Ekphrastic Enlargements: The Daguerreotype and Richard Howard's "Homage to Nadar"

Abstract

Nadar My subject is ekphrasis and nineteenth-century portrait daguerreotypy. One of the oldest verse forms in literature, ekphrasis can most generally be defined as any "verbal representation of graphic representation" (Heffernan 299); it is a poem which takes as its preliminary or ostensible subject a painting or work of sculpture and enlarges upon problems and interests that are only implicit there. Examples range from Homer's description of Achilles' shield in the Iliad, to Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" to John Ashbery's "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror." So ubiquitous has the "poem about a painting" become in the past two or three decades, that Robert Lowell felt compelled to reassure his listeners at a reading that his poem "Marriage"-a poem which is based on van Eyck's "Arnolfini Marriage," and one of the finest examples of ekphrasis in contemporary verse-"isn't one of these many poems that describe a painting. It's about my marriage."1 He felt that there were too many such poems, and was aware of how harsh critics could be towards poets who use great works of art to piggy-back their way into literary history, as it were, and who struggle only to do poorly what the painting accomplished better in the first place. (This is a subtler version of the view held only by a naïve few that ekphrastic poetry is frivolous because it is not about the real world.) I doubt whether a poem can ever be merely descriptive without in some way re-presenting, and thereby transforming, the original and our sense of what it says through the later poet; it is likely to be more a question of degree. In any case, such merely descriptive poems would not be examples of ekphrasis in its finer aspect. Ekphrastic poems which have taken on an importance and integrity quite apart from the status of the original (which in certain cases, such as the original of Keats's "Grecian Urn," are often not known anyway), the apparent subject is often only a point of departure, a means of looking inward toward the processes of representation itself and the nature and meaning of mimesis. The reflections and discoveries of ekphrastic verse in writing today seem especially topical in light of our culture's deep absorption in the image. The world we have before us- in its appearance—is a collage of disparate simulacra, we now believe; the image not only represents the reality but has become the reality, or at least conditions our understanding of, and response to, reality. "What characterizes our so-called advanced societies," writes Roland Barthes, is that they today consume images and no longer, like those of the past, beliefs; they are therefore more liberal, less fanatical, but also more "false" (less "authentic")- something we translate, in ordinary consciousness, by the avowal of an impression of nauseated boredom, as if the universalized image were producing a world that is without difference (indifferent), from which can rise, here and there, only the cry of anarchisms, marginalisms, and individualisms. (119)