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Windows into the Myth: A Pictorial
Reading of Lloyd Jones’s See How They
Run
Aleksander Bednarski
Abstract
The article offers an intermedial reading of Lloyd Jones’s novel See How They Run, part of the series that comprises novels retelling eleven tales from the earliest extant British collection of prose fiction known as the Mabinogion. In the article I explore verbally transmitted explicit and implicit references to the visual medium which, as I demonstrate, are used to repackage some of the most archaic aspects of the original
text. By employing a theoretical framework developed by Boris Uspensky in his A Poetics of Composition.
The Structure of the Artistic Text and Typology of a Compositional Form, I argue that the novel’s pictorial
dimension mirrors perspectival systems of Renaissance and pre-Renaissance painting. I conclude that the transfer from the former to the latter, together with other visual elements, constitutes a significant component in Jones’s strategy to transcribe the mythological and religious substratum of the medieval original.
Résumé
Cet article propose une lecture intermédiale du roman de Lloyd Jones, See How They Run, qui fait partie d’une série comprenant des romans qui reprennent onze contes des Mabinogion, la plus ancienne des fictions en prose en Grande-Bretagne. L’article analyse plus particulièrement les références verbales implicites et explicites aux médiatisations visuelles les plus anciennes du texte original. En s’appuyant le cadre théorique utilisé par Boris Uspensky dans sa Poétique de la composition, l’article défend la thèse que la dimension visuelle et pictoriale du roman reflète les formes perspectives de l’époque de la Renaissance et de la pré-Renaissance. En conclusion, il avance l’idée que le transfert d’un système à l’autre, soutenu par d’autres éléments visuels, constitue un aspect capital de la stratégie de Jones dans la transcription des couches myhtologiques et religieuses du texte médiéval.
Keywords
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Lloyd Jones’s novel See How They Run is part of the “New Stories from the Mabinogion” series commissioned by the Welsh publisher Seren. The series comprises ten novels retelling eleven tales from the earliest extant British collection of prose fiction known as the Mabinogion, and has been described as arguably “the greatest service to the Welsh national epic” alongside Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation of the tales in the 19th century (Hickling 2010). The 21st century retellings of the Mabinogion transfer the medieval stories into the context of
modern Wales, although they do not eschew global issues.1 To date, however, the novels have not drawn much
critical attention and the ways they combine distant and often hermetic medieval material and contemporary issues remains largely unexplored.
Lloyd Jones’s See How They Run is a retelling of the Third Branch of the Mabinogi2, “Manawydan
Son of Llŷr”, a tale structured around the archaic motif of the ritual of renewal and involving a magically-provoked intrusion of the supernatural into the world. At the same time, the novel is profusely saturated with descriptions of, and references to, visual perception, plastic arts and other images to the extent that it seems impossible to avoid the question about the role of those elements in the production of meaning. My aim in this paper, apart from contributing to the process of filling in the lacuna in Welsh fiction studies regarding the Seren series, is to offer an intermedial reading of the novel by analysing verbally transmitted explicit and implicit
references to the visual medium3 which will allow me to demonstrate the ways they are used to repackage
some of the most archaic aspects of the original tale. I conclude that the novel’s visual dimension mirrors the perspectival systems of Renaissance and medieval painting, and that the transfer from the former to the latter on the novel’s compositional plane constitutes a significant component in Jones’s strategy to transcribe the Third Branch of the Mabinogi.
“Manawydan Son of Llŷr” is a direct continuation of the second branch and begins with the aftermath of the war against the Irish. Among the seven men who have survived the war are Manawydan and Pryderi.
The latter offers Manawydan rule over Dyfed4 and the hand of his mother, Rhiannon. They go to Dyfed, and
Manawydan marries Rhiannon during a feast at the court at Arberth. One day, while Manawydan, Rhiannon,
Pryderi, and his wife Cigfa are sitting on Gorsedd Arberth,5 an enchantment falls on Dyfed, transforming it
from a land “abundant in honey and fish” (Davies 2008, 36) into an uninhabited, desolate and uncultivated wilderness. The four friends are soon forced to migrate to England where they excel in practising different crafts, which arouses hostility in local craftsmen. Manawydan refrains from responding with aggression, and all four return to Dyfed. There, following a white boar chased by their dogs, they come across a “huge, towering fort” (Davies 2008, 39), and inside they find a well with a golden bowl hanging above it suspended by chains whose other ends disappear into the sky. When Pryderi and Rhiannon touch the bowl, their hands
1 See, for example, the war in Iraq in Niall Griffiths’s The Dreams of Max and Ronnie, visions of the future in Gwyneth Lewis’s science fiction The Meat Tree or Russell Celyn Jones’s post-apocalyptic The Ninth Wave, or computer games and virtual reality (The
Meat Tree).
