Tyler

O SEE is a preternatural effort
no less than the automatic operation
of a natural law. Jules Romains' theory
of eyeless sight involves vision by means
of other organs than the eyes, even by the
pores of the skin. In *The Body's Rapture*,
Romains' novel, the hero, a ship's officer
very much in love, begins to hallucinate
his wife's image in his cabin while away
on his voyages. The novelist's speculation
is that these hallucinations are not neces-
sarily a supernatural phenomenon, but
issue merely from an intense desire to see
an absent object. If this "preternatural"
type of vision were a fact, it would seem
to validate the ancient theory of the astral
light, which is believed today by some
theosophical groups to act as a photo-
graphic plate extending infinitely through
space. Thus, the image of the sailor's wife
might have been registered on the astral
light, and through the husband's intense
desire, his eyes were enabled to see her
"astral photograph." Romains takes a
rationalistic view of the phenomenon—a
view opposed to the religious-magical
view of poetry that hallucination—or
vision of imaginary objects—is a violent
and creative form of pathology, as with
saints, poets, or madmen.

The moral implication of Romains'
thesis of preternatural vision goes beyond
the conscious erotic desire of an indivi-
dual. In regard to clinical investigation,
there exists no specific way of knowing
whether the pathological imagining of the
affected subject be the result of his active
desire, and thus projects the desire of his
own mind or body, or whether momen-
tarily his peculiar condition renders his
sight hypersensitive to usually unseen
emanations from some objective source,
as might be the case with Romains' sailor.

As Romains indicates, the philosophic
tendency in this speculative situation
would be to emphasize as the source of
hallucination, not fear or unconscious de-
sire, but conscious eroticism. The aspect
of love between the ship's officer and his
wife is its conversion of the romantic ideal
into the classical ideal—into an ideal of
love. In this sense, it is to be valued as a
radical form of spiritual collaboration.
Without his wife's intense love, the sail-
or's experience might have been impos-
sible. It may be that (although at this
time such an experience must have an
enveloping air of mysticism) the woman's
desire was necessary to force the path of
her image through space, and thus it was
only through the interaction of wily and
husbandly desires that the necessary
"light" was created to register her image
on the atmosphere in the ship's cabin.

The theory of eyeless sight involves
speculation about the previous existence
of other organs of vision. This conspicu-
ously anti-Darwinian idea would posit

that the suspicion one may have of being
able "to see blindfold" is the result of the
racial memory of having actually seen
with other organs than the eyes. Thus,
some part or parts of our bodies may be
vestigial organs of vision: and yet any
racial memory of an organ or organs of
vision constitutes memory of only the
means of seeing, not of what might have
been seen. The past as memory necessarily
becomes inner sight, and the imagination
combines not only things seen once, and
things seeable now, but things that might
be seen. The imagination may be called
the abstract, all-seeing organ of vision. In
analyzing it, we do not always know how
far objective reality may be discovered
as corresponding with it, nor can we al-
ways scientifically allocate in time and
space the sources of the elements em-
ployed by the imagination. For instance,
Surrealists believe that their surreal visions
will some day be realized on the plane
of concrete reality.

Skilled imaginative vision—the vision
of art—has ambiguities peculiar to itself.
Paul Valéry has said that most people
see with the eye of the dictionary rather
than the physical eye. While as a symbol-
ist poet M. Valéry wished to advocate
the role of an image-device, the meta-
phor, rather than some other linguistic
device, the fact remains that a dictionary
is merely the disorganized aspect of lan-
guage, and that one needs only to adopt
a certain form of interpretation to allege
that symbolist poetry is but one of all the
organized forms of "seeing with the dic-
tionary." We do not need to have read
that arch-interpreter of simple images,
Proust, to know that, presented to the
visual complex of eye-plus-memory, an
object is automatically encrusted with as-
sociations attached, not only to the class
of objects as perceived in average ex-
perience, but also complicated with mem-
ories related to delicate patterns of vision
that correspond to the actual patina laid
by time on surfaces of paintings and
statues, transforming their quality to one
degree or another.

Proust's visual memory is that of a spec-
tator of life as if life were a work-of-art.
The juncture of the active and passive
memory agents in this writer is most sug-
gestive in the light of the above remarks.
"Reality" for Proust was divided into
that which had received his personal im-
press previously to the moment he was
writing about, and that which was still
independent of his impress, but which he
could describe in the light of general asso-
ciations established by objects among
themselves, especially with respect to or-
ganic changes. The last great scene in
Proust's novel is that of the party at the
Prince de Guermantes', where the author
discovers the astounding transformations
wrought by time in the physical appear-
ance of his old friends and acquaintances.
The marvelous delight in the elaborate
descriptions in this part of the novel lies
somewhat in their naiveté, because ordi-
narily one would not be so surprised as
Proust that people change radically with
time. Proust's tone of phenomenal dis-

covery in these passages is due to his
view of reality as a thing he had already
transformed into the permanency of a
work of art. For him, the work of art
was preeminently a symbol of arrested
time; all else was flux. In his life, Proust
came to feel that he gave everything he
experienced its peculiar permanency, and
if an image should appear in a fresh
guise, it was no organic change of its own
that explained its new aspect, but only
that he—the spectator—was enabled to
use it for a fresh purpose, a new series of
effects, and, in itself, it remained un-
changed. So Proust's philosophy of art
was essentially platonic. Out of his int-
tense awe before the heights of Parisian
society, he projected the images of that
society onto a virtually ideal level, as
though they were deathless. Oddly enough,
he would eventually have liked, it seems,
to have hallucinated these social images
as Romains' ship's officer hallucinated
the image of his wife, and Proust makes it
plain that his initial physical introduction
into the society of the Faubourg St. Ger-
main was a fairy tale come symbolically
true. So his hallucinative imagination is
an inversion of the theory of the perma-
nent record of images kept by the astral
light. He imagined, he saw, he conquered
—and his conquest passed away until he
revived it in what he conceived its essen-
tial nature, the work of art.

Proust's esthetic was of the imagina-
tion and the past, not of reality and the
future. For, as he relates the events of
his novel, he finally accepted with tragic
sublimity the organic changes effected by
time in the society he loved—a society
disappearing not only in its transient per-
sonnel but also in its basic theory of ex-
clusiveness, in both of which Proust was
so much interested. The greatest concepts
of the eternal have always been involved
with a class, an élite. . . . But on his last
visit to the Prince de Guermantes' house,
Proust finds the broad new reign of the
bourgeois-bohemian-artistic. Now he re-
veals a reality of the present as an alembic
of causal factors making a result that
disappears mysteriously between the quiv-
ering, closed curtains of the future. Nev-
ertheless, he registers the features of the
future-past by noting the survival of the
facial characteristics of the Guermantes
family in its youngest scion—facial char-
acteristics which, one may believe, formed
a profound fascination for him; a love
less personal and intimate than his love
for Albertine's face. In this "metaphor-
ism" of nature—the dialectic result
achieved between biological transforma-
tion and the concentration of the erotic
spectator—Proust seems to hint at the
enunciation of a principle of collabora-
tive vision: an entente between the thing
seen and the see-er—as though organic
nature's repetitiveness were a response to
the spectator's desire to perpetuate natu-
ral images; consequently, we might as-
sume the tendency not only of art, but of
reality, to make us see only what it is
desirable to see. After all, the survival of
certain patterns in life would go unrecog-
nized, if memory, both in the individual
and racial senses, were not present; and

75

THE RAPE 1934

RENE MAGRITTE

no less unrecognized if art, the instrument of the individual and the race, were not also present.

## II

If Proust had any lesson to teach humanity, it was this: that if reality, for the erotic spectator, tends to coalesce into a work of art, the converse is also true: the work of art tends to decoalesce into reality. Oscar Wilde's daring epigram that life imitates art has become practically a twentieth century platitude; in substance, it means only that art teaches us to see that to which previously we were blind. As a fact, this doctrine of the imitation of art by life has the accessory support not only of iconographic critics such as Meyer Schapiro and Dr. Edgar Wind, but also of the Marxist theorists of art, paradoxically enough, for all demonstrate that if art imitates life principally in the creative sense, life imitates art principally in the critical sense—that is, in ways of looking at it, evaluating it, ways varying with periods no less than with groups and individuals. Part of the thesis that life imitates art is that in extending art in terms of behavior, men imitate it in exactly the same sense that the artist imitates life—through criticizing it. In a voice trembling with the emotion of a third person, Wilde declared in his famous dialogue that the Greeks were a nation of art critics, meaning a fluid mobility of relation existed in Greece between art and life, which criticized each other even as they imitated each other. If art has no absolute or eternal standards of vision, neither has life, and certainly, neither has any community in any period, the individuals of which may have widely differing conceptions of artistic vision.

Certain devices of Surrealism—sophisticated, ritual, paradoxical—hark back to age-old forms of play that in turn echoes the most ancient magic. I mean the

casual daydream of the present that traces the outlines of figures and faces in the clouds, a profile made by a crack in the ceiling, a landscape in the abstract design of a carpet. No doubt, such casual occupations are the vestiges of antique divination and sorcery, of alliances with the devil and supplications to divine powers. As significant pastimes now, they form only the reveries of lovers, madmen, or surrealists. A striking exception to this statement is Tchelitchew, who has made the interpretation of a simple image a complex structure certainly neither Surrealist nor trivial. As a matter of fact, it would be a mistake to assign exclusively to Surrealism and magical vestiges the origin of the modern mentality which I call, using the form of the agent, “the connoisseur of sight.” From impressionism, through Cézanne’s and Picasso’s cubism, to German expressionism, Italian futurism, and Surrealism, modern painting accents in one way or another the interpretation of the image as a genesis of metaphor, or—speaking graphically—of metamorphosis.

The generic impulse of all the arts, and of painting in particular, is to remake the world, either with a loving accuracy of optical vision, in order to create a super-fidelity to reality (as in Meissonier, Vermeer, or Da Vinci), or (as in Cézanne, Picasso, and the impressionists) by means of patches of paint of individual form and more or less complex structural analysis of line and mass. The cosmic sense, together with the prolonged brooding that it engenders, is necessary for the artist to determine his type of vision as well as his area of worldly interest. Yet, as long and deliberately as the artist must brood, his conscious purpose of method and the selection of his subject are not all that determines the content of his art—especially if we consider the fact that different periods have separate evaluations of the same work of art. In the temporally parallel existences of so many differing styles in painting, diversity simultaneously exists in the valuations of artistic vision.

The mental content of the esthete, or he whom I would term the connoisseur of sight, the same as Proust's erotic-spectator, tends to be overcrowded or at least incommoded by the available riches. In this situation, his reactions incline to the automatic, if only to escape the burden of decisive critical judgment and so avoid the reproaches of adherents to definite and opposed judgments. Moreover, under the influence of Surrealist painting and of such individualists as Picasso and Tchelitchew, the connoisseur of sight develops a faculty of simultaneous apprehensions with respect to the images of everyday life, interpreting accidental effects in newspaper photographs and nature itself according to the thesis of the double-image and imitation by nature or photography of known textures of painting. Nor is it extraordinary that the connoisseur of sight should carry his perceptive faculty to the independent interpretation of images fugitively perceived in painting itself.

The growth of iconographic criticism

suggests that, in any era, a generalized basis exists for tracing the more or less concrete identification of images in various styles of painting, and in separate examples of the same style, as well as among cartoons, photography, and dress-fashions. What is true of the artist, the erotic creator, is thus also true of the spectator, the erotic critic; a situation of collaborative vision exists.

