13 - Ekphrasis

Summary

Don DeLillo is a word-painter. This is not merely a generic label touting his skill for visualisation as a writer, but rather a specific identification of his fundamental approach as an artist. He declared as much in his seminal interview with Thomas LeClair. Responding to LeClair's question about spatial analysis in his work, DeLillo explained:

It's a way to take psychology out of a character's mind and into the room he occupies. I try to examine psychological states by looking at people in rooms, objects in rooms. It's a way of saying we can know something important about a character by the way he sees himself in relation to objects. People in rooms have always seemed important to me. I don't know why or ask myself why, but sometimes I feel I’m painting a character in a room, and the most important thing I can do is set him up in relation to objects, shadows, angles. (LeClair 14)

Students and scholars of DeLillo's work have probably encountered this passage before, maybe once too often, so that we might forget to pay close attention to what the artist is saying here. But slow down and look again, because it is tremendously revealing. DeLillo gets inside his character's mind from the outside. He envisions a figure in a room. He sees that figure in relation to objects in that room; indeed, at the initial stage, the figure is essentially just another object. Through careful observation and contemplation, however, DeLillo begins to fathom certain inner depths by examining how that figure sees himself or herself in relation to those other objects. In this way, the flat figure, all surface at first, gradually accrues layers and volume – in short, the object acquires subjectivity. By describing what and how the figure sees, by considering why these objects matter to the emergent subject, by tracing the evolution of the subject's relation to these objects as time passes and contexts change, and by capturing this nexus of visual relations and perceptions through language – this is how a word-painter creates art.

Although DeLillo is unusually adept at producing this sort of art, he did not invent the technique. In fact, dating back to classical antiquity and continuing through the present, there is a vibrant tradition of literature constructed according to these principles: ekphrasis.