The Body as Medium and Metaphor

FAUX TITRE

312

Etudes de langue et littérature françaises

publiées sous la direction de

Keith Busby, M.J. Freeman,

Sjef Houppermans et Paul Pelckmans
The Body as Medium and Metaphor

Hannah Westley

AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2008

Illustration cover: Lucas Cranach, Lukrezia und Judith.
© Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (painting lost since WW II).

Omslag ontwerper: Aart Jan Bergshoeff

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of

‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence’.

ISBN: 978-90-420-2398-7
© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008
Printed in The Netherlands
 Contents

Introduction 7

Imaging the Absent Subject:

Marcel Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 15

The Autoportrait;
Michel Leiris’s L’Âge d’Homme 49

Mimicking Mimesis:
Francis Bacon’s Portraits 81

Textual Imagery:
Visualizing the self in the writing of Bernard Noël and
Gisèle Prassinos 113

From the informe to the abject:

Shifting morphologies in the art of Louise Bourgeois
and Orlan 161

Conclusion 201

Bibliography 205
 Introduction

To what extent do artists and writers still have recourse to the

body to express their sense of self? In the wake of the postmodern
dissolution and dispersal of the subject, we are witnessing a
resurgence of interest in the re-presentation of the body. The body is
the threshold of subjectivity, the point of intersection between the
private and public, the personal and political, and the artist or writer
attempting to represent themselves must negotiate the complex divide
between subject and object roles. But the sphere of self-representation
has evolved dramatically over the course of the twentieth century and
traditional methods of self-expression would no longer appear to be
applicable. The myth of an integral self that is identical with self-
image has been exploded, and we are left picking up the pieces.
Today’s artists and writers must negotiate new means of expression.
Focusing on the body in self-representation, this book demonstrates
how, in an ongoing exploration, certain artists and writers have moved
beyond a conception of the subject that is predicated solely on vision.
Taking an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach, I
have pursued the theme of the representability of the self through the
body in contemporary visual arts and French autobiography. The
structure of the text is therefore comparative, contrasting the re-
presentation of the body through sculpture and painting with its
representation through literature. In concentrating upon writers who
are also art critics (Leiris and Noël) or artists (Prassinos), my work has
been orientated towards the visual arts and how writers attempt to
reconcile a visual consciousness with the written word. From Marcel
Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre, through Louise Bourgeois’s part-objects,
to Orlan’s sculptural surgery, my research has led me from the
complete break with figurative and mimetic representation, initiated
by artists and writers at the beginning of the century, to my last
chapter, which focuses upon an unexpected contemporary revival of
interest in semi-figurative or representational self-expression.
8 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

Autobiography as a genre has received substantial critical

attention over the last twenty years but the sphere of self-
representation in the arts has been relatively neglected. Critical work
that has previously focused upon this crisis in representation has been
confined to the study of various movements or has had a single
thematic approach. Mary Ann Caws’1 and Whitney Chadwick’s2
volumes on women and Surrealism examine self-representation and
identity but are devoted primarily to visual art and are obviously
focused upon fluctuations within a single movement. More recently,
studies of self-portraiture by women have spanned the period of the
twentieth-century3 while Joanna Woodall’s Facing the Subject4
includes critical analysis of self-portraiture and the understanding of
the human subject from the Italian Renaissance up to the present day.
Michael Sheringham’s comprehensive volume on French auto-
biography5 comes up to date in its examination of recent innovations
in self-writing but does not expand into the realms of auto-fiction. The
body has been the subject of a recent volume by Amelia Jones6 in her
study of body-art while Hal Foster7 looks at the 1990’s phenomena of
abject art and the return of the real body. However, none of these texts
allow for the broad reach and rich intertextual nature of self-
representation that spans the divide between literature and the visual
arts. None of them have considered the way in which visual self-
representation interacts with autobiographical writing: an interaction
that is central to my argument. This book seeks to redress this
imbalance by negotiating precisely such an interface, locating the
body and vision as sites of constructive interplay between literature

1
Caws, M. A. et al (eds.) Surrealism and Women Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press, 1991.
2
Chadwick, W. (ed.) Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and Self-Representation
Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press, 1998.
3
For example, Borzello, F. Seeing Ourselves: Women’s Self-Portraits London,
Thames and Hudson, 1998 and Meskimmon, M. The Art of Reflection: Women
Artists’ Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century London, Scarlet Press, 1996.
4
Woodall, J. (ed.) Portraiture: Facing the Subject Manchester and New York,
Manchester University Press, 1997.
5
Sheringham, M. French Autobiography: Devices and Desires Oxford, Clarendon
Press, 1993.
6
Jones, A. Body Art; Performing the Subject University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 1998.
7
Foster, H. The Return of the Real The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1996.
 Introduction 9

and visual art that share these preoccupations in the endeavour to

destabilize and redirect the reader and the viewer’s gaze.
The contradictions inherent in self-representation, between the
self who is creating and the self-reflexive protagonist of the work,
foreground the central issue of contemporary thought: the problematic
status of the self. The theme of the body in self-representation
involves a dual concept that has implications for the way in which
autobiography or self-portraiture is interpreted. The body can be
conceived in both a specular, imaginary synthesis and a dynamic,
dispersed presence throughout a fragmented work. The particularly
self-referential nature of modern autobiography and self-portraiture
posits the self as constituted solely in the act of creation. Mimetic
description of the body or the first-person voice of the
autobiographical text is no longer a guarantee of the presence of the
creator.
In this study, I examine the repercussions of this notion in an
autobiographical text that de-authorizes the first-person utterance,
Michel Leiris’s L’Âge d’Homme and in the performative
autobiographies of Bernard Noël and Gisèle Prassinos. I bring the
same examination to bear on the confrontation between the subject
and object in Marcel Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre, Francis Bacon’s
portraits and the art of Louise Bourgeois and Orlan. I adopt a critical
framework through which I explore the problematics and the
boundaries of self-representation. Starting with Lejeune’s concept of
the autobiographical pact, I navigate my way through critics of art and
literature towards a new contractual genre: an intertextual practice of
interpretation that arises from the interrelation between the
reader/viewer and the text. Through readings of Barthes, Lacan,
Bataille and Butler, I am interested in the nature of subjectivity and
how this may be expressed through the functioning of art in society in
ways that are not bound up in the artist’s intentions.
Barthes’s reading of abstract painting is indebted to C. S.
Peirce’s semiology in his fascination for the subjective traces of the
artist in the work, although he also allows for a category of sensation
that transcends the limits imposed by visible particularities. Lacan’s
theory of le stade du miroir has been the foundation for a wealth of
metaphor and criticism applied to self-representation while remaining
the essential theory behind the acquisition of selfhood through the
transition from the Imaginary to the Symbolic stages. Butler’s theories
10 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

about identity formation reflect the challenges to corporeal

morphology expressed in the art of Louise Bourgeois and Orlan.
Bataille’s notions of the convulsion and breaching of the subject are
recurrent in the writing of Leiris, while his thoughts upon l’informe
allow me to connect Bourgeois’s work to the art of Orlan through
Kristeva’s concept of the abject. Looking at the ways in which
subjectivity finds expression in the work of my subjects, I explore the
nature of aesthetic reception by investigating how works of art are
intelligible to those who read or view them.
The ideology of self-representation has traditionally assumed
that there is a self to express and the means with which to express it.
The writers and artists incorporated in this book do not start from this
stable perspective. The possibility of performative self-representation
does not allow for the premise of an originary self. The works I have
chosen to comment upon neither express a subjectivity, nor seek to
represent one, rather the writer’s/artist’s subjectivity evolves in and
through their work and at the point of encounter with the
reader/spectator. Thus the self becomes a process of invention,
performance, reciprocity and intersubjectivity.8 The themes which
recur and which connect these artists’ work are the themes that
necessarily pervade autobiography and self-portraiture: time, memory,
perception and expression. Visual art and art of the text are not
reducible to one another and by adopting a structure that juxtaposes
artists with writers, chapter by chapter, I hope to avoid any reductive
comparisons. This juxtaposition will, however, allow me to bring to
light the similar preoccupations, themes and concerns that the artist
and the writer seek to express in their different media. It will become
clear that these artists and writers, while straddling the historical or
symbolic stretch of time that unites and divides modernism and
postmodernism, are yet brought together by timeless concerns
involving the nature of the self and are also progressively influenced
by evolving theories of subjectivity. The work under consideration
shows a tendency to concentrate on the performance of subjectivity,
the way in which an identity is constructed over and in time, the way
in which it depends upon intersubjective relations with a reader or

8
I define intersubjectivity as the contingency of the self of the writer/artist upon the
self of the interpreter: an encounter between two or more subjects.
 Introduction 11

spectator. Such performances highlight the vulnerability and the

constructed nature of the self.
Left floundering in the wake of Dadaism, Surrealism, Freud
and psychoanalysis, Michel Leiris and Marcel Duchamp attempt to
come to terms with the shattering and irrevocable split of the illusion
of a stable and centred self. Id versus ego, or post-Saussure, signifier
versus signified, the fragmenting of the self is reflected in the division
of the sign and vraisemblance is lost to literature, as figuration is lost
to the visual arts. Francis Bacon, Gisèle Prassinos and Louise
Bourgeois are still reeling under the consequences of this
revolutionary wave fifty and sixty years later. Bacon treads the self-
dissolving path between figuration and abstraction, while Prassinos
creates anthropomorphic characters woven from fragments of
subjectivity. Bourgeois moves into real space with objects at once
symbolic and interactive, as Bernard Noël fabricates a fantasy body
whose world is based on vision, presence and sensation.
I have chosen writers who demonstrate through an emphasis
on vision how the symbolic power of language does not exist
separately or independently of experienced or perceived phenomena.
Language does not reveal an interior life or self; it is only in the
discovery of others and of the world that language is able to give rise
to a subjectivity. Language is not at the origin but at an encounter
between self and other, self and situation. The emphasis on the visual
in the writing of Leiris, Noël and Prassinos paradoxically undermines
the possibility of empirical knowledge. If for them, sight and
experience are inextricably linked, in other words, that which is
perceived is also experienced by and through the body, then the
transcription of vision in their texts is necessarily fragmented and
partial. As knowledge is predicated on experience, perfect self-
knowledge is an unattainable goal. Knowledge of the self is
continually deferred, contingent on intersubjective relations within the
text and between the text and reader. The body, which is the writer’s
point of view on the world, is also one of the objects in his/her world.
Paradoxically, this book adopts the inverse form to the form
of the work I examine. Temporality, as a common vein running
throughout these multiple self-representations, is fragmented, re-
versed, anticipated and amalgamated. The importance of time in the
structure and forms of memory and the vicissitudes of subjectivity is
highlighted in each of my separate studies. The perception of time is
12 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

neither linear nor successive: the past becomes present in the process
of remembering and the present reflects the future as intentions for the
future influence and shape present behaviour. Therefore, time
becomes a network and flux of desire. In order better to demonstrate
the development of themes and ideas, this study has a chronological
and linear structure, which will throw into further sharp relief, the
tumultuous interventions into time that are present in these works.
However, remaining faithful to my subjects, my text takes a peculiarly
cyclical turn. Duchamp foreshadows in many ways the strategies of
my last subject, Orlan.
In the last chapter, I have chosen to juxtapose two contempo-
rary female artists as they continue to make radical innovations in the
sphere of self-representation. The work of Louise Bourgeois takes up
where Duchamp left off, in the manipulation of the exhibition space,
the confrontations between the self of the artist, embodied in the work,
and the self of the spectator, and the insidious erosion of generic
hierarchies. Framing, in all its various manifestations haunts the work
of my subjects as the ontology of the work, its importance as an
autonomous conveyor of meaning, comes to stand in for the self of the
artist/writer that can only take shape through it. However, nowhere
has the frame been put to more radical use than in the work of Orlan,
who demonstrates how even art of the technological, internet age, an
art that knows no physical or geographical boundaries, depends more
than ever on Duchamp’s legacy of the manipulation, subversion and
exploitation of the frame.
Another aspect of Orlan’s work that exemplifies, perhaps, the
most radical turn of contemporary art, is the return of the repressed,
the return of the real body. If my investigation begins with the
apparently definitive rupture with all forms of referential and mimetic
art, it finishes with the return of the referential. However, this is not
the static, stable sign that we once recognized, this is a referential
vulnerable to change, process and self-division. To recall Merleau-
Ponty, the body is both seeing and seen, touching and touched. The
gaze unites the seer and the seen – the body by which the gaze passes
therefore assumes object and subject positions. The body is the
expressive space by which we experience the world. While artistic
Modernism, after Cartesian philosophy, objectified the body while the
“I” of the subject became the disembodied “eye,” distinct and
transcendent of the body, the performative self, following the
 Introduction 13

postmodern dispersal of the subject, is no longer inherent or

transcendent.
The body has never disappeared entirely from the sphere of
self-representation but the body became other bodies, bodies of the
Other. Stripped of its mimetic signifying power, the body, as
exemplified in the work of Duchamp, Noël and Prassinos, fragmented
to return as an experiential void. Lacking physical substance, it
became the receptacle for sensory encounters, a synaesthetic
subjectivity that found its expression on the page or in images as
moments of presence, reconstituted only in the imagination of the
beholder. Bacon dissolved the physiognomy of his subjects and
reconstituted them through the abstract folds and textures of oil paint.
Bourgeois took fragments of the shattered body and remoulded them
in ways to challenge the complacent self-presence of the spectator;
Leiris projected an absent self onto a pre-existing image of mythical
bodies. If memory is to be experienced, as Leiris demonstrates, it
cannot remain an entirely visual process but it is through the
visualization of the past that other sensory associations are evoked.
Leiris’s memories have, as their catalyst, the external image of
Cranach’s painting of Judith and Lucretia. Through his imaginary
projection and identification with the figures in the painting, Leiris’s
thoughts move from a perception of external phenomena to voyage
inwards on sensual waves of remembered experience. In the work of
these subjects, the challenge to the conventional division between
subject and object is mirrored in the subversion of the traditional
dichotomy of form and content. As subject and object find their union
in the intersubjective encounters between reader/spectator and the
body of the text, so form and content achieve a symbiotic relation and
their inseparability allows the work to stand in for the absent body of
the creator. At the start of the new century, Orlan presents us with the
body of a survivor; a body prone to change, destruction and
reconstruction but the body that demonstrates the shift from metaphor
to medium, from continuum to contiguity; the body that grounds the
artist’s attempts to express the multiplicity of her lived experience.
 Imaging the Absent Subject:
Marcel Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre

Introduction

In this first chapter, I will be introducing the themes that

permeate my study and the framework of critical methodology that
guides my approach to self-representation. The selection of
Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre as my first line of enquiry allows me to
introduce both the historical genre of self-portraiture and theories of
autobiography and to demonstrate how literary criticism can be
applied to non-literary subject matter without reducing the visual to
the verbal or vice versa. Duchamp’s approach to art and his own self-
mythification are indicative and prophetic of the artists and writers
whom I will discuss in later chapters. Self-representation is the
documentation of a performance whereby the private becomes public
and each of the following artists and writers deal with this transition in
highly diverse and individual ways. I shall focus first and foremost on
the work under discussion but in situations where the private and
public personae are inextricably and often confusingly intertwined, as
in the case of Duchamp and Bacon in particular, I shall also include
biographical detail in order to situate the work within the necessary
context.
In this chapter, I shall demonstrate how Duchamp’s con-
ceptual approach towards art involved a breakdown of generic
hierarchies and traditional value judgements. In various ways,
Duchamp’s attitude anticipated the work of many poststructuralist
theorists in his assertion that subjectivity was the product of, and not
the cause of, representation. Subjectivity is heralded as being
constituted in systems of codification that structure representation.
Art, as Le Grand Verre demonstrates, is always intertextual and does
not refer to some transcendent model, as reality and experience exist
in and through representation. Within an art-historical perspective, I
16 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

shall define this approach with reference to distinctions between

modernism and postmodernism. Duchamp also anticipates the
poststructuralist shift of emphasis away from the producer and text,
and onto the reader and text (or, in this case, the viewer). I shall draw
attention to this not only by looking at how the artwork signifies but
also the way in which Duchamp creates a mise en abyme by
incorporating the viewer’s gaze into the artwork and which operates
simultaneously as both a modernist strategy of self-referentiality and a
postmodernist subversion of the status of the artwork. I will
demonstrate how the apparent hermetic autonomy of Le Grand Verre
is dispersed and disseminated through its connection with Duchamp’s
previous work and through the disruptive element of language, which
erupts with subversive force in the visual plane.
In introducing autobiographical theory, I shall open up pers-
pectives upon the nature of the desire that propels an autobiographical
text, Lejeune’s theory of le pacte autobiographique and the way in
which all self-representation is an intersubjective encounter. I begin
by situating the tradition of self-portraiture within a contemporary art-
historical perspective and expanding upon my methodology.

Contextualizing Duchamp: Methodology and Definitions

The historical construction of the artist as genius is perpetuated
through the tradition of self-portraiture. The use of self-portraiture is a
culturally defined and defining practice and artists have produced
concepts of themselves as culturally dominant by employing certain
visual tropes. These tropes have ranged from portraits of the artist as
Christ to representations of the clothed male artist and his nude female
model, composed so as to define the status of the male artist as a
unique creative individual and to ensure the authenticity of his vision.
The self-portrait is a mediation of the self in social signification. Like
the tests of historical verisimilitude, which pervade readings of
autobiography, self-portraits have been subject to “tests” of truth or
accuracy. The “truth” of both self-portraiture and autobiography
traditionally lies in the ability of the work to reveal the nature of the
creative personality through the image.
Psychobiographical readings of self-portraits, like psycho-
analytic readings of autobiography, are intended to explain the
psychology of the creative individual. However, in the modernist logic
that subtends much recent art history, the object is now often seen to
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 17

stand in for the author in an exchange of identities. Art history

discourse assumes a “Duchamp” as reflected through or represented in
his works. In so far as the figure of the artist is condensed to an
authorial label, the artist’s significance is often seen to be identical to
the significance of his work. Duchamp’s significance is frequently
conflated with the significance of his work, particularly the
readymades, in relation to postmodernism. As mass-produced objects
rendered art only by reference to their authorizing function, the
readymades become Duchamp as he is recognized in contemporary
culture – and come to signify postmodernism.
I define postmodernism in this context as the radical other that
distinguishes itself in opposition to the modernism of Greenberg:
modernism that promoted an art that was formally pure and
autonomous in relation to the degradation of popular culture and of
antiformalist, explicitly political art, such as Dada. Greenberg’s essay
of 1939, Avant-Garde and Kitsch, opposes mass culture to
antibourgeois high art and calls for an art of increasing purity and
flatness that would be ensured by the artist’s disinterest in political
concerns. The rigidity of Greenberg’s modernism is affirmed in his
infamous lecture of 1961, Modernist Painting: “The essence of
Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of
a discipline to criticize the discipline itself – not in order to subvert it,
but to entrench it more fully in its area of competence” (Greenberg,
1992; 308). Through the voice of the critic, art thus searches for its
origins, yet is fully evident to itself, existing in a self-conscious
relation to its own past.
Modernist art history institutionalized the author as the basis
for aesthetic value. Such a discourse suppressed inconsistency and
difference of meaning in the figure of the author in order to ensure
interpretative closure. If objects can be identified with intentional
subjects, they can be unified into a meaningful narrative that fits into a
larger teleological history. Greenbergian modernism has now become
the outmoded “other” against which postmodernism defines itself as
“new” and Duchamp, inculpated by Greenberg, is championed by
postmodernism in his perceived rejection of modernism. In discourses
of postmodernism, art is seen to become postmodern precisely when it
is argued to be destabilizing the definitions of artistic purity and
authority associated with Greenbergian modernism. Postmodernist
18 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

discourse advocates an end to a belief in coherence and continuity and

an end to the metaphysic of narrative closure.
La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même or Le
Grand Verre is a multimedia work that combines oil, varnish, lead
foil, wire and dust on glass mounted between two glass panels.
Divided into two regions and separated by three fins of glass that are
perpendicular to the plane of the work, they are described by
Duchamp as belonging respectively to the Bride and the Bachelors.
This work has been subject to innumerable art historical and critical
discourses: psychoanalytic readings by Arturo Schwarz, expository
accounts by John Golding and Richard Hamilton, postmodern
appropriation by Jean-François Lyotard and Dalia Judowitz and
feminist interpretation by Amelia Jones. The uniformity of such
critical analyses lies in their conflation of the work with the person of
the artist, seeking to justify this interpretation within the life of the
artist. I propose a critical methodology, which combines the semiotic
theory of Roland Barthes with an awareness of recent
autobiographical theory. I am interested in the interaction of this
theory with Barthes’s inquiry into how art functions and
communicates through its encounters with different spectators. As I
have indicated in the introduction, Barthes’s reading of abstract art is
Peircean in his fascination for the subjective traces of the artist in the
work, although he also allows for a category of sensation that
transcends the limits imposed by visible particularities. I wish to build
upon the work of critics such as Bryson and Lyotard who have opened
up a new approach to visual art that combines these semiotic theories
and that explores the nature of aesthetic reception by investigating
how works of art are intelligible to those who view them.
Recent critics of autobiography have sought to locate
autobiographical truth not in the product but in the process of writing.
Philippe Lejeune observes “écrire son histoire, c’est essayer de se
construire, bien plus qu’essayer de se connaître” (Lejeune, 1971; 84).
Within the context of autobiography as activity and process, critics
such as Lejeune and Sheringham refer to a quest for form, which acts
as a structuring force in the elaboration of the autobiographical text.
This form does not construct a stable mirror image of the self, which
can be exported from text to life, but a profusion of signs and traces of
selfhood, which are generated as the autobiographer “processes”
memories. The autobiographical text is now seen not as the reflection
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 19

of existing images but for its capacity to dispel fixity as it engenders a

sequence of provisional recognitions. Lejeune’s concept of the pacte
autobiographique places the emphasis of autobiography upon the
énonciation, the act of narration, to the interaction of the textual I and
its extra-textual counterpart. Lejeune’s definition locates autobio-
graphy within textual reference rather than textual resemblance.
In his critique of the authorial personality, Barthes draws
upon Benveniste’s linguistics to illustrate how the self or subjectivity
is held to be constituted in the exercise of language; outside language
there is no self to express. Barthes notes that even autobiography
cannot now assert a substantial identity between the je of the writer at
the moment of utterance and the past self s/he claims to reveal to the
reader. The autobiographical first-person pronoun, seeking to link past
and present, can only refer to the speaker at the moment of
énonciation and this founds his/her statement about the past on the
present act of uttering. At the end of an article published two years
after L’Autobiographie en France, Lejeune renounces his previous
attempts to find a definition of autobiography that would be coherent
and exhaustive. Having decided that autobiography is as much a mode
of reading as a mode of writing, he looks instead to a history of
autobiography that would be the history of the way in which
autobiography is read. His notion of a contractual genre dependent
upon codes of transmission and reception relocates the problematics
of autobiography as genre as an interaction between reader and text.
Self and self-image can never coincide in representation. Self-
representation is the effect of a constructed similarity between identity
and language (or image), an attempt to fix the flux of experience and
to ground it in a single subjectivity. But self-representation in art
galvanizes an act of recognition that is a production, rather than a
perception, of meaning. Viewing is an activity of transforming the
material of paintings into meanings, and that transformation is
perpetual: nothing can arrest it.
The non-figurative nature of Le Grand Verre allows me to
approach it through a poststructuralist informed perspective of
autobiographical theory that allows for the production of subjective
meaning within the work itself. In place of the closure of meaning, the
polysemous nature of signs implies the free play of interpretation.
However, as Barthes writes in La Sagesse de l’Art, meaning sticks to
man:
20 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

Quand bien même veut-il créer du non-sens ou du hors-sens,

il finit par produire le sens même du non-sens ou du hors-sens [...] Si
tant d’hommes (à cause de différences de culture) ont l’impression de
“ne rien comprendre” devant une toile, c’est qu’ils veulent du sens, et
que la toile (pensent-ils) ne leur en donne pas (Barthes, 1982; 169).

Therefore the viewer continually looks for signs within the artwork
that will refer to some external referent. As I will demonstrate, the
autobiographical nature of Le Grand Verre can only be sought within
the context of the work’s evolution and the way in which Duchamp
uses the piece to confront and dissolve the hierarchic relations
between object and subject, artist and viewer.

Le Grand Verre

Traditionally, portraiture assumes that identity is inseparable

from the sense of presence achieved through mimesis; that is, the
signifier (the portrait) is conflated both with the referent (the sitter)
and the signified (the sitter’s identity). But if identity and body are
opposed, because an external likeness no longer guarantees the
expression of an originary identity, this problematizes the way in
which the portrayed body can re-present the sitter’s identity, however
this may be defined. In order to locate Le Grand Verre within the
sphere of self-portraiture, according to Lejeune’s concept of auto-
biography as a contractual genre, a viewer must look for indications,
explicit or implicit, that the author, narrator and protagonist are one
and the same. Duchamp complicates the viewer’s desire to identify the
authorial personality by subverting this traditional mimetic paradigm
of self-portraiture.
Duchamp’s life has, as far as possible, been well documented,
most recently in a biography by Alice Goldfarb Marquis. Duchamp
was an elusive personality who valued solitude and privacy and to
confound the public’s appetite for personal detail, he often issued
contradictory and confusing statements about his life and art. Through
his work, his interventions into the public arena and the projection of
an enigmatic personality, Duchamp constantly manipulated the
authoritative role attributed to the creative artist. He subverted the
certainty of his artistic status by posing as a feminine author (Rrose
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 21

Sélavy1) and by reconfiguring his authorship through various

signatory pseudonyms. Le Grand Verre, upon which Duchamp
worked between 1915 and 1923, when he declared it to be definitively
unfinished, is widely acknowledged as his greatest work and
furthermore as one of the most influential, yet most esoteric, works of
the twentieth century. Arturo Schwarz has interpreted Le Grand Verre
as the story of the incestuous love that Duchamp harboured for his
sister Suzanne, while other psychoanalytic interpretations have
indicated a fear of castration or a desire for androgyny. Duchamp
acknowledged these readings but chose neither to confirm nor negate
them, remarking astutely: “Chacun d’eux donne à son interprétation sa
note particulière, qui n’est pas forcément fausse, ni vraie, qui est
intéressante, mais seulement intéressant en considérant l’homme qui a
écrit cette interprétation, comme toujours ailleurs” (Duchamp, 1967;
70).
Duchamp remained a bachelor for most of his life, finally
marrying at the age of sixty-three. Although he maintained close
friendships with women all his life, notably with Katherine Dreier,
Mary Reynolds and Peggy Guggenheim, according to the testimony of
the women, these were not sexually motivated relationships. Mary
Reynolds, his long-term “mistress” said, towards the end of her life:
“Marcel is the only person I ever met who was not people. He could
be in a room with me and I still felt alone” (Tomkins, 1997; 376). The
longitude of their relationship came about through a mutual respect for
each other’s solitude. Many of Duchamp’s contemporaries admired
him for his embodiment of the Baudelairean ideal of the artist-flâneur,
a dandy, an observer of, rather than a participant in society. Tomkins
observes that, although Duchamp betrayed no homosexual
inclinations: “There is much evidence to suggest, however, that his
enormous personal charm derived in no small part from an ability to
reconcile, without apparent conflict, the male and female aspects of
his complex personality” (ibid; 13).
The bride in Le Grand Verre is a forerunner of Duchamp’s
female alias, Rrose Sélavy. Lyotard has identified both the figure of
Duchamp and Rrose in the bride of Le Grand Verre, the bride being
stripped bare, and in the naked figure of Etant Donnés (a late work I

1
This pseudonym was taken up by subsequent writers and artists, notably Robert
Desnos, Corps et Biens.
22 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

shall refer to in a further section), the stripped bride. Duchamp’s

adoption of a female identity was a radically subversive gesture in the
1920’s and one that he characteristically played down:

J’ai voulu [...] changer d’identité et la première idée qui

m’est venue c’est de prendre un nom juif [...] Je n’ai pas trouvé de
nom juif qui me plaise [...] et tout d’un coup j’ai eu une idée:
pourquoi ne pas changer de sexe! (Duchamp, 1967; 111).

Duchamp’s adoption of this female identity indicates a desire to cross

gender barriers, and, as we will see, it forms an important part of the
complicated motifs of Le Grand Verre. The work’s narrative, as
revealed by the notes of La Boîte Verte,2 is one of frustrated sexual
longing that reveals the infinite interplay of eroticism and the elusive
object of desire. Whether a viewer chooses to interpret this as
revelatory of Duchamp’s own sexual identity, or as a metaphor for his
continual artistic struggle, it forms an integral part of the intimate self-
portrait that is Le Grand Verre.
Le Grand Verre is self-representation in so far as it embodies
and re-presents Duchamp’s artistic career up until the conception of
the work and during the period he was working on it. The problem of
the interpretation of self-presentation introduces a dichotomy: is the
work autobiographical in so far as it represents lived experience, or in
so far as it is the re-presentation of artistic personae? For Duchamp,
there was no dichotomy between art and life. In proposing a
conceptual, rather than a retinal art, he disrupted the conventional
collaboration between the cause and effect in art: a re-presentation of
an original experience. Duchamp strove for an art which should not
only represent an object but be in itself, an idea, even as the object
represented might not be actual in the phenomenal sense but rather as
a mental image. Hence his insistence on La Boîte Verte as the
necessary companion to Le Grand Verre; the ideas were as important,
if not more important, than the visual realization. Duchamp was
convinced that works of art are not imitations of the merely actual but
are realities in themselves, and as realities, they are not only objects
within the physical world but also objects in and of consciousness
(cervellités, he termed them). Duchamp’s art abolished represent-
ational space and the concept of the picture as something remote from

2
The notes that accompanied the evolution and presentation of Le Grand Verre.
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 23

lived experience. For example, he renounces the sources of his

pictorial constructions in Le Grand Verre and thereby neither re-
presents, interprets nor transforms the objects – they become different
objects, in kind as well as in intention. Duchamp’s position therefore
undermines the dichotomy of the problem of self-presentation. He is
not attempting to re-present lived experience but rather to construct it
as a reality within his work. Duchamp’s subjective experience is
constituted by the dynamic, dispersed and heterogeneous components
of Le Grand Verre.

The Role of the Spectator

Central to postmodern constructions of Duchamp are his

statements concerning the role of the viewer in establishing the
meaning of the work of art, statements that perpetuate Duchamp’s role
as radically subverting the modernist notion that the art object
contains or transparently expresses the intentions of the maker.
Duchamp said about interpretation:

Je crois beaucoup au côté “médium” de l’artiste. L’artiste fait

quelque chose, un jour, il est reconnu par l’intervention du public,
l’intervention du spectateur; il passe ainsi plus tard à la postérité. On ne
peut pas supprimer cela puisqu’en somme c’est un produit à deux pôles;
il y a le pôle de celui qui fait une oeuvre et le pôle de celui qui la
regarde. Je donne à celui qui la regarde autant d’importance qu’à celui
qui la fait (Duchamp, 1967; 122).

Paradoxically, the contemporary viewer depends upon

Duchamp’s authority to confirm the notion that he criticizes authority,
citing his own statements about the dependence of the artist on his
audience and the way in which authorial identity is produced through
the art-work as this work is interpreted by an audience: “Je considère
que si un monsieur […] habitait au coeur de l’Afrique et qu’il fasse
tous les jours des tableaux extraordinaires, sans que personne ne les
voie, il n’existerait pas. Autrement dit, l’artiste n’existe que si on le
connaît” (Duchamp, 1967; 122). Just as Duchamp subverted ideas of
authorship, he also experimented with strategies designed to
manipulate public perception.
Despite its visual transparency, or perhaps because of it, Le
Grand Verre continues to resist definitive critical appropriation. When
24 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

challenged by Pierre Cabanne to provide his own interpretation of Le

Grand Verre, Duchamp replied:

Je n’en ai pas parce que je l’ai fait sans avoir d’idée. C’étaient
des choses qui venaient, au fur et à mesure. L’idée d’ensemble, c’était
purement et simplement l’exécution, plus des descriptions genre
Catalogue des armes de Saint-Etienne sur chaque partie. C’était un
renoncement à toute esthétique, dans le sens ordinaire du mot. Ne pas
faire un manifeste de peinture nouvelle de plus (Duchamp, 1967; 70).

This statement demonstrates, to some extent, Duchamp’s self-

mythification. In his reluctance to provide any explanation of his work
lies a self-conscious awareness of the myth of the enigmatic Romantic
artist.
The legacy of Dada provided Duchamp with a subtext in the
extent to which chance plays a role in the development or completion
of a work of art; a phenomenon that Breton was soon to term “le
hasard objectif.” In the case of Le Grand Verre, this was seen to occur
as the glass was shattered in transit following its first public
appearance at the International Exhibition of Modern Art at the
Brooklyn Museum in 1926. Duchamp was later to say about the
incident: “C’est beaucoup mieux avec les cassures, cent fois mieux.
C’est le destin des choses” (Duchamp, 1967; 132). Duchamp’s
reluctance to provide an interpretation of his own work should not be
understood as a refusal or as a sign of the work’s intelligibility.
Rather, Duchamp’s statement repositions the significance of this work
as a process.
As early as 1846, Eugène Chevreul mentioned the space for
the spectator that was central to the nature of abstract art.3 Chevreul
emphasizes the cultural position of the analyst within the analysis of
an image that is part of the generation of meaning. The viewing-
subject brings to the image his/her own cultural heritage thereby
negating the possibility of any predetermined meaning. A sign-event,
or the production of meaning, is not a one-sided structure. Address,
the ways in which a viewer is invited to participate in the
representation, is, perhaps, the most relevant aspect of a semiotics of
subjectivity. Duchamp claimed: “le chef-d’oeuvre en question est
déclaré en dernier ressort par le spectateur. C’est le regardeur qui fait
3
Chevreul, Théorie des effets optiques que présentent les étoffes de soie, Paris, Firmin
Didot frères, 1846.
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 25

les musées” (Duchamp, 1967; 70). Barthes observes that:

“l’esthétique, comme discipline, pourrait être cette science qui étudie,
non l’oeuvre en soi, mais l’oeuvre telle que le spectateur, ou le lecteur,
la fait parler en lui-même: une typologie des discours, en quelque
sorte” (Barthes, 1982; 176). Semiology reveals that the picture is
neither a real object nor an imaginary object. The identity of what is
represented is ceaselessly deferred, the signified is always displaced
and the analysis is endless but this infinity of language, or this
“leakage,” as Barthes calls it, is precisely the picture’s system. The
image is not the expression of a code but the variation of a work of
codification: it is not the repository of a system but the generation of
systems. In an analogous manner, autobiography, or autobiographical
selfhood, might be envisaged as a leakage of subjectivity into art
through the medium of style. The self disclosed in autobiography is
not only that of the creator in the present act of creation but that which
through the “intentional act” of autobiography involves a mode of
consciousness which seeks to apprehend, in the moment of creation,
the subjectivity of the creator.

Mirroring Marcel

The autobiographical intention (pace Lejeune) or the extent to

which Le Grand Verre is self-representation is revealed in a
preliminary drawing for the piece. This drawing labels the upper
portion of Le Grand Verre as MARiée and the lower portion as
CELibataires. The signature, evidence of the authorial body split in
two, has the two senses, male and female. Duchamp’s presence in the
work, promised to the viewer through the signature, is scattered and
deferred. This difference or separation, in Lacanian terms, echoes the
split that occurs when the symbolic ruptures the imaginary unity
within the self – a separation that marks the repression of desire and
the subject’s recognition of sexual otherness. By reactivating this split,
Duchamp marks the moment of the determination of sexual difference
as potentially reversible. Duchamp undermines the authority of the
authorial signature by indicating the instability of a single coherent
authorial identity. Duchamp’s masculine identity, like that of his
female alias – Rrose – is continually marked by the artist as a
construct.
26 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

Duchamp’s multiple authorial I’s indicate the continual

shifting of identities in his oeuvre and in his self-presentation in the
public arena, where he identifies not only with the imaged “woman”
but with various other aliases, including Dee, Totor, Slim Pickens,
Marcel Douxami, George W. Welch and R. Mutt. Marcel consequently
becomes just another alias, marking identity itself as contingent. The
absence of the “real” making subject represses the viewer’s desire to
identify with the authorial I believed to exist in the work. When
viewed along with his other authorial strategies, Duchamp’s adoption
of femininity can be seen to be exposing the instability of gender as a
continually shifting and socially constructed role. His self-
construction as a feminine subject (an object of his own making)
exposes the masquerade involved in every act of self-presentation.
Le Grand Verre can be interpreted within a framework of
interconnected traditions. Its primary encounter with traditional self-
portraiture lies in the internal rules of that genre which require the use
of the mirror. On this model, it is expected that artists will produce
accurate renderings of their features based on their reflection in the
mirror. The reflection itself represents a second stage in self-portrait
production between the artist as the subject and the self-portrait as an
objective imitation. Many of Duchamp’s notes refer to the function of
Le Grand Verre as mirror: the mirror of a fourth dimension. He
writes: “Le continu à 4 dim. est essentiellement le miroir du continu à
3 dim” (Duchamp, 1975; 130). However, reflected space is
homogeneous to the space that it reflects; the specular operation is one
that replicates and makes identical. Duchamp instead regards the
mirror not as a duplicating machine but as a duplicitous machine.
Lyotard observes how the mirror-like function of Le Grand Verre
extends beyond the positioning of the viewer to the positioning of its
own content. He suggests that Le Grand Verre is a mirror with two
faces: “Les deux espaces virtuels se réfléchissent donc (mariés), mais
leur incongruence est forte (célibataires) […]. Il y a entre eux la même
paroi qui conjoint et disjoint les discours antithétiques” (Lyotard,
1977; 56).
The mirror as a metaphor for painting is a significant one.
Conventionally, mirror images are read as accurate visual reflections
of real objects so the way that the mirror mimetically reproduces these
images is a model for the rules of aesthetic naturalism. According to
these rules, the painting should conform to the logic of the mirror and
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 27

it succeeds or fails in the extent to which it mirrors the likeness of the

world. The power of painting to simulate reality is associated with the
privilege of sight over the other senses in western philosophical
discourses on knowledge. Representation is inextricably linked to the
power of knowledge.
In addition to the issue of likeness, the mirror also acts as a
metaphor for framing images. In the aesthetic realm, as in the
philosophical, the frame constructs the image or the knowledge. The
frame places certain material into the centre of discourse and
marginalizes others. Embedding the mirror within the text produces an
effect of mise en abyme; a process of infinite regression that explodes
the frame and decentres the text.4
The notion of the mirror furthermore pertains to the definition
of the self. In psychoanalytic theory, it is through the Lacanian stade
du miroir that the infant’s undifferentiated psyche becomes part of the
social fabric and acquires its identity as an individual subject or self.
The mirror stage is both an observed phenomenon of infantile
development and, significantly, acts as a metaphor for the construction
of the subject. The self is constituted as a whole in opposition to
others in order to make sense of language and the society into which it
is thrust. The privilege of sight, as an “objective” sense through which
the world can be “objectively” understood, makes the logic of the
mirror a cultural norm (see also chapter 3, page 81).
Duchamp was fascinated with the technical breakthroughs in
the visual sphere, such as the stereoscope and devices of three-
dimensional illusion. He mastered the techniques of anamorphic
perspective (forgotten for three centuries) and drew upon, most
notably in Nu Descendant l’Escalier, the chronophotographic experi-
ments of Muybridge and Marey. In distancing his work from that of
other artists, Duchamp rejected the “frisson rétinien” of conventional
art and, in its place he put an art that self-consciously undermined the
primacy of visual form itself. Duchamp’s critique of the fetishism of
sight provides an important counter-example to the Greenbergian
construction of modernism. He drew on many non-visual sources,
which might be broadly divided into literary and psychological. The
two writers whom he found inspirational, Jean-Pierre Brisset and

4
For further discussion, see L. Dällenbach, Le récit spéculaire: Essai sur la mise en
abyme.
28 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

Raymond Roussel, worked with the power of puns and anagrams,

games that undermined the purely communicative function of
language. Le Grand Verre has sometimes been interpreted as a
transposition of their method into a visual register. Stressing the
complicated relation between titles and works and playing with the
artist’s name and identity, Duchamp problematized not only the
representations of sensations (retinal art) but also that of ideas. His
disdain for pure opticality appeared not only in his introduction of
linguistic frames and mediations but also in his preoccupation with the
ways in which the desiring body enters the pictorial landscape.
The concept of ocular desire as described by Bryson, “the life
of vision is one of endless wanderlust, and in its carnal form the eye is
nothing but desire” (Bryson, 1984; 209) is complicated in Duchamp’s
work by unexpected contradictions. For example, in Nu Descendant,
the idealized nude of tradition is forced from her pedestal and down
the staircase where she could be expected to arouse more explicitly
erotic responses. But her form, far from being an object of desire, is
decomposed and androgynous; the painting mocks the viewer’s
attempt to derive direct sensual pleasure from her contemplation. The
ocular desire Duchamp introduced into his work was never that of an
erotic stimulation that produced satisfaction; he was the master of the
unfinished work, the masturbatory gesture of repetition or anti-
cipation.
In Nu Descendant, Duchamp wanted to create “une image
statique du mouvement.” He acknowledged that “au fond, le
mouvement c’est l’oeil du spectateur qui l’incorpore au tableau”
(Duchamp, 1967; 51). Already, the spectator’s active participation in
the generation of meaning is demanded. In Le Grand Verre, Duchamp
seeks to incorporate both the viewer’s eye and the viewer’s intellect
seemingly to complete another transition: the depiction of physical
movement has become the depiction of movement from one
psychological state to another, from bride to wife.

Production of Le Grand Verre and the Deferral of Origin

Duchamp resisted the formation of a single artistic persona by

resisting any assimilation into groups or movements. He remained
determinedly on the periphery of Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism
and his work, although revealing at times similar preoccupations to
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 29

those of his contemporaries is always marked by a difference both in

style and conception. The activity celebrated in La Boîte Verte falls
within the chronological limits of the Dada movement, which in New
York was announced by Duchamp’s activities later than in Europe, in
1915, and can be thought to have ended when he left Le Grand Verre
unfinished in 1923.
Thematically, his work often anticipates that of the Surrealists
in its concern with the desires and repressions of a divided self. For
the Surrealists, the technique of écriture automatique was understood
as revealing the irreducible heterogeneity within the self. This view
was informed by their reading of psychoanalysis that claimed that
otherness is inscribed within the self: the subject is not identical with
itself but is the dialectic of self and Other (see also chapter 2, page
53). The Surrealist painters attempted to find a visual language for the
fears and fantasies of the inner self, which was to work through the
symbolism and association of dream imagery. Artists such as Ernst
and Miró developed the method of frottage that was the plastic
equivalent of écriture automatique. However, Duchamp sought to
move beyond the notion of self-expression and stated his intention to
begin by eliminating la patte of painting.
Several critics, notably John Golding, have observed how the
upper and lower regions of Le Grand Verre represent the summation
of Duchamp’s two divergent artistic practises. The Bride region has its
origins in Duchamp’s painting from his earliest sketches, to La Mariée
of 1912. The Bachelor region has closer affinities with Duchamp’s
production of readymades. Self-representation operates at the
intersection of personal and collective experience. Autobiography
suggests the idea of connections, the perception of patterns and
linkages in the disparateness of past experience. There is an evident
temptation to read a teleological pattern of causality into the evolution
of Le Grand Verre yet the process by which the work came into being
negates the very notion of origin.
While Le Grand Verre radically breaks with previous pictorial
traditions, the irony is that Duchamp reproduces previous works,
thereby defining Le Grand Verre, as I have remarked, as a
compendium of his past. Both the Bachelor and the Bride regions are
generated as reflections and projections of his previous pictorial
works. Le Grand Verre consequently emerges as a corpus whose
identity is defined through reproduction. For Duchamp, the process by
30 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

which Le Grand Verre came into being was as significant as its

iconographic content. The laborious manner in which he chose to
reproduce his previous works emphasizes the uniqueness of the work
in construction and problematizes the notion of a locatable origin. The
work is formed through a constant interplay with its past and present
environment.
The Bride, as a pictorial referent, is undermined by her literal
transposition onto the glass. La Mariée was Duchamp’s final painting
in his Munich series (1911-1912) and still reveals Duchamp’s interest
in Cubism. La Mariée of the painting has a semblance of anatomical
legibility: shoulder, arm and breast fall into place and allow the viewer
to reconstruct the empty armature of the head. Duchamp attempted to
transfer the painted bride onto glass by projecting a negative onto the
surface of the glass treated with a photosensitive emulsion. When this
technique failed to develop, he used lead wire to draw the silhouette
which he painted in by using gradations of black and white in order to
simulate a photograph. The use of such strategies to reproduce the
bride, not in her original colours but as a black and white photograph,
suggests that the iconographic content of the image was less important
to Duchamp than the projection of the material and technical
conditions of its production as reproduction.
So Duchamp deploys techniques of delay and reproduction
not only to challenge the generic conventions of art but also in order
to undermine the notion of origin. In the painting La Mariée, the sex
cylinder dominates the centre of the composition, attached to the
figure’s head (a device which foreshadows the displacement of the
sexual organs in Surrealist art5). The implication that sexual fantasies
are a form of intellectual as well as physical activity is explored in
greater depth in Le Grand Verre. Here, the “sex” cylinder is replaced
by a reservoir of love gasoline, which is distributed to the motor.
According to La Boîte Verte, the motor emits artificial sparks which
bring about the Bride’s threefold blossoming or stripping that is
represented by the three draft pistons in the cinematic cloud.
Duchamp’s literal reproduction of the pictorial Bride on glass reduces
her to a readymade, one whose mechanical existence is simulated by
her appearance as a photograph or engraving. The concept of pictorial

5
The theme of mechanized sexual organs was also pursued in the paintings of
Picabia, whose anarchistic humour was a significant influence on Duchamp. See, for
example, his painting Je Revois en Souvenir Ma Chère Udnie of 1914.
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 31

uniqueness is undermined as the reproduction of the Bride presents

her not as a unique but as a multiple entity.
Duchamp’s allusions to mechanical reproduction, including
engraving, photography and cinema, constitute both the subject matter
and metaphorical subtext of the notes in La Boîte Verte. He refers to
the Bride’s cloud-like cinematic blossoming:

Se greffant sur l’arbre-type – l’épanouissement cinématique

(commandé par la mise à nu électrique). Cet épanouissement
cinématique est la partie la p. importante du tableau
(graphiquement comme surface). Il est, en général, l’auréole de la
mariée, l’ensemble de ses vibrations splendides: graphiquement, il
n’est pas question de symboliser par une peinture exaltée ce terme
bienheureux – désir de la mariée; seulement plus claire, dans tout
cet épanouissement, la peinture sera un inventaire des éléments de
cet épanouissement, éléments de la vie sexuelle imaginée par elle
mariée-désirante (Duchamp, 1975; 63).

Duchamp’s graphic rendering of this épanouissement is literal to the

extent that it is represented by the three draft pistons.
The Piston de courant d’air of 1914 is a photograph of a
plane of square gauze or netting material in front of an open window
that assumes different shapes when moved about by draughts of air.
Duchamp explained:

I wanted to register the changes in the surface of that square, and

use in my Glass the curves of the lines distorted by the wind. So I
used a gauze, which has natural straight lines. When at rest, the
gauze was perfectly square – like a chessboard – and the lines
perfectly straight – as in the case of graph paper.6

Embedding allusions both to chess and chance, Piston de courant

d’air contextualizes chance events as a series of imprints that
undermine pictorial modes of production. The notion of chance that
subtends the mechanical operations of the Bride is further revealed by
the Nine Shots, a group of nine holes drilled into the glass. Using a
match dipped in paint and a toy cannon, Duchamp aimed shots at a
target point that corresponded to the vanishing point (in perspective),

6
Letter of 21 May, 1915; reprinted in Gough-Cooper, Ephemerides on and about
Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Selavy, 1887 – 1968.
32 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

leading each time (the process was repeated three times) to generating
three points.
The strategies of reproduction deployed in the Bride region
are also pursued in the lower half of Le Grand Verre. Duchamp
reproduces Broyeuse de chocolat, no.2, Témoins oculistes and Trois
stoppages-étalon. The Tamis, or parasols, resemble cones used in
seventeenth-century treatises on perspective and anamorphic imagery,
where their function was either to construct or correct visual
distortion. In La Boîte Verte, the Tamis are described as “une image
renversée de la porosité” a pun on the dust that was allowed to
accumulate on Le Grand Verre for a period of several months before
being carefully graded in concentration and fixed with varnish. The
usual purpose of a sieve (le tamis) is here inverted in shape and
function, allowing the dust to settle. According to Duchamp, the dust
was to be a kind of colour, suggesting that this miniature relief
undermines the primacy of the colour of liquid paint. Colour in this
context emerges as a projection of time or a temporal delay.
The Témoins oculistes were created by multiplying three
times a ready-made oculist chart and placing them one above the
other. The rings were reproduced by working in the negative, on the
reverse side of the glass, through a laborious process of scraping away
excess silver. The transposition of the commercial eye charts emerge
as mechanisms of projection, which instead of mirroring external
reality, reflect the very mechanisms of projection that structure the
glass, connecting, like a mirror, the upper and lower regions.
Duchamp describes this section:

Sculpture de gouttes (points) que forme l’éclaboussure après

avoir été éblouie à travers les tableaux oculistes, chaque goutte
servant de point et renvoyée miroiriquement dans la partie haute
du verre en rencontre avec les 9 tirés =/ Renvoi miroirique
(Duchamp, 1975; 93).

Duchamp thus presents Le Grand Verre as a folding mirror

that reflects back upon itself, a looking glass where the viewer’s gaze
is already represented within the work. Duchamp’s naming of the
témoins oculistes also exemplifies the way in which his punning use
of language complicates the signifying process (does étalon refer to a
measure or the reproductive fertility of a stallion?). The word témoin
in this context signifies on different levels (evoking witnesses at a
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 33

wedding; the témoin oculaire who is an eye-witness, a realistic

observer) and Duchamp multiplies possible meanings through the
creation of a new term, témoin oculiste, to suggest, perhaps, the
mechanization of sex and representation.
Thierry de Duve interprets the role of the Témoins oculistes as
a metaphor for the public reception of Le Grand Verre:

They are simultaneously metaphors of the bachelors and the

physician of their gaze [...] the ocular witnesses focus the gaze of
the bachelors and dazzle it into a sculpture of drops that will be
projected via mirrorical return in the region of the nine shots
where it will rejoin, in a necessarily missed encounter, the bride’s
desire. Duchamp imagines the encounter of the object and the
public in the manner of this missed encounter [...] The manner in
which the ocular witnesses are depicted thus illustrates the manner
in which the real encounter of work and viewers is represented
according to Duchamp (de Duve, 1996; 402).

However, the Témoins oculistes represent not only the viewer’s self-
reflective gaze but also that of the introspective creator. By
strategically redeploying the notion of painting through reproduction,
Duchamp redefines both the meaning of art as product, and the artist
as a unique producer. The creative act is redefined as an act of
dispossession, one that delivers the artist from the obligation of
perpetuating the conventions of traditional painting, as well as
perpetrating the myth of his or her own identity. Duchamp reproduces
himself by producing replicas of his own oeuvre. Duchamp as author
is distanced from the original Duchampian objects.

Reproduction or Repetition?

Barthes writes about repetition as a feature of culture with

respect to the mechanical processes of reproduction exploited by the
Pop Artists. Warhol’s images of Marilyn freeze the star in her image
as star. This is an imaginary status as the star’s being is the icon: in
this instance, repetition becomes depersonalization. In Pop Art,
repetition intends the destruction of art but also proposes another
conception of the human subject. Barthes concludes: “la répétition
ouvre accès, en effet, à une temporalité différente” (Barthes, 1982;
182). For Duchamp, in the same way, repetition generates temporality
rather than identity. Duration, in this sense, is not defined linearly,
34 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

since the past and future coexist. In La Boîte Verte, Duchamp refers to
Nietzsche’s notion of the “eternal Return” to demonstrate that all
appearance is re-presentation, that is, a return to appearance.
Duchamp’s technique of reproduction may be considered as an
instance of the “eternal Return” to the extent that his concept of art is
that of a field of readymades. As a reassemblage that reproduces
Duchamp’s previous pictorial works on glass, Le Grand Verre
manifests the readymade character of pictorial representation.
Seeking to distance himself from art as a form of expression
and refusing the privileged role of the artist, Duchamp discovered
through mechanical reproduction new ways of envisaging creativity.
Mechanical reproduction involves forms of impression whose
multiple character challenges both the uniqueness of the artist and the
unity of the work of art. Walter Benjamin’s analysis of art in the age
of mechanical reproduction argues that for the first time in history,
mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitic
dependence on ritual and allows it to be rooted in a democratic
culture. Implicit in this argument is Benjamin’s concern about the
dialectic inherent in art “for art’s sake”: art can be a resistance to
political doctrine and the kitsch of the culture industry, or it can be a
form of collusion with the forces of oppression and control.
For Benjamin, mechanical reproducibility offers a democratic
corrective to the unique value which bourgeois society accords to the
“authentic” work of art. By appropriating the logic of the multiple,
Duchamp valorized the notion of reproduction as a form of
production, one that brings together the artistic, social and economic
realms. Le Grand Verre has itself been reproduced, notably by
Richard Hamilton in 1965, a copy that was supervised and approved
by Duchamp. Ironically, the deliberate techniques of reproduction
involved in such a reconstruction emphasize the unrepeatable gestures
or the traces of chance that contributed to the realization of the
“original.” Thus the reconstruction of Le Grand Verre also highlights
the extent to which Duchamp employed the Surrealist concept of le
hasard, and how this can be seen to engage with the artist’s
unconscious, in contrast with the depersonalization of mechanical
reproduction. For example, the random firing of matches from a toy
cannon clashes with the choice of the analytic vanishing point as
target; the use of the standard oculist’s chart with its connotations of
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 35

scientific precision is at odds with the fallibility of the art of hand

engraving.
The iconography of Le Grand Verre represents metaphors for
the subject’s identity rather than its totality. The images never accede
to autonomy as centres of interest before being assimilated by the
over-arching narrative provided by La Boîte Verte. By superimposing
a narrative upon his work, Duchamp reinforces rather than closes the
divisions between the creating self and the past self. Rather than
retrieving a past identity, he seeks to represent the differences,
uncertainty and instability integral to the process of self-invention.
Similarly, Le Grand Verre reflects neither the rejection nor the
assimilation of artistic traditions, but rather, makes visible the
conditions of the possibility of art through the redefinition of pictorial
conditions.

A Gendered Identity

Duchamp’s identity, scattered and deferred in the hermetic

symbolism of Le Grand Verre, loses its foundation in the
heterogeneity of the work. Duchamp’s “autobiographical narrative”
requires the sanction of the Other. All self-representation is ultimately
dependent upon an intersubjective paradigm, a case of mutual
recognition in which the self I proclaims already acknowledges the
scrutiny of the Other. The memory inherent to autobiography is
enacted in the visual sphere as a process of returning and searching.
Written autobiography, as I will demonstrate in the following
chapters, expresses memory as a temporal process, unfolding in
present and past time. Duchamp’s interference between semiotic
systems, the visual and the verbal, allows him to scatter subjectivity in
a transit between word and image. Subjectivity is constituted not
through a narrative re-enactment of the past but in a process which
encompasses past moments of the subject’s history and his present
being in order to accommodate the disparate nature of subjectivity.
For Lyotard, the figure of Rrose is omnipresent throughout
Duchamp’s work. He remarks:

Mais les femmes sont aussi du ‘sexe’ masculin. Et la

terreur consiste entre autres, si toute la question passe par les
femmes, à identifier le principe de disfonctionnement avec la
différence des sexes. Contre cette terreur, Monsieur Marcel se
36 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

travestit en Mlle Rrose, et travaille les ’coupures.’ Passant outre

à l’importance donnée à la différence des sexes, et donc à leur
réconciliation, il va au-delà, beyond sex (Lyotard, 1977; 94).

In suggesting that Duchamp passes beyond sex, he implies that

Duchamp is an androgynous creator, who remains, nevertheless, a
coherent subject. However, Duchamp’s image is absent from Le
Grand Verre precisely because his exploration of sexual identities
leads to the decentring of a stable self. Subjectivity is disseminated
through present, as well as absent, images.
On the left-hand side of the lower region of Le Grand Verre
are the 9 moules mâlic, whose position coincides with the Bride in the
upper quadrant. Also entitled the Matrice d’Eros and forming the
Cimetière des 8 uniformes ou livrées, the nine moulds look like
dressmakers patterns that outline three-dimensional form on a two-
dimensional surface. They are gas castings, empty vessels that parody
social positions: the priest, delivery boy, gendarme, cavalryman,
policeman, undertaker, flunky, busboy and stationmaster. Absent from
this group is the artist. The artist’s presence cannot be represented as a
figurative mould as he embodies a plurality of social types and
functions as a mirror to society. The artist’s presence is represented by
the components of his creation.
Duchamp’s work activates problems of authorship and
interpretation partly through his manipulation of gendered imagery.
His fascination with the permeability of the borders of sexual
difference is demonstrated by his role-playing as Rrose Sélavy and
also by his notion of inframince, which he insisted, cannot be defined
but only exemplified. Inframince indicates sexual identity both as
difference and sameness. He wrote: “séparation inframince – mieux
que cloison, parce que indique intervalle (pris dans un sens) et cloison
(pris dans un autre sens) – séparation a les 2 sens mâle et femelle”
(Adcock, 1983; 56). The inframince separation exposes the
constructed and oscillating nature of the barrier between self and other
on which the subject depends to negotiate his/her own identity; the
interdependence of self and other, masculine and feminine.
In Le Grand Verre, the terms masculine and feminine become
erotic functions, losing any but the most oblique and metaphorical
connections to biologically gendered men and women. The bachelor
masturbates while the bride hovers above. As I have noted,
Duchamp’s theme for Le Grand Verre was that of sexual desire and
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 37

sexual frustration. Like the Retard of the subtitle (Le Grand Verre is
subtitled Retard en Verre), the bachelors were intended never to
achieve sexual fulfilment while the Bride was inspired to an auto-
erotic climax. The Bride hovers between innocence and experience,
virginity and fecundity. Her role mirrors the element of reversibility in
Duchamp’s terms: he imagined the Bride’s stripping both as an act of
consummation and as the apotheosis of virginity. Bride and Bachelors
are seemingly independent yet it is their suspension in the never-
consummated relationship that determines the identity of each in his
and her state of frustrated desire.
In La Boîte Verte, Duchamp notes:

Les moulages du gaz ainsi obtenus, entendraient les

litanies que récite le chariot, refrain de toute la machine-
célibataire, sans qu’ils pourront jamais dépasser le Masque = Ils
auraient été comme enveloppés, le long de leurs regrets, d’un
miroir qui leur aurait renvoyé leur propre complexité au point de
les halluciner assez onaniquement (Adcock, 1983; 76).

The bachelors are therefore hallucinations of masculinity. Similarly,

the female locus of the bachelor’s desire is an elaborate construct,
rather than a representation of universal “woman.” In response to the
idea that Le Grand Verre negated “woman,” Duchamp stated: “C’est
surtout une négation de la femme au sens social du mot, c’est-à-dire la
femme-épouse, la mère, les enfants, etc” (Duchamp, 1967; 133). A
masturbating figure of fantasy, the bachelor, is contained in a
subordinate position below the bar of Le Grand Verre, a barrier that
signifies the vanishing point of the horizon as well as the Bride’s
clothing. By enunciating both masculine and feminine positions of
desiring subjectivity, Duchamp’s work demands the recognition of the
eroticism of interpretation – the interdependence and interchange
between object and subject of the interpretative gaze.

Framing Le Grand Verre / Framing Duchamp

Integral to Le Grand Verre and sharing its title (with the

removal of one comma), the 1934 La Mariée mise à nu par ses
célibataires même, generally called La Boîte Verte, is an elaborate
case of torn papers covered with handwritten notes composed while
Duchamp worked on the glass piece. As I have explained, these notes
38 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

expand upon, elaborate, or more often, obfuscate ideas that are

visually played out in Le Grand Verre. Duchamp’s intention was to
produce the box in an edition of three hundred, each of which would
match the original as closely as possible. Duchamp’s handwriting was
printed in facsimile onto the paper bits, which thus serve as fetishistic
synecdoches of the artist himself. However, as mass-produced
fragments authorized by the reproduced yet ostensibly unique
handwriting of Duchamp, they act as self-authenticating objects which
conflate the artist’s mark or signature with the author; a conflation that
validates not only aesthetic attribution but judgement as well.
Furthermore, like the readymades, the multiple examples of
Duchamp’s boxed “ideas” operate to expose the cultural fetishization
of authored objects as commodities. Duchamp produced the boxes
with the intention of marketing them.
La Boîte Verte in itself exemplifies Duchamp’s active
representation of himself through his work in the public arena.
Merging the archival marks of the artist with the artist’s artworks, La
Boîte Verte asserts, and relies on for its commercial success, the
economic value of Duchamp’s ideas. La Boîte Verte promotes these
ideas beyond the esoteric Le Grand Verre, which is inaccessible to
most of the public both conceptually, because of its signifying
complexity, and literally, because of its physical immobility (fixed in
place at the Philadelphia Museum of Art). The notes, which Duchamp
described as operating like a “Sears Catalogue” in relation to the
object, also corrupt the integrity of Le Grand Verre as a self-sufficient
object by inserting a literary intertext that supplements the signifi-
catory lack of the visual object.
The spectator’s experience of Le Grand Verre is intended to
be mediated by the notes. Duchamp said:

Je voulais que cet album aille avec le Verre et qu’on

puisse le consulter pour voir le Verre parce que, selon moi, il ne
devait pas être regardé au sens esthétique du mot. Il fallait
consulter le livre et les voir ensemble. La conjunction des deux
choses enlevait tout le côté rétinien que je n’aime pas. C’était
très logique (Duchamp, 1967; 71).

Therefore, interpreted from a Greenbergian perspective, the notes

undermine the standards of modernist aesthetics by refusing the
separation of media into pure categories of formalist specificity. The
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 39

conjunction of written and visual information disrupts the visual

consumption of Le Grand Verre by interfering with its “retinal”
character. The act of vision is contextualized, thereby redefining the
aesthetic autonomy of Le Grand Verre. By designating the box as a
kind of manual or catalogue, “une somme d’expériences,” Duchamp
stresses the conditions of its production. He redefines Le Grand Verre,
not as an object in its own right, but as a prototype whose function is
to redefine through industry the very meaning of art.
If Le Grand Verre expanded the notion of the frame
conceptually, it also played with more traditional framing functions.
When a frame performs a continuous isolating function around an
image, creating a homogeneous enclosure, the frame sets the picture
surface back into depth and helps to deepen the view; it is like a
window frame through which we see a space behind the glass. The
frame then belongs to the viewer’s space rather than the illusory,
three-dimensional world disclosed within and behind. By contrast, the
simple or unframed canvas enables the painting to stand out from the
wall as an autonomous object, instead of receding into the framed
space.
Le Grand Verre may be seen as prefiguring the Surrealist
preoccupation on the theme of the window as a transitional plane
between reality and imagination, foreground and background, external
and internal worlds. Often deploying it to suggest yearning for the
beyond, the Surrealists also used the window as an aperture through
which a face could look into the shadowy room of the unconscious.7
Le Grand Verre literally embodies the theme of the shattered window.
It defies the high modernist ethic of pure opticality. Lyotard observes
how the use of perspective in the lower half of Le Grand Verre
produces the effect of a virtual three-dimensional space. However, as
the support is made of transparent glass, the eye paradoxically cannot
traverse it to explore this virtual space.
The two sections of Le Grand Verre were rendered through
two incommensurable spatial projections that refuse visual unity. As
does the disparity between the perspectivalist or anamorphic lines
etched on the glass and the “real” world visible through the work’s

7
Duchamp’s Fresh Widow (1920) anticipates many of the Surrealists’ visual puns.
The work is a set of miniature French windows, painted black. The punning title
highlights the notion of incommensurable spatial orders that are combined to
challenge the viewer’s faith in his/her eyes.
40 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

transparent “canvas.” When the viewer’s eye traverses Le Grand

Verre, it encounters the real objects that are behind it, for example, the
window of the exhibition room of the Philadelphia Museum. The eye
becomes aware of its own activity without being able to lose itself in
virtual objects. A viewer also becomes aware of the refracted gazes of
other viewers who are themselves framed by the work. The result is a
denial of visual plenitude, which reinforces the pattern of endless
sexual excitation and frustration explicit on a thematic level.
Simultaneously, the work draws attention to its own constructed,
artificial status by denying the viewer’s desire for escape into the
imaginary reality potentially represented by the artwork.

The Frame of Language

Duchamp’s elaborate process of framing, mediating and

controlling the viewer’s apprehension of his work lends prominence to
his chosen title. As I have indicated, Duchamp, like the Surrealists,
often chose titles with the goal of disrupting or contesting the apparent
meaning of the image. In Duchamp’s case, the discursive was allowed
to undermine the self-sufficiency of the figural in radical ways. The
addition of même to the full title of Le Grand Verre disrupts the
signifying process and prevents a narrative interpretation of the title.
The disruption of the visual by the verbal subverts representation and
thus exposes the arbitrary nature of the visual sign.
Barthes refers to the title of a painting as “l’appât d’une
signification.” He observes how in classical painting, the analogy of
the painting was echoed in the analogy of the title. When the title of
the work does not immediately appear to correspond to the subject of
the painting, the title initially appears to block access to an
understanding of the content. The title’s very specificity seems to
invite an analogy that refuses to fit the work. In his attempt to wed the
visual and the verbal aspects of representation, Duchamp exploits the
viewer’s dependence on language. Le Grand Verre seems to be
engaged against culture whose rhetorical discourse it abandons by
establishing a hermetic code. This is an impenetrable code,
exacerbated by the notes of La Boîte Verte, and which causes the
viewer to incessantly return to the image in an interminable attempt to
reread and reinterpret. The (non)sense of the title pervades the work,
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 41

constituting “le moment négatif de toute initiation” (Barthes, 1982;

170).
Barthes observes that with the readymade or real object, art
begins only at its periphery, its framing, its museography. The framing
begins with the name: “Dans le ready made, l’objet est si réel que
l’artiste peut se permettre l’excentricité ou l’incertitude de la
dénomination” (Barthes, 1982; 204). The readymade reveals precisely
what functionalism denies: the function of the name. Duchamp
chooses an industrial product and displaces it, putting it to another
purpose, whereby it loses its utilitarian dimension but, by the same
act, gains a function that is purely symbolic. The symbolic nature of
Duchamp’s readymades lies partly in the incongruity of the title to the
object. Rather than an ontological view of art, Duchamp believed in
“nominalisme pictural,” by which he intended that naming an object
transforms it into something else. Calling a manufactured object a
readymade imbued it with the status of art. By the same process,
adopting a female name and character changes Duchamp into a
woman. By becoming Rrose Sélavy, the artist changes his name and
his identity.
If titles are significant in Duchamp’s work, this is because
they no longer function as mere labels but instead as devices that
reframe the retinal impact of images in terms of punning associations.
The visual opacity of Le Grand Verre attests to Duchamp’s successful
displacement of meaning away from the retinal and toward its active
interplay with linguistic and poetic frames of reference. Like Nu
descendant un escalier, the subtitle of Le Grand Verre (Retard en
Verre) inscribes a temporal delay that attempts to interfere with the
visual consumption of the image. Duchamp wishes to redefine
painting as a process that includes temporal considerations.
The Cubists, particularly Braque and Picasso, sought a similar
effect in their collages where the disjunction of images introduces a
temporal delay and the displacement of meaning. The formal texture
and polyocular vision wrenches the image away from traditional
notions of temporal and spatial depiction. Retard en Verre reflects
Duchamp’s continued attempts to move beyond the notion of painting
by refusing to assimilate this work to a picture on glass. Duchamp
introduces the notion of delay as a way of distancing himself from
traditional pictorial conventions. Thematically, this infinite deferral
42 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

prevents any action from being triumphantly carried out. The Bride
remains forever in the process of being stripped bare.
For Duchamp, this strategy of postponement or deferral does
not involve the mere transposition of painting into another medium
but rather, the redefinition of the medium itself in terms of a deferral,
a passage that postpones the pictorial becoming of painting. The
Retard is imposed upon the viewer’s impatience to see/seize the
object: “Il ouvre des intervalles et moments de délai, il décomprime
les coordonnées du centralisme, il démobilise le corps d’armée qu’est
le corps de l’oeil. Non seulement l’uniformité disparaît, mais
l’identité” (Lyotard, 1977; 69). Deferral is symptomatic of self-
discovery: not to get to the point is to put off definitive self-
confrontation and commitment. Autobiographical truth lies in the
process (the journey) rather than in the product (the destination). The
notion of deferral or postponement is characteristic of autobio-
graphical narrative. Self-narrative involves a dynamic process that is a
double drive, backwards and forwards. The dynamism of auto-
biography is driven by the contradictions of memory and desire.
Duchamp’s declaration in 1923 that Le Grand Verre was to remain
definitively unfinished demonstrates the impossibility of completing
his own narrative.

The “Subject” of the Work

As I have observed, self-representation has an overt public

dimension. It involves not only an engagement or negotiation with the
conventions of genre but also with an imaginary Other, an interpolated
subjectivity which receives and responds to the image with which it is
presented. Self-identity is therefore always constituted through a
relation to an Other. Confronted with Le Grand Verre, the viewer
becomes the object of his/her own gaze, mirrored in the reflective
surface. Instead of being cast as the passive consumer of the image,
s/he is awakened to an awareness of the prevailing conditions of
viewing. Duchamp vicariously crosses the boundary that separates
creation from reception and tries to anticipate and incorporate in
advance the position of this Other.
An anticipation of the viewer is made further explicit in
Duchamp’s later work Etant Donnés, where the artist dictates every
aspect of the work’s reception from the peep-holes in the door, to the
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 43

cut-off perspective of the nude figure and his posthumous directive

that the work was not to be photographed until twenty years after its
installation.8 Unlike the Other anticipated by the traditional
autobiographical text, a fictive Other with whom the real reader can
never coincide and who serves to frame the real reader by heightening
their self-awareness, Duchamp creates a space for the viewer which
accommodates a plurality of viewing positions. To be addressed by
one’s own image is to be made aware of the manifestation of oneself
as subject while being interpolated into Duchamp’s subjectivity who
remains both subject and creator of the work that frames the gaze.
Duchamp’s paintings reveal him to be a painter of images, and
of images whose relationship to their backgrounds and to the space
around them is occasionally irrelevant and always of secondary
importance. This separated him from the Cubists, who were interested
in the concept of objects embedded in a spatial continuum or flux that
was as pictorially significant as the depicted objects. By using the
transparency of glass as a medium, Duchamp denies one of the
signatory marks of painting, that of figure/ground relations. Duchamp
reduces the notion of pictorial background to a readymade, one that
changes with the position of the glass. The referential relations
between figure and background now emerge as no longer internal to

8
To its detractors, Etant Donnés is little more than another of Duchamp’s hoaxes: “the
ultimate bluff against art and its whole superstructure, an obscene diorama pawned off
on a reputable museum because of the reputation of the “artist” and the brilliant
literary apparatus lending it prestige” (Shattuck, 1984; 291). To others, it represents
Duchamp’s most profound exploration of the troubled confluence of vision and
desire. The viewer becomes voyeur, reviving the theme of Le Grand Verre where the
témoins oculistes watch the bride being stripped bare. Now, the beholder is directly
turned into a scopophilic viewer, caught in the embarrassing act that underlies all
visual pleasure. Or, more precisely, that act is put in quotation marks, because the
problem with the scene is its “hyperreality,” its excessive realism, which stages
eroticism as a spectacle in the glare of artificial light. The installation subverts the
traditional identification of subjectivity with either a monologic, spectatorial gaze or a
dialogic specularity. Rather than the picture returning the gaze of the viewer in the
manner of previous nudes (for example, Manet’s Olympia), which suggests the
possibility of reciprocity, the viewer becomes the uneasy object of a gaze from behind
– that of those waiting to see the peep show. The door, as Paz notes, is like the hinge
of a chiasmic visual scene, which turns the viewer into the object of the other’s look.
The equation of the “I” with the sovereign “eye” becomes itself unhinged.
44 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

the logic of the image but as a product of its chance encounters with
the world and its spectators.
Looking at Le Grand Verre therefore leads a viewer back to
his/her own image, which blends with the painted forms and
reflections of the outside world. The act of looking-at a painting
becomes an act of looking-through. The glass, on which the
composition is painted, by reason of its very transparency, becomes an
obstacle to the viewer’s vision. Gazing at Le Grand Verre, the
viewer’s eye is not allowed to rest. The viewer is enclosed in Le
Grand Verre and becomes part of the work. This brings about an
inversion of the position of the terms that are seen to constitute
creation and artistic contemplation: the artist’s subjectivity (or the
viewer’s) and the work. Thierry de Duve observes:

Art does not address itself to the masses but to an individual, and
the work of art, whatever it is, chooses its viewers one at a time.
However, once the spectator falls into this viewing trap, it is
another viewer that he sees looking at him or whom he sees
looking. There the viewers are always double; following Lacan,
we might say that the individual viewer gets split there. It is to
another that his gaze is addressed and from an Other that it comes
back to him (de Duve, 1996; 405).

In Barthes’s appreciation of Arcimboldo’s painting, he

observes that the painting is mobile. The painting dictates to its viewer
by the obligation to come closer or to step back from the image in
order to decipher it. The reflections and images mirrored in Le Grand
Verre cause a viewer to look at the work from different angles and
distances which both incorporate and eliminate their own likeness.
The transparency of the material also ensures that a viewer circles the
work to look at the reverse view. Barthes observes that by asking the
human subject to move, the work implies a relativization of the space
of meaning. Including the viewer’s gaze within the work, whilst
simultaneously opening up a multiplicity of viewing positions,
Duchamp ensures that the viewer’s movement participates in the
work’s status. Barthes also comments how in the verb to gaze, the
frontiers of active and passive are uncertain. By dint of gazing, one
forgets one can be gazed at oneself. Duchamp overturns the
relationship between subject and object by revealing the subjectivity
of the authorial I to be interchangeable with the subjectivity of the
viewer.
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 45

Barthes indicates in La Sagesse de l’Art that there is a useful

lexical ambiguity to the term “subject.” As Barthes concludes in the
case of Cy Twombly, so the same applies to Duchamp:

Chez Twombly, le ‘sujet,’ c’est bien sur, ce dont la toile

parle; mais comme ce sujet n’est qu’une allusion (écrite), toute la
charge du drame passe à celui qui la produit: le sujet, c’est
Twombly lui-même. Le voyage du ’sujet,’ cependant, ne s’arrête
pas là: parce que l’art de Twombly semble comporter peu de
savoir technique (ce n’est, bien sûr, qu’une apparence), le sujet de
la toile, c’est aussi celui qui la regarde: vous, moi (Barthes, 1982;
175).

The subject of a work can refer to its “object” (that which it offers to
reflection), or the person who thereby represents him/herself – the
implicit producer.

“Je vous regarde comme on regarde l’impossible”9

Despite its public character, as a graphic description of the

workings of a machine and the representation of an erotic ritual, Le
Grand Verre, as Octavio Paz observes, is still a secret work:

The Large Glass opens out before us like the image of

contradiction. But the contradiction is apparent rather than real:
what we see are only moments and states of an invisible object,
stages in the process of manifestation and concealment of a
phenomenon. With that lucidity which is no less unique in him
because it is constant, Duchamp alludes to the duplicity of his
attempt: ‘Perhaps make a hinge picture (tableau de charnière).’
With the Large Glass, we face a hinge picture which, as it opens
out or folds back, physically and/or mentally, shows us other
vistas, other apparitions of the same elusive object (Paz, 1978;
93).

As Le Grand Verre resists rational definition, so it still resists critical

appropriation.
I have explained how traditional portraiture conveys an
illusion of the uniqueness of the portrayed subject by presupposing a
belief in the unity of the signifier (the “interior essence” of the
portrayed) and the signified (the exterior form). However, Le Grand

9
Lacan, Séminaire XI, pp.70 - 96; quoted in Barthes, 1982; 280
46 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

Verre undermines the optics of pure vision, refuting the notion of

artwork as mimesis or mirror. Martin Jay has described the history of
modernist painting as a laboratory of postperspectivalist optical
experimentation, with a subcurrent of outright antiretinalism that
culminates in Duchamp. Duchamp dismisses the use of a sign system
that refers iconically. He therefore prefigures the crisis of modernity
that can be perceived in the recognition of the irreconcilable split
between signifier and signified. As soon as this unity is challenged,
the homogeneity and the authenticity of the portrayed subject fall
apart. Much contemporary portraiture renders a sitter’s presence
through the indexical sign: similarity is outmoded; contiguity is
proposed as the new mode.10
However, Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre further problematizes
any indexical association with subjectivity. His painterly performance
is systematically absent in the multiple reproductions of his work. Le
Grand Verre further subverts Lacan’s stade du miroir, where the
Imaginary, associated with looking and being seen, becomes the realm
of a coherent and stable self-image. Lacan defines imaginary inter-
subjectivity as a three-term structure: 1) I see the other; 2) I see him
seeing me; 3) he knows I see him. The relation to one’s body image,
one’s identity, passes through the relay of the Other. However, in the
viewer’s relation to Le Grand Verre, the nature of intersubjectivity is
closer to Barthes’s understanding of the lover’s gaze:

Or, dans la relation amoureuse, le regard, si l’on peut

dire, n’est pas aussi retors; il manque un trajet. Sans doute, dans
cette relation, d’une part je vois l’autre, avec intensité; je ne vois
que lui, je le scrute, je veux percer le secret de ce corps que je
désire; et d’autre part, je le vois me voir: je suis intimidé, sidéré,
constitué passivement par son regard tout-puissant; et cet
affolement est si grand que je ne peux (ou ne veux) reconnaître
qu’il sait que je le vois – ce qui me désaliénerait: je me vois
aveugle devant lui (Barthes, 1982; 282).

The viewer of Le Grand Verre sees himself blind in his/her own gaze.
The space of subjectivity that Le Grand Verre reveals is both
theatrical and symbolic. However, the performative dimension of self-
representation, whether it is enlisted to validate the self by

10
Orlan, whom I shall discuss in my concluding chapter, is a perfect example of this
contemporary shift.
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 47

confrontation with others or to transform the self through the

interpolation of the Other’s complicity, is inevitably constrained by
other factors which threaten to expose it as nothing more than a
rhetorical illusion; Duchamp refuses to constitute an image of himself
for others. As Barthes explains: “l’imaginaire est ce sur quoi les autres
ont barre” (Barthes, 1975; 85). In rejecting figurative art, Duchamp
shakes off the remnants of the psychological realism that Barthes
identifies as part of traditional character formation.11 The desire to
elude definition lies in the need to maintain an unstable, creative
identity. To impose an image on the self is to deprive it of certain
liberties. As Barthes later observes in La Chambre Claire, the loss of
the self is brought about because the objectification of the subject that
bestows the experience of wholeness on it, is a discursive
transformation that translates the subject into the terms of the doxa,
the platitudes of public opinion (see also chapter 3, page 84 and
chapter 4, page 151). One’s image is always cast in terms of the
already-represented. Duchamp’s highly personal iconography resists
oppression by resisting the images and concepts that reinforce
traditional self-representation. Duchamp constructs a conception of
subjectivity based on variety and diversity. Analogous to the
decentring of the self in contemporary autobiography, Duchamp’s Le
Grand Verre refuses to re-inscribe a unified subject. The interrogation
of mimesis and the confrontation of the barriers between masculine
and feminine challenge the notion of the image as a transparent
representation of the “self” of the artist.
By inscribing the notion of delay (Retard) into an abstract
self-portrait, Duchamp also indicates his refutation of the Other’s
perception of his self. Duchamp’s self is spatial, time is translated into
space and difference is rooted in desire. The topology of subjectivity
favours dispersal. Identity is unlocatable and involves displacement. It
is what the artist is but what the Other perceives. If postmodernism
signifies performativity, as Lyotard outlines in La Condition

11
See L’Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits. This essay observes that a
“character” is a collection of semes held together by a proper name (or the je of the
first person narrator). The justification of particular collocations is the compatibility
of the meanings in relation to cultural (ideological) codes. Cultural codes depend upon
stereotypes whose essence is pure repetition. The stereotype is a synonym for déjà-lu,
déjà-fait and functions iteratively, like the sign.
48 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

Postmoderne, Le Grand Verre is a paradigm of postmodern

subjectivity. In merging subject and object positions and deploying
techniques of reproduction, Duchamp reveals the intersubjective
formation of identity. Through the incorporation of male and female
symbols, he indicates the interdependence of gender definition while
the impenetrability of the visual and verbal semiotic systems and the
cycle of sexual desire illustrate the impossibility of narrative closure.
Le Grand Verre demonstrates how a genre can be liberated from its
history so that it can become an arena for new significations.
 The Autoportrait:
Michel Leiris’ L’Âge d’Homme

Introduction

Michel Leiris’s L’Âge d’Homme is an exploration of the

plasticity of memory. It is at once confession, catharsis, classic
childhood memoir and representative of the avant-garde crisis in
self-representation. If autobiography prior to Leiris and as opposed to
autobiographical fiction (such as Proust’s enterprise) was regarded as
a retrospective moulding and ordering of the past, in order to convey
upon it a teleological coherence, Leiris reveals both the fallibility of
memory and self-knowledge, and the mutual desire that propels an
autobiographical text.
Memory has traditionally been conceived as visual: classical
mnemonic strategies for rhetoric (mnemonic deriving from
Mnemosyne – goddess of memory and mother to all muses) depended
upon a visualization of architectural or spatial structures. Much
modern self-narrative draws upon the mnemonic power of visual
imagery often leading the autobiographer to include photographs (see
Barthes and Breton) or to adopt a fragmented text, analogous to a
collection of snapshots (see Walter Benjamin). From the outset, L’Âge
d’Homme reveals itself to be a highly visual undertaking. Leiris
announces his desire in the introductory essay to group together the
images that have contributed to his sense of identity. He draws
constant analogies between his writing and the visual art of
self-portraiture. He refers to “les traits qui [...] donnent sa
ressemblance au portrait” (p. 29),1 “un tableau de moi, peint selon
ma propre perspective” (p. 26), “une telle galerie de souvenirs” (p.
41).

1
All references to L'Âge d'Homme in this chapter are to the 1995 edition in the Folio
collection by Gallimard.
50 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

In the prologue, Leiris commences with an intricate

description of his physiognomy. In textualizing his physical presence,
Leiris renders it as sign, and thus his body becomes a metaphor in the
text, standing in for something that is not there. L’Âge d’Homme
begins with an exterior vision of Leiris, the detailed description of his
person and concludes with the interior visions of his subconscious, the
dream descriptions. This framework represents the corporeality of
existence, the external representation of the self, and the open-ended
quest for an interior subjectivity. Leiris’s rule of composition reflects
this symbolic framework: “Identité [...] de la forme et du fond.” He
seeks simultaneity in the conjunction of interior and exterior vision.
The conspicuous lack at the heart of L’Âge d’Homme is a material
image of the autobiographer. This lack of an image – of the body that
is a sign of desire and of agency in the world – places the emphasis of
the writing upon the constructed nature of identity; how the presence
of the writer is both evoked and dispersed throughout the text.
L’Âge d’Homme and La Règle du Jeu have been subject to
innumerable critical appraisals and analyses. Many of these
investigations of the texts have focused upon the psychoanalytic
elements of Leiris’s writing and the significance of both his
experience of psychoanalysis and his position as a Surrealist dissident
upon the style and structure of his writing.2 While these factors remain
integral to a comprehension of L’Âge d’Homme, they do not concern
my own exploration of the text. I wish to reveal how Leiris evolves a
visual imagination by inscribing the visual into the verbal, the extent
to which he develops a “plastic” self-retrospective and to what extent
his identity is formed through pre-existing visual images or
projections. In order to take account of L’Âge d’Homme as a partially
therapeutic exercise, as indicated by Leiris, I shall discuss the links
between Surrealism and psychoanalysis, the similarities between
Lejeune’s definition of autobiography as transaction, which I
discussed with reference to Duchamp, and the psychoanalytic notion
of transference. This will enable me to elucidate the dialogical nature
of Leiris’s enterprise in contrast to its interpretation as a cathartic
outpouring of fear and self-loathing; the interpretation suggested by
Leiris himself. Through a subsequent discussion of the fallibility of
self-knowledge, I shall look at the way in which Leiris frames his

2
See, for example, P. Lejeune (1975), R. Bréchon (1973) and R. Simon (1984).
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 51

narrative, the imagistic presentation of memories and the

self-deception that results from a masking of desire. I shall also
explore the common themes that Leiris develops through his art
criticism, their relevance to L’Âge d’Homme and the concept of le
sacré, which he developed with Bataille, and to which Leiris
considered all art should aspire.
Before embarking upon my analysis of Leiris’s archive of
images, it is helpful to contextualize the narrative in relation to the
cultural climate in which it was written, as Leiris’s involvement with
writers and artists at the time had a marked influence upon the
evolution of his own aesthetic ideal. Leiris was deeply involved in the
visual arts both through his friendship with artists and the art criticism
he wrote for various journals. It is therefore important to consider the
position of figurative or realist art and the crisis it faced during the
1930s.

Modernism versus Realism

The Left-sponsored realism debates in Paris in the mid-1930s

demonstrate that self-representation, in particular portrait painting,
was drawn into the fray. Louis Aragon’s address Réalisme socialiste
et réalisme français was made in October 1937 and had a profound
influence. He condemned modern theories for their neglect of the
traditional humanist genre of portrait painting. The artists found
themselves trapped within a dialectic – modernism versus realism.
Representation and self-representation were at the centre of this
dilemma. Since the advent of Cubism, portraiture had ceased to be a
solely realist genre, one which was committed only to replicating
physical likeness. It became a stage upon which was played out the
tension of the drama between tradition and avant-gardism. As artists
moved increasingly away from figuration to abstraction, the genre of
portraiture held a problematic position in the hierarchy of artistic
classification.3
A frequently cited case of an avant-garde artist reviving
portraiture as part of a return to realism was that of former Surrealist,
Alberto Giacometti, who did so in a Cézannist portrait of his mother

3
I shall examine the traditional role of the portrait and the crisis it faced in the early
part of the twentieth century in greater detail in the following chapter.
52 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

in 1937. The pressure on avant-garde artists of the period to submit to

the political dictates of the prevailing realism put them under much
strain; similar pressures had helped to precipitate Picasso’s much
talked about cessation of painting during 1935. As artists registered
the dissolution of a once secure artistic identity, they turned towards
introspective self-examination. Leiris, at the heart of this cultural
upheaval, was aware of the difficulties for artists as his criticism of
both Masson’s and Giacometti’s work reveals. He was also
preoccupied with how to reconcile contemporary political, cultural
and artistic demands with his own highly personal project.
A social realist agenda demanded not just a politically
engaged art but also one that was accessible and in touch with reality.
Leiris’s desire to make his work accessible to his reading public is
revealed in his introductory essay “de lui faire découvrir en lui-même
quelque chose d’homophone à ce fond qui m’était découvert.” Leiris
was aware of the criticism he would receive regarding the apparent
indulgent narcissism of his project and when he wrote the introductory
essay to L’Âge d’Homme at the end of the Second World War, he
sought to deflect such opinions. As regards the duty of the writer:
Il resterait qu’il lui faut, se situant sur le plan intellectuel ou
passionnel, apporter des pièces à conviction au procès de notre
actuel système de valeurs et peser, de tout le poids dont il est si
souvent oppressé, dans le sens de l’affranchissement de tous les
hommes, faute de quoi nul ne saurait parvenir à son
affranchissement particulier (p. 24).

Leiris’s exhortations on behalf of self-representation were not

intended to be merely self-justificatory but conformed to his general
convictions about the role of art in society.
Leiris considered his friend André Masson’s return to
self-portraiture during the war years as the most effective way to come
to terms with oneself and the current climate. He applauded the artist’s
objective self-appraisal and his attempts at self-definition through
portraiture (see Leiris, 1940; 198). However, Leiris still criticized his
own self-absorption at this time of international crisis:
Il y a, certes, quelque chose de risible (voire que d’aucuns
n’hésiteraient pas à qualifier d’odieux) dans mon obstination à
poursuivre cette recherche sans rapport direct avec la crise
pourtant tragique que le monde traverse aujourd’hui. Mais n’est
ce pas dans le moment même que tout est remis en question qu’on
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 53

éprouve, avec le plus d’urgence, le besoin de faire le point en

soi-même (Leiris, 1968; 200-201).

In this perspective, Masson’s self-portraits become symbolic

of Leiris’s own autobiographical project. Leiris sought in Masson’s
work the reflection and expression of his own artistic ambitions. In
doing so, he established a pattern that was to characterize his art
criticism for the rest of his life. He looked to visual art not merely for
the justification of his own likes and dislikes, his preference for
certain artists’ work over others, but also for inspiration – for a surge
of energy that remotivated his own work. His art criticism reveals as
much, if not more, about his creative intentions and ambitions than
does his self-commentary in his journals and critical essays.
For Leiris, Masson was the peintre-matador who incarnated
the definition of tauromachic art. In his criticism, he envisages him as
a matador, who in place of the painter’s palette and brush wields a
cape and sword (see Leiris, 1940; 100). Leiris appreciated particularly
in Masson’s portraits, his exploration of the relationship between
freedom and servitude as they are expressed in the referential space –
the balance between reality and invention. He describes Masson’s
self-portraits as a mirror offered up to the artist’s conscience where the
processes of consciousness itself are reflected. Although Masson does
not seem to have credited his self-portraits with any heuristic function,
Leiris regarded them as the mise en abyme of his entire oeuvre. He
saw them as establishing an intrinsic relation between the process of
introspection and the external circumstances which prompted it,
therefore, serving as the link between self and the world, le soi et le
réel. Typically, Leiris’s criticism reveals more about the critic, his
desires and intentions, than the artist of whom he speaks.
If Leiris’s undertaking was to a great degree a quest for
self-knowledge and self-definition, it was also a search for the origin
of artistic vocation:
Si tant est que l’un des buts les plus ‘sacrés’ qu’un homme puisse
se proposer soit d’acquérir une connaissance de soi aussi précise
et intense que possible, il apparaît désirable que chacun, scrutant
ses souvenirs avec le maximum d’honnêteté, examine s’il n’y peut
découvrir quelque indice lui permettant de discerner quelle
couleur a pour lui la notion même de sacré (Leiris,1989; 74).
54 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

The significance of le sacré and its consequences for L’Âge d’Homme

will be explored in a later section. However, cathartic confession
would not suffice for Leiris’s self-examination. In order to confer an
artistic status upon his endeavours, he imposed his tauromachic code –
an undertaking to remain as objective and truthful to his past as
possible. Such an undertaking requires the indulgence of an attentive
reader. It is with this reader that Leiris establishes his dialogue in the
prefatory essay.

Autobiography as Dialogue: Transaction or Transference?

In L’Âge d’Homme, Leiris uses a technique of thematic

layering, setting up frames within frames to create a context where
minor incidents accumulate manifold meanings. The relevance of his
anecdotes is tied to their structural position within the network of
themes, chapters and sub-texts. Michael Sheringham has highlighted
the similarity between Leiris’s narrative method and Freud’s
case-histories:

If, for Freud, the memory of an incident will ‘make sense’ in the
light of a network of associations uncovered (or supplied) in the
work of analysis, for Leiris it is the process of textual construction
which engenders meaning. In Freud, meanings are assigned by the
analyst, in Leiris they are largely a function of the interplay of
themes and structures, and therefore remain virtual and unofficial:
it is for the reader to collaborate in the work of analysis
(Sheringham, 1993; 129).

L’Âge d’Homme proceeds not so much through causal development

but rather by associations engendered by memories which bring to the
fore a principle of discontinuous narration and thus highlight
contrasts. This produces a narrative whose progression is often
grounded in antithesis. Memory assumes a constituent importance for
the work of art.
Of L’Âge d’Homme, Leiris writes in his Journal that no other
form of literature was possible for him at the time. He envisaged a
form of confessional literature, for example, theoretical essays based
on personal experience, episodes from his life, or thematically
grouped anecdotes (see Journal, 24.8.33; 230). Leiris conceived
L’Âge d’Homme not just as a work of art but also as a form of therapy.
He wanted his friends to regard his autobiographical project as a form
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 55

of liquidation. He hoped they would understand that the reason for his
detailed and unflattering self-portrait was severity, not complacency;
it represents his desire to break with or disassociate himself from the
past (see Journal, 7.1.36; 298). Leiris’s explicit reference to L’Âge
d’Homme as an exercise undertaken as a type of therapy forms a part
of the three-fold act that is his autobiography. It is first and foremost:
Acte par rapport à moi-même puisque j’entendais bien, le
rédigeant, élucider, grâce à cette formulation même, certaines
choses encore obscures sur lesquelles la psychanalyse, sans les
rendre tout à fait claires, avait éveillé mon attention quand je
l’avais expérimenté comme patient (p. 14).

He describes it further as an act in relation to others, as his confessions

would alter the way in which others perceived him, and finally, as a
literary act.
Leiris’s desire to confess, to paint a self-portrait that is
apparently as objective as possible, leaves him vulnerable to
interpretation and appropriation. His awareness of this is revealed in
the second act: “Acte par rapport à autrui.” One of the aims of Leiris’s
autobiographical writing is therefore concurrent with the aims of
psychoanalysis – to elucidate and identify repressed or suppressed
aspects of his identity. Whereas these might be revealed during the act
of transference in the psychoanalyst’s room, Leiris chooses a method
of revelation that is dependant upon the transaction between himself
and the reader. Like the patient on the couch, Leiris seeks to provide
neither interpretations nor explanations for the memories, dreams and
images that he relates. The thematic structure of the book groups
images that are linked through association rather than linear
temporality. He invites the reader to make associative links by the way
in which the related incidents arise not in the course of a chronological
narrative but through the thematic structure.
To speak of Lejeune’s pacte autobiographique as that of a
transaction between writer and reader is to insist upon the constitutive
role of an intersubjective relation between self and other in generating
identity. To claim, as psychoanalysis does, that otherness is inscribed
within the self is to assert that the subject is divided from the outset.
The subject is neither identical with itself nor with the imaginary
portrait that the reader paints of the writing subject. The art of the
self-portraitist and the art of the analyst initially appear to be
56 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

diametrically opposed. Lacan consigns portraiture to the realm of the

Imaginary, and refers to it only as a regrettable instance of those static
imagos in which the subject seeks to alienate its desire. The art of the
portraitist and analyst are thus pitted against one another in Lacan’s
campaign against ego psychology. According to Lacan, ego
psychology is misguided in its attempts to strengthen the ego
defences, which only serve to further alienate the subject in an
imaginary construct.4 However, the notion of self-representation as a
transaction implies a parallel with the psychoanalytic situation of
transference. The transaction – transference analogy diverts attention
away from the illusory unity of the ego and towards the more
malleable concept of a subject-in-process.
Lejeune’s concept of le pacte autobiographique, as we have
seen, is that of a relationship that the reader enters into with the text,
and consequently, with the autobiographer. Numerous scholars of
autobiography have charted the ways in which the reader enters into
such a relationship, confident that the autobiographer’s tale will have
relevance as well as referentiality.5 Lejeune’s relationship of trust
recalls Derrida’s notion of otobiographie. Derrida posits the ear of the
Other as the place into which the autobiography is told, and in which
the autobiography takes form. Thus an autobiographical text becomes
autobiography only in its transit through telling – highlighting the
constitutive role played by the reader in the relationship.

A Visual Memory

As Leiris’s description of and references to images reveal, he

is fully aware of their power to frame and objectify, therefore he
attempts to resist photographic stasis in his writing. Instead of
reproducing the images which haunt him (the schoolbook illustrations,
the photographs of his aunt) Leiris reconstructs them in the narrator’s
memory, a reconstruction of images in which the reader necessarily
colludes. Leiris describes the power that images hold for him in the
prologue as he sets out the metaphysics of his childhood; for example,
the recursive image on the tin of cocoa that reveals to him the mystery
of infinity, the pictures in journals and textbooks that contribute to his

4
See Lacan, Ecrits (1966), p. 42.
5
See, for example, Bruss (1976) Eakin (1985) or Lejeune (1975).
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 57

understanding of ageing, maturity and death. Through his associative

method, the image on the cocoa tin also becomes a mise en abyme of
Leiris’s autobiographical oeuvre: representative of the open-endedness
of the quest for identity.
The emotional intensity with which Leiris reconstructs such
images opens up the possibility for his subjective re-entry into the
objectified past. This runs the risk of breaking the rigidly imposed
stylistic framework of the narrative. Leiris expresses the desire, in
laying down his tauromachic code, for a “cadre rigide imposé à une
action où, théâtralement, le hasard doit apparaître dominé.” However,
he later admits, that having presented the reader with a gallery of
childhood recollections:
Je n’attache pas une importance outrancière à ces souvenirs
échelonnés sur divers stades de mon enfance, mais il est d’une
certaine utilité pour moi de les rassembler ici en cet instant, parce
qu’ils sont le cadre – ou des fragments du cadre – dans lequel tout
le reste s’est logé (p. 40-1).

