This large exhibition presents works from ancient Athens to contemporary America, including some famous and powerful objects. In this context, Shambroom dignifies democracy as the rule of regular people. (His photograph is also the favorite of Boston Globe critic Mark Feeney.)
Shambroom’s village councilors are middle-aged Americans in mostly casual clothes, including polo shirts for the two men. They all seem to be listening to the speaker at the right–three of them watching her face, one staring attentively into the distance.
The flags and seal behind them convey authority. These people represent the state, which ultimately wields the power of life and death. (Compare the empty juror chairs in Jim Dow’s eloquent photo, “Grady County Courthouse, Jury Box, Cairo, Georgia, 1976,” also in the exhibition.) But the councilors are not evidently bossing anyone around. They are probably trying to decide whether a proposed building conforms to the city plan.
The councilors occupy a dais that sets them apart from any constituents who might attend, whether to petition them or to oversee their work. The woman at the center, presumably the council chair, is raised higher, and she seems to be listening with mild amusement.
The large scale of the photograph (33 x 66 in) makes it monumental, in the tradition of public history painting. In fact, the exhibition invites a comparison to “The Magnanimity of Lycurgus” (1791), a large and histrionic oil painting by Jean-Jacques François Le Barbier, which was made for the Paris Salon at the height of the Revolution. Shambroom’s photo suggests that representative Americans deserve the same kind of recognition as the Lawgiver of Sparta.
The word “populism” is being used today mainly to criticize political ideologies that posit that the true people of any given country form a homogeneous and intolerant bloc. The people have enemies–domestic and foreign–and can be led by a single, charismatic figure. For me, Shambroom’s city council images are quiet statements of a different form of populism. Here, the people are diverse and deliberative, and they merit the right to do the unglamorous and endless work of self-government.
Mrs. Dalloway created the Zoom link herself. There was so much to do for the evening’s virtual meeting: outreach, slides, breakout-group assignments.
Scrolling social media, Clarissa came upon a lovely vacation photo of an English garden. How calm the air can be early in the morning, like the flap of a wave, the kiss of a wave. She scrolled down to the comment thread and saw that Hugh had posted a cheerful remark. Her old friend Hugh–the admirable Hugh! She “liked” his comment.
A push notification: Active shooter. The location seemed to be no more than five miles away. Clarissa could have been there.
Septimus saw the same notification. Deep in a subreddit for veterans, he muttered to himself several times: “Active shooter.” Evans had been shot. No, it was an IED–Evans had bled out before Septimus’ own eyes when the shrapnel had ripped his throat. He’d come home in a body bag. But you could still see Evans sometimes, you could still hear him clearly speak. Septimus scanned the comments for Evans’ name, because he might still post. He might say what it’s like where he is now–is it a happier place?
Now, an automated reminder to take his meds. Septimus hated those pills. They deadened him so that he could hardly see the future or how love rules everything or the disgusting corruption of the human body.
On Clarissa’s screen, the name Peter Welch popped up. Out of the blue, after so many years, Peter suddenly wanted to know how she was doing. “Where RU?!?” she asked him back. He was in town, visiting from Dubai; maybe they could get together? His status was complicated and he wanted to talk.
A flood of memories, like photos from deep in one’s saved-items folder. For some reason, seeing Peter’s text brought back that time she’d hooked up with Sally Seton.
Richard was talking to someone, but Clarissa couldn’t see who. His laptop was angled away from her, and he had his headset on. She checked his calendar. He must be talking to Millicent Bruton. Millicent had sent the meeting invite and had asked Hugh to join them. Clarissa felt a pang. It wasn’t sexual jealousy–Millicent was no threat, and these people would never see each other in person. The feeling was FOMO. Why didn’t Millicent want her to join the conversation? Was Clarissa totally out of the loop now?
Richard honestly found Millicent Bruton a bit silly and scatterbrained. She’d drafted a post that she wanted him to put on his policy Substack. He, Hugh, and Millicent were editing it together in a shared doc. It was a mess. Her main point seemed to be that people should move to Canada. (That’s always the idea, Richard thought–let’s all move to Canada). Hugh, who managed internal comms. for his family’s real estate business, believed that no one ever reads more than 40 words. He was adding bolded headings– “What it means” and “Why it matters”–and turning Millicent’s paragraphs into bullet points.
Richard would post her piece–why not? His traffic was way down, anyway. So nice of Clarissa to organize the webinar for his org! A virtual get-together might boost his profile. He thought about sending his wife a heart emoji, but that feeling passed before he clicked.
Clarissa hoped that people would join the Zoom on time, leave their cameras on, post witty comments in the chat, and have a good time together. She pinged an old friend with a reminder and ordered a protein smoothie to be delivered for lunch. Before she submitted her order, she messaged Richard to see if he wanted anything, but he’d already ordered his own tempeh tacos.
Their daughter Elizabeth said, “I’m going outside for a walk.” Clarissa and Richard nodded distractedly and went back to their screens.
In “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1946), Maurice Merleau-Ponty discusses Paul Cézanne’s portrait of the critic Paul Geffroy (1895-6), which led me to some congruent reflections.
Merleau-Ponty notes that the table “stretches, contrary to the laws of perspective, into the lower part of the picture.” In a photograph of M. Geffroy, the table’s edges would form parallel lines that would meet at one point, and the whole object would be more foreshortened. That is how an artist who followed what we call “scientific perspective” would depict the table. Why does Cézanne show it otherwise?
Imagine that you actually stood before Paul Geffroy in his study. You would not instantly see the whole scene. Your eye might settle on your host’s face, then jump to the intriguing statuette next to him. The shelves would at first form a vague pattern in the background. Objects for which you have names, such as books, would appear outlined, as borders filled with color. On the other hand, areas of the fireplace or wall would blend into other areas.
You would know that you could move forward toward M. Geffroy, in which case the table would begin to move below you. Just as you see a flying ball as something moving–not as a round zone of color surrounded by other colors–so you might see the table as something that could shift if you moved your body forward.
A photograph of this real-world scene would be a representation of it, very useful for knowing how M. Geffroy looked in his study, and possibly an attractive object in its own right. But the photo would not represent anyone’s experience of the scene. Instead, it would be something that you could experience, rather like the scene itself, by letting your eye move around it, identifying objects of interest, and gradually adding information. You would experience the photograph somewhat differently from the actual scene because you would know that everything was fixed and your body could not move into the space.
A representation of this scene using perspective’s “laws” would make the image useful for certain purposes–for instance, for estimating the size of the table. Michael Baxandall (1978) argued that Renaissance perspective originated in a commercial culture in which patrons enjoyed estimating the size, weight, and value of objects represented in paintings.
But other systems have different benefits. Here is a print in which Toyoharu Kunichika (1835-1900) uses European perspective for the upper floor and a traditional Chinese system (with lines that remain parallel and objects placed higher if they are further away) for the lower floor. As Toshidama writes, this combination is useful for allowing us to see as many people and events as possible.
Perspective does not tell us how the world is–not in any simple way. The moon is not actually the size of a window, although it is represented as such in a perspectival picture (East Asian or European). Perspective is a way of representing how we experience the world. And in that respect, it is partial and sometimes even misleading. It overlooks that for us, important things seem bolder; objects can look soft, cold or painful as well as large or small; and some things appear in motion or likely to move, while others seem fixed. We can see a whole subject (such as a French intellectual in his study) and parts of it (his beard), at once and as connected to each other.
Merleau-Ponty writes:
Gustave Geoffrey’s [sic] table stretches into the bottom of the picture, and indeed, when our eye runs over a large surface, the images it successively receives are taken from different points of view, and the whole surface is warped. It is true that I freeze these distortions in repainting them on the canvas; I stop the spontaneous movement in which they pile up in perception and in which they tend toward the geometric perspective. This is also what happens with colors. Pink upon gray paper colors the background green. Academic painting shows the background as gray, assuming that the picture will produce the same effect of contrast as the real object. Impressionist painting uses green in the background in order to achieve a contrast as brilliant as that of objects in nature. Doesn’t this falsify the color relationship? It would if it stopped there, but the painter’s task is to modify all the other colors in the picture so that they take away from the green background its characteristics of a real color. Similarly, it is Cézanne’s genius that when the over-all composition of the picture is seen globally, perspectival distortions are no longer visible in their own right but rather contribute, as they do in natural vision, to the impression of an emerging order, of an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes.
The deeper point is that a science of nature is not a science of human experience. Third-person descriptions or models of physical reality are not accounts of how we experience things. And even when we are presented with a scientific description, it is something that we experience. For instance, we actively interpret a photograph or a diagram; we do not automatically imprint all of its pixels. And we listen to a person lecture about science; we do not simply absorb the content.
There are truths that can be expressed in third-person form–for example, that human eyes and brains work in certain ways. But there are also truths about how we experience everything, including scientific claims.
And Cézanne is a scientist of experience.
Quotations from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1946), in Sense and Non-sense, translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Northwestern University Press 1964); image by Paul Cézanne, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The image on the Mus?e d’Orsay’s website suggests a warmer palette, but I don’t know whether it’s open-source. I also refer to Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy : A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford, 1978).
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than a quarter of a million Americans work professionally as graphic designers. Each designer produces many images, many of which are reproduced widely. Of course, other countries also have designers and commercial artists. Thanks to them all, we are awash in billions of images: illustrations, logos, advertisements, cartoons, explanations, warnings, decorations, and more.
Coming after modernism, today’s designers often produce abstracted images of real-world objects, highly simplified for impact and legibility. I assume that we can interpret such images because of conventions that we learn, plus the natural inclination of the human eye and brain to match patterns to observed realities (Gombrich 1961).
I illustrate this post not with a contemporary graphic image but with a painting by the noble courtier Konoe Nobutada (1565-1614) entitled “Meditating Daruma.” Daruma is the Japanese name for Bodhidharma, who probably lived about one thousand years before Nobutada and is credited with introducing Chan Buddhism to China. In turn, Chan evolved into Japanese Zen.
One of the main stories about Bodhidharma tells that the Emperor Wu of Liang asked this barbarian monk how much merit he had earned for his generous support of Buddhism. Bodhidharma said “none,” because the emperor had acted with worldly intent. The monk then meditated in front of a wall for nine years. I assume this is what he is doing in this painting. The text says: “Quietness and emptiness are enough to pass through life without error.”
I would submit that this image is very fine. I tried copying it freehand, and every version that I made was worse than Nobutada’s. Thus the image passed Leon Batista Alberti’s test of beauty (“nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse”). However, I was the one conducting the test. I can easily imagine that many of the professional graphic artists working today could reproduce it perfectly, or indeed rival it.
In the process of trying to copy this painting, I discovered that each of my outlines of a hooded figure looked like a person who was staring into the distance, albeit at a different distant point each time I drew it. Although Bodhidharma is often depicted as irascible, here we cannot see his expression, and his back conveys peace.
The design of a meditating monk is simple, and today we are surrounded with highly effective simplified designs; but I find this one far more moving that most others. The reason is its source. This is not a logo for some modern business. Instead, it is an object that is about four centuries old (from long before the deluge of mechanically reproducible images), made by an artist who pioneered a new form of Zen art. The simplification here is his invention, not a prevailing style.
In his discussion of Nobutada, Stephen Addiss writes, “Ignoring the colorful and delicate style of court artists of his day, he brushed simple ink paintings of Zen avatars on coarse, sometimes recycled paper. Like his new style of calligraphy, these paintings were revolutionary” (Addiss 1989, p. 23).
Furthermore, by representing Daruma in meditation, this artist presented an aspirational self-portrait. Although Nobutada was a rich courtier rather than a monk, he must have performed sitting meditation, or at least honored it. Thus the image is a trace of a real person’s life, which, in turn, was inspired by the person he depicts.
We might consider that art, in general, has these two dimensions. One is the form of the object as perceived by human beings, with our naturally evolved eyes and brains. We tend to match the form to objects in our environment. The other is the story of the object’s origin within a larger historical context. Here, for example, we see a single line that conjures the idea of person wrapped in a robe, and we also see also an artifact of Konoe Nobutada, of early 17th-century Japan, and of the Zen tradition extending back for a thousand years. The provenance of the painting not only raises its monetary value but also makes it more genuinely moving than a contemporary image would be.
This idea–an abstract and universal concept is also the outcome of a human act–seems resonant with Buddhism. Although Bodhidharma is quasi-mythical, he has long been associated with the Lankavatara Sutra. That text begins with the standard formula, “Thus I have heard,” and it purports to be a recollection of the actual Buddha by his disciple Ananda (he of the perfect memory). But it can’t possibly be historical, or told by Ananda, or written by Bodhidharma. Its authorship is a fiction excused by the thesis that it conveys: namely, that “There is no one who speaks, nor is there anyone who hears. Lord of Lanka, everything in the world is like an illusion.”
My family and I are going briefly to the Netherlands soon. In preparation, I reviewed Svetlana Alpers’ The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (1983), which has helped me to think about pictures since I first encountered this book in the 1990s.
Alpers’ theory is subtler than my summary, but a good way to introduce it might be to consider two paintings (neither of them discussed by Alpers).
First, an Annunciation by Fra Angelico from 15th-century Florence:
This image conveys a story (Luke 1:26-38). The important questions for the viewer are what is happening and what that signifies. (In this case, the significance is cosmic, since the the Incarnation is underway.) The characters are central; other objects function like scenery and props for these protagonists.
The frame is like a window or a proscenium arch that allows us to look into a defined space. We are assumed to stand or kneel in front of the frame, looking toward the vanishing point right above Mary’s head. Each object is clearly outlined–probably first drawn, then colored in. The artist has analyzed reality in terms of these outlines. For instance, the building is a perfect rectangle; the arches are half-circles. And the bodies of the angel and woman are meaningful shapes, since humans were created in the image of God. By showing the true shape of important objects and people, the artist conveys truths of theology, geometry, and other worthy subjects.
Now compare a View of Egmond aan Zee by Salomon van Ruisdael.
This work also shows a few people in a context. But now we might imagine that we always have a visual field that changes as we move our eyes, our heads, and our locations in space. We can’t even tell the shape of our current visual field because it moves as we try to look at the edges. This picture is like a finite rectangle that has been snipped out of the whole field at a certain moment and hung on the wall. It is formed not of outlines but of brushstrokes. It was probably not drawn but composed with paint.
Van Ruisdael surely had aesthetic reasons for what he included and where he placed these objects, enjoying the location of the bluff, the darker cloud, and the church tower. But he hid his own contrivance by allowing the frame to interrupt the landscape and clouds. We do not imagine that the frame is something real, like a window, but just the edge of the image.
It is not clear where the viewer is located, partly because there are hardly any objects with sharp edges that would allow us to infer a vanishing point. We might be looking gently down on the scene, or we might not occupy any single location. Similarly, a map presents the earth as it would be seen from no particular point, without foreshortening. The Dutch were fascinated by maps and excellent at mapmaking.
All the objects are interesting; the eye does not necessarily settle on anything in particular but moves across the canvas. Everything is bathed in the same light and air. Something is happening–a group moves toward the town–but the painting is not a meaningful story, and the best question is not “What does their activity signify?”
Alpers thinks the purpose of this second work is to describe the reality that the viewer already knows, because the viewer delights both in the physical world and in the art of description. Other critics have supposed that appreciation of the natural world is spiritual, based on the idea of a creator.
Here, “art” has its original, Latin sense, which encompasses what we would call science as well as painting. A Dutch person would buy a van Ruisdael for the same reason that he would look through van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope, Christiaan Huygens’ telescope, a lens ground by Spinoza, or at a map. He wanted to learn more about how things look.
Alpers identifies the first model with Italy and the second with the North, especially the Netherlands, but she resists a simple dichotomy. The two “schools” were in close contact from the 1400s on. Major artists intuitively understood the differences, and some (such as Michelangelo) wrote explicitly about them. Unsurprisingly, some of the most interesting artists disrupted the dichotomy in original ways. Alpers discusses Rembrandt as an example and mentions some Southern cases that are beyond the scope of her book about Dutch art: Titian, Caravaggio, and Velazquez.
The two models are heuristics for understanding a wide range of European painting, but great artists have challenged it.
In a museum not far from our house, there is a painting entitled “Zen Saying” by the great teacher Hakuin Ekaku (1685-1768). Author of the koan “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”, Hakuin “was the most influential Rinzai Master in Japanese history” (Kasulis 1981, p. 105), and Rinzai is one of the three traditions of Japanese Zen.
