Crítica de Arte e Cultura No Mundo Contemporâneo - A Palavra e A Imagem
Crítica de Arte e Cultura No Mundo Contemporâneo - A Palavra e A Imagem
Crítica de Arte e Cultura No Mundo Contemporâneo - A Palavra e A Imagem
A PALAVRA E A IMAGEM
Organização
Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa
Alda Correia
Teresa de Ataíde Malafaia
Co-organização
Ana Daniela Coelho
Joana Vidigal
Maria José Pires
Design, paginação e arte final
Inês Mateus l [email protected]
Imagem na Capa
© Maria João Worm 2006
Imagem na Contracapa
© Maria João Worm 2001
Edição
Centro de Estudos Anglísticos da Universidade de Lisboa
Impressão e acabamento
COLIBRI - Artes Gráficas
Tiragem 600 exemplares
ISBN 978-972-8886-08-0
Depósito Legal 262 601/ 07
2007
A Palavra e a Imagem
Investigadoras
Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa
Alda Correia
Ana Daniela Coelho
Ana Rosa Gonçalves
Joana Vidigal
Luísa Maria Rodrigues Flora
Márcia Bessa Marques
Maria José Pires
Teresa de Ataíde Malafaia
AGRADECIMENTOS
A equipa organizadora de A Palavra e a Imagem agradece ao Coordenador Cientí-
fico do Centro de Estudos Anglísticos da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de
Lisboa, João Almeida Flor, a forma muito construtiva como contribuiu para definir o
Programa de Investigação e Intervenção A Moderna Diferença.
Ao Hugo Xavier da Cavalo de Ferro Editores agradecemos a generosa dispo-
nibilidade para participar na Mesa Redonda que finalizou o IV Seminário do ciclo
A Palavra e a Imagem, realizado em Maio de 2006, onde participou também o
Professor Jacques Leenhardt e que foi moderada por Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa e
Teresa de Ataíde Malafaia.
À Luísa Falcão reforçamos os nossos agradecimentos pelo modo profissional e
generoso com que se dispôs a resumir e traduzir as comunicações publicadas em
língua inglesa.
À Salomé Machado agradecemos a colaboração prestada à equipa organizadora.
A revisão do ensaio de Jacques Leenhardt, feita por Silvane Maria Pereira Brandão,
merece-nos também um agradecimento especial.
Lista de participantes no Ciclo de Seminários A Palavra e a Imagem
Maria Salomé Machado
Centro de Estudos Anglísticos da Universidade de Lisboa
Faculdade de Letras - Universidade de Lisboa
Alda Correia
Centro de Estudos Anglísticos da Universidade de Lisboa
Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Catherine Bernard
Université Paris VII
Maria José Pires
Centro de Estudos Anglísticos da Universidade de Lisboa
Escola Superior de Hotelaria e Turismo do Estoril
Emily Eells
Université Paris X
Jacques Leenhardt
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris
Maria João Worm
Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa
Centro de Estudos Anglísticos da Universidade de Lisboa
Faculdade de Letras - Universidade de Lisboa
Márcia Bessa Marques
Centro de Estudos Anglísticos da Universidade de Lisboa
Academia de Música de Santa Cecília
Ana Rosa Gonçalves
Centro de Estudos Anglísticos da Universidade de Lisboa
Escola Secundária 3 Dra. Laura Ayres, Quarteira
Luísa Maria Rodrigues Flora
Centro de Estudos Anglísticos da Universidade de Lisboa
Faculdade de Letras - Universidade de Lisboa
Landeg White
Universidade Aberta de Lisboa
Ana Daniela Coelho
Universidade de Lisboa
Teresa de Ataíde Malafaia
Centro de Estudos Anglísticos da Universidade de Lisboa
Faculdade de Letras - Universidade de Lisboa
Índice
Lista de Ilustrações . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Introdução
Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa, Alda Correia, Teresa de Ataíde Malafaia . . . 13
Idade Média, Renascimento e o Início da Modernidade – Desfazendo Mitos
Maria Salomé Machado . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Ver o Corpo, Escrever o Corpo: em Mrs. Dalloway de Virginia Woolf
e Água Viva de Clarice Lispector
Alda Correia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Empathy and Dissidence in Contemporary English Art and Fiction
Catherine Bernard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Resumo em português . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Frida Kahlo, the Wounded Flesh Made Sign
Maria José Pires . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Resumo em português . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
The Victorians at Amiens Cathedral: Translation and Transposition
Emily Eells . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Resumo em português . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
Crítica de Arte e Cultura no Mundo Contemporâneo
Jacques Leenhardt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
Fazer acontecer uma história
Maria João Worm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
Nem uma Palavra Só, nem uma Imagem Só, mas a sua Mistura Heterogénea
Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
Lendo Marriage A-La-Mode, de William Hogarth
Márcia Bessa Marques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
Dois Rossettis: Christina e Dante Gabriel – “Is she transcribing from his lips?”
Ana Rosa Gonçalves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
A Delicada Resistência de uma Porcelana ou Desta Matéria São Feitos
os Romances. Atonement de Ian McEwan
10 Índice
das referidas práticas, por um lado, a escrita jornalística, que as novas tecnolo-
gias estão a desenvolver exponencialmente, a ensaística, o conto, o relato de
viagem e biográfico, o romance, o poema, o drama e, por outro lado, as múl-
tiplas imagens em suporte digital, o design, a fotografia, o vídeo, o cinema, a
arquitectura, a gravura.
Assentes nestes princípios, organizámos, em 2005-06, na Faculdade de
Letras da Universidade de Lisboa, um ciclo de quatro seminários com o título
A Palavra e a Imagem, cujas comunicações agora se publicam.
que a ciência se liberta das grilhetas impostas pela religião cristã». Maria
Salomé reforça, pois, a teoria de que devemos fazer radicar o dealbar da
Modernidade no Renascimento, tal como explica M. H. Abrams: «Beginning
in the 1940s, a number of historians have replaced (or else supplemented)
the term “Renaissance” with early modern to designate the span from the end
of the middle ages until late in the seventeenth century.» (Abrams [1957]
1999: 264).1
Sobre a acepção de «diferença», Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa apresentou
uma comunicação ao primeiro do ciclo dos quatro seminários A Palavra e a
Imagem. Tal comunicação esteve na base do ensaio «De Thomas Kuhn, The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions às Questões de Diferença».2 Aí, problema-
tizou o binómio diferença/identidade fundamentalmente em relação ao con-
ceito de paradigma, como este é definido pelo historiador e filósofo da ciência
Thomas Kuhn. Além disso, alargou a referida problematização, considerando
as teorias de Mark Currie que, em Difference, avalia ensaisticamente o
processo de definição de «diferença» entre meados da década de sessenta do
século XX e o início do século XXI, partindo do conceito estruturalista de
signo linguístico. Alcinda concluiu pela necessidade de se considerar hoje,
criticamente, a própria forma de oposição binária para definir diferença/iden-
tidade, forma que, em última instância, impede a conceptualização do livre
proliferar das diferenças.
Seleccionar e problematizar «alguns importantes enquadramentos teó-
ricos diferenciados em que hoje é viável estudar palavra, ou imagem visual,
ou qualquer das relações diferentes que entre ambas se possa estabelecer» foi
também objectivo de «Nem uma Palavra Só, nem uma Imagem Só, mas a sua
Mistura Heterogénea». Neste trabalho, incluído na presente colectânea, Alcinda
Pinheiro de Sousa ensaiou ainda «uma diferenciação dos tipos de imagem
visual a que podemos estar a referir-nos, sobretudo actualmente, quando tal
diferenciação está potenciada, como antes nunca esteve, pelo aceleradíssimo
para ele e, por outro, a sublimação da mulher passiva realizada pela Poeta.
«Frida Kahlo, the Wounded Flesh Made Sign» convida, tanto a uma
leitura articulada entre o Prefácio de Angela Carter à colecção de postais,
Images of Frida Kahlo, e a vida da artista, como a incursões na obra ficcional
de Carter. Destaca-se, assim, o desejo da artista plástica se representar, o que
implica reflectir sobre o auto-retrato e remeter para obras ilustrativas de um
percurso, no qual as expressões de teor autobiográfico são uma constante.
Vemos, por conseguinte, reforçada a especificidade identitária de Kahlo, tradu-
zida principalmente no modo como olha para si própria. Da relação que Maria
José Pires estabelece entre os registos ficcionais, plásticos e críticos, emanam
várias formas de narrativa, nomeadamente a da utilização do sofrimento
sentido por Frida nos seus auto-retratos. Este recriar das experiências de teor
emocional encontra-se descrito no modo como Carter lê Frida, como Frida se
lê a si própria e, por fim, como Maria José propõe que as leiamos. Com essa
finalidade, destaca o papel da dor, a criação artística de Frida na sua expres-
são catártica e também a relação que Carter estabelece com outras mulheres
artistas, para quem fama e exibição, neste caso de mexicanidade, coexistiram.
O ensaio de Luísa Flora «A Delicada Resistência de uma Porcelana ou
Desta Matéria são Feitos os Romances. Atonement de Ian McEwan» centra-se
na narrativa e na sua capacidade para interpelar o acto de viver. Isto implica
interrogar o próprio acto de escrever ficção, problematizando-o na sua
legitimidade e articulando-o com um dos temas da obra – a viagem de auto-
-descoberta da adolescente, Briony Tallis. Esta, que pretende ser escritora, verá
o mundo em função daquilo que julga servir a sua escrita, e agirá na vida real,
de acordo com essa conjectura. O romance é sintonizado com uma linhagem
romanesca ocidental que parte, essencialmente, do realismo, mas que remete
para «múltiplos contributos de uma tradição imensa e plural». Luísa Flora
serve-se ainda de entrevistas dadas pelo escritor e de afirmações de Milan
Kundera para evocar a concepção de arte romanesca ilustrada por Atonement
e para avaliar a prática ficcional de McEwan, chamando a atenção para o uso
que este faz do experimentalismo e do realismo: «a ortodoxia, que tem vindo,
sob diversos semblantes, a privilegiar o experimentalismo e a desvalorizar o
realismo como método literário ilude o fundo do problema e é, pelo menos em
autores como McEwan, uma falsa questão, uma não questão».
A mesma interpelação sobre o acto de viver e o acto de escrever é con-
substanciada no ensaio «Ver o Corpo, Escrever o Corpo: em Mrs. Dalloway de
Virginia Woolf e Água Viva de Clarice Lispector» de Alda Correia. O seu ponto
de partida é a reflexão sobre a interpretação do corpo na cultura e
pensamento ocidentais e a distinção feita por Molly Hite entre dois tipos de
Introdução 21
4 Veja-se, a propósito da exibição presente em diversas práticas culturais, a reflexão de Bella Dicks:
«(...) displays are no longer confined to galleries, museums or other dedicated exhibitionary
venues. Forms of display today occupy visitable, material environments. Cultural meanings are
literally written into landscapes, roads and street furniture, seating, walls, screens, objects and
artworks. Museums represent societies as walk-through exhibitions of material artifacts.» (2003:
17-18).
Introdução 23
Referências
Abrams, M. H. ([1957] 1999). A Glossary of Literary Terms. Boston, Mass.: Heinle &
Heinle.
Cannon, John, ed. ([1997] 2002). The Oxford Companion to British History. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Childs, Peter (2000). Modernism. London and New York: Routledge.
Dicks, Bella (2003). Culture on Display. The Production of Contemporary Visitability.
London: Open University Press.
Eysteinsson, Astradur (1990). The Concept of Modernism. Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press.
Pinheiro de Sousa, Alcinda (2006). «De Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions às Questões de Diferença». «And gladly wolde (s)he lerne and gladly
teche». Homenagem a Júlia Dias Ferreira. Org. Comissão Executiva do
Departamento de Estudos Anglísticos da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de
Lisboa. Lisboa: Colibri. No prelo.
Walker, John A. & Sarah Chaplin (1997). Visual Culture. An Introduction. Manchester
& New York: Manchester University Press.
Williams, Raymond ([1976] 1983). Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society.
London: Fontana Press.
Yolton, John W. et al., eds. ([1991] 1995). The Blackwell Companion to the
Enlightenment. Introd. Lester G. Crocker. Oxford: Blackwell.
