Salome and the Dance of Writing: Portraits of Mimesis in Literature 9780226519654

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~~ANDTHE

DANCE OF WRITING

Portraits of Mimesis in Literature

Fran~oise Meltzer

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

Franc;oise Meltzer is associate professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literature and the Committee on Comparative Studies in Literature, University of Chicago. She is the translator of Georges Poulet's Exploding Poetry: BaudelairelRimbaud. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 1987 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 1987 Printed in the United States of America 96 95 94 93 9 2 9 1 90 89 88 87 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Meltzer, Franc;oise. Salome and the dance of writing. Includes index. 1. Mimesis in literature. 2. Portraits in literature. I. Title. 809' ·93355 PN47.M45 1987 86- 24 893 ISBN 0-226-51971-6 ISBN 0-226-51972-4 (pbk.)

For Theodore Frederick Meltzer 1906 - 19 85 Omnis curae casusque leva men

On ne saurait done entrer dans un trop grand detail quand on veut exposer des sujets d'estampes, et qu'on est absolument ignorant dans l'art. -Rousseau, "Sujets d'estampes"

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

IX

1

Salome and the Dance of Writing

13

2

The Spearpoint of Troilus

47

3

The Golden Calf and the Golden Ass

73

4

Still Life

113

5

Sleight of Hand Handling 1 59 A Manifesto 1 76 The Doubts of Laocoon 189 Showing the Hand: Caricatures; or, It's Done with Mirrors 201

159

Echoes Index

21

5

21 9

Vll

Acknowledgments

This book owes so much to so many colleagues, friends, and students that only a few can be mentioned here. The first order of thanks goes to Ralph Johnson, always a friend and generous enough to remain my teacher. Without him, this book would simply not exist. His gentle criticisms and patient encouragement were invaluable, and I remain forever in his debt. I am also grateful to my husband, Bernard Rubin, and to my mother, both of whom provided loving support and tolerance, as well as intellectual companionship. I am additionally grateful to my crafty husband, without whose remodeling of the house I would not have been driven in despair to the typewriter. Barbara Hanrahan was a kind and level-headed friend, as was Nicholas Rubinfier. The University of Chicago generously offered me a leave of absence for an entire academic year to further this project, and Karl J. Weintraub, the dean of the humanities during my leave, was directly instrumental in affording me that time. The present dean, Stuart Tave, kindly arranged for research money, which was invaluable to this project. Rosemary Camilleri was my first assistant. She carefully ferreted out useful material, and sent it regularly to me in France. She suggested bibliographies and course offerings, goaded me onward, IX

Acknowledgments

and essentially kept me honest in my readings for this book. Michael Salda, my second research assistant, was a tireless and invaluable editor, commentator, reader, and friend. The amount of time and energy he put into this manuscript is incredible. He remained loyal and wryly cheerful even when funds and prose ran dry. My debt to him is enormous. His wife, Monica Salda, worked with equal zeal to introduce the manuscript into the computer. I am more than grateful. Robert Alter (to whom lowe my (ormation), Ross Chambers, and Manfred Hoppe read the manuscript and made very helpful suggestions for revision. The Gnu Group of criticism remains, of course, a lasting influence and inspiration: Rick Eldridge, Lorna Gladstone, Stephen Melville, Andrew Parker. Elizabeth Bigongiari typed the entire manuscript in its early stages. I wish also to express a special note of thanks to my graduate students at the University of Chicago: they have been my most demanding teachers. Finally, I wish to say thanks to my father, who did not live to see this book in print, but who was my greatest companion of the mind, and to whom this book is dedicated.

x

~,~~C

~~ANDTHE

DANCE OF WRITING

Introduction

"There are two ways of understanding the portrait," Baudelaire wrote, "history and the novel."l One of the prejudices of this book is that such a distinction can and should no longer be made. The question to be asked here is, How does literature imagine representation and, therefore, history? The way in which I go about trying to answer that question is to look at how the portrait (the painted portrait with a frame around it) appears in various literary texts of differing times and nationalities. The portrait, because it is "other" to the verbal economy of the text, functions as a good barometer for literature's views on itself, on representation, and on the power of writing. The choice of the portrait is essentially arbitrary on my part; I could as well have considered music, landscapes, tactile expressions, and so on. But there was something curiously alluring about eidetic images in literature, about the way they function, about the re-representation of the character in a portrait the reader never "sees" but which the text purports to give him or her for viewing. For finally, it is the portrait of itself that literature paints when it conjures up a version of the painted arts. I have chosen the portrait because it entails a 1. "Ou Portrait," in Oeuvres Completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), p. 921.

Introduction

notion of the individual, often an "idealized" one at that, to quote Baudelaire once again. 2 The choice of the textual portrait is intended to privilege neither the visual nor the human figure (as over landscapes, for example) but merely to serve as an index of writing's views of itself. Moreover, the obvious randomness of texts chosen here is designed to cast light on the problem from varying points of view-not to insist, subtextually, on any kind of atemporal transcendence on the part of writing over history. There are certainly obsessive myths that return in writing, but these are always informed by the context from which text emerges. Nevertheless, there is one obsessive myth which, while it does not necessarily distinguish literature from the other arts, demonstrates the assumptions that writing makes about itself: the myth of representation. A text does not only "re-present" the world for us; it also re-presents itself. It is perhaps for this reason that the portrait is so convenient a measure for the power given to representation in a text. Portraits appear with regularity in literature, and, from the "first," literature is related to painting. There is a famous remark attributed to Simonides that poetry is vocal painting; painting silent poetry. This analogy can only be possible, however, if writing, like painting, is seen first as having an imitative quality. Whether poetry, for example, imitates human life or a given style and meter, its first characteristic, as Plutarch was later to note, is imitation. This study, therefore, has nothing to do with art history or its concerns. The portrait qua portrait is not at issue here; rather, what concerns us is the way literature conjures up a portrait, describes it, augments or diminishes it, and manipulates its visual presence in the text. How, in other words, does literature attempt to recast, reedit, in verbal form, something both visual and fundamentally nonverbal? It is the attempt to answer this question that results in the apparently random juxtaposition of texts. The great model for the representation of reality in literature is, of course, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946). Auerbach wrote of repre2.

2

Ibid.

INTRODUCTION

sentation in general (the depicted world); but the trends in literary criticism, especially in the second half of this century, have used Auerbach's book as a measure for or against the concepts of representation and mimesis (which, as the book's title implies, are essentially inextricable one from the other); for or against such movements as deconstruction and structuralism; for or against the "world" as over the "world of the text." For example, in his 1978 article "Mimesis and the Motive for Fiction,"3 the critic Robert Alter laments the demise of mimesis in contemporary literary theory, and refers directly to Auerbach's great book in so doing: Mimesis, which for so long has seemed the very touchstone of the Western literary enterprise, and which only a generation ago served as the grandly resonant title for one of our century's masterworks of criticism, appears to have fallen on evil days. [Po 228]

Alter's charge is echoed by Edward Said, who, in the September 1983 issue of The New York Times Book Review, accuses modern literary theory of losing contact with "reality," of isolating "textuality from the circumstances, the events, the physical senses that made it possible and render it intelligible as the result of human work." Theorists are today engaged, Said continues, in an obsessive textuality which is "the exact antithesis and displacement of what might be called history" (pp. 3-4). As with Alter, Said's counterexample is Auerbach-a critic who for Said combined historicity with "worldly" situation. For Said, it was Auerbach's homelessness (Mimesis was written in Istanbul) while he was writing his book that made his connection with history, and his understanding of the world from which he had been exiled, that much stronger: In other words, the book (Mimesis) owed its existence to the very fact of Oriental, non-Occidental exile and homelessness. And if this is so, then Mimesis is not, as it has so frequently been taken to be, only a massive reaffirmation of the Western cultural tradition, but also a work built upon a critically important alienation from it. 3· In Triquarterly 4 2 (1978), 228-49.

3

Introduction

For both Alter and Said, the notion of mimesis is seriously threatened by contemporary criticism. On the other hand, there is Jonathan Culler's reading ofM. H. Abrams's seminal book on Romanticism, The Mirror and the Lamp. Abrams's book had argued that the Romantic period in literature liberated us from the notion of creation as mimesis; that Romanticism substitutes the lamp (generating its own energy) for the mirror (merely reflecting what is). Before moving to Culler's argument, we should note that in Abrams's book mimesis has already reached the "evil days" of which Alter writes, since Abrams takes pains to show that Romanticism is a "way out," a successful escape, from the mimetic prisonhouse of mirrors. But Culler, in the (minimally) deconstructive type of reading criticized by both Said and Alter, shows in his chapter "The Mirror Stage" that Abrams's triumphant emergence from mimeticism, his lamp, is an illusion because the lamp is in itself a mimetic image. Here is Culler on Abrams: If we are persuaded, as Abrams's readers usually are, that we have indeed made this decisive move from mirror to lamp, it is because we are convinced that The Mirror and the Lamp is an accurate mirror. It can convince us that this shift away from representation has taken place only by convincing us that it is accurately representing or reflecting what has taken place-accurately mirroring what is to be found in the texts. 4

Any text of criticism, according to this argument, is already mimetic by virtue of "accurately mirroring" the texts it considers and the historical situation from which they emerge. The crux of Culler's argument is that mimesis is unavoidable: This persistence of mimesis, as the very ground of arguments which reject it, ought to arouse our suspicions that perhaps we have not left the order of mirrors and mirroring and that perhaps, on the contrary, lamps are only another version of mirrors and belong to the same system of specularity and representation. [Po 162] 4. "The Mirror Stage," in The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 162.

4

INTRODUCTION

Culler's conclusion is that "We do not escape mIrrors and lamps" (p. 168). The status of mimesis becomes extremely confused in all of this. But bound to that status, and equally confusing, are the stakes for literary criticism. To summarize thus far: Alter and Said, two contemporary critics who stand outside of the deconstructive method, fault that method for rejecting mimesis. M. H. Abrams, a critic of the generation previous to that of Said and Alter, writes a book which proclaims mimesis as happily overcome by the Romantic revolution. Jonathan Culler, a critic much influenced by the deconstructive project, argues that Abrams's escape from mimesis is an illusion, and that Abrams's argument is in itself mimetic. Moreover, Culler concludes that mimesis is unavoidable. I would add that Culler's argument is mimetic as well, since it insists on reading text as mirror, since it wants to see the lamp as a double for the mirror, since it mimetically recapitulates the stances of other critical enterprises and, finally, since it privileges representation by seeing any textual trope as a doubling of ideology. If, as Alter and Said argue, the deconstructive reading cuts us off from the world and thus ignores the novel's mimetic project, the deconstructive reading concomitantly resurrects mimesis by seeing it at the foundations of any critical gesture. With Auerbach, according to Alter and Said, the text mirrors the world; with Culler, the text mirrors mimesis. The deconstructive reading retains, even if it changes, the doubling that is mimesis. Culler's book on deconstruction notes the insistence within deconstruction upon mimesis: Another concept affected by deconstructive theory is the notion of mimesis, which involves hierarchical oppositions between object and representation and between original and imitation. 5

At this point, a question arises: when we talk of mimesis in a novel as mirroring the world, and when we read Kant, for example, as Jacques Derrida does, with the intent of pointing 5. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 185.

Introduction

to a mimetic economy within the third Critique, are we grappling with the same issue? Alter and Said would answer, I think, no to this question; Derrida would answer yes. Herein lies the problem: it is almost as if there were two different methods of discourse, not merely jargon, to address the politics of mimesis. It is an argument, not only between types of literary criticism, but also (and perhaps therefore) between literary criticism and philosophy. Mimesis puts into play the "science" of linguistics, since the notion of representation is inherent in the theory of referentiality. Mimesis lies in wait at the heart of psychoanalysis, since the concept of the Subject is tied to that of the identification, or lack thereof, with the other; Lacan's term for the subject's desire to imagine itself as a totality is the "mirror stage" -which is also, it should be noted, the title of Culler's article. Mimesis questions the status of history, since the text will be judged as a valid, invalid, or indifferent portrait of the world from which it springs, or which it addresses. One begins to wonder if there is such a thing as a nonmimetic issue, or at least an issue that does not ultimately lead to questions of mimesis. Derrida's response to Alter and Said might be that there is no danger of losing mimesis: mimesis is so fundamental to our thought that it reduplicates itself everywhere, even in a criticism that attempts to escape it (Abrams); even in a philosophy that refutes it (Kant); even in a criticism that faults another for adhering to it, consciously or not (Derrida, Culler). Indeed, we might even ask if the convenient categories we cling to--criticism, philosophy, linguistics, psychoanalysis, history, the arts in general-if all of these apparently distinct enterprises are not, finally, different struggles within the machinery of mimesis. Derrida sees such a machine as beginning with Plato. In a footnote to his chapter "The Double Session" in Dissemination, Derrida argues that Plato's theory of mimesis forms "a kind of logical machine: it programs the prototypes of all the propositions inscribed in Plato's discourse and those of the tradition."6 This machine, for Derrida, comprises two propositions and six consequences of those propositions. It is a machine, 6. Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 186, n. 14.

6

INTRODUCTION

Derrida goes on to say, which "according to a complex but implacable law . . . deals out all the cliches of criticism to come" (p. 187). Criticism thus viewed becomes an endless, mimetic repetition or, significantly, the representation of a mechanistic principle already in place with Plato. It should be noted that, with Plato, there are two types of mimesis: good and bad. 7 The "good" appears in Plato's notion of the ideal State: if our laws and behavior imitate the Ideal, its goodness and justice, then we will attain the fairly utopian Republic of which Plato speaks. It is this type of mimesis that leads Socrates to say to Phaedrus, "he who knows the truth is always best able to discover likenesses." Plato's second notion of mimesis, the "bad," argues that everything in the world is a pale shadow of the Idea; so imitation imitates what is already a poor copy. Here we may think of Plato's own analogy: a carpenter who makes a bed is imitating the idea of a bed, but the artist who paints an imitation of the carpenter's bed is thrice removed from the truth. His is a mere "laying on of colors," expressing the externals and not the essence of the thing. 8 This conflict in Plato's view of mimesis is partially responsible for Derrida's view of Plato's "machine" -able to generate every conceivable critical response to mimesis. Part of the problem is that "good" mimesis must proceed from a mental representation of external ideas, and these representations, as Kant was to point out later, are essentially groundless, since they spring from the very things Plato wants to exclude from them: phenomena. The act of painting the bed entails the ability to represent the bed to oneself mentally, and thus partakes of the same mental process that allows for imagining the Ideal. To then discredit this "secondary," literal mimesis as mere "shadow" is to refuse to acknowledge the mimetic movement of the mind which makes both possible. "Bad" mimesis necessarily imitates "good" mimesis; and the latter would be impossible without 7. I am using here the argument of J. Tate as expounded in Classical Quarterly 22 (1928), 16£f., and his sequel article "Plato and 'Imitation,'" also in Classical Quarterly 26 (1932), 161-69. Tate makes a good case for this distinction in

Plato. For another good discussion of Plato on mimesis, see R. C. Lodge's Plato's Theory of Art (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953; reprinted New York: Russell and Russell, 1975), pp. 167-91. 8. Republic 10.597 a-e.