2 The name is used to describe the first four tales of the collection (also known as the Four Branches of the Mabinogi) which are linked by the hero Pryderi and are ascribed to one author, whose identity is subject to various speculation, see e.g. Andrew Breeze (2009) or Simon Rodway (2007). The tales are dated to the period between c. 1060 and 1120 (Davies 2008, xxvii).
3 After Wolf (1999), I define medium as “a conventionally distinct means of communication, specified not only by particular channels ... of communication but also by the use of one or more semiotic systems serving for the transmission of cultural ‘messages’” (1999, 36). Different media would therefore include language, vision, music or film (a hybrid medium).
4 An early medieval kingdom in West Wales occupying modern Pembrokeshire, Ceredigion, and Carmarthenshire.
5 Gorsedd (mound, throne) Arberth is a hill with a special ontological status, it has “specific properties” (Davies 2008, 230), and the site of contact between the human world and the otherworld in Welsh tradition known as Annwn (“Arberth”).
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stick to it, they lose the ability to speak, and they vanish, together with the fortress. Manawydan and Cigfa travel to England where Manawydan’s skills as a shoemaker again trigger threats from local craftsmen. Back in Dyfed, Manawydan tries to grow wheat, but all his three fields are destroyed by an army of mice. Manawydan catches one of them and wants to hang it on a miniature gallows when he is approached successively by a cleric, a priest and a bishop, who ask him to spare the mouse. Manawydan negotiates to free Rhiannon, Pryderi and Dyfed from the enchantment, which he succeeds in doing. The person responsible for casting the spell as an act of revenge on behalf of Gwawl – Rhiannon’s would-be husband – is revealed to be Llwyd Cil Coed, a friend of Gwawl. Llwyd lifts the spell, Dyfed is populated again, and Rhiannon and Pryderi magically reappear after being imprisoned in Llwyd’s court (Pryderi wore gate-hammers around his neck and his mother the asses’ collars). The mouse turns out to be a pregnant woman, Llwyd’s wife.
Manawydan, although not a strictly divine figure in the tale, is usually seen as originally being a British
divinity (Tolstoy 2009, 58)6. His father, whose name is an archaic Welsh word for ‘sea’, is often seen as the
Welsh equivalent of the Irish hero or sea-god Lir (Botheroyd and Botheroyd 1992, 230). Manawydan’s name, despite the lack of any other analogies, has been linked to the Irish sea god Manannán mac Lir (MacCana 1992, Davies 2006). As Proinsias MacCana asserts, the mythological substratum of the Four Branches is already creatively processed by their author in order to comment on their contemporary society (1992, 58-9). Yet, a look at the most rudimentary components of the plot (a cataclysm/fertility crisis; a transition into another reality facilitated by a vertical axis (‘axis mundi’); a sacrifice; a reversal of the cataclysm) allows us to see the skeleton of the tale along Eliadean lines as being built around a hierophany – “the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world” (Eliade 1987, 11) – and as an echo of a ritualistic pattern aimed at re-establishing a link with the ‘otherworld’. In a similar vein, Will Parker identifies the deepest stratum of the tale as the scenario of the ‘Wasteland Myth’ and the archaic fertility myth involving the sacrifice of the sacred king and the eventual rebirth of the land – it is Manawydan who literally reintroduces agriculture to Dyfed (2005, 386-7). Similarly, Nikolai Tolstoy reads Manawydan’s story as a culture myth, where, as a result of “a magical duel between the benevolent deity and his dark adversary ... the forces of chaos and destruction are repelled” (2009, 59). In very general terms, therefore, the story involves an intrusion by the magical/supernatural into the human world.
Lloyd Jones’s version of the tale makes Llwyd Cil Coed, the villain in the original tale, its main character. Jones’s Llwyd (Dr Llwyd McNamara, also called Lou) is a frustrated academic who receives an unexpected opportunity to boost his career by writing a biography of Big M (short for Manawydan) – a famous Welsh rugby player and, as is later implied, Llwyd’s father. Big M’s story, transposing the Mabinogi tale to the modern world of rugby, business and the criminal underworld, is embedded in Llwyd’s story in the form of a biography obtained from the late Irish scholar, Dr Feeney, an expert in Celtic sport (Dr McNamara travels to Dublin to collect the manuscript and a flash drive from Feeney’s mother). Apart from the fragments of the manuscript read by Llwyd on his computer screen, additional background is provided by his own memories of the town in West Wales where he spent his childhood. As the narrator suggests, it was in the local hotel (Hotel Corvo, the novel’s equivalent of Gorsedd Arberth), ran by Manawydan, his team mate Pryderi, his wife Ziggy (Cigfa of the original tale), and Pryderi’s mother Rhiannon, where Llwyd was conceived when his mother, Maureen, had sex with Big M (Jones 2012, 77). Details from Big M’s life are also supplied by
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the local carpenter-painter who tells the story of the hotel sign being shot down by gangsters, Ziggy’s diary, and an official report on Pryderi’s mental condition (Pryderi and Rhiannon are institutionalised – for reasons not explicitly specified – in a psychiatric ward, which corresponds to the imprisonment in Llwyd Cil Coed’s court). Manawydan’s story, filtered in different ways through Llwyd’s reading, alternates with fragments from the scholar’s private life. Driven by the desire to take revenge on Feeney, Llwyd tries to erase the Irishman’s work from the collective memory by destroying the manuscript and deleting the files, yet his efforts are frustrated by new versions of Big M’s story stored on memory sticks he is mysteriously supplied with (e.g. one of them is mailed to Prof. Williams, the head of the department). As a result of his haphazard involvement in investigating Big M’s biography, Llwyd’s relationship with his pregnant wife, Catrin, collapses. Towards the end of the novel Catrin leaves Llwyd and goes to West Wales where, as Llwyd later learns, she joins Big M, Pryderi and Rhiannon at Hotel Corvo (where they apparently had returned to run an ‘eco-farm’). In the novel’s final scenes, Llwyd destroys Manawydan’s crops but, upon meeting his presumed ‘divine’ father in the Hotel, he experiences a spiritual transformation which makes him ready to resume work on the biography (it is not made clear whether he reunites with Catrin or not). The explicitly stated message is that Big M’s life story (and, implicitly, the Mabinogi tale) will never be erased from the collective memory (Jones 2012, 216). As mentioned, Jones’s text abounds with references to the visual medium communicated through different channels, as well as visual perception generally. One of the most prominent motifs is Llwyd’s preoccupation with the desktop of his computer screen, ordering and deleting icons and changing wallpaper pictures, including those taken by himself. The computer screen is frequently juxtaposed with the view from his office window, a view which Llwyd repeatedly contemplates. Apart from the pictures on the computer screen, photographs appear in the form of a gallery devoted to Big M in Hotel Corvo and as a photo of the office window mentioned above. Painting is represented by the missing hotel sign, anonymous kitsch paintings in the psychiatric ward, and the reference to Alma Tadema’s work “Ask Me No More”. Other elements include a reference to Giotto and his innovative use of linear perspective, the tableau vivant of the Oberammergau
Passion Play7, the mouse tattoos of Welsh rugby players, film, and the visualisation of childhood memories.
Following Werner Wolf’s (1999) classification of intermedial relationships in literature, all the elements mentioned above fall under ‘covert intermediality’, where only one medium (in this case verbal)
appears directly and constitutes the dominant medium8. Covert intermediality, in Wolf’s typology, may be
either explicit or implicit, which is equivalent to the difference between telling and showing, respectively. Wolfgang Hallet provides a similar distinction between the representation of a medium on the thematic level and the imitation “in verbal form [of] the specific structure or the aesthetics of another art form and its specific way of arranging and structuring signs aesthetically” (2015, 608). As I will demonstrate in what follows, in
See How They Run both aspects of intermediality are involved in the production of meaning.
In the case of intermedial relationships involving the verbal and the visual codes, the mechanism operating on the covert level is, naturally, ekphrasis (Wolf 1999, 43). For most of its history seen as a hindrance
7 Oberammergau is a German village known for its annual production of the Passion Play and its woodcarving tradition (“Passion Play Theatre”).
8 As opposed to overt intermediality, when different “media are directly present with their typical or conventional signifiers”, as in the case of reproductions or illustrations (Wolf 1999, 40).
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to narrative temporality9, today the pro-narrative potential of ekphrasis in narrative fiction has been more widely
analysed and its contribution generally acknowledged, most notably in the work of Tamar Yacobi or even in James Heffernan’s more recent observation that ekphrasis “turns pictures into storytelling words” (Heffernan 2015, 48, my emphasis). The modern understanding of ekphrasis roughly doubles Wolf’s distinction between telling and showing, in the sense that apart from descriptions of different types of artworks (‘telling’), criticism today also tends to include as ekphrasis the compositional and structural emulation of pictorial representation (‘showing’). The understanding of ekphrasis no longer seems to be limited to descriptions of high visual art, but embraces a wide range of references or allusions to visual representations, e.g. Tamar Yacobi’s ‘ekphrastic model’ – a representation “in words of a visual cliché, some common denominator ... of numerous artworks” like, for instance, a ‘Turner landscape’ (2005, 219). Verbal imitation of the structure or aesthetics of visual representation is frequently referred to as ‘pictorialism’, and by many authors is regarded as broader than, or
separate to, ekphrasis.10 Yet in what is perhaps the most inclusive typology of ekphrastic phenomena presented
to date, Valerie Robillard classifies mechanisms operating on the level of composition, style or structure as ‘structurality’, so that ekphrasis includes “those texts which might otherwise fall into that rather overcrowded group called ‘the pictorial’” (Robillard 1998, 60). For the sake of clarity, however, in what follows I will use the term ‘pictorial’ when referring to the employment by Jones’s text of visual perspectival relationships on the compositional level, and, by demonstrating how they are underpinned by descriptive ekphrasis, I hope to explore the ways it works in repackaging the original tale of the Mabinogi.
