Performing objects: On the verbal making of things

12 PERFORMING OBJECTS: ON THE VERBAL MAKING OF THINGS Andreas Mahler The nineteenth century witnesses a slow and surreptitious shift from a mimetic conception of literature to its performative conception. Especially around 1850, artists seem to become less and less interested in expressing something in literature rather than in creating something as literature. It is precisely this move from (mimetic) world-making to (performative) text-making Baudelaire), liberating him/her from the constraints -Dinggedicht both as an artefact depicting an object and as a composition making one. Then it moves backward to explore the constructive mechanisms of textuality with regard to the Parnassian movement ), as well as forward to show how later generations engage with things not so much in order to represent but rather to present them. Finally, a similar development is traced in narratives, which develop from the mimeticism of descriptions to the foregrounding of the performative qualities of prose. This, however, includes a much greater risk of falling prey to the recuperating attempts to reintegrate the text-making into a conventionalized mimetic reading, expecting, and finding, a fragmented and continge Dirt into Gold -century French Charles Baudelaire in a sketch for an epilogue to the enlarged 1861 re-edition of his collection of poems entitled Les Fleurs du mal dirt, and I have made Performing Objects 13 1 My focus in the following will be on the everybody knows, the word poein. The intransigent early modern classicist Ben to make somet produce with this things, nothing but things aesthetic. According to Baudelaire, this is (a painter of modern life). What the city (seemingly) referentially aesthetically transforms into almost naturere-presenting the 1850s (urban, industrial) ugliness of the French capital, this with the help of words, the the strict sense of th - in doing so, he presents it as something that exists only in and through the text. Perhaps one of the most striking examples for this surreptitious but distinct modernist / -oriented mimesis to a textbased performance is poem nr. XXIX in the first section of Les Fleurs du mal, It begins like this: Rappelez-v Sur un 2 1 For the sketch see Charles Baudelaire, , 2 vols., vol. 1, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975) 191ff; the quoted text is on p. 192. All translations from the Baudelaire poem are by the author. 2 Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal et autres (The Flowers of Evil and Other Poems) (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1975) 57, ll. 1-8; for a much more detailed reading Andreas Mahler 14 The speaker of the poem, through the Parisian landscape,3 at first sight objec 4 At the same time, however, the poem itself, even in the first two of its twelve stanzas, resorts to a rather exquisite and 5 it makes use of rhetorical ornate (e.g., complex syntax (the hy as if it were an ugly real-life objec slowly but steadily turns out to be an exquisite and rare object of verbal construction, reached and produced through a meticulous and extremely selfconscious choice and composition of words. What Baudelaire thus seems to be Instead of mimetically describing the object, he textually performs it. He builds it ith words on a white sheet of paper, constructing a striking specimen of precisely that vie moderne: of modern urban life (with Paris as its undoubted nineteenth-century capital).6 of the poem see Horst Weich, Paris en vers: Aspekte der Beschreibung und semantischen ik der Moderne (Paris in Verse: Aspects of Description and Semantic Fixation of Paris in Modern French Lyrical Poetry) (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1998) 49ff. 3 For the topos of the see Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: New Left Books, 1973) 35ff. 4 For a history of odour and stench in eighteenthand nineteenth-century Paris see Alain Corbin, XVIIIe-XIXe (Miasma and Narcissus: Smell and the Social Imaginary in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries) (Paris: Flammarion, 1986). For the cultural significance as well as productivity specifically of dirt in Victorian England see Dirt in Victorian Literature: Writing Materiality (New York: Routledge, 2016). 5 For the aesthetic as a field for the (re-including) positivization of a socially, morally or Manifest and Laten Relevance and Narrative Research, ed. Matei Chihaia and Katharina Rennhak (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019) 19-33, especially 25ff. 6 For Paris as the cultural centre of the nineteenth-century aesthetic debate see Christopher Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); cf. Performing Objects 15 So, instead of depicting a momentary Parisian event in the speakers life, the poem first posits an element of choc7 only to display8 celebrating, it via 9), the already ambivalent if not sublime carcass, l. 13), which begins to 20), which leads t 25) and as a dream29), presenting itself like a sketch on a canvas whilst