Words into pictures : E.E. Cummings' art across borders

251 Pages·2007·1.46 MB·English

by  Jiri Flajsar

Words into Pictures

Words into Pictures
E. E. Cummings’ Art across Borders

Edited by

Ji(cid:284)í Flajšar and Zénó Vernyik

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING
Words into Pictures: E. E. Cummings’ Art across Borders, Edited by Ji(cid:284)í Flajšar and Zénó Vernyik

This book first published 2007 by

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2007 by Ji(cid:284)í Flajšar and Zénó Vernyik and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN 1-84718-335-2; ISBN 13: 9781847183354
TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations....................................................................................vii
Acknowledgements..................................................................................viii
Introduction.................................................................................................x
Chronology.............................................................................................xviii

Part I: New Contexts

Cummings and the Brotherhood of Visual Poetics......................................2
Richard Bradford

Reflecting EIMI: The Iconic Meta-Sonnet, Manhood, and Cultural
Crisis in E. E. Cummings’ No Thanks.......................................................27
Gillian Huang-Tiller

The Posterity of Idiosyncrasies: E. E. Cummings’ Influence
on Post-War American Poetry...................................................................58
Isabelle Alfandary

Part II: Political Cummings

From Bad Boy to Curmudgeon: Cummings’ Political Evolution..............68
Milton Cohen

Divine Excess: The Logic of General Economics
in The Enormous Room.............................................................................90
Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder

Part III: Cummings in Space

“As usual I did not find him in cafes”: I-space, “i” space,
and Spatial Cognition in E. E. Cummings’ Poetry..................................108
Taimi Olsen

Sacred-Evil New York: Urban Spatiality in Tulips & Chimneys............126
Zénó Vernyik
vi Table of Contents

Part IV: Amongst Arts

Crossing Generic Boundaries: Sculpture, Painting and Engraving
as Compensations for E. E. Cummings’ Hermeneutic Short-Cuts..........156
Claudia Desblaches

“With chasteness of sea-girls”: Björk’s Adaptation
of E. E. Cummings’ Poetry......................................................................170
Emília Barna

Part V: Identity and Subjectivity

Beyond the Scope of the “I” in E. E. Cummings’ Leaf Poem.................188
Kurt Harris