7

Introduction

the capacity for the former, more literal, mimesis. We have still escaped neither mirrors nor lamps. The insistence on two types of mimesis-good and badwill put critics into two camps. There will be Aristotle, who will argue against Plato by holding that to imitate is a natural human trait; that what matters in imitation is not the Idea, but rather the means and manner of imitation. Tragedy itself, he will say, imitates human action, and imitation in general must be seen as necessary and good. Quintilian will argue, to some extent in response to Aristotle, that imitation in itself is not enough in, for example, rhetorical exercise: imitatio per se non sufficit. He will say that one must imitate more than an author's style, vocabulary, and figures-{)ne must imitate only good writers, and one must further imitate with understanding. Thus Quintilian conflates both of Plato's mimeses: imitation is necessary, but it is a means, not an end; to imitate only is to create the mere shadow of a substance, to make "crass copy." Plutarch will follow Aristotle by claiming that it is the subject matter imitated that is of import. He will add that imitation is one of the three necessary components to poetry (the other two being its fictional quality and its artistic element). Augustine's imago dei is a doctrine grounded in mimesis. Kant, in his third Critique, attempts to overcome the mimetic model by claiming that our notion of beauty is born not of imitation but of the free play between imagination and understanding. The fine arts are not productions of nature; the artist does not imitate things in nature-that would be crass copy, what Kant calls "aping."9 But, as Derrida points out, for Kant the artist ends up imitating the acts, the freedom, of nature. "Mimesis," writes Derrida of Kant, displays the identification of human action with divine action---of one freedom with another ... an identity with the other on stage, and not the imitation of an object by its copy. "True" mimesis is between two producing subjects and not between two produced things. 10 9. Kant's third Critique contains an extended discussion on mimesis. See especially sections 43-51, in Critique of Tudgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1974). For the notion of "aping," see section 49. 10. "Economimesis," trans. R. Klein, in Diacritics 2 (197 2 ), 9.

8

INTRODUCTION

For Kant, pure creativity must imitate God's creativity. As Derrida notes: Mimesis here is not the representation of one thing by another, the relation of resemblance or of identification between two beings, the reproduction of a product of nature by a product of art. It is not the relation of two products but of two productions. P.nd of two freedoms. [P 9]

So Kant's system, which condemns mimesis on the level of product, insists upon it on the level of activity. This is what Derrida calls an "anthropo-theological mimesis." From the "first," as we have already noted, in what Derrida calls "the Tradition," literature is termed analogous to painting. Aristotle had said that poetry and painting as arts of imitation should use the same principal element of composition: plot in tragedy; design in painting. And Plato says, in the Phaedrus, that writing has a quality very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence ... but . . . they always say one and the same thing. II

The fact that here Plato puts painting and writing together to discredit them for their silence does not alter the mimetic model he uses: the simile itself (painting is like writing), and the view that neither represents the truth because they do not speak. We might add that Socrates defines memory as "pictures painted in the soul" and forbids writing as an aid to memory (274 d--e). In Horace's Ars Poetica, there is the recasting of Simonides' simile: ut pictora poesis. Lessing, in "Laoko6n" (1766), will argue against the simile. Sculpture and painting, he says, are atemporal; while poetry gives us action in time. But, of course, this argument too is mimetic, since Lessing wants a statue to represent a static moment and a poem to represent a diegesis. We still remain within mirrors and lamps; we are still within Plato's machine of mimesis. 11.

Phaedrus 275 d.

9

Introduction

Is Derrida right, then, in arguing that in Plato are already generated all of the cliches of the criticism to come? If, as Derrida argues, mimesis is necessary to memory (we remember that which we mentally re-represent to ourselves; there must always be a time lag between the event and its memory), then perhaps mimesis is necessary to thought itself. After all, thought walks one step ahead of itself, must look back upon itself, as it were, to recognize its own movement. Are not binary oppositions (Heidegger notwithstanding) such as subject and object, represented and representing, original and copy, essential to any discourse at all? Representation quite obviously means to present again. This is certainly the crux of mimesis. But it also means to bring before the mind, to display to the eye, to symbolize, to stand in the place of. The word "representation," then, tied as it is to the notion of mimesis, is also and equally tied to that of thought, or at least to the way in which we represent thought to ourselves. Consciousness is thought brought before the mind; mental concepts are mimetic of our experience; words themselves can stand in the place of thoughts, objects, people; writing may stand in the place of speech (or vice versa). Even the biblical tradition that prohibits representation, or image-making, serves to increase its power by virtue of acknowledging the potential seduction of the image. The politics of mimesis can be easily adhered to, so that everything becomes, finally, mimetic. Derrida, for example (even though he is aware of it, writes it, acknowledges it often), in seeking mimesis everywhere ends up blurring boundaries, erasing the very frames he points to. What does it mean, after all, to open up a study of Kant, as Derrida does, with the following agenda: These proportional analogies are constructed on a certain number of apparently irreducible oppositions. How are they finally, as they always do, going to resolve? And to the advantage of what political economy? [Po 4]

Of course, in showing us how texts that profess to retain difference (gaps, oppositions, boundaries) in fact subvert themselves by erasing that difference, Derrida is pointing to a problem in Western metaphysics, in textuality, in thinking itself. 10

INTRODUCTION

On the other hand, by insisting a priori upon finding the subversion within the opposition, and then dissolving it, Derrida repeats the very gesture of the text he mechanizes. But Derrida knows that. Yet there is a sense in which boundaries can never be dissolved; a sense in which the textual politics of deconstruction (which, I would argue, are political indeed) are a form of metaphysical and textual leisure which not everyone can afford to espouse. It is perhaps this uneasiness that informs the critiques of Alter and Said. The textual portrait, it seems to me, is at once the mimetic gesture of writing (writing seeking to control the eidetic other, to reduce it to its own terms), and the moment when "otherness" -because it is contextualized in a place where, like Auerbach, it is homeless-grants us a better perspective on the "home" of literature. For the portrait never fully allows itself to be swallowed by the text that invents it; it retains an element of alterity. It is in this sense that I have tried to show the portrait in literature: as part of the economy of mimesis, and as the insistence upon separation, which, as the parable of the Tree of Life tells us, makes knowledge at least possible.

11

1

Salome and the Dance of Writing

loris-Karl Huysmans's novel, A Rebours (Against Nature) was to be called (by Arthur Symons) "the breviary of the Decadence." Published in 1884, it is the story of the reclusive and rich aesthete, lean Floressas des Esseintes. The book itself marks Huysmans's break with the Zola group and with its doctrine of unmitigated philosophical materialism. In his 1903 preface to the novel, Huysmans wrote: There were many things that Zola could not understand; first, that need I felt to open the windows, to escape an environment in which I was suffocating: then, the desire I felt to shake off prejudices, to rupture the limits of the novel, to insert into it art, science, history, to cease to use in a word, the form of the novel merely as a frame for a more serious work. What struck me most at the time was the need to abolish traditional plot, to drink even passion, woman, to concentrate my paintbrush of light on a single character, at all costs to create a novelty. 1 1. My emphasis. This passage appears in A Rebours (Paris: Fasquelle, 1961 ), p. 21 (my translation). Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent quotations from the text of the novel are taken from Robert Baldick's Against Nature (Baltimore: Penguin, 1959) and will henceforth be specified by page number only. This system will be used for all texts mentioned frequently in this study.

Chapter One

Zola was duly horrified by this work about a wealthy dandy who chose to retreat into his self-made fortress of opulent wonders. But this comment by Huysmans is significant in that it views the novel as constricted: as framed (un cadre) by convention and simultaneously as enclosing (framing) the very convention that suffocates it. The form of the novel itself is here seen as the frame "for a more serious work" and as a scaffolding that delimits, precisely because it does not contain, the serious. Here we already (or still) have the problem of fiction as an unserious enterprise; the same view that allows Socrates to expel Homer from the Republic: "for we have come to see that we must not take such poetry seriously as a serious thing that lays hold on truth."2 For Huysmans, Zola's view of fiction functions to excuse the novel's lack of "seriousness" by using plot to suggest a grave philosophical stance. But Huysmans rejects this view and wants the novel to be the portrait, not its frame: "to concentrate my paintbrush of light on a single character, at all costs to create a novelty," and to accomplish this goal by inserting into the novel "art, science, history." Such a project may be seen as a "novelty" in the heavily Zola-influenced period during which A Rebours was written. Had Huysmans turned to the writings of Friedrich Schlegel, some one hundred years earlier, he would have found words very similar to his own. In the Athenaeum of 1798 (no. 116), Schlegel had written: Romantic poetry is a progressive universal poesie. Its purpose is not merely to reunite all of the separated types of poetry and to place poetry into contact with philosophy and rhetoric. It wants and also must mix poetry and prose, originality and criticism, art poetry and nature poetry. [My translation]

Huysmans describes his erudite hero in words which could as well have been used by Schlegel in his own famous remarks on the poet from the Athenaeum: Des Esseintes, with his love of artifice, his eccentricity, his alienation, his occultism, is the result of "sophistical studies, super-terrestrial subtleties, semi2. Plato, The Collected Dialogues, ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), Republic 10.608, p. 833.

14

SALOME AND THE DANCE OF WRITING

theological speculations, . . . aspirations towards an ideal, towards an unknown universe, towards a distant beatitude, as utterly desirable as that promised by the Scriptures" (p. 8889)· For Huysmans the novelist, as a painter, must explode the limits of the canvas; more importantly, he must explode the very concept of the frame, and produce a work "as desirable as those promised us by the Scriptures." On the basis of these views of Huysmans, it can be argued that the metaphor for the entire poetics of A Rebours, the model for what he seeks to do with the novel, is Gustave Moreau's Salome. Salome, the figure from the Scriptures, whose dance resulted in the death of John the Baptist-Salome is for Des Esseintes uncontainable by the frame of any moral or ideological system. Huysmans's lengthy descriptions of two of Moreau's Salomes are perhaps the most explosive (and certainly the most passionate) moments in the novel. But the manner in which those portraits are described is also Huysmans's ontology of writing, and that will be our focal point here. The concept of the portrait in Huysmans's novel is then on three levels: first, the view of the traditional novel as both framing ("a more serious work" ) and enframed (by the "suffocating" restrictions of convention); second, Huysmans's idea that his novel will concentrate on the painting of "a single character," the traditional view of portraits beginning with La Bruyere; and, finally, the depiction of "real" portraits, with emphasis on the two Moreau paintings to be considered. 3 What is intriguing about Salome, among other things, are the periods during which she becomes an object of interest. After biblical times, Salome seems to arouse no curiosity until the fourth century, at which time she is the favorite of the authors of Roman decadent literature-the same authors who 3. The use of the term "literary portrait" is problematic because it conjures up a La Bruyere definition--of giving a verbal "sketch" of an individual so that he presumably appears before the reader's eyes as clearly as a portrait in a gallery. Unless otherwise stated, however, this study will use the term ((literary portrait" to mean a literal picture that appears in a literary text: for example, the picture of Dorian Gray in the novel by Oscar Wilde. The Moreau paintings in the Huysmans text, on the other hand, are unique in that they are picturespaintings-that actually exist outside of the novel, "in the world."

Chapter One

are among the favorites in Des Esseintes's library.4 Her rise to prominence in the fourth century may also be attributed to the building, in Alexandria, of the great church in honor of John the Baptist. She is vilified and rendered satanic, but at least she has emerged from oblivion. She resurfaces in the Middle Ages, because the Crusades gave increasing attention to the Baptist. It is during this period that her name becomes confused with that of her mother, Herodias (a confusion that persisted: Heine, Mallarme, and Banville all write of "Herodias" when it is clear that they are referring to Salome). In the Middle Ages, Salome appears everywhere: on tympana, on stained glass windows, in the vitraille of the Cathedral of Rouens, where she lustfully walks on her hands during the banquet (an image which may have inspired Flaubert's Herodias).5 During the Renaissance, she appears occasionally, but she is quieter and more dignified: Giotto, Ghirlandaio, Titian, Luin, Andrea del Sarto, and Fra Filippo Lippi all depict her as lovely, but hardly as a devouring female. She fades againuntil the nineteenth century with the publication, in 1842, of Heinrich Heine's Atta Troll. Here she becomes the Salome of Des Esseintes: beauty without morality. She has lost all of her political and historical meaning, symbolizing rather the pure ideal of great beauty without scruples, without restraint, with cruel indifference. In 1876, when Flaubert was immersed in his study of Salome and her vengeful mother, Herodias, he wrote to Mme de Genettes: "The story of Herodias, as I understand it, has no relation to religion. What captivates me in 4. "One section of the bookshelves lining the walls of Des Esseintes's blue and orange study was filled with nothing but Latin works-works which minds drilled into conformity by repetitious university lectures lump together under the generic name of 'the Decadence'" (p. 40). 5. A thirteenth-century painting of Salome walking on her hands has recently been uncovered near Boussac in central France. The painting is from a mural on the chapel walls of a command post in a fortified farm originally owned by a knight Templar. For an in-depth and extremely useful discussion of the history of Salome and her depictions, particularly in southern France, see Linda Seidel's article, "Salome and the Canons," Women's Studies 2 (1984), 29-66. For a more general discussion of the sources for the biblical story, see Helen Grace Zagona, The Legend of Salome and the Principle of Art for Art's Sake (Geneva: Droz, 1960), and Harold W. Hoehner, Herod Antipas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).

16

SALOME AND THE DANCE OF WRITING

this, is the official face of Herod (who was a real prefect) and the ferocious face of Herodias, a type of Cleopatra and de Maintenon."6 Flaubert, interestingly (and typically), is one of the few writers who did his homework: he read the Bible and other sources, and his Herodias remains a vivid and learned account of the story. He retains the clear distinction between Salome and Herodias. Flaubert's earlier historical novel, Salammbo, is the story of Carthage. It was originally written in what Flaubert considered to be a lyrical, biblical style. 7 His description of the Carthaginian princess ,was, it seems, a major influence on Gustave Moreau's vision of Salome. It was one of Moreau's favorite books, 8 for he loved the ornate prose Flaubert used to detail 6. Correspondance (Paris: Conard, 1930), p. 309. The letter was written on June 19, 1876, shortly after the Salon that displayed the Moreau paintings "Salome Dancing" and "The Apparition," which were to reappear in Des Esseintes's house in A Rebours. In a letter to Mme de Genettes in April of the same year, the same month of the Salon, Flaubert tells of a trip he has taken to Pont-l'Eveque and to Honfleur, to do research for Histoire d'un coeur simple. It is this trip, says Flaubert, that inspires his Herodias: "Do you know what I feel like writing after this? The story of Saint John the Baptist. The nastiness of Herod toward Herodias excites me. It is as yet only a dream, but I really want to develop this idea" (Correspondance, p. 296). See also B. Fay and A. Coleman, Sources and Structure of Flaubert's Salammb6 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1914). 7. Eduard Maynial, in his introduction to the Garnier edition of Salammb6, recounts the following anecdote: "Des 1867, Jules Claretie racontait dans un feuilleton du Temps l'histoire de la premiere redaction de Salammb6 et de la lecture que Flaubert en fit, en petit comite, a quelques amis de choix . . . Flaubert avait d'abord ecrit Salammb6 sous la forme d'une sorte de poeme en prose, une succession de versets rythmes, analogues aux Paroles d'un croyant de Lamennais. Toutes les phrases commen~aient par et ... dans un mouvement d'une monotonie obsedante: 'et Matho se leva ... Et Salammb6 repondit ... Et Carthage s'endormait ... Et les lions en croix rugissaient ... m Salammb6 (Paris: Garnier, 1961), p. ix. Flaubert's insistence on beginning every sentence with "And" seems to me to be as much an attempt to emulate the biblical vav as it is an experimentation with the prose poem. 8. Jean Paladilhe and Jose Pierre note, in their book Gustave Moreau, trans. Bettina Wadia (New York: Praeger, 1972): "It is not surprising that Baudelaire was one of Moreau's favorite writers, who included Flaubert, especially his Salammb6, Gautier, Leconte de Lisle and Vigny" (p. 90). See also Philippe Iullian, The Symbolists, trans. Mary Anne Stevens (London: Phaidon, 1973), and G. Larroumet, Notice historique sur la vie et les oeuvres de M. Gustave Moreau

Chapter One

the exquisite attire of the princess. Indeed, Flaubert's description of Salammbo is almost identical to Moreau's vision of Salome: Her hair, powdered in a violet sand, and gathered in circles according to the style of Canaanite virgins, seemed to make her larger. Tresses of pearls attached to her temples dangled nearly to the corners of her mouth, rosy as an open pomegranate. On her breast was an assemblage of gleaming stones, imitating by their medley the scales of a muraena. Her arms, garnered with diamonds, emerged naked from her sleeveless tunic, which was spangled with red flowers on a black field. Between her ankles she wore a small chain of gold to regulate her gait, and her great coat of deep purple, fashioned from an unknown material, trailed behind her. [Po 12]

Here we already have the combination that makes Salome so tantalizing for many fin de siecle writers: the virgin and the devouress. The devouring quality is emphasized by the fish to which Flauhert compares Salammho and her attire: the muraena, the voracious moray eel of the Mediterranean, is long and pointed as a needle and excessively dangerous-its bites are terrible. One of Moreau's favorite novels, we have noted, was Salammbo, and the influence upon the painter is marked. He had already been struck by the story of the Baptist with "La decollation de St. Jean-Baptiste," a work by Puvis de Chavannes from the 1870 Salon. In 1874 the figure of Salome again captured Moreau's attention: Paul Baudry had presented a draft for the foyer at the opera house in Paris-it was "The Dance of Salome." Whereas Moreau began with an interest in St. John's story, his attention clearly turns more and more to the dancing princess. Out of 120 Moreau drawings on the subject, (Paris, 1901), p. 43ff. Julius Kaplan points out that Moreau did not actually own a copy of Salammbo, but had other books by Flaubert. Kaplan further notes of Moreau that "the influence of Salammbo is discernible in the high headdress and flowing robes Flaubert describes and the high-vaulted sanctuary of Tanit containing a many-breasted goddess" The Art ofGustave Moreau: Theory, Style and Content (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982), p. 52.

