The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
In this case, if the human traveler is moving too fast to realize what the walls and corners of the streets of London are like, the reader is asked to imagine at what speed fog might travel. This involves slowing down our pace, as it were, while reading, and following every crevice in the wall and edge of the window—exactly as would happen if we were asked to imagine how an ant travels through the curves of a fraction of space that we can cover, in an instant, with the sole of our foot.
It is not my intention to exhaust within the limits of such a brief paper the inexhaustible typologies of hypotyposis. I will suggest only some directions for research.
The different techniques of focalization could be analyzed. For instance, the excellent analysis by Joseph Frank of the agricultural fair and speeches in Madame Bovary, which he carried out in a genuinely pre-semiotic age, should be reread: the three levels of the square, the stage and the room are set up live, as it were, that is to say in a Griffith-style parallel montage, creating a visual effect through this emphasis on simultaneous speeches. * One would have to refer, of course, to the two battles of Waterloo, Stendhal’s (seen by a protagonist, Fabrizio del Dongo, who is inside it, and who gets lost in the space he crosses haphazardly, while he loses the sense of the global space of the battle), and the one in Les Misérables, seen from on high by an omniscient Hugo, who analyzes the spaces Napoléon does not see. Elsewhere† I have spoken of the different points of view that gradually create the space in Manzoni’s “Quel ramo del lago di Como” (That stretch of Lake Como)—where idiosyncratic syntax corroborates the play of points of view. It would be worthwhile following step by step the vision of the three trees during the carriage ride in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur, in order to grasp a double phenomenon: a successive shifting of point of view and the interspersing of spatial description with other reflections that take time (in reading) and space (in writing) in order to make the sense of a journey real, and justify the slow, progressive change of visual angle.
We could continue, but it is worthwhile trying to say something in conclusion about what links these different manifestations of hypotyposis. We have already alluded to this at various stages, and all we need to do now is pull the threads together. Hypotyposis is not based on a semantic rule, as happens with tropes and rhetorical figures, a rule whereby—if you disregard it—you do not understand what is being said. When metonymy uses the container to stand for the content (“let’s drink a glass”), if the addressee ignores the rule, he (pedantically) assumes that he is being invited to sip a solid object. If in using a simile or metaphor someone says that a girl is a little deer, an obtuse person who ignores the rule will note with amazement that the person named is not a quadruped, nor has she horns on her forehead. But on the whole these misunderstandings do not take place, except in comic or surreal stories.
When, however, one is faced with any of the instances of hypotyposis cited up till now, the addressee can easily avoid collaborating and visualizing. He can merely grasp that he is being told that a city is being sacked, that a drawer is full of knickknacks, or that a certain Friar John was a giant-killer. We have even insinuated that in the case of Robbe-Grillet the reader can refuse, indeed may have to refuse, to see anything precise, because the author probably wanted to stimulate this refusal to activate an excess of visuals.
Hypotyposis is, then, a semantic-pragmatic phenomenon (besides, inasmuch as it is a figure of thought, like irony and similar figures, it requires complex textual strategies and can never be exemplified through brief quotations or formulas) and is a prime example of interpretative cooperation. It is not so much a representation as a technique for eliciting an effort to compose a visual representation (on the reader’s part).
And indeed, why should we think that words “allow us to see,” when they were invented precisely to speak of what is not before our eyes and what cannot be pointed at with a finger? The most words can do (since they produce emotional effects) is to lead us to imagine.
Hypotyposis uses words to make the addressee construct a visual representation. The proof of this is the kind of problems that arise in that exercise which is the opposite of ekphrasis (which is a verbal description of an image), and is the “translation,” or visual materialization of what a verbal text allowed us to imagine. Let us go back to the description from Revelation I cited previously. The real problem for all the Mozarabic miniaturists (the illustrators of those splendid commentaries on Revelation known as the “Beati”) was that of representing the four living creatures who are above and around the throne (in the Vulgate, which was the only version known to the illuminators, ” super thronum et circa thronum”). How can these creatures be above and around the throne at the same time?
An examination of the solutions offered by the various “Beati” shows us how impossible the enterprise is, and gives rise to representations that do not “translate” the text satisfactorily. And this is because the miniaturists, having grown up using the Greco-Christian translation, thought that the prophet “saw” something similar to statues or paintings. But the culture of John the Apostle, like that of Ezekiel, from whose vision John drew inspiration, was a Hebraic culture, and moreover his was the imagination of a seer. Consequently, John was not describing pictures (or statues), but, if anything, dreams, and, if you like, films (those moving pictures that allow us to daydream, or in other words, visions adapted for the layman’s state). In a vision that was cinematic in nature, the four creatures can rotate and appear at one moment above and before the throne, at another around it.*
But in this sense the Mozarabic miniaturist could not collaborate with the text, and in some sense, in his hands and in his mind, the hypotyposis failed to work. Proof therefore that there is no hypotyposis if the addressee does not play the game.
Version of a paper given at the Centro di Studi Semiotici e Cognitivi at the University of San Marino on 29 September 1996, during a conference on the semiotics of space. I began my paper with a reference to Sandra Cavicciolis article “I sensi, lo spazio, gli umori. Micro-analisi di In the Orchard di Virginia Woolf (in VS 57 [1990]), one of the finest analyses of space in literature. On that occasion the author was present in the room. Now that she is no longer with us, I would like to dedicate these reflections to her.
THE FLAWS IN THE FORM
I would like to reread a page from Luigi Pareysons Aesthetics;* actually, it is less than a page, just a few lines from subsection 10 of the third section (“The Parts and the Whole”) of chapter 3 (“Completeness of the Work of Art”). Subsection 10 is entitled “The essential nature of each part: structure, stopgaps, imperfections.”
We know that one of the central preoccupations of Pareyson’s Aesthetics was its polemic against Croce’s idealism and against its most deleterious consequences in militant criticism. He aimed at reclaiming the character of totality in artistic form, and therefore refused to pick out in the work sporadic moments of “poetry,” like flowers growing among the (however functional) brushwood of simple “structure.” It is not really necessary, but it is useful to remind ourselves that “structure” in those days, and particularly in Italy, was something to avoid; it meant scaffolding, mechanical artifice that had nothing to do with moments of lyrical intuition, and at most stood out in a Hegelian sense as a negative impulse, as conceptual residue, which at best served to let the moments of poetry shine like individual jewels.
In his notes to the chapter Pareyson refers to Luigi Russo as a cautious champion of the “nonextraneity of structure in art,” but the latter author (though he recognizes that there is a structure that is not pre-poetic, not a mere frame or skeleton on which to insert later poetic flowers, and sees structure “as though generated by the interior of the mind that has been moved to poetry”) cannot avoid conceding that the mind so moved “catches its breath and
