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  • A Minor Form and Its Inversions: The Image, the Poem, the Book in Celan’s “Unter ein Bild” 1
  • Timothy Bahti (bio)

There is perhaps no form more minor in today’s culture of literacy than that of the lyric poem. In our mass culture the lyrics of popular music have absorbed all sense and status of “the lyric,” while graffiti are more regularly and widely read than any printed poems. In our university culture, where methods are deployed and ideological purposes invoked for the study of social representations, histories, genders, and powers, the little genre of the lyric is—as if mixed up with all its very reliance on mere metaphors—the odd man out, the poor stepchild, the black sheep, small potatoes indeed.

What is the case for the lyric is even more so for some of its subforms, old, arcane, and physically small as they are: ekphrasis and the emblem-poem. Although both subforms have an illustrious past—ekphrasis may be co-present at the beginning of Western literature, and may present its most cosmic ambitions, while the emblem once partook of universalizing moral and representational claims—the one can hardly be spelled today, while the other is more likely to be understood in its derivative sense of a symbolic or typical epitomization. Perhaps the most celebrated act of literary ekphrasis in recent times did not even call itself such, nor was it in verse: Foucault’s introduction to Les Mots et les choses, on Velázquez’s Las Meninas. [End Page 565]

This article will not draw out the length of the “minor form” of lyric ekphrasis, which in German literature would include such remarkable examples as Mörike’s “Auf eine Lampe” and Rilke’s “Archaïscher Torso Apollos.” Nor will it retrace the historical depth and breadth of the literary emblem, especially during the European Renaissance and the German baroque.2 Rather, its purpose is to take one instance of lyric ekphrasis, which in its relation to its art-object is also structured as an emblem, and which in its dimensions is altogether minor, and to demonstrate its inversions: from above to underneath, from seeing to reading, from ending to beginning, from sensuousness to the apocalyptic—from the minuscule poem to the cosmic book. In the course of such a demonstration, a plaidoyer will also be presented for the major stakes and accomplishments and status of the minor.

“. . . when the light of sense / Goes out”

—Wordsworth, The Prelude

Celan’s poem “Unter ein Bild” (I,155) 3 is an ekphrasis—the verbal representation of a visual work of art—of Van Gogh’s “Crows Over Wheatfields,” and as such an ekphrasis, it appeals at once to last works—the painting is thought to be one of Van Gogh’s last, if not the last—and to first: in the founding work of our Western literary tradition, Homer’s Iliad, the famous ekphrasis of the shield of Achilles (Book XVIII) introduces not only the subtradition of ekphrastic writing, but in the same gesture the cosmic reach of Western art—for the literary representation of the imagined shield’s visual representation [End Page 566] portrays a concentrically and cosmically ordered series of worlds—and the representational device of the mise-en-abîme (for the representations on the shield re-present in miniature the whole of the story of the text, the Iliad, that contains them). These founding features of Western ekphrasis should be recalled here because Celan’s ekphrasis is, for all its brevity, no less grand in its reach and scope. All of four verses long, “Unter ein Bild”‘s title should be treated as a fifth, or first, line, for it both sets up and as quickly upsets the specific convention of ekphrastic writing that the poem employs. This is the convention of the emblem, especially popular during the baroque period, in which a visual image is combined with its (literally and visually subordinate) verbal naming, elaboration, commentary—its verbal re-presentation—according to several regular steps. 4 The image comes first (known as the pictura), followed by the title or sometimes a motto (the inscriptio), followed in turn by a caption—or...

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