Idade Média, Renascimento e o Início da Modernidade
– Desfazendo Mitos
C
onstitui um fenómeno interessante e até irónico que, em pleno século
XXI, quando investigadores e estudiosos têm à sua disposição as tecno-
logias mais sofisticadas que lhes permitem não só pôr em causa e
reinventar os resultados das pesquisas dos seus antecessores, mas também
proceder à divulgação de novas hipóteses e/ou conclusões, o comum dos
mortais continue a pautar-se por certas ideias antiquadas e preconcebidas
acerca das matérias que os especialistas tanto se empenham em difundir.
Os exemplos mais óbvios remetem para as imagens que se projectam de
imediato na mente do presumível público alvo quando confrontado com
certas designações que se referem a determinadas épocas históricas: Idade
Média, Renascimento e Modernidade. A primeira mantém-se irremediavel-
mente associada ao apodo obscurantismo, a segunda ao prestígio de uma
mudança que se imagina radical no curso dos saberes, a terceira dá origem a
juízos vários na sua maioria contraditórios. Por isso, no intuito de desmitificar
velhas teorias obsoletas que teimam em persistir, vai-se fazer uma tentativa de
redifinir parâmetros e contextos.
Não obstante os conflitos e convulsões, o período medievo preserva no
seu seio as sementes dos vários saberes que germinariam no Renascimento
dando fruto tanto nesta época como nas subsequentes. De facto, desde os
primórdios da incompreendida e mal amada Idade Média e, sobretudo, após
a entronização do Cristianismo como religião oficial por Constantino, que
todos os mosteiros, conventos e abadias possuiam uma biblioteca, mais ou
menos bem fornecida, dispersa pelos vários quadrantes do conhecimento.
Sobre os manuscritos que nelas se encontravam armazenados, debruçavam-
-se os monges, frades e outros membros da Igreja não só com o objectivo de
proceder ao seu estudo mas também de os perpetuar através de novas cópias,
de preferência enriquecidas com iluminuras. No decurso destes trabalhos,
embora a Igreja vigiasse com zelo implacável quem tinha acesso aos documen-
tos, mesmo o mais simples dos copistas não ficava imune ao que transcrevia,
benificiando deste modo ínvio, da influência do valioso espólio de saberes
que o Império Romano desenvolvera.
28 Maria Salomé Machado
Referências
Carter, R. and J. McRae 2001: The Routledge History of Literature in English. 2nd ed..
London and New York: Routledge.
Fox, Adam 2002: Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500-1700. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Treasure, Geoffrey 2000: The Making of Modern Europe 1648-1780. London and New
York: Routledge.
Ver o Corpo, Escrever o Corpo: em Mrs. Dalloway
de Virginia Woolf e Água Viva de Clarice Lispector
ALDA CORREIA
(CEAUL-Centro de Estudos Anglísticos da Universidade de Lisboa /
Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
mulheres devem em primeiro lugar destruir a imagem do corpo que lhes foi
imposta pelas estruturas patriarcais, como a-sexuadas, histéricas, místicas, um
reflexo do corpo masculino, e numa segunda fase, depois de redescobertos os
seus corpos perdidos, devem pensar e escrever através das suas experiências
físicas, como mulheres. Esta formulação implica a existência de dois tipos de
corpo com representações diferentes, que Molly Hite teoriza como “the body
for others, the body cast in social roles and bound by the laws of social
interaction” e o “visionary body (...) a second physical presence in fundamen-
tal respects different from the gendered body”,6 que pode trazer novas
perspectivas e novas estratégias de representação estética. No artigo em que
apresenta esta distinção, Hite estuda a evolução de um momento a outro nas
obras de Virginia Woolf, sublinhando a importância do corpo visionário na
fase mais madura da escritora, evolução que tinha sido, aliás, já proposta por
Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou no seu livro Feminist Readings of the Body in V. Woolf’s
Novels.7
Os romances Mrs. Dalloway (1925) de Virginia Woolf e Água Viva (1973)
de Clarice Lispector exploram com bastante clareza estes dois conceitos de
corpo e é disso que aqui nos ocuparemos. Mrs. Dalloway é uma das obras de
Virginia Woolf que aborda com maior amplitude a questão social, tanto no
que diz respeito ao sistema e às relações entre classes e tipos sociais, como
no que diz respeito às tensões vividas pela mulher em todo esse contexto. A
relação de Clarissa com o corpo, que reflecte a ansiedade de Virginia Woolf
e também muita da ansiedade da época sobre o corpo feminino, é, na verda-
de, conflituosa: se por um lado ela optou por um casamento convencional e
economicamente seguro, por outro não consegue relacionar-se fisicamente
com o marido, acabando por revelar as suas emoções em relação a Sally e a
Peter. Vejam-se as várias referências à sua castidade, à frieza no casamento, à
paixão por Sally:
Like a nun withdrawing, or a child exploring a tower, she went upstairs
(...) And really she preferred to read of the retreat from Moscow. He
knew it. So the room was an attic; the bed narrow; and lying there
reading, for she slept badly, she could not dispel a virginity preserved
through childbirth which clung to her like a sheet.
6 Molly Hite, “Virginia Woolf’s Two Bodies”, Genders 31, 2000. www.genders.org/g31/g31-hite.html.
7 Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou, Feminist Readings of the Body in Virginia Woolf’s Novels (Thessaloniki:
Giahoudi-Giapouli, 1997).
38 Alda Correia
(...) But this question of love (...) this falling in love with women. Take
Sally Seton. (...) Had not that, after all, been love?
Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world
might have turned upside down.8
Este conflito corresponde, segundo Kitsi-Mitakou, à dicotomia contida na
imagem da Virgem Maria, caracterizada pela vivência dos estados opostos de
virgindade e maternidade. Woolf teria partido do mito cristão para explorar a
imagem da virgindade em Clarissa, utilizando comparações frequentes com a
vida monástica e descrições físicas que sublinham a forma alongada, erecta e
fria da protagonista e mesmo a ausência dos seios: “she felt like a nun who
has left the world and feels fold round her the familiar veils and the response
to old devotions”; “feeling herself suddenly shrivelled, aged, breastless”.9
Esta relação conflituosa com o corpo é reforçada através das duas perso-
nagens que podem ser consideradas como duplos, espiritual e corporal, de
Clarissa: respectivamente Septimus Smith e Doris Kilman. Patricia Moran
sublinha que tanto Septimus como Doris se relacionam de forma perturbada
com a alimentação; para ambos esta simboliza a ligação à vivência de um
corpo que os limita. Septimus “could not taste, could not feel. Even taste had
no relish to him”.10 A impossibilidade de sentir, que o levará à morte, o
pecado pelo qual a natureza humana o tinha condenado, estende-se a todo o
corpo, inclusivamente à sexualidade:
Love between man and woman was repulsive to Shakespeare. The
business of copulation was filth to him before the end. But, Rezia said,
she must have children.
(...) So there was no excuse; nothing whatever the matter, except the
sin for which human nature had condemned him to death; that he did
not feel.11
A insensibilidade que afecta Septimus no corpo, na alma e nas suas
relações com os outros é tão redutora quanto a fealdade no corpo de Miss
Kilman. O seu “unlovable body”, aliado à pobreza, afastá-la-á da possibilida-
de de acesso à felicidade, conduzindo-a, ao contrário de Septimus, à revolta
contra a marginalização de que era alvo, contra a desigualdade perante
mulheres como Clarissa, contra o sofrimento por que era obrigada a passar e
8 Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, ed. Shakespeare Head Press (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) 25-28.
9 Woolf 23-25.
10 Woolf 66.
11 Woolf 67 e 69.
Ver o Corpo, Escrever o Corpo 39
12 Woolf 96-99.
13 Woolf 10.
14 Woolf 10: “But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body,
with all its capacities, seemed nothing, nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself
invisible; unseen; unknown; There being no more marrying, no more having of children now.”
15 Esta questão é analisada sob outros pontos de vista através do casal Smith cuja mulher, Lucrezia,
pretende ter um filho, de Sally Seaton que é mãe de “five enormous boys” ou de Bradshaw que
fala constantemento do filho em Eton.
16 Woolf 29 e 47: “That was her self – pointed; dartlike; definite”; “this coldness, this woodness,
something very profound in her (...) an impenetrability.”
40 Alda Correia
17 Kitsi-Mitakou 65-66: “The allusion to the “Dutch painting” which Clarissa stops to look at while Woolf
is defining her body, far from being accidental, reinforces Clarissa’s image; the severity, plainness,
and asceticism of the figures in fifteenth-century Flemish paintings harmonize with her wooden-
ness and uprightness. Yet, the painting is not defined; neither its title, nor its painter are specified.
The obscurity of the picture, which may range from a fifteenth-century Jan van Eyck or Roger van der
Weyden, to a seventeenth or eighteenth-century Rubens or Rembrandt, allows Woolf to suggest a
whole period in painting. That is, Dutch painting, which at its rise in the early Renaissance subtracts
the body from its natural characteristics by elongating the figures, reducing their depth, and
rendering them two-dimensional, inflexible and unapproachable, and ends up two centuries later
in the apotheosis of the flesh, the corpulent, spherical and massive bodies. The allusion to the
whole Dutch period reflects Clarissa’s oscillation between two antinominal concepts: the extinction
of her body (...) on the one hand, and the redefinition of her body as virginal and breastless on the
other hand. Dutch painting and Christianity at this point converge, and echo Clarissa’s
dichotomized body: both take the body away only to give it back defined through patriarchy.”
18 Miss Kilman diz, embora num contexto ambíguo: “Ugly, clumsy, Clarissa Dalloway had laughed
at her for being that; and had revived the fleshly desires, for she minded looking as she did beside
Clarissa” (p.96); Clarissa refere ao recordar Kilman na festa: “She hated her; she loved her” (p. 130).
Ver o Corpo, Escrever o Corpo 41
19 Clarice Lispector, Água Viva (Rio de Janeiro: Francisco Alves Ed., 1993) 14-15.
20 Lispector 33, 53 e 16.
42 Alda Correia
21 Lispector 35-47.
22 Lispector 80.
23 Lispector 93.
24 Lispector 87-88.
25 Lispector 100-101.
26 Carlos Mendes de Sousa, Clarice Lispector – Figuras da Escrita (Braga: Univ. Minho, 2000) 301-309.
Ver o Corpo, Escrever o Corpo 43
Referências
Braunstein, Florence, Jean-François Pépin. O Lugar do Corpo na Cultura Ocidental.
Lisboa: Instituto Piaget, 2001.
Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society 1.4 (1976): 875-893.
Damásio, António. O Sentimento de Si. Mem Martins: Publ. Europa-América, 2003.
Hite, Molly. ”Virginia Woolf’s Two Bodies,” Genders 31, 2000.
www.genders.org/g31/g31_hite.html. 4 Julho 2005.
Kitsi-Mitakou, Katerina. Feminist Readings of the Body in Virginia Woolf’s Novels.
Thessalonoki: Giahoudi-Giapouli, 1997.
Lispector, Clarice. Água Viva. Rio de Janeiro: Francisco Alves Ed., 1993.
Merleau-Ponty, M.. Phénomenologie de la Perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1972.
Moran, Patricia. Word of Mouth, Body Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia
Woolf. Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1996.
Sousa, Carlos Mendes. Clarice Lispector – Figuras da Escrita. Braga: Univ. Minho, 2000.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Shakespeare Head Press Edition. Oxford: Blackwell,
1996.
Empathy and Dissidence in Contemporary
English Art and Fiction
CATHERINE BERNARD
(Université Paris VII)
feminist writing.2 Similarly, a lot has been said about the historical turn of
recent English fiction and its historiographic potential.3 I shall consequently
not return to these well-charted grounds but shall rather turn my attention to
the way part of contemporary English art and writing precisely address – to
redress it maybe – the long and ambiguous tradition, in English literature
especially, of the overlooked, an overlooked that has been excised altogether
from representation or, when present, has featured under the sign of the
repellent and threatening other, the alien within to be contained aesthetically.
These questions have been raised before by both feminist readings of the
canon4 and post-colonial or Marxist readings.5 My modest contribution to this
debate which aims at producing an alternative reading of modernity, will
2 The list of studies devoted to these two specific fields would be too long. Suffice it to mention the
recovery work that has been done by the “New modernist studies” to reread the Modernist canon
and hear the muffled voices of forgotten – as often as not women – writers. See for instance: Carola
M. Kaplan and Anne B. Simpson (ed.), Seeing Double: Revisioning Edwardian and Modernist
Literature (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge
[Mass.]: Harvard University Press, 1995), Ann L. Ardis, Modernism and Cultural Conflict. 1880-
1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), or Stella Dean, Challenging Modernism.
