Luckily, at those very points where theoreticians are incapable of telling us what hypotyposis is, they are nearly always able to provide us with magnificent examples of it. The first three come from Quintilian (Institutio Oratoria, 8.3.63–69). His first one quotes a line from the Aeneid(5.426) where two boxers “stood up instantly erect on the tips of their toes.” The second quotes Cicero’s Verrine Orations (5.33.86): “He stood on the shore, wearing sandals, with a red pallium and a long tunic down to his feet, leaning on a vulgar little woman, he, the praetor of the Roman people,” and Quintilian wonders if there is anyone so devoid of imagination as not to be able to visualize this scene and its protagonists, and even more than is said, to see their faces and eyes and their obscene caresses, and the uneasiness of the onlookers. The third example, also from Cicero, is a fragment of his speech for Q. Gallius, and refers to a dissolute symposium: “I seemed to see people going in and coming out, some staggering in drunkenness, others yawning from the drunken excess of the day before. The floor was filthy, spattered with wine, and covered with garlands of faded flowers and fish bones.”
His fourth example goes like this: “Undoubtedly, in fact, whoever says ‘a city has been captured,’ associates with that phrase the idea of all the horrors that such a calamity usually entails, but this kind of concise statement does not arouse profound emotion. If instead the concepts contained in a single word have the chance to expand, they will set before you flames spreading through houses and temples, the roar of crashing buildings and the indistinct uniform rumble produced by various sounds, the uncertain flight of some people, the last desperate embraces of others, the howling of infants and women, and the old people who have remained alive, unluckily for them, until that day; and then the devastation of things both sacred and profane, the milling around of those carrying off booty and coming back for more, and the prisoners, in chains, being pushed along, each one by his own torturer, and the mother trying not to let her child be taken away from her, and the struggle among the victors…”
Similarly, Dumarsais suggests the following extract from Racine’s Phèdre as an example of hypotyposis:
Cependant sur le dos de la plaine liquide
S’élève à gros bouillons une montagne humide;
L’onde approche, se brise, et vomit à nos yeux,
Parmi des flots d’écume, un monstre furieux.
Son front large est armé de cornes menaçantes;
Tout son corps est couvert d’écaillés jaunissantes;
Indomptable taureau, dragon impétueux,
Sa croupe se recourbe en replis tortueux…
Meanwhile on the surface of the ocean’s plains
A watery mountain arises amidst great froth;
The wave approaches, breaks,
and spews forth before our eyes,
Amidst the spray of foam, a furious monster;
Its broad forehead is armed with menacing horns,
All his body is covered with yellowish scales; This indomitable bull, this aggressive dragon, Has a croup that curves round in tortuous curls…
If we consider the four examples from Quintilian, we see that in the first all that is mentioned is a physical posture (and the reader is invited, as it were, to imagine the scene). The second describes a pose with a certain amount of spite; the solemnity of the red pallium is set against the vulgarity of that little woman ^ muliercula ‘), leading the addressee to notice this clash. In the third passage what makes the description interesting is not only its greater precision and length but the unpleasantness of the things described (we must not forget that in the classical art of memory a monstrous or terrible image had more chance of being remembered by the speaker and therefore of being evoked at the right moment). The fourth example is not a specific instance, but it suggests what a detailed and moving description of an extended sequence of actions might be like, and I deliberately describe the dramatic sequence of these actions as if I were discussing a cinematic sequence.
In the case of the Racine passage we have something even more complex: the description of various phases of a natural event, but with continuous zoomorphic transformation of each of the wavy forms that are listed. It is difficult to resist the temptation, or the habit, of imagining them visually. It might seem irreverent to cite Walt Disney and Snow White’s flight into the woods (though this irreverence would be lessened if we supposed that Walt Disney had poetic procedures of this very type in mind), but in reality both Racine and Walt Disney are simply following one of the most natural tendencies in human beings, namely, giving substance to shadows, or, rather, seeing threatening, animal forms in the shapeless darkness of nature in turmoil (and in this context Parret rightly sees hypotyposis as one of the figures that leads to the production of the sublime).
What I think we can say, however, is that in these examples we are faced with differing descriptive and narrative techniques, which have in common only the fact that the addressee draws a visual impression from them (if he wants to—in other words, if he wants to collaborate with the text). This means I can therefore say that hypotyposis does not exist as a specific rhetorical figure. Language allows us to describe faces, forms, positions, “scenes,” and sequences of action, and it allows us to do this continually in everyday life (otherwise we could not even say, “Could you please go to the hardware store and get me something that looks like this”); all the more so, then, does it encourage us to do this for artistic reasons. However, it allows this to happen by way of a multiplicity of techniques, which are not reducible to a formula or rule, as can be the case with real tropes and rhetorical figures like synecdoche, hyperbaton, zeugma, and even—to some extent—metaphor.
All we need to do then is to proceed to a typology of techniques for representing or evoking space. Except that at this point we really need to ask ourselves what is meant by space—and we cannot avoid asking ourselves an analogous question about time.
There is Newtonian space and time, which exist as absolute entities, and Kantian space and time, which exist as pure intuitions and conditions that are a priori of experience. There is the Bergsonian contrast between clock time and the time of internal duration, and there is the measurable space of Cartesian geometry and the lived space of phenomenology. It is not a question of privileging one or the other, since language always allows us to speak of these things, and we can say without difficulty how many millions of miles we need to travel to reach Alpha Centauri or to make us undergo (or, rather, suffer) an interminable journey between Florence and Fiesole, not to mention a voyage around one’s own room (in Tristram Shandy the discussion between two characters coming down a staircase takes up three chapters).
If we wanted to rewrite Lessing’s Laocoon today (after the invention of new mimetic techniques like cinema), we would have to ask ourselves if a division between temporal arts and spatial arts still makes sense, and—if we regard such a division as still valid—ask how spatial arts can represent time and temporal arts represent space.
In the meantime, there can still be many reflections on how spatial arts represent space. The classic example of this is perspective, where a two-dimensional physical surface produces threedimensionality as its proper content, and where a minimal portion of representational surface can express a vast expanse of space: this is realized by anyone who, after long contemplation of it in various reproductions, finally sees Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation in the Ducal Palace at Urbino and is amazed at how such a small frame can contain what is perceived to be such a vast space.
I have dealt with the question as to how the arts of space represent time, or actually imply the time of their own contemplation, elsewhere. * Phenomenology is vast and requires first and foremost an analysis of the various relations between what Genette calls signifying spatiality and signified spatiality (and which for reasons that will become clear later I would prefer to refer to as spatiality of expression and spatiality of content). There are paintings that suggest a sort of freezing of the moment, like the Annunciation by Lotto, where Mary’s gesture of surprise is caught in the moment a cat darts across the room, or the slash by Lucio