Rather than presenting an incomplete framework, I contend that Leiris

explodes the limitations of the temporal frame as the past confronts
the present in the realm of subjective experience. James Olney
reminds us that the integration of past and present represents a
hallmark of autobiographical narrative: “Memory can be imagined as
the narrative course of the past becoming present and [...] it can be
imagined also as the reflective, retrospective gathering up of that
past-in-becoming into this present-in-being” (Olney, 1980; 241).
Visual memories from childhood reveal to Leiris certain
mysteries of life and serve to shape his views, his metaphysics. Leiris
explains the formative images of his childhood as due to the inability,
common to most children, to grasp abstract concepts, the need to
visualize these ideas in order to comprehend them. For example, he
associates the soul with a bauble or a trinket. In retrospect, he explains
this association as his firm belief as a boy in the substantial existence
of his soul that he could only imagine as something solid and
identifiable (p. 38). So deeply ingrained in his memory are these
images that he writes, for instance, of the image that formed his notion
of suicide: “cette association s’est tellement ancrée dans mon esprit
qu’aujourd’hui encore je ne puis écrire le mot SUICIDE sans revoir le
radjah dans son décor de flammes” (p. 31). This particular passage
58 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

also reveals the extent to which these visual memories are

synaesthetic. The very word suicide is broken down by Leiris to
expose the visual, oral and sensual connotations that it holds for him:
Il y a l’S dont la forme autant que le sifflement me rappelle, non
seulement la torsion du corps près de tomber, mais la sinusoïdalité
de la lame; U I, qui vibre curieusement et s’insinue, si l’on peut
dire, comme le fusement du feu ou les angles à peine mousses
d’un éclair congelé, C I D E, qui intervient enfin pour tout
conclure, avec son goût acide impliquant quelque chose d’incisif
et d’aiguisé (p. 31).

The sense of the word is contained in the shape of the syllables and
the experience of memory which it gives rise to.
Leiris’s account of his childhood metaphysics and the
catalogue of images which gave rise to them serves as an introduction
to the image which he claims inspired L’Âge d’Homme: Cranach’s
painting of Judith and Lucretia:
De ces deux créatures – auxquelles j’ai attaché, arbitrairement
peut-être, un sens allégorique – il y a quelques années la vue m’a
bouleversé [...] Et de là m’est venu l’idée d’écrire ces pages,
d’abord simple confession basée sur le tableau de Cranach et dont
le but était de liquider, en les formulant, un certain nombre de
choses dont le poids m’oppressait; ensuite raccourci de mémoires,
vue panoramique de tout l’aspect de ma vie (p. 41).

Leiris’s impulse to write a “confession” confirms his desire to

write the truth, yet as L’Âge d’Homme reveals, it is never as simple to
confess as one might expect. Because the subject of autobiography is a
self-representation and not the autobiographer himself, most
contemporary critics describe this self as a fiction. When we locate the
pressure to tell the truth in the context of the fictive self that is
accountable for producing the truth, the problematical alliance
between fact and fiction in autobiography begins to emerge.
Confession, and consequently autobiography, is of a relational nature.
The relational nature of the autobiographical pact depends on the
authorization of the reader and the trust that the reader places in the
“truth” of the autobiography. Leiris perceives certain truths relating to
his sense of identity within the Cranach painting. This external
representation gives the reader an opportunity to locate the “truth” of
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 59

Leiris’s subjectivity within a pre-existing material image. It is the

authorization as well as the catalyst for the confession to follow.
In Leiris’s writing, as in the work of his favourite artists, there
is a constant oscillation between form and formation. He draws our
attention to the process of writing, the subject engaged in the process
of remembering, but is simultaneously bound by self-imposed rules of
form and style. As his life becomes literature, it is caught in the
dialectic of tradition and innovation and this tension remains
unresolved. Leiris’s reading of the Cranach painting is a highly
subjective one and is located in the eroticism of the image. Leiris
forms his relationship to the painting through what he perceives as the
reality of the image as it relates to him:
Le réalisme artistique ou littéraire ne ‘chosifie’ pas ce que de nos
jours on appellerait le référent. Loin de rejeter celui-ci dans la
froideur d’une prétendue objectivité, il s’efforce de traduire la
relation concrète que nous avons avec lui et implique donc une
large part de subjectivité! ce que je nomme la ‘présence’ n’est
peut-être pas autre chose que la capacité que cet objet d’art
plastique ou d’écriture a de faire sentir avec force, par le
spectateur ou le lecteur, l’existence d’une telle relation entre
l’auteur et son référent (Journal, 23.1.82; 751).

This passage not only reveals the nature of the relationship between
Leiris and the painting but also what he perceives to exist between
Cranach and his painting (thereby, also implicating Leiris’s relation to
his own writing).
In its production as well as in its consumption, the work of art
confronts the spectator and the reader with difference, with the failure
of interpretation to appropriate the art-object itself. As s/he interprets,
the interpreter is confronted with a repeated failure and a continual
desire to take possession of otherness and difference. The experience
of difference is not only ever-present but also elusive and unlocatable.
Leiris’s transcription of Cranach’s painting, from the spatial sense of
pictorial imagery into the temporal process of a written text, is his
attempt to subsume the difference of the picture, to bring it into his
own sphere of experience in an act of interpretative appropriation.
60 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

Projecting Identity

It is worth considering Leiris’s descriptions of Judith and

Lucretia in some detail:
la première, Lucrèce, appuyant au centre de sa blanche poitrine,
entre deux seins merveilleusement durs et ronds (dont les pointes
semblent aussi rigides que des pierres ornant au même endroit un
gorgerin ou une cuirasse), la lame effilée d’un poignard au but
duquel perlent déjà, comme le don le plus intime pointe à
l’extremité d’un sexe, quelques gouttes de sang, et s’apprêtant à
annuler l’effet du viol qu’elle a subi, par un geste pareil; celui qui
enfoncera dans une chaude gaine de chair et pour une mort
sanglante l’arme bandée au maximum, telle la virilité inexorable
du violeur quand elle était entrée de force dans l’orifice béant déjà
entre ses cuisses, douce plaie rose qui peu d’instants après
restituait la libation à pleines gorgées, exactement de même que la
blessure – plus profonde, plus méchante aussi, mais peut-être
encore plus enivrante – faite par le poignard laisserait jaillir, du
fin fond de Lucrèce pâmée ou expirante, un flot de sang;
la seconde, Judith, á la main droite une épée nue comme
elle, dont la pointe meurtrit le sol à très peu de distance de ses
orteils menus et dont la lame très large et très solide vient de
trancher la tête d’Holopherne, qui pend, débris sinistre, à la main
gauche de l’héroïne, doigts et cheveux mêlés pour une atroce
union, – Judith, parée d’un collier aussi lourd qu’une chaîne de
bagnard, dont le froid autour de son cou voluptueux rappelle celui
du glaive près de ses pieds, – Judith placide et ne paraissant déjà
plus songer à la boule barbue qu’elle tient à la main comme un
bourgeon phallique qu’elle aurait pu couper rien qu’en serrant ses
basses lèvres au moment où les écluses d’Holopherne s’ouvraient
ou encore que, ogresse en plein délire, elle aurait détaché du gros
membre de l’homme aviné (et peut-être vomissant) d’un soudain
coup de dents (pp. 142-3).

Both descriptions reveal the horrified fascination with which

Leiris perceives the two women. Devoid of feminine charm, his use of
adjectives evokes monsters of nature, possessing more masculine than
feminine attributes. The first description of Lucretia, her breasts
described as hard and round, no beguiling curves, likens her to the
instrument of death that she holds in her hand. The act of penetration,
like the thrust of the dagger, lends a rhythm to the description that
climaxes with the “flot de sang.” Far from an objective transcription
of the painting, Leiris’s art appreciation comes closer to that of
Baudelaire’s in its evocation of images, allusion and analogy. His
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 61

subjective input is evident in the adjectives, similes and metaphors:

the drops of blood on the tip of the dagger are like the gift “à
l’extremité d’un sexe,” the stiffness of the dagger is the same as “la
virilité inexorable du violeur.” In drawing this parallel between the act
of rape and the act of suicide, Leiris imaginatively recreates and
anticipates the past and future of the static image; re-animating the
petrified heroine with the projective force of his imagination and
lending attributes to the picture, such as sensual adjectives, that the
medium of paint cannot convey and that were, perhaps, unintended by
the artist.
Similarly, the description of Judith recreates a woman whose
deeds render her, in Leiris’s eyes, barely human. She is an “ogresse en
plein délire” whose nudity, compared to the sword she holds, is
infinitely more menacing than seductive. The horror of the act she has
perpetrated is accentuated by the apparent nonchalance with which she
holds the bloody head in her left hand. Again, Leiris’s use of
adjectives reveals the multisensual nature of his pictorial appreciation:
the necklace Judith wears is both heavy and cold. Leiris’s imaginative
re-creation of the painting’s history involves the participation of
Holofernes – a drunken, perhaps vomiting victim.
Leiris acknowledges his subjective interpretation of Cranach’s
painting when he writes that his description leaves the women even
more naked than they appear to be in the painting. This is shortly
followed by Leiris likening himself to Holofernes, lying at the feet of
his idols. This recurring comparison is first drawn at the conclusion of
the prologue when Leiris describes himself as Holofernes, the hero.
He indicates that the subject of his autobiography could be
summarized as how the hero, Holofernes, graduates, with the
inevitable mishaps, from the miraculous chaos of childhood to the
ferocious virility of manhood (p. 42). The psychoanalytic implications
of Leiris’s identification with Holofernes have been commented on by
previous critics and do not concern me here; what is significant is how
this parallel, established from the outset, allows Leiris’s subjective
entry into the painting that is the source of his inspiration, and how
this characterizes his emotional re-creation of visual memories
throughout the book.
Leiris’s self-exploration is always in part an extension of his
Surrealist nominalism, a quest for an intensity experienced within the
act of writing itself. This is also reflected within his art criticism; he
62 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

admires artists who he feels share his aesthetic quest – the moment of
tauromachic truth, confrontation with the self, a drive against the void.
In an article of 1929, Leiris defines what it is he admires in
Giacometti’s sculpture:
Il n’y a cependant rien de mort dans cette sculpture; tout y est au
contraire, comme des vrais fétiches qu’on peut idolâtrer (les vrais
fétiches, c’est-à-dire ceux qui nous ressemblent et sont la forme
objectivée de notre désir), prodigieusement vivant, – d’une vie
gracieuse et fortement teintée d’humeur, belle expression de cette
ambivalence sentimentale, tendre sphinx qu’on nourrit toujours,
plus ou moins secrètement, au centre de soi-même (Leiris, 1929;
210).

The parenthetical explanation reveals what Leiris seeks in the

art he admires – an objective expression of his own subjective
desires. Leiris seeks an art that appears to reconcile the objective or
external expression of subjective longing with the evocation of that
longing in the viewer. It is such a role that Cranach’s painting plays in
L’Âge d’Homme.
Portraiture sets up a perpetual oscillation between observer
and observed. The artist and his or her subject, whether it be another
or the self, creates a representation that combines the dual positions of
passivity and activity. The notion of an intersubjective relation
between subject and object, artist and sitter, makes possible the
conceptualization of an interactive relationship – an oscillation that
might eventually conflate subject and object. As a Surrealist, Leiris
was aware of the apparent heterogeneity of the self that écriture
automatique was intended to reveal; as a veteran of psychoanalysis, he
was aware of the intersubjective components in the formation of
identity. The collaborative or interactive nature of the relation between
analyst and analysand is reflected in the dialogic nature of Surrealist
enterprises.6 Leiris’s knowledge of psychoanalysis combined with his
experience of Surrealism, where the technique of automatic writing
was understood as fracturing an illusory unity of the self, prevents him
from seeking to create the consoling fiction of an autonomous ego.

6
At the origin of the Surrealist movement is a collection of automatic texts, Les
Champs Magnétiques created by André Breton and Philippe Soupault writing in
tandem with each other.
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 63

The techniques of thematic association, discontinuity and

disruption which Leiris retrospectively described as his règle
tauromachique lead to a certain symbiosis of style and content:
“Identité, si l’on y tient, de la forme et du fond mais, plus exactement,
démarche unique me révélant le fond à mesure que je lui donnais
forme” (p. 21). However, this description of his technique is
deceptively simple, belying the stylistic rigour that Leiris brought to
his writing. It does nevertheless confirm Leiris’s desire for an
impression of spontaneity, whether real or contrived, his desire to
render his experiences present to the reader. To create an “authentic”
self-portrait, Leiris realizes that the intimacy with one’s self, which
the term “identity” presupposes, must be broken down and along with
it, the cohesiveness of the self-image. The onus lies with the reader to
reconstitute both the self-image and the identity of the writer.
Leiris’s technique of fragmentation undoes the tradition of
self-representation within autobiography that attempts to represent the
subject as a coherent entity. Such a specular subject belongs to the
Lacanian order of the Imaginary. As I have observed, Lacan contends
that formal stagnation marks all the portraits that the subject produces
of itself in the Imaginary. The task of the analyst is to erase these false
icons and to suspend the subject’s certainties. As a “photomontage” of
images, memories, dreams and extracts, Leiris’s subjectivity manifests
itself for the reader through a series of provisional self-portraits.

The Frame and le Sacré

In the writing Leiris contributed to the Surrealist reviews is

evidence of his Surrealist convictions, for example, his preoccupation
with the unconscious and dreams, but unlike the automatic writing of
his colleagues, Leiris already subjected his writing to a “souci
compositionnel.” Leiris identified amongst those Surrealists who were
to group around André Masson, including himself, a common desire
for a certain formal discipline where the work of imagination had to
be dominated by formal beauty (see Leiris, 1992; 219-229). Although
Leiris rapidly disassociated himself from the Surrealist group, the
impact of Surrealist techniques left their mark upon his work. Perhaps
the most significant of these influences for the imagistic narrative of
L’Âge d’Homme is that of the dream.
64 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

For the Surrealists, the dream represented an instant of

involuntary poetry – it was at the basis of Aragon’s artistic con-
victions.7 Similarly, for Leiris, dreams were a source of imagery and
escape, but above all, they represented the possibility for creating
another separate, autonomous reality. Aragon was later to highlight
the use of the dream for the Surrealists:
La pureté du rêve, l’inemployable, l’inutile du rêve, voilà ce qu’il
s’agit de défendre contre une nouvelle rage de ronds de cuir qui
va se déchaîner. Il ne faut pas permettre que le rêve devienne le
jumeau du poème en prose, le cousin du bafouillage ou le
beau-frère du haï-kaï (Aragon, 1980; 186).

However, it could be contested that it was precisely the similarity

between the dream and what Barthes has identified in the haiku that
fascinated Leiris. According to Barthes, “le flash du haïku n’éclaire,
ne révèle rien; il est celui d’une photographie que l’on prendrait très
soigneusement, mais en ayant omis de charger l’appareil de sa
pellicule” (Barthes, 1980; 113). The haiku for Barthes represents what
the dream comes to represent for Leiris – a fleeting evocation of an
authentic, self-contained moment of reality, of presence.
Leiris tried constantly to define this sense of the instant,
which was for him, primarily pictorial. In his journal, he describes this
sense as présence and claims that whatever it is that is imbued with
this quality does not need to signify anything; it is sufficient that it is
there, that it exists (see Journal, 30.7.77; 682). In Bacon’s painting,
Leiris exalts above all the painter’s ability not only to be present
(présent) but also to be contemporary (actuel):
Recherche plus ou moins expresse d’un comble de tension, sans
doute est-ce à cela que répond l’oeuvre entier de Bacon [...] Sur le
plan thématique, tension [...] entre tradition et modernité [...] de
sorte que l’on pourrait croire le peintre avait – spontanément –
fait sienne la phrase de Baudelaire assurant qu’un moitié de l’art
est ‘l’éternel et l’immuable’ et l’autre la modernité ‘soit le
transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent’ (Leiris, 1989; 19-20).

This very same tension, the dialectic between tradition and innovation,
characterizes Leiris’s own writing. Leiris celebrates paintings that
seem to achieve what frustrates him as a writer – the possibility of

7
See Aragon, Une Vague de Rêves (1924).
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 65

cancelling out absence, “peupler le vide.” Rendering reality for Leiris

never involved a copy but rather a transmutation. In his Journal, he
writes about Picasso’s paintings, claiming for them a quality of
authenticity that does not lie in any naturalism or rationalism but
rather in their air of urgency or inevitability: “le tout est qu’il y ait
nécessité” (Journal, 27.12.35; 295). The canvas or sculpture is never
simply a blank screen across which images are projected but is above
all a dynamic space, a space of animation that calls reality into
question.
Leiris’s chosen artists describe their relationship to their
subject. This relationship cannot be resolved in the past (of the
subject) but only in the present (of the creation). For Leiris, art is
primarily a matter of authenticity and not representation – the trap to
avoid is that of narrative. On the margins of the quotidian, the work of
art should express a new temporality – that of the instant. This is to
be perceived not in the product but in the process of creation.
Giacometti’s sculpture, in particular, seemed to mirror Leiris’s
indefatigable and eternal pursuit of the réel and he claimed that
Giacometti’s figures constituted an acte de présence.
Thus for Leiris, some visual art, like the dream, comes to
represent disruption and discontinuity, placed as it is outside the
continuum of the everyday. Similarly, the theatre, “lieu de la mort
feinte” (Leiris, 1955; 44), symbolizes a link, a bridge between illusion
and reality, sleeping and waking. Like the stage of the theatre, to
whose influence Leiris attributes his allusive and metaphorical writing
style (p. 44), the dream or the work of art became a screen upon which
were played out his fears about mortality and death. Therefore these
ideas held significant thematic implications for Leiris’s writing but
they also held stylistic significance – representing the ability to
escape a pre-ordained order, allowing for disruption and discontinuity.
It is this stylistic influence, connected to Leiris’s use of imagery,
rather than its interpretation, that interests me here.8 It was in the
attempt to situate his writing outside the traditional concepts of space
and time, to liberate it from the chronological transcription of the

8
For discussion of the relevance of the dream to Leiris’s autobiography, see Lejeune
“Rêve et autobiographie” in Lire Leiris Autobiographie et Langage, Paris,
Klincksieck, 1975, pp. 91-100.
66 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

quotidian, where “le singulier devenu fragment de pluriel,” that Leiris

turned to his Surrealist legacy.
Leiris’s dedication in L’Âge d’Homme acknowledges a debt of
gratitude to another Surrealist dissident: “A Georges Bataille, qui est à
l’origine de ce livre.” Bataille’s theory of le sacré which he evolved
with Leiris derives from salient features of the visionary ideals of
Surrealism: the rupture of the ego boundaries, the sacrifice of oneself,
becoming Other. During the 1930s, Bataille returned repeatedly to the
theme of loss over and against the modern norms of utility and
conservation. He contends that our lives are impoverished by the
dominance of our instincts of self-preservation. Life, according to
Bataille can only hope to achieve an incandescent intensity when it
puts itself at risk, burns and consumes itself. This argument is
demonstrated in Bataille’s essay on Van Gogh, published in
Documents, 1930. Bataille argues that Van Gogh’s self-mutilation, in
spite of its basis in mental illness, was no less the expression of a
social function. The act of cutting off an ear is compared with
mutilations carried out in initiatory and other rites; both are said to
spring from a desire to rupture limited being. Leiris seems to have
shared this scorn for bourgeois self-preservation, literally, in his
account of masochism – slashing his body during his unsatisfactory
love affair with Kay – but more importantly and more profoundly, the
desire to rupture is expressed symbolically and stylistically. Through
his projective identifications with Judith, Lucretia and the decapitated
Holofernes, Leiris is able to become Other. Identification is usually
conceived of as a process of incorporation, or introjection, analogous
to the physical ingestion of an object. Leiris’s type of associative or
projective identification is the reverse of this: it becomes a forceful
projection of the Subject outside of himself.9

Object and Subject

L’Âge d’Homme is purgatorial rather than redemptive, and

lacks a clear end-point. Leiris uses his past and his past personae in
order to elaborate a new, present self, thus making the autobio-

9
For discussion of the concept of identification in psychoanalysis, see Laplanche and
Pontalis Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (1973).
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 67

graphical process a basis for future transfiguration of the self. Leiris

hopes that his autobiography:

Me modifiât, en m’aidant à prendre conscience, et qu’elle

introduisît également un élément nouveau dans mes rapports avec
autrui [. . .] Envie [. . .] de tout avouer pour partir sur de nouvelles
bases, entretenant avec ceux à l’affection ou à l’estime desquels
j’attachais du prix des relations désormais sans tricherie (p. 14-5).

The significance of this transformation is stylistic in as much as Leiris

plays down the gap between past protagonist and present writer by
representing the past only as it is reconstructed in the act and process
of writing. The fragmentation of the text, the multiplicity of the
images, breaks up and offsets the imposition of a monolithic identity.
Through writing, Leiris controls the image-making process and
attenuates the potential spell-binding fixity of self-images.
Autobiography thus becomes the site of the formation of subjectivity
through writing and the locus of the confrontation between a
fragmentary self and a multivocal text.
The extent to which Leiris succeeds in conveying an
impression of spontaneity and discontinuity is relative; his visual
memories are as carefully framed in the text as any of the static visual
images to which he makes reference. For example, in the section
entitled “Le Génie du Foyer,” Leiris frames the story of his sickness
with the memory of his mother looking like a Roman matron. The
memory has been inspired by Leiris’s thoughts on classical themes,
“Antiquité.” He introduces the anecdote with his most familiar
memory of his mother: “Quand je pense à ma mère, l’image d’elle qui
me vient le plus fréquemment, c’est telle que je la voyais alors, en
chemise de nuit – une longue chemise de nuit blanche – et natte dans
le dos” (p. 65). The memory then develops, related in the past tense
and overlaid by interjections from the narrator as to how the memory
still holds true in the present. The anecdote in question is postponed
by yet another memory, brought to mind by the unfolding narrative, of
how Leiris and his brother played with the stove before which he now
sits. In such a manner, the mechanics of memory unfold, layer upon
layer. Finally, Leiris recalls the text to its initial point of departure and
closes the frame with his mother: “Ma mère, très petite, devait avoir
une vieille robe de chambre passée sur sa chemise de nuit et sa natte
pendant long dans son dos” (p. 67). Although this sentence does not
68 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

conclude the section, followed as it is with a description of his father,

the near repetitive use of vocabulary, besides its relevance to the
appearance of women from antiquity, provides a precise visual frame
to the anecdote.
The interplay between object and subject positions is an
integral point of exploration in autobiography where the self as subject
gazes at the self as object. “Le sujet et l’objet” forms one of the
sections outlining Leiris’s childhood metaphysics. The account of his
first erection, experienced during a family walk when he sees poor
children climbing trees barefooted, reveals to him how an involuntary
subjective response to external events indicates the interaction of
interior and exterior worlds:
Je notai du moins une coïncidence, impliquant un parallélisme
entre deux séries de faits: ce qui se passait dans mon corps, et les
événements extérieurs, dont je n’avais jusqu’alors jamais tenu
compte en tant que se déroulant dans un milieu réellement séparé
(p. 40).

This memory recurs several times in the narrative, on each

occasion imbued with different layers of meaning. The initial account
of his sexual awakening is interpreted as this intuition of the division
between subject and object and the extent to which the self is formed
through its responses to the external world. At the time, Leiris makes
no connection between the scene he witnesses and his erection; later
he recalls the emotions he experienced upon seeing the children and
remembers the empathetic sensation of pleasure and pain of the
children’s bare feet against the bark, the pity he felt for their poverty
and the fear he imagined in anticipation of their possible fall. Such
moments of intense revelation constitute for Leiris the expression of a
tauromachic truth – an interruption of consciousness, which brings
him face to face with himself in a heightened awareness of the present
instant.
In the section “Mon frère ami,” Leiris describes such a
moment of truth resulting from a simultaneous experience of positive
and negative identification. On the cliffs of Sainte-Adresse, Leiris
observes a studious schoolboy walking with his brother and mother.
At the same time, the clanging of a solitary buoy reminds him of a
young prostitute he had met the previous evening:
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 69

Dans une certaine mesure, je m’identifiai à lui [the schoolboy] –

de par mon incapacité à mépriser certaines contingences
matérielles telles que le confort – à des travaux scientifiques que
je juge mesquins, tandis qu’au coeur du monde comme au large
de cette crique il y a quelque chose de si brûlant qui délire, qui
crie tout seul [the buoy he associates with the prostitute],
demandant simplement qu’on l’entende et qu’on ait assez de
courage pour s’y dévouer tout entier (p. 128).

This experience of identification brings Leiris to a sudden awakening

of consciousness. Sheringham interprets this scene as confronting
Leiris “with a mise en scène of his inadequacies, particularly his
inability to surmount the fears and scruples which impede his devotion
to the poetic intensity and authenticity he craves” (Sheringham, 1993;
133).
Sheringham’s exposition of the scene fails to observe that
while Leiris’s projective identifications lead to the inevitable
introspective self-examination, they also turn his thoughts beyond
himself and to the insights he has gained into the life of the prostitute.
This juxtaposition of narcissistic self-reflection and exterior vision is
channelled into a feeling of pity which Leiris (relating back to the
occasion of his first erection) expresses as an experience of sexual
desire: “Revenu en ville, j’eus un moment l’idée de retourner ‘à la
maison close, pour coucher avec la prostituée. Je ne le fis pas, et sans
doute ai-je eu tort” (p. 128). Such a sexual union would perhaps have
accorded Leiris the means with which to reconcile the opposition he
senses: his self-pity, provoked by his despised life as fonctionnaire,
and his admiration for the authenticity he perceives in the hardship of
the prostitute’s existence.
According to Leiris, the divide between object and subject can
be traversed only in the act of sexual union or in suicide. The death of
Cleopatra represents to Leiris a kind of symbolic union of the Lucretia
and Judith prototypes:
Examinant les conditions dans lesquelles Cléopâtre, reine
d’Egypte, a mis fin à ses jours, je suis frappé par le contacte de
ces deux éléments: d’une part le serpent meutrier, symbole mâle
par excellence, – d’autre part les figues sous lesquelles il est
dissimulé, image courante de l’organe féminin [...] je ne puis
m’empêcher de noter avec quelle exactitude cette rencontre de
symboles répond à ce qui est pour moi le sens profond du suicide:
devenir à la fois soi et l’autre, mâle et femelle, sujet et l’objet, ce
70 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

qui est tué et ce qui tue, – seule possibilité de communion avec

soi-même (p. 141-2).

The implication of the dissolution of gender barriers (as well as the

division between object and subject) in an act of absolute love or
suicide, the inseparability of eros and thanatos, recalls Barthes’s
notion of jouissance. Jouissance appears essentially as an interruption
of consciousness that shatters the static mirror world of the Imaginary
(see also chapter 4, page 138). The annihilation of the self that is
inherent to the notion of jouissance makes explicit the association
between orgasm (jouir) and death, aligning with Leiris’s concept of
suicide:
On peut dire que la crise de la mort est en analogie avec le
spasme, dont on n’a jamais à proprement parler conscience, à
cause de la déroute de toutes les facultés qu’il implique et de son
caractère de retour momentané au chaos. La tristesse bien connu
d’après le coït tient à ce même vertige inhérent à toute crise non
dénouée, puisque dans l’aventure sexuelle comme dans la mort le
point culminant de cette crise s’accompagne d’une perte de
conscience, au moins partielle dans le premier cas (p. 87).

Leiris’s text, through a certain symbiosis of style and content,

seeks to suspend the reader’s sense of self as a unified subject (just as
the author seems to elude definition); therefore, the act of reading (like
the act of love or suicide) comes to imply the dissolution of the
subject/object divide.10

Textual Crises

The theme of death, the fear and loathing, attraction and

revulsion it inspires in Leiris, is a recurrent one in L’Âge d’Homme.
Barthes maintains that death is omnipresent in the sphere of
self-representation, particularly in the visual art of photography.11 This
idea is present in Leiris’s vision of himself petrified and framed in the
wooden oblong of an old daguerreotype (p. 35). Barthes connects the
representation of the body in photography with death, through both his

10
I shall explore this concept further in relation to a multivocal text in my study of
Gisèle Prassinos.
11
The pervasive presence of death in the sphere of self-representation is a theme that I
shall elaborate upon with reference particularly to Francis Bacon and Gisèle
Prassinos.
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 71

definition of the studium and the punctum. Through the studium,

photography has the capacity to impart to its subjects a mask-like
fixity and the immobility of this mask represents death in person.
However the body appears, the subject has no control over how others
perceive it (this relates back to the fears expressed in Leiris’s
prologue: his concerns about others’ misinterpretation of his
intentions). To experience the process by which the Subject becomes
Object is to undergo a kind of mini-death.
Simultaneously, the insistence upon the past reality of the
object reveals a kind of punctum. The attestation of the past reality of
a human being is also an attestation of their death at some future time,
which may itself be in the past. Photography embodies the illusion of
le stade du miroir; the Subject is always already dead to itself, as it is
always already a mask. Similarly, for de Man, death presides in
autobiography: “Death is a misplaced name for a linguistic
predicament, and the restoration of mortality by autobiography [. . .]
deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores” (de Man,
1984; 70). The fragmentation and discontinuity of Leiris’s text, the
lack of any material likenesses, attempts to avoid this petrifaction. The
accumulation of anecdotes and the juxtaposition of memories and
images dissolve the self into the Symbolic text, evading the
coalescence of the Imaginary.
However, Leiris is aware, as he indicates in his prologue
(“Acte par rapport à autrui”), that the text remains a rhetorical genre
open to interpretation and therefore unable to guarantee the dispersion
of the Subject (see also chapter 4, page 138). The triumph of the
Symbolic over the Imaginary, or the Imaginary over the Symbolic, is
dependent upon the reader’s interaction with the text. Autobiographers
do not write primarily for themselves. In the light of reader-response
theory and Lejeune’s discussion of le pacte autobiographique, the
importance of the reader’s role in the autobiographical process is in no
doubt. Autobiography constitutes a kind of act, in the case of L’Âge
d’Homme, a three-part act.
Leiris is aware and desirous of the possible therapeutic value
of the autobiographical process but he still determines to challenge
and confront his reader. Leiris’s autobiographical act corresponds to
the theme of the theatre and the corrida, which permeates L’Âge
d’Homme. A theatrical performance, like any act (as I shall
demonstrate in my final study of the performances of Orlan) requires
72 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

the complicity of the Other (reader/viewer). In the act of reading, the

borderline between stage and audience, performance and existence
becomes blurred. In Leiris’s narrative, this has particular relevance as
Leiris presents his memories as the visual performance of his past. He
likens the distance from which he views his past to watching scenes in
a theatre (p. 44); he is confined to an imaginative reconstruction of the
past in which the reader is invited to collaborate.
Moments of intense revelation experienced by Leiris in the
past and recounted in the present reveal how the instance of recall still
has the power to render him vulnerable to the very emotion he tries to
capture in writing. The account of the incident on the cliffs of Sainte-
Adresse provokes a crisis in the writing of the text and Leiris, noting
how far he has departed from his starting point, wonders whether his
associative method, his linking of memories, has deteriorated to
become no more than a matter of style:
A mesure que j’écris, le plan que je m’étais tracé m’échappe et
l’on dirait que plus je regarde en moi-même plus tout ce que je
vois devient confus, les thèmes que j’avais cru primitivement
distinguer se révélant inconsistants et arbitraires, comme si ce
classement n’était en fin de compte qu’une sorte de guide-âne
abstrait, voire un simple procédé de composition esthétique (p.
128).

This apparent crisis in the writing of the text makes the reader aware
of the present act of textual construction, the engagement with
material, words, memories, current preoccupations, in which
connections must be established and out of which something must be
created.
Similar crises occur elsewhere in the text and serve a dual
purpose that is both stylistic and thematic. They alert the reader to the
fallibility of the autobiographer and the fallibility of memory, or the
extent to which a present perspective can be accurately brought to bear
upon a personal history. They also reveal the latency of experience:
the way in which Leiris relives the experience at the time of writing.
What constitutes the crisis is the temporal abyss between the moment
in the past, the memory of the sensation, and the moment in the
present, the reality of a sensation: the fact of discontinuity. The nature
of autobiography involves the constant intervention of the past into the
present moment, a radical revolution of temporality. Therefore what
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 73

incites Leiris’s narrative crises is not the simple fact of remembrance

but the intensity that is latent within the process of remembering.
As I have observed, the intensity of experience revealed by
Leiris in L’Âge d’Homme is most often related to an interruption of
the continuum of consciousness brought about by the unexpected
collision of the object/subject. The importance of this experience, or
the vision of this ideal experience, and its relevance to Leiris’s work is
defined in his notion of le sacré, which I have mentioned above. The
significance of le sacré is explored in the 1929 Giacometti article:

Il y a des moments qu’on peut appeler des crises et qui sont les
seuls qui importent dans une vie. Il s’agit des moments où le
dehors semble brusquement répondre à la sommation que nous lui
lançons du dedans, où le monde extérieur s’ouvre pour qu’entre
notre coeur et lui s’établisse une soudaine communication [. . .]
La poésie ne peut se dégager que de telles ‘crises,’ et seules
comptent les oeuvres qui en fournissent des équivalents (Leiris,
1929; 209).

In the sculpture of Giacometti, the paintings of Picasso, Masson and

Bacon, Leiris admires the artists’ ability to disrupt a sense of
continuity and to shatter the apparent homogeneity of the quotidian. I
shall explore how Bacon achieves this sense of disruption in the
following chapter. The entirety of Leiris’s art criticism is united by a
few specific essential criteria. Above all, the trait Leiris exalts in his
art criticism is realism: “ce qu’est au vrai notre condition propre”
(Leiris, 1983; 46). In his Journal, he writes about Bacon’s style of
prophetic realism (Journal; 21. 1. 81). It is this sense of reality that
Leiris seeks to convey by imposing his tauromachic code in an effort
to communicate a truth that is as objective as possible.
In order that L’Âge d’Homme conforms to Leiris’s
self-imposed tauromachic code, it has to involve the taking of risks, to
present a challenge not only to the reader but also to the author. He
describes his autobiographical enterprise as an attempt to shape his
life into a solid block as a means of warding off the threat of
mortality. He acknowledges the paradox of this attempt as, at the same
time, he declares himself willing, like the matador, to risk everything.
Leiris perceives this sort of risk in the art of André Masson:

Point crucial de l’art: guerre inexpiable du créateur avec lui-même

et du sujet avec l’objet, dichotomie féconde, joute sanglante dans
74 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

laquelle l’individu entier est engagé, ultime chance pour l’homme

– s’il consent à y risquer jusqu’à ses os – de donner corps à un
sacré (Leiris, 1966; 63).

This notion of an art in which the artist is fully engaged –

mind and body – is elaborated upon in the prologue to L’Âge
d’Homme: “Il s’agissait moins là de ce qu’il est convenu d’appeler
‘littérature engagée’ que d’une littérature dans laquelle j’essayais de
m’engager tout entier. Au-dedans comme au-dehors” (p. 15). Leiris
also seeks to imbue his autobiography with the sort of realism that he
perceives in Bacon’s work, a realism that is subjective because he is
wholly engaged with his narrative, and a realism that involves the
taking of risks because of the intensity of that engagement. The visual
manner in which Leiris evokes and reconstructs his past facilitates the
technique of stream-of-consciousness memory association but it also
allows the reader to enter into and participate in the pictures of his
past. These pictures are all the more potent for their textual
reconstruction, which, as opposed to any form of static image, are
multisensual or synaesthetic in their evocations of the past.

The Fallibility of Self-Representation

Autobiography, however fragmented or faithful to the

discontinuity of experience, remains an exertion of control over
self-image. In writing an account of his/her life, the writer
“authorizes” the life because the identification between writer and text
is explicit. Nevertheless, in writing the life, the autobiographer must
also stand apart from the self, trying to envisage and read the self from
a distance imposed by the passage of time. L’Âge d’Homme reveals
how a creative, constitutive relationship exists between image and
identity in autobiographical writing; how the visual memory, the
reading of images from the past – be they fixed in an external
materiality, such as the Cranach painting, or fluid in the mind’s eye,
like the dreams, – is integral to Leiris’s construction of identity.
Leiris’s fixation upon the Cranach painting unfolds in a series of
readings of that image – readings that structure the text because the
painting has come to structure Leiris’s self-identity. These readings
are concerned with the act of interpreting visual memories in a way
that becomes integral to the very construction of identity. Both his
sense of self-identity and the narrative he recounts about the formation
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 75

of that identity are evoked in repeated attempts to fix and understand

that image, which expands and shifts as he returns again and again to
read its significance.
Leiris establishes this distance between himself and the self in
formation on the page through his projective identification with
Cranach’s painting. In the attempt to represent and, perhaps reconcile,
the apparently contradictory facets of his character, the figures in the
painting become his alternative “doubles.” Freud, in the essay on The
Uncanny, recounts an incident that occurred on a train journey when
he caught sight of his face reflected in a swinging glass door and, for
an instant, failed to recognize it as his own. He recalls having a hearty
distaste for the bearded stranger lurching towards him and wonders if
his reaction was not “a vestigial trace of the archaic reaction which
feels the “double” (the mirror reflection) to be something uncanny
(unheimlich)” (Freud xvii, 1953-74; 248). Leiris recognizes his alien
doubles within the three images contained within the painting: the
self-sacrifice of Lucretia, the bloody bravery of Judith and
Holofernes’s severed head.
The quotation that Leiris selects to head the chapter entitled
“Tragiques” is indicative of the role that the Cranach painting plays in
the construction of L’Âge d’Homme. Goethe’s Faust sees in the
Medusa the image of his beloved Margaret. Mephistopheles warns
him: “C’est de la magie, pauvre fou, car chacun croit y retrouver celle
qu’il aime” (p. 43). In the figures of Lucretia and Judith, Leiris
perceives the characteristics of the women whom he has known and
loved, and he projects onto these women the entirety of his sexual
history. Thematically, the painting serves as the structuring pivot of
the autobiography. The image of Lucretia in tears gives rise to the
section on wounded women; Judith is the figure around whom are
gathered the images of death and tragedy – principally, the tragic
roles played by Leiris’s Tante Lise. “La Tête d’Holopherne” groups a
series of recollections ostensibly inspired by the theme of wounded
men. Leiris finally combines the names of Lucretia and Judith to write
a chapter beginning with the tale of Cleopatra (mentioned above),
whom Leiris considers to encapsulate the qualities of eternal
femininity in her ability to reconcile the characteristics of both Judith
and Lucretia (p. 142).
These passages, linked as they are to the Cranach painting,
underscore how the visualization of his memory is integral to the
76 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

formation of Leiris’s identity as he writes. Both the subject of the

book and his present subjectivity seem embodied in this image. If the
image incarnates Leiris’s self, what is required of him now in the
autobiographical act is to read into this image a meaning and an
identity. Leiris orients his book around an image because the image
evokes more about his life than a conventional autobiographical
narrative might. Leiris makes the reader aware of the inherent
open-endedness of the quest for identity; in so doing he makes
autobiography a process that spawns self-estrangement as much as
self-retrieval. By reading his own subjectivity through a pre-existing
image, autobiographical desire in Leiris can also be interpreted as a
desire to become other. The juxtaposition and layering of visual
memories sets aside the story as narrative progression, as a path or
line that leads to a centre. The way is through the Cranach painting,
or, rather, the story evolves out of the painting that is its centre. Event
and identity unfold in a fragmented, nonchronological way as
evocations born of an image. The reading of the image entails that
self-representation becomes a form of self-analysis which turns on the
retrospectively constructed meaning of an image. The visual image is
privileged over narrative.
Thus the painting not only evokes an experience of
identification but also provides three divergent types of muse. Muses
for the Surrealists always provided this double function: inspiration
and a blank canvas upon which could be projected the desires and
fears of the individual artist. For example, this double function of the
muse for the Surrealists is revealed in a joint venture involving Man
Ray and Meret Oppenheim. The best known of these photographs
shows Oppenheim posed naked beside the etching press, her inked
forearm and palm raised, as if to imprint directly on the photographic
plate. The body of the Surrealist muse becomes a text upon which the
male Surrealist reads his desire; femininity is perceived as a reflective
mirror in which the artist narcissistically recognizes himself. The logic
of the Man Ray photograph – black ink on white skin, the phallic
handle of the printing press obscuring the sex of the female subject –
is a logic that disavows difference and otherness. However, Leiris, in
evoking three separate muses, of both the male and female sex,
exploits both the differences between the figures, their difference as
well as their similarity to him, and consequently the very different
associations that each of the characters hold.
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 77

The Multiplication of Self

In laying down his tauromachique code, Leiris desires to

reveal an “authentic” self or selves. He is aware that he is unable to
provide a perfect or complete portrait, as he acknowledges on the
second page:

Si rompu que je sois à m’observer moi-même, si maniaque que

soit mon goût pour ce genre amer de contemplation, il y a sans nul
doute des choses qui m’échappent, et vraisemblablement parmi
les plus apparentes, puisque la perspective est tout et qu’un
tableau de moi, peint selon ma propre perspective, a de grandes
chances de laisser dans l’ombre certains détails qui, pour les
autres, doivent être les plus flagrants (p. 26).

So Leiris is aware of his fallibility and aware that a single interior

perspective can produce only an abstract self-portrait. He is also aware
of the risks that this entails as regards his relations to those around
him.
The risks inherent to self-representation, the risk of distortion,
manipulation and deception are evoked by Goethe in an essay on
Leonardo’s Last Supper, who alerts us to the potentially disconcerting
aspect of a face viewed through a distorted perspective. Asserting that
the human countenance is only beautiful if contained within strict
parameters of size, Goethe instructs the reader, “look at yourself, in a
concave mirror, and you will be terrified at the inanimate, unmeaning
monstrosity, which like a Medusa, meets your eye. Something similar
is experienced by the artist, by whose hands a colossal face is to be
formed” (Gage, 1980; 185). The risk entailed in exploiting such a
perspective lies in placing the subject, at least temporarily, beyond the
grasp of recognition. The subject, through a process of rupture and
self-estrangement, is propelled outside of him/herself. The self-
portrait therefore becomes the portrait of a moment of rupture, of the
destructuring of the self in an experience of otherness. It is such a
destructuring that Leiris pursues through his evocations of otherness.
In pursuing “authenticity” and reality, Leiris presents eclectic,
sometimes contradictory, images. It is as if, in the words of Rimbaud,
“Je est un autre.” Whether this distorted perspective is intentional or
unintentional, it imposes a sort of mask upon the writing subject. This
is acknowledged by Leiris in a diary entry heading “Amours d’Holo-
78 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

pherne”: “Comment oserais-je me regarder si je ne portais pas soit un

masque, soit des lunettes déformantes” (p. 156). This mask can be
equated with the kind of defacement described by de Man in his essay
on autobiography. De Man contends that the act of textual
self-construction works to create a new physiognomy through the
agency of prosopopeia, thus disfiguring (transforming) the writing self
(de Man, 1979; 67-82). De Man’s notion of textually creating a new
face aligns with the image of the mask. However, in his theory of
autobiography, self-exposure becomes self-deception, an aesthetic
game, a play of signifiers. Cognizant of the fact that any self-image
construed in an autobiography must also confront the image of the self
constructed elsewhere, Leiris acknowledges the risk of distortion and
draws the reader’s attention to the unavoidable fallibility of
self-knowledge.
If portraiture or representation is of a relational nature, a
dialogue, the meeting of object and subject, as I have indicated, then
self-portraiture or self-representation is also a complicitous act, as we
have seen with regard to Duchamp. And, here, the mask plays a
crucial role in the interpretation of self-representation. The subject,
who is also the object of his/her own gaze, provides a likeness which
is then given over to the gaze of the spectator or reader. The distortion
of the subject imposes the aforementioned mask. Self-representation
therefore becomes less about recognition than about desire: the mask
is the catalyst for desire. The search inherent to self-representation is
that of the desire to recognize and, in turn, to be recognized. Leiris
refers to his style as a sort of photomontage yet fails to include any
photographs. Photography, with its claims to authenticity and veristic
representation, has to be disposed of before the mask, the place where
desire is invoked, can be grappled with. The mask is both the
mechanism for the arousal of desire and the impediment to its
attainment; therefore, the mask becomes one more rhetorical strategy
in the collusive process of self-representation.
The incorporation of images from the past, material or verbal,
creates the effect of looking at the self as if the self were another – the
photographed self, the dream or memory self; for example, Leiris’s
incorporation of diary entries, records of dreams. A picture of the past,
whether verbal or visual, flashes upon the consciousness of the reader
or writer and causes a kind of disassociative shock, transforming our
perception of the present reality. The picture of the past, detached
 Imaging the Absent Subject: Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre 79

from the course of history, represents a confrontation of the past with

the present moment and the recognition of the relevance of the past to
the present moment. If the mind is likened to a camera, the
photographic moment erases the distinction between past and present
by interrupting time, taking a frame out of its context for perusal in the
future. The inclusion of such (textual) images within an autobiography
involves a certain process of spatializing the narrative of a life. The
textual fragments, which compose a text that is no longer continuous
and linear, perform as historical pictures, breaking the flow of
(narrative) time, existing as fragments, and superimposing the past
upon the present.
Leiris speaks of his visual imagination in terms of allegory:

Pour une très large part, le goût que j’ai de l’hermétisme procède
du même mouvement que cet amour ancien pour les ‘allégories,’
et je suis convaincu qu’il faut rapprocher également de ce dernier
l’habitude que j’ai de penser par formules, analogies, images, –
technique mentale dont, que je veuille ou non, le présent écrit
n’est qu’une application (p. 55).

In Laokoon, an Enlightenment study on the inimical relationship

between plastic and literary art, G. E. Lessing prescribes a sharp
distinction between the spatiality of pictorial art and the temporal
nature of narrative. Lessing criticizes allegory as a decadent form,
because it attempts an illegitimate crossover between narrative and
picture. But in Leiris’s work, allegory’s spatialization of narrative has
a special purpose and design.
The spatial interpretation of a static image, or rather, a series
of images paradoxically reveals to Leiris the temporal process of
ageing:

Je retrouve une image matérielle très précise qui contribua pour

beaucoup à me donner la notion de la succession des stades de
l’existence, de l’écoulement du temps . . . Il s’agit d’une suite de
compositions que je vis tout petit, ornant le dos du cartonnage
d’un album édité à Epinal, et qui était intitulée Les Couleurs de la
vie (p. 32).

Leiris’s reactions to these images constitute his first experience of

objectification. He perceives himself as belonging to these coloured
categories, unable to outwit the inexorable progress of time despite his
inclinations: “J’ai passé maintenant par un certain nombre de ces
80 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

couleurs [...] La couleur jaune – ou de maladie de foie – me guette et

j’espérais, il y a à peine plus d’un an, échapper, grâce au suicide, à la
couleur noire [...] je demeure encastré dans ces Ages de la Vie” (p.
35). Imagination is contained in and by the remembered image, which
lends to the imagination its very form and makes it specific to the self.
The images are dispersed yet they take precedence in the memory over
temporal moments and events. The teleological unfolding of events in
a story is contrasted here with the more vivid and ever evolving
images from Leiris’s past. The reality of the images becomes mythic
in their status not as events but as catalysts for the unravelling of
memory.
Leiris admits the fallibility of his visualization of the past.
After relating his memory of the Contes d’Hoffmann, he writes:
J’arrive à le reconstituer ici d’après mes souvenirs, y joignant
l’observation de ce que je suis devenu depuis lors et comparant
entre eux les éléments anciens ou récents que me fournit ma
mémoire. Une telle façon de procéder est peut-être hasardeuse, car
qui me dit que je ne donne pas à ces souvenirs un sens qu’ils n’ont
pas eu, les chargeant après coup d’une valeur émotive dont furent
dépourvus les événements réels auxquels ils se réfèrent, bref,
ressuscitant ce passé d’une manière tendancieuse? (p. 51).

Such self-doubts and questioning permeate Leiris’s text, highlighting

the distinction between the past self of memory and the present
writing self. Leiris uses Cranach’s painting as a sort of reference point
to draw together his memories and classify them in a manner which,
he feels, best demonstrates the contradictory elements of his
personality, thus attempting to breach the divide between past and
present selves.
 Mimicking Mimesis:
Francis Bacon’s Portraits

Introduction

According to Bacon’s friend and biographer Michael Peppiatt,

Bacon was an enigmatic character who could not be pinned down:

The closer you got to him, the more likely he was to turn nasty or simply
disappear – to go through a wall into a life where you could not follow. He
was a past master at slipping from one situation, one social level, to another,
and at being many things to many people [...] The enigma that he sought in
his work surrounded him like a protective cloak, allowing him repeatedly to
break the mould of accepted thought and accepted behaviour. Enigma was
the source from which he drew his greatest strength and inventiveness
(Peppiatt, 1996; xviii).

