The Search for Synthesis in Literature and Art

In this book the author uses metaphors to rethink the relation between verbal and visual images and, in a broader sense, to examine the desire for personal fusion in friendship and love. Drawing upon a wide range of artistic and literary figures. Colley emphasizes the paradox that synthesis is possible only when space remains between the elements that seek to blend. To reveal the intrinsic structure of methaphor, Colley turns first to the nonsense verse of Edward Lear. Lear's limericks and drawings, in their tendency to link incongruous objects (carp/harp, hatchet/flea), remind the reader of the ever-present suitable and visible spaces within metaphor. By contrast, the metamorphoses described in Ovid and Dante illustrate a merging of words and images in which one form of expression entraps or misrepresents the other. Colley goes on to show how the dialogue between words and pictures becomes a shaping force in the work of Paul Klee; he fuses the two but also honours and sustains their differences. For Gerard Manley Hopkins the interplay between words and images is crucial to a sense of personal integration.
Hopkin's strong interest in cartographic perspective, evident in early sketches, caries over to a metaphor of "mapping" in his poems - an attention to defining points and boundaries that chart his course between the sensuous particulars of the natural landscape and a larger transcendent vision. Colley turns finally to the most compelling of the various struggles to create synthesis - the quest for personal fusion - and the role space plays in the experiences of separation, death, love and friendship.