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Ekphrasis Refigured: Writing Seeing in Siri Hustvedt's What I

Loved

Article  in  Mosaic a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature · September 2012

DOI: 10.1353/mos.2012.0032

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Noting the extensive and sustained engagement with visual media in many contemporary American novels, this
essay argues that the notion of ekphrasis as a critical notion must be reconceptualized in order to accommodate
the complexity of the relations between new literary expressions and the visual.

Ekphrasis Refigured:
Writing Seeing in Siri Hustvedt’s
What I Loved
ASBJØRN GRØNSTAD

Seeing is like hunting and like dreaming, and even

like falling in love. It is entangled in the passions—

jealousy, violence, possessiveness; and it is soaked in

affect—in pleasure and displeasure, and in pain.

Ultimately, seeing alters the thing that is seen and trans-

forms the seer. Seeing is metamorphosis, not mechanism.

—James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the

he Blindfold, Siri Hustvedt’s

T
Nature of Seeing
first novel, begins thus:
“Through my barred win-
dow, across the narrow airshaft, I looked into the apartment opposite mine and saw
the two men who lived there wander from one room to another, half dressed in the
sultry weather” (9). The opening passage of her next novel, The Enchantment of Lily
Dahl, trades the first-person point of view for that of a third-person narrator but
retains the thematic preoccupation with furtive glances: “She had been watching him
for three weeks. Every morning since the beginning of May, she had gone to the win-
dow to look at him” (1). Finally, in her third novel, What I Loved, the author depicts
a scene in which the gaze again assumes a prominent role: “‘While I was lying on the
floor in the studio,’ she wrote in the fourth letter, ‘I watched you while you painted

Mosaic 45/3 0027-1276-07/033016$02.00©Mosaic

34 Mosaic 45/3 (September 2012)

me. I looked at your arms and your shoulders and especially at your hands while you
worked on the canvas. I wanted you to turn around and walk over to me and rub my
skin the way you rubbed the painting’” (3).
What unites these three excerpts is not the fact that they are authored by the same
person, nor that they all occur on the very first page of the novel from which they are
quoted, but—quite evidently—that they are all concerned with acts of looking. It is
almost as if the narratives to be recounted emerge out of this voyeuristic act, emerge
as a gesture of the gaze. But what kind of gesture is it, and who is looking? And to what
end? To satisfy a certain curiosity, a force of habit, or an erotic impulse? Or maybe the
characters are looking in order to achieve some kind of quietly enraptured state, akin
to that of which James Elkins speaks? As the author of these novelistic fragments her-
self suggests, looking occasions strange travels in the empire of what she, in a differ-
ent context, calls the “still, silent, and odorless image” (Mysteries xvi).
It is this impenetrable silence enveloping the image that presents the initial crux
of the multi-faceted problem of ekphrasis, which is concerned with quite a specific
and highly delimited type of viewing. The characters in the three novels quoted from
earlier are all looking at other bodies. They are all women gazing at the bodies of men.
Gazes, glances, and looks of course permeate literature as a medium—verbal story-
telling would hardly be conceivable without them1—but the act of looking ekphrasti-
cally is a much more infrequent and, arguably, distinctive occurrence that warrants
particular consideration. It is also one that poses a curious challenge. Writing about
moving pictures in the epochal Screen article “The Unattainable Text,” Raymond
Bellour drew attention to the fact that filmic images were ultimately unquotable.
Hardly a promising outlook for aspiring ekphrastic writers, Bellour’s conclusion may
be disputed but it also seems too eminently recognizable to be ignored. Who hasn’t
confronted the ineffability of an image when attempting to translate into words the
content of a favourite portrait, the essence of a memorable movie, or the emotional
appeal of a particular photograph? “I shall call on pictures to do too much work,” T.J.
Clark writes in a recent book, “to stand for an ethics and politics I find I can state only
by means of them” (43).
How to articulate the ethics and politics of images without erasing them in the
same sweep—this aporia remains a central preoccupation not only for the circum-
scribed discourse of ekphrasis, but also in the area of contemporary visual culture at
large. Many are the proclamations that have now entered the era of the Image,2 and
thus it appears pertinent to gauge the repercussions of this shift in sensibilities for the
kinds of power assumed by written texts. The state of being constantly besieged by
images is bad enough, but being inundated with images that are also silent and always
 Asbjørn Grønstad 35

