The ekphrastic evocation of real-ity and the Modernist dismantling of pictorial frames in fiction

Resumen

This article suggests that modernist novelists abandoned the practice of using pictures or similar framed images to introduce elements unperceived in empirical reality, such as the impenetrability of a character, the inexorable pattern of destiny or the intervention of haunting ghosts. However, this does not mean that modernist novelists gave up the ekphrastic techniques of narrating those extraordinary aspects of reality that would challenge the credibility of their tales. What they did was to dismantle the frames around the significant object that would be described ekphrastically and placed it in the empirical reality of their fictional world. Objects thus presented are not simply passing images. They are charged with a powerfully dynamic significance that pervades the narrative entirely. They become like icons that allow for a visualisation of the narrative's core issue, the chief concern of the narrative, which - like Lacan's notion of the Real - otherwise escapes language and verbal representability.