Thanks to this calculated remoteness, the relations which we may have with the subject of the painting exclude all familiarity and forestall any ill-timed intervention on our part. This figure, for example, does not suspect that he is being looked at; he is alone in his space, foreign to the things which surround him, lonely and exiled in the midst of the studio which has become immense, imprecise, disturbing. Formerly (around 1946–47) the décor was sometimes rendered with all its details but by a multiplicity of lines which referred one back to its basic indefiniteness. Today it is hardly sketched in, or else treated with utter unconcern. The lack of differentiation of the backgrounds sets off the isolation of the subject and reveals the presence of emptiness around beings and things. The figure occupies, without inhabiting it, a vague, mysterious, dilapidated space; apples graze the table which remains in ignorance of the other furniture, and whose legs scarcely rest on the floor. The background is purposely left to itself; gray and formless, both dirty and luminous, it takes on by turns the aspects of an ocher mist, a cloud of soot, of leaden or silver pools or vapor. Traversed by vague currents whose light and shadow sluggishly oppose or penetrate each other, it gives the sensation of a substantial but neutral and unreal space, whose colors are those of waiting and foreboding. It is a propitious space for apparitions. Seemingly random lines cross it, organize it, detach in passing the outline of an easel or a sofa. Careless indications, but they give this immense uncertain space its exact dimensions, and provide unreal space with its own sensory quality.
The uniformity of the subjects is more striking here than in the sculpture, for the latter means of expression traditionally implies a restriction if not a codification of the subjects. One sculpts a nude, not a woman in her bath. In painting, diversity is the rule; the limitation to two dimensions paradoxically allows one to represent everything. Yet Giacometti hardly varies the subjects of his paintings. The landscape is almost exclusively the houses of the rue d’Alésia or the trees against the background of the mountains of Stampa. The still life is apples, bottles, a bouquet, a few familiar objects on the table. Or else a corner of the studio, the stove and the coal scuttle. The faces are those of the same people from his close-knit circle: his wife, his brother, his mother, his usual model, Caroline, Lotar. The seated person, his hands on his knees, does not change his pose. The nude is standing, her arms hanging close to her body. And all the heads have the same expression, the same bearing, the same fixity. This uniformity of subject in an artist for whom “in every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist is conscious of it or not,” is most revealing. The explanation, as we have seen, is that the subject of the picture is not Diego or Annette, is not yet Diego or Annette, but for the moment Diego withholding himself, Annette unattainable. If he were to change his model oftener, Giacometti would perhaps experience less vividly the necessity to change himself, that is to advance, to explore each new work a little further. But there is a simpler reason: The more known the model is, the more unknown he is. The insistent, obsessive questioning of a human being (or any other subject) finally strips him of his known part and uncovers the unknown which is all in depth within him. The model lends himself all the more submissively to this laying bare when the painter ceases to linger over superficial details and particularities which might distract him in a person chosen at random. An occasional model might give a portrait that would be more like, would resemble the model more and Giacometti less. The longer the sittings last and the oftener they are repeated, the more the model will resemble Giacometti, to the detriment not of the profound personality of the model but of its surface particularities. One evening at a café, Giacometti looked at Annette with insistence.
She was surprised. “Why are you looking at me like that?” “Because I didn’t see you today.” Annette had just posed the whole afternoon for him. He had not seen Annette, but the unknown stranger, the model. The creature close to us becomes a stranger, the unknown par excellence, revealing man and the world as unknown, revealing him, Giacometti, to himself as an unknown being.
* * *
Giacometti’s paintings are painted less with colors than with lines, and his palette is as restricted as his subjects. A range of grays and ochers; black, white, and gray lines are apparently sufficient. But within this dominant tone, where all the nuances and transparencies of gray echo each other, appear colors, rare and scarcely exuberant ones, discreet and refined, drawing a sure power from their very restraint, from the rightness of their pitch or their place. The abuse and exasperation of pure or mixed colors to which painters have habituated us have ended by blunting our sensibility and smothering color in its own excesses, leaving us with an insipid impression of grisaille. Starting with gray and using it as an alembic, Giacometti resensitizes colors, gives them back their subtlety and their acuteness. They emerge from gray but remain suspended in it. They no longer act on their own, but are strictly subjected to the necessities of a pictorial language, itself dominated by the subject. That is, they obey that gradation in expressive intensity which mounts from distances and inanimate things to the human face, passing through familiar objects and places. As one draws near the face the intensity increases and the difficulties of portrayal increase. The light fails, the color becomes dimmer. Thus the still lifes are generally more colored than the portraits and less so than the landscapes. In the latter, despite the alliance with gray, the color sings, the greens of the foliage respond to the blue of the sky and the red of the bricks. The grays of the still lifes are already denser and more encroaching, and in the figure paintings they are the very color of that unfathomable and hallucinated space of which the figure is captive. They create obsessions, dull the light, and sometimes make it well up behind the head which then seems surrounded by a mysterious halo.
Giacometti’s paintings are painted less with colors than with lines, because color is the quality of surfaces and parts, and, as we have seen, Giacometti precisely refuses to give expressiveness to surfaces and parts. The eyes are blue and the lips red, but Giacometti does not paint eyes or lips, but the distant totality of the face and the depths which it reveals. The vacuum which exudes the vague and dense skein of lines of a face cannot be anything but gray, the canceling out of the colors of the spectrum, the color of refusal and the impossible.
The circular arrangement of the picture around a central point also indicates the character of the line, which, as I have already indicated, plays the chief role in it. We again come upon Giacometti’s so-characteristic line—rapid, discontinuous, indefinitely repeated. Preferably black, white, or gray (but it may happen that a thread of color intrudes in its meshes), it defines forms less than it calls on them to reveal themselves by multiplying within the outlines. Its frequency and its insistence increase as it nears the center. Thus, in a portrait, Giacometti treats the background hastily, lingers but little over the body and the arms, to apply all his care and effort to the head. Although often barely sketched in, it is the décor which is located and fixed. The head is all the more vague and fleeting for being worked over, weighted with color, and loaded down with line. For the looming of its totality, that is, the condition of its truth and its likeness, depends on the indefiniteness of its parts and the eruption of its surface. The face appears like the arena of a fierce combat; it is there that the match is played, that the frenzied interrogation of the eye takes place, that the most precise of all instruments, the eye and brush together, must operate with patience as well as cruelty. The immediate presence demands rapidity, violence of attack and penetration, but the definition of distance implies minute care in the approach. Without moderating its fury, this contradictory instrument pursues sometimes for nights on end a single undiscoverable line. The struggle has its ups and downs, its successes and reversals. From one day to the next the portrait can vanish, reappear, disappear again, revive again; and nothing allows one to foresee the outcome. A constant pursuit in the form of successive contentions. A line is added to another line, oblitera
tes it, and advances. Innumerable lines which outline nothing, define nothing but which cause something to appear. More than in the drawings, the line explodes, crumbles, scatters into segments which mingle with the brushstrokes. Multiplying and dividing, the lines seem to cancel each other out and vanish in the totality of a head which bursts spontaneously out of the void, the excess of work effacing the traces of work. We no longer see how it has come nor from where it has come. The familiar face of Annette is still present, more present than ever, but detached, transfigured, so that it seems to us that we recognize the unknown which she is, that we sense without distinguishing it. A solitary apparition of an unknown Annette, that seems created by the sole power of a silent injunction.
Giacometti goes from known to unknown by stripping down, by progressive asceticism. He flays appearances and digs into reality until he renders visible the essence of their relationship, that is, the presence of something sacred. That sacredness whose nostalgia is expressed in all modern art, whose lack gives rise to undertakings as poignant as they are sterile. Giacometti drives it out of hiding and wakens it where it is hidden, in the depths of each new thing and each being. It is useless to dissociate the nymph from the forest and the siren from the wave. There is a sacredness only in the excess relationship between man and reality, in the impossible communication of the one with the whole, laceration of oneself and lacerating of the other, sole threshold and lightning flash, which the totalizing power of the creative act establishes.
