the sort of mental rigor that Brecht calls for in his plays and in the War Primer. It is as if, after signing the enlistment forms, the men who speak the four lines of Brecht’s poem slowly became the stuff of their helmets: their skulls fusing with the grey iron that encased them. After such a fusion, there could be only one way out: death.

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Figure 26  Unknown photographer, “Mad Soldier,” 1943, War Primer

The 32nd and the 41st quatrains of Brecht’s collection depersonalize their photographic subjects, but not all of Brecht’s speaking photographs are depersonalized. The individual does appear in the War Primer, at least as a spokesperson for the greater impersonal effects of the war. The 67th poem of the collection captions a photograph of a Wehrmacht soldier crouching down and holding his head beside the corpse of another (Figure 26). Hier sitz ich, haltend meinen armen Kopf: Der Irreführer über alle Berge. Die Körnlein hat das Huhn im Kropf: Die kriegen die Zwerge. (Brecht 1988, 245) I’m left to sit here holding my poor head: Now the Misleader’s fleeing from his troubles. The cock that chokes on all the corn he’s fed: They’ll all go up in bubbles. (Brecht 2001, 67) The poem affords us nothing new in its commentary. The soldier’s insights into the retreat of the Wehrmarcht from Russia and the incompetent

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leadership of Hitler are obvious generalizations. What is significant about this poem is that it collaborates with the caption that is already attached to the photograph: a caption that names this lone soldier and describes his condition. The caption reads: “Das Ende … Unteroffizier Georg Kreuzberg (86. \I. D.) Wurde von russischen Truppen auf dem Schiachtfeld von Orel in dieser Stellung angetroffen. Er ist geistesgestört.” (“The End … Corporal Georg Kreuzberg (86th Infantry Division) was found like this by Russian troops on the battlefield of Orel. He had gone mad.”) In the two other speaking photographs, Brecht is cavalier concerning the naturalism of his prosopopoeia. In captioning those photographs, he applies voices that are less naturalistic than didactic. In the 67th quatrain, Brecht would seem to have struck a balance between the personal and the general. Corporal Kreuzberg is allowed to keep his name, and his madness is allowed to keep its tenor, as the final line of the poem attests. “They’ll all go up in bubbles” is the chatter of an unstable mind: one brought to its breaking point and beyond. In his letter to Albert Einstein, entitled “Why War,” Sigmund Freud concludes that there are two “psychological features of civilization” toward which humankind has evolved. The first is “the strengthening of the intellect” and “the second is the internalization of aggression.” These two features, writes Freud, “are most harshly contradicted by war” (Freud 2005, 232). The voices that fill up Brecht’s War Primer dramatize the contradiction. By giving face and voice to such persons as Goering and Goebbels, Brecht exposes these men as unevolved apes. They become the satirical monkeys in a photo album depicting weak intellects and externalized aggression. In the same way, the empty helmets of the dead Wehrmacht troopers become the empty skulls and gaping mouths of the mindless. From these hollow places come lessons for the living. All in all, these lessons take the forms of confessions. The subjects of the photographs effectively confess to the reader. Like those truths that are unsealed and imparted to Odysseus in the underworld, these confessions involve unsealing for us cautionary truths. The speakers demand that the living consider their actions before it is too late, before, as the photograph of Corporal Georg Kreuzberg shows, the external aggression that is war becomes internalized and the soul as well as the body comes undone.

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Figure 27  Edward Curtis, “The Women of the Desert,” 1904

Dream after Dream after Dream: Adam Thorpe’s “Navaho” Adam Thorpe’s poem “Navaho” (1988) may be regarded as “the last word” in terms of the speaking photograph. The poem is not only written in the voice of its photographic subject—a Navaho woman; it also relates the circumstances of this subject’s internment within the photograph she describes. This internment involves what I would term “a photographic metempsychosis.” Describing how she has become one of Edward Curtis’s photographs, the Navaho woman who speaks Thorpe’s poem relates how she passed from life through Curtis’s darkroom into the image she describes (Figure 27). In this respect, the poem is inventive and novel, and yet its inventiveness and novelty are not the products of Thorpe’s imagination alone. Instead, Thorpe’s poem brilliantly alludes to such traditional narratives of metempsychosis as Plato’s The Myth of Er and those related by Dante in his Divine Comedy. Like Er (Plato’s witness to the afterlife, who returns to his own body so that he might relate the circumstances of the soul’s metempsychosis)… the speaker in Thorpe’s

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poem relates the circumstances of her own transformation into Curtis’s photograph. Equally, like the shades of the Divine Comedy, Thorpe’s speaker finds herself assigned to an afterlife from which she delivers a dramatic monologue. Thus, Thorpe’s poem is a pastiche of the pagan and Christian traditions: a pastiche that Thorpe associates with the darkroom process. However, the association of metempsychosis and photographic development implies as well a kind of spiritual theft: by means of Curtis’s camera, Thorpe’s speaker has been abducted into aesthetical and theological traditions that are wholly foreign to her own. Even while Thorpe’s speaker never overtly calls her transformation a “theft,” her description of it is a realization of such a crime, figuring “Navaho” as a poem that both celebrates the beauty of Curtis’s work and calls into question its ethics. Navaho   (after a photograph by Edward Curtis)

His thumbs pressed us to sleep in the long trays. We drifted through memories of mountains, the liquid Stung our eyes: We thought we were drowned. Then sudden we awoke Jewelled, glyptic, numinous, dripping from tongs The primum materium That washed our dim remembrances clean Of the desert’s breath, the stench of leather. Etched from silvers, Swabbed with a sponge, Our faces are blurred as dreams we half-remember Under the starlight’s vast particulars, under the wind. I am the woman Who turns and leans, hair streamed in thin flags, Lips pulled to a grin by the hook of the shutter; thinking This might be eternal— The bedrock clocked by hooves, the moan of the wind, The stiff ingiving of the saddle. You shuffle past Our framed freeze,

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Omnipotent mooning faces—white, puissant, Temporal—and pause, sometimes, to flick the catalogue, pin Us with the sharp Demotic of name; the wound of the blood’s struggle Cauterised, made clean by letters. I lean to pull My horse’s rein, Parting the grass to dark’s invulnerable hug As the clouds race, fevered by dusk, and you pass on In dream after dream after dream. (Thorpe 1998, 79) As seemingly mystical as the poem is, its images are, in fact, narrated descriptions of the photographic developing process. The “pressing thumbs” that would seem to “drown” the speaker and her fellow Navahos are, of course, the thumbs of the photographer bathing the photographic positive in the “trays” of emulsion. Equally, the way in which the speaker awakens “etched from silvers” and “dripping from tongs” corresponds with the way in which such positives must be hung to dry after they have developed. While, in themselves, the descriptions are beautifully executed, it would be doing the poem an injustice to merely celebrate its images as aesthetically ingenious. Rather, these images express Thorpe’s conceptualization of photography as a sort of metempsychosis. Note how, after her awakening, the speaker’s memory has been “washed of dim remembrances.” Such a description recalls “the River of Forgetfulness” that Socrates describes at the end of the Republic: the river “whose water no pitcher can hold” and from which all the souls ready to be reincarnated are “compelled to drink” and so “sleep” (Plato 1974, 621: XI, 10, iii, a.). Once this river has been tasted, the soul becomes “the primum materium,” entering life anew. Also note that the speaker’s description of drowning invokes the Christian conception of baptism; not only is she “pressed down” in the developing solution, she rises up as a proselyte does from a baptism. While baptism does not directly relate to metempsychosis, it is a change of self. The old self is “swabbed” “clean” of its past life and born again in the spirit. Through the theological allusions, Thorpe’s poem documents a spiritual journey, mapping its various points. Nowhere is this strategy

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more evident than in the poem’s second stanza. “Jewelled, glyptic, numinous,” the speaker says of herself after she has risen from Curtis’s trays. At first, the three words that form the list of adjectives appear to be static. Each adjective would seem to correspond with the reality of the newly washed photographic positive. Rising wet from the developing tray, such positives have a luster that warrants a comparison to jewels. And the objective correlative of the first adjective (“jewelled”) inspires our acceptance of the other two adjectives (“glyptic” and “numinous”). To a casual reader, the two other adjectives seem little more than amplifications. However, what Thorpe accomplishes with these three adjectives is to chart the woman’s transformation, which occurs in three stages: The woman is first a decorative object. Then, she is a piece of high art. Finally, she is a “numinous” personage. From whatever reality she had as a Navaho woman on horseback, as a “jewelled” thing, the speaker has first become the work of a lapidary. In itself, such a transformation recalls W.B. Yeats’s description of how his soul will find “form” for itself in the images of Byzantium. “Once out of nature,” writes Yeats, “I shall never take / My bodily form from any natural thing / But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make / Of hammered gold and gold enameling ….” In many respects, Thorpe’s poem is a retelling of Yeats’s, and the adjective “jewelled” figures centrally in this retelling. As Yeats describes how he will become embodied in the “gold enameling,” so Thorpe’s speaker describes how she has become “jewelled.” This transformation from life into art applies as well to the second adjective of Thorpe’s catalogue, “glyptic,” for the word equally alludes to the world of artistic mimesis, but whereas a “jewelled” thing would seem to be the product of an artisan, something that is “glyptic” entails the work of a sculptor. Thus, a “jewelled” thing is a decorative object; a “glyptic” one is (or can be) an object of high art. In this usage, Thorpe ascribes Curtis’s photography a status higher than that of the decorative: Curtis’s images are both beautiful and sublimely inspired. However, while the word “glyptic” implies this, it departs from the terminology of photography; the word “glyptic” has no correlative in the darkroom process, and it has little to do with photography in general. Even while Curtis used glass-plate negatives, which are made by way of etching with acid, the transformation that the woman describes does not entail becoming such a photographic negative. Rather, she describes becoming a photographic positive. Such a positive has nothing to do with being “glyptic.” One cannot “carve” or “sculpt” in photographs, and yet Thorpe insists on this word, prompting us to

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consider the issue of photographic depth. In my discussion of Melville’s poem, I observed that Melville describes the photograph of Hancock as something of a window or hallway through which and into which a viewer might see. Thorpe’s conception of such a depth differs. He suggests that the woman’s photograph is something of a block of marble into which Curtis has carved her likeness. Such a suggestion allows us to conceive of the photograph as part of a mausoleum or funerary relief in which the dead person is shown as he or she appeared in life. And were Thorpe’s list of adjectives to end with the word “glyptic,” I would make the case that Thorpe conceives of Curtis’s image as something of a tomb. But the last of the three adjectives departs completely from this suggestion. The word “numinous” transforms the suggested opacity of sculpted stone into a spiritual manifestation. “Numinous,” says the speaker. “Then sudden we awoke / Jewelled, glyptic, numinous ….” It is a testament to the subtlety of Thorpe’s use of these adjectives that this final one is not distinguished from the other two by a conjunction. The list does not read: “jewelled, glyptic and numinous.” The omission of the conjunction is a little thing of great importance, for the inclusion of such a conjunction would suggest that the speaker is all of these things at once, and not passing through these various states: passing from life into decorative art, and then from decorative art into high art, until she finally becomes a numinous personage. Thorpe’s allusion to the numinous is, in fact, an allusion to what Rudolf Otto terms “the extra” aspects of the holy: those manifestations of the divine that cannot be explained in empirical or psychological ways, even while they may be “felt as objective and outside the self” (Otto 1958, 11). The final adjective of Thorpe’s catalogue catapults Curtis’s photograph out of the phenomenal realm, incarnating Curtis’s image as one that hosts an inexplicable manifestation of spirit. The list of adjectives maps the metempsychosis of the speaker. It tracks her transformation from her life as a Navaho woman into her afterlife as a numinous personage. As such as personage, she occupies a photographic heaven. In Philip Larkin’s poem, his speaker alludes to such an idea. “Like a heaven,” he says. Thorpe’s poem relates a similar idea. And not just this idea: “Navaho” also invokes the notion of a heavenly album. It is to be remembered that Larkin’s speaker describes the lady’s photographs as being inside such an album. In the third-to-last stanza of Thorpe’s poem, the speaker alludes to the fact that we “pass over” her photograph in a museum catalogue. The catalogue is also an album. However, while

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both speakers take up the image, only Thorpe’s may be said to describe this album and its heaven with any sort of imaginative faith. For Larkin’s speaker, the matter is mere similarity. The presence of the indeterminate article in the phrase “like a heaven” diminishes the idea, figuring it as mere fancy. Larkin’s speaker does not say “like Heaven.” That would suggest the actual possibility of the Christian Heaven, and, in his pessimism, he cannot make such a leap of faith. However, Thorpe’s speaker can, and does. As the woman attests: she has entered into the holy album of the museum catalogue from which she watches us pass over her. In this way, Thorpe’s poem beautifully realizes Yeats’s artistic fantasy. It portrays how one can pass out of their bodily form and live forever in a representation. While this is wish fulfillment, it is no less compelling. The metaphor finally celebrates the power of Curtis’s art. However, the woman’s passage into Curtis’s photographic heaven remains problematic. While Thorpe’s poem charts her metempsychosis, it also relates how the woman has passed out of her life and the cultural contexts and traditions of that life. Curtis’s camera has “taken” her from the world of the Navaho into a photographic afterlife that consists of European traditions. Already in my discussions of Thom Gunn’s Positives and Richard Howard’s “Charles Baudelaire” I have touched upon such photographic thefts. Especially in my discussion of Howard’s poem, I concluded that such thefts entail taking memory. In Thorpe’s poem, however, what Curtis’s camera steals from the woman is not her memory, but her entire cultural context: Our faces are blurred as dreams we half-remember Under the starlight’s vast particulars, under the wind. I am the woman Who turns and leans, hair streamed in thin flags, Lips pulled to a grin by the hook of the shutter; thinking This might be eternal— The bedrock clocked by hooves, the moan of the wind, The stiff ingiving of the saddle. The passage of the woman through Curtis’s darkroom resembles the passage of the souls through the metempsychosis Socrates describes in The Myth of Er. The emulsions that Curtis uses are like the waters of The River of Forgetfulness, which, once tasted, wash away the soul’s memory

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of its former life. However, it cannot be said that these lines describe a total theft of the woman’s self. Unlike the souls who drink from The River of Forgetfulness and so forget their past lives completely, the woman has not utterly forgotten her past life. She knows, for instance, the names of things: “starlight,” “the wind,” “flags,” “the shutter,” “the hooves” and “saddle.” However, while she knows these things and experiences them even in some sort of temporality—for we cannot feel the wind or hear the sound of hooves unless there is some lapse of time—she has no history to relate. What is she doing in the photograph? Is she partaking in a hunting party or a migration? What? She cannot say. Furthermore, she has no Native American cultural terminology to apply to what she experiences during her metempsychosis. Nothing of the Navaho conception of the afterlife would seem applicable to her transformation into a photograph. The way that the speaker has become decontextualized and without history parallels the way that she has become disembodied. “I am the woman,” the speaker informs us. Initially, such a statement seems merely informative. The speaker is identifying herself among the other Navahos in the photograph. But there is a disembodying aspect to the statement. As the speaker is inside Curtis’s image, her statement is strangely impossible. When we identify ourselves in direct discourse, we do not say “I am the man” or “the woman.” We say, “It’s me.” When we identify ourselves in photographs, however, we often come to speak of ourselves objectively: “I am the one on the right.” Usually, what prompts such declarations is the recognition that we have physically changed. We do not look like we used to, and so the person we are addressing needs guidance to see us in the photograph. This sort of guidance is what the speaker gives us when she says: “I am the woman.” But where is she when she says this? Before the statement, we have understood her to be speaking from within Curtis’s image. From there, it would be more natural for her to say: “It’s me, here.” But instead, she speaks as though she is standing beside us. Thus, it seems as though she is both inside and outside the photograph. This renders her as a disembodied agent. She is able to look out of the photograph and also able to look into it. The disembodied aspect of the speaker calls our attention to the way that she is, finally, a disenfranchised person: as a Navaho woman, she speaks as a European theologian. As a European theologian, she has the visage of a Navaho woman. These contradicting elements render her wholly alien in either world. In some respect, the recognition that Thorpe’s speaker does not speak like a Navaho might call Thorpe’s

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project into question. Thorpe would seem to be violating Quintilian’s mandate concerning prosopopoeia. By referring to such esoterica as “the primum materium,” the speaker speaks unnaturally. And yet to expect this speaker to speak like a Navaho defeats the effect of Thorpe’s poem. What his prosopopoeia gives face and voice to, then, is not a Navaho at all, but the ambivalence one experiences when looking at the photography of Curtis. For, even as Curtis strives to record the lives of the Navaho with grace and dignity, the 19th- and early 20th-century Anglo-American culture for which he made these records was in the process of systematically destroying the Navaho with devices less innocuous than the camera. Thorpe appeals to this historical reality throughout his poem, overtly making reference to it in his description of the speaker’s baptism in Curtis’s trays. For, in the case of the Navahos, Christian baptism did not only involve the shedding of the “old body” for the new one in Christ; it involved the wholesale eradication of their culture. Not only were the Navaho lands invaded by white settlers, Navaho children were forcibly taken from their parents and sent to Florida for an English education. There, they were systematically baptized in a way that amounted to the extirpation of their language, religion and customs. The process of photographic developing that Thorpe describes re-enacts this history. As the woman loses her physical nature, the Navaho nation loses its cultural nature. As she becomes a spokesperson for antique-pagan and Christian traditions, her own conception of the spirit world is erased. However, even while Thorpe allows for these historical subtexts to come forth, “Navaho” pays homage as well to the dignity in the Navaho that Curtis’s photograph records. It does so by recognizing that the woman’s image has become preserved as a piece of timeless art. While such a preservation does not right the wrongs that have been incurred by this speaker and her people, it does afford her something lasting, for, in her present timeless state, she has achieved a vantage point from which to regard the culture that supplanted her own. It is a vantage point from which present and future viewers are not seen as triumphant conquerors, but frail wisps of dreams that pass over her image like clouds: You shuffle past our framed freeze, Omnipotent mooning faces—white, puissant, Temporal—and pause, sometimes, to flick the catalogue, pin Us with the sharp

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Demotic of name; the wound of the blood’s struggle Cauterised, made clear by letters. I lean to pull My horse’s rein, Parting the grass to the dark’s invulnerable hug As the clouds race, fevered by dusk, and you pass on In dream after dream after dream. Like Yeats’s speaker in “Sailing to Byzantium” and like the voice of the Grecian urn at the end of Keats’s ode, Thorpe’s speaker has come alive in art. However, Thorpe’s ekphrasis has altered the significance of her transformation. Yeats’s speaker in “Sailing to Byzantium” does not point out that his readers will fade away, nor does the urn describe how Keats’s speaker will fade away. Thorpe’s speaker, however, identifies herself as immortal and, more importantly, she identifies those who view her image as not immortal. Looking into her image, we are nothing more than the stuff of clouds. It is our approaching extinction that the speaker sees, and thus, Thorpe’s ekphrasis figures Curtis’s photograph as a speaking memento mori. Staring into it, we stare into the enargeia of our own dissolution. Both Brecht’s and Thorpe’s poems offer their readers truths in a manner that bears resemblance to the way truths have always been offered by the dead to the living, at least in literature. Like Tiresias in The Odyssey instructing Odysseus on how he may finally get back to Ithaca, or like the shades in Dante’s Divine Comedy confessing their sins to the Poet, the speakers of Brecht’s and Thorpe’s poems relate truths following their transformations into the photographs from which they speak. These truths involve looking back at the lives out of which these speakers came. Thus, theirs are rare vantage points; standing outside of our world, these speakers see from the perspective of wholeness: that is, from the perspective of completed beings. If this wholeness is only the fictional illusion of these poems, the fact does not diminish its potency. From the foppish utterances of Goering and Goebbels to the empty helmets in the puddle to the madness of Corporal Kreuzberg to the theology of the Navaho woman—these speakers regard our folly and ephemerality.

