Webb, 'Shield of Achilles and the Poetics of Ekphrasis', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9512
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9512-webb-shield

@@@@95.11.2, Becker, Shield of Achilles

Andrew S. Becker, <i>The Shield of Achilles and the Poetics of
Ekphrasis</i>. Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995. Pp. 191.
ISBN 0-8476-7998-5.
  Reviewed by Ruth Webb, Classics -- King's College (London)
     udlc070@bay.cc.kcl.ac.uk

The transformation of the term "ekphrasis" would constitute a
fascinating chapter in the history of the Classical Tradition.
From its humble origins as a technical term in ancient rhetoric,
"ekphrasis" has become a key-term in contemporary criticism. This
meteoric rise is the result of some drastic surgery: the
restriction of its ancient range of meaning to "descriptions of
works of art". The creation of this new "genre" was given its
main impetus by Friedlaender's 1912 survey of ancient writing on
art and architecture (although Friedlaender himself scrupulously
avoids using "ekphrasis" itself outside the original rhetorical
context).[[1]]The modern development of ekphrasis as a genre
corresponds to a diverse range of interests, from the referential
readings of archaeologists in search of evidence for lost
monuments, to more recent art historical readings of ekphrasis as
viewer response to the visual arts or to purely literary analyses
of the genre as <i>mise en abime</i>, as a metapoetic reflection
on the functioning of the text.[[2]]

  The present volume belongs to this last, literary category,
although the first two are also discussed by Becker and are
relevant to his approach. B. sees ekphrasis as a metaphor for
poetry and the ekphraseis in the <i>Iliad</i> as teaching the
audience how to respond to the epic itself. The examples of
ekphrasis in the <i>Iliad</i> other than the Shield (e.g. the
arms and sceptre of Agamemnon, Hera's chariot) show that B. does
not restrict his definition to descriptions of figural
representations. But the notion of "art" is key to his
interpretation of ekphrasis as a lesson, teaching us both to
accept the illusion created by the verbal or visual artist and to
admire the skill involved in creating that illusion.

  B. thus provides a welcome challenge to the idea that a
description should provide a transparent window onto its
referent, never drawing attention to its own textuality. His
reading of the ancient rhetoricians on ekphrasis (an enterprise
which is however of limited use in understanding ekphrasis in its
<i>modern</i> sense) draws attention to the importance of
awareness of illusion and the barrier of language in ancient
rhetorical theory. But in B.'s model this lucidity is only one
aspect of response to art and literature. He interprets the
rhetors' claim that ekphrasis effectively 'places its subject
before the eyes' as an instance of submission to illusion and
thus argues for an "double movement of illusion and disillusion"
(p. 38) in the ancient rhetorical texts. 

  This constant oscillation is central to B.s reading of
ekphrasis and is expressed in two terms borrowed from Ricoeur
(who however uses them in a rather different context and a
different sense): "appropriation" and "divestiture". Movement
between absorption into the world of the representation and
awareness of the artistic and material means by which that
representation is created is seen as characteristic of the
response to the visual arts in Homeric ekphrasis and thus of the
response demanded of the poet's own audience. The detailed
commentary on the Homeric Shield which forms Section II of this
book and the readings of other examples of ekphrasis discussed in
Section I, illustrate this constant oscillation. (All Greek is
translated, although slight variations in the English between
text and commentary might cause confusion for the entirely
Greekless reader.) 

  However, B.'s method of analysis is more complex than this
initial duality would suggest. The originality of his approach to
the question of ekphrasis lies in the development of four
different levels of attention which can be detected in the
Homeric Shield of Achilles. These are set out in Section I (the
main lines of which will be familiar to students of ekphrasis
from B.'s previously published articles). 

  The levels are: (1) the subject matter represented by the work
of art, i.e. the problematic scenes on the Shield; (2) the work
itself; (3) the artist and (4) a focus on the describer who
reacts to the work and provides a further level of mediation (pp.
42-3). (B. strangely, and at times rather confusingly, invents
Latin terms for these levels.) As B. makes clear, these levels
partially correspond to earlier approaches to the problem: (1)
reflects Lessing's emphasis on the role of narrative in verbal
description; (2) corresponds to the moments in the description
which would satisfy the archaeologist's quest for precise and
plausible detail.

  This model presents the enormous advantage of allowing for
different foci of interest at different times and of reconciling
various models of reading, cutting through some of the critical
<i>impasses</i> noted by B., (in particular the curiously
persistent "Homer's mistakes school" to use B.'s apposite
description of critics who resort to "misunderstanding" of a real
image to explain inconsistencies in the Shield). B.'s
multi-layered reading takes the analysis of ekphrasis beyond any
simple dichotomies such as truth and invention or the rivalry of
word and image. As such, B.'s model could usefully be applied to
other ekphraseis of works of art in which the focus constantly
shifts between the surface of the work, the subject matter and
the viewer's response.

