Assia Djebar's Musical Ekphrasis

The trope or genre of ekphrasis is conventionally understood as the verbal representation of visual representation.¹ However, critics such as Mack Smith² and Siglind Bruhn³ have recently argued that verbal representations of music or musical representations of both visual and verbal art may also be considered ekphrastic. Ekphrasis exposes the mutability of forms since, by definition, it is the expression of one form of representation in terms of another. Any form that is expressed in terms of another always sweeps elements of its former composition along with it even as it is itself substantially transformed. In this sense, ekphrasis always involves an "exchange" or what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would describe as a double movement of "deterritorialization."⁴ Deleuze and Guattari argue that music in particular has the capacity to unhinge the overly stratified connection between voice and language, enabling the voice to perform outside the confines of any conventional or dominant grammar, idiom, or form, with implications that extend beyond generic transgression (371).⁵

This essay will examine some of the links between the notion of musical ekphrasis and Deleuze and Guattari's theory of deterritorialization in relation to the work of Algerian writer Assia Djebar. In numerous texts, but especially in L'Amour, la fantasia, Djebar utilizes ekphrastic features as a way of negotiating the problematics of the encounter between France and Algeria. Djebar's turn to musical form deterritorializes the objectifying power of French history and language by refusing to follow the conventional logic of sense upon which the efficacy of such power depends. By listening to texts that normally solicit visual responses—namely, documents, letters, autobiographical accounts, and paintings—Djebar is able to pick up otherwise indiscernible sounds of struggle, resistance, fear, fascination, and even love. As we shall see, Djebar constructs musical ekphrases to formally register the conjunctions and disjunctions that characterize relationships of exchange between positions that seem to be irreversibly opposed.⁶ As a musical ekphrasis, L'Amour, la fantasia textually traces the often paradoxical double movement that can occur between aesthetic forms and genres and, by extension, between languages, between histories, between a written/visual culture and an oral one, and between the sexes. By scrambling the codified alignment of particular aesthetic forms with specific senses, Djebar's ekphrases not only contest the structure of power these alignments legitimate ideologically; in addition, her textual transmutations express the potential for such rigidly structured sense—including colonial sense, patriarchal sense, and traditionalist sense—to become deterritorialized.

Why Ekphrasis?

Assia Djebar is not the only postcolonial writer to feature musical ekphrasis as a key structural and thematic component of her writing. A number of recent novelists—including Hanif Kureishi in The Black Album, Hanan al-Shaykh in Beirut Blues, Vikram Seth in An Equal Music, Salman Rushdie in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and Yasmin Zahran in A Beggar at Damascus Gate—have also utilized musical ekphrasis as a form through which to articulate, among other things, the inevitable entanglements and exchanges that occur between lovers, languages, cultures, and histories.⁷ The obvious question this undeniable postcolonial tendency forces us to ask is: Why ekphrasis?

The actual practice of ekphrasis can be traced back as far as the eighth century B.C.E. to Homer's description of Achilles' shield in the Iliad. Unlike later ekphrastic practice, early examples such as Homer's were not limited to poetic descriptions of sculpture or paintings but included a wide range of objects (Mitchell 165). The more restricted sense of ekphrasis as a verbal representation of visual representation does not become standard until the fourth century C.E. at the earliest. From this later perspective, ekphrasis brings together the sister arts of painting and poetry, transgressing generic boundaries, even as its existence ultimately relies upon the material distinctions between the two forms.

G.E. Lessing's take on the sister arts in his 1766 Laokoon is often cited as the aesthetic position ekphrasis fundamentally undermines. Against the slippery correspondence between the sister arts that had come to dominate artistic practice by the eighteenth century, Lessing argues that each...