18

SALOME AND THE DANCE OF WRITING

are of Salome alone. 9 But the inbreeding in the history of the nineteenth-century Salome is as great as that of her lineage, as we shall see below. Moreau, inspired by Flaubert's Salammbo, paints "Salome Dancing" in oils and the watercolor "The Apparition," both works displayed in April of 1876 at the Salon Palace of the Champs Elysees, the latter at the Exposition Universelle in 1878. Although critics were somewhat offended by the pieces, more than 5°0,000 people came to the Salon to see Salome. Flaubert himself was overwhelmed by Moreau's vision and began research for his Herodias in the same month of the same year. 10 So we have come full circle. Flaubert's verbal depiction of Salammb6 inspires Moreau's paintings of Salome, which in turn help to motivate Flaubert's story of Salome. These two works by Moreau grace the walls of Des Esseintes's opulent retreat in A Rebours. Huysmans, in describing the Moreau paintings, attempts to translate a pictorial art into prose; but the paintings he is describing were inspired by writing. It is this symbiotic relationship between writing and painting that Salome provides-both in her biblical "origins" and in the countless depictions her story has generated-and Huysmans's prose rendition thus from the outset demonstrates the extent to which "writing" may be seen, like painting, as a form of augmented iconization. Here is Huysmans's Des Esseintes describing the painting "Salome Dancing" by Moreau: 70

Amid the heady odour of these perfumes, in the overheated atmosphere of the basilica, Salome slowly glides 9. R. von Holton, "I.e developpement du personnage de Salome a travers les dessins de Gustave Moreau," L:Oeil, nos. 115-16 (July-August 1964). See Kaplan for a detailed discussion of Moreau's preparatory studies for Salome, in Art of Gustave Moreau, pp. 59-67. 10. As previously noted, Flaubert was already inspired to write on Salome after his trip to Pont-l'Eveque and Honfleur. His work on Herodias was delayed by the long completion of Un Coeur Simple, finished in August. On August 17, Flaubert writes to his niece Caroline, "Now that I am finished with Felicite, Herodias presents itself and I see (clearly, as I see the Seine) the surface of the Dead Sea glistening in the sun. Herod and his wife are on a balcony, from which one can glimpse the golden tiles of the Temple" (Correspondance, p. 341). See also Robert Baldick's "Introduction" to the English translation of Flaubert's Trois contes: Three Tales (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 14.

Chapter One

forward on the points of her toes, her left arm stretched in a commanding gesture, her right bent back and holding a great lotus-blossom beside her face, while a woman squatting on the floor strums the strings of a guitar. With a withdrawn, solemn, almost august expression on her face, she begins the lascivious dance which is to rouse the aged Herod's dormant senses; her breasts rise and fall, the nipples hardening at the touch of the whirling necklaces; the strings of diamonds glitter against her moist flesh; her bracelets, her belts, her rings all spit out fiery sparks; and across her triumphal robe, sewn with pearls, patterned with silver, spangled with gold, the jewelled cuirass, of which every chain is a precious stone, seems to be ablaze with little snakes of fire, swarming over the mat flesh, over the tea-rose skin, like gorgeous insects with dazzling shards, mottled with carmine, spotted with pale yellow, speckled with steel blue, striped with peacock green. [P.64]

I have emphasized certain words to show what Huysmans has done in this passage to give Salome full life. The verbs are overwhelmingly of motion: glides, stretched, holding, rouse, begins, rise, fall, hardening, whirling. The words describing the jewels and the attire of Salome are given life, too, by the use of a vocabulary describing the play of light upon them: glitter, fiery, sparks, spangled, ablaze, dazzling, speckled. These words are further animated by a simile: the jeweled cuirass of Salome is like "little snakes of fire" which swarm all over her mat flesh like (a second simile) "gorgeous insects" of an entire array of colors. Flaubert's muraena is evoked here, for he had described the jewelry on Salammbo's breasts, it will be remembered, as "an assemblage of gleaming stones, imitating by their medley the scales of a muraena." Huysmans substitutes rainbowed insects, and swarming snakes of fire. Huysmans's passage is entirely in the present tense (unlike most of the rest of the novel), thus reinforcing the immediacy of the drama-"she begins the lascivious dance" -and giving us a Salome who moves, who actually dances. Moreover, the cataloguing in the passage is almost vertiginous: Huysmans uses verb after verb, adjective after adjective, to achieve the prose imitation of Moreau's heavily adorned and bejeweled 20

SALOME AND THE DANCE OF WRITING

Salome against a background of opulence. The passage also makes repeated use of anaphora, the employment of the same syntax at the beginning of phrases: sewn with, patterned with, spangled with, ablaze with, mottled with, spotted with, speckled with, striped with. The intricacy and ornamented quality of Moreau's painting is evoked in prose by a barrage of synonyms and overloaded syntax which, by their very accumulation and repetition, evoke in the reader the heady odor of perfumes, the overheated atmosphere of the basilica, the dreamlike quality of the murderess Salome as she "slowly glides forward on the points of her toes." The irony is that the reader feels a need to "open the windows, to escape an environment in which [he] is suffocating" -the very sensation evoked in Huysmans by the tenets ofZola's novel, from which Huysmans is himself trying to escape. The overheated, overcharged atmosphere of Herod's basilica, moreover, is a double of the cloistered and luxurious house of Des Esseintes with its exotica, hothouse, and opulent extravagance. This tripled doubling is an issue to which we shall return. II The rhetorical term for what Huysmans has achieved in this passage is ecphrasis: the description in detail, usually of an art object. Saintsbury says that ecphrasis is "a set description intended to bring person, place, picture, etc., vividly before the mind's eye." More recently the art historian Jean Hagstrum has called ecphrasis "that special quality of giving voice and language to a mute art object." His reasoning is justly grounded on the etymology of the word: the Greek ekphrazein means "speak out," "to tell in full."I2 This does not mean that the character depicted need actually speak (although this does occur in some examples of ecphrasis), but rather that the scene and/or character described is brought to life so vividly by the narration that the icon tells its own story, far beyond the static representation of its medium. The most familiar example of 1 1. I say "tripled" doubling simply to mean that the suffocating environment of Naturalism, from which Huysmans seeks refuge, is doubled by the cloistered prison of Des Esseintes, and again by Herod's steamy basilica. 12. The Sister Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 18 note. For a good study of ecphrasis, see Page DuBois, History, Rhetorical Description, and the Epic: From Homer to Spenser (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1982).

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Chapter One

ecphrasis in literature is the shield of Achilles, in the description of which Homer gives us a microcosmic world alive with activity. Here is part of it: [Hephaistos] pictured, then, two cities, noble scenes: weddings in one, and wedding feasts, and brides led out through town by torchlight from their chambers amid chorales, amid the young men turning round and round in dances: flutes and harps among them, keeping up a tune, and women coming outdoors to stare as they went by. A crowd, then, in a market place, and there two men at odds over satisfaction owed for a murder done: one claimed that all was paid, and publicly declared it; his opponent turned the reparation down, and both demanded a verdict from an arbiter, as people clamored in support of each, and criers restrained the crowd. The town elders sat in a ring, on chairs of polished stone, the staves of clarion criers in their hands, with which they sprang up, each to speak in turn, and in the middle were two golden measures to be awarded him whose argument would be the most straightforward. 13

In the microcosm of this icon, this shield, there teems a vast and complex life: cities, judicial proceedings, wedding feasts and so on, all of which are brought to life by the ecphrasis Homer employs. Significantly, when Hephaistos has finished Achilles' shield, he fashions its border-that is, its frame: Then, running round the shield-rim, triple-ply, he pictured all the might of the Ocean stream. [57980]

The ocean stream frames the scenes depicted on the shield, and it also "frames off," delimits, the story of the shield from the larger story of the Iliad. In this sense, ecphrasis may be seen as an early version of the intercalated story, or "frame 13. The Iliad, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Doubleday, 1974), 18:45979, p. 451. 22

SALOME AND THE DANCE OF WRITING

story," the most famous examples of which are in Boccaccio's Decameron. As with an ecphrastic passage, the frame story suspends the action of the larger story of a work in order to concentrate on the "telling in full" of a different tale. In both ecphrasis and the intercalated story, the "frame" is two things: a narrative device separating the smaller tale from its larger context, and an explicitly or implicitly evoked boundary marking that same separation (for example, the ocean stream surrounding the rim of Achilles' shield). The concept of the frame, then, assumes an inside and an outside, much as the term "intercalation" means, in geology, the insertion of another layer between two well-defined layers of rock. When Huysmans writes in his preface that he wants "to rupture the limits of the novel," to cease using the novel "merely as a frame," and to "insert into it art, science, history" -he is, on the one hand, using the vocabulary of the concept of framing (insert, limits, frame) and, on the other, trying to rupture that concept as well. Thus, Huysmans's description, through Des Esseintes, of Salome dancing, is at once ecphrastic-a "telling in full," the bringing to life of an art object-and, simultaneously, a refusal to frame his vision, for his "paintbrush of light" in no way delimits the movements of the dancing scene to any proscenium or canvas edge. Huysmans dilates, in other words, the concept of depiction. Such a dilation is further achieved by the use of revery in the contemplation of the Moreau painting. When Des Esseintes tries to understand the meaning of the lotus flower Salome holds in her right hand, his revery is one of erotic grotesquerie; but it is a revery that blurs the boundaries between the painting itself and Des Esseintes's rich (as well as necrophiliac) imagination: Perhaps, too, in arming his enigmatic goddess with the revered lotus-blossom, the painter had been thinking of the dancer, the mortal woman, the soiled vessel, ultimate cause of every sin and every crime; perhaps he had remembered the sepulchral rites of ancient Egypt, the solemn ceremonies of embalmment, when practitioners and priests layout the dead woman's body on a slab of jasper, then with curved needles extract her brains through the

Chapter One

nostrils, her entrails through an opening made in the left side, and finally, before gilding her nails and her teeth, before anointing the corpse with oils and spices, insert into her sexual parts, to purify them, the chaste petals of the divine flower. [Pp. 66-67]

This sadistic, mysogynistic revery, with its vague historical overtones, achieves an extended form of ecphrasis, for what Huysmans has done is to "continue" the story of the painting. It is Salome who is put upon the slab and dissected, dismembered; for it is Salome who holds the lotus blossom. The remainder of the passage performs a gruesome autopsy on the woman, and the lotus flower (lest we had overlooked its phallic overtones) is "inserted into her sexual parts, to purify them." Thus the "soiled vessel" is purified by the lotus. Because the revery employs the same rhetorical devices as the previous passage (anaphora, cataloguing, the use of the present tense to achieve vividness of detail), the Moreau painting has flowed into the revery of Des Esseintes, thus rupturing the boundaries of the former, and reinforcing the latter's identification with the painter. Later, the narrator tells us, "In Gustave Moreau's work, which in conception went far beyond the data supplied by the New Testament, Des Esseintes saw at long last the weird and superhuman Salome of his dreams." This vision of Salome is essentially identical to Huysmans's concept of the novel. Moreau's second Salome, "The Apparition," a watercolor, now gains Des Esseintes's attention. This work was the hit of the 1876 Salon. It may have been inspired by Heine's Atta Troll (Moreau owned a copy of Heine's Poemes et Legendes) and by Delacroix's "Decollation de St. ]ean."14 The painting itself seems to depict a mosque--except that it contains a statue of Buddha. Salome is transfixed by the haloed head of the Baptist, but no one else seems to see it (except perhaps the musician). Here is what Des Esseintes sees: With a gesture of horror, Salome tries to thrust away the terrifying vision which holds her nailed to the spot, bal14. For other possible influences on Moreau for his Salome, including works by Regnault, Delacroix, and Rembrandt, see Kaplan, Art of Gustave Moreau, p. 57·

24

SALOME AND THE DANCE OF WRITING

anced on the tips of her toes, her eyes dilated, her right hand clawing convulsively at her throat. She is almost naked; in the heat of the dance her veils have fallen away and her brocade robes slipped to the floor, so that now she is clad only in wrought metals and translucent gems. A gorgerin grips her waist like a corselet, and like an outsized clasp a wondrous jewel sparkles and flashes in the cleft between her breasts; lower down, a girdle encircles her hips, hiding the upper part of her thighs, against which dangles a gigantic pendant glistening with rubies and emeralds; finally, where the body shows bare between gorgerin and girdle, the belly bulges, dimpled by a navel which resembles a graven seal of onyx with its milky hues and its rosy finger-nail tints. [Pp. 67-68]

What is striking about this description is that, while the scene is once again brought to life, Salome herself is rendered almost lifeless. Apart from the description of her clawing hand (which has replaced the commanding gesture from the previous painting), everything else about her that lives is inanimate: the gorgerin grips her, the jewel sparkles and flashes, the girdle encircles her hips, the pendant dangles and glistens. As against the previous Salome description, from the oil painting, in which the inanimate cuirass is compared to "snakes swarming" and the movement of insects, here the similes either compare inanimate objects to equally inanimate ones ("a gorgerin . . . like a corselet") or compare and thus transpose the animate to the inanimate (the "navel which resembles a graven seal of onyx"). The verbs relate mainly to hard, metallic, or gemlike objects, and adornments of constraint: the gripping gorgerin, the encircling girdle, the clasp. Finally, Salome is totally depersonalized, rendered static at the end of the passage, described as a corpse "where the body shows bare . . . the belly bulges." She has become lifeless: her potency, like her navel, "a graven seal of onyx." It was this perverse virgin who had aroused the dormant sexual desires of Herod; and Des Esseintes, of course, identifies with the old tetrarch, but prefers Salome after her fatal dance: Like the old King, Des Esseintes invariably felt overwhelmed, subjugated, stunned when he looked at this

Chapter One

dancing girl, who was less majestic, less haughty, but more seductive than the Salome of the oil-painting. [P 68]

Des Esseintes continues, "here she came to life. . . ." She has for him "the charms of a great venereal flower, grown in a bed of sacrilege, reared in a hot-house of impiety." This second description is curious for several reasons. In the first place, as we have seen, the Salome of the watercolor is in fact far less alive than the Salome who dances. While the first Salome holds a lotus blossom, which Des Esseintes dreams will purify her soiled sexual parts when she is dead, this Salome is herself the flower-not the pure lotus, but a venereal blossom of sin. The focus of attention in "The Apparition," the watercolor, is, as its name implies, the head of the Baptist. It is to this severed head that Des Esseintes gives movement and life. The head "glows eerily" in an embracing "sinister gaze," having "left the charger ... and risen into the air, the eyes staring out from the livid face, the colorless lips parted, the crimson neck dripping tears of blood" (p. 68). There is "a fire in the glassy eyeballs," which are fixed in "agonized concentration" on the frozen figure of Salome. In this painting then, the decapitated Baptist lives-a fact which is firmly reinforced by the verbs the narrator chooses to describe him. On the other hand, the "living" dancer is motionless and deadened-only her jewels seem alive. And yet it is of this frozen figure that Des Esseintes says, "here she came to life." Des Esseintes-the character who gives a dinner (at which all the food is black, and served by naked black women) to mourn the "temporary" loss of his potency-is fascinated by the woman who was able to reignite the old tetrarch. Salome is here the vampire woman who "saps the morale and breaks the will." The idea that sexual activity saps a man of his mental as well as physical strength is an old one. (We find it in Balzac, for example, whose poets often cannot write if they are having a liaison with a woman. )15 More significant in this view of Des Esseintes's Salome, however, is the concept of the seductress as an icon, or engine, brought to life for the purpose of de15. For example, Lucien in Illusions perdues and Raphael in La Peau de chagrin-both are plagued by intellectual indolence when they are "heureux taus les jours," Balzac's euphemism for an active sex life.

