The Fetish

Literature, Cinema, Visual Art

Massimo Fusillo

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501312373
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Object fetishism is becoming a more and more pervasive phenomenon. Focusing on literature and the visual arts, including cinema, this book suggests a parallelism between fetishism and artistic creativity, based on a poetics of detail, which has been brilliantly exemplified by Flaubert's style. After exploring canonical accounts of fetishism (Marx, Freud, Benjamin), by combining a historicist approach with theoretical speculation, Massimo Fusillo identifies a few interpretive patterns of object fetishism, such as seduction (from Apollonius of Rhodes to Max Ophüls), memory activation (from Goethe to Louise Bourgeois and Pamuk), and the topos of the animation of the inanimate. Whereas all these patterns are characterized by a projection of emotional values onto objects, modernism highlights a more latent component of object fetishism: the fascination with the alterity of matter, variously inflected by Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Barnes, and Mann. The last turning point in Fusillo's analysis is postmodernism and its obsession with mass media icons-from DeLillo's maximalist frescos and Zadie Smith's reflections on autographs to Palahniuk's porn objects; from pop art to commodity sculpture.

1

The Object of Seduction

Narration and description: ekphrasis

At the very beginning of our exploration we find objects mantled with magic, ritual, and sacred values. In truth, it isn’t a simple matter to determine whether these are object-fetishes in the full sense of the term, or rather, ancient and medieval archetypes of a phenomenon that remains essentially modern. There is no doubt that the great explosion of our theme took place only with the coming of the Industrial Revolution, when the production and circulation of consumer goods became more massive and frenetic, and the world turned into that accumulation of commodities Marx speaks of at the beginning of Das Kapital. Perhaps it is not by coincidence that this development roughly coincided with the era that invented the concept of fetishism, a fruit, as we have seen, of Enlightenment rationalism and the colonial experience. Following in the fortunate wake of Michel Foucault (or at least, of Foucault reduced to formula), it would be tempting to say that it was the theory that constructed the phenomenon, but it seems to me that matters are rather more complicated, and that there is not such a direct nexus of anthropological reflection, social reality, and literary tradition. The last of these, as always, has its own rhythms and constants, as well as highly stratified interactions with the other systems. Rather than attempting to resolve these general problems, we will examine instead how, in literature, descriptive attention toward the world of objects was long relegated to the margins, and then introduce our first typology with a specific ancient archetype of the object-fetish, finding it, appropriately, in a Hellenistic setting. We will then pursue this typology in some of its medieval and modern ramifications, and finally into cinema.

The interaction between word and image, time and space, narration and description, has a long history behind it, beginning with the Iliad and the ekphrasis of the shield of Achilles, in which a given visual datum is freely transfigured in a literary account. After Homer, Alexandrine poetry and the Hellenistic novel channeled ekphrasis toward a rigorous respect of figuration, toward pure descriptivity of a sort that will return again with force in the baroque era (for example, in Giambattista Marino’s Galleria). The insistence on rigor, however, has always been accompanied in parallel by an impure approach to this arduous rhetorical exercise, linked to the concept of enárgheia (incisive pictorial power) and the dynamics of the sublime. In reality, even when ekphrasis suspends temporality to focus on a single static moment, it never abandons a certain narrative tension, perhaps latent but still potent. The presumption of the existence of a fundamental distinction between separate figurative languages can never finally disentangle description and narration one from the other. Numerous recent studies on ekphrasis have come to this conclusion, beginning with a celebrated book by Murray Krieger (1992) based on the idea of natural signs, and such approaches have resonated widely today, ranging from the ancient epic to romantic mimesis (Cometa, 2005), to the modernist experiments of William Carlos Williams and W. H. Auden, to postmodern poetics, to the description of film and performance events. Current discussion tends to privilege those writer-critics who, like Denis Diderot, Charles Baudelaire, John Ruskin, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Rainer Maria Rilke, avoid analytic detail in favor of creative, evocative criticism that considers perception to be an infinite activity. As always, it is important to avoid excessive dilation of the concept of ekphrasis, which risks making the meaning of the term coincide with art criticism or with description in general. As James W. Heffernan argues in Museum of Words (2004), ekphrasis is the literary representation of a visual representation. It cannot therefore be confused with phenomena such as pictorialism—which is the presence in literature of visual effects—or with iconicity—the literary use of graphic techniques that represent the content of the work—a practice found from Hellenistic poetry to the avant-gardes of the last century. Neither must ekphrasis be confused with the iconotext, which is the weaving together of literary and visual elements, as in the novels of Winfried Sebald that include photographs.

