9_4 szczepanek

Upload: stripes-in-my-head

Post on 14-Apr-2018

217 views

Category:

Documents


0 download

TRANSCRIPT

  • 7/29/2019 9_4 Szczepanek

    1/10

    Anna Szczepanek

    Holy Cross Academy n. a. Jan Kochanowski

    ul. Kociuszki 13, 25-310 Kielce, Polska

    E-mail: [email protected]

    CUBISTIC TECHNIQUES IN

    WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS EKPHRASTIC POETRY

    This article presents the relationship between verbal and visual arts. In order to be

    more specific, the term ekphrasis (a literary description of a picture, sculpture or even

    architecture) is introduced here. Subsequently, using the Differential Model introduced by

    Valerie Robillard, some early poems written by William Carlos Williams are discussed. TheDifferential Model enables a classification and analysis of ekphrastic poetry depending on

    the intensity of relationship between pictorial and literary works of art.

    The associative category is one of the three categories proposed by Robillard. This

    category comprises these literary works which relate to the visual arts on the basis of non-

    formalized structural and ideological associations. This category makes it possible to explore

    the relation between Williams poetry and cubism.

    KEY WORDS: visual arts, verbal arts, ekphrasis, intertextuality, cubism, poetry,

    modernism.

    The verbal and visual arts have always shown remarkable affinities. Correspondences

    between poetry and painting have been present in every epoch. Homer, whose poetry has for

    ages inspired painters and sculptors, skillfully describes in his works objects of art, e. g. in

    Iliad a shield belonging to Achilles. The pictorial art of the Middle Ages is based on the

    Bible. The Renaissance, with its interdisciplinary interests, encouraged a mutual relationship

    between the arts: poetry often made its subject pictorial representation. In the case ofRenaissance painting, the viewers understanding of the on canvas depends on his knowledge

    of mythical, biblical and literary symbols and allegories. In eighteenth century England,

    William Blake, a poet and a painter himself, took inspiration from the works of Milton and

    Dante. Blakes pictures are not mere illustrations of the two great poets poems. They

    symbolically represent his understanding and interpretation of their texts. In the nineteenth

    century a similar relationship between poetry and painting existed in the poetry and pictures

    of the artists connected with the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. Not only did they employ in their

    works well-known Medieval symbols and characters, but also illustrated their own poems as

    1

  • 7/29/2019 9_4 Szczepanek

    2/10

    well as painted pictures that were commentaries on the work of other poets (e. g. A.

    Tennysons impact on E. Burne-Jones).

    Such a close relationship between these two arts is possible due to the similar

    goals of poetry and painting. Both arts try to condense images and meanings in order to

    maximize expression in a small temporal or spatial dimension. Main comparisons are

    based upon the way these two arts reflect reality. Aristotles idea that art ought to

    imitate reality was valid for several centuries. According to it, poetry is like painting

    because both have as their subjects existing reality and both are devoted to the mimetic

    representation of the real world. The arts attempt to imitate the reality and comment on

    it.

    There are several different kinds of relationship between poetry and painting.

    Poetry may be a verbalization of the subjective perception and understanding of apainting, a personal response of the poet to a particular picture. Poetry may praise the

    artistic abilities and uniqueness of a painters vision. Poetry may seek correspondences

    in language, images and forms that could reflect or imitate a painting. Finally, poetry

    may use painting as an example of the same perception of the world shared by a painter

    and a poet. All the poems which are concerned with visual arts can be classified as

    ekphrasis.

    Ekphrasis, alternatively spelled ecphrasis, is a term used to denote verbal

    representation of visual arts. The term primarily can be found in Aphthonius Progymnasmata,

    an early book on rhetoric. The original definitions of the word from the Greek are speaking

    out or telling in full (Greekekout andphrasein to speak). In modern times ekphrasis is

    considered to be a descriptive work of prose or poetry dealing with any of the visual arts, e. g.

    painting, sculpture, photography, architecture or even film (actual ekphrasis). What is more,

    verbal arts can be a response to an imaginary work of art or even a mental process of creation

    of a particular visual work of art (notional ekphrasis)1.

