Picture as Spectre in Diderot, Proust, and Deleuze

Thomas Baldwin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351193214
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Literature

"The possibility of ekphrasis, the verbal representation of visual imagery, is fundamental to all writing about art, be it art criticism, theory or a passage in a novel. But there is no consensus concerning how such representation works. Some take it for granted that writing about art can result in a precise match between words and visual images. For others, ekphrasis amounts to a kind of virtuoso rivalry, in which the writer aims to outdo the pictorial image that is being described. In close readings of Diderot, Proust and Deleuze, Thomas Baldwin shows how ekphrasis can create a spectral effect. In other words, ekphrastic spectres do not function as fully present stand-ins for given works of art; nor can they be reduced to the status of passive and absent others. Baldwin also explores the ways in which the works of Diderot, Proust and Deleuze inhabit each other as ghostly influences."

CHAPTER 1
The Spectre in Theory

GROUCHO: [Standing in front of a picture of a woman covering an anatomical drawing] Is this your picture?

CHICO: I no think so. It doesn’t look like me.

GROUCHO: Well take it out of here immediately and hang it up in my bedroom.¹

In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein quotes a dialogue between Socrates and Theaetetus in which the former asks ‘what the object of painting is: the picture of a man (e.g.), or the man that the picture portrays?’.² Leaving aside the complex issues it raises with regard to what David Kaplan calls their ‘ofness’,³ Socrates’s (and indeed Groucho Marx’s) question goes to the heart of a perennial and still quite tricky problem with pictures, namely that of the relationship between their powers of ‘imitation’ or ‘illusion’ and the actual stuff — the dabs of paint, ink, or whatever — of which they are made. Is all or some art to be understood or appreciated in terms of mimetic transparency and illusion — as a replica or imitation of its object? Moreover, when I look at a certain kind of picture, is my perception only as of the object it portrays? Is my pictorial experience of a picture that portrays a man modelled on an illusion as of seeing a man? Can a picture of a man be so like a man that we are liable to mistake it for one? Do I see through the canvas to the object portrayed there, or can I also, or simultaneously, attend to the signifying, material substance of the picture? When I read a novel, while I may not actually see the object in the words, in what sense, if at all, am I able to see through the words to the object they appear to describe? Pictures are both like and unlike literary works, of course. A painter and a writer can give us, each in his own way, an idea of what a town looks like, but while the painter might make us ‘see’ his town, the writer can at best inspire us to imagine our seeing it. The writer can certainly endeavour to ‘paint’ an image of the town, but reading his text will not remotely resemble the painter’s view of it.

In The Object of Art, Marian Hobson identifies four modes of artistic ‘illusion’: simulation, or adequatio, in which the work of art ‘makes itself like something which is not there’; dissimulation, or dissimulatio, whereby the work of art ‘hides itself by some diversionary behaviour’; seeming, the contrary of adequatio, where the work of art ‘seems’ to be ‘like’ something else but is ‘not really’; and appearing, or aletheia, in which the artwork ‘shows itself, and points to something beyond’.⁴ As Hobson suggests, art as adequatio or dissimulatio, or what she also refers to as ‘hard’ illusion (p. 63), which requires the signifying surface of the picture or text to conceal its material existence — to be entirely forgotten or ignored in a ‘sightless vision’ — was out of favour in the twentieth century, and is arguably no more de rigueur in the twenty-first.⁵ In fact, ‘illusion’ has often been characterized, she suggests, ‘by a scornful twentieth century as a fascination, a passive trance in front of the work which has effaced all trace of its production’ (p. 3). Both Jean Ricardou and Julia Kristeva (these are Hobson’s examples) reject the view of art as ‘hard’ illusion — an illusion by virtue of which, or so the argument goes, what is depicted or described can be viewed as directly given or ‘merely there’ — in one way or another, be it in the name of ‘littéralité’ (Ricardou) or of ‘sens’ (Kristeva). Indeed, this resistance seems to be one of the raisons d’être of the nouveau roman.⁶ In spite of the possibility of hiatus that stalks our attempts to compare pictures and texts, and however much we would like to think that such things represent an object in ‘reality’, art does not ‘turn unmediatedly towards nature’.⁷ Our experience of an object portrayed in a picture or described in a text is not modelled on an illusion as of seeing that object: we do not see through the View of Delft to a small Dutch town and we do not see a boarding house located in the French capital through the words of the opening pages of Le Père Goriot — at least in any direct, unmediated sense. Images of Delft and Paris are mediated by the work of art, be it picture or text, in its material particulars. For many critics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, to argue in favour of the illusion of art as ‘hard’ — as transparent and unmediated, as simulation or dissimulation — is not just misguided, it is morally reprehensible: illusion is the agent of political narcolepsy and alienation.