In the Homeric epic and generally in ancient narrative, description does not play a decisive role, but is strictly subordinate to the principal action, and is often narrativized, as in the famous archetype of the shield of Achilles, which retraces the process of the shield’s fabrication. Ekphrasis here is fundamentally ornamental and never mars the inflexible hierarchy that positions the unfolding story in absolute primacy. Even the famous law of epic delay never cedes predominance to description, which might be explicated during a narrative pause, as in the modern novel. Instead, classical ekphrasis consists of a proliferation of adjectives with discourse and digressions that contribute to that sensation of narrative fullness and the pleasure of infinite fabulation that so enchanted Goethe. Thanks also to Homer’s canonicity, the total subordination of description to the unfolding story would become a highly successful dogma, upheld at various times as classical, rationalist, and organic. Nicolas Boileau, for example, hurls abuse at the prolix profusion of detail typical of the baroque romance, which is far superior to the limited visuality of its direct model, the late Hellenistic novel (Boileau is furthermore, perhaps, the first to execute a summary judgment of our poor, put-upon descriptions, saying that the reader may easily skip over them. About an extremely lengthy description of a palace, he admits to have simply skipped over twenty pages and thus to have escaped from the garden!). Under the heading Description in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, Jean Marmontel criticizes the absence of coherent unity in this literary form. In terms similar to Marmontel, Paul Valéry condemns the arbitrary order of the elements that compose a description, rendering it neither coherent nor necessary, and potentially infinite. The Marxist Georg Lukács compares Honoré de Balzac’s realism, in which descriptive details are always functional to the story, with the impressionism of Flaubert and Émile Zola, for whom details become autonomous still-lifes that do not integrate themselves into a unitary, organic context.

These criticisms of description, in fact, could just as easily be seen as points in its favor: we have already seen how object-fetishes are intimately connected to antihierarchical knowledge, to a recognition of the value of details, to the everyday, to material things, to a knowledge that articulates forms ever less Aristotelian and organic. In the modern novel after Flaubert, we find more and more space provided for description, and along with it, for dynamics of visuality.

Behind Lukács’s position we cannot fail to find the authority of Georg Hegel’s aesthetics, which thoroughly subordinated the novel to the epic, held to be the most authentic, original form. According to this view, Balzac would be preferable to his modern successors, in essence because he is closer to Homer. But if we compare the Homeric epic to the realist novel, or generally all epic literature to all forms of the novel, we note a substantial difference that separates Balzac from Homer, despite the fact that narration predominates in both. Homer lacks the tight fabric of descriptive elements that produce the reality effect, those often insignificant objects whose only function is to say, “we are reality,” as Roland Barthes (1968) famously wrote about the barometer in Flaubert’s A Simple Heart. This difference can be easily explained by that separation of styles propounded in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946): in the most classic, canonical, foundational literary genre in Western culture, there is no space for the serious representation of daily life, a province exclusively suited to the lowest genres of comedy. The epic narrator suspends the flow of narration only rarely to dwell on the spaces in which the all-important action unfolds, and these spaces tend to be codified into a series of conventions: the wondrous palace, armor, the locus amoenus, works of art, the garden.

Apollonius of Rhodes

To find our ancient archetype of the object-fetish we need to shift several centuries forward to an era that begins after a major watershed in classical history, the expedition of Alexander the Great; a change as significant as the Industrial Revolution that will be our true point of departure. The archetype arrives not by coincidence in this moment, since Hellenism has often been defined as a bourgeois, secularized era that stressed themes linked to the private dimension, with a hyper-cultured literature and a laboratory of poets who were both philologists and librarians, who classified and systematized all previous tradition, establishing canons, genres, and authors with precise techniques of attribution. This period gave birth to a figure very similar to the author-function that Foucault identifies as characteristic of the modern era. A work very different from Hegel’s idea of a primordial, authentic epic, the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes is a harbinger of the invention of the Hellenistic novel which was soon to come, another fruit of the cultural revolution ushered in by Alexander’s voyage. With its contamination of eros and travel, the Argonautica has long been considered a precursor of the Hellenistic novel, joining the long list to which some narratologists (Genette) and philologists (Hölscher) would add even Homer’s Odyssey, in demonstration of the precocity of the new form and the precarious boundary between it and the epic. Leaving aside the problems of literary genre, we prefer to point out instead the way Apollonius of Rhodes offers us a true poetics of the object, highly innovative with respect to Homer’s descriptive techniques. In the Argonautica, objects are described with notable analytic precision and great attention to visual data and the fascination they exercise on the senses. The tales in the Argonautica often invoke myths whose themes link closely to the overall meaning of the poem, which is indeed an epic, but one invented in an experimental era, the Alexandrine period, which largely rejected the canonicity and sublimity of the traditional epic form. The intention here was not conservative, aimed at restoring a lost greatness; on the contrary, Apollonius made use of all the literary innovations of his era, transposing them into its most canonical form as though to sabotage it from within. The protagonist, Jason, is an antihero who bears his responsibility to lead the quest as an unbearable, unjustified burden, and he only completes it with the magical assistance of the girl who loves him, Medea. Jason’s principal attribute is his beauty, joined with a certain oratorical gift for seduction, but as a warrior he totally lacks confidence, in strong contrast to his counterpart, Hercules, who by no coincidence only participates in the first part of the quest. Once he leaves the expedition, Hercules is glimpsed again only once, from far off, in the desert of Africa, in a heartrending scene that seals his distance from the others, a distance as great as that separating the archaic heroism of Homer from the Hellenistic world of Apollonius.

