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SECTION 2 ESSAYS ON INDIVIDUAL AUTHORS
Natallia Dzichkouskaia Minsk Linguistic University, Belarus
Types of Ecphrastic Descriptions in Headlong
Статья посвящена такому актуальному и популярному в литературоведческой науке явлению, как экфрасис. Роман Майкла Фрейна «Одержимый» представляет собой иллюстрацию такого типа дискурса благодаря многообразию включенных в повествование видов экфрасиса (миметических и немиметических, цельных и дискретных, простых и сводных и т.д.).
Ecphrasis is the verbal representation of works of art, primarily of painting and graphic arts. There are various kinds of ecphrasis classification suggested by different scholars. According to its volume ecphrasis can be complete, reductive and zero, while according to its authorship it can be divided into dialogic and monologic ones. Ecphrasis may be complete and discrete, simple and composite as well as direct and indirect. Depending on whether a writer describes a real or a fictitious work of art ecphrasis may be mimetic or non-mimetic.
The novel Headlong (1999) by Michael Frayn is one of the most illustrative examples of ecphrasis in contemporary English literature. It presents a story of the thrilling adventures of a philosopher and arts critic Martin Clay who comes upon the tracks of a missing masterpiece from the series “The Seasons” by Peter Bruegel the Elder (1525/1530-1569). There were many reasons for Frayn to fix upon this particular artist. Pieter Bruegel is considered to be one of the most philosophic painters of the 16th century when thousands of people accused of heresy were executed by the Inquisition. His work is based on two principal ideas: on the idea of indifferent universe and transience of human existence, and on his country’s tragedy of Spanish tyranny.
Bruegel devoted the whole year 1565 to the work on the landscape series, depicting the complete yearly cycle of the changes in nature. “The Seasons”, or “Months” as they are conventionally
called, which are described in Headlong is a series of splendid poetical paintings. The artist admired his country and glorified its beauty in different times of the year. The series which he created for the wealthy Antwerp merchant Niclaes Jongelink have long been an object of contoversy. Some scholars believe that Jongelink owned twelve panels of the “Months” (each painting representing one month), but others think that not more than six panels (one per two months) could have ever existed. The series opens with “The Hunters in the Snow” (December-January) which is considered to be the best painting of the cycle, and then goes “The Gloomy Day” (February -March). It is commonly agreed that the missing picture should have represented April and May. The series is finished with “The Hay Harvest” (June-July), “The Harvesters” (August-September) and “The Return of the Herd” (October-November).
The main character of Headlong Martin Clay who comes to the country with his wife, an arts critic, and a little daughter to work on a book on nominalism schemes to get the painting - that very missing picture from the Bruegel’s series - from his simpleton-neighbour. The scholar’s adventures are deeply intertwined with the story of Bruegel’s heretical life - he created his masterpieces right under the Cardinal’s very nose at the times of rageful Inquisition. Martin mounts his hobby-horse - iconology - to find clues in the vanished painting, to decipher it and to prove that “The Merrymakers” is the missing part of the series. During his investigations he gets so obsessed with the idea that the picture replaces real life for him - he no longer thinks about his beloved wife, his little daughter Tilda, his debts and possible problems with the law. Common sense gives place to his headlong desire to possess Bruegel’s missing picture. Analysis of Bruegel’s actual paintings from the “Months” and other works that are described in detail together with the imaginary painting, the nonexistent artifact, gives Martin a clue to the mystery. Bruegel’s imaginary painting is opposed to the real one in Michael Frayn’s novel. Thus we have examples of mimetic attributive and non-mimetic ecphrases, or ecphrasis and diegesis. This is how Frayn describes Bruegel’s real painting “The Hunters in the Snow”:
...There they go again, those weary men with their gaunt dogs... Their heads are lowered, their spoils are meagre. Three hunters with thirteen dogs to feed and nothing but a single fox to show for their labours. There’s no great rejoicing at their return, the women making a fire outside the inn with the sign that’s hanging half off its hooks don’t give them a glance, any more than the plowman looks up to see Icarus vanishing headlong into the sea in that earlier painting of Bruegel’s that Auden made almost as famous as the Hunters. What takes the eye in the landscape that opens away at the foot of the hill we are on: the village turned in upon itself by the cold, the tiny figures on the unfamiliar ice, the sky leaden above the white floodplain around the frozen river, a planning magpie black against the whiteness, leading the eye on to the broken teeth of the mountains on the other side of the valley, and the distant town at the end of it beside the winter sea [Frayn 1999: 58].
And here the author together with the readers travels through the imaginary painting “The Merrymakers”:
I’m looking down from wooden hills into a valley. The valley runs diagonally from near the bottom left of the picture, with a river that meanders through it, past a village, past a castle crowning a bluff, to a distant town at the edge of the sea, close to the high horizon. Running along the left-hand side of the valley are mountains, with jagged crags sticking up like broken teeth, and snow still lying in the high side valleys. It’s spring. On the woods below the snow line, and tumbling away in front of where I’m standing, there’s the first shimmer of April green. The high valley air is still cold, but as you move down into the valley the chill dies away. The colours change, from cool brilliant greens to deeper and deeper blues.
The season seems to shift in front of you from April into May as you travel south into the eye of the sun... [Frayn 1999: 43]
The two ecphrases have much in common: abundance of verbs
of motion, identical similes, and the similarity of plot composition. Frayn has described the imaginary painting completely in Bruegel’s real manner, so that it could have really been a part of the series. “The Merrymakers” is a composite ecphrasis: one can recognize details of several of Bruegel pictures - “The Hunters in the Snow”, “The Magpie on the Gallows”, “The Return of the Herd”, and “Landscape with the Parable of the Sower” in it.
