Copyright by Laura Mareike Sager 2006 - The University of Texas at ...

Likewise, in Kunert’s poem, the reader is both invited to adopt the
speaker’s perspective, but also a more distanced one towards the speaker at the
end. Through the use of deictic adverbs such as “da” and the descriptive parallel
structure of the beginning verses of most stanzas (e.g. “On the streets,” “In the
corners”), the reader takes on the same detached, observing perspective. But this
parallel structure also emphasizes the continuity between Goya’s capricho and the
ensuing capricho-like images of the poet’s mind. Moreover, when the poem ends
with the speaker identifying with Goya’s aquatint and putting himself in the
position of the awakening artist, the use of the ambiguous “Feder” and the
disjuncture between the lighthearted tone of this stanza and the rest of the poem
allows the reader a higher-level position from which he in turn can observe the
speaker’s blind spot, that is, his dream of superiority over the painter and the
demons oppressing him and society. Although the reader has a greater degree of
distance toward the speaker in Kunert’s poem than the viewer has toward the
protagonist in Buero’s drama and Saura’s film, all three texts play with the point
of view in similar ways, inviting both identification with and distance toward their
subjects.
I have discussed these three examples of dramatic ekphrasis to show how
a film can dramatize a visual image in similar ways as do literary texts. The
montage starts in all three examples with a glance of the image itself (a
description in the poem, a mise-en-scène tableau vivant in the drama and the
film), and then continues the painter’s “sueño” with a dream of the speaking
subject or the dramatic or filmic protagonist. The structure of the ekphrastic
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