The Corporeal Imagination. Patricia Cox Miller
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ending of one verse might also become the beginning of the line following.”49 His overall description of this little work is revealing of his aesthetic mindset: “It is small,” he says, “yet it brings a sense of surfeit; it is disjointed yet tangled [inconexa est et implicatur]”—a succinct statement of the late ancient aesthetic embrace of narrative forms that convey intimate relatedness precisely by advertising disjunction.50
This much, however, has already been reviewed, but in his preface to this poem Ausonius adds one other significant ingredient. Referring to the monosyllabic words as puncta, “punctures” or “stopping points,” he writes that “they merely hold together like the individual links in a chain.” He says to the recipient of his poem: “You will endow them with a certain value, for without you they will be just monosyllables.”51 In other words, without the active participation of the reader, his poem will not be complete, its meaning left unconstrued. It is noteworthy that Ausonius’s puncta—words that have become “things,” magnets of attraction in Brown’s sense—constitute the nodal points on which the meaning of the poem turns. In his book of meditations on photography, Roland Barthes used the term punctum to characterize the detail in a photograph that has the power of expansion: “While remaining a detail, it fills the whole picture.”52 For Ausonius as well as for his latter-day counterpart, the punctum is the fragment that draws the reader or viewer into an imaginative construal of a whole.
This petitioning of active imaginative engagement by readers or spectators was part of the aesthetics of discontinuity, and one of the literary techniques for eliciting this kind of active reading was the ekphrasis. In an ekphrasis, effects of visual and sensory immediacy come together as the writer attempts to bring a painting or other material object (whether real or imagined) alive in words.53 As literary theorist W. J. T. Mitchell describes it, “the basic project of ekphrastic hope” is “the transformation of the dead, passive image into a living creature.”54 Ekphrastic writing was not invented in late antiquity,55 but its handling by authors such as Ausonius was less linear, more dependent on dissonant parallels, and when embedded in longer narratives, late ancient ekphrases were “less open to [their] contexts” than earlier ekphrases were and tended to function as “self-contained and self-defining units.”56 Here once again is the aesthetic preference for “juxtaposition and contrast [over] logical relationship; contiguity no longer required continuity.”57
The catalogue of fish in Ausonius’s poem Mosella is actually an ekphrasis within an ekphrasis, since the poem as a whole purports to be a description of a river. There are two features of this catalogue that I want to highlight. One is the hyper-realism or pictorial theatricality of his descriptions, which creates a “reality-effect”—an illusion of reality—and suggests that such forms of representation are poetic effects rather than straightforward description.58 As Georgia Nugent has explained, writing like this draws upon a kind of “synaesthetic response” in the reader, who must sense something that cannot strictly or literally be seen.59
The second feature of the catalogue that adds to an understanding of Ausonian ekphrasis is its context, a poem about a river that constantly alludes to the optical illusions created by the reflective qualities of water. Frequently employing metaphors of mirroring to describe the unreliability of these watery visions, the poem is preoccupied with the deceptive nature of images both verbal and visual.60 With its use of terms like absens, derisus, decepta, figura, and simulacrum, the poem issues a caveat to its reader that “the ekphrastic encounter in language is purely figurative,” as Mitchell has observed.61 The catalogue of fish is only one of the ways in which the poet underscores what he writes in line 239 of “The Moselle”: “pleasure is taken in sights which are ambiguously true and false.” As Nugent remarks, “Ausonius is a poet very much aware of the ambiguities, deceptions, and substitutions inherent in representation,” and by his ekphrastic technique he “invites the reader to enter into the game of imaginative visualization based on what is fundamentally a verbal artefact.”62
While there is no doubt that the writer of ekphrases was attempting to transform the reader into a spectator and that sight was a privileged sense in ekphrastic representation, it is also true that “ekphrastic rhetorical exercises often strove precisely to exceed the visual by evoking tactile, kinetic, aural and olfactory sensations as well.”63 For example, Ausonius’s poem “Cupido Cruciatus” purports to describe a painting of the descent of the god Amor into the underworld, there to be tortured by a series of lovelorn goddesses. It is an ekphrasis filled with images that are difficult to visualize, and its “reality-effect” succeeds only by petitioning senses other than sight. In one passage of this poem, the underworld is depicted as a place “where [Cupid’s] wings move sluggishly in the close darkness.” As Nugent describes it, “the impression is that Cupid is experiencing difficulty in plying his wings, because of the thickness of the night. But what sense, precisely, does this make? While we intuitively grasp its meaning, the image is not actually visual; rather, it seems to draw upon a kind of synaesthetic response—the weight of night and darkness is something that we may sense, but cannot (strictly speaking) see.”64
This kind of ekphrastic engagement of the reader’s imaginative senses is a defining characteristic of the literature, poetic as well as narrative, that grew up around the phenomenon of relics in the course of the fourth century and can in some ways be credited with the creation of the meaning of relics. If it is true, as Victor Saxer has argued, that the holy dead were truly materialized only when they were fragmented and dispersed,65 it is also true that those material bits came alive in the literary and artistic appeals that were made to the sensuous imaginations of participants in this form of Christian ritual. These appeals aimed at a virtual re-education of the human senses, teaching viewers to see that a material object might have spiritual life.
Relics and Figuration
The phenomenon of relics was characterized by an insistent impulse toward figuration, both verbal and artistic. Damasus, bishop of Rome from C.E. 366–384, for example, appears to have had a hearty appreciation for the function of the trace as a condition of meaning: as he went around Rome establishing shrines at tombs of martyrs, he made the city into a network of traces that was at once geographically tangible and verbally material, since at each shrine he left lines of poetry, the epigrams for which he is famous.66 In one of these poems, addressed to the martyr Felix, Damasus made puns on the martyr’s name, engaging in the sort of etymological wordplay that became a standard feature of encomia to martyrs—Augustine, for example, punned on the names of Vincent and Agnes, and Prudentius on the names of Agnes, Hippolytus, and Cyprian.67 Again the impulse to bring out the full aesthetic virtuosity of the fragment on two levels is evident. The linguistic filiations spun out of a martyr’s name match the filiations of spiritual power that inhere in a fragment of his or her body. Relics became verbal as well as material artifacts.
The creative mimesis involved in the sort of dissonant echoing effected when poetry and relic were juxtaposed was also characteristic of late ancient ekphrases that described the art decorating the martyria. Gregory of Nyssa’s encomium on Saint Theodore contains an ekphrasis on the paintings in Theodore’s memoria. Gregory begins by privileging the metaphor of sight, describing the visual splendor of the building and its contents:
When one comes into a place like this one in which we are assembled today, where the memorial and holy relic of the righteous one are, one is first struck by the magnificence of what there is to see: a building as befits God’s temple, splendidly wrought in terms of its great size and beautiful decoration and in which the woodworker has carved the wood into the shapes of animals and the stonemason has polished the marble slabs to the smoothness of silver. The painter has also colored the walls with the flowers of his art in images representing the martyr’s brave actions, his resistance, his suffering, the brutal appearance of the rulers, the insults, that fiery furnace, the athlete’s most blessed death, and the sketch of Christ, the judge of contests, in human form.68
In the passage that follows, however, sensibilities other than sight are brought into play: “All of this he fashioned by means of colors as though it