at the same time a dog is jealously, and seemingl , 35), because she is interested in a piece of meat that she had already reserved for herself, before the urban -observer arrived (ll. 33-36). The last three stanzas, after a dash, sum up the alleged experience. What at first sight looked like a selfyeux, soleil de ma nature r of my eyes, sun of my being / You, my angel and my passion, ll. 39- (queen of the Graces, l. 45) is sketched as a beautiful young woman who is warned by the speaker that her youth and life will this dirt, too, l. 37). What starts as a memento mori remembrance now turns into a carpe diem kind of emblem in an act of exhortation and persuasion but above all with the speaker himself as the form- / Qui vous mangera de baisers, / De mes with kisses, / That I have kept the form and divine essence / Of my decomposed loves, ll. 45-48). This seems to follow the traditional bipartite structure of the descriptive poem, with (1) a long descriptive part detailing the object (stanzas I-IX), followed by (2) a also Karlheinz Stierle, der Stadt (The Myth of Paris: Sign and Consciousness of the City) (Munich: dtv, 1998). 7 For the urban encounter as an experience of choc (shock) see Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire 116-18, 125, 134. 8 foregrounding, rather than referring and informing, see Mary Louise Pratt, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977) 136ff. Andreas Mahler 16 much -XII) evaluating the object in relation to him/herself. And yet, if description seems to imply mimesis, what we get is 9 , not of something prethe poem seems to do is precisely (and programmatically) take a metonymical part the rotting carcass to (rhythmically, metrically, verbally, , the poem itself is figuring as the poet-maker, performatively produced in and through the text. Dinggedicht).10 Object poems were extremely popular in the mid-nineteenth century, not only in France. In France, however, they were more often than not connected with a movement kind of inversion of the Parnassian project. Where the Parnassians chose extremely valuable, select objects and tried to transpose them into equally valuable, select language, Baudelaire seems to heighten the challenge by choosing the low, the mean, the repulsive, to prove his poetic skills. And yet, as the analogy is apt to show, the Parnassians were already (positively) doing the same thing. Recent criticism has tried to make a case for seeing the Parnassian project rather as an a-mimetic than a mimetic one or, at least, both as a mimetic and an a-mimetic project at the same time, which means that what the Parnassians were producing were in analogy to picture puzzles rabbit-duck-like text puzzles, mimetically suggesting the representation of an 9 Salon de 1859 and Le peintre de la vie moderne (The Painter of Modern Life), II, 608-82 (especially 619ff), and 683-724. For a ) see Weich 151-53. 10 Subjekti Subjectivity in Poetry and the Poetry of Things and Places), Literaturwissenschaftliche (Literary Theories, Models and Methods: An Introduc -105; cf. also Shimon Poetics Today, 6 (1985): 461-73. Performing Objects 17 object, whilst already performatively, and textually, presenting it.11 This can be such as a gem, a medal or an altermedial work of art, whilst at the same time making use of their very own verbal medium, not to merely depict but to construct (Enamels and Gems) would be a case in point.12 What the poems in the collection attempt to do is build textual gems, enamels, artefacts that do not so much simply reflect something valuable albeit largely uninteresting or even banal from their Accordingly, it is not by accident that Baudelaire dedicated his Fleurs du Mal magician of French letters, to my beloved and revered master Gaut 13 Poetologically, the Parnassian object poem is characterized on the pragmatic level by a radical reduction of the enunciation, on the semantic level by strategies nd on the syntactic level by the iconic textual support of this rarefaction (Rarefizierung).14 In other words, there is practically no speaker; the object itself is foregrounded; it is endowed with extremely select lexematic items; and its rhetoricity and metrics are used to back 11 For the a-mimetic aspect of Parnassian poetry see the contributions in Jenseits der Mimesis: 19. Jahrhunderts (The Other Side of Mimesis: The Parnassian transposition and the Paradigm Change in Nineteenth-century Poetry), ed. Klaus W. Hempfer (Stuttgart: Steiner, 200 Mimesis Diskurs: Die Vexiertexte des Parnasse als Paradigma anti-mimetischer Sprachrevolu (Language Mimesis Discourse: Parnassian Text Puzzles as a Paradigm of an Antimimetic Language Revolution), , 116.1 (2006): 34-47. For the phenomenon of the rabbit-duck see E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1988) 4; it has to be pointed out, however, that if the rabbit-duck oscillates between two versions of the 12 , ed. Claudine Gothot-Mersch (Paris: Gallimard, 1981). 13 Baudelaire 31; the English translation follows Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal: The Complete Text of The Flowers of Evil, trans. Richard Howard (Boston, MA: David R. Godine, 1983) 3. 