I do not want to dwell here on the objections to a prosaic conception of the iconic or linguistic sign as mimetically transparent. Nor do I wish wholly to consign the arguments of the critics cited by Hobson to the flames. However, as Hobson rightly notes (see p. 8), Ricardou’s dismissal of the mimetic or ‘realist’ potentialities of art in the name of more formal or material concerns is trite, relying upon a crude understanding of artistic illusion and imitation which he can easily — but powerlessly — undermine. All resolutely anti-mimetic, pro-literality arguments implode as soon they seek to amputate a term from what is (at least) a dialectical process: all possibility of external reference, or of what Niklas Luhmann terms ‘autopoiesis’, is decried in the name of a stubborn, one-sided championing of form and of painted or textual opacity.⁸ For Ricardou, the artwork is either referentially transparent or formally opaque. It cannot be (playfully) both: the two are quite simply incompatible. All possibility of contradiction, of an Adorno-esque play of antinomies within the artwork (see the section on Adorno below), is removed. Thus there can be no tension, no oscillation, no dialectical movement in our experience of it in which some form of referential illusion and awareness of the text or painting as material agencement are implicated and entwined. If we accept Ricardou’s prejudice, we are left with an impoverished view of the ‘realist’ work as something that understands itself as little more than a dissimulating window onto the world. It seeks to make itself ‘like something which is not there’; its material substance ‘hides itself’. The only important consideration is ‘Qu’est-ce que cela signifie?’; ‘Comment ça signifie?’ is simply irrelevant or forgotten.⁹ This is the sentimentality and debility of Ricardou’s nouveau roman: it suppresses the dialectic of rationality and mimesis (‘magic’) that, for Adorno at least, is immanent to all art.¹⁰

This view of the workings or claims of ‘realism’ is unserviceable. It is broadly similar to one that understands our pictorial experience of a cup depicted in a picture by Chardin, for example, in terms of the illusion that we see a cup: a picture of a cup is so like a cup that we are liable to mistake it for one. Few if any writers have held so crude a doctrine, of course, but some have arguably come close. E. H. Gombrich’s model for pictorial experience is the famous duck-rabbit figure that can be seen as either duck or rabbit but not both. For Gombrich, seeing the subject of a picture and seeing its surface are mutually exclusive. Our experience of a picture is thought to alternate between a perception as of the depicted object and a perception as of a flat, rectangular, painted object. Richard Wollheim has argued that the Gombrichian ‘alternation’ account makes no contact with pictorial experience because it makes the value of that experience simply unaccountable.¹¹ While it is only possible to see the duck-rabbit figure as a duck or a rabbit but never both, it is certainly possible, Wollheim insists, to see a Chardin as at once a picture of a cup and a flat, rectangular surface. As Flint Schier says, Wollheim’s account allows both for a ‘What is it?’ approach to depiction and ‘that loving attention to the handling of the physical medium which is the delight of the true aesthete’.¹² To return to Theaetetus: the viewer can see the ‘picture of a man’, not merely either the man or the paint.

For Hobson, the work of art as it is understood by Gombrich and (in its naive, crudely ‘realist’ manifestations) by Ricardou is merely replica and transparent imi tation, an object whose ‘material unreality is ignored in our perception of it’ (p. 12). In the words of Diderot: ‘l’effet est produit sans que l’art s’aperçoive’.¹³ Hobson contrasts this approach with that of Sartre and of Barthes, for whom, she argues, ‘there is a duality in the very apprehension of the work’ (p. 12). For these thinkers, the work is ‘a kind of phantom’ (p. 11). So it seems that a more ‘spectral’ or ‘bimodal’ (p. 47) account of the work of art and of ekphrasis, in which the viewer’s or reader’s involvement and awareness are allowed to coexist, might help us out of the impasse into which hard illusion sends us. It remains to be seen, however, whether it is wise to align Sartre and Barthes, as is Hobson’s wont. As we shall see, both writers conceive of the work of art in more or less spectral terms, and their approaches may be broadly analogous. Taken together, however, these approaches do not constitute a stable or homogeneous aesthetic category or ‘type’ (p. 12). In any case, a brief examination of recent theoretical works that deploy the concept of the ‘spectral’ and ‘spectrality’, including those of Sartre and Barthes, will help us to illuminate the strange ‘presence’ of painting in the texts that are the focus of this book and, eventually, to think of the relationship between word and image in terms other than those of linguistic transparency or radical displacement, presence or absence.

