| Summary: | Colour and the visual are central to the works of the American writer Gilbert Sorrentino (1929-2006). Like the modernist poets, Sorrentino was inspired by the visual arts, which allow for a more direct interpretation of the world, whereas words, being more abstract and arbitrary, tend to impose a certain distance from experience. But can language render the notion of colour as it is expressed in the visual arts? Painters have direct access to the whole colour spectrum by mixing primary colours in a way that the discreteness of the written word forbids. Sorrentino chooses to accept and further to radicalize this limitation. When qualifying red objects he avoids specific terms such as “vermilion” or “scarlet” and keeps to the generic word “red,” which encompasses all the shades of red. Its sensory impact evokes the pure and primary colours of modern painting. Sorrentino thus rejects compromise, an attitude which verges on modernist purism.
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