Framing Lives as Paintings

Abstract

This article builds on the most recent work done on ekphrasis in contemporary fiction and explores its capacities to blur the boundary between visual art and life writing. Since ekphrasis can contest the border of the work of art, this article also draws from Derrida's notion of the parergon (1987). Ekphrasis is most commonly understood as the ‘verbal representation of a visual representation’ (Heffernan 1993), while the parergon captures the ambiguous, ‘ornamental’ frame that separates the artwork from the world beyond it. By focusing on Amy Sackville's Painter to the King (2018) and Laura Cumming's The Vanishing Man (2016), two books that use Diego Velázquez's painting Las Meninas (1656) to frame their life narratives, this article shows how ekphrasis can act as a discursive parergon that challenges the borders between art and life, fact and fiction, literature and painting, and inside and outside. These empathetic life narratives—of a Spanish painter and a Victorian bookseller respectively—emulate Velázquez's visual techniques and implicate the reader, who is turned into a quasi-eyewitness through ekphrasis, within their meaning-making structures. In both instances, the enchanting spell of Velázquez's painting is used to push these life narratives into the realm of the imagination.

Keywords:

• contemporary fiction
• life writing
• ekphrasis
• parergon
• frame
• gaze
• Las Meninas

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Amy Sackville, Laura Marcus and the Americanists at the University of Bern, including Gabriele Rippl, for their invaluable help with this article. My research and my visit to the Prado were kindly funded by the Berrow Foundation Scholarship and the Vivian Green Fund at Lincoln College, Oxford, respectively.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Before 1843, the painting was referred to by various other names, including “The Family”.

2 Both Sackville and Cumming have experimented with visual storytelling elsewhere: Sackville's novel Orkney (2013) is set on a Scottish island and is filled with colorful descriptions of the environment; Cumming's non-fictional On Chapel Sands (2019) relies on photography to tell her mother's childhood story. 

3 Cf. Gabriele Rippl's article for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (2019) for a more comprehensive overview on ekphrasis to date.

4 Needless to say, this article silently builds on numerous other preceding studies. Apart from research on frames, for example by Erving Goffman in the social sciences (1974), Mary Ann Caws in modern fiction (1985), and Werner Wolf and Walter Bernhart's in literature and other media (2006), implicit attempts to bring ekphrasis and the parergon have also been attempted (Heffernan 137; Brock 133-134; Milkova 160; Müller 201).

5 Strictly speaking, the narrator of the novel remains ungendered. There are various indicators, however, to interpret this narrative voice as a fictionalized version of the author herself.

6 Cf. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Laocoon (1766), from which the adjectives in this sentence are borrowed, for the first systematic comparisons of the sister arts.

7 Contemporary literature has indeed experienced a meteoric rise of genre-bending life narratives, especially of ‘autofiction’. Examples include Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy (2014-2018), Sheila Heti's Motherhood (2018), and Siri Hustvedt's Memories of the Future (2019).