Collection of Sand Page 8
The Parisian landscape in the background raises further problems. It is dominated by the mass of Notre Dame, but the cathedral from that perspective could only be seen from the left bank of the Seine, and in that case one cannot explain the tall houses it has on the right, because on that side it only has the river. In short, what we have here is a fictional, symbolic landscape. Why Notre Dame? The cathedral had nothing to do with Orléanist symbolism (Louis Philippe portrayed himself as a secular person, a son of the Enlightenment) but with the symbolism related to social theories of the time, with the democratic Christianity of De Lamennais; and this was also the period when Victor Hugo began writing The Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which the cathedral is a symbol of freedom.
Because of all this, the painting shocked the public and the critics when it was displayed at the Salon of 1831. What aroused protests were the realism of the insurgent proletarians, who were defined by the critics as ‘looking like jailbirds’, ‘scum’, ‘the dregs of society’, and the daring portrayal of Liberty, especially since she displayed one of her armpits as having hair (the classical nude was always hairless). Despite all this, the painting was bought by the Ministry of the Interior, but already in 1832, when the new regime started to clash with further popular revolts, it disappeared from circulation. It was displayed again after the 1848 revolution, but only for a short time; in 1849 the subject-matter once more became controversial, and the work ended up in a stock-room. The author tried to resurrect it from there for the Universal Exposition of 1855. But Marianne’s Phrygian beret was still a subversive image at the time, even though Delacroix had simply followed classical models here, without any partisan intent. Now we can see that the Phrygian beret is not red like those of the sans-culottes but of a dark-brown colour. And X-ray scans have discovered that underneath this faded colour there is a layer of scarlet. It is a short step from here to inferring that Delacroix toned down that highly provocative red in order to appease the censors of the Second Empire. Whatever the case, at the request of Napoleon III, the painting ended up in the exhibition. After a number of other vicissitudes, under the Third Republic, the work entered the Louvre, and after that into universal glory.
[1983]
Say It with Knots
In New Caledonia messages of war and peace were transmitted by means of a rudimentary rope made from banyan bark (Ficus bengalensis) knotted in various ways. A piece of rope with a bowline knot at one end was a proposal to join a military alliance; if the addressee accepted the alliance, all he had to do was tie a similar knot at the other end of the rope and return it to the sender; in that way an indissoluble pact was agreed. On the other hand, a knot around a small firebrand—extinguished, but with traces of burning on it—was a declaration of war; it meant ‘We shall come and burn your huts.’ The message offering peace to the vanquished was more complicated; it was a question of persuading them to return to their destroyed village and to rebuild it (the conquerors were very careful not to settle in a village belonging to others and to the spirits of their dead); for that reason the knot for this message would tie together pieces of the reeds, shrubs and leaves that were used for building huts.
These knotted fibres are on display in an unusual exhibition: Knots and Bindings, at the National Foundation for Graphic and Plastic Arts, in Rue Berryer, in Paris. The display invites us to reflect on the language of knots as a primordial form of writing.
These fibres call to mind the pieces of rope used by the Maori (we are still in the Pacific) and mentioned by Victor Segalen in his novel Les Immémoriaux (A Lapse of Memory): the Polynesian bards or narrators recited their poems by heart, with the aid of interwoven strings, the knots of which were counted between their fingers to mark off the episodes of their narrative. It is not clear what correspondence they established between the succession of names and deeds of heroes and ancestors on the one hand and the knots of different size and shape placed at different intervals along the strings on the other; but certainly the bunch of threads was an indispensable aide-memoire, a way of making the text permanent before any form of writing. ‘These strands were called “Origin of the Words”,’ writes Segalen, ‘for words seemed to spring forth from them’ (A Lapse of Memory, translated by Rosemary Arnoux, Brisbane: Boombana Publications, p. 27). The advent of writing, or rather the sole fact of knowing that white men entrusted their memory to black signs on white paper, put the processes of oral memory into crisis: the bards forgot their poems, the strings stayed silent in their hands. ‘The oral tradition,’ writes Giorgio Agamben, commenting on Segalen, ‘maintains its contact with the mythical origin of the word, in other words with what writing has lost and what it continually pursues; literature is the never-ending attempt to recover those lost origins.’
In the exhibition in Rue Berryer there is also a quipu from the Peruvian Incas. This is a fringe made up of differently coloured cotton threads used by the high functionaries of the Inca Empire for State accounts, population censuses and evaluation of agricultural produce: in short, it was the computer of that society, and everything was based on the precision of its calculations and measurements.
There is a Japanese object made from thin strips of wood knotted in a complicated, almost baroque pattern, which symbolizes the god of the mountain who flees to the mountain-tops during winter in order to descend on to the plain in spring as the god of rice and to watch over the young plants. In the tradition of Japanese Shintoism there are gods called ‘knotters’ because they bind the heavens to the earth, the spirit to matter, life to the body. In their temples a cord of knotted straw indicates the purified space, closed off to the profane, where the gods can stay. In the more sophisticated Buddhist rituals, the power of the knot exists even without any material support: all the priest has to do is to move his fingers as if tying a knot for the space of the ceremony to be closed to malign influences.