SALOME AND THE DANCE OF WRITING

stroying the male. An extension of this view is Des Esseintes's conviction that the locomotive is far more refined and far more beautiful than modern woman; for the locomotive, like Salome, is the height of feminine beauty: Has not man for his part, by his own efforts, produced an animate yet artificial creature that is every bit as good from the point of view of plastic beauty? Does there exist, anywhere on this earth, a being conceived in the joys of fornication and born in the throes of motherhood who is more dazzlingly, more outstandingly beautiful than the two locomotives recently put into service on the Northern Railway? [P. 37]

Here again, an inanimate object is brought to life, anthropomorphized. Like Salome, these "engines" are draped in metallic and confining attire: the first engine is "an adorable blonde with a shrill voice, a long slender body imprisoned in a shiny brass corset" ; the second has "a thick-set figure encased in armour-plating of cast iron." One quickly remembers Salome's gripping gorgerin which holds in her waist like a corselet, and the girdle encircling her hips. What Des Esseintes admires in these engines is what he admires in Moreau's Salomes: all three are artifices created by man (that is, men). Indeed, Des Esseintes considers artifice to be the distinctive mark of human genius. Of the engines, Des Esseintes muses: It is beyond question that, among all the fair, delicate beauties and all the dark, majestic charmers of the human race, no such superb examples of comely grace and terrifying force are to be found; and it can be stated without fear of contradiction that in his chosen province man has done as well as the God in whom he believes. [Po 38]

Like God, man can create life out of the inanimate. But for Des Esseintes it is precisely the inanimate, the artifice, that is celebrated. Life is granted by man to jewels, metals, engines, and paintings. It is an inverted mimesis of creation: for that which is created by man is art, which, once it is frozen in time, is then given movement. The icon-whether it be man's locomotives or Moreau's Salomes-is given life and voice, rupturing the limits between the animate and the inanimate. This

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is ecphrasis taken to its most extreme extension; such that the novel itself becomes a prolonged ecphrasis. For if writing is art, then the very immobility of the word on the page becomes a tribute to man's ability to create. Like the artificially induced flowers in Des Esseintes's hothouse, far more beautiful than those found in nature, the novel outdoes God at his own game, for writing produces "life" where there is none, precisely by insisting upon the superiority of artifice. It is the initial enthusiasm of a Midas touch that celebrates the ability of man to transform everything into gold, and then proclaims gold to be far more valuable, far superior to simple nature. If God can turn Lot's wife into salt, man can make a salt statue that moves. Des Esseintes's fascination with the Scriptures is for the purpose of resurrecting the villains of the Bible, and turning them into objects of worship. Not insignificantly, the Whore of Babylon is described in terms identical to those of Salome: And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication .... I saw the woman drunken with the blood of saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. [Revelation 17:4-6]

But if the Bible is the model, the creation of the artist always goes "far beyond the data supplied by the New Testament." The genius of Moreau, in Des Esseintes's view, is that his Salome is precisely like a locomotive-inanimate, powerful, and potentially deadly: She had become, as it were, the symbolic incarnation of undying Lust, the Goddess of immortal Hysteria, the accursed Beauty exalted above all other beauties by the catalepsy that hardens her flesh and steels her muscles, the monstrous Beast, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning, like Helen of ancient myth, everything that ap-

proaches her, everything that sees her, everything that she touches. [Po 66; my emphasis]

The story of Salome from the Bible is, in Des Esseintes's view, written in "brief, naive phrases." He continues: "But nei-

SALOME AND THE DANCE OF WRITING

ther St. Matthew, nor St. Mark, nor St. Luke, nor any of the other sacred writers had enlarged on the maddening charm and potent depravity of the dance." The paintings of Gustave Moreau, however, achieve what the Bible does not: they bring Salome to life. Moreover, they rupture all boundaries: "The painter seemed to have wished to assert his intention of remaining outside the bounds of time, of giving no precise indication of race or country or period." Again, this is what Huysmans intends for his novel. While Moreau may have wished to remain outside of all bounds of time and country, there is a "real" Salome on which his painting is based-a Salome against which his depiction plays. So, too, Des Esseintes's description of the Moreau work plays against the "real" painting, which, after all, can be made available for the reader if he wishes to compare it to its verbal rendition. Here we are already raising the issue of the categories "original" versus "copy," an issue as complex as it is obscure. Before embarking upon this problem, however, let us consider the "real" Salome. Three principle sources tell us the story of Salome: the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, and the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. According to Josephus, Salome was the daughter of Herodias and the stepdaughter of Herod Antipas (the Herod of Moreau's paintings). She was twice married: first to her uncle Philip, tetrarch, and thirty years her senior; and then to Aristobulus, king of Lesser Armenia (West Asia in biblical times). It is significant that Josephus does not connect Herodias to John the Baptist. The Baptist's story is told separately, for it is to Josephus a story of pure religious politics and has nothing to do with a seductive dance. In his Antiquities of the Jews, we read: Now, when others came in crowds about him [the Baptist], for they were greatly pleased by hearing his words, Herod, who feared lest the great influence John had over the people might put it into his power and inclination to raise rebellion (for they seemed to do anything he should advise), thought it best, by putting him to death, to prevent any mischief he might cause, and not bring himself

Chapter One

into difficulties, by sparing a man who might make him repent of it when it should be too late. 16

Herod Antipas had good reason to be afraid of John. Antipas, to begin with, was tetrarch of Galilee. When the Roman general Pompey had marched into Palestine in 63 B.C., he had captured Jerusalem and reduced Jewish territory to Judea, without the coastal cities and the confederacy towns of Decapolis (central Transjordan). Several other smaller regions were also left to the Jews: Galilee and Peraea, east of the Dead Sea. At the time of Jesus, Galilee was known as a seat of Jewish resistance to Rome. Herod Antipas ruled during the ministry of Jesus, and as tetrarch he was Rome's representative to Galilee. His political situation was shaky and dangerous: he was neither a Jew nor a Roman. Jesus called Antipas a "fox" (Luke 13:32), and Josephus's claim that Antipas killed John because he represented a political threat is quite plausible. 17 But Herod Antipas had another reason for fearing, indeed hating, John: in marrying Herodias, Antipas had violated Mosaic law. The Synoptic tradition gives John's harsh criticism of 16. Antiquities of the Jews, in The Works of Flavius Josephus, ed. D. S. Margoliouth, trans. W. Whiston (London: Routledge, 1906), p. 534. Josephus's account of the death of the Baptist is in the context of the destruction of Herod's army by Aretas, king of Arabia Petrea. Herod had originally married Aretas's daughter, and then wished to get rid of her when he fell in love with Herodias, so when his wife asked to be sent away, he happily agreed. But she went straight to Aretas, her father, and told him of Herod's bigamous plan. Aretas took his revenge by attacking and destroying Herod's army. The Jews believed, and Josephus adds "very justly," that the destruction of 11erod's army was God's punishment for "what he did against John, that was called the Baptist." The conclusion of the story is that Herod, infuriated, wrote to Tiberius, telling him of Aretas's attack. Tiberius in turn asked the General Vitellius to make war on Aretas and to "bring him to him in bonds, or to kill him, and send him his head." This attack was thwarted, however, by the death of Tiberius, and Vitellius retired to Antioch. Thus the death of the Baptist is, for Josephus, a power ploy on Herod's part, the result of which is the defeat of the latter's army as "a mark of God's displeasure to him" for killing John. It is Herod's bigamy, moreover, that contributes to his military defeat. 17. For a good discussion of the sources of information on the historical John the Baptist, and his relationship to Jesus, see Charles H. H. Scobie, John the Baptist (London: SCM Press, 1964).

SALOME AND THE DANCE OF WRITING

this unlawful second marriage as the reason for his execution. Even Josephus is harsh with Herod for the marriage, although he does not see it as the principal reason for John's death. Josephus writes: They [Herodias and her first husband] had a daughter Salome, after whose birth Herodias took upon her to confound the laws of our country, and divorced herself from her husband while he was alive, and was married to Herod [Antipas], her husband's brother by the father's side; he was tetrarch of Galilee. [Po 536]

So the sin is double, since both guilty parties were married when they eloped together. The genealogy of the family is tortuous, but is essentially as follows: Herodias was the granddaughter of Herod the Great by Malthace the Samaritan. Philip, Herodias's first husband, was also the son of Herod the Great by Miriam, daughter of Simon the priest. Antipas and Philip were therefore half brothers, and both were uncles to Herodias. Josephus tells us that Herodias married Philip when he was still in favor with his father. After Herod the Great felt betrayed by Miriam, Philip's mother, he banished his son and disinherited him. Philip retired to Rome with a disgruntled Herodias, who had thought she had made a marriage of wealth and power. Antipas went at some point to visit his half brother in Rome, and it did not take the cunning Herodias long to see in her house guest (also her uncle and brother-in-law) the possibility of a far more felicitous marriage. He was tetrarch of Galilee, in favor with his father, and extremely wealthy. She apparently convinced him to elope with her. They did so and took the young Salome with them (who, by the way, was like her mother the granddaughter of Herod the Great). The story has another twist: Herodias was also Agrippa's sister. When he rose to power, she became insanely jealous and persuaded Antipas to go to Rome to demand more favors. But the hapless Antipas arrived in Rome to find himself accused of treachery (presumably by Agrippa, who had anticipated the rivalry). The twist lies in the fact that Herodias, everywhere described as cold and calcu-

Chapter One

lating, loyally chose exile with her husband although her brother was prepared to spare her this fate and to reinstate her wealth. 18 But a few important events had occurred before the exile: John, who had repeatedly and relentlessly accused Herodias of sin on account of her second marriage, had been executed by Herod Antipas. Herod had then found himself in the midst of a very dangerous and costly war with Aretas, king of Arabia and outraged father of the wife Herod had spurned in favor of Herodias. Herod was losing the war and appealed to Tiberius for help. It is while Herod is anxiously awaiting reinforcements that he hears of Jesus. In both Matthew and Mark, the tetrarch is convinced that this man Jesus is John returned from the dead as God's punishment for the execution. Herod is waiting for Vitellius to come to his military aid, and thinks back on the decapitation of the Baptist. In both biblical passages, then, the story of Salome's dance is a flashback. Matthew's rendition of the story is the following: It was at that time that reports about Jesus reached the ears of Prince Herod. "This is John the Baptist," he said to his attendants; "John has been raised to life, and that is why these miraculous powers are at work in him." Now Herod had arrested John, put him in chains, and thrown him into prison, on account of Herodias, his brother Philip's wife; for John had told him: "You have no right to her." Herod would have liked to put him to death, but he was afraid of the people, in whose eyes John was a prophet. But at his birthday celebrations the daughter of Herodias danced before the guests, and Herod was so delighted that he took an oath to give her anything she cared to ask. Prompted by her mother, she said, "Give me here on a dish the head of John the Baptist." The king was distressed when he heard it; but out of regard for his oath and for his guests, he ordered the request to be granted, and had John beheaded in prison. The head was brought in on a dish and given to the girl; and she carried it to her mother. Then John's disciples came and took away the body, and buried it; and they went and told Jesus. 18. For a detailed discussion of Salome's genealogy, and of Hasmonaean and Herodian families, see A. H. M. Jones, The Herods of Judaea (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938).

SALOME AND THE DANCE OF WRITING

When he heard what had happened Jesus withdrew privately by boat to a lonely place; but people heard of it, and came after him in crowds by land from the towns. 19.

We have said that an intercalated story may be "framed" by a narrative device which separates it from the larger context. In this passage from Matthew, Herod's flashback is framed by the first and the last sentences. Both of these sentences, moreover, have to do with the faculty of hearing, which determines and controls the movements of the story. Reports of Jesus "reached the ears" of Herod, who becomes convinced that this Jesus is John returned from the dead, and thinks back on the events leading to John's execution. The fact that the New Testament does not say "Herod thought" is of little consequence, because the narrative doubles the logical progression of Herod's mind, explaining the grounds for his fear. (Another example of this literary technique is to be found in the Chanson de Roland, in which the sound of the horn from Roland's rear guard is narratively followed until the story, like the sound of the horn, reaches Charlemagne, many leagues away.) The story of John's execution is framed at the end of the passage with "When [Jesus] heard what had happened ..." This phrase returns us to the present of the narrative, and is again an audile movement (a message) that leaves Herod's palace and travels until it reaches Jesus. Given that the execution of John is already past when the passage opens, what Jesus hears may be that Herod fears Jesus to be John, and not the news that John is dead. 20 In any case, the audile as a system of movement closes the passage: when the people heard that Jesus had departed-"heard of it" -they "came after him in crowds by land from the towns." As to the Salome story itself, what is singular is the reference to the famous dance, for it is totally lacking in specific description, not to mention sensuality. We know only that the daughter of Herodias (Salome is not even mentioned by name) danced before the guests at Herod's banquet and that he was 19. The New English Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), Matthew 14: 1- 13. 20. See James Morison, Practical Commentary on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1945), p. 250, note to verse 13.

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"delighted." Such a comment is purposely vague, which cannot help but intrigue the reader, since the dance was powerful enough to result in the death of a prophet. According to Erich Auerbach, such an evasive approach to the sensual is typical of the revisionist interpretation that characterizes early Christian writings: The total content of the sacred writings was placed in an exegetic context which often removed the thing told very far from its sensory base, in that the reader or listener was forced to turn his attention away from the sensory occurrence and toward its meaning. 21

There is no doubt, in Matthew's telling of Salome's story, that the princess is significant only because she is a cog in the machinery that causes the death of the Baptist. Indeed, the "meaning" of the story is so emphasized at the expense of the "sensory occurrence" that Salome, as we have noted, is not even referred to by name. Auerbach comments: ... generally almost the entire body of New Testament writings is written from within the emergent growths and directly for everyman. Here we have neither survey and rational disposition, nor artistic purpose. The visual and sensory as it appears here is no conscious imitation and hence is rarely completely realized. It appears because it is attached

to the events which are to be related, because it is revealed in the demeanor and speech of profoundly stirred individuals and no effort need be devoted to the task of elaborating it. [P. 47; my emphasis]

For there to be an artistic element, then, there must also be conscious mimesis-at least, such is the case for Auerbach. The Old and New Testaments are certainly worlds apart in this regard, for it is the highly "figural" quality of the latter that makes its writings singularly lacking in the visual and the sensory. Indeed, it is the Christian insistence upon "backformation," that is, upon seeing everything in the Old Testament in terms of the New, and thus upon revisionist interpretation, 21. Mimesis, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 48. Future references will give page number only.

