Ekphrasis and Lamination in Byatt's Babel Tower

A. S. Byatt scatters narrative episodes and meta-artistic themes across a wide canvas in Babel Tower (1996), inventing and framing texts while juxtaposing literary and pictorial language. Backed by inset narrative of La Tour Bruyarde, Babel symbolizes a postmodern condition in which discursive systems and artistic media clash and compete. A dystopian narrative accompanies theme of disjunction in language, society, and arts. Byatt foresaw that novel would be cracking-up of and tearing-loose of from world... [and would] move much more into different areas of visual as a kind of paradigm (qtd. in Campbell 232). Within an intergeneric framework of texts and images, legal, social, and historical discourses mingle, while discordant voices and opinions disrupt any notion of unity. In this hybrid text, as in life of its protagonist, Frederica Potter, everything remains in flux, including volatile relations of writing and painting. To bring these issues into focus and clarify relations between and art, I will compare textual strategy ofLamination, or layering of narrative and intertextual panels, with overpainting, erasure of brushstrokes with assimilation of traces. Simonides' famous dictum, is mute poetry and poetry a speaking picture, implies that ekphrasis narrativizes or interprets silent art. Leonardo da Vinci gave primacy to painting because of its sensory immediacy and G. E. Lessing to literature because epic poetry dramatizes action, but for Walter Pater [all] constantly aspires towards condition of music (129). For Murray Krieger, modernism [sees] verbal arts ascend to status of model--in center and facing both ways, toward plastic arts and toward music, and absorbing both ends into themselves (206). W. J. T. Mitchell sees arts as rivaling each other in a contest or paragone that asserts their distinct qualities (Iconology 4749). While words refer to objects through signs, visual arts present images to senses. James A. W. Heffernan defines ekphrasis as the verbal representation of visual representation, underlining its relation to artworks rather than natural objects (Museum 1, 3). John Hollander distinguishes actual ekphrasis from notional ekphrasis, the verbal representation of a purely fictional work of art (4). Pictorialism transposes pictorial styles into words, generat[ing] in effects similar to those created by pictures (Heffernan 3, emphasis added). In first four novels of Potter series, Byatt engages with art, giving actual ekphrases of numerous Van Gogh paintings in Still Life (1985) and notional descriptions of imaginary works in Babel Tower. Byatt said in an interview that almost all writers who write about painting write about it as though it was narrative or at least poetry, yet what I like about it is that element in visual which completely defeats language (17). She cites Patrick Heron's claim that [p]ainting ... is a materialist art, about material world--a claim that privileges sensation, whereas [the] novel, however it aspires to specificity of Zola's naturalism, works inside head (Tonkin 17). Aware of radical otherness of optics, she points out that [v]isual images are stronger than verbal half-images, and a good novel exploits richness of imprecision, of hinted (Portraits 93). Words are an abstract medium, and sensory thickness of paint attracts writer. But aesthetic energy derived from painting must be diverted into verbal channels. Using color words substantively as well as adjectivally, juxtaposing them in series, and drawing a lexicon from paint-box are among Byatt's means of achieving sensory density. She cites Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth as full of colour-painterly descriptions of skies and flesh, brilliant writing about act of painting, a wonderful bravura display of perpetual recomposition of visual world into artwork (Portraits 70). …