There is only a small number of such ethnographic exhibits, lent by the Musée de l’Homme, the Museum of African and Oceanic Arts and private collections, and there are also items from the Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions. In fact the main part of the exhibition consists of knots in the artworks of contemporary artists; their work contains loops, knots and tangles in a large variety of materials inspired both by the primitive force of anthropological objects and a creative fascination in the countless practical uses of knots in everyday life.
Without wishing to invade the field of art criticism, I will briefly mention the following items: a beautiful ensemble by Etienne-Martin (ropes, belts, horse caparisons, mats); a barrier made of poles, ropes and rolled-up tents by Titus-Carmel; a palisade held together by tangles of hemp by Jackie Windsor; a gravel bed with remains of carbonized ropes resting on it by Christian Jaccard; many bewitching coloured objects by Jean Clareboudt; bows decorated with ribbons by Louis Chacallis; bindings round lead pipes by Claude Faivre; roots made from hawsers by Danièle Perrone; and other examples of knotty materials from nature (a root, a bird skeleton by Louis Pons, entangled vegetable fibres by Marinette Cucco).
One of the cases in the exhibition induced in me, as a professional writer, a rather nightmarish sensation: ‘Imprisoned Books’ consisted of volumes that were tied up, gagged or hanged, in all sorts of ways, a book wrapped up in a mass of hemp and lacquered in the colour of a red lobster (Barton Lidicés Beneš), or—a less oppressive spectacle—a book with pages made of gauze like embroidered spiders’ webs (Milvia Maglione).
The exhibition, organized by Gilbert Lascault, has a catalogue in which there is an article by a mathematician, Pierre Rosenstiehl. The fact is that knots, as linear configurations in three dimensions, are the object of a mathematical theory. Among the problems the theory opens up are
those relating to the Borromean Knot or Chain (three rings linked together, but any two of the rings are linked only by the third). The Borromean Knot was also very important for Jacques Lacan: see the chapter ‘Ronds de ficelle’ (Knots of Rope) in his Séminaire, Livre XX: Encore, 1972–1973 (Paris: Seuil, 1975), pp. 107–23.
I would never dare to try defining in my own words the relationship of the Borromean Knot to the unconscious according to Lacan; but I would like to try to formulate the geometrical and spatial idea I have managed to draw from it: the three-dimensional space actually has six dimensions since everything changes according to whether one dimension passes above or below another, or to the right or left of the other, just like in a knot.
This is because in knots the intersection between two curves is never an abstract point but is the actual point where one end of a rope or cord or line or thread or string either runs or turns or is tied above or below or around itself or around another similar item, as a consequence of very precise actions carried out by practitioners of a range of crafts, from the sailor to the surgeon, the cobbler to the acrobat, the mountaineer to the seamstress, the fisherman to the packer, the butcher to the basket-maker, the carpet-maker to the piano-tuner, the camper to the chair-mender, the woodcutter to the lace-maker, the bookbinder to the racquet-maker, the executioner to the necklace-maker . . . The art of making knots, which is the peak of both mental abstraction and manual work, could be seen as the human characteristic par excellence, just as much and perhaps even more than language . . .
[1983]
Writers Who Draw
With the arrival of Romanticism, writers in France began to draw. The pen runs across the page, stops, hesitates, absent-mindedly or in great agitation leaves a profile in the margin, or a puppet, or a scribble, or it becomes engrossed in drawing a frieze, a piece of shading, a geometric labyrinth. The thrust of graphic energy finds itself every so often faced with a dilemma: to continue evoking its own ghosts through the steady trickle of the uniform letters of the alphabet or to pursue them in the visual immediacy of a rapid sketch? It appears that this temptation did not always arise: there have always been painters who write, but very few writers who draw. All of a sudden, between the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, the education of a young person who would become a man of letters was not considered complete if it did not include some training in drawing or painting. The lives of poets and writers opened up to a practice and ambition which in some cases could have led to a professional commitment in the field of art, if the other vocation had not been stronger. At the same time even the manuscripts of those who had no artistic education began to swarm with small figures or doodles. It was the cultural physiognomy of the writer that was changing, with the new aspiration towards the ‘total work of art’, which took shape in Germany under Romanticism, a dream cherished by Novalis (who invented the phrase), and which would be the basis of Wagner’s programme. Hoffmann (who was translated into French in 1829) instantly became a model for new French literature, not only because he created a new genre, the Contes fantastiques (it was the French, always ready to provide a label for cultural innovations, who invented the term, which had no equivalent in German), but also because he was presented as someone who was both a writer, a draughtsman and a musician: the new type of versatile talent which Romanticism had called forth.
