Meta-Representation: World-Making Thematized in the Ekphrastic Poetry of Dan Pagis

Abstract

Meta-representation in discourse refers to the discourser’s explicit or implicit thematizing of representation. Such thematizing may bear on a variety of poetic features and operations. For instance: What objects does one choose to represent or foreground or marginalize or omit altogether? Moving from selection to evaluation, how (un)suitable is a medium or a genre to the challenge of representing the object? And to what extent does that object itself suit the communicative purposes and effects sought? Such questions always arise throughout the author’s genetic process, but they sometimes appear in the finished text itself, whether on the surface or in some oblique or dramatized form.

The elegant poetry of the modernist Hebrew poet Dan Pagis (1930-1986) presents an assortment of such meta-representations. His ekphrastic poetry has a special claim to an interest in this regard. Ekphrasis, as defined by Yacobi based on Sternberg's theory of quotation, is an intermedial quotation that transfers a visual image (a painting, a sculpture, a photograph) to language. Since one discourse here re-presents what has already been directly represented in another discourse, ekphrasis is an exemplar of meta-representation. This intermedial transfer and doubling throws yet more light on the issue of world-making, far more than does any reference to the world in either of the media, the verbal or the visual, on its own.

In turn, Pagis offers an instructive case in point. His ekphrastic poems mix the dramatization of representational problems with open commentary. Furthermore, they often do so from unusual, estranging viewpoints that compound and thematize the meta-representational issues.  My article will focus on the question of (un)success in world-making and will explore it through a set of poems that play variations on the theme.