Abstract
The paper deals with a peculiar motif of literature, cinema and fine arts, an ornamental pattern in its various manifestations, especially in the form of wallpaper design filling a fictional interior. Drawing on the recent theories of ornament (Karsten Harries, Jacques Derrida, Frank Ankersmit) - explaining a penetration of the rococo ornament, "rocaille", from periphery to the centre, a dissolution of the boundaries between representation and ornamentation, and the merging of depicted space inside the picture with the one outside "the broken frame" -, but mainly throughout selected modern literary texts (Petersburg by Andrei Bely from 1916; The Street of Crocodiles from 1934 and Sanatorium under the sign of the hourglass from 1937 by Bruno Schulz, Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov from 1957), I argue that the imaginary dimension of these surfaces arises from - and is an output of - a surviving form of the rococo affective pattern.
In connection to the physiognomy of these patterns - that shape substantially both our physical and psychic universe - I also explore a dialectics between the form and "the formless" - typical for the phenomenon of pareidolia - which is displayed on the wall surfaces by one's moving perspective and framed by the spectator's body.