ultimately unquotable seems to be a less than cheerful scenario. What needs to be pur-
sued at this juncture is a form of language that neither aspires to exhaust the visual
(thereby abusing it), nor attempts to evade it altogether. In short, what we need is a
critical gesture that is imaginative enough to speak and to signify with the visual
rather than for it, a method that does not even try to translate the image into words
but is able to generate new meanings and to arrive at a new understanding of the
visual text by self-reflexively theorizing its own responses to it. In order to do that, one
would have to perform readings that at least to some extent break free from linearity
to embrace laterality as a methodological basis for interpretive practices. I shall return
to these concepts below.
It may be that the most promising approach to the problem of the unattainable
image is to be found outside the perimeters of critical writing. Ekphrastic textuality
embodies a set of attitudes and perspectives on the visual object that scholarly endeav-
ours would probably do well to emulate: among these are openness, reciprocity or dial-
ogism, invention, and intermedial sensitivity. Although art and film criticism can be
regarded as one manifestation of ekphrastic practice—that is, if we accept an excep-
tionally broad definition of the term—literary ekphrasis undoubtedly escorts us onto
avenues of interartistic thinking that criticism traditionally has neglected. Evidently, I
do not propose that scholarly investigations should imitate the style or procedures of
literature, but merely that we stand to gain something from taking into account the
objective of ekphrastic texts and their epistemological position vis-à-vis the image.

he relative scarcity of critical attention notwithstanding, ekphrasis has a long and

T slightly convoluted history. Deriving from the Greek ekphrazein, meaning “to speak
out” or “to tell in full,” the term originated in classical rhetoric as an exercise, the pur-
pose of which was to train rhetoricians to evoke an object in such vivid terms that lis-
teners would virtually accept the description as the real thing (Scott 1). The earliest
examples of literary ekphrasis, however, were to be found in epic literature, in Homer’s
rendering of Achilles’s shield in Book XVIII of the Iliad, in Virgil’s depiction of Aeneas’s
shield in Book VIII of the Aeneid, and in Ovid’s ekphrases of the tapestries of Minerva
and Arachne in the Metamorphoses. Subsequently, ekphrasis gradually confined itself
to poetic descriptions of visual artworks, such as Lucian’s representation of Zeuxis’s
painting of a female Hippocentaur in the first century and Callistratus’s treatment of
fourteen statues in the fourth century. Key examples from later literature comprise
Shakespeare’s “The Rape of Lucrece,” Wordsworth’s “Elegiac Stanzas,” Keats’s “Ode on
a Grecian Urn,” and Shelley’s “On the Medusa of Leonardo in the Florentine Gallery.”3
The poetic investment in ekphrasis seems to have diminished in the romantic period
36 Mosaic 45/3 (September 2012)

(14), but was formidably rekindled with the onslaught of modernism. It is hardly sur-
prising that a historical climate characterized by increased transmedial collaboration
and interartistic cross-fertilization would prove eminently conducive to the develop-
ment of ekphrasis as not only a rhetorical device or a literary sub-genre but also an
aesthetic figure—a trope—in its own right. Historically, ekphrasis, as well as the the-
oretical literature on it, has always been predominantly, if not exclusively, about the
shifting, mutable phases in the relationship between poetry and painting. From
Simonides’s frequently cited catchphrase that painting is “mute poetry” and poetry “a
speaking picture” to Horace’s ut pictura poesis (“as is painting, so is poetry”) to
Lessing’s Laokoön and, finally, to James Heffernan’s influential definition that ekphra-
sis is “the verbal representation of visual representation” (3), this relationship has
more or less monopolized the discourse on this specific rhetorical figure. An expan-
sion of the typological compass of ekphrasis, then, could potentially yield new
insights into word-image relations. Although the media of painting and sculpture
vitally persist as objects for ekphrastic literature, a belated turning toward other visual
genres—photography, film, television, and computer-generated imagery among
them—is inevitable at this point.
Many of the theoretical issues at stake in the redefinition of the relation between
literature and visuality that the work of ekphrasis entails apply equally to the genres
of poetry and prose fiction. Among the most immediately identifiable is the previ-
ously mentioned problem of the unattainability of the visual text as well as the silence
at the heart of the ontology of the image; the ongoing conflict between narrative and
description that is a mainstay of the history of critical reflection on the temporal arts;
the possible contribution that a new theory of ekphrasis may represent for future evo-
lutions in the field of intertextuality; and, at long last, the continuously deferred argu-
ments about mimesis that always appear to come back to haunt us. Obviously, these
are questions far beyond the scope of this essay, and all I can hope to accomplish here
is to cautiously broach some of them.
It was Jean Hagstrum who, writing in 1958, discerned the impulse of written texts
to break the silence of the image. Ekphrasis, he maintained, may be understood as “that
special quality of giving voice and language to the otherwise mute art object” (18). On
a similar note, Grant F. Scott suggests that literature that engages with images “breathes
words into the mute picture; it makes pictures out of the suspended words of its text.”
At the same time, this is a conflicted motion, as its motivation, for Scott, is “to defeat the
dominion of the image by writing it into language” (xii). Regardless of literature’s inten-
tion, its insistence upon and dedication to freeing the image from its deafening silence,
the verbal act that is ekphrasis, also discloses a desire to suppress the image. In being a
 Asbjørn Grønstad 37

