The Corporeal Imagination. Patricia Cox Miller

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      This late ancient habit of relieving material and linguistic artifacts of conventional referential or mimetic impulses—that is, the habit of manipulating a little to get a lot—is characteristic of the other type of poem that Optatian wrote, the technopaegnia, poems with reversible verses and other linguistic tricks that advertise the linguisticality of the poetic works and function on an abstract level as explorations of the possibilities of language itself. Some of these poems are very complex in their demand for “re-combinatory” reading; they “progress,” so to speak, but only by a series of disjunctions or dislocations.

      As one interpreter has shown in great detail, “there are more verses in Optatian’s poetry than a mere line-count will reveal: each poem also contains a number of inherent permutations of itself, a number of potential dispositions.”⁴⁵ This is getting a lot from a little with a vengeance! Further, “writing no longer functions primarily as the record of speech but as the medium of a linguistic artifact whose interest lies in an aspect of language extrinsic to its reference, usually a sensory aspect.”⁴⁶ When words take on this kind of physicality, poetry becomes “sensory” or tactile. As with pattern poems, so also here one finds the “thingly” aspects of language as poetic images assume a material presence.

      This aspect of the aesthetics of late Latin poetry has an exact analogy in the cult of relics, where a dead body (like language) no longer functioned primarily as a record of human living (like speech) but rather as a material artifact whose referent lay outside itself in a spirituality that demanded sensory expression for its abstract belief in conduits of divine presence. Although I agree with Robert Wilken that “tactile piety, worship with the lips and the fingertips” was an important dimension of the cult of relics,⁴⁷ I would note that a relic is a curiously abstract piece of matter that signifies the many potential dispositions of the body of a martyr or saint: like a poem by Optatian, the martyr’s body contained a number of inherent permutations of itself, as bones and ashes were “translated” to various points around the Mediterranean world. As Victricius of Rouen explained, each relic was a link in a “chain of eternity” (vinculo aeternitatis) that bound the martyrs together.⁴⁸ The fragments, that is, become properly intelligible when they are viewed as knots in an abstract “narrative line,” the eternal chain of Victricius’s theological imagination.

      Relics as well as Optatian’s poems were successful in one sense because of the visual immediacy they achieved by emphasizing the part at the expense of elaborations of organic wholes, as I pointed out earlier. In late ancient poetry, such visual immediacy could be evoked by using the techniques of the technopaegnion, but another technique was the use of ekphrases, which turned readers into active pictorial imaginers. Similarly, the literature that developed around relics aestheticized those objects by its insistent appeal to art and sensuous metaphors to describe them, often using ekphrastic techniques.

      The technique of ekphrasis is the final component of the aesthetics of discontinuity that I will introduce by way of an exemplary figure, the late fourth-century poet Ausonius, probably best known in the context of late ancient Christianity as the teacher of Paulinus of Nola. In his literary output one finds an attitude toward poetic narrative and composition similar to that of Optatian in terms of experiments with words that depend for their aesthetic value on an abstract level of appreciation for the play of language itself. Thus among Ausonius’s poems are the “Griphus Ternarii Numeri,” a “Riddle on the Number Three” (an attempt to list all of the things that come in threes), and the “Technopaegnion,” a poem that he describes as consisting of “verses begun with monosyllables and ended with monosyllables” that are “linked up so that the monosyllable which was the ending of one verse might also become the beginning of the line following.”⁴⁹ His overall description of this little work is revealing of his aesthetic mindset: “It is small,” he says, “yet it brings a sense of surfeit; it is disjointed yet tangled [inconexa est et implicatur]”—a succinct statement of the late ancient aesthetic embrace of narrative forms that convey intimate relatedness precisely by advertising disjunction.⁵⁰

      This much, however, has already been reviewed, but in his preface to this poem Ausonius adds one other significant ingredient. Referring to the monosyllabic words as puncta, “punctures” or “stopping points,” he writes that “they merely hold together like the individual links in a chain.” He says to the recipient of his poem: “You will endow them with a certain value, for without you they will be just monosyllables.”⁵¹ In other words, without the active participation of the reader, his poem will not be complete, its meaning left unconstrued. It is noteworthy that Ausonius’s puncta—words that have become “things,” magnets of attraction in Brown’s sense—constitute the nodal points on which the meaning of the poem turns. In his book of meditations on photography, Roland Barthes used the term punctum to characterize the detail in a photograph that has the power of expansion: “While remaining a detail, it fills the whole picture.”⁵² For Ausonius as well as for his latter-day counterpart, the punctum is the fragment that draws the reader or viewer into an imaginative construal of a whole.

      This petitioning of active imaginative engagement by readers or spectators was part of the aesthetics of discontinuity, and one of the literary techniques for eliciting this kind of active reading was the ekphrasis. In an ekphrasis, effects of visual and sensory immediacy come together as the writer attempts to bring a painting or other material object (whether real or imagined) alive in words.⁵³ As literary theorist W. J. T. Mitchell describes it, “the basic project of ekphrastic hope” is “the transformation of the dead, passive image into a living creature.”⁵⁴ Ekphrastic writing was not invented in late antiquity,⁵⁵ but its handling by authors such as Ausonius was less linear, more dependent on dissonant parallels, and when embedded in longer narratives, late ancient ekphrases were “less open to [their] contexts” than earlier ekphrases were and tended to function as “self-contained and self-defining units.”⁵⁶ Here once again is the aesthetic preference for “juxtaposition and contrast [over] logical relationship; contiguity no longer required continuity.”⁵⁷

      The catalogue of fish in Ausonius’s poem Mosella is actually an ekphrasis within an ekphrasis, since the poem as a whole purports to be a description of a river. There are two features of this catalogue that I want to highlight. One is the hyper-realism or pictorial theatricality of his descriptions, which creates a “reality-effect”—an illusion of reality—and suggests that such forms of representation are poetic effects rather than straightforward description.⁵⁸ As Georgia Nugent has explained, writing like this draws upon a kind of “synaesthetic response” in the reader, who must sense something that cannot strictly or literally be seen.⁵⁹

      The second feature of the catalogue that adds to an understanding of Ausonian ekphrasis is its context, a poem about a river that constantly alludes to the optical illusions created by the reflective qualities of water. Frequently employing metaphors of mirroring to describe the unreliability of these watery visions, the poem is preoccupied with the deceptive nature of images both verbal and visual.⁶⁰ With its use of terms like absens, derisus, decepta, figura, and simulacrum, the poem issues a caveat to its reader that “the ekphrastic encounter in language is purely figurative,” as Mitchell has observed.⁶¹ The catalogue of fish is only one of the ways in which the poet underscores what he writes in line 239 of “The Moselle”: “pleasure is taken in sights which are ambiguously true and false.” As Nugent remarks, “Ausonius is a poet very much aware of the ambiguities, deceptions, and substitutions inherent in representation,” and by his ekphrastic technique he “invites the reader to enter into the game of imaginative visualization based on what is fundamentally a verbal artefact.”⁶²

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