34

SALOME AND THE DANCE OF WRITING

which makes for writings essentially void of depiction. 22 When there is an antagonism between sensory appearance and meaning-an antagonism that Auerbach claims permeates the whole of the Christian sensibility-"then the sensory occurrence pales before the power of the figural meaning." Auerbach's definition of figural interpretation is so well known that even he simply cites his earlier article, which had established the definition: Figural interpretation "establishes a connection between two events or persons in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second involves or fulfills the first. The two poles of a figure are separated in time, but both, being real events or persons, are within temporality. They are both contained in the flowing stream which is historical life, and only the comprehension, the intellectus spiritualis, of their interdependence is a spiritual act." [P. 73]

Auerbach is here referring, once again, to the Christian writings that interpret the Old Testament as a series of prophecies for the New. And yet it is clear that in the biblical passage the same type of revisional interpretation is at work. In the first place, Herod thinks that Jesus is John risen from the dead. This is in fact a variation of the view the New Testament will urge us to adopt. In the Gospel of Luke (3:16), John says, "but there is one to come who is mightier than I. I am not fit to unfasten his shoes. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire." John is thus the precursor of Jesus, the one who clears the way and begins his work. In this sense, Herod is right, and is right to fear. In the second place, Salome is a Maccabbean princess. Like many other figures in the New Testament, she symbolizes both the old Judaic tradition and 22. I am using the notion of backformation figuratively. Its technical meaning is "a word actually formed from, but looking as if it were the base of, another word; e.g. burgle (from burglar)," Webster's Unabridged DIctionary (Cleveland, Ohio: Collins, 1979). This etymological reversal of chronologythat is, the reading of a later word as the basis of an earlier one-is how I am using backformation in a political sense: the imposition of an ideology to "explain" the basis of earlier events. Further, throughout this study I will be using the notions of parataxis and hypotaxis in a loose, nonliteral sense.

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the Roman Empire. She is also the heathen whose laws and power the New Testament at once affirms (initially) and rejects (ultimately). Salome, Herod, and her mother stand in opposition to John, Jesus, and the gathering multitude worshiping the two prophets. The punishment that will come to Herod and his line is emphasized by Luke in his stern judgment of Herod, even before mention is made of the execution of John: "But Prince Herod, when he was rebuked by him over the affair of his brother's wife and for his other misdeeds, crowned them all by shutting John up in prison" (Luke 3:19-20). The temporal doubling is heavy-handed: in the "present" of the narrative, Herod is nearly omnipotent, and can destroy. In the ttfuture" of the Christian narrator, however, it is Herod, and not John, who is doomed. John's martyrdom prefigures the death of Christ. Christ is indeed, in the Christian view, a far greater John risen (and to be risen) from the dead. And yet it is significant that Herod has it backwards: t'The people were ... all wondering about John," writes Luke, "whether perhaps he was the Messiah" (3:15-16). Herod wonders whether Christ might not be John. The second rendition of the Salome story in the New Testament is Mark's, and is told with several intriguing variations. Once again, the passage begins with Herod hearing of Jesus, but it also adds the various rumors about him that circulated: Now King Herod heard of it, for the fame of Jesus had spread; and people were saying, "John the Baptist has been raised to life, and that is why these miraculous powers are at work in him." Others said, "It is Elijah." Others again, "He is a prophet like one of the old prophets." But Herod, when he heard of it, said, "This is John, whom I beheaded, raised from the dead." [Mark 6:14-16]

The passage begins with an exact parallel to Matthew: Herod hears of Jesus, and of his miracles. But this passage gives two other explanations for Jesus, besides that he is John risen from the dead: Jesus is Elijah; Jesus is a prophet like those of old. The rumors, then, are critical because they demonstrate how firm Herod is in his belief that Jesus is John risen from the

SALOME AND THE DANCE OF WRITING

dead: for Herod rejects the other two possibilities equally held by the masses, and insists that Jesus is John returned. Mark continues his story: For this same Herod had sent and arrested John and put him in prison on account of his brother Philip's wife Herodias, whom he had married. John had told Herod, "You have no right to your brother's wife." Thus Herodias nursed a grudge against him and would willingly have killed him, but she could not; for Herod went in awe of John, knowing him to be a good and holy man; so he kept him in custody. He liked to listen to him, although the listening left him greatly perplexed. Herodias found her opportunity when Herod on his birthday gave a banquet to his chief officials and commanders and the leading men of Galilee. Her daughter came in and danced, and so delighted Herod and his guests that the king said to the girl, "Ask what you like and 1 will give it you." And he swore an oath to her: "Whatever you ask 1 will give you, up to half my kingdom." She went out and said to her mother, "What shall 1ask for?" She replied, "The head of John the Baptist." The girl hastened back at once to the king with her request: "I want you to give me here and now, on a dish, the head of John the Baptist." The king was greatly distressed, but out of regard for his oath and for his guests he could not bring himself to refuse her. So the king sent a soldier of the guard with orders to bring John's head. The soldier went off and beheaded him in the prison, brought the head on a dish, and gave it to the girl; and she gave it to her mother. When John's disciples heard the news, they came and took his body away and laid it in a tomb. [6:17-29]

In Mark's rendition of the story, it is Herodias and not Herod who wishes to kill John. Indeed, here Herod considers John just and holy, listening to him and hearing him gladly, if perplexedly. Second, we have a better sense of who attended the banquet: Herod's lords, high captains, and the chief citizens of Galilee-a noble assembly, before whom Herod would surely not like to be humiliated. Third, Salome is not instructed in advance by her mother-she asks her mother what to demand

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of Herod. Fourth, Mark makes it appear that the dish is Salome's idea. The dish, "a charger" as the King James Version calls it, is literally a carrier, and was used at the time of Herod for elaborate feasts. The banquet, then, was crowned with a feast for Herodias's eyes: the head of John on a platter. Fifth, Mark introduces the figure of the executioner. Here again, the focus of the narrative is achieved through the movement of another element: in this case, the head of the Baptist, which, in relay fashion, goes from executioner to Salome and then to her mother. Last, Salome's dance delights more than Herodit delights the entire assembly. As in Matthew's story, however, Mark does not describe the dance, nor does he refer to Salome by name. And, as in Matthew, this passage is framed by "hearing." It has been argued that Mark's story gives Salome more personality-or at least gives us more information about her. She, like an obedient child, asks her mother what to desire, and adds only the cruel touch of the charger. 23 And yet, as with the first passage, this one is remarkably lacking in the sensual and the visual. While we may conjure up all sorts of reasons for Salome's demand of a charger, we too in so doing would be guilty of revisional interpretation: that is, we would be imposing our own, "modern," explanation upon an aspect of the text that is paratactic to the point of being skeletal. If we remain at the level of Mark's text, however, we can see that it insists upon the meaning as against the sensory: the 23. See Rene Girard, "Scandal and the Dance: Salome in the Gospel of Mark," New Literary History 15, no. 2 (Winter 1984), 311- 24. See also my rebuttal in the same issue, "A Response to Rene Girard's Reading of Salome," 325-32. As John Carthew (Teeside Polytechnic, Middlesbrough, U.K.) has noted in an unpublished commentary on both these readings, the Salome tale should be considered within the larger context of the story of Christ as a whole. The miracle of the loaves and fishes, which follows the beheading of the Baptist, prefigures the sharing of food at the Last Supper and the institution of the Eucharist, and in turn the Last Supper prefigures the crucifixion. Thus "pathos-sparagmos-epiphany," closely aligned to Gilbert Murray's analysis of Greek tragedy in his "Excursus on the Ritual Forms Preserved in Greek Tragedy," in Jane Ellen Harrison's Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (London: Merlin Press, 1963), pp. 345-46. I am grateful for Professor Carthew's comments, and agree with his point that an isolation of the Salome tale from its larger textual circumstances does it a certain violence in itself.

SALOME AND THE DANCE OF WRITING

same antagonism we noted in Matthew's telling. We can also see that, as in the first passage, this one insists upon the auditory within the sensory realm: not only in the audile references that bracket, or frame, the passage, but also in the fact that Herod "liked to listen to" John, although "the listening left him greatly perplexed." The auditory is here the sense that allows for the dissemination of information. It is a sense insisted upon in this passage because the Gospels were more often heard than read at the time they were inscribed: information comes through hearing; the sensory is at most a vehicle to meaning. In this sense, the New Testament is purely 10gocentric: what counts is the spoken "Word" of Jesus; his teachings are speeches of which the inscription by the authors of the Gospels is merely a subsequent recording. The voice and speech are privileged to the greatest degree, for Jesus is the voice of Truth. 24 Even Herod is another manifestation of the privileging of speech: although his oath is a standard rhetoric of the time, Salome decides (or Herodias decides) to take it literally.25 (The modern equivalent would be someone forcing you to eat your hat). He agrees to this form of concrete thinking, in both passages, "for his oath's sake," and for the sake of those at his table. In other words, he agrees to fulfill Salome's request for his own sake; he had spoken, and the word must be truth. The insistence of the New Testament upon the meaning as over the sensory, upon the figural as over the mimetic (in its most straightforward sense), is an insistence culminating in the repression of otherness through the Aufhebung of Christ. 24. In using the term "logocentric," I am, of course, alluding to the writings of Jacques Derrida, whose views have by now become so familiar that a summary of his argument seems unnecessary. See, for example, Dissemination: Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); OfGrammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1976); and passim. For a good synopsis of Derrida's position on logo- and phonocentrisms, see Christopher Norris, Deconstruction, Theory and Practice (London: Methuen, 1982), especially "Jacques Derrida: Language against Itself," pp. 18-55. 25. Morison's Commentary (p. 248, note to verse 7) cites W. H. Dixon, The Holy Land, chap. 43, "Herodias" : "... by the custom of oriental courts she [Salome] could demand the wages of her shame."

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Indeed, the story of Christ, with his final agony on the cross and his ultimate triumph when he rises from the dead-that story is perhaps the most dramatic allegory for the annihilation of difference: that is, for the colonization of antithesis through synthesis. In this sense, the story of Christ is the best model for the deconstructionist view that the dialectic is a repression because it always tries to culminate in an Aufhebung. 26 Auerbach comments upon Mark: The author of the Gospel according to Saint Mark has no viewpoint which would permit him to present a factual, ob;ective portrait of, let us say, the character of Peter. He is at the core of what goes on; he observes and relates only what matters in relation to Christ's presence and mission. [Po 47; my emphasis]

We may of course ask ourselves whether there is such a thing as "a factual, objective portrait." We may even go so far as to say that Auerbach's desire for such a portrait is another insistence upon the "truth," and thus as repressive as the revisional interpretation he notes in the early Christian writers. Still, while these objections are, in my view, well grounded, it is also the case that Auerbach's very definition of the "figural" demonstrates the way in which difference is erased. Figural interpretation, Auerbach had said, "establishes a connection between two events or persons in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also the second." And vice versa. The intellectus spiritualis, then, is a spiritual act that erases difference by bringing "the two poles of a figure" separated in time into a "flowing stream which is historical life," thus rendering them "interdependent" and, finally, indistinguishable. The concept of history is clearly at issue here. It can be argued that the bringing together of two separate "poles," or figures, into a common stream is precisely the annihilation of history-by the same dialectical movement that results in Aufhebung through the intellectus spiritualis. And yet if Mark, 26. See Derrida's reading of Hegel in Writing and Difference, chap. 9: "From Restricted to General Economy: a Hegelianism without Reserve" (pp. 25077). Derrida argues that Hegel's "restricted economy" is subverted by a "general economy" of surplus meaning-a logocentric discourse of representation pressed into service by the Western notion of writing.

SALOME AND THE DANCE OF WRITING

for example, only "observes and relates what matters in relation to Christ's presence and mission," it is clear that for Auerbach, at least, this necessitates the absence of "portraits." Auerbach is onto something here that I do not believe even he recognizes. The portrait, precisely when it is clearly framed, is the refusal to connect a series of friezes with an overarching meaning. It is a refusal to establish a connection between two events or persons separated by time and tradition. It is not a narrative, nor is it a view of history as a "flowing stream." It is in itself, when taken by itself, a willed stress upon the paratactic. Conversely, if the Scriptures, especially the New Testament, are paratactic in style, it is for the purpose of allowing the intellectus spiritualis to fill in the gaps, to make the connections. It is, then, a parataxis which, like a dialectic, awaits only the spirit(ual) to be resolved through absolute knowledge-in this case, into hypotaxis. If we now return to Moreau's paintings of Salome, and to Huysmans's verbal depiction of them, we can see that the apparent opposite is taking place: the paratactical prose of the New Testament is replaced by a hypotactical style (both painterly and syntactical) of remarkable magnitude. The Huysmans depiction of Salome is rife with conjunctions, causal connections, catalogs of detail, and elaborate modifying clauses. Unlike the passages from Mark and Matthew, Huysmans's story of Salome is interested primarily in the dance and the dancer. The focus has, of course, changed dramatically, for Huysmans observes and relates only what matters in relation to Salome's presence and mission. The audile has given way entirely to the visual and the sensual: whereas movement in the New Testament had been connected with sound, here movement is ocular. Color words and color concepts dominate the Huysmans vision (as they do the Moreau painting). In Huysmans, we have an impressive vocabulary of color: "silver," "gold," "tearose," "carmine," "pale yellow," "steel blue," "peacock green," "milky hues," "fingernail tints." The verbs either give movement to the luster of the jewels and metals, as we have noted previously ("glitter," "spit out fiery sparks," "ablaze with swarming snakes of fire," etc. )--{)r refer specifically to the body: the breasts, which rise and fall, Salome gliding on the points of her toes, her hardening nipples, her bulging belly. A hypotactic

Chapter One

style, then, which emphasizes the sensual and visual, makes Salome the focus of attention even when (as in the second painting described) the head of the Baptist "glows eerily," suspended in the air-all of this certainly amounts to the apparent diametric opposite of the equivalent biblical passages. And yet it is clear that, as the purpose of the parataxis in the New Testament is to allow the intellectus spiritualis to "fill in the gaps" with a figural interpretation, so too the Huysmans passage seeks to "fill in the gaps" of the Gospels by fleshing out the full story of the dance. Huysmans had complained that none of the authors of the Gospels had enlarged upon the depravity of the dance, and that the genius of Moreau lay precisely in his ability to bring Salome to life. Huysmans's hypotactic revery on Salome is therefore responding to the Gospels in the same systemic way that the Gospels sought to be interpreted: he is establishing a "connection" between two separate times by bringing Salome to life in a timeless stream. Indeed, Salome has a specific moral meaning for Huysmans's decaaent hero: she is for him the symbolic incarnation of "undying Lust, the Goddess of immortal Hysteria, the monstrous Beast." The capitalization of the nouns adds to the allegorical tenor. Salome, to Huysmans, is exactly what she is for Mark and Matthew: pure meaning. The fact that the ethics of Huysmans's meaning are different from those of the New Testament does not alter the second fact that Huysmans is tracing the same gesture as the early Christian writers: revisional interpretation, yielding figural meaning. Indeed, if the purpose of the New Testament is to demonstrate that Christ touches every aspect of our lives, every part of our existence, Huysmans's Salome is no less all-encompassing: like Helen of Troy, Huysmans writes, Salome poisons "everything that approaches her, everything that sees her, everything that she touches." She is the Christ inverted. Huysmans's revery of Salome is the attempt to come close to the immortal, to the superhuman, to that which is indifferent to time and history. These are also, of course, the subjects of the writers of the Gospels. If Salome is the purposely ignored figure of Matthew, Mark, and Luke; Christ is similarly the figure glossed over in Huysmans. In the Christian texts, the Herodias figure dominates over that of 42

