40 - Of Human Suffering: The Essay and Ekphrasis

Summary

This chapter considers the ekphrastic essay in British history, from nineteenth-century art writing to twentieth and early twenty-first-century writing about photography and experimental essay films. If ekphrasis is the attempt to render visual representations in verbal form, the ekphrastic essay can also register the limits of that representation in our inability fully to depict or describe such experiences as strife, pain, and human suffering. Ekphrastic essays, this chapter suggests, take the problem of bearing witness as part of their formal logic, using the doubt and critical force of the essay form to trace the image of suffering. From Walter Pater’s meditations on the quiet despair of Botticelli’s Madonnas, to John Akomfrah’s three-screen examinations of climate change and colonial violence and John Smith’s small-scale films that challenge representations of the ‘War on Terror’, ekphrastic essays compel us to notice what we cannot so easily see.