14 Poetry), Romanische Lyrik: Dichtung und Poetik. Walter Pabst zu Ehren (Poetry in Romance Languages: Poetry and Poetics. In Honour of Walter Pabst), ed. Titus Heydenreich, Narr, 1993) 69-91, especially 84-87. Andreas Mahler 18 the verbal construction of the object as a complex and extremely rare verbal really a hidden secret. There is evidence that this shift from a mimetic representation to a performative making has its beginnings in France in poetological debates situated as early as in the 1820s or even the 1810s.15 One could Seeing the Elgin M ead as an a-mimetic intermedial transposition a from architecture to textuality in that it is not so much concerned with the mimetic depiction of the fragmentary freeze and its faithful description (about which we learn practically nothing) but rather with a performative textual (re)building of the freeze precisely through dashes, gaps, run-on lines and a fragmentary syntax.16 One might even go further and say that mimesis, or at least the Classicist variety of mimesis, characteristic of the literary practices prevalent in Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, is the one effect of performativity that tries to completely obliterate its performative base by explicitly and programmatically denying the fact that art must be made before it can be, which would be the (at the time) widespread principle of celare artem (concealing art), or of medial transparency.17 15 For the aesthetic de ory of Victor Cousin: A Mere Relative Autonomy of the Beautiful and Its Reception by Baudelaire), f Sprache und Literatur, 107.3 (1997): 173-213. 16 gin -Comparative ), Medienkomparatistik, 1 (2019): 135-48; for the distinction between what he wants to see as the a-mimetic phenomenon of the and the rather traditional mimetic phenomena of ekphrasis and pictorialism see Klaus W. Hempfer, und die Problematisierung der Mimesis in der Parnasse- ( and the Problematization of Mimesis in Parnassian Poetry), Frankreich Berlin: Past and Present), ed. Winfried Engler (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1997) 177-96. 17 remarks in Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology, trans. David Henry Wilson (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) 247-303. Performing Objects 19 - This seems to pose again, and perhaps with renewed vigour the question of the performative. As stated in the introduction to this issue, purely speech actbased concepts of the performative as well as their mere philosophical deconstructions nowadays seem to have become slightly superseded. One could add that the same applies to predominantly theatre-based notions that largely tend to regard the performative as the putting of something into practice, its which becomes apparent in the fact that, as I have indicated above, though it looks like being in a symmetrical opposition to the mimetic, it even seems to underpin the mimetic itself one could argue that the performative is something much more radical in the sense that it should be treated like a general principle of unrest, some kind of (medial or mediaone could call (human) creativity, making emerge things hitherto inexistent and unknown and, in doing so, enlarging and modifying the world. Let me briefly follow that line.18 mystery and legend. The first edition of the OED almost exclusively tried to trace it back to Old French parfournir (to deliver) or, desp to a rare verb parfourmer (of rather dubious standing). The second edition from 1989 significantly added to this the option of seeing it as a combination of the prefix perughly, completely, to completion, to - plus the verb former To give To construct, frame; to make, bring into of a thorough process of forming something (spatially) through and through, and then (temporally) again and again. the (spatial) To finish making, complete the construction of [a material object or To carry out, achieve, accomplish, execute [...]; to go through and finish, to 18 : Raumordnungen und Raumpraktiken im theatralen Mediendispositiv (Theatricality and Spatiality: Orders and Practices of Space in the Theatrical Medium), Neumann, 2009) 235-50. Andreas Mahler 20 To my mind, this looks extremely similar to what the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand 19 In his seminal conceptualization of the sign, Saussure proposes to see the semiotic unit, not so much as a binary, but as a ternary relation bringing (1) indistinct materiality on the one hand, and (2) indistinct ideas on the other, plus as its third (3) - 20 simultaneously divides - both swirling clouds, creating (or, as for that, of what Saussure calls the - - of differentiality. simultaneously imprinted both on the plane of vague, amorphous thought (A), and on the equally featureless plane of sound (B21 as can be seen in his own illustration of what one in the sense sketched above - He also famously compares this to the cutting of a sheet of paper with its two sides (recto and verso) involved: A language might also be compared to a sheet of paper. Thought is one side of the sheet [recto: A] and sound the reverse side [verso: B]. Just as it is impossible to take a pair of scissors and cut one side of paper without at the same time cutting the other, so it is impossible in a language to isolate sound from thought, or thought from sound. To separate the two for 19 See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 2009) 111, 120. 