SALOME AND THE DANCE OF WRITING

Salome; in the Huysmans text, the floating and bloody head of the Baptist dominates, to the exclusion of any reference to Christ. In both cases, the repressed representations of Salome and Christ, respectively, have the same "plot": it is called revenge in the first, and imminent justice in the second. The impulse for retribution, however, is the same. The Salome of Huysmans, moreover, is also born of a vision that privileges speech-this despite the fact that the audile has been replaced by an emphasis on the visual. Like the passages in the Gospels, this Salome's power rests in her insistence upon taking the word literally. If it is her dance that extracts the rash oath from Herod; it is also the same assumption that the word is truth that leads to the decapitation of the Baptist. The Salome of Moreau and her verbal rendition by Huysmans, then, is a mimetic elaboration, both ideological and figural, of the logocentrism informing the writings of the Gospels. In the texts of the Gospels as well as of Huysmans, writing is secondary to presence: in the former, writing serves solely to convey the Word of Jesus; in the latter, it serves only to "bring to life" the Salome of Moreau's canvas. It may be argued that in erasing the apparent differences between the Christian and the Huysmans texts, I have been guilty of the very accusation leveled against logocentric interpretation: the annihilation of difference through synthesis. And yet my point is rather that an insistence upon the concept of immortality must of necessity always lead to the erasure of temporality, of difference, and therefore of history. We have noted that the concept of the portrait is at the core of this problem: the Gospel writers cannot "present a factual, objective portrait," because they must emphasize meaning at the expense of the representational, the mimetic. On the other hand, Huysmans's stated purpose is to "rupture the limits of the novel," to concentrate his "paintbrush of light on a single character, at all costs to create a novelty." Such a concentration, as we have seen, entails a refusal to allow for a frame; it is the insistence upon a hypotaxis that seeks to situate everything in a timeless stream, in "pure meaning." While there is surely no such thing as an ideal, factual, objective portrait, a frieze in isolation, the project of either 43

Chapter One

ignoring the portrait or of exploding its limits rnust lead to a symbolism wrested from any historical context. This is the case, not only of the early Christian revisionists, who fashion the older Scriptures into a prophecy for the new, but also of Huysmans's Salome as inspired by Moreau, whose very trappings are a catalog of the ahistorical: Buddhas, mosques, Egyptian deities, and Maccabbean attire all aggregate into a timeless and dizzying opulence. When the time frame is exploded, the assumption is that language is transparent, that it can point directly to a transcendent meaning, that the purpose of language is to confirm its own presuppositions, regardless of context or history. The portrait in the literary text is an obstacle to such a view, for the portrait itself is self-contained and functions as an eruption within the hypotactic stream of the text. It is perhaps for this reason that the portrait is generally interpreted figurally-that is, the portrait is seen as the representation, or the mimesis, of the assumptions of the text. But if we refuse to see the portrait in this light, if we ask how and not what it means in the text, if we refuse to sublate it by exploding its frame and insist rather on seeing it precisely as an obstacle, as an opacity that disturbs progression of the text's willed meaning-then we may find in the portrait the problematic relationship between not only writing and iconization but also between writing and history, between fiction and history. The next chapter will attempt such an inquiry, by examining what happens when the portrait in the literary text is that of a historical figure. Again, what is at issue is the relationship between writing and iconization. Again, we will attempt to view writing as an activity that is far more than the secondary reflection of presence-that logocentric view we found in both the Gospel passages and in Huysmans. In the Huysmans revery on Salome, and in the Gospels, there is a metaphor for the logocentric view of writing: we have said that in the Gospels, Christ is secondarily represented by the head of the Baptist, and in the Huysmans text, Salome is similarly represented by her mother. These secondary portraits that haunt the texts may be seen as metaphors for the way writing is viewed with them-transparent vehicles conveying truth, but bearing no real "meaning" beyond this activity, and 44

SALOME AND THE DANCE OF WRITING

thus no reference apart from that meaning. Since both the Christian and the Huysmans texts are purportedly the story of a dance, and since those three texts in fact never describe the dance at all, we may also see in that undepicted dance another metaphor for writing. Indeed, this is precisely the way in which Mallarme sees the dance: Let it be known that the ballerina is not a woman dancing; that, within those juxtaposed motifs, she is not a woman, but a metaphor that summarizes one of the elemental aspects of our form, sword, goblet, flower, etc., and that she is not dancing, suggesting, by the wonder of ellipses or bounds, with a corporeal writing, that which would take entire paragraphs of dialogued as well as descriptive prose to express in written composition: a poem detached from all instruments of the scribe. 27

What Mallarme sees in the dance, the texts we have discussed do not. And it is in this sense that the unimaginable dance of Salome in these texts-as unimaginable for Matthew, Mark, and Luke (who does not even mention it) as it is to Huysmans (who is limited to describing Salome's attire and the movements of parts of her body, but never "the dance" as a full moment)- is a metaphor for writing in the logocentric perspective. For that which is believed to be the transparent tool of "real" meaning need never be acknowledged. If Mallarme succeeds in deautomatizing writing, it is by admitting that there is no dance, and no woman dancing. But for the writers of the Gospels as well as for Mallarme, there is always a dance, always a woman dancing-and her name is Salome. As long, in other words, as writing is viewed as referential to meaning, to presence, Salome's dance will be seen as an insistent aporia, but an unimaginable one. I am using aporia, not only to mean doubt, but also impasse-an impasse of thought 27· "A savoir que Ia danseuse n'est pas une femme qui danse, pour ces motifs juxtaposes qu'elle n'est pas une femme, mais une metaphore resumant un des aspects elementaires de notre forme, glaive, coupe, fleur, etc., et qu'elle ne danse pas, suggerant, par Ie prodige de raccourcis ou d'elans, avec une ecriture corporelle ce qu'il faudrait des paragraphes en prose dialoguee autant que descriptive, pour exprimer, dans Ia redaction: poeme degage de tout appareil du scribe." Oeuvres Completes, Pleiade edition (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. 304.

45

Chapter One

motivated by rhetorical "dances" which attempt to "get at" truth. 28 Seen in this way, Salome's dance becomes the blind spot of writing to its own repression. Huysmans's "paragraphs of dialogued as well as descriptive prose" not only fails in "rupturing the limits of the novel," but fails because the prose itself maintains a blind spot in relation to writing itself. Moreau's painting, static as it is, is in fact closer to Mallarme's vision, because it is a writing through the language of the body-a writing that is frozen, detached from "all instruments of the scribe." So, too, the portrait in the literary text must be seen as an insurmountable opacity. It is because the writers who create portraits in the text strain to sublate them into an addendum to the figural meaning of their writings, and to the meaning of writing itself, that the opacity of such portraits must be insisted upon. That which ruptures the limits of the text is the portrait itself, with its solid frame refusing all synthesis. As such, the portrait is radical otherness in the text. 28. Nietzsche discusses writing and the dance of the pen in The Twilight of the Idols. See also Derrida on this notion in Nietzsche: "Force and Signification," in Writing and Difference, pp. 29- 30.

2

The Spearpoint of Troilus

We should have a double gallery of pictures, one of which would be the reflection of the other: the one, the gallery of external circumstances which completely determine and circumscribe the individual, the other, the same gallery translated into the form in which those circumstances are present in the conscious individual; the former the spherical surface, the latter the centre which represents that surface within it. -Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

Hegel's double gallery of pictures is his metaphor for the situation of the individual within time. l It is to be noted that this I. Karl F. Morrison contrasts this passage in Hegel with the snapshot and pointillism-the latter being composed of frozen, fragmented images, which are, "therefore, two metaphors for non-mimetic, and even anti-mimetic, historical study." The connecting moments between snapshots (such as medieval statistics), says Morrison, "are lost beyond recovery." He argues that for Hegel the pictures are like photographs-"frozen, isolated moments." But Morrison continues: what matters for Hegel is "not the pictures themselves," but rather "the process by which the entire series has been made. The important thing was the process of mimetic self-recognition and alienation by which the Spirit moved through time. The pictures were only remembrances of the Spirit's

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Chapter Two

double gallery reflects back upon itself; that is, the double rows face each other in a dialectical pattern of mimetic exchanges. The first row depicts the external circumstances determining and circumscribing the individual-in other words, framing him. The second row is "the same gallery" as experienced within the individual. The first frames from without, the second from within. For Hegel, this concept forms a sphere with a center. Both sphere and center represent each other. Inside and outside, then, are for Hegel sublated into one with the conscious individual, so it is not surprising that the long gallery lined with pictures on each side is suddenly transformed into the sphere, that metaphor of totality. But it is the double picture gallery that represents the two aspects of the individual; that is, the double rows of portraits are the moment before synthesis, the moment that insists upon difference, upon temporal disparity, and upon otherness within the individual himself. As such, then, the portrait may be seen as that moment which exists before otherness is repressed through Aufhebung, before any radical difference has been colonized by figural interpretation, by sameness. Let us consider a "classical" example of a portrait gallery in literature-a gallery whose express purpose is the depiction of "history." The passage to which I am referring is from the first book of Virgil's Aeneid: it is another of the classical models of ecphrasis. The scene takes place in Carthage, where Aeneas has finally landed after his many adventures and suffering. Aeneas is awaiting the arrival of Dido, queen of Carthage, who has not yet met this refugee. He is in a great temple which Dido has been building to the goddess Juno, when he notices previous manifestations. Hegel's subject was the integrative process hidden within events, and mediating between them, not its fragmentary, visible results, the pictures." I think this is an accurate reading of Hegel-but what I am trying to stress is that his metaphor of the picture gallery for the subject is in itself a mimetic economy which, while ultimately "integrated" into a sphere, nevertheless points to the pictures as more than "remembrances" and "visible results." They are, above all, the moments before integration, precisely the mimesis that allows for the notion of otherness and self. The Mimetic Tradition of Reform in the West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 4 01 -

2.

THE SPEARPOINT OF TROILUS

"a series of frescoes depicting the Trojan war, whose fame had already gone round the world."2 The various frescoes that confront Aeneas tell, in fairly chronological order (at least, from Aeneas's point of view), the story of the war. As in the Homeric passage on the shield of Achilles, the ecphrasis here brings an icon (in this case, a series of frescoes) to life with vivid descriptions of action, often reinforced by the use of the present tense. Here is part of it, describing the death of Troilus: Another scene was of Troilus in flight, his weapons gone (Unhappy the lad, unequal the fight with Achilles): his horses Are bolting; heels over head he hangs backwards out of the chariot, Yet gripping the reins; his neck and his hair are being dragged along Over the ground, and his trailing spearpoint scribbles in the dust. [Pp. 26-27]

The difference between this ecphrastic passage and the one in Homer is, of course, that while the shield of Achilles describes an innominate world in teeming detail, the frescoes in Virgil describe a landscape and war that are both familiar and personally tragic for the spectator-Aeneas. In other words, what is remarkable about the shield is the way in which the smith-god Hephaistos has managed to make the lifeless metal live: cities, animals at pasture and people all come to life. But there are no proper names, no recognizable human faces in the Homeric passage. In this passage from the Aeneid, on the other hand, there is nothing but proper names: Aeneas picks out his comrades-in-arms as well as his foes, and clearly identifies Priam, Diomede, Troilus, Achilles, Rhesus, Hector, the women of Troy, Penthesilea, and Memnon. The strangest moment of recognition occurs when Aeneas sees himself in one of the frescoes: "He noticed himself, too, in the forefront of the battle." Clearly, Aeneas's reputation has preceeded him in Carthage. Herein lies part of the irony, too: Aeneas comes to a strange place and almost immediately encounters a portrait gallery of his own tragic history-one which contains a moment within the process which, in Hegel's terms, makes the 49

Chapter Two

gallery of his own tragic history~ne which contains a moment within the process which, in Hegel's terms, makes the subject. The subject's recognition of his own past self lies in alienation-temporal as well as spiritual. The Aeneas viewing the frescoes is no longer the Trojan warrior they depict. His distance (historical as well as geographical) from Troy is now greater than his distance from Carthage, the land he does not yet know but which now constitutes his "present" picture, framing him. Despite Aeneas's total immersion in these frescoes (he is described as being "rooted in a deep trance of attention" ), his initial emotional identification with the scenes depicted is undercut by the contrast between the living frescoes on the one hand, and his helplessness as a spectator before them on the other. The frescoes may "live," may be full of action and verisimilitude, but Aeneas cannot enter them-he is, in effect, rendered lifeless and passive in the face of these living frescoes. Indeed, he utters a deep groan "to see the spoils, the chariot, the actual body of his friend [Hector], and Priam's defenceless hands stretched out to Achilles." The frescoes are in a sense a slap in the face to him, for while he may be depicted in one of them as being "in the forefront of the battle," his side, after all, has lost. Everyone of his friends depicted here was killed by the Greeks-he is the sole survivor. It is as if the frescoes, which Aeneas would like to think are there as a monument for "the fame of our deeds," were there to remind him of his failure. Achilles is the victor in these scenes: he drags Hector around the walls of Troy three times, demands a ransom, remains indifferent to the pleading, outstretched hands of Priam. Troilus was no match for him-and neither, we must assume, was Aeneas. It is no accident that this "monument" stands as a reminder of Aeneas's humiliation and suffering, with only a brief reference to his valor. For the frescoes stand within the temple of the goddess Juno, archenemy to Venus, mother of Aeneas. And it seems also no accident that the ecphrastic passage in Homer describes a shield fashioned for Achilles, the man of steel. It is an ecphrasis that depicts all aspects of life, fashioned for the hero's might and triumph. The ecphrasis in Virgil echoes 5°

THE SPEARPOINT OF TROILUS

Homer by contrast: it describes rather the specific tragedy of the Trojans, and the present helplessness of the vanquished hero. The fact that Aeneas will go on to found Rome, thus exacting an ultimate (in both senses) revenge upon the Greeks, does not erase the present state of affairs for Aeneas. As he weeps, he tells Achates that his tears are for "the nature of things" (sunt lacrimae rerum), and wonders if there is any place on earth left unhaunted by his sorrows. And yet his reputation, as we have noted, has preceeded him here, and he can thus say to Achates, "then cast off fear; the fame of our deeds will ensure your welfare" (line 462). So the frescoes also comfort him, and the entire ecphrastic passage is introduced with the following: "with many tears and sighs he feeds his soul on what is nothing but a picture" (line 363, animum pictura pascit inani).3 This introduction to the description of the frescoes is almost a paradox, for if these are "nothing but pictures," then why is Aeneas so moved? The classical scholar W. R. Johnson has noted: Inani means, of course, "having no life," but it also means "deceptive, illusory, empty, meaningless." In part Vergil reminds us that art is illusion, that his poem is illusionbut, since this scene ... is concerned with art that imitates history, we are also being reminded that history, the thing imitated, is as illusory as the art that imitates it: image of an image. [Po 105]

Image of an image-is this not precisely the view of history that Hegel's doubled picture gallery gives us to contemplate? Indeed, we might say that Virgil presents us with such a gallery, 3. I am here using W. R. Johnson's translation of line 363, in Darkness Visible: A Study of Vergil's Aeneid (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 100. For a good study of the gaze in relation to ecphrastic moments in the epic, see Lee W. Patterson, "Rapt with Pleasaunce: Vision and Narration in the Epic," ELH 48 (1981), 455-75, especially 455-59 relating specifically to Aeneas and the frescoes at Carthage. As for line 462, "Then cast off fear, . . ." R. D. Williams notes that it is often taken out of context (as I have also taken it) but he adds, "there is no harm in this provided that it is understood that the meaning is 'people are sympathetic,' not 'the world is full of sorrows, is a vale of tears.'" The Aeneid of Virgil: Books 1-6 (London: Macmillan, 1972), p. 196.

