- Lists. This is a technique that undoubtedly leads to the evocation of spatial images without establishing priorities. Three examples: one classical, or at least from late Latin, and two modern. Here is the description of the city of Narbonne in Sidonius Apollinaris:
Salve Narbo, potens salubritate,
Urbe et rure simul bonus videri,
Muris, civibus, ambitu, tabernis,
Portis, porticibus, foro, theatro,
Delubris, capitoliis, monetis,
Thermis, arcubus, horreis, macellis,
Pratis, fontibus, insulis, salinis,
Stagnis, flumine, merce, ponte, ponto;
Unus qui venerere iure divos Leneum, Cererem,
Palem, Minervam Spicis, palmite, pascuis, trapetis.
Hail, Narbonne, famous for your healthy air,
Both your town and your countryside are good to see,
As are your walls, citizens, periphery, shops,
Harbor, colonnades, forum, theater,
Shrines, capitols, banks,
Baths, arches, granaries, butchers,
Meadows, fountains, islands, salt flats,
Pools, river, merchandise, bridge, and sea;
The only town that can rightly worship the gods
Bacchus, Ceres, Pales, Minerva,
With your vine sprigs, corn ears,
pasture land, and olive presses.
And here is a single paragraph from the description of the drawers in Leopold Bloom’s kitchen, in the penultimate chapter of Ulysses:
What did the first drawer unlocked contain?
A Vere Foster’s handwriting copybook, property of Milly (Millicent) Bloom, certain pages of which bore diagram drawings, marked Papli, which showed a large globular head with 5 hairs erect, 2 eyes in profile, the trunk full front with 3 large buttons, 1 triangular foot: 2 fading photographs of queen Alexandra of England and of Maud Branscombe, actress and professional beauty: a Yuletide card, bearing on it a pictorial representation of a parasitic plant, the legend Mizpah, the date Xmas 1892, the name of the senders: from Mr + Mrs M. Comerford, the versicle: May this Yuletide bring to thee, Joy and peace and welcome glee: a butt of red partly liquefied sealing wax, obtained from the stores department of Messrs Hely’s, Ltd., 89, 90, and 91 Dame Street: a box containing the remainder of a gross of gilt “J” pennibs, obtained from same department of same firm: an old sandglass which rolled containing sand which rolled: a sealed prophecy (never unsealed) written by Leopold Bloom in 1886 concerning the consequences of the passing into law of William Ewart Gladstone’s Home Rule bill of 1886 (never passed into law): a bazaar ticket, no 2004, of St. Kevin’s Charity Fair, price 6d, 100 prizes…
And in this case the list continues for page after page. If we can say about the Narbonne passage that the presentation of architectural elements acts as a cinematic panning shot suggesting a shape (today we would say it suggests at least a skyline), for Joyce all that matters is the gargantuan abundance of irrelevant objects that opens up its unfathomable depths before our eyes, the labyrinthine richness of that drawer. Let us look at the description of another drawer, this one belonging to the old aunt in the “Othys” chapter of Nerval’s Sylvie:
She rummaged once more in the drawers. What delights! How everything smelled good, how all the bits and pieces shone and shimmered with lively colors! Two slightly damaged mother of pearl fans, Chinese porcelain boxes, an amber necklace and a thousand frills, among which shone out two little white woollen shoes with buckles encrusted with Irish diamonds.
We certainly see shining in the drawer those nice things of terrible taste that enchant the two young visitors, and we see them because priorities stand out—that is to say that some objects are emphasized at the expense of others. But then why do we also see Bloom’s drawer, where no article has a privileged role? I would answer that Nerval wants us to see what is in the drawer, whereas Joyce wants us to see the unfathomability of the drawer. I do not know whether the reader manages to see Bloom’s drawer better than Robbe-Grillet’s pier, seeing that both are devoid of priorities. We can say, however, that Robbe-Grillet puts together objects that in themselves are not surprising, like a pier, a parapet, some surfaces and lines, whereas Joyce puts together things that are mutually incongruous and for that very reason surprising and unexpected. In some way (I presume) the reader has to prioritize a disordered ensemble of objects, or make some choices (perhaps by focusing on the sandglass), and by doing so collaborates in the task of making mental images.