The label translates the calligraphed words as: “Verdant mountains usually walk, barren women give birth at night.” The label also explains that the character for “usual” or “normal” (tsune) is here elongated in an unusual way–indeed, to the very “limits of legibility.”*
When I try to think about verdant mountains walking, I can form inferences. For example: if verdant mountains walk, we’d better stay out of their way! I cannot picture them walking without resorting to a cartoonish image. This is a limitation of my imagination, of language, or of the possible.
I can imagine that Hakuin–after decades of practice–had a different experience from mine when he thought of walking mountains and barren women giving birth. I can picture him having that experience without sharing it.
(By the way, he might equally have seen statements such as “The self exists” and “There is no self” as senseless paradoxes.)
I cannot read Hakuin’s brushstrokes. I could, however, learn to read Japanese calligraphy, and I already know (roughly) what this text means. The characters are across a border of understanding from me, yet I can know what lies over there and can even shift the border by learning more from scholars and intermediaries.
I cannot feel what it was like to be the artist who painted this image, but I can learn many facts about his life, his genre, the koan he represents here, the tradition of koans, and his context. Again, Hakuin stands across a border, but I can indefinitely continue learning about what is on his side.
Right now, I am looking at a photograph of the painting, having recently seen the original. My mental state is reasonably calm but perhaps a bit distracted, since I am also typing. I know that I could see the same image while anxious or bored, and the whole experience would be different. I could even deliberately induce a state of anxiety. Then I would know that I had experienced the image while I was calm, but I would no longer be able to feel it the same way.
In short, there is a border around my current state of mind. I know what lies beyond it and can say (roughly) how it feels over there, but I cannot feel it now. I do know that the world for me always has a certain mood, which can change. In that sense, I know that my condition is temporal.
Expanding the scale of time, I can recall (sometimes vividly) what it felt like to be a child or a young parent with a child in arms. But those are memories rather than experiences. There is a border around my identity as a middle-aged person. I can see over it but cannot cross it.
I can imagine the permanent end of my own consciousness. But experiences turn instantly into memories, and not so with death. There is a border around the whole of a life. We can know what the world will be like without ourselves in it but cannot feel that absence. Hakuin experienced the end of his consciousness and left something for us that he can no longer know.
I am sitting and typing next to my dog. We each know and care a lot about the other. But Luca has no idea about Japanese Buddhist calligraphy, not even enough to form questions that are beyond his ken. He doesn’t know that he doesn’t know. I understand barely enough about Zen that I do know some of what I don’t know, but my dog’s example shows that there can easily be things entirely beyond any being’s capacity to grasp.
The Japanese word kyogai is important in Zen practice. It is often translated as “consciousness.” It turns out that it literally means “boundary” or “bounded place,” and it derives originally from the Sanskrit word visayah, in the sense of a pasture that has a boundary.
Think of an animal grazing in a space surrounded by hedges. Or think of Hakuin, with his specific language and mood, writing about verdant mountains that walk. The mountains are outside his pasture, and he is outside mine.
This thing called kyogai is an individual thing. Only a sparrow can understand the kyogai of a sparrow. Only a hen can understand the kyogai of a hen and only another fish can understand the kyogai of a fish. In this cold weather, perhaps you are feeling sorry for the fish, poor thing, for it has to live in the freezing water. But don’t make the mistake of thinking it would be better off if you put it in warm water; that would kill it. You are a human and there is no way you can understand the kyogai of a fish (in Hori 2000)
This is not precisely true. We can understand a vast amount about the fish, including its ideal water temperature and details about its sensory organs and neurology. There is a sense in which we can understand the kyogai of the fish and the fish cannot. It presumably has no grasp of the category of kyogai (or to draw from a different tradition, Umwelt). However, it is correct that we can never know how it feels to be a fish. We can’t even feel as we ourselves do in a different mood. And who knows what kyogai we cannot even imagine?
Victor Sogen Hori adds:
Kyogai can be said to change and develop, for it is a product of human effort. Thus one can say “His kyogai is still unripe” (Mada kyogai ga mijuku) or “His kyogai is still shallow” (Mada kyogai ga asai), implying that even though the monk has been working at overcoming his indecision, or fear, or pride, he still shows traces of self-consciousness. Finally, kyogai bears the quite personal imprint of the particular individual. One person’s way of acting in a fire drill, cooking in the kitchen, carrying on the tasks of daily life may be energetic and impassioned; another may do the same tasks coolly and methodically. Yet each may in his own fashion be narikitta in the way he acts. Thus one can say of monk Daijo’s way of performing some task, “That is typically Daijo kyogai.” (Hori 2000, p. 293).
If we can change our kyogai, how should we go about that?
We can ignore the boundaries (including the boundary of death) and graze in our respective pastures. This may be wise.
We can explore our own pasture and its boundaries to come to understand it fully. That is what Kant meant by a “critique” of reason–not a criticism of it, but an analysis of its structure and limits.
We can interact with people who have crossed our own boundaries. I am fortunate that a painting from the hand of one of the most famous Zen masters is in my neighborhood. To study that painting is to observe someone from a different time and context–and specifically someone who wrote about things “whereof one cannot speak.” Hakuin wrote koans not for himself but to benefit others, living and not yet born.
And we can try to cross the boundaries. A koan is a tool for doing that. The painting by Hakuin represents a verbal koan in Japanese characters. It is also a physical object that can work as a koan.