New Readings in Literature and Culture, 1914-45 (London: Ashgate, 2002).
3 One may mention Linda Hutcheon’s now classic essay, A Poetics of Postmodernism (London:
Routledge, 1988), in which she explores at length Graham Swift’s critical rereading of the writing
of history in Waterland. One may also refer to chapter 4 of Steven Connor’s The English Novel in
History. 1950-1995 (London: Routledge, 1996), to Patrick Swinden, The English Novel of History
and Society 1940-1980 (Londres: Palgrave, 1984), David Leon Higdon’s Shadows of the Past in
Contemporary British Fiction (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 1985), Margaret Scanlan’s
Traces of Another Time. History and Politics in Postwar British Fiction (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1990), Elisabeth Wesseling’s Writing History as a Prophet: Postmodernist Innovations
of the Historical Novel (Amsterdam: Benjamins,199), Susana Onega’s Telling Histories.
Narrativizing History, Historicizing Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), Christina Kotte’s Ethical
Dimensions in British Historiographic Metafiction, Studies in English Literary and Cultural History
(Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2001), Peter Middleton and Tim Woods’s Literatures of Memory.
History, Time and Space in Postwar Writing (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2000), Brian Bond’s The
Unquiet Front. Britain’s Role in Literature and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002).
4 I am thinking, among other canonical feminist rereadings of the canon, of Elizabeth Bronfen’s Over
her Dead Body. Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1992) and, in the field of visual arts of the work of Griselda Pollock: see her Differencing the
Canon: Feminism and the Writing of Arts Histories (London: Routledge, 1999) or her Generations
and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings (London: Routledge, 1996).
5 One may mention the by now canonical interpretation of Mansfield Park by Edward Saïd in Culture
and Emperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993) or Terry Eagleton’s reappraisal of Wuthering
Heights in Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso, 1996).
Empathy and Dissidence in Contemporary English Art and Fiction 49
A lot could be said about this tell-tale passage in which the logic of
representation (“inscrutable”) is revealed to tie in with that of the social and
domestic economy, and in which a disturbing political unconscious may also
be seen at work, according to which the lower classes are – even if ironically –
perceived as the home monster, the ugly and frightening beast hitherto enslaved
but that ominously raises its head and sets itself free of its own accord.
Already, in Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold felt the pressure of
those he defined as “the Populace,” to be distinguished from the aristocratic
Barbarians and the middle-class Philistines. As early as the late 1860s, the time
of Arnold’s publication of his essay, the ”populace” was felt to be about to
burst the circumference of its allotted world, to emerge in full light, Arnold’s
description conveying mixed feelings of fear and fascination:
But that vast portion, lastly, of the working class which, raw and half-
developed, has long lain half-hidden amidst its poverty and squalor,
and is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an English-man’s
heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex
us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it
likes, breaking what it likes, – to this vast residuum we may with great
propriety give the name of Populace.9
Throughout Victorian fiction one can feel this teeming “populace” pressing
against the walls of decent society, threatening to wreak havoc. In Bleak House,
in which one finds the most disturbing account of the life of the Victorian
dispossessed, little Jo’s dwelling in the famed Tom All Alone’s is caught in the
powerful political paradigm of decadence and civil corruption, rotting away,
collapsing and oozing noxious vapours that reach to the heart of a sickening
society. The social other within only surfaces here under the aegis of a form of
neo-gothic fear and trembling that seems to rule out any possibility of
redemption beside sacrifical death, the very sort of death visited on Little Jo.
In the 20th century, with the remarkable exceptions of Lawrence’s Sons
and Lovers, until John Braine in Room at the Top (1957) and Alan Sillitoe in
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) brought the working class to the
forefront of fiction, these dark corners of England’s collective house featured
essentially as sociological testimonies especially in the works of field pho-
tographers like Bill Brandt. One should also mention, in the 50s and 60s, the
extraordinary project of Jeremy Forsyth on the west end of Newcastle, who
9 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 1867-69 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993),
p. 107.
Empathy and Dissidence in Contemporary English Art and Fiction 51
painstakingly documented the life in one street of Newcastle and the changes
brought on by modernization to working-class mores. Later in the 60s,
Magnum photographer Don McCullin was also to bring the dispossesed the
same attention he brought to the documentation of modern war.
***
Such return to / of the real, to borrow art critic Hal Foster’s words10
features larger in more recent developments in art and writing, artists finding
here another way of blurring the frontier between fiction and fact and of
exploring the constructedness of social representation. Denouncing the gospel
of the autonomization of the artwork expounded by part of the Modernists
whether in France or in Britain and Ireland, from Mallarmé to Baudelaire, from
Valéry to Eliot, the artist redefines himself / herself “as ethnographer,”11 in
order to show culture at work and to question the way it naturalizes its
ideological premises.
This may take the concrete form of a shift in the geographical focus as is
the case in Peter Ackroyd’s monumental biography of London: London. The
Biography which relocates the heart of London’s cultural identity in the East
End, the three maps placed at the beginning of the book (the City in 1800, the
City in 2000 and Soho and the West End) implicitly overlapping with, say, that
of Woolf’s upper middle class London in Mrs Dalloway or The Years yet also
widening the geographical and sociological range to include the East end.
Against the glorious narrative of England as it is inscribed in its West end
monuments – monuments in which Woolf already perceived the deadly spirit
of Imperial and reactionary ideology to be fully at work –, Ackroyd proposes
a winding and ever-shifting history of the under world of London, and reclaims
the energy of an archaic popular culture that has remained resilent until its
eradication by capitalist gentrification (see his history of the Docklands in
chapter 7 of the biography: “Fortune not Design”).
As reclaimed by Ackroyd, the spirit of London is footloose, deeply
anarchic, centrifugal. However Ackroyd’s celebration is also fraught with the
nagging certainty that it may today be retrievable only as a ghostly trace:
The decade which saw the emergence of the “yuppies,” for example,
also witnessed the revival of street-beggars and vagrants sleeping
“rough” upon the streets or within doorways […]. The Strand, in
10 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge [Mass.]: The MIT Press, 1999).
11 Ibid., chap. 6.
52 Catherine Bernard
12 Peter Ackroyd, London. The Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), p. 767.
13 Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory” New Left Review, New
Left Review I/82, November-December 1973.
Empathy and Dissidence in Contemporary English Art and Fiction 53
14 Iain Sinclair, Lights out for the Territory (London: Granta, 1997), p. 116.
54 Catherine Bernard
celebration that would convert loss into affirmative identification and thus
reassuringly heal the breach. Such is the ambiguity at the heart even of Raphael
Samuel’s unrivalled and monumental Theatres of Memory15 which retrieves
the broken skeins of popular memory and so doing tries to unravel the very
politics of memory.
It was precisely this contradiction that the sculptor Rachel Whiteread
meant to address and foreground when she conceived House the work that
won her the 1993 Turner Prize. Sollicited by Artangel – the ground-breaking
English commissioning art trust –, Whiteread chose to transplant her production
outside the consecrated space of the white cube of the art gallery. When
answering Artangel’s invitation, she did not alter the idiosyncratic aesthetic
vocabulary she had first elaborated with her series of resin casts of the under-
space of chairs, and then refined with the production of casts of interiors, of
unthinkable spaces, such as the interior of a drawing room. But House took
one step further her twofold reflection on the state of art “after the end of art”
– to resort to Arthur Danto’s terminology – and on the role of art in the city,
after the decline of ideologies and utopias.
Against the doxa of the “demateralization of art” heralded by the American
art critic Lucy Lippard in relation to the development of non canonical neo-
dadaist aesthetic gestures in the 60s, such as short-lived happenings,
Whiteread’s casts flaunted their intractable materiality while, symmetrically,
acknowledging that matter could also prove ghostly and that presence and
absence were but the two mirror facets of experience. Against the supposed
autonomization of modern art, she also repositioned the artwork in the very
fabric of urban and political space. Incidentally, she also revisited and revised
the canonical history of English modern art, generating discrete inter-aesthetic
echoes of the now overlooked works of the painters of the Camden Town
Group (1911) and the London Group (1913) who – under the influence of
Walter Sickert – had focused on the less glorious corners of English society as,
for instance, did Harold Gilman in his Tea in a Bedsitter (1916).
Against the increasingly abstract agenda of in situ art which tended to
depoliticize the relationship between the artwork and its environment,
Whiteread reasserted the necessity or the artist to reflect on her / his insertion
within their environment, the very fabric that made her / his works possible
and marketable. Her decision to produce a cast of the interior of one of the
terraced houses doomed to demolition on Grove Road, in the working class
East end borough of Bow,16 was more than a meta-aesthetic comment on the
relative exhaustion of the conventional sites of art, whether it be the gallery or
the museum. It also engaged in a controversial dialogue with the great tradition
of monumental and commemorative public sculpture. House did not explicitely
purport to be any form of cenotaph erected to the memory of a culture soon
to be ousted by the irresistible gentrification of East London – a gentrification
in which, ironically, artists and galleries had a key role. It merely intended to
testify to what had once been. From the start, Whiteread’s choice of location
and object constituted a powerful statement on the violent erasure of a
formely deeply-rooted culture. As Iain Sinclair himself shows in the essay he
devoted to Whiteread’s Grove Road, House was an highly sophisticated work
which addressed no less complex issues relating to what the marxist historian
E.P. Thompson analysed as the “making of the English working class,” the
mapping of identity, its sense of collective rootedness and the necessarily
nostalgic dynamics that relate us back to often imaginary collective selves.
By choosing this time to produce a cast of a whole house, instead of
focusing on a single room, or on pieces of furniture, Whiteread also appro-
priated and thematized one of the seminal tropes of English consciousness: i.e.
that of the house as extension of a private and family identity and, symmet-
rically, as synecdoche for a whole community and England at large. The trope
will be familiar to anyone who has read Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the
Revolution in France, in which the founding father of English conservatism
elaborates on the image of England as a country estate to be handed down
from generation to generation improved yet fundamentally unchanged. At the
heart of the running metaphor in Burke’s anti-revolutionary rhetoric lies the
central vision of England as a vast portrait gallery, lying at the heart of the
mansion and recording the stately procession of generations that guarantee
the permanence of the patriarchal order.17 Jane Austen was to pick up the
theme in her idealized vision of Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice to produce
her own complex version of the conservative myth.18 19th century fiction was
to make good use of the same trope to develop a reflection on the exhaustion
of the same patriarchal order, on the passing of an ancient system and on the
16 House stood from October 25 1993 to January 11 1994 and was then demolished.
17 Edmund Burke, Reflections of the Revolution in France, 1790 (London: Pelican, 1968), pp. 119-
122.
18 On that subject see Alistair Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate: Study of Jane Austen’s
Novels (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972).
56 Catherine Bernard
19 On the subject see my own “Habitations of the Past: Of Shrines and Haunted Houses” REAL.
Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, Herbert Grabes (ed.), vol. 21 (Tübingen:
Gunter Narr Verlag, 2005), pp. 161-172.
20 One should add that the age of the building does not in any radical way alter the gist of the matter:
as French architects and sociologists have amply shown in recent years, the destruction of modern
tower blocks may be just as traumatic to the inhabitants as the destruction of houses erected in the
middle of the 19th century. See Paul Chemetov Vingt mille mots pour la ville (Paris: Flammarion,
1998).
21 Pierre Bourdieu, Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique, 1972 (Paris: Seuil, coll. Points, 2000), pp.
272-279.
Empathy and Dissidence in Contemporary English Art and Fiction 57
22 See his essays collected under the title The Culture Industry (London: Routledge, 1991) and his
essay on Samuel Beckett, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” Notes to Literature, vol. 1, 1958 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 241-275.
23 In that respect, it intends to show up such institutions as the Geffrye Museum, which stages a sort
of crash course in the history of domestic interior, and is also located in East London for what they
are: affirmative and ultimately alienating exercices in memorial marketing intended to function as
nostalgic and soothing echo chambers of a homogeneous culture that never existed as staged.
24 Angela Dimitrakaki, “Gothic Public Art and the Failures of Democracy. Reflections on House,
Interpretation and ‘the Political Unconscious’” in Chris Townsend (ed.), Rachel Whiteread (London:
Thames & Hudson, 2004), p. 109.