David Carrier, an American scholar, asserts that it is practically impossible to differentiate between descriptions of real and fictitious works of art in a literary work. We find that ‘ ...in vividly presenting paintings, such writing cannot itself tell us whether that art described actually exists. Real paintings can be described in fiction, and imagined paintings in art history writing... ’ [Carrier 2003: 8] L. Geller, however, considers that from the point of view of semiotics there is difference between the depiction of the existent and nonexistent paintings: ‘imaginary paintings need to be devised and such invention submits to the narrative or topical logic, not the pictorial one. The existent ones need to be transmitted. [Геллер 2002: 9]. In relation to “Merrymakers” we are inclined to share Carrier’s point of view, because while reading Headlong one is unable to guess whether the canvases exist or not if one is unaware of the actual state of affairs.
One of the most important ecphrastic functions in the novel is the storyline formation. The search for the picture, the scrupulous research of Bruegel’s whole artistic heritage - these are the key events that determine the novel’s plot. Frayn realizes that not every reader is familiar with Bruegel’s work that is why he dwells on the details which facilitates our understanding of the paintings and, eventually, of the essence of the novel. The writer stresses the power of art and its role in the novel characters’ transformation. The lives of Tony (Martin’s broke neighbour, the owner of the picture), Laura (his wife), Martin’s wife, Martin himself have considerably changed since Martin became really obsessed with the proofs that “The Merrymakers” is the greatest work of art ever.
The main character is an observer, who looks at the world as if it were a play or a painting and reads the painting as if it were a book
using iconographical and iconological methods. Looking at people he temporarily becomes an artist, who breathes new life into his paintings at one stroke of the brush. The character’s psychological portraits are created with the help of discrete, i.e. interrupted ecphrasis (the description is interrupted, scattered, it alternates with the narration). This is how Frayn describes the first impression Tony Churt made on Martin:
...He’s taller than me, and as I raise my eyes to meet his I have plenty of time to take in mud-splashed boots, then mud-coloured corduroy trousers and a mud-coloured checked jacket. There are holes in his mud-coloured jersey, and any hint of garishness suggested by the triangle of muddy green flannel shirt above is counteracted by his muddy brown tie.
He even has a gun, properly broken, in the crook of his arm.
His long face, stretching away above me toward a mud-coloured flat cap, is the only feature that doesn’t quite fit the prevailing colour scheme. It’s simultaneously raw and bluish grey, with little overlooked dribbles of dried blood where the razor’s nicked it [Frayn 1999: 9].
Tony is described as a painting with the help of colourful epithets: mud-coloured, muddy-green, bluish grey. This description is, in fact, an ecphrasis of the live picture, or inverse ecphrasis. The same device is used in the other characters’ portraits. Later, on seeing Laura, Martin is surprised:
I’d been expecting, if not a broken old crone, then at least another comfortably worn accessory, like the sofa or Tony himself. But she’s entirely out of keeping with the iconography. Not much more than half his age, for a start - a lot younger than me - younger than Kate, even. She’s thin and dark, and she’s dressed not in brown but in scarlet - a loose scarlet sweater that rises high around her neck and comes halfway down over dark velvet trousers. She smiles at us, but doesn’t offer her hand, possibly because it’s wrapped in kitchen paper... [Frayn 1999: 21]
Ecphrasticity of these images contributes to the reader’s illusion of being in the same room when getting acquainted with the characters of the novel. It also emphasizes the author’s artistic vision of the characters, which fits in the general image of the novel - colours and half-tints play an important role in their description, whereas other writers resort to different methods of characters’ portrayal and don’t attach great importance to their colour perception. Suffice it to recall David Lodge’s portrayal of the main characters in the novel Nice Work to see a different approach to the issue. He presents Robyn Penrose’s and Victor Wilcox’s appearance in the way they see and perceive each other physically, namely their height, figure and build with a strong implication of sex appeal. Here is Vic’s first impression of Robyn:
She had copper-coloured hair, cut short as a boy’s at the back, with a mop of curls tilted jauntily forward at the front....She sat at her ease on the sofa, with her long, booted and pantalooned legs crossed at the ankles... Then she yawned suddenly, like a cat, revealing two rows of white, even teeth [Lodge 1989: 108].
By contrast with the novel Nice Work, Headlong is full of visual vocabulary and optical images. The description of clothes, objects, people are rich in colour characteristics, tones and half-tints. This is the way Frayn describes Laura’s bruise left after her husband’s beating:
She pulls her emerald sweater. We’re looking at her rib cage, and the soft silken underswell of her left breast. Across the bottom of her heart stretches a large irregular indigo storm cloud surrounded by a greenish nimbus [Frayn 1999: 192].
Headlong abounds in verbs denoting visualization - like “gaze”, “look”, and in order to create an even more powerful effect, Frayn helps us to transform into a Netherlander together with Martin: I put
myself in the clogs of an ordinary Netherlander in 1568, gazing at The
Parable of the Blind that Bruegel painted in that yea. [Frayn 1999: 302].
Thus, thanks to his colourful and minute verbal reproductions of paintings as well as to the extensive excursus into the Netherlands history of the sixteenth century, Michael Frayn manages to convey the epoch’s spirit as if he transported us into the country that Pieter Bruegel had described in the series “The Months” so tenderly and affectionately. The novel Headlong is a splendid example of analysis and interpretation of a work of visual arts in literature.
References
1. Геллер JI. Воскрешение понятия, или Слово об экфрасисе //
Экфрасис в русской литературе. - М.: МИК, 2002.
2. Frayn М. Headlong. Faber and Faber, 1999.
3. Carrier D. Writing About Visual Art. New York: Allworth Press, 2003.
4. Todge D. Nice Work. Tondon: Penguin Books, 1989.