catalyst for the communicativeness of the image, language simultaneously seeks to

manage it. This is perhaps the first paradox of intermediality, that ekphrasis may repre-
sent writing’s attempt “to overcome the power of the image in a mimetically-oriented
culture of images” (Meltzer 102). Heffernan incisively encapsulates this dilemma in the
following passage: “Ekphrasis commonly reveals a profound ambivalence toward visual
art, a fusion of iconophilia and iconophobia, of veneration and anxiety. To represent a
painting or sculpted figure in words is to evoke its power—the power to fix, excite,
amaze, entrance, disturb, or intimidate the viewer—even as language strives to keep that
power under control” (7).4 If the relation of language to visuality is predicated upon the
performance of ventriloquism, what are the consequences of ekphrasis for the semiotic
afterlife of the image? Does it survive its incorporation into the configurations of the
verbal—and, if so, how and in what shape?—or does it wither away like so many reels
of nitrate film stock? Maybe the verbal transformation of the image actually serves to
enhance it, assuming that the art object is merely considered as raw material for the
process of refinement administered by that which is either spoken or written? Or maybe
ekphrasis does amount to an act of violence against the image; as Judith Butler reminds
us in her book Excitable Speech, language can be a violent means of expression in “its
effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must
remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing” (9). But isn’t there another, non-
violent way to approach the ineffable? And isn’t a dialogue with the elusive what we
want most of all?
In order to disentangle some of these rather thorny uncertainties, it may be useful
to return to the thoughts of the godmother of intertextual studies herself. More specif-
ically, what has grabbed my attention is Julia Kristeva’s use of the metaphor of hospi-
tality for a revitalized perception of how the quoting text may accommodate the quoted
text (or the hypertext, the hypotext, as Gérard Genette might have put it [356]). In other
words, would it be possible to theorize the psychology of ekphrasis—notional (as in
What I Loved) as well as actual (as in Arielle Greenberg’s poems)—in terms analogous
to the affiliation that exists between a host and his guests? An encounter in such cir-
cumstances would promote the kind of transmedial intimacy that could be presumed
tacitly to undergird the authentic desires of the ekphrastic impulse. Even so, the trope
of hospitality would still be able to ensure the intertext’s pristine alterity. The ekphrasis
would offer a temporary abode for the fugitive fragments of the visual text, which in
turn would extend the range of meanings that encrust the host text.
Whether or not the historical practice of literary ekphrasis has really cultivated
such a gesture of intertextual hospitality is another matter. More often than not, it
might seem, ekphrasis has been a strategy for possessing the visual, an elaborate plan
38 Mosaic 45/3 (September 2012)

for the acquisition of the image. And without falling back on an easy essentialization, it
is tempting to read the relation between the conventional ekphrastic text and its visual
object in terms analogous to the kind of gendered patterning of spectatorship that tra-
ditionally has equated woman with an image and man with an image-maker (Bryson
xxv). Viewed in this light, ekphrasis emerges as a device designed to master the image.
Describing the visual becomes a way of possessing it. Hustvedt’s ekphrases evince a
more organic and open-ended relation to their objects, one in which the purpose is not
to master or possess the image but rather—in an act of aesthetic hospitality—to
accommodate it and let it continue to expand semiotically within its new ekphrastic
home. “It would be a delicate critical practice,” W.J.T. Mitchell writes while drawing on
Nietzsche, “that struck images with just enough force to make them resonate, but not
so much as to smash them” (Pictures 9). This balancing act, where images are brought
out of their muteness but remain unconquered by language, is exactly what the narra-
tor strives to accomplish in What I Loved. Hustvedt’s novel enacts a feminine ekphra-
sis: first, in that it does not intend to possess its images; second, in that it draws on a
heterogeneous array of images, still as well as moving, that are made implicitly to com-
ment on each other; and third, in that it makes an ongoing and unfinished work the
object of the principal ekphrastic moment. In a way, the development from static to
dynamic images (paintings to video) can be found narratively to mirror the new and
more fluid approach to ekphrasis that Hustvedt’s novel generates.
The ekphrastic encounter is principally one of radical transmutation. While the
quoted visual text finds new spaces in which to thrive, acquiring in the process new
tissues of signification, the written text that subsumes it extrapolates from the quota-
tion what it needs in order to come into being as a productive enunciation. Providing
a home for filmic ekphrasis like the one that we find toward the end of What I Loved,
however, is a major challenge, since it involves coming face-to-face with an object that
in a sense is twice absent. The written text has to wrestle not only with the Bellourian
unattainability of the image, but also with the fact that its mise-en-scène contains fig-
ures and objects that were already absent during the projection of the film itself.
If ekphrastic writing behaves like a host in the field of textuality, just to go back
momentarily to Kristeva’s analogy, how does it entertain its guests? It neither pries
them nor requires their life’s story; it maintains a sensitive curiosity and a responsive
distance. The quoted text is not an object but a ripple of subjectivity in an intersub-
jective performance. Earlier I said that I would revisit the notion of laterality as an
alternative method for approaching the hermeneutical complexities of ekphrasis. I
borrow this term from an article by Peter Caws on Bersani and Dutoit’s book Forms
of Being. While the linear dimension of textuality, according to Caws, is that which
 Asbjørn Grønstad 39

