Daniel Kong U1630291D

HL4040 Literature and Art (Essay Abstract — Option A, Question 1)

10th April 2020

Making reference to selected literary works, write an essay that considers how the device of

ekphrasis has been deployed. You should refer to at least 2-3 short poems or 1 long poem or

novel. (2500 Words)

It Closes its Eyes to Speak: Ekphrastic Remaking and Brueghel’s Icarus

Pieter Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus carries a cruel indifference. Its human

subjects wither beneath the weight of some great natural sublime, one that reduces the

painting’s potential drama to the quotidian: the shepherd tending to his flock, the farmer

ploughing his field, all mere parts of a larger landscape. The pair of legs thrashing at the

water’s surface is even more incidental and unimportant, with no indication — apart from the

title — that the figure should be read as Icarus. In this manner, Bruegel accomplishes a major

reduction of the mythic to the mundane. “Musée des Beaux Arts” by W.H. Auden and

“Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” by William Carlos Williams famously depict this

reduction in poetic form, rendering in their poems Brueghel’s compositional indifference to

Icarus’s fate. Their work however, is marked by a severe apprehension as they perform the

poetic reworking of Brueghel’s painterly textures. Both poems appear to struggle with the

painting’s ambivalence, demonstrating a sense of blindness towards the painting, as if

Brueghel were withholding a key element of the drama, or, more broadly, that the form of

painting itself resists a literary explication of its aesthetic and emotional content. We receive

an impression of the ekphrastic process as one that is fundamentally based on an un-

reciprocity between painting and literary work. Both poets, in encountering a sense of the

unknown in their reception of Icarus, are seen to reconfigure that blindness as an absence that

invites and legitimates literary creation. They consequently efface the artwork, generating a

new sensory texture that is localised within this site of unknowing. The poems superimpose

their literary efforts upon this supposed absence, bearing in their final forms an anxiety

towards the underlying painting that haunts them. We may thus posit that ekphrasis is an

anxious departure from the original painterly source, whereby the literary work generates a

new aesthetic texture that is the product of an artistic antagonism towards its referent.

Ekphrasis, as it is observed in these two poems, presents as an initial feint a plain or

innocent reworking of its source. The poems suggest initially, a naïve or wishful suggestion

that they might summon the same aesthetic content that is located in the painting. In their

response to Brueghel, Auden and Williams identify the painting’s key aesthetic quality as its

rejection of Icarus’s mythic significance, positing Icarus as being subject alternately to a

“human position” (Auden l.3), or a supreme indifference — his fate being “a splash quite

unnoticed” (Williams l.16). Their effort towards an aesthetic equivalence is immediately

observed in the poems’ attempted aping of painterly form within their poetic structures. They

betray, as Murray Krieger describes in his analysis of ekphrasis, the desire of literary works

to emulate the visual composition of paintings:

the ekphrastic principle may operate not only on those occasions on which the verbal

seeks in its more limited way to represent the visual but also when the verbal object

would emulate the spatial character of the painting or sculpture by trying to force its

words, despite their normal way of functioning as empty signs, to take on a

substantive configuration – in effect to become an emblem (Krieger 9)

Auden and Williams’ approach mimics Brueghel’s “spatial character” as it pertains to the

placement of Icarus. His subdued and half-glimpsed appearance in the painting is rendered in

Auden through the speaker’s scant mention of “white legs disappearing into the green sea”

(Auden l.20). William’s depiction of the “splash quite unnoticed” is similarly incidental. Both

poems place their verbal equivalent of Brueghel’s visual image at the end of their poems. In

doing so, they presume to replicate the audience’s gaze that encounters the half-submerged

legs as an after-effect, a secondary feature preceded by the initial reception of the painting’s

ever-stronger landscape. In keeping with Krieger’s analysis, we observe an attempt to

transform verbal signifiers into visual ones. The ekphrastic process sees an alignment of

words into a visual, as opposed to a purely linguistic, logic.