In paying homage to Bacon the man, Peppiatt also reveals one of the
most intriguing and therefore powerful aspects of the artist’s work: its
evasiveness, its ability to confound interpretation, whilst
simultaneously inviting the spectator to engage with an apparent
narrative. In this chapter, I shall be looking at this characteristic of
Bacon’s work, in particular through his self-portraits – the extent to
which they reveal or disguise the subject. What happens when the
painter turns his gaze upon himself? Does the work reveal the
knowledge of a coherent and unified identity, or does it reflect
Bacon’s multi-faceted public personae?
To address these questions, I shall adopt a partly art-historical
perspective in order to look at the extent to which Bacon was
consciously working within a tradition of portraiture and also working
against, or subverting that tradition. It is necessary to take into account
not only the biographical knowledge that we have of Bacon but also
the critical attention that he has received, from writers as diverse as
Gilles Deleuze to Milan Kundera and Ernst van Alphen. Many of
these critics have attempted to address what they perceive as the
indefinable element in Bacon’s work, its ability to move and disturb
82 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

its audience. The most recent of these critical texts is Van Alphen’s
Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self, which examines Bacon’s
conception of self-identity and how this relates to his representation of
the body. This text is the most relevant to my own enquiry into
self-representation and I shall consequently extrapolate and engage
with those aspects of Van Alphen’s text that are most pertinent to my
own argument.
Within the context of this thesis, Bacon presents himself as
the logical successor to both Duchamp and Leiris. Among the few
artists for whom Bacon expressed admiration, Duchamp, the great
anti-retinal artist, ironically drew high praise from this visual artist.
Before Duchamp abandoned easel-painting, he created one of the most
influential paintings of the twentieth century for the consequences it
held for the portrayal of movement and the human body: Nu
descendant un escalier. Duchamp was interested in process as a
subject for painting, and the way in which a human body makes a
coherent structure in movement, even if that structure is never
revealed completely at any one moment in time. There are certain
technical similarities between Duchamp’s analysis of movement and
Bacon’s distortions of the human figure but the difference between the
artists’ objectives is considerable: Bacon does not seek to show
successive appearance, but rather the superimposition of appearances.
However, it was not only, or so much, Duchamp’s artistic
legacy which impressed Bacon but the myth of the man as artist. As
John Russell explains:
Bacon’s admiration for Duchamp is extended not so
much to individual works [...] as to the attitude of mind behind
them: the unfailing historical sense, the conclusions arrived at and
decisively acted upon, and the disdain for self-promotion and the
making of a ‘career’ (Russell, 1971; 51).

Part of Duchamp’s “attitude of mind” was, as we have seen, his

ambivalent attitude toward critics whose interpretations he sought
constantly to deflect and which resulted in an effect of self-promotion
and self-mythification. If Duchamp had both a social and artistic
influence, Bacon’s life-long friendship with Leiris, to whom he was
introduced by Sonia Orwell in the 1960’s was both beneficial to
Bacon’s career (through Leiris’s criticism and the contacts facilitated
by his art dealer wife, Louise, daughter of Picasso’s dealer,
 Francis Bacon’s Portraits 83

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler) and influential in the degree to which the

two men shared similar ideas and philosophies. Leiris’s concept of
beauty, which he elucidated in much of his criticism, was something
Bacon related to his own aesthetics, while Leiris found in Bacon’s
painting, as we have seen, the moment of le sacré, which he
constantly sought to convey in his own writing.
If, as I argued in chapter two, Leiris’s L’Age d’Homme reveals
the fallibility of memory and the nature of an open-ended quest for a
self-identity which he seeks through projective identifications with
pre-existing images, I now wish to explore Bacon’s plastic identity
through a similar investigative framework. How far were Bacon’s
self-representations informed by his knowledge of images in art
history? To what extent were the self-portraits influenced by his
fascination for photography, in particular the experiments of
Muybridge and Eakins, and popular imagery in the press? How does
Bacon reconcile the figurative imperative, which he brought to his
entire oeuvre, with his desire to exploit the sensual quality of his
medium, and how is the materiality of oil paint understood to engage
with the materiality of the represented body? And, finally, to what
extent do his self-portraits question the very possibility of
self-knowledge and the possibility for the artist of representing this
self? I shall draw upon both the critical vocabulary of semiotics and
contemporary feminist art criticism, which is invaluable in its
articulation of the problems inherent to the objectification of the self
and negotiating the artist’s relation with pre-existing images.

Distorting mirrors

Just as Duchamp related Le Grand Verre to the tradition of

self-portraiture partly through his references to this work as a mirror
of the fourth dimension, Bacon also engaged with this generic rule.
Similarly to Duchamp, who, as we have seen, referred to the mirror
not as a duplicating but as a duplicitous mechanism, expressing his
disdain for pure opticality, Bacon expressed his preference for the
bizarre distortions provided by fairground mirrors as opposed to the
apparent mimetic truth of conventional mirrors. John Russell quotes
Bacon as saying:
One thing I’d like to have is an enormous room lined
with distorting mirrors from floor to ceiling. Every so often
84 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

there’d be a normal mirror inset among the distorting ones. People

would look so beautiful when they passed in front of it (Russell,
1971; 90).

It is this quality of distorted mirroring that has often been perceived in

the twisted and contorted features of his portrait subjects. However, it
is not only the superficial, decorative effects of these trick mirrors that
led to their fascination for Bacon but the way in which they offered
him the scope to undermine and subvert the traditional conventions of
mimetic portraiture. Here, I shall pursue the observations I made in
my first chapter on the mirror not only as a metaphor for painting but
also for knowledge.
Van Alphen devotes a section of his book to “The Mirror
Image: Deceptive and Deceived.” This deals with how Bacon often
employs the image of the mirror in his paintings and the extent to
which it plays the role of a mise en abyme. However, the literal
representation of the mirror in Bacon’s paintings is not necessarily
relevant to the way in which it relates to his self-portraiture. It is
helpful to look at René Major’s concept of negative hallucination,
employed by van Alphen. Major introduces this idea in an interview
about Bacon:

Il arrive qu’une personne se regardant dans un miroir ne

parvienne pas à se voir. C’est ce qu’on appelle l’hallucination
négative. Je pense à un cas précis de quelqu’un qui a retrouvé son
image dans le miroir après avoir brisé la surface en jetant un
verre. L’image apparut d’abord morcellée avant que les fragments
ne retrouvent leur unité habituelle. Le morcellement s’avère ici lié
à l’impossibilité temporaire de faire apparaître une définition fixe
et répétitive de son image (Major,1978; 28-31).

Van Alphen applies this idea to Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror,

1968. This painting raises the question of sight by pitting the internal
gaze of the portrayed subject against the gaze of the viewer, external
to the picture. Van Alphen observes how the focalization in the
painting is ambiguous with regard to both its object and its subject:
It is impossible to detect where the defect in looking originates, or
whose defect it is. Is it the external focalizer (the inscribed
viewer), the internal focalizer (the figure), or the mirror that
defeats the representation of the visual experience? Is the sense of
sight deceived, or does sense of sight deceive us? Do we see what
 Francis Bacon’s Portraits 85

we see, or does vision (the mirror) make us see? (Van Alphen,

1992; 73).

Van Alphen demonstrates the way in which Bacon unsettles the

viewer by questioning the apparent representational paradox of the
painting. However, can the concept of negative hallucination still be
applied when there is no narrative, unresolved or not, and when the
mirror is absent from the representation?
Major’s use of the mirror recalls us to Lacan’s stade du
miroir. Through seeing itself in the mirror with the mother, the infant
is able to differentiate its polymorphous experience of its body from
those of the mother and form a specular image of its whole self. The
concept of negative hallucination, referring as it does (in Major’s
example) to both the temporality of display and the fractured
reflection, draws attention to the fragility of a specular sense of self.
The problem of the instability of vision is inextricably related to the
problem of the instability of identity. The reflected image identified
with an ideal self whose integrity and consistency implies a unified,
autonomous self, is at odds with the incoherent experience of
embodied selfhood. When the mirror image is stable, the figure has a
demarcated identity. Identity becomes blurred when the mirror image
cannot be identified as a mirror reflection (see also chapter 4, page
153, and chapter 5, page 171). Self-representation, as we have seen in
the work of both Duchamp and of Leiris, requires the sanction of the
Other, as demonstrated, for example, by Lejeune’s pacte
autobiographique. How does the Other sanction a self-representation
when a distorted or shattered image fractures the illusory unity of the
self?
Russell refers to the six heads that formed part of Bacon’s first
show at the Hanover Gallery in November 1949: “What painting had
never shown before is the disintegration of the social being which
takes place when one is alone in a room with no looking-glass. We
may feel at such times that the accepted hierarchy of our features is
collapsing” (Russell, 1971; 38). Such an observation indicates the
very subjective content of Bacon’s painting, its lack of objective
contours, and the emotional response that this provokes in the viewer.
The rupture of ego boundaries implied by the destruction of the
cohesiveness of the self-image not only invokes the artist’s unstable
sense of self but also that of the viewer.
86 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

The Presence of Death

As I have already observed, a dependency on a

unity-bestowing relation to the self-image is not desirable but
mortifying. I illustrated this point by evoking Barthes and Lacan.
According to these theorists, the subject loses itself when it is
objectified in representation. The loss of self happens because the
objectification of the subject that brings about an experience of
wholeness is a discursive transformation that translates the subject
into terms of the doxa, the platitudes of public opinion. The subject
falls prey to a representation that constructs it in terms of stereotypes.
So, according to Barthes, in the portrait the subject is not confronted
with itself in its essential quality, but in becoming an image it is
alienated from itself, because it is assimilated into the doxa. Duchamp
tries to avoid casting his image in terms of the already-represented by
deferring and diffracting the gaze of the Other while Leiris disperses a
decentred sense of self through a fragmented and multi-layered text.
Bacon seeks to unsettle representations of the self that mortify
self-experience by portraying the conflict between the artificiality of
representation and the resistance of the subject to that artificiality.
In his interviews with David Sylvester, Bacon emphasizes the
need for distortion in order to represent the “real” appearance of the
portrayed subject:

Bacon: What I want to do is to distort the thing far beyond the

appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of
the appearance.

Sylvester: Are you saying that painting is almost a way of

bringing somebody back, that the process of painting is almost
like the process of recalling?

Bacon: I am saying it. And I think that the methods by which this
is done are so artificial that the model before you, in my case,
inhibits the artificiality by which this thing can be brought about
(Sylvester, 1982; 40).

Bacon explicitly tries to represent the experience of death and the

process of bereavement and mourning through his series of paintings
that commemorate George Dyer. The objective representation of death
 Francis Bacon’s Portraits 87

is not the aim of these paintings as much as the representation of the

presence of death.
The mortification implicit in the act of representation as
intimated by theorists such as Barthes, Lacan and de Man implicates
death metonymically in the representation of a living body. In the
paintings of Bacon, death is evoked not simply through the
representation of the human subject but through the conflation of the
living body with death. To see the portrait as an instance of narrative
implies that the viewer must distinguish two stories in the
representation: the life-story that is condensed into one moment of that
life, the description of that moment becoming a metaphor of the past
and future in which the depicted moment is embedded, and the story
of the process of representation, of portrayal.
Traditionally, the act of representation by means of
condensation is the act that challenges death. The portrait is the story
of the life, the story that has still to be formed and shaped by the
representation of it. Death is made intelligible by portraying and
fixing the life-story, which will have preceded the sitter’s death.
Without the act of representation, the life remains unshaped and
indistinguishable from death. From this perspective, the motivation for
the act of representation is the desire to transform the unacceptable
situation of death into an event – an event in which death is acceptable
because it is represented as absence. The death-to-come is indirectly
represented as the opposite of the life-story portrayed. So con-
ventionally, the portrait claims to unravel a reality: the life-story. The
representation claims to unmask the truth about a person or life.
However, as we have seen, the distortions and facial variations of
Bacon’s portraits seem to produce the opposite effect, that of masking
the subject. The contorted imagery deforms, decomposes and kills the
subject. This kind of representation draws the viewer into the situation
of death.
The disturbing impact of Bacon’s portraiture lies, to a great
extent, in the damage he inflicts upon the faces of his subjects. The
power of facial disfiguration is partly semiotic in the disruption of the
expressive repertoire. Disfigurement becomes a mask. Bacon’s
portraits with their facial variations often evoke metaphors of injury
but Bacon himself resisted the idea: “Whether the distortions which I
think sometimes bring over the image more violently are damage is a
very questionable idea. I don’t think it is damage.” However, the
88 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

images leave the viewer unsure. Their suggestions of modelled flesh

that often seems to suffer injury and dislocation are at the same time
dissolved into elusive smear-blurs, or are transformed by blots and
swipes of naked paint. Do these confusions and disruptions alleviate
sensitivity with formal surface technique and optical arabesque? Or do
they aggravate it by suggesting impossible but still imaginable
extremities? The subjective impact of Bacon’s faces does not only lie
in the disarrangement or fracturing of the features. It is to be found in
certain kinds of unreadability, uncertainty and ambiguity. The fugitive
blurs where the shaping of the flesh becomes insubstantial and
untraceable have an obscure depictive purpose, the background seems
to be corroding into the figure. This confusion is expressive,
deliberately breaking down the pictorial register and becoming marks
of loss.
While Bacon was working on commemorating his lover,
George Dyer, he was also engaged in a parallel series of self-portraits.
In the early 1970s he concentrated almost exclusively on images of
Dyer and himself, capturing the effects of suffering on his own face.
In these self-portraits, singles or series of small heads and the
occasional full-length painting, Bacon used for his own image some of
the same expressive means he had found to portray his dead lover.
Parts of the head are scalloped out or hidden by black brushstrokes of
shadow. In sharp contrast to the almost theatrical nature of the
paintings of the previous decade, with their emphasis on new visual
metaphors, these heads came out of a need to reduce and simplify. In
one series, the black background surrounds the artist’s face like a
liquid, submerging all but a few features. Yet the heads are always
instantly recognizable, and all the more vivid for the encroaching
darkness.
Bacon’s use of shade and shadow in his portraits is unlike the
traditional use of shadow in painting. It is not the realistic projection
of the figure, a mirror image of the subject or a repetition of the
subject’s profile. Traditionally, shadows are seen in relation to
identity, supposedly confirming the identity of the subject through
substantiating their presence. If a shadow is read metaphorically as a
realistic representation, the identity of the figure is captured and
represented by its shadow. Shadows, like photographs, are
re-productions, mimetical mechanisms. However, in Bacon’s painting
the shadows subvert the classical distribution of light in painting and
 Francis Bacon’s Portraits 89

undermine their mimetical function. The shadows in the portraits are

not extensions of the subject but a part of its reality. The figures
dissolve into their shadows and the shadows dissolve into the
backgrounds of the paintings. The figure is no more real than its
shadow. Reproductions such as those created by shadows, mirrors and
cameras create visual identity by externalizing identity within framed
visuality. The use of shadows in Bacon’s work demonstrates the
invasion of the subject by external elements that lead to the
deformation of the body. The body is deformed into extensions; the
shadow is one of these extensions. Therefore the shadows lose their
iconic function and become indexes of the depicted bodies.
Self-portraits remained a dominant feature of the artist’s
output for the rest of his life, but here they have the particular
poignancy of bereavement. In a large new triptych, painted in 1973
and entitled Three Portraits, Bacon portrays himself, a blur of
confused movement, seated in the central panel. He is flanked by a
heroically muscled George Dyer and by Lucian Freud caught in a
sudden contortion. Self-Portrait, 1973 records the artist’s deepening
despair with the graphic detail of a diary: the emotional isolation
conveyed by the painting, where the figure leans for support on a
washbasin, apparently ripped off the wall and left to float on the
picture plane, is also rendered by the incongruity of the image, adding
to the immediacy of its impact.

Simultaneous Memory

Memory is inherent to self-representation, constituting in

large part the knowledge or sense of the self. As we have seen,
Duchamp encompasses memory in Le Grand Verre by making of it a
sort of compendium or catalogue of his previous work. Leiris’s L’Âge
d’Homme is composed around memories of childhood and
adolescence. The role that memory plays in figurative self-portraiture
is much less obvious – how does the artist encapsulate in a single
image the knowledge or sense of the past? As opposed to the temporal
comprehension of a written text, which reflects and mimics to a
certain extent the passage of time, the instantaneous apprehension of a
static image obliges the artist to incorporate temporality by different
means. It is useful here to consider for a moment the way in which
portraiture has traditionally dealt with this issue.
90 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

In the medieval period, physiognomic likeness was not the

primary way of representing a person’s identity; for example, the
position and status of a nobleman was conventionally symbolized by
his coat of arms. A method of characterization was thereby initiated
which still takes place in conservative portraiture and which depends
upon the imitation of a recognizable iconographic type. Portrait
imagery was responsive to the social and political circumstances of
the sitter and demonstrated this through the depiction of various
symbols and prototypes. An implied historical narrative was therefore
conveyed through conventional symbols contained within the
painting. Thus portraiture was not just a matter of rendering a likeness
but also involved a narrative element. In the nineteenth century, a
belief in the scientific objectivity of the science of physiognomy led to
the conviction that a person’s character could be deduced from the
external appearance, so the depiction of a sitter’s history became less
important; the greatness of the subject was revealed in his/her
features. However, artists such as Courbet, Manet and the Im-
pressionists began to interrogate this presumed identification between
individualized physiognomy and a distinctive, interiorized identity and
portraiture soon became more concerned with a lived intimacy
between painter and sitter, challenging the normal politics of the
portrait transaction. The identity of the artist became as significant as
the identity of the sitter and began to imply a self that was distinct
from the abstract, interior identity which justified orthodox public
recognition.
At this point, there is a recognizable shift in the emphasis on
memory in portraiture. Rather than encompassing entirely or solely
the past of the sitter, the emphasis is placed upon the temporal nature
of the portrait transaction. It is also at this point, with the invention of
the camera that we begin to identify the primary difference between
photography portraiture and painting. Generally speaking, the decisive
difference between photography and painting lies in their respective
material relation to what they represent. To say that a painting or a
drawing is a translation is to say that each mark on the paper is
consciously related to the appearances that are represented and
equally, to each mark or space set out on paper. Both painting and
drawing are the result of consideration and transposition, a process of
 Francis Bacon’s Portraits 91

making that requires time.1 Photographs on the other hand do not

translate from appearances but quote from them; their figuration is not
necessarily impregnated by experience or consciousness. A
photograph can render an instantaneous and apparently unconstructed
reproduction of reality. Its being unconstructed or literal relies on the
fact that on the level of denotation the photograph appears to be purely
analogous. Thus, to quote Barthes: the photograph is a “message sans
code” (Barthes, 1982; 13); it is essentially weak in intentionality
because the photographic message is simply given. Photographic
portraits therefore seem to close the gap between “external” likeness
and the self of the depicted person: the portrayed body no longer
represents the sitter; it is the trace of the sitter. The iconic
identification between photograph and living reality was supposedly
guaranteed by the passage of light waves from the sitter’s body to the
photographic emulsion. It is the very temporal nature of painting that
opens up the possibility of a relationship between the sitter and the
artist and creates a space for the intervention of memory. The
relationship between painter and sitter has often been described in
analogy to the act of making love. Russell writes:

We also know that the relationship between painter and sitter is

charged with contradictory feelings and instincts as any other
human relationship [. . .] portraiture can also be an act of love, and
the penetrations involved can be as profound as anything in sexual
relations: each partner gives himself, in such a case, without
reserve (Russell, 1971; 62).

Such a metaphor belies the traditional assumption of the male as

opposed to female artist but nevertheless conveys the sense of the
relationship that evolves over the process of portrait painting, a
progressive rather than an instantaneous appreciation of character.
The position of memory or the passage of time in portraiture
is comparable to the transaction-transference metaphor, which I
employed with regard to Leiris: the notion of intersubjectivity giving
rise to an interactive relationship that seeks to conflate subject and
object. The idea of time therefore becomes an essential part of the
relationship between the portraitist and his/her subject. Here we
should remember that the very concept of modernism is temporal.
Modernist painters such as Braque and Picasso attempted to collapse
1
See John Berger, Another Way of Telling, p. 93.
92 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

time and memory into a single image through the manipulation of

perspective and the simultaneous apprehension of different views of
the subject. The complicity inherent to the act of portrait painting
becomes apparent if the portrait is understood to be a series of
narratives, the likeness of the sitter being one of those narratives.
Bacon’s attitude to portraiture was unusual in many respects.
He disliked having the sitter in the room with him as he worked and
preferred to work from photographs and memory. Also the majority of
his portraits tend to represent friends and lovers. He told Sylvester “If
I like them, I don’t want to practise the injury that I do to them in my
work before them. I would rather practise the injury in private by
which I think I record the facts of them more clearly.” Russell makes
the observation that portraiture had a bad reputation in the 1960s:

People still felt, in a primitive, unjustifiable but quite

irresistible way, that a portrait could deny and destroy them. They
remembered how Winston Churchill had reacted when he saw
Graham Sutherland’s portrait of him; and they remembered how
de Gaulle, when in power, never sat to a painter. Portraiture had
become a gamble in which you laid your identity on the
gaming-table and ended up as the loser (Russell, 1971; 107).

This reveals one reason, amongst others, for which Bacon

preferred to work from memory and not from direct observation when
executing a portrait. More significantly, the fact that Bacon preferred
to work from memory indicates the extent to which his portraits are
less about capturing physical likeness and more about representing the
character or self of the subject. Bacon’s self-portraits were also
painted, as Russell records “out of his head” (ibid; 97). In his
self-portraits, as in his portraiture, Bacon depended more on the
memory and experience of self than on the direct transcription of
external appearance.

Index versus Icon

Linda Nochlin characterizes the originality of portraiture in

the “meeting of two subjectivities” (Nochlin, 1974; 29). This
foregrounds the aspects of portraiture that depend upon specific
notions of the human subject and of representation, that is, that
subjectivity is equated with notions like the self or individuality and is
 Francis Bacon’s Portraits 93

defined in its uniqueness, as an interior essence rather than as a result

of a social formation. Therefore the portrait refers to someone, a
presence outside the portrait. Traditionally, the portrayer proves
his/her artistic originality by consolidating the self of the portrayed.
The portrayer enriches the interiority of the portrayed’s self by giving
it exterior form. In this sense, photography is not the traditional
portrayer’s ideal but the failure of that ideal, because the essential
quality of the sitter can only be caught by the artist, not by the camera.
A camera can capture the appearance of a person maximally but the
photographer has as many problems in capturing a sitter’s “essence”
as a painter does.
In Hans-Georg Gadamer’s text on the portrait, he speaks not
of an essential quality that is captured but of an increase of being that
seems to be produced by the portrayer in the portrait. The portrayer
makes visible the inner essence of the sitter and this visualizing act is
creative and productive. Therefore a portrait is more than a passive
rendering of what was presumed to be already there (although interior
and hence invisible). The portrayer gives this supposed interiority an
outer form so that it can be perceived; the outer form becomes the
signifier (expression) of the signified (the sitter’s interior essence).
Gadamer exemplifies the semiotic economy of mimetic representation
by assuming a unity between signifier and signified. However, in
assuming this unity – that of a straightforward relationship of identity
between signifier and signified – Gadamer asserts the apparent
essential homogeneity of the sign. The semiotic conception that
underlies this view is based upon the idea that the sign in its unity
must represent the singularity of the signified: thus the sign comes to
represent authenticity.
Van Alphen observes how in twentieth century art the portrait
has become a problematic genre precisely because from a semiotic
point of view the crisis of modernity can be seen as the recognition of
the irreconcilable split between signified and signifier. He explains
that as soon as the sign becomes split, the portrait loses its exemplary
status for mimetic representation. But artists, who have made it their
project to challenge the originality and homogeneity of human
subjectivity or the authority of mimetic representation, often choose
the portrait as the genre to make their point. He observes: “The
portrait returns, but with a difference, now exemplifying a critique of
the bourgeois self instead of its authority; showing a loss of self
94 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

instead of its consolidation; shaping the subject as simulacrum instead

of as origin” (Woodall, 1997; 242). This tension between signified and
signifier is evident in Bacon’s portraiture.
While Bacon remained resolutely a figurative painter, many of
his paintings verge on abstraction not only because of the distorted
imagery but also through his exploitation of the sensual potential of
his preferred medium – oil paint. The evidence of the artist in his
work, the index, is left in visible and textural brushstrokes. While the
icon signifies by virtue of a resemblance to its object, it is not
necessarily predicated upon the degree of “realism” of the image. It is
the decision to suppose that the image refers to something on the basis
of likeness that is the iconic act, and a sense of specularity is its result.
The index signifies by virtue of an existential bond or causal
connection between itself and the object.
C.S. Peirce’s description of the index emphasizes its
symmetrical opposition to the icon: while the icon does not need the
object to exist, the index functions on the ground of that existence.
Therefore, Abstract Expressionist painting is the apotheosis of the
indexical sign. It uses the contiguity of the index to point back to the
presence of the artist, hence the importance attached to the
individuality of the expressionist gesture. This gesture is contained in
signs that range from the recognizable “hand” of the artist, to the
signature.2 Bacon derided the Abstract Expressionists, dismissing all
abstraction as essentially “decorative;” he was known to refer to
Pollock as “that old lace maker” and to compare de Kooning’s Woman
series to playing-cards. Such public derision, however, did not prevent
Bacon from responding to the Americans’ achievements and turning
them to his own purpose. The flat bands of colour in many of Bacon’s
later works clearly show that at some level he was influenced by the
Barnett Newman colour-field canvases he had seen, either in shows or
in reproduction. Bacon was also aware of the gestural spontaneity of
de Kooning’s brushwork, which may have encouraged him to become
freer in his own application of paint; he sometimes experimented with
throwing paint on to the canvas and letting it drip. Bacon’s criticism
of abstract painting indicates, perhaps, the threat he felt it posed to his

2
This idea is developed in Derrida’s notion of the trace: the indexical sign that refers
by contiguity, not simply to the past (the maker of the image) but more importantly, to
the future, the reading of it.
 Francis Bacon’s Portraits 95

own work. He also understood that taking a figurative image to the

verge of abstraction gave it a compelling tension.
Bacon’s paintings, unlike the work of purely abstract painters,
which are devoid of any mimetic relationship to empirical reality and
embody an indexical registering of traces, create a tension between the
demands of figurative representation and an abstract engagement with
the materiality of his medium. In other words, they embody a conflict
between indexical and iconical signs. Deleuze uses the term figural in
an attempt to describe this aspect of Bacon’s style. This stylistic
tension becomes evident if his portraits are compared to photographs
of his sitters, as is often done in critical works about the artist, such as
Bacon: Portraits et Autoportraits introduced by Milan Kundera. On a
preliminary viewing, there is apparently little to differentiate one
portrait from another. However, a comparison between the photo-
graphic likeness and the painted portrait reveals the extent to which
Bacon captured the physical idiosyncrasies of his sitters. The features
that he focuses on in each portrait obviously depend upon his personal
or intimate knowledge of the subject.
Bacon claimed not to be interested in showing people, as is
often supposed, in a state of nervous tension:

I’m not a preacher. I’ve nothing to say about the

“human situation.” What gives the pictures their desperate look, if
they have one, is the technical difficulty of making appearances at
the present stage of the evolution of painting. If my people look as
if they’re in a dreadful fix, it’s because I can’t get them out of the
technical dilemma. As I see it, there’s nothing, today, between a
documentary painting and a very great work in which the
documentary element is transcended (Russell, 1971; 99).

It is the fragile balance between index and icon, the way in which the
materiality of the paint engages with the materiality of the flesh that
combines to characterize his portraiture.
Bacon observed about portraiture: “Once you know how to do
it, it becomes illustration.” Bacon’s artistic imperative was, therefore,
to remain within the area of the not-known, in a challenging technical
sphere, while concentrating on sitters who were well-known to him.
“Portraiture is impossible now,” he also remarked, “because you’re
asking chance to fall your way all the time. The paint has to slide into
appearance at every level, the accidents have to be all in your favour”
(Russell, 1971; 70). This reveals the degree to which Bacon was still
96 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

consciously working within a Surrealist legacy with an emphasis on le

hasard. However, in both his first self-portrait of 1956 and the second
one, which he made two years later, the number of explicit accidents
is comparatively small; in relation to the self-portraits of the 1960s
these take few technical chances.

Le Geste Brutal

The initial impression of Bacon’s portrait heads is not so much

that they are distorted as that they are contorted. In the work of the
1950s, there are times when the image seems to surpass the paint,
where the iconic image dominates the indexical marks of paint (for
example, Three Studies for the Human Head 1953) and there are other
occasions (as in several of the van Gogh series) when the paintwork
looks overworked and has become almost detached from the image. In
the close-up heads of 1961, the image is often twisted and the
paintwork is vigorous and fluid, yet the image and the paint coalesce in
a way that demonstrates a harmony of index and icon. The paintwork
verges on abstraction in its dynamic and confident layering, while the
image retains the likeness of the person portrayed (for example, Three
Studies of Henrietta Moraes 1969). As the 1960s progressed, the
portrait heads grew consistently more abstract to the point at which, as
Russell remarks, the human face would seem to disappear altogether in
the “jewelled slime of the paint, leaving behind it an eye-socket, or the
deep cave of a nostril, or an irreducible patch of hair, as tokens that
somewhere among the strong-willed chromatic smearing a named
individual was commemorated” (Russell, 1971; 100).
The indexicality of Bacon’s paintwork, the processing of the
paint which creates the impression of impasto and leaves the traces of
the construction within the image, is often read as self-reflexive as it
renders the process of image-making manifest: the painter and the act
of painting are metonymically represented in the image. In the case of
Bacon, the nature of this reflexivity does not signify the making of the
image but rather the unmaking of the body. The painter’s hand is
metonymically present in the textures of cloths and in the imprints of
tools he has used to wipe away the paint that would have given
substance to his subjects. These traces unmake the bodies resulting in
the unbinding and dissolution of the subject. The painting of the body
coincides with the perception of the body in a symbiosis of form and
 Francis Bacon’s Portraits 97

content. In the conflation of representation and perception, the body is

unmade.
Bacon himself provided the best commentaries on his work in
the course of two interviews, with David Sylvester in 1976 and
Archimbaud in 1992. In both interviews he speaks admiringly of
Picasso, in particular his period between 1926 and 1932. It is here that
Bacon observes Picasso exploring a domain that “n’a pas été exploré:
une forme organique qui se rapporte à l’image humaine mais en est
une complète distorsion” (Kundera, 1996; 9). Here Bacon identifies
the principle characteristic of his own work. Kundera describes this
period of Picasso’s work : “chez Picasso, le geste léger du peintre
transforme des motifs du corps humain en réalité picturale
bidimensionnelle et autonome” (Kundera, 1996; 10). However,
Bacon’s work, he continues, achieves a very different transformation:

Chez Bacon nous sommes dans un autre monde:

l’euphorie ludique picassienne (ou matissienne) y est relayée par
un étonnement (sinon un choc) devant ce que nous sommes
matériellement, physiquement. Mue par cet étonnement, la main
du peintre [. . .] se pose d’un geste brutal sur un corps, sur un
visage, ‘dans l’espoir de trouver, en lui et derrière lui, quelque
chose qui s’y est caché’ (Ibid; 10).

In this instance, Kundera invokes the indexical quality of Bacon’s

images – the hand of the painter that is revealed in this geste brutal.
So how does Bacon, through the contortion of his models,
maintain their recognizable characteristics? And the models are
recognizable, the triptychs and various series reveal the same people
over and over again. It could be said that Bacon’s portraits are
investigations into the limits of the self. To what extent can a person’s
likeness be manipulated and transformed for it still to remain
recognizable? Where and what are the boundaries beyond which a self
ceases to be that self?

Bacon on Bacon

Autobiographical voices are often thought of as deeply

singular attempts to inscribe individual identity. They are, however,
not only mosaic compositions but may often be structured through
processes of mirroring and dialogic relations with cross-historical and
98 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

cross-cultural others and thus may resonate with various sorts of

“double” voicings. Bacon’s obsessive and recurring scream or cry, the
image of the open mouth, has been attributed to several sources.
Bacon himself claimed to have been haunted by the close-up of the
screaming bespectacled face of the nurse in the Odessa steps sequence
of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. Bacon was fascinated by the idea
that a solitary image could summarize the self-destructive courses of a
whole continent; an image that collapsed time and space into a single
symbolic moment. At other times he referred to the image of a
screaming girl in Poussin’s Le Massacre des Innocents which he saw
as a young man at Chantilly. Dawn Ades has linked some of Bacon’s
imagery, significantly the mouth, to images and photographs that were
reproduced in Bataille’s Documents.3
Bacon also, infamously, derived many paintings from
Velásquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X. In so far as Bacon was
influenced by Velásquez, Russell observes that the influence extended
further than the mere borrowing of a motif. Looking, for instance, at
Velásquez’s portrait of Philip IV of Spain, he was struck by the fact
that hidden within that great and complex image was a straightforward
portrait. Velásquez’s genius, as far as Bacon was concerned, lay in the
deformations, which in his hands, looked inevitable. Bacon was also
impressed by the element of continuity in Velásquez’s work: his
determination, for example, to vie with the state-portraits of Titian and
remake them in the image of Velásquez’s own time (see Russell,
1971; 46).
Among other influences, Bacon acknowledged Picasso and
Rembrandt, who according to David Sylvester, “taught him most
about the handling of paint, the creation of volume, the representation
of flesh and of the relation of clothes to the body within them”

3
One entry in the Documents’ critical dictionary is Bataille’s “La Bouche.” It is
accompanied by Jacques-André Boiffard’s photograph of an open mouth, wet with
saliva. In his text Bataille discusses how experiences of both pleasure and pain are
physiologically expressed through the mouth and uses this to demonstrate the
bestiality of man: the mouth, normally the locus for the emission of language that
differentiates human from beast, serves in extreme moments as an orifice that emits
bestial cries.
 Francis Bacon’s Portraits 99

(Sylvester, 1986; 56). Bacon did not receive a formal art education; he
was an autodidact in both the practice and the history of art.
Nevertheless, he was very conscious of the tradition within which he
was working. His fascination with certain preceding artists is
communicated to us, not just via the anecdotal evidence of his
biographers, but through the work itself. Bacon was not only engaged
with the work of his predecessors but also with their Romantic legacy:
the mythological cult of the artist as genius.
It is important to examine here the historical construction of
the myth of the artist as genius. Art has always been informed by
material circumstances, despite its claims to independence. When
artists found themselves, in the latter half of the nineteenth century,
producing for an art market rather than for a relatively stable system
of patronage, it was necessary for their role to be reinvented. They
became marginalized figures with respect to social institutions, which
no longer financially supported them, and they, in turn, adopted the
marginal position as one of power. Their freedom from the “system”
bestowed upon them the status of creative individuals that became a
selling point for their art. As Carole Duncan points out, with specific
reference to the overt sexuality of the male bohemian lifestyle and the
art produced through it:

The artist [...] in his turn must merchandize and sell

himself, or an illusion of himself and his intimate life, on the open
avant-garde market. He must promote (or get dealer or critic
friends to promote) the value of his special credo, the authenticity
of his special vision, and – most importantly – the genuineness
of his anti-bourgeois antagonism [...] In acquiring or admiring
such images, the respectable bourgeois identifies himself with this
stance (Duncan, 1982; 311-312).

The genius myth valorized the economic marginality of the artist and
turned that weakness into strength.
Bacon was not only conscious of the power of the
mythological cult of the artist but knew how to manipulate his own
self-image to the extent that he became his own best publicist while
still appearing to elude publicity. Sylvester’s Interviews with Bacon
were quoted so extensively in the ever-increasing volume of Bacon
scholarship that they became the prime sourcebook. After decades of
mystery enshrouding the artist and his work, their effect was oracular.
The power of Bacon upon Bacon grew to such a degree that it became
100 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

axiomatic that the artist himself was the greatest, if not the sole,
authority on his work. Thus Bacon managed not only to create a
corpus of images whose meaning could not be reduced to a particular
narrative statement about the human condition, he also provided a
guide to how they should be understood, which was, briefly stated,
that they should not be “understood” at all. The images, as far as the
artist himself was concerned, were to all intents and purposes
ineffable. According to Peppiatt: “They were to be glazed, framed like
Old Masters, then exhibited to the crowd. The passionate atheist, who
would denounce the sham of faith in every bar, had made pictures for
which he demanded the unquestioning acquiescence of religious
conviction” (Peppiatt, 1996; 273-4).
Bacon’s desire to control the way he himself and his pictures
were interpreted did not diminish as he grew older and more
respected. He continued to affect indifference to what was written on
the subject, but in the last years of his life he took extreme measures
to prevent several texts from being published about his life and work.
Peppiatt relates some of the difficulties he faced as Bacon’s
biographer and cites other examples, such as when the writer and
editor Bruce Bernard put together a “scrap-book” juxtaposing extracts
from articles with documentary photographs and reproductions. Bacon
encouraged the project right up until publication, when he stepped in
to block the book.4
An artist who becomes a legend in his own lifetime while
limiting and controlling all the available information about his life
inevitably attracts an avalanche of conjecture and revelation once he
dies. New approaches to Bacon have been prompted not only by the
discovery of unknown works or documents but also by questioning his
own contradictory reading of his art. Peppiatt observes: “Rarely has
the dictum not to heed what an artist says, only what he does, been
more applicable.” Bacon suppressed as much biographical information
about himself as he could, insisting that his work had to stand by
itself, without reference to his life; yet, the life he lived and the images
he made are intimately interdependent. Bacon proclaimed his distaste
for narrative or literary painting, for any imagery that told a story. He
insisted that his work, although replete with symbol and allusion,

4
See Bruce Bernard “About Francis Bacon” Independent Magazine, 2 May 1992.
 Francis Bacon’s Portraits 101

“meant nothing.” Yet the mystique Bacon created with and around his
paintings appeared almost to amount to a substitute religion. By
assimilating hieratic images of the past, he seemed to be seeking to
reclaim some of the mystery and power of great religious art.
Although over recent time, poststructuralist theory and
feminist interventions into art history have interrogated the paradigm
of the Romantic genius, certain features of the myth are still pervasive
in our society. A pertinent example would be the recent film about
Francis Bacon: Love is the Devil by John Maybury. Scenes that
involve the artist at his easel portray Derek Jacobi as Bacon thrusting
paint at the canvas in an impulsive and spontaneous manner, usually
characterized by an expression of concentrated anguish. The film
leaves little or no room for the thoughtful deliberation and structuring
of an image; Bacon wielding his paintbrush is analogous to a sexual
demonstration of virility.
Christine Battersby, in her book Gender and Genius, charts
the chronological development of the concept of genius and its
associations with both artists and maleness. As a feminist critic, she
observes the consequences this held for women artists but makes a
distinction that is worth noting here:

From its inception and up to our time, this notion of a

genius-personality would trap women artists and thinkers. On the
one hand – even before Freud – the driving force of genius was
described in terms of male sexual energies. On the other hand, the
genius was supposed to be like a woman: in tune with his
emotions, sensitive, inspired (Battersby, 1989; 103).

As Simone de Beauvoir argued in Le Deuxième Sexe, the archetypal

genius artist was Vincent van Gogh, whose legacy as a type has
filtered down through the generations. Van Gogh represents the
misunderstood genius of the avant-garde whose works are in advance
of their time and are only vindicated for their innovation generations
later. He was, biographically, a model of the suffering, alienated
bohemian and became a paradigm for a generation of artists after him
who would champion his work. The biographical film Love is the
Devil not only reveals the extent to which the public still valorizes this
romantic myth but also the enduring success of Bacon’s determination
to fabricate and perpetuate his own legend.
102 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

Pre-existing Images

Bacon used photographs as a source of inspiration for his

work. His studio was constantly littered with black and white images,
press clippings and documentary pictures. He observed about the
influence of photography on his work:

I think of myself as a kind of pulverizing machine into

which everything I look at and feel is fed. I believe that I am
different from the mixed-media jackdaws who use photographs
etc. more or less literally or cut them up and rearrange them. The
literalness of photographs so used – even if they are only
fragments – will prevent the emergence of real images, because
the literalness of the appearance has not been sufficiently digested
and transformed. In my case photographs become a sort of
compost out of which images emerge from time to time. Those
images may be partly conditioned by the mood of the material
which has gone into the pulverizer (Russell, 1971; 71).

Bacon’s source material was eclectic and wide-ranging. Apart

from pictorial imagery, he acknowledged the influence of literature,
textbooks and manuals. Dawn Ades has investigated the extent to
which Bacon could have been influenced by Bataille’s journal
Documents: “Bacon possessed copies of Documents, and has talked
specifically about the effect some of the illustrations reproduced in
them had upon him, notably those of slaughterhouses” (Ades, 1985;
12). However, she continues, “It was not just the illustrations, but the
whole context of ideas in which these illustrations were situated, that
must have touched Bacon” (ibid; 12). The heterogeneous content and
format of the journal, which adopted the principle of collage, isolating
and juxtaposing disparate images and texts, was a familiar Surrealist
device. It is a strategy designed to subvert conventional hierarchies,
categories and identities, and to produce strangeness and incongruity.
Parallels can be seen between the type and layout of illustrations in
Documents and Bacon’s own disparate collection of visual sources.
It is interesting to note that Bacon’s obsessive fascination with
news photography was by no means an isolated phenomenon: picture
journalism had just come of age, with the advent of small cameras,
new printing techniques and magazines such as Picture Post. From the
outset, Bacon was fascinated by the way images on film and in
photography changed almost imperceptibly and then beyond
 Francis Bacon’s Portraits 103

recognition from frame to frame. He particularly admired the studies

in movement by Muybridge. Bacon himself preferred working in
series. His imagination was stimulated by a sequence, with one form
developing out of another; “images breed other images in me,” he said
(Peppiatt, 1996; 87). Even in his earliest experiments as a painter he
tended to execute variations in sequence on a specific subject.
Apart from these working influences, Bacon also understood
the potential of photography to perpetuate his own burgeoning myth.
A photograph of the artist in his studio taken by Douglas Glass in
1957 shows the immaculate Bacon sitting in the midst of the chaos
that always characterized his studio space. According to Peppiatt this
aesthetic disorder reached a climax in the Reece Mews studio where
the artist worked for the last thirty years of his life, claiming that he
worked best amongst the chaos because it suggested images to him.
He was also aware of the photogenic potential of these surroundings
and how artists, since the end of the nineteenth century, had used
images of their studios to publicize their work and enhance their
image. Bacon was constantly aware of the legend growing up around
him. Peppiatt confirms that Bacon created and manipulated the public
image of himself and, by extension, of his studio:

It is less likely that the exhilarating mess actually ‘suggested

images’ to him than that the wild disorder reinforced a certain
notion of the randomness and spontaneity of his creative process
that Bacon wanted to project. The confusion in the studio, like the
‘confusion’ of vision on the canvas, was willed [...] At another
level the studio chaos suited the legend that was forming around
the artist, partly at his instigation, partly beyond his control”
(Peppiatt, 1996; 162-163).

Although he came from an upper-class background, Bacon

deliberately cast himself as an inspired misfit from the wilds of an
Irish stud farm. He used these public misconceptions of himself to
perpetuate his outsider status and thereby link himself to preceding
traditions. Bacon identified himself with Romantic misfits and
Surrealist heroes, including Rimbaud, Lautréamont and Van Gogh
amongst others.
It was no coincidence that Bacon painted his first identified
Self Portrait at the same time he produced his variations on a portrait
of Van Gogh (around 1955). Bacon’s fascination with Van Gogh was
clear from as early as 1951, when he was painting Head, which started
104 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

out as a pope but eventually turned into a portrait of the Dutch artist.
Bacon kept a copy of Van Gogh’s letters by his bedside and constantly
reread them, finding many of his own convictions as an artist reflected
in his predecessor’s insights. According to Peppiatt, Bacon’s interest
in Van Gogh was quickened by seeing Vincente Minelli’s Lust for
Life, in which Kirk Douglas plays Van Gogh to Anthony Quinn’s
Gauguin, and he returned to the theme less obliquely in 1956 with the
first Study for Portrait of Van Gogh.
This picture was directly inspired by The Painter on his way
to Work of 1888, which was destroyed during the Second World War
and consequently only exists in reproduction. It shows Van Gogh,
weighed down by outdoor painting equipment, making his way
towards a motif in the fields of Provence. Bacon’s versions are
uncharacteristic in their loose, rapid brushwork and explosion of
colours. Bacon clearly felt a degree of identification with Van Gogh,
in much the same way as, by his own admission, he had become
obsessed by Velásquez’s Pope. Van Gogh represented the ultimate
outsider, “le suicidé de la société,” as Artaud called him. At the time
of painting, Bacon was involved in an unhappy love affair and
possibly empathized with the suffering reflected in Van Gogh’s
solitary stooped figure. Certainly, in Bacon’s variations on the theme,
the figure conveys a weight of loneliness and appears to melt into its
own shadow, which in its turn is swallowed by the harsh yellows and
reds of the road. However, the legacy of Van Gogh’s influence
permeates Bacon’s work to a greater extent than this one series of
portraits.
The features that have consistently been stressed throughout
the century in the self-portraits of male artists include their isolation,
their alienation and their uniqueness. To be an “artist” was signified as
much by lifestyle as by any aesthetic sensibilities or common artistic
style. Thus links between life and art ensured authenticity as much as
a signature could. Much self-portrait imagery was caught up in this
artist mythology and certain forms became standard means to ensure
that artists were perceived in the correct way. Many representations
showed artists in marginal social spaces such as cafés, bars and
brothels. When self-portraits were set in the studio, that space was
almost always conceived as being beyond ordinary domestic routines
and even, possibly, a dangerous anti-bourgeois place.
 Francis Bacon’s Portraits 105

Tropes in self-portraiture that went beyond evocations of

risqué settings also developed over the course of the century. The
figure of the artist himself often used the concepts of marginality and
alienation. Most often, the artist is represented as a tortured figure,
sometimes in pain. The archetypal image of the tortured artist is Van
Gogh’s Man with a Pipe of 1889, in which he portrayed himself with
a bandaged ear, having himself cut off part of it. Bacon paid direct
homage to Van Gogh in his 1957 series of heavy impasto paintings
but there are also oblique references in his self-portraits where he
depicts himself with facial injuries, such as the self-portrait of 1972
with a black-eye. Through employing such tropes, Bacon linked
himself to a tradition of painting and also to a certain artistic identity.