    Due to apparent disagreement in the subtleties of the use of the term and itsapplication I have decided to follow the idea proposed by Valerie Robillard in In Pursuit of

    Ekphrasis. The author treats ekphrastic texts as intertextual constructs which allows creating

    a descriptive framework dealing with various approaches to ekphrasis. Robillard introduces

    her own Differential Model which is meant to enable the distinction and classification of

    different kinds of ekphrastic relationships. She identifies three typological categories:

    depictive, attributive and associative. The first one includes texts which aim at the most

    1 HEFFERNAN, James.Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago,

    1993, p. 6.

    2

  • 7/29/2019 9_4 Szczepanek

    3/10

    truthful representation of the pictorial sources, including both description and analogous

    structuring. Attributive category encompasses such sub-categories as: naming, i.e. mentioning

    the source of ekphrasis in the title or the text) and alluding to a painter, style or genre, or

    through indeterminate marking, understood as presence of foreign elements and traces

    incorporated into a new system .The last one, the associative category, accounts for poems

    which refer to some ideas, trends or conventions related to visual arts. The associations might

    be thematic, theoretical or structural2.

    In this article I try do analyze some of W. C. Williams ekphrastic poems employing

    Robillards Differential Model, particularly focusing on the associative category. This

    category seems to be helpful in discussing Williams works, as they are often a combination

    of inexplicit visual sources, quite difficult to identify or classify in any other way. Williams

    poetry significantly reflects different aspects of ekphrastic literature, yet, my mainobjective is to show the unusual structural and ideological experimentations which are

    the result of Williams encounter with European cubist art at the Armory Show in 1913.

    An interviewer once asked William Carlos Williams what he considered to be his

    strongest characteristics. The poet answered: My sight. I like most my ability to be

    drunk with a sudden realization of value in things others never notice 3.

    Since seeing came first for Williams, it should come as no surprise to learn that

    the poet was a Sunday painter when he attended medical school at the University of

    Pennsylvania. However, he gave up painting for poetry as the latter required less

    apparatus and could be done on the run, between patients if necessary. He filled out a

    prescription blank with French Painting and Modern Writing viewing poetry as a kind

    of relief for himself, a doctor who still wanted to paint 4. Yet, the modernist painting

    provided Williams with some other kind of relief offering him an encouragement to

    liberation from the traditional poetics.

    It was not until I clapped my eyes on Marcel Duchamps Nude Descending a

    Staircase that I burst out laughing from the relief it brought me! I felt as if an enormousweight had been lifted from my spirit, for which I was indefinitely grateful 5.

    The Armory Show served for Williams as a trigger in order to search for new forms of

    expression. Owing to Cubism, the poet found it possible to break with the mimetic tradition.

    Abstract painters were the first to reject the purely representational role of art. Every picture

    2 ROBILLARD, Valerie. In Pursuit of Ekphrasis: An Intertextual Approach. In ROBILLARD, V.;

    JONGENEEL, E. (ed.) Pictures into Words. Amsterdam, 1998, p. 56.3 DIJKSTRAN, Tashija. William Carlos Williams and the American Scene. New York, 1987, p. 14.4 DIJKSTRAN, footnote 3, p. 15.5 WILLIAMS, William Carlos. Recollections. InArt in America, February, 1993, p. 52.

    3

  • 7/29/2019 9_4 Szczepanek

    4/10

    tells a story: this was at least the general supposition until the appearance of a

    deliberately abstract ideal of painting in modern times. Those artists, who in the early

    years of the twentieth century, turned away from the conventional modes of expression,

    claimed to be motivated by a concern for the freedom and creative independence of their

    art. During the Cubist years, which stretched from 1907 until the outbreak of the First

    World War, new formal and conceptual rules were proclaimed 6.

    E. H. Gombrich observes that Cubism itself and its methods are radical efforts to

    call attention to the work as manmade, as artifice, and thus to break the mimetic

    illusion7. Mimesis, which is art understood as an imitation of nature, was the dominating

    approach until modernism. Cubists paintings are not meant to be imitative or in

    competition with reality. They are conceived as possessing a purely pictorial reality of

    their own. Cubist paintings form a composition, but they imply no world outside on thecanvas. Cubism frustrates our attempt to decipher the signs in terms of referential

    meaning. Picasso seems to be experimenting: how far can he go reducing physical and

    psychological context, and yet paint something that still contains elements of

    recognizable life. However, the function of those elements of reality is not to inform the

    observer about particular objects, but to narrow down the possible interpretations until

    we are forced to accept just the flat pattern.

