Intro      Writing       Les mots et les noms       The unspeakable Other       Painting       Mathematics       The Thing Itself       Bibliography

Painting the thing itself

In the chapter 'Figures of speech', in which Alexander struggles to represent the plum in words, the possibility of a more accurate representation in paint is posited. Painting, it is argued, has three advantages over language. The first is that paint avoids the mistaken belief in transparency that haunts language. In language, 'it is... common, not to think about the distance between words and things, between words and life, between words and reality' (SL, 200-1). This is the mistaken view of a neat set of correspondences between words and things which Saussure dismisses. On the other hand, 'It is impossible not to think about the distance between paint and things' (SL,200). Paint's status as a signifier is self-evident: 'Paint itself declares itself as a force of analogy and connection.' (ibid) and thus escapes the false assumptions we make of language: 'We know paint is not plum-flesh. We do not know with the same certainty that our language does not simply, mimetically coincide with the world.' (ibid). The second advantage of painting, according to the text, is that it represents more accurately: 'A trompe l'oeil painting is admired for its skill in mimetic deception. You cannot have trompe l'oeil in writing...' It is sufficiently accurate to 'fool the eye', but as paint is a self-evident signifier, it avoids being conflated with that which it represents.

The third possible advantage over language, according to the text, is that painting has an accessible, pre-existent signified: vision. We have already seen how attempts to access a pre-existent signified in language have foundered. Vision, however, seems to offer more stability. Trying to write on 'a painter who was also an articulate writer had taught him [Alexander] that: you could see things before saying them, indeed without saying them.' (SL, 198) Vision is naked — unmediated — in a way that thoughts are not: looking at the Van Goghs in the prologue, Alexander recalls wanting to write the thing itself, and notes, 'Sometimes he still saw the brushstrokes, as it were, in this naked way...' The text also posits that certain colours and shapes are mathematically reliable. At the beach party at Les Saintes Maries, earlier in the novel, the philosopher Vincent Hodgkiss is holding forth on Wittgenstein:

He spoke of a mathematics of colour, Wittgenstein, a Farbmathematik: one knew saturated red or yellow, once experienced, as one knew the nature of a circle or the square on the hypotenuse. (SL, 96)

According to these claims, it would seem that painting is the ideal medium of representation: it declares itself a signifier; it is accurately mimetic; and it imitates a pre-existent signified. However, each can be refuted from within and without the text.

I glided over the contradictions inherent in the first claim for the purpose of this argument's trajectory; let us return now to the quotation, 'We know paint is not plum-flesh.' (SL, 201) This is a false argument: we know equally that the words 'plum-flesh' are not themselves plum-flesh, whether written or spoken. The problem of representation was never one of substitution, in art or in language. Further, after stating 'Paint declares itself as a force of analogy' (SL, 200), the passage continues thus: '...a kind of metaphor-making between the flat surface of the purple pigment and yellow pigment and the statement 'This is a plum.' 'This is a lemon.'' The choice of phrase 'This is a...' is reminiscent of Renée Magritte's Ceçi n'est pas une pipe.[1] That Magritte's painting was felt necessary and groundbreaking in its time suggests that paint's status as signifier is not as self-evident as the text declares. Art is not immune to the accusation of false transparency. Without the strength of the first claim, the second becomes problematic: if paint is no more self-evident a signifier than language, then 'trompe l'oeil' risks seeming to 'simply, mimetically coincide with the world' (ibid).

This supports half of the second claim — that painting is mimetic — but not that it is accurate. Unlike language, the relationship between signifier and referent (the word tree and that tree through the window) is not arbitrary. However, neither is it exact. To regard painting as simply trompe l'oeil is as common and inaccurate as to regard language as an unmediating window onto the world: paintings are flat, unchanging, and delimited by the size of the canvas; the referent is not, and vision is not. Painters have fought against this misapprehension just as writers have, as the text admits:

There was a cultural shock when painters shifted their attention from imitating apples to describing the nature of vision, paint, canvas. But the nausea Jean-Paul Sartre felt on discovering that he could not, with language, adequately describe a chestnut tree root is a shock of another kind. (SL, 201)

Even while trying to dismiss this as 'a shock of another kind', the text foregrounds the problematic nature of vision, paint, canvas. The false assumptions prevalent in language have required as much fighting in paintings.

The final claim on behalf of art again assumes a false simplicity: the pre-existent signified. Alexander discovers 'you could see things before saying them', but to see a chair (the referent) is not to see it as a chair (the signified). In order to separate the two, one must consider a state with vision but before knowledge: infancy. The infant vision of Stephanie's newborn child, William, is described thus:

The particles he saw in the flowing waves of light were streaked with the colours of the flowers, mauve, lilac, cobalt, citron, white-gold, sulphur, chrome, though of course he could not name or distinguish these divisions of light as he could not see the lip of the iris, the frilled trumpet of the daffodil... (SL, 130-1)

This is infant vision: pure light, in which even colours cannot be distinguished ('he could not name or distinguish these divisions of light'), and in which forms cannot be so much as seen ('he could not see the lip of the iris'). At the end of the passage, the next paragraph opens, 'Art is not the recovery of the innocent eye, which is inaccessible.' (SL, 131) This presymbolic ideal fails in the same way as Kristeva's semiotic, for neither brings us any closer to the thing itself: the semiotic slides into meaninglessness; the infant cannot name or distinguish. We are, once more, back in Saussure's vague, uncharted nebula in which 'nothing is distinct before the appearance of language' (Saussure, 1916: 112). The vision that seemed to offer a pre-existent signified is no more certain than words: 'We all remake the world as we see it, as we look at it. If William did not, it was because he was new, he was barely used to horizontal and vertical framing patterns...' (SL, 131). This brings to our attention an aspect of the signified-referent relationship that we have not yet discussed: the referent (such as the tangible 'lip of the iris') pre-exists us, but the signified (by which we know it as 'the lip of an iris') is dependent on acquired knowledge. Whatever we see is always already both referent and signified, visual information and a pattern by which we interpret it. Without the interpreting pattern, the signified, the visual information of the referent is meaningless. The text tells us that William was 'barely used to horizontal and vertical framing patterns, he was not separate from his mother.' (ibid) The acquisition of these framing patterns is associated with separation from the mother, which is the first step into the symbolic order. By the time William has learnt the framing patterns required to make sense of the visual information, he will be in the realm of the symbolic order — of the signifier.

Let us consider further the position of the signifier in art — the painted thing. As in language, nothing in a painting is just the thing itself but always also something else. Metaphoricity is not restricted to language. For instance, in the early days of the play's composition, the symbolism of Van Gogh's paintings are outlined, such as the 'connotations of French naughtiness' (SL, 84) of novels. The yellow chair brings 'into play his own terrors and hopes [Van Gogh's], and behind it, the culture of Europe, north and south, the Church itself. The yellow chair was the opposite of the insane messianic visions and voices.' (SL, 85) The yellow chair turns out to be, after all, not the thing itself but the locus of associations and symbolism which cannot be deduced simply from looking at — or in some way experiencing it — but which can only be communicated through the symbolic order.

Other passages will argue the same point. Professor Wijnnobel, who meets Alexander at the BBC, mockingly analyses the painting 'The Breakfast Table' until he has made of the coffeepot 'the unfallen circular hermaphrodite of Plato's symposium' (SL, 217) though Alexander protests, 'That spoils its quiddity as a thing.' (SL, 216) Nor is the interpretation of paintings purely wilful: 'Olives, Frederica agreed with Alexander [as they looked at Van Gogh's 'Olive Pickers'] could not not recall the Mount of Olives, the Garden of Gethsemane, in the day of Van Gogh the pastor's son, the lay preacher. As the cypresses must always, differently, mean death.' (SL, 8)

By the time we reach things, they are always already culturally associated, and so they will always also be something else:

As Vincent Van Gogh said, in our world, olive trees may stand for themselves, maybe must stand for themselves, and so with cypresses, sunflowers, corn, human flesh. (Though he could not divest any of these of the cultural metaphors that come close and intrinsic as their shadows, replacing, as he almost said, the old halo.) (SL, 366)

While apparently declaring the importance of a thing being the thing itself, the text undermines this in parentheses, and even before that in its wording. Not only can olive trees, cypresses, and so forth, not be separated from their cultural metaphoricity, but they are not even said to be themselves: 'olive trees may stand for themselves, maybe must stand for themselves'. They are self-signifying. In our world, an olive tree will always mean 'an olive tree' (and all the associated meanings of that) rather than simply being one. 'In our world' is the key: the world is ours inasmuch as it is our perceptions of it; we are always already acculturated, always already in our world, not the world. The impossibility of divesting images of cultural metaphors is sewn into the prologue, in a subtle ambiguity:

At first he had thought he could write a plain, exact verse, in which a yellow chair was the thing itself, a yellow chair... Sometimes he still saw the brushstrokes, as it were, in this naked way, so that his earlier thoughts of this garden had to be undone, the idea of black wings stripped from the painted leafage, the vulgar idea of blood splashes washed off the notation of geraniums. But it couldn't be done. Language was against him, for a start. (SL, 2; my emphasis)

The phrase 'But it couldn't be done' lies between Alexander's attempts to undo his previous visual associations and an explanation of why his intentions for his play could not be fulfilled; positioned where it is, it throws its meanings both ways. The associations Alexander makes with the images and their multiple, additional meanings are no more escapable in painting than in language.

Stephanie's insight into Wordsworth's 'Immortality' Ode, in the brief moments she has managed to clear from duties as wife and mother, turns out to be essential to the argument:

Stephanie saw suddenly that the reiterated, varied 'deeps' of this stanza were part of a Wordsworthian vision of a darkness that was life and thought, a contrasted image as true as the human habits and roles of the preceding description of the Darling of a pigmy size. The two came together in the final line of the second stanza where the poet assures the child that 'Custom' shall
'lie upon thee with a weight
Heavy as frost and deep almost as life.'
(SL, 188)

Once more, we have a vision of a presymbolic ideal state, which is neither Kristeva's semiotic nor Byatt's infant vision, but Wordsworth's Romantic idealisation of the child, who has yet to enter the symbolic order, and recognition of the inescapable weight of custom and culture.

1 The painting consists of a pipe and beneath it written in French 'This is not a pipe' to remind the viewer that it is not a pipe but a painting of a pipe.