My analysis of the novel’s compositional plane will be based on the theoretical apparatus developed by Boris Uspensky (a representative of the Tartu semiotic school) in his A Poetics of Composition. The framework offered by Uspensky, firmly rooted both in literary studies and art history, allows us to expand in greater detail the analysis of the aspects classified by Robillard as ‘structurality’. Uspensky’s analysis and typology of the differentiations between the external and internal point of view are exemplified largely by contrasting ancient and pre-Renaissance art with Renaissance painting. In this context, considering Lloyd Jones’s reference to Giotto (as the one responsible for the introduction of perspectival dimension), as well as the motif of the architectural/digital window that invites associations with Leon Battista Alberti’s metaphor of the window (see below), Uspensky’s model seems to be a particularly apt framework for analysing the visual aspect of See
How They Run.
For Uspensky, the underlying structure of the text (whether visual or verbal) can be described in terms of the permutations of the internal and external point of view, the opposition of which he deems to be “of a pervasive character” (1983, 130), as it can be activated on four levels: the ideological, phraseological, spatial-temporal and psychological, all depending on the gradation of distance between the authorial/narrator’s position and the depicted world. Thus, on the ideological plane, narration from the point of view of a character directly participating in the events signals an internal perspective (as opposed to the external authorial voice) (Uspensky 1983, 132). The phraseological level is concerned with the reproduction of colloquial, ungrammatical or
9 For example, Gérard Genette’s famous statement about description as ancilla narrationis – the ‘handmaid of narrative’ (1982, 134).
10 For Hagstrum, ekphrasis falls within the broader phenomenon of pictorialism, which manifests itself by a variety of references to painting (1958, xxii) whereas it is itself limited to “giving voice and language to the otherwise mute art object” (1958, 18, note 34). For James A. W. Heffernan, “pictorialism generates in language effects similar to those created by pictures” like “focusing, framing, and scanning” (1993, 3).
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foreign speech, which, if employed, suggests an internal view in relation to the presented world (Uspensky 1983, 132). On the spatial-temporal plane, in turn, the adoption of a bird’s eye view, for example, or any non-concurring position of the narrator in respect to the world described, or a lack of temporal synchronization (e.g. past tense narration) signals an external point of view (Uspensky 1983, 132). The psychological plane is identified by Uspensky with the author’s reliance on an individual consciousness, which naturally involves an internal perspective (Uspensky 1983, 133).
Analogically, the opposition between the external and the internal point of view is traced by Uspensky in pictorial art, where he distinguishes two major tendencies: the external point of view, dominant in Renaissance painting, and the internal, common to ancient and medieval art (1983, 135). The former is linked to the linear perspective, which is perhaps most famously exemplified by Alberti’s idea of a painting as a window (fenestra
aperta) which presupposes a distance between the perceiving subject and the represented object. The latter
involves “the internal positioning of the observer or artist with respect to a representation” (Uspensky 1983, 135). The main feature of the internal perspectival system, called by Uspensky ‘inverse perspective’,11 is
manifested mainly by the diminution of represented objects in relation to the imaginary observer within the represented world, “so that the figures in the background of the painting are represented as being larger than those in the foreground” (1983, 136).
Another compositional aspect discussed by Uspensky concerns the problem of frames which mark the shift from one point of view/perspective to another. In the case of the ‘window view’ representation strategy, the borderlines provided by the material delimitation of the picture plane are sufficient – the real frame ‘guides’ the viewer into the representation (Uspensky 1983, 143). When the internal point of view is involved, however, internal (inset) frames may be used. This is accomplished by a shift from the external point of view in the periphery of the representation to the internal one in the centre, where the world is shown
as if seen from the point of view of the observer located within (hence the diminution of objects mentioned
earlier) (Uspensky 1983, 143). Analogous mechanisms of framing are identified by Uspensky in literary texts. Shifts in perspective on the ideological, phraseological, spatial-temporal and psychological levels may result in embedding parts of the narrative to form “microdescriptions” (1983, 155).