    Cubism works by accentuating the contradictory and disharmonious, and by

    bringing together on the same plane, elements normally separated into different planes

    by mimetic illusion. Cubist painters disrupt the Renaissance norms of linear perspective,

    chiaroscuro and other means of suggesting three-dimensionality on a two dimensional

    medium. In Cubist art, the size and the position of objects are not dependent upon their

    distance from the viewer but upon their conceptual and formal importance. Cubism

    breaks up into multiple perspectives the ancient focus, which was fixed, static and

    unitary. Cubist objects are presented as if viewed from many different angles at the same

    time, often chopped into block-like forms. Breaking with perspective also meansbreaking with creative principle of cause and effect8.

    Visual works of art became for Williams a pretext for finding the universal form of art.

    No ideas but in things9he said, and he believed that the poets business is not to talk in

    vague categories, but to write particularly ...upon the thing before him, in particular to

    6 BAKER-SMITH, Dominic. Literature and the Visual Arts. In COYE, M. (ed.) Encyclopedia of

    Literature and Criticism. London, 1990, p. 98.7 GOMBRICH, E. H.Art and Illusion. Princeton, 1961, p. 281.8 STEINER, Wendy. The Colors of Rhetoric. Chicago, 1985, p. 80.9 WILLIAMS, Carlos William. Selected Poems. London, 1976, p. 133.

    4

  • 7/29/2019 9_4 Szczepanek

    5/10

    discover the universal10. In his poetry Williams put emphasis, not so much on the

    representational, but on the structural aspect of both visual and poetic object. Such an attitude

    towards visual arts indicates Williams commitment to form as well as his life-long interest in

    painting.

    The analogy between Cubist poetry and painting involves both the matching of

    technical elements of painting with those in writing and the resemblance of aesthetic

    presuppositions and ideologies. Thus, the associative category proposed in Robillards

    Differential Model may comprise the majority of Williams early poems.

    Many Williams poems are very often little pictures depicting moments unnoticed

    by others. Let us consider the poem A Locust Tree in Flower.

    Amongof

    green

    stiff

    old

    bright

    brokenbranch

    come

    white

    sweet

    May

    again11.

    The poem concentrates around the static image of a blossoming tree. The unusual

    condensation of adjectives gives primarily importance to the visual recognition of the

    locust tree. Williams separates the particular sensations placing only one word in a

    verse. By means of this the poet gradually comes from the detail a branch, to the more

    general May. However, the poem is not descriptive. It does not aim to reflect a truly

    10 BRINNIN, Malcolm. William Carlos Williams. In UNGER, L. (ed.) Seven Modern American Poets.

    New York, 1960, p. 8385.11 WILLIAMS, footnote 9, p. 89.

    5

  • 7/29/2019 9_4 Szczepanek

    6/10

    existing locust tree, yet it produces a series of visual impressions which are associated

    with the arrival of spring season.

    Williams attacks the mimetic tradition that distanced us from the original writing.

    His attack implies a questioning of the foundation of ontology, not to destroy the

    tradition, but to loosen the rigidity of its logical structure. As Heidegger says: tradition

    takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-evidence; it blocks our

    access to those primordial sources from which categories and concepts handed down

    by to us have been in part genuinely drawn 12. It is this blockage that provokes

    Williams to write as an attack.

    He maintains that language in the twentieth century has become blurred and

    obscured by continual comparisons. To counter the effects of this situation Williams

    avoids poetic practices that decorated language with associations (e. g. rhyme andmeter). He often writes about unconventional poetic subjects (e. g. wheelbarrows,

    kitchen sinks, ice cream), and uses nonlinear syntax (e. g. non-finite verbs and parataxis

    co-ordination of clauses without conjunctions). The non-representational line is

    another feature of Williams poetry. In traditional poems, lines typically end where a

    sentence, a clause or a phrase ends, unless they are enjambed for some purpose.

    Williams rejects this practice because he feels it is one of the ways in which traditional

    poets avoid emphasizing the clarity of objects 13. He claims:

    o separate the pattern from the line is an important part of the poets

    occupation today; in painting the color and the outline frequently have the same

    relationship. The statement, no matter how embellished by metaphor, today runs over,

    irrelevant to the metrical pattern, from one line to another.

    Between Walls can be treated as an exemplary poem illustrating Williams

    innovative poetic approach.