Foreplay with forefathers

For artists who pursued the path of figurative painting through

the 1950s, Giacometti’s obsessive adherence to the figure and
devotion to the demands of his artistic vision was well known. As in
the case of Duchamp, it was the mythological cult of the artist himself,
as well as his work that had a lasting impact upon Bacon. The
sculptor’s apparent indifference to financial success made a deep
impression on a younger generation of artists. Bacon was clearly
affected by Giacometti’s attitude to life and the chaos of his own
studio no doubt derived in part from the older artist’s photogenic cave
behind Montparnasse, filled with rubble and sculpture. Ades states:
“Giacometti was of central importance to the generation of artists
starting their career in the late 40s and 50s: his work and his ideas
were brought to the fore in Britain by the critic David Sylvester (a
close friend of Bacon)” (Ades, 1986; 74). Bacon named Giacometti as
“the greatest living influence on my work” (Farson, 1993; 167). He
was conscious, above all, of Giacometti’s artistic achievement: the
need to take human appearance to the edge of dissolution by reducing
it to its essence. In his search for a solution to the long-standing
problem of how to articulate the pictorial space around his figures,
Bacon clearly borrowed certain formal devices from Giacometti,
notably the cage-like structures the artist had used in early sculptures.
But he was also indebted to the overall reverberation of Giacometti’s
oeuvre, which, like his own, had its roots in surrealism.
106 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

While all artists are influenced, in some way, by the work of

their predecessors, I have demonstrated that Bacon was not only
concerned with a painterly tradition but also with the tradition of the
painter, in other words, the artist’s image and position in society. As
we have seen, Bacon’s attempts to control his public image involved
both the manipulation of publicity and the way he presented himself to
the public in the context of his own work, that is, through his
self-portraits. But he could not prevent critics from making
comparisons between himself and other artists or writers. In Bacon’s
interview with Archimbaud, he refers several times to the work of
Samuel Beckett: “J’ai toujours été étonné de ce rapprochement entre
Beckett et moi [...] j’ai toujours trouvé que Shakespeare avait exprimé
bien mieux et d’une façon plus juste et plus puissante ce que Beckett
et Joyce avaient cherché à dire.” He goes on to say, “En peinture, on
laisse toujours trop d’habitude, on n’élimine jamais assez, mais chez
Beckett j’ai souvent eu l’impression qu’à force d’avoir voulu éliminer,
il n’est plus rien resté et que ce rien en définitive sonnait creux”
(Kundera, 1996; 12). Bacon’s attack on, or dismissal of Beckett,
reveals much about his fears concerning his own work. His remarks
about Beckett expose the degree to which he resented being classified
as a particular type of painter and the need he felt to protect his work
from cliché and categorization.
Bacon resisted certain dogmatisms of modernism that created
a division between tradition and modern art, and that defined
contemporary art as existing in an autonomous epoch with its own set
of values and criticism. He defended himself against a systematic
explanation of his ideas on art in the fear that he would stifle the
unconscious creative element in his work, fearing also the risk of
turning his art into narrative. If it is possible to draw a comparison
between Bacon and Beckett, it lies in their respective positions
regarding the history of their art, in recognizing the tradition within
which they work. Both artists were also concerned, above all with the
physiological materiality of the human individual. This is why even
Bacon’s Crucifixion, which in the history of art has often
encompassed the significance of religion, ethics, the history of the
western world, becomes in Bacon’s imagery a physiological
phenomenon: “J’ai toujours été touché par les images relatives aux
abattoirs et à la viande, et pour moi elles sont liées étroitement à tout
ce qu’est la Crucifixion” (Kundera, 1996; 16). For Bacon, the
 Francis Bacon’s Portraits 107

non-believer, the notion of sacrilege did not enter into his work,
focusing as he did upon a purely corporeal reality. Leiris described his
work as an art of demystification, cleansed of religion and morality.
Another acknowledged master whose influence Bacon, like all
other twentieth century painters, had to learn to assimilate was
Picasso. Of all Picasso’s work, Bacon remained throughout his life
most particularly impressed by the period between 1927 and 1932.
Like the Surrealists, whose activities he followed closely and whom
he occasionally joined, Picasso was deeply interested in the fertility of
the unconscious mind; he was also attracted to the dreamlike blend of
the animate and inanimate in surrealist art. Out of this new freedom to
re-create the human form with the metamorphic fluidity of dream,
Picasso produced one of his most disquieting images, the combination
of sex and mouth, or “vagina dentata” as the Surrealists named it. This
metaphor of confusion, anger and fear intrigued Bacon, whose
obsession with the open mouth had already been confirmed. However,
more significant than the specific ways in which Picasso influenced
him was Bacon’s realization that the only way to make the human
form once more central to art lay in distorting it. Certain stylistic
similarities with Picasso are immediately apparent. The knob-like,
featureless head of Bacon’s figure in his Crucifixion of 1933
unambiguously recalls the one in Picasso’s Crucifixion.
While remaining aware of the possible sources of Bacon’s
imagery, it is necessary to be cautious about seeing Bacon’s pictures
as the product of various assimilated “influences.” As Peppiatt among
other critics has noted, Bacon’s interest in the open mouth may quite
simply date back to his first sexual experiences; and that may explain
why, as a young man, he was transfixed by Poussin’s cry when he
chanced upon it in Chantilly; and why that fascination continued to
haunt him, even extending to hand-coloured illustrations of diseases of
the mouth (see Peppiatt, 1996; 85). The supposed hierarchy of
influence, whereby the older work, the source, is presumed to have
influenced the newer one, is often perceived as detrimental to the
received artistic authenticity of the newer work: the new work is
perceived as the passive recipient of influence. However, Michael
Baxandall has proposed a reversal of this view. According to
Baxandall, the later work actively produces the “influence” by
choosing to respond to the older work. It is equally possible to
consider, as Van Alphen proposes, that both artists shape their work
108 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

through an active intervention in the assumptions and theories about

the artwork and that understanding these interventions helps to
understand their works in relation to the historical process in which it
is shaped.

Eluding the doxa

The distortions and contortions inherent in Bacon’s portraiture

are analogous to the construction of identity. Each painting is a
performance, an act of creation that demands the effort of recognition.
The emotive content of the portraits, the dark scalloped shapes,
shadows and blurred features are perceptive pictures of the anxieties
that shape our subjectivity. As with the act of looking into a mirror,
each painting involves a scrutiny of self-searching as the viewer’s eye
traces the paintwork, and the emphasis is necessarily upon the process
of this search, represented in the artist’s evolving imagery, as well as
in the end product that is the image. The fact that the facial images
often appear to be distorted almost beyond recognition forces the
spectator to enter into an interactive relationship with the image.
Ultimately, the artist’s images must be able to exist outside of his
intentions, and therefore, the viewer participates in their creation. In
Bacon’s portraits, the spectator sees the documentation of the
performative act of creating identity.
The tenuous nature of some of the portraits’ iconic relation to
their sitter exposes the essential contingency of identity and reveals
notions of the self to be a constructed convenience. Bacon confers
identity with one hand and undermines fixed notions of it with the
other. Bacon’s self-portraits, from image to image, series to series,
explode the notion of a linear, chronological sense of life; they
provide a lateral autobiography. The recurrence of Bacon’s own image
throughout his oeuvre is not an overt first-person narrative or a
narrative of artistic failure or triumph. Bacon’s approach to his
self-image creates an omnivorous, ever-expanding self that constantly
reveals facets of itself. His self-portraits lack restraint and irony; they
attempt to resuscitate emotional content via the artist’s aesthetic.
Philippe Sollers has written about the social aspect of Bacon’s
portraits, the way in which the apparent “ugliness” of the images is a
possible consequence of both external and internal influences:
 Francis Bacon’s Portraits 109

Les individus sont constamment déformés par la broyeuse sociale

et par eux-mêmes. On les oblige (ils s’obligent) à être absurdes,
idiots, grimaçants, appliqués, menteurs, intéressés, pourris,
boursouflés. Et tout à coup, ils sont beaux. Terriblement beaux
comme ils le méritent. Voilà ce que le portrait, repensé, doit dire
en une seule fois. L’apparence au-delà de l’apparence. Energie,
déformation, beauté [...] Les portraits de Bacon sont ainsi peints à
l’arraché, comme pour sauver l’essentiel d’un être humain avant
sa disparition biologique ou son engloutissement dans le
mensonge photographique. (Où les morts sont-ils plus morts que
dans les enregistrements que l’on fait d’eux?) (Sollers, 1996;
102).

From this perspective, subjectivity is viewed not as an essential,

indisputable essence but rather as the result of an accumulation of
factors, social, perceived and projected.
According to Van Alphen, Bacon’s portraits propose that
sight becomes a kind of touch, a stimuli, an act that is inflicted upon
the body as a whole. Taking Bacon’s Three Studies for Self Portrait
(1979) as an example, Van Alphen observes how the event of
perception of visual stimuli is represented visually:

The eyes of Bacon in all three panels [...] express total

susceptibility to visual stimuli. The figure’s gaze is paralysed,
reminiscent of the gaze of a rabbit caught in a band of light. The
gaze is dictated by the stimulus, not by the holder of the eye
(Alphen, 1992; 54-5).

Van Alphen compares this with the portrait of Michel Leiris where the
writer seems to be under the spell of something he sees. In an
apparently trance-like state, he is no longer the powerful observer of
the outside world; rather he is dominated by the visual: “Thus the
function of focalizer is detached from perception: the focalizer’s look
is arrested” (ibid; 55). Van Alphen concludes that what Bacon’s
portraits theorize is a need for the specific: “for the sensational that is
no other than itself, for a process in which the viewer must participate,
for a participation that hurts, deforms, but happens; they theorize the
need for narrative” (ibid; 57). This narrative does not tell the story of
the picture but the story of an interactive encounter between viewer
and image.
The deformations Bacon inflicts upon his subjects problem-
atize vision. In the same way as the portrait subjects appear to observe
110 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

the observer; the observer tries to re-form the subject of vision.

Through focusing upon the contortions and smears of paint, the
viewer’s concentrated perception analyses and breaks down the image.
Like an Impressionist painting that shifts into focus only when viewed
from a distance, under the gaze of analytical scrutiny Bacon’s subjects
dissolve and evaporate into the materiality of the blurs of paintwork.
The distinction between object and subject disappears and leaves only
the sensation of perception. The process of perception that the work
reflects upon and stimulates undermines the concept of self as an
external image of the physical body in favour of the subjective or
internalized experience of self: a self that eludes the fixity of vision
and is constantly in flux. Van Alphen concludes:

The difference between the idea of an originating

identity and that of a deformed identity provides the
opportunity for a temporal re-establishment of identity. The
deformed body is the only representation left of the missing
identity. This representation of the deformed body is not only
the logical result of the violent process of perception, it is also
the only signifier which keeps the idea of identity alive (ibid;
81).

I contend, however, that it is precisely the process of perception

involving the re-construction of the image by the viewer that conveys
the sense of identity. This is not a monolithic view of
self-representation but an inter-active, structuring sense of perception
that involves the viewer and the decomposing object in view.
Traditionally, portraits and self-portraits have been representa-
tive of our attempts to understand ourselves through our own self-re-
presentation. Fundamental to the construction and articulation of
identity, the portrait flatters our vanity, not only as a record of beauty
or a promise of immortality but also because the image describes an
identity founded on the implicit assumption that there exists some
stable, authenticating origin behind it, which it is the task of art to
reveal. Far from being only the record of appearance, the portrait
promises to be an art of revelation. In the same way, as I have
observed, portraits have been judged to be “good” if they succeed in
revealing the “inner” person, extricating the ideal from the incidental,
expunging the contradictory and the peculiar to reveal a unified and
immutable essence that is thought to underlie the chiaroscuro of
appearance.
 Francis Bacon’s Portraits 111

Bacon’s portraits reveal the extent to which any coherent

notion of a permanent and stable identity is little more than a
consoling and controlling fiction. In basing his self-portraits and
portraits on remembered perceptions, the face becomes the site of a
dynamic transaction, an interface, between the self and the other. The
disturbing abstract amorphousness of the face and head shifts the
register of the image away from an external reality; the distortion of
the image suggests the anomalous experiences and feelings that
necessarily have no name or image. Resisting identification, the
shadowed face insinuates a destabilized self, creating the need for the
spectator’s interaction, the effect of which is to emphasize that
identity flows rather than resides, so that a person becomes little more
than an assemblage of identities, or a succession of faces. To recall
Kristeva, Bacon’s self-portraits reveal the extent to which self-identity
is constantly en procès.
The sensuousness of the visible strokes of oil paint
emphasizes the fragility of the self as notions of an originary identity
give way to an idea of subjectivity as a social construct, hinted at in
the indexical marks of the painter in the image. The heavy gloss of the
varnished surface of the paintings insistently pulls the viewer’s eye
back to the surface of the image, denying any illusion of access
through depth. Similarly, though isolated and tightly framed, the heads
imply proximity, rather than intimacy or revelation of character. The
facial expressions, the isolated features, and the directly
confrontational nature of some of the faces, which seek to engage and
challenge the viewer, rather than offer themselves up as objects of
contemplation, are all expressive of social interaction. The strong
shadows and lighting in the portraits suggest an actor caught in a stage
spotlight, underscoring the idea of performance. So the distortion
which creates the mask-like effect becomes the essential means to
emphasize an awareness that identity is always constructed according
to the distanced gaze of the Other. Like the actor, projective images of
self are sanctioned under the guise of having ceded control of identity.
Rather than as a source of anguish, Bacon celebrates the freedom that
an elusive identity confers, much as his own art demonstrably
celebrates the continual creative potential of painting.
 Textual Imagery:
Visualizing the Self in the Writing of
Bernard Noël and Gisèle Prassinos

Part One: Bernard Noël

Introduction: Autobiography or Autoportrait?

According to Michel Beaujour in Miroirs d’encre,

autobiography is essentially opposed to self-portraiture: “L’anamnèse
de l’autoportrait s’oppose à la réminiscence autobiographique,
toujours fondé à quelque degré sur la croyance en la permanence d’un
moi individuel dont l’intériorité est antériorité” (Beaujour, 1980; 167).
However, as I have already observed with regard to Leiris (one of
Beaujour’s autoportraitists), it is possible that the tension between
different forms of memory, for example, memories that evolve with
the narrative and those that are overlaid and juxtaposed within the
narrative, are features of both autobiography and the autoportrait. For
Beaujour, the existence of narrative order commits autobiography to a
monolithic view of memory which undoes the mechanisms or the
process of remembrance. Therefore autobiography is perceived as a
teleological narrative that recounts the contents of memory while the
autoportraitist views memories as impersonal materials out of which
to construct a present self in the act of writing (see Beaujour, 1980;
252).
This definition, however, is hardly applicable to either the
discontinuous work of Leiris, which highlights the distinctness and
emotional potency of past memories, or, even more clearly, the
fragmentary, present-tense discourse of Noël. For Leiris, the contents
of memory are repeatedly subordinated to the ramifications of his
associative network: the way in which one memory gives rise to
another or the way in which the present recalls the past, associations
which occur independent of chronology. The clarity with which
images are formed of the past, the precision with which certain
114 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

moments are captured, is no guarantee that a coherent picture will

emerge or that a sense of continuity between past and present selves
will be established. However, there is throughout L’Âge d’Homme, a
sense of the profound intertwining of past and present. Sheringham
observes with regard to Stendhal that the reader is “dealing with
memories, not Memory, fragments of a past, not the Past”
(Sheringham, 1993; 295). This also applies to Leiris. Memory in
Leiris is tied to the momentary and the singular, remembering remains
a present activity but his narrative identity arises out of this temporal
network that weaves together present and past, past and present.
Beaujour claims that the autoportraitist (therefore Leiris) does
not attempt to rejoin the past as s/he lacks confidence in a coherent
self that is constituted through time and seeks, solely, to apprehend
him/herself in the present through the act of writing. The
autoportraitist’s desire for textual incarnation leads to the suppression
of personal memory and the complete acceptance of the self as a
montage of disparate images and materials. However, as I have
indicated, Leiris in L’Âge d’Homme although seeking a particular
experience of self through the act of writing, seeks it also in the
conjunction of past and present selves. Writing for Leiris represents
the attempt to rediscover the relevance of the past, to accept that his
narrative identity is a fusion of the textual and the historical. Leiris’s
subjective retrospection is as important a component in the
examination of his self-identity as the textual persona reflected in the
act of writing.
If Leiris reveals the extent to which an identity can be created
only through the play of resonances and connections between past and
present, Noël reveals the vulnerability of the self and memory as a
performative act. Through the juxtaposition of styles and genres, he
attempts to avoid the stasis and fixity of language. Such writing is far
from the vraisemblance of the traditional mirror of the social world.
Although Noël makes no autobiographical claims upon his writing
inasmuch as there is no specific autobiographical volume, he
repeatedly clarifies the indissoluble link between his life and his
writing. His life is perpetuated through language and vice versa.
In this chapter, I shall be primarily concerned with the way in
which Noël deals with the concept of vision and how he tries to
reconcile a visual consciousness that inheres in the body, with a
literary project. I shall also extend my focus on self-representation
 Textual Imagery: Bernard Noël and Gisèle Prassinos 115

beyond the bounds of autobiography by looking at an epistolary text

Le Double Jeu du Tu and I shall concentrate principally on Noël’s
novel, Le 19 octobre 1977. Noël’s writing lends itself to the
investigation of the links between a visual consciousness and
self-representation through both his art criticism and his fiction. In the
texts I have selected, Noël is ultimately concerned with a three-way
relationship, the way in which he apprehends and perceives the
exterior world, and how it passes via his body to be translated into
symbols on a page.
Noël’s Journal du regard is almost entirely dedicated to an
exploration of the nature of vision and how this relates to painting.
Nevertheless, Noël’s constant investigation of the possibility of sight
and its transcription inevitably has a bearing upon his own art and this
becomes explicit in the final pages of the journal:

Qu’est-ce d’ailleurs que notre création? Un langage, c’est-à-dire

un espace artificiel, qui déchire l’espace où être et voir étaient
identiques, donc parfaitement unis. Mais, peu à peu, nous
changeons l’apparence du monde pour lui substituer une surface
artificielle de même nature que notre langage, car nous espérons
retrouver l’identité en unifiant l’espace du monde et l’espace
inventé derrière nos yeux. Ainsi deviendrons-nous notre propre
création dans un monde créé par nous. Et tout cela par le travail
du regard (Noël, 1988; 124-5).

The intertextuality of his work, elements of repetition, re-examination

and re-interpretation, constitutes Noël’s work as an inseparable entity,
a symbolic body standing in for the body of the writer. This metaphor
is extended by Noël’s fascination with his own and others’ corporeal
existence. In his poetry and novels, notoriously Le Château de Cène,
Noël explores the nature of physicality, he refuses to dignify the body
and often seems to emphasize its most base or ridiculous elements.

Le Double Jeu du Tu

La vie, apparemment, n’a d’autre but que de perpétuer la vie, et

pourtant, dès que l’on parle, tout se passe comme s’il ne s’agissait
que de perpétuer le langage – le langage qui, lui-même, ne fait
durer que l’absence de tout. L’homme, dès lors qu’il est devenu
un mot, n’existe plus (Noël, 1998; 10).
116 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

In other words, language, while predicated upon presence (the

presence of the writer), instantiates the absence of that present. While
acknowledging the apparent futility of literary self-representation, the
impossibility of the text coinciding with the writing self, Noël
recognizes the inseparability of his life and language. If he is
conscious of the fallibility of language, he is also conscious of its
autonomy, the way in which it gives rise to another self:

J’écris, je me regarde écrire, et que vois-je? Je me vois en train de

me replacer moi-même par un autre. Un autre qui portera mon
nom, mais ne sera cependant pas celui qui, ici et maintenant, écrit:
Je. D’ailleurs, n’est-ce pas le langage en son entier qui est l’Autre
auquel s’efforcent de s’identifier tous les Je qui s’écrient: Je est un
autre? (Noël, 1998; 18).

Noël highlights the physical and self-reflexive nature of

writing while simultaneously recognizing that the object that is the
creation is finally severed from the act of creativity. This severance
does not, however, produce closure upon a text, as language is
constantly regenerative. Thus Noël draws the reader’s attention to the
dangerous duplicity of language: “Tel est le double jeu de l’écriture:
elle vous efface, mais pour vous conserver dans le mouvement même
de cet effacement qui, lui, perpétuellement recommence. Ainsi, elle
n’immortalise, dérisoirement, que la mise à mort” (Noël, 1998; 9). In
drawing attention to the petrifaction of language, Noël strikes at the
heart of the autobiographical enterprise at the same time as examining
his own motives for writing.
Le Double Jeu du Tu is an epistolary text which Noël wrote in
collaboration with Jean Frémon and it differs from a more
conventional autobiography as the letters are written for a specific
reader, the recipient of the letter. The text is interesting in the extent to
which it reaches beyond the autobiographical genre, as it is usually
understood. As a genre, autobiography cannot exist only as the
objective transcription of what happened to the writer in the past;
autobiography is also writing, with all the elements of textual
construction and self-reflexivity that I have observed this to involve.
Autobiographical theory has in the past been brought to bear upon
private letters, journals or notebooks in the absence of an official
autobiography, as well as having been used to throw light upon
published formal autobiographical works. Le Double Jeu du Tu is
 Textual Imagery: Bernard Noël and Gisèle Prassinos 117

interesting in the light of such studies because although the letters that
comprise this book take the form of private documents, the enterprise
was clearly always intended for publication. This juxtaposition of
public performance and private exchange highlights the degree to
which the writing constitutes a kind of act.
A notion of performance is always already present in the way
the two writers issue challenges to one another and construct a space
in which identities are formed and performed. In the light of
reader-response theory and Lejeune’s discussion of the pacte
autobiographique, it is not surprising to find an emphasis upon the
reader’s role in the book. However, this is complicated, or made more
ambiguous, by the apparently private nature of the correspondence.
Neither of the writers make any claim for personal letters being a
more “authentic” representation of the self than a more traditional
form of autobiography and Noël, in particular, seems to be
consciously rebelling against having any autobiographical associations
made with the writers’ correspondence. Nevertheless, Le Double Jeu
du Tu demonstrates that it is not formal autobiographies alone that
involve a construction of self.
No genre can be guaranteed of greater “authenticity” than any
other as all texts involve textual construction and to posit a more
authentic mode of autobiographical writing would be to propose that a
form of writing exists which is unaffected by questions of reception.
But different forms of writing involve different conventions and this
serves to throw the emphasis back upon the reader and the
expectations they bring to bear upon different works. In Le Double
Jeu du Tu, Noël demonstrates a type of performative autobiography,
the creation of an identity in and of the present, without recourse to
memories of the past. Instead of a formation of the self over and
through time, the reader engages with a performance which is at once
reactive and creative; a provisional self is proposed, rejected, defined
and evolves through interaction with the other and in the present act of
writing.
A reading public is anticipated by the text in the first
exchange of letters, which contain the writers’ ambitions for their
project. They state their desire to embark on a project together, which
will be transformed through the effort of collaboration; a project that
is both unpredictable and replete with obstacles and provocation
because it evolves from a process of interrogation and response;
118 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

observation and query. Consequently, one of the aims of the game

would appear to be precisely a certain element of surprise and an
obligation to respond to questions with the greatest degree of honesty.
Frémon envisages the enterprise as distancing the writers from their
usual sphere of literature:

S’exposer à la provocation, se mettre mutuellement, soi-même et

l’autre, à la question [...] – écrire, et se trouver forcé de dire
pourquoi on ne l’aurait pas voulu. Dire également pourquoi nous
allons cacher ce que nous allons cacher ce que nous ne
manquerons pas de cacher […]. L’intérêt de tout cela? Ce que je
te cacherai ne sera pas forcément ce que je me serais caché sans
ce double jeu, et inversement, et réciproquement (ibid; 15).

Frémon opens up the possibility of dishonesty in the dialogue and

thereby acknowledges that the non-dit of the texts to follow will
possibly hold as much interest or as much relevance as what is
expressed. Although one of their ambitions for their exchange is to be
as uncensored as possible, Frémon acknowledges that an element of
cheating will be inevitable, perhaps despite the will of the writers. He
thereby draws attention to the fallibility of the text, any text, in its
failure to be as transparent as possible. The inherent duplicity of
language, its potential manifold meanings, renders the possibility of
truth an unlikely outcome.
The writers recognize that one of their tasks is to create sense
through language. As their letters become embodiments of their
identities, the words give form and expression to that identity. Frémon
introduces a citation from Beckett, which, in commenting upon
expression in general, has a direct bearing upon the writers’
self-imposed task: “The expression that there is nothing to express,
nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no
power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to
express.” The two writers have no starting point other than their
agreement to write, they have no narrative thread, no specific idea of
what they want to discuss; the only origin is an obligation to respond
to the other: “il me plaît de croire que je vous persuade, et il me plaît
de croire que cela me suffit grâce à vous je me crée, je me crie, un
non-dit, un problème mais dont on peut alors parler” (ibid; 17). As
correspondents, the writers write for a specific reader who is
well-known to them but they are still aware of the creative force of
 Textual Imagery: Bernard Noël and Gisèle Prassinos 119

language and the way in which their letters reveal and create
identities. Noël and Frémon write to one another in the hope that the
literary exchange will be both a self-discovery and a discovery of each
other.
The apparently formal tone of the “vous” address that is
employed at the start of the correspondence indicates that there is no
false assumption of intimacy or pre-conceived familiarity. All that is
required for the exchange to evolve is reception and response: “Votre
écoute, vos réactions, supposées, tendent à le combler (le vide), à le
remplacer par un débat: le pourquoi de ce phénomène. Et dès lors plus
rien n’est vide, vous m’avez répondu et je m’accroche à vous” (ibid;
18). The speaker feels the need to speak without knowing exactly
what he will say, and the listener responds to this intention. As
embodiments of their subjectivity, the letters of Noël and Frémon are
manifestations of their intention to speak and arise through the
interpellation of mutual address. The title of the collection makes
explicit the intersubjective nature of the exchange. Le Double Jeu du
Tu implies the plural nature of the je, which is contained within the
jeu, and that is constituted through the interplay with the tu.
Also implicit in the sense of jeu, is the notion of indefinition,
the process of gambling, of risk or false-starts as well as development.
Noël re-evokes his metaphor of the body:

Sans doute avais-je envie d’écrire un livre qui serait unique

comme mon corps – un livre qui serait mon corps de papier, mais
à la différence du corps, les livres se retournent […] On entre dans
le jeu, et il ne s’agit pas de gagner – de gagner un corps – mais de
jouer (ibid; 26).

In place of the concept of the book existing as an impersonal space of

a collection of texts (in this case, the collection of letters), Noël draws
attention to the book as object, as an integral and autonomous unit of
meaning. However, in place of the defined contours of a body, the
book takes shape as it is written, while the form, constituted and
interpreted by both writer and reader, is permanently in flux and
forever subject to change and redefinition. With the notion of
indefinition co-exists the possibility of imprecision, and Frémon
draws attention to this by indicating the duplicity of language or the
fragility, the permeability, of the borders between truth and fiction.
The writers, consciously or unconsciously, in performing for their
120 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

reader adopt masks, inventions and untruths, claiming that there is no

single true face. In acknowledging the imprecision of language, the
writers highlight the ambiguity of the dialectical relation between the
apparent freedom of self-expression and its simultaneous dependence
upon the perspective of the Other.
Frémon evokes the image of a rolling snowball, a metaphor
for the accumulation of words and letters and asks where does the
truth lie: does it lie in the process of accumulation that works towards
the revelation of the truth? Or does the accumulated mass conceal the
truth? Already he is expressing doubts about the revelatory potential
of language, doubts that are constantly re-evoked throughout the text.
He expresses his anxieties about the consequences of the
correspondence for the writers’ relationship:

Je me demande soudain si ce jeu entrepris depuis quelques

semaines nous rapproche ou nous éloigne? Incontestablement, il
précise des différences […] tout l’intérêt du projet est là, me
semble-t-il, creuser les différences, creuser les résistances, sans
que cesse l’amitié, qu’au contraire elle se trouve renforcée par le
risque même qu’elle prend: le choix commun de fuir la
complaisance (Noël, 1977; 43).

The writers have issued themselves a challenge that lies in the creative
expression of self and the avoidance of the complacent belief that
there is a pre-existing, originary self that is waiting to be revealed or
represented.
Despite the obviously intended honesty of the texts and the
authors’ claim to be writing personally, they wish at all costs to avoid
the trap of autobiography. Consequently, it is little surprise when Noël
accuses Frémon of wallowing in autobiographical discourse. Despite
his criticism, he recognizes the difficulty of providing a textual
backdrop to their discussions without resorting to self-revelation.
However, Noël is wary of becoming rhetorical. The nature of their
exchange aims less to record a pre-existing self than to demonstrate an
ongoing construction of self and a simultaneous examination of this
process. A letter is a provisional self, proffering elements of an
identity that are open to interpretation, appropriation. A series of
letters opens up the possibility for the reconstruction of that
provisional self in the light of the response or reaction in the replying
letter. Noël’s suspicion of autobiography reveals an awareness of the
 Textual Imagery: Bernard Noël and Gisèle Prassinos 121

danger of becoming solipsistic and complacent. The writers have set

themselves the task of attempting to live out an autobiography, living
for and through the written text. The risk is that of becoming
narcissistic, of losing their grasp on the world, the process and
exchange of writing and, instead, to start recording the past.
In response to Noël’s accusation, Frémon acknowledges that
he has a tendency to individualize the debate, or to reduce it to the
dimensions of individual psychology. At the same time, he recognizes
that one of their primary aims was to write without self-censorship
and so he questions the reasoning behind Noël’s apparent wish to
stifle autobiographical inclinations:

La seule censure pourrait venir, dis-tu, du tien reproche de te

vautrer dans l’autobiographie […] J’en reviens à ce reproche:
Qu’est-ce que l’autobiographie et quoi fait qu’elle est l’objet
d’une censure particulière. Est-ce que devenir cet
homme-médecine n’est pas la solution au dilemme: impossibilité
de l’autobiographie – impossibilité d’autre chose. Et quelle est la
cause de ce dilemme s’il existe? Tu as fort bien relevé un point: à
s’exercer à l’examen de conscience, on en découvre l’ennui.
Est-ce qu’il n’y aurait pas lieu pour échapper à cet ennui et qui
sait déboucher sur de l’inconnu révélateur, de pervertir
l’autobiographie (ibid; 44).

To which Noël replies that the problem does not lie precisely in
writing or not writing autobiography but in the avoidance of
complacency:

Attention: il y aura une ‘biographie’ qui serait noble, bien portée,

moderne, et une autobiographie, qui serait la complaisance
réactionnaire. Il va falloir faire table rase de cette distinction, car
toute est biographique. Je pense au miroir qui, autrefois, en se
baladant le long de la route, écrivait le roman. Eh bien, nous
avons avalé le miroir, et du coup, au lieu de réfléchir, il pense.
Cela change le niveau de la description, et les mémoires, au lieu
de nous venir d’outre-tombe, nous viennent à présent
d’outre-corps (ibid; 52).

Noël reveals that he accepts the inevitability of the subjective

nature of the writing but he hopes to change the level of description
from that of retrospective reflection to an active demonstration of
ongoing thought. Consequently, the self-seeing “I” attempts a level of
criticism from within subjectivity rather than observation from
122 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

without. Objective vraisemblance has disappeared and, consequently,

the belief in the transcendent status of language. Already in Le Double
Jeu du Tu, Noël’s emphasis on the corporeality and the intentionality
of language awakens the reader to an awareness of consciousness as
incarnate in a body and inhering in the perceptual world. So how does
he reconcile this desire for the expression of a performative, evolving
identity with the demands of fiction?

Le Corps

Noël draws attention to the central contradiction of the

autobiographical text, that is, the ontological gap between the writing
self and self-reflexive protagonist of the work, by focusing upon the
representability of the body. He explores this paradox via the body as
specular, imaginary synthesis and the body as dynamic dispersion
throughout a fragmented work. The body is a dialectic that operates as
the point of fusion and mutual suspension of subject and object:

Le corps, dis-je. Et il y a devant moi cette main qui écrit. Je la

regarde. Elle s’arrête. Elle écrit qu’elle s’arrête, et donc ne s’arrête
pas […] Cela pourrait servir de prétexte à une observation de
l’observation, et j’apprendrais à noter le décalage entre le regard
et l’écrit, ou peut-être le trajet de l’image entre sa réalité, sa
conscience et son écriture – le trajet à travers mon corps (Noël,
1998; 30).

Noël perceives his body to be the medium that apprehends and names
reality, transforming perception into language.
Noël’s insistence upon the physicality of language highlights
the interdependence of the body and consciousness:

Qui parle? Ma bouche. Qui parle par ma bouche? Mon corps.

Mais si mon corps a besoin de parler, de se parler, pourquoi la
parole a-t-elle perdu à peu près toute évidence physique?
Pourquoi la nomination est-elle, par excellence, l’opération
abstraite? C’est que le corps ne produit pas son langage: il
apprend à parler. On lui apprend […] Un corps qui parle s’oublie
dans sa parole. C’est un peu comme s’il entrait dans un autre
corps – un corps abstrait, celui du langage (ibid; 15).

As the knowledge of language is incorporated into the body, language

is the very tool by which we express this knowledge and thereby
 Textual Imagery: Bernard Noël and Gisèle Prassinos 123

transform the impersonal abstract potential of language into personal

expression.
Noël’s consuming interest in the nature of vision, the way in
which we apprehend images, is conveyed most explicitly in his
writing upon the visual arts, such as Journal du regard and Onze
romans d’oeil. In these texts, he also elaborates on his fascination for
the physical interpretation of the visual, that is, the gesture of painting,
the hand that creates the mark on the page or canvas. The conscious
and deliberate transcription of imagery is conveyed through the body,
which acts as a mediator between the interior and exterior worlds.
However, this physical transcription is not only the mechanism of
representation, Noël also credits the body with interpretative and
creative faculties. He refers to his body as the chambre noire via
which all thought must pass in its transformation into expression. He
describes the process of writing as a form of translation of vision that
occurs in and through his body (see Noël, 1998; 97). In this
description, he comes close to Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of vision in
L’Oeil et L’Esprit : “C’est en prétant son corps au monde que le
peintre change le monde en peinture” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964; 16).
Through his analysis of le regard, Noël concentrates on the
interdependency and metamorphosis of images that exist in reality and
images that exist in thought. In other words, he is consumed with the
inevitability of subjective vision.
In order to look more closely at the way in which Noël
attempts to reconcile the visual with language, I shall now look at his
novel Le 19 octobre 1977. According to Hervé Carn: “Pour B.N. plus
que l’imaginaire, c’est l’image qui est la matière privilégiée de la
fiction” and this book demonstrates, above all, the limitations of
language in comparison to painting. According to Carn, Noël
considers painting to be a more emotive, efficient and affective means
of expression than literature (see Carn, 1986; 71). However, Le 19
octobre does not only demonstrate the power of painting but the
potency of any visual image. In Le 19 octobre, Noël sets out to write
what he terms “le premier monologue extérieur.” The first part of the
novel juxtaposes elements which gravitate around a certain malaise. It
is revealed that this malaise was provoked by reading Maurice
Blanchot’s L’Arrêt de mort several years earlier and the profound
distress experienced on that occasion has been re-evoked by a
photograph that had been slipped inside a book. So, similarly to
124 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

Duras’ L’Amant, the book begins with a photograph, a visual image

that is central to the text but never reproduced for the reader.

Transcribing Vision

The text of Le 19 octobre shifts between the voice of the

first-person narrator, unidentified snatches of dialogue, lines of poetry,
literary quotations and the voices of characters that seem to articulate
further the thoughts of the narrator. This dissolution of the authorial
body forestalls the unification of the text under a single authoritative
message. The anonymous snatches of conversation serve to emphasize
this level of indeterminacy, marking each proposition with the process
of its uttering, while rendering it impossible to anchor the utterances.
The self-reflexivity of the text introduces a dramatic gradation of
language and highlights the ambivalence of the referential status of je:
“Où en suis-je à présent? Mais il ne s’agit pas de moi: il s’agit
toujours de relations, de rapports, et de cette impuissance à dire ce que
leur fixité met en circulation” (Noël, 1998; 14).
The text’s self-reflexivity holds thematic as well as stylistic
implications. The narrator employs a similar technique to that of
Barthes whereby the writer draws attention to the physical act of
creation. Barthes writes: “J’écris: ceci est le premier degré du langage.
Puis j’écris que j’écris: c’en est le second degré” (Barthes, 1975; 70).
Barthes attempts to postpone the moment at which discourse thickens
into stereotype by reinserting discourse into a situation of énonciation
in which the énoncé no longer appears natural (see also part 2, page
168). Noël highlights the physical process of writing, constantly
drawing the reader’s attention to the act of transcription as the pen
covers a blank sheet of paper with symbols (Noël, 1998; 18). Both
writers are attempting to shake off the remnants of the psychological
realism that is identified as part of traditional character formation but
Noël’s discourse introduces a further metaphor whereby the physical
act of transcribing words onto the page is likened to the painter’s
gesture on the canvas. In the Journal du regard, he observes: “Dans
toute oeuvre visuelle, la visibilité est le résultat du travail obscur de la
main. Cette visibilité voyage à travers le corps, de l’oeil à la main,
puis elle entre dans le regard” (Noël, 1988; 28). In comparing the act
of writing to the visual art of painting, Noël emphasizes how both the
 Textual Imagery: Bernard Noël and Gisèle Prassinos 125

brush and the pen are tools that serve to convert reality into images
and images into thought.
The fragmentary nature of Noël’s texts, in particular the
Journal du regard, seems to subvert the ideology of authorship,
insofar as the author functions as an authority that is a barrier against
interpretation (the text cannot signify beyond conscious authorial
intent), but also authority in all its forms. Authority, in this sense, is
represented by any idea or agency that can be presented as the
ultimate signified of a text. The verbal performance of the Journal du
regard embodies the practice of this theory, reminding the reader that
its writer is also a poet. The text’s anti-linearity, the blank spaces and
fragments of poetry create a symbiotic relation between form and
content, challenging the reader to apprehend the text as a visual
ensemble as well as a symbolic structure. The fragmentary structure of
the text displays an aphoristic tendency and the discontinuous
paragraphs comprise a multiplicity of discourses.
In Le 19 octobre, the narrator draws attention to the
fragmented text, making a claim for its greater vraisemblance,
indicating that as thought processes proceed through fitful starts of
inspiration, the text should reflect this; what is fictitious in fiction,
according to Noël, is precisely its quality of seamless continuity (see
Noël, 1998; 31). Noël repeats this claim in a response to André
Miguel that is collected in Treize cases du je. The question posed
concerns above all Noël’s poetry: “L’écriture fragmentaire, telle que
vous aimez, est-ce un travail intellectuel, à froid, ou est-ce une
révélation spontanée. Ou les deux?” To which Noël replies:

L’écriture est un travail, mais reste à savoir sur quoi. Un travail

pas seulement sur la langue, mais sur le corps. Je crois que
l’écriture est la pensée du corps […] Mon écriture consiste
justement à travailler à cette description […] Je n’aime pas plus
une écriture fragmentaire qu’une écriture ‘globalisante,’ mais sans
doute ai-je cru, un temps, que le fragment était plus près du vrai –
plus près parce que l’à-pic sur lequel il s’achève est à l’image de
la vie coupée net par la mort (Noël, 1998; 96).

Noël’s use of fragmented specular images recalls the question

posed by Barthes in “Le cercle des fragments”: “écrire par fragments:
les fragments sont alors des pierres sur le pourtour du cercle: je
m’étale en rond: tout mon petit univers en miettes; au centre, quoi?”
(Barthes, 1975; 96). Barthes’s rhetorical question creates the notion of
126 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

images in a fragmentary space that resist the coalescence of a single

image into the Imaginary. If the centre conceals a void, revealing
subjectivity to be disoriginary, such a space can only be the unstable
location of the text as writing. In “Le fragment comme illusion”,
Barthes claims that the fragment is an attempt to break out of the
specular echoes of ideologized discourse; he is constantly deploying
strategies to diffract his narrative. In his autobiography, Roland
Barthes par Roland Barthes, the author deploys a fragmentary
structure to negate the sense of linear progression. Like Noël’s
Journal du regard, the text takes the form of a series of displacements
from one mode of discourse to another. While Barthes’s technique
stems from a desire to undermine traditional assumptions made about
the meaning of a text and its origin, Noël’s technique also seeks to
challenge the nature of vision, the different ways in which we
apprehend a visual image and a written text:

Mettre en mots consiste à projeter le monde sur son intimité;

mettre en images entraîne à projeter son intimité sur le monde.
Dans le premier cas, on fabrique du lisible; dans le second, on
pense faire un objet visuel, mais lui aussi sera lu (Noël, 1988; 11).

De Man asserts that the assumed referential status of

autobiography reveals the fictionality of all referentiality and how
autobiographers, in their attempt to escape the constraints of language,
are necessarily and inevitably reinscribed within the textual system.
However, the nature of Noël’s fragmentary text resists the illusion of a
centred self that language is sufficiently transparent to express. De
Man’s critique suggests that the specular nature of autobiographical
discourse tends to posit the self as the cause of language, rather than
its most profound effect. However, language is neither an external
force nor a tool of expression, but the very symbolic system that both
constructs and is constructed by the writing self. If, as I have
observed, self-representation is the effect of a constructed similarity
between identity and language, an attempt to cast in fixed terms the
self-reflexive, discontinuous shifts in modality and perspective that
are inherent in human experience and to ground them in a single
subjectivity (the illusory stade du miroir), then to make this attempt is
to confront the limitations of expression. Noël acknowledges these
limitations and attempts to resist interpretations of his work as a
 Textual Imagery: Bernard Noël and Gisèle Prassinos 127

composite sign: a signifier and signified already congealed into a

finished meaning.
Like Barthes, Noël reveals his distrust of language. This is
exemplified in Le 19 octobre by the status of the first-person pronoun:

Est-ce le mot ‘signe’? C’est un mot glissant. Il m’a poussé vers

une image, où il y avait un je, un je, encore un je, beaucoup de je.
Oh! me suis-je dit, quoi de plus impersonnel que le pronom le
plus personnel. N’importe qui est un je (Noël, 1998; 35).

Noël’s constant interrogation of language prevents the reader

identifying with the source of the text. He unravels characterization,
revealing that identity is only an identity-effect, the transformation of
a material surface into imaginary profundity. At another moment, he
asks: “Je, me dis-je, mais qu’est-ce que je, sinon le garant de la
crédibilité de tous les récits?” (Noël, 1998; 51).
Noël highlights the ambiguity of the status of je. Je is an
element in a code, a language, but it is also an index. Je refers only to
the person uttering it and is thus what Jakobson calls a shifter, a
message straddling the code. Je can be appropriated by any speaker of
that language but its meaning can only be given as the addresser of the
message to which it belongs. Therefore je is not a conventional sign as
it relates to a specific act of utterance. The irreducible nature of the
pronoun means that it can never be the immediate expression of a
subjectivity prior to the code. The narrator of Le 19 octobre has a
sense of identity that depends solely on his relation with the objects
and people that surround him, including his writing; Noël describes
him as “simple figure optique.” When he is no longer able to see, as in
the following example, he loses his consciousness of self:

J’ai plongé dans la nuit. Elle est alentour comme une liaison dans
laquelle toute chose accède à un même rapport. Et dès que je me
suis enfoncé dans l’immobilité qui me tient là, j’ai senti l’intensité
de cette liaison, et son intimité. Le je s’y éteint (Noël, 1998; 67).

The nature of Le 19 octobre as a monologue extérieur means

that the reader never forms an external image of the narrator. Instead,
we experience the world through the eyes of je and are therefore
confronted with a series of disjointed tableaux. In the absence of a
definable physical presence, the book stands in for and creates the
narrator. He explains how his reality is a fiction as it only gains
128 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

substance within the body of the text; he can achieve a sense of reality
only through writing: “A présent je me dis: ta réalité sera ce que tu
écris, et à la fin on verra” (Noël, 1998; 16). The repeated criticism of
his lover is: “Il n’y a pas de corps dans ton texte” (ibid; 89). The
narrator’s body, his body-image, is dispersed within the text he
produces. The body for Noël as the subject of knowledge is not an
assembly point for the unified totality of self, but a point of dispersion
for the affects that pull the unity of self apart. The body is more
process than image; it therefore exceeds representation. The
consequences of this for the reader involve an inability to identify
with the text and therefore the reader’s sense of self as a unified
subject is suspended. Like the decentred self of the writer, the reader
has no secure identity, as the receiver of a message, for there is no
message and the reader cannot identify with the discourse, as there is
no recognizable speaker. The multiplicity of textual voices multiplies
the reader’s response and divides their subjectivity. In Treize Cases du
je, Noël writes:

Il faut écrire, entrer dans l’écriture, mais le moment où j’écris est

le moment où l’écriture disparaît, c’est-à-dire devient si
réellement elle-même qu’elle ne fait plus rien d’autre qu’être.
Comment communiquer cette disparition à l’instant même où moi
je disparais? Le lecteur, à son tour, ne cherche-t-il pas la même
intimité? Et qu’est-ce que l’intimité, sinon la dissolution de la
différence? A partir de là, il ne s’agit plus de demander: où est le
corps? mais où n’est-il pas? (Noël, 1998; 30).

If Noël recognizes that to enter into language is to enter into a

symbolic body, an autonomous system, language is also an extension
of the body. This relates not only to a formation of identity, as
previously observed but also to a physical experience of language.
When the narrator states that his reality is a fiction and his girlfriend
claims that his text lacks substance, this is less an attack on his literary
skills than an affront to his reality. Similarly, Noël writes in the
present because “Il n’y a pas de corps dans le passé” (ibid; 90) and the
text must become an experience like that of a lived moment. The
philosophy professor elaborates on this point: “Il y a rencontre entre le
lu et le vécu des yeux comme si le livre était l’espace corporel d’un
récit […] – Corporel? – Oui, pas l’espace vécu” (ibid; 94). He avoids
a narration of the past because memory contains neither flesh nor
blood; it is but words and images (ibid; 50). So the narrator of Le 19
 Textual Imagery: Bernard Noël and Gisèle Prassinos 129

octobre is defined not by any self-image, which would be necessarily

be a past image, but by the images of what he perceives around him in
the present: he is a “simple figure optique” because “tout n’est que
matériau de la pensée” and this material is “la pensée de mes yeux”
(ibid; 72). Like an image that appears to stop time with its evocative
power (the photograph in part one), writing seeks to become an
experience of and through the body.

Language versus Sight

The second part of Le 19 octobre, “Le travail du jour”, begins

with a crisis of conscience for the narrator who asks himself if he can
continue writing. He recognizes a certain paradoxical quality in
language:

Il est vrai que les mots éloignent les pétales et l’odeur pour ne
réaliser que l’Absente de tous bouquets; mais ils savent également
produire une proximité inquiétante, à la manière d’une loupe qui,
en grossissant tel détail, le rend plus que présent (Noël, 1998; 66).

Here Noël is clearly foregrounding the idea of absence by placing it in

upper case unlike the lower case of Mallarmé’s text. But while
resigning himself to the limitations of language, he notices its
symbolic potency, and hopes that he will be able to exploit this
potential. Seemingly in order to test this dual and microscopic power
of language, the narrator breaks into description, extending the
physical quality of vision, the way in which it resonates through his
body, to encompass even the most quotidian scene.
Fixing his look upon three dead leaves moving across the
paving stones, he notices how his vision creates a frame, a
photographic framework: “Mon attention vient de se fixer sur un
espace très restreint: une parcelle de sol pavé […] Je ne vois que cela,
et la pointe d’un pied chaussé de noir” (ibid; 66). The random
designation of his use of space creates its own internal logic as, like
the use of light within a painting, a luminous quality radiates from and
appears to unify the three elements of his picture: “Je veux dire qu’elle
(la lumière) forme entre les feuilles, le pied et les pavés un petit
volume transparent dans lequel les trois choses que je vois semblent
enfermées.” His spontaneous creation of a nature morte within an
invisible framework leads him to identify with and respond to the
130 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

vision: “j’éprouve, à les voir ainsi libres et retenues, une allégresse au

centre de laquelle, à mon tour, je me sens lumineusement libre et
retenu” (ibid; 66). The narrator’s impression of being at once both free
and constrained demonstrates the impossibility of sublating
perspectives into one coherent construct. The way in which vision is
experienced and carries an emotional or sensual weight exemplifies
how, for Noël, the interplay of the senses, while each one remains
unique, all contribute to a single expressive space. In focusing the
narrator’s vision in such a manner, the reader is also reminded that
perception is always perspectival, dependant on the viewer’s position.
The narrator of Le 19 octobre is far from the role of the traditional
omniscient, omnipresent narrator; his vision is fragmented, fallible
and incomplete.
The monologue extérieur may be an attempt to inaugurate a
paradigm of narrative multiperspectivism but it does not, however,
amount to a new synthesis of the “real.” The representation of things
is never total or panoramic. It is fragmentary, now larger, now
narrower, but most often reduced, as if by a fracture in the field of
vision, to a section of the real, strictly limited, beyond which it is
futile to try to see anything. This recalls Noël’s description of his
poetry. Noël seeks to bring to his writing a similar set of aesthetics as
he perceives to exist in painting:

Or le problème du peintre c’est de mettre dans l’espace des objets

qui font que, tout à coup, l’espace devienne adéquat à
l’identification, à une circulation entre celui qui regarde et cet
espace. Cela unit le regard à l’espace peint parce que les objets
ont été disposés dans une harmonie, un équilibre […] Je me
demande si le poème n’est pas la même chose: en écrivant on a
affaire à un espace dans lequel on dispose des objets verbaux. Et
voilà, c’est tout à coup un poème […] à cause d’une certaine
condensation d’énergie (Noël, Entretiens avec Dominique
Sampiero, 1998).