With Williams, the translation of Brueghel’s visual composition into a literary body is

particularly evident, with the central three verses that describe the indifferent landscape

literally pushing Icarus’s fate to the poem’s borders. William’s beginning and ending verse,

wherein the fate of Icarus is described, engenders a readerly premise that seeks to be highly

equivalent to that which Brueghel might have intended. The title, shared and reproduced

unaffectedly by Williams as “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”, declares the myth to the

viewer only to subsume Icarus beneath the landscape’s sublime drama, generating a surprise

when the viewer discerns the minute symbol of Icarus that carries none of the name’s mythic

weight. As suggested by Cristina Giorcelli in her study of Williams’ image-derived works:

Williams seems to be motivated by a (didactic) project: he directs our eyes

sequentially from one chosen detail to the other in any given painting so as to disclose what

he considers relevant to its structure, to its organization, to the dynamic tensions that
hold it together, and to the spatial relations between and among its various features. Not

only, but in so doing, Williams makes us relive the process of creating the painting step by

step (Giorcelli 122)

William’s attempt at faithful reproduction presents a deference to the visual reception and

creation of Landscape with the Fall of Icarus as what we may term as an aesthetic scenario,

wherein the poem responds to the painting as a contained whole for its specific relations

between a naturalistically rendered Icarus and its overwhelming landscape. Auden

foregrounds this enveloping of artistic creation and reception in a slightly different manner

through his opening attention to “The Old Masters”, lacking an immediate mention of

Brueghel’s title while surrendering equally to an approximation or hypothesis of the painter’s

intention. His method, though substantially more verbose than Williams, may be equally

described through Giorcelli’s analysis of the didactic sensibility of the ekphrastic process,

wherein the effort towards a pictorial clarity within the poems would ideally regenerate the

minute specificities, “dynamic tensions”, and “spatial relations” that are collectively

Brueghel’s aesthetic scenario.

It is this premise of an innocent reproduction of the painting that is consequently

observed to sharply depart from Brueghel’s source. Although the poems achieve an

approximation of structural equivalence, the modes by which poetic language generates

aesthetic affect is substantially different from those of painting. Krieger provides several key

analyses of the artistic conflict between paintings and literary works that is engendered by

ekphrasis, proposing that paintings contain visual signifiers that are “natural”, whereas the

work of verbal signifiers to produce images is always protracted, “un-natural”, and less

immediate:
 words are many other things but are not — and happily are not — pictures and do not,

even illusionarily, have “capacity.” How can words try to do the job of the “natural

sign” (i.e., a sign that has to be taken as a visual substitute for its referent), when they

are obviously, only arbitrary—though conventionally arbitrary—signs? (Krieger 2)

The arbitrary nature of the verbal signifier, as Murrary suggests, stems from its lack of an

inherent visuality. The painted signifier is innately visual, and requires no further discursive

operation to produce a visual reception. Words however, aspire towards a painterly sense of

the pictorial through a more complex means of assemblage, and, as Krieger suggests, are in

themselves bereft of an aesthetic ‘force’ or substantive power. It is for this reason that

Brueghel’s work possesses an immediacy that contradicts literary creation. While literary and

poetic works assemble an aesthetic moment sequentially and progressively, paintings present

their drama as a complete, indivisible present-ness. The event of Icarus’s fall, and the work of

the shepherd and ploughman, bear no mark of causality or internal narrative. While the

reception of the painting contains a sense of time and forward movement, as was just

analysed in William’s efforts to replicate the progression of the audience’s gaze, the painting

itself is resistant towards linear time, championing a Kairos of the aesthetic moment over a

chronology of how the painting’s various characters came to their depicted positions.