Chapter Two

and that he does so at two levels. In the first instance, there is Aeneas in the "present" of the narrative staring at his own likeness in one of the frescoes. This moment of mise en abfme contains both a doubling and a reflection: the frescoes depict what Hegel calls "the gallery of external circumstances which completely determine and circumscribe the individual," while the figure of Aeneas as (motionless) spectator to these is "the same gallery translated into the form in which those circumstances are present in the conscious individual." The second level at which there is a doubling has to do with time within history: the frescoes themselves represent, to the spectator Aeneas, his own recent past; but within the larger context of the Aeneid as a whole, the frescoes are prefigurations for the future. The ruins of Troy make possible the future grandeur of Rome. This is a double image, which the reader (or auditor) of the Aeneid recognizes, but which Aeneas cannot. Aeneas then stands as the pivotal axis between past and future. While the past (his past) is vividly portrayed for him by the frescoes, and he stands spectator to his past, the reader/ hearer of the Aeneid is spectator to the spectacle as a whole. Unlike Aeneas, the reader knows that the frescoes that mesmerize the hero of this epic are the story of the tragedy that allows for an even greater civilization than that of the triumphant Greeks of the frescoes, and knows too that the Aeneid itself is the written rendition of the new, far greater frescoes depicting the birth of Rome by way of the life of Aeneas, its founding father. It is the reader or hearer of the Aeneid, then, who sees the double gallery of pictures. Thus, Virgil's oxymoron, pascit pictora inani (for how can one feed on the meaningless?) is also a brilliant litotes: "nothing but a picture" is a diminution of the frescoes through a negative adjective, the result of which is to emphasize their importance and their power. The story of Aeneas, like Hegel's double gallery, consists in two rows of images: those in the frescoes at Carthage (their story retold by Aeneas at Dido's banquet), and those of the epic itself, which recasts the events and the hero that led to the founding of Rome. The Roman who was to hear the Aeneid would stand in relation to that epic much as Aeneas stood to the Carthaginian frescoes; indeed, the former would identify

THE SPEARPOINT OF TROILUS

with the latter, for even though he would not see himself "in the forefront of the battle," he would know that the story was of his people, and of his city. The several lenses of time coexisting in the Aeneid might be seen as a refusal, on the part of that text, to synthesize a dialectic. For example, the personal war between Juno and Venus is not resolved. Each goddess is given her victory, each in her own time. The walls of Juno's temple may depict her triumph at Troy, but the very fact that Aeneas still lives, and stands tearfully contemplating the frescoes, means that Venus's day is soon to dawn. Dido's suicide is in itself the foreshadowing of Juno's decline and Venus's rise. The Aeneid is nonetheless an elaborate backformation. Just as revisionist interpretations of the early Christians sought to explain the Old Testament from the perspective of the New, so the Aeneid seeks to reinterpret the history of the Trojans and the Greeks in the light of the grandeur of Rome. Even the tragic love between Dido and Aeneas is a way of explaining the rivalry that was to exist between Carthage and Rome in Virgil's own day, at the ultimate expense of the former. The temporal decalage, then, is sublated-and this by the very position of Virgil's reader to the text. And yet there is something central about the way in which writing is viewed in all of this. It is clear that for Aeneas, for example, the frescoes are a source of comfort as well as of humiliation: "the fame of our deeds will ensure your welfare," he had said to Achates. That is, even though the frescoes depict the defeat and ruin of Troy, the fact that these events are inscribed on the temple walls is of comfort because it means that the lot of the Trojans, their tragedy, has been immortalized, and by sympathetic strangers. It does not matter, in this sense, whether the frescoes are viewed as "art" or as a record of the war-what matters is that for Aeneas, their inscription is what gives him comfort. In other words, the frescoes themselves are a type of iconic writing. We have already noted the similarity between the reader of the Aeneid in relation to the epic and Aeneas in relation to the frescoes. This similarity is reinforced by the concept of inscription-that which records events and thus ensures fame. This is the function of both the 53

Chapter Two

frescoes at Carthage and the Aeneid. Both record history by inscription; thus both regard "writing" as the act of leaving a trace. The fact that one such act consists of a series of frescoes we shall never see, and thus shall never be able to judge as good or bad art, and that the other such act has given us what some consider to be the greatest epic written, is here unessential. What counts rather is that both Virgil and his hero regard "writing" as inscription-whether it be on walls or on parchment-for the purpose of leaving a trace. There is a moment in this ecphrastic passage on the frescoes that could serve as a metaphor-a fleeting one-for the points I have been trying to make here. It comes in the lines on the death of Troilus; lines we cited above. Troilus, it will be remembered, is depicted in flight, weaponless, overwhelmed by Achilles, hanging backwards out of his chariot, "his neck and his hair are being dragged along over the ground." What more humiliating a posture for a warrior than to be dragged on the ground by his own bolting horses, to be head over heels? He makes the pathetic motion of still gripping the reins-the symbolic gesture of retaining control-but the scene of this fresco is both grotesque and heartrending. The last line describing this portrait of defeat seems cruel, so much does it emphasize the helplessness of the vanquished Troilus: "and his trailing spearpoint scribbles in the dust" (et versa pulvis inscrihitur hasta). The image is vivid: the spearpoint leaves senseless lines in the dust; a scribble signifying nothing. But if we view this moment in the frescoes as a metaphor of inscription, it suddenly becomes the iconic encapsulization of the view of writing I have been arguing underlies this epic. The trailing spearpoint of the vanquished Troilus is, like the frescoes as a whole, a sign of the helplessness and tragedy of the Trojans----certainly. The verb inscribo means, in its literal sense, to write on or inscribe. But, it also means to mark without actual writing, to impress. In other words, Troilus's spearpoint, careening senselessly in the dust as it does, produces no writing-this is a measure of the warrior's helplessness-but it does leave its mark in the dust, a mark the fresco imitates by representation. Here is truly the image of an image:

54

THE SPEARPOINT OF TROILUS

for the scribble of the spearhead at once mirrors the tragedy of Troy and the trace left by the tragedy-a trace the frescoes reiterate. This trace-inscription that is not writing per se, but rather recording-insists upon memory and therefore makes the slaughter of Troyan event with meaning. "Then cast off fear," says Aeneas when he sees the frescoes. One fear had been that there would be no trace left of the fallen city. The paradox is that, in order for fame (and therefore memory) to be ensured, the humiliation of the Trojans at the hands of the Greeks must be the story told. The reciprocity between writing and pictorial representation is perhaps at its height in Virgil in the description of the frescoes. Aeneas sees "portraits" of his past, and these bring back the vivid pictures of the war. The reader, aided by both the description of the frescoes and Aeneas's commentary on them, is thus himself given a firsthand view of the events of the war from the Trojan perspective. The ecphrasis is here an icon put into writing, while the icon itself becomes an inscription that the narrator "translates" into words. Like the Aeneid itself then, the moment we share with Aeneas in front of the frescoes has the purpose of representation for the sake of memory. Memory becomes a means of making sense of the senseless; and inscription the medium for ensuring memory. Here is a view of history which is by definition revisionist and figural: Troy must fall that Rome may rise. "Writing" in this moment of the Aeneid is dilated into inscription of any sort that allows for memory; history becomes the fruit of memory as it is inscribed. The scribbling spearpoint of Troilus is the mimetic depiction of this ideology of history. It is precisely because the spearpoint writes nothing, but rather leaves a series of lines in the dust, that it becomes etched in memory. Aeneas, as the depository of that memory within the overall "past" we recognize in experiencing the epic, will be spurred by the trace to rectify the fall of his city and of his people. As with the decapitation of the Baptist, the frescoes depicting the death of Troy are seen by us from the perspective of a figural interpretation of history, which already means rectification: justice and revenge are read into the representation of violence.

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M'introduire dans ton histoire c'est en heros effarouche. -Mallarme

Bearing in mind this passage from the Aeneid, and the depiction of history we have seen that lies at its core, let us move forward to another historical portrait-a portrait that purposely fails to represent. The portrait appears in Stendhal's novel Le Rouge et le noir (1830), and is of Napoleon. It is a portrait that is never described, in part because Napoleon is a figure known to us by description. 4 Julien Sorel, the protagonist of this novel, has become a priest because Napoleon has fallen; the military life no longer offers the possibility for an ambitious young man of modest circumstances to rise above his birth. A tutor in a rich man's house, Julien is busy courting his patron's wife, the virtuous Mme de Renal, while concomitantly playing the role of the pious clergyman. It is a role because Julien's choice of the priesthood has been motivated solely by his social ambitions-religion leaves him utterly indifferent. Indeed, Julien's role model (the narrator calls him Julien's "master" ) for his social-climbing strategy is Moliere's Tartuffe, the hypocrite par excellence who u,ses his position within a wealthy family to drain the coffers for his own use. Julien likes to quote Tartuffe's famous line, "Je ne suis pas un ange," thus tripling the irony of that cunning understatement (e.g., Le Rouge et le noir, p. 417). The example of Tartuffe is, of course, Julien's secret; but it is an honest secret, so to speak, because Julien's imitation of Moliere's hypocrite conforms with both his position and his behavior in the Renal household. Tartuffe, in other words, is exactly the person Julien's circumstances permit him to imi4. See Leonard Linsky, Names and Descriptions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). Linsky gives a good summary of Mill, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, etc., on the proper name. For Frege, says Linsky, "the logical behavior of descriptions is . . . indistinguishable from that (of denoting) proper names" (p. 7). See Gottlob Frege, "Uber Sinn und Bedeutung," Zeitschrift fur Philosophie und philologische Kritik 100 (1892), 25-50. The standard translation is "On Sense and Reference," in Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, ed. Peter Geach and Max Black (Oxford: Blackwell, 1952). See especially in this article the discussion of proper names that have no real referents-such as Odysseus. Napoleon, however, because of his historical existence, always denotes Napoleon--even in a literary text.

THE SPEARPOINT OF TROILUS

tate. In choosing a figure whose "character portrait" is painted in one of the great comedies of classical French literature, Julien is at once modeling himself on a clever con man and bowing to his own erudition-all at the expense, he believes, of the more obtuse, but more cultivated, upper class he appears to serve. Moreover, Julien does not seem to consider Tartuffe's ultimate disgrace; he believes himself to be more clever than his model, and he is in any case sufficiently cynical to see the ending of Tartuffe for what it is: an unconvincing deus ex machina. 5 The reader of Le Rouge et Ie noir is thus given to contemplate a literary character who mimics another: image of an image once again. It is a doubling that is successful: Julien can look into his mirror and see a good likeness of Moliere's hypocrite. Julien's imitation of Tartuffe can be, and indeed often is, overt; what Hegel would call the external circumstances that completely determine and circumscribe Julien, parallel those of Moliere's hypocrite. It is the other side of the gallery, however, that is the problem for Stendhal's protagonist; for the circumstances of Julien's life are not mirrored within him: the other side is a secret-not only to the Renal household in general but also, in a sense, to Julien himself. We discover this hidden side in an episode that appears to be the height of quotidian banality: Julien learns that the mattresses in the Renal household are being restuffed. He is suddenly gripped by the greatest terror, for his secret is about to be discovered: his possession of a portrait of Napoleon, hidden under his mattress. It is to be noted that this fact has also been kept from the reader, as if the image Julien strives to give of himself to the Renal household were initially foisted upon us as well. That most private of places, the bed, is about to be revealed to the world, the reader included. This type of extended erlebte Rede-that is, the apparent voice of the narrator, giving us, indirectly, the thoughts of the characterswhich the Stendhal text achieves here, amplifies the sense of rupture: the privacy of the bed is profaned, as are the most secret and private thoughts of Julien. The sexual implications 5. At the very end of the play, the king's envoy suddenly appears, saves Orgon and his family from financial and social ruin, and imprisons Tartuffe.

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that dominate are inevitable; even the virtuous Mme de Renal (who is fast succumbing to Julien's advances) is convinced that the portrait must be that of a lover, a rival: -Save my life, Julien said to Mme de Renal; only you can do it; for you know that valet is my mortal enemy. I must confess to you, Madame, that I have a portrait and that I have hidden it in my mattress. At these words Mme de Renal became pale in turn. ---Only you, Madame, only you can go to my room at this moment; look, but without leaving traces, in the corner of the mattress closest to the window; you'll find there a smooth little black box. . . . - I have a second favor to beg of you, Madame; I beg you not to look at the portrait; it is my secret. -It is a secret! repeated Mme de Renal in a suffocated voice. 6

Mme de Renal executes both orders, but falls prey "to all the horrors of jealousy." Julien, meantime, snatches the box away from her, says nothing, runs to his room, and burns the box immediately. The text continues: He was pale and haggard; he exaggerated the extent of the danger he had just run. "The portrait of Napoleon," he said to himself, shaking his head, "and found on a man who professes such hatred for the usurper! Found by M. de Renal, a black reactionary and in a bad temper! And as the height of all imprudence, on the cardboard mounting of the portrait, lines written in my own hand! And they leave no doubt of the depth of my admiration! Each one of these raptures of love is dated, too, and the last one just the day before yesterday!" "My entire reputation fallen, destroyed in one moment!" said Julien as he watched the box burn, "And my reputation is my fortune, it's all I have to live for-and good God, what a life!" [Po 56]

There are several noteworthy aspects to this passage. To begin with, Stendhal pokes obvious fun at his "hero" : he 6. Le Rouge et Ie noir (Paris: Garnier, 1973), p. 55. All references are to this edition, and translations are my own.

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"exaggerated the extent of the danger he had just run," says the narrator. Stendhal himself exaggerates, by following every one of Julien's sentences in this passage with an exclamation mark-the result being (as in today's comic strips) that the emphasis of that form of punctuation loses all of its power; the precise equivalent of Julien's hyperbolic effusions. The narrator's implication, moreover, is that Julien has reached the point of playing a role even when he is ostensibly feeling real emotion. Even if Julien could explain away the portrait, were it to be found by a member of the Renal household (especially by the dreaded valet), he knows that he could never justify the real indictment of him in this context: lines written in his own hand on the cardboard mounting of the portrait. These lines are in themselves fascinating. In the first place, they are ((raptures of love" to the former emperor. In a sense, then, Mme de Renal is more astute than she imagines in assuming that the portrait holds the likeness of a rival, a lover-it does. Julien worships Napoleon with all the passion a star-struck lover would feel for his mistress. Indeed, there is a strong element of courtly love here: like the Troubadour lover, Julien worships his love from afar; and like the Troubadour, Julien knows that the essence of his love is that the beloved is inaccessible and must always remain so. More to the point, however, is the fact that these ((raptures of love" are written as a journal; that is, they are intended for their author's eyes only, they are dated, and they are effusions of the most private of thoughts. 7 It is understandable that anyone, Julien included, would be at best disturbed to have a journal discovered and read. It is not precisely this, however, that horrifies Julien. What worries him rather is that the handwriting which rings the portrait is clearly his, and that he will therefore be identified with Napoleon. Such an identification would, he is convinced, be lethal to his situation, for his identification with Napoleon would by necessity contradict 7· The point of view is complicated here, since the notion of "privacy" and of Julien's eyes "only" are problematized by the presence of the reader. Though the reader does not read Julien's handwritten raptures, he or she is privy to the knowledge that the portrait of Napoleon and journal entries around it exist-whereas Mme de Renal knows only that there is a portrait.

