Collection of Sand

by Italo Calvino

  Baudelaire knew not only how to draw but how to put his intelligence at the service of his pencil (or his charcoal or his ink), and his self-caricatures have a pungent sharpness. The epoch that starts with him, in other words the second half of the century, sees poets and writers becoming more relaxed, less academic, in drawing figures on paper (apart from those who were painters as their first profession, such as Fromentin, or those who did etchings following all the rules, such as Jules de Goncourt, or those who illustrated their exotic voyages with accurate devotion, such as Pierre Loti).

  More than the novelists (Dumas the Younger was a good caricaturist, Maupassant drew droll puppets, Anatole France was a draughtsman of elegance and bravura), it is the poets who catch our attention, especially Verlaine, who had never studied drawing but who was a witty draughtsman, full of fun and inventiveness and with a very modern touch. There are many self-portraits that caricature the jutting-out jaw beneath his minuscule nose, emphasizing that Mandarin Chinese look he had: that is how he appears in a small sheet of paper where his features are simplified into a series of superimposed triangles before being totally deconstructed into pre-Cubist planes. But the most moving piece is a portrait of Rimbaud leaning across a café table staring at a bottle of absinthe, with the face of a child in a sulk. (But Rimbaud himself was not an interesting draughtsman, at least judging by the two examples exhibited here.)

  A poet who put special calligraphic care into his letters was François Coppée, who structured the page of every letter with great clarity and illustrated it with ideograms and rebuses. In his love letters to Méry Laurent (a demi-mondaine who was maintained by an American dentist) he called his girlfriend ‘dickie-bird’ and himself ‘the she-cat’. However, these nicknames, which to our ear sound as if they have got the genders wrong, are systematically replaced by the drawing of a dove preening itself and a puffed-up tom-cat, who imprint themselves on our eyes as female and masculine ideograms respectively through the evocative power of the drawing.

  Méry Laurent was courted in the same period by Mallarmé as well, who also wrote her letters with little drawings. He too portrayed her in ornithological terms, but used far more ink: for Mallarmé she was ‘the peacock’. Mallarmé was not at all good at drawing, nor had he developed any technique, but he put into his figures something of the great delight that animated his incomparable verbal talent. One note in which he makes an appointment with ‘the peacock’, who was arriving by train, becomes a precious Mallarmean ‘comic strip’, scribbled with great joy.

  The pursuit of a sphere of expression different from that of words is the urge behind many of these pictograms which have been traced in the margins of pages that are dense with writing. How can one not feel the eternal, irrepressible envy of the writer for the painter? ‘What a happy job is that of the painter compared with that of the man of letters!’ we read in the Goncourt brothers’ journal, dated 1 May 1869. ‘In the one we have the happy activity of the hand and eye as against the torment of the brain in the other; and the work that for one of them is a joy is torture for the other . . .’

  [1984]

  II

  THE EYE’S RAY

  In Memory of Roland Barthes

  Amongst the first details to emerge about the road accident on 25 February at the junction of Rue des Ecoles and Rue Saint-Jacques was that Roland Barthes had been disfigured, so much so that nobody, just a few yards from the Collège de France, had been able to recognize him. The ambulance that picked him up had taken him to the Salpêtrière Hospital as if he were an anonymous victim (he had no documents on him) and so he stayed in the ward unidentified for hours.

  In his last book, which I had read just a few weeks previously—La Chambre claire, Note sur la photographie (Editions Cahiers du Cinéma-Gallimard-Seuil, 1980) (Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, London, Vintage, 1993)—I had been struck above all by the wonderful pages on the experience of being photographed, on the unease caused by seeing one’s own face become an object, on the relationship between the image and the ego. As a result, amongst the first thoughts I had as I waited anxiously to hear his fate was the memory of that recent reading, the fragile and distressing link with his own image which was suddenly being torn apart just as one tears up a photograph.

  However, on 28 March, in his coffin, Barthes’s face did not seem at all disfigured: it was him, exactly as he was when I regularly encountered him in the streets of the quartier, cigarette dangling from a corner of his mouth—that was the way all those who grew up before the Second World War smoked (the historicity of the image, one of the many themes of Camera Lucida, applies also to the image that each one of us gives of ourselves in life). But his face was fixed like that for ever, and the same pages from chapter 5 of the book, which I went back to reread immediately, now spoke of that, only of that, of how the fixity of the image is death, hence our inner reluctance to be photographed, as well as our submission to it. ‘As if the (terrified) Photographer must exert himself to the utmost to keep the Photograph from becoming Death. But I—already an object, I do not struggle’ (Camera Lucida, p. 14). An attitude that now seemed to find an echo in what we managed to find out about his condition during the month he spent at the Salpêtrière unable to speak.

  (The mortal danger he was in was apparent immediately, not in the fractures to the head but in those to his ribs. So then another quotation immediately occurred to his distressed friends: the one about the rib that had been amputated in his youth because of a pneumothorax and which he kept in a drawer, until he decided to throw it away, in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.)

  These references in my memory are not accidental: the fact is that his entire oeuvre, I now realize, consists in forcing the impersonality of our linguistic and cognitive mechanisms to take account of the physicality of the living and mortal subject. Critical discussion of Barthes—which has begun already—will be polarized between the supporters of one Barthes or the other: the one who subordinated everything to a rigorous methodology and the one who had just one sure criterion, namely pleasure (the pleasure of intelligence and the intelligence of pleasure). The truth is that those two Barthes are just one: and in the constant and variously balanced co-presence of these two aspects in Barthes lies the secret behind the fascination his mind exercised on many of us.

  On that grey morning I was wandering through the empty streets behind the hospital, looking for the ‘lecture theatre’ where I had learned Barthes’s body would leave from, in a very private ceremony, to go to the provincial cemetery where he would join his mother in her grave. And I met Greimas, who had also arrived early, and who told me about how in 1948 he had met Barthes in Alexandria, in Egypt, and had made him read Saussure and rewrite Michelet. For Greimas, an unbending master of methodological rigour, there was no doubt: the real Barthes was the one who carried out the semiological analyses with discipline and rigour as in Le Système de la Mode (The Fashion System); but the real point that made Greimas disagree with the obituaries in the newspapers was their attempt to use professional categories like philosopher or writer to define a man who eluded all classifications because everything he had done in his life he had done for love.

  The day before, when François Wahl told me the time and place of that almost secret ceremony, he had spoken of a ‘cercle amoureux’ of young men and girls which had formed together round Barthes’s death, a circle jealously possessive of a grief that would not tolerate any other display but that of silence. The stunned group which I joined was made up to a large extent of young people (few of those in their midst were famous; but I did recognize Foucault’s bald cranium). The plaque on that wing did n
ot have the university denomination ‘Lecture Theatre’, but said ‘Salle de reconnaissances’ (Mortuary Chamber), and I realized that it must indeed have been the morgue. From behind white curtains that went all around the room every so often a coffin would come out, shouldered by pall-bearers all the way to the hearse and followed by a family group of ordinary people, tiny little old women mostly, each family identical to the one in the preceding funeral, as if in a superfluous demonstration of the levelling power of death. For those of us who were there for Barthes, waiting motionless and silent in the courtyard, as if following the implicit message to keep the signs of a funeral ceremony to the minimum, everything that appeared in that courtyard seemed to magnify its function as sign; I felt that over every detail of that wretched scene hovered the sharp gaze that had trained itself to discern revelatory clues in photographs in Camera Lucida.

  So this book of his, now that I’m rereading it, seems to me to point entirely towards that final journey, that courtyard, that grey morning. Certainly it was from an examination of the photographs of his recently dead mother that Barthes’s reflections in the book had started (as is recounted at length in the second half of the volume). It was an impossible pursuit of his mother’s presence, which he found in the end in a photograph of her as a little girl, an image that was ‘a lost, remote photograph, one which does not look “like” her, the photograph of a child I never knew’ (p. 103). The photograph was not reproduced in the book, because we could never have understood the value it had taken on for him.

  A book about death, then, just as the previous one—Fragments d’un discours amoureux (A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments)—had been a book about love. Yes, but this one too was a book about love, as is proved by this passage about the difficulty of avoiding the ‘heaviness’ of one’s own image, the ‘meaning’ to give to one’s own face: ‘For it is not indifference which erases the weight of the image—the Photomat always turns you into a criminal type, wanted by the police—but love, extreme love’ (p. 12).

  This was not the first time that Barthes had spoken about being photographed: in his book on Japan—L’Empire des signes (Empire of Signs)—one of his least-known works, but one of the richest in terms of acute observations, there is the extraordinary discovery, when observing photographs of himself published by Japanese newspapers, of a look in his features that was indefinably Japanese. This was explained by the way they have over there of touching up photographs, making the pupil of the eye round and black. This discourse about intentionality being superimposed on our image—historicity, belonging to a particular culture, as I said before, but above all the intentionality of someone who is not us but who uses our image as a weapon—crops up again in Camera Lucida in a passage on the power of truquages subtils (‘the subtlest deceptions’, p. 14) used on photographs. Barthes had discovered a photograph of himself, one where he thought his grief for a recent death was recognizable, on the cover of a book that satirized him where his face had now become detached from his inner self and looked sinister.

  The reading of this book and the death of its author happened too close to each other for me to be able to separate them. And yet I must succeed in doing so in order to give an idea of what the book really is: it consists of Barthes’s progressive approach towards a definition of that particular type of knowledge that was opened up by the advent of that ‘anthropologically new object’ (p. 88), the photograph.

  The reproductions in the book are chosen on the basis of this argument, which we might call a ‘phenomenological’ one. In the interest that a photograph arouses in us Barthes distinguishes between a level that is that of the studium or cultural participation in the information or emotion that the photograph conveys and that of the punctum, or in other words the surprising, involuntary transfixing element that certain images communicate. Certain images, or rather certain details of images: the reading that Barthes offers of the works of famous or anonymous photographers is always startling. The things he reveals to us as being extraordinary are often physical details (hands, nails) or details of clothing.

