The practice and theory of modern literary ekphrasis remain dominated by the original and foundational pairing of poetry and painting in Horace's Ars Poetica, from which the ut pictura poesis genre ...is derived. From Shelley's 'On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery' to W. H. Auden's 'Musée des Beaux Arts', from Browning's 'My Last Duchess' to Yeats's 'The Municipal Gallery Revisited', we can listen to most of the greatest poets of the modem age reflecting, some with envy, others with defiance, on the seeming superiority of the image over the word. The novel, however, seems to have made no comparable contribution or addition to this genre. How many novelists have turned their narrative skills towards the contemplation of the other arts? If, as James Heffernan has argued, 'the art of speaking for pictures is above all a rhetorical performance', is not the novel better equipped for such an extended performance?
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Most modern novelists show a passing or referential interest in the world of art, quoting from it repeatedly, but rarely constructing entire fictions around the idea of a parallel art which speaks in a silent language.
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Swift and Theatre McMinn, Joseph
Eighteenth-century Ireland,
01/2001, Volume:
16, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Swift seems to have been one of those early eighteenth-century artists who saw literature and writing as synonymous with culture and civilisation. His most authoritative biographer, Irvin Ehrenpreis, ...argued that Swift showed little interest in 'the sister-arts.' Yet it can be shown, through an examination of his friendships, his library and his social circle in both London and Dublin, that Swift held a life-long interest in drama (if not always in theatre). His interventions on the subject were usually prompted by the charitable and the controversial nature of certain productions, notably in relation to Dublin's Smock Alley. Swift's poetry, seen in this context, exhibits many 'theatrical' qualities, while his famous satire, Polite Conversation, lent itself readily to theatrical adaptation in Dublin and London.
John Banville's fiction is esentially poetic in design and meaning. Although it clearly belongs to a modernist form of the self-conscious novel, often associated with cynical despair, it always ...creates an image of imaginative consolation. The tragic in Banville derives from a sense of language as an obstacle to perception: since language cannot adequately describe or comprehend experience, the only consolation is fiction itself. The Faustian myth behind the tetralogy on astronomers asserts the superior reality of metaphor and symbol over rationality and abstraction. The poetry of Rainer Rilke and Wallace Stevens, which celebrates a primitive sense of imaginative perception, offers Banville a modern Romanticism based on hope. /// La fiction de John Banville est fondamentalement poétique dans son dessein et sa signification. Quoiqu'il fasse partie d'une forme moderniste du nouveau roman, souvent associée avec le désespoir, il invente toujours une image de consolation imaginative. Le tragique chez Banville vient d'une conviction que les mots obscurcissent la perception: puisque la langue ne peut suffisament décrire ou comprendre l'expérience, la seul consolation est la fiction elle-même. Le mythe de Faust dans la tétralogie sur les astronomes montre la supériorité de la métaphore et du symbole sur la raison et l'abstraction. La poésie de Rainer Rilke et celle de Wallace Stevens, qui célébrent un sentiment primitif de la perception imaginative, offrent à Banville un romantisme moderne inspiré par l'espoir.
