Risa y penitencia - Luz Aurora Pimentel

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This triple nature of most ekphrastic texts—concrete, analytic, and narrative—is at thebasis of the different kinds of ekphrasis according to which function is the dominant one, andso, we have poetic, narrative, and critical ekphrasis. Ekphrasis, as the critical tradition hasnow well established, is not just a game of verbal ornamentation but a complex intermedialrelation that questions not only the notion of the text and its limits, but also the notion ofrepresentation itself. The ekphrastic text is often the embodiment of complex poetic ideas orthe vehicle for important symbolic and/or thematic meanings in narrative. Criticism has dealtwith these two modes intensively and extensively; one only has to think of the hundreds ofarticles written about Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn”, or the many studies on the narrativefunction and meaning of Gustave Moreau’s Salome paintings in Huysman’s A Rebours.Critical ekphrasis, by contrast, has received little attention; the assumption is that in essaysand studies on art history, the description of the object to be analysed and interpreted isfactual, “objective”—transitive, in short. Since critical ekphrasis places such a strongemphasis on the analytical aspects of description for its hermeneutic purposes, we assume it isthe plastic object, as such, that is being interpreted, whereas in fact—and this is my maincontention—what is interpreted is the analytic text itself, which is not a “replica” of theplastic object but an ideological grid producing a new semantic object: the verbalrepresentation constructed by means of a series of selections and exclusions that have beendetermined by the ideological principles and presuppositions of the writer.The Aztec goddess of life and death, Coatlicue, is a case in point. In JustinoFernández’ classic study, due to this art critic’s explicit intention to debunk the myth ofCoatlicue’s monstrosity and of the Aztecs’ irrationality, the goddess appears to the reader as ageometric, harmonious structure; a great work of art full of beauty and rationality. Bycontrast, in Octavio Paz’ essay on the same subject, as the poet’s project is to break theisolation of pre-Columbian cultures by integrating them to the modern cultural spectrum, the
earth goddess is revealed to us in all her surrealistic potential: a great work of modern art.And one cannot say that either scholar “falsifies” the image of Coatlicue; it is simply aquestion of perspective, of an ideological stance that leads to the selection and exclusion ofcertain details, to the foregrounding of certain aspects while leaving others in the background;that equally leads to the use of certain models of organization of the descriptive material at thebasis of their different hermeneutic project. So that, in the end, the reader is confronted by, atleast, two verbal Coatlicues, while in the material reality she continues to be the same singlesculpted block of stone. It is the eye—be it as gaze or glance (cf. Bryson 1983, 87-131)—thattransforms a plastic object into a text that may be read for meaning, and, therefore, the plasticobject turns into as many texts as there are eyes to gaze/glance at it. In this respect, criticalekphrasis operates just like poetic or narrative ekphrasis: in the very act of describing, thewriter selects, reorganizes, establishes hierarchies, attributes meanings, interprets; in otherwords, resignifies the plastic object according to the line of thought established by the verbal(con)text, not by the plastic object itself, for, paradoxically, if the ekphrastic impulse tends, atfirst, to an analogical relationship with the plastic object it ostensively purports to re-present,to re-produce, in the long run the verbal representation ends up being closer to the semanticnetwork of its context than to the object it originally intended to represent.The affinity of critical with poetic and narrative ekphrasis is especially evident in aninteresting text by Octavio Paz, “Risa y penitencia”, which I would now like to analysebriefly. I find this essay particularly interesting not only because it is marked by Paz’erudition of prehispanic cultures, but particularly because it is astride the essay and the prosepoem; the lyric “I” of the poet is the meeting point for all these meditations; a meditation onthe enigma posed by the ancient Totonaca clay laughing faces is projected on to the enigmaof human identity, and, more specifically, of the poet’s identity. “Risa y penitencia” was
Page 1 and 2: Memoria, identificación e identida
Page 3 and 4: Memoria, identificación e identida
Page 5 and 6: Funge como el hilo de Ariadna, una
Page 7 and 8: Spitzer ha llamado onomatopeya sint
Page 9 and 10: “como guijarros cayendo en un poz
Page 12 and 13: Obras citadasBryson, Norman. 1983.
Page 16 and 17: originally written as a prologue to
Page 18 and 19: palabras que no entiendo. He olvida
Page 20 and 21: east of heaven, pillar of smoke mak
Page 22: Works citedBryson, Norman, Vision a

Risa y penitencia - Luz Aurora Pimentel

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