Remedial Intermediality: Ekphrasis in Sinéad Morrissey’s “The Doctors”

Abstract

The idea of a “paragonal” struggle has been repeatedly referred to by critics as a key characteristic of the genre of ekphrasis. “Words and image,” W. J. T. Mitchell has claimed, “seem inevitably to become implicated in a ‘war of signs’ (what Leonardo called a paragone) in which the stakes are things like nature, truth, reality, and the human spirit” (Mitchell 1986: 47). When literature responds to visual images, it is hard to avoid a struggle for supremacy or the workings of an implicit teleology: where the image was, the word shall be. Nevertheless, ekphrasis is complicated: as some sort of representation of the visual given is typically enacted, this opens for power relations that can rarely be summarized in simple terms. The ekphrastic poem may seldom describe the image in a totally subservient gesture, but it does not usually erase it either. Yet a suspicious, critical reading will tend to identify some sort of appropriative gesture between the lines of even the most innocuous of ekphrastic poems. The contrastive attitudes underlying this situation exemplify more general trends concerning the power relations of literary influence. It is no coincidence that important work on ekphrasis was done in the 1980s and 1990s, when literary criticism became increasingly inclined to identify power relations in intertextuality and other relationships of influence.Where Harold Bloom’s (1997) anxiety of influence presents a narcissistic process of self-empowerment, correctives such as Christopher Ricks’s (2002) view of allusion as being a generous homage to one’s predecessors opened up for more mutual relations. A turn from the former to the latter – from appropriation to mutuality – has an obvious ethical attraction, as it potentially brings with it the promise of a movement, within aesthetic practices, from self-regarding acquisitiveness to a more open-handed altruism. In an article entitled “New Ekphrastic Poetics,” which attempts to use a collection of essays on French examples of ekphrasis to identify a major sea-change within the genre, Susan Harrow approaches the promise of such a turning of a leaf with infectious enthusiasm. She writes of a “desire to develop the ekphrastic beyond traditional assumptions of linear influence, mimetic translation, and textual incorporation,” conceiving of the arts not as rivals but as representative of “reciprocal visual and textual cultures” (Harrow 2010: 257). Whereas she derides traditional conceptions of ekphrasis as being charac-