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  • Andreï Makine: l’ekphrasis dans son œuvre
  • Helena Duffy
Andreï Makine: l’ekphrasis dans son œuvre. Par Murielle Lucie Clément. (Collection monographique Rodopi en littérature française contemporaine, 54). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011. 158 pp.

Defined as a literary re-creation of visual art works, ekphrasis is a special type of intertextuality (a more general and recently more fashionable word). That this literary term as old as Homer’s Iliad, where it refers to the descriptions of the scenes depicted on Achilles’ shield, is making a comeback is evidenced by Murielle Lucie Clément’s study of Makine’s representations of images, both still (Part I) and moving (Part II), and music (Part III). Linking this contemporary Franco-Russian novelist’s ekphrastic writing to his bilingualism (for Clément, music and painting are ‘languages’), the author, a painter and musician herself, identifies several functions of ekphrasis, although the distinction between these is not always clear. The psychological function may consist in ‘une prise de conscience chez [le personnage]’ (p. 27), as illustrated by the impact of a picture showing a boa strangling an antelope on a heroine entangled in an incestuous and thus (at least in René Girard’s terms) violent relationship. By justifying a prostitute’s moral downfall, descriptions of photographs of her youth (child, husband, happy days) have a diegetic function. Additionally, such ekphrases allow Makine to navigate between his novels’ temporal planes or, like the propagandist documentary on the threat of nuclear war, to situate his narrative in a precise historico-political context. The structural role of ekphrasis is exemplified by the picture of a protagonist’s mother that opens and closes one of Makine’s novels, first representing an enigma and then offering the solution. Likewise, the description of the sailors’ song Iablotchko, whose opening line is ‘Little apple where do you turn?’, captures a protagonist’s drunken confusion. Finally, photographs of executed Nazi criminals illustrate the ontological function of ekphrasis: [End Page 127] the men’s closed eyes symbolize the heroine’s refusal to see her relationship’s transgressive nature. If classic ekphrasis celebrates the picture’s verisimilitude, its postmodern avatar highlights the discrepancy between representation and reality, as indeed do Makine’s descriptions of photographs validating a spy’s false identity or of French adventure films that offer a highly unrealistic portrait of the Hexagon. Of the book’s three parts, the one dealing with music is the least convincing, firstly because music is generally non-representational, and secondly because the term ‘musical ekphrasis’ usually relates to a composer’s efforts to portray extramusical realities and not to literary descriptions of musical compositions. (Clément’s awareness of this problem does not discourage her from examining passages both imitating and describing sounds.) Thirdly, although a priori organized like the first two parts, Part III appears as a collection of disjointed remarks concerning anything vaguely music-related, including a pianist whose career is ruined by Stalinism, or a military instructor’s voice that ‘sings praises’ of weapons. Overall, given Clément’s definition of ekphrasis as ‘la représentation verbale d’une représentation’ (p. 19), it would be more appropriate to speak here — and maybe also in Parts I and II — of intertextuality. It would also be worth noticing that, while testifying to the affinity of Makine’s writing to postmodern literature, its ekphrastic (or intertextual?) character is meant to contribute to the couleur locale of his novels, which systematically offer a simplified and stereotyped image of Russia.

Helena Duffy
Uniwersytet Wrocławski
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