Sartre: Imaginary Objects

For Sartre, ‘l’acte d’imagination’ is positively magical. It is tantamount to an incantation ‘destinée à faire apparaître l’objet auquel on pense’.¹⁴ Consciousness itself is surrounded by a ‘cortège’ of phantom objects (p. 175). Unlike the ‘real’ objects of perception, which appear from a particular angle, ‘les objets imagés’ are viewed as troubling silhouettes (p. 161): we see them only from an unstable, sketchy viewpoint that ‘s’évanouit, se dilue’ (pp. 161–62). The imagined object is, of course, unreal:

Sans doute il est présent mais, en même temps, il est hors d’atteinte. Je ne puis le toucher, le changer de place: ou plutôt je le peux bien, mais à la condition de le faire irréellement, de renoncer à me servir de mes propres mains, pour recourir à des mains fantômes.

(p. 162)

The unreal object is both ‘present’ and tantalizingly — almost uncannily — out of reach. Thus imagining objects, or at least touching those objects one imagines, involves a strange doubling of the self, a making-unreal of one’s body (‘il faut que moi-même je me dédouble, que je m’irréalise’ [p. 162; Sartre’s emphasis]). I must become phantom in order to touch the evanescent imaginary object. The va-et-vient of these objects is such that they exasperate, and subsequently induce, desire. They constitute a ‘manque défini’: an image of a white wall is a white wall ‘qui manque dans la perception’ (p. 163; Sartre’s emphasis). The phantom (imaginary) object tricks and frustrates desire, ‘un peu comme l’eau de mer fait de la soif’ (p. 162). Such objects are not individuated, since they are both ‘too much’ and ‘not enough’: ‘Trop d’abord: ces objets-fantômes sont ambigus, fuyants, à la fois eux-mêmes et autre chose qu’eux-mêmes, ils se font les supports de qualités contradictoires’. It is the ambiguity of the unreal or imaginary object, its capacity to be at once itself and something other than itself, that makes it frightening. While ‘la perception claire’ is, from a certain perspective, eminently reassuring, the imaginary objects that haunt us are ‘louches’ (p. 171; Sartre’s emphasis). An imaginary object is ghostly in that it does not possess the reassuring self-presence of an object of perception. It is never ‘franchement lui-même’ (p. 171).

Sartre also discusses the ‘transformation’ of imaginary images, a process which, he argues, is necessarily either ineffectual (whereby it produces nothing new) or radical (and consequently destructive):

si je donne à Pierre en image un nez camard ou retroussé, il n’en résultera pas pour son visage un aspect nouveau. Ou bien, au contraire, si je cherche à me représenter mon ami avec un nez cassé il peut arriver que je le manque et que, entraîné à compléter la forme ainsi produite, je fasse apparaître un visage de boxeur qui n’est plus du tout celui de Pierre.

(p. 172)

Any attempt to transform an imaginary object is thus doomed to failure, since that object will either remain the same in its essential aspect (in which case it has not acquired an ‘aspect nouveau’) or will be supplanted by an entirely different object (Pierre’s face is simply replaced by that of another person who, presumably, looks nothing like him — a boxer). In both cases, we have failed to bring about what, for Sartre, is a more balanced metamorphosis, a transformation in which ‘quelque chose reste et quelque chose disparaît et où ce qui reste prend une valeur nouvelle, un aspect nouveau, tout en conservant son identité’ (p. 172). It is, however, in precisely such terms of transformation, in which something of the evanescent phantom object both remains and disappears (allowing it to be altered in some way whilst retaining its original form or identity — Pierre’s face and that of a boxer, or Pierre’s face as that of a boxer, or any other such combinations), that we can begin to understand what the authors in this study do with the image — to shed light on the operations and experiments that Diderot, for example, performs on the ‘objet imagés’ (the ‘fantômes’) he encounters as he recalls the works of art exhibited at the Salon and elsewhere.

What, though, does Sartre have to say about our experience of ‘real’ pi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Spectre in Theory
• 2 Writing the Spectre: Diderot
• 3 Making the Spectre: Proust
• 4 Spectres of Proust: Deleuze
• Conclusion
• Bibliography of Works Cited
• Index