Kirjallisten kuvausten enargeiaa

Abstract

Enargeia of Literary Descriptions. Ekphrasis in Lars Sund’s Siklax Trilogy In his historical novels Colorado Avenue (1991), Lanthandlerskans son (1997) (“Son of a Country Shopkeeper”) and Eriks bok (2003) (“Erik’s Book”) (the so-called Siklax trilogy), Lars Sund depicts the life of Swedish-speaking Finns from the end of the 19th century to the 1950s. The narrator makes use of films, TV programmes, paintings and photographs to recount their history. These representations fulfill W. J. T. Mitchell’s (1994, 152) definition of ekphrasis as the “verbal representation of visual representation”. Nevertheless, the narrator describes with the same enthusiasm, among other things, a marching soldier and the ringing of church bells. By comparing the descriptions of Sund’s trilogy with the divergent definitions of ekphrasis, this article examines the function of ekphrasis in Sund’s novels and whether Sund’s way of using ekphrasis elucidates this problematic concept. The history of ekphrasis dates back to the Greco-Roman world. In antiquity the referent of ekphrasis was of secondary importance, instead what was stressed was the vividness and liveliness of the description, the enargeia, which is also the common denominator of the ekphrastic descriptions in Sund’s novels. Ekphrasis frequently describes a viewer’s reactions and observations, which in turn control the reactions of the readers and help them to see the object as if it were before their eyes. Ekphrasis is considered to be self-reflexive because it highlights the complicated and often rival relationship between word and image. The vivid description of the object, the enargeia, tempts the reader to immerse himself in the described world and at the same time makes him aware of the illusion and gets him to reflect on the meaning of the description. The metafictionality of ekphrasis is related to one of the main themes of Sund’s novels: the fact that history is always mediated through different kinds of documents – both textual and visual.