Dogen (1200-1253) comments on the koan, “Who can hear insentient beings speak dharma?” He says:
Only the insentient know the dharma they speak of, just as walls, grass, and trees know the spring. Ordinary and sacred are not hemmed in by boundaries, nor are mountains and rivers; sun, moon, or stars.
“Zen Saying” is an insentient object that hangs on the wall of the museum. During a few seconds more than 250 years ago, Hakuin took a stick of hardened soot and glue, ground it with water, dipped a brush into the mix, and spread some of the blackness downward across the paper to make a long, imperfectly straight, sometimes translucent line that is unmistakably a brushstroke. That line is a bit of earth, a thing. It depicts nothing, but it means “usual,” contributing to a sentence about something so unusual that we cannot envision it.*
The line is a trace of the act of a specific man who long ago became insentient soot himself. The other insentient things around this work look different in its presence, as–according to Heidegger–a Greek temple that stands on the earth and presents itself as the home of a god makes a world appear:
The luster and gleam of stone, glowing by grace of the sun, first makes manifest the light of the day, the breadth of the sky, the darkness of the night. The temple’s firm towering makes visible the space of air. The steadfastness of the work contrasts with the weaving of the flowing sea, and in its own repose brings out the latter’s turmoil. Trees and grass, eagle and bull, snake and cricket first enter into their contrasting shape and thus come to appear as that which they are (Heidegger 1964, pp. 669-70).
Standing in the presence of the “Zen Saying,” I sense my contrast with it and feel myself appearing as that which I am.
In George Eliot’s Romola, we see events from the perspective of four major characters (one at a time): Tito Melema, Baldassarre Calvo, Tessa, and Romola herself. Four people can have up to 3! = 6 bilateral relationships. In Romola, each of these six potential connections is filled out with several independent interactions.
Just for example, Tito encounters Nessa on his first day in Florence and then on several important occasions, Baldassare takes shelter in the farm where Tessa lives, Tessa’s toddler runs into the street and into Romola’s arms, and Tito washes ashore at Baldassare’s very location on the shore of the Arno. In that last case, the older man has no reason to expect his enemy to appear, but when this happens, he understandably feels that “something was being brought to him” for a reason–as a “fortunate chance for him” (italics in the original).
These distinct connections arise over a short period in quite a large community. (The population of Renaissance Florence was on the order of 100,000, but that understates the improbability, since Baldassare has been enslaved in the Middle East and encounters Tito almost as soon as he finds himself in Florence. The odds of that encounter must be one in a million.)
I think we generally assume that we pass through life with one thing just happening after another–sometimes as a result of our decisions, but often by sheer contingency. Occasional coincidences should be expected as a matter of probability, but they do not mean anything. Every one out of a million events will be a one-in-a-million event.
These assumptions make Romola look contrived and perhaps didactic, evidently the work of an artist who has deliberately connected four characters in the maximum number of ways to explore symmetries and contrasts. The text seems unlike life.
As Caroline Levine (yes, my sister) shows, Romola learns as the story unfolds. She figures out that life is not foreordained and prophesies are unreliable–sometimes true, but only by chance. (Prophesies are important in this political novel, since the main political actor, Savonarola, gains his influence through prophesy.) Romola concludes that human beings make free moral choices that alone determine what happens. Her conclusion seems inconsistent with the density of coincidences in the plot, which should instead suggest (as the addled Baldassare concludes) that everything has been set up for a reason.
Caroline notes that plotted narratives typically have a strange feature. The author knows what will happen and selects the events to narrate with that outcome in mind. It’s a flaw in a plotted narrative if we’re told things that don’t matter later.
Imagine two events that occur in a sequence, A and B. In a novel, A should have an affect on B, yet B is the cause of A in the sense that it explains why A is narrated.
This means that Romola may (or may not) be correct about how life works, but she is wrong about her own story as it is told in the eponymous novel. Her story is determined by an omniscient creator and organized to reach coherent conclusions.
For me, the density of coincidences is a bit alienating: it’s like seeing the puppeteer’s hands. As the coincidences mount, I think: this is just too improbable. I prefer Middlemarch, which also has coincidences, but at a much lower rate. Still, perhaps the best conclusion is that any narrated story is a contrivance. In this case, it’s contrived to teach us that only our choices matter, and that is a bit of a paradox.
Supposedly, many American men think more than once a day about the Roman empire. This seems implausible, but I must admit that Rome often comes to my mind. For instance, I recently read Zenobia; Shooting Star of Palmyra by Nathanael Andrade (Oxford University Press, 2018).
A powerful female monarch from Syria, Zenobia has been a figure of fascination for 18 centuries. She’s been a symbol for misogynists and feminists, for European imperialists, Arab nationalists, and cosmopolitan modernists. She appears in Christian histories, the Talmud, early Islamic sources, and bel canto operas.
Andrade selects and sorts the ancient written sources (all of which are biased in various ways) and relevant inscriptions, coins, and statuary. He is especially helpful at explaining the context of Palmyra, a thriving merchant city with a distinctive hybrid culture. The protagonist of his book was Septimia Zenobia (a Hellenistic monarch), Iulia Aurelia (a Roman woman of the senatorial class), and Bathzabbai (a Palmyrene clan leader), and she probably inhabited all three roles fully.
We know almost nothing about her inner life, but her story is dramatic. The 240s and 250s saw the Roman empire often at war with the nascent power of Sassanian Persia to its east. In 260, the Romans suffered a catastrophe when their emperor, Valerian, was defeated on the battlefield and taken prisoner. At the same time, the empire was beset by Germanic invasions and a rebellion in Gaul. The whole eastern Mediterranean was at risk, but it was saved by a Palmyrene leader named Odeanthus (a.k.a. Odainat), who bore Roman titles, including commander, governor, and consul. With the Empire in disarray, Odeanthus essentially ruled an important region from his capital in Palmyra, calling himself King of Kings, albeit without openly challenging Roman sovereignty.
