Terrorizing Images Culture & Conflict
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Terrorizing Images Culture & Conflict Edited by Isabel Capeloa Gil, Catherine Nesci and Paulo de Medeiros Editorial Board Arjun Appadurai ⋅ Claudia Benthien ⋅ Elisabeth Bronfen ⋅ Joyce Goggin Bishnupriya Ghosh ⋅Lawrence Grossberg ⋅ Andreas Huyssen ⋅ Ansgar Nünning Naomi Segal ⋅Márcio Seligmann-Silva ⋅ António Sousa Ribeiro ⋅ Roberto Vecchi Samuel Weber ⋅ Liliane Weissberg ⋅ Christoph Wulf ⋅ Longxi Zhang Volume 16 Terrorizing Images Trauma and Ekphrasis in Contemporary Literature Edited by Charles I. Armstrong and Unni Langås This publication has been made possible by the generous financial support of the Faculty of Humanities and Education at the University of Agder. ISBN 978-3-11-069290-7 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-069395-9 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-069403-1 ISSN 2194-7104 DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110693959 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International Licence. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Library of Congress Control Number: 2020908026 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020 Charles I. Armstrong and Unni Langås, published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston The book is published open access at www.degruyter.com. Cover image: Milomir Kovačević: “Marshall Tito Street and Photographer’s Shadow” Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com TableofContents CharlesI.Armstrong and UnniLangås Introduction: Encounters between Traumaand Ekphrasis, Words and Images 1 Frederik Tygstrup De te fabula narratur! Violence and Representation in Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance 13 Øyvind Vågnes What Does It Mean To Be Human? SpeculativeEkphrasisand Anthropocene TraumainDon DeLillo’s Zero K 29 Joachim Schiedermair The OrdinarinessofTrauma: Reconstructing IntertextualityasanAesthetics of Trauma 47 Unni Langås Terrorizing Images and TraumaticAnticipation in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours 67 László Munteán Phantomogenic Ekphrasis: Traumatizing Images in Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man 85 Adriana MargaretaDancus Reenacting Rape in ÉdouardLouis’s HistoryofViolence 101 Stijn Vervaet Empathic Vision? WarPhotography,Ekphrasis, and MemoryinBosnian War Literature 117 CharlesI.Armstrong Remedial Intermediality: EkphrasisinSinéad Morrissey’s “The Doctors” 137 VI TableofContents Stephanie Schwerter Traumatizing Images of Belfast in MaryCostello’sNovel Titanic Town 151 Christine Berberich Ekphrasisand the Holocaust: Traumatic Images in JonathanLittell’s The KindlyOnes 167 KarinSanders White Oblivion: Antarctica and the Suspension of Trauma 183 Contributors 197 Index 201 Charles I. Armstrong and Unni Langås Introduction: Encountersbetween Trauma and Ekphrasis,Words and Images 1Central themes This book seeks to question ajuncture, or crossing, between twodifferent dis- courses or fieldsofinvestigation: trauma and ekphrasis. It responds to the re- cognition that terrorizingimages permeate the public sphere in connection with traumatic experiencesand conflicts and emphasizes the ways in which such images are described and interpreted in words. Itsmain intention is to an- alyze the incorporation of verballyrepresented images – mental images, media images, and artistic images – in literary textsand to discuss their form and func- tion. The importance of images in the context of political conflicts has been scru- tinizedinrecent criticism, but scholarlyattention to their verbal representations is less widespread. This book argues that an examination of the concept and practice of ekphrasis is crucial to understanding how the images in question work and that aforegroundingoftheir diverse effects and functions in contem- porary literature is vital for illuminating and understanding such images. Contemporary literature is analyzed here in the context of its engagement with visual culture in abroader present-day and historic perspective.The inter- pretations demonstrate how literature provides ameetingplace between trauma and the visual image. Rather than scrutinizing this encounter as though it were exclusivelythe object of visual or culturalstudies, we emphasize the specificity of the literary engagement with visual images. This entails neither jettisoning the traditionalconcept of ekphrasis, typicallydefined as encompassing “averbal representation of avisual representation” (Heffernan 2004:3), nor uncritically reproducingits traditionalfunction, but rather subjecting it to scrutinyand, wherenecessary,todisplacement.The forceofthis displacement can in part be observed in how contributors seek new