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his role and posture as a priest in the Renal household. "My entire reputation fallen, destroyed in one moment," Julien moans. Julien considers the handwriting around the portrait to be "the height of all imprudence." This conviction is the result of what psychoanalysis would label projection: it is because Julien does in fact identify with Napoleon that he assumes that a discovery of the portrait and of his handwriting would lead anyone else to conclude what Julien himself believes: that he is a second Napoleon. "By virtue of thinking about Napoleon's victories," the narrator says a few pages later, "[Julien] had seen something new in his own victory. 'Yes, I won a battle,' he said to himself, 'but I must profit by it. I must crush the arrogance of this proud gentleman now that he has retreated. That is pure Napoleon' " (p. 63). Thus we have the more secret model for Julien, for while Tartuffe is the obvious ideal within his external situation, it is Napoleon who informs the consciousness of our hero. Indeed, it was only because the military no longer offered a young man of modest birth the possibility of rising to power, as I have noted, that Julien took his secondbest alternative-the priesthood. In this sense, Tartuffe's hypocrisy is a given, but it is also acquired faute de mieux. The handwriting, then, is for Julien the opposite of what it seems for Troilus. The latter scribbles what appear to be senseless lines in the dust, and yet these scribbles, as we have said, are in fact traces that will record the Trojan's heroism, thus granting meaning to otherwise senseless deaths. With Julien, on the other hand, the writing that surrounds the portrait of Napoleon is meant, initially at least, to have meaning. Yet it is of utmost importance to Julien that the handwriting be erased-that all traces, in other words, be obliterated with respect to his connection with "the usurper." When Troilus's senseless scribbles are inscribed in the frescoes at Carthage, the scribble becomes trace, becomes recorded, and thus becomes history. When Julien burns the box containing the portrait of his hero, however, the traces that might subsist and thus inevitably link him to the emperor are erased. No trace, no identification, no record of his identification-nor, indeed, of Julien's identity. 60

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The texts of Virgil and of Stendhal are essentially the same, in that they both see writing as transcendental meaning-the essence of this meaning lies in the conviction that writing leaves a trace, and thus changes events, and thus is tantamount to history. Virgil's epic, his description of the Trojan War, is like a series of lines written by his hand around the cardboard mounting that is the Aeneid. They give the reader a frame-a reference-by which to "read" the drawings on the temple walls. Julien, with his enraptured, handwritten lines surrounding the picture of his hero, similarly traces a frame of control and of identity for himself. As in Virgil, it is writing that controls the depiction of history here, for the portrait of Napoleon is, like the frescoes at Carthage, the representation of a historical figure-a representation translated, it would appear, into writing. In contrast to the Virgil text, where such a control seems successful-Aeneas does indeed see himself in the frescoes, he does recognize the depiction of a history that is his, the reader/hearer of the Aeneid does construct from this a third Aeneas of the future who will perform great deeds-the case of Julien is one of an altogether failed control. It is becau~e Julien wants to be Napoleon that he writes his innermost thoughts around the cardboard of the portrait. It is because, on the other hand, he is not Napoleon that his possession of the portrait must remain a secret. Julien treats the portrait of Napoleon as if it were a mirrorit is his own face he wants to see in that portrait, and it is for that reason that he tries to personalize the portrait by surrounding it with a ring of his own private thoughts in writing. But not only is he not Napoleon, he has become Tartuffe, and so the mirror refuses to reflect (represent) what Julien wills. It is a Tartuffe who cries, ''And my reputation is my fortune, it's all I have to live for." Fama is the issue here again, as it is for Aeneas. The face of Napoleon within the frame is at odds with the writing that frames it. In Virgil the mise en abfme was caused by a moment in which three periods of time were telescoped into one: the past depicted in the frescoes, Aeneas within his present seeing himself in the past, and the reader of the Aeneid viewing the whole from a future that can only see the moment in question as

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past. For Julien, however, the moment is one of a gnoseological as well as temporal difference. The figure Julien wants the Renal household to take him for is not the figure portrayed in the frame, even though Julien feels far more tied to Napoleon. The handwriting is an attempt both to maintain his emotional ties to Napoleon (and to Julien's most "real" self, he believes) and to force the picture in the frame to be Julien Sorel. Unlike the passage in the Aeneid, here there can be no spectator to the portrait; it must remain hidden under the mattress and, ultimately, be destroyed, because it does not portray the figure who should be there: "I have a second favor to beg of you, Madame; 1 beg you not to look at the portrait; it is my secret." But the reader, of course, has "seen" the portrait. But have we really seen it? Here we get to the heart of the issue: the connection between painting and writing. Derrida has commented: This collusion between painting (zographia) and writing is, of course, constant. Both in Plato and after him. But painting and writing can only be images of each other to the extent that they are both interpreted as images, reproductions, representations, or repetitions of something alive, of living speech in the one case, and of animal figures in the other (zographia). Any discourse about the relationship between literature and truth always bumps up against the enigmatic possibility of repetition, within the framework of the portrait. 8

Are we perhaps back in Hegel's double gallery of pictures, with painting reflecting (reproducing, representing) writing and vice versa? Derrida notes that in Plato's Republic the painter plays two separate roles. On the one hand, he "illustrates a book that is already written when he appears on the scene" (Dissemination, p. 188). On the other hand, he functions "as a 8. Derrida, Dissemination, p. 188. Also by Derrida, see La verite en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), which treats the notion of parergon: that which according to Kant is neither inside nor outside the work (ergon)-for example, the frame. This study by Derrida "frallles" painting with four sides, or considerations: (1) the parergon and the philosophical discourse on painting, (2) the relation between phonetic and graphic concepts, (3) the ductus, or signature mark of the artist and the proper name, and (4) the argument between Heidegger and Schapiro concerning truth in painting.

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pure indicator of the essence of a thought or discourse defined as image, representation, repetition" (p. 189). Painting is both "that degenerate and somewhat superfluous expression" and "really only the painting of a painting," which can thus "reveal the essential picturality, the representativity, of logos." We are wrestling here with a different problem, it would seem. For the texts we are considering accomplish within their telos the evocation of a painting inside a gramme. Image of an image, yes; but more specifically, the writing of a painting. In this sense, Julien's portrait of Napoleon with its frame of writing takes on a metaphorical aspect, for it may be seen as the extension, precisely, of the confrontation between painting and writing within a writerly context. In the texts of both Virgil and Stendhal, painting is imitated through writing. Mimesis of mimesis. In both texts, the painterly is evoked and then decoded, interpreted, through the written. The pictorial, in other words, is in both cases granted existence only to be colonized by writing. What appears initially to be a given pictorial event that the written professes to portray is in fact the opposite: the texts of Virgil and Stendhal finally give us a pictorial mode inverted from its normal posture-the pictorial is here merely representational of the written. The portrait in these texts, then, is kidnapped by writing. It is a form of theft that pretends authenticity-a mimesis, in other words, which by trying to assimilate painting within its purview, acts as if there were no duplication, no radical otherness to the mode it colonizes, no model to be mimicked. When writing assimilates painting into itself, it is the difference between painting and writing that is repressed. Writing passes off painting as its own; it is mimesis become plagiarism. Indeed, the Latin word plagiarius means a kidnapper, a literary thief. The original Greek root is plaga-a snare or trap; plekein, the verb, meaning to entwine. What is entwined is the difference, once again, between painting and writing, at the expense of the former. Mimesis becomes plagiarism when it admits neither to imitation nor to the recognition of repetition. Writing passes off painting as its own. Plagiarism is, moreover, the subtext of Le Rouge et le nair. We have already noted that Julien Sorel imitates Tartuffe and

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emulates (tries to equal) Napoleon. The implications are crucial. Tartuffe after all is a literary creation-a character who imitates a pious priest. Julien, in imitating the hypocrite in deed as well as word ("Je ne suis pas un ange" ) is imitating fiction. Stendhal, furthermore, is writing fiction that imitates a fiction that imitates a role. But there is another level of imitation to add to this layered configuration. Le Rouge et Ie noir is based upon a real event that took place a few years before the novel was written. Antoine Berthet, a young man of poor origins who became a priest, was condemned to death for having tried to kill a certain Mme Michoud in a church. The circumstances are essentially identical to those of Julien. Stendhal's novel is then the fictionalized account of a "real" event. With the publication of the novel, the French public immediately recognized the infamous '~ffaire Berthet." As the critic P. G. Castex notes in his introduction to the novel, however, "Stendhal n'a jamais explicitement indique cette source de son roman" (p. lix). 9 This refusal to acknowledge imitation is significant, not only because, once again, it duplicates the hypocrisy/doubling that proliferates at every level in the novel, but also because the novel itself has its own concept of imitation, and its own defense thereof. The narrator in Le Rouge et Ie noir makes the following declaration, one frequently cited by critics: Well, sir, the novel is a mirror wandering down a wide road. Sometimes it reflects the blue of the heavens before your eyes, sometimes the mud of iniquity. And you will accuse the man who carries the mirror on his back of immorality? His mirror shows the mud, and you accuse the mirror! You had better accuse instead the long path where the iniquity lies, and even more, the road inspector who lets the water stagnate and the mire form. [Po 342]

The reader will note that, as in Julien's histrionic speech of which the narrator makes contemptuous fun, here too the exclamation mark is ironic. The mark of hypocrisy with Stendhal manifests itself through that form of punctuation. The 9. See Castex's "L'Aventure criminelle" in his introduction to the novel (pp. lviii-Ixv) for a good summary of the ''Affaire Berthet."

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above passage is, of course, famous, principally because of what it demonstrates to be Stendhal's view of the novel in general. More to the point for our purposes here, however, is the lack of responsibility professed by the narrator with respect to his craft: he merely carries the mirror on his back, so to speak, and it is not his fault if the mirror occasionally shows filth as well as the blue skies. The issue of moral responsibility rests only upon the mud and the road inspector: the narrator simply reflects what is already there. Novel, then, equals mirror; and the novelist is only the agent of the reflection. The argument is a very crafty one, precisely because literature has always seen itself as mimesis, as representation. Stendhal simply uses this assumption for his own purposes. It is an argument that echoes Tartuffe once again. For when the hypocrite announces that he is not an angel, he is cleverly alluding to the fact that no man is without flaw, for God has made man imperfect, and so on. In other words, Tartuffe is erasing his faults by playing off an accepted credo: man is by nature sinful. It is therefore not his fault if he is imperfect, just as it is not the narrator's fault in Le Rouge et Ie noir if the road is filthy and muddy. Exit all moral responsibility. The passage is further important because of the model of the mirror, which is duplication at its most literal level. The portrait of Napoleon is one such image, not only because it is for Julien the picture of what he feels himself to be in truth, but also because the portrait itself is of a historical figure. Writing appropriates (plagiarizes) the role of painting by trying to give images of "the truth." As such, writing mimes the frescoes of Carthage, or the portrait of Napoleon: it leaves a trace by the inscription of images. For Hegel, the Subject, the individual, is likened to a doublt gallery of pictures. But it is also true that for Hegel the concept of the "individual" exists only insofar as he reflects an unfolding into the universal. For Hegel the subject/object distinction is a necessary moment, an eternal contradiction always to be sublated. 1o The double gallery of pictures is for Hegel one in 10. In the Aesthetics) Hegel makes clear the necessity and movement of the dialectic for subjectivity and, ultimately, Spirit: "For greatness and force [of the Spirit] are truly measured only by the greatness and force of the opposition

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which "one would be the reflection of the other." This metaphor for the individual clearly demonstrates both the need for the concept of individuality and the Aufhebung, which insists on totality, allowing the Spirit to overcome otherness. The double gallery is sublated into the individual, who is himself sublated into the universal principle of Spirit. The implications of this for the concept of history become, at this point, of significance. The dialectic, as one aspect of the deconstructionist view holds, is problematic because it uses otherness (or negation) to achieve synthesis. ll In this perspective, Hegel's mirrored gallery becomes the metaphor for a type of imperialism: for the mirror is only a first moment in the dialectic, or of a subject/object division. In fact, the reflection thrown back by the mirror is out of which the Spirit brings itself back to unity with itself again. The intensity and depth of subjectivity come all the more to light, the more endlessly and tremendously is it divided against itself, and the more lacerating are the contradictions in which it still has to remain firm in itself. In this development alone is preserved the might of the Idea and the Ideal, for might consists only in maintaining oneself within the negative of oneself." Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 1:178. Alexandre Kojeve reads Hegel's dialectic as a structure of being unfolding into totality: "Hegelian Dialectic is not a method of research or of philosophical exposition, but the adequate description of the structure of Being, and of the realization and appearance of Being as well. To say that Being is dialectical first is to say (on the ontological level) that it is a Totality that implies Identity and NegatIvity." Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. Alan Bloom, trans. J. H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 259. Subjectivity allows for totality, but it is a "first" and continuing process, which must yield the Aufhebung. This movement is rhetorically mirrored in the gallery of pictures passage, which ends in the totalizing sphere. See also note 1 to this chapter. 11. See, for example, Paul De Man, "Genesis and Genealogy (Nietzsche)," Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 80. See also Claude Levi-Strauss, "History and Dialectic," The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). Levi-Strauss responds to attacks on structuralism by arguing that

these attacks are born of an illusion that ties historical meaning to individual thought, thus falling prey to the Hegelian traps of "individualism and empiricism." Hegel, then, still needs the illusion of individuality in order to integrate it into the movement of the Spirit. See also Derrida's "From Restricted to General Economy: a Hegelianism without Reserve," Writing and Difference. And, for a discussion of the notion of the subject in relation to language, see David Carroll, The Subject in Question: The Languages ofTheory and the Strategies of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

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nothing more than the doubling of a same principle. Thus Hegel's metaphor of the gallery of mirrors prepares us for the inevitable Aufhebung, and for the ensuing vision of history as the Absolute unfolding, without difference, into the world. It is for this reason, I would argue, that the gallery returns when Hegel discusses history: Nature, the externalized Spirit, is in its existence nothing but his eternal externalization of its continuing existence and the movement which reinstates the Subject. But the other side of its Becoming, History, is a conscious, self-mediating process-Spirit emptied out into Time; but this externalization, this kenosis, is equally an externalization of itself; the negative is the negative of itself. This Becoming presents a slow-moving succession of Spirits, a gallery of images, each of which, endowed with all the riches of Spirit, moves thus slowly just because the Self has to penetrate and digest this entire wealth of its substance. 12

Here again, we have the image colonized by writing. For Hegel's passage on history shows us a gallery containing a series of pictures, which, as the spirit moves, lose their frames, becoming part of the flow of "Spirit emptied out into time." In the passage by Hegel that opens this chapter, the double gallery is blurred horizontally, as it were, by an infinitude of interreflections and doublings. In the above passage, on the other hand, the autonomy of the image is blurred vertically, or linearly, by a repetitive, spiraling prose C'the negative is the negative of itself" ), which doubles the telos of Hegel's text: the movement of the Spirit that gathers into itself each individual time frame. The single image shimmers for a brief moment, only to be sublated by an Absolute. The economy of writing functions in two principal ways in Hegel: the prose style doubles the movement of the Spirit, and the act of writing itself retraces that movement by subjugating the image. It becomes, as Derrida has noted, a "writing of sovereignty." But writing can take over more than the image: there is a tendency in criticism to see writing as encompassing everyJ.

12. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, analysis and foreword by N. Findlay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 492; my emphasis.

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thing. Jacques Derrida has commented on this tendency as well: For some time now, as a matter of fact . . . one says "language" for action, movement, thought, reflection, consciousness, unconsciousness, experience, affectivity, etc. Now we tend to say "writing" for all that and more: to designate not only the physical gestures of literal pictographic or ideographic inscription, but also the totality of what makes it possible.... And thus we say "writing" for all that gives rise to an inscription in general."13

"For some time now," certainly, but the text of Virgil was already transmuting the frescoes of Carthage into "writing." The spearpoint of Troilus is such a moment in the Aeneid. With Hegel, we do not even have a "real" series of pictures to contemplate: the image is evoked as pure concept, only to be used as a metaphor for knowledge, which is proffered by writing. Does writing always consume the image; always attempt to extend its borders? The philosopher Paul Ricoeur suggests that writing be the basis of a theory on the icon: "If it could be shown that painting is not this shadowy duplication of reality, then it would be possible to return to the problem of writing as a chapter in a general theory of iconicity."14 The concept of painting as "this shadowy duplication" comes, of course, from Plato's Phaedrus. Ricoeur notes: A remark made in passing in the Phaedrus provides us with an important clue. Writing is compared to painting, the images of which are said to be weaker and less real than living beings. The question here is whether the theory of the eikon, which is held to be a mere shadow of reality, is not the presupposition of every critique addressed to any mediation through exterior marks. [P. 40]

Ricoeur's answer to the Phaedrus is that painting grants us even more, not less, than the original: 13· Of Gram rna tology, p. 9· 14. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning

Texas Christian University Press, 1976), p. 40.

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(Fort Worth:

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Far from yielding less than the original, pictorial activity may be characterized in terms of an "iconic augmentation," where the strategy of painting, for example, is to reconstruct reality on the basis of a limited optic alphabet. This strategy of contraction and miniaturization yields more by handling less. In this way, the main effect of painting is to resist the entropic tendency of ordinary vision-the shadowy image of Plat