After four years of rule, Odeanthus was murdered by assailants who remain unknown to this day. The initial propaganda from Rome implied that Odeanthus was killed because he’d become treasonous. It’s likely that a pro-Roman faction in Palmyra expected to replace him. Instead, his widow, Zenobia, quickly gained political control and reigned as a regent in the name of her minor son Wahballath, a.k.a. Septimius Vaballathus, a.k.a. Athenodorus. Now some of the Roman propaganda suggested that an evil and unnatural woman had killed her husband to gain his throne.
Zenobia seems to have led a tolerant and culturally vibrant polity that may have seen itself as Palmyrene and/or Syrian, although she presented herself and her son as Roman officials and claimed to be related to the Greek-speaking Egyptian queen Cleopatra. She ruled various kinds of pagans, Christians (both orthodox and gnostic), early rabbinic Jews, Manichaeans, Zoroastrians, and others. The Greek philosopher Longinus was a courtier and reputedly Zenobia’s personal mentor, although he was not actually the author of On the Sublime, which was attributed to him in later centuries.
Zenobia’s territory dramatically expanded when her forces captured Egypt, the breadbasket of the Roman empire and the terminus of sea routes in Asia. It’s not clear why she launched this invasion, but it could have been on behalf of Palmyrene merchants who competed with Egyptians. Zenobia was now calling herself Augusta (a title for an empress) and using the title Augustus for Wahballath. She was empress of the richest third of the Roman imperium. One can imagine a stable new entity forming in the Levant. However, In 272, the Emperor Aurelian invaded and defeated the Palymrenes, taking mother and son to Rome as prisoners. The unified Roman empire still had another century and a half to go.
Andrade deals sensitively with the horrifying events at the site of ancient Palmyra in 2015-2016. The site had been controlled by European imperialists and then by Syrian secular nationalists, each of whom had exploited Zenobia’ memory for their own purposes. ISIS destroyed the ruins and their living guardians as an attack on both Assad and the West.
Out of the countless depictions of Zenobia since her time, I’ll mention a set of paintings by Giambattista Tiepolo. These works hang in different museums and had miscellaneous titles. In 1974, Fern Rusk Shapley first noted that they all depict scenes from the life of the Queen of Palmyra. Shapley conjectured that the Zenobios, a noble Venetian family who were unrelated to Zenobia but who happened to share her name, commissioned them for one room in their palazzo. Knox (1979) accepts that they are all by Tiepolo but thinks that the artist painted them over several decades for the Zenobios.
Of course, these paintings are not realistic or consistent with modern scholarship–or even very serious–but I appreciate that Tiepolo could imagine Zenobia as a heroic soldier and as a stoic victim. The National Gallery’s Queen Zenobia Addressing Her Soldiers (1725/1730) shows her in a martial pose–see above–while the Prado’s Queen Zenobia before the Emperor Aurelian (1717) depicts her as gracious in defeat. Both look like scenes from an opera.
References: Shapley, “Tiepolo’s Zenobia Cycle,” in Robert Enggass, Hortus imaginum: essays in Western art (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1974): George Knox, “Giambattista Tiepolo: Queen Zenobia and Ca’Zenobio: ‘una delle prime sue fatture’,” The Burlington Magazine 121.916 (1979): 409-418. See also: Velazquez, The Spinners; Goya’s Familia del infante Don Luis; and three great paintings in dialogue
The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC displays The Feast of the Gods by Giovanni Bellini with additions by Titian (1514/1529), The Old Musician by Edouard Manet (1862), and The Family of Saltimbanques by Pablo Picasso (1905). These major works talk to each other.* We might say that the Bellini is a work of art, the Manet is a work about art, and the Picasso is about the artist.
Bellini’s painting illustrates a story from Ovid (Fasti I:415ff.). Mario Equicola, a courtier in service to the Duke of Ferrara, had given Bellini detailed and learned instructions about how to represent the original passage (Colantuono 1991). Equicola argued that poetry was the greater art; painting was merely derivative. Some contemporaries disagreed with this assessment, but all expected art to represent classic texts: usually Scripture, but in this case a pagan myth.
Bellini creates a kind of set for the gods, a flat area with a backdrop (which is now mostly Titian’s work). The characters are shown frozen in the midst of action.
Giovanni Bellini and Titian, The Feast of the Gods, 1514/1529, oil on canvas, Widener Collection, 1942.9.1
The artist counts on certain expectations that make the image easily legible. As usual in Renaissance art, light comes from a sun behind the viewer’s left shoulder. Space is reserved between the major objects and the edges of the canvas, so that the scene is “framed” both aesthetically and literally. Objects that are further away are not only smaller but blurrier and lit differently from those at center-stage (sfumato). Although the characters are Greco-Roman gods, they wear costumes and hold props from Bellini’s own time. Their bodies and other objects are represented with glowing detail; for example, the ceramics represent the earliest depictions of Chinese porcelain in European art.
If this is what we expect from art, then it is hard to see how anyone could surpass Bellini. He knows all the tools and techniques. He can represent round objects and faces rotated on all axes; light reflecting on metal, glass, porcelain, and liquid; water flowing through space; shadows and highlights; and naked and clothed bodies with discernible weight. But once this kind of painting has been produced at a high level for several centuries, the whole approach could become tired–especially once artists become enthusiastic about radically different styles from other cultures and times.
