“Language Cannot Do Everything”: Ekphrasis as a Strategy of Re-vision in Adrienne Rich’s Poetry

Year 2010, Issue: 31, 23 - 36, 01.04.2010

Marta Soares

Abstract

Images are, and always have been, a paradoxical source of fascination and anxiety. Throughout cultural history, the sensory effects and illusory presence of the visual have frequently led to idolatry, iconoclasm, and iconophobia. Depreciated by Plato as mere imitations of the real, images own nonetheless an immense irrational force, expressing what Régis Debray describes as the human need to overcome the fear of nothingness, “le néant” 15-43 . Ultimately powerful and attractive, images create the illusion that the visible is accessible and present; as Umberto Eco emphasizes, the “image possesses an irresistible force,” producing “an effect of reality, even when it is false” Wagner 30 .2 Although visual language has been with us since the onset of humanity, truth is that we are presently saturated with images, since ours is the era of the “image-world,” as Susan Sontag puts it, where pictures have an almost unlimited authority, threatening to replace reality and substitute firsthand experience 153-80 .

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