58 Catherine Bernard
intimate and collective selves. Her casts of the space under and in-between
book shelves conjure memories of the books we have read, wish we had read,
would like to read, and of the very mental space these vanished or virtual books
open, a space to be filled in and that can only exist negatively. Similarly, her
recent series of the casts of filing boxes, inspired to her by the boxes she found
in her own mother’s house, turn the sculptures into a complex system of con-
flicting signs: the boxes are both treasure-troves and ominous, slightly threat-
ening indexes evocative of those bureaucratic panoptical systems of control
which we know to have been intrumental to 20th century planned genocides.
When transplanted and monumentalized as they were in Whiteread’s
installation in Tate Modern’s turbine hall in 2005-2006, private memory, the
memories of the overlooked are once more seen to interact with the collective
memory the great national museums are meant to embody.25 Although the
monumentalized scale of the Tate installation adds to the defamiliarizing
power of Whiteread’s casts, all Whiteread’s works are lessons in renewed ways
of looking at the overlooked, at the very fabric of our everyday lives. It is no
wonder then that at the same time as Magnum photographer Martin Parr
produced his uncanny series of photographs of light switches,26 each almost
obscenely testifying to the taste of the house’s owner, Whiteread also produced
her own version of light switches. Anonymous, bland, purely functional and
yet disconnected from their environment, unlike Parr’s clichés, these images
make us see this banal object for the first time, transcending its mere function,
while insisting once more allegorically that art must shed light on the
overlooked, must make us see.
What made House unique was its capacity to address the pragmatic
agenda of contemporary art, to force art back onto the public arena, to heal
the breach between the artwork and society and thus to cancel its autonomiza-
tion. House was one of those “anxious objects” to borrow Harold Rosenberg’s
formula, which desacralize art by provoking a violent estrangement of our
expectations of what art should be. The tags on its walls, which read “Wot for”
and “Homes for all black and white,” were proof enough that art could still
object, could still resist its commodification by the culture industry and that its
task was also to engage, beyond the sheltered precinct of the art world, into a
25 The installation was entitled Embankment, and was part of the Unilever series of sponsored works
commissioned by the Tate. It could be seen from 11th October 2005 to 1st May 2006.
26 Martin Parr and Nicholas Barker, Signs of the Times: A Portrait of the Nation’s Tastes (London:
Cornerhouse Publications, 1992).
Empathy and Dissidence in Contemporary English Art and Fiction 59
***
By taking her sculptures out of the studio or the impersonal spaces of the
art gallery or the museum, Whiteread intended to relocate art at the heart of
the polis, to turn the artist once more into a valid interlocutor. She also
implicitly meant to make us see how political and cultural the space in which
we live has always been. Other artists also engaged in a similar dialogue with
our everyday space and also intended to make us gaze at the overlooked
spaces of our lives anew. With his work Semi-detached (2004), Michael Landy
also revisited the common places of England’s collective memory. Installed in
the monumental Duveen Galleries of Tate Britain on Millbank, Landy’s work
consisted of the painstakingly reconstituted exterior of a semi-detached house,
similar to those to be seen everywhere in Britain and which have become the
27 For an analysis of the dialectics of presence and absence produced by this work, see James E.
Young, “Rachel Whiteread’s Judenplatz Memorial in Vienna. Memory and Absence” in Townsend
(ed.), pp. 162-172.
28 It is yet another proof of the paradoxical role of art in today’s culture industry that Landy’s work,
for all its adversarial stance was from the start processed by the corporate culture of the museum
and subsumed under its now institutionalized counter-discourse, as testifies the description of the
work still to be found on the Tate’s web site: “Semi-detached, a major site-specific installation,
takes as its focus the artist’s father, a former tunnel miner incapacitated by an industrial accident
twenty-five years ago. Through sculpture, video and sound Landy invokes broader questions of
value and usefulness, employment and purpose.” 30th October 2006.
//www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/landy/
60 Catherine Bernard
29 Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories. Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (London: Routledge,
1995), p. 88.
Empathy and Dissidence in Contemporary English Art and Fiction 61
30 See Edward Saïd’s well-known analysis of this silence at the heart of Austen’s novel in Culture and
Emperialism.
62 Catherine Bernard
The looking into the mirror depicts what Carter later writes in the Preface
regarding Frida’s emotional experience and her attempt to transform “her
whole experience in the world into a series of marvellously explicit images.
She is in the process of remaking herself in another medium than life and is
becoming resplendent. The flesh made sign.” And when we ask ourselves
‘What flesh?’ Carter immediately answers: “The wounded flesh.” Frida herself
was her own raw material. In order to show how Carter believed Frida to be
ahead of her time in many ways, she pinpoints how this artist kept the raw
material raw, since “the wounds never healed over”. (Carter 1998: 434).
When we go back to Carter’s short story “Flesh and the Mirror” and we
read the last paragraph “The most difficult performance in the world is acting
naturally, isn’t it? Everything else is artful.” (Carter 1996: 70) we are remembered
of André Breton, the French surrealist, who described Frida’s work as a ribbon
around a bomb. Her paintings transmit, in a very powerful way, a strong
energy, a great passion and pain. This is probably what led Carter to underline
how much pain is contained in her paintings, when she quotes Frida’s husband,
Mexico’s most celebrated artist, Diego Rivera: “Frida is the only example in
the history of art of an artist who tore open her chest and heart to reveal the
biological truth of her feelings.” Moreover, Carter believes that the unchanging
gaze on the painted face shows an enigmatic stoicism, along with martyrdom
as Frida’s wounds are displayed, reckoning the artist as a “connoisseur of
physical suffering”. (Carter 1998: 434). Therefore, it makes us believe that
when portrayed on canvas, that Frida helped herself to resist the pain as if she
felt a need to paint in order to endure it physically and psychologically (then
becoming more real and confirming her hold on existence).
The second feature Angela Carter points out to concerns Frida’s physical
appearance. She begins by admiring what Frida did with her hair in the
paintings, commenting on how the hair of “the most sensual of painters, hangs
in disorder down her back only when she depicts herself in great pain, or as
a child”, when traditionally wild, flowing hair is associated with sensuality and
freedom. Regarding Frida’s usual hairstyle, Carter gives us a complex picture:
Sometimes her hair is scraped back so tight the sight of it hurts;
or it is unnaturally twisted into knots; plaited with flowers and ribbons
and topknots and feathers in any one of fifty different ways; arranged
in fetishistic, architectural composition of braids. (Carter 1998: 435).
It isn’t hard to imagine the loose hair Carter using terms as the adjective
“scraped” – which implies a harshly rub on –, the verb “hurts”, the expression
“unnaturally twisted into knots” – inferring an artificial control implying pain –,
the excessive “fifty different ways” of plaiting the hair using various accessories,
72 Maria José Pires
principles, such as life and death, male and female, light and dark, ancient
and modern.
Another aspect Carter observes in Frida’s painting is her straightforwardness:
She depicts her body enclosed in one of the plaster-of-Paris corsets
prescribed for her crumbling spine, her torso stuck with tacks, she
paints the fresh incision of the surgeon’s knife; her own blood, and
other people’s, too; her miscarriage; her restless dual nature, part
European, part Mexican; her broken heart. (Carter 1998: 436).
Despite Carter’s admiration for this straightforward form with which Frida
depicts her reality, she also points out to how subtle Frida can be when
painting the deer pierced with arrows. This painting, The Little Deer (1946), is
also seen as an example of Frida’s interest in Eastern religions and mysticism:
her head conjoined with the body of a stag shows such complex assimilation
of sources, since it relates to the artist’s suffering due to her failing health and
turbulent relationship with Rivera, as well as it sums up a world view in which
different cultures and belief systems combine. Thus, the word “carma” inscribed
at the bottom of the canvas becomes a reference to the Eastern concept of
reincarnation; whereas the arrows allude to St Sebastian’s Christian images.
On the other hand, in Aztec culture, the deer is known to symbolise the right
foot – Frida’s injured limb from her childhood – and relates to the animal alter-
ego, a subject that fascinated Frida and that is tied to Angela Carter’s reference
to anthropomorphism – which in turn raises the question of the meaning of
humanity itself, topics that can be found in Nights at the Circus (1984).
As such, Carter recognizes Frida’s ability to make of her “broken,
humiliated, warring self a series of masterpieces of mutilation” like she also
did in real life, the writer presents these circumstances by concluding that
Frida’s narcissism becomes triumphant, a carnival. But she adds, within
brackets, “Never forget the black humour in her paintings”. (Carter 1998:
436). We can say the same thing of some of Angela Carter’s work. Even in this
Preface, similarly to her journalism, the writing is “thoughtful yet immediate,
concise but not shallow” (Smith 1997: xiv) and still ironic and poignant. This
is quite evident when Carter focuses on Frida’s marriage to Rivera as a
“monstrously ambiguous couple – Frida with her moustache, Diego with his
fat man’s breasts. The sexiest couple in Mexico, who did not fuck.” After
explaining how factual her statements are, through a parenthesis, Carter
underlines again their physical differences and how this is so absolutely
obvious in their working interests: “he did the large-scale public works, the
great political murals. She did the colour postcards of heightened states of
mind, the politics of the heart.” (Carter 1998: 436). However, Carter seems to
74 Maria José Pires
acknowledge the originality of this relationship by pointing out that Rivera was
Frida’s muse, alluding to two self-portraits, one of 1943 and the other of 1949,
which “show he of the bullfrog features ensconced upon her forehead, in the
place where I imagine that Cain was marked.” For Carter, these portray
obsession, devotion, and inspiration. Furthermore, she stuns us with this remark:
Muses aren’t supposed to make you happy, after all. Then again men
are warned against marrying their muses. Women sometimes have no
option. (Carter 1998: 436).
Notwithstanding these assumptions, Carter still concludes that Frida
became “a great painter because of, not in spite of, all this.” (Carter 1998:
437). Such a conclusion seems to reflect the way Carter’s Night’s at the Circus
is also built; it begins with a young American journalist, named Jack Walser,
who tries to explode the heroine Fevvers’ reputation as a real woman who also
has real wings and in the end he becomes aware of her liberation, her
emancipation from real-life models of femininity. No wonder in the end the
“spiralling tornado Fevvers’ laughter began to twist and shudder across the
entire globe”; though her laughter might also be at Walser’s credulity: “It just
goes to show there’s nothing like confidence!” (Carter 1994: 295).
In the Preface, Carter also underlines the need women painters face of
making “exhibitions of themselves in order to mount exhibitions”. She does so
by strongly stressing the verb phrase, “are forced”, and as a paradigm presents
their options – “Fame, notoriety, scandal, eccentric dress and behaviour”
(Carter 1998: 437) – as well as their identities: Rosa Bonheur (the XIX Century
French artist considered one of the most renowned animal painters in history,
whose unconventional lifestyle contributed to the myth that surrounded her
during her lifetime, as she smoked cigarettes in public, rode astride, and wore
her hair short); Meret Oppenheim (the Swiss Surrealist painter and sculptor,
whose youth and beauty, free spirit and uninhibited behaviour, precarious
walks on the ledges of high buildings, and the “surrealist” food she concocted
from marzipan in her studio, all contributed to the creation of an image of the
Surrealist woman as beautiful, independent, and creative), Leonor Fini (the
Italian artist who always rejected categorization of any kind and whose
eccentric persona and flamboyant dress was rivalled only by Dali’s), Georgia
O’Keeffe (who would test her physical and psychological independence by
living beyond the fringe of civilization, bucking oppressive social conventions
to become one of the first female American artists to lead a professionally
successful and emancipated life) and finally Frida Kahlo. The examples shown
by Carter all seem to confirm her idea that “Fame is not an end in itself but a
strategy.” As opposed to “are forced”, Carter chooses the same paragraph to
Frida Kahlo, the Wounded Flesh Made Sign 75
explain how “Being famous means she can stake out her own territory, can
even determine, wholly or in part, the way her paintings will be looked at.”
(Carter 1998: 437) (our emphasis).
Frida’s transition to a much mature style and to a public acknowledge-
ment as a major artist “was assisted, not hindered, by her growing fame as the
beautiful wife of the Mexican muralist.” We know how Frida felt lost and
unprotected without Diego, but she was still determined to keep herself strong
as she grew more independent from him. Thus, we believe that Frida’s higher
success and independence was attained at an artistic, emotional and financial
level, the latter she perceived from the moment her first four paintings were
bought by Edward G. Robinson. Similarly, Angela Carter’s second prize, the
Somerset Maugham Award for her third novel Several Perceptions (1968),
brought her the opportunity to spend the money on a visit to Japan, where she
lived a unique experience (1969-1972). She then returned to England to get
divorced and to build her career with help from journalism. As Roland Barthes
wrote at the beginning of Empire of Signs (1970) “Someday we must write the
history of our own obscurity – manifest the density of our narcissism”. Carter
seems to have later reflected on the cultural diversity of her own experience
when dealing with the Marquis de Sade in The Sadeian Woman in the
following passage: “Flesh comes to us out of history (…)” (Carter 1979: 11).
That seems to have been implied in the way Frida Kahlo became famous as a
symbol of what Carter names “Mexicanness”. For her, Frida used anything and
everything, from pre-Columbian jewellery antiques to beads bought from the
market, turning herself into a “folkloric artefact”. Carter also points out to how
different she would be in her contemporary class society, since Frida chose to
wear the most elaborate Mexican traditional dress “at a time when the
Mexican bourgeoisie, from which she came, did not indulge in fancy dress
and even high Bohemia, to which she now belonged, only kept it for parties.”
(Carter 1998: 437). Nowadays, some believe that Frida used this dress option
in two ways: to make a nationalist political point and to make a statement
about her own independence from feminine norms.
Carter’s emphasis is then on how such “enchantment of disguise”, a
“perpectual festival of fancy dress”, overcame Frida. Even after describing
some awkward situations, Carter stresses the artificiality of Frida’s dazzled
smile along with “her living exposition of the vitality of the peasant culture of
Mexico” (Carter 1998: 437) turned into a piece of political theatre; an
appearance that, according to Carter, could easily be trapped in the high
fashion world. Thus, she considers the opening of Frida’s show in Paris (1938),
at which the Franco-Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli designed a couture line
76 Maria José Pires
and a dress that she baptised “la robe de Madame Rivera”. To promote such a
style, Frida’s hand, covered with jewels, appeared on the monthly cover of the
French Vogue magazine. It is in a two line paragraph that Carter sums up
Frida’s choices, by comparing them to Walt Whitman’s: “Like Walt Whitman,
if she contradicted herself, it was because she contained multitudes.” (Carter
1998: 437). Although we haven’t found contradictions in Carter’s choices of
lifestyle yet, since she considered herself as a feminist writer, living her life
accordingly to her subversive nature, we know that she always acted like a
woman to whom nothing was sacred, not even feminisms. This isn’t hard to
notice when we are dealing with a writer’s work that includes novels, short
stories’ collections, dramatic works for radio, theatre and cinema as well as
journalism and other writings.
When mentioning Frida’s death in 1954, Carter observes how easy it was
for Diego Rivera to turn the blue painted house in Coyoacan into the Museo
Frida Kahlo, mainly because she believed the artist had already “made of their
home a shrine dedicated to their entwined, if complicated, lives.” This makes
sense when Carter considers Frida as a work of art, who produced “art works
inside one another” and then shows us how these reflect on “the unfinished
portrait of Stalin on the easel in her studio, with her wheelchair next to it”, and
the mugs with the couple’s names in the kitchen. Albeit Carter considers “the
magic and artful universe of this house, a beautiful and wholly invented life of
flowers, fruit, parrots, monkeys and other people’s children”, she cannot avoid
a comment on Rivera’s conducting guided tours to Hollywood film stars of the
work of the Revolution in Mexico: “Both husband and wife were more than
the sum of their contradictions.” Reflecting on Frida’s various facets, Carter
arrives at an image of a laughing and enchanting woman and then flirts with
it in this manner: “Yes. I believe that. I believe that she was enchanting.”
(Carter 1998: 438).
In the last paragraph of her Preface to the Frida Kahlo’s postcards’ collec-
tion, Carter sums up what one is able to see on a first glance at the artist’s work:
(…) she painted the strangeness of the world made visible. Her face.
Her friends. A bowl of fruit. Flowers. The victim of a crime passionel.
The sun. A dead child. The curse of love, the disasters to which the
female body is heir. ‘VIVA LA VIDA’, she scrawled on her last painting
when she was about to die. (Carter 1998: 438).
Here we get the portrait of a woman who did not submit to any standard
of beauty, but still defined it; a beauty that underlines women’s absolute
singularity. Such strong praise of Life would later be present in Carter’s last
novel, Wise Children (1991), when the twin heroines end up their seventy-fifth
Frida Kahlo, the Wounded Flesh Made Sign 77
birthday partying along Bard Road, promising to “go on singing and dancing
until we drop in our tracks (…). What a joy it is to dance and sing!” (Carter 1992:
232). This ending celebrates Life when Carter already knew she had lung cancer.
Finally, we consider it ironic that Frida herself was unable to escape the
same consumerist machine that she so fiercely criticised. Deemed as the
quintessential icon of Mexican Surrealism, her paintings nowadays fetch the
highest prices of any Latin American artist.1 Similarly, we may question
ourselves about how Angela Carter, who strived to remain outside the canon,
would react if she ever found out that, in the year following her death, the
British Academy received more requests for doctoral study grants on her work
than on the entire eighteenth century! (Gamble 1997: 1). She surely would
have found her own canonisation amusing!
References
André, María Claudia (2005). “Evita and Frida: Latin American Items for Export” In The
Latin American Fashion Reader, edited by Regina A. Root. New York: Berg
Publishing, 247-262.
Carter, Angela (1988 [1974]). “Flesh and the Mirror” In Fireworks. London: Vintage,
61-70.
–––. (1979). The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History. London: Virago
Press.
–––. (1994 [1984]). Nights at the Circus. London: Vintage (first published by Chatto &
Windus).
–––. (1992 [1991]). Wise Children. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd.
–––. (1998 [1997]). “Frida Kahlo” In Shaking a Leg: Journalism and Writings. London:
Vintage (first published by Chatto & Windus), 433-438.
Gamble, Sarah (1997). Angela Carter: Writing From the Front Line. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Sage, Lorna (1994). Angela Carter. Plymouth: Northcote House in association with the
British Council.
Smith, Joan (1997). “Introduction” In Shaking a Leg: Journalism and Writings. London:
Vintage (first published by Chatto & Windus), xii-xiv.
1 Such is María Claudia André’s point of view presented in the article “Evita and Frida: Latin
American Items for Export” that can be read online. 28th September 2005.
http://www.palgrave-usa.com/pdfs/1859738931.pdf.
Resumo em português
Frida Kahlo, a carne dilacerada feita signo1
1 O título advém do próprio prefácio de Carter – “The flesh made sign. The wounded flesh.”
80 Maria José Pires
devoção, e inspiração. Todavia, Carter termina por afirmar que Frida se tornou
uma grande pintora devido a todas estas circunstâncias e não, apesar delas,
contribuindo para isso o encanto do seu disfarce, um festival perpétuo de
vestidos trabalhados.
Após reflectir sobre as várias facetas de Frida, no último parágrafo do
prefácio à colecção de postais, Carter resume o que pode ser visto em relance
inicial do trabalho da artista, e alude a ‘VIVA LA VIDA’, frase inscrita num
último quadro de Frida. É-nos dado, assim, o retrato de uma mulher que não
se submeteu a qualquer padrão de beleza, mas que procurou antes redefini-
la através do seu próprio padrão, que evidencia a singularidade absoluta das
mulheres.
Consideramos irónico como a própria Frida Kahlo foi incapaz de iludir o
consumismo que tão veemente criticou. Tida como um ícone do surrealismo
mexicano, hoje em dia os seus quadros alcançam os preços mais altos de
qualquer artista Latino-Americano. De modo semelhante, questionamo-nos
sobre a forma como Angela Carter, que tentou permanecer fora do cânone,
reagiria se descobrisse que, no ano após a sua morte, a Academia Britânica
recebeu mais pedidos para bolsas de estudo sobre a obra dela do que sobre
todo o século XVIII. Seguramente veria esta canonização com divertimento!
The Victorians at Amiens: Translation and Transposition
EMILY EELLS
(Université Paris X)
1 The name of the town is used here, and generally in this paper, as a synecdoche to refer to its
cathedral, Notre-Dame d’Amiens.
86 Emily Eells
taste of what is different when it points out that duck pâté is a speciality of
Amiens. Murray’s guide-book underscores cultural difference when it also
advises the English traveller how to behave abroad, which includes the
following pointers about etiquette in church:
Englishmen and Protestants, admitted into Roman Catholic churches,
at times are often inconsiderate in talking loud, laughing, and
stamping with their feet while the service is going on: a moment’s
reflection should point out to them that they should regard the feelings
of those around them who are engaged in their devotion. Above all,
they should avoid as much as possible turning their backs upon the
altar. In a church ladies and gentlemen should not walk arm in arm –
as that is contrary to the usual practice of the people and to their idea
of good manners: they should avoid talking together during the
service.2
Murray’s hand-book presents Amiens in superlative terms, as ‘one of the
noblest Gothic edifices of Europe’. It praises the cathedral by comparing it to
English architecture, for example when it describes the rose window which
‘surpasses every thing of the sort which England can produce’. Similarly, its
description of the cathedral’s deeply recessed sculpted portals stress that the
feature is characteristic of French architecture though it is unusual in English
architecture:
[…] the arches supported by a long array of statues in niches instead
of pillars, while rows of statuettes supply the place of mouldings, so
that the whole forms one mass of sculpture; an arrangement of
constant occurrence in French Gothic, though rare in English.3
The guide-book sustains the comparison with English cathedrals when it
describes the interior of the cathedral whose sense of height is unfamiliar to
the English visitor:
The interior is one of the most magnificent spectacles that architectural
skill can ever have produced. The mind is filled and elevated by its
enormous height (140 feet), its lofty and many-coloured clerestory, its
grand proportions, its noble simplicity. The proportion of height to
breadth is almost double that to which we are accustomed in English
cathedrals.4
Those two points about Amiens – that the sculpted decoration is integrated
into its architectural structure and that its interior cathedral is of inspirational
height – are two of the tenets of the Gothic Revival movement. In the mid
nineteenth century, that movement was dominated in England by the theory
and practice of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-1852) who collab-
orated on the design of the Houses of Parliament in London, undoubtedly one
of the most prominently visible examples of the Gothic Revival.
The description Murray’s guide-book makes of Amiens presents it as a
model of Gothic architecture as defined by Pugin in his Principles of Pointed or
Christian Architecture: ‘First, that there should be no features about a building
which are not necessary for convenience, construction or propriety; second,
that all ornament should consist of enrichment of the essential construction of
the building.’5 Pugin cites the flying buttresses of Amiens as a specific example
of how ‘an essential support of the building’ has been made into ‘elegant
decoration’,6 appealing in the following terms to his readers: ‘Who can stand
among the airy arches of Amiens […] and not be filled with admiration at the
mechanical skill and beautiful combination of form which are united in their
construction?’7 Pugin is also awed by the internal vastness of Amiens and
compares it to what he considers to be the ‘deficient […] internal height’8 of
English churches. He believed that English architecture should adapt that
feature of the Gothic cathedral to their own designs, taking care to incorporate
the foreign without affecting the fundamental characteristics of the English:
The neo-Gothic churches modelled on the design of Amiens cathedral are the
most concrete manifestation of how the British were inspired by Amiens and
adapted their impressions of its cathedral into their own work.
10 See J.C. Links, The Ruskins in Normandy: A Tour in 1848 with Murray’s Hand-Book (London: John
Murray, 1968).
11 Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995),
pp. 307-8.
12 John Ruskin, The Bible of Amiens (London: George Allen, 1897), p. 165. [first published 1884].
13 See Roman Jakobson, Essais de linguistique générale (Paris: Minuit, 1963), p. 86. [first published
1959].
The Victorians at Amiens: Translation and Transposition 89
16 Umberto Eco, Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation. (London: Phoenix Paperback, 2003), pp.
12-16.
17 David Lodge, ‘The Argument from Translation’ in Language of Fiction (London: Routeledge and
Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 20.
18 In the lower church of San Francesco, Assisi.
19 Ruskin, Bible of Amiens, p. 242.
20 Ruskin, Bible of Amiens, p. 242.
21 Ruskin, Bible of Amiens, p. 176.
The Victorians at Amiens: Translation and Transposition 91
Ruskin’s use of French terms identifies what the calls the ‘Madone Nourrice’
with the country where she is represented, whereas his French translator went
one step further as Proust specifically identified this Madonna as an
‘Amiénoise’, or native of the town.