Detail, showing water flowing into a glass vessel
Manet’s The Old Musician bears some similarities to Bellini’s work. Again, several characters are presented on a flat stage with a tree and the sky behind them and light coming from the upper-left. However, the edges of this image cut right through one human figure and the tree, reminding us that we are looking at a painted canvas. Especially in the foreground and around the boy’s silhouette, the paint strokes are easily legible (another reminder that this is a painting). A horizon is visible, but the background is ambiguous. Flat ground behind the boy seems to morph into a low wall behind the young man. The sun casts shadows to the right of the violinist but to the left of the man in the tall hat. Perhaps the setting is the outskirts of Paris or another great city, but the location is obscure.
And there is no story. Maybe the people will move later on, but they are not evidently in the midst of doing anything now. The musician has stopped playing his violin, which might have animated them before. No character looks at any other, except that the musician stares at us.
You need a guide, such as Charles Fried (Fried 1969) or David Luban (Luban 1994) to tell you that the figures here are quoted from previous works of art, including an ancient statue of the philosopher Chrysippus, Watteau’s Pierrot (1718-19), and Manet’s own Absinthe Drinker (1858-9). The subject of this painting is not any story but art itself. The tradition within which Bellini painted has come to an end, like a tune previously played by a musician who is now “old.”
The figures in Manet’s painting are timeless and may combine costumes from diverse periods, but it’s safe to say that they are socially marginal. The young girl is barefoot and responsible for a baby. This is not a conventional family or a respectable organization but perhaps a band of homeless people. One of them, the violinist, is clearly a kind of artist, and the painting implies that artists in general are outsiders. In contrast, Bellini had painted his work for the private study of Duke Alfonso d’Este. From Bellini to Manet, successful artists have evolved from well-placed courtiers to bohemians.
Picasso was a spiritual heir to Manet. A young migrant from Spain, living in bohemian Paris among poets and artists, he embraced a marginal and critical role. He and such friends as the poet Guillaume Apollinaire regularly visited the circus, where they felt (or at least claimed) an affinity with the performers. In The Family of Saltimbanques, Picasso depicts a group of acrobats from the lowest tier of that profession. The landscape is even emptier than in the Manet.
By Pablo Picasso – Digital reproduction or scan of original painting: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27675009
The harlequin figure may be a self-portrait, the large jester is probably Apollinaire, the woman may be Picasso’s lover and model Fernande Olivier, and the girl may represent an orphan whom Olivier and Picasso had recently adopted, only to return her–rejected–to an orphanage. This image, then, is self-referential and confessional, in contrast to the outward stance of both Bellini and Manet. It exemplifies Picasso’s Rose Period, which had recently succeeded his Blue Period, and it can be understood as an objective correlative of the painter’s evolving mood.
These three paintings share several motifs. For instance, the feet. The Naiads in the Bellini are barefoot, per Ovid:
Naides effusis aliae sine pectinis usu, 405
pars aderant positis arte manuque comis;
illa super suras tunicam collecta ministrat,
altera dissuto pectus aperta sinu;
exserit haec umerum, vestes trahit illa per herbas,
impediunt teneros vincula nulla pedes.
There were Naiads, some whose hair flowed down without a comb,
others having arranged it by hand with skill.
This one serves with her tunic gathered above her calf,
another opens the robe to reveal her breast:
This one uncovers a shoulder, another drags her hem in the grass
No tender foot is shackled with a shoe.
These naked feet are meant to be mildly erotic. Not so with Manet, whose shoeless young girl is poor and encumbered with an infant. With her dirty feet, she may refer to Caravaggio’s Madonna of Loreto (1604-6). And Picasso’s saltimbanques wear slippers for acrobatics.
All three paintings relate in important ways to poems. I’ve mentioned that Bellini’s work illustrates a passage from Ovid’s Fasti. This is a somewhat distasteful story. Priapus (whom Bellini shows erect under his tunic) is about to rape a Naiad named Lotis while she sleeps, but a donkey brays, awakening the whole company and subjecting Priapus to ridicule. He then kills the donkey with his scythe. (In Bellini’s version, it looks as if Mercury was already watching before the donkey brayed.)
Manet’s friend Baudelaire encouraged him to paint modern society. These lines of Baudelaire’s can be compared with The Old Musician:
À une Mendiante rousse
Blanche fille aux cheveux roux,
Dont la robe par ses trous
Laisse voir la pauvreté
Et la beauté ...,
To a Redhead Beggar Girl
Pale girl with auburn hair
Whose clothes though their holes
Let your poverty show
And beauty ...
Most of all, the fifth of Rilke’s great Duino Elegies is entirely about Picasso’s Family of Saltimbanques, with which he lived (in the Munich home of Hertha Koenig) for several months in 1915, after having seen the same painting in Paris. The poem addresses each character in turn.
Rilke begins:
Wer aber sind sie, sag mir, die Fahrenden, diese ein wenig
Flüchtigern noch als wir selbst, die dringend von früh an
wringt ein wem, wem zu Liebe
niemals zufriedener Wille? Sondern er wringt sie,
biegt sie, schlingt sie und schwingt sie,
wirft sie und fängt sie zurück; wie aus geölter,
glatterer Luft kommen sie nieder
auf dem verzehrten, von ihrem ewigen
Aufsprung dünneren Teppich, diesem verlorenen
Teppich im Weltall.
[...]
But who are they, tell me, these drifters, just a bit
More fleeting than ourselves, wrung out from early on--
by whom, for whose desire, by what insatiable will? Instead, it wrestles them,
bends them, loops them and swings them,
throws them and catches them again; as if through oiled,
slippery air, they come down
on the worn-out mat, worn ever thinner by their constant
leaping, this carpet that is spent in space.