joins the text to teleology (its “reading-for-the-plotness,” as it were), the lateral dimen-
sion of the text denotes everything that escapes the thrust of the narrative: “cross-
connections, vectors pointing to a linguistic or cultural context, stylistic tropes, intra-
textual allusions, etc.” Thus explained, it is not difficult to see the resemblance between
Caws’s idea of laterality and Roland Barthes’s concept of the “third meaning” or Kristin
Thompson’s writings on excess. Laterality is nevertheless a considerably less rarefied
phenomenon than those two critically entrenched terms, and for me it implies not so
much a textual dimension as a particular reading practice or even something as outra-
geously amorphous as a stance toward that which is being read. To read laterally does
not mean to read against the plot but beyond it. Thus, a lateral reading is to some extent
geared toward what Mieke Bal refers to as “the poetics of the detail” (Screen 8), and,
moreover, to the space of description as opposed to that of narrative. By now it should
have become clear that this is also the space of the ekphrastic.
While a burgeoning interest in the subject of ekphrasis in recent years has
extended the referential scope of the term somewhat, historically it has been rather
narrowly confined to a particular kind of relation between a text and an object.
Ekphrasis, once it solidified into a persistent rhetorical figure or even a literary form,
usually entailed—as we have already seen—the media of either painting or sculpture
as the object of a poetic description and the genre of poetry as the medium in which
the description was made. Especially beloved by some of the late modernists, ekphras-
tic poetry was also, however, very much a gendered pursuit. Given the limited appli-
cation of a device which could in principle pertain to modes of description between
virtually any two art forms or media, it could perhaps be argued that ekphrasis as tra-
ditionally conceived has materialized as a form of entelechy.5 There are, however, fer-
tile signs that the field of ekphrasis is changing to accommodate new constellations of
relationships between the act of description and its object. In the work of New York-
based author Siri Hustvedt—and specifically in her 2003 novel What I Loved—it
becomes clear that the patterns of ekphrasis have migrated from the realm of poetry
to that of fiction, from the medium of painting to that of more recent visual media
such as video art, and, last but no less importantly, from the consciousness of the male
poet to the imagination of the female novelist. The labour of ekphrasis allows an
intricate figuration of alternative spaces of desire and plenitude. Hence, the aesthetic
and theoretical ramifications of this doubly significant shift for what one could term
the politics of looking needs to be more fully explored. Furthermore, a text as preoc-
cupied with and immersed in the world of the graphic as What I Loved would suggest
that literature may also in fact be construed as a visual medium.
40 Mosaic 45/3 (September 2012)

et in the cerebral, rarefied enclaves of New York’s art world in the 1970s and
S onward, Hustvedt’s third novel What I Loved revolves around the friendship
between experimental artist Bill Wechsler and the art historian Leo Hertzberg, the
book’s narrator, who maintains a collection of objects from his past in a drawer and
writes academic tomes with titles such as A Brief History of Seeing in Western Painting.
With deteriorating eyesight but painstakingly accurate powers of recollection,
Hertzberg chronicles, like a modern Tiresias, the layered and entangled history of his
relation with Wechsler, with the artist’s two wives, Lucille (a poet) and Violet (a
scholar researching hysteria and eating disorders), his son Mark, and with his own
wife Erica (a literary scholar) and son Matthew. Awash in minute descriptive details
and deeply embedded in the visual world, the narrative that Hertzberg recounts could
trace its genesis back to a decisive, fortuitously constitutive aesthetic experience: that
of the narrator looking at and becoming profoundly affected by one of Wechsler’s
paintings, simply entitled Self-Portrait:

Bill’s painting hung alone on a wall. It was a large picture, about six feet high and eight feet
long, that showed a young woman lying on the floor in an empty room. She was propped
up on one elbow, and she seemed to be looking at something beyond the edge of the paint-
ing. Brilliant light streamed into the room from that side of the canvas and illuminated her
face and chest. Her right hand was resting on her pubic bone, and when I moved closer, I
saw that she was holding a little taxi in that hand—a miniature version of the ubiquitous
yellow cab that moves up and down the streets of New York. (4)

From this encounter with a strangely captivating image the entire fabula of Hustvedt’s
novel emerges. Thus, the fiction of What I Loved is engendered by the pregnancy of the
gaze, by an act of productive looking perhaps akin to Kaja Silverman’s use of the term
(5). Hertzberg returns to the gallery a week later to purchase the painting and eventu-
ally seeks out and befriends Wechsler, deliberate actions of fascination and curiosity
that in turn set the events of the unfolding story in motion. And as if to reinforce the
narratively foundational significance of Self-Portrait, Hertzberg’s re-imagining of the
painting is preceded by a short passage that quotes the actual words of Violet, the per-
son who posed for Wechsler, recalling the sensuality of the situation that occasioned
the picture: “‘I watched you while you painted me. I looked at your arms and your
shoulders and especially at your hands while you worked on the canvas. I wanted you
to turn around and walk over to me and rub my skin the way you rubbed the paint-
ing. I wanted you to press hard on me with your thumb the way you pressed on the
picture, and I thought that if you didn’t, I would go crazy, but I didn’t go crazy, and
you never touched me then, not once. You didn’t even shake my hand’” (3). Evidently,
 Asbjørn Grønstad 41

the beginning of Hustvedt’s novel configures subjectivity, perspective, and the logis-
tics of looking in densely inflected and rather complex ways. Here is a notional
ekphrasis, composed by a female author but delineated by a narrator who is a man,
involving an image of a reclining woman painted by a male character who names his
work Self-Portrait and whose model reciprocates his gaze in an overtly haptic and
erotically-charged fashion. Vertiginously intersubjective, this scenario radically
reshuffles conventional patterns of desire, objectification, visual pleasure, and
descriptive power.
While the avid narratologist would have a field day with the elaborate network of
focalization that comprises the opening of this novel, my main interest in the follow-
ing lies beyond the field of narrative theory per se. What is possibly the most striking
quality of Hustvedt’s text is the way in which it tacitly challenges a cluster of intractable
premises underpinning our conceptualization of the relationship between literature
and art, word and image, writing and seeing, narrative and description, and gaze and
object. Although one reviewer has characterized the book as a “page turner”
(Burroway), it would seem that the perspicacity and singularity of What I Loved are to
be most memorably found in those passages where action gives way to depiction,
telling to showing. Its abundant and extended moments of ekphrasis mark the work as
one peculiarly attuned to the overwhelming presence of the visual in the consciousness
of the writer. Taken together, the many descriptions of Wechsler’s artworks constitute
a virtual museum, or archive, of images within the space of the novel.
This enactment of visuality in a medium frequently considered adverse to the
culture of the ubiquitous image is nothing if not astounding and suggests, it could
be claimed, that What I Loved—in tandem with novels such as, for instance, Three
Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (Richard Powers), Underworld (Don DeLillo),
Larry’s Party (Carol Shields), Austerlitz (W.G. Sebald), The Book of Illusions (Paul
Auster), Seek My Face (John Updike), and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
(Jonathan Safran Foer)—heralds the appearance of what may be named a nascent
ocular literature, or oculariture.6 By this slightly incongruous phrase I do not only
have in mind the kind of “visual poetics”—the life of the visual in the literary—
about which Mieke Bal has written so eloquently (“Poetics” 492), but something that
transcends mere pictorialism to encompass a sense of writing both as a way of see-
ing and, more importantly, as a way of showing seeing (Mitchell, “Showing” 165). An
ocular literature is one that engages acutely and powerfully with the domain of visual
culture, that blends into it and thereby reveals the extent to which the novel also can
be considered a visual medium. This undoubtedly represents a shamelessly heretical
stance to the proponents of that firmly entrenched logocentric tradition that regard
42 Mosaic 45/3 (September 2012)

literature as an especially delicate and intangible mode of expression, wholly uncon-

