Cambridge (2017) h/b 301pp £75 (ISBN 9781107192652)
This handsome book is a tremendous piece of work on a fascinating area of study. It concerns itself with the problems of aesthetics: why do we feel emotions (which are real emotions) for things which are themselves not real? How can inanimate things move us when we know they are not real? How do we ‘receive’ aesthetic experience—and is it not the same in the visual arts (operating in space but not time) as it is in written media operating in time but not space? What then of film which shows pictures moving in time? What—for that matter—of the ancient ekphraseis which use narrative to show pictures, especially when (as in Catullus 64) the picture bursts back into narrative life and renders the ekphrasis ‘disobedient’ (as Andrew Laird termed it in JRS 83 (1993) 18-30)?
G. begins his lively and engaging study with a look at Philostratus’ Imagines which tackles the issue of how we react to artistic stimuli. He convincingly rebuts the post-modern reduction of all such stimuli to the status of texts in discourse by putting the viewer back in the picture and seeing the subject engaged emotionally with the object. These are people looking at people, not merely readers of texts, a point strongly pushed by G.’s account of Homer’s Sirens who show the grisly power of art all too well, just as Homer many times shows the power of words to make strong men weep (e.g. Odyssey 8.521-531). The effects of art are neurological, physiological and emotional as well as aesthetic, and G. is here assessing the role which form plays in this configuration. Philostratus show how we are moved by the visual arts even as we recognise that they show things which are not there in a form which is plainly artificial. G. brings in Lessing, whose Laokoon (1766) teased apart the different spheres of painting (which concern themselves with ‘objects’) and poetry (which render ‘actions’ in a sequential form) and this space vs. time dichotomy is at the heart of G.’s argument in the bulk of the book.
The next major section of the book concerns itself with the temporal nature of narratives. G. discusses the way narratives make use of phenomenological time and draw on our ability to experience time through other minds, both real and fictional. This is the ‘Theory of Mind’ version of narratology, as seen especially in novels such as Ulysses which give us a focalising glimpse into the mind of the narrating voice—a voice which also elongates time so that the single day of the narrated time is extended into greater narrative time by means of its enormously mindful concentration on the phenomenology of the subject. The way we experience time is further examined through analysis of Augustine—whose ideas clearly prefigure the phenomenology of the 20th century and whose analysis of the triad of memoria, attentio and expectatio are instructive and helpful. Narrated time discloses the ‘as-if’ of the plot as lived by the characters, while narrative time passes for the reader, and this ‘double-time’ allows readers to reconfigure the temporal aspect of their own lives. Narratives often distort time of course: ‘descriptions freeze narrated time, anachronies distort it and alternative modes of coherence downplay it’ (64). Narrators such as Plutarch group events together for thematic reasons rather than slavishly following a chronological order. The narrative standpoint of Augustine looking back and taking us through an early life—which was all leading up to his conversion—lends a teleological perspective to things while also keeping the reader attentive to the then and the now, the former ‘Augustine’ being narrated and the present ‘Augustine’ the narrator.
G. uses Heliodorus’ novel Ethiopica (3rd-4th C AD) as a test case of his reading of narrative in temporal form: a good model for narrative use of time as this text places more emphasis on plot than on characterisation. and so can be seen to expend a lot of effort into the configuration of time, especially by the framing of narratives within each other. Stories are told within the story—which elevates the self-conscious ironic skill of the narrative, just as it did in the bardic tales in Homer’s Odyssey. G. also draws attention to the ‘spatial form’ of descriptive passages with the emphasis on enargeia and ekphrasis. In the slippage of narrative ordering there is much scope for suspense and also pathos, and G. rounds off this major section with a reminder of the power of song as described by Gorgias and also Plato. G. then compares the temporal dynamics of Heliodorus with that of modern film and uses Ozon’s 2012 film Dans la maison as an example of how narrative more often avoids the Theory of Mind and concentrates on action rather than character, exactly as Aristotle (Poetics 1450a15-25) had said of the priority of plot over character. Here, as in Heliodorus, there is a narrative drive and a nice blend of literature (Germain) and visual arts (his wife Jeanne) as well as the use of framed narrative (the boy Claude’s writings released in instalments through the film and using cliff-hanger technique to keep the audience’s suspense high).