- Accumulation. Another technique (which was already suggested by Quintilian’s third example) is the excited accumulation of events. The events have to be either incongruous or extraordinary. Naturally elements of rhythm intervene, and this is why the following hypotyposis from Rabelais (Gargantua 1.27) lets us visualize the scene (whereas we would not be able to see the scene from a procedure that was merely one of listing, as in the wonderfully amusing list of “balls” in 111.26 and 28, which is more enjoyable in phonic than in visual terms):
With one lot he spilled their brains, with others he broke their arms and legs, and with a third he dislocated the neck bones, split their kidneys, slit their nose, burst their eyes, battered their jaws, shoved their teeth down their throats, shattered their shoulder blades, splintered their legs, dislocated their thigh bones, and plucked their limbs from their trunks.
If any tried to hide among the thicker vine leaves, he broke the whole ridge of their back, breaking their spine like a dog’s.
If others tried to run and escape, he knocked his head away in pieces shattering his lamboidal joint. If any tried to climb up a tree, thinking he was safe, he impaled him through the arse with his stick […]. Others he would stab beneath the ribs, wrecking their stomachs, and they died on the spot. Others he struck so fiercely on the navel that their tripes spilled out. And with others he pierced their bum-gut through their balls. It was, you must believe, the most gruesome spectacle ever seen […]. Some died without speaking, others spoke without dying; and some died speaking, and spoke dying.
- Description appealing to the addressee’s personal experience. This technique requires that the addressee bring to the discourse something he has already seen and suffered. This activates not only preexisting cognitive schemes but also preexisting bodily experiences. I would suggest as a key example one of the many passages in Abbott’s Flatland:
Place a penny in the middle of one of your tables in Space; and leaning over it, look down upon it. It will appear a circle.
But now, drawing back to the edge of the table, gradually lower your eye (thus bringing yourself more and more into the condition of the inhabitants of Flatland), and you will find the penny becoming more and more oval to your view; and at last when you have placed your eye exactly on the edge of the table (so that you are, as it were, actually a Flatland citizen) the penny will then have ceased to appear oval at all, and will have become, so far as you can see, a straight line.
Part of this technique involves the evocation of interoceptive and proprioceptive experiences on the part of the addressee. In other words, it makes the reader recall experiences in which he has suffered the effort of proceeding through a space. On this topic I would like to cite these two lines from Blaise Cendrars’s Prose du transsibérien (by the way, this is a text that, since it has to describe a very long journey, uses many of the techniques I have already defined, from the list to minute description). At a certain point Cendrars reminds us that
Toutes les femmes que j’ai rencontrées se dressent aux horizons Avec les gestes piteux et les regards tristes des’sémaphores sous la pluie…
(All the women I have met rise up on the horizons With the piteous gestures and sad looks of signals in the rain…)
If we bear in mind that in French “sémaphores” are not our city traffic signals (which in French are “feux rouges”) but rather signals along the railroad tracks, those who have experienced trains proceeding slowly on misty nights will be able to evoke these ghostly shapes that slowly disappear in the drizzle, as though fading away, while one looks out of the window at the countryside immersed in darkness following the panting rhythm of the carriages (that carioca rhythm evoked by Montale in “Addii, fischi nelbuio”).
The interesting problem is, rather, how much these lines can be appreciated by those born in the age of high-speed trains, with their hermetically sealed windows (for which there is no longer even the trilingual notice banning us from leaning out). How does one react to a hypotyposis that summons up the memory of something that has never been seen? I should say the answer is by pretending to have seen it, and on the basis of the elements that the hypotyposic expression supplies us with. The two lines appear in a context that mentions a train traveling for days and days across endless plains, the signals (specifically named) in some way remind us of eyes twinkling in the dark, and the allusion to horizons makes us imagine them lost in a distance that the train’s movement can only magnify second by second….In any case, even those who only know today’s express trains have seen through the window lights disappearing into the night. And suddenly the experience we have to remember becomes tentatively outlined: the hypotyposis can also create the memory it needs for it to work.
On the other hand, if it is actually true that those who have experienced their first kiss can easily savor a line like Dante’s “la bocca mi baciò tutto tremante” (he kissed me on