20 de Saussure 111. 21 de Saussure 110, 111 (the illustration). Performing Objects 27 conclusion. Its overall effect looks very much like what has been called a 43 r and signified.44 and, hence, hidden but is still openly visible and in flux; it is in the process of - p - - the reader becomes witness of the making of something valuable through the use, in rh he conspicuously homophonous already know from Baudelaire.45 So what the poem does is not only perform the 43 Borgesian quote, see Rainer Warning, (Hetero 44 See Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary 250-57, for an attempt to concretize the tilt into verso-recto arecto-verso miotics of Poetica, 38.3-4 (2006): 217-57. 45 , ed. Lloyd James Austin (Paris: GFrepresentation to an allusive, evocative presentation see his programmatic remarks in tion) in , ed. Henri Mondor and G. JeanNommer -quarts de la jouissa literature pas y directly presenting their objects. I think, however, that what is needed is allusion only. The Parnassians take the entire thing and show it: this is how they lose the mystery; they rob the mind of the delicious joy of thinking that it creates. To name an object is to suppress to suggest it, Andreas Mahler 28 rarity of the select vocabulary but language itself, turning the somewhat awkward -sound into a golden treasure of hardly ever seen signifiers. It would be possible to trace these textual strategies of verbally performing objects throughout the period of literary modernism via texts by, say, Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams to those by e.e. cummings or even John Ashbery. Let me just focus on one more example taken from a collection of poems from as late as 1942, which is (for my purpose again) significantly entitled Le parti pris des choses (Siding with Things I quote its first paragraph: ndre mais souvent aussi de la 46 Judging from its title, the poem at first sight (again) looks like a thing poem. But instead of depicting its chosen object, instead of describing it, instead of - the idea of what an orange is than what an orange does. Taking its cue rather from the signifier (the verso) than the signified (the recto), the prose poem departs from the analogous squashing sound resulting from the combination of (different) nasal vowel and (identical) voiced alveo-palatal onge ange oceeds to evoke the different tactile types of elasticity and recuperability that differentiate the two on enigmatic, the aim of literature being there is no other aim to evoke objec .]) 46 Francis Ponge, Le parti pris des choses (Paris: Gallimard, 2008) 41. (As in the sponge, there is in the orange an aspiration to regain countenance after having been subjected to the task of being expressed. But where the sponge always succeeds, the orange never does: its cells have been destroyed, its tissues have been torn. While its skin only slowly reestablishes itself in its form due to its elasticity, an amber liquid has spilt, accompanied, it is true, by sweet refreshment, and perfume but often also by the bitter awareness of .]) Performing Objects 29 the common ground of their specific form: while the squashing of the (vocally) -establish its previous form in its account of the differen hence, does not (entirely) go back to its previous form but disperses into a multiplicity of perceptive effects, such as an amberSo what Ponge does in the poem is less describe a reala textual one. He presents it rather than representing it. He performs the (I beg giving us an idea of its acoustic form, then by evoking its tactile form and, lastly by adding the ideas of its gustatory and olfactory self-sacrifice at the cost of its squashed visual form. And, in doing so, he not only (celebratingly) produces the surprising multiplicity of the from prematurely expelled seed to the final evocation of the 42) but also - 11) with the orange as against the (rather Making Things in Narratives - ing by performing of creating rather than imitating, of producing rather than reproducing begins, as early as in the second half of the nineteenth century, to (slowly but gradually) spill also into narratives. Seemingly mimetic descriptions of seemingly extratextual objects tilt into performative textual creations that exist in the text only, and nowhere else.47 It is above all the Flaubertian novel where this tilt of the description from a mere situating ancilla narrationis to a textual creation in its own right to what will 47 For a thorough discussion of literary descriptions see Philippe Hamon, l'analyse du descriptif (Introduction to the Analysis of the Descriptive) (Paris: Seuil, 1981); Yale