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The Ekphrastic Gaze in British Postmodern Fiction

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The Ekphrastic Gaze in British Postmodern Fiction The Ekphrastic Gaze in British Postmodern Fiction Eingereicht zur Annahme als Dissertation an der Technischen Universität Dortmund, Fakultät Kulturwissenschaften (Anglistik/Amerikanistik) vorgelegt von Nataliya Gorbina [email protected] Matrikelnummer: 182257 Erstgutachterin: Prof. Dr. Christiane Maria Binder Zweitgutachter: Prof. Dr. Gerold Sedlmayr Dortmund, April 2020 Veröffentlicht als Dissertation in der Fakultät Kulturwissenschaften der Technischen Universität Dortmund. Table of Contents 1. Introduction................................................................................................................ 1 1.1 The Current State of Research in the Study of Ekphrasis in British Literature.................................................................................................................... 2 1.2 Issues of Methodology......................................................................................... 5 2. The Postmodern Turn Through the Ekphrastic Gaze in British Fiction................... 17 2.1 The Shift from Modernism to Postmodernism in the Arts................................ 17 2.2 The Sociocultural Poetics and Politics of the Ekphrastic Gaze in British Postmodern Fiction.................................................................................................. 20 3. The (De-/Re-)Construction of the Object of the Ekphrastic Gaze: In the Interstices between Art, Words, and Life..................................................................... 33 3.1 “Could a Life be a Work of Art”?...................................................................... 33 3.2 The Compositional Fabrication of Ekphrastic Reality....................................... 44 3.2.1 The Ekphrastic Gaze and Its ‘Secret Geometry’: From a Michelangelesque Discharge Bucket to a Giottesque Perfect Circle.................. 47 3.3 The Iconography and the Iconology of Ekphrastic Reality............................... 55 3.3.1 The Ekphrastic Gaze and the Third Dimension of a Work of Art: From the Removal of Three Centuries of Dirt to the Revelation of a Gainsboroughesque Dream................................................................................. 59 3.3.2 The Ekphrastic Gaze and the ‘Docile Body’: From the Antichrist’s Michelangelesque Curls to Erato’s Rokeby Venus Pose.................................... 70 3.4 Conclusion......................................................................................................... 83 4. The (De-/Re-)Construction of the Ekphrastic Beholder: In the Interstices between the Gazes of Author, Character, and Reader.................................................. 86 4.1 Who Was the Ekphrastic Beholder After All?................................................... 86 4.2 The Dialectic of the Ekphrastic Beholder as the (Pseudo-)Connoisseur........... 93 4.2.1 Through the (Pseudo-)‘Intellectual Lens’ of the Ekphrastic Beholder’s Gaze: The ‘Bloody Ruskin’ of British Postmodern Fiction................................ 97 4.2.2 On the (Pseudo-)‘Moral Retina’ of the Ekphrastic Beholder’s Gaze: The ‘Con-Turned-Artist’ of British Postmodern Fiction.................................. 107 4.3 The Interplay between the Three Ekphrastic Gazes of Author, Character, and Reader............................................................................................................. 116 4.3.1 Following in the Footsteps of Author and Character: The ‘Scholarly’ and ‘Alert’ Reader of British Postmodern Fiction............................................ 120 4.3.2 The Reader’s Ekphrastic Gaze as an Instrument of ‘Constructive Visualising Work’............................................................................................. 128 4.4 Conclusion....................................................................................................... 134 5. The (De-/Re-)Construction of the Meta-Ekphrastic Discourse in British Postmodern Fiction: Between the Métarécits and the Petits Récits of the Ekphrastic Gaze.......................................................................................................... 136 5.1 Conclusion....................................................................................................... 158 6. Conclusion.............................................................................................................. 160 Bibliography............................................................................................................... 