All these semantic nodes are synthesized in the meaning imbued in certain objects, especially that which Apollonius chooses as his equivalent to the shield of Achilles. In place of a precious weapon, he describes in exquisite detail a piece of clothing, a cloak embroidered with mythological scenes, at the center of which stands Aphrodite gazing at herself in the mirror of Ares. The image symbolically condenses the opposition between love and war that runs through the poem. This ekphrasis is introduced during a respite on the island of Lemnos, where the women have exterminated all their men and now dedicate themselves to masculine activities. Various moments in the story describe the reversal of male and female roles with reference to the paradigm of the Amazons, and at the tale’s culmination, the Golden Fleece is finally achieved only thanks to Medea’s love for Jason. Speaking directly to the reader, Apollonius emphasizes the blazing splendor of the object. A similar heightened description exploiting the sense of touch and smell returns with another object of clothing: the peplum that the queen of Lemnos, Hypsipyle, gave to Jason at the moment of his departure, and which is used for its bewitching fragrance to trap Medea’s brother. Following a Homeric topos, the poet passes in review the owners of the object, revealing that its intoxicating perfume derives from the fact that Dionysos slept on it with Arianna, after she had been abandoned by Theseus. While in Homer the account of the owners is digressive, here instead the device has a figural value. The object powerfully synthesizes the motif of the abandoned lover, evoking both the mythic paradigm of Arianna and the experience of Hypsipyle.

The example that best summons to mind our category of the object-fetish appears in another significant moment, at the exact center of the poem, the beginning of Book III, in the scene when Aphrodite, upon the request of Jason’s divine protectress Hera, asks her son Eros to intervene, promising the boy a precious toy in exchange for the favor she petitions. The passage reads:

Come, be kind to me and do the task I tell you and I will give you Zeus’ gorgeous plaything, that one his dear nurse Adresteia made him when he was still a babbling infant in the Idaean cave—a perfectly round ball; no better toy will you get from the hands of Hephaestus. Its segments are made of gold and around each of them wind two circular bands; the seams are hidden, for a dark-blue spiral runs over them all. And if you toss it in your hands, it throws off a flaming trail through the air like a star. I will give it to you, but you must shoot Aeetes’ daughter and enchant her with love for Jason. Let there be no delay ... (Apollonius Rhodius, Book 3, vv.131–139, p. 227)

The description is dramatized following classical standards, with an analytical character devoid of explicative elements (Apollonius trusts in the erudition of his readers), which suits the Hellenistic tone of disenchanted divertissement that marks the Olympian scene generally, contributing to its encompassing intention to highlight the net divide between the human and divine worlds. The tragic story of Medea is triggered by a simple, frivolous caprice: a ball with golden circles and enameled seams, one with extremely ancient origins, as it had belonged to the infant Zeus (a detail that provokes an intentional dissonance). All the poem’s action wheels around an object that works a magnetic fascination on Eros, that primordial, ancient enfant terrible. The god of love’s fascination for the ball is the same as Jason’s for the Golden Fleece, the mythic object at the center of the plot, which, in this epic, bourgeois novel, is devoid of any sacred import.

The splendid cloak, the fragrant peplum, the golden toy: it is no coincidence that the ancient poet who most displayed a fetishistic fascination for objects and their seductive power over the senses, and who projected onto them a band of symbolic meanings, was long active in the highly developed metropolis of Alexandria. Without indulging in historical recursivity, we cannot fail to notice a nexus between the theme of the object-fetish and an urban, bourgeois society that felt posthumous with respect to the archaic epic, and one that privileged the potent ambiguity of eros.

By virtue of these conditions, Apollonius introduces a long-lasting typology of object-fetish: the object that seduces by its splendor, and through this seduction is able to set in motion an entire narrative plot. Eros goes into action only because of his fascination with the object itself, one with a complex structure, perfectly concealed beneath the golden enamel that covers its seams. It is a triumph of artistic illusion, capable of evoking the immaterial refulgence of a star. We are far from the passion for the raw materiality of objects that will animate modernism, and with it much visual art in the twentieth century. Here, instead, we observe an exceptional object with nothing everyday about it, one with magical connotations and an illustrious history. Nevertheless, A...