The second major part of the book concerns itself with Pictures (‘the detached gaze’) and the book helpfully gives us all the images discussed in (monochrome) illustrations. G. teases apart the three strands involved in visual art—the painted canvas itself, the image depicted on it, and the thing which the image is attempting to represent—and so analyses the semiotics of art-appreciation with due regard to the perceptualism whereby the image may be nothing much like the ‘real thing’ owing to the artistic conventions employed (Cubism for instance), or where (as in the ‘duck-rabbit’ picture) the same image may be seen as either of two different things. We have to do serious ‘seeing-in’ in order to capture the ‘as-if’ of the pictorial image, even in the case of the image on a lavatory door (182). The book so far has argued for Lessing’s dichotomy of the temporal narrative vs. the spatial picture, but G. now shows how pictures (such as Hogarth’s Marriage à-la Mode) can convey actions and stories, and there are good examples (such as Kleist’s play Der zerbrochene Krug) where a story has been inspired by a static painting. In Lucian’s Amores there is the story of the statue of Aphrodite permanently stained by the young man who fell in love with, and made love to, the stone goddess, confusing copy and prototype and showing ‘the power of eros to transform stone into flesh’(193). Vase paintings from ancient Greece demand a lot of ‘seeing-in’ both in terms of being two-dimensional flat representations of 3-dimensional things and scenes and also in terms of the limitations of artistic media available—although the ancients did also find ways of producing the trompe-l’oeil effect. Vase painters even cleverly used the shape of the vessel itself to help the mimetic effect, as in Exekias’ vase-painting of Dionysus reclining on a ship (p. 205). Pots showing the blinding of Polyphemus can indicate elements of the tale in a static visual way—the pot in the giant’s hand alludes to his intoxication for instance. Images of powerful seeing are especially valuable for this view of reception, and so Gorgo throws ‘into relief the gaze at the vase through the gaze on the vase’ (248). G. then (chapter 7) considers a recent multi-media installation by the Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué entitled The Fall of a Hair. This series of images from the Syrian civil war reverses the artistic process as those being ‘shot’ by the camera are literally shooting the artist, bringing out the ‘double-shooting’ imagery commonly used in photography where we ‘load’ and ‘aim’ a camera and then ‘shoot’ a film (249). The effect of The Fall of a Hair is to allow the viewer to see what being in Syria feels like in a truly shocking way. This acts as a good example of the way in which aesthetics meets politics to the mutual benefit of both and brings us back to the highly personal aesthetics which G. argued for in the opening section.
The book ends with an epilogue in which G. discusses Kathryn Bigelow’s 1994 film Strange Days—‘set in a dystopic Los Angeles on the last day of the second millennium’ (264). The film’s hero, Lenny Nero, uses VR technology called SQUID to relive his past experiences with his ex-girlfriend Faith and also finds himself investigating the death of the rapper Jeriko One. Where he relives his happy past with Faith, Lenny is like an Odysseus who has ‘given in to the temptation of the Sirens….Strange Days casts the idea of the Sirens in the mould of cyberpunk’ (266). The film shows the dangers of unmediated aesthetic experiences being used freely instead of real life and becoming addictive: balanced against this is the value of ‘the wire’ in allowing the death of Jeriko One to be properly investigated: unrestricted direct knowledge versus vicarious prurience. The mise-en-abîme is there too, whereby we are watching a film in which characters are watching films, and the film is both the medium and the content of itself. This may seem a million miles away from Philostratus, but G. neatly brings the argument back to where it started and links the two: ‘Strange Days and its high-tech version of the Sirens’ song provide an engagement with aesthetic experience that shares the thrust and sophistication of Philostratus’ ekphraseis’ (270).
This is a book which is itself full of ‘thrust and sophistication’ and anyone reading it will learn a huge amount in areas where classicists’ feet do not commonly tread. All quotations are rendered into excellent English and I spotted no typographical errors at all. The book is lavishly illustrated and produced and manages to make old ideas new and exciting, giving us a reading of aesthetic philosophy which is accessible and highly enjoyable. A triumph.
John Godwin