Imposing a framework on perception, the narrator foregrounds a

fragmentation, an explosion into aspects where energy is condensed:
the narrator’s gaze turns living beings into things, things into living
beings, fascinated by the insignificant detail and underscoring
congruity and diversity in place of a homogeneous appearance.
At times, the description in the novel appears to be purely
visual. The narrator is not only fascinated by the look or the
 Textual Imagery: Bernard Noël and Gisèle Prassinos 131

appearance of objects surrounding him, he is also intrigued by the

look, the gaze of other characters. Describing the appearance of his
escort in part two, his vision is held by her face and eyes. With minute
attention to detail, the narrator metaphorically holds a magnifying
glass up to his companion’s face and his look is indiscriminative:
“C’est peut-être qu’ayant fixé les yeux, je n’ai plus un regard qui
décrit, mais, tout au sommet de moi, un flottement: celui d’une
légèreté encore hésitante entre le lâcher et la retenue” (Noël, 1998;
74). He describes her eyes and, consequently, the emotional effect
they have on him: “L’oeil gauche me paraît plus étroit, plus mouillé,
plus tendre; l’autre est vif, avec un point de lumière au centre, qui me
pique et me dérange” (ibid; 75). Therefore, this is no longer a question
of pure optics but again of the interrelatedness of the senses. The eye
is not only considered to be in some way revelatory of the “I” of the
perceived but provokes a subjective response in the beholder. The
power of being held in someone’s look is also described as disturbing,
as that of being aware of the oscillation between being the viewed
object and the viewing subject: “Je vois son regard; j’ai même
l’impression d’être à l’intérieur de lui, et cependant il m’échappe sans
que je puisse m’arrêter à un mot qui me dirait avec certitude: il est
tendre, il est ironique, il est fuyant, il est attentif” (ibid; 77).
If desire is provoked by sight and yet eternally frustrated at
not being able to describe a vision or render it eternally present, it is
also this frustration that drives desire. The ultimate incompatibility of
image and language is parallel to the impossibility of the seeing
subject coinciding with the seen object. Acknowledging the
limitations of human vision, the narrator’s refrain, “Je ne me
connaîtrai jamais […] Parce que je ne peux pas regarder mes yeux au
moment où je la regarde” (ibid; 105), denies the fiction of unmediated,
self-contained presence, of a self-identical moment which is removed
from the temporal flux. As the philosophy professor observes: “Nous
sommes fluides et changeants […] L’important est qu’une tête réelle
puisse dire à une autre tête réelle: Je suis Toi, alors c’est la débandade
des certitudes, la fin du corps considéré comme boîte conserve de
l’identité” (ibid; 98). The impossibility of deducing the self from its
appearance is mirrored in the impossibility of the coincidence of the
seeing and the seen: the eye meeting the “I”. This concept is
pre-empted in part two by the narrator’s companion who has a large
132 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

mirror above her bed: “Si je l’ai mis là, c’est pour la raison un peu
folle que je rêve de m’y voir en train de dormir” (ibid; 79).
The description, as I have demonstrated, is not limited to the
sense of the visual, it extends to incorporate more synaesthetic
moments but these are often concluded by a return to sight, such as a
description of the potent beverage in part two:
L’effet est volatil; la langue, le palais irradient ensuite un froid
odorant, et chacun me semble creusé de milliers de papilles
brusquement ouvertes. La bouche y gagne une présence
envahissante au milieu de la tête, et il s’en suit que mes yeux
s’étalent bientôt sur une concavité qui gonfle et gonfle,
m’obsédant de sa grotte où j’imagine d’incessantes méta-
morphoses entre la chair et l’odeur (Noël, 1998; 76).

Vision is the catalyst for other sensory experiences. The

pleasure the narrator takes in his visualization of the scene becomes
frustration when he realizes that it will not suffice to hold his attention
for long. Distractedly, he seeks another prop for his eyes to behold,
trying to avoid the trap of description: “Du temps passe, et je devine
que je cherche moins un lieu où reposer ce qui m’anime qu’un détour
pour lui éviter de tomber de mes yeux dans ma bouche.”
Paradoxically, the writer perceives verbal description as that which
renders vision impure and thus he returns to the central theme of the
novel: the failure or inadequacy of language. He realizes that words
have only one advantage, that of being able to bring about the
transformation of objects. The limitation of language is that it
represents the loss of an original presence, and in our pursuit of that
presence, our attempt to recreate reality through language, we are
continually misled and deceived. Words remain behind as the failure
of what they were witness to. Reality is diluted or rendered false in the
transposition of representation from fact to vraisemblance: “Entre les
mots et les choses, il y a cet escalier sans marches auquel manquent
même le limon et la rampe” (ibid; 37).
Here, I would like to recall the task of the autobiographer and
the way in which the attempt to render reality (vision or memory)
shares this characteristic. The autobiographer attempts to circumvent a
settled vision of the past. However, this difficulty is compounded by
the possibility that the lived reality of the individual past will have
been eroded or contaminated by prefabricated elements taken from
literary and cultural stereotypes. The writer runs the risk that the
 Textual Imagery: Bernard Noël and Gisèle Prassinos 133

reconstruction of past feelings is commandeered by the vraisemblance

of convention and artifice. Memory is heterogeneous and the material
of memory lies largely outside language; autobiography involves the
attempt to bring the extra-linguistic into language, aiming to record
and simulate the resurgence of sensation. Noël’s writing deals in the
momentary and the fragmentary. This can be linked to the failure of
the autobiographical project, which remains, in essence, a collection
of fragments. This then poses the question, if autobiography is linked
to an essential unity, a coalescence of the disruptive, discontinuous
work of memory, is memory therefore incompatible with
autobiography?
I would argue that Noël’s writing, in seeking to avoid the
artifice of vraisemblance, acknowledges the limitations of language to
represent a lived reality and through this acknowledgement, comes
closer to expressing the multiplicity of lived experience. Noël’s
fragmentary text exemplifies how time is neither undergone nor
constituted by us and, consequently, we can no more encompass time
than we can circumscribe our life. Similarly, we can never be sealed
into any single temporal dimension, but exist as a living synthesis of
all three. When we remember a past incident, we do not call up an
idea or an image we re-open time and carry ourselves back to the
moment when it was present. Time is a network of overlapping
intentionalities. Therefore, our past always remains potentially
retrievable as temporality is not something we conceive or observe: it
is the process of living our lives. Noël demonstrates how, just as
vision’s perspective precludes the possibility of perceiving everything
simultaneously, so the perspective of our temporal consciousness rules
out an all-encompassing grasp of time. Our reflection on time is itself
situated in time; our reflection on subjectivity is itself part of our
subjectivity.
In Le 19 octobre, while recognizing the ultimate incompat-
ibility of vision and language and the impossibility of the perfect
transcription of sight, the narrator also recognizes their complemen-
tary natures and the presence of certain parallels: “J’ai compris – trop
tard? – que le mouvement qu’articulent nos yeux ressemble à celui de
la langue” (Noël, 1998; 67). As he walks, he forgets himself in the
observation of the objects he passes: “Les yeux passent d’une chose à
l’autre, et le regard les unit, formant récit” (ibid; 68). Paradoxically,
the narrator seems to want to deprive his lover of the power of vision:
134 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

“Je veux te crever les yeux.” He expresses admiration for her eyes and
mouth but significantly the shape of her mouth. If he renders her
blind, he binds her more tightly to him. As a writer, his is the power of
language. The loss of vision accompanies the annihilation of self and
the consciousness of difference.
There is a sexual metaphor in Noël’s description of the loss of
self: “J’ai plongé dans la nuit […] Et dès que je me suis enfoncé dans
l’immobilité qui me tient là, j’ai senti l’intensité de cette liaison, et son
intimité. Le je s’y éteint” (ibid; 67). In the darkness, as in the act of
love, a sense of self is surrendered. This comparison is apparent in
L’Âge d’Homme, as I have already remarked, when Leiris observes
how the annihilation of self in death compares to the orgasm (see
chapter 2, page 67). The final sentences of Le 19 octobre make
explicit the association between orgasm and death: “Je vois l’âme de
ton sexe, dis-je. Et je meurs” (ibid; 122). Earlier in the text, the
narrator refers to the female sex as the eye: “elle […] me regarde, pose
un pied sur le lit, se retrousse, cambre son bas-ventre, et cuisses
écartés, ouvre son sexe des deux mains: -Mon oeil!” (ibid; 22). Leiris
also draws a parallel between the female sex and the eye:

La signification de l’oeil crevé est très profonde pour moi.

Aujourd’hui, j’ai couramment tendance à regarder l’organe
féminin comme une chose sale ou comme une blessure, pas moins
attirante en cela, mais dangereuse par elle-même comme tout ce
qui est sanglant, muqueux, contaminé (Leiris, 1995; 81).

Noël extends the metaphor with his implication that pure

vision involves the annihilation of the self: “pour la première fois, je
me perds dans mes yeux. Je n’existe plus; seule compte la chose
regardée” (Noël, 1998; 22). The loss of consciousness or self that
death and orgasm entail is compared to the ability to hold a vision and
to suspend other sensory experiences: “Il m’a dit: – Voir vraiment,
c’est mourir. Ou peut-être était-ce: – Voir vraiment, c’est voir la mort.
A moins qu’il n’ait dit: – Le visible nous cache la mort” (ibid; 95).
From the description of the photograph in part one, to the
petition for the torture victims in Argentina, to the sacrificial tableau
in part two, to the narrator’s possible death at the end of the novel
(quoted above), themes of death and violence are omnipresent in Le
19 octobre. The montage nature of Le 19 octobre and its anti-linearity
are reminiscent of Breton’s Nadja. In part three of Le 19 octobre, Noël
 Textual Imagery: Bernard Noël and Gisèle Prassinos 135

relates a childhood anecdote in which a young girl rips out the eyes of
a doll. The incident begins with a question:

Tu crois qu’elles nous voient vraiment? […] Mais ce ne sont pas

les vrais yeux […] Et si on regardait ce qu’il y a derrière? […]
Elle prenait alors une des petites cuillères de son service à
poupées, puis, saisissant l’un des bébés de la rangée, elle lui
arrachait les yeux (ibid; 96).

Breton uses the same metaphor related by Nadja:

Cela la fait penser à sa petite fille, une enfant dont elle m’a appris
avec tant de précautions l’existence, et qu’elle adore, surtout parce
qu’elle est si peu comme les autres enfants, ‘avec cette idée de
toujours enlever les yeux des poupées pour voir ce qu’ il y a
derrière ces yeux’ (Breton, 1964; 102).

Both writers are questioning the nature of vision and its

tenuous relationship to a purely subjective reality. They undermine
both the notion that it is solely through the sense of sight that we
apprehend and comprehend the world and also the idea that the eye
can be in any way revelatory of the beholder’s identity, or to recall the
Romantics, the expression of the soul.

Imaging Identity

In part three, the narrator eavesdrops on a conversation where

the speaker adopts the role of the writer’s alter ego. During the
conversation, it is explained from a writer’s point of view how images
can be transcribed into literature; the image inspires the words, which
inevitably cannot remain true to reality but in their turn transform
reality and provoke other images:

Le texte raconte ce visible en transformation, comme si je ne

faisais que transcrire, avec des mots, des fantômes de formes […]
D’une part, le texte conserve ce que j’ai vu, et d’autre part, il
élimine puisqu’il n’est plus du visible, mais des mots […] Plus ce
que je veux représenter se perd dans ce que je fais, plus j’écris
avec acharnement pour que le lecteur voie. Qu’il voie ce que je ne
vois plus (Noël, 1998; 99).

Suddenly the emphasis upon the creation of images is displaced from

136 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

the writer onto the reader.

Through focusing on the processes of production and
reception, Noël reveals the extent to which the writer’s identity as
writer is situated within the texture of discourse. Rather than being, in
humanist terms, the origin of meaning, it is deeply implicated in
language. However, he acknowledges that the attempt to associate the
identity of the writer with either the person who produces the text, the
text itself or the interpretation of the text by the reader is a false
enterprise. The identity of the writer is in perpetual transformation but
while a writer can only exist through his work, the work itself can
only exist through the reader. This aligns with Noël’s observations on
the impossibility of language coinciding with lived reality and how
language becomes the Other that replaces the writer.
In part 3, the anonymous talker explains:

Il m’arrive parfois d’avoir un regard sans interprétation; d’un seul

coup le langage fait silence, et je sais que ce silence est la chose
que j’essaierai de faire entendre au stade final: un langage pacifié
parce que tout voyant, ni pilleur de réalité, ni pilleur d’être,
simplement en accord de telle sorte qu’il n’y a plus rien à dire
(Noël, 1998; 104).

This moment can only be identified as that of the death of the writer as
the writer both realizes and is realized through his work: “Dans les
moments où je n’écris pas, je ne vois plus rien. L’écriture me fournit
une image du monde, et elle construit l’espace dans lequel je vis”
(ibid; 100). Noël writes that he has stopped writing and the words
confront the writer as an impossible challenge; the defiance of the
gesture is an illusion: a writer ceases to be a writer as soon as he puts
down his/her pen.
Referring to the writer, Blanchot explains:

Ses talents, il les met en oeuvre, c’est-à-dire qu’il a besoin de

l’oeuvre qu’il produit pour avoir conscience d’eux et de
lui-même. L’écrivain ne se trouve, ne se réalise que par son
oeuvre; avant son oeuvre, non seulement il ignore qui il est, mais
il n’est rien. Il n’existe qu’à partir de l’œuvre (Blanchot, 1981;
15).

So according to Blanchot, the writer comes into being through

language. However, for Noël, because the image is inextricably tied to
 Textual Imagery: Bernard Noël and Gisèle Prassinos 137

the word and vice versa, he writes not only to produce an identity to
be perceived and interpreted by the reader, or as a means of
communicating his vision but also as the sole means of rendering his
world visible and real to himself: “J’écris pour voir, mais aussi pour
vivre, pour vivre et voir par le biais de l’écriture une totalité, seul
monde où j’ose avoir des gestes, habiter.” And this work is perpetual.
The writer’s task is symbolic of the role of language within the fabric
of society. Sight does not suffice to constitute experience, without
language we cannot participate in or incorporate ourselves into the
reality we perceive: “j’ai envie de voir, mais voir ne me suffit pas, car
si je vois sans mots, c’est comme si je voyais de loin et sans pouvoir
toucher, m’incorporer” (Noël, 1998; 103).
In Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of vision and painting, L’Oeil et
l’Esprit, he proposes that while the body is in the world forming part
of the objects and substance that surround us, an object amongst
others, it is the capacity of sight that leads us to interpret the world as
an extension of ourselves, to conceive of the self as the centre of the
visible world. This arises from the enigma that the body is both seeing
and seen:

Lui qui regarde toutes choses, il peut aussi se regarder, et

reconnaître dans ce qu’il voit alors ‘l’autre côté’ de sa puissance
voyante. Il se voit voyant, il se touche touchant, il est visible et
sensible pour soi-même. C’est un soi, non par transparence,
comme la pensée, qui ne pense quoi que ce soit qu’en l’assimilant,
en le constituant, en le transformant en pensée – mais un soi par
confusion, narcissisme, inhérence de celui qui voit à ce qu’il voit,
de celui qui touche à ce qu’il touche, du sentant au senti – un soi
donc qui est pris entre des choses, qui a une face et un dos, un
passé et un avenir (Merleau-Ponty, 1964; 19).

So the body inhabits space not in the sense of position but in the sense
of situation because the body is constituted through its rapport with
the objects which surround it. Noël explains that his (textual) identity
arises as a consequence of his interaction with his surroundings,
environment and relationships, as well as his very inability to express
what defines this experience of identity (Noël, 1998; 14). In other
words, an awareness of the intersubjective formation of identity can
be indicated but never perfectly described.
For Merleau-Ponty perception is not an exact science; the
seeing subject plays a role in perception but this is not the role of the
138 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

calculating, reasoning subject. It is not the intellect that apprehends

the world but the emotional, bodily subject, which, therefore, projects
onto the perceived world its emotional repertoire. Similarly, time is a
subjective experience. The subject is present only in regards to his/her
future and past, as time is a network of intentions. The narrator of Le
19 octobre recognizes that his appreciation of reality is limited “il
arrive qu’une chose se perde dans sa propre évidence. J’en vois bien la
réalité, mais voir la réalité la couvre d’une énigme […] Ou bien, est-ce
que la pensée ne se trahit pas elle-même en prenant sa représentation
pour sa réalité?” (Noël, 1998; 13). Art is the product of subjectivity
and therefore an imperfect picture of reality.
At the end of Barthes’ autobiography, there is a sample of
Barthes’s handwriting, an indexical trace of bodily presence which
claims “on écrit avec son désir, et je n’en finis pas de désirer”
(Barthes, 1975). For Noël, the locus of this desire is in the pursuit of
the visible. In Le 19 octobre, the narrator recalls a conversation: “Je ne
veux rien, et cependant ce que je fais est voulu. / Qu’est-ce qui est
possible? / Le désir. Seulement le désir” (Noël, 1998; 13). Desire in
Noël’s text is represented by a constant oscillation, a movement
to-and-fro, the tension created by the wish to reconcile or assimilate
word to image and image to word. The narrator explains that writing
is his attempt to draw closer to the world or to reconcile himself with
it through representation and expression. It is this movement towards
the world that produces the tension inherent in writing, as the reality
he wishes to apprehend seems to slip away (ibid; 103). The tension
lies in the fissures or the fault-line of the text, just as the most erotic
part of the body, according to Barthes, is “là où le vêtement baîlle”
(Barthes, 1973; 19). In Le 19 octobre, words reveal and belie images,
faces are confused with identity, skirts cover and expose the female
sex, and a single image has multiple verbal interpretations. The desire
which propels the text is evoked in the narrator’s love-letter: “J’écris
pour le désir et la violence, c’est dire que je cours toujours derrière toi.
Toujours en retard des mots parce que les mots retardent par rapport
aux yeux” (Noël, 1998; 42).
If the linear nature of the text unfolding in time mimics a
movement towards the future, this is in contrast with the contents of
Noël’s text. Noël states: “La mémoire est le roman. Le roman est le
passé présent” (Noël, 1998; 42). The past is composed of images that
are realized through words and render the past present; the past is not
 Textual Imagery: Bernard Noël and Gisèle Prassinos 139

composed of language but language serves to re-evoke it. The

infinitely possible permutations of a single image that is evoked
through language entail that the past can never be perfectly
communicated. Language modifies the image in such a way that it is
re-evoked in the mind’s eye, the reconstituted image is an imperfect
reflection of the original, which we then attempt to rectify with
further descriptive language, and so on, in infinite regression (ibid;
16). Consequently, in the present, our narration of the past can only be
told untruthfully and hence passes into the realms of fiction (ibid; 26).
The narcissism of gazing into images from the past does not
escape Noël as he writes: “Se souvenir: on enfonce toujours la même
porte ouverte, et l’on entre suivi de soi-même, et de soi-même, et de
soi-même” (ibid; 91). Any objective retrieval of the past is as unlikely
as looking past one’s own reflection in a mirror. The narrator wonders
if the relationship between a memory and its image is not the same as
that between an image and its reflection but recalls that one is drawn
out of the passage of time while the other breaks up into the ripples of
Narcissus’ pond (ibid; 108). The advantage of words in the evocation
of memory is that they are “un miroir sans reflet” (ibid; 39).1
For Noël, le corps is analogous to the text. In seeking to
render language as immediate, as discontinuous as imagery, the
fragmentary, self-referential discourse becomes experiential. It
unsettles the reader and destroys the comfortable world of the
Imaginary in the attempt to become a discourse of the body. And the
body becomes the space of fictional dispersion. However, the

1
The way in which moments of chance evoke past experiences that have been
retrospectively masked by the intellect also recalls Proust. In Proust, voluntary
memory is structured as an archive of images, and involuntary memory functions as
past images intervene into the present moment. Within the Proustian novel it is the
body that registers or records memories and impressions, for example: “Ma mémoire,
la mémoire involontaire elle-même, avait perdu l'amour d'Albertine. Mais il semble
qu'il y ait une mémoire involontaire des membres, pâle et stérile imitation de l'autre,
qui vive plus longtemps, comme certains animaux ou végétaux inintelligents vivent
plus longtemps que l'homme. Les jambes, les bras sont pleins de souvenirs engourdis”
(Proust, vol. 3, 1954; 699). That cognition and perception are dependent upon the
entirety of the sensory apparatus means that memory is irreducible to the operations of
consciousness and therefore cannot be brought to light: to remember within the space
of the remembering body is to remember without knowing anything. The body in
Proust, as in Noël, names a principle of articulation between writing, memory and
materiality that does not belong to the domain of knowledge.
140 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

accusation brought by the narrator’s girlfriend (“il n’y a pas de corps

dans ton texte”) indicates that the writer’s quest is perpetually
doomed. Reading, like writing, destabilizes subjectivity. Noël creates
a rhetorical fragment of the Imaginary but the Imaginary is inhabited
by the fragmentary; the moment of textuality affirms the
fragmentation of the self. The body is an object that is always liable to
congeal into a purely imaginary entity; the self falls back into the
Imaginary by writing but writing will always return to the
fragmentary. The narrator of Le 19 octobre is never entirely
co-incident with fragmentation but his use of fragmented images
evokes the dispersed self. The text reveals that self-representation is
never self-same. Like Barthes’ concept of jouissance that exceeds the
frame of representation, language is a shifting, symbolic order, which
appears to cohere into an Imaginary whole but is always subtended by
the fragmentation of the dispersed self.
If Noël posits the body as a dispersed presence, an
experiential void, insisting on the materiality of language to evoke the
materiality of a fragmented, perceptual subjectivity, the following
section will examine how Gisèle Prassinos creates a similar sense of
self through a very different approach. In contrast to the absent body
image of Noël’s text, where no corporeal contours are attributed to the
narrator, through a close reading of Mon Coeur les écoute, I will
demonstrate how Prassinos fabricates a mulititude of surreal body
images where consciousness and physicality are juxtaposed in
disturbing and satirical ways. In my examination of Noël’s texts, I
have sought to show how he brings a heightened visual consciousness
to bear upon a linear, if discontinuous, text. How does Prassinos
manipulate the text and the incorporation of actual images to convey
her particular vision of the body and challenge the reader’s pre-
conceived sense of self?

Part Two: Gisèle Prassinos

Introduction

Mon Coeur les écoute is a literary exploration of an unending

search for identity. It is the continuation of the self-portrait Gisèle
Prassinos started in Brelin le Frou, created in 1975. The text, which is
 Textual Imagery: Bernard Noël and Gisèle Prassinos 141

composed of short stories often resembling prose poems, shifts

between the narrative voice of a je, sometimes male, sometimes
female and il, nous, on and moi et moi-même. The playful and
humourous sketches that at times derive their humour from tragic and
bleak situations, prevent the reader from penetrating the text and
extracting any given meaning or identifying any single narrator.
Indeed, the text displays paradoxical shifts in the narrative voice. A
confessional first-person narrative builds a relationship of warm
intimacy with the reader, which is stripped away in a subsequent story
by a change of pronoun or a change of tone, and replaces the
sentiment of intimacy with one of confused alienation. The stylistic
devices that Prassinos uses to keep her readers from falling into a false
sense of security are echoed by the themes of her stories; familiar
emotions, situations and recognizable occurrences from everyday life
are pushed to the point of incredulity and incomprehension. A story
with a plausible beginning accelerates into a surreal nightmare where
all vraisemblance is lost.
The symbiotic relation of theme and style is reinforced and
reiterated in the incorporation of Prassinos’s images within the text.
The images, which do not so much illustrate the stories but become
ideograms of them, are included in the text in such a fashion that it is
impossible for the eye to skim over or ignore them. The images are
inserted between paragraphs, at the side of the page or at the end of a
story. Consequently, they appear to interrupt the smooth linear perusal
of the narrative and enhance the already thematically fragmentary text.
The short stories, or fragments, therefore assume an almost episodic
structure. All of the images portray the bodies that are the victims of
Prassinos’s text; bodies that undergo metamorphoses, become porous
or abject, which have their past lives literally inscribed on their flesh
or become mere tools of extraordinary conscious control. The images
and text work together to the point at which the very notion of the
body’s self-sufficiency becomes nebulous. The metamorphoses of the
body are inextricably linked to the fluidity of the text. This uncertainty
and indefinition that surrounds the body propels the workings of the
text; with the lack of any identifiable corporeal morphology within the
stories, the body of the text also becomes troublesome and complex.
What is the rapport between the speaking voice and the text? How
many narrative voices are there? From what perspectives are they
142 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

speaking? As the voices multiply, the possibility of any coherent

narrative perspective is irremediably undermined.
Mon Coeur les écoute is not only an exploration of the body
and its manifold images, the images that are projected outwards and
reflected back, it is also a search for self-knowledge and acceptance.
In the preface to the 1939 edition of L’anthologie de l’humour noir,
André Breton recalls Freud’s definition: “L’humour a non seulement
quelque chose de libérateur, analogue en cela à l’esprit et au comique,
mais encore quelque chose de sublime et d’élevé.” In this edition, he
included the writing of a fourteen year-old poet, Gisèle Prassinos.
Prassinos’s literary debut is well known – the child prodigy and
femme-enfant to the Surrealists. What is less well known are the
problems faced by the mature woman writer seeking a narrative voice
of her own and attempting to shed the formative and restrictive
influences of her teenage years. Consequently, Prassinos’s autobio-
graphical texts not only work their way back through an accretion of
poetic texts and myths, trying to unravel and unwork the conventions
of first-person narratives, they are also a personal search for a
narrative persona that is capable of shaking loose the shackles of her
own literary history. Her highly idiosyncratic use of humour is not
merely a literary device used to prevent the text from cohering into an
easily identifiable and generic whole, but also a personal quest into the
possibilities of autobiography and self-representation via the medium
and metaphor of the body. The playful sketches display a humour
which is at different times fantastical, self-derisive and double-edged,
a humour that is mirrored in the pen and ink drawings.

The Body

The first story of the collection introduces some of the themes

that permeate the text. In Ce que je sais maintenant, the narrator
awakes one morning to find himself invaded by un corps étranger, an
almost transparent membrane that has attached itself to his face. As
the story progresses, the narrator’s body accumulates these
membranes and he observes them also on the bodies of other people,
although they are not visible to everyone. By the end, the narrator is
covered by membranes which have, with the progression of time,
become hard and brittle, clinging to the body as though it had become
 Textual Imagery: Bernard Noël and Gisèle Prassinos 143

a mollusc (p. 12)2. The narrator realizes that they do not constitute an
illness but are a consequence of life: “Tantôt insidieuses et prenant
leur temps, tantôt brutales, elles se plantent dans nos chairs jusqu’à
nous réduire et nous perdre. L’une ou l’autre, cela ne change rien.”
The first story already clearly demonstrates the thematic
concern of the vulnerability of the body through a fantastical and
symbolic exploration. The imagery in the writing, evoked through
metaphor and detailed description, is enriched by the simple drawing
at the end which depicts an anthropomorphic figure encased in a
womb-like surround of what the reader assumes to be crusty
membranes. The humour that underpins Prassinos’s prose surfaces
when she describes two injured boys, hit by a car, seeking to shake
loose the membranes that seek to suffocate them. She describes the
membranes at first like rose petals then, finding this too poetic a
metaphor, resorts to the more mundane image of a cabbage. The
movements of the boys are described in such detail that the reader
envisages the scene in slow motion and they are described ludicrously
as: “On eût dit deux danseurs costumés mimant la frayeur et le
désespoir le plus intense” (p. 11). What do these membranes symbol-
ize: the irrevocable and inexorable progress towards death, an attempt
by the body to protect itself against the ravages of life? Or do they
relate to the title Ce que je sais maintenant, in that all the narrator now
knows is the fragility and ephemerality of physical existence?
The reader is ultimately left in the position of the narrator:
“Inutile de dire où j’en suis maintenant moi-même et ce que je sais,
comme beaucoup doivent savoir sans oser parler. Je m’observe
chaque matin” (p. 11). Useless to draw a definitive signified from a
surreal text when the possible interpretations appear infinite, the
critic’s task is one of observation and comment. Prassinos’s text is a
very knowing text and readily lends itself to a variety of readings:
psychoanalytic, feminist or performative. In this reading, I shall make
use of such critical frameworks to elucidate her imagery and word-
games although I do not think it would be helpful, rather limiting, to
enforce any of these frameworks onto such a playful text. The critic
Annie Richard3 has categorically concluded that this is an autobio-
graphical text and the indications in the narrative to support this are

2
All references are to Mon Coeur Les Ecoute Paris, HB Editions, 1998.
3
Annie Richard, Le Monde suspendu de Gisèle Prassinos, Calvisson, HB Editions,
1997
144 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

innumerable and undeniable. Ce que je sais maintenant is less a

comment on the visible traces tracked onto the body by time as an
observation by a mature writer on her current situation. However, as
we shall see, this text is far from the straightforward rendition of a
life-story; as the stories unfold, the possible interpretations accumu-
late.
The ambiguity that is initiated by the scenario in the first story
is reinforced in the second, Comme un amas de scories. The
anonymous ils spoon-feed the narrator as left to him/herself,
mealtimes become slow, tortuous and messy (p. 14). Is the narrative
voice that of an infant or, following one of the suggestions of the
previous story, an old and infirm person? The text is uncertain as all
the information the reader is given is that concerning the physical
sensations of the protagonist’s current situation and the haunting he is
subjected to by vague and indefinable memories. The sensual
description of food (“J’aime la pâte tiède et molle des aliments qui
vient se poser sur ma langue et mes gencives nues”) is followed by a
womb-like image of the wool which keeps him warm, before the
sensuality resurfaces in a reference to masturbation: “Quant aux
caresses des doigts entre mes jambes, ils ignorent que je les provoque
en m’oubliant volontairement dans mon linge” (p. 15).
This physical bliss, a return to the innocence, pleasures and
dependency of infancy, is disturbed only by the nagging suspicion of a
loss of better times: “Parfois je me demande si, entre celui-ci et la fin
ou entre l’arrivée et le départ, comme on voudra […] une période plus
essentielle ne se serait pas écoulée dont j’aurais perdu le souvenir” (p.
14). Prassinos here raises what is to be another central theme of the
collection, that of the fallibility of memory. In a concentrated and
abstract form, Prassinos’s narrative expands like a sponge full of
water. She evokes common emotions: regret for time past, nostalgia,
half-forgotten faces, laughter and voices. These sentiments are
contained within symbolic and economic prose: “En effet, je devine
au milieu de moi-même comme un amas de scories d’où se détachent,
durant certains de mes rêves nocturnes, des morceaux ravivés.” This
story introduces the concept of doubling, which is expanded upon in
later stories: the doubling or division of the conscious or cerebral self
and the body’s corporeal existence. The reader is also made aware of
the protagonist’s domination of the narrative voice, of a division or
alienation between the je and the unidentified ils. This story concludes
 Textual Imagery: Bernard Noël and Gisèle Prassinos 145

with a dismissal of the troubling psyche and a return to the pleasures

of the flesh, “toujours dans mes rêves, je sens une autre chair que la
mienne s’ouvrir et s’épanouir sous ma main heureuse.”
In the third story, Les trous, the idea of time and the body’s
resistance to, or rebellion against, its inexorable progress is developed.
Unlike Ce que je sais maintenant, where the body is shown to be
impotent in the face of time, this story introduces the narrator as
struggling against the wave that threatens to engulf him. The central
thematic concern is highlighted by the personification of time:
Je dois aller avec le Temps, les bras chargés de mes “oeuvres”,
sinon Il me dépasse, entraînant la catastrophe. Que j’arrête d’être
laborieux et dans ce torrent de pierres endiablées, du moins dans
l’étroite bande qui m’y est affectée, il se forme des trous et je
tombe (p. 18).

In order to avoid these holes, which are “des lieux de pensée,” the
narrator reacts and seeks to inscribe himself in time. He tries to
achieve this inscription by continually working, ensuring a ceaseless
flow of production to prevent the formation of holes. However, he
realizes that the frenetic pace of work serves no purpose as the
narrator creates objects that are useless: “sans emploi à notre époque.”
The story’s irony runs deeper as the narrator is not creating
but destroying objects around himself: “je fais de la charpie.” The
concept of work as profitable and worthwhile employment is
subverted, as the narrator achieves nothing through his occupation
save that of distraction. Indeed, in keeping himself occupied, he
avoids the trap of thinking. Thought, in this case, involves “une
lucidité aiguë, non pas la sérénité, l’abandon dû à la faiblesse qui, je le
crois, précède la plupart des morts véritables.” The story concludes
with a worrying thought. Although the narrator succeeds in keeping
himself busy for the moment, he is preoccupied with the future when
he will have no more space in his over-flowing apartment for more
shreds of material and he will be obliged to give himself up to “la
seule et mortelle pensée.” This story, to a greater degree than its
precedents, is more probably a reflection on the task of the writer. The
“oeuvres” are, in contrast to their maker, durable, however useless,
and not subject to the passage of time. In the face of mortality, the
protagonist is driven to create. Even if his creations are redundant,
desire is stronger than reason and the creations are only required to be
146 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

visible and tangible: to exist. However, the ambiguity inherent in these

tales ensures that no one interpretation is infallible; the tale is also an
allegory of the mindless but necessary pursuit of manual labour.
As the stories progress, so Prassinos elaborates on her themes.
In the fourth story, L’heure du rendez-vous, the division of mind and
body becomes explicit. The device of personification previously used
for time is employed to talk about the body as a demanding and
annoying acquaintance. In this objectification of the body, we are
reminded of Lacan’s stade du miroir where any sense of bodily
contour is articulated through a necessary self-division and self-
estrangement. For the infant, this involves an imaginary relation, one
of psychic projection in the register of the Symbolic, that is, in and
through the differentiated and differentiating use of speech. While in
Lacan, the body in pieces finds its unity in the image of the Other
(which is its own anticipated image), Prassinos creates a reversal of
these terms so that the body literally divides from its own identity. “Le
corps” is referred to as “l’esclave” with whom cohabitation becomes
impossible, thus is banished. However, the banishment proves to be
no easy task, as the narrator discovers hitherto unsuspected
connections between mind and body. For some time, he succeeds in
living “seul” (without his body), lost in a world of meditation and
ecstasy, free of corporeal concerns. However, finally he is forced to
admit the apparition of disturbing signs: “Quelque chose qui ne m’est
pas étranger, que j’aurais connu jadis et qui s’efforcerait de me
rejoinder.” The narrator concludes that these puzzling physical
manifestations are the body trying to rejoin the self. The body is a sad,
humbled version of its former self and the self fears that its
reapparition is a reminder of “l’heure du rendez-vous.” Here again, in
a different form we are reminded of the vulnerability and ultimate
frailty of our physical condition. Once again, despite the conscious
efforts of the narrator, he is inevitably recalled to thoughts of
mortality: “la seule et mortelle pensée,” or in different phrasing
“l’heure du rendez-vous.”
The humour that is omnipresent in these stories occurs
cheekily in Mon bras droit where the narrator loses his right arm on a
regular basis, which, after a certain time, returns repentant to its body.
The drawing depicts a figure with a heart that features prominently on
his chest and curiously, a detached left arm. The discrepancy between
the image and text highlights the reader’s role as interpreter.
 Textual Imagery: Bernard Noël and Gisèle Prassinos 147

Confronting the image, it is the right arm that has been lost (whereas it
is the depicted character’s left arm). The accuracy of the image exists
only within the gaze of the reader, in the relationship between reader
and image rather than in the faithful depiction of a reality that might
objectively precede this. A play on words occurs in the last sentence
“Est-ce que j’y tiendrais tellement à ce membre?” (p. 34). How is it
possible to be attached to something that is detached? The narrator is
holding onto the arm that would normally do the holding. A similarly
provocative humour emerges in Le matin which starts: “Le matin, il
est mou” and is the first story to employ the il pronoun. This is also
accompanied by an image, more explicitly provocative than the
former and reinforces the theme of physical (and here, sexual)
impotency.
Not all of the stories are illustrated and the images appear at
irregular intervals throughout the text. When they do appear, the
adoption of lines in place of words demonstrates an attempt at
specificity and precise description. As opposed to the symbolic power
of language, drawing represents a more direct mode of com-
munication: it arrests the work of the reader’s imagination. The visual
interruption of the text, of the perusal of the linear narrative, also
interacts with one of Prassinos’s thematic concerns that seems to play
down narrative causality and to suggest, at least potentially, an
alternative sense of self and identity. Similarly to Duchamp who seeks
to expand the frame of Le Grand Verre and disseminate meaning
through his interference between semiotic systems, Prassinos crosses
visual and verbal modes of signification to allow for the possible
expansion of interpretation.
As I have observed, the inclusion or reference to images in
narratives of the self, interferes with the text’s temporality. Leiris’s
use of the Cranach painting prevents his narrative unfolding as a
temporal process and it becomes instead a process of returning to and
searching the image which acts as the catalyst for the unraveling of the
skeins of memory. Prassinos’s images do not serve as a catalyst for
the text but they allow for a transit between word and image that
becomes an essential rhythm in the text. The instantaneous
appreciation of a static image contrasts vividly with the temporal flow
of discourse and apart from capturing and expressing a fleeting
moment of description, insisting on the particularity of description, it
also slows the reader down to create a different experience of reading.
148 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

Peuple fier again explores the vulnerability of the body, this

time its emotional vulnerability, in a satirical tale of an imaginary
tribe. Deploying the pronoun nous for the first time, the narrator
explains how this people could no longer accept the fact that every
internal emotion was captured and revealed in facial expression:
“Nous n’étions pas disposés à admettre plus longtemps que notre
peau, forte de sa souplesse, continue à enregistrer des émotions ou
sentiments que nous avions le droit de garder secrets” (p. 52). The
people devise a series of defensive disguises in order to hide their
faces. These are judged insufficient and develop to the point where
they become an all-in-one body armour where any gesture of
friendship or respect towards others, any sort of revealing body
language, is rendered impossible. Nevertheless, there remains one
final inconvenience. They perceive, through the visor, eyes that well
with tears. In the absence of adequate disguise, they are obliged to
turn their eyes away from this indecent display of emotion (p. 54). The
picture here is a perfect illustration, depicting an oblong case on
wheels where the only signs of life are betrayed by two eye and nostril
holes. Is this an ironic comment on an increasingly impersonal
society, the difficulties of communication or the inevitability of
emotional betrayal? In a parody of extremes, the text gives rise to
innumerable interpretative possibilities.

A Doubtful Identity

While the first stories in the collection underscore the

fallibility of the body, J’ai du mérite raises the theme of the
vulnerability of identity, of the je. The narrator decides that he must
change his name, as the person he is becoming has nothing to do with
the person he once was. The concept of an evolving identity is taken
to the extreme where he is no longer recognized in his own
neighbourhood and the narrator puzzles “Je ne sais qui je suis
maintenant. Du moi ancien et de l’actuel, qui est ou fut l’usurpateur?”
(p. 35). Whereas in other stories the division occurs between the
intellect and the body, in this instance, the intellect is literally
represented by the unrecognizable head: “Pour le moment, il s’agit de
faire l’unité entre mon corps et ma nouvelle tête.” The past here takes
a different toll on the self by achieving the effect of doubling the soi.
 Textual Imagery: Bernard Noël and Gisèle Prassinos 149

The old self is shed, albeit reluctantly, and a new self is symbolized by
the new head.
As is common to all the stories, however, the past will not
readily or easily disappear and the uncomfortable juxtaposition of a
new head on old shoulders gives rise to comic situations. The new
head does not have the same likes and dislikes as the first one, so the
narrator finds it necessary to order an entire new wardrobe, tailor-
made. The end of the story presents the reader with the image of a
personality that has evolved and changed as the consequence of a
changed body:

J’étais en harmonie avec ma première tête et depuis si longtemps.

L’intruse me l’a sournoisement détruite et sans doute dévorée de
l’intérieur. Puis elle en a fendillé la peau qui seulement demeurait,
comme on fait de la coque d’un oeuf dur, pour finalement
l’écarquiller un jour, surgir et régner à sa place (p. 37).

Characteristically, this tale is not without ambiguity. If the

replacement of one head by another indicates an evolution in
character, then from where is the narrative voice speaking? Prassinos
reveals that the materiality of the body is not the effect of discourse or
vice versa, but that self and body, or corporeality and discourse, are
mutually determining. She undermines the material irreducibility of
the body through her fantastical configurations and surreal scenarios.
Moi et moi-même explores this same division of self:

C’est au coeur du mal que nous coïncidons le mieux, Moi et moi-

même, quand à l’instant d’agir nous renonçons à nous interdire
quoi que ce soit. Notre unité atteint alors une plénitude telle que
nous trahissons de concert, sans chercher à distinguer qui de nous
deux est le vrai coupable (p. 94).

The title story is accompanied by a figure composed of a

castle and the narrator elucidates for us: “Il y a en moi un château,
vieux à present et dont les ramparts menacent sans cesse de
s’écrouler” (p. 46). In order to prevent this deterioration, the narrator
dedicates his time to his own self-preservation, closed off to the
outside world and to the appeals of others. Despite his reiterated self-
justification for his insular attitude for which he supplicates the
compassion of the reader, his conscience troubles him: “Ce que je
supporte mal, ce sont les cris de détresse. Ils profitent de ma
150 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

distraction, je n’ai pas eu la présence d’esprit de les couper pendant

leur trajet et ils me sont parvenus […] Et je m’en veux.” He realizes
that were he to come to the help of all the plaintive cries of others, he
would return to himself to find himself in ruins. Nevertheless, he
hopes that as long as he survives, through the effort of self-
preservation, he will serve as an example to encourage and console the
others: “Car au fond, ils n’ignorent pas que mon coeur, lui, les écoute”
(p. 48). This short story has been interpreted by Richard as the key
text of the collection, an autobiographical comment on the part of the
writer, for whom the problem is how to listen and respond to others,
how to maintain communication. She concludes: “L’humour voile à
peine le soupçon qui pèse sur la tâche de Gisèle Prassinos: faut-il
continuer à se tenir dans cet ailleurs, quelque part dans le passé?”
(Richard, 1997; 105). While, as I have observed, the autobiographical
input into this collection is undeniable, this is altogether a far too
reductive reading of this text.
Mon Coeur les écoute is a perceptive and allegorical reading
on the nature of identity. The castle ramparts, always on the point of
collapse, are also the defences of the ego. According to Lacan, as I
have pointed out with reference to Leiris, ego psychology is
misguided in its attempts to strengthen the ego defences which only
serve to further alienate the subject in an imaginary construct. This
apparently coherent self-image is delusive as it suppresses the diffuse,
indeterminate sense of existence that is associated with the Symbolic.
In Lacan, the existence of the Imaginary depends upon the adoption of
the perspective of the Other to convey this impression of wholeness.
However, in Prassinos’s text, it is precisely the Other that threatens
the illusion of the Imaginary. Aware of the fragility of the self, the
narrator feels that in order to maintain the ego, he must close himself
off to the Other. However, he realizes that this task is in vain as self-
maintenance is a permanent process, and, try as he might, he cannot
entirely block out the presence of the others. In other words, the
ramparts of the ego remain an illusory and provisional defence; they
cannot deny the heterogeneity or intersubjective nature of the self.
The relation of the self to the Other is as necessary a part in
the construction of identity, as the recognition that this identity is
constantly in the process of self-renewal. In Barthesian terms, as I
have indicated in my discussion of Noël (see part one, pages 136 and
152), the Imaginary is inhabited by the fragmentary; the moment of
 Textual Imagery: Bernard Noël and Gisèle Prassinos 151

textuality (the Symbolic) affirms the fragmentation of the self. If the

body is an object that is always liable to congeal into a purely
imaginary entity, the self falls back into the Imaginary by writing (as
the text is open to the appropriation of the Other) but the act of writing
will always return to the fragmentary. The image of the castle also, of
course, recalls the reader to the theme of imprisonment which
permeates these texts; the notion that a life is impoverished by the
dominance of the instinct of self-preservation which shores up the
defensive ramparts of the ego only to confine and isolate the self.
The theme of memory resurges in Maintenant je suis le
maître, an ironic tale on the power and unpredictability of recall. The
narrator finds that his memories accumulate to such an extent that they
become confused and overwhelming and he loses all sense of himself
(p. 49). The discontinous jumble of memories is so disruptive that the
narrator determines to find a means to order and control them:
“Chaque fois qu’une période de ma vie toucherait à sa fin, je
l’enfermerais sous une chape. En même temps et par le même moyen,
je travaillerais à isoler les couches anciennes.” However, this system
of isolation proves to be self-defeating as whenever the narrator wants
to indulge in nostalgic reminiscence, he finds that his memories are
inaccessible. Thus he devises a system of trapdoors whereby he
maintains the classification of his memories but can access them at
will. He concludes triumphantly: “Enfin, je suis victorieux.
Aujourd’hui je peux évoluer à l’aise d’un étage à l’autre. J’ai les clés,
je suis le maître. Chacun de mes temps est prisonnier comme dans un
livre. Rien ne vient plus confondre mon esprit ni l’offenser.”
This story highlights the importance as well as the fallibility
of memory. The narrator has a fundamental need to indulge in
reminiscing (“j’avais besoin de m’attendrir sur un corps, un visage du
passé”); the resurgence of the past in the present is necessary for a
current act of self-affirmation. However, memory is spontaneous and
sometimes unreliable, therefore the associative method of recall
creates confusion: “un paysage, un fragment de scène, une phrase et
plus souvent des figures, passaient d’un temps à un autre sans que j’y
prenne garde.” In this story, Prassinos draws attention to the
impossible, if desirable, nature of this fantasy. The heterogeneity of
memory and the associative process of remembrance render
impossible the cataloguing of memory (this is, of course, what Leiris
attempts to demonstrate with his associative style of writing). The
152 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

narrator’s comparison of his memory system to that of a book

undermines the status of Prassinos’s text. The fragmentary and
discontinuous nature of the writer’s own text reveals no trace of
chronological ordering or teleological masterplan.
La parole is an observation on language and its consequences.
The undesirability of la parole is mentioned in several stories,
including Mon Coeur les écoute and J’ai décidé de ne pas grandir.
The narrator observes that the word in thought and the spoken word
are but distantly related. In an organic metaphor, the word is
compared to a seed, which in the blink of an eye “a germé, poussé
tiges et racines, déplié feuilles et fleurs [. . .] Des étrangers en somme,
pour la plupart. Il y a de quoi être émerveillé et méfiant” (p. 55). The
power of language is not to be underestimated, in public it even
presents a danger as it transforms itself, takes on manifold meanings,
exercises untold influence and operates as in a game of Chinese
whispers, where the final word has no bearing on its original intended
meaning. The narrator draws this conclusion: “Le mieux est de se
taire, réduit au minimum, sans proliférations et de s’en contenter.” As
Prassinos does not distinguish between the spoken and written word,
this can also be read as an observation on the dangers of writing and
misinterpretation. The consequences of la parole are infinite: “Une
unité lâchée n’est jamais perdue” but despite the fact that subsequent
interpretations may have little or nothing to do with the writer’s
intention, they will always be held to account (“On est malgré tout
responsable”). While the conclusion is ironic (the writer cannot be
silenced), s/he can always attempt an economy of style “sans
proliférations” which is exactly what Prassinos sets out to achieve in a
metaphoric economy of language.

Performing the Self

Prassinos recognizes the limitations of self-expression with its

unforeseen interpretations and seeks to resist any single perspective
through a series of rhetorical strategies. The text shifts between the
“autobiographical” je, the novelistic il and the collective nous or on as
if to detach the producer of the text from the subject of the work. This
dissolution of the authorial body forestalls the unification of the text
under any single authoritative message. It is useful here to recall
Benveniste’s distinction between énonciation and énoncé that is used
 Textual Imagery: Bernard Noël and Gisèle Prassinos 153

in autobiographical theory to refer to the subject of the enunciation

(the present je of the narration) and the subject of the utterance (the je
whose history is being recounted and who exists at a temporal and
ontological distance from the narrating self). Similarly to Noël’s text,
Prassinos achieves the production of different levels through
énonciation, marking each proposition, each story, with the process of
its uttering while rendering it impossible to anchor the utterances. In
so doing, the reality of the text can only be constituted through the
process of utterance and not reflected in it from outside. The verbal
performance of her text operates as a mirror-like reflection between
form and content: the structure of the text is fragmentary (as I have
indicated through reference to the images) and the stories become
autonomous entities revealing no overall narrative development while
they comprise a multiplicity of discourses.
The pervasive humour in her texts also introduces a gradation
of language that seeks to avoid the coalescence of the sign. For
Barthes, the coalescence of the sign involves the absorption of
difference, which is a function of doxa. An effect of coalescence is the
rush towards the signified, the refusal to follow the signifiers, the
steady consumption of the mythic production of meaning. The surreal
situations in which the narrators find themselves also avoid the
psychological realism that is the essential part of traditional character
formation. Prassinos attempts to reinsert discourse into a situation of
énonciation where the énoncé no longer appears natural. Aware of the
far-reaching consequences of language, Prassinos prevents her
discourse from cohering into the continuous utterance of a single
subject. Whereas linear utterance seems to suggest the unfolding of a
single, definable message towards a pre-destined conclusion, the
fragmentary structure keeps the signifier on top, preventing an
ultimate meaning being drawn from the text and arresting the
interminable circulation of signifiers. In Le fragment comme illusion,
Barthes claims that the fragment is an attempt to break out of the
specular echoes of ideologized discourse; he is constantly deploying
strategies to diffract his narrative. However, he is also aware that “en
croyant me disperser, je ne fais que regagner sagement le lit de
l’imaginaire” (Barthes, 1975; 99). Similarly, Prassinos seems to resign
herself to the inevitability of (mis)interpretation (“Le mieux est de se
taire”) but while the text might run the risk of reappropriation, the
writer continues to explore its possibilities.
154 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

A different gradation of language becomes apparent in the

following story where the concept of performance in identity
formation is undermined and consequently displaced. Lorsque le
rideau est tombé explores the performative (and, here, theatrical)
aspect of self-identity and the impossibility, perhaps for a writer, of
seizing the experience of life in the present. The narrator rarely shows
himself in public, as the least witness is an obstacle that prevents him
from experiencing and, therefore, participating in the present (p. 58).
He feels that he is misunderstood and unknown, as he is unable to
reciprocate the attentions of others: “C’est donc rétrospectivement et
dans la solitude que je vis l’heure passée […] Pour tout dire, je
deviens moi-même, je joue mon rôle, lorsque pour les autres le rideau
est tombé” (p. 58). The theatrical nature of the self is not only evoked
in the image of the curtain but in the revelation that in order to become
himself, he plays his role. Prassinos again reveals the falsity of an
Imaginary and coherent self that is conveyed by the perspective of the
Other; in order to find his identity, the narrator must remove himself
from the interpretative gaze of the Other. Similarly to the previous
story, where one of the consequences of language is that of
misinterpretation, here the true self of the narrator cannot be perceived
in the presence of others by whom he remains “incompris, méconnu.”
The paradoxical position highlighted by the narrator is that he would
have to be seen in private to be understood which remains an
impossibility as the private space would thereby become public.
Theatrical performance traditionally concerns the staging of
an event and, like any performance, requires the complicity of the
Other, that is the interrelation of performer and spectator. Although
performance is inevitably an ephemeral event, like la parole of the
previous story its consequences can extend beyond the event, which is
why the narrator is untrusting of the gaze of others. The fact that it is
only in private and in retrospect that the narrator feels he can grasp
reality, indicates Prassinos’s recognition that the desire to recapture
and replay or rewrite significant moments of our lives represents an
attempt to possess our own subjectivity. As Best and Collier have
indicated, with reference to Barthes, “the experience of subjectivity is
always traumatic, in the sense that it escapes meaning in its
immediacy and can only be understood in retrospect” (Best and
Collier, 1999; 13). Prassinos’s story undermines the possibility of
reciprocity inherent to performance (theatrical or social) but restages it
 Textual Imagery: Bernard Noël and Gisèle Prassinos 155

on a textual level. Instead of the immediacy of a “real” performance,

the reader is privy to the temporal deferral of a narrative performance.
The deferral of interpretation implicit to the consumption of a text is
highlighted in the story: “Je reçois, comme tout le monde. Quant à
donner, à rendre, j’y apporte toujours du retard” (p.57). The private
and “real” space of the narrator does indeed become public as he
performs for the benefit of the reader. The narrative voice, despite its
protestations, blurs the borderline between stage and audience,
performance and existence, and remains intersubjective.
The idea of the heterogeneity of the self is comically parodied
in L’un ou l’autre and this leads to the effect of doubling and self-
doubt that occurs in many of the stories: “En vérité je ne sais qui je
suis. Celui qui agit en secret ou l’autre qui, au moment d’agir,
s’aperçoit qu’on l’a déjà fait à sa place” (p. 59). This personal or
psychological misrecognition is also raised in Cela where similarly to
J’ai du mérite, the narrator fails to recognize his own face. It is also a
more direct commentary on le stade du miroir: “Non, je ne me sens
pas le droit de supprimer cet homme. Que m’a-t-il fait? D’ailleurs je
ne le connais pas. C’est moi que je venais chercher dans ce miroir et
c’est lui que je vois” (p. 61). The suicidal desire of the narrator is
thwarted as he drops his revolver in surprise upon seeing the strange
face in the mirror. Wondering if the face he sees is a hallucination, he
closes his eyes and turns away but returns to the mirror only to find
again the strange face. The texts undermine any preconception that the
self is captured and reflected in an unchanging physiognomic likeness;
identity cannot be represented through mimesis or a literary
vraisemblance.