    Between Walls

    the back wings

    of the

    hospital where

    nothing

    12 Quoted after: RIDDEL, Joseph N. The Inverted Bell. Modernism and Counterpoetics of William

    Carlos Williams. Louisiana, 1991, p. 251.13 BRINNIN, footnote 10, p. 516.

    6

  • 7/29/2019 9_4 Szczepanek

    7/10

    will grow lie

    cinders

    in which shine

    the broken

    pieces of a green

    bottle 14.

    The fact that the lines do not extend to the right margin tells the readers that they

    should pay attention to the visual possibilities of poetic discourse. Because we are

    accustomed to the end of line which reinforces some message, such words as: the and

    where are stressed as if they carried some special meaning. What their importance is,

    however, is by no means clear. Williams gives them significance, but unlike in

    conventional poems, he does not provide any context to which connect these words.

    Perhaps the intensity he gives to insignificant words is analogous to Cubist paintings in

    which some background elements tend to be overexposed.

    Many other Williams poetic techniques are connected with those of Cubist

    painters. Williams needs the ideas borrowed from Cubism for practical ends: to restore

    some of the tensions that were lost in poetry that discarded regular form and meter.Williams does away with the foot, at least as traditional poets knew it: the metrically

    regular lines are, in his poetry, very infrequent. To regain some expressiveness he has

    lost in discarding the traditional foot, Williams turns to the visual dimension of poetry,

    complementing the sound of the poem with its appearance on the page. Williams

    interest in painting made him unusually appreciative of the poem on the page. The

    spatial arrangement of words on the page became just as important as syntax or style.

    Similarly to Cubist painters, Williams eliminates the perspective and breaks up

    the expected (representational) syntax of relations between things. His use of words

    tends to strip the detail of any interpretative ambiguity. Nevertheless, Williams

    withholds all clues. Any meaning we find is a meaning we create. In Nantucket the

    poet presents a colorful picture of a household.

    Flowers through the window

    lavender and yellow

    14 WILLLIAMS, footnote 9, p.189.

    7

  • 7/29/2019 9_4 Szczepanek

    8/10

    changed by white curtains-

    Smell of cleanliness-

    Sunshine of late afternoon-

    On the glass traya glass pitcher, the tumbler

    turned down, by which

    a key is lying And the

    immaculate white bed15.

    Still, the choice of subject matter is by no means justified; the reader does not

    know what (if anything) is hidden behind the images of purity and innocence.The details of Williams personal life and the observations of works of art which

    have touched him, create a poem where one thing exists beside another or after another

    or echoes an earlier appearance not because of some identifiable meaning and value but

    because they happen to be there.

    Each word in Williams' poetry functions not as symbol, or logos, but as a shape,

    as the real. Just as Paul Klee has to produce the most sophisticated abstractions in

    order to simulate the primitive, Williams violates the rules of language to achieve the

    natural American speech.

    The early Williams poetry is an assault on the habits of interpretation. The poet

    crumble the clues which may allow possible interpretation, so they erase the point of

    departure for interpretation (relation of the work of art to another world that lies outside

    it the world of reality, or the world of ideas or symbols). Some of the poems lack

    moral, social or psychological context, that is why they are only art for the arts sake

    impersonal and detached from reality. Similar paradox can be observed in Cubist

    painting, too. Cubists in their quest for what we might call the purely visual, took away

    from the things they painted most of the attributes on which visual recognition depends.

    Still, without this recognition painting may not lose its meaning. Visual arts operate with

    colors, lines, shapes and images, therefore they can affect our sense of sight without

    intellectual involvement. The vehicle of poetry is language. Thus if a poet wants to

    express his own perception of reality (often clear only to him) by means of a distorted

    language, he is bound to fail. P. Moore compares Williams poems to a red STOP

    15 WILLIAMS, footnote 9, p. 171.

    8

  • 7/29/2019 9_4 Szczepanek

    9/10

    painted on a triangular YIELD sign16. It challenges the traditional way of looking at

    things and proposes a fresh and new attitude towards them, yet it leads nowhere.

    The notion of poetic and pictorial representation is also similarly discussed by Stephen

    Bann. In his essay on collage he speaks of Apollinaires poem, a calligramme, dedicated to

    Picasso as an example of how the pictorialist mode of poetic representation produces a kind

    of reversal of the processes involved in painterly collage. Through the activity of reading the

    poem, we make the page irretrievably abstract; its space is negated, to the extend that it is

    scored through with the tracks of signification with our perception slavishly follows. By

    contrast, the Picasso collage makes the page concrete: that is to say, it emphasizes both its

    physical presence and its ambiguous representational status as an episode in a structure of

    parallel, frontal planes whose spatial interrelationships cannot be easily determined17.

