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Significant Form in Jacob's Room: Ekphrasis and the Elegy

2002; University of Texas Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tsl.2002.0018

1534-7303

Kathleen Wall,

Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation

In the first chapter of Jacob's Room, we meet one of the novel's numerous painters, Charles Steele. Faced with the prospect that his subject, Mrs. Flanders, might move, he "struck the canvas a hasty violet-black dab. For the landscape needed it. It was too pale—greys flowing into lavenders, and one star or a white gull suspended just so—too pale as usual" (2). While Mr. Steele is certain that the critics will condemn his work, he feels that his hasty dab is just what his canvas needed—"it was just that note which brought the rest together" (3). The effect of Mr. Steele's black dab suggests a vision of the work of art that bears a considerable resemblance to that which Clive Bell articulated in his 1914 book on aesthetics, Art. Attempting to define the characteristics that are shared by those works we consider art, Bell concludes that it is their significant form: