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

an espousal of the Enlightenment and thus as appeal to overturn the unreason of a
reactionary Spain. 91 This ambivalence of the pictorial sign which defines the
Caprichos, and which is further heightened by its conflict with the various verbal
signs, mirrors a loss of orientation and meaning within Goya’s social and private
world. The early commentaries by Goya’s contemporaries can thus be seen as
attempts to stabilize the meaning of those images by drawing on traditional
emblematic or symbolic structures of signification (cf. Schlünder 100).
Describing and defining the grotesque images of Goya’s fantasy, these
commentaries also aim not only at an understanding of the images themselves, but
also of the social reality that produced them.
Twentieth century literary and cinematic responses to the Caprichos can,
in a way, be seen as a continuation of the tradition of these commentaries, that is,
as a continued attempt to define these images whose elusiveness and
indefiniteness frustrate and resist verbal definition and description. But what does
this mean for filmic ekphrasis? Will it have an advantage over literary ekphrasis
in providing visual as well as verbal commentary? Or do the Caprichos also defy
attempts to grasp it through dramatization and theatricalization? On the other
hand, would not a statement such as the one cited above that the Caprichos have
to be looked at and read imply that verbalizations of them are equal in status to
the visual images? What format do these responses take: do they attempt to talk
about the image, enter into dialog with it, or compete with it – and are different
types of responses equally successful in their intermedial transposition of El
91 See C. Christopher Soufas, “‘Esto sí que es leer’: Learning to Read Goya’s Caprichos,” Word
and Image 2 (1986): 311.
73