Uspensky also draws attention to the rendering of the background in different artistic conventions. In medieval painting, for example, background is frequently executed “in a different artistic system than the central part” (Uspensky 1983, 156). Renaissance art, in turn, employed composite space where each “microspace”, often represented as a view from a window, had its own independent linear perspective (Uspensky 1983, 156). Such embedded representations, Uspensky argues, frequently played a decorative function – they were
representations of representations, examples being the work of Giotto, Tintoretto or El Greco (Uspensky 1983,
158). As a result, the heightened conventionality emphasised, by way of contrast, a more realistic rendering of the foreground (Uspensky 1983, 163). In other words, background represented the external (peripheral) point of view in relation to the objects depicted in the centre and, even if it was ‘behind’ the object, it was, in fact, intended to represent what was located in front of it. In literature, one of the techniques used to represent, for instance, background characters, is to describe them as puppet-like, i.e. stereotyped or conventionalised (Uspensky 1983, 160-161).
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The compositional framework of See How They Run rests on the contrast of two perspectival systems, the Renaissance one and the ‘medieval’. This art historical context is evoked by the reference to Giotto and
his innovative use of perspective12 and, more prominently, by the focus on the virtual window of Llwyd’s
computer screen juxtaposed with the architectural window in his office. Most of Big M’s story is told in the form of embedded episodes, and the majority of those are displayed and then read by Llwyd on the screen, the act of opening and closing the computer or files, or inserting memory sticks, nearly always mentioned: “Lou logged on and waited for his bunch of daffs to appear” (Jones 2012, 41), “Lou logged off and shut down his computer” (Jones 2012, 58), “Lou closed down his computer and went to stand by the window...” (Jones 2012,
122), “Whilst he fired up his computer he phoned home...” (Jones 2012, 146) etc.13 On the spatial level, the
embedded narratives are then visualised as windows opening on the surface of the screen, thus situating Llwyd in the position of an external observer, e.g.: “He retraced his steps to the bin, restored the file, and scrolled to the end of Feeney’s first chapter. Yes, there it was, Hotel Corvo, on the cliffs of West Wales” (Jones 2012, 57). The computer screen, in turn, is frequently juxtaposed with the real window in Llwyd’s office, so that the opposition between the virtuality of the computer window and the real world outside the architectural one is explicitly suggested:
In the doll-within-doll world of his computer the clouds had no emotional density; yet over there in the sky, moving very slowly in the far distance, they imparted a sensuous, supernatural otherness, a stratospheric mysticism; high in the blue above him they seemed to drift on the invisible winds of time, a fantastical convoy. (Jones 2012, 19)
While Llwyd has little or no control of the reality outside his window, he is far more successful with manipulating the icons, folders and wallpapers on his screen. Playing with icons and folders, he feels like a god inspecting and controlling “the world within the screen” who can click new folders “into existence” (Jones 2012, 16). Such an emphasis placed on a framed picture/view and the juxtaposition of the architectural window and the computer screen activates associations with Leon Battista Alberti’s conception of painting developed in his famous treatise as an open window: “I draw a rectangle of whatever size I want, which I regard as an open window through which the subject to be painted is seen” (2004, 54).
Yet, as shown by Anne Friedberg in her The Virtual Window. From Alberti to Microsoft, Alberti’s window was not, as is commonly presented, “a mimetic rendition of what one would see out of an architectural window, looking onto the natural world” (2009, 32). The perspectival realism propagated by Alberti did not imply the realism of the subject matter or a temporal realism (Friedberg 2009, 33) but rather functioned as a
metaphor for the frame demarcating the virtual14 immateriality of the picture plane, “a separate ontological
register” (Friedberg 2009, 9). Alberti’s window is therefore a metaphor, a transfer device and a conduit
12 It comes up in a reference to Big M: in his biography, Dr Feeney says the player “introduced a new spatial awareness to rugby, in the way Giotto had introduced depth to medieval art; gifted with rare insight, they’d both construed a new vision, the third dimension, one on canvas, the other on grass ...” (Jones 2012, 50).
13 Only two episodes are introduced differently, but even these are presented in spatial-visual terms: Llwyd enters a picture in his memory, which after 3 paragraphs switches seamlessly to Big M’s story (“His memory held a clear picture of a big white building on a promontory... So Big M said yes to Pryderi” (Jones 2012, 58-60), and the story of the shot-down hotel sign is reported by the carpenter-artist (Jones 2012, 88-89).