Notes........................................................................................................201
Contributors.............................................................................................210
Index........................................................................................................214
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1-1 Final Schema of No Thanks (Small Special Collections Library,
University of Virginia)
1-2 Final Schema of No Thanks (as it appears in the typescript edition
of the volume)
1-3 First Schema of No Thanks (Houghton Library)
1-4 The first lines of the Sonnets, applied on the Final Schema
1-5 Structural chart of EIMI
3-1 Typology related to the reference frame
3-2 Cartographic fictional space in Tulips & Chimneys
3-3 Partitions of space in “i was sitting in mcsorley’s”
3-4 Binaries into a triad
3-5 Sacred fictional space in Tulips & Chimneys
4-1 E. E. Cummings 1894-1962, Noise Number 13, 1925, Oil on
canvas, 59 9/ x 42 ¾ in (151.29 x 108.59 cm) Whitney Museum
16
of American Art, New York. Photograph by Geoffrey Clements.
4-2 Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors, 1533, National
Gallery, London
4-3 Giovanni Battista Bracelli, “Duel pour la Toison d’Or” in Bizzarie
di Varie Figure, 1624, Livorno
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This volume started out as a lack, something that its editors voiced
when they first met in February, 2005. What began as a casual and
friendly discussion over some food and wine, ended up as a long-term,
close professional relationship and a common plan for a new volume of
essays on Cummings. Strangely enough, chance, fate, or the hand of
someone above, had a lot to do with this book.
Nevertheless, however much does this strange encounter of an early
date have to do with the material existence of this book, it would have
never become anything more than a common dream, if it was not for a lot
of people who made it turn into reality.
First and foremost, our contributors deserve credit. They are the ones
who filled with content the structure we provided. Their work and their
original ideas made this into something unique and original, colorful and
varied. At the same time, their excellent cooperativity, and unparalleled
patience made them unusually pleasant to work with, while the
friendliness and honest interest some of them showed, turned our
relationship from a mere professional venture into something that we dare
call friendship.
However, all those essays, and all the effort their authors spent on
writing them, would have been of no use, if Cambridge Scholars
Publishing had not decided to agree and publish it. To some, this act of
saying thanks to them may sound a mere formality, but it is not so. The
fact that they trusted us from the very beginning deserves genuine and
heartfelt thanks, just as their willingness to publish a volume that has a
potentially limited audience. In addition, they proved very understanding,
flexible and helpful throughout the long months that this project required,
for which we are really grateful.
In particular, we would like to thank Dr. Andy Nercessian, our editor,
for showing interest in our project, for taking all the risks that it involved,
and for being very understanding about the delays that we encountered.
Carol Koulikourdi also deserves all our respect and thankfulness, for
answering all the questions that arose, for assisting us with our problems,
and devoting so much energy to make sure that everything went smoothly.
Amanda Millar, the person responsible for the volume’s typesetting,
should also be remembered as someone who contributed a lot to the
Words into Pictures: E. E. Cummings’ Art Across Borders ix
project and made up for the delays by being even more efficient than
usual.
Some of the artworks and poems reprinted in this volume are the
properties of various galleries and publishing houses. Therefore, we would
also like to thank them for allowing us to reproduce them here. We are
grateful to Boni and Liveright and W. W. Norton, for letting us reprint
poems of E. E. Cummings. The Houghton Library of Harvard University
and the Small Special Collections Library of the University of Virginia
also deserve our thanks for letting us reprint copies of manuscripts in their
collections. In a similar vein, the Whitney Museum of Modern Art, for
their permission to print Cummings’ Noise Number 13, and the National
Gallery, for kindly agreeing to the reproduction of Hans Holbein the
Younger’s The Ambassadors also deserves credit. Carcanet Press holds the
rights to Charles Tomlinson’s “Lines,” New Directions to the poems of
William Carlos Williams, and Faber and Faber to Hugo Williams’ poem.
The arrangements regarding these rights are still in process at the time of
the volume’s publication, and the author of the essay quoting them holds
full responsibility for their satisfactory conclusion.
We would also like to thank Jeffrey Alan Vanderziel and the
Department of English and American Studies at Masaryk University,
Marcela Malá and Zuzana Šaffková and the English Department at the
Technical University of Liberec, and Jaroslav Machá(cid:254)ek and the
Department of English and American Studies at Palacký University, for
tolerating all the inconveniences and missed deadlines they had to suffer.
This book would not have ever materialized without their flexibility and
understanding.
And last, but not least, our love and thanks to our families and friends,
and loved ones who could not get the attention they deserved while we
devoted our time to making this book materialize, and who supported us
nonetheless.
INTRODUCTION

The reader holds a new volume of essays on E. E. Cummings in her
hand. One that tries to shift the focus of interest of Cummings studies to
fields that are somewhat less researched, or traditionally somewhat
neglected. Although we do not claim that the book deals with heretofore
uncharted territories, it nevertheless does contain essays that focus on less
well-wrought topics. Therefore, it can be said to attempt to make the
treatment of the oeuvre of E. E. Cummings, if not more, at least differently
balanced.
The title of our volume, Words Into Pictures, has a peculiar ring to it.
In one phrase, it brings together the verbal and the visual, two forms of art
traditionally considered to be distinct and separate; a tradition that was
most clearly voiced by (and to some extent also instituted by) Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing in his Laokoon. In fact, this title, by positing the
possibility of transfer or metamorphosis between words and pictures
seems to be in clear violation of Lessing’s clear-cut system of verbal vs
visual. The book apparently ignores the dictum of associating “temporality
with literature and spatiality with painting and sculpture” (Landwehr 2002,
12), a division that allows literature to be only temporal, and painting to be
only spatial, and that labels all experiments that try to blur the boundaries
and experiment with spatial poetry or temporal (or narrative) painting as
imperfect, perverse or second-rate. As W. J. T. Mitchell puts it, quoting
Lessing himself:

[I]t is “prescribed as a law to all poets” that “they should not regard the
limitations of painting as beauties in their own art.” For poets to “employ
the same artistic machinery” as the painter would be to “convert a superior
being into a doll.” It would make as much sense, argues Lessing, “as if a
man, with the power and privilege of speech, were to employ the signs
which the mutes in a Turkish seraglio had invented to supply the want of a
voice.” (Mitchell 1995, 155)

Hidden in this prescriptive separation of the two types of art by Lessing,
behind his “moral, aesthetic imperative” to differentiate between “verbal
and visual mediation” (154) is, in addition, the preference of the written
over the pictorial, the attribution of superiority to the verbal arts. By
arguing “that the artist, unlike the writer, could only portray a single