A mentor of mine once advised me, in my teenage years, that the writings of Paul Valéry are only fit for those who have reached a certain age. Though the precise threshhold was left ambiguous, I may now draw some conclusions, having recently received from him a small selection of Valéry’s commentary on the 19th Century Impressionists, particularly Degas, Manet, and Berthe Morisot. I’d like to draw out some insights from this initiation.1
Describing Manet’s portrait of Morisot, Valéry describes how certain great paintings achieve an effect beyond the visual, an effect of “poetry,” in which the technique is wholly subsumed in a gestalt:
Many a fine painting has no necessary suggestion of poetry. There are many masterpieces that have no overtones. It can even happen that the poetry comes late to birth in a man who, until then, was simply a great painter: Rembrandt, for instance, after attaining perfection in his early works, rises, later on, to the sublime level, to the point where art itself grows imperceptible, and is forgotten: having attained its supreme object without any apparent transition, its success absorbs, dismisses, or consumes the sense of wonder, the question of how it was done. In the same way, music can sometimes so enchant us that the very existence of the sounds is forgotten.
And now I can say why the portrait I was speaking of is a poem. Manet has contrived to infuse his work with overtones, adding an element of mystery to his firm craftsmanship. He has matched the physical likeness of his sitter with the one and only harmony that might convey a singular personality.
He is entranced especially with the work of Morisot, and, further, what her life and her habits reveal about the nature of the artist. He begins sociologically, the level of class analysis, departing from there to the mysterious nature of perception:
There is a contradictory quality in the middle classes which makes them suddenly produce artists, where nothing in the tastes, manners, or aspirations of such well-ordered families might warrant the spontaneous generation of personalities in no way deducible from the characters of parents or kindred. It is as if the moderation, the fear of risk, the clear-cut and well-tried beliefs, the cult of security and solidity in all its forms, were suddenly defied—and mystified—by the daemon of painting or poetry, risen among the abruptly blazed-up flames of a gentle and sleepy hearth. Beings of a singular sensibility, troubled with a restless will to expression, appear in the midst of a tranquil little world, to astonish, sometimes to annoy, and sometimes to win it over. Perhaps this should be seen as the workings of a natural law: an artist is a reaction; responding to the usual with the unheard-of, detecting what is strange in what is common, distilling purity from impurity by a mysterious process which can take place only in the presence of all that is worn out, habitual, conventional, and commonplace. Our daemon’s task is to cheat the law by which habit debases all sensation.
As in the life of one Berthe Morisot, so in the wider field of high culture: the radical experimental direct observation of the Impressionists exploded from the well-tilled earth of Romanticism and Classicism, which by 1860, Valéry argues, had become “caricatures of themselves.”
Searching to analyze the pleasure of the eye for its own sake and transfer it to canvas became the essential aim of the passion for painting. The imagination which the Romantics set out to inflame, the truth which the Realists claimed to transfix, were found to be somehow exhausted. Art now looked for quite another thing: in fact for nothing less than the advent of pure sensibility.
This cult of sensibility, in a strange way, cross-pollinated with literature and in fact united the efforts of the poets and the painters, the Word and the Image, which by their separate paths both lead back to the mystery of the perceiving consciousness.
Just as Monet and his associates founded their art upon the general principle of vision, and on the acute study of the eye’s most delicate reactions to light (which reduced the “subject” to a mere pretext, and led the artist to treat the same one in series, at different times of day), so Mallarmé strove to deduce all poetry from the very principle of language—to consider it, that is, in complete generality; each poem, consequently, was to be considered and treated as a particular example, of which the essential function was to direct the mind back toward the very power of words in themselves. It seems to me necessary to bring together Mallarmé’s intuitions of absolute poetry, which stem from the very source of all expression, and the beginnings of impressionism with its treatment of things and beings as modulations of light, on which they depend for their purely visual existence: these tendencies have a closer and more significant relationship than one of mere coincidence in time.
Impressionism brings with it the speculative life of the eye: an impressionist is a contemplative of purely visual meditation: he creates through the eye, exalting its sensations to the level of revelation. And what, in fact, could be more wonderful? If the word “mystery” has a meaning, I cannot see it better applied than to the principle of all things: the life of the senses.
Paradoxically, a dedication in the first instance to the pure experience of the senses somehow carries each individual artist, through their own irreducible style, toward union with the higher principles of nature.
A painter seeks himself through things, and, dreaming open-eyed, deduces from things seen their principles of harmony. But things do not sing for everyone, and those for whom they do, do not hear the same tunes. Every true painter has his own resonance, differing from that of all the others, and constituting the essence of his artistic personality; but this latter does not involve his personal character as a whole. It may even be that the more a painter develops a tendency to analyze and interpret visual experience (as the impressionists did) the further will that special tendency take him away from his ordinary self: he acquires a double existence, and this refinement of his aesthetic sensibility may indeed develop his mastery in a way strangely reminiscent of the developments of the most abstract thought.
