From Poetic Realism to Pop Art

Author(s): Robert Greer Cohn

Source: MLN, Vol. 84, No. 4, French Issue (May, 1969), pp. 668-674
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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668

From Poetic Realism to Pop Art

Poetic realismin the various arts comes about typicallywhen a familiar
scene is revisitedafter a period of remotenessand is witnessedthrough
a limpid glycerineof nostalgicemotion. The mood, we know, wells from
a man's deepest longing: his desire to returnall the way to the Source,
Paradise, or its living approximation,the native landscape of the long-lost
child, the neighborhood,the Home. This kind of feelingis as old as our
culture. Auerbach began his saga of Western realism with such a scene
fromthe Odyssey: Ulysses'quelling return,aftertwentyyears of wandering, to his household,complete with faithfulold servantand dog (later,
Du Bellay adds subtle modern touches, a la Vermeer,of roof-tilesand
chimney-smoke).Had Auerbach rummagedfurtherthroughthe Hebrew
tradition,he mightjust as well have begun his storywith Tobit and his
dog or some vignettesfromthe Song of Songs, like that wistfulvalentine
of the fellowstandingbehind the wall and peering throughthe lattice of
a house-window(later, Chagall will suspend him at an angle in mid-air).
But since, broadly speaking,the mood may be felt to underlie any representationdrawn fromeverydaylife-even those factual depictionsblended
with extremefantasyas in the " magic realism" of Breughel,Bosch, Dali,
Miracle in Milan-there is no point, for our present purpose, in multiplying these examples fromthe distantpast. Even recognizedly" realistic
poetry" such as Villon's, MathurinRdgnier's,Boileau's or Thomas Hood's
hardlybelongs in our purview. Here, rather,we will be talkingabout a
special brand of this sentimentwhich is peculiarly characteristicof the
modern era beginning,approximately,with the Romantics. It is simply
a verykeen versionof lyricrealism,and it comes about with the particular
isolation and self-concernor extremeindividualismwhich historiansassociate with Romanticism. Because alienated souls like these were apt to
look with prolonged disdain on the ordinarybourgeois panorama, the
momentsof reconciliationhave a special pointedness.With our twentiethcenturyironic insights,we are not surprisedat the vulnerabilityof their
pretended self-sufficiency-Goethe,
incidentally,long ago reflectedon this
bittermatterin his Harzreise-but occasionallyit must have come as an
unexpected and joyful jolt to their ennui that theycould still belong in
some ways, if only to things. Indeed, the more a man is alienated, the
more he is likely to appreciate,in such offsetting
moments,veryordinary
things. This can puzzle the sort who naturallythink of art as something
rathermore special, hi falutin,for example in the academic or beaux-arts
manner of noble figuresclassicallyarrayed on pedestals above us mere
mortals. Here, contrariwise,
we have a select instanceof the play of crosspurposes, the sort of morris-danceJoyce described, between artist and

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philistine. So we have this fascinatingnew vein of the beautifullybanal

or even, by extreme extension, the exquisitely boring. In a few elite
cases, this blend of opposites can be compounded maddeningly. It no
doubt takes a special kind of man, preferablyof the problematicrecent
variety,to appreciate such a union, a Flaubert,Chekhov,Kafka, Nabokov,
Giacomettior Beckett to derive huge or " henormous" delight fromflat
dreariness,just as, in a better identifieddirectionof the waywardspirit,
such men can laugh an absurdistlaugh at sheer disaster.
The intensermomentsof poetic realism tend, naturallyenough, to be
like a naive documentary"still" inserted in a fictitious
fragmentary,
the
film-story: value obviously depends largely or even entirelyon the
optique, in this case the special view of plain life seen throughthe astonished eyes of some superb poets.
Our vein seems to startwith the Romantics-our firstexample is going
to be fromNerval-but, witha littlenudging,theseperspectivescan always
be prolonged. Should we go back as far as Vermeer? I would preferin
this instance to referto Proust'sway of looking at that insignificant
petit
pan de mur jaune, the hungrylook of a person who almost never went
out anymoreand couldn't go home again. Perhaps we could allude to
certainpassages in the Confessions,this is gettingcloser,or corresponding
ones in the coeval genre painters,Chardin and Greuze. A few lines in
Sainte-Beuve'sPoesies et pensees de JosepheDelorme are even warmer,for
example the opening of theRayons jaunes. But one has to startsomewhere
and, although it is not easy to demonstrate,I sense the promised "keenness" much more distinctlyin a little poem of Gerard de Nerval called
La Cousine:
L'hiver a ses plaisirs;et souvent,le dimanche,
Quand un peu de soleil jaunit la terreblanche,
Avec une cousine on sort se promener. . .
-Et ne vous faitespas attendrepour diner,
Dit la mere. Et quand on a bien, aux Tuileries,
Vu sous les arbresnoirs les toilettesfleuries,
La jeune fille a froid . . . et vous fait observer

Que le brouillard du soir commencea se lever.

Et l'on revient,parlant du beau jour qu'on regrette,

Qui s'est passe si vite . . et de flamme discrete:

Et l'on sent en rentrant,avec grand app6tit,

Du bas de l'escalier,-le dindon qui rotit.

This turkeycould be embarrassingif it weren't for Nerval's optique and

the faithwe have in him as an absolute artist. Reading this modest early
poem of Gerard's,we are home in another sense, far back in the mezzotintedand heavilyfurnishednineteenthcentury,with some of the familiar

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670

strangenessof a visit in a dream or reveryto our own childhood streets

which led goodness knows where or the equivalent ones we strolled in
an adolescent daze to adjacent neighborhoodswith all sorts of slightly
feverish and puzzling decor surrounding a reassuring warmth. This
etat d'dme persiststhrougha good deal of Sylvie,particularlythose episodes with the solid village girl, the Sylvie of the title, which have reminded criticsof Flemish painting, though,to quibble again, I feel the
crucial distinction:
Voici le village au bout de la sente qui c6toie la foret:vingtchaumieres
dont la vigne et les roses grimpantesfestonnentles murs. Des fileuses
matinales,coiffeesde mouchoirsrouges, travaillent,reunies devant une
ferme. Sylvien'est point avec elles. C'est presque une demoiselledepuis
qu'elle execute de fines dentelles, tandis ques ses parents sont restes
de bons villageois.-Je suis monte h sa chambresans etonner personne;
deja levee depuis longtemps,elle agitait les fuseaux de sa dentelle, qui
claquaient avec un doux bruit sur le carreau vert que soutenaient ses
genoux.
Et elle alla cherchantdans les armoires,dans la huche, trouvantdu
lait, du pain bis, du sucre, etalant sans trop de soin sur la table les
assietteset les plats de faience emailles de larges fleurset de coqs au
vif plumage. Une jatte en porcelaine de Creil, pleine de lait oif
nagaient des fraises,devintle centredu service,et, apres avoir depouille
le jardin de quelques poignees de cerises et de groseilles,elle disposa
deux vases de fleursaux deux bouts de la nappe. Mais la tante avait dit
ces belles paroles:
-Tout cela ce n'est que du dessert. II faut me laisser faire a present.
Et elle avait decrochela poole et jete un fagotdans la haute cheminee.
Out of justice to Greuze,we ought to note thatGerard himselfcompares
his Sylvie,in a certain light and setting,to a picture by the eighteenthcenturypainter.
Later, towardthe end of the Second Empire when a new subtleraesthetic
is a-borning,Rimbaud's Ce qui retientNina is clearlyin the lineage of the
Nerval prose:
Nous regagnerionsle village
Au ciel mi-noir
Et ca sentiraitle laitage
Dans l'air du soir;
Ca sentiraitl'etable pleine
De fumierschauds
Pleine d'un rythmelent d'haleine
Et de grands dos
Les lunettesde la grand'mere
Et son nez long
Dans son missel; le pot de biere

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M L N
Cercle de plomb
Moussant entre les larges pipes
Que cranement
Fument des effroyables
lippes
Qui, tout fumant,
Happent le jambon aux fourchettes
Tant, tant et plus,
Le feu,qui claire les couchettes
Et les bahuts.

Between Nerval and Rimbaud there had been the Baudelaire of the
"Tableaux parisiens,"notablyLe Cygne:
Le vieux Paris n'est plus (la formed'une ville
Change plus vite,h6las, que le coeur d'un mortel)
Je ne vois qu'en esprit tout ce camp de baraques,
Ces tas de chapiteaux 6bauch6set de futs,
Les herbes,les grosblocs verdispar l'eau des flaques,
Et, brillantaux carreaux,le bric-a-bracconfus.
La s'etalait jadis une menagerie;
La je vis, un matin,a l'heure oui sous les cieux
Froids et claire le Travail s'6veille,ou la voirie
Pousse un sombreouragan dans l'air silencieux,
Un cygnequi s'etait evade de sa cage,
Et, de ses pieds palmes frottantle pave sec,
Sur le sol raboteux trainaitson blanc plumage.
Pres d'un ruisseau sans eau la bete ouvrantle bec
Baignait neurveusementses ailes dans la poudre,
From the firstline-" Andromaque, je pense a vous "-the touchingly
resigned tone a la Flaubert begins to build the sadly lucid atmosphere,
the crystalworld of feeling surroundingthe city-poetlike a paperweight
globe about its isolated little snowman. He does not reject the setting
(as he does in the poems of exotic voyaging) but rather it lodges in his
heart, dignifiedby its vibrancybetween past and present in memoryor
regret,vaguelyrecallingthatline in Du Cote de Chez Swann whereProust
in Paris "et c'6tait dans mon coeur";
speaks of turninga street-corner
for there stood a spire like the one in Combray. The process whereby
dream world mergeswith realityor, along a time dimension,past joins
with present,and crystallizesinto the tertiumquid of imagination-that
of the memories,
" queen of faculties"-is symbolizedby the transfiguration
which are now in him pregnantly" plus lourds que les rocs."
So the city participatesin the poetryas "la muse familiere,citadine,
vivante" as he called it in Les Bons chiens. Its casual and banal aspects