Origins

In J’ai décidé de ne pas grandir, Prassinos passes from the

desire to combat the force of time to the ultimate form of conscious
control over the body. Having been inside his mother’s womb for ten
years, the narrator, upon finally entering the world, decides to keep the
size and the appearance of a newly born baby. In order to do so, he
constructs an invisible cage around his body. This story makes explicit
the womb imagery which earlier stories conjure up and suggests a
reason for which the characters sometimes seem to seek confined or
confining spaces: “Je désirais conserver au-dehors le loisir, le calme et
156 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

la protection totale que j’avais appréciés dans mon habitat original.”

Amongst the things that the narrator finds disturbing in the real world,
he mentions “la parole que je jugeai superflue.” Similarly to the
narrator of Le Visage, he prefers to remain quiet and reflective, with
his thoughts, his calculations and his discoveries as his only
companions. In this way, in a strange reversal of the mentally
handicapped child in an adult’s body, the narrator remains, to outlive
his mother and subsequent nursemaids, in an infant body which
acquires “l’âme et l’esprit d’un vieux savant.”
The purity of origin or the desirability of the infant or pre-
infant state is again evoked in Je suis sale where the baby is
represented literally as the clean slate or blank canvas: “un enfant si
pur de teint à sa naissance qu’on ne pouvait le distinguer des draps de
son berceau” (p. 30). In this story, the body does not acquire
membranes but cobwebs and other physical traces of the life lived,
including “des villes entières mais en ruine, des scènes de famille mais
en mauvais état, des souvenirs, des phrases essentielles mais transies
et des têtes partout, plus mortes que les autres;” the negatives of life
are printed on his body. This story is a virtual reversal of Les trous:
instead of the narrator inscribing himself in time with his artifacts,
time is inscribed on the body. In an allegory of life’s inevitable
process of gain and loss, the body becomes the archive of memory,
which literally stores the images of the past. In a humourous twist, the
narrator finally finds it necessary to rid himself of his parents, who
have also become marked on his body, as well as his best friends. In a
frustrated quest for the cleanliness of his original state, he attempts to
scrape and scratch away these physical souvenirs but in the end
realizes the futility of his task: “Déjà bien qu’il m’arrive de travailler
jusqu’à la tombée du jour, je ne parviens jamais à être propre.”
With Emboîtements, halfway through the collection, the
narrator changes gender and becomes female. This story re-evokes the
theme of the pre-nascent state in a description of happiness: “Quand je
me sens au comble de bonheur, je sais très bien ce qui se passe […]
J’ai réintegré ma mère ou bien, nostalgique, elle m’a reprise” (p. 76,
author’s italics). The condition that the narrator experiences is double;
the days when she feels this luxurious womb-like state, she also feels
in a state of pregnancy herself: “Je donne à flotter en rêve dans une
eau que balancent des mouvements divers […] Celui qui m’habite
éprouve la volupté que j’éprouve, j’en suis sure […] Ainsi me la
 Textual Imagery: Bernard Noël and Gisèle Prassinos 157

doublant.” She experiences simultaneously both the sensation of

returning to the womb and the sensation of being pregnant.
The notion of the doubling inherent in the infant’s detachment
from the mother underlies La septième fois with the narrator’s
frustrated search for the love of his other half. Although it is the
seventh time the narrator has fallen in love only to be disappointed, he
concludes optimistically: “Il faut me l’avouer, j’en suis sûr, tout me
l’apprend, c’est là qui me double, ma couche originelle. C’est là mon
temps, mon verbe qui va s’accomplir, me mettre au monde, c’est là
mon envers et mon endroit” (p. 70). Playing with the Oedipal theory,
the narrator concludes that it is not so much through frustrated desire
for his mother that he seeks his beloved but that he is propelled by the
original severance from her body that leaves him incomplete. In the
final sentences, the metaphor of writing raises the question of whether
artistic creation can take the place of procreation.
The theme of pregnancy is again raised in Qui? which also
returns to the idea of the face as the locus of an identity. The mother’s
primary concern for the baby is what he would become if she hadn’t
consented to bestow upon him a face: “Cet attribut, ce sceau, ce lieu
public où se concentre et se répand tout ce qui remue dans l’obscurité
de l’homme?” (p. 81). This becomes the central concern of La roue
(p.126), where the narrator is born without a face. It therefore
becomes the task of his mother, happily an artist, to create his
features. This text reveals the extent to which identity is a construct
that will always depend, to a certain extent, upon the features
attributed to oneself by the Other.
The importance of the maternal relationship in the formation
or affirmation of self-knowledge is raised in Où suis-je donc? The
narrator suffers from a bad memory and at times loses the knowledge
of where he is, with whom and when. Unexpected details such as a
smile or an idiosyncratic gesture serve to resituate his memory. In the
beginning, he is confusingly offered resituation in two different time-
scales. Confronted with this choice, he always opts for “les temps
originels” where he rediscovers his mother: “Quand je reconnais ma
mère, c’est ému par l’odeur de ses mains qui combine celle de Javel et
de la lavande. Ou bien, à l’aube, dans son lit […] Alors, vraiment, je
me mets à exister, je sais où je suis” (p. 106).
The theme of imprisonment recurs in the stories. The narrators
are imprisoned within their own frail bodies, subject to the flux of
158 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

physical fallibility and often this gives rise to the impression of

doubling. The notion of restriction or restraint not only occurs within
the framework of the body but also within physical space, as in Les
trous where the narrator’s creations threaten to overwhelm his living
space. Insufficient space is again evoked in Un Frère, where the
protagonist’s projects and desires assume physical dimensions and
occupy his living space until they take up the whole of his bedroom
floor. Often the narrator seeks a confining space, as in Le visage, but
more common is the idea that the characters are imprisoned against
their will. The exception to this rule is, as I have just indicated, when
the sensation of imprisonment recalls the pre-nascent state of being in
the safety of the womb.
In Comme un mort qui respire, the narrator is entrapped
within an impossibly tiny living space: “Mon logement n’a qu’une
seule pièce, si réduite que je ne peux déplier les coudes dans le sens de
la largeur” (p. 139). This claustrophobic situation, depicted also in the
accompanying image, is nevertheless redeemed by the view that the
narrator sees through the window. At this point, the register of the
prose changes and gives way to poetic description. This flow is
abruptly halted by the thoughts of the narrator who reminds himself:
“A quoi bon m’exalter? Je continue à me taire, sans pensées, sans
mouvements, comme un mort qui respire.” The temptation represented
by a window onto the world is again taken up in Le visage where the
narrator has chosen seclusion and solitude in a cell-like space in order
to dedicate himself to study. He is continually disturbed by a face that
appears at the tiny window high in the wall. At first, the narrator is
indignant and loses his concentration, finding it impossible to ignore
the intruder. Finally the supplications of the disembodied head win
over the narrator and he suffers the fleeting impression that a mask
detaches itself from his face to kiss the lips of the intruder. The
fulfillment of desire is frustrated by the glass barrier that separates the
narrator’s self-image and the image of temptation.
The final story of the collection turns from the theme of origin
to return to one of a final destination. In La sentinelle, the je has
always looked out towards the left where he sees the sea. Frustrated
by the limitations of his vision, he puts out his left eye and therefore
looks in the other direction, towards the land. However, the narrator
finds that he is unsatisfied with this new perspective and instead starts
to gaze back towards the forbidden region of the sea. He is forced to
 Textual Imagery: Bernard Noël and Gisèle Prassinos 159

return his attention to the external world when he becomes aware of

the shadow of a large ship that is cast over the land, thereby uniting
his two worlds and two visions. The narrator acknowledges the
implications of this unexpected unity: “Mon instinct de sentinelle me
renseigna. Cette fois, sans aucun doute, on venait pour moi.
Consentant ou non, je ne pouvais échapper. Du reste, j’étais déjà
désigné, touché. Un mât de ténèbres projeté par l’imposant visiteur
commençait à me pénétrer” (p. 155).
The unification of self, the reconciliation of difference, the
resolution of ambiguity can only indicate the inevitability of a final
destination (“l’heure du rendez-vous”). The themes of division,
discontinuity, fragmentation and uncertainty that underscore this text
and its subjects finally seem to resolve themselves in an image of
death. Or does the image represent the autonomy of a finished work of
art?
 From the informe to the abject:
shifting morphologies in the art of
Louise Bourgeois and Orlan

Introduction

This chapter needs to be located within the context of this

text. In chapters one and three, I have demonstrated the ways in which
Duchamp and Bacon use self-representation to question the very
possibility of self-knowledge and how they engage with and subvert
the traditions within which they work. This chapter arises also in the
light of my work on Bernard Noël and Gisèle Prassinos (chapter four).
As we have seen, Noël reveals not only the vulnerability of self
through the performative act of memory but demonstrates the extent to
which our visual apprehension of the world is influenced by our
corporeal existence. Noël credits the body with interpretative and
creative faculties. He draws attention to the central contradiction of
the autobiographical text, that is, the ontological gap between the
writing self and the self-reflexive protagonist of the work, by focusing
on the (un)representability of the body. Prassinos explores the
possibilities for the representation of an identity through a surreal and
explosive narrative where the body metamorphoses and reduplicates
itself in a way that questions the certainty of interpretation and
unsettles the reader. In this chapter, I will look at how two women
artists, Louise Bourgeois and Orlan, have also negotiated the
subject/object dialectic through their work on the body in order to
subvert the conventions of visual self-representation. I shall approach
their work through definitions of the informe and the abject, to
demonstrate how these terms are applicable to the subversive nature of
their work and how they operate in the work’s encounter with the
spectator.
With reference to Bourgeois, I will look at the framework of
the art institution and how it affirms the role of the artist in society, a
perspective that reflects back to my chapter on Duchamp, and to
162 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

investigate the possible ways in which the work of an artist such as

Bourgeois has been an enabling influence on the artist I shall
subsequently discuss, an artist who makes use of media technology,
Orlan. I will show how art has become less a matter of a single social
environment, for example, the fecund metropolis that was Paris at the
fin-de-siècle, to evolve in a technological age where geographical
borders no longer present a handicap to an exchange of influences and
where the nationality of an artist is rendered obsolete in the eyes of an
international audience.
The work of Bourgeois and Orlan is preoccupied with the
positioning of the subject and how this subject interacts with corporeal
morphology, but it is not possible to launch into a discussion of their
work without first drawing attention to the historical and critical
contexts from which they emerge. As we have seen in chapter three,
the Romantic myth of the artist is one that dates back to the nineteenth
century. Bacon perpetuated the Romantic myth of the artist on the
margins of society whilst simultaneously undermining the pre-existing
traditions of portraiture and self-representation. He engaged with the
tradition of the marginal artist through the conscious manipulation of
his own myth and its perpetuation through the autobiographical
content of his work. The resonances of that still pervasive myth are all
the more pronounced for female artists working in the field of
self-representation. Self-portraits by women artists of this century
frequently intervene in these masculine artist myths and their favoured
visual forms by engaging with previous visual tropes and parodying,
reappropriating or actively subverting them.
The problematic posed for artists in self-representation is that
of being at once subject and object, seer and seen. The now classic
formulation from John Berger is still central to a consideration of the
subject/object contradictions which face women working with the
female body:

A woman must continually watch herself […] From earliest

childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself
continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyed and the
surveyor within her as the two constituent yet always distinct
elements of her identity as a woman (Berger, 1972; 46).

For women artists, this problematic is magnified by the historical

approach to woman, perceived as the object that is to be represented
 The Art of Louise Bourgeois and Orlan 163

by the subject, the male artist. “Woman” has been consistently evoked
in western art while “women” were subjects that escaped
representation. Stereotypical uses of women’s bodies as subject-matter
occluded the representation in art of women's multifaceted
experiences. For the woman artist producing a self-representation, this
situation was particularly difficult to surmount. That is, it is difficult
to find a form of representation which does not objectify the woman’s
body but which represents the woman as subject. Therefore, the
confrontation between subject and object has been a common feature
of women’s self-portraiture. The dichotomy inherent in self-portrait-
ure is consequently multiplied when a woman artist is negotiating a
space for self-representation. The concept of the surveyor and the
surveyed, self and other, and the ways in which this interacts with
both the specular tradition of self-portraiture and the construction of a
female identity has been commented on and investigated by women
writers and critics as diverse as Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir
and Luce Irigaray. More recently, several works have been published
on women and self-portraiture, including Marsha Meskimmon’s The
Art of Reflection (1996), which I shall refer to later, Francis Borzello’s
Seeing Ourselves: Women’s Self-Portraits (1998) and Amelia Jones’s
Body Art; Performing the Subject (1998).
Since the 1970s, the body has been a crucial site for feminist
intervention in art practice as it was perceived to represent the
exclusively male-dominated history of western art and, at the same
time, offered women artists the scope to articulate a specifically
female experience. However, as I have indicated, reappropriation of
the female body by women has never been an uncomplicated issue.
The debates in the 1970s and 1980s about pornography and voyeurism
raised the question of how the sexed body could be represented in
ways which would avoid its framing by the traditional structure of the
male gaze.1 It is imperative to take into account a feminist practice and
critique of self-representation as, in the late 1970s and 1980s,

1
I am referring to how, in the European tradition of the female nude, ownership is
primary and the sexuality of the subject is not her own but that of the owner/spectator.
In reflection of cultural and social relations between the sexes, the perfect female
body in representation became the cipher for masculine desire, that of the artist and
viewer. This question has been explored in depth by critics such as Linda Nochlin in
Woman as Sex Object, Studies in Erotic Art 1730-1970 (1973) and in Berger et al,
Ways of Seeing (1972).
164 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

feminism contributed a fundamental dimension to the conviction that

identity is neither authentic nor essential but socially constructed. In
the light of a feminist, psychoanalytically informed conception of
subjectivity, I am here examining the ways in which the body in self-
portraiture has become the framework through Louise Bourgeois and
Orlan explore and expose identity construction.

Part One
Informing the Margins of Modernism

It is impossible here to do justice to an artist whose oeuvre

encompasses almost the length and breadth of the twentieth century
and on whom the secondary literature constitutes a secondary body of
work almost as dense and often as elliptical as the work it comments
upon. I prefer to examine a cross-section of Bourgeois’s oeuvre,
specifically her sculpture of the 1960s and 1970s. I shall also look at
the installation of her four sculptures in the Tate Modern in 2000 since
Louise Bourgeois is a pertinent example of an artist who, in order to
reflect upon her cultural and personal history, exiled herself from her
country of origin (similarly to Duchamp). Moreover, it has been in the
United States that she received the closest critical attention up until
the last ten years. The opening of the Tate Modern Gallery in London
brought her suddenly to the attention of a largely unsuspecting British
public and the appearance of her imposing, site-specific sculptures in
the entrance hall to this national institution tacitly acknowledged her
as one of the most important sculptors of her generation.2 Here, I shall
focus upon these two periods of Bourgeois’s work that best
demonstrate how the representation of the body traverses her oeuvre
in ways that unsettle gendered norms and undermine the idea of a
single corporeal morphology that is identical to a gendered identity.
How does self-representation move away from an integrated surface
image to emerge in part-objects and physical amalgamations, and how
does the spectator come to stand in as a surrogate artist to confuse and

2
The Turbine Hall is the site of temporary exhibitions and Bourgeois’ Towers have
long been succeeded. However, for the sake of this study, I shall discuss the works in
situ.
 The Art of Louise Bourgeois and Orlan 165

conflate self-identities? I will examine the way in which the work in

the Tate Modern connects with the long productive past of the artist,
to what extent it evokes her repetitive themes and how it interacts with
the intimidating space that houses it, and consequently, houses the
artist.
Bourgeois’s life story is now as well known as her artwork
and this has frequently led to reductive readings of her sculpture. As
Bernadac writes:

Louise Bourgeois has become a major phenomenon in the space

of just a few years, almost in spite of herself. Her place in art
history is now so special that the legend around her occasionally
tends to eclipse the aesthetic import of her oeuvre. The fate is
typical of strong and charismatic personalities whose lives are
tightly intertwined with the evolution of their work (Bernadac,
1996; 7).

Griselda Pollock has pointed out that there is a tendency with

critics confronted by Bourgeois to conflate the artist and the work and
perform a narrowly psychobiographical reading: “The problem with
psychobiography […] is that it is both bad art history and bad
psychoanalysis” (Cole, 1996; 88). It is difficult to side-line the
intensely personal narratives that feed into Bourgeois’s work as the
artist herself has indicated the relevance of her life history and
especially, the childhood memories that resurface throughout her
oeuvre. Yet it is also necessary to take into account the way in which
her artwork transcends the particularities of a single autobiography to
engage with the other subjectivities that encounter it in the gallery
space and how this encounter creates the meanings that arise from the
work. Psychoanalytic criticism has moved away from its early limited
focus on the author of a particular work and looks instead at the ways
in which the work communicates with its reader. This shift in
emphasis cannot be ignored by art history. The relevance of the
spectator and the way in which s/he responds to an artwork and how
the artwork itself interacts with its surroundings is imperative to a
consideration of Bourgeois’s work.
As early as 1975, Lucy Lippard wrote:

It is difficult to find a framework vivid enough to incorporate

Louise Bourgeois’s sculpture. Attempts to bring a coolly
evolutionary or art-historical order to her work, or to see it in the
166 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

context of one art group or another, have proved more or less

irrelevant. Any approach – non-objective, figurative, sexually
explicit – awkward or chaotic; and any material – perishable latex
and plaster, traditional marble and bronze, wood, cement, paint,
wax, resin – can serve to define her own needs and emotions.
Rarely has an abstract art been so directly and honestly informed
by its maker’s psyche (Weiermair, 1989; 13).

While Bourgeois’s oeuvre remains a singular and idiosyncratic project

as Lippard rightly points out, it is nonetheless important to
contextualize Bourgeois’s situation, seeing its position in relation to
history and to the traditions from which she emerged. Bourgeois left
Paris in 1938 where she had been at art school and forged contacts
with the Cubist artists and the Surrealists. Her work can be seen to
interconnect with Surrealist preoccupations and it manifests certain of
their themes. One of these abiding themes is eroticism.3
The erotic content of much of Bourgeois’s sculpture has been
a subject of focus for many critics, yet Bourgeois has maintained an
ambivalent and distanced attitude when questioned about it:

People talked about erotic aspects, about my obsessions, but they

didn’t discuss the phallic aspects. If they had, I would have ceased
to do it […] Now I admit the imagery. I am not embarrassed about
it […] When I was young, sex was talked of as a dangerous thing;
sexuality was forbidden […] At the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, we had
a nude male model. One day he looked around and saw a woman
student and suddenly he had an erection. I was shocked. Then I
thought what a fantastic thing, to reveal your vulnerability, to be
so publicly exposed! We are all vulnerable in some way, and we
are all male-female (Weiermair, 1989; 17).

Here Bourgeois touches upon one of the principle ideas that

characterize her erotic works: the notion of bisexuality.
Bourgeois’s sculpture is above all a sensual art. Surfaces and
textures are as integral to her work as the form or the concept. She
identifies surfaces with her skin. Lippard observes:

It can be the cloth in Cumulous, or a thin layer of peeling latex

over bulbous plaster, or the heavier folds in Fillette, or a glowing

3
Eroticism in Surrealist art and writing has been extensively investigated by critics
such as Hal Foster (Compulsive Beauty), Mary Ann Caws (Surrealism and Women)
and Xavière Gauthier (Surréalisme et Sexualité).
 The Art of Louise Bourgeois and Orlan 167

flow of dark resin totally immersing underlying forms. Within the

art (as, one suspects, within the artist) form and the formless are
locked in constant combat (Weiermair, 1989; 17).

Certain sculptures, forming part of her 1974 exhibition in

New York, were made by placing wet wood inside plaster; the plaster
dried the wood which then split its shell. This process of physical
pressure can be seen as a metaphorical or creative equivalent for
giving birth or as the eruption of sexual desire. It could equally be
understood as the artist literally breaking out of her skin, the
intellectual evolution of an idea that cannot be contained or restrained.
It is in the process by which the object is made that its symbolism lies.
Therefore, the object does not signify as a finished autonomous work;
a slippage of meaning occurs in its evolution. However, this slippage
does not only occur in the fabrication of Bourgeois’s objects. It also
occurs at the moment of encounter between the artwork and the
viewer. It is this idea that I shall now pursue with reference to
Bourgeois’s part-objects and their expression of a gender duality.

The Part-Object

Bourgeois’s famous Self-Portrait of 1963-4 (figure 26) bears

no resemblance to the body of the artist. Armless, legless and
containing references to both male and female genitalia (breasts,
vulvic folds and testicles), the overall form represents the phallus.
Lacking direct mimetic clarity, the work re-presents the boundaries
between masculine and feminine and subverts the orthodox notion of a
single gendered self-identity. According to Lippard, Bourgeois sees
such mergings of opposites as a “presexual perception of the
dangerous father and the protective mother. [The work deals with] the
problem of survival, having to do with identification with one or the
other; with merging and adopting the differences of the father”
(Weiermair, 1989; 16). Freudian connotations of the Oedipal stage are
evident here but such work also taps into the Surrealist tradition of
androgyny.
In Arcane 17, Breton clarified the need to resolve the inherent
conflict between male and female principles. As a glorification of
spiritual fecundity, the myth of the androgyne became a celebration of
spiritual procreation. The Surrealist painter, Victor Brauner, produced
a work in 1934 entitled Number, which shows a boxlike womb,
168 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

attached to the ends of which are male and female sexual organs and
in which a small sculpted figure resides. For Brauner, as for other
Surrealists, the metaphysical fusion of male and female into the
perfect androgyne had a spiritual and physical counterpart in the
sexual act; a union that blurred the distinction between the sexes in a
celebration of love. Giacometti’s Suspended Ball of 1930 is sexually
ambivalent. The ball, which swings over the blade of the wedge, is
presumably the active masculine element of the work although the
sphere has a cleft removed that creates a vaginal shape, while the
wedge despite its phallic shape has a labial form. The erotic reading of
the contact between the ball and wedge also suggests phallus and
buttocks. Giacometti’s work first appeared in the publication of the
Surrealists’ intellectual rivals, Bataille’s Documents, before it was
taken up and feted by the Surrealists. It is a Bataillean view of this
work that is most relevant to my own enquiry into Bourgeois’s
sculpture.
According to Rosalind Krauss and Yves-Alain Bois in their
reading of Bataille’s definition of the informe (Formless: A User’s
Guide, 1997), Giacometti’s sculpture collapses definitions of distinct
sexuality and therefore belongs within the operational sphere of the
informe. They define this operation as a process that strips away
categories and undoes the very terms of meaning and/or being. They
see the constantly shifting identity of the sculpture’s organs, or “part-
objects,”4 that is brought about by the systematic relationship between
movement and permutation as a mechanism to resist meaning, to
attack the illustrative or the thematic. Bataille describes the informe in
the critical dictionary published in Documents (see Bataille, 1968).

4
The idea of the part-object derives from the psychoanalytical work of Melanie Klein
in which she describes how certain organs seem to detach themselves from the
maternal body to produce scenarios of paranoia through which the infant enacts its
desire or frustrated rage against the figure of the mother for whom these objects stand.
Deleuze and Guattari engage with Klein’s discourse in L’Anti-Oedipe (1972) to
demonstrate how the goal of Klein’s theory makes the part-object into a symbolic
agent of intersubjective relations. They refuse this interpretation in order to
demonstrate how the part-object works within a chain of signifiers and changes its
nature as it changes its function. They move away from its definition as symbolic to
stress the incessant production of meaning and argue that the part-object is not the
representation of the parental figure but part of a sequence of connections: a
permutational operation that enacts change, the reversal of this change, and therefore
demonstrates the utter instability of meaning. Thus Deleuze and Guattari’s definition
of the part-object comes close to Bataille’s theory of the informe.
 The Art of Louise Bourgeois and Orlan 169

For Bataille, the informe is neither a stable motif nor a classification;

the formless has only an operational and performative existence. It is
the operation of slippage between readings or interpretations that
renders them unstable. The informe therefore displaces binary
oppositions.
Here I shall seek to show how Bourgeois’s erotic sculpture
likewise displaces such oppositions and, rather than resolving them
into a dialectic, maintains the slippage of interpretation and meaning
that characterizes the operation of the informe. Modernist logic
categorized the part-object as the “partial figure” whereby the body
contracted into its synecdoches. The fragment became the vehicle of a
symbolic truth, and body parts or organs came to stand in for the
absent figure (columns to represent phalluses, breasts to represent the
mother). However, the part-object allows for a psychoanalytic
dimension that creates interpretative space and allows for a process of
intersubjective connections which refuses any single authoritative
signified.
As with her Self-Portrait, where the title interacts with the
sculpture to further displace meaning and the viewer’s expectation of
a gendered self-identity, Bourgeois’s Fillette of 1968 exemplifies the
relevance of Bourgeois’s naming of her work to disseminate the
signified. Fillette is a large phallus and resembles, according to
Rosalind Krauss, “nothing so much as an outsized dildo” (Weiermair,
1989; 23). The textural quality of this work arises directly from the
combination of materials: latex and plaster. Like other of Bourgeois’s
objects it is not mounted but suspended in the exhibition space so that
the viewer confronts it, alarmingly, at eye-level. This also means that
the viewer encounters the gently swiveling object from a number of
viewing positions, which undermines the need for any single
perspectival view.
Le Regard of 1966 has a squat spherical form with undulating
contours and a vaginal split that reveals other indeterminate, organic
shapes. Germinal (1967), The Fingers (1968), and Soft Landscape II
(1967) are made of bulbous protruding forms which suggest both the
phallus and breasts while Cumul I (1969) (figure 27) resembles a lunar
landscape again formed by protruding phallic shapes amongst soft,
curvaceous folds and suggesting associations with eyes or eggs.
Hanging Janus (1968) (figure 28) and Janus Fleuri (1968) combine
phallic shapes to create oval hanging forms and Janus Fleuri
170 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

incorporates an explosive split where the texture of inner tissue is

externalized and contrasts with the smooth, finished, round forms.
However, the forms are not always so organic.
In Femme Couteau, a pointed, aggressive shape rises to form
a pair of buttocks or a clitoris. It is a wrapped and folded marble blade
which was described by Bourgeois, in Freudian terms, as embodying:
The polarity of woman, the destructive and the seductive […] The
woman turns into a blade […] A girl can be terrified of the world.
She feels vulnerable because she can be wounded by the penis. So
she tries to take on the weapon of the aggressor […] The battle is
fought at the terror level which precedes anything sexual
(Weiermair, 1989; 16).

Harmless Woman (1969) shows a female torso with assertive, out-

sized breasts and a phallic point in place of a head. Bourgeois’s
sculpture combines elements of both aggression and vulnerability,
dependence and independence, interconnecting with a network of
signifiers. The artist transgresses categorical oppositions to produce
morphological mutations where definitions of male/female,
inner/outer, and object/subject are collapsed and provide no fixed
position from where a meaning can be generated.
Bourgeois’s erotic sculpture manifests most clearly what I
have identified in her work as the informe. However, in order to
illustrate how the informe also permeates other, non-erotic work, I
will now look briefly at some earlier sculpture of very different
thematic concern, which nevertheless, still shows the informe at work.
As we have seen, Bourgeois has always worked with a wide range of
materials with different physical properties that lend themselves to a
variety of metaphorical associations. Another dominant preoccupation
has been the way in which architectural structures become
anthropomorphic or acquire psychological overtones. Bourgeois’s
early work of the 1940s already contains and manifests this interest.
One of her first sculptures is entitled The Blind Leading the
Blind, 1947-9 and is constructed of wooden stakes of human height
that can be interpreted as figures in procession, each with their arms on
the shoulders of the figure in front. The sculpture could be equally
understood architecturally as a double row of columns capped with
lintels. The figural and architectural interpretations are not at odds but
can also be combined so that the structure can be conceived of as
 The Art of Louise Bourgeois and Orlan 171

enclosing or protecting the figures. In the 1940s, Bourgeois was

primarily a painter and her work often showed women with houses for
heads or bodies, a series of Femme Maison (the segmented nature of
these images is reminiscent of the series of Surrealist drawings
cadavres exquises). Her interests already clearly lay in the way people
correspond or adapt to, the structures they inhabit or the spaces they
occupy. Her position as a foreigner in New York led to a relationship
with her architectural surroundings that was one of fascination and
alienation. Other paintings and engravings show links between
sculptural forms and psychological or emotional frustrations: ladders
that are suspended from ceilings and rendered purposeless, a balloon
trapped inside a room by too small a door or houses with wings. The
paintings demonstrate how architecture mediates relationships between
the individual and the world, the private and the social. The
unexpected metaphorical associations and juxtapositions demonstrate
how Bourgeois’s early sculpture already operates in a similar manner
to her later erotic objects, working to undo binary oppositions and
produce a ceaseless flow of different readings.
Bourgeois’s work has rarely conformed to the Modernist
precept that art should or can only ever be about art. In chapter one, we
saw how in Greenberg’s definition, sculpture is optical, appealing to
the eyes and the intellect (it is intrinsically Apollonian) and does not
require or rely for effect upon the viewer’s participation. Sculpture
interacts with the space around it but does not own the space; in
Greenberg’s terms, sculpture that depends upon bodily presence
becomes theatrical. The space of theatre, which differs from everyday
space as it is reserved for a performance, does not conform to
Greenberg’s theory as he envisages sculpture as being independent of
a particular place or particular human presences. Bourgeois’s two
sculpture exhibitions in 1949 and 1950 included a series of totemic
wooden sculptures called Personnages which were installed as an
environment in the gallery and which could be rearranged from show
to show. The way in which the sculpture articulated the surrounding
space and the very mobility of the sculpture made the exhibition into
an event (a concept that also arises out of Surrealist practice). Their
mobility lent the sculptures an almost bodily presence and they are
consequently irreducible to Greenberg’s purely optical criteria, they
refuse to be self-contained objects. Here again in the slippage between
definitions, we see the informe at work. The installation of
172 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

Personnages illustrates that the artist conceived of her work as

functioning in groups, elements that connected and operated within an
undefined network.
In 1966, Bourgeois exhibited work in a show called “Eccentric
Abstraction” organized by Lucy Lippard at the Fischbach Gallery. At
this time, Bourgeois was working in plaster and semi-soft materials
such as latex and rubber. Her work included open-fronted hanging
forms in plaster, which she called lairs. Again these have contradictory
psychological overtones relating to the home nest and safety but also
to threat and vulnerability. The different physical properties of the
materials both bewilder and invite interpretation. In the 1990s,
Bourgeois made a series of works called Cells. These have often been
interpreted, as Warner points out, as a meditation on memory:
They are spaces which make evident the continuity of the past in
Bourgeois’s present, and her duty to confront, re-enact and
exorcise her experiences […] The use of architecture as a
metaphor for psychological, physical and sexual relationships
between people recurs throughout her work […] But it was not
until the Cells that Bourgeois created a dynamic, spatial formula
for the exploration of body and environment, self and past, past
and present (Bourgeois, 2000; 13).

It is out of this work that the Tate Modern towers developed and if the
meaning of these sculptures appears momentarily to be more
clarifiable than the previous works I have discussed, I will seek to
show that the operation of the informe is still at work.

Spiraling Selves

“Then it was done. ‘Biggest ever’ permeates the room, mixing

Spielberg-scale spectacle with the psychological symbolism of the
surreal. Here, installation art gears up to theme-park
showmanship. Yet the theme, harking back to Bourgeois's 1947
suite of engravings with text ‘He Disappeared into Complete
Silence,’ weds architectural forms to the cycle of nurture,
rejection, and reconciliation experienced between mother and
child. We crane our necks, staring up the inner shaft of I Undo,
with its jolting red glass ovals--a psychedelic model of the birth
canal. We wait in lines to climb to roller-coaster heights,
becoming weak-kneed and vulnerable as we reach the top and
find ourselves under those massive, terrifying mirrors--each of us
a cruel, Francis Bacon--like portrait in a sky-high theater of
 The Art of Louise Bourgeois and Orlan 173

clinical self-regard. Such ruthlessness and pity mingle easily with

tenderness. They’re caught like specimens under glass, just as the
artist's mother-and-child dyads are, secreted at the heart of each
tower. Old battles are reimagined and resolved. Indeed, Bourgeois
remarks that the works ‘reflect the optimistic view that I feel
today’--a view seen through the long lens of her eighty-eight
years, as if from a great height” (Steven Henry Madoff “Towers
of London” Artforum Summer 2000).

Entering the vast space of the Turbine Hall that is the entrance
to the Tate Modern in the year 2000, the spectator was overawed by
the immensity of the surrounding area. The architects involved in the
conversion of the building from power station to art gallery
maintained the industrial connotations of the space by guarding
elements of the existing machinery as well as the space’s uncluttered
simplicity. Approaching the four works of Bourgeois, a spectator was
first of all struck by the contrast between these huge organic shapes of
curvilinear aspect and the industrial lines and angles that house them.
The four works, the largest in Bourgeois’s series of spiders, entitled
Maman, and the three towers entitled, I Do, I Undo and I Redo,
seemed to draw their material inspiration from their surroundings –
giant steel constructions. The first tower, I Do, was constructed of a
spiral staircase which wound around a central column and up towards
a small, railed platform. This was surrounded by four circular mirrors,
a fifth mirror that encompassed the entire scene, and at the centre of
the platform was a wooden chair. The second tower, I Undo, was a
cylindrical core with a spiral staircase in a square-framed steel skin,
around which was wrapped a second staircase. At the bottom of the
tower, a small door allowed access to a cell-like space where a chair
and a mirror faced each other. The third tower, I Redo, was made of
two spiral staircases, one of which was compacted into the interior
void of the column while the other wound about the outside. Similarly
to the first tower, there was a platform encircled by mirrors on which
were two wooden chairs and a steel-framed glass cabinet containing a
double-headed sculpture.
For anyone familiar with Bourgeois’s work, the sculptures in
the Tate Modern and the artist’s accompanying text revealed one of
the themes that dominate her output: parent-child relationships.
Bourgeois referred to the towers as a “family affair” and originally
imagined the conversation that visitors would engage in across the
towers as being dialogues between father and son. However, as the
174 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

sculptures that were housed in the towers suggested, the work finally
became the manifestation of the maternal relationship. In each tower,
the artist placed a small bell jar containing the sculpted figures of a
mother and child that represented three different kinds of maternal
relationship, described in Bourgeois’s accompanying text.
I Do represents the good mother and featured a nurturing
mother and child:

I Do is an active state. It’s a positive affirmation. I am in control,

and I move forward towards a goal or a wish or a desire […] I am
the good mother […] the giver, the Provider. It is the “I Love
You” no matter what.

I Undo represented the rupture of the maternal bond where the

sculpture showed the infant reaching out towards the distracted
mother whose breast disgorges useless milk:

The Undo is the unraveling. The torment that things are not right
and the anxiety of not knowing what to do […] One is immobile
in the wake of fear […] In terms of a relationship to others, it’s a
total rejection and destruction. It is the return of the repressed […]
I am the bad mother […] The guilt leads to a deep despair and
passivity. One retreats into one’s lair to strategize, recover and
regroup.

In I Redo, the sculpture showed the bond between mother and

child through an attached umbilical cord, which tied the floating infant
to the mother’s body:

The REDO means that a solution is found to the problem. It may

not be the final answer, but there is an attempt to go forward […]
You have confidence again. In terms of relationships to others, the
reparation and reconciliation has been achieved. Things are back
to normal. There is hope and love again.

The towers encompassed the themes not only of the

relationship between parent and child but also the relationship
between architecture and sculpture. The maternal theme introduced
Bourgeois’s personal narrative on an intimate level while the
sculptures invited spectators to interact with them on a social level.
The towers created for the viewer a spatial experience that was
encountered through movement and over time. Marina Warner in the
 The Art of Louise Bourgeois and Orlan 175

Tate catalogue described the associations that the towers might hold
for a viewer, such as architectural structures associated with watching
and warning: observation posts and watch-towers, lighthouses and
signal stations, places that afford different means of seeing and being
seen. She also observed that the spiral staircase is technically the most
efficient way of providing vertical access within a confined space and
simultaneously, perhaps, conjures a vision of those most private
spaces concealed within everyday structures, such as attics or cellars:
“The stairway is thus a means of entry or escape, a passageway
between the public and the private realm” (Bourgeois, 2000; 8).
Spiral staircases, as Warner indicates, are an economical use
of space. However, they are also associated with self-defense,
allowing the besieged to defend himself from above his attackers. In
the first tower, I Do, the single spiral staircase was the only means of
ascent and descent, consequently controlling and limiting the number
of visitors to the tower. I Undo and I Redo contained two spiral
staircases. The double spiral may represent the process of dialectical
argument and its continuing debate or resolution. In place of a static or
complete structure, the double spiral embodies a process. It does not
express a moment past but the continuing evolution of the present – a
process of growth, the advancement towards self-knowledge or
understanding. The harmony of rhythm encapsulated in the double
structure represents how time and movement are collapsed into the
individual’s progress on the spiral staircase and becomes ceaseless
movement. As I have observed, the chairs on the tops of the towers
were intended by Bourgeois to encourage encounters and dialogue
between the viewers on the towers. They also correspond to the
subject themes indicated by the titles. I Undo contained a single chair
and mirror in a cell-like space in the interior of the tower, rendering
communication with others impossible. I Redo had two chairs in place
of the single chair at the top of I Do and therefore seemed to
encourage dialogue of a private nature.
I have previously discussed the importance of the mirror as a
metaphor within painting in my chapters on Duchamp and Bacon and
it is worth recalling here. In addition to the concept of painting as
mirror, the way in which a painting “mirrors” the likeness of the
world, the mirror also acts as a metaphor for framing images. The
frame constructs the image or the knowledge by placing certain
material into the centre of discourse and marginalizing others. To
176 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

move the mirror is to alter the frame and thus to consider different
subjects or knowledge. As a literary device, embedding the frame
within the text produces a mise en abyme: a process of infinite
regression that explodes the frame and decentres the text. The mirrors
on the towers lent themselves to just such a framing function. The
person who occupied the central chair found him/herself reflected in
the four circular mirrors, which inclined towards one another and
inwards towards the platform to create the semblance of a private area.
On the first tower, the fifth raised mirror encompassed and reflected
the entire scene. The self-reflection prompted by contemplation of
one’s self in a mirror was invoked and subsequently undermined as
the fifth mirror reflected back the narcissistic scene as a simulacrum of
a real event. The fifth mirror, operating as a framing device, was
reminiscent of Bacon’s paintings, which often incorporate frames
within frames, the persons depicted are enclosed within a pictorial as
well as a real frame. The figure is therefore isolated in representation
while this self-reflective mechanism furthermore serves to highlight
the artificial status of the work of art and undermines any pretensions
to mimesis or the notion of the painting as being a window onto
another reality.
The towers were at once structures of isolation and
fortification, metaphors that can easily be applied to the maternal
position or the situation of the child. If the mirror stands for the
construction of knowledge, it also stands for the construction of the
self, as we have seen, through the Lacanian stade du miroir. The
thematic sequence of the towers can also be interpreted as
representing this stade du miroir. The infant of I Do depends upon the
mother’s presence in a symbiotic relationship and identifies
him/herself with and through her body. I Undo could symbolize the
infant’s move away from the mother as it develops its own sense of a
gendered identity and a (false) sense of an integrated self-image. The
final tower, I Redo, can be equated with the child’s realignment within
the family structure and a new sense of identification with the figure
of mother or father, depending on the sex of the child. In Freud’s
Oedipal theory, this process signals the transition from the pleasure
principle to the reality principle, from the enclosure of the family to
society at large. Lacan’s interpretation sees the child moving from the
Imaginary stage into the Symbolic order: the pre-given structure of
social and sexual roles and relations which make up the family and
 The Art of Louise Bourgeois and Orlan 177

society. The integral position of the mirrors in Bourgeois’s towers

aligns the infant’s progress more closely with Lacan’s view of the
infant as it invests a sense of identity in its own self-image.
Paradoxically, the museum visitor climbed the tower in order to look
out, to look at the others below but because of the positioning of the
mirrors found him/herself locked in self-contemplation, and became,
when reflected in the fifth mirror, an integral part of the sculpture.
However, the spectator’s experience did not remain a private one; s/he
also became the object in the gaze of gallery goers on the first floor of
the Tate Modern who could look down onto the sculptures – the
participant was simultaneously object and subject. Also, in this way,
the association of the towers with structures such as lighthouses
becomes apparent: intended both as places to be seen and to see from.
The careful placing of the chairs and the mirrors in the towers
set up a situation of controlled viewing which is rarely encountered in
sculpture. The work of art most noted for this concept is Duchamp’s
Etant Donnés (see chapter 1, page 40, footnote 8) where the spectator
beholds the installation through a peep-hole in a door. The viewer
consequently becomes the uneasy object of a gaze from behind, that of
those viewers waiting their turn. The act of viewing becomes the
uncomfortable act of voyeurism and the beholder becomes a
scopophilic viewer, thus the traditional relationship of an artwork with
either a monologic gaze or a dialogic specularity (where the gaze is
returned by the figure depicted) is undermined and the equation
between the “I” and the sovereign “eye” is subverted. In other words,
the viewer is no longer in an anonymous position of authority but
becomes, through the artist’s manipulation, part of the artwork that is
viewed by others. This again transgresses the Modernist principle of
the autonomous artwork and serves to ensure that the artwork
becomes less of an autobiographical narrative and more about the way
in which self-representation can become the representation of any self.
In this case, the participant encounters his/her own reflection and the
sculpture becomes the site of encounter with another subjectivity. The
sculpture changes its function and thereby, characteristically of the
informe, changes its nature as spectators take their turn to climb the
spiral staircases.
178 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

From Informe to Abject

In Formless: A User’s Guide, Krauss and Bois take issue with

the notion that the informe could ever be associated with the abject.
They draw attention to an exhibition that was planned at the same time
as their own (the exhibition for which this book operates as a manual).
The title of the rival exhibition was to be From the Informe to the
Abject. A title that they claim clearly implies the belief that:

If the informe has a destiny that reaches beyond its

conceptualization in the 1920s to find its fulfilment and
completion within contemporary artistic production, it is in the
domain of what is now understood as ‘abjection’ (Krauss and
Bois, 1997; 235).

They claim that in contemporary art criticism, there is a danger that

the two terms become conflated and they oppose the operational
function of the informe to the static, semantic concept of the abject:

The abject-as-intermediary is, in this account, thus a matter of

both uncrossable boundaries and undifferentiable substances,
which is to say a subject position that seems to cancel the very
subject it is operating to locate, and an object relation from which
the definability of the object (and thus its objecthood) disappears
(ibid; 237).

Krauss engages with Laura Mulvey’s interpretation of Cindy

Sherman's recent work, frequently described as abject, and
demonstrates that what Mulvey perceives to be abject is, in their
definition, informe. What Krauss and Bois choose not to highlight is
the crucial slippage in Kristeva’s definition of the abject (they
recognize that it is Kristeva’s and not Bataille’s definition of the
abject that is currently employed) that is, her distinction between the
condition “to be abject” and the process “to abject.” This distinction
will become clear in my discussion of Orlan’s work. Here, I would
like to propose that the abject can be as operational as the informe and,
without wishing to confuse the terms, I shall seek to demonstrate that
in the work of Orlan, the second artist in this chapter, the informe
becomes abject, and that the abject, if remaining objectifiable,
depends upon the informe in order to be represented.
 The Art of Louise Bourgeois and Orlan 179

In the 1970s, there was a noticeable shift of emphasis towards

what Rosalind Krauss has defined, in an attempt to characterize the
pluralistic art of the decade, indexical art. Much art became refocused
on the indexical grounding of art in physical presence, on a body, in a
site.5 As we have seen, Bourgeois’s work became site-specific through
her gallery installations that were conceived for a particular place.
This shift was not without its historical precedents (I refer back to my
chapter on Duchamp) but it arose out of a general crisis in
representation. The move to reground art was urgent in the wake of
the serial objects of Minimalism, simulacral images of Pop and
demonstrations of Conceptual work. However, it was also prompted
by a growing sense of disillusionment with the art market; artists were
attracted by the ephemerality of performance and installation art, and
its lack of marketability in its stress upon action in time rather on the
creation of a finite object. One of the most important catalysts in the
development and increasing prevalence of performance and body art
was the influence of practicing female artists and a new wave of
feminist criticism. Their art demonstrates a return to the body and the
social, to the abject and the site-specific. This grounding of art in a
real presence, whether the body, a pre-existing site or object, was not
confined to feminist practice (indeed Krauss cites specific examples
such as Gordon Matta-Clark who made cuts into derelict buildings and
Bruce Nauman’s moldings of body parts and marginal spaces),
however, it was a crucial site of feminist intervention.
Mary Kelly remarked in 1981, in the light of much of the work
that arose out of the 1970s, that the specific contribution of feminists,
“has been to pose the question of sexual difference across the
discourse of the body in a way which focuses on the construction, not
of the individual, but of the sexed subject” (Kelly, 1984; 96).
However, if much feminist body art of the 1970s posed the question of
identity in terms of sexual difference located in the body, there was
still the ever-present contradiction between the demand for a rigorous
critique of existing codes of the erotic and the desire to produce new
and liberating representations for women. Feminist body art seemed
sometimes to dangerously run the risk of being reinscribed within old
systems of viewing. For example, very divergent performances by

5
A distinction must be drawn here between the historical tradition of monumental
site-specific sculpture and the innovations of the 1970s which led to sculpture that
could more descriptively be defined as site-responsive.
180 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

artists such as Carolee Schneeman, Yoko Ono and Ana Mendieta, with
their emphasis upon the body in an attempt to control its
objectification, were sometimes misconceived by critics who
understood their work to be “essentialist,” that is confirming the binary
opposition within a phallocentric order by equating the feminine with
the other term in the phallocentric regime. Because of this risk, many
artists tended to deconstruct existing representations of women and
simultaneously rejected narrative, figuration and illusion in favour of
textual strategies, which refused any easy identification between
viewer and image. For similar aesthetic reasons, artists also turned
away from painting and favoured instead photo-texts, performance and
“scripto-visual” media.6 This artistic revolution was later termed
“negative aesthetics” because as Laura Mulvey pointed out, if women
were to be represented as active desiring agents “the great problem
then is how to move on to ‘something new,’ from creative
confrontation to creativity” (Mulvey, 1992; 968).
One of the ways in which women artists have sought a
productive space to investigate the re-presentability of the body is
through site-specific and performance art. The spaces and locations of
art have been used to explore the relationships between absence and
presence, identity and experience. Work that incorporates both spatial
and temporal dimensions maps out territories where artists are able to
explore the self as an ongoing process of construction in time and
place through the operation of memory as well as in the present.
Location and time become a means to narrate the self, even if the
narrator (the artist) is absent. Even when the artist’s presence in
installation or performance art is only referenced indirectly by
association or allusion, these “indexical” works insist on the need to
situate the practices of making art in relation to a practice of viewing
which is also positioned socially and symbolically.