— 9 —

The Shadow of the Former Self The Shadow of the Former Self

“Listen, my good friend!” said the Shadow to the Learned Man. “I have now become as happy and mighty as anyone can be; I will, therefore, do something particular for thee! Thou shalt always live with me in the palace, drive with me in my royal carriage, and have ten thousand pounds a year; but then thou must submit to be called shadow by all and everyone; thou must not say that thou hast ever been a man; and once a year, when I sit on the balcony in the sunshine, thou must lie at my feet, as a shadow shall do! I must tell thee: I am going to marry the king’s daughter, and the nuptials are to take place this evening!” (Andersen 2004, 236) In A Short History of The Shadow (1997), Victor I. Stoichita introduced a new term to psychological discourse in the hope of defining an as-yetunexamined stage of early childhood development. The term is “the shadow stage,” a phase in perceptual and psychological development that Stoichita distinguishes from Lacan’s “mirror stage.” “As Lacan has stated,” writes Stoichita, “the mirror stage involves primarily the identification of the I, whereas the shadow stage involves mainly the identification of the other. In relation to this, we can understand why Narcissus fell in love with his specular image and not with his shadow” (Stoichita 1997, 31). Stoichita’s conception of the shadow stage is striking. Even more so when we consider it in the light of H.C. Andersen’s fairy tale “The Shadow.” Certainly, in the tale, the shadow is the other. It usurps the place of the man who casts it, finally even killing him. In his tale, Andersen intuits a sinister fact: the otherness of the shadow is akin to the otherness of the assassin.

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But Stoichita’s shadow stage and Andersen’s fairy tale present us with a paradox: how is it that the shadow—the body’s most faithful metonym— comes to be considered as our other, while the reflection—the body’s other great metonym—comes to be considered as our self? The paradox becomes even more far-reaching when we consider the frequency with which we see our shadow in comparison to our reflection. “I have already sat on every surface; like weary dust, I have gone to sleep on mirrors and windowpanes: everything takes away from me, nothing gives, I become thin … ” (Nietzsche 1976, 385). The complaints of Zarathustra’s shadow imply the ubiquity of our own shadows: how we drag them everywhere, how we ignore and neglect them, how their reflections accompany our own, even in mirrors. The universality of the shadow would suggest that, rather than being less a representative of the self, it is more of one, and yet the insights of Stoichita and Anderson ring true: while the mirror provides us with a spectral image of self, the shadow remains an other. The reason for this does not entail absolutes. For the sake of his general argument, Stoichita might be thought of as engaging in hyperbole. Rather than furthering this hyperbole, we might relegate the distinction between the reflection and shadow to being another distinction between metaphor and metonymy. That is to say, the reflection is an admixture of metaphor and metonymy, but, in this admixture, metaphor is dominant. With its ability to capture every detail and contour of the face, each line and every hue, the mirror inspires the statement: “That’s me.” The admission is inherently metaphorical, for in seeing ourselves reflected, we see our selves “carried” (the original Greek meaning of the word “metaphor”) away from our bodies and onto a two-dimensional surface of glass—the mirror. In contrast to reflection and its predominately metaphorical aspect, the shadow is more heavily weighted with metonymy. While we always see ourselves in a mirror, we do not always see our own shadow. Thus, the shadow takes us by surprise. Seeing ourselves in a mirror, we may determine our position and pose; however, accosted by our shadow, we find ourselves under the scrutiny of an exterior light source that also plays a part in determining where, when and how our shadow appears. In this way, our shadow confronts us in accordance with our location. We do not usually seek it. A shadow is the result of the environment in which we find ourselves. Thus, the shadow is both a synecdoche of our presence in a place (what we unintentionally cast), and it is also synecdochic of that place (its lighting, its time of day, its interiors and exteriors). This duality

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is particularly noticeable under a streetlight, when, owing to the position of the light source, our shadow overtakes us, and this may explain why the two great stories about shadows (Andersen’s fairy tale and Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl) were written in the 19th century: the first era to have extensive modern street lighting. In any case, the fact that the shadow is an uncontrollable thing—one that appears at the behest of light—may explain why it is considered as an other, and may explain as well why the shadow is not generally associated with photography. In terms of photography, the distinction between reflection and shadow is, in fact, a distinction between light and shadow. “The art of fixing a shadow” is one of Fox Talbot’s terms for the medium he invented. According to Fox Talbot, a photograph is not only “a picture divested of the ideas which accompany it,” it is also “a succession of stronger lights thrown upon one part of the paper, and of deeper shadows on another” (Fox-Talbot 1993, 77). In his description of the photographic process, Fox Talbot is careful to call attention to the doubleness of the photograph: how it is nothing without shadows as well as light. Were a photograph to be made under conditions in which—to use St. James’ phrase—there were “no shadow of turning” (James 1:17, AV), the image would be blank: its negative all shadow, its positive all light. And yet, one is wont to forget the importance of the shadow when considering photography as a medium of light: “light writing.” The distinction between light and shadow might lead us into any number of areas of investigation, not least of which is the psychological ramifications of such a distinction. For example, much might be said—and indeed much has been said—in terms of “light writing” and scopophilia. Regarding photography as a medium of light, and thus as the medium of the self, one is apt to regard the viewing of photographs as entailing a complete fruition of the autoerotic projection that both Freud and Lacan ascribe to scopophilia. As a piece of light writing, a photograph might be thought of as an utterly reflective image. However, while one might take this tack, at least when it comes to photographs of the self, the paradigm of scopophilia does not seem to apply. In the ekphrasis of a photograph of the self, the image of the self in fact inspires a contrary impulse: one that entails rejecting this image as an image of a non-self—a shadow. The reason for this rejection may be found in Siegfried Kracauer’s notions of photographs. While Kracauer does not employ the imagery of the mirror and the shadow in his examination of photography, he recognizes why one may come to reject

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his or her own image as a shadowy other. “ … It is not the person who appears in his photograph,” writes Kracauer, “but the sum of what is to be deducted from him. [The photograph] annihilates the person by portraying him, and were he to converge with it, he would not exist” (Kracauer 1995, 56). Kracauer’s is another version of the photographic encounter: one quite different from Benjamin’s. According to Kracauer, the spirit of the photograph is not a vague essence—not an etwas, but an agent of deductive logic. As such, the photograph of the self proffers a sinister syllogism: “I am here,” it declares. “I was you, ergo, I am the sum total of all that you have lost in time.” Considered in this light, the photograph of the self is always a photo of the former self, and thus a sort of Belial: a demonic angel bent on annihilating the older, viewer-self by the simple deduction of years. Such an image recalls the sinister intention of Andersen’s Shadow and its demand that the man should lie down at its feet and be called its shadow. It demands that he recognize how he is to become nothing, and thus it murders him. The threatening quality of the shadow accounts for the attitudes that poets exhibit toward their childhood photographs. In their ekphrases of the images of their younger selves—a subclass of the chronotope of the photograph that I term “The Shadow of the Former Self”—they cease to write about mirrors, light and life, and they begin to evoke such images as the shadow, the shade and the stranger. The reason for this, in part, is that the photographs of their younger selves are memento mori. Serving as milestones that mark the distance between the present and the past, these images call death to mind, but, were these images merely images of death and the passage of time, they would evoke far less complicated poetic responses than they do. Instead, as Kracauer suggests, these images present poets with a terrifying logic: a logic whose deduction amounts to a negation of innocence, efforts and hopes. In short, “that-which-has-notbeen-accomplished” and “that-which-is-dead” come to stand before the poetic speaker and do so wearing his or her childhood face. This constellation explains why ekphrases that describe childhood photographs often take very different attitudes toward these images than we have seen thus far in this study. These attitudes manifest in a strategy of sorts. Indeed, in these poems, the poetic speakers often attempt to gain control and even to destroy childhood images by relegating them to being objects of the other. In fact, in these ekphrases, the poems themselves work to dispel the power of these photographs. Robert Penn Warren’s poem “Old Photograph of the Future” and Zbigniew Herbert’s

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poem “Photograph” operate as talismans, in fact, against the annihilating power of their speakers’ younger-photographic selves. In both of these works, the speakers take shelter within their linguistic art—poetry— allowing the potency of their words to neutralize their photographs. The rivalry between the image and the text finds a new manifestation in such works. Formerly, we witnessed how various rivalries formed between actual photographs and poems. There, the issue was that of accuracy and hegemony: which medium would figure as superior to the other? Here, however, the question is: which one of these media has more power to express the past: the poem or the photograph? In the case of Warren and Herbert, the victor would seem to be the poem, in that it has the power to relegate the status of “other” to the old photographic self, and thus to name away the past. However, at the close of this chapter, I will examine John Ashbery’s poem “The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers.” As we will see, Ashbery’s poem is something of an apostasy: a poem that denounces poetry and all language as being hopelessly unable to communicate the truth of the past. In his poem, then, Ashbery’s speaker regards photography as being the truer medium. Rather than distance himself from his younger-photographic self, as Warren and Herbert do, Ashbery’s speaker seizes on his former image as being his “true self,” and thus superior to any words that might describe that self; and so, for this speaker, the image of the former self is not a shadow. Instead, his words correspond with the otherness of the shadow, for words—or what words can say about the self—are finally distancing and non-reflective. Pink and White, Black and White: Robert Penn Warren’s “Old Photograph of the Future” Since the advent of cheap, amateur-operated cameras, certain types of snapshots have become ubiquitous. There is the wedding photograph, the birthday party photograph, the Christmas photograph, but most notorious of all is the baby picture. This type of photograph has become such a cliché in modern life that it hardly needs description. Whatever ekphrasis might be spent on describing such an image would seem wasted words, for each snapshot of a newborn is a near copy of the next, and whatever details surround the child in its cradle pertain to the cradle: the teddy bear, the mobile, the animal-print bedding. Add to this the glowing faces of the

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proud parents, and the baby picture is complete. And so, we might ask why a poet as distinguished as Robert Penn Warren would elevate such a commonplace image by writing a poem about it? Ostensively, the genesis of Warren’s “Old Photograph of the Future” (1984) lies in the threat the baby picture poses to Warren’s speaker: how the image of his infant-self is a damning piece of evidence. Proof of the poetic speaker’s bright beginnings, the snapshot of his young parents and his infant-self serves as a milestone for how far and how wrong he has gone in life. And so the image must be neutralized. Warren’s method for neutralizing this image is to employ the novelistic discourse of free-indirect speech. Through this discourse, Warren’s speaker dissociates himself from the people in the photograph, becoming a disembodied narrative voice. However, while this tactic is successful, what Warren’s speaker cannot disassociate himself from is the materiality of the photograph itself. Its shabbiness is his shabbiness. Its age is his age. Thus, Warren’s poem separates the photographic subject from the material object of the photograph, regarding the former as the other and the latter as the self. Old Photograph of the Future That center of attention—an infantile face That long years ago showed, no doubt, pink and white— Now faded, and in the photograph only a trace Of grays, not much expression in sight. That center of attention, swathed in a sort of white dress, Is precious to the woman who, pretty and young, Leans with a look of surprised blessedness At the mysterious miracle forth-sprung. In the background somewhat, the masculine figure Looms, face agleam with achievement and pride. In black coat, derby at breast, he is quick to assure You the world’s in good hands—lay your worries aside. The picture is badly faded. Why not? Most things show wear around seventy-five, And that’s the age this picture has got. The man and woman no longer, of course, live.

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They lie side by side in whatever love survives Under green turf, or snow, and that child, years later, stands there While old landscapes blur and he in guilt grieves Over nameless promises unkept, in undefinable despair. (Warren 1985, 55) Dignifying many of the tritest aspects of the baby picture, “Old Photograph of the Future” runs the risk of being cloying. Including in its image-repertoire a “pink” baby, a “pretty and young” mother and a father who “looms” with “pride,” the poem could not be more indulgent of the saccharine aspects of such snapshots. However, what succeeds in the poem is the reality that any such photograph affords its viewer. As Warren’s speaker makes clear, the speaker knows what will happen to the family. He understands that the parents’ innocence is, in fact, an ignorance of the harm that the future holds in store for them: a future that entails promises that will be “unkept,” as well as “despair.” In the discussion of the Snapshot Elegy, I referred to Stephen Cheeke’s concept of “the as-yet-unharmed” quality of a photograph. Cheeke bases his concept on his examination of Philip Larkin’s poem “MCMXIV,” which describes a photograph of young men waiting to enlist in the British Army at the start of the First World War. In his ekphrasis of this photograph, Larkin recognizes that the image harbors an innocence that he cannot share, for, writing in the 1950s, Larkin knows what will befall and what befell these men (Cheeke 2008, 201). Studying his baby picture, Warren’s speaker has a similar knowledge. The photograph of his infant self inspires in him equivalent feelings of loss, and on a far more personal level than Larkin’s speaker experiences, as the people in Warren’s photograph are Warren’s speaker and his parents. Setting the cherub-like baby and two loving parents up against the speaker’s knowledge of “nameless promises unkept” amounts to seeing the family as representatives of the “as-yetunharmed.” It is the “as-yet-unharmed” condition of the family that threatens Warren’s speaker so thoroughly. Gazing wide-eyed into their future, the father, mother and the infant all send the message: “lay your worries aside.” The speaker’s knowledge of “nameless despair” and “promises unkept” negates this message, and the negation severs any possible affinity the speaker might have with the family. Warren’s rhetoric lends the separation a biblical significance. Already, I have addressed the idea of a photographic album being “like a heaven,” to use Larkin’s phrase again. By contrast, Warren’s rhetoric figures

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the photograph as a faded image of an earthly paradise: a paradise where and when the father and mother become an Edenic Pair, or— in a New Testament context—where they become The Holy Family. Warren achieves this intertextual effect by employing such phrases as “blessedness,” “mysterious miracle” and “forth-sprung”: phrases that chime biblically and that allow Warren to liken the disasters that befell the family with the disaster of Original Sin or the Betrayal in Gethsemane. Thus, while the “pink” baby may resemble the “blessed” Abel or Christ, as the poem’s conclusion implies, the child’s messiah-like promise has come to naught. In short, the speaker’s description of the old “guilty” man beside the graves is the portrait of a grieving Cain or Judas: a man who is a betrayer of “nameless promises.” That this baby picture can put Warren’s speaker in such a despairing and postlapsarian state figures it as a dangerous image: an image requiring some weapon or antidote that might neutralize its effect. In the study of Hardy’s poem “The Photograph,” I observed that Hardy’s method for dealing with the threat of the photograph of the woman was to burn it. In Warren’s poem, the strategy is quite different. Rather than describe the destruction of the photograph, Warren employs a discourse that allows his speaker to dispossess the people inside the photograph. I am referring to the way that the poem’s first two stanzas are written in the novelistic discourse of free indirect speech. In her definition of free indirect discourse, Katie Wales describes it as a “combined discourse” that blends the “character’s focalization and narrator’s voice.” Wales goes on to quote Roy Pascal, who terms this discourse “the dual voice.” She also quotes Ann Banfield, who calls it the “the unspeakable, since there is no ‘real speaker’” (Wales 2001, s.v. “Free and indirect discourse”). Synthesizing Pascal and Banfield, Wales presents us with a definition that allows us to understand the true force behind free indirect discourse: its unpossessable nature. This is what Banfield means by an “unspeakable” quality: the first two stanzas of Warren’s poem, for example, are “unspeakable” because their dualities alienate them from any one speaker. They cannot be one voice, nor do they speak directly. This unposessable nature calls attention to the inherently grammatological aspect of novelistic discourse in which the narrative voice is unvoiced. As Banfield states, the narrative voice “strips the social mask from the self and shows behind the speaking I, the silent, shifting point of consciousness which is the I’s special reference” (Banfield 1982, 97). Warren’s motivations for employing this kind of discourse in his poem

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are various and even contradictory. In part, they seem to correspond to his speaker’s longing to be re-enfranchised within the family circle and also his feelings of disenfranchisement from it. For example, in the first stanzas, the speaker becomes imaginatively embroiled with the thoughts of the mother. In a manner that calls to mind Pascal’s notions of dualism, the speaker syntactically embroils his voice with her thoughts. This is paralleled by a transition from an objective to a subjective point of view. Beginning with the phrase “that center of attention,” the poem’s first sentence moves from the objective perspective of the poetic speaker to assume the subjective perspective of the mother. Once this is accomplished, the sentence would seem to enter into the mother’s thoughts, which are expressed in such phrases as “surprised blessedness” and “mysterious miracle sprung-forth.” In themselves, these phrases are not the possessions of the poetic speaker so much as they are those of the mother. Here, we have an instance of Banfield’s “shifting point of consciousness.” However, the shift is not complete, because the phrases appear in a sentence that the mother could not or would not have said. Notice the poem’s second sentence, which forms the entirety of its second stanza: “That center of attention, swathed in a sort of white dress, / Is precious to the woman who, pretty and young, / Leans with a look of surprised blessedness / At the mysterious miracle forth-sprung.” Even the most cursory read of this sentence indicates that it is unspeakable in Banfield’s sense of the word. It could not be spoken by any of the persons inside the photograph, nor could a person reasonably speak it in direct discourse. The sentence’s convolutions and shared phrases render it unspeakable and unpossessable. Indeed, they characterize the silence that Banfield speaks of—a silence that corresponds to the silence of the photograph. In fact, like the photograph, this silence is no place where the speaker can maintain himself, and it is nothing he can possess. He is not the infant any longer, nor does his knowledge of the future allow him to remain embroiled in the “miracle.” These facts disenfranchise him from whatever reverie he might feel. They end whatever duality he might narrate. In short, the discursive structure of these sentences can no more bring to them the lifelike quality of direct speech than can the speaker possess the purity of the blessed event recorded in the photograph. Here is the sound of speech dispossessed and replaced by the pangs of a reflective gaze. At last, the speaker comes to stand outside of the huddled joy of the family where, finally, he speaks singularly and alone after the second stanza.

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However, the obverse of this feeling of disenfranchisement is the speaker’s need to disenfranchise himself from the family, and thereby escape the damning logic of the photograph. Warren satisfies this need by devising a linguistic block of sorts designed to separate the family from his speaker. The need for this block is absolute, for, as Kracauer suggests, to merge with the image of the former self amounts to the logical negation of the present self. In the case of Warren’s speaker, to be the baby in the photograph means to be the culprit of the parent’s grief and the inheritor of the disasters that befall them. In the most dramatic sense, Warren’s method for creating this block is to abandon novelistic discourse in the third stanza and to speak alone. However, before this move, he will also introduce certain barriers in the first two stanzas as well. The most significant of these barriers is the word “that,” which, in the first and second stanzas, establishes the speaker as being away or outside of the center of the mother’s attention. Initially, it might seem that I place too much emphasis on this word; however, as “that” opens both the first and the second stanzas of the poem, and does so in a manner that calls attention to the center of the photograph, the emphasis is not excessive. Rather, it’s useful to recognize how this demonstrative pronoun invokes the language typically used to describe such snapshots. But it does this in a way that renders the speaker’s relationship to his childhood image as wholly estranged. In the language that has grown up around the snapshot, the word “that” is not out of place in conveying description. However, in terms of the snapshot, the word “that” is either introductory or it is interchangeable with “this.” Noticing a photograph on a wall in a house, we ask, “Who is that?” and receive the response: “That’s Alice. This is when we were in Spain.” Such a shift from “that” to “this” may correspond with a gesture, or the person may step toward the photograph; however, these gestures and approaches are only secondary to the way in which, describing a snapshot, a person comes to use the image to close the distance that has formed between then and now (the temporal counterparts to that and this). When we speak of photographs, then and now are as unstable as that and this, and—as is often the case—the more one talks about a photograph, the more that image becomes this one. That “stranger” becomes “this cousin.” “That woman” who “was there” becomes “Alice” who “is here, beside the house.” However, in his poem, Warren will not shift from “that” to “this.” Instead, his speaker insists on remaining away or outside of the image, and thus insists on the temporal distance that lies between himself and the subjects of the photograph.