  The commentary on the Shield and the close readings of other
Homeric descriptions of art works elicit many keen observations.
Even when one is not in total agreement on every detail, the
interpretation is thought-provoking and constantly challenges the
reader to a closer consideration of the text. However, I have
some reservations about the way it is applied. Often, a great
deal of weight is placed on individual terms. An exclamation such
as <i>thauma idesthai</i>, "a wonder to behold", can quite
resonably be said to draw attention to a describer's response to
the sight, (level 4) and thus to the presence of a mediating
interpreter. However, the reading of a lone adjective such as
<i>kalos</i> "fine, beautiful", or even the intensive particle
<i>per</i> (to cite just a couple of examples), as a sign of
aesthetic appreciation or as drawing attention to a describer's
response is not always so convincing. Similar points could be
made with respect to other levels.

  These are very minor points of emphasis and interpretation but
further questions emerge when one tries to reconcile the levels,
as discussed and applied in this book, with the workings of the
<i>Iliad</i> as a narrative text. In particular, the treatment of
level 4, the focus on the describer/responder, raises certain
problems. The description as a whole is frequently referred to as
a "response" to an image, the describer is said to "translate the
images into words" (p. 99). Such phrases have the unfortunate
implication that there was some pre-existing image to which the
text is in some sense a response - unfortunate because B. himself
more than once states his belief that the Shield is imaginary.
Indeed his whole analysis points to the literary function of the
description. 

  This ambiguity arises from the lack of a clear and
consistently maintained distinction between the internal,
fictional viewer whose responses are <i>represented</i> in the
text, and the poet or author himself. The distinction is obscured
partly by vocabulary, by B.s use of the term "ekphrasis" to stand
for the text, its referent, an internal viewer, and the poet's
response. This elision is clear in the programmatic discussion of
ekphrasis as "a metaphor for an audience's reponse to poetry" (p.
4). B. goes on to explain: 

  The relation between the ekphrasis and the (imagined) work of
visual art can be read as analogous to that between reader (or
listener) and the poem. To put it in less abstract terms, the
bard's response to visual images becomes a model for our response
to the epic.

  Here as elsewhere in the book, the terms "ekphrasis" and
"bard" are made to bear a heavy load. In the set of comparisons
laid out in this passage, ekphrasis is made equivalent to
audience response to poetry, the responding reader, and to the
"bard's" response to visual images. Indeed throughout the book
"the ekphrasis" is hypostasised. It is not simply a fragment of a
text but subsumes some of the characteristics of the
viewer/narrator in such phrases as: "the ekphrasis responds to
the images with imagination and sympathy" (p. 83); "the
ekphrasis...gives itself over to the suggested world of the
images without forgetting that they are images" (p. 104). 

  This lack of clarity, leading to the impression that the
shield (the object) exists outside the ekphrasis in the same way
as the poem (the <i>Iliad</i>) exists apart from the responding
audience, is not incidental. It is at least partly the result of
B.'s argument that the <i>Iliad</i> represents an aesthetic in
which the visual arts are placed on an equal footing with the art
of poetry and in which the visual artist is celebrated as the
equal of the poet. B.'s emphasis on ekphrasis as response, rather
than representation of response, masks the single inescapable
fact about the Homeric Shield: that it is a purely verbal
artefact 

  Becker's analysis is frequently challenging and
thought-provoking, his levels a flexible and potentially valuable
tool for the analysis of descriptions of works of art. But his
own application of this interpretative model is, to my mind,
flawed by the lack of attention to the larger workings of the
<i>Iliad</i> as narrative text. One would also have liked to see
more discussion of key questions such as the nature of the
audience envisaged, modes of reception and, crucially, the
concept of art embodied in the text. To what extent do the
Shield, chariots, sceptres, armour and poems belong to the same
category? Theon, the only one of the ancient rhetoricians
discussed by B. to mention the Shield, did not categorise it as a
description of a work of art but placed it alongside other
accounts of the preparation of military equipment.[[3]]  Of
course, ancient rhetoricians tell us about ancient rhetoric, not
Homeric poetry. But Theon's apparent eccentricity does serve to
underline the fact that the classification of all these objects
as "art" cannot be taken for granted.

  Certain of the problems I have mentioned can, I think, be
attributed to the concept of ekphrasis within which B. is
working. The assumption of a pre-existing "genre" to which the
Shield belongs makes it easy to ignore vital questions. The
modern usage of the ancient rhetorical term has proved to be
extremely useful tool "to think with", opening the way to
sophisticated analyses of strategies of verbal representation in
ancient texts. But as a modern creation it needs to be used with
caution in the search for an understanding of ancient aesthetics.

NOTES

[[1]]  P. Friedlaender, <i>Johannes von Gaza, Paulus
Silentarius</i>, Leipzig, 1912.

[[2]] See most recently P. Galand-Hallyn, <i>Le reflet des
fleurs: description et metalangage poetique d'Homere a
Erasme</i>, Geneva, 1994. 

[[3]] Theon classes the Shield as an example of ekphrasis of
<i>tropoi</i>. In this particular rhetorical context,
<i>tropos</i> must mean the "manner" in which something is done
(Latin, <i>modus</i>), and not "customs" as in B.s translation,
p. 2, n.1.