Collaborative Ekphrasis: An Exercise in Shared Perception for the Writing Classr
Collaborative Ekphrasis: An Exercise in Shared Perception for the Writing Classroom
Andrew David King
In the eighteenth book of the Iliad, after Hector has killed Patroclus and so spurred Achilles, Patroclus’s closest friend, back into battle, the epic’s eye turns from the give-and-take of warfare to the careful, considered description of an art object. Not just any art object, and to utilitarian observers no art object at all: replacement armor for Achilles (who had loaned Patroclus his own armor), lost it when Hector stripped it from Patroclus’s corpse. Thetis, Achilles’s mother, asks the divine blacksmith Hephaestus to craft a new set for her son in his grief. The god grants this. In doing so he transforms what in other circumstances, other epics, might have been a routine plot point into an immortal moment in the history of Greek poetry. For the shield he makes is unusual: in nine concentric circles it tells of ancient cosmology, of how the Greeks conceived the universe and life on earth. Homer dedicates hundreds of lines to the description of this shield, so that in coming to understand a matter of epic fact—how the shield that Hephaestus is crafting actually looks to the characters—we’re transported beyond fact and into rapturous communion with this fictive sculpture, as, we suppose, Thetis is in the very moments the shield is first shown to her.
An artwork within an artwork, a vision within a vision: the luxurious, if not decadent, description of Achilles’s new shield marks the emergence of the rhetorical technique of ekphrasis (the ancient Greek word for “description” from the prefix for “out of” and the verb “to tell”) in the Western canon. In the middle of the twentieth century, after countless instances of visual art and literature fused by writers attuned to language’s multisensory capacities, Western ekphrasis cycled back to its origins. In his poem “The Shield of Achilles,” W.H. Auden took up the role of Hephaestus, rewriting Homer’s passage—and resmithing the shield—so that scenes of antiquity’s Golden Age, themselves not entirely untroubled, were replaced with the hellscapes of the world wars.
This is old news to plenty of readers and writers. I recapitulate it because of my belief in the importance of history for contemporary writing pedagogy, and because there seem to me a few aspects of the Homeric passage that are telling but often overlooked. The one I want to focus on here is the way—well, one way—that the passage constructs the act of looking, which in this case is constituted by the interpretation and appreciation of art. The imagined shield that inspires Homer’s ekphrasis itself originates in the conjunction of two viewpoints and wills, those of Thetis and Hephaestus. The artwork’s qualities and powers are embedded, however complexly, in a social web rather than confined to a closed channel linking a single viewer, or narrator, to a single thing viewed. Thetis catalyzes the shield’s creation while Hephaestus conceives and