Ruskin’s guide to the Western façade of the cathedral reveals how the
design of the scenes from the Bible and the symbolically decorative features
reflect the particular context of Northern France where they were sculpted.
The sculptures are at their most purely symbolic in the quatrefoils depicting
the months of the year and in the series of quatrefoils representing the vices
and virtues. It was customary for medieval artists to use scenes from peasant
life to symbolize the different months, and the variations in the agricultural
calendars that can be seen on buildings throughout Europe illustrate how the
relationship between signifier and signified is defined by context. Given
climatic differences, the words signifying the months of the year have different
meanings in different places: on the façade of Amiens cathedral, the month of
‘August’ is represented as a peasant hard at work threshing, which contrasts
with the representation of the same month on the façade of St Mark’s basilica
in Venice, where August is synonymous with siesta. These contrasting repre-
sentations of the same month prove that translation can never be the simple
‘transport’ of a set of signifiers from one language to another, as that operation
also affects the signified, which is transported into a different climate.
Similarly, the symbolic representations of the paired vices and virtues are
dependent on cultural context. In the bleak area of the Somme, the virtue of
Charity is depicted as a woman donating a cloak to a poor cold man,
described in the following terms by Ruskin:
Charity, bearing shield with woolly ram, and giving a mantle to a
naked beggar. The old wool manufacture of Amiens having this notion
of its purpose – namely, to clothe the poor first, the rich afterwards. No
nonsense talked of in those days about the evil consequences of
indiscriminate charity.23
Ruskin here points to the geographical specificity of this representation: the
cloak donated is a product of Amiens, one of medieval France’s leading textile
centres, and its donation is an appreciated act of charity in a place known for
its wind-swept chilly climate. Ruskin’s comment equally invites comparison
with his own times, when ‘indiscriminate charity’ was discouraged, in favour
of charity which benefited only those judged morally virtuous.
Amiens’s conception of Charity contrasts with the depiction of the same
virtue in more clement climes, for example in Giotto’s frescoes in the Arena
chapel in Padua. In the fertile warmth of Italy, Charity is represented by the
bounty of the earth: her basket is overflowing with corn and flowers and her
prosperity is symbolized by the sacks of golden wheat on which she stands to
reach up to the hand of God. These two representations of Charity again
illustrate how context determines representation, as they engage in a complex
play between signifier and signified. The sculpture in Amiens and Giotto’s
fresco use two different signifiers to symbolize the same virtue because what
is being signified – namely the act of Charity – also varies according to context
and climate.
Ruskin tried to make the moral teaching represented on the cathedral wall
relevant to his readers by using contemporary references in his commentary
on the vices and virtues. When he points to the vice of Churlishness, repre-
sented as a woman kicking the servant who brings her a drink, he compares
that image to the contemporary French cancan dancer, pictured in 19th
century prints.24 In a similar way, Ruskin updates the vice ‘Rebellion’ when he
points out that modern French and English men have the same scornful
attitude to the church as the figure depicted on the sculpted wall of Amiens
cathedral. Ruskin’s comment on this vice draws from English culture and
includes a moralizing aside censuring both the French and the English
Protestant reader: ‘Rebellion, a man snapping his fingers at his Bishop. (As
Henry the Eighth at the Pope, – and the modern French and English cockney
at all priests whatever.)’25 These quatrefoils thus show how translation takes
into account differences in time and place when establishing the relationship
between signifier and signified, confirming Venuti’s point that: ‘A translated
text should be the site where a different culture emerges, where a reader gets
a glimpse of a cultural other’.26
Proust’s Bible d’Amiens demonstrates how translation negotiates the
transmission of the cultural information conveyed by a text. He took on the
role of cultural mediator or go-between, adding numerous, extensive footnotes
to explain the references in the English original. For example, he feared his
French readers might ignore certain facts about the English Reformation, so he
annotated Ruskin’s allusion to Sir Thomas More with the following footnote:
‘Beheaded under order of Henry the eighth because he refused to acknowl-
edge the king’s supremacy’.27 Similarly, Ruskin’s reference to ‘John Bunyan’s
Mr Greatheart’28 prompted Proust to identify him as a character from The
Pilgrim’s Progress.29
The cultural explanations Proust adds to his translation exemplify Jean-
Jacques Lecercle’s theory of Interpretation as Pragmatics.30 Lecercle argues
that literary exchange is carried out on the ALTER model, an acronym based
on the first letters of the words author, language, text, encyclopaedia and
reader. The text is thus in the central position, with the author at the start and
the reader at the end of the working model. The space between them – which
they share with others – comprises language on the one hand and Eco’s concept
of the encyclopaedia, on the other. My study of Proust’s translation of Ruskin
incites me to alter the ALTER model by doubling the ‘t’ to indicate that the
translator shares the central position with the text, negotiating its linguistic and
cultural aspects for the reader. It is fitting that the acronym also suggests that
the translator alters the original version, making it into a different, text, as Proust
transforms The Bible of Amiens, augmenting and modifying its dimensions
almost beyond recognition when he makes it into ‘La Bible d’Amiens’.
Proust’s annotated Bible d’Amiens rewrites the original text, both in
another (foreign) language and in the personal idiom of the translator. It
belongs to a different artistic school from Ruskin’s Bible of Amiens and is
coloured with references to the translator’s native French culture. Whereas
Ruskin numbers the statues on the western façade and presents them in a
catalogue of paratactic notes, Proust prefaces his translation with a lengthy
preface indulging in impressionism and purple prose. He is not concerned
with what is set in stone: his interest is in how the visitor’s vision of the
cathedral is coloured by their own mood as well as by the mood of the day
they see it. Proust’s affinity is with Monet, whose series of paintings of Rouen
cathedral he cites when he describes Amiens as ‘blue in the mist, dazzling in
the morning, sun-drenched and richly golden in the afternoon, pinkish,
27 Marcel Proust [translator], La Bible d’Amiens (Paris: Mercure de France, 1904), p. 181. My
translation.
28 Ruskin, Bible of Amiens, p. 31.
29 Proust, Bible d’Amiens, p. 129.
30 Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Interpretation as Pragmatics (London: Macmillan, 1999).
94 Emily Eells
Morris realises that they dull the memory of personal, subjective impressions:
[…] for the facts of form, I have to look at my photographs; for facts of
colour I have to try and remember the day or two I spent at Amiens,
and the reference to the former has considerably dulled my memory
of the latter.37
Morris even suggests that the absence of a photograph better preserves his
own impression of the place:
I remember best […] the porch into which I first entered, namely the
northern most, probably because I saw most of it, coming in and out
often by it, yet perhaps the fact that I have seen no photograph of this
doorway somewhat assists this impression.38
His essay therefore traces how he transforms the objective, mechanically
produced photographs sitting on his desk into blurred recollections of his
subjective impressions of Amiens, colouring the black and white images with
his memories and impressions.
Morris anticipates Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Representation’, when he insists that one needs to go to a place
to experience its ‘aura’. His title – ‘Shadows of Amiens’– even foreshadows the
very word which Benjamin uses to define the conditions which produce the
aura effect: ‘If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes
a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you,
you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch’.39
Walter Pater’s article entitled ‘Notre-Dame d’Amiens’ was published a
decade after The Bible of Amiens, in 1894, the year of his death. Pater seems
to echo back to Ruskin in his opening, superlative praise of Amiens as ‘the
greatest and purest of Gothic cathedrals’, though nowhere in the article does
he cite either Ruskin’s name or his work. He confers on Amiens the title of ‘the
“queen” of Gothic churches’40 and echoes Pugin when he admires the ‘integrity
of the first design’41 which means that ‘at one view the whole is visible,
intelligible’.42 Pater confirms that this cathedral complies with Pugin’s definition
of the Gothic when he points out that ‘later additions affixed themselves’ to
that ‘first design’ and ‘rich ornament gathered upon it’.
Pater’s essay on Amiens counters Ruskin’s focus on the building as a
construction of sculpted stone and makes his main interest its relationship to
humanity. Pater emphasizes that Notre-Dame d’Amiens was one of ‘those
grand and beautiful people’s churches’,43 built by the commune of Amiens
during a period characterized by ‘certain novel humanistic movements of
religion’.44 He refers to the sculptural decorations as translations into stone but
stresses that the teaching is ‘popular, almost secular’45 as they treat the Bible
as a book about real men and women. He argues that art has at last become
acquired a human interest46 and as a result, what purport to be lessons based
on scripture are in fact ‘the liveliest observations, on the lives of men’.47 Pater’s
particular interest is in how the contemporary viewer sees Amiens cathedral,
which over the centuries has acquired what Proust calls a fourth dimension,
that of time.48 Pater reflects on the quality of the light inside the cathedral
which, having been ‘imprisoned’ there for so long, has become ‘almost sub-
stance of thought, one might fancy, – a mental object or medium.’49 Pater’s visit
to Amiens prompts him to summarize his aesthetic theory in the pithy question
‘the salt of all aesthetic study is in the question, – What, precisely what, is this
to me?’50 As it had done for Morris and Ruskin who feasted there before Pater,
Amiens flavoured and enriched their contributions to Victorian art.
References
Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Task of the Translator’ and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction’ In Illuminations, trad. Harry Zohn (New York:
Schocken Books, 1968). First published 1955.
Eco, Umberto. Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation. (London: Phoenix Paperback,
2003).
Handbook for Travellers in France (London: John Murray, 1843).
Jakobson, Roman. Essais de linguistique générale (Paris: Minuit, 1963). First published
1959.
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. Interpretation as Pragmatics (London: Macmillan, 1999).
Links, J.C. The Ruskins in Normandy: A Tour in 1848 with Murray’s Hand-Book
(London: John Murray, 1968).
Lodge, David. ‘The Argument from Translation’ in Language of Fiction (London:
Routeledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).
Morris, William. ‘Shadows of Amiens’. The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine
(February 1856), pp. 99-110.
Pater, Walter. ‘Notre-Dame d’Amiens’, Miscellaneous Studies (Macmillan: London,
1910), pp. 109- 125. First published in Nineteenth Century, March 1894.
Proust, Marcel. ‘Combray’ In A la recherche du temps perdu, vol.1 (Paris: Gallimard,
Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1987). First published 1913.
Proust, Marcel [translator]. La Bible d’Amiens (Paris: Mercure de France, 1904).
Pugin, A. Welby. The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (London: John
Weale, 1841).
Ruskin, John. The Bible of Amiens (London: George Allen, 1897). First published 1884.
Smith, Lindsay. Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry: The Enigma of Visibility in
Ruskin, Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995).
Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London:
Routledge, 1995).
Resumo em português
Os Vitorianos em Amiens: Tradução e Transposição
referem como o encontro com o outro e a impressão que lhes causou a cate-
dral influenciaram o seu trabalho – prolepticamente no caso de Morris, que
visitou a catedral quando era jovem, e analepticamente em relação a Pater,
cujo artigo sobre Amiens foi publicado no ano da sua morte.
Em ‘Shadows of Amiens’, o ensaio que Morris escreveu aos 22 anos, após
a sua visita à catedral, o autor considera Amiens como producto do revivalismo
gótico na arquitectura, mas dá também a entender que ela inspirou o movi-
mento ‘Arts and Crafts’ que ele próprio viria a fundar. O ensaio inclui uma
breve referência a uma pintura renascentista sobre madeira, representando
S. Firmino, patrono da catedral, e que se encontra no ambulatório. A parte do
painel que mais atraiu a atenção de Morris foi a que narra a descoberta e a
transladação das relíquias do santo.
Morris usa o termo ‘Shadows’ para se referir às fotografias que tinha sobre
a secretária e que usou como auxiliar de memória quando estava a escrever
o seu ensaio. Este torna-se assim num exercício mental sobre a invenção da
fotografia e o modo como esta influenciou a sua experiência de visitante da
catedral, antes e depois da viagem. As palavras que escreve mostram como
ele transforma aquelas fotografias objectivas e feitas por meios mecânicos, em
registo das suas impressões subjectivas de Amiens, emprestando às imagens a
preto e branco a cor das suas memórias e impressões, mostrando assim ter
captado, com a sua presença no local, a atmosfera que o define.
