“we're made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
And so they are better, painted -- better to us,
Which is the same thing. Art was given for that” [1]
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
And so they are better, painted -- better to us,
Which is the same thing. Art was given for that” [1]
What is it about art that can make even the most
realistic representations ‘better to us’ than the very reality they seek to
capture? Browning’s observation – that paintings can make the observer love
what they have never cared about in reality – is by no means new. Aristotle
notes in section 6 of his Poetics
that ‘there are things which we see with pain so far as they themselves are
concerned but whose images, even when executed in very great detail, we view
with pleasure’[2]. There is something, then, fundamentally
different between experiencing reality and experiencing a representation of
that reality, and that difference fundamentally concerns pleasure. To answer what is so different, I will propose
three answers, exploring the latter two in detail through the writing of
Hopkins and the ekphrastic work Ruskin. Ekphrasis, the representation of art by
another work of art in a different medium, has a special part to play in this
discussion because of the way in which it can highlight the capacities and
boundaries of different art forms, and thus their relation to reality.
The three answers then: the first is simply the
fascination excited by the nature of representative art as essentially
illusory. Earlier in Browning’s poem the Prior criticises the realism of Fra
Lippo Lippi’s painting, exclaiming: ‘Faces, arms, legs and bodies like the
true/As much as pea and pea!’[3] Of course, a representation cannot be as like
its referent as two real peas. A painting of a pea must be two dimensional and
even a sculpture of the pea must be of a different material, probably harder
than the original and of a different texture. Even supposing appearances were
identical, they would certainly not taste the same! The ‘trompe de l’oeil’ that
allows Ruskin to write about marks on canvas as animated humans with histories,
futures and thoughts is intrinsically and enduringly intriguing and
pleasurable. Second, the production of art involves looking at reality in a new
way and, arguably, with a view that the reader will also be forced to look
again at the familiar in a more intense and pleasurable way. Finally, art intensifies our experience of
reality by its own limitations. In seeking to express or create things beyond
the nature of a particular artistic medium, the observer/reader’s attention is
paradoxically drawn to precisely those aspects of reality.
In the quotation above, Browning highlights the
great discovery of Russian Formalism: the things which art renders new and
‘better’ to the observer are often precisely those things ‘we have passed/
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see’. According to Shklovsky, ‘habitualization
devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war’[4].
His verb graphically suggests that material and even human surroundings are not
only dulled to our perception, but actually engulfed and annihilated by
familiarity. Scholars like Shklovsky suggest that we do not actually perceive
familiar objects with the full extent of our observational capacity, we only
recognise them. Thus,
‘The purpose of art is to impart
the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The
technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to
increase the difficulty and length of perception.’[5]
If the technique of art is defamiliarisation,
this must involve the artist him/herself seeing things in an unfamiliar, new
and strange way. In the Victorian period, this way was articulated by John
Ruskin in The Elements of Drawing. In
a footnote to defend his assertion that in nature there are no outlines, he
explains perhaps his most famous theory of painting. He argues that excellent
painting is really a matter of perception: ‘The whole technical power of
painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye; that is to say, a sort of childish perception
of these flat stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what
they signify’[6]. The implication is that ordinary recognition interprets and actually
distorts what is really perceived by the ‘innocent’ eye.
Whereas, for the Russian Formalists, such
perception was an end in itself, for Gerard Manley Hopkins to take pleasure in
reality was to appreciate God and his creation. Close perception was then a
religious act. He was deeply suspicious of writing poetry as an occupation
suitable for a priest, and thus it seems no coincidence that when he did write
and was most comfortable with his writing, he attempted to discern the
‘grandeur of God’ which with the world is ‘charged’. In his journals, even when
resolves to write ‘no verses in Passion week or on Fridays’[7]
in a gesture of pious self-discipline, he can be found making unrelated,
seemingly unprovoked observations upon the world around him. From his
descriptions, it does not appear that he only analysed and recorded the
spectacular and unusual, but sought, in the spirit of Russian formalism, to
make the habitual, astonishing. This is achieved primarily by the extraordinary
connections he makes between phenomena that have no ‘real-world’ association.
This metaphorical stretching takes place not only at the imagistic level –
likening moonlight to a cobweb, for example[8]
- but at the level of words themselves.
One of the most dramatic chains of mentally-acrobatic images can be
found in a journal entry from 1866:
‘Drops of rain hanging on rails etc. seen with only the low
rim lighted like nails (of fingers). Screws of brooks and twines. Soft chalky
look with more shadowy middles of the globes of cloud on a night with a moon
faint or concealed… Cups of the eyes, Gathering back the lightly hinged
eyelids. Bows of the eyelids. Pencil of eyelashes. Juices of the eyeball. Eyelids
like leaves, petals, caps, tufted hats, handkerchiefs, sleeves, gloves. Also of
the bones sleeved in flesh. Juices of the sunrise. Joins and veins of the same.
Vermilion look of the hand held against a candle with the darker parts as the
middles of the fingers and especially the knuckles covered with ash.’[9] p9
The disjunct images are immediately striking:
rain likened to fingernails and the long list of unlikely similes for an
eyelid. The power of these similes lies
in the mental effort required to bring the two images together, whereby both
subject and analogue are rendered fresh and new. In order to visualize how
raindrops might be like fingernails, one has to imagine an exact image of
fingernails long enough that when light shines from behind them, the
semitransparent material of the nail is illumined while the rest of the finger
is silhouetted and dark. Both water droplets and finger nails are so familiar
as to be prime candidates for Shklovsky’s deadening habitualization. They are
also very different substances: one liquid and transparent, the other hard and
translucent. However, drawing together these images reveals, perhaps, how they
truly appear, rather than what they truly are.
Even though water is ductile and fluid, a drop suspended and unmoving could
appear, as Hopkins suggests, as shiny and solid as a fingernail.
The image of the illuminated hand then returns
for closer inspection when Hopkins considers a hand held up before the candle.
Having drawn attention to the translucent and light-catching nails, he now
suggests the whole hand to be light-permeable. However, rather than describe
the effect of light passing through the skin in terms which are familiar – we
know the skin to be peach coloured and to glow with a more rosy hue when backlit
– he treats the hand as actually transformed in colour. Indeed, he begins the
sentence with the specific name of the most striking red-orange pigment used in
painting. This opaque paint vividly conjures the actual colour of the
translucent skin. This painterly colour is subtly transformed into an image of
hot coals when it is contrasted with the ashy darkness of the knuckles and
finger-middles. Through the theme of painting materials, the diverse images are
woven together into a painterly perspective. Despite the insubstantial vaporous
quality of the clouds, there are lent opacity and substance by the description
of their ‘soft, chalky look’, while the eyelashes, which have three-dimensional
substance, are rendered mere lines by the phrase ‘pencil of eyelashes’.
Among the seeming random complexity of this
passage, it is perhaps the word ‘juice’ which stands out most strangely. This
is a prime example of Hopkins’s dislocation, not only of images, but of words
themselves. Though the watery jelly of the eyeball might be, visually, like the
liquid extracted from fruit, the specific association of ‘juice’ still renders
the description of the eye unfamiliar and strange. ‘Juices of the sunrise’ is
even odder Perhaps visually the colour of the sunrise and, say, orange juice,
might be similar, but again the specificity of the word jars and renews our
image of the sky.
By
reducing everything he sees down to their most basic and anonymous formal
components of colour, shape and texture, Hopkins uses the ‘innocent’, painterly
eye recommended by Ruskin, and renders his objects both strange and minutely
exact to the imagination. His writing style too is compressed so as to be almost
impressionistic. As a painting by Monet does not exhaustively explain or
recreate the subject, but provides the visual tools with disjointed, vivid
strokes which the eye and mind cohere and interpret, so Hopkins gives the
barest components of his images, leaving the connections to be drawn with an
active effort that intensifies the visual experience. Indeed, Hopkins’s condensation
of language almost amounts to an admission of the limits of language, just as
the annotations he made to his sketches highlighted the limitations of drawing.
It is precisely that gap between his language and the effect produced by it
that makes his writing ‘better to us’ than the things he describes, some of
which we have probably already carelessly passed today.
There is a sense in which reality encompasses all
its representations. Reality is three dimensional, but includes two-dimensional
surfaces like painting; it is aural but includes silence; it is visual but it
includes blindness; it includes but is not limited to the sense of touch; it
exists in motion but includes stillness. There is a sense in which any art that
seeks to represent reality is fulfilled in reference to reality, just as
referring the reader to the reality of fingernails and water drops fulfils
Hopkins’s artistic creation. However, what happens when the subject is a
representation itself? In contrast to
reality, a painting is silent and still, created with a limited colour palette.
In contrast to reality, writing is non-visual, in that the writing generally
conveys more than the visual marks on the page, which is why looking at a page
of poetry in an unknown language would not fully realise the artistic product.
Writing can attempt to evoke sound, smell, touch, sight and even taste, but
these things are not inherent in the process of reading. Reading occurs in
time, but that may or may not correspond to the timeframe suggested by the
subject. What happens, then, when a poem is painted or a painting is written
about? We will explore only the latter of these dynamics, in the work of Ruskin, yet an appreciation of the former will
naturally be involved.
Ruskin appreciates the problems involved with
turning a painting into a linguistic account. In his majestic work entitled Modern Painters, two artists in
particular emerge as pinnacles of excellence in Ruskin’s opinion: the elder is
the Renaissance artist, Tintoretto, and the younger, a contemporary of Ruskin,
Turner. Yet, perhaps Ruskin is only conscious of what is missing from a linguistic description. He asserts that he ‘will not
insult this marvellous picture [Tinoretto’s crucifixion] by an effort at a
verbal account of it’[10].
Yet his description adds as much as it takes away. He observes that contrary to
most renditions of the crucifixion, Tintoretto does not communicate Christ’s
agony in either his expression, which is calm, nor through bodily wounds.
Instead,
‘the Agony is told by this,
and by this only; that, though there yet remains a chasm of light on the
mountain horizon where the earthquake darkness closes upon the day, the broad
and sunlike glory about the head of the Redeemer has become wan, and of the colour of ashes.’[11]
Here we can see the essential instability and
multiplicity of words. In the painting there is a patch of yellow-peach colour
behind Christ, around which there are dark, grey-violet clouds, but to call
this ‘a chasm of light’ evokes many implications that surely cannot be inherent
in the marks made by Tintoretto. Chasm comes from the Greek for ‘yawning
hollow’[12],
implying the action of opening and the impression of depth. It also suggests
that the sky has been cracked or broken apart, which air cannot occur in
reality, let alone in marks representing clouds on the walls of the Scuola
Grande di San Rocco. Likewise, though the picture veritably features dark
tones, especially towards the edges, the picture does not (could not?) directly
represent an earthquake. ‘Earthquake’, then modifies the darkness in some
imaginative, unexplained way, probably informed by Gospel account of an
earthquake which occurred at the moment of Jesus’s death. Ruskin also
introduces retrospective time into the static picture when the brightness
around Jesus has ‘become’ pale. This tendency to animate a still scene is most
pronounced when Ruskin goes on to describe another Tintoretto: The Massacre of the Innocents.
He
highlights a particularly dramatic part of the painting, where a woman is
suspended in mid-air in front of some steps, holding a baby. A man above her is
holding the feet of the infant. Ruskin renders the scene in italics, as
follows:
‘she hurls herself over the edge, and falls head downmost, dragging the
child out of the grasp by her weight; - she will be dashed dead in a
second’[13].
In a sense, this description is deeply true to
the imaginative impact of the painting. However, again, to say that she ‘hurls’
herself implies an active, forcible leap into the air which, in the context,
amounts to the desperate action of suicide. From the painting it seems she has been
caught as she falls through the air, but another interpretation could be that
she was pushed, or tripped. In anticipating her death, Ruskin looks beyond the
painting into the immediate future.
Not only does Ruskin animate the time within the
scene captured, he evokes the process of painting the finished picture as well.
In describing the painting of water in The
Sun of Venice Going to Sea, he implicitly imagines Turner observing the
real scene which he will paint: ‘A stream of splendid colour fell from the
boat, but that occupied the centre only’[14].
The past tense of ‘fell’, suggests a real moment in time, beyond the painting
Ruskin considers. He describes how the water, without any particular
identifying feature, was yet ‘no dead grey flat paint’. In this moment, he
moves from real scene to a potential painted image. The next moment, he has
returned to his imagined reality, describing the water as the subject of
Turner’s painting: a ‘downright clear, playing, palpable surface, full of
indefinite hue’[15]. As if having
accomplished the mimesis of this spectacle, Ruskin then asserts, ‘But Turner is
not satisfied with this’, as if narrating the moment when Turner is about to
recommence his painting and add the sense of something unseen, either the past
movement of the water, or a current concealed by its stillness.
The point is not to ascertain whether or not
Ruskin’s art criticism was ‘correct’ or not. As Oscar Wilde wrote: ‘Who cares
whether Mr Ruskin’s views on Turner are sound or not? What does it matter? That
mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and so fiery-coloured in its noble
eloquence, so rich in its elaborate symphonic music… is at least as great a
work of art as any of those wonderful sunsets…’[16].
It does matter, in so far as it reveals where one art-form ends and another
begins. More importantly, it shows that representation can never be the
secondary, analytical activity it purports to be. Rather, mimesis is inescapably
creative. In the case of ekphrasis, the
different media of written and visual art require an active, artistic and
inventive recreation in order to represent each other. Finally, we should note
that it is the aspects of Tintoretto that gesture beyond his medium - his
evocation of internal agony, the impression of movement - that fascinate
Ruskin, and that it is the moments in Ruskin’s prose where he reaches beyond
writing into colour and music, when Wilde finds him ‘mighty and majestic’. In
this we discover that what is most powerful in art is ultimately that which
cannot be captured, that which hovers at its edges and beyond.
[1]
Robert Browning, ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, Robert
Browning the Major Works (Oxford 1997, 2005) p181
[2]
Aristotle, Poetics, ed. G F Else (Michigan
1970) p20
[3] Browning,
p178
[4]
Shklovsky in Literary Theory and
Criticism, Patricia Waugh (Oxford 2006) p216
[5]
Ibid.
[6]
John Ruskin The Elements of Drawing (London,
1857) p6
[7]
Gerard Manley Hopkins, in Gerard Manley
Hopkins ed. Gardener (London 196) p93
[8] ‘Moonlight
hanging or dropping on treetops like blue cobweb.’ Hopkins ed. Gardener 1961 p92.
The cobwebs suggest an appearance of connectedness between the branches, and of
the light as thin strands where it touches the fine branches. It also magically
lifts the image of the light, which the logical mind knows does not exist
independently from the trees it illumines, from the dark background, giving it
an independent presence and substance.
[9]
Hopkins, p93
[10]
John Ruskin, Modern Painters Volume
II: Part III p261
[11]
Ruskin MP p262
[13]
Ruskin MP p264
[14]
Ruskin MP p148
[15]
ibid
[16]
Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/ntntn10h.htm
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