166 1. Introduction This study examines the dynamics of the sociocultural poetics and politics of the ekphrastic gaze in British postmodern fiction. It establishes that the ekphrastic gaze expresses the aesthetic, historical, and socioculturally specific shift: the postmodern turn. It is a turn away from the aesthetic forms and ideologies of modernism and modernity towards a new postmodern paradigm in British fiction. In this sense, the ekphrastic gaze helps to contextualise British postmodern fiction within the multilayered Western ekphrastic tradition in general and within the British ekphrastic tradition in particular. Appearing time and again in works of British postmodern fiction, it contributes to the (de-/re-)construction of a wide variety of meanings that can be classified into two strata: iconographical meanings expressed by recurrent art-historical or art-related themes/motifs on the one hand, and iconological meanings contained in the sociocultural ideologies underlying their recycling in a postmodern context on the other. I should like to begin with an example from John Lanchester’s novel The Debt to Pleasure that illustrates the way the ekphrastic gaze expresses the sociocultural postmodern turn and creates a link between British postmodern fiction and the interdisciplinary tradition of ekphrasis. As part of his musings about food and art, the hedonistic and snobbish narrator of Lanchester’s postmodern culinary-narrative, a self-proclaimed genius Tarquin Winot, appropriates Oscar Wilde’s semi-ironic idea of looking at sunsets as J.M.W. Turner’s inventions (Wilde, “Decay” 28-29)1 to suggest that T.S. Eliot may be similarly regarded as an inventor of the spring upsurge of suicide attempts: . I must say that I have often wondered whether, just as Turner invented sunsets, T.S. Eliot may have invented the seasonal surge in the incidence of people attempting to do away with themselves . (Lanchester 63) Post-ironically enough, in accordance with Tarquin Winot’s pretentious display of what John Banville calls “cod scholarship” (x) in the introduction to Lanchester’s novel, this appeal to the now iconic – if not paradigmatic – standpoint that “Life imitates Art” (Wilde, “Decay” 26) simultaneously masks and unmasks the unreliability of his 1 See, for example, Turner’s painting The Scarlet Sunset painted in c. 1830-40 and located at Tate Britain in London. 1 postmodern narrative. After all, he only makes this appeal in order to explain the death of his nanny – one of the many deaths the narrator himself is, in fact, responsible for. This blatant hint at The Debt to Pleasure’s protagonist as a postmodern Dorian Gray is accentuated by his cheeky indication of the juxtaposition between modernism and postmodernism: “Modernism is about finding out how much you could get away with leaving out. Post-modernism is about how much you can get away with putting in” (159). Whether or not Tarquin Winot actually succeeds at “gett[ing] away with putting in” (159) his philosophy and aesthetics of murder as artistic activity and getting away with murder itself, such an instance epitomises a parodistic return to the existing ekphrastic discourse. It is a return to the whole sociocultural and interdisciplinary – rather than exclusively literary – metanarrative of ekphrastically formulated ways of seeing. At the same time, it is a turn towards postmodern (de-/re-)construction of meaning(s) through a postmodern subject’s ekphrastic gaze. Thus, whether or not Lanchester’s recycled ekphrastic image of a simultaneously Turneresque and Wildean sunset epitomises British postmodern ekphrasis, it illustrates the postmodern poetics and politics of the ekphrastic gaze. It demonstrates how the ekphrastic gaze helps to produce a socioculturally and ideologically motivated construct of artistically modified reality as an ‘already made’2 or, rather, a déjà vu (‘already seen’). Moreover, this example locates what may be regarded as an aesthetic and sociocultural milestone in the British and Irish ekphrastic tradition essential to the formation of a postmodern ekphrastic way of seeing. It also indicates the meta-ekphrastic discourse in the interdisciplinary ekphrastic tradition that consists in revisiting and recycling existing modes of seeing rather than inventing new ones. Finally, it demonstrates the (de-/re-)construction of recurrent meaning(s) by means of the ekphrastic gaze in British postmodern fiction. These meanings are explicit and implicit, (pseudo-)innovative and parodistic. They are also (self-)contradictory, (self-)subversive, aesthetic, historical, ideological, inherently socioculturally specific, and vividly postmodern. 1.1 The Current State of Research in the Study of Ekphrasis in British Literature Ever since the publication of James Heffernan’s influential study on the history of ekphrastic poetry Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery 2 This term is borrowed from Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s conceptualisation of the aesthetics of postmodernism (qtd. in Hutcheon, Politics 89;
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