Krieger answers:

As preparation for the discussion of Ekphrasis, The Illusion of the Natural Sign below, see Krieger's earlier work, Ekphrasis and the Still Movement of Poetry; or Laokoön Revisited (1967)

[Readers will note that Murray Krieger details his chapters with letter-emblems, like shields, which are meant to call attention to the fact that he has tried to shape his book as an imitation of the word ekphrasis (an ekphrasis of ekphrasis) and thus represent the circle designating the Homeric shield that is its most celebrated representation. (xiv)]

The Illusion of the Natural Sign

Ekphrasis as a Subject:

Krieger's title comes from his effort to look into ekphrasis as if to look into the illusionary representation of the unrepresentable, even while that representation is allowed to masquerade as a natural sign, as if it could be an adequate substitute for its object. (xv) He says "What is being described in ekphrasis is both a miracle and a mirage: a miracle because a sequence of actions filled with befores and afters such as language alone can trace seems frozen into an instant's vision, but a mirage because only the illusion of such an impossible picture can be suggested by the poem's words." (xvi-xvii) He reports that he felt that he had to continue to struggle with ekphrasis and its network of complications because he was convinced that such an enquiry goes to the very heart of the language-which is to say, the habit of metaphor-that, throughout its history, has shaped and directed our literary criticism. And he believes we could investigate literary paintings or pictorial poems-say, narrative pictures and detailed verbal descriptions-and conduct our study either historical or generically, depending on the sort of conclusion we hoped to read.

The Natural Sign:

In contrast to John Hollander's project in The Gazer's Spirit, Krieger's working definition of ekphrasis is theoretical and broad. " I initiated this enquiry by accepting the narrow meaning given ekphrasis by Leo Spitzer (epigraph to Foreward) as the name of a literary genre, or at least a topos, that attempts to imitate in words an object of the plastic arts...but my interests lead me to extend the literal interest in ekphrasis to the widest possible probing of the ekphrasitc principle, they lead me to search for a theory that would account for all the spatio-temporal possibilities within the poetic medium." (9) Krieger goes on to elaborate on his earlier essay, Ekphrasis and the Still Movement of Poetry and to say "What is stated in all these diverse attempts at ekphrasis is the semiotic status of both space and the visual in the representational attempt by the verbal art-an ultimately vain attempt-to capture these within its temporal sequence, which would form itself into its own poetic object."(9)

In the conflict between these two impulses, between the attraction to ekphrasis and the aversion to it, what we are feeling is, on the one side, what he calls the "semiotic desire for the natural sign" and, on the other, "the rejection of any such claim to the 'natural,' for fear of the deprivation it would impose on our freedom of internal movement, the freedom of our imagination and its flow in its arbitrary signs." (11)

Does poetry operate like painting? Krieger asks "What theory of representation what semiotic, is required in order to argue that imitation is the same operation in the visual and verbal arts? Since Plato first distinguished between natural and arbitrary signs, but made it utterly within the precincts of an aesthetic-indeed, a metaphysic- that rested on a doctrine of mimesis, the language arts have had a lengthy struggle to free themselves, because of the visually disadvantaged medium, from the secondariness assigned to them in their non-naturalness of representation." (13)

Nature's Transcendence:

H e traces the ekphrastic principle in the Western poetic: Krieger suggests "...we have to comprehend the burden of the natural-sign aesthetic under which the language arts labored for so long. It is an aesthetic in which representation can be nothing other than literal imitation and thus poses no problems. Under the aegis of this aesthetic, and with the eyes as the privileged sense (as it was for Plato), the model art is of course the pictorial art to which the verbal art s to adapt its program."(13) And the poetics, Krieger notes, "... is built out of the spatial and visual language of pictorial art, though, as applied to the verbal arts, that language can be no more than roughly and uncritically metaphorical in its attempt to force those verbal arts to take on alien (i. e. spatial and visual) characteristics." (13)

It is not surprising that this sort of semiotic produces the device termed enargeia as a major virtue for the language arts to attain. To create enargeia is to use words to yield so vivid a description that they - dare we say literally? - place the represented object before the reader's (hearer's) inner eye. (14)

Verbal Emblems:

Krieger makes the point that it is important to note that the lyric and narrative modes of poetry are dependent on the invisibilities of language..in view of non-dramatic poetry's mimetic objective and the handicaps of its medium to attain it as directly as its more obviously mimetic rival arts, ..poetry developed and pursed an ekphrastic ambition..expresses itself, its commitment to enargeia, in a variety of ways."(14) And, in pursuit of his original essay where the plasticity of language becomes the object itself, he finds in following the development of narrative that the sign moves in his terms from epigram to ekphrasis to emblem. "It is in the latter, the emblem, the ekphrastic principle, even more than in ekphrasis itself, fully realizes itself." (14)

"Once the shift from natural-sign picture to picture-as-code has occurred, it is a short step to a configuration of words that would turn themselves into a form that is the self-enclosed equivalent of an emblem, in effect a verbal emblem....It seeks to defy the mediating properties and the temporality of language by finding in language a plasticity that, as in the plastic arts, turns its medium into the unmediated thing itself, as if it were the word (Word?) of God." (22)

In short, this is the history of epigram to ekphrasis to emblem:

• 1) "The movement from epigram (with the word as subsidiary to the object it accompanies) to the minimal notion of ekphrasis (with the word attempting an equivalence to a described object) achieves its ultimate claim in the poem-as-emblem (with the word as itself the primary object). It is in the latter that the ekphrastic principle would most fully realize itself. Thus I see the ekphrastic principle, which I have traced here from the "visual epistemology" of Plato and the consequent call for enargeia, as completing itself in the verbal emblem of the Renaissance. This development from Plato's enargeia to the Renaissance emblem is for me the first major extended moment--and the most complex-in the history of my subject."(23)
  
• 2) "...by the late seventeenth century and through the first half of the eighteenth, the well-ordered semiotics of the untransforming mirror, differently sponsored by rationalism and by empiricism, restores the dominance of the doctrine of a literalistic imitation and with it, thanks to the continued appeal to "visual epistemology," the authority of the ut pictura poesis. this second moment in the history of my subject, a more uncomplicated moment that treats poetry as verbal painting....the medium of the verbal arts is to be thinned to utter transparency in their effort, as a disadvantaged relation, to emulate the natural sign arts, now restored to primacy as the model for all the arts." (23)
  
• 3) "...of those occasions on which language, as if discovering and exploiting its other-than-natural sign function, permits the poet not only to gain effects beyond the reach of the painter but even to 'get the better of nature.' In valorizing the "sublime" at the expense of the "beautiful," Burke would have us break through the finite dimensions of the merely pictorial to the limitless potentialities of unpictural emotions. this shift from the externally directed natural sign to internal human expression creates a third moment for my narrative, one that springs from an anti-formal impulse." (25)
  
• 4) "...a different notion of what it is to emulate nature....under New Criticism...the paradox of an internal ekphrasis can flourish a new as the mark of a spatial form that can coexist with the flowing character of words as an aesthetic medium. ...The poem as emblem, under the ekphrastic principle, seeks to create itself as its own object. And yet no object." (25)
  
• 5) "...our current moment, the negative postmodern skepticism ...the various literary movements, have, in their anxiety to press their own antiformalism, clearly declared such claims to be deceptive self-mystification resulting form the sacralizing or fetishizing impulse of a long reactionary moment...arguing for a rhetoric of temporality that would dissolve the would-be emblem-that ekphrastic gesture-and let the string of allegories, like life's unrepeatable moment, keep running." (27)
  

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