O artigo de Pater, intitulado ‘Notre-Dame d’Amiens’, foi publicado em
1894, no ano da morte do autor e dez após a publicação de The Bible of
Amiens. Pater parece fazer-se eco de Ruskin ao iniciar a sua descrição de
Amiens em tom altamente elogioso, chamando-lhe ‘a maior e a mais pura das
catedrais góticas’ – embora nem o nome nem a obra de Ruskin apareçam
citados no artigo. Ele dá a Amiens o título de ‘rainha’ das catedrais góticas e,
tal como Pugin, admira a unidade do plano original que faz com que o todo
se torne, de imediato, visível e inteligível. Pater afirma que esta catedral
obedece à definição que Pugin dá do gótico, sublinhando justamente a
existência de elementos que mais tarde foram adicionados ao plano original
e a profusa ornamentação que se veio a acumular.
A visita que Pater faz a Amiens leva-o a resumir a sua teoria estética na
pergunta que está no cerne de todo o estudo da estética: ‘Mas, afinal, o que
significa isto para mim?’
Tal como fizera com Morris e Ruskin que, antes de Pater, já tinham
ficado deslumbrados com a catedral, Amiens tornou mais variada e rica a
contribuição que eles deram à arte vitoriana.
Crítica de Arte e Cultura no Mundo Contemporâneo
JACQUES LEENHARDT
(École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales)
obsoletas, não sabe mais como apreciar aquilo que vê. Ele se preocupa em
deixar crescer em si mesmo uma liberdade de julgamento até agora não expe-
rimentada, procura ainda as muletas de um critério socialmente aceito no
qual se fiar.
Será preciso esperar Baudelaire para que a crítica de arte coloque clara-
mente seu papel como mediação entre um público, qualificado na época de
burguês, em princípio capaz de reações sensíveis mas insuficientemente livre
para deixar que elas se exprimam por si mesmas, e os artistas, que afirmam
cada vez mais a irreprimível transcendência de sua subjetividade.
Com Baudelaire se estabelecem as categorias fundadoras da prática
crítica no domínio da arte. Uma comunidade de horizonte reúne o artista,
o público e o crítico, que a emoção do pintor fixa a seu modo sobre a tela.
Ela se exprime no objeto estético. O crítico a reformula, por sua vez, numa
linguagem em que investe toda a parcialidade de seu olhar e é ficando mais
perto de sua paixão que ele consegue ser o mais universal, pois essa paixão
subjetiva tem o mesmo fundamento que a do artista e, potencialmente, do
público. Ele encontra por esse viés um acesso próximo da sensibilidade
adormecida e mal exercida do público.
A reformulação sensível da arte na linguagem leva muito evidentemente
uma vantagem considerável sobre a formulação pictórica. Utiliza a mediação
de uma estrutura de comunicação universal, a linguagem, perfeitamente
exercida em cada um. Se os públicos são relativamente cegos àquilo que se
passa no quadro, é porque sua experiência cotidiana não lhes dá, senão rara-
mente, a ocasião de prestar atenção nas diferenças nas quais reside todo o
interesse. Aprendemos a ler e a escrever, não a olhar. O crítico da arte sabe,
ou deveria saber, apreciar uma cor, uma intensidade, uma tonalidade, uma
linha. Deveria achar aí um significado e comunicá-lo na linguagem verbal.
Assim transcrito, o efeito plástico torna-se perceptível para aquele que não
está acostumado com ele e o texto crítico funciona, por sua vez, como uma
escola do ver, uma pedagogia da sensibilidade.
Não obstante, a própria escrita apresenta estados diferentes. Aprender a
ler um texto informativo não desenvolve senão uma parte das potencialidades
da linguagem e da leitura. A escrita é por natureza às vezes descritiva, poética
e metafísica; dito de outra forma, ela descreve um objeto referencial, evoca as
sensações provocadas por esse objeto numa sensibilidade e subsume esse
objeto num conceito, resgata sua validade universal, seu sentido.
Essas três funções se reencontram na prática da crítica de arte. Esta deve
designar o objeto de seu discurso dentro de sua autonomia: um quadro, uma
instalação, a imagem de um corpo, a fotografia de um nevoeiro na contraluz, etc..
Crítica de Arte e Cultura no Mundo Contemporâneo 107
Sabe-se, entretanto, que não existe descrição, nem absoluta, nem pura-
mente objetiva. A imaginação do crítico é, portanto, sempre convidada a com-
pletar esse referente oferecido, a interpretá-lo, isto é, a lhe atribuir um sentido,
a fazê-lo entrar enfim num conjunto significativo mais vasto. A imaginação
crítica toma emprestado da linguagem para fazer sua função “poética”, princi-
palmente sua estrutura metafórica. No discurso crítico, o objeto de arte é
sempre, além daquilo que parece ser, descrito através do modo analógico do
“como”. É isto e outra coisa ao mesmo tempo. Prestígio e prestidigitação da
escrita, o de poder manifestar dois estados da coisa ou da idéia no mesmo ato
verbal. Para quem não vê senão esse ponto de incandescência poética, a
escrita entra, naturalmente, no domínio da filosofia, pois se uma coisa é isso
e ao mesmo tempo pode ser aquilo, somente a imaginação saberá dar conta
dessa complexidade.
Esse estado crepuscular de toda obra de arte sob o olhar do discurso
crítico se liga ao caráter movente e efêmero de toda a realidade humana. A “vida
moderna”, tal como Baudelaire nomeava o estado de movimento browniano
permanente da vida, do mundo apreendido pela consciência, faz da fugacida-
de uma característica essencial das coisas e, por conseqüência, também de sua
representação na arte. É uma das razões pelas quais o inacabamento da obra
se tornou uma qualidade metafísica desta. Ele deixa abertas as portas da ima-
ginação que terá por função atribuir um significado subjetivo àquilo que per-
manecia, na sua essência e na sua objetalidade, propriamente indeterminado.
A determinação do significado, não estando jamais assegurada de forma
definitiva para a própria obra, torna-se apanágio do público, e eventualmente
daquele que é como uma voz provisória deste: o crítico. Oscar Wilde não
dizia, no seu estilo irônico, preferir um mau artista a um que fosse bom
“because I can make more of him than he is” (porque posso fazer dele mais
do que ele é)? Preferir o esboço à obra acabada é dar mais chances ao possí-
vel, é prever o lugar e a importância do crítico e do espectador na realização
do significado da obra.
E isso é verdade tanto da parte dos artistas, que podem desejar conceber
seu trabalho como uma obra aberta e dizer, com Duchamp, que “são os
espectadores que fazem o quadro”, quanto da parte do público cujo gosto se
sabe que vai, há um século, em direção ao esboço do mesmo modo que em
direção à obra terminada. Ele também sente prazer com a incompletude da
obra, com a condição, todavia, que seu caráter enigmático não seja para ele
ocasião de uma renúncia à compreensão.
O texto crítico nunca deixou, desde Diderot até nossos contemporâneos,
de se colocar na posição de mediação que torna necessária uma arte cujos
108 Jacques Leenhardt
Da palavra história
Por vezes a razão, de tanto se pensar a si própria, esquece-se do corpo e
da vida. Quer aceder a um plano para além dela, onde possa permanecer em
forma de eterna verdade alcançável que espera pelo pensador.
Acertar o pensamento com a vida, integrá-lo nela.
Da palavra definição
Perante um lugar, chega um
pensador perdido e faz um levanta-
mento do lugar. Parte do que chama
princípio e escreve eu estou aqui,
prende um fio ao aqui e segue em
frente desenrolando a sua linha de
pensamento e vai desenhando um
mapa. Faz isso porque não deseja
estar perdido. Quando regressa, o
pensador descansa numa definição.
Chega outro pensador perdido e
cumprimentam-se, trocam palavras.
Através do desenho do mapa, o
segundo pensador aproveita para des-
cansar. Se adormecerem, sonham
cada um por si, mergulhados no
Maria João Worm, Técnica mista sobre
mesmo mistério.
papel - três imagens em dimensões
aproximadas do A4, 1996
120 Maria João Worm
Penso que deve haver qualquer coisa comum nas vidas todas que passa-
ram e na nossa que agora é. Uma fonte primeira de natureza anterior à defini-
ção de definição mas que não é o mesmo que indefinição. O que procuro nas
imagens e nas palavras é reconhecer o desconhecido e saber que o partilho
profundamente.
Reflectir, não é só ser contemporâneo e pensar, é espelhar o que se mantém
para além do tempo. Penso que os registos todos têm em comum a vontade
de comunicar esse mistério.
E essa vontade atravessa o tempo com dedos longos e sem impressões digitais.
Nem uma Palavra Só, nem uma Imagem só,
mas a sua Mistura Heterogénea
U
ma palavra, ou uma imagem visual, ou qualquer das relações diferen-
tes que entre ambas se possa estabelecer é hoje analisável em termos
de vários quadros teóricos. Um desses quadros é o da psicologia, no
qual nomeadamente se inscreve Ernst Pöppel como especialista em neuro-
psicologia da percepção, interessado em algumas implicações das respectivas
teorias no campo da avaliação estética.2 Em Grenzen des Bewußtseins. Über
Wirklichkeit und Welterfahrung (Fronteiras da Consciência. Sobre a Realidade
e a Experiência do Mundo), Pöppel demonstra que a imagem percebida não
decorre exclusivamente do estímulo recebido pelos olhos. Para tal, sugere ao
leitor certas experiências com o conhecido cubo de Necker (nome do seu
inventor):
4 Traduz-se aqui para português este passo de Grenzen des Bewußtseins, assim como se reproduz
o cubo de Necker, porque, tanto a tradução, como a reprodução do cubo, em Pöppel (1989).
Fronteiras da Consciência. A Realidade e a Experiência do Mundo, estão incorrectas:
Ou se vê o quadrado, que está mais à direita e em baixo como estando à frente, e então
o quadrado, que está à esquerda e em cima, é o lado de trás do cubo. Ou é exactamente
o contrário, de modo que então o quadrado à esquerda e em cima estaria à frente.
(Tradução minha.)
5 Traduz-se ainda o passo transcrito de Grenzen des Bewußtseins:
Esta experiência muito simples demonstra-nos além disso que, evidentemente, não
estamos de modo algum cem por cento entregues, com a nossa percepção, a uma
situação de estímulo. Nas linhas sobre o papel nada se altera, só na nossa consciência
acontece qualquer coisa, e estes acontecimentos «internos» causam uma alteração do
que é percebido. As ordens da vontade impõem ao simples estímulo a maneira como ele
tem de me aparecer.
(Tradução minha.)
Nem uma Palavra Só, nem uma Imagem só, mas a sua Mistura Heterogénea 127
6 Eis a tradução deste outro passo de Grenzen des Bewußtseins agora citado:
Foi mostrado por historiadores da arte (…) que Paul Klee se ocupou intensamente de
questões da psicologia da percepção. Em especial, impressionou-o o cubo de Necker.
Em muitos trabalhos de Klee, pode ver-se como ele jogou graficamente com o cubo, e
como aproveitou formalmente a sua dupla perspectiva. (…) O artista utiliza portanto a
criatividade do cérebro humano, não apenas do seu, mas também do do observador.
Recentemente, surgiram referências a que Picasso também se debateu com questões da
percepção visual, e a que, por exemplo, o desenvolvimento do cubismo, sem este olhar
para além das fronteiras do mundo da arte, dificilmente teria sido possível.
(Tradução minha.)
7 O principal professor de Maurits Cornelis Escher acabou por ser Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita, de
origem portuguesa, e que ensinava técnicas de gravura, o qual veio a ser assassinado, juntamente
com a família, num campo de concentração nazi, depois de terem sido levados de casa no final
de Janeiro de 1944.
8 Quanto a Belvedere, esta questão era já observada no catálogo da Exposição Organizada pela
Embaixada dos Países Baixos e Apresentada em Portugal, pela Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, em
1981/1982. A tal propósito, ver Escher (Dezembro de 1981 / Janeiro de 1982).
Sobre a análise que Pöppel faz dos trabalhos de Escher, e do cubo de Necker, ver Pöppel 1993:
Kap. 16 „Gestalt und Hintergrund: Die Neugier des Bewußtseins” («Forma e Fundo: A Curiosidade
da Consciência») passim.
128 Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa
9 Traduz-se, por fim, o passo de Grenzen des Bewußtseins que se transcreveu: «O que vemos ou
ouvimos, o que percebemos, é resultado de um a-preender activo e não de um registar passivo.»