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Another aspect of Warren’s resistance or neutralization of the photograph involves the imagery he employs to describe the people in it. Notice the way that the infant is nothing more than a “trace of gray.” In itself, the image prompts us to describe Warren’s attitude toward his infant self as one that accords with Stoichita’s conception of the shadow. The infant is an other, not the self. The infant has no relationship in fact with the speaker, but comes to be regarded as nothing more than a bit of umbra. And the infant is not the only member of the family to be described in terms of a shadowy other. The father in the picture is described as “looming,” as a shade might be said to do. However, while these descriptions would seem to relegate the infant and the father to the realm of the other, Warren also draws one overt comparison between himself, the infant and the father. Describing the infant as a “trace of gray,” Warren allows for an imagistic parallel between his speaker and the child: as an aged man, the speaker is, himself, a gray trace. Even as the speaker would distance himself from the infant, he finds himself sharing this essential characteristic. This deft turn cements the general irony of the poem. As well as comprising a linguistic block designed to neutralize the photograph, “Old Photograph of the Future” is also an attempt to describe the uncanny similarity between the “trace of gray” that is the infant and the “old” and “faded” trace that is the adult speaker. Thus, the title is a subtle allusion to Job 1:21: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart” (Job 1:21, AV). Warren’s version of this passage from Job would supplant his “nakedness” with a “faded light,” and thus his poem as much as states: “As a gray trace I came into the world, and as a gray trace I shall depart”—in other words: I am “an old photograph of the future.” In such a constellation, the photograph of the child is, finally, a photograph of the shadow that falls over the Valley of Death. Thus, the poem would describe a circular motion of time: one that begins and ends with such shadows. But while the infant becomes the shadow of the other, which is death, the material photograph—its physical condition—becomes for Warren something of a mirror: The picture is badly faded. Why not? Most things show wear around seventy-five, And that’s the age this picture has got. The man and woman no longer, of course, live.

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“Most things show wear around seventy-five,” states the speaker, as much describing himself as the physical condition of the photograph. The line prompts us to recognize the idea that the materiality of the image is something of a mirror in which the speaker sees himself. Unlike Brecht’s and Thorpe’s poems, where the speakers find themselves inside of the photographs that they describe, Warren’s speaker does not experience this type of connection. In fact, the opposite would seem to be the case: He is nowhere within the photograph—is not the infant, nor is he mirrored in the parents. But even while he is separate from the subjects of the snapshot, he is not separated from the materiality of the image. This recognition prompts a change in the tone and discourse of the poem. Notice how, in this stanza, the novelistic discourse has fallen out of the poem; here, the diction is simple and chatty, and the grammar acquires the offhanded phrasing of slang. Seeking to achieve his rhyme of “not” and “got,” Warren lops off the ending of the past participle “gotten” (the American usage) as well as the preposition “to” that should accompany this verb. This shortening of the verb moves from a formal register to a colloquial one, and this colloquial grammar is emblematic of the bluntness of rustic truisms and nonchalant resignations. Were the poem a dramatic monologue requiring “the business” of an actor (the invention of some stage movement or other), such a line would be the cue for that actor to drop the photograph back in a desk drawer or close it away again in an old album, so that he might turn to the audience and give the last two stanzas of the poem as a soliloquy about the general pathos of experience, old age and loss. Perhaps, these elements of general pessimism and rustic truth most hinder the success of Warren’s poem. In addition to its sentimentality and the clichéd subject of its ekphrasis, such statements are at best generalizations. Warren as much as states that all sons stand and shall stand before their parents’ graves filled with regret over unfulfilled promises, and that all new parents gaze and shall gaze over their newborns with innocent joy. Such generalizations are inherently designed to inspire a trite pity and to turn this pity into something of a lens through which all life may be viewed. However, in spite of these drawbacks, “Old Photograph of the Future” is noteworthy for attempting to describe the indescribable in an unexpected way. In the early 21st century, generally when we designate a work of literature as one that describes the indescribable, we do so in reference

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to the work of such poets as Paul Celan or Wilfred Owen: poets who experienced horrors and wrote of these terrors in such ways as to make their indescribable natures understandable. Rarely, do we consider that a poet might also write about the indescribably banal, and do so in a way that renders this banality affecting. Warren’s poem attempts to do this, as the poem’s sincerity testifies. Had Warren described his baby picture satirically and with disdain, the poem might have had more vivid and unique imagery, but it would have also betrayed the pathos that such a photograph inspires: a pathos which is trite to write about, but that remains, nonetheless, genuine. Thus, “Old Photograph of the Future” does what so many better poems fail to do, and this is to honor the sadness one accrues through life’s slow and general losses. On Zeno’s Arrow: Zbigniew Herbert’s “Photograph” No discussion of the photographic self and its otherness would be complete without some consideration of Zbigniew Herbert’s poem “Photograph” (1985). Herbert’s poem has much in common with Robert Penn Warren’s. Like Warren’s speaker’s, Herbert’s describes a photograph from his childhood. Also, he describes this childhood self as an other. Both in time and space, the boy in the snapshot he describes is estranged from him. Finally, like Warren’s poem, Herbert’s also features a description of a parent. Despite these similarities, however, the direction that Herbert’s poem takes is radically different than Warren’s. Whereas Warren’s poem remains focused on the personal events recorded in the baby picture, contrasting these events with the adult life of its speaker, Herbert’s poem uses the photograph of the boy as a springboard into a greater set of cultural, religious and historical allusions. This intertextuality figures the photograph not just as the marker of a lost childhood. It is a marker of a lost era: an era whose end comes with the beginning of the Second World War. To dramatize the change of eras, the poem employs two speakers. The first narrates the ekphrasis of the photograph through the poem’s first four stanzas. He speaks from the post-war present, studying his childhood image. The second speaker is the photographer, who is also the father of the boy in the phorograph. The second speaker addresses the boy in the poem’s last two stanzas, which are indented. Speaking from inside the photograph, the second speaker shares traits with the

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speakers of Brecht’s and Thorpe’s poems. Indeed, he figures the last two stanzas of Herbert’s poem as the ekphrasis of a speaking photograph. However, his prosopopeia differs from those we have find in Brecht’s and Thorpe’s poems. This is because there is little in the snapshot to give the photographer-father a physical presence. In fact, describing the boy as being alone, the first speaker makes no direct reference to the father. However, describing the shadows of evening that fall around the boy’s feet, the first speaker observes among them the shadow of “a straw hat,” which he enigmatically describes as something that the boy “knows.” The detail is cryptic, but equally clarifying. The shadow denotes the father’s presence. Taking the snapshot with the sun at his back, the father inadvertently captures his own shadow at the feet of the boy. In this way, he enters the photograph, becoming an umbral ghost. While comparing the father with a ghost is appropriate, for it allows us to understand the nature of the father’s presence, Herbert’s narrative is not a ghost story. Instead, the last two stanzas take the form of a Bible story. The father speaks like the biblical Abraham, and the boy becomes his Isaac. Taking the snapshot becomes the moment of the Abraham’s sacrifice. Conflating taking snapshots and sacrifice, then, Herbert suggests that both are acts of faith: as the biblical Abraham sets out to sacrifice his only son, believing that God will make him the father of generations, so Herbert’s Abraham sets out to photograph his son, believing that the power of the camera will preserve the child. Photograph This boy motionless as an arrow of Eleata a boy amidst high grass has nothing in common with me except a date of birth the papillary line my father took this picture before the second Persian war from the clouds and foliage I conclude it was August the birds the crickets rang the smell of corn smell of full moon below the river called Hipanis on Roman maps a watershed and nearby thunder advising them to take shelter   with the Greeks their colonies on the sea weren’t too far

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Herbert has often been termed a classical poet. The classics provide him with a rich ironic veneer through which he can address personal and political themes. A member of the Polish underground during the German occupation and a critic of the pro-Soviet regime that came to power after World War Two, Herbert uses classical and biblical themes in order to veil his political attitudes. In part, this explains the intertextuality of the poem. For Herbert, the classics and the Bible afford him an ironic distance and a critical perspective. The anachronistic reference to the “Second Persian War” is, then, an ironic and allegorical allusion to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939. The river the Romans called “the Hipanis” is the river Bug in southern Poland. Thus, the sacrifice of this Isaac by this Abraham occurs in Hebert’s Poland and on the verge of World War Two. After the snapshot is taken, there will be six years of occupation, death camps and a victor’s peace with the Soviet Bloc. These historical clarifications aside, “Photograph” is an eclogue of sorts. Divided into two voices whose separation is indicated by the indentation of its two last stanzas, the poem partakes in the classical tradition of Virgil. The speakers speak in or about a pastoral landscape, in which the boy poses. However, the eclogue seems incomplete. Unlike the shepherds of Virgil’s Georgics, Herbert’s speakers do not share the same time or space. Their words would seem unable to reach each other. This is further complicated by a lack of chronological order in the narrative of the poem. Speaking from the post-war present, the

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first speaker reflects on his childhood image, and, while he makes various classical references, his attitude is one of a late 20th-century man. Speaking in the past when the photograph was taken, the second speaker (Abraham) speaks the indented stanzas. Addressing the boy as his modern-day Isaac, temporally, at least, he should not be able to hear the first speaker. In addition to the temporal disjunction, the eclogue is also complicated by the absence of information. The event that separates the first speaker from his boyhood self and his father is the war, which we hear nothing about. There is the allusion to “The Second Persian War,” but the allusion is elliptical. Rather than bridging the gap between the moment when the snapshot was taken and the moment when the first speaker looks at the image (and so writes his poem), the allusion circumvents the actual war with a classical reference, which is as intertextual as it is opaque. The allusion is similar, then, to the disenfranchisement I noted in Warren’s poem. Just as Warren does not describe the “promises unkept” but rather relegates them to being “nameless,” Herbert does not describe the war. Instead, he diverts from its history, using the classics as an ersatz. In both poems, these elliptical descriptions establish temporal barriers between the “as-yet-unharmed” childhood selves in the photographs and the harmed (experienced) selves of the speakers. Within these barriers, the events of harm remain undescribed. In my discussion of Larry Levis’s poem “Sensationalism,” I recognized how, in that poem, the story of the man and the horse corresponded to what Cathy Caruth terms “a trauma parable:” a story that is used to replace a traumatic event. I suggest that Herbert’s ekphrasis functions similarly. The allusion to Abraham and Isaac affords Herbert a trauma parable—a fact that is in many ways appropriate, as parables are also biblical in origin. Confronted with the historical realities of the war and also with the logical annihilation that Kracauer ascribes photographs, Herbert’s first speaker produces such a parable. Through an act of ventriloquism, he replaces the dead father with the biblical patriarch, allowing him to speak the end of the poem. The gesture makes his personal and national histories meaningful. Rather than describe the atrocities of the war, and to reiterate his experiences of them, the speaker aligns his own past with the biblical story. Genesis provides him with a parable through which his personal losses can be interpreted. The traumatic parable, however, does not end here. In fact, Herbert extends it to canonical proportions. His personal history becomes

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translated into the negotiation of the classical and the biblical traditions. In fact, the boy’s innocence is assigned to the classical tradition, the father’s to the biblical one. This explains why, in the unindented stanzas, the speaker makes only classical references while describing the photograph. The references to the philosophical discourses of Zeno (the “Arrow of Eleata”), the Histories of Herodotus (“the Second Persian War”) and the nomenclature of Roman cartography (the river “Hipanis”) assign the boy to the classical world. These allusions are contrasted with Genesis 22, which occupies the final two indented stanzas. The allusions are not merely rhetorical. Herbert deftly uses them to examine the nature of childhood innocence verses adult experience. He implies that childhood innocence is classical. Adult experience is Hebraic. The implication further complicates representations of time. Having the first speaker speak in the post-war present and the second in the pre-war past, Herbert reverses time. The poem runs from present to past—again, the eclogue seemingly breaks down. But, alluding to the classics in the first part of the poem and to the biblical tradition in the second part, Herbert preserves the canonical history. Historically, classical literature, religion and culture precede their biblical counterparts (at least as far as the Western Tradition is concerned) and, in a great many respects, the biblical counterparts usurp the places of the classical ones. Maintaining the canonical timeline, Herbert aligns the classical tradition with an innocent or unharmed age. The biblical tradition, on the other hand, accords with an age of experience or harm. Thus, standing beside the river “Hipanis” just before “the Second Persian War,” the boy in the photograph is something of a Phaedrus or an Ion, but he does not await the Army of Xerxes. He awaits Abraham’s knife. The canonical history also provides Herbert with a metaphor for photography. In the poem’s first section, the central allusion is to “the Arrow of Eleata.” This is a reference to the pre-Socratic philosophy of Parmenides and Zeno, which is expounded on in Plato’s dialogue Parmenides and further explained by Aristotle in The Physics. In Plato’s dialogue, Zeno, the disciple of Parmenides, explains his master’s conception of The One. The concept maintains that all things may be reduced to a unified whole or One. According to Parmenides and Zeno, this means that there is no movement. All things are part of a single whole, and so change and movement are impossible, because The One cannot be divided (Plato 2006, 128 c–d). As a means of proving the position, Zeno engages in reductio ad absurdum. He produces a

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number of paradoxes designed to confound the concepts of change and motion. One of these paradoxes is “the Arrow of Eleata.” In The Physics, Aristotle summarizes the paradox, which logically sets out to prove that motion is an illusion. “If everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest,” explains Aristotle, “and if that which is in locomotion is always occupying such a space at any one moment, the flying arrow is, therefore, motionless” (Aristotle 2006, VI: 9 239 b5). From Aristotle’s description, it is easy to understand why Herbert uses Zeno’s paradox to describe the photograph: like the arrow at rest in one of the instants of its flight, the boy in the snapshot is “motionless.” But, even more than his motionlessness, as an image, the boy is part of a greater unity: the unity of the photograph. Inside the photograph, the boy is forever seen in relation to the river and the shadows. He cannot be disconnected from them; he is with them as they are with him, and all are at rest. All are one. For Herbert, the unity reflects the boy’s innocence: these things are “the only shadows that he knows.” In other words, the snapshot is more than a mere synecdoche of the past. It is a complete unity: a unity brought together by the child’s innocence and ignorance of time and history. The unity of the snapshot is immediately harmed by the Genesis story. As the story illustrates, the God of Israel is a god wholly separated from Man: a god who offers Abraham neither rhyme nor reason as to why Abraham should sacrifice his son. Furthermore, as the story itself illustrates, the literary tradition that supports the religion of this god is a tradition founded upon movement: And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him. Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off. And Abraham said unto his young men, Abide ye here with the ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you. And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together. And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father: and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering? And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went

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both of them together. And they came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son. And the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, Here am I. And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou anything unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me. And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and beheld behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son. (Genesis 22: 3–13, AV.) As is evident from the passage, the Genesis story derives from an entirely different conception of the universe, the self and the divine. It appeals to the idea of a dualistic reality, in which humanity and God are separated. God keeps his ways secret, and human beings may choose to obey or not. In Fear and Trembling, Søren Kierkegaard distinguishes the Hebraic conception of reality from the classical conception of it, terming the former as the “personal” and “religious” and the latter as “the public” and “ethical.” As Kierkegaard relates, classical ethics can be completely mediated. These ethics are essential constructs. For the Greeks, they exist as absolutes, outside of time, but they can be logically described, and so they can be publicly mediated and explained through reason. However, the personal and the religious conceptions of reality found in the Old Testament entail private relationships between God and individuals. The reasoning involved in these relationships cannot be aired publicly, nor can it be explained rationally. Rather, it is based on faith alone. Thus, when an individual such as Abraham is instructed to act, he cannot explain why he acts. He simply must act. “With [the story of Abraham and Isaac],” writes Kierkegaard, the necessity of a new category for understanding becomes apparent. Such a relationship to the divine is unknown in paganism. The tragic hero does not enter into only private relation to the deity, but the ethical is the divine and therefore the paradox in it can be mediated in the universal. Abraham cannot be mediated which can also be expressed by saying he cannot speak. (Kierkegaard 2006, 52)

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As Kierkegaard recognizes, the realities behind the story of Abraham’s sacrifice are those that cannot be mediated. Abraham could not have explained publicly his rationale for doing what he did. Equally, Isaac could not have comprehended his father’s motives: “Then, [Abraham and Isaac] returned home,” writes Kierkegaard, “and Sara hastened to greet them; but Isaac had lost his faith. No word of this has even been mentioned in the world, and Isaac never spoke to anyone of what he had seen and Abraham never suspected that anyone had seen it” (ibid., 13). In short, the father and the son both fall silent, because neither of them can explain. In terms of Herbert’s poem, if we consider the boy in the photograph as inhabiting an as-yet-unharmed classical world, we may also consider him as someone whose thoughts and conceptions of reality can be mediated: that is, they may be explained. He understands the world through a simple logic. Such logic is innocence: the freedom to relate what occurs and is thought without fear of repercussions, chastisements or incomprehension. In short, the boy in the photograph sees the world as The One. However, after the sacrifice—or, in terms of Herbert’s poem, after the war—there is an end of mediation. This is most obvious in the father’s words. He expresses an anxious need to take the picture, but this can also be felt in the ironic tone of the first speaker. There, we sense a disenfranchisement in which he has “nothing in common with” his former self. All is characterized by a sense of an experience that cannot be mediated: an experience that the poem figures in its various images of foreboding (“the clouds,” “the thunder” and “shadows”). These images imply that something is coming: something unmediatable such as Blitzkrieg or God out of the whirlwind. The nature of this unmediated and unmediatable experience corresponds to the first speaker’s own paradox. While he has “nothing in common with” the boy in the photograph, he shares with him the same pulse (the same “papillary line”). Thus, he is and is not the boy. This is a paradox that cannot be mediated—at least not by a photograph. But Herbert suggests that poetry can explain such a paradox. Unlike a photograph, a poem can relate change. It can even suggest the realities of trauma, accommodating Caruth’s traumatic parable. What gives poetry this power is its temporality, but, even more than this, poetry is the medium of metaphor. Throughout this study, I have repeatedly recognized that photography is a highly metonymic medium. Stressing the way in which a photograph is an index, I have observed that it provides a poet with an image of the thing itself. But this metonymy is confounded when the thing itself is no longer mediated

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or mediatable: when it entails, for example, a sense of foreboding or traumatic remembrance. In such cases, what is required is a metaphorical substitution. In Herbert’s poem, the substitution is the biblical allusion to Genesis: an allusion that completely departs from the first section of the poem, and so completely departs from the description of the photograph and its metonymy. The departure corresponds with the first speaker’s departure from, or rejection of, the snapshot. In short, the first speaker as much as states: “Not photography, but poetry can accommodate the breach that has occurred between my boyhood and adult selves.” This idea is made manifest in the poem’s descriptive strategies, which are different in the first and second sections. The first section consists of a fabric of metonymic descriptions. The second is a fabric of metaphorical ones. In the first section, the boy is part of the scene, and the scene is all that he knows. This contiguity flies in the face of metaphor. As Roman Jakobson maintains, metaphor is a figure of death and change. It relies upon the continual arrival of substitutions. One thing must be made absent so that something else may appear to bear its likeness (Jakobson 1987, 306–7). In the motionless reality of the photograph, the confrontation of such substitutions is impossible. In the absence of movement, all is static; no object may depart so as to be substituted, nor may any object arrive to be its substitute. Thus, proximity is the only reality in the photograph. Like the Arrow of Eleata, all is one and spatially present, and nothing arrives or departs. However, as the original Genesis narrative demonstrates and as the second section of Herbert’s poem echoes, the biblical narrative is highly metaphorical and temporal. For example, the distance that the father and the son travel is not measured spatially, but temporally. According to Genesis, Abraham and Isaac travel for three days. In addition to this temporal measurement, the story entails a series of metaphorical substitutions. The ram becomes a metaphorical substitute for the boy just as the angel that delivers the message to Abraham is a substitute for God himself—for, even while the story comes to express the will of God, God does not appear in it. All of these temporal and metaphorical elements carry over into the story of Herbert’s Abraham and Isaac. Pleading with the boy to remain still for “only an instant,” Herbert’s Abraham is a man plagued by an ever-moving reality: a reality on the verge of catastrophic change. He understands that change will come, and so he seeks (as we all seek when taking snapshots) something to stop this change—if only in the form of a record.