turnsofphrase – such as “ekphrastic inversion,”“speculative ekphrasis,” and “phantomogenic ekphrasis”–to de- scribe the ekphrasticdimension of the texts interpreted. As the contributions to this volume will show,atraditional interpretation of ekphrasis as also encom- passing awider field of engagement,includingpictorial energeia, also under- lines how the concept suffers transformation as it travels into new historical and discursivezones. One might construe ekphrasis as aconceptual dinosaurfrom an earlier age, when literaryanalysis had yettoface anyreal challengefrom visual studies or OpenAccess. ©2020Charles I. Armstrong and Unni Langås, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative CommonsAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https:// doi.org/10.1515/9783110693959-001 2 Charles I. Armstrongand Unni Langås culturalstudies. YetW.J.T.Mitchell has warned against the construction of sim- plistic historical narrativeswhereby,for instance, thereis“asingle ‘great divide’ between the ‘ageofliteracy’ […]and the ‘ageofvisuality.’ These kinds of narra- tivesare beguiling,handyfor the purposes of presentingpolemics, and useless for the purposes of genuine historical criticism” (Mitchell 2005:349). Rather than looking at ekphrasis as adated, exclusively literary approach, it would be more generous to view it as atrailblazer for later approaches to intermedial and multi- modal forms of expression. Critical and literary engagementswith ekphrasis werepioneering efforts to engagewith the kinds of crossingofborders that are now among the central concerns of the humanities. Seen from the perspective of literarystudies, ekphrasis also has the benefit of not jettisoning the text for some frictionlessmultimedial space. This does not, however,entail that the earlier conceptions of ekphrasis can be accepted whole- sale withoutreformulation. Earlyattempts to formulate how ekphrasis works concentrated almost exclusively on the relationship between wordand image. The relationship between literature and painting was endlessly deliberated upon, theirclose but difficult relationship understood as one between “sister arts” (as in Hagstrum 1958), or even as afraught but productive loveaffair. The temptation was to present them as natural opposites in an ineluctable bina- ry.The identification of literature with temporality and the visual arts with spa- tiality,encouraged by Lessing’s Laocoön essay(2003 [1766]), was key to the emer- gence of this conceptual dyad. Once they are presented togetherinthis way, the two art forms quickly accrue other,metaphysical properties.Inparticular, the imagebecomes the carrier of spontaneity and presence, and ekphrasis becomes invested with adesire – or “hope” in W. J. T. Mitchell’sformulation – to somehow allow the verbal medium to appropriate these qualities (see Mitchell1994:152– 156). Coming as abelated supplement to the preceding image, the verbal perfor- mance tries to usurp the primacy of the visual. Conceptualizations of the ekphrastic relation between text and imagehave been subject to historical changeand are not built on natural or essentialdeter- minations. Yetthe idea that visual images are somehow more direct and vitalre- curs and is perhaps also an inescapable part of the conceptual heritageofek- phrasis. From this perspective,literature’sengagementwith the visual is either away in which literature can escape the confines of its own medium, or,more humbly, ameans to revitalize our sensual engagement with the world. Subjected to asimultaneouslydefamiliarizingand deciphering gesture, obfuscating mechanisms give waytoredemptive clarity.William Wordsworth wroteofpoetry’sneed to show the extraordinary in the ordinary,and ultimately the wish to getbeyond conventional barriers in order to gain access to vital im- mediacy is aRomantic one (Wordsworth 2012). Maurice Blanchot used areading Introduction: Encountersbetween Trauma and Ekphrasis,Wordsand Images 3 of Friedrich Hölderlin to identify literature’sdesire for aspontaneous form of speech (Blanchot 1995:111–131), and Geoffrey H. Hartman (1954) did the same in UnmediatedVision. The paradoxhere is that literature borrows the idiom of another medium in order to attain an unmediated condition. Does this mean that literature creating afalse sense of immediacy?Animportant tenet of con- temporary visual culture studies is that “the idea of the visual object cannot be reduced to codes and signifyingsystems” (Moxey2008:138). If literatureis inherentlybound to semiotic codes alien to the image, then its dealings with vis- uality maymerelybepaying lip service to an impossible ideal. The oppositionbetween wordand imagemay,however,beapotentiallylim- iting one, and we mayhavemuch to gain by opening it up or going