6
This was also the consequence of attempts to unsettle other traditional binaries such
as high versus low art, fine art versus “domestic” craftsmanship.
 The Art of Louise Bourgeois and Orlan 181

Part Two
Performing Orlan

Orlan is a French artist who began her career as a performance

artist in 1964. Her first street performance was in 1965 and for five
years, she ran a performance symposium with Hubert Besacier in
Lyon. She came to the attention of the international media in 1990
with her Réincarnation project that involves plastic surgery and whose
ramifications raise philosophical, social and cultural questions. I shall
look in depth at the Réincarnation project through a framework of the
abject but first I would like to indicate the traditions from which Orlan
arises and the way in which her early performance work situates itself
as a natural precursor to her current projects, an aspect that is ignored
by many critics.
Sarah Wilson has remarked how:

Synchronic, ‘postmodernist’ accounts of Orlan's work today omit

its time-impregnated axis which situates it at the crux of the old
and the new. The relationship between sex and art, the sacred and
the profane is at the heart of the matter; her enthusiastic embrace
of technology – ‘le nouveau trompe-l'oeil de notre temps’ as she
calls it – is simply the obverse of her relationship with a long
tradition (Orlan, 1996; 10).

Orlan’s work, despite its contemporary radicality, is not without

precedents in the French tradition from which she emerges. This is
demonstrated by Wilson in the article that heads the catalogue Orlan:
ceci est mon corps . . . ceci est mon logiciel. Wilson indicates a
lineage that stems from Germaine Richier’s sculpture that vilifies the
western cult of female beauty, marking the caesura of the second
World War, to Niki de Saint Phalle’s evocation of the power of the
church, to Gina Pane, who in the 1970s and 1980s practiced her art on
her own body. Pane used serial photography and film to record these
events, and Wilson highlights the religious resonances of Pane’s work
that evoke a “Franciscan attitude to self-abnegation and Sainthood.”
Wilson notes that Orlan has also indicated alternative sources of
influence, such as Antonin Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty,” the
Viennese Actionists and American contemporaries like Chris Burden.
The way Orlan’s work reaches back within a tradition, interacting
182 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

with her precedents and how her work evolves as a consequence,

allows me to indicate how the informe can be seen to react within the
sphere of the abject, and how the latter is not possible without the
former.
In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler assesses the body in
theoretical terms that are useful for a consideration of this argument
with reference to Orlan’s early performance work. Butler poses the
question of whether there is a shape, cultural or political, that serves to
define the body. She points out the Christian and Cartesian precedents,
which, prior to the emergence of vitalistic biologies in the nineteenth
century, understood the body to be inert matter that either signified
nothing or the flesh of the fallen state of mankind. She notes that in
the writings of de Beauvoir and Sartre, the body is figured as mute, to
which meaning can be attributed only by a transcendent
consciousness. In a move away from this Cartesian dualism of mind
and body which is redescribed in the structuralist frame as culture and
nature, she asks: “How are the contours of the body clearly marked as
the taken-for-granted ground or surface upon which gender
significations are inscribed, a mere facticity devoid of value, prior to
significance?” (Butler, 1990; 129). She takes issue with Foucault in
his essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”,7 who argues that there
must be a stable and self-identical body prior to its cultural inscription.
For Foucault, cultural values emerge as the result of an inscription on
the body. The body acts as the medium or blank page that must be
destroyed and transfigured in order for “culture” to emerge. Butler
also refers to Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger,8 which suggests that
the very contours of the body are established through markings that
seek to establish specific codes of cultural coherence. Therefore any
discourse that seeks to establish the boundaries of the body naturalizes
the taboos that serve to define what it is that constitutes the body.
Butler interprets Douglas as saying:
That what constitutes the limit of the body is never merely
material, but that the surface, the skin, is systematically signified by
taboos and anticipated transgressions; indeed, the boundaries of the

7
“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected
Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry
Simon, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977).
8
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, London, Boston and Henley: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1969.
 The Art of Louise Bourgeois and Orlan 183

body become, within her analysis, the limits of the social per se. A
poststructuralist appropriation of her view might well understand the
boundaries of the body as the limits of the socially hegemonic (ibid;
131).
Butler pursues this argument with reference to AIDS, bodily
“pollution” (the meaning of which I shall explore later) and Kristeva’s
definition of the abject to demonstrate how binary distinctions are
constituted to define the contours of the body; in other words, how the
corporeal concepts of “inner” and “outer” consolidate and stabilize the
socially inscribed coherent subject. How does Orlan’s performance
work challenge the viewer’s preconceptions of the limitations and
possibilities of the body? How does the artist not only play with
physical boundaries but also ideas of “inner” and “outer” and gender
constructs?
I would like to propose that Orlan’s work prior to the
Réincarnation project, which I will discuss later, already challenges
the gendered contours of the body through exploring their social
construction and by questioning the notions of inner and outer that
Butler raises in her text. Orlan has written:
J'ai toujours considéré mon corps de femme, mon corps de
femme-artiste comme étant le matériau privilégié pour la
construction de mon oeuvre. Mon travail a toujours interrogé le
statut du corps féminin, via les pressions sociales, que ce soit au
présent; et dans le passé où j'ai pointé certaines de leurs
inscriptions dans l'histoire de l'art. La déclinaison des images
possibles de mon corps a traité du problème de l'identité et de
l'altérité (Orlan, 1996; 84).

Since her earliest performances, Orlan has sought to unsettle

gender binaries, undermine the western canon’s depictions of the
female nude and challenge social expectations of conformist
behaviour. In 1968, she posed as a series of tableaux vivants,
parodying the Venuses of Manet and Velasquez. During French
feminist action during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Orlan
intervened with placards that declared “Je suis une homme et un
femme.” Her subversion of grammar already demonstrates the shifting
possibilities of an unstable gender. She became Sainte Orlan in 1971
and wrapped herself in costumes, white leatherette and black vinyl.
Much of this work was based around the trousseau left to her by her
mother which, in a direct transgression of its traditional purpose, she
184 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

used as a canvas to record sperm trails left by lovers that she traced
with the “womanly” art of embroidery.
The sacred and profane have long been enmeshed in Orlan’s
work. (This recalls not only Bataille but also Leiris and le sacré
discussed in chapter two.) In an event in Lyons in 1976, she was
recorded in a series of sixteen photographs performing a striptease.
Starting with the image of a baroque Virgin (figure 34), Orlan was
draped in the sheets of her trousseau, exposing one breast that suckled
a swaddled bundle. As the striptease progressed, Orlan shed her
layers, along with their connotations of modesty, sanctity, femininity
and maternity, until she was naked. In 1977, at the International
Contemporary Art Fair in Paris, she offered the baiser de l’artiste
(figure 33) to passing members of the public at a price of five francs.
Through highlighting the commercial nature of her gesture, Orlan
evoked issues of prostitution, art as commodity, tenderness versus
aggression, and exploitation, which she pursued in an exhibition
entitled Art et Prostitution in Nice. It was also recorded in a triptych
that registered three phases: the solicitation and the kiss, the
swallowing and the visible descent of the money through a plastic
tube and a plastic pubis that filled with the money.
Confrontation with the spectator in order to elicit strong
responses was foregrounded in a performance at the Musée S.
Ludwig, Aix-la-Chapelle. This work also demonstrates the way in
which Orlan’s work has always been theoretically informed. Entitled
Etude documentaire: la tête de méduse, this performance involved
Orlan showing her genitals to the public through a magnifying glass
during menstruation, with half of her pubic hair painted blue. Video
monitors showed the heads of spectators arriving, those viewing and
those leaving. Freud’s text on the head of the Medusa was handed out
to visitors at the exit, which quoted “A la vue de la vulve le diable
même s’enfuit” (quoted in Orlan, 1996; 85). An ongoing performance
involved the measuring of spaces (their physical and moral
parameters) with Orlan’s body as the measuring standard. Over the
course of four years, she measured art galleries, including the
Pompidou centre, museums and a convent. The ritual involved the
process of measuring, the washing of her soiled costume (created
herself), and the collection of the water, used in the washing, which
was then transferred to containers sealed with wax as relics. Wilson
 The Art of Louise Bourgeois and Orlan 185

has noted some of the connotations and reactions provoked by this

performance:
The Virgin, conceived ‘immaculately,’ without stain, counters
the tradition of the bride's display of bloodied linen after the wedding
night; we are brought back to the central motif of the trousseau for
Orlan. Her ‘measuring’ performances provoked violently sexual
reactions: she was spat upon, insulted as a ‘woman of the streets;’ the
trial of measurement passes through filth: ‘L’épreuve de la mesure
passe par la souillure’ (Orlan, 1996; 10).
The first indications of Orlan’s future Incarnation project
appeared in an exhibition in Lyons where seven stuffed pillows were
suspended from high-tension cables, onto which increasingly large
images of Orlan as Ingres’s Grande Odalisque were projected. Orlan
wrote: “Volonté d’entrer en lutte avec le mythe / de se mesurer à lui,
de le mystifier à son tour / de s’approprier sa légende. En épousant
l’oeuvre d’art référentielle, j’en éprouve le narcissisme […] Passer du
fait à l’être” (Orlan, 1996; 11). In the same way as she challenged the
hierarchical patriarchy of the church, Orlan now turned her attention
to the Western canon. In 1990, on her forty-third birthday, Orlan gave
a performance that involved the signing of a declaration of intent for
her project La Réincarnation de Sainte Orlan. As Orlan has explained,
the performance has two titles:

Cette performance a deux titres: Le premier: La réincarnation de

Sainte Orlan fait allusion au personnage qui s’était crée petit à
petit en endossant les images religieuses de madones, vierges,
saintes. Le deuxième titre: image-nouvelles images fait un clin
d’oeil aux dieux at déesses hindous qui changent d’apparence
pour faire de nouveaux travaux, de nouveaux exploits (il s’agit
pour moi de changer de référents de passer de l’iconographie
religieuse judéo-chrétienne à la mythologie grecque), chose que je
ferai après toutes les opérations. D’autre part ce titre fait allusion
aux dites nouvelles images, c’est-à-dire aux nouvelles
technologies car je me suis fait une nouvelle image pour produire
de nouvelles images (Orlan, 1996; 86).

If the informe is to be found at work in Orlan’s performances,

it is surely in the way she seeks to unsettle binary definitions, the
traditionally designated forms of art: male/female, high/low art,
religious/profane, self/other. In parodying a phallocentric western
canon, she both engages with the tradition and maintains a marginal
186 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

stance, simultaneously interior and exterior to an acknowledged

lineage. Her direct challenges to a gendered identity unsettle
conventional expectations and situate her work on a fuzzy borderline
of transexuality (she is un femme and associates herself with the
transexuality of the figures of saints). She exposes the interior of her
“real” body to confound the assumption that identity can be associated
with an integrated surface image and to present what has been
unacceptable in conventional depictions of the female nude. The erotic
mixture of the sacred and profane operates in a similar manner to her
approach to the tradition of fine art. In stripping away a moral high
ground, she injects religious icons with a direct transgressive
sexuality, and through bodily invocations of an iconographic ideal of
beauty (the Venuses and Odalisques), she marries the mundane with
the sacrosanct, the real with the ideal.
Butler insists that the notion of performativity must be kept
distinct from the notion of performance (she refers to the
performances of Vito Acconci). Performance presumes a voluntarist
conception of subjectivity according to which we can all theatrically
remake or restyle our bodies and identities while performativity
contests the very notion of the subject. Therefore if identity is a
construct that is performative, according to Butler (that is to say that
the gendered body has no ontological status apart from the various
acts that constitute its reality), and thereby temporal, then Orlan’s
work represents a microcosm of coming-into-being. With reference to
homosexuality, Butler discusses the vulnerability of bodily margins:
“If the body is synecdochal for the social system per se or a site in
which open systems converge, then any kind of unregulated
permeability constitutes a site of pollution and endangerment” (Butler,
1990; 132). Butler maintains that the construction of stable bodily
contours relies upon fixed sites of corporeal permeability and
impermeability and she suggests that those sexual practices that
challenge the hegemonic order effectively reinscribe the boundaries of
the body along new cultural lines. Indeed, challenging the
heterosexual construction of gendered exchange “disrupts the very
boundaries that determine what it is to be a body at all” (ibid; 133). I
would argue that this is one of the principal aims of Orlan’s work.
However, rather than directly challenging the notion of compulsory
heterosexuality, Orlan confronts the rigidity of binary gender and its
policing of the body. Starting with the blank canvas of the naked
 The Art of Louise Bourgeois and Orlan 187

body, she exposes and undermines social expectations of its potential

and re-inscribes its boundaries by changing its shape, altering its
possibilities and consequently challenging our notion of the subject.

Abject Alienation

If Orlan’s early work explores the possibility for the

construction of an identity over and in time by exploring and re-
presenting concepts of inner and outer, deconstructing gender binaries
and recreating sexed identities, her more recent work also explores
notions of inner and outer but this time the work comes closer to
Butler’s formulation of permeability and impermeability. La
Réincarnation de Sainte Orlan does not so much disrupt the
boundaries of the body as much as render them obsolete.
Butler demonstrates how Kristeva’s formulation of the abject
suggests the uses of this structuralist notion of a boundary-constituting
taboo for the purposes of constructing a discrete subject through
exclusion. The “abject” designates that which has been expelled or
discharged from the body and rendered “Other.” The abject is not only
alien to the subject but also intimate with it. This intimacy is
characterized as overproximity and therefore produces panic in the
subject. Hal Foster in The Return of the Real, indicates how:

The abject touches on the fragility of our boundaries, the fragility

of the spatial distinction between our insides and outsides as well
as of the temporal passage between the maternal body (again the
privileged realm of the abject) and the paternal law (Foster, 1996;
153).

Therefore, both spatially and temporally, abjection is a condition in

which subjecthood is troubled and where meaning collapses. Butler
concludes that the expulsion of the abject allows the subject to
establish the contours of the body by constructing an alien Other, the
“not-me.” She describes how the boundary of the body, as well as the
distinction between internal and external, is “established through the
ejection and transvaluation of something originally part of identity
into a defiling otherness” (Butler, 1990; 133). Butler uses the
definition of the abject to question the validity of terms such as inner
and outer, revealing how they make sense only with reference to a
mediating boundary that strives for stability. In other words, if we
188 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

accept the terms of inner and outer, we constitute a binary distinction

that stabilizes and consolidates the coherent subject. The abject,
according to Butler, consolidates this fantasy by constructing an alien
other, against which the subject defines its impermeable external
border. However, the moment of expulsion, the creation of the abject,
is what interests me here as it threatens to explode this binary
definition, as the inner literally becomes the outer. When the
coherence of the subject is challenged, the meaning and necessity of
these terms becomes vulnerable to displacement: “If the ‘inner world’
no longer designates a topos, then the internal fixity of the self and,
indeed, the internal locale of gender identity, become suspect” (ibid;
134). In other words, the informe is always already at work on the
margins of the abject; the informe is present when form and borders
are at the point of dissolution.
As I have already indicated, the crucial ambiguity in
Kristeva’s formulation is the slippage between the operation “to
abject” and the condition “to be abject.” “To abject” is to expel, to get
rid of what is unacceptable to the self; “to be abject” is to be repulsive,
unsure of one’s coherence as a subject. For Kristeva, as for Butler, the
operation to abject is necessary for the maintenance of the subject as
well as society while the condition to be abject is corrosive and
threatening. According to Butler, when the subject abjects what is
unacceptable in order to define him/herself against an alien other, the
subject is colluding in a fantasy that maintains that a coherent subject
is a viable and desirable possibility. In modernist writing, Kristeva
views abjection as conservative, even defensive. Her example
demonstrates that even writers such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline
sublimate and purify the abject. So is the abject disruptive of
subjective and social orders, or a confirmation of them? To what
extent does Orlan’s project of the 1990s transgress binary distinctions
and terms of symbolic difference, or in its horror-filled content,
merely offer provocation that allows the viewer to walk away,
reassured and reconfirmed in their coherent subjecthood?
Abject art does not only belong to the domain of self-
representation but, as the Whitney Museum exhibition on abject art
demonstrated in 1993, covers many social and cultural
preoccupations. According to the authors of the museum catalogue,
Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art, abject art became
the oppositional art form of the 1990s. It encodes the traditional stance
 The Art of Louise Bourgeois and Orlan 189

of the avant-garde, which positions itself outside the mainstream and

seeks to flout artistic and social conventions:

Although ‘abject art’ is a play on ‘object art,’ the term does not
connote an art movement so much as it describes a body of work
which incorporates or suggests abject materials such as dirt, hair,
excrement, dead animals, menstrual blood, and rotting food in
order to confront taboo issues of gender and sexuality. This work
also includes abject subject matter – that which is deemed
inappropriate by a conservative, dominant culture (Levi, 1993).

Its very classification as the oppositional art form suggests its

accepted and necessary position in both the art world and society as
the rebel that reconfirms the hegemonic order through its oppositional
stance. However, where abject art offers an interesting and powerful
critique is in the domain of self-representation and the ways in which
artists are currently seeking to present a self or identity.
As I have demonstrated so far, Orlan’s early performance
work marks a move away from the figuration of identity as an integral
whole. Now I would like to turn to an analysis of La Réincarnation de
Sainte Orlan, a project that combines notions of the temporal and
performative in her identity construction with an emphasis on the
abject in the literal manipulation of her bodily contours. Orlan’s
project since the beginning of the 1990s involves repeated operations
of plastic surgery that are intended to shape her body in ways which
conform to her sense of her own identity. She thus becomes a living
portrait, using flesh and blood rather than canvas and paint to create a
likeness. In her manifesto, published on her website, she calls her
work carnal art and situates it within the tradition of self-portraiture:

L’Art Charnel est un travail d’autoportrait au sens classique, mais

avec des moyens technologiques qui sont ceux de son temps. Il
oscille entre défiguration et refiguration. Il s’inscrit dans la chair
parce que notre époque commence à en donner la possibilité. Le
corps devient un ‘ready-made modifié’ car il n’est plus ce ready-
made idéal qu’il suffit de signer” (Manifeste de l’Art Charnel,
Internet).

Orlan’s work, and its connotations with a sort of social sado-

masochism and corporeal alteration, often uses violent imagery that
elicits strong emotional and physical responses. In this, her present
work has clearly evolved from her early performances, which also
190 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

sought to bring about direct psychic and emotional responses in the

spectator. Her use of plastic surgery both alludes to a cultural norm of
feminine beauty (through its conventional associations and purpose)
and transgresses it, by enacting rituals of pain on the body through
cutting and dismemberment. Its shock value derives from the sight of
a woman who “remodels” her face and flesh through her own action
or by surgery.
Orlan’s work has been associated with cyber-feminism
because of its links to the technologies of plastic surgery and the way
she has packaged herself as a product in CD Rom form. Ideas about
cyber-feminism refer to the potential for future spaces, opened up
through science and technology, in which images of femininity and
masculinity would be so altered as to be devoid of binary meaning,
indicating a loss of any sense of a natural or essential body.9 However,
Orlan’s recent project appears to confirm rather than destroy gendered
distinctions as her self-image relies upon a variety of western icons of
female beauty. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the surgery that
Orlan has undergone alters her facial features to conform to a
composite of images from the Western art canon of five famous
Renaissance and post-Renaissance representations of idealized
feminine beauty. There are many problematic ramifications to Orlan’s
project that are significant to debates about women artists and the
representation of female corporeality and which have been
commented on by critics. Rosemary Betterton has observed:
Like the story of the ugly sister in Cinderella who cuts off her
toes in order to fit the slipper or the Little Mermaid who walks on
knives in Hans Andersen’s story, mutilation of the flesh stands as a
powerful negative message that female desire can only be achieved
through pain. Cosmetic surgery is ambivalent in its assertion, on the
one hand, that we have the freedom to transform our bodies as given
in nature, and on the other, that such self-mutilation inscribes a
cultural ideal (Betterton, 1996; 147-8).

Orlan has stressed that this is not a project in the search of

beauty. She claims to have chosen the five beauties as much for their

9
See, for example, Donna Haraway’s essay “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science,
Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” in Simians,
Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York and London: Routledge,
1991, pp.151-163.
 The Art of Louise Bourgeois and Orlan 191

particular mythological or historical importance as for their physical

attributes. Although Orlan thereby refutes any narcissistic investment
in her project, the historical and mythological connotations remain
important iconographic issues. For example, she chose the nose of a
sculpture of Diana because the goddess was aggressive and refused to
submit to the will of gods and men; she chose the forehead of da
Vinci’s Mona Lisa because of its androgyny and the chin of
Botticelli’s Venus because of her desire for love and spiritual beauty.
Each operation that Orlan has undergone is expected to change a
specific feature of her physiognomy, and she generates computer
images for the surgeons to follow. That her features are drawn from
different styles and periods effectively demonstrates that the concept
of “natural beauty” is a question of history and fashion, a discursive
construct. Currently, her appearance is in defiance of cultural codes of
beauty, especially since the forehead implants that were intended to
replicate the appearance of the Mona Lisa’s brow, and that are
commonly referred to in the press as Orlan’s horns. As Philip
Auslander has pointed out, the fact that Orlan’s unconventional
physiognomy is the result not of defiance of her culture’s standards
but, rather, of an effort to conform to canonical models of beauty is an
irony that cannot be ignored: “The work’s critical edge derives from
the failure of the subject to become the desired image” (Auslander,
1997; 131). Paradoxically, the combination of five “beauties” has
resulted in the creation of a grotesque mask, highlighting the way in
which physiognomy, rather than revealing the subject, operates as a
masking or a masquerade of identity.

Sculpting Identity

The project, La Réincarnation de Sainte Orlan, in itself as

well as its various forms of documentation, is open to multiple
readings in relation to questions of femininity, social taboos, private
and public domains, the limits of art and self-portraiture and the
commodification of women. Orlan has eliminated the distance
between artist and object in representation and undermines many of
the senses of self-portraiture that depend upon this critical distance by
using her own body as the blank canvas and confronting in the most
direct way possible the concept of woman as an object in
representation. However, by rendering herself redundant as practising
192 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

artist, she places the medical establishment, in particular the doctors

who operate on her, in the position of artists by proxy. Therefore she
objectifies herself with regard to them by offering up her flesh as the
raw material from which they fashion an image of femininity. The
way in which her work is documented (her operations are shown on
video screens in galleries and exhibited in photographic format) also
does not exclude her from objectification with regards to the art
market and its audience.
By engaging in this project, Orlan has demonstrated her own
investment in the images of female beauty that have been enshrined
by the western art tradition and has established a form of control over
her own self-image which allows her to accede to the power of that
image and her investment. As Marsha Meskimmon has indicated, this
control could be similar to the pathological control which is akin to
eating disorders and other self-damaging behaviour that is undertaken
by disempowered individuals struggling to maintain some sort of self-
control. Meskimmon observes:
The issue of control in the Orlan project is crucial because it alters
the subject/object relationship in the work. If she can be said to
control the project, it could be a dynamic response to the
technological possibilities available to people in the late twentieth
century and the concepts of excessive femininity as masquerade.
If, however, Orlan is the material of surgeons and the art
establishment, her work is little more than a radical restaging of
the traditional disempowerment of women in our society
(Meskimmon, 1996; 127).

Orlan herself has stressed that these are not masochistic

performances but interventions into the technological reworking of the
human body. Orlan’s refusal to play the role of the passive patient is
important and undeniable. She is an active participant and the
surgeons are as much performers in her theatre of operations as she is
the object performed upon. While she cannot reverse the power
relations that necessitate her being the object of the surgeon’s knife,
the surgeons are as inscribed in her artistic discourse as she is
inscribed within the medical discourse. Her project, in all its
complications, re-emphasizes the difficulties of women artists who
attempt to come into self-representation through reappropriating
femininities which operate within a patriarchal system.
 The Art of Louise Bourgeois and Orlan 193

While Orlan’s project demonstrates very literally Butler’s

theory of identity as performative (action and transformation with
their material consequences are clearly in process), it also comes close
to demonstrating Butler’s refinement of her theory as explained in
Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” In Bodies that
Matter, Butler suggests that gender identity is an impossible goal that
can never be fully realised. It is a performance whose fault-line lies in
its incorporated knowledge of its own constructed nature. Orlan’s
project is interminable; it has no stated goal or end-point (she does not
know how many operations she will undertake and has envisaged
further identity-changing processes that will extend beyond the
physical element). Contrary to the conventions of plastic surgery
where surgeons display images of before and after to persuade
potential clients of the perfect transformations they can achieve, Orlan
uses the technology of plastic surgery in ways that challenge the
rhetoric of the stable self, the ideal self that cosmetic surgery is
advertised to reveal, and that is, therefore, intrinsic to surgical
discourse. The surgeon’s publicity images allude to a hidden process
which produces a static result, images of Orlan during and post
operation refuse the notion of an image frozen in time and space and
suggest instead a definition that foregrounds process and change.
Rather than being the means by which an inner identity achieves its
appropriate external manifestation, Orlan’s use of plastic surgery
exposes a self for which identity is mutable, suspended, en-procès.
The reason that Orlan’s project has gained so much media
attention (that rarely makes any reference to her work as a
performance artist prior to the 1990 project, despite a career that has
spanned thirty years) is perhaps not to be understood as a result of the
critique she is making on plastic surgery, feminine beauty or identity
but in the effect it has on its spectators. This effect derives precisely
from Kristeva’s observations on how morphology is constituted, the
inner and outer, permeable and impermeable. Central to Orlan’s
project are the video projections of her operations, which are screened
worldwide in various galleries. The time in between operations is
dedicated to exhibitions derived from this performance: reliquaries are
made out of bottling the fat that is extracted from her body during
liposuction, blood-soaked gauze is exhibited alongside photographs of
Orlan in the stages of recovery. This ties in with her early work and its
references to religious iconography, martyrdom and religious relics.
194 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

Sarah Wilson has indicated the religious implications of the operation

performance, recorded in the photographs:
The Sandra Gering gallery exhibited forty one pairs of computer
composite photos paired with photos of recovery, equivalent to
forty exhibition days (Orlan in the wilderness) plus a final face
created with morphing software, and in addition reliquaries of
human flesh in resin, and Dr Cramer’s operating outfit–a
displaced, empty shroud. It was a Passion Play for our times, with
all the drame, mystery and anxiety generated by surgical
procedure, followed by the triumphant resurrection of unscarred
Flesh (Orlan, 1996; 13).

Orlan challenges the logic of a system (western art) that privileges

form over matter. By filming the process by which her physical image
changes, Orlan reveals the informe becoming abject, a site of
intervention, the borderline between inner and outer.
During her operations, Orlan reads from carefully chosen
texts: a passage from Lemoine-Luccioni’s book on dress, La Robe,
extracts from Michel Serres, Artaud’s Corps sans organes, and the
well-known passage from Kristeva’s Pouvoirs de l’horreur on what
constitutes the abject. These texts are important to Orlan’s
performance as they frame it within a literary, psychoanalytic and
theoretical exploration, establishing the control she exerts over her
project and situating it for her viewers. As she explains in her
manifesto: “L’Art Charnel transforme le corps en langue et renverse le
principe chrétien du verbe qui se fait chair au profit de la chair faite
verbe; seule la voix d’Orlan restera inchangée, l’artiste travaille sur la
representation” (Manifeste de l’Art Charnel, Internet). However, the
contents of the texts have often been denigrated by critics who attach
more importance to the act of reading, to the voice that maintains a
monologue throughout the clearly painful operations. This is partly
due to Orlan’s claim that she feels her voice captures and expresses
her “self” better than her physiognomy ever did, and partly due to the
necessary importance of her role as conscious agent. Parveen Adams
has written:

What is important is not meaning but articulation. Orlan’s voice

carries on through all the vicissitudes of the operation. Perhaps
neither she nor the spectator actually follows the meaning. It
doesn't matter. In a sense her reading is a resolute turning away
from the body at the very moment when it is critically involved in
 The Art of Louise Bourgeois and Orlan 195

surgery. It is a way of ignoring her body . . . If this use of the

voice works, it is because it divorces her from meaning and
designates her. It is the hypnotic quality of the voice and not what
it is saying that matters (Orlan, 1996; 69).

However, I contend that the passages that she reads, Kristeva’s in

particular, indicate the reasons for which her performances are so
difficult to behold.
In a recently published paper, Kate Ince observes that Orlan’s
readings refer doubly, both to Orlan’s body and to the aims and
implications of the Réincarnation project. She demonstrates how
Orlan’s readings are performative, referring to Butler’s claim that
“there is no reference to a pure body which is not at the same time a
further formation of that body” (Butler quoted in Ince, 1999; 66). I
would argue that in Orlan’s performance, no element takes precedence
over another nor can be separated from the spectacle as a whole. The
texts are an integral part to the performance in the same way as the
question and answer sessions that she holds with her video audience
or the importance of the costumes, worn even by the surgeons, and the
all-pervasive element of the carnivalesque (see figure 36). However, I
believe that Kristeva’s text is crucial to an understanding of the
audience’s response to Orlan’s show, wherein lies the meaning of her
work.
The video installations of Orlan’s operations and the
exhibition of the work which results from them demonstrates how the
fetishized surface of the female body is opened to reveal its disturbing
interior; the work demonstrates a progression from the exterior, which
masks the horror of abject matter, to the interior of the body. From the
tradition of the fine art nude where the unregulated sexual body is
repressed in order to maintain the unity and integrity of the viewing
subject (that is, the perfect female body representing the object of
desire for the heterosexual male spectator), Orlan’s work has evolved
in a way that does not so much elude the objectifying gaze as expose
its profoundly fetishistic structure. Orlan’s operations embody the
slippage of the abject as they reveal the division between surface
allure and its concealed horror. The nature of her work exposes the
body as a problematic site that disrupts normative assumptions about
self and identity.
The disturbing power of Orlan’s work lies in its ability to
have an impact on more than the cerebral register. The shudders of
196 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

disgust, anticipation, horror and fascination that her work incites in

her audience are violent physical responses. Orlan insists that the
operation is shown live as it is the moment at which the body is cut
open; the body is the material with which she is working and the
content of her work is in its very process and progress. Orlan denies
that she experiences any pain during her operations, despite only
having a local anaesthetic for procedures which usually require a
general anaesthetic. This is a point that she emphasizes in her
manifesto, claiming that it distinguishes her Art Charnel from Body
Art:

Contrairement au ‘Body Art’ dont il se distingue, l’Art Charnel ne

désire pas la douleur, ne la recherche pas comme source de
purification, ne la conçoit pas comme Rédemption. L’Art Charnel
ne s'intéresse pas au résultat plastique final, mais à l'opération-
chirurgicale-performance et au corps modifié, devenu lieu de
débat public (Manifeste de l’Art Charnel, Internet).

Orlan describes what she experiences as discomfort and

claims that it pales to insignificance beside the pain of childbirth. That
Orlan denies any pain is ambivalent and perhaps unsettling in the
context of a defence of her work as feminist, it does however run
against the tradition in body art, where performers have emphasized
the pain they undergo in performances in order to stress their artistic
credibility. The denial corresponds to Orlan’s desire not to represent
the body’s material presence as irreducible but rather contingent and
malleable. It also serves a further purpose when Orlan turns to her
audience and says – you are about to see videos which will make you
suffer. Orlan displaces her pain onto the suffering of her audience.
Orlan’s work undoes the work of representation. During the
operation, her face is partially detached from her head, a tube is
inserted to separate the skin from the flesh and the surgeon’s finger
follows, gradually the face becomes pure exteriority and the camera
shows the red bloody mass behind the skin (see figure 35). The face
no longer projects an illusion of depth and in revealing that behind the
image there is nothing, Orlan disturbs one fundamental illusion about
the inner and the outer, that the body can no longer be understood as
representing the self, or the face as being the locus of identity, because
 The Art of Louise Bourgeois and Orlan 197

the face is an appearance without essence.10 In her exploration of this

fragile borderline, Orlan abjects matter that is difficult to behold. In
the eyes of the audience, during this process, she becomes abject. The
subversive power of her performance lies in her simultaneous
personification of Kristeva’s two terms. Her operation destroys the
distinction between inner and outer, her body becomes permeable as
the surgeon’s knife manipulates its contours.
The artefacts that Orlan places in exhibitions of her work,
including the bodily matter that I have described previously, can
safely be qualified as a form of abject art. Yet once this matter is
detached from the body, it becomes inert and consequently less
threatening. It is precisely in the collision of the process of abjecting
with the abject figure that lies the subversive potential of Orlan’s live
performance. Confronting the abject incites panic in the viewer; it puts
the viewing subject’s sense of unified self into crisis. Barbara Creed
has drawn on Kristeva in an analysis of horror films. In referring to
those moments when the spectator is forced to look away, she writes
that in this instance:

Strategies of identification are temporarily broken, as the

spectator is constructed in the place of horror, the place where the
sight/site can no longer be endured, the place where pleasure in
looking is transformed into pain and the spectator is punished for
his/her voyeuristic desires. Confronted by the sight of the
monstrous, the viewing subject is put into crisis — boundaries,
designed to keep the abject at bay, threaten to disintegrate,
collapse (Creed, 1993; 137).

The meaning of Orlan’s work lies in the process of continually

destroying and rebuilding her identity. This simultaneously calls into
question the identity of the viewer.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have tried to demonstrate the way in which

two very different artists have come to terms with self-representation.

10
The psychoanalytic implications of Orlan’s project, dealing with issues of inside
and outside and relating them to Lacan, anxiety and lack, is explored in Parveen
Adams’s “Operation Orlan” (Orlan, 1996).
198 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

Bourgeois’s sculpture manifests the interruption of binary distinctions

and a new mapping of gendered morphology that frees up relations
between artwork and viewer for an alternative construction of identity.
Orlan’s performance work demonstrates how an artist moved away
from the fascination with surface to concentrate on the construction of
an identity through time. Her work, focused in on the human body,
also betrays the move back towards the indexical sign and an attempt
to ground the referent in a temporal reality. The way in which Orlan’s
performance work revels in the sensual potential of the body testifies
to its historical context but, I would argue, it also paves the way for
much contemporary art which is situated in the real; a current “real”
that is situated in the abject or traumatized body.
Hal Foster has indicated some of the reasons for this
preoccupation in the work of contemporary artists:

There is dissatisfaction with the textualist model of culture as well

as the conventionalist view of reality — as if the real, repressed in
poststructuralist postmodernism, had returned as traumatic. Then,
too, there is disillusionment with the celebration of desire as an
open passport of a mobile subject – as if the real, dismissed by a
performative postmodernism, were marshalled against the
imaginary world of a fantasy captured by consumerism (Foster,
1996; 166).

He also relates this interest to recent social phenomena such

as AIDS, the destroyed welfare state, poverty and crime. He observes
that the diseased or damaged body is the evidentiary witness or
testimonial to certain truths. He also indicates the danger of
designating the abject body as the site of truth as it risks becoming a
point of alterity pushed to nihilism. Nevertheless, on the other hand, in
popular culture, trauma is treated as an event that guarantees the
subject, and in this psychologistic register: “the subject, however
disturbed, rushes back as witness, testifier, survivor […] In trauma
discourse, then, the subject is evacuated and elevated at once” (ibid;
168). In Bourgeois’s part-objects, the artist becomes an absentee
authority that challenges the experience of the viewing subject. If
Orlan’s recent work seeks to tackle two contradictory imperatives,
deconstructive analyses and identity politics, suggesting that the self
must be destroyed in order to be represented, that contiguity rather
than mimesis represents the contours of the self, it also exemplifies a
strange rebirth of the author. Orlan’s project witnesses the return of
 The Art of Louise Bourgeois and Orlan 199

the real converging with the return of the referential. This is not the
referential as we knew it, static and authoritative, this referential is
subject to metamorphosis, process and change. Bourgeois and Orlan
have contributed to a body of work that rethinks the morphology of
the subject, which contests the very notion of the self and how it is to
be represented. By tracing the fault-lines of the self through reference
to the informe and the abject, these artists expose the falsity of a
naturalized, coherent subject and search for a means of expressing the
multiplicity of their lived experience.
 Conclusion

Throughout this study, I have referred to the intersubjective

nature of self-representation, which I defined in the introduction as an
insistence upon the contingency of the self of the artist/writer on that
of the interpreter of the work. As I have demonstrated, the
intersubjectivity of these encounters, between artwork and viewer, text
and reader, instantiates the decentring and dispersal of the Cartesian
subject of modernism. The Cartesian tradition taught us to juxtapose
thought and body, and to purge them of all ambiguity – in abandoning
this tradition we reinstate the embodied subject as one who is always
already intentionally related to the world in some measure. The work I
have chosen to focus upon exemplifies instances of this profound shift
in the conception and experience of subjectivity that has occurred over
the last century.
While self-representation is not the only arena where this shift
has been manifested, self-writing and self-portraiture are necessarily
paradigmatic of this change as the originary subject was, and often
still is, presumed to be revealed by the work. I have sought to show
how the work that I have chosen, rather than revealing a subject,
creates and constructs that subject. I have highlighted the position of
the body as the locus of this dispersed self and as a marker of the
subject’s place in the social and artistic arenas. The self-
representations I have examined propose that the subject comes about
always in relationship to others and the locus of identity lies
elsewhere. The body, as represented in these works, is not an
unmediated repository of selfhood or subjectivity, it only acquires
meaning through its contextualization within certain codes of identity:
interventions and interactions by and with others. For those who wish
to privilege self-representation for its merging of art and life, who
envisage the unique body of the artist as self-contained in intention
and authority, the body must be conceived of as an unmediated
reflection of the self. Rather, I have shown how self-representation
problematizes the ontological coherence of the body. The relation to
the self entails reciprocity and contingency as an embodied experience
202 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

of subjectivity involves being, simultaneously, both object and

subject.
I have sought to show how the apparent narcissism of self-
representation, for example, Leiris’s misgivings expressed in his
preface to L’Âge d’Homme or Orlan’s fixation on her own body, is,
while remaining an exploration of the self, dependent upon an
exploration of the other. Duchamp’s self-portrait implicates the
viewer, as do Bourgeois’s autobiographical Towers, while Leiris
projects and formulates an identity around pre-existing mythological
figures and Bacon interacts with a tradition of historical self-
portraiture. The narcissism of self-representation is a projection of the
internal structures of identification outwards, interconnecting the
internal and external self as well as the self and other. Rosalind Krauss
has argued, “identity […] is primarily fused with identifications (a felt
connection to someone else)” (Krauss, 1985; 197), while Butler has
indicated that the narcissistic imaginary by which the subject
constitutes itself, produces the body as the image of the other: “The
specular image of the body itself is in some sense the image of the
Other” (Butler, 1993; 76).
The work that I have focused on splinters rather than coheres
the self. Instead of assuring the pre-social coherence of the self or
subjectivity, these self-representations enact narcissism as
contingency. However, while these works seem to describe the
destabilization of the subject and the interconnectedness of self and
other, subjectivity remains embedded in the materiality of the body.
Subjectivity is neither decorporealized or made transcendent but is
enacted through the body. As Noël, Prassinos and Orlan demonstrate,
the body is no longer objectified or fixed (indeed, in Le 19 Octobre
1977, the body no longer exists as a set of definable contours but as a
sensory receptacle) but enacted through particular relations of
production and reception. I do not propose that the works that I have
drawn on, in terms of reception, can be seen to mean anything or
everything, but rather that these texts and images have a range of
potential meanings that are linked and relative to the contexts of their
production, display and interpretation. However much autonomy a
particular reader/viewer may have, or assume to have, in front of a
painting/text, according to this theory, subjectivity is always produced
at least by the interaction between the “I” of the work and the “you”
this “I” addresses. Meaning is located not only in the dialectic
 Conclusion 203

between artwork and viewer but also in the dialectic of the past and
present of the work.
My concluding study of the work of Orlan is exemplary of the
way in which artists are now enacting the dispersed subject of the
contemporary era and indicative of the future directions that self-
representation may take in the visual arts. Severing the link between
bodily appearance and self-identity, Orlan constructs herself through
technologies of representation as well as medical technology, to
produce herself, as Amelia Jones describes, as “posthuman” (Jones,
1998; 227). Orlan’s body is experienced both by herself and her
audience in and through technology. While refocusing attention back
onto an embodied subjectivity, Orlan paradoxically seems to be
disembodied via high-tech media. Amelia Jones observes how this
apparent contradiction characterizes much contemporary art:

Seemingly paradoxically, given the conventional association of

technology with disembodiment and disengagement from the
world, recent body-oriented practices have increasingly mobilized
and highlighted this reversibility, using the artists’ own body/self
as both subject and object, as multiplicitous, particular, and
unfixable, and engaging with audiences in increasingly interactive
ways (Jones, 1998; 239).

While technological and media innovations are rapidly and

more clearly absorbed into the sphere of visual arts and are sometimes
slower to appear in literature, the consequences of these innovations
and the implications they hold for the ways in which we conceive of
our subjectivity, inevitably spill over into textual form. In the last
chapter of French Autobiography, Michael Sheringham looks at
recent innovations in autobiographical writing and examines how
certain writers have incorporated the visual aspect of memory into
their texts, either through the literal use of images or their indirect
transcription. He observes, “For a majority of Westerners in our time
photographs are the most telling and evocative tokens of the
individual past […] photographs have come to play a prominent part
in modern autobiography” (Sheringham, 1993; 315). Looking in
particular at Roland Barthes, Marguerite Duras and Paul Auster,
Sheringham examines how, for these writers, the photograph is an
emanation of the real and how it can be used to circumvent or to
204 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

highlight the vulnerability of the process of remembering by making it

manifest within the text.
If, as Sheringham observes, contemporary autobiographers are
turning increasingly towards a visual aesthetic in order to inscribe
their identity, then this goes some way towards demonstrating, not
only the concerns surrounding the problematic status of the self and
how this can be expressed textually, but also the interplay between
genres that this thesis has attempted to encapsulate and express. My
comparative approach has been an attempt to highlight the profoundly
intertextual nature of self-representation. While visual arts and
literature remain distinct art forms with their own set of internal and
generic rules, I have revealed here, partly by concentrating on writers
who are driven by a visual aesthetic, the extent to which visual art and
the written text are motivated by mutual concerns. Leiris and Bacon
demonstrate clearly an exchange of influences; Leiris perceived in
Bacon’s painting the moment of le sacré that he desired to capture in
his writing while Bacon was aware of and responded to, amongst
other interests, the Surrealist legacy of le hasard. Noël and Prassinos
demonstrate how a visual aesthetic can be brought to bear upon a text,
resulting in the instigation of radical innovations in prose writing.
Orlan, similarly to Duchamp, uses words and text to expand and
diffuse the frame of her visual art. These artists and writers locate the
body and vision as sites of interaction and interplay between literature
and visual art in ways that destabilize generic hierarchies and continue
to call into question the nature of the subject.
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Chevreul, E. Théorie des effets optiques que présentent les étoffes de
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D’Harnoncourt, A. and Mcshine, K. (ed.s) Marcel Duchamp New
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Dällenbach, L. The Mirror in the Text trans. J. Whiteley, Cambridge,
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Duchamp, M. Ingénieur du Temps Perdu, entretiens avec Pierre

Cabanne Paris, Editions Pierre Belfond, 1967
Frascina, F. and J. Harris (eds) Art in Modern Culture: an Anthology
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Jones, A. Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp
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Woodall, J. Portraiture: Facing the Subject Manchester, Manchester
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Chapter Two

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Aragon, L. Le Traité du Style Paris, Gallimard, 1980
Barthes, R. L’Empire des Signes Genève, Flammarion, 1980
Beaujour, M. Miroirs d’encre: Rhétorique de l’autoportrait Paris,
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Leiris, M. “Bacon le hors-la-loi” in Fourbis Paris, Gallimard,1989

Leiris, M. André Masson Rouen, Imprimerie Wolf, 1940
Leiris, M. Biffures Paris, Gallimard, 1948
Leiris, M. Brisées Paris, Gallimard, 1968
Leiris, M. Fourbis Paris, Gallimard, 1955
Leiris, M. Francis Bacon Paris, Albin Michel, 1983
Leiris, M. Journal 1922 - 1989 édition établie par Jean Jamin, Paris,
Gallimard, 1992
Leiris, M. La Peinture est plus forte que moi
Leiris, M. L’Age d’Homme Paris, Gallimard, 1995
Leiris, M. Miroir de la Tauromachie Montpellier, Fata Morgana,
1981
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Sheringham, M. French Autobiography: Devices and Desires
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Woodall, J. (ed.) Portraiture: Facing the Subject Manchester and
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Chapter Three

Archimbaud, M. Francis Bacon: Entretiens avec Michel Archim-

baud Paris, Editions Jean-Claude Lattès, 1992
Barthes, R. L’Obvie et L’Obtus Paris, Seuil, 1982
Battersby, C. Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetic
London, Women’s Press, 1989
Baxandall, M. Patterns of Intention and the Historical Explanation
of Pictures New Haven, Yale UP, 1985
Benjamin, A. “Betraying Faces: Lucien Freud’s Self-Portraits” in Art,
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Nochlin, L. “Some Women Realists” in Arts Magazine May 1974
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Van Alphen, E. Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self London,
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Chapter Four

Part One

Barthes, R. Le Plaisir du Texte Paris, Seuil, 1973

Barthes, R. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes Paris, Seuil, 1975
Beaujour, M. Miroirs d’Encre: rhétorique de l’autoportrait Paris,
Seuil, 1980
Blanchot, M. “La littérature et le droit à la mort” in De Kafka à Kafka
Paris, Gallimard, 1981
Blanchot, M. L’Arrêt de Mort Paris, Gallimard, 1979
Carn, H. Bernard Noël Paris, Seghers, 1986
Derrida, J. Mémoires pour Paul de Man Paris, Galilée, 1988
Merleau-Ponty, M. L’Oeil et l’Esprit Paris, Gallimard, 1964
Noël, B. and Frémon, J. Le double jeu du tu Montpellier, Fata
Morgana, 1977
Noël, B. Journal du regard Paris, P. O. L., 1994
Noël, B. Le 19 octobre 1977 Paris, P. O. L., 1998
210 The Body as Medium and Metaphor

Noël, B. Le Château de Cène Paris, Gallimard, 1990

Noël, B. L’espace du poème: Entretiens avec Dominique Sampiero
Paris, P. O. L., 1998
Noël, B. Onze romans d’oeil Paris, P. O. L., 1999
Noël, B. Treize Cases du je Paris, P. O. L., 1998
Proust, M. A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, vol. 3 Paris, Gallimard,
1954

Part Two

Barthes, R. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes Paris, Seuil, 1975

Best, V. and Collier, P. (eds) Powerful Bodies: Performance in
French Cultural Studies Bern, Peter Lang, 1999
Breton, A. L’Anthologie de l’humour noir Paris, Sagittaire, 1939
Prassinos, G. Mon Coeur les écoute Paris, HB Editions, 1998
Richard, A. Le monde suspendu de Gisèle Prassinos Calvisson, HB
Editions, 1997

Chapter Five

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Battersby, C. Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics
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Berger, J. Ways of Seeing London, BBC and Penguin Books Ltd,
1972
Bernadac, M. L. Louise Bourgeois, Paris and New York, Flammarion,
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Best and Collier, P. Powerful Bodies: Performance in French
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Betterton, R. An Intimate Distance: Women Artists and the Body
London, Routledge, 1996
Bois, Y. A. and Krauss, R. Formless: A User’s Guide New York,
Zone Books 1997
 Bibliography 211

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Caws, M. A. (ed.) Surrealism and Women Cambridge, Mass., MIT
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Cole, I. (ed) Louise Bourgeois Oxford, Museum of Modern Art, 1996
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Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. Anti-Oedipe Paris, Editions de Minuit,
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Meskimmon, M. The Art of Reflection: Women Artists’ Self-Por-

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