“Texts for an Approach,” trans. John Ashbery, Giacometti: Three Essays, by Jacques Dupin (New York: Black Square Editions–Hammer Books, 2003). First published in Alberto Giacometti (Maeght Éditeur, 1962; Fourbis, 1991).
MARCELIN PLEYNET
(1933)
THE IMAGE OF MEANING
We have heard much talk about novelists in the past few years and we have heard much talk from novelists … and more often than not we listened with great interest. Since then these novelists have become famous and they now talk a little less. What I should like to say here is that, despite the fact that the title of this evening’s discussion is “The New Poetry,”1 I do not in the least intend to present myself as a poet, I do not in the least intend to take the floor in the name of any kind of poetry, modern or anachronistic. There is no question of letting it be supposed that after the novelists it will be the poets who will try to get themselves talked about, then, after the poets, the painters, the musicians … in short, the corporations. None of that has any interest. Perhaps there is nevertheless a lesson to be deduced from the fact that the novelists, once they became famous, stopped talking … There certainly is a lesson to be deduced for the novelists, the poets, and the others. One is inclined to wonder, for instance, whether these novelists weren’t more interested in communicating the problems that their craft imposed on them, the problems they encountered in writing, than in having their work assimilated to a kind of literature recognizable by the reader … Once the label appears on the merchandise, everyone feels reassured. As for me, I must say that I am no more interested by the sonnet than I am by the novel, nor by anything which could come under the heading of entertainment or the art of staging what is by common consent called the world, reality … all things which I don’t really have much knowledge of, if indeed I have any knowledge of them at all. If I knew what it is that is by common consent called the world, I would no doubt write novels and poems, or perhaps in that case I wouldn’t write at all. What I mean is that I haven’t the vaguest notion of what happens when a man feels exalted, when he is in love, or when he is cuckolded. Not only do I have no ready-made answers to these questions but furthermore I don’t think it will ever be possible to answer them. Besides, these questions are badly chosen; to wonder what happens when a man feels exalted is already to presuppose a number of certainties which may be relied on … Actually, all these certainties seem to me highly contestable. And in this light, the question to which I would be most willing to accord its due is: “What is happening?” It is because I don’t know what is happening that I write. In the same way, it is because I don’t know what is happening here at this moment that I believe myself authorized to speak. Nevertheless, let there be no mistake, I do not plead for a happy ignorance, or a painful one. By refusing to recognize literary categories I claim the right to find the place in which I may look for myself and recognize myself. The structures and forms proposed to me (whether they be novelistic, poetic, pictorial, musical, social, etc.) have this in common: They presuppose that I might recognize myself in an order whose meaning would then become apparent, on condition that I grant it its authority, that I justify myself. For example, one can suppose that certain works have a temporary success because they confer authority on a meaning which criticism and the public recognize (at which point we have illustration: The work has no function beyond ornamenting what has been lived) … Let such an enterprise become dogmatic and we have academicism. Now, as far as I am concerned, in my ignorance of what is happening, how could I accept one form rather than another, how could I accept to confer authority on a form which doesn’t take ambiguity into account, but speaks in terms of what is happening; which ignores the multiplicity of answers, no doubt contradictory, to the question “What is happening?” This multiplicity of answers may nevertheless be resolved … I would resolve it for the moment by saying that what speaks in what is happening is thought—the thought of what is happening.2 That is, the formulation of the proposition which Jakobson attributes to Peirce: “The meaning of a sign is another sign by which it may be translated.” What speaks out in this passing from one sign to another is nothing more than the thought that a sign must be translated. By this I mean that what speaks—elicits speech from what we may call the text and the translation, the apprehended sign and the translated sign—is the thought that there can be no text without a translation and hence, with all the more reason, no translation without a text. Certainly a table has no meaning beyond the word “table,” and yet we live neither in the table nor in the word “table,” we live in the exchange. It is this that I would like to write: the meaning that alights on the table.
