The Rebuke

I can't resist posting a link to this, silly though it is: Julian Barnes's suitably bathetic rewriting of the end of Madame Bovary. Sample:

That man who told you my story did not really understand me, you see. He did not like me. He told one of his friends he thought me a vulgar little woman. He said my story made him want to throw up. He thought himself more important than me. In the eyes of the world, no doubt he was.

I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles...

It occurs to me that I never write anything about the visual arts in this blog. This is certainly not through lack of interest. Perhaps it is a matter of inclination (if I might abuse that word): I want always to escape to the higher ground of language, the rarefied air of the word, and not to risk descending the subterranean depths of the image. Perhaps the topographical figure is misleading. I prefer the comfortable plasticity of words to the hard-edged impenetrability of the image.

Anyway, I was in the Fitzwilliam Museum today, and I had another chance to take a look at a painting which has intrigued me in the past, Salvator Rosa's L'Umana Fragilita (Human Frailty), c.1656. It isn't particularly good, as you can see. In fact it's pretty nasty, a treatment of the vanitas topos that is at once tasteless and pedantic. Take a look at the walkthrough on the museum website if you like: it doesn't make the painting any more palatable, though.

The aspect of this composition that fascinates most is the fact that the infant child is writing: at first glance perhaps we see his mother's hand guiding the child's movements; but then it is clear that his wrist is being held by the angel, by Death. The justification for the inclusion of the writing motif seems to be that the words on the page express familiar commonplaces of the memento mori type ("Conception is a sin", "Birth is pain", "Life is toil", "Death a necessity"). So runs the explanation on the website. But isn't there something more to it than that? One possible reading, perhaps an over-literal one, might have the child signing his own death warrant. Another might posit the signing of a name, the first entry into the symbolic order, the barring of the subject, as the mark of death. The antinomies of the written word: deathless, changeless, and so dangerous—according to Plato; vital, life-giving, expressive of the soul (and so dangerous) —according to the poets. Naming an object brings it into being, but naming an object also annihilates it: 'I name "This woman"', writes Blanchot, 'and real death has been announced, is already present in my language.' And then: to write is to turn one's self inside out, to commit one's subjective interiority to the horrifyingly alien blackness of the ink on the page. (And language, I think, might well have evolved first as a private, autochthonous mechanism and not as a facilitator of social communication.) The written word confers death upon the writing subject; writing is self-annihilation.

It's not all doom and gloom though. In the bottom left corner of the painting we have a delightful vignette: a happy putto blows bubbles, as if to suggest the insouciance of childhood. It doesn't symbolize this at all, of course: bubbles are almost always meant to signify transience, as the website blurb tells us: this suggests 'the brevity of human existence. "Homo est bulla"—"man is but a bubble"—was a well known phrase of the day.' Fair enough. But it did put me in mind of a certain poem I came across fairly recently: Richard Crashaw's 1646 Bulla ('The Bubble'), which is a sort of hallucinogenic fugue, a study in the emptiness of words: I present below my own terribly inadequate (and quite possibly incorrect in places) translation of the closing lines, spoken in the person of the bubble herself:

Sum venti ingenium breve
Flos sum, scilicet, aeris,
Sidus scilicet aequoris;
Naturae iocus aureus,
Naturae vaga fabula,
Naturae breve somnium.
Nugarum decus & dolor;
Dulcis, doctaque vanitas.
Aurae filia perfidiae;
Et risus facilis parens.
Tantum gutta superbior,
Fortunatius & lutum.
Sum fluxae pretium spei;
Una ex Hesperidum insulis.
Formae pyxis, amantium
Clare caecus ocellulus;
Vanae & cor leve gloriae.
Sum caecae speculum Deae.
Sum fortunae ego tessera,
Quam dat militibus suis;
Sum fortunae ego symbolum,
Quo sancit fragilem fidem
Cum mortalibus Ebriis
Obsignatque tabellulas.
Sum blandum, petulans, vagum,
Pulchrum, purpureum, et decens,
Comptum, floridulum, et recens,
Distinctum nivibus, rosis,
Undis, ignibus, aere,
Pictum, gemmeum, & aureum,
O sum, (scilicet, O nihil.)