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And this is where Herbert’s irony culminates. While Herbert’s allusion to Genesis honors the metaphorical tenor of the biblical narrative, the faith that motivates Herbert’s Abraham differs from the faith of the biblical patriarch. Readying to sacrifice his son, the biblical Abraham believes he will still be the Father of Generations. Such a faith is a faith in the future. However, faith in the future is not what Herbert’s Abraham would seem to have: little one my Isaac bend your head it is only an instant of pain then you will be whatever you want—a swallow lily of the field for I must shed your blood my little one for you to remain innocent in the summer lightning safe forever like an insect in amber beautiful as a cathedral of fern preserved in coal This is the faith of the photographer made biblical. It is not based upon a faith in the future, but a faith in the camera’s power to keep the past “safe” by killing it. The comparison of killing and photographing is an old one. The term “snapshot” itself is taken from the terminology of hunting, and originally referred to a hunter’s hastily made shot at a flushed game bird (OED: s.v. “snapshot.”). Such hasty shooting parallels the usual hastiness of a photographic snapshot. However, the haphazard “shooting” of amateur photography is not the only point of similarity between killing and photographing. The camera effectively kills an instant in time, or it records, at least, the instant as it passes. Such a photographic kill does not involve a faith in future generations, but a faith in the lasting power of recording past ones. Herbert’s Abraham comes to perform his act of sacrifice under the auspices of a photographic god. Such a god does not demand the sacrifice of the child to an everlasting Death. Rather, this god demands the sacrifice of an instant. As the poem makes clear, after this “instant of pain,” the child may do and be whatever he likes: little one my Isaac bend you head it is only an instant of pain then you will be whatever you want—a swallow lily of the field

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The liberality of the father’s promise is altogether ambiguous. Does the father’s largess indicate a general indifference to his son: an earnest need to record the boy and then to forget him? Or does the list of promises relate the father’s general helplessness? We cannot say. The Whitmanesque tenor of the catalogue suggests that the latter is the case. After he takes the photograph, the father as much as declares that the future is beyond his control. Thus, if the boy wishes, he may leave his physical body to become anything—anything except—as the list implies—a child. What the child becomes is the first speaker: someone who is far removed from the riverbank and the innocent oneness found there. One of the poem’s other great ironies, of course, derives from the fact that it is the father who has actually been transformed. Not only has he become an Abraham. He has become the shadow at the feet of the boy. In fact, the list of shadows in the fourth stanza (“the shadow of a straw hat shadow of a pine tree shadow of the house”) calls attention to the elegiac function of the poem. The father has entered the world of shadows. Indeed, he has become part of a singular unified umbra cast by an ancient sunset. The pines and the house are part of it, but the most important part is the straw hat. The shadow of the hat calls to mind again Barthes’s notion of the punctum. In my discussion of Thom Gunn’s poem, I quoted Barthes’s description of the punctum in which he describes it as being an “accident” within a photograph that “pricks” him with its poignancy (Barthes 1980, 27). For Herbert’s first speaker, “the shadow of the straw hat” is such a punctum. It pricks his attention, and so—like Benjamin before the fishwife or Barthes in Camera Lucida before the photograph of his mother—the first speaker honors the father by way of the shadow. He gives voice to it. In part, Herbert accomplishes this typographically. Indenting the poem’s second section, he concretely illustrates the shadow that falls at the feet of the boy, who occupies the first section. The indentation dramatizes the role the shadow plays. It provides the absent (and no doubt dead) father with a physical form. Indeed, the indentation ekphrastically recreates the punctum, replacing the actual shadow in the snapshot (if an actual snapshot ever existed) with what I would term “a notional punctum.” The constellation may equally exonerate the poem’s disjointed and anachronistic eclogue. The first speaker is a man who is probably the age of the father when the father took the photograph. The second speaker is the father. The two have much in common: Each would preserve the

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other. Each is aware of time. Each understands the nature of harm. Just as this knowledge separates them from the boy, it unites them as photographer and poet. If their lines do not constitute an eclogue in the strictest sense, then, they may constitute a musical canon. The concerns of the first speaker are echoed in the pleading of the second, and, as the second is the father of the first, the canon seems cyclical: the pleading of the second speaker echoes the concerns of the first and back again. In this way, Herbert’s Abraham is a father of generations. His son does survive the war. More importantly, the son continues his father’s work. He preserves the past. This is done not by way of a snapshot, but by writing a poem, but it is done nonetheless. In the course of doing this, the poem performs as well a national and cultural task. What “Photograph” finally embodies is the postwar mind. This is a mind steeped in the religious, philosophical and literary traditions of Western Culture. But it is also a mind that recognizes how these traditions could not prevent nor can they truly explain the Second World War. Paradoxically, however, these traditions are all the post-war mind has to work with. The result is a seemingly fragmented and anachronistic eclogue in which things seem heard and also not heard, passed on and also lost. The ekphrasis, then, does not only describe the snapshot of a boy by a river. It describes the intellect of a survivor. A Head of Fungus: John Ashbery’s “The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers” Ordinarily, when one broaches the subjects of ekphrasis and John Ashbery, one obligates oneself to embark on a discussion of Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” Unquestionably the one of the best-known ekphrastic poems of the late 20th century, “Self-Portrait” has inspired critics for the past 35 years. However, “Self-Portrait” is not entirely suited for the purposes of the present study. The subject of the poem is the painted self-portrait of Parmigiano, and not a photograph.1 1  James Heffernan (1993, 169–90) identifies how Ashbery writes his poem paying heed to his use of photographic reproductions of Parmigiano’s painting. As Heffernan rightly suggests, these reproductions involve photography—and the role that photography plays—in the ekphrasis of painting. But this subtlety does not warrant further comment here.

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It is for this reason that I turn from “Self-Portrait” to discuss one of Ashbery’s less-known poems, “The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers” (1956). An early poem of Ashbery’s, “Little J.A.” anticipates the style of the poet’s mature work: a style that Robert Pinsky describes as having “systematic, oddly destructive assemblages of ‘pure’ words and forms of speech, beautifully fashioned and isolated from all but the ghost of an apprehensible physical world” (Pinsky 1976, 78). Pinsky’s description is applicable to the style of “Little J.A.” The poem’s dense veneer of allusions and seemingly arbitrary images figure it as something of a lush cacophony of galimatias. It is at the end of this cacophony that one comes to the ekphrasis of the photograph of Little J.A. After such dizzying effects as those of the poem’s first two sections, one would expect that this ekphrasis would entail still another fog of words; however, when Ashbery’s speaker comes to his own photograph, his tone changes. This change is significant, and in terms of the theme of this chapter, it may be said to be revolutionary. Unlike the speakers of Warren’s and Herbert’s poems, Ashbery’s speaker hails his childhood image, and he prioritizes it over literary language. Instead of employing his style to affect a distance between himself and his boyhood image, he inverts the pattern we have observed in Warren’s and Herbert’s poems. This inversion amounts to an acknowledgment and acceptance of his boyhood image. “This comic version of myself / is the true one,” admits this speaker. The “truth” of this image transforms the photograph into a mirror of the poetic speaker: a mirror in which he experiences “lovely feelings.” Considered in relation to Stoichita’s shadow stage, Ashbery’s speaker’s feelings toward his own image correspond to a shift from the shadow onto the reflection. In addition, the speaker’s attitude toward his own childhood image parallels his attitude toward words in general and literature in particular. While poets such as Warren and Herbert may be described as believers in the word and its power to express truth, Ashbery’s speaker is a poetic apostate: that is, he discounts the power of words. For this speaker, words can only be reductive and evaluative, because words and their ensuing narratives come to construct fantasies of “goodness” and “badness.” Thus, according to the speaker, the virtue of truth is always compromised by words. However, photography, with its analogue of the visual, has the power to record an inescapable Truth, and it is for this reason that Ashbery’s speaker hails his childhood image as his “true self.”

The Shadow of the Former Self The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers I Darkness falls like a wet sponge And Dick gives Genevieve a swift punch In the pajamas. “Aroint thee, witch.” Her tongue from previous ecstasy Releases thoughts like little hats. “He clap’d me first during the eclipse. Afterwards I noted his manner Much altered. But he sending At that time certain handsome jewels I durst not seem to take offence.” In a far recess of summer Monks are playing soccer. II So far is goodness a mere memory Or naming of recent scenes of badness That even these lives, children, You may pass through to be blessed, So far does each invent his virtue. And coming from a white world, music Will sparkle at the lips of many who are Beloved. Then these, as dirty handmaidens To some transparent witch, will dream Of a white hero’s subtle wooing, And time shall force a gift on each. That beggar to whom you gave no cent Striped the night with his strange descant.

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Poetry, Photography, Ekphrasis III. Yet I cannot escape the picture Of my small self in that bank of flowers: My head among the blazing phlox Seemed a pale and gigantic fungus. I had a hard stare, accepting Everything, taking nothing, As though the rolled-up future might stink As loud as stood the sick moment The shutter clicked. Though I was wrong, Still, as the loveliest feelings Must soon find words, and these, yes, Displace them, so I am not wrong In calling this comic version of myself The true one. For as change is horror, Virtue is really stubbornness And only in the light of lost words Can we imagine our rewards. (Ashbery, 1956, 1985, 12)

Pyrotechnics and indirect statements characterize “Little J.A.” The poem is representative of the poet’s opus: an opus that Paul Hoover maintains uses “periphrasis” as its central device. By way of periphrasis or circumlocution, writes Hoover, Ashbery’s poems “capture the philosophical spirit of the age, as otherwise reflected in the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Derrida” (Hoover 1994, 166). It is difficult to disagree with Hoover. Such poems as “Little J.A.” remind one of Wittgenstein’s Sprachspiele (language games). “Little J.A.” garrulously testifies to a disbelief in meta-narratives—in meta-narratives and perhaps also in micro-narratives, for the poem affords its readers more questions than answers: Can we read the poem’s three sections as a whole? What possible correlation might there be between the first and second sections? Or between these sections and the third? While Ashbery is generous enough to offer us the word “yet” at the beginning of the third section—so as to suggest a connection between this section and the two

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previous—this “yet” seems little more than an empty gesture. Do the meditations that lead up to this word truly reach the conclusion that this conjunction implies? Or does this “yet” function as a penultimate move in a language game whose end is nowhere? Writing of Ashbery’s postmodern style and the allusive endings of his poems, Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle state: Part of what makes Ashbery’s poetry ‘postmodern’ is that it repeatedly articulates the desire to “step free at last” but at the same time repeatedly ironizes, dislocates, writes off this gesture or “ambition.” Ashbery has described his poems as being like dreams, and as texts for a reader to pick up, to start reading and put down again at whatever point she or he chooses: like dreams, Ashbery’s poems tend to give no coherent or comforting sense of how or why they end, and yet they also convey a strong sense of desire and need to think in terms of ends. (Bennett and Royle 1995, 286) Considered in the light of Bennett’s and Royle’s insight into Ashbery’s postmodernism, the “yet” of the third section would seem to introduce this section as a sort of codicil of desire: a fine point or reconsideration that “writes off” the previous ideas of the first two sections. Interpreting “yet” in this way, it’s tempting to “start reading” “Little J.A.” from its third section. Such a choice would isolate the ekphrastic part of the poem, and it would allow us to examine the poet’s insights into his snapshot independent of the rest of the piece. But, while entering into Ashbery’s dream-narrative in this way maintains the focus of this study, to consider the poem as merely a dream fabric and, thus, as a text that may be entered and exited at will deprives the poem of its full effect. With this in mind, I argue for the unity of “Little J.A.” and maintain that the poem’s seeming disunity hides a straightforward meditation on memory and seeing. What Ashbery offers is a structured argument, the general theme being that memory is a construction that fictionalizes the past. Embroiled with language and thought, memory is without virtue. The first section of the poem serves as an example of this lack of virtue. The second is a catechism on the first, concluding that memory and literature are beggars or even whores that cannot enumerate the truth. The third section provides us with an alternative medium to language: photography. Photography is, finally, championed as a source of truth, in that it is “the light of lost words.”

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There is much in the poem that would challenge these assertions. The first section, for instance, reads as anything but a memory: Darkness falls like a wet sponge And Dick gives Genevieve a swift punch In the pajamas. “Aroint thee, witch.” Her tongue from previous ecstasy Releases thoughts like little hats. “He clap’d me first during the eclipse. Afterwards I noted his manner Much altered. But he sending At that time certain handsome jewels I durst not seem to take offence.” In a far recess of summer Monks are playing soccer. A veritable tapestry of allusions, this section of the poem descends from the modernist tradition of the collage. “Little J.A.” recalls Eliot’s “The Waste Land” or Pound’s Cantos. However, while modernists such as Eliot and Pound use the collage to suggest the general collapse of cultural traditions, Ashbery’s collage expresses no such pessimism. Rather, the poem’s many references serve to portray a modern conscience and its associative constructions. Indeed, this consciousness is so capacious and eager to be inclusive that it may be said to hold collages within collages—echoes within echoes. Notice how the ninth line of John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet 19” (“I durst not view heaven yesterday, and today”) echoes in Ashbery’s tenth line: “I durst not seem to take offence.” Simultaneously, the phrasing calls to mind Eliot’s line “What should I resent?” from the “The Waste Land,” a poem that owes much to Donne’s influence. Given Ashbery’s poetic demeanor, we could make much or little of these allusions. In any case, it is fair to state that this passage is a portrait of a late 20th-century adult mind at work. The work of this mind is to make connections, comparisons and allusions that serve to create meaning from the events of the past: events from which one may fashion art. As John Shoptaw writes of the poem, by means of collage, “Ashbery relates the conception of the hero ab ovo through primary narratives,

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adapting James Joyce’s nursery-rhyme style of the first section of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” (Shoptaw 1994, 27). Shoptaw’s insights into the poem’s opening section are keen. Recognizing the first section of the poem as a story of origins, Shoptaw regards “Little J.A.” as “a study of artistic virtue” (ibid.), in that the poem traces this virtue from the child’s first forms of storytelling (the Dick and Jane primer and the Punch and Judy) to the most complex and adult forms (Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Andrew Marvell’s “The Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers,” and such 18th-century novels Defoe’s Roxana and Richardson’s Pamela). We may add to Shoptaw’s list the comic book, which would seem to be the imagistic correlative for Genevieve’s thoughts: thoughts that she releases like “little hats,” recalling the comic book’s thoughtbubbles. Also, there is the name “Genevieve” itself, which suggests the hagiography of St. Genevieve, patron saint of Paris. Famed for her contribution to the preservation of that city, Genevieve is iconic of the most noble of personages. Alluding to the saint’s noble history, Ashbery sullies it, transforming the noble woman into a common harlot in an abusive marriage. What we may surmise from this collage of narratives is the story of a fall from grace, or, more precisely, a story of the events that proceed from such a fall. In my examination of Robert Penn Warren’s poem, I discussed how Warren alludes to the Holy Family or to Adam and Eve in his description of the mother and father of the infant, as the young and naive parents smile over the newborn in an as-yet-unharmed past. From his vantage point, Warren’s speaker knows the future to this past, and so he has, we might say, tasted the fruit of knowledge. Even while there is much that distinguishes Warren’s poems from Ashbery’s, a similar narrative plays out in “Little J.A.” Ashbery’s speaker possesses a vantage point that is similar to Warren’s. Both speakers reflect upon their childhood images. Both know what happened. However, while the past that Warren’s speaker looks back upon is an idyllic one, the past that Ashbery’s speaker would seem to look back upon is anything but idyllic. In the third section of the poem, the “hard stare” of the boy attests to this, but so does the narrative in the first section. While we cannot describe Dick and Genevieve as the parents of Little J.A., we can describe their relationship as being anything but idyllic, as the woman’s words attest: “He clap’d me first during the eclipse. Afterwards I noted his manner

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While Warren’s poem engages in sentimentality and cliché, we cannot say the same about “Little J.A.” However, while Ashbery’s poem does not express the run-of-the-mill regret that Warren’s does, the reason for this lack of sentimentality involves the poem’s style more than its narrative. The domestic tawdriness of the first section’s narrative is as commonplace as the baby picture. The story is one of stock domestic violence and the general distemper of modern life, complete with a soccer match playing in the background (on television?). What distinguishes “Little J.A” from Warren’s “Old Photograph of the Future” is how, with its seemingly obtuse images and allusions, Ashbery’s poem makes no room for the homely sentimental attitudes we find in Warren’s poem. Instead, all seems misaligned and overtly obscure. What’s more, little of the poem’s first section entails original phrasing. Much, if not all, of the section consists of phrases stitched together into a narrative that would seem anything but personal. Whereas Warren’s and Herbert’s poems are filled with the personal sentiments of their speakers (their dramatic turns of phrase, their nostalgia, their sense of history), Ashbery’s poem is empty of such sentiments. Thus, we cannot describe Dick and Genevieve as the parents of Little J.A. The poem is empty of any connectedness, and while we might feel some sentiment for Genevieve, we have to ask: Are our feelings directed toward an actual person? Or are they felt for other literary surrogates, such as Defoe’s Roxana or Richardson’s Pamela? In effect, the people in Ashbery’s poem are hardly people at all, and their story is hardly a story. Stripped to its narrative bones, the story of the first section may be summarized as follows: After “previous ecstasy,” Dick “punches” Genevieve, and then buys her off with “certain handsome jewels.” However, we are looking in the wrong place if we wish to discover a narrative that expresses an emotional value. Instead, the first section of the poem is an example of the metaphorical evaluations and re-evaluations of memory. These evaluations and re-evaluations become the subject of the second section of the poem: So far is goodness a mere memory Or naming of recent scenes of badness

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That even these lives, children, You may pass through to be blessed, So far does each invent his virtue. And coming from a white world, music Will sparkle at the lips of many who are Beloved. Then these, as dirty handmaidens To some transparent witch, will dream Of a white hero’s subtle wooing, And time shall force a gift on each. That beggar to whom you gave no cent Striped the night with his strange descant. The section is a catechism. Addressing the “children,” the speaker sets out to teach them (or us) the nature of memory and its constructions. Unlike St. Augustine, who regards memory as being the storehouse of all that is true, Ashbery’s speaker holds a cynical attitude toward memory: an attitude that regards memory as a mechanism for making myths of “goodness” and “badness.” According to the speaker, the past cannot be reviewed without evaluation in the form of fantasy and sentimentality, as alluded to in the phrase “The white hero’s subtle wooing,” an obvious reference to the figure of Prince Charming in Snow White or Cinderella story. But the fairy-tale elements here are only half of the allusion. Far more central to this section is the allusion to “handmaidens.” The word is rich in biblical significance, but chiefly the allusion refers to the story of Hagar, the mother of Abraham’s illegitimate son, Ishmael (Genesis, 16: 1–16, AV). The bastardy of Ishmael and his ostracism from the Children of Israel is an old theme in literature, dealt with most extensively in Melville’s Moby Dick. Ashbery’s allusion to this narrative, however, focuses more attention on Hagar than on Ishmael. Cursed by Sarah, Hagar flees from her mistress. God intervenes in her flight, blessing Hagar and sending her back to Sarah. These events are not what chiefly interest Ashbery, however. Affixing the word “handmaiden” with the adjective “dirty,” Ashbery would sully the whole affair. Hagar becomes little more than house-help, and Sarah is transformed into a “transparent witch.” In this way, the tradition and origin of such narratives are

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debased. The biblical story of origins becomes another vaudeville: a second act of Punch and Judy. Nowhere is this burlesque made more apparent than in the allusion to Andrew Marvell’s poem “The Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers.” Ashbery alludes overtly to this poem in his title, but it is not until the second and third sections of “Little J.A.” that Ashbery’s speaker seemingly picks up on the allusion. In the Marvell poem, the speaker watches the beautiful nymph T.C. as she goes “taming” the flowers in a state of beatific virtue. Watching and seeing are central to the conceit of the poem. This strategy is so overt that Marvell’s opening lines declare: “See with what simplicity / This Nimph begins her golden daies!” (Marvell 1971, vol.1, ll. 1–2, 40). Such an opening sets the stage for one of literature’s oldest tropes: the admiring shepherd and the wandering nymph. However, literary convention aside, this trope allows us to understand the major difference between Ashbery’s and Marvell’s poems, centered on the different sorts of contact the two speakers have to the objects of their admiration. In Marvell’s poem, the nymph is obviously contiguous to the speaker. They share the same Arcadian landscape. In his poem, Ashbery exchanges this metonymic sight for a metaphorical sight, or what he terms a “dream.” The word “dream” in Ashbery’s poem is figurative and synonymous with fantasizing or wishing. This becomes clear when we recognize how none of the many persons who figure in the second section of the poem may be said to see each other. In fact, they are not even able to dream of each other in the sense of having someone appear to them in a dream. Ultimately, in the second section of “Little J.A.,” contiguous vision has no part to play in the evaluation of memory. The speaker, the children, the handmaidens, the transparent witch, even the beggar, are all absent from one another. This situation contrasts sharply with what occurs in Marvell’s poem. The metonymic contact that Marvell’s speaker enjoys with T.C. is severed in Ashbery’s poem. What is left in “Little J.A.” is Marvell’s longing for the idyllic nymph. When projected backward onto memory, for Ashbery, this longing amounts to the idealization or vilification of past events. The past is either “a goodness” or “a badness.” The awkwardness of these two nouns is intentional. They are meant to ring with the false notes of ineloquence, for ineloquence is what the “children” of Ashbery’s catechism are left with as a tool to evaluate their memories: ineloquence and clichés in the form of fantasies. Hence, Ashbery invokes such stock characters as “The white hero” and