Life becomes a form of “magic realism”—the term used by the Museum of Modern Art as the title of one of its exhibits of primitive and naturalistic romantic painting. Not long ago, while seated in the subway, I noticed one of a series of advertisements issued by the Metropolitan Museum of Art illustrating, in this instance, a painting entitled “Morning Glory,” by Audrey Buller, a painter whom I did not know. Yet, at a glance, I found this painting as marvelous and familiar as was the vision of that giant gauntlet of mail which Horace Walpole found in a dream and later declared was the genesis of his *romans noirs*.

## III

“Morning Glory” is unquestionably an example of what the Museum of Modern Art would call magic realism. This painting has qualities of primitivism and naturalism. And it also has a curious romantic air; it seems, even at first glance, like images in dreams, to mean more than it says and, considered naturalistically, to say more than it means. The drama and mystery of statement noticed in magic-realist paintings is obtained chiefly, not through originality of texture or form, but through selectivity, through what the painter chooses to represent. But it also depends much on the concentration upon detail and the doting care with which the painter has rendered his objects. One's attention is always caught by great finesse in “natural” rendering and the typical reaction is that given to Audubon's extreme realism in depicting his birds and animals. Instinctively, the spectator sympathizes with the eroticism of the painter who must have brooded long over many aspects of his subject to have arrived at such consummate presentation. Or, as in Eakins' painting of the sculler, one's attention is caught by the sparkle of this far object seen as if through a telescope! It seems as though the man in the scull is an arrested moment in the roving movement of a telescope over a large landscape. This emphasis on details of a large painting, if numerous enough, gives an impression of a redundancy of riches. However, if the field of vision be narrow, and the subject a still-life, the magic-realist seems to select certain objects as of supreme interest above other objects and so to suggest fetichism.

While naturalism of technique emphasizes a preference for specific objects, abstractionism as well as Da Vinci's anatomical realism treat objects, on the contrary, as generalities. Cézanne imparts excitement to “mere apples” by his structural analysis, but it is the general excitement of architectural nature, of which

76

DAUGHTERS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
COURTESY EDWARD G. ROBINSON

GRANT WOOD

apples happen to be a means. While objects in cubist paintings of the semi-abstract kind may seem phantasmal through their illusory insubstantiality (some of Picasso's and Juan Gris' portraits, for instance), the magic-realist object obtains its dramatic effect through hallucination; that is, the psychological mechanism of desire, typified by the "realism" of painted food that deceives the appetite of an animal. The intellectual appetite of the human being is attracted to the painted object as food for memory as well as food of memory: memory itself. Magic realism makes an instantaneous appeal to the theory of memory—"the past eternalized." I would say that the magic-realist style is the most symbolic expression of the average instinct in spectators of painting, whose impulse is to recognize, to snatch at the canvas as a passport into the Heaven of the past—the past containing love letters, souvenirs, strands of hair, rings, photographs, and the dead. The magic-realist object seems to draw together its electrons so as to fortify itself against decay and against both the analysis of abstractionism and the interpretation of expressionism and surrealism. So it is an "embalming" by art.

It must not be supposed that the so-called primitive style is not in every way as mature, at least for the spectator, as other styles of painting. The "magic realism" of such a painter as the Douanier Rousseau, at its highest imaginative point in "The Sleeping Gypsy," creates an adult fairy tale full-fledged-something from an Arabian Nights suite of lantern slides. In this picture, the folds of the Gypsy's gown seem the incarnate rhythms of sleep. Rousseau's painting method was very beautiful even though it offered no modern "ism," but it offered instead an extreme of human myth. As a genre, magic realism involves surrealist as well as primitive painting, and is always close to one of two extremes: painting style or literary myth. The attitude of the connoisseur of sight toward the literary myth of the magic-realist is naturally Proustian: it permits the associative process to operate so as to encompass any symbolism having its source in either the conscious or the unconscious of the magic-realist painter. This painter sometimes may not know why he concentrates upon certain objects

or why he takes toward his objects certain perspectives, organizes them in a certain way. Especially may this be true of the "nature painter," because of the universality and "impersonality" of sky, water, and land. Nature in the scenic sense openly invites the mental-symbolic action of the painter, in whose unconscious, we must suppose, is an awareness of the old, pantheistic myths.