    In analyzing the above poems by Williams I have attempted to demonstrate theapplication of Robillards Differential Model to some poetical texts which at first reading

    do not seem to be typical examples of ekphrastic poetry. The associative category offers a

    structural basis for further discussion of any ekphrastic texts which only allude to some

    pictorial media. Still, as the case is with all possible kinds of ekphrasis, its actual

    understanding depends on the readers whose aim is to reveal for themselves the elements of

    visual discourse hidden behind the verbal ones.

    Anna Szczepanek

    Akademia witokrzyska im. Jana Kochanowskiego w Kielcach

    TECHNIKI KUBISTYCZNE W EKFRASTYCZNEJ POEZJI WILIAMA CARLOSA

    WILLIAMSA

    Streszczenie

    Artyku przedstawia relacje pomidzy werbalnymi i wizualnymi rodkami przekazuartystycznego. W celu precyzyjnego ujcia tematu zostaje wprowadzony termin ekfraza

    (utwr literacki bdcy opisem dziea malarskiego, rzeby lub budowli), a nastepnie,

    korzystajc z Modelu rnicujcego, zaproponowanego przez Valerie Robillard, omwione

    zostaj wczesne wiersze amerykaskiego poety Williama Carlosa Williamsa. Model

    16 MOORE, Patrick. Cubist Prosody: William Carlos Williams and the Conventions of Verse Lineation.

    InPhilological Quarterly, 4, Fall, 1986, p. 528.17 BANN, Stephen. The Poetics of Discontinuity? In Word and Image: A Journal of Verbal Visual

    Enquiry, Nr 4 (1), JanuaryMart 1988, p. 354.

    9

  • 7/29/2019 9_4 Szczepanek

    10/10

    rnicujcy umoliwia klasyfikacj i analiz poezji ekfrastycznej w zalenoci od

    intensywnoci relacji pomidzy dzieami malarskimi a literackimi.

    Jedn z trzech kategorii wyszczeglnionych przez Robillard jest kategoria asocjacyjna,

    zawierajca utwory literackie nawizujce do sztuk wizualnych na zasadzie

    niesformalizowanych odniesie strukturalno-ideologicznych. Kategoria ta daje sposobno

    przedyskutowania zwizkw i zalenoci pomidzy wczesnymi wierszami W.C. Williamsa i

    malarstwem kubistycznym.

    SOWA KLUCZE: sztuki werbalne, sztuki wizualne, ekfraza, intertekstualno,

    poezja, Kubizm, modernizm.

    Anna Szczepanek

    Jano Kochanovskio ventojo Kryiaus Akademija Kielcuose

    KUBISTINS TECHNIKOS EKFRASTINJE WILIAMO CARLOSO WILLIAMSO

    POEZIJOJE

    Santrauka

    Straipsnyje analizuojami santykiai tarp verbalini ir vizualini meninio vaizdavimo

    priemoni. Tikslesniam pasirinktos temos supratimui naudojamas naujas ekfrazs terminas

    (ekfraz literatros krinys, apraantis tapybos, skulptros ar architektros krinius).

    Remiantis Valerie Robillardo pasilytu skirtuminiu modeliuaptariami ankstyvieji

    amerikiei poeto Wiliamo Carloso Williamso eilraiai. Skirtuminis modelis suteikia

    galimyb klasifikuoti ir analizuoti ekfrastin poezij pagal ryi tarp dails ir literatros

    krini intensyvum. Viena i Robillardo iskirt kategorij yra asociacijos kategorija,

    apibdinanti tuos literatros krinius, kuriuose neformalizuot struktrini ideologini

    nuorod priemonmis ireikiamas vienoks ar kitoks santykis su vizualiniu menu. i

    kategorija teikia galimyb aptarti ankstyvj W. C. Williamso eilrai ir kubistins tapybostarpusavio ryius ir abipus priklausomyb.

    REIKMINIAI ODIAI: verbaliniai menai, vizualiniai menai, ekfraz,

    intelektualumas, poezija, kubizmas, modernizmas.

    Gauta 2004 12 10

    Priimta publikuoti 2005 01 28

    10