The peculiarity of Berthe Morisot was to live her painting and to paint her life, as if the interchange between seeing and rendering, between the light and her creative will, were to her a natural function, a necessary part of her daily life. She would take up the brush, leave it aside, take it up again, in the same way as a thought will come to us, vanish, and return.
Each moment of light offers us a text, which is usually dimmed or overloaded with habit; the first task of the painter’s eye is to restore to that text the purity of naked sensation: then it must be deciphered, interpreted, just as an intelligent reader situates the accents, tone, pitch, and rhythms which bring to life what is written.
The mystery: that the naiveté of the artist’s direct engagement with the senses sidesteps our preconditioned responses and yet, on the far side of that, circles back to a rendezvous with the whole.
Man lives and moves in what he sees: but he sees only what he thinks. Try out a variety of characters in a given landscape. The philosopher will see nothing but vague phenomena; the geologist, epochs crystallized, confused, smashed, or pulverized; the soldier, strategic advantages and obstacles; and for the peasant it will mean nothing but acres, sweat, and income. They recieve nothing from their senses but the necessary stimulus to drive them on to certain other things, to their own obsessions. All of them register a certain scheme of colors; but each transforms them immediately into signs, which speak direct to the mind like the conventional colorings on a map.
At the very opposite pole stands the abstraction of the artist. To him color speaks of color, and to color he replies with color. He lives in his object, in the very midst of what he is trying to capture, perpetually beset by temptation and challenge, by examples and problems, analysis and excitement. He cannot but see what he is thinking and think what he is seeing.
Nothing can give an air of greater absence, remoteness from the world, than a concentration on the present in its purity. Nothing perhaps is more abstract than what is.
These reflections culminate in a reassessment of the tendency to equate a focus on the interior life with purity and wisdom, and an obsession with the senses as superficial if not delusive. One lesson of art appears to be that our internal life, when cut off from communion with the senses, the aperature of creation, can become in its turn unmoored, claustrophobic, and fantastical.
It is easy to put the life that is satisfied with the phantasms imposed on it by the separate senses in opposition to some life of the “heart,” or spirit, or even of pure intellect, all withdrawn from the surface agitation of things touched and things seen. But why suppose that our depths, or what we take to be such, why suppose that the apparent profundities we discover within ourselves should, thanks to some strange chance or after prolonged searching, be a more important object of observation—supposing, that is, that we do not invent what we are looking for—than the appearances of the external world? Might not that abyss which opens to the exploration of the most inconstant and credulous of our senses be, on the contrary, simply the scene and the product of the vainest, coarsest, and crudest of our feelings—those whose perceptions are confused, and as remote as possible from the precision and coordination found in the others which give us, as their creative masterpiece, what we call the External World?
Instead, art, the sustained discipline of the senses, may be understood as a heightened mode of living; and a particular life, the journey of a soul through the world as gifted it by the senses, as a work of art.
Perhaps mysticism is simply a rediscovery of an elementary, and, in a way, primitive sensation, the sensation of living, arrived at by an uncertain path which makes its way through life that has already been lived and, as it were, finished.
Links.
RIP Kundera. A 1983 interview: “In order to make the novel into a polyhistorical illumination of existence, you need to master the technique of ellipsis, the art of condensation.”
The massive oak trusses, sourced from French forests, for Notre Dame’s roof reconstruction arrived by Seine-barge last month.
Cormac McCarthy’s rules for copy editing.
Tony Wood on historian Karl Schlögel’s immersive archeology of Soviet life: “There are vignettes on everything from tattoos to hydroelectric dams, from china elephants (ubiquitous in Soviet homes) to Lenin’s mausoleum, from palm trees to the massive prefab housing blocks of the 1970s.”
Miłosz on his wrestling with angels:
Here, perhaps, is where I part ways with many people with whom I would like to be in solidarity but cannot be. To put it very simply and bluntly, I must ask if I believe that the four Gospels tell the truth. My answer to this is: “Yes.” So I believe in an absurdity, that Jesus rose from the dead? Just answer without any of those evasions and artful tricks employed by theologians: “Yes or no?'“ I answer: “Yes,” and by that response I nullify death’s omnipotence.
Nick Ripatrazone on human creativity in the age of the Machine.
In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself.
—Proust, Time Regained
A blessed and sun-drenched August to all,
As ever,
J
Selections taken from Degas, Manet, Morisot, Princeton University Press, trans. David Paul.