taminated by the physical. As David Rodowick has pointed out, literature as a signi-
fying practice has often been ontologized in contradistinction to more corporeal and
tactile arts like painting and sculpture: “Through Kant, Hegel, and beyond, the most
temporal and immaterial arts, such as lyric poetry, ranked highest, since they were
presumed to be the most spiritual; that is, they corresponded most closely to the
immateriality and temporality of thought” (34). Novelistic discourse, however, can-
not be reduced to the kind of media purism espoused by this logocentrist orthodoxy.
With respect to books that feature images as a component integral to the work
(e.g., Sebald’s Austerlitz, Duane Michals’s The House I Once Called Home, or William
Vollmann’s Rising Up and Rising Down), this seems patently self-evident. But how
does the claim that the novel may also be a visual medium of sorts apply to the vast
majority of texts that, after all, do not contain literal images? One suggestion would
be that, since visuality is not a homogeneous phenomenon and can imply a multitude
of forms and instantiations, it should not be approached exclusively as a cause, or
means, but also as an effect, or result. In other words, visuality may very well derive
from sources that are not themselves visual in a strictly material sense (besides litera-
ture, dreams and imagination would be two other obvious catalysts). Yet, one might
still object that thinking about literature as something visual is predicated upon a
deliberate conflation of medium and effect. Be that as it may, the main point is that
there appears to be enough evidence to suggest that the distinction between the ver-
bal and the visual vis-à-vis the novel is an increasingly tenuous one. To denote the
alternative experience of the visual that can be had from literary texts, then, I propose
to use the term nominal or conceptual visuality, a notion whose coordinate is that
ekphrastic hermeneutics which animates the novels mentioned earlier.7 This plays
itself out in What I Loved as a refusal to abide by the unstated conventions that regu-
late the relationship between the description and the object described as well as
between the description and the larger narrative of which it is a part.
There are about a dozen ekphrases dispersed throughout Hustvedt’s novel, most
of them charting the changing phases of the artist Wechsler’s work. Supplementing
these sketches are some additional descriptions of the sensationalist installation
pieces made by the young artist-criminal Teddy Giles (a creepy acquaintance of
Wechsler’s notoriously unreliable son Mark) and occasional accounts of actual works
of art, such as the paintings of Goya. Moreover, the novel’s language is suffused with
a keen and consistent visual sense, which tends to make the narrator’s internal and
external landscapes come to life as painterly images, as when toward the end of the
story he pictures his old friend Violet in her husband’s work clothes: “When I think
 Asbjørn Grønstad 43

of Violet in Bill’s ragged shirt and paint-smeared jeans, I give her a Camel to smoke,
and I call the image in my mind Self-Portrait. I never imagine her at the piano any-
more” (366). Sometimes this direct engagement with both the aesthetic and prosaic
objects of the visual world is complemented by more self-conscious ruminations on
the contingencies of seeing, particularly in conjunction with the narrator’s gradual
loss of vision. “I have a condition called macular degeneration,” he tells us. “I have
been near-sighted since I was eight years old. Blur is nothing new to me, but with
glasses I used to see everything perfectly. I still have my peripheral vision, but directly
in front of me there is always a ragged gray spot, and it’s growing thicker. My pictures
of the past are still vivid. It’s the present that’s been affected” (19). And upon sum-
moning an old memory of a shared vacation in Vermont with Wechsler’s family, he
makes a confession: “I was merely a voyeur of my own life, a cold spectator who looks
on at other people going about their daily routines” (355). Fortifying this visually sat-
urated diegesis is the fact that Hertzberg the narrator is an art history professor
wrapped up in the history of seeing who continually has to adapt and modify his gaze
to keep up with the artistic trajectory of his closest friend Wechsler.
So comprehensive and meticulous is the ekphrastic cycle in What I Loved that the
text in a sense doubles, in the process birthing a parallel cosmos that seemingly obeys
a different set of rules. This nested work appears rather uncannily as if it could just as
well have been the origin of Hertzberg’s narrative. At any rate, these ekphrases do not
come across as simply an unusually scrupulous recording of the features of diegeti-
cally prominent artworks. Rather, the narrator seems to be conspicuously drawn
toward these objects as sites of alluring enigmas and tantalizing desire.
Among the most prominent of the many ekphrastic passages in the book are the
series of paintings Wechsler made of the dark-haired woman from Self-Portrait
(referred to as “Multiple Selves” in the essay Hertzberg wrote for the accompanying
exhibition [10, 25]); the paintings of the artist’s father (44); the so-called “Hysteria
Pieces,” a group of boxes containing doors and rooms and cut-outs and photographs
(70); the Hansel and Gretel works, a combination of boxes and paintings that tell the
story of the fairy tale’s protagonists as a journey from starvation to abundance (82);
an installation about a young boy called The Changeling (114); O’s Journey, an instal-
lation of twenty-six boxes referred to by one of the characters as “Bill’s great American
novel” (125); the “Number Pieces,” a series of glass cubes inside which allusions to the
numerical signs appear in the form of objects, books, and figures (169); the “101
Doors,” another installation composed of doors in sizes from six inches to twelve feet
that one could open and look into (219); and the unfinished and posthumous Icarus,
a startling and opaque video work that is essentially an accumulation of images of
44 Mosaic 45/3 (September 2012)

