Ekphrastic Encounters by Kennedy David;Meek Richard;

Author:Kennedy, David;Meek, Richard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manchester University Press

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Mirroring naturalism in word and image: a critical exchange between Émile Zola and Édouard Manet

Lauren S. Weingarden

This chapter addresses ekphrastic practice from two directions: first, conventionally, as critical and literary writing about painting; second, expansively, as the starting point for exposing a dynamic exchange between writer and painter. Here I interrogate the theoretical and critical dialogue between the critic and writer Émile Zola and the painter Édouard Manet, a dialogue initiated by Zola’s ekphrastic act. This dialogue, however, raises important theoretical questions: what happens when a writer’s ekphrastic description of a painting becomes the pictorial model for his own literary and theoretical writing? What happens when a painter paints a critical response to the ekphrastic text inspired by his work? How does this critical and theoretical exchange exceed the limits of both text and image and activate a third level of cross-referencing? How might this cross-referencing signal, in turn, a complex, multivalent engagement between the ‘sister arts’?

In exploring these questions, I have challenged the theoretical limits of both ekphrasis, which focuses on the picture within the text, and iconography, which focuses on a precise textual reference within the picture. I have therefore adapted three theoretical models, which have expanded the classical definition of ekphrasis and its rhetorical markers, to a word-and-image methodology that positions text and image on equal footing and in dynamic, dialogic exchange.1 To begin with, I build on Gérard Genette’s notion of transtextuality, and what he calls hypertextuality, in presenting Manet and Zola’s shared allegiance to Baudelairean modernity.2 According to Genette, transtextuality refers to ‘the textual transcendence of the text’, which he had earlier defined as ‘all that sets the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts’.3 Genette further defines hypertextuality, a type of transtextuality, as ‘any relationship uniting a text B (which I shall call the hypertext) to an earlier text A (I shall, of course, call it the hypotext), upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary’.4 In this Baudelairean context, hypertextuality functions as a dynamic transformative process wherein the original text is quoted or indirectly alluded to in incrementally numerous secondary texts, whether verbal or pictorial.

Liliane Louvel’s model of the iconotext provides a method for more precisely describing the productive interaction between text and image, wherein each medium exceeds its own signification as well as the ekphrastic paradigm. Louvel defines iconotext as ‘the attempt to merge text and image in a pluriform fusion’. ‘The word “iconotext”’, she adds, ‘conveys the desire to bring together two irreducible objects and form a new object in a fruitful tension in which each object maintains its specificity.’5 According to this model, the new iconotext ‘object’ occupies ‘the ontological space of the in-between’.6 It is precisely this in-between space that is the focus of my interrogation of the word-and-image dynamics between Zola and Manet. While Louvel’s definition of iconotext pertains to ekphrasis and textual analysis, she devises ‘a scale of pictorial description’ to identify degrees of ‘pictorial saturation’ within a wide range of ekphrastic texts.

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