  Against recent theorizations of photography as a cultural convention, artifice, non-reality, Barthes privileges the ‘chemical’ basis of the operation: a photograph is the trace of luminous rays emanating from something that exists, something that is there. (And this is the basic difference between photography and language, which can talk of something that is not there.) In the photograph we are looking at something that has been and is no longer there: this is what Barthes calls the temps écrasé (‘defeated time’, p. 97).

  It is a typical Barthes book, with its more speculative moments where it seems that by dint of multiplying the links in his terminological net he can no longer succeed in extricating himself, but also with sudden illuminations, flashes of proof that arrive like surprising but definitive presents. From its very first pages Camera Lucida contains a declaration of his ongoing methodology and programme of work: refusing to define a ‘photographic universal’ (p. 5), he decides to take into consideration only the photographs which he was ‘sure existed for me’ (p. 8).

  ‘In this (after all) conventional debate between science and subjectivity, I had arrived at this curious notion: why mightn’t there be, somehow, a new science for each object? A mathesis singularis (and no longer universalis)?’ (p. 8).

  Roland Barthes cultivated the science of the uniqueness of every object, in a way that combined a scientist’s ability to produce general rules with a poet’s attention for what is singular and unique. This kind of aesthetic philosophy or delight in understanding is the great thing that he has—I would not say taught us, because it is not something that can be taught or learned—that he has proved is possible: or that it is possible to search for it.

  [1980]

  Day-flies in the Fortress

  A swarm of day-flies flew into a fortress, came to rest on the ramparts, attacked the keep, and invaded the sentinels’ patrol path and the dungeons. The network of nerves on their transparent wings hovered amidst the stone walls.

  ‘It is pointless for you to stretch your wiry limbs,’ said the fortress. ‘Only those who have been made to last can claim to exist. I last, therefore I am. You don’t.’

  ‘We inhabit the space of the air, we mark time with the beating of our wings. What else does existence mean if not this?’ answered those fragile creatures. ‘You, on the other hand, are only a shape planted there to mark the limits of space and time in which we exist.’

  ‘Time flows over me, but I remain,’ insisted the fortress. ‘You only graze the surface of coming into being just as you graze the surface of water in streams.’

  And the day-flies: ‘We dart about in the void just like writing on a blank page and the notes of the flute amid the silence. Without us there is nothing but the all-powerful and ever-present void, so heavy that it crushes the world, the void whose annihilating power is clothed in solid fortresses, the void-fullness that can only be dissolved by what is light and swift and slender.’

  You can imagine this dialogue taking place in the Forte del Belvedere in Florence, which is host to Fausto Melotti’s aery sculptures, one of which has this very title, Gli effimeri (Ephemera): it looks like a musical score of ideograms as weightless as water-insects that seem to whirl around a brass bedstead screened by a mesh of gauze.

  You can also imagine, if you wish, that the background to this dialogue is the debate on the aesthetics of the ephemeral that we have been hearing about this year in Italy. But you can also easily ignore those discussions, for Fausto Melotti’s discourse is about something else: his use of poor and perishable materials—little sticks of welded brass, gauze, little chains, foil, cardboard, string,
iron wire, chalk, rags—is the fastest way to reach a visionary realm of marvels and splendours, as children and Shakespearean actors well know.

  On the other hand, one cannot help remembering that this exhibition unfortunately is already closing on 8 June, as if by some literal misinterpretation of the value of the ephemeral by the Florentine organizers. As a result, all these works, many of which have been completed specifically for the spaces of the Fortezza del Belvedere (whether they are new creations or ‘enlargements’ of previous works), will be on display only for two months. This temporally contracted celebration is yet one more paradox in the story of an artist who only in his declining years has been recognized as one of the greats.

  On the green bastions of the Belvedere a palisade of geometric shapes made from burnished steel and bristling with spears whose tips are raised in the air or stuck into the ground might suggest a barbaric or extra-terrestrial war; but we instantly realize that it has been placed there to defend a space in which the force that wins out is inner strength, the resistance is one composed of slender lines, the confrontation is backed up by irony.

  I would say that it is in dimensions around a metre in height that the rhythms of Melotti’s imagination and their placements in the Fortress come together most happily. And happiness here means the maximum of cheerfulness and melancholy together, as in The Traveller, who with his string scarf is walking past a wall full of metallic, geometric posters under a sky of textiles.

  Or as in Ulysses’ Ship, which is hollowed out like the breast-bone of a bird, with a little chalk head on a mast. (It must be pointed out that Melotti, one of the ‘founding fathers’ of abstract art, almost always puts some figurative element, no matter how small, into his works, as though implying that ‘rigour’ is never where we most expect to find it.) Or like The Grand Canal, which is made of perforated bricks placed on a mirror.