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occasion the mildermomentsof the sweetdefeat,the variouslygentle and

poignant elegiac climate. And as in a Dutch urban scene, the mildnessfor the horizontalpanorama of the world has its own infiniteof maternal
calm-turns insensiblyinto song.
A criticcan easily pause here in numb wondermentat the feat Baudelaire has broughtoff,at the sense of timingand the precisionof ear which
is required to fuse, at everyturn,in a higher synthesis,the vertical and
horizontal" dimensions" of spirit: the transcendentaland the casual. The
result is somethinglike that "rien que le naturel excessif" he found in
hashishvisions. Perhaps thisis whyMartin Turnell preferredBaudelaire's
"live bird" to Mallarme's more fully symbolistswan. But critics like
Turnell are apt to make too much of a good thing. Realistic poetryis
one valid way of art, especially in the hands of a Baudelaire; it is not
the only one and not necessarilythe best. A capacity to savor Laforgue
or Corbiere need not ruin one's appetite for Mallarm6 or Valery any
more than Le Cygne need make us scant the gorgeouslysymbolistLa
Chevelure fromanother of Baudelaire's pens. Poetry like La Chevelure
rises througha complex dialectic of its own in which the smaller dosage
of the ordinaryis made up for by a higher degree of crystallizationof
warring forces from the heights and depths of the psyche. Baudelaire
knew this and, no mean critichimself,made clear where his preferences
lay, forexample, in the essayPuisque realisme il y a:
Le Poesie est ce qu'il y a de plus reel, c'est ce qui
n'est complktementvrai que dans un autre monde.
Ce monde-ci,dictionnairehieroglyphique.
That it was a matterof preferenceforMallarm6 too is amplydemonstrated
by those early pieces like Reminiscencein which he indulges the realistic
vein at will and masterfully.
Baudelaire, unlike the pedestrian Mr. Turnell, was a ferventadmirer
of Madame Bovary. The best passages of that artisticnovel, or of Un
Coeur simple or the Education sentimentale,are bathed in the sober glow
of the touchinglyquotidian as seen throughthe eyes of Emma-Gustave.
Flaubert,as is well known,had been bullied by his friendsinto renouncing
his built-inromanticism,so it came back with a multipliedvengeance,like
the banished demon of the Gospels, in this restrained,complex, ashamed
and profoundlyaccepted form. Keeping his distance from his anima or
heroine by cruel lucid irony,the virile creatorin him thus paid the price
that allowed the timid tendernessto flood back, via a back route, into
our initially unsuspectingand gradually gratefulreaders' souls; softness
about the most routine things of a French provincial town like the
against the skyalong the route of Charles' medietchingsof tree-branches
cal visit,the hollow sounds casksmade when beat on by a child's stubborn
stick. Here is a choice momentof L'Education sentimentale,one I suspect
Proust must have lingered over:

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II remontait,au hasard, le quartier latin, si tumultueux d'habitude,

mais desert i cette epoque, car les etudiants etaient partis dans leur
families. Les grands murs des colleges, comme allonges par le silence,
avaient un aspect plus morne encore; on entendait toute sorte de bruit
paisibles, des battementsd'ailes dans les cages, le ronflementd'un tour,
le marteau d'un savetier;et les marchandsd'habits,au milieu des rues,
interrogaient
chaque fenetre,inutilement.Au fond des cafessolitaires,la
dame du comptoir baillait entre ses carafons remplis; les journaux
demeuraienten ordre sur la table des cabinetsde lecture; dans l'escalier
sous les bouffeesdu vent tiede ...
des repasseuses,des lingesfrissonnaient
Joyce,who had a Vermeer reproductionhanging in his study and who
said of Un Coeur simple " That's really what I wanted to write,"demonstrateda masteryof the same sneakytechnique Flaubert had employed in
his descriptionsof Emma's romanticreveries;in the GertyMcDowell episode of Ulysseshe spares us no ear-warmingsentimentfromthe adolescent
" nambypambypantsymarmelady" past we were tryingto live down with
Nabokov or Stravinsky. But who knows where that past is lurking?
Stravinskyhimselfsmugglesin some " outworn" emotion amid the dry
ironies of The Rake's Progressin a furtiveway he maybe learned from
Kurt Weill. This is a jagged Brecht-likemixtureof sweet bitterness,akin
to Apollinaire's "cigarette amore et delicieuse comme la vie." Joyce
distills a homelier brew or Irish stew: not only in the Gerty McDowell
episode but throughoutthat dear dirtyDublin day he regales us with
Plumtree's Potted Meat advertisementsor the tassled dance cards and
sachetsalmost anyone can rummageout of a creakingmaternal drawerof
memory.When Proust returnedto greyprovincial Combray throughthe
cup of tea he rediscovereda "prosaisme qui sert de grand reservoirde
poesie" in his Tante Leonie's bedchamber where " je revenais toujours
avec une convoitiseinavouee m'engluer dans l'odeur me'diane,poisseuse,
fade, indigesteet fruiteedu couvre-liti fleurs."
Proustmusthave been aware of an dimesoeur vibratingunder the oddly
flat,or mat, Parisian park views of his friendVuillard. Recently,Pierre
Schneider has alluded finelyto the low-keyedquality of those drawings
and paintingsin a phrase that refersto their tacit protagonist:le citoyen
bonheur. Alain-Fournierand sometimesRadiguet were mastersof this
manner,Apollinaire, Leon-Paul Fargue, and Jules Romains belong somewhere in this fleetingpicture. Then there is the Sunday promenade in
Sartre'sBouville, througha virtuosostretchof urban lyricism;the portrait
of Oran in Camus' La Halte du Minotaure is comparable,with a haunting
image in those excruciating,obsessivelyboring stone lions in frontof the
public building. Beckettfecitin his turn: his typicalwork is a particularly
ashamed and rusefuldetour to the adorable in bathos, the savorycliches
of conciergeFrench as only a foreigner,preferablyIrish, could appreciate
them.
And so we come to Pop Art. On the museumwalls now appear avatars

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banana
of our appealing banality as a row of appallinglyflat poster-style
splits or rows of Marilyn Monroes or peeled tomatoeson labels. Literary
equivalents proliferatein the little magazines signed by poets like Gary
Snyder and Michael McClure and a whole itinerantgroup of Zen-type
San Franciscans.There is a compellingsadnessmixed in withthisnostalgia
for the god-awfullyreal: this is the pathos of the shallow, the almost
entirelyfailed-it doesn't even succeed at that, i. e. total failure-which
involves a special case of ambivalence, a timid brand of death-urge.
"Failure the longed forvalley,"as Richard Wilbur, a magnificentsquare,
puts it, which is another way of saying Keats' "I am half in love with
easeful death." This was the secret, we muse, of those fake windows
painted on dismal factorywalls we once passed and also of thoseembryonic,
early prints or chromolithographs(images d'Epinal)
not-quite-making-it
that Rimbaud hymnedin his Alchimie du verbe, that the surrealistsand
Dadaists took up and that our newspapers are now featuringin some
sophisticatedneo-primitiveads. Now, in Pop Art, the artisthas come full
circle,or about as far as you can get around, all the way back Home to
the long-denied setting and its familiar appurtenances. In fact he has
come so far so fast that he has abandoned in the process all the "way
around," the limited but humanly rewardingbusiness of being an artist
in any extensivesense. For example, Wayne Thi6baud's portraitsrepresent somethinglike highlyselectiveor syntheticphotography.The experience of themis powerfulas life sometimesis, not as art in any significant
degree. Like some saint who opts for nothing,the pop artistmightstand
to gain All spiritually,or almostAll-he is not quite pure-but he obviously
givesup therewiththe usual functionsof craftsor careers. The greatartists
of the past were often tempted to do this and were often aware of the
absurd nature of their endeavor to catch wholes throughall-too-human
parts. But, snugglingup again and again to a sortof sainthood of perfectionismand innocence,theystopped shortagain and again out of a subtle
instinctfor human life and production,and somehow they managed to
spiral dialecticallytoward prettycomplete approximationsof Being. In
the end, even at some cost to innocence,most of us will take the "View
of Delft" over the tomato cans. True, the pop artistenjoys a personal
advantage in the mild ambivalence mentioned earlier: not only the
imageryor even the whole work but really the artisthimselfglows in the
lovely pathos of flop. It is mild ambivalence because the artist doesn't
die or sufferin any tragicdegree: he is merelylike Morgan or the rest of
the beat generationnot fulfillingthe parental hopes. As a finalsad note,
if the Warhol goes out and sells the neat empty" thing"-and he does:
one hears of fantasticprices-even the sacrificialaspect disappears, and
we are left with very little. Perhaps we ought to look elsewhere for
promisingdevelopmentsin poetic realism.
StanfordUniversity

ROBERT GREER COHN

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