EKPHRASIS AS MEMORY SPACE IN M. PROUST’s “PORTRAITS DE PEINTRES”

Abstract

The article considers ekphrasis as one of the ways to create visual images in M. Proust’s “Portraits de Peintres”. The relevance of the research is resulted from arising interest to the phenomenon of literary visuality as well as the absence of specialised works devoted to the early lyric cycle of French modernist. The purpose of the article is to analyse devices of intersemiotic translation from a visual impression into a verbal description. Despite the full neglect on the part his contemporaries and researchers’ scepticism to Proust’s sole lyric cycle, this early experience contains, in our view, a repertoire of Proust’s recurring images and motifs. Artistic discourse of “Portraits de Peintres” refers, at a minimum, to three artistic codes: traditional genres of painting, literary ekphrasis, musical illustration. M.Proust combines the details of several paintings in his description, thus creating a text-puzzle, in which recognisable objects and the sequence of their appearance represent the manner of an artist and/or the style of an epoch in the mind of a recipient. Ekphrasis does not refer to the particular painting but to the genre image: “rural landscape” (Cuyp), “elegiac landscape” (Potter), “ceremonial portrait” (Van Dyck), “theatre scenery” (Watteau). They correspond to four literary models: idyll (Cuyp), lamentation (Potter), panegyric (Van Dyck), madrigal (Watteau). “Portraits de Peintres” gave rise to the layering typical for “later” Proust, when each time the text encourages to guess the new source of the “quotation”: symbolic landscape of the Dutch art, “portrait gallery” of great artists, emblematic puzzle image. The analysis of visuality in Proust’s cycle allows to assume that his Ekphrasis is not oriented to an individual artwork but to a text corpus even if the object of imitation comprises the individual style.