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“for meaning from one frame of reference to another” (Friedberg 2009, 14), although still in keeping with the Renaissance convention of the distanced, external position of the fixed viewer. Interestingly, although
Alberti clearly places painting before writing15, he also strongly advocates close collaboration between spatial
and temporal art, where narrative is welded with the painting surface: “The great work of the painter is the ‘historia’; parts of the ‘historia’ are the bodies, part of the body is the member, and part of the member
is a surface” (2004, 67)16. The narrative aspect of Alberti’s conception is also observed in the Renaissance
polyscenic representations mentioned by both Friedberg and Uspensky. Despite obvious differences, Alberti’s window has many affinities with the computer screen. Both are framing devices demarcating virtual (both digital and immaterial) second-order reality. The characteristic thing about the computer screen is that it may embed a multitude of ‘nested’ or ‘inset’ windows which, however, has analogies not only in medieval painting (different microspaces in different artistic systems), but also in the Renaissance practice of polyscenic
representations that conveyed a continuous narrative in a single frame (Friedberg 2009, 1, 36)17.
The spatial-visual framing of the Mabinogi tale18, for the most part displayed and read in ‘installments’
by Llwyd on his computer screen, may be seen as an interesting conflation of Alberti’s/the Early Modern strategy of representation and modern technology. Llwyd’s computer screen can be read as a polyscenic window onto the virtual (intradiegetic) reality (“the windowed elsewhere” (Friedberg 2009, 243)), displayed as consecutive ‘microdescriptions’ of Big M’s ‘historia’, with the fixed observer-reader located outside the picture plane demarcated by the screen’s frame. The same strategy can be, in fact, observed when we consider all the embedded episodes from Big M’s life, including those not displayed on screen. Although they vary in the way of framing (a screen, an image in memory), focalisers (the carpenter) and narrative modes (a mental health assessment form), they are all framed on the ideological plane by the main narrative voice filtered through Llwyd’s mind. The voice, like the metaphor of the window, is therefore a ‘transfer device’ to the ‘virtual immateriality’ of the ‘original’ Mabinogi story. At the same time, this arrangement is consistent with the pictorial framework: the main narrative functions as a frame demarcating a plane where representations of
representations are nested.
This neat correspondence is, however, complicated by Llwyd’s preoccupation with the arrangement of icons and folders on his desktop, as well as wallpaper images; in other words, with what constitutes the background to the embedded windows-narratives. Llwyd uses three wallpapers: the photograph of daffodils, the picture of Hotel Corvo, the custom screensaver showing a Canadian landscape, and finally a “meaningless” photo of a field with blue sky above it. The first three images do not seem to work as a background for Big M’s story displayed on the screen – they are either too realistic, their signifying potential is too substantial or they evoke memories: the daffodils are so realistic they attract a fly which distracts Llwyd from his work, the picture of Hotel Corvo reminds him of his drinking session in the hotel bar, and the “autumnal scene by a
15 “Yet who will deny that painting has assumed the most honoured part in all things both public and private, profane and religious, to such an extent that no art, I find, has been so highly valued universally among men?” (Alberti 2004, 62).
16 Any “studious painter” is advised “to make himself familiar with poets and orators and other men of letters, for he will not only obtain excellent ornaments from such learned minds, but he will also be assisted in those very inventions which in painting may gain him the greatest praise” (Alberti 2004, 89).
17 The examples given by Friedberg include Lorenzo Ghiberti’s (1378-1455) Baptistery Doors in Florence, 1403-1424, and Masaccio’s (1401-1428) Tribute Money, 1427 (2009, 36).
18 It should be kept in mind that dr Feeney’s intradiegetic account of Big M’s story, although it recounts more or less exactly the storyline of “Manawydan son of Llŷr”, still remains a retelling.
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lake” makes him respond “to previous pictures he’d seen of lakes in Canada” (Jones 2012, 122). Llwyd finally settles with the “meaningless” photograph of a field (“a generic, undulating tract of greenness with a blue sky above it” (Jones 2012, 122)) which does not activate any memories or associations that would interfere with the reception of the embedded episodes.
In the context of the perspectival implications evoked by Llwyd’s screen and embedded windows, the preoccupation with wallpaper images reveals a significant pictorial mechanism operating on the novel’s compositional plane. As was mentioned before, the background in painting, according to Uspensky, frequently plays the role of frames and, as such, corresponds to the external point of view in relation to the central part of the representation, even if it is located behind the object. The stipulation is that it then has to be more conventional (‘less realistic’), so that it does not ‘block’ the more realistic central part. It seems that the “meaningless” photo Llwyd finds, as opposed to the previous ones, is conventional enough to provide an unobtrusive background for the historia developing in the foreground (i.e. Big M’s story). This mechanism also seems to tap into Yacobi’s notion of the ekphrastic model and the view that “the less particular the visual image, the more evident its function as aid, not rival” of narrative (1995, 632). Thus, the generic, conventional picture evoking a default Windows’ wallpaper enables a shift of focus from Llwyd’s screen (and the embedded story) to the embedding level, i.e. it functions as a frame. Indeed, immediately after setting the wallpaper, Llwyd closes down his computer, stands by his office window and plays with the idea of taking a picture of the view to use as a wallpaper only to decide not to, as he would not be able to “capture the essence of the place, its numen” (Jones 2012, 123). This is because the ‘numen’ (‘divinity’), corresponding to the deity figure of Big M/Manawydan and the hierophanic substratum of the original Mabinogi tale, is located not on the diegetic level, but on the embedded one.
