The Ekphrastic Visual / Verbal Game of Mirroring in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49

Abstract

The Ekphrastic Visual / Verbal Game of Mirroring in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 Yosr Dridi (bio) Ever since the publication of André Gide’s 1893 journal, the mirror trope in artistic representation has been irrevocably linked to the originally heraldic metaphor1 of mise-en-abyme. Describing the paintings of Hans Memling and Quentin Metsys, Gide devotes particular attention to the way “a small convex and dark mirror reflects the interior of the room in which the scene of the painting is taking place” (30). These painting-reflecting mirrors-within-the-painting are Gide’s way of illustrating his fascination with any work where he can “find transposed . the very subject of that work” (30). It was not until 1950, when Claude-Edmonde Magny published her Histoire du roman français depuis 1918, that Gide’s observation about reflexive mirrors found a conceptual consecration in the notion of mise-en-abyme. In its turn, mise-en-abyme had to wait until Lucien Dällenbach rebaptized it as “the mirror in the text” for its ultimate association with the mirror representational metaphor. In his The Mirror in the Text, Dällenbach posits that “the mise en abyme and the mirror are sufficiently interchangeable for us to combine the two and to refer to ‘the mirror in the text’ whenever the device appears” (35). Such is the short history of how the mirror trope came to be equated with mise-en-abyme. Thus theorized, the mirror in the text / mise-en-abyme has traditionally been understood as either a painting within the painting, a play within the play, or a novel within the novel. But what of a painting or a film within the novel? What of Remedios Varo’s Bordando El Manto Terrestre and the fictional film Cashiered in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49? Can they not be analogically considered mirrors of the text in the text? These questions warrant an examination of the notions of pictorial and cinemato-graphic ekphrasis in relation to the mirror trope. Originally a rhetorical device in the Greco-Roman tradition of “bring[ing] the subject matter vividly before the eyes” and “mak[ing] listeners into spectators” (Webb 1, 8), ekphrasis has come to mean the “verbal representation of visual representation” in modern scholarship (Heffernan, Museum 3; Mitchell 152). In addition to its definition as the vivid verbal rendering of plastic2 artifacts within a literary work, ekphrasis can be classified [End Page 23] into two types, depending on the object of ekphrastic representation. Accordingly, a verbal representation of a painting or a sculpture is referred to as a “pictorial ekphrasis,” and a verbal description or narration of a film or a filmic element is known as a “cinematic [or cinematographic]3 ekphrasis” (Heffernan, “Cinematic Ekphrasis” 4). The distinction between pictorial and cinematographic ekphrases is formulated as follows: “while pictorial ekphrasis often turns an arrested moment into a story, cinematic ekphrasis typically narrates what is already a story told by a sequence of images” (4). The rationale behind the theorizing of cinematographic ekphrasis rests on the fact that, like painting or sculpture, cinema is also visual art and, as such, it can lend itself to ekphrastic representation. Be it pictorial or cinematographic, ekphrasis is a nexus between visual and verbal poetics. However, despite the visual nature of its object of representation, ekphrasis remains essentially a literary mode, performed entirely in the verbal medium. It is, therefore, only logical that pictorial and cinematographic ekphrases would adapt themselves to the specificities of literary writing by narrativizing and dramatizing the visual subject matter. In this regard, Shadi Bartsch and Jaś Elsner insightfully observe that there is no such thing as “an ekphrasis degree zero,” asserting that pure descriptive ekphrasis, untrammeled by narrativization and dramatization, is a rare (and rather uninspired) occurrence in literary writing (ii). There is always a purely literary, and by extension defamiliarizing, added value in any ekphrastic representation of a painting, sculpture, or filmic element. Laura M. Sager Eidt classifies such transformative ekphrases under the category of “dramatic ekphrasis,” which appropriates and dramatizes the visual artwork by summoning it up, eliciting its recognition in the audience, and eventually altering it...