I am the short-lived spirit of the wind
I am, that is, the flower of the air,
That is, the star of the sea,
The golden joke of Nature
The wandering tale of Nature
The brief dream of Nature.
The glory of small things, and grief.
Sweet and learned futility.
The daughter of golden treachery;
And the mother of the easy smile.
Only a droplet is prouder,
Dirt more blessed.
I am the prize of fleeting hope;
One of the isles of the Hesperides.
The casket of beauty, the blind little eye
Of lovers, to be sure;
And the fickle heart of false glory.
I am the mirror of the blind goddess.
I am the password of Fortune,
That she gives to her soldiers;
I am the warrant of Fortune,
With which she consecrates frail hope
When for drunken mortals
She seals her documents.
I am charming, wanton, inconstant,
Beautiful, glowing and graceful,
Elegant, bright and fresh,
Not like unto snow, roses,
Water, fire and air,
Painted, bejeweled, and golden,
O I am (that is, O nothing).

So there we have it: this blog's first entry on the subject of painting. Kind of got away from me there, didn't she?

"We want the poetry of life"

Flicking through Amiel's Journal intime I chanced upon this fittingly autumnal entry:

September 22, 1871. Charnex.—Gray sky—a melancholy day. A friend has left me, the sun is unkind and capricious. Everything passes away, everything forsakes us. And in place of all we have lost, age and gray hairs! ... After dinner I walked to Chailly between two showers. A rainy landscape has a great charm for me; the dark tints become more velvety, the softer tones more ethereal. The country in rain is like a face with traces of tears upon it—less beautiful no doubt, but more expressive.

Behind the beauty which is superficial, gladsome, radiant, and palpable, the aesthetic sense discovers another order of beauty altogether, hidden, veiled, secret and mysterious, akin to moral beauty. This sort of beauty only reveals itself to the initiated, and is all the more exquisite for that. It is a little like the refined joy of sacrifice, like the madness of faith, like the luxury of grief; it is not within the reach of all the world. Its attraction is peculiar, and affects one like some strange perfume, or bizarre melody. When once the taste for it is set up the mind takes a special and keen delight in it, for one finds in it

"Son bien premièrement, puis le dédain d'autrui,"

and it is pleasant to one's vanity not to be of the same opinion as the common herd. This, however, is not possible with things which are evident, and beauty which is incontestable. Charm, perhaps, is a better name for the esoteric and paradoxical beauty, which escapes the vulgar, and appeals to our dreamy, meditative side. Classical beauty belongs, so to speak, to all eyes; it has ceased to belong to itself. Esoteric beauty is shy and retiring. It only unveils itself to unsealed eyes, and bestows its favors only upon love.

[trans. Mary Augusta Ward]

Pseudodoxia

A couple of posts back, Andrew Simone made some comments in response to my Antal Szerb entry about what he calls the 'paradox of the disingenuous'. I'd like to be able to say something novel and profound about that particular problem of logic, but, for I cannot, I'll knock out a few half-formed ideas and half-witted comments here instead. I shy from the abstract, and generally respond better to particular instances; so accept, please, these few lines of Ovid:

Crede mihi, distant mores a carmine nostro
____(uita uerecunda est, Musa iocosa mea)
magnaque pars mendax operum est et ficta meorum:
____plus sibi permisit compositore suo.
Nec liber indicium est animi, sed honesta uoluntas
____plurima mulcendis auribus apta ferens.

[Tristia 2.353-8]

Believe me, the way I live has nothing to do with my poetry (my life is modest, my Muse playful). Most of my work is lies, and fictions: it is more responsible to itself than to its author. A book is not the index of its author's mind, but a sincere impulse bearing very many things to flatter the ear.

I love this. The injunction 'crede mihi', 'believe me', is undercut by the admission that the body of work (which is, in the final analysis, all we have of the author) is composed of lies and fictions. And that line 'plus sibi permisit compositore suo': in the first place 'it has allowed more to itself than to its author' – stressing the claim that an author's life can be chaste even if his poems are filthy (an invocation of the lex Catulliana) – but then again: 'it has more to do with itself than with its maker' – detaching work from author, destabilizing the notion of author as originating source (another fiction, but a persistent one). This word 'compositor' casts the poet simply as an arranger of material, a mere function of dispositio (and this, of course, is exactly what a poet was at one time: a manipulator of rhetorical phrases, a processor of commonplaces); and to a modern ear the word cannot help but suggest a connection with the technology of printing: the role of the compositor is that of formatting, the arrangement of type on the galley trays. What does it mean to make the author into the function of a largely mechanistic process?

