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Mitchell's prime referent for ekphrastic hope is the description of the Shield of Achilles in the Iliad but he returns to Ray and Bob in the process:
This is the phase when the impossibility of ekphrasis is overcome in imagination or metaphor, when we discover a "sense" in which language can do what so many writers have wanted it to do: "to make us see." This is the phase in which Bob and Ray's "radio magic" takes effect, and we imagine in full detail the photographs we hear slapping down on the studio table (Sometimes Bob would acknowledge this moment in a variation of his punchline: instead of a wish, an expression of gratified desire — "I'm sure glad you folks could look at these pictures with us today.") This is like that other moment in radio listening when the "thundering hoofbeats of the great horse Silver" make the giant white stallion with his masked rider gallop into the mind's eye.
The third stage, ekphrastic fear, is realised thus:
But the "still moment" of ekphrastic hope quickly encounters a third phase, which we might call "ekphrastic fear." This is the moment of resistance or counterdesire that occurs when we sense that the difference between the verbal and visual representation might collapse and the figurative, imaginary desire of ekphrasis might be realized literally and actually. This is the moment when we realize that Bob and Ray's "wish" that we could see the photographs would, if granted, spoil their whole game, the moment when we wish for the photographs to stay invisible.
He elaborates on ekphrastic fear further:
It is the moment in aesthetics when the difference between verbal and visual mediation becomes a moral, aesthetic imperative rather than (as in the first, "indifferent" phase of ekphrasis) a natural fact that can be relied on. The classic expression of ekphrastic fear occurs in Lessing's Laocoön, where it 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.''
Going from the idea of converting a superior being into a doll, Mitchell very rapidly, in fact rather startlingly, offers for the rest of the essay, an account of ekphrasis arguing that:
The "otherness" of visual representation from the standpoint of textuality may be anything from a professional competition. to a relation of political, disciplinary, or cultural domination in which the "self" is understood to be an active, speaking, seeing subject, while the "other" is projected as a passive, seen, and (usually) silent object. Insofar as art history is a verbal representation of visual representation, it is an elevation of ekphrasis to a disciplinary principle. Like the masses, the colonized, the powerless and voiceless everywhere, visual representation cannot represent itself; it must be represented by discourse.
Let me repeat for emphasis,
Like the masses, the colonized, the powerless and voiceless everywhere, visual representation cannot represent itself; it must be represented by discourse.
I emphasize this because this is the move that enables him to arrive at the conclusion that:
The voyeuristic, masturbatory fondling of the ekphrastic image is a kind of mental rape that may induce a sense of guilt, paralysis, or ambivalence in the observer.
"What sort of people do they think we are?," the composers asked. "Rapists, voyeurs, masturbator," Mitchell answers, meaning writers. He then takes one of the most famous so-called 'ekphrastic' poems — Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn, ending with the famous lines "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" — and deals with them, writers, roughly:
Perhaps the scholarly controversy over the boundary between what the urn says and what Keats says reflects a kind of ekphrastic disappointment. If the poet is going to make the mute, feminized art object speak, he could at least give her something interesting to say.
The key problem, for Mitchell is rooted in
a fundamental tendency in all linguistic expression. This is the point in rhetorical and poetic theory when the doctrines of ut pictura poesis and the Sister Arts are mobilized to put language at the service of vision. The narrowest meanings of the word ekphrasis as a poetic mode, "giving voice to a mute art object," or offering "a rhetorical description of a work of art," give way to a more general application that includes any "set description intended to bring person, place, picture, etc. before the mind's eye." Ekphrasis may be even further generalized, as it is by Murray Krieger, into a general "principle" exemplifying the aestheticizing of language in what he calls the "still moment." For Krieger, the visual arts are a metaphor, not just for verbal representation of visual experience, but for the shaping of language into formal patterns that "still" the movement of linguistic temporality into a spatial, formal array.
I think we may consider most poetry to be, broadly speaking, the shaping of language into formal patterns that "still" the movement of linguistic temporality into a spatial, formal array, which would then make most poetry into an act of rape, which is in fact what Mitchell argues.
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