* * *
Thus, in the title we have chosen, “The New Poetry,” what seems to me particularly interesting is not the accent placed on poetry, but the accent placed on newness. In my opinion we haven’t sufficiently examined this newness which is as old as the world and which never stops being new. And today, when fashions, novelties, and dubious originalities succeed each other at an ever faster pace, I am sure that we have a great deal to gain, if we want to find our bearings, by asking ourselves what is the perennial character of newness. What the newness of Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Cézanne consisted of for their contemporaries … What the reader confronts in an essentially new work. Let us, to be brief, say it is a shift which situates the reader not in the unreadable but facing the unreadable. If as Peirce says, “the meaning of a sign is another sign by which it may be translated,” it is enough that the reader, or what is read, or the artist’s translation (his vision) use another set of rules than the one agreed on, or transform the rules agreed on (Baudelaire, Mallarmé) for the eyesight to cloud over behind a disappointed convention (in the case of Baudelaire and Mallarmé, the convention would be that of nineteenth-century bourgeois morality and syntax), a convention disappointed by a new meaning, purer or more ambitious. It remains to be seen what this set of rules is, and how it is created. Why does Hugo abandon classical verse, why does Mallarmé see verse breaking up, why is Rimbaud not satisfied with subjective poetry, if not because the agreed-on set of rules plunged them into unreadability. Example: General Aupic found it utterly meaningless for the young Baudelaire to be interested in poetry, while for Baudelaire poetry was meaning itself. Thus a new set of rules and new worlds were created. Because the rules (or the syntax if you will) no longer allow what has been lived to be read (General Aupic’s rules don’t allow Baudelaire to understand what he lives), the rules (or the syntax) of t
his experience (to understand what he experiences Baudelaire discovers a new set of rules), the rules (or the syntax) of this experience involve a reconversion of such a kind that the rules, which we may call anachronistic, will not succeed in deciphering anything of the new code but faults, when they ought to be deciphering their own shortcomings with regard to a meaning which they are unable to satisfy.
* * *
What has happened to this novelty today? What is one to understand when Francis Ponge writes: “One must work onward from the discovery made by Rimbaud and Lautréamont of the necessity of a new rhetoric”? If we can no longer persuade the table to be a table except in the very act of its disappearing, if words continue to evoke what we are losing hold of, if, as Roland Barthes says, “Language has become simultaneously a problem and a model,” what can our speech resemble in this distribution of meaning among signs, in this abrupt multiplicity of meaning which is made up of nothing but questions? Doesn’t everything point to the fact that man is today facing for the first time something which is no longer the vocabulary of the identity of appearances (the vocabulary as catalogue), the dogmatic grammar of the unity of a meaning, but, at the heart of a language which is inexhaustible and which cannot be resolved, multiplicity where the image of meaning occurs? An image which cannot be pinned down and which language does not exhaust. What does this mean? No doubt nothing more than that we must accept the consequences of Jean Paulhan’s statement in Clefs pour la poésie: “The elements of mystery are those of any expression: sign and meaning” … and that this mystery is perhaps not so mysterious since not only does it understand us but we understand it. These consequences (the thought of everything that makes a sign in meaning) are those of a new rhetoric or of new rhetorics which will allow us to write everything that we write—that is, to perceive and to live everything that we live. How can we develop this into a discursive language? An anecdote quoted by Jakobson may provide an answer: “In Africa a missionary criticized his faithful for not wearing clothes. And you, replied the natives, pointing to his face, aren’t you naked somewhere? Of course, said the missionary, but that is my face! Well, they answered, with us the face is everywhere.” How can we write everything we write? First of all, perhaps, by not following the example of the missionary who clothed his nakedness with the word “face.” Perhaps by consenting to see that words don’t clothe it, but that they thrust into the world the image we have of our nakedness, and they will not fail someday to transport us to some Africa where the face is worn everywhere, since the body (and, like the body, the word) is not clothed … Where, at the center of the multiplicity of appearances, the familiar solidity of meaning, undergone today but not experienced, will speak (where what today appears as madness, derangement, will reveal itself as liberty). One can think, or hope, that today for the first time works tend more and more to claim this multiplicity and to comprehend it—that is, to think it. Today for the first time the works which claim this meaning try to think its multiplicity.
Collected French Translations: Prose Page 41