Williams, despite attempting to produce a similar Kairos, is inevitably drawn towards

spurts of narrative propulsion. His work is thus far from an innocent or successful

reproduction, but one that admits the literary tendencies towards narrative that fractures the

painterly kairotic whole into a series of smaller, literary kairotic moments. With each

successive verse, a portion of the painting is isolated and blooms into its own self-contained
movement: the farmer ploughs his field (stanza 2), the spring scene blooms with life (stanza

3), Icarus’s wings melt (stanza 4), he crashes into the water (stanza 5). Auden’s rendition of

Icarus’s fall similarly narrativises Brueghel, strengthening the dualism between Icarus’s fall

and the landscape’s indifference through the speaker’s placement of the fall as the painting’s

inciting event, that is met alternately by the ploughman’s indifference, “the ploughman may //

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry” (Auden l.17-18), and the possible sighting of the fall

from someone on the ship, “and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen // Something

amazing, a boy falling out of the sky” (l. 21-22). These events wherein “everything turns

away” (l. 16) are positioned as a result of the fall, and the dynamism between the fall and

landscape is pulled from Brueghel’s immanent present-ness into a chronologically separated

series of cause and effect.

This difference between painterly and literary modes of creation goes on to create a

perceptive inability in the ekphrastic reception of the poem, producing a sense of unknowing

towards Brueghel’s work that is heightened by the painting’s pre-existing engagement with

the themes of indifference and the dissipation of mythic significance, qualities that confront

the poems with a severe unintelligibility. The painting becomes “un-readable” and “un-

writable”, provoking a re-creative effort wherein poetry begins to efface its source and seeks

to generate a new aesthetic texture.

The movement of plain reception and reproduction towards an antagonistic effacing

and re-writing of the source is highly evident in Auden, whose work not only speculates

heavily on the possibilities of Icarus’s fall — producing events that are clearly absent from

the painting — but goes as far as to reference other paintings in an intertextual web,

suggesting an underlying logic of Brueghel’s attitude towards human suffering that contests
the heavy ambivalence of Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. As noted by Max Bluestone,

“Musée Des Beaux Arts'' draws together a series of paintings situated within the eponymous

Musée:

Conjoining widely separated historical events, those in the paintings, and implicitly

those of the late 1930’s, Auden’s poem thus re-states in a verbal medium the figural

view of history imaged in Brueghel’s plastic art. A figural view of history assumes

that all human events are related and continuous, and Auden has recently again expressed

his dismay before “the atomization of time — the most terrible thing that is happening

in the world today” (Bluestone 331-332)

Bluestone identifies Road to Calvary, The Census at Bethlehem, and The Massacre of

Innocents as other Brueghel paintings that accompany Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, with

Icarus being the only painting that is named explicitly, and is the one that receives the most

attention and speculative elaboration.

Auden’s speaker struggles against the quotidian scenes of Brueghel, wrestling with

the fraught juxtaposition of the mundane with scenes of religious and mythological

significance. It is the lack of illumination of figures like Christ, the Madonna, and Icarus that

creates, in the consciousness of Auden’s speaker, an aesthetic unknown that the speaker

responds to in an antagonistic fashion, producing in verse a bifurcation of the mythical-

religious against the mundane that seeks to illuminate both, to draw from Brueghel’s

ambivalence a kind of ordering logic. In a similar manner with which Auden fractures

Brueghel’s Kairos into a chronological cause and effect, his poem also splits the immanent

dynamism of the divine and the mundane into an oppositional polarity. The “miraculous
birth” (Auden l.7) is set against children “skating // On a pond at the edge of the wood” (l.9-

10), the massacre of innocents that is derived from a nativity story in the Gospel of Matthew

is set against “some untidy spot // Where the dogs go on with their doggy life” (l.13-14). The

confrontation of divine and mundane that reaffirms the inevitability of the “human position”

of suffering is the poem’s central idea, and is one that is birthed from the reconfiguring of a

painterly ambivalence into a creative absence. This ‘empty’ space legitimises Auden’s efforts

to propose an underlying logic to Brueghel’s work, and to tear from his naturalistic ambiguity

a new aesthetic texture that was not necessarily present in the original work.

Effacement and illumination are similarly observed in Williams, whose poem, though

subtler than Auden, performs a re-orientation of Brueghel’s landscape to create a new

gesture: that of Icarus’s fall and the sensory fullness of that moment. Williams’ speaker

seizes on the fact that the fall is absent from Brueghel. Not only does Brueghel choose to

omit the legend’s signature feature of the sun melting the wings wax, the medium of painting

itself — and its innate stillness — resists and lacks the literary potential to produce the fall as

a progressive series of aesthetic and sensory markers, as we had previously noted in our

discussion of Williams’ submission to literary narrativisation and its inherent movement.

Brueghel’s omission should not be understood as still frame of a moving image where

previous frames might have shown the features of Icarus’s fall. Rather, the painting’s

illustration of legs sticking above the water simply is, providing a visual signifier for a fallen

Icarus whose smallness and lack of definition within the composition produces the painting’s

crucial indeterminacy towards the significance or validity of the myth. Williams’ speaker

seizes on this omission, crafting in his verse an antagonistic opposition towards the painting’s

rendering of the splash that is answered by the new literary gesture of the fall. This thinking

clarifies the unusual separation of stanzas four through six. The fourth stanza’s depiction of
the wings melting, that suggests the fall, is unusually separated from the fifth and sixth

stanzas whose rendering of the splash as something occurring “unsignificantly // off the

coast” (Williams l.13-14) disconnects the two scenes, creating a lack of continuity and the

impression that Icarus’ fall did not result in the splash. This severance is only restored in the

speaker’s final declaration that “this was // Icarus drowning” (l. 17-18). Williams

accomplishes here an assertion of the speaker’s own literary creation against the signifier that

is supplied by the painting. His poem ultimately contradicts Brueghel, positing a new text that

‘answers’ or demystifies what was supposedly absent from the source.

While it is widely accepted that the ekphrastic process features a departure from its

source, our probing of the nature of this departure produces a question of whether the

ekphrastic work is a mere speculation of possibilities outside the painting, or an attempt to

craft new aesthetic substance within the painting’s borders. The provocation of Brueghel’s

Icarus by Auden and Williams presents a specific ekphrastic relationship where this

progression from reproduction to effacement is particularly clear. The painting’s internal

drama and ambiguity pushes the ekphrastic process into an inspired state of antagonism. As

the poems struggle against the sense of withholding that is found in Icarus, new aesthetic

textures are generated. Visual signifiers are converted to verbal signifiers, and the passage

from image to text transforms painterly aesthetics into a new literary body. Brueghel’s Icarus

haunts the resultant poems in a deeply anxious manner, presenting itself as a phantom double

who is answered in the texts by his poetic twin. This new poetic Icarus, superimposed upon

the mute unintelligibility of its visual inspiration, turns away from Brueghel to generate new

movements and new figurings of the same myth. Poetry mimics, then effaces and overlays its

effort upon a painting that continues to baffle it, it closes its eyes to speak.
 Works Cited:

Brueghel, Pieter. “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” The British Library, The British

Library, 7 June 2016, www.bl.uk/collection-items/landscape-with-the-fall-of-icarus.

Auden, W.H. “Musée Des Beaux Arts.” Auden, Musée Des Beaux Arts,

english.emory.edu/classes/paintings&poems/auden.html.

Williams, William C., A W. Litz, and Christopher J. MacGowan. The collected poems of

William Carlos Williams. New York: New Directions, 1986. Print.

Krieger, Murray, and Joan Krieger. Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Print.

Giorcelli, Cristina. “Pictures from Brueghel: Looking Backward, Pointing Forward.” The

Cambridge Companion to William Carlos Williams, by Christopher J. MacGowan,

Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 115–129.

Bluestone, Max. “The Iconographic Sources of Auden's ``Musée Des Beaux Arts''.” Modern

Language Notes, vol. 76, no. 4, 1961, pp. 331–336. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3040513.

Accessed 31 Mar. 2020.