(Tradução minha.)
10 A referida publicação – Faria, Baptista, Luegi e Taborda (2006) – foi a primeira do projecto de inves-
tigação «Registo e Análise do Movimento dos Olhos durante a Leitura», projecto em curso desde
Dezembro de 2003, no Laboratório de Psicolinguística, Onset-Centro de Estudos de Linguagem,
Nem uma Palavra Só, nem uma Imagem só, mas a sua Mistura Heterogénea 129
11 À imagem do fontanário aqui em causa foi atribuída a seguinte legenda: «Fontanário em pedra
com duas bicas adossado ao gradeamento do jardim de S. Lázaro [Porto].» (Faria, Baptista, Luegi
e Taborda 2006: 126.)
Nem uma Palavra Só, nem uma Imagem só, mas a sua Mistura Heterogénea 131
12 A defesa de que a língua é historicamente relativa configura também Keller (2003). «The Natural
Language: An Example of Spontaneous Order and its Sociocultural Evolution».
132 Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa
13 Quanto à declaração de Keller sobre o objectivo de contrapor as suas definições de sintoma, ícone
e símbolo às que Charles Sanders Peirce dá para indício, ícone e símbolo, ver Keller 1998: 100.
Nem uma Palavra Só, mas a sua Mistura Heterogénea 133
14 No caso da publicidade e do marketing, estes problemas das relações entre o cultural, por um
lado, e o económico, o social e o político, por outro lado, são ponderados por Pinto e Castro
(2002). Comunicação de Marketing.
134 Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa
***
Há que proceder agora a uma diferenciação dos tipos de imagem visual
a que podemos estar a referir-nos, sobretudo actualmente, quando tal
diferenciação está potenciada, como antes nunca esteve, pelo aceleradíssimo
desenvolvimento das chamadas novas tecnologias. Já no ano de 1997, em
Visual Culture. An Introduction, trabalho atrás citado, Walker e Chaplin, ao
definirem o que designavam por «Área de Estudo da Cultura Visual», caracteri-
zavam o seu objecto como «amplo» e «heterogéneo». Além disso, e conforme
pode observar-se no seu esquema da página trinta e três, atrás reproduzido,
subdividiam esta área recente de estudo em função de quatro classes distintas
de cultura visual que intitulavam «Belas Artes», «Artes/Design», «Artes Perfor-
mativas e Artes do Espectáculo» e «Média de Massas e Electrónicos».15
Neste contexto, limitar-me-ei a citar uns poucos exemplos apresentados
por Walker e Chaplin para cada uma daquelas classes de cultura visual: a
15 Relativamente à amplitude e heterogeneidade da cultura visual, ver Walker & Chaplin 1997: 32-4.
Sobre a própria noção de diferença (neste caso aplicada aos enquadramentos teóricos em que
Nem uma Palavra Só, mas a sua Mistura Heterogénea 135
se pode estudar, hoje, a palavra, ou a imagem visual, ou qualquer das suas múltiplas relações, bem
como aplicada aos vários tipos de imagem visual a que podemos estar a referir-nos, sobretudo hoje
também), ver Pinheiro de Sousa (2006). «De Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
às Questões de Diferença». Embora posteriormente muito trabalhado, o ensaio agora referido teve
por base parte da comunicação que apresentei ao primeiro da série de quatro seminários, com o
título A palavra e a Imagem, série organizada em 2005 / 06, pelo Programa de Investigação A
Moderna Diferença, do Centro de Estudos Anglísticos da Universidade de Lisboa (CEAUL).
16 Quanto aos exemplos das quatro classes de cultura visual, e sobre a polémica classificação da
fotografia neste enquadramento, ver Walker & Chaplin 1997: 46.
136 Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa
Deve ainda fazer-se notar que Stedman escreve Narrative, e faz os neces-
sários desenhos, no pressuposto do seu carácter estético, como pode inferir-se
do que afirmam Richard e Sally Price, em introdução a Stedman’s Surinam.
Life in an Eighteenth-Century Slave Society: «Without question, Stedman
considered himself a far better artist than writer, and his contemporaries seem
to have shared his opinion.» (R. Price and S. Price 1992: xl.) Além disso, sobre
o juízo de valor relativo que Stedman faz deste seu trabalho, considere-se o
que ele declara, em Narrative, a propósito das formas como descreve e
desenha dois tipos de macaco que encontra no Suriname: «In the annexed
plate I have delineated both these monkeys, the large quata and the small
saccawinkee, thus trying to correct with my pencil the deficiency that may be
in my pen.» (Stedman’s Surinam 1992: 171.) No presente contexto, limito-me
a validar o assim reconhecido pressuposto estético de Narrative que,
implicitamente, avaliarei quanto à narrativa escrita da execução do negro
Neptuno e à respectiva ilustração.
Feitas estas especificações, parto da hipótese de que a maioria dos
leitores, cuja competência linguística em inglês for suficiente, lê primeiro a
narrativa da execução, até porque ela precede espacial e temporalmente, no
livro, a imagem que a ilustra. Passo, por isso, a transcrevê-la na íntegra, para,
de modo semelhante ao da maior parte dos leitores, começarmos a apreciar tal
narrativa e, depois, a respectiva ilustração, e a forma como as duas interagem:
The third Negro, whose name was Neptune, was no slave, but his
own master, and a carpenter by trade. He was young and handsome, but
having killed the overseer of the estate Altona in the Para Creek in
consequence of some dispute, he justly lost his life with his liberty.
However, the particulars are worth relating, which briefly were that he,
having stolen a sheep to entertain some favorite women, the overseer
had determined to see him hanged, to prevent which he shot him dead
among the sugar canes. This man being sentenced to be broken alive
upon the rack, without the benefit of the coup de grace, or mercy
stroke, laid himself down deliberately on his back upon a strong cross,
on which with arms and legs expanded he was fastened by ropes. The
executioner (also a black), having now with a hatchet chopped off his
left hand, next took up a heavy iron crow or bar, with which blow after
blow he broke to shivers every bone in his body, till the splinters,
blood, and marrow flew about the field. But the prisoner never uttered
a groan or a sigh. The ropes now being unlashed, I imagined him dead,
and felt happy till the magistrates, moving to depart, he writhed from
the cross till he fell in the grass, and damned them all for a pack of
barbarous rascals. At the same time, removing his right hand by the
Nem uma Palavra Só, mas a sua Mistura Heterogénea 139
help of his teeth, he rested his head on part of the timber and asked
the bystanders for a pipe of tobacco, which was infamously answered
by kicking and spitting on him, till I, with some Americans, thought
proper to prevent it.
He then begged that his head might be chopped off, but to no
purpose. At last, seeing no end to his misery, he declared that though
he had deserved death, he had not expected to die so many deaths.
“However, you Christians (said he) have missed your aim, and I now
care not were I to lie here alive a month longer,” after which he sang
two extempore songs, with a clear voice taking leave of his living
friends, and acquainting his deceased relations that in a little more
time he should be with them to enjoy their company forever. This
done, he entered into conversation with two gentlemen concerning his
trial, relating every one particular with uncommon tranquillity, but
said he abruptly, “By the sun it must be eight o’clock, and by any
longer discourse I should be sorry to be the cause of your loosing your
breakfast.” Then turning his eyes to a Jew whose name was De Vries,
“Apropos, Sir (said he), won’t you please pay me the five shillings you
owe me?” “For what to do?” “To buy meat and drink to be sure. Don’t
you perceive that I am to be kept alive?” – which (seeing the Jew look
like a fool) he accompanied with a loud and hearty laugh. Next
observing the soldier who stood sentinel over him biting occasionally
on a piece of dry bread, he asked him how it came that he, a white
man, should have no meat to eat along with it. “Because I am not so
rich,” said the soldier. “Then I will make you a present. First pick my
hand that was chopped off clean to the bones, Sir. Next begin to
myself, till you be glutted, and you’ll have both bread and meat which
best becomes you.” And which piece of humour was followed by a
second laugh, and thus he continued when I left him, which was about
three hours after the execution. But to dwell more on this subject my
heart
– Disdains
Lo! tortures, racks, whips, famine, gibbets, chains
Rise on my mind, appall my tear-stained eye,
Attract my rage, and draw a soul-felt sigh,
I blush, I shudder, at the bloody theme.
white man, should have no meat to eat along with it. “Because I am
not so rich,” said the soldier. “Then I will make you a present. First pick
my hand that was chopped off clean to the bones, Sir. Next begin to
myself, till you be glutted, and you’ll have both bread and meat which
best becomes you.”
Semelhante forma de figurar visualmente a execução de Neptuno per-
mite suprimir alguns traços grosseiros da caracterização narrativa escrita dos
que nela tomam parte, ou dos que a ela assistem, e das próprias reacções da
vítima. Este é um exemplo paradigmático:
At the same time, removing his right hand by the help of his teeth, he
rested his head on part of the timber and asked the bystanders for a pipe
of tobacco, which was infamously answered by kicking and spitting on
him, till I, with some Americans, thought proper to prevent it.
Assim, e apesar da crucial tragicidade da acção que o negro protagoniza, ou
precisamente por causa dela, dir-se-ia que a imagem pretende firmar-lhe a
intocada dignidade humana essencial, transfigurando Neptuno no verdadeiro
herói da narrativa: «But the prisoner never uttered a groan or a sigh». A heroi-
cidade do negro Neptuno, propagandeada visualmente pela imagem da sua
execução, parece repercutir também as considerações moralizantes com que
Stedman termina o relato:
Now, how in the name of Heaven human nature can go through
so much torture, with so much fortitude, is truly astonishing, without
it be a mixture of rage, contempt, pride, and hopes of going to a better
place or at least to be relieved from this, and worse than which I verily
believe some Africans know no other Hell.19
Por fim, e quanto ao espaço da acção, a narrativa faz, até certo ponto,
submergir Neptuno e o seu carrasco no amontoado caótico dos que partici-
pam na execução, e dos que a ela assistem:
This done, he entered into conversation with two gentlemen concern-
ing his trial, relating every one particular with uncommon tranquillity,
19 Note-se que o carácter sentimental de Stedman, próprio da sua época, e que de forma latente
configura todo o relato aqui em causa, encontra-se bem apontado por Richard e Sally Price, em
introdução a Stedman’s Surinam:
Stedman was proud of being unusually sensitive, even in an age of pervasive and
modish sentimentality. He described the intensity of his empathy for all creatures from
early childhood, which paralleled his troubled reactions to much of what he later
witnessed in Surinam.
(R. Price and S. Price 1992: xv.)
Nem uma Palavra Só, mas a sua Mistura Heterogénea 143
but said he abruptly, “By the sun it must be eight o’clock, and by any
longer discourse I should be sorry to be the cause of your loosing your
breakfast.”
Pelo contrário, no espaço quase vazio da ilustração, agigantam-se Neptuno e o
carrasco. Em primeiro plano, os instrumentos da tortura, e a parte do corpo
mutilado do negro vêm ao encontro do observador. Além disso, revela-se-nos
a perpendicular que une dois extremos dos instrumentos da tortura – a ponta
da barra de ferro empunhada pelo carrasco (na parte superior da gravura, a
meio) e o machado caído no chão (na parte inferior da gravura, a meio tam-
bém). Esta perpendicular cruza com a horizontal definida pelo lado direito do
corpo jacente de Neptuno, estando acentuada pela linha que, em paralelo e
acima dela, o horizonte traça igualmente. No espaço da gravura, semelhante
eixo cruciforme parece determinar a organização do desenho minimalista dos
protagonistas da execução, e dos respectivos instrumentos, o que, dir-se-ia,
visualmente reforça o estoicismo crístico do herói negro.20
***
A expressão «mistura heterogénea», que figura no título deste ensaio,
pretende aludir a um conceito básico da química. Mediante a epígrafe esco-
lhida, apontei uma primeira definição desse conceito – «mistura é uma
combinação de duas ou mais substâncias em que estas mantêm a sua identi-
dade própria». Acrescento agora que, à «mistura, em que a composição não
é espacialmente uniforme, dá-se o nome de mistura heterogénea». (Chang
1994: 9.) Ao analisar algumas relações entre a narrativa escrita e a respectiva
gravura ilustrativa da execução de Neptuno, o meu objectivo consistiu em
ensaiar, de modo relativamente limitado mas sistemático, e num exemplo
apenas, a utilização, por analogia, do conceito de mