LILACH LACHMAN

TIME, SPACE, AND ILLUSION: BETWEEN KEATS AND POUSSIN

HOW SHOULD WE INTERPRET the inscription "Et in arcadia ego" ("I, too, have lived in Arcadia") discovered by Poussin’s Arcadian shepherds? Does the "I" refer to a dead shepherd speaking from the past, or to "death himself speaking ominously in the eternal present," as Erwin Panofsky has suggested?  In either case, the voice evoked by the funeral inscription speaks of a world to which the participants in Poussin’s pastoral—and those viewing the painting—no longer have a vital relation. In this respect, "Et in arcadia ego" seems to pay its dues to history rather than address our sense of the present. At the same time, the inscription draws attention to the gap between the voice from the grave and its "hearing" by both the Arcadian shepherds and those beholding the painting. Friendship and love amid radiant scenery contrast with the elegiac remembrance of one who has left these joys forever. Accordingly, "I, too, have lived in Arcadia" makes sense, as Louis Marin implies, only inasmuch as it is mediated by our own ravishing of a tomb and a dead language, the Latin Et in Arcadia Ego. Moreover, the act of deciphering the inscription via the double gaze directed by Poussin toward Arcadia—that of the Arcadian shepherds and our contemplation of them—becomes the focus of the painting. The enigma of Arcadia thus stages itself multiply both spatially and temporally.

This means that the inscription "I, too, have lived in Arcadia" invokes ("quotes") an original context that cannot be reproduced either in painting or in writing. Although all such quoting of the past for the purpose of re-presentation entails the displacement of context and perspective, when it also involves a transfer from one medium into another, the effects of the displacement are often more radical. Such is the case both with Poussin’s painting "Et in Arcadia Ego" and Keats’s famous paradigm of ekphrasis, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," which involves transfer in the opposite direction: from visual to verbal art.

Both works frame a classical act of communication within another in another medium. Moreover, these acts are both framed by the classical convention in which an epigram is inscribed upon an art work in order to encourage the viewer to project into that work a speaking object.  By virtue of the transfer from one frame to the other they invoke both the natural silence of the picture/urn and the utterance of the object parlant (through the quoted inscription and the quoted epigram, respectively). This dual effect stimulates inquiry into the identity of what is seen and also draws attention to the signaling activity, which itself differentiates the object from the medium. The mediated re-presentation thus foregrounded, by both artists, provokes a charged interplay between the aesthetic pursuer and the untamed or unnaturalized object of interrogation. In Keats, this effect seems to me the more extreme. Not only, as several critics have pointed out, does his poem represent a composite drawn from various sources, but also, as I shall argue here, one of his models is Poussin’s allusive paintings.  As an ekphrastic remaker who alludes to another interart transfer, Keats must unfold a third-order representation of the re-presentation that the visual artist has already incorporated into his own medium.

More generally, this interplay with the signs of the “other” quoted medium raises the question of the role of the interart traffic: Is ekphrasis a form of mimesis in line with Horace’s maxim ut pictura poesis?  Or is the image/word transfer an intersection that allows multilevel play between the visual and the verbal? Tamar Yacobi has made this argument on a wide front,  and I would oppose, as she does, the current tendency in the study of ekphrasis to limit the issue to mimetic representation, although I argue from a somewhat different perspective and corpus. The aesthetic variations on the word-image conflict—my subject here—go back to Lessing’s semiotic distinctions and their analysis by Meir Sternberg. Challenging the encounters of contemporary theory with the Laocoon, Sternberg re-contextualizes Lessing’s bifurcation of the mimetic art into the spatial and temporal by reference to the underlying common ends “beauty” and “illusion.”  His argument that Lessing’s illusionism in the Laocoon is governed by purely semiotic terms draws new attention to the role of the medium and to diverse modes of representation that can be deployed to achieve this purpose. As I will demonstrate in what follows, these modes, which pertain to any sign-system, also serve to draw aesthetic distinctions among works, artists’ poetic worlds, and even cultural eras. Thus, reading Poussin in the light of Lessing rather than in terms of the underlying assumptions of seventeenth-century art, the way traditional historical criticism has tended to read him, will reveal some important aesthetic and cultural differences between his work and that of Keats.