It is possible to argue that the ‘numen’ is also ‘captured’ in compositional terms. As I will argue in what follows, this is realised in the transition from the external/Renaissance-type perspective to the internal, redolent of the medieval/pre-Renaissance perspectival system. After most of the original Mabinogi story is retold in the embedded episodes, Llwyd sets out to search for his wife Catrin, and travels to Hotel Corvo where he meets all the characters from the accounts he has read. It would seem that the embedded level and the embedding one are welded into one, but in fact it is Llwyd’s point of view which changes from the external to the internal when he enters the embedded (myth-saturated) reality. This shift is signalled by an image – the photograph Llwyd receives from Catrin and which represents the view from his office window: “...when he opened it [the letter] he saw that it contained two items. The first was a simple home-made card showing the view from his college window (when had she taken that?) with a short message inside” (Jones 2012, 155). The reason for taking the photo and presenting it to Llwyd are not explained, and the picture’s role seems to be of an internal compositional ‘stitch’ marking a shift in perspective: the view (a part of the diegetic reality) is transformed into a picture of the view, a ‘second degree’ view. Pictorially speaking, what heretofore belonged to the central part of the representation, now becomes decorative background.
The shift to an internal perspective is signalled in at least two other ways, involving visual representation as well. While walking through the field towards Hotel Corvo, Llwyd comes across two scarecrows dressed in his own clothes, apparently taken from his own wardrobe. Llwyd is struck by the resemblance between himself and the scarecrows, one of which bears “a comical, triumphant air” and is compared to “a grimacing
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clown” who, “in tripping over his ridiculous shoes in the centre of a ring, had managed to convey in the moment of falling an ironic message – I told you this was going to happen” (Jones 2012, 189). Like the photo of the window view, the reason for the scarecrows’ appearance and their likeness to Llwyd is not explained, and their existence is later denied by both Big M and Catrin (Jones 2012, 203-4). The scarecrows are, in fact, conventionalised visualisations of Llwyd: their frozen movement (“gaunt and unmoving, leaning towards the sea” (Jones 2012, 188)), their comic and mannequin-like look and the clothes make the scarecrows models of the Llwyd from the previous section of the novel (i.e. the Llwyd ‘outside the picture space’). Again, analogously to the window photo, an element of the heretofore diegetic reality is transferred to the background as a representation of a representation. We are thus provided with the visualisation of the main character from an external point of view, and the puppet-like character of the visualisation chimes well with Uspensky’s criterion of representing background figures.
Another element suggesting the ‘inverted’ perspective in the novel’s last section is the sign of Hotel Corvo painted by the artist-carpenter. As mentioned above, Hotel Corvo corresponds to Gorsedd Arberth which in the original tale has the properties of a liminal zone (Davies 2008, 238). Analogously, the sign is ontologically ambiguous, as its story seems to be looped: it is made by the carpenter (Jones 88), then, according to him, is later shot off by the alleged IRA members and stored by Pryderi in the hotel office (Jones 2012, 89). Later, in one of the embedded accounts, we learn that Pryderi commissions a new sign from the very same carpenter (Jones 2012, 96). Yet when Llwyd arrives at the Hotel in search for Catrin, the sign is still missing and its absence is explicitly mentioned: “He looked up at the missing sign and it was still missing” (Jones 2012, 186), “then he stared at the rusty brackets which had once held the Hotel Corvo sign, when the place was in its pomp – before that fateful gunshot” (Jones 2012, 187).
The sign, as a representation endowed with decorative function and heightened fictionality, relates to the external perspective. Its flickering in and out of existence may be read as mirroring the perspective of Llwyd the narrator which is only partially internal at that stage – the embedded story is mediated by the carpenter and Dr Feeney’s account. Once Llwyd assumes the entirely internal point of view (i.e. moves into what has heretofore been a series of representations), the mediation in the form of the iconic sign is no longer necessary, although its conspicuous absence still serves as an internal stitch binding together the levels of representation.
Llwyd’s internal perspective also seems to be signalled on the psychological level. When conversing with Big M, it seems that ‘Manawydan’ ‘reads’ Llwyd’s (narrator’s) thoughts; thus the latter’s status as the focaliser is undermined: “In between the apples and pears and plums, Lou could see objects glinting in the growing light. He watched them, and wondered what they were. ‘Memory sticks, Llwyd. Flash drives, whatever you want to call them. I think you know what they are,’ said Big M.” (Jones 2012, 215). Another detail suggesting Llwyd’s internal point of view is his perception of Big M as literally ‘huge’: “He [Big M] stood up and came to stand by Lou. He seemed very big, standing up to his full height ... His head was almost out of sight, he really was a huge man” (Jones 2012, 201), which reminds us of inverse perspective when “the figures in the background of the painting are represented as being larger than those in the foreground” (Uspensky 1983, 136).
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of view structured in the mode of a polyscenic representation analogous to the ‘Albertian’/linear rendering of perspective relations, to another perspectival system that could be said to resemble an internal one, akin to
pre-Renaissance perspectival systems.19 What is worth noting, however, is that no shift back into the external
point of view takes place and the narrator is ‘locked’ inside the embedded (mythological) representation. This is signalled by two elements: the memory stick presented to Llwyd by Big M with his life story written by himself (Jones 2012, 217) and the photo of the field Llwyd takes with the intention of using it as an ideal screensaver which resembles the generic “meaningless” picture he has used before: “At some point he took his digital camera from a pocket and took a picture of the cornfield still standing, yellow under blue. It would be ideal as a screensaver if he went back to his college desk, to start all over again” (Jones 2012, 224). Both the story in the memory stick and the photo, however, remain hidden (unread and unseen), as otherwise they would provide an external point of view in relation to the last scenes of the novel.
Thus, Big M’s (i.e. Manawydan’s) story is retold despite Llwyd’s attempt to erase it from memory. The
lack of transition back from the internal perspective freezes the narrative (and the reader) in the illud tempus20
of the mythological (doubly-fictional) reality. On the thematic level, a kind of hierophany takes place: Llwyd is pardoned, provided with a boon (the memory stick and the ideal screensaver photo) and undergoes spiritual/ psychological healing resulting from the encounter with his father/divinity/Father-god figure. It is the ‘zero-degree’ reality which reflects the deepest substratum of the original tale and where signs are not needed (the Hotel Corvo sign is explicitly missing): the novel’s last scenes are the ‘signified’ in relation to the preceding part of the narrative. In this way, the ending echoes the denouement of the original tale. As mentioned earlier, at the most rudimentary level the ending of the Third Branch reflects rebirth in the cycle of life and death. In
See How They Run the rebirth is reflected by the one-way shift to the mythological substratum of the tale.
It seems that the adoption of a more inclusive approach to ekphrasis in the mode of Robillard’s model allows us to reconcile different types of verbally-rendered visual elements which contribute to the unveiling of the narrative and enable the exploration of those aspects of the text that might otherwise remain undetected. Lloyd Jones’s strategy of rendering the Third Branch of the Mabinogi is realised by a different intensity of visual relations, ranging from traditional ekphrasis to pictorial structurality. Thus, the pictorial framework of
See How They Run seems to rest, at least to some extent, on the framework of ‘stronger’ ekphrastic elements
in the presented world: the shifts in perspective are signalled by different types of verbally mediated images. This essay has only scratched the surface of the visual dimension of Jones’s novel, and the function of most of the visual elements must be reserved for another discussion, yet it is possible to risk the statement that Jones’s text is an intermedial retelling of the Third Branch of the Mabinogi that, by employing a wide range of visual representations on different intratextual levels, taps into what W. J. T. Mitchell calls a ‘pictorial’ (1995, 9) and Werner Wolf an ‘intermedial turn’ (1999, 2) in modern culture.
In the case of See How They Run, the employment of the visual medium to retell the story with archaic mythological and, ultimately, a religious substratum, also tallies with Alberti’s remark (referring back to Trismegistus) that painting “originated together with religion” (Alberti 2004, 62), and may be read as an
19 The medieval mindset in relation to art is also evoked by Big M himself: “‘Not everyone can be famous you know’, continued Big M. ‘I quite liked it in the Middle Ages when artisans were anonymous, just part of the team” (Jones 2012, 205).
20 Eliade’s term signifying “the non-temporal moment ... in which the creation took place” (Eliade 1961, 152), which is then reactualised by ritual or myth.
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attempt to mirror the intrusion of the supernatural into the human world in the medieval tale. The spatial-visual repackaging of “Manawydan Son of Llŷr”, which in the novel undergoes the threat of being forgotten, also seems to echo Alberti’s view that “painting possesses a truly divine power in that not only does it make the absent present ... but it also represents the dead to the living many centuries later” (Alberti 2004, 60) and testifies to the potential of the visual medium to collaborate with the narrative to (re)tell stories.
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Aleksander Bednarski is assisant professor at the Department of Celtic Studies at the John Paul II Catholic
University of Lublin specialising in Celtic studies, modern Welsh fiction, as well as intermedial studies. His PhD thesis offered a pictorial reading of Niall Griffiths’s novels. He is currently working on a book on visu-ality in Welsh fiction.