Writing is lying: that much we know. Sincerity is a pose, truthfulness a strategy. There are many different ways to gain the trust of the reader, and most of them involve us in the paradoxes of persuasion: 'believe me, I tell lies'; 'don't believe me, but pay attention'; 'I don't care if you believe me, but truths are hidden among the lies'. Rabelais wrote that his writing should be treated as a Silenus box, valueless and false-seeming on the surface, but concealing some precious truth; he also encouraged his readers to get as drunk as possible before considering believing such a fantastical lie. And just as the supposed truths of myth are allegorically cloaked in a fabuleux manteau of lies, so literature is no 'indicium animi' but an 'honesta voluntas', a 'truthful impulse' expressing itself, like the Cretan liar, only in falsehoods and untruths. It is only by struggling through the double bind of the problem of authorship that we attain unto that 'honesta voluntas' untouched by paradox. Believe that if you will: it's all lies, though.

A few thoughts on that line from Hamlet ('We are arrant knaves all, believe none of us'). It brings to mind some of the things Christopher Prendergast has to say on Flaubert's citational technique in his excellent book The Order of Mimesis. Given the impossibility of transcending the position from which we make and judge the truth-value of utterances, where is the point from which an earnest critique of stupid irony might be possible? Can a text 'be ironic about irony, and thus entertain the possibility of non-ironic readings?' It's an amusing problem, especially in the light of this:

'[...] as the classicists have pointed out, it is not the least of the paradoxes that para-dox is in fact subsumed under the general class of the doxa.'

And Hamlet here is effectively doing what all good authors do, 'quoting without quotation marks', saying something that every reader knows to be 'true' (for we are all stupid), and thus destabilizing the position from which doxa makes its utterances (the position of doxa is precisely that of bêtise or of madness). It is a literary commonplace that women should not believe men. Most Renaissance readers knew that Catullus, through Ariadne, advised 'let no woman believe a man's oath, let none believe that a man's speeches can be trustworthy.' To repeat the commonplace, as a way of persuading a woman to believe, is madness; and perhaps Hamlet's madness, feigned or otherwise, is the same as the madness of the mind that writes only in quotations to ridicule common knowledge, that ironizes about irony and catches itself up in the aporia of sincerity, and that composes lies and fictions in order to tell the truth.

To conclude, allow me to quote a line Prendergast quotes from Flaubert:

'La bêtise consiste à vouloir conclure.'

Walks Through The Woods II

"It is true that those who do not seek [knowledge] have more wealth than those who do. The doctors who sit by the stove wear chains and silk, those who travel can barely afford a smock. Those who sit by the stove eat partridges and those who follow after knowledge eat milk-soup. Although they have nothing, they know that as Juvenal says, 'He only travels happily who has nothing.' I think it is to my praise and not to my shame that I have accomplished my travelling at little cost. And I testify that this is true concerning Nature: whoever wishes to know her must tread her books on their feet. Writing is understood by its letters, Nature by land after land, for every land is a book. Such is the Codex Naturae and so must a man turn over her pages."

--Paracelsus, Fourth Defence [trans. Anna M Stoddart]

How to gain the reader’s goodwill by threatening him

[The second instalment in an occasional series on the subtle art of captatio benevolentiae.]

"TO THE READER WHO EMPLOYS HIS LEISURE ILL

Whoever you may be, I caution you against rashly defaming the author of this work, or cavilling in jest against him. Nay, do not silently reproach him in consequence of others’ censure, nor employ your wit in foolish disapproval or false accusation. For, should Democritus Junior prove to be what he professes, even a kinsman of his elder namesake, or be ever so little of the same kidney, it is all up with you: he will become both accuser and judge of you in his petulant spleen, will dissipate you in jests, pulverize you with witticisms, and sacrifice you, I can promise you, to the God of Mirth.

Again I warn you against cavilling, lest, while you calumniate or disgracefully disparage Democritus Junior, who has no animosity against you, you should hear from some judicious friend the very words the people of Abdera heard of old from Hippocrates, when they held their well-deserving and popular fellow-citizen to be a madman: 'Truly, it is you, Democritus, that are wise, while the people of Abdera are fools and madmen.'

You have no more sense than the people of Abdera.

Having given you this warning in a few words, O reader who employ your leisure ill, farewell."

--Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy [trans. Holbrook Jackson]