childhood, from infancy up until the ages of ten or eleven (332). In addition to
Wechsler’s art, there are references to exhibitions showing the popular and scandalous
work of the sinister hoodlum artist Teddy Giles, a rising art star who has coined the
phrase “entertainment art” (241). One of his works is an installation of nine dismem-
bered polyester bodies that have all been tortured (201), another a shocking act of
decadent iconoclasm in which Giles has pushed the figure of a murdered woman
through one of Wechsler’s paintings of his son (299).
In tracing the artistic growth of a multimedia artist over a period of years that
spans most of his career, Hustvedt enables a new understanding of what ekphrasis
might be. From a textual point of view, it can be a global as well as a local structure,
temporally stretched out as well as spatially immediate, even narrative as well as
descriptive. And the close attention the author pays to the developmental aspect of
Wechsler’s work essentially gives us biography as ekphrasis. Perhaps the first instantly
noticeable pattern of the artist’s aesthetic itinerary is the gravitation toward ever more
mobile ways of seeing, and the shift from painting via installations and video at the
same time mimics and embodies technologically- and institutionally-determined his-
torical transformations in the apparatuses of vision. Painting comes first, later giving
way to the three-dimensionality of the boxes, glass cubes, doors, and rooms that make
up the installation pieces, finally culminating with the colossal compilation of mov-
ing images constituting the video art.
It is not insignificant that the novel’s sequence of ekphrastic encounters comes to
an end with an incomplete work, as a sense of becoming and change seems imminent
to the narrative flow of What I Loved. Icarus, perhaps inspired by Window Water Baby
Moving, Stan Brakhage’s grainy 16mm film about the birth of his first child, begins
with footage of newborn babies:

Tiny beings with distorted heads and frail, squirming limbs. Bill’s camera never left the
infants. Adults were present as arms, chests, shoulders, knees, thighs, voices, and occasion-
ally a large face that intruded into the lens and came close to the baby. The first child was
asleep in a woman’s arms. The little creature had a large head, thin blue-red arms and legs,
and was dressed in a checkered suit and an absurd little white bonnet that tied under its
chin [. . .] Bill followed along as the children rode in carriages, slept in Snuglis, lolled on a
parental arm, or had seizures of desperate weeping on a shoulder. Sometimes the mostly
unseen parents or nannies delivered monologues on sleeping habits, nursing, breast
pumps, or spitting up as the traffic rumbled and screeched behind them, but the talk and
noise were incidental to the moving pictures of the small strangers. (332)
 Asbjørn Grønstad 45

The passage is representative of the direct, unadorned, and observational prose that
epitomizes Hustvedt’s method of rendering the visual artefacts within the fictional
universe. In a way, the narrative voice does not attempt so much to examine, or re-
animate, these objects as to acknowledge their bare existence. For the artist, the images
become a record of this Bazinian act of recognition, an affirmation of productive
vision’s potential for recharging perception. For the narrator, the act of describing what
he sees is similarly imbued with a sense of commitment to chronicle, in an almost
unobtrusive fashion, consciousness embroiled in the process of showing seeing.
But interspersed with Hertzberg’s unembellished sketches are more subjective
interpretations of the style of the images. “There was a resolute, pitiless quality to the
tapes,” he notes at one point, “a dogged desire to look and look hard” (335). In the
next paragraph he writes that “the longer I watched, the more mysterious I found the
pictures in front of me. What had started as ordinary images of children in the city
became over time a remarkable document of human particularity and sameness”
(335-36). In documenting the familiar gestures and events of childhood with a rigor-
ous attention to revealing detail, Wechsler’s cinéma vérité-like opus turns the incon-
spicuous matter of the everyday inside out to divulge the secrets that only the camera’s
glance can convey.
Effervescent as they may be, these images do not exist outside the novel; they are,
as has already been established, instances of notional ekphrasis. There is no external
source that the reader can consult to compare the author’s observations with the real
thing. Is it too outlandish to suggest that this kind of ekphrasis lends immediacy to
the visual experience that is less unequivocal when it comes to regular ekphrasis? A
description of an actual image or string of images—like William Carlos Williams’s
Brueghel poem “The Hunters in the Snow” or Arielle Greenberg’s reading of Monte
Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop—is always informed and in some way mediated by its
object. The ekphrastic relation is one defined by intertextuality, the visual work act-
ing as a supplement to the literary text or, alternatively, the poems acting as a second-
ary figuration of the shadows cast by the painting/film. The absence of a tangible
image-text in What I Loved makes the moment of vision that ekphrasis performs
more of a creative than a responsive act of seeing. Put differently, the literary here gen-
erates the visual without the inspiration or involvement of an existing material image.
A fictional work like Icarus, notwithstanding, is just as phenomenologically radiant as
Brueghel’s painting “The Return From the Hunt” as delineated by Williams’s poem,
or as Hellman’s film brought back to life in Greenberg’s verse. Icarus, in short, has
become a work of visual art in its own right, albeit one only accessible in the pages of
Hustvedt’s novel. But the question is, does that matter?
46 Mosaic 45/3 (September 2012)

The ekphrastic series in What I Loved, of which Icarus is the imposing culmina-
tion, serves to destabilize our routine conceptions of the genre. Appropriating and
renewing a literary form whose historical development has been dictated by the con-
tingencies of masculine techniques of looking and writing, Hustvedt eschews the
temptation to objectify the visual so intrinsic to the tradition of ekphrasis. In What I
Loved, description does not imply objectification or the desire to essentialize the
image. Writing about art and images becomes a means of perception, not an act of
possession. And contrary to what is most often the case in ekphrastic poetry, the
object is presented as malleable, unfinished, and constantly transmuting into some-
thing else. Such an emphasis on becoming is a far cry from the kind of pristine per-
manence that appears to enshroud the ekphrastic object in, for example, Keats’s “Ode
on a Grecian Urn” or Auden’s “Musée des Beaux-Arts.” What I Loved also frees the
image of its generic immobility, as time-based media such as video gradually become
more salient as objects of ekphrasis. Unique to the novel, moreover, is the transmedial
evolution of the ekphrastic movement, in which the twin acts of describing and look-
ing extend across several different visual media. Finally, Hustvedt’s inventive use of
ekphrasis restructures the relationship between description and narrative in the
novel, to such an extent, even, as to give the former prime of place. What all this
amounts to for a more overarching reappraisal of contemporary ekphrastic texts
remains to be seen, as we can only await future excursions into a novelistic terrain
where the act of seeing itself is made the object of the look.

NOTES
1/ Balzac, for instance, considered his own work a “literature of images” (see Alan Spiegel, Fiction and the
Camera Eye: Visual Consciousness in Film and the Modern Novel [Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1976. 5.
Print]).
2/ The notion of a “pictorial turn” was first suggested by W.J.T. Mitchell in his Picture Theory: Essays on
Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. Print).
3/ The term ekphrasis was first recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1715, codified as “a plain dec-
laration or interpretation of a thing.” In the second entry of 1814, the term was defined in terms of “florid
effeminacies of style.”
4/ A corresponding remark is made by Scott, who points out that ekphrasis has “a Janus face: as a form of
mimesis, it stages a paradoxical performance, promising to give voice to the allegedly silent image even
while attempting to overcome the power of the image by transforming and inscribing it” (13).
5/ Entelechy implies that one possible manifestation of a term or object has erroneously become synony-
mous or confused with its entire ontological reach. See Clyde R. Taylor’s book The Mask of Art: Breaking
the Aesthetic Contract—Film and Literature (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998. 59. Print).
6/ Contemporary poetry also boasts important ekphrastic voices such as those of Jorie Graham and Arielle
Greenberg. See, for instance, Jorie Graham’s The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994
(Hopewell, NJ: Ecco P, 1995. Print) and Arielle Greenberg’s “Seven Poems” (Conjunctions 42 [2004]: 19-25.
Print).
 Asbjørn Grønstad 47

7/ What W.J.T. Mitchell refers to as a projection of virtual spaces would be another way of talking about
this notion of conceptual visuality (see Margaret Dikovitskaya, Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual After
the Cultural Turn [Cambridge: MIT P, 2005. 56. Print]).

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ASBJØRN GRØNSTAD is Professor of Visual Culture in the Department of Information Science

and Media Studies at the University of Bergen, where he is also Director of the Nomadikon Center.
His book Screening the Unwatchable: Spaces of Negation in Post-Millennial Art Cinema was published
in 2011. He is also the founding editor of Ekphrasis: Nordic Journal of Visual Culture.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

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