October 14, 1907. Paris, France.
While his wife and child remain at the art colony, Rainer Maria Rilke spends several months in Paris. On this particular date, he is studying an early still-life by Paul Cezanne titled The Black Marble Clock (1869). The painting belonged to Cezanne's friend, Emile Zola.
Later, the painting would move to other private hands before winding up back in Paris, where it currently resides with a rich person. This is what paintings do. But don’t let it distract you from The Black Marble Clock.
The world of the painting: The Black Marble Clock (1869).
What does Cezanne include in this still-life?
An inventory of objects might mention the half-dressed table; a folded white cloth on the surface; a tea cup and plate; one lemon; a large seashell or maybe a dish; one crystal vase or candle stick that seems to hold a reflected object; large black clock looming the background, two vases visible on top of it . . . and whatever else I've missed or misread.
The painting seems to get richer the longer one looks at it.
The story it tells depends on the palette Cezanne selected; the painting would not be the same if the colors had developed differently. This leads me to the obvious question, namely, what colors feel essential to this palette? What role does light play in diminishing or expanding these colors?
It seems as if the whites of the fabric tablecloth get plucked up to resonate in the multiple objects. The darker accents also reappear inside these same objects and across the dark background, in that space where contrast emerges between those burnished portions that resemble a coppery gold.
Let's go through what we know of the poet who is studying this painting. Let us mention, too, how we know this, and the context in which this knowledge is gathered.
I often resort to this practice when beginning an essay or a review: a simple dialogue between the writer and the page about the nature of knowledge expressed in the text.
How do we know what we know?
And what do we mean when we say that we know it?
We know what Rilke thought of this painting because he described it in a letter to his wife, Clara. During this year in Paris, when he lived separately from wife and daughter, Rilke wrote a daily letter about the art he had seen to her. As an artist, Clara found herself committed to childcare, but she must have valued these letters because she saved them.
We don't know what Clara thought about the distance a child had placed between her and her own creative practice.
Am I changing the “subject”?
October 14, 1907. Paris.
The date and place have not changed. The aforementioned letter from Rilke to Clara continues.
Rilke seems interested in the sounds of Cezanne's colors in The Black Marble Clock:
Although one of his idiosyncrasies is to use pure chrome yellow and burning lacquer red in his lemons and apples, he knows how to contain their loudness within the picture: cast into a listening blue, as if into an ear, it receives a silent response from within, so that no one outside needs to think himself addressed or accosted. His still lifes are so wonderfully occupied with themselves…
Pure chrome yellow and burning lacquer red are "loud" to Rilke. And Cezanne "contains" this loudness by adding a "listening blue."
Cezanne painted his first still-life, Still-Life with White Bread (1865), the year prior to this. I am definitely changing the subject.
The world of the painting: Donald Barthelme on Joyce.
In an essay titled “After Joyce” (1964, I think), Donald Barthelme tried to defend non-representational art from its critics, particularly those who felt ‘alienated’ by the absence of lyrical proximity. I will excerpt a few parts (and italicize the phrases that glimmer to me):
Satisfied with neither the existing world nor the existing literature, Joyce and Stein modify the world by adding to its store of objects the literary object— which is then encountered in the same way as other objects in the world. The question becomes: What is the nature of the new object? Here one can see an immediate result of the shift. Interrogating older works, the question is: what do they say about the world and being in the world? But the literary object is itself "world" and the theoretical advantage is that in asking it questions you are asking questions of the world directly. This sounds like a species of ventriloquism— the writer throwing his voice. But it is, rather, a stunning strategic gain for the writer. He has in fact removed himself from the work, just as Joyce instructed him to do. The reader is not listening to an authoritative account of the world delivered by an expert (Faulkner on Mississippi, Hemingway on the corrida) but bumping into something that is there, like a rock or refrigerator.
Barthelme turns abruptly to modern painting here:
The question so often asked of modern painting, "What is it?" contains more than the dull skepticism of the man who is not going to have the wool pulled over his eyes. It speaks of a fundamental placement in relation to the work, that of a voyager in the world coming upon a strange object. The reader reconstitutes the work by his active participation, by approaching the object, tapping it, shaking it, holding it to his ear to hear the roaring within.
It is characteristic of the object that it does not declare itself all at once, in a rush of pleasant naiveté. Joyce enforces the way in which Finnegans Wake is to be read. He conceived the reading to be a lifetime project, the book remaining always there, like the landscape surrounding the reader's home or the buildings bounding the reader's apartment. The book remains problematic, unexhausted.
As I turn abruptly to twitter and Brian Davey:
Joyce gives us “a linguistically exciting surface, dense, glittering, here opaque, here transparent,” Barthelme says. And there are worlds of possibility in these perversions, I think.
“Joyce he proceeds like a man weaving a blanket of what might be found in a hardware store,” adds Barthelme. “The strangeness of his project is an essential part of it, almost its point. The fabric falls apart, certainly, but where it hangs together we are privileged to encounter a world made new.” As for Gertrude Stein, her words and syntax also reveal “a willingness to follow language wherever it leads (and if it leads nowhere, to make capital of that).”
Joyce "defended his language... as a largely emotional medium built up by sifting and agglutination... " (Ellman)
"I very recently met a man who said, how do you do. A splendid story." (Stein)
“These perversities answer perfectly Valéry's specifications.” (Barthelme)
“Using this as an opportunity to once again post the syllabus Barthelme assigned his students. Ishmael Reed! Paley! Bernhard!” (Davey)
Finally, after much digression, I return to the essay that isn’t the clock or the letter in Paris. “It has been argued that the ontological status of the literary work has always been just this, that Pilgrim's Progress is an "object" in this sense just as Finnegans Wake is,” continues Barthelme, “but such arguments ignore the changed situation that ensues when the writer is aware of and exploits the possibilities of this special placement.”
And now comes the lovely finale:
Joyce and Stein reap the benefits of a new strategy. Their creations modify the beholder. I do not think it fanciful, for instance, to say that Governor Rockefeller, standing among his Mirós and de Koonings, is worked upon by them, and if they do not make a Democrat or a Socialist of him they at least alter the character of his Republicanism. Considered in this light, Soviet hostility to "formalist" art becomes more intelligible, as does the antipathy of senators, mayors and chairmen of building committees. In the same way, Joyce's book works its radicalizing will upon all men in all countries, even upon those who have not read it and will never read it.
The art changes us and we change it in turn. If I had a wife and a child, I’d be tempted to write a letter and tell them all about it.