French Studies, 61 (1981): 1-26. introduced above) to nar Endless Writing), Deutsche Viertelja , 85.3 (2011): 393-410. Andreas Mahler 30 can duly be observed.48 Right at the beginning Sentimental Education Rosanette flee from the chaos and confusion of the 1848 revolution in Paris to the seemingly idyllic romance of the forest of Fontainebleau,49 the text resorts to a number of descript turn out to be more than mere mimetic representations of an alternative, nonurban, non-Parisian surrounding or context. Rather than depict a pleasant and peaceful countryside in contradistinction to a city in turmoil, what these descriptions do is paradigmatically take up elements from other descriptions in the novel and, in doing so, contribute to the overall effect of textually constructing a landscape that, like all the other textual elements in the Sentimental Education, produce nothing but contingency (and, as 50 What they display is a verbal making of events, revolutions, and catastrophes that entirely remain without meaning. Surely, they do show a landscape, but what they perform is nothing but indifference: - nt des roches 48 For the important function played by descriptions in the tilting of narratives from the mimetic to the performative in what he calls paradigmatic narration (as opposed to a syntagmatic one focused on the plot) see the seminal essay by Rainer Warning, (Paradigmatic Narration: Coping with and Exposing Contingency), Romanistisches Jahrbuch, 52 (2001): 176-209. For a preparatory path toward this argument see the contributions in Travail de Flaubert Todorov (Paris: Seuil, 1983), as well as the cogent reflections on an a-mimetic and antiUne course cont du nouveau roman (Problems of the nouveau roman) (Paris: Seuil, 1967) 91-111. 49 See Gustave Flaubert, (Sentimental Education), ed. Claudine Gothot-Mersch (Pars: GF-Flammarion, 1985) 392ff. 50 Flaubertian concept of way of seeing things) see his letter to Louise Colet (16 January1852) in Correspondance, ed. Bernard Masson (Paris: Gallimard, 1998) 156. Performing Objects 31 ent r 51 des ro dissolve the whole thing into nothingn 52 Again, one could demonstrate this textual making of verbal things, this performative presentation of literary objects instead of their illusionistic mimetic representation the activation of the process including the verso as against the sole focus on the recto as its result with reference to similar passages in Proust or Conrad or Faulkner or Joyce. Let me, however, conclude by drawing attention to a last passage, which I want to borrow from Samuel Beckett. In his Texts for Nothing from the early 1950s, Beckett begins to experiment with descriptions that perform nothing but the tilt between verso and recto, recto and verso, itself.53 As soon as there semantic result, it finds Let us take a look at the beginning of Texts for Nothing I: Suddenly, no, at last, lo 51 Flaubert, 399. (One day, they arrived half way up a hill entirely made of sand. Its surface, with no traces of footsteps, was marked by symmetrical undulations; here and there, like a promontory in a dried-up ocean bed, rocks stuck out, having the vague form of animals, turtles with their heads moving forward, seals creeping along, hippopotamuses and bears. No-one. No sound. The sand, struck by the sun, dazzled the eyes; and all of sudden, in the vibration of the light, the animals seemed to move. They quickly went back home, fleeing the dizziness, almost scared. .]) 52 This seems to correspond precisely again to the aesthetic oscillation (or, as for that, recto and the verso of language that is apt to present something absent as present, only to withdraw it in the end; for further elaboration of 53 Comparatio, 10.1 (2018): 19-38. Andreas Mahler 32 very flat, of a mountain, no, a hill, but so wild, so wild, enough. Quag, heath up to the knees, faint sheep-tracks, troughs scooped deep by the rains. It was far down in one of these I was lying; out of the wind. Glorious prospect, but for the mist that blotted out everything, valleys, loughs, plain and sea. How can I go on, I s perhaps the same, What possessed you to come? I could have stayed in my nk.54 This is the typical Beckettian game of positing and negating, of evocation and and, in offeri - of having evoked it. The Beckettian title that perhaps best illustrates this device is the one of his short 55 invites makes us see the performing act itself: it shows (and makes us aware of) the oscillatory movement on t verso and recto and recto and verso. It gives us a glimpse of the radical ground of the signifying presence/co-presence or, as the English language so aptly has it, the impossible 56 54 Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose, 1950-1976, ed. Mark Nixon (London: Faber and Faber, 2010) 3. 55 triad The Fictive and the Imaginary 238-46; the following reading is, of course, only one of the multiplicity of possible readings of this syntagm. 56 For a more detailed use of this (for my purposes) highly apposite idiom see my GermanischRomanische Monatsschrift, 65.2 (2015): 203-25.