From my seat in the subway, obliged to turn my head almost at right angles, I gazed repeatedly at Audrey Buller's nature painting, not having thought of Walpole's gauntlet at the first moment, but having found the lower border of the morning glories, where the vine crossed the top of the tree stump about which it grew, as familiar as if it were the hairline on the head of someone I loved. I realized that this last effect proceeded from the general aspect of a head, for which the abbreviated tree trunk was a synonym, surrounded by the "hair" of the morning-glory vine. And as soon as this was established, I thought of the tree trunk as phallic-with the same surprise one has when, after long familiarity with Tanguy's paintings, he realizes that the open ground so many of them depict is not only a desert with an horizon of pure sky, but a beach, so that the sky is a synonym for the sea, which has withdrawn remotely from this desert, and thus the vestigial, bonelike structures on the desert-née-beach are synonyms for forgotten bathers.... But if the tree stump was phallic, it was incompletely so, because the tree of which it had been the base had been cut down, at which point the thick veil of morning glories, which had an illusion of erupting from a clean cut, became a blossoming spray of blood. So apparently some dim drama of castration or frustration was involved with the creation of this picture.

After encountering this painting many times on my subway rides, I studied it with my varied interpretations in mind, and sought further evidence for my original assumptions. Even as I registered the exquisite touch, the naïve loyalty, and the fanatical leisure which Audrey Buller has put into her work, I noticed that about the base of the tree stump were brown leaves: pubic hair! And then my mind, veering and seeking, and putting distance

between myself and the painting (the same distance the painter had from her object), I realized that the physiognomic character of this tree stump with its close-fitting aureole of morning glories found echoes in not one but two images, both of which I had seen in contemporary painting. One was Grant Wood's painting, "Daughters of the American Revolution," and the other was a conceit of René Magritte: a woman's torso painted as a pun for her head (since the torso had a coiffure of hair). Then I realized that the inflexible rigidity of the stump in Audrey Buller's painting corresponded to the stiff-necked morality of the American women in Wood's painting as well as to the obdurate cylinder of Magritte's torso. My eyes returned to the morning glories, whose blue, subtle splendor cast so vivacious a cloak about the top of the stump. It was their presence, touching and not touching the object to which they clung, that created the hallucination of these two pictures, for the morning glories humanized and brightened and validated the tree stump, just as the chevelures of the D.A.R. rescue them from their stubborn woodenness, make them women, and as the hair of Magritte's image, acting inversely, invalidates the female torso by making a grotesque female face of it-a face which has attached a neck almost as unlovely and stumplike as those of the D.A.R. in Wood's painting; a neck whose principle invades the face of Magritte's image as the necks of these ladies seem to invade their faces and make knotholes of their eyes. I then noticed with what loving care the articulation of decayed fibrous ligaments was executed in Miss Buller's tree stump, and I could not help feeling that it was, even with its trait of permanent unbendingness, more lovely, human, and feminine, than either Magritte's torso-face or Wood's D.A.R. faces. Moreover, its chevelure was a flowering vine, it was "hair that grew flowers." And yet its sex, seen from another perspective, seemed male.

*(Continued on page 83)*

THE EROTIC SPECTATOR

(Continued from page 77)

I saw then the sexual inevitability of the perspective taken by Audrey Buller toward this object, painted with its base almost level with the spectator's eyes. It rears into the sky like a lighthouse on an open coast, and barely discernible beyond is the water of a bay, with houses and landscape beside it. Evidently, the tree stump is on a prominence of some kind, or else the painter depicted it from the viewpoint of a depression or gulley. It seemed to me that, gazing up at it from my seat (Walpole saw his gauntlet appear at the top of a stair), I approximated the viewpoint of the painter herself. I was accidentally dropped into the female principle of the concavity, the gulley, from which I was compelled to look at this object with its male silhouette. . . . The brown leaves at the stump's base seemed to represent age, and the flowers the bright blue of life's morning: youth. The blue foam was assuredly a sexual foam, and the cutting away as of blood by the cutting away of part of the object's original bulk, it might symbolize a friction either premature or tardy and anti-climactic. The morning glories formed a sort of artificial tree foliage, and brought an illusion of maturity to a tree deprived of its destined stature and the crowning glory of its life by premature death. In the same way, women are found with false hair providing an illusion of youth or ripeness after they have become desiccated. The neck represents the stubbornness of desire, the hair the benison, however modest, of illusion. Suddenly I was brought to remember Romains' novel, and I felt that I could not be more in harmony with the vision of this painting than if its image had been my wife, trying to present herself to me over a great distance. . . .

I remember Brichot, the etymologist, in *Remembrance of Things Past*, and how, on Proust's first visit to the Verdurins at their country house, La Raspelière, he entranced Proust with his accounts of how the French towns of the region came to have their present names. No doubt, the young esthete, the budding lover of Albertine, was fascinated by the metamorphic history of these names, a process hidden amidst numerous decades, even centuries, of linguistic crossbreeding and mispronunciation. Brichot, with the authority of a lover and an expert, seeks out the roots of place-names which must seem to his listener be analogous to the roots of memory and nature alike—memory, as psychological metamorphosis, and nature, as organic metamorphosis. In the pure realm of vision, has not the imagination, perhaps, the same expert and erotic authority as Brichot's learning? The elementary character of Audrey Buller's nature image makes it susceptibility abstract and genetic. Is it not a womb of vision, tracing possible origins as we trace the child to its mother, as Proust the last of the Guermantes to the first? Brichot's science permits him to see behind the names of French towns a Roman camp, a

THREE MOVES

(Continued from page 79)

away. This placing, which looks deliberate enough, constitutes an 'illness' of the images compared with the drive of similar images in the other two paintings. And they are no longer biomorphic; with one exception, they have returned to inertia.

There is significance not only in the use of the word 'illness' in the title, but also in the substitution of 'general' for 'king' in the identification of the platform objects. 'General' takes the place of 'king' because there is now more concern with tactics than with the dream of power. ('The Sailors' Barracks' as a title has a more tenuous relationship with the images, but the sailors, the king and the general are all one person.)

The platform has been lowered and discloses a large area of the palace. This building is bleaker than the sailors' barracks and depicted from a less interesting angle than the palace in 'The Evil Genius of a King'. It is not a desired object at all, but purely and simply the image of a stare. And nothing now hides in the shadow of the screen: everything on the platform is out in the open.

Upon the 'shuttlecock', the only image which remains biomorphic, falls the task of making a final concession to the pondering eye. Its form suggests a completely naked being, and its position suggests that it is unaware of being overlooked. This suggestion of unawareness is supported by the air of indifference worn by the other objects, which have become inert because any organic stirring would give the game away. The 'shuttlecock's' unawareness is a ruse: the son lies naked, simulating sleep and exposing himself under the eye of the mother. In the other two works the aim is disclosed and the action concealed; in 'The General's Illness' the situation is reversed, and is a decisive step in the direction of the ultimate dénouement in 'The Regret', where a red rod lies between biscuit-coloured laths, under the lowering ceiling of the father's house.

Danish fjord, a German church, a Greek marsh. An individual, a family, a group, a nation, may be naturally "inbreeding." Each keeps a set or sets of images loved in various degrees. Here, I refer particularly to a genealogy whose first ancestor is the libido. Coiling and tremulous, the eye of the libido is the king octopus of the soul. Therefore I am not surprised to find, visiting one of its tentacles in the masquerade of a beloved guest, still another image. . . . Audrey Buller's stump on which the morning glory vine confers its prim blue astronomy escapes from the starry prison like a fugitive from a Gothic castle, and in its stead, enjoying its capture with marvelous consequence, appears the metamorphic cascade of blonde hair that erupts from the top of Veronica Lake over her ramrod body. And suddenly I understand that Miss Buller's painting is really a portrait of the Medusa, emasculated of her horrible locks and blessed with a tonsure.

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