[...]
Rilke takes Picasso’s static image and gives it a story, a before-and-after, much as Bellini had turned Ovid’s narrative into a snapshot. Not only does Rilke imagine that the acrobats were jumping before the calm moment captured in paint, but he discusses how they gradually learned to leap.
He begins a later stanza:
Ach und um diese
Mitte, die Rose des Zuschauns:
blüht und entblättert.
Oh and about this
center, the rose of onlooking:
it blooms and sheds its leaves.
Most translations (collected by Martin Travers) presume that the acrobats form the rose. That is probably correct. However, I suspect that Picasso is also the “rose of onlooking.” During his Rose Period, his pink-ish mood suffuses his work. The painting is a kind of self-portrait as well as an answer to Manet and the tradition of narrative art that preceded them both.
*Picasso definitely knew The Old Musician. Manet may not have known The Feast of the Gods, which was in England in his day. He’s responding to the overall tradition of European painting. References: Anthony Colantuono (1991) “Dies Alcyoniae: The Invention of Bellini’s Feast of the Gods,” The Art Bulletin, 73:2, 237-256; Michael Fried (1969), “Manet’s Sources: Aspects of His Art, 1859-1865,” ArtForum, vol. 7 no. 7; David Luban (1994) Legal Modernism, University of Michigan Press. See also: Velazquez, The Spinners; an accelerating cascade of pearls (on Galileo and Tintoretto); Manet’s “Old Musician” (from 2004).
While on a quick but lovely trip to Prague–and since Milan Kundera had died recently–I decided to read a book that I had not read before, Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (translated from French by Aaron Asher).
It is a set of linked stories with some essay-like passages, “a novel in the form of variations” (p. 227). The stories constantly recombine leitmotifs: the acts of laughter and forgetting that are named in the title plus dancing (especially in circles), caches of letters, literary writing, and sex. I think the novel as a whole avoids any theory–any consistent and organized way of combining its major themes that might reflect a truth about the world. Instead, it plays with them. Perhaps the resistance to theory and the embrace of free play is itself a theory of both literature and politics, a kind of liberalism that emphasizes the right to have and to express a complex and individual inner life.
The gender binary is very evident, and there is a lot of sex as well as some rape. The most admirable characters are women; most of the men are pretty bad. But the women are mostly defined by their relationships to male lovers.
For instance, exiled in France, Tamina is surrounded by privileged bourgeois citizens of a free republic who want to express themselves in writing (for the sake of being writers), bend her ear with their concerns, or have sex with her, and none of them is willing to assist her at any personal cost. The narrator says:
[This] is a novel about Tamina, and whenever Tamina goes offstage, it is a novel for Tamina. She is its principal character and its principal audience, and all the other stories are variations on her own story and meet with her life as in a mirror (p. 227).
One of Tamina’s admirable features is her steadfast love for her late husband, an exiled Czech dissident/writer–someone who sounds rather like Milan Kundera, albeit with a shorter lifespan.
Tamina doesn’t have much of an agenda: cultural, political, or otherwise. That’s fine; she’s just trying to live her life. But one gets that sense that this is not really “a novel about Tamina.” It’s a novel about someone like Kundera, as seen by his devoted wife. Indeed, as a deceased Czech dissident, Tamina’s husband is now purely good–a figure worthy of grief who cannot possibly do any harm. Tamina strives to preserve his memory.
The narrator writes:
The gaze of a man has often been described. It seems to fasten coldly on the woman, as if it were measuring, weighing, evaluating, choosing her, as if, in other words, it were turning her into a thing.
Less well known is that a woman is not entirely defenseless against that gaze. If she is turned into a thing, then she watches the man with the gaze of a thing. It is as if a hammer suddenly had eyes and watched the carpenter grip it to drive in a nail. Seeing the hammer’s malicious gaze, the carpenter loses his self-confidence and hits his thumb.
The carpenter is the hammer’s master, yet it is the hammer that has the advantage over the carpenter, because a tool knows exactly how it should be handled, while the one who handles it can only know approximately how (pp. 285-286).
Could this be reversed, to talk about a woman’s gaze at a man? Could the hammer think about anything other than the carpenter?
I cannot address the whole of Kundera’s oeuvre, let alone his peers and influences, but I did find this general thesis inMatonoha (2014):
The reduction of women to objects, which are observed or used by male subjects, is a conspicuous feature of Czech prose. By the same token, this classic feminist critical topos (man in the position of a subject, woman reduced to the position of an object) is further internally structured in Czech prose. Generally speaking, the following model is more or less repeated: at first glance — objectification, reification, fetishization, trivialization; on a second plane — proving that the male character is misunderstood, reduction of the female character, and the uncovering of his existential dependence on a loving female character; however, it is the next, higher, plane that uncovers the real, unreflected patriarchal and androcentric groundwork of the whole epistemological and ethical complex. Therefore, the model does not only include banal sexism and scopophilia (although they are plentiful) but also, on the second plane, paradoxically flattering and therefore even more treacherous identities …
Matonoha discusses Lucie from Kundera’s The Joke (1967) as the novelist’s first example of a recurrent type, the “idealized silent woman.” This also seems to be Tamina’s role in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. And the narrator tells us that she is the center of that whole book.
Kundera is a political writer insofar as he sees state communism as hostile to individual flourishing. His female characters are among the victims of that system. But he seems to miss the possibility that they are also oppressed on account of their gender and that men like him can play a role analogous to the state’s.