These ideas were stimulated by an exhibition in the Maison de Balzac, Drawings by French Nineteenth-Century Writers. It displays 250 documents (from simple doodles to sketches and caricatures or indeed to watercolours and actual paintings) by forty-five famous or minor or forgotten poets and writers, but all of them significant for the relationship between pictorial penmanship and writing. It has to be said at the outset that the theme is valid only in the most general terms, for the claim that one can establish a link between the style of a given writer and their drawings seems untenable given the very evident absence of style in the drawings themselves, whether this is due to the author’s crude hand or to a skill that is too impersonal. So I believe that it is impossible to establish why many writers draw and many others, despite their works being full of visual imagery, do not draw at all. (The list of non-drawers is impressive too, including as it does Chateaubriand, Madame de Staël, Flaubert, Zola.)
It has been known for some time that the most talented amateur painter amongst French nineteenth-century writers was Victor Hugo, and this exhibition confirms it. For the show they have transported from the Maison Victor Hugo (the other—and more interesting—writer’s house that is now a museum in Paris) some of his haunting works in pen and ink depicting ghostly cities and eerie landscapes, where the artist in those anxious years gave vent to the darkest vein in his Romanticism, but also displayed an ingenious inventiveness in his experimentation in this medium.
As for the other champion, also in terms of written output, Balzac, he had no talent at all for drawing, and limited himself to scribbling a few small, rather childish drawings (especially faces) in the blank spaces in his manuscripts. Balzac, then, despite the fact that the exhibition is in his house, is represented by only two pages, and they are reproductions at that, not even originals. Another lacuna is Stendhal, but knowing the rudimentary sketches that accompany his La Vie de Henry Brulard, we could almost consider him as belonging to the group of non-drawing writers. Neither was Michelet very skilful with a pencil, judging by a very summary sketch for a proposal of his for a monument to the fallen of the French Revolution.
Then there are the writers who can draw all too well and who for that reason are less interesting. Mérimée, Alfred de Vigny, Théophile Gautier had had proper art lessons, but the many works on show here—illustrations of historical subjects, watercolours of landscapes, caricatures, architectural drawings—seem rather anonymous. Even the drawings with which Mérimée filled the headed ministerial notepaper during the meetings of the many official commissions on which he was an important member are very composed and academic. More interesting are his travel notebooks, for their precise observation of countries and costumes, things which we find forcefully expressed in a very different way in his short stories. Amongst those by Gautier two drawings in red ink stand out, testimonies to his grotesque, tormented-poet tastes: a witch’s kitchen and a Temptation of St Anthony in an erotic and sadistic vein.
George Sand was a technically accomplished landscape artist in pencil and watercolours, but at least in a group of grey-green, light-brown mountain-views she manages to convey something unusual: a bristling, stagnant, mineral wasteland. These are little scenes created using a technique she herself invented; she called them ‘dendrites’, after those stones which exhibit a faint pattern of branching, multicoloured veins.
The most unexpected discovery of the exhibition is Alfred de Musset as a precursor of comic strips. This ‘child of the century’ of Romanticism, to quote his autobiographical work, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle, would compose for his own entertainment, as well as for that of friends and family members, stories in the form of cartoons with caricatures of well-known characters: on display here are two complete sets of stories. One tells the tale of a journey to Sicily by the poet’s brother, culminating in an affair with a lady of easy virtue from Messina. The other is the account of a piece of Parisian gossip: how a large-nosed gentleman proposed to the singer Pauline García (sister of Maria Malibran) and how during the successive bouts of breaking-up and making-up between the couple the fiancé’s conspicuous nose changed shape and size. The great thing is that another contender for the singer’s hand was the poet himself, Alfred de Musset, who portrays himself as a patient confined to bed by a pulmonary illness, undergoing improvements and relapses in his conditio
n which are caused by the alternating fortunes of his rival. Even in caricature Pauline is not lacking in a certain dreamy grace, but the evil brains behind the plot was George Sand, portrayed with her cigar or a long pipe and brandishing a sabre.
These comics before their time are of a surprising modernity in their narrative conception and graphic elegance, something between Rodolphe Töpffer and Edward Lear, so much so that they attain a stylized liveliness that looks almost twentieth-century, reminiscent of Sergio Tofano’s drawings. With de Musset we see the start of the custom of illustrating letters to a lady friend with little drawings (theatre gossip once more, where the same characters keep resurfacing). De Musset is one of the cases where one can talk of ‘writer’s drawings’ as of something different from an artist’s drawings, in that they are connected with a narrative creativity and stylization and also have a kind of irony and self-mockery: all of these are literary procedures, even though they are noticeably different from the procedures used by the author in his written works.
The other type of ‘author’s drawing’ that the exhibition highlights is that of writing that becomes drawing, and here the surprising example is Barbey d’Aurevilly, who kept an illustrated diary or scrapbook using different-coloured inks, where the written phrases are interspersed with arrows, hearts, suns, chalices, geometric decorations, all of them rather rudimentary and disorganized but with a tremendous graphic vitality and brio bordering on the effects of ‘Outsider Art’. This great French dandy possessed a complete cache of coloured inks and goose-quill pens of varying sharpness as well as paintbrushes. For instance, he would rewrite in gouache his stylized signature, which he had already written in pen, until it became a dense and viscous calligram, or he would compose abstract hieroglyphics that resembled monstrous insects or mobiles in the air.