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the “transparent witch,” who traditionally personify “goodness” and “badness” respectively. Their clumsy presence in the section represents ineloquence and the clichés it engenders. Ashbery’s reason for resorting to these stock characters is not to place the “children” and their stories on a lower level from that of the poet and his stories. While the poem engages in elitist references in its first and second sections, elitism is not the intention. Unlike Eliot and Pound, Ashbery does not require that the “children” have an extensive knowledge of what Eliot calls “the Tradition.” Rather, in the second section of the poem, Ashbery is interested in drawing a parallel between the devices of literary allusion and popular fantasy. The stock characters of the “white hero” and the “witch” are nothing more than impoverished versions of the speaker’s own literary allusions. The “dirty handmaidens” that are Cinderella and Snow White are merely representational counterparts of their more complex cousins, Hagar, Roxana and Pamela; just as the “transparent witch” is but an ersatz version of Shakespeare’s First Witch, whose words (“Aroint thee, witch”) are spoken by Dick in the first section of Ashbery’s poem. These parallels allow Ashbery to liken popular literature and its allusions with literary tradition and its allusions, and thereby to indict high and low culture simultaneously. In short, neither literature nor popular fantasy can extract the truth from memory. Like Genevieve (or like Roxana or Pamela) who has been “clap’d,” then “punched” and then left to reevaluate her lot for the sake of “some rich jewel,” literature and pop fantasy are the stuff of whores, or they are the stuff of beggars, whose descant “stripes” the night with a dissonant nonsense. This attitude toward literature distinguishes Ashbery’s poem from Warren’s and Herbert’s, in that the latter two poets believe in the truth of words, whereas Ashbery’s poem is the apology of a cynic. “A cynic,” declares Oscar Wilde’s Lord Darlington, is “a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing” (Wilde 2008, 45). Darlington’s definition may ring true of the speaker in “Little J.A.,” for he well knows the price of all of his allusions, but seemingly not their value; or perhaps it is more accurate to say that Ashbery’s speaker is a man who knows the value of these allusions, but he cannot find a means for redeeming this value in his postmodern reality. In his discussion of Ashbery’s poem “Clepsydra,” Harold Bloom makes a similar point: “I can think of no poet in English,” writes Bloom, “earlier or now at work, who insists upon so subtly unemphatic a pervasive tone. As a revisionary ratio, this tone intends to distance Ashbery from Whitman

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and from Stevens, and is a kind of Kenosis, a self-emptying that yields up any event of afflatus” (Bloom 1974, 118). While Bloom’s emphasis here is on Ashbery’s anxiety of influence and how this anxiety affects the poet’s tone, Bloom’s use of the term Kenosis speaks of the spiritual or personal absence of this poet in his own poems. Few contemporary critics are more readily aware of the significance of the term than Bloom. Kenosis is St. Paul’s term for the incarnation of Christ. Christ “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men,” writes Paul (Philippians 2:7. AV). Paul’s description of Christ’s emptying of himself suggests that all that was divine about Christ left him when he became a man. Bloom suggests that all that is personal about Ashbery leaves him in the act of writing. Thus, “Clepsydra” is an empty vessel. This emptiness is perhaps what Pinsky would describe as Ashbery’s “pure” words, for, if Ashbery’s poems are empty of self, they are merely constructions of words for words’ sake. Thus, considering Lord Darlington’s definition of cynicism, Ashbery’s poems might be thought of as expansive price lists of language, devoid of value. However, at least in regard to “Little J.A.,” such a conclusion neglects the gesture the poem makes toward the snapshot of the boy-self: Yet I cannot escape the picture Of my small self in that bank of flowers, My head among the blazing phlox Seemed a pale and gigantic fungus. I had a hard stare, accepting Everything, taking nothing, As though the rolled-up future might stink As loud as stood the sick moment The shutter clicked. To my knowledge, in modern poetry, there is no other poem that places such a powerful significance on the word “yet.” This one word marks an apostasy. Beginning the third section, the conjunction suggests that the speaker has a change of heart and that, after he has castigated literature as a whore, he now must redeem language, in as much as to say: “Yes, language and its byproduct literature are whores, but they are whores with hearts of gold, for they are finally necessary … even good.” However, while this “yet” suggests that what follows will involve something of this

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sort of redemption for language, the redemption does not occur. Instead of redeeming language, Ashbery turns to photography. According to his speaker, photography does not suffer from the sentimentality and value judgments of literary writing and speech. “Yet,” then, redeems nothing. Instead, it marks an embrace of the visual medium. The other word of significance in the poem’s third section is “escape.” The counterpart of this word is the word “dream,” as it appears in the second section of the poem. In “Little J.A.,” these two words are synonymous. The literary allusions and popular fantasies that the speaker addresses in his catechism in the second section are equivalent to “dreams” or “escapes” from the true past. However, in the third section, the word “escape” has more far-reaching significance than the word “dream” has in the second. While “dream” suggests the whimsy of the mind, “escape” comes to refer to the mechanisms that operate in all literary production and consumption. Writing or reading a text, one enters what Derrida calls “the delirium of reading” (Derrida 2004, 94). This delirium is the product of absences made present by means of representation. Creating a figurae in mentis, language makes that which is not present present in the mind of its reader. The presencing power of language is heightened in literary figures, such as metaphors and allusions. These figures further the power of this presencing and, by extension, they further the power of this escape. As I have observed at various points in this study, both allusion and metaphor are substitutes for those things that are already absent. Genevieve is never present except when we read about her, but when her words are in fact an allusion to Defoe’s novel and to Roxana’s words, reading of Genevieve makes present a still-more absent literary personality: Roxana. In the epilogue to Unrecounted, W.G. Sebald writes: “remembrance … in essence is nothing other than a quotation. And the quotation incorporated in a text (or painting) by montage compels us—so Eco writes—to probe our knowledge of other texts and pictures and our knowledge of the world. This, in turn, takes time. By spending it, we enter into time recounted and into the time of culture” (Sebald 2004, 90). Sebald’s notion of time spent implies that the passage from one text to the next through a montage is an act of reverence. Engaged in the work of memory, recollection entails a sacrifice of time (moments of life) to retrieve and evaluate a given memory. Ashbery’s attitude toward this sacrifice is that it is no sacrifice at all. Rather, it is an escape from true feelings, and thus all speech or acts involving language comprise

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nothing more than a protracted chain of allusions in which the truth never draws nearer. Where truth would seem to lie for Ashbery’s speaker is in the metonymy of his childhood photograph, as reflected by the change of style in the poem’s third section. Notice how here description becomes a seminal part of the presentation. In the first and second sections of the poem, while there were descriptions, none of these descriptions suggested any greater contiguity than certain scenic cues. For example, there is the image of the night falling “like a wet sponge.” Ashbery’s descriptions are surreal and outlandish, as in Genevieve’s “thoughts,” which are released “like little hats.” In neither case can we term these descriptions as realistic. Rather, all the descriptions in the earlier parts of the poem are products of metaphor or allusion. However, once Ashbery begins his ekphrasis of the snapshot, the issues of background and contiguity arise. Notice how the child’s head is contiguous with the “phlox,” and while his head is compared to something from outside of the photographic image (to fungus), this comparison remains metonymic in its relationship to the organic world: the boy is a mushroom among flowers. What is even more central to the metonymy of the passage is the powerful relationship between the child’s stare, the photographic instant and the future. The “hard stare” of the boy “accepts all and takes nothing.” In themselves, these words seem paradoxical. To take nothing is to neutralize all acceptance, unless, of course, the acceptance is merely a matter of resignation, and there is little to suggest that it is not. Indeed, the child accepts the future as being faulty, even unworthy, and he is helpless to change it. He looks at the camera (the future’s surrogate) as though it were a rotten vegetable. The notion is substantiated in the verb “stink.” The camera is a source of the putrefaction, and thus, seemingly, he regards the future as though it were the same. The suggestion is comical, but the comedy does not undermine the boy’s pristine and slight regard. He is a mushroom among a prospect of flowers. From the prospect with its perfumes, his eyes diminish the future. Like the virtuous nymph in Marvell, his disdain is seemingly pure, while all the future stinks loudly with talk. All the more fantastical is the contiguity the passage suggests. The child’s eyes reach the future, and, when they do, their disdain signifies that it “stinks.” However absurd the constellation is, there is something evidential about it. It is as if the boy were contiguous with the future. His

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stare substantiates the loud smell, and, in turn, the loud smell substantiates his stare. The whole business forms a chronotope that involves the child in “taking everything” from the future but “accepting nothing” from it. Such power gives life to the image. Once again, Benjamin’s notion of the etwas of the fishwife deserves mention, for, if the boy in the photograph can perceive the rottenness of the future, then, he too exhibits the fishwife’s etwas. He too never entirely perishs into art. Instead, he remains like a fixed point. In the prospect of flowers, he is more powerful than all the literary allusions put together, for while these allusions amount to references inside of references, he accommodates the idea of a “true” self. While Dick and Genevieve have no originality in themselves, but figure only as representational echoes of earlier representations, the boy would seem to be the “true” origin of Ashbery’s speaker. In fact, he may be said to be the analogical embodiment of true innocence. “Hard” and “wrong” though he may be, he is uncorrupted by the loud stink of future babble. Associating the boy with innocence calls to mind, of course, the dynamics we see Warren’s and Herbert’s poems. Once again, an image of a childhood self announces how the future has fallen: how innocence is gone and how an Eden (in Ashbery’s poem the prospect of flowers) has been lost. Ashbery’s phrase for this is “rolled up.” The image suggests a bouquet of flowers wrapped in newspapers. Cut from the days of childhood, the future has become rotten and must be rolled up and thrown out. However, while the dynamic is similar to what we see in Warren’s and Herbert’s poems, the conclusion is quite different. The third section of Ashbery’s poem reverses the dynamic. In Warren’s and Herbert’s poems, the past was either dangerous or useless. Therefore, the speakers of both poems work to neutralize their photographic images, and they use poetic language to accomplish this. Indeed, the power of poetry for these speakers lies in its ability to evaluate the photographic evidence, and finally to relegate it to a secondary status under language: the agency of meaning. Ashbery’s speaker will have none of this. As the first two sections of the poem substantiate, language is a cheap and unreliable harlot who will go by any other name, while the photograph is alive with “the loveliest feelings”: Though I was wrong, Still, as the loveliest feelings

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Poetry, Photography, Ekphrasis Must soon find words, and these, yes, Displace them, so I am not wrong In calling this comic version of myself The true one. For as change is horror, Virtue is really stubbornness And only in the light of lost words Can we imagine our rewards.

There is a Lacanian pathos that culminates in the conclusion of “Little J.A.” Recognizing the way that words “displace” the “loveliest feelings,” Ashbery’s sorrowful note at the end of the poem is one of resignation. As Lacan recognized, language will always form a net or a chasm between us and any sense of union or reunion with our origins. And as language is the child of thought, this displacement is the automatic work of thought. In Ashbery’s poem, thought finally is no better than a Roxana: willing to compromise her virtue for “some rich jewels,” “jewels” which are another name for the “horror of change.” Opposed to this sluttish horror of words is the photograph, which inspires “lovely” feelings by virtue of its stubbornness. Photography is the ultimate source of this virtue, even if this virtue is comical and otherwise unflattering, but then the unflattering aspects of the boy are what win him his virtue. His “hard stare” cannot be evaluated. He is “wrong,” but he is neither good nor bad. Rather, he is “the light of lost words.” As seemingly offhanded as this phrase is, its play on the word “light” is central. In this little phrase, Ashbery sums up his admiration for photography. In its silence and in its old light, the snapshot is a marker of forgotten speech. While it records the visual image to impossible detail, its analogue can never bequeath to the future a single word. Photography is thus a storyless medium; while a photograph may suggest any number of stories, it has no linguistic power to cast thought into the future, and so it cannot provide anyone with an escape. Ashbery’s poem takes issue, then, with Kracauer and his conception of the annihilating image that is the photograph. Rather than suggesting that his speaker’s reunion with this photograph would result in his destruction, Ashbery suggests that, were his speaker to enter the textual representations of literature, it would amount to his annihilation, because literature is nothing more than a chimera of words. Were we to consider Ashbery’s poem in terms of Stoichita’s shadow stage, we could regard

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literature as the shadow that the poet casts, while photography is his reflection. Perhaps this best explains the poem’s contrasting styles. In the first two sections of “Little J.A.,” Ashbery’s style, with all its periphrasis, amounts to a shadow: a shadow that, like Narcissus’s own, leads the poet to the place of his reflection. The poem’s final section reveals this reflection. Gazing into his childhood photograph, the speaker does not return to the past, but he is afforded access to the “beautiful feelings,” feelings that are like those one experiences while being in love. Ashbery’s ekphrasis of his childhood snapshot amounts to something of a love poem to himself, as though his head among the phlox were comparable to the face of T.C. among her flowers. What Warren’s and Herbert’s poems teach us about the photograph of the former self and the sort of chronotope it inspires is that these images inspire a return to language. Throughout this study, I have examined poems that celebrate or, at the very least, hail photography for its accuracy. From Melville’s metaphysics to Levis’s Platonism, poem after poem has regarded photographs as being more powerful than words, and thus poem after poem has put itself in service of a photograph, but Warren and Herbert reverse this. Seemingly recognizing the threat that the photograph of the former self harbors within it, these poets employ language as a natural defense against this threat. The relationship with the photograph of the self is based on creating a defensive position for the poetic speaker: a wall of language that shields one from the realities of time as these realities are manifested in the physical condition of the photograph and the lost innocence of its image. However, this is the very idea with which Ashbery’s poem takes issue. Indeed, Ashbery does not celebrate language as a vessel of the self. For him, language would seem to be a cacophony of echoes, none of which draw one any close to feelings, but instead render one isolated in a seemingly disingenuous house of chatter. For Ashbery, then, the photograph of the former self reunites the past with the future, bringing “lovely” feelings and satisfying longing.

— 10 —

The Photoshopped Image: the Ekphrases of Digital Photographs The Ekphrases of Digital Photographs

From this moment on, photography is dead—or more precisely, radically and permanently redefined as was painting one hundred and fifty years before. (Mitchell 1992, Book Jacket) One cannot help but smile on reading William J.  Mitchell’s comment about photography. Paraphrasing Hippolyte Delaroche’s famous declaration about painting after the invention of photography, Mitchell displays wit and insight at the same time, for it is true that, upon the invention of digital imaging, traditional photography suffered a blow similar to the blow suffered by traditional painting in the mid-19th century. The relationship that traditional photography had with the idea of truth has been diminished, even downright eradicated. Once it was possible to “trust” a photograph. To call it evidence by virtue of the medium from which it came—light writing. Now, this trust is gone. Digital imaging has the power to manipulate images, erasing those objects in the image that hinder or obscure the meaning that the photographer seeks to communicate, or to otherwise enhance images in myriad ways. Of course, traditional photography has always been subject to manipulation. From the various methods of development in the darkroom to the angle at which the photographer shoots the picture, manipulation has always factored in the areas of aesthetics and photographic truth. This is a fact that Victor Burgin and other post-modern critics of photography have been keen to observe. However, before the advent of affordable and easily operated software programs such as Photoshop, such manipulations required the specialized skills of experts in the darkroom. At present, the

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power to manipulate images is the hands of anyone who chooses to use it. As Mary Warner Marien observes, in the 1980s and 1990s, what this change meant for photography was a loss of innocence: Anxiety about the effects of digital technology was the latest appearance of photography’s oldest ghost, technological determinism, which continued to evoke illusory beliefs that, in its relative simplicity, past photography was more innocent than contemporary modes, and that “straight” photographs overshadowed other powerful ways in which photographs have been and will continue to be deceptive. (Marien 2006, 399) Marien’s insight is not to isolate digital imaging as a unique change to the medium of photography, but to recognize that the unique change that has occurred has taken place in the realm of “illusory beliefs” that have risen up around the medium. In effect, viewers of photographs have become less “innocent,” less willing to believe in the simplicity and veracity of a photographic image, because they have become more aware of how anyone can manipulate that image. This awareness has had the effect of undermining photography’s role as a medium of quotation, relegating it, we might say, to being a little brother to painting. In making this observation, I am thinking again of the insight John Berger expressed in the 1970s that photography is a medium of “quotation;” painting, on the other hand, is a medium of “translation” (Berger 1995, 111). Making this declaration, Berger clearly states that photography and painting have nothing in common. Now, in the 21st century, things have changed. Now, digital imaging allows a user of Photoshop to manipulate photographs, and we might even go so far as to say that it allows them to be changed into a translation. With regard to the ekphrasis of photographs, the change from traditional camera work to digital imaging amounts to a change from “descriptions of quotations” to “descriptions of translations.” Such a shift would seem to correspond with a loss of interest on the part of many poets, at least judging by the relatively small number of poems written overtly about digital images. I have encountered very few that hail the digital medium specifically as one worth celebrating. Knowing that such an image is manipulated, few poets seem to wish to champion the honesty of it. As Marien observes, photography has, indeed, lost its innocence, and also, perhaps, its fascination for poets.

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However, there are notable exceptions, among them the poems of Tadeusz Dąbrowski and Klara Nowakowska. For both of these poets, the manipulative aspects of digital photography become the center of their explorations into existential and spiritual identity. What gives weight to this subject is that each of these poets plays on the same issues of photographic truth. Recognizing how photography has always been associated with the evidence and essence of its subjects, these poets approach the digital image as a means for what we might term “tampering with existence.” In short, the obsessions of these two poets involve the issues of vanishing, blurring and amplifying reality so that the past might be erased or dulled. The ekphrases of these poets share something in common with Lewis Carroll’s “Hiawatha’s Photographing,” in that the speakers of Dąbrowski’s and Nowakowska’s poems make the reader aware of the mimesis involved the production of photographs, and, like Carroll’s speaker, the contemporary speakers engage in this mimesis. However, awareness and participation are not the most significant elements that Dąbrowski and Nowakowska share with Carroll. Even while these poets acknowledge the madeness of a digital photograph, they opt as well to regard the quality as only another aspect of the magical power of the medium. Thus, like Carroll, Dąbrowski and Nowakowska still regard the medium as a source of truth: a truth that can be altered, but not destroyed. In fact, as their poems suggest, Dąbrowski and Nowakowska regard digital manipulation as means for perfecting reality. ˛ Software Metaphors: Tadeusz D   abrowski’s “I scanned my photograph from the first year” and “Resolution” I scanned my photograph from the first year I scanned my photograph from the first year at primary school: crookedly cut fringe, chubby little cheeks, a slightly bitten lip, frighteningly trusting eyes. Gradually I move along the contrast bar and out of the milky nothingness emerges a shape that becomes real half way

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down the scale, then sinks into the background again. Happy is he who dies in this way. And now I’m looking in the mirror and I have to agree to a few wrinkles that weren’t there not long ago (could they ever have not been there?). So that’s me, me again, all me, including the acne scar, the hole in my tooth, and one day, perhaps, the hole where a tooth has gone. Too much of that me for me to take in, accept as my own. Bearing in mind that we are only at the body. (Dąbrowski 2009) Tadeusz Dąbrowski’s poem “I scanned my photograph from the first year” (“Zeskanowałem”) compares its speaker’s actual body with the effects that imaging software has on his digitalized photograph. As the poem makes clear, the speaker’s body ages less gracefully than the way the contrast bar on the software he uses makes his photograph “emerge” and “sink.” In itself, the comparison is fascinating. It calls attention to a shift of focus. The ekphrasis is not of the photograph so much as it is of the digitalizing process. The speaker’s attention to the contrast bar—part of Photoshop or of some other similar program—alludes to how alterations have become mainstays of digital photography. In short, the computer, iPad and the iPhone allow us to do what we want to images, and thus any suggestion of photographic truth is diminished, if not utterly dismissed. However, digital alterations are less central to the poem’s themes than they may first appear to be. The poem is not about adding, subtracting or morphing the photograph. Specifically, it is about the contrast between a virtual existence (and a seemingly digitalized death) and an actual physical one and a real death. These two existences are at odds, and the flash point is the software application. “Moving along the contrast bar,” the speaker witnesses his boyhood image “emerge” from out of the primum materium of “milky nothingness.” Then, “half way down / the scale,” it becomes “real” in the sense that it enumerates all his physical losses and forecasts his eventual death; however, these realities are displaced again by the dark side of the contrast scale, which suggests a more graceful return into nothingness. Seemingly, the poem’s themes and imagery conflict with many of the fundamental attitudes examined in this study. The speakers of

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many of the poems I have analysed thus far regard photographs as perfect substitutes or even as the living representations of their subjects. Dąbrowski’s speaker does not challenge such assertions. The speaker’s photograph from his first year at primary school may be empowered with demands similar to the fishwife’s. It is an image of his former self. It does seem to threaten him in a manner that calls to mind Warren’s and Herbert’s attitudes toward their childhood photographs; however, these similarities are secondary to his envy of the software. The contrast bar has the power to seemingly perfect the course of birth, life and death, and death is the most significant of these three states. The contrast bar makes a superior quietus, which will be unlike any the speaker experiences in the actual course of his life. Dąbrowski’s poem calls our attention to a greater theme, then: the competition between the actual and digital worlds. Cyberspace and virtual imaging occupy a great part of contemporary experience, and their facsimiles compete with the concrete realities that surround us. For many of us, the computer is a prosthetic mental space, whose visual representations proffer themselves as actual experiences in manners that parallel the pseudo experiences of suppressed ekphrases. The envy of Dąbrowski’s speaker vitalizes the situation still further. Digital experience not only can perfect images from life. It can generate a seemingly happy life and perfect death. In this way, the poem reinvigorates some of the most well-worn topoi in the Western tradition by animating them through its descriptions of software. It accomplishes this through relying upon visual culture at large and this culture’s understanding of the IT world. For example, elsewhere in this study, I have called attention to how photographs are comprised of light and shadow. The game the Dąbrowski’s speaker plays with the contrast bar reveals the fact again. The speaker’s photograph emerges from out of pure light, in which there are no shadows, and it “sinks” into pure shadow, in which there is no light. The poem reveals again that a photographic image is comprised of both. However, the nature of photography is not what the speaker focuses on in the description. Instead, the passage invokes the classic trope of passing from the light of life into the shadow of death. The contrast bar facsimiles an easeful transition between these states: a fact that the speaker acknowledges when he declares: “Happy / is he who dies in this way.” The envious declaration is an allusion to Herodotus, in fact. One remembers the Greek statesman and poet Solon and his definition of happiness, as Herodotus relates it

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in the Histories. Solon declares that if a man dies with “a sound body, health, freedom from trouble, fine children, and good looks … he may be justly called happy” (Herodotus 1954, 53). Dąbrowski’s speaker suggests that the contrast bar, with its gradual scale, is a digital manifestation of such a happy end. Smoothly emerging from the “milky nothingness,” the happy man slides through life and painlessly sinks. Since the second half of the poem describes the speaker’s acne scar and the hole in his tooth, we understand that he is already not experiencing this sort of graceful decline. The poem introduces, then, a new source of metaphors into poetic convention. One is tempted to term these metaphors “Software Tropes,” because they accommodate the technological advances of the computer age. In Dąbrowski’s poem, the contrast bar provides one great example of these metaphors, in that it usurps the place of such ancient tropes as the “candle of life.” “Out out brief candle,” declares Macbeth. Indeed, Shakespeare is not the first to use the candle as a metaphor for life. It is one of the most common metaphors in literature, and we find its antithesis in the 23rd Psalm: “in the Shadow of the Valley of Death.” Dąbrowski’s poem replaces these well-worn images with the contrast bar, and this opens up still more metaphorical possibilities—all of which may be derived from the sleek interface of a Windows operating system. The “buttons,” “toggles,” “scroll-down menus” and “slide bars” of Microsoft mimic the appearances of physical objects, but are, in fact, facsimiles. Many of these facsimiles, however, have greater significances in our lives than their concrete manifestations, and thus, quite naturally, they enter into figurative language. However, the success of the passage depends, of course, on our general understanding of software. The clichés and the allusions would be meaningless if the reader did not recognize the references to computer interfaces, but we do.1 1  In making this observation, I am tempted to argue even that Dąbrowski’s poem offers a new and virtual metaphor for what Martin Heidegger terms (after Plato) “the ekphanestation” of the poetical. Heidegger takes the word from Plato, recognizing it to mean “shine out” or “reveal.” Ruminating on the power of the fine arts to bring new things into being, Heidegger writes: “Could it be that the fine arts are called to poetic revealing? Could it be that revealing lays claim to the arts most primally, so that they for their part may expressly foster the growth of the saving power, may awaken and found anew our vision of, and trust in, that which grants?” (Heidegger 1993, 340) For Heidegger, the fine arts are a threshold over which the new things are revealed. They bring these things into Being. In

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These new metaphors furnish the poem with its grammatically odd final line:                Too much of that me for me to take in, accept as my own. Bearing in mind that we are only at the body. When dealing with translation, of course, one must always be wary of staking too much on aberrant syntax. Is the quirkiness of these lines due to the choices of the poet or the choices of the translator? In any case, the final line of the poem catches, so to speak, on the preposition “at.” “We are at the body.” What is so striking about the preposition is the way it imposes a precise location and time on the speaker’s consciousness. “At” is not a word that allows for vagueness either in time or space. We stand at the corner of the street at 2:31 p.m. Such a statement challenges any uncertainty. But “at” has yet another meaning. It calls attention to the settings of a software program. Considered in terms of the contrast bar of an imaging program, the word “at” describes the settings of the scale that the speaker is playing with. One sets the “contrast bar” at a certain percentage of lightness or darkness and the resulting image is adjusted. What’s more, the typographical symbol for “at”—written as “@”—is central in the standard notation of one’s electronic mailing “address,” one’s location within the virtual world. Thus, in the close of his poem, Dąbrowski contrasts the fixity of the body with the fluidity of software settings and cyberspace. He alludes to how the body’s fixity is, in fact, not fixed, in the sense that the speaker is well aware of his own physical decline. The body might be said to be the default for the speaker—for us. We are “real” in the sense of our places on the contrast bar, but we will not be slid gradually to the dark side of the bar. Rather, light and shadow will converge to reveal our unedifying declines as we glimpse them moment-by-moment

itself, the idea is not new, but harks back to the age-old notions that poets and artists are divinely inspired. Receiving messages from the muses, they create those works that have not been created before. Playing with the contrast bar, Dąbrowski’s speaker seems to have discovered an image that illustrates ekphanestation in itself. The emerging and sinking of his photograph corresponds to the emergence and sinking of that image’s being. Indeed, the fine arts give way to digital software, at least figuratively.

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in the mirror. The point can be clarified by returning to the issue of the speaker’s wrinkles that weren’t there not long ago (could they ever have not been there?). So that’s me, me again, all me, including the acne scar, the hole in my tooth, and one day, perhaps, the hole where a tooth has gone. Could the wrinkles “ever have not been there?” The body finds itself set at certain points that cannot be denied, and what came before them is lost—except in the digital. Thus, “I scanned my photograph from the first year” addresses the central desire that would seem to lie behind digital manipulation: control of nature. In the virtual world of Photoshop, Dąbrowski’s speaker is afforded the happiness of controlling nature, or simulating that control—admiring it, even envying it, for his demise has “too much” in it to be graceful. Responses such as this call to mind the attitudes expressed by the speakers of the poems we have examined in the previous chapter: speakers who reject the images of their former selves. The speakers of Warren and Herbert recognize their childhood images as markers for the deaths that have come to their childhoods and that are coming to their adulthoods, and so these speakers deny the photographs. Preferring the sliding contrast bar to the reality of his body, Dąbrowski’s speaker engages in a similar kind of denial; not that he denies his former self, but that he prefers the device by which he can manipulate his image. In other words, it is not the photograph of the boy in primary school that the ekphrasis celebrates; it is the means by which a computer can change that or any image. This celebration of mutability seems to be one major aspect of the ekphrasis of digital photographs; it acknowledges the loss of so-called photographic innocence (to return to Marien’s term) by lauding the falseness of manipulation. The attitude contrasts sharply to those we observed in early 19th-century ekphrases of photographs, which celebrated the Platonic aspects of photography and how these aspects thwarted the misrepresentations of painting. When it comes to digital ekphrases, rather than condemning manipulation and misrepresentation, “I scanned my photograph from the first year” hails it. We might argue that the change of attention marks a sociological change as well: in present culture, the self is less regarded as an entity of personal truth and more as an object

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that might be altered and manipulated surgically, cognitively, digitally and otherwise. We are, then, subject to our own manipulations. Another of Dąbrowski’s poems, “Resolution” (“Rozdzielczość”), addresses a similar theme, except it turns on the dynamic interaction between its speaker and an addressee: Resolution Today I chose myself an eye from your naked photo and enlarged it to the limits of the screen, to the limits of resolution (and that’s high enough for one to believe you’re real). I enlarged your right eye, wanting after the final mouse click to jump to the other side, to examine your soul or at least my own clicked-on self. Around the forty-fourth enlargement I saw my own foggy silhouette, at the sixty-sixth the outline of the camera, readable to me alone. But beyond that there was nothing but grey rectangles neatly laid like the bricks in a house, like the stones in the wailing wall I stand in front of day and night, doggedly swelling the cracks with notes filled with my poems. (Dąbrowski 2008) Amplification has remained one of the chief goals of optics since the early 17th century. The microscope’s lens allows us to enlarge the microscopic world and to gain access to its operations. The goal has naturally been transferred to photography. Attached to an amplifying lens, a camera records what the naked eye cannot see, and it is this amplification—or rather the notion of it—that gives rise to the kind of essentialisms we have detected in the poems of Pope Leo, Melville and Carroll; for the suggestion in each of those poems is that the photograph can in some way amplify the soul of its subject, and thus allow the poetic speaker to gloss the subject’s essence.

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Dąbrowski’s poem returns us to this sort of essentialism by alluding to the realities of computer software. In the poem “I scanned my face from the first year,” the speaker plays with the contrast bar. In “Resolution,” the speaker plays with the zoom-in setting. Amplifying the size of the eye in the photograph, the speaker seeks access to his addressee’s soul. The act appeals to another obvious and timeworn cliché. Zooming in on the eye, the speaker indulges the platitude that “The eye is the window to the soul.” The platitude is not stated directly. However, obviously, it forms part of the speaker’s motivation for zooming in on the eye in the first place. In fact, the poem indirectly reinvigorates the cliché. If the eye is such a window, it implicitly argues, then, zooming in on it zooms in on the soul. In this way, “Resolution” also employs the imagery of the computer as a new set of metaphors, and this is one of the most satisfying aspects of the poem. These dead metaphors are reliant upon the discourse and nomenclature of the Microsoft operating system. For example, using the computer to enlarge the addressee’s photograph, the speaker uses (more than likely) a version of Microsoft Windows to access ‘the window to the soul.’ Indeed, the joke may be taken still further, for it appeals to the basic discourse of end-users. We are all aware that to use a piece of Windows software, we must “open” the program. The word “open” has become the term for such operations. Dąbrowski’s speaker opens a window on his computer, which allows him to open the photograph of the addressee’s eye, which figuratively should allow him to open a window to the addressee’s soul. Indeed, the joke culminates with image of the Wailing Wall of pixels, which has no windows in it. The poem ends, then, by ironically cancelling the cliché that it seemingly has indulged. Opening window after window, the speaker comes to a dead end. Dąbrowski’s allusions and inferences to the computer are further advanced by another aspect of the poem: the addressee. Who is the addressee? Little is said about this person. Like a beloved in a sonnet, the “you” in the poem is overshadowed by metaphorical imagery. However, one clue to the nature of the addressee presents itself. In the opening line, the speaker states: “Today I chose an eye from your naked photo.” The word “naked” calls attention to itself. In one respect, the word aligns itself with the essentialist project of the speaker: He would like to lay bare the soul of the addressee. He would make the addressee naked by way of zooming in on the photograph. However, there seems to be something else here as well. The poem begins by suggesting that the speaker is

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familiar with the nakedness of the addressee. He has seen the naked photograph before, perhaps many times. As we have no descriptions of the relationship between the speaker and the addressee, we can only speculate about this. At first, one is tempted to argue that there is a romantic relationship between them. Of course, there is little evidence for such a relationship, except for the speaker’s desire to access the addressee’s soul. In the most pedestrian and modern sense, the idea corresponds to yet another romantic cliché. We could argue that the speaker seeks to access the addressee’s soul in order to understand the inner workings of the person—knowing the addressee in a spiritual sense. However, what troubles this interpretation is the strange detail: zooming in on the addressee’s eye, the speaker declares that he has access to the person’s “soul / or at least my own clicked-on self.” The either–or element here prompts a question: how is it possible for the speaker to be in the eye? Given the degree of clichés the poem embraces, we could argue that the image invokes the romantic trope of being lost in the eyes of a beloved. One is reminded of the Roman de la Rose, where Guillaume de Lorris’ speaker first spies the rose in Narcissus’ Well, which is an allegorical allusion to the lady’s eye. In part, at least, the cliché of the eye being the window to the soul originates in such romances. While it goes too far to suggest that Dąbrowski is making an allusion to the Roman de la Rose, it does not go too far to suggest that his cryptic image appeals to the sort of narcissism Guillaume de Lorris ascribes to love. Were we to seek a more literal interpretation, however, we might construct a background story in which we argued that the speaker’s “clicked-on self” is his captured reflection. He has taken the photograph of the naked addressee, and so his image is captured in the addressee’s eye. Such a narrative is not outside the range of possibilities, although it too asks us to speculate and to construct. However, in a poem so given to accepting the nomenclature and realities of the computer age, one cannot help suspecting that the nakedness of the addressee is another allusion to digital photography— and for the sorts of images it makes readily available. For example, what sort of digital image is this? How far are we from uncensored Internet surfing here? Is the addressee possibly the subject of an erotic photograph? In asking these questions, I do not wish to incriminate the poetic speaker, nor do I hope apply to the poem an unseemly narrative based on a single adjectival detail; however, there is something fruitful in such questions.

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The psychology behind erotic images hardly needs re-examining here. It is generally understood that erotica inspires a longing for access and possession. Since the late 19th century, photography has been involved in fostering such longing. The reasons for this are obvious, but, as Clive Scott has observed, they are equally complex. Scott writes: “If photography has a special complicity with the pornographic, it is because the camera, acting as a window between the viewer and the viewed, creates a distance not of aura, but of dispossession, a discontinuity likely to activate the reification or idolization of the viewed” (Scott 1999, 55). Scott’s observation assists us, perhaps, in understanding the dynamics of the poem. Possessing the naked photograph of the addressee, the speaker is seemingly confronted with a constellation similar to the one that Scott describes. The naked image presents him with a window. Opening the window, he is confronted by a distance. Across this distance, he recognizes a discontinuity. He does not possess the “soul” of the addressee and, yet, looking at the addressee’s nakedness, he reifies the naked body as harboring such a soul. In this way, the photograph is imbued with the qualities of an icon, whose prototype the speaker would access. What makes the dynamic all the more fascinating is how it may involve fusing the poetic address with the aspects of digitalizing software. In his examinations of how captions work in conjunction with pornographic images, Scott states: Pornographic magazines use captions precisely to conceal the realty upon which it depends for its addictiveness: captions imply accessibility, possibility of relationship, while the photographs purvey a distance that absolves the reader from relating, from interesting himself in the life of another, and allows desire to realize itself in manipulation. (ibid.) In one respect, of course, the speaker’s address to the naked person in the photograph works as a caption in a manner similar to that which Scott describes. The address implies accessibility and establishes a relationship. At this point in this study, we are used to such relationships. Once again, we have an apostrophe to a photograph. However, the power of words to bridge the distance is augmented here by the zoom-in function, which enhances the figurative verbal contact by seemingly increasing visual proximity through enlargement. Of course, what is truly ironic about

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enlarging the image is how it does not lead the speaker any closer to the addressee. This is hardly surprising. Making the photograph bigger does not make it deeper. What is surprising is the speaker’s acceptance of his own “click-on image,” which replaces the soul. This turn calls again to mind the concept of scopophilia. As Otto Fenichel describes it, scopophilia involves “identification.” Within the object of desire, the gazer is incorporated, and so he or she identifies him or herself with the viewed object (Fenichel 2005, 330). We saw something of this in John Logan’s poem, where his speaker becomes part of the glove in Siskind’s photograph. However, in Logan’s poem, the speaker sincerely rarifies this sort of identification. In Dąbrowski’s poem, we must take things with a grain of salt. Relating how he has either gained access to the addressee’s soul or his own image, Dąbrowski’s speaker seems casually aware of the psychological concept of scopophilia, and this may explain why he states, in a cavalier manner: I saw my own foggy silhouette, at the sixty-sixth the outline of the camera, readable to me alone. The lines are fraught with ennui. The image is “readable to [him] alone,” but this does not seem a great confession. If what the speaker confesses is his scopophilia, then, it is a greatly disappointing sort. The “foggy silhouette” might allude to his psychological awakening. It could correspond to a moment when he recognizes his voyeurism, or it might be what we first thought it was: the image of himself captured in the addressee’s eye at the time of the taking of the picture. Another possibility is that the speaker’s reflection is cast onto the glass of the computer screen. This sort of reflection becomes clearer when the screen is blank, and, as the speaker goes on to report, once the eye has reached beyond the sixty-sixth enlargement it has changed into “grey rectangles,” which are blank. The ambiguity of the image provides us with a gambit of possibilities. Some are seemingly serious, others less so. In any case, such an image corresponds to the games that Dąbrowski is playing. Indeed, play finally drives “Resolution.” Just as the speaker plays with the zoom-in feature, he plays with clichés and possibly even time-honored psychological concepts. We might even say that he digitalizes all of these into the “grey bricks” of himself that finally reveal nothing. The pixels are an

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image of a dead end: a wall without windows on which the speaker appears not as a lurid voyeur but only as a vague reflection. Opening window after window and zooming in on the photographic image, the speaker describes how the computer allows us to enlarge a digital image to a point where we can perceive its composition—its pixels—but these enlargements never amount to accessing the numinous. The speaker will never reach the soul, and neither will we. The more we interpret the poem the more we zoom in, and the less we see, getting closer to details, which finally allot us the blankness of uncertainty. This is our realization, not the speaker’s, and this is an important point. Within the narrative of the poem, the speaker does not seem to realize anything. Instead, he notices these truths seemingly again. The tone of the poem speaks for this. The realities of software have already revealed all these truths many times before to him. What is left is to play with the image. A poem such as Dąbrowski’s seems to cancel Benjamin’s notion of the fishwife’s demand. It suggests that, were Benjamin to have zoomed in on Hill’s photograph, he would have come no closer to the etwas that stuns him. Indeed, it would have vanished. Ironically, such a suggestion almost parallels what Benjamin himself argues for in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936). There, he famously claims that reproduction “shatters” the auric authenticity of a work of traditional art. Benjamin writes: By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition …. (Benjamin 2007, 215) Plurality and proximity are, then, central to Benjamin’s ideas of reproduction. By virtue of the reproduced image’s plurality, its original ceases to have uniqueness, and by virtue of the proximity of its many copies, these reproductions become immersed in the diverse situations of their new contexts. In neither of his poems does Dąbrowski address the affects of mechanical reproduction. Instead, he addresses the effects of digital contrast and enlargement, but the effects seem similar: playing with the contrast bar or the zoom feature in Photoshop, the speaker deflates the aura of images.

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And yet, as ironic as “Resolution” is, the reference to the Wailing Wall at the end of the poem may also reanimate photographic aura. This is foremost the case because there is still an addressee, and the addressee is still inside the photograph, and the speaker still desires contact with the person. The addressee seems to have a demand—a soul—and he or she is still addressed in a manner that once again calls to mind the chronotope of the photograph. The portrayals of digital imaging have not changed the constellation. In fact, the poem couches the desire in a religious simile: like the believer dobbining before the bricks of the Wailing Wall, the speaker stashes his poems between the pixels. It is hard to say how literal such an image is. End-users are aware that texts and images may be “set in” to one another. Thus, the speaker could conceivably set in his poems between the bricks; however, reading this act into the poem seems forced. Indeed, the Wailing Wall image is the first instance in which the imagery of the computer must give way to an older and more ceremonial set of images. “Doggedly swelling the cracks” between the pixels “with notes filled with [his] poems,” the speaker returns us to an ancient, hand-written tradition. The addressee remains, finally, something sacred and sought for—perhaps even wailed over—and so, as much as digitalization has changed the nature of the photograph, it has not changed the chronotope that it finally inspires. The metaphors of Dąbrowski’s ekphrases call attention to how visual culture surrounds us with soft figurations. Traditionally, figurative language works to harden abstractions or sentiments by concretizing them with actual visual objects. Shakespeare concretizes the shortness and brevity of life with the image of the candle—a real object. The psalm concretizes death with the image of a valley—equally real. The cliché (“the window to the soul”) does the same. Software metaphors—at least as Dąbrowski uses them—pick up on this work third-hand, so to speak. They follow catachreses of programmers and software companies. Microsoft, for example, enlists the window as a metaphor for its operating system. Quite successfully, they transfer the qualities of real object onto a virtual one. In the opening of his chapter on metaphorics, E.R. Curtius calls attention to the fact that metaphor involves such transferences, and that the sources for many of the most traditional metaphors are the professions, landscape and food (Curtius 1953, 128). The concrete world thus provides the abstracting mind with shapes to figure its conceptions. Such is the aim of operating systems as Windows and OS X for Mac. However, the metaphors of these operating systems quickly die into

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mere nomenclature. Dąbrowski’s poem reanimates them by inverting the metaphorical gesture. The virtual or software object (the Microsoft window) comes to substantiate the abstraction (an easeful death or an access point to the soul), and it is here where things become third-hand, in that second-order metaphor transfers to a third-order metaphor. The actual world—the first order of things—is hardly alluded to. Such figures call attention to a speaker who never looks up from the computer. The hard world around him does not afford him metaphorical material: the digital world of software does. A Sublimely Blurred Unity: Klara Nowakowska’s “Low Resolution” Dąbrowski’s ekphrases involve the manipulation of a photographic image in order to achieve control over that image: to manipulate it in a manner that communicates another truth. However, as Klara Nowakowska’s poem “Low Resolution” (“Niska rozdzielczość”) relates, the manipulation of a photographic image on a computer is not the only means by which a poetic speaker can gain control of reality. Instead, a digital camera may be set so that it blurs deliberately what it records and thus creates an image that better corresponds to what a viewer might seek from reality: Low Resolution    for Kama Ash and rust drifting out of nowhere has hinted autumn to these trees – earlier than anyone would have expected, earlier than the outbreak. I fix for you my close-up encounters with petrified nature in the lowest resolution; what better way to render reality, that which connects us: a wooden footbridge

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The techniques of muddying, blurring and tinting a photograph are by no means unique to digital photography. One of the major photographic movements of the 19th century aimed at devising photographs that were “artistic.” Applying tar solution and other chemical methods to their images, many 19th-century photographers deliberately sought an image that called to mind the “petrified nature” that Nowakowska describes in “Low Resolution.” However, Nowakowska’s poem calls attention to the control that digital photography affords the common photographer. This speaker is not a specialist, not an expert alone in a dark room, but rather a person playing with a digital image by reducing the number of pixels that are used in the image, and thus she deliberately dulls reality, “turning” “a factory” “in dreams into a cathedral.” Such a transformation summons images of the “Satanic Mills” of Blake’s Jerusalem, for it evokes a reality blurred by a dream-vision. What distinguishes the speaker’s vision from Blake’s is that the dream Nowakowska’s speaker describes is manufactured by digital resolution. Like Dąbrowski’s speaker in “I scanned my photograph from the first year,” Nowakowska’s speaker celebrates the device that transforms reality. However, what distinguishes “Low Resolution” from Dąbrowski’s poem is that while Dąbrowski’s speaker embraces digital manipulation, the speaker in “Low Resolution” desires and celebrates images that are made by this manipulation, for these images reflect the reality that “connects us”: in the lowest resolution; what better way to render reality, that which connects us: What can be meant here? Is the speaker suggesting that the only means by which reality can be “rendered” is through a manipulated image: one whose diminished amount of pixels causes it to be blurred? There can be no other way of interpreting these lines and, yet, such a suggestion flies in the face of what photography has always meant for the essentialist: that through photographic accuracy, the invisible, interconnected world is revealed. Nowakowska inverts this notion. Seemingly, for her speaker, the interconnectedness of the world cannot be seen unless one squints.

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The key word in this notion of interconnectedness is, of course, “resolution,” for not only does this word refer to the number of pixels that fill a digital image, it refers to the notions of completeness and teleology, the sense of something being “resolved.” Nowakowska’s speaker effectively suggests that her image constitutes an end to the absolutes of resolution, at least in the traditionally photographic sense. Clarity, in short, shall not dominate the photograph. Instead, uncertainty, speculation and ambiguity will reign. Returning to the etymological origins of the word “resolution,” we remember that, in Latin, resolutio refers to a loosening. Effectively, Nowakowska’s notions of low resolution may be said to loosen details from reality, and thus resolve it. This fact may shed light on why so few poets have yet written ekphrases of digital photographs. Throughout this study, time and time again, poets have hailed photography as a medium of exactitudes. Photographs are synecdoches of the past. They reveal who and/or what was. In fact, as the snapshot elegies demonstrate, often the revelation is so powerful that a photograph “becomes” the person that it represents. Before the invention of digital photography, the ekphrases of photographs celebrated photography as the medium of the thing itself. This has been one of the major contentions of this book. However, with the introduction of digital photography, it is less possible to celebrate photography as such. In my examination of Larry Levis’s poem “Sensationalism,” I called attention to the anti-ekphrastic elements of that work, identifying it as a poem that challenges that act of mimesis. Effectively, Levis reiterates Plato’s concerns about the untruth of poetry. But, even while Levis’s poem does this, it does not challenge the truth of Koudelka’s photography. In Dąbrowski’s and Nowakowska’s poems, the situation is reversed. The poems do not challenge mimesis, per se. They challenge photographic truth and describe the diminution of this truth. The given term for this diminution is “low resolution”: the diminished ability to resolve the photographic image with its subject. In both poems, resolution comes to the foreground. As was the case in all the chapters of this book, in selecting the works to be discussed here, I did so based on the quality of the poems. I found that Dąbrowski’s and Nowakowska’s poems were those that best addressed the issues at hand in the ekphrasis of digital photography, though this meant citing two poets from Poland, a choice that that runs the risk of obfuscating the ekphrases of digital images in the AngeloAmerican poetic world. As we can see from these poems, there is

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something nationally specific to the notion of resolution, or the lack of it: something that suggests itself as a reaction to living under a régime and an ideology that endorsed such absolutes as those put forward by Soviet Communism. Under the totalitarian governments of the Eastern Bloc, photography functioned as a weapon of surveillance and evidence. The absolute evidence leveled against a political offender could amount to a photograph of that person offending the state. Such images necessitated resolution: they depended on evidential clarity. With this in mind, we might regard these poems as rejections of this absolutism: rejections of a state-eye that saw too much but neglected the spiritual connectedness that lies beyond sight. However, no matter how much Nowakowska would seem to contradict the traditional aesthetic notions of photographic clarity and truth, her poem still plays on these themes, in that she would celebrate a muddied or myopic truth. In fact, we might describe her ekphrasis as a willful myopia. Her speaker would see blurred images rather than clear ones, for, in seeing a blurred world, she is able to derive a sfumato-like truth. This form of truth corresponds to the convention of the “blind seer,” who sees truth because he cannot see appearances. In “Low Resolution,” the speaker is not blind like Tiresias. Hers is not a total darkness. Rather, it is the distortion of individuations. Nowakowska’s poem may be said to describe the sort of Platonic Oneness that Herbert described in the first section of his poem, in that the blurred reality her speaker achieves through the digital camera would seem to create a tapestry of indistinct objects, as reflected in the poem’s final stanza: a wooden footbridge cast over the rails, a factory turning in dreams into a cathedral? While we cannot fault these images for clarity, there is a lack of deixis here. The footbridge is “cast over the rails” but what proximity does this bridge have to the factory? And where is the factory? Is it “turning in dreams” and thus never existed in reality? Or is the factory “turning in dreams into a cathedral” and thus existed in reality but now has entered into dream? In addition, are the bridge and the rails also part of this dreamscape or are they outside of it? Furthermore, what rails does the speaker refer to? Railway rails? The handrails of the bridge itself? It is not the poem’s intention to resolve these questions. Instead, its aim is to

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describe images that dissolve the differences between things, and thus to create a scene of sublimely blurred unity. Poets such as Dąbrowski and Nowakowska do not abandon photography as a medium of truth or essentialism. Rather, in their ekphrases of digital photographs, their poems hail photography as a means for achieving these goals. What differs, then, between these works and many of the poems examined previously in this study is that, for Dąbrowski and Nowakowska, there is absolute acknowledgment of the part that mimesis plays in establishing truth: for these poets, truth is not achieved by means of an unhandmade record; it is achieved by passing such a record through aesthetic experience. Such software as Photoshop and devices as the digital camera become, at least for these poets, extensions of the imagination and its ability to manipulate reality into a form of artistic expression. We may even stretch the point so far as to state that, for these poets, manipulating reality entails accessing the truth. The manipulations of digital imaging may have moved us forward technologically, but they return us to painting’s relationship with the truth. Traditional photography and its lease on the truth may be nothing more than a phase in the development of representations: an era of 160 years or so when representation allied itself with the indexical. Dąbrowski’s and Nowakowska’s poems call our attention to how this era may be over. Thus, the control that the speakers of Dąbrowski’s and Nowakowska’s poems describe is a control that brings the intractable nature of a photographic record into the ever tractable but ever more insightful nature of the imagination. In this manner, digital imaging becomes an extension of the mind in a manner that renovates Christopher Isherwood’s famous opening to Goodbye to Berlin: “I am a camera.” Dąbrowski’s and Nowakowska’s speakers do not declare themselves as to be “cameras,” yet these speakers imply that they are digital imaging devices (digital cameras, Photoshop-like programs, etc.), capable of manipulating reality by causing it to vanish, enlarge and blur the truth as they see fit. What these poems relate to us, then, is a general change in our overall acceptance of manipulation and our general understanding that truth is ever subjective—prone to manipulation, finally even to utter invention. This is the message affixed like an Aesopian moral to every digital photograph: a moral whose warning would seem to fill us less with the fear of untruth than with the acceptance of it. In his recent monograph

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After Photography, Fred Ritchin recognizes that not only are we now willing to accept photographic manipulation but this acceptance has prepared us for more extensive types of physical manipulation in the form of genetics. “The more than two decades of frequent alteration of photographs in the press,” writes Ritchin, have made genetic manipulation more palpable, immanent, and perhaps even inevitable. If one can repeatedly show brown eyes turning blue, lips and breasts enlarging, and any and all putative “flaws” disappearing, the process seems less scary or remote. If we, like our jeans and our cars, can transition from a solid physicality into the allure of image, then we too become more likely candidates for manipulation. (Ritchin 2009, 25) Ritchin’s observation pertains to the relationship between digitally altered images and genetically altered bodies, but, as Dąbrowski’s and Nowakowska’s poems suggest, a similar parallel may be drawn between digitally altered images and amplifications of the past. In short, just as the manipulated photograph prepares us for a perfected body, so it may prepare us for a perfected history, or, at the very least, a perfected access to this history. Such a concept changes the very metaphors for memory—metaphors that, as I have observed, have been in existence for thousands of years. In the discussion of Whitman’s “My Picture-Gallery,” I recognized how Whitman’s poem alluded to St. Augustine’s storehouse of memory, and how Whitman had effectively renovated Augustine’s concept, giving it a democratic framework. Poems such as Dąbrowski’s and Nowakowska’s involve yet another renovation: one in which the storehouse that previously was located beneath Augustine’s Palace of the Mind becomes scanned in, so to speak, and stored as a .jpg file. In this form, the items that fill the storehouse need not be “called up” as Augustine would have them, but merely “opened” as one opens a Microsoft Word or Photoshop document, and from there the past may be edited. This conversion is easy for us to conceive, and initially it strikes one as innocent—even convenient. However, when we consider the function of memory as Augustine describes it—how memory is the way in which one achieves salvation through God—we understand that poems such as Dąbrowski’s and Nowakowska’s, finally, bid adieu to such salvations. In this way, these poems end a journey of sorts. At the beginning of

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this journey, we left Augustine’s palace of orderly thoughts and memories and then traveled to Whitman’s gallery of democratic vistas. Now, we come to Dąbrowski’s and Nowakowska’s Photoshop programs, whose architectonics correspond more with Mikhail Bakunin’s anarchism than with any other kind of order. In God and the State, Bakunin declares: “[t]he idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, in theory and practice” (Bakunin 2003, 13). Dąbrowski’s and Nowakowska’s poems may be regarded as testimonials in defense of Bakunin’s position, for they place into the hands of their speakers the freedom that Bakunin claims the idea of God takes from us. They do this by dismissing the absolutism of photography and its 19th-century reputation for capturing and revealing the truth. In place of this reputation, these poems put forth the manipulating or liberating hand of makers who change the past with a click.

Coda: Sallie in her Byzantine Mirror Sallie in her Byzantine Mirror

The Photograph See dis pictyah in my han’? Dat’s my gal; Ain’t she purty? goodness lan’! Huh name Sal. Dat’s de very way she be— Kin’ o’ tickles me to see Huh a-smilin’ back at me. She sont me dis photygraph Jes’ las’ week; An’ aldough hit made me laugh— My black cheek Felt somethin’ a-runnin’ queer; Bless yo’ soul, it was a tear Jes’ f’om wishin’ she was here. Often when I’s all alone Layin’ here, I git t’inkin’ ‘bout my own Sallie dear; How she say dat I’s huh beau, An’ hit tickles me to know Dat de gal do love me so.

Sallie in her Byzantine Mirror Some bright day I’s goin’ back, Fo’ de la! An’ ez sho’ ’my face is black, Ax huh pa Fu’ de blessed little miss Who’s a-smilin’ out o dis Pictyah, lak she waned a kiss!

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(Dunbar 2008, 171)

Laurence Dunbar’s poem “The Photograph” (1903) is a declaration of tragic love. Intoning one of the antique themes of the Blues, the speaker promises: “Some bright day I’s goin’ back, / Fo’ de la!” But why not now? What keeps him? War? Wandering? Prison? The exact reason is not named, but the line aches—it seems at least to me—with the melancholy of a wish, and so it anticipates hopelessness. Tension runs through the poem: Will Sallie wait? Will the emotions that prompted her to send her picture in the first place be the same when the speaker does return? Or, more terribly still: Will the speaker return? Will the circumstances that keep him away finally be his end? The poem, then, is as much about loss as it is about love, as much about wishing as it is about having, as much about the impossible as it is about the possible. And yet, while “The Photograph” balances these two themes, it ends in a description of a sincere act of love—the kiss (“Pictyah, lak she waned a kiss!”). Despite what one might expect, Dunbar’s speaker does not claim to “waned” (want) to kiss Sallie’s “pictyah.” Instead, in her picture, Sallie wants (or seems to want) to kiss him. Such a reversal might easily be described in psychological terms as projection: the speaker sees his own desires reflected in the image. But while this may the case—while psychology may win the day, so to speak, and explain the animated quality that this speaker sees in the photograph—nonetheless, he sees life. Sallie is “a-smilin’ out o dis pictyah” in a way that she might smile out of a window. At the end of this study, a poem such as Dunbar’s confronts us with a choice: we may dismiss the photographic life that the speaker ascribes to Sallie’s photograph, or we can embrace it. We can decide that poems such as Dunbar’s merely nod to the fetishistic aspects of the human subconscious—what Freud terms the scopophilic drive, our love of looking—or we can allow for the medieval realism that Benjamin and Barthes ascribe to photographs: the belief that they are emanations attributable to a kind

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of magic. Of course, this investigation has been founded upon the life of photographs: how can it be denied that Dunbar’s speaker possesses an image that is not so much a photograph of the girl as it is the girl herself? To the one who holds such an image, love is not lost nor dead, but in the palm of the hand. And why not? In whatever place this speaker finds himself, to hold such an image is the closest he can come to love, dead or alive. In a letter he wrote to his business partner, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1828, Louis Daguerre declared, “I am burning with desire to see your experiments from nature” (Batchen 1999, i). That the first words to be written about photography should express such a “desire to see” speaks volumes for the longing that has always been part of the medium: a longing that, as Dunbar’s speaker attests, had not dissipated by the end of the 19th century, nor by the end of the last. Writing near the end of the 20th century, poets such as Heaney and Logan, Larkin and Ashbery—to name only a few—attest to the persistence of this longing. Longing, then, is where we must end; Daguerre’s desire has not diminished. At various points in this study, I have maintained that the life that poets ascribe to the camera’s image occurs within the confines of literature, and thus whatever position this study has taken toward photography is filtered through literary texts. However, as Dunbar’s poem expresses, there is nothing uniquely literary about this attitude. Nor is his speaker an eccentric fetishist or a primitive. Keeping the photograph is simply human. “The Photograph” serves us, then, as a mirror in which we see events growing ever more distant. In this mirror, our own visual culture is reflected. The face of this culture does not countenance the “enlightened” critical positions of sophisticated, visual theorists. It does not describe photographs as coded texts, nor declaim how these images are meaningless. Instead, it expresses a desire for redemption. For the ekphrasis of a photograph is more than a curiosity or an academic obscurity. While literary descriptions of traditional works of art generally appeal to high-minded conceptions of so-called “high culture,” and so often signal a level of elitism, the ekphrasis of a photograph is the description of a democratically redeemed past. Recognizing the similarity between the credulity of the icons of Byzantium and the photographs of modern life, Marie-José Mondzain writes:

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Photography … seems to be powerfully linked to a history of credulity in, and attachment to, the real presence of the existence of what it shows. And it does this with infinitely greater force in relation to something that reveals the Truth in the negative. In effect, the terms in which photography is described, the procedures by which it reveals what left an impression on it—resemblance; two dimensionality; the passage from light to a darkness that is so revealing, as is the one from the revelatory darkness to the charismatic light of presence; the symmetric and secular nature of the image with respect to its model; the seizing and holding of the moment that evokes eternity so well; the image of what died yesterday and remains alive today; the image of what will live always despite everything that annihilates us today, in a word, this opposite world so similar to ours that is shown to us, mimetic and painless—all this is everything that turns photography, as a providential invention, into a redemptive and authentifying technique. (Mondzain 2005, 210) The redemptive and authentifying technique of photography is what makes its images “alive,” just as the sheer number of these images and the weight of their presence in our daily lives figure them among our neighbors and friends. Thus, that these images might be kissed and spoken to, detested and adored, burned alive and embraced, implies how they reveal to us a mentality that contradicts our own conceptions of modernity: a mentality that figures us as primitives, iconophiles and Byzantines. This recognition echoes the assertions of the cultural critic Bruno Latour, who writes: No one has ever been modern. Modernity has never begun. There has never been a modern world. The use of the past perfect tense is important here, for it is a matter of a retrospective sentiment, of a rereading of history. I am not saying that we are entering a new era; on the contrary we no longer have to continue the headlong flight of the post-post-postmodernists; we no longer seek to be even cleverer, even more critical, even deeper into “the era of suspicion.” No, instead we discover that we have never begun to enter the modern era. Hence the hint of the ludicrous that always accompanies postmodern thinkers; they claim to come after a time that has not even started! (Latour 1993, 47)

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Latour’s assertions support my own. They allow us to recognize the nearness of the past and to connect the ancient literary and rhetorical traditions of that past with the poetic practices of the present, so that we might recognize that a modern poet such as Dunbar is not a descendant of the Byzantines; along with all of the poets this study has examined, he is their contemporary. Their ekphrases participate in the same faith as the Byzantine devotee in the presence of the acheiropoietos. Should we be in doubt about this fact, we have but to return to Dunbar’s poem, recognizing how its final stanza does not merely engage in an ekphrasis of the photograph; it hails the life of that image: Some bright day I’s goin’ back, Fo’ de la! An’ ez sho’ ’s my face is black, Ax huh pa Fu’ de blessed little miss Who’s a-smilin’ out o dis Pictyah, lak she waned a kiss! Dunbar is subtle, disturbing the calm of the poem’s last description of the image by employing the preposition “out” instead of the usual usage of “in.” The photograph is something of a window, out of which Sallie emerges. Like the Hill’s fishwife, Sallie cannot be contained within her photograph. She comes out willing to kiss. Thus, Dunbar’s poem is another manifestation of the chronotope of the photograph, for it suggests a thickening between the time and space of the speaker and the time and space of Sallie herself. The disposition of Dunbar’s speaker, then, is exemplary of the ekphrasis of photographs: a trope that comes finally to be a meditation on the link between the material and spiritual worlds. As Guy Davenport recognizes, one of the first photographs was a still-life (in French “a nature morte”) (Figure 28), thus this image and the countless photographs that have been made after it are engaged in the original function of all still-lifes: “the ongoing meditation on where matter ends and spirit begins, and on the nature of their interdependence” (Davenport 1998, 102). Davenport’s description of the still-life explains the tension in Dunbar’s poem, for the tensions between love and loss that so dominate the poem are really about the tension between “where matter ends and spirit begins.” We have seen manifestations of the tension throughout this study. Again

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Figure 28  Unknown photographer, “Table Prepared for a Meal”

and again, the ekphrasis of photographs involves itself in a powerful chronotope: a chronotope that describes a meeting between the living and those persons, places and objects that never entirely perished into art.

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Index Index

Page numbers in italics refer to photographs acheiropoietos 26–7, 129, 316 Adamson, Robert 3 “Mrs. Elizabeth Hall of New Haven, Scotland” 9, 10 Agee, James 29 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men 29 Alabiso, Vincent 142, 156 Andersen, Hans Christian 250–3 Apollinaire, Guillaume 172 Aristotle 8, 89, 266–7 The Physics 266–7 Armstrong, Nancy 105–6, 135 Fiction in the Age of Photography 105–6 Ashbery, John 7, 4, 254, 273–4, 276–83, 285–9, 314 “Clepsydra” 283–4 “The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers” 7, 254, 273–89 “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” 273–4 Auden, W.H. 58–9, 108, 176 The Dyer’s Hand 58 “Hic et Ille” 58 Auerbach, Erich 220, 234 Bakhtin, Mikhail 3, 16, 212 Bakunin, Mikhail 311 God and the State 311

Banfield, Ann 257–8 Barthes, Roland 71, 77n3, 84, 126, 182, 210, 216, 272, 313 Camera Lucida 77n3, 272 justesse 216 punctum 182, 272 Bataille, Georges 200, 213 Batchen, Geoffrey 61, 83, 314 Baudelaire, Charles 196–7 “Les Correspondences” 196–7 Les Fleurs du Mal 188, 198 “Le Guignon” 193 Journaux Intimes 191 “The Modern Public and Photography” 192 see also Howard, Richard; Nadar Belting, Hans 18 Benjamin, Walter 3, 9–19, 43, 71, 81, 83, 84, 119, 126, 149, 186, 197, 207, 233, 253, 272, 287, 303, 313 “A Short History of Photography” 9–10, 12 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” 303 Bennett, Andrew 277 Berger, John 19, 66–7, 81, 126, 195, 291 “And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos” 81

Index The Bible Genesis 263, 265, 266–73, 281 Gospel of John 69 Job 260 The Pauline Epistles 220 Philippians 284 Psalms 232, 295 Blake, William 306 Jerusalem 306 Bloom, Harold 87, 283–4 Bourdieu, Pierre 15n1 “Postface to Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism” 15n1 Brady, Mathew 31, 34–6, 41–2, 44, 65–6, 115, 169, 171 “General Winfield Scott Hancock” 31, 41, 42 “John C. Frémont” 35 Brecht, Bertolt 7, 233–40, 249, 261, 263 The Caucasian Chalk Circle 236 Mother Courage and Her Children 236 War Primer 7, 233–40 Brunet, François 1, 2n1 Photography and Literature (Exposures) 2n1 Burgin, Victor 4, 4n2, 22, 290 Byron, George, Lord 100, 110 Cadava, Eduardo 209–10 calligram, definition 6 Cardenal, Ernesto 6, 138–9, 157–8, 160–70, 171, 187 “Prayer for Marilyn Monroe” 6, 138–9, 157–70 Carroll, Lewis 5, 21, 44–60, 66, 68, 70, 104, 112–14, 118, 124, 176, 292, 298 “Hiawatha’s Photographing” 5, 44–60, 66, 176, 292 “Self-Portrait” 51, 52 Caruth, Cathy 225, 265, 269 Unclaimed Experience 225 catechism 115–16, 118, 277, 281–2, 285

329

Celan, Paul 120, 221, 262 Cheeke, Stephen 1, 75–6, 256 Chong, Denise 139–41, 144–5, 156 Christ, Catherine see “Portrait of Catherine Christ” (photo) chronotope, definition (Bakhtin) 16 chronotope of the photograph definition 16–17 subclasses anti-ekphrasis 6–7, 217–29 ekphrastic calligram 6, 171–216 ekphrasis of the cicerone 4–5, 20–69 iconic photograph 6, 136–70 the Photoshopped image 7, 290–311 shadow of the former self 7, 250–89 snapshot elegy 5–6, 70–103 speaking photograph 7, 230–49 suppressed ekphrasis 6, 104–35 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 28, 68 cicerone 28, 60, 63–7, 113, 125, 147, 157 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 29 Cuddon, J. A. 231 Curtis, Edward 241–9 “The Women of the Desert” 241 Curtius, Ernst Robert 96–7, 304 Dąbrowski, Tadeusz 7, 292–300, 302–7, 309–11 “I scanned my photograph from the first year” 7, 292–8, 306, 311 “Resolution” 7, 298–305, 311 Daguerre, Louis 314 daguerreotype 34–5, 62n4, 64 Daniels, Kate 138–9, 142, 146–50, 152, 154–7, 170 “War Photograph” 138, 139, 142, 146–7, 150, 157 Dante Alighieri 28, 69, 96–8, 100, 214, 230, 234–5, 241–9 Divine Comedy 28, 69, 241–2, 249 Davenport, Guy 316

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D’Avignon, F. 34–5 “John C. Frémont” 35 Defoe, Daniel 279, 280, 285 Roxana 279, 280, 283, 285, 288 deixis 180, 308 de Paor, Louis 138–9, 142, 151–6, 158, 170 “Changeling” 138, 139, 142, 151–6 Derrida, Jacques 276, 285 Dickson, William Kennedy 23, 24 “Clip from Kinetoscope of Pope
Leo XIII” 23, 24 digital photography 7, 289–91 manipulation of images 292, 297–8, 306, 309–10 Dikovitskaya, Margaret 137 discourse, free indirect 275 Dodgson, Charles see Carroll, Lewis Donne, John 278 “Holy Sonnet 19” 278 Draaisma, Douwe 62 Dryden, John 96, 130 Dunbar, Paul Laurence 313–14, 316 “The Dying Gaul” 122, 127, 130, 133, 134 “The Photograph” 312–17 Eckhart, Meister 118, 209 ekphanestation 295n1 ekphrasis, definition 11 ekphrasis of photography, definition 1–4 see also chronotope of the photograph Einstein, Albert 240 Eliade, Mircea 216 Eliot, T.S. 229, 278, 283 “Little Gidding” 230 “The Waste Land” 278 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 117 Evans, Walker 29 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men 29 Fenichel, Otto 302 Fischer, Barbara K. 65 Foucault, Michel 6, 172–4, 214

Frazer, James 169 Frémont, John C. see Brady, Mathew; D’Avignon, F. Freud, Sigmund 72, 91, 168–9, 215, 225, 240, 252, 313 Totem and Taboo 168–9 Frost, Arthur B. 56 “The Older Son” 56 Frye, Northrop The Anatomy of Criticism Garner, Stanton 41 Gennep, Arnold van 138, 142, 149, 151, 154–5, 161 The Rites of Passage 142, 151, 154–5 Gilson, Étienne 234 Glob, P.V. 121–2, 124–6, 128–9, 132, 136, 137, 139, 142, 145–6 The Bog People 121 “Grauballe Man’s excavation” 125 Goebbels, Joseph 234–7, 240, 249 Goering, Hermann 234–7, 240, 249 Goya, Francisco 221 Los Desastres de la Guerra 221 “Grauballe Man” (photo) 122, 124 Grosser, David 150 Guillaume, de Lorris 300 Roman de la Rose 300 Gunn, Ander 173, 174–87, 216 “Photograph #35” 178, 182 “Photograph #36” 179, 182–3 Gunn, Thom 6, 171, 173, 174–87, 193, 246, 272 Positives 174–87 Gurney, Ivor 5, 74–82, 103, 126, 208 “Photographs” 5, 74–82, 83, 103 Hall, Elizabeth see Adamson, Robert; Hill, David Octavius Hancock, General Winfield Scott see Brady, Mathew Hardy, Thomas 5, 83–94, 103, 126, 257 “The Photograph” 5, 83–93, 103, 126, 257

Index Hauser, Gerard 148 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 21, 29–31, 44, 46, 60, 104 The House of the Seven Gables 30 Heaney, Seamus 6, 19, 107, 119–21, 123–34, 136, 144, 171, 186, 194–5, 231, 314 “The Grauballe Man” 6, 107, 119, 120–34 Heffernan, James 3, 11, 175–6, 181, 273 Museum of Words 3, 11 Heidegger, Martin 295 “Helmets” (photo) 237, 238 Herbert, Zbigniew 4, 7, 253, 262 “Photograph” 7, 262–73, 289 “Herman Melville” (photo) 44, 45 Herodotus 108, 266, 294–5 Histories 108, 266, 294–5 Hill, David Octavius 3, 9–13, 16–18, 44, 83, 186, 216, 303, 316 “Mrs. Elizabeth
Hall of New Haven, Scotland” 9, 10 Hollander, John 1, 33, 165, 168, 176 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 110, 170 Homer, 11, 120, 176, 230 The Odyssey 229, 249 Hoover, Paul 276 Howard, Richard 6, 171–2, 174, 184, 187–200, 203, 211, 216, 221, 229, 246 “Charles Baudelaire” 6, 174, 184, 187–99 Hunter, Jefferson 1, 2n1, 103, 236 Huỳnh, Công Út see Ut, Nick Isherwood, Christopher 309 Goodbye to Berlin 309 Jakobson, Roman 15, 59, 124, 238, 270 Jarrell, Randall 114 Jones, David 122, 130–2 “The Dying Gaul” 122, 130 Jongeneel, Els 2n1 “Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Goering” (photo) 234, 235

331

Joyce, James 231, 279 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 279 Keats, John 207–10, 213, 249 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” 207, 249 Kierkegaard, Søren 62n4, 205, 268–9 Either/Or 62n4 Fear and Trembling 268–9 Kim Phúc 139 Koetzle, Hans-Michael 141–2 Koudelka, Josef 217–29 “Untitled” 216, 218 Kracauer, Siegfried 13, 252–3, 259, 265, 288 Kranz, Gisbert 2n1 Krieger, Murray 2n1, 40 Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign 3n1 Lacan, Jacques 215, 250, 252, 288 Larkin, Philip 5, 19, 75–7, 94–103, 119, 166, 245–6, 256, 314 The Less Deceived 102–3 “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album” 5, 94–103, 166 Latour, Bruno 85, 93, 315–16 Lawrence, D. H. 67 Studies in Classic American Literature 67 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 176–7, 232 Laocoön, An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry 176, 232 Levis, Larry 7, 217, 220–5, 227–9, 236, 265, 289, 307 “Sensationalism” 7, 217–29, 265, 307 Lock, Charles 14–15, 212–13 Logan, John 6, 19, 172, 174, 199–216, 221, 229, 302, 314 “On a Photograph by Aaron Siskind” 6, 174, 199, 201–16 de Lorris, Guillaume see Guillame, de Lorris Longley, Edna 133–4 Longley, William 111

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Lowell, Robert 102–3 Lunde, Ingunn 73 “Mad Soldier” (photo) 239 Magritte, René 173, 198 Ceci n’est pas une pipe 173, 198 Marien, Mary Warner 291, 297 Martin, Charles 111 Marvell, Andrew 279, 282, 286 “The Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers” 279, 282 McLuhan, Marshall 106, 119 Understanding Media 106–7 Meltzer, Françoise 1 Melville, Herman 4, 5, 17, 21, 60, 66, 68, 70, 83, 89, 104, 112, 114–17, 119, 125, 128, 138, 157, 167–9, 171–2, 190, 220, 245, 281, 289, 298 Moby Dick 116, 281 “On the Photograph of a Corps Commander” 5, 17, 23, 29–44, 128, 138, 157, 168–9, 171–2, 189 memory 61–8, 86, 136, 137, 142, 144, 146, 148, 194, 195, 225, 246, 277, 280–5, 310 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 227 metaphysics, 20, 23, 36–8, 203, 204, 289 metempsychosis 241–7 Mitchell, W. J. T. 1, 4n2, 40–2, 88, 136–7, 157 Mitchell, William J. 290 Moholy-Nagy, László 105, 107 Mondzain, Marie-José 27, 206–7, 314–15 Monroe, Marilyn see Cardenal, Ernesto; Newman, Arnold; “Norma Jeane Mortenson (Marilyn Monroe)” (photo) Moore, Marianne 6, 17, 107–21, 123, 125, 136, 144, 171, 194, 220 “The Paper Nautilus” 6, 17, 107, 108–19, 120

Nadar 174, 187–9, 192–5, 197–9, 203, 216 “Charles Baudelaire” 174, 188, 189 Newman, Arnold 162–4, 169–70 “Marilyn Monroe, Hollywood California” 163 Niépce, Joseph Nicéphore 314 Nietzsche, Friedrich 68, 88, 202, 210, 211, 251 “Norma Jeane Mortenson (Marilyn Monroe)” (photo) 161, 162 North, Michael 1, 104 Nowakowska, Klara 7, 292–311 “Low Resolution” 7, 305–11 Olds, Sharon 138–9, 142–6, 148–50, 154, 156, 158, 170, 171 “Coming of Age in 1966” 138–9, 142–6, 170 Otto, Rudolf 207, 245 Ovenden, Graham 51 Panofsky, Erwin 15n1 “Paper Nautilus” (photo) 111 Pascal, Blaise 67, 258 Pensées 67 Peirce, Charles Sanders 14 Peress, Gilles 133 “Northern Ireland, Londonderry, Bloody Sunday” 133 Phan, Thị Kim Phúc see Kim Phuc photography acheiropoietic quality 12–13, 17, 22, 24, 25–8, 30, 43, 46 accuracy 24, 64, 222, 254, 289, 306 annihilating qualities 253–4, 265, 288 as index of subject 3, 14, 16, 82, 89, 177, 229, 269 as memento mori 174, 249, 253 as theft 184, 192–4, 242, 246–7 childhood innocence, relation to 253, 279, 287, 289, 294, 297 copycat posing 34–7

Index developing process 243–4, 248 distinction from other visual representation 14, 291 killing, comparisons to 271 lenses 105, 155, 298 light and shadow, distinction between 252, 294 manipulation 306 miscaptioning 223–4, 235–6 rivalry with accompanying text 40, 173, 254 scopophilia 215, 252, 302 storyless medium 288 synecdoche, power to depict 238 transformation of intangible time into tangible space 13 truth of image 7, 21–2, 24, 30–1, 45–6, 68, 216, 292, 293, 307 see also digital photography phrenology 31, 33, 34, 38–9, 44 Pia, Secondo 26 “Negative of the Shroud of Turin” 26 Pinsky, Robert 274, 284 Plato 4, 5, 17, 21–2, 24, 43, 69, 90, 222, 228, 241, 243, 266, 289, 295, 297, 307, 308 Ion 69 The Myth of Er 241, 246 The Republic 21–2, 90, 222, 243 Pliny the Elder xi A Natural History xi Poe, Edgar Allan 29, 64 The Daguerreotype 24 Pope Leo XIII 5, 22–4, 28–9, 31, 43–4, 46, 60, 66, 68, 70, 112–13, 199–200, 298 “Ars Photographica” 5, 22–9, 31, 199–200 “Portrait of Catherine Christ” (photo) 83, 84 Pound, Erza 104–5, 278, 283 Cantos 278 Proust, Marcel 70–3 Psellus, Michael 18

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Quintilian 2, 231, 235, 248 Rae, Patricia 76, 208 Ramazani, Jahan 82 Reeve, Lowell 110 rhetorical devices apostrophe 5, 7, 18–19, 81, 84, 94, 101, 126, 188, 217, 301 enargeia 2, 73, 176, 221 metaphor 15, 17, 58, 73, 82, 96, 112, 123–4, 226, 251, 269, 270, 282, 285, 304–5 metonymy 14–15, 64, 82, 238, 251, 269 mimesis 11–12, 17, 21, 22, 24–5, 26, 51–3, 104, 203, 207, 222, 228, 292, 307, 309 periphrasis 276, 289 prosopopoeia 7, 18, 87, 231–2, 235, 248 synecdoche 58–9, 124, 226, 238, 307 Richardson, Samuel 279, 280 Pamela 279, 280, 283 Rilke, Rainer Maria 207 “Archaïscher Torso Apollos” 207 Ritchin, Fred 309–10 After Photography 309–10 Robillard, Valerie 2n1 Royle, Nicholas 277 Sacks, Peter M. 72, 81–2, 160 Saint Augustine 63–4, 194, 281, 310–11 Confessions 63 Saint Genevieve 279 Saint Paul 284 Sand, George 187, 189, 191–2 Schwartz, Delmore 92–3 Scott, Clive 301 Sebald, W.G. 285 Unrecounted 285 shadow stage (psychological development) 250–1, 274, 288–9

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Shakespeare, William 32, 38, 79–80, 236, 279, 283, 295, 304 Coriolanus 236 Henry V 32, 38 Macbeth 279, 283, 295 Othello 89 “Sonnet 99” 79–80 Shaw, John MacKay 50 Shloss, Carol 30 Shoptaw, John 278–9 Shroud of Turin 26 Sidney, Philip 232 Apologie for Poetrie 232 Siskind, Aaron 6, 174, 199–204, 206–16, 302 “Gloucester 114” 174, 199, 200, 204, 206, 208, 214, 216 Socrates 21, 22, 69, 90–1, 209, 222n1, 243, 246 Sontag, Susan 30, 76, 133–4, 141, 143, 145, 223 On Photography 30, 134, 141 Regarding the Pain of Others 223 Sophocles 236 Antigone 236 Souto, H. Mario Raimondo 23 Spamer, Otto 110 spiritualism, positivistic 27, 43, 44, 60, 66 Steichen, Edward 134 The Family of Man 134 Stevens, Wallace 120, 284 Stoichita, Victor I. 250–1, 260, 274, 288 A Short History of the Shadow 250 “Table Prepared for a Meal” (photo) 316, 317 Talbot, William Henry Fox 12–13, 20–1, 252 The Pencil of Nature 19 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 32, 157–8, 165 Thorpe, Adam 7, 19, 233, 241–9, 261, 263 “Navaho” 7, 233, 241–9

Trachtenberg, Alan 30–1, 34–5 Turner, Peter 203–4 Ut, Nick 6, 138, 140 “The Terror of War (Vietnam, Napalm, Trang Bang)” 139–41, 140 Virgil 28, 130, 131, 229, 264 Wailing Wall 299, 304 Wales, Katie 257 “Walt Whitman” (photo) 60, 61 war American Civil War 41 First World War 75–6, 93, 120, 256 Second World War 217, 223, 233–40, 262, 264, 273 Spanish Civil War 107 Vietnam War 139–40, Warren, Robert Penn 7, 253–7, 259–62, 265, 274, 279–80, 283–7, 289, 294, 297 “Old Photograph of the Future” 7, 253, 254–62, 280 Weston, Edward 110 Whitman, Walt 5, 21, 28, 60–8, 70, 112–13, 125, 147, 170, 185, 194, 204, 283, 310, 311 Leaves of Grass 60, 66 “My Picture-Gallery” 5, 28, 60–8, 310 see also “Walt Whitman” (photo) Wittgenstein, Ludwig 276 Wordsworth, William 17–18 Yates, Frances A. 68 Yeats, William Butler 131, 154, 230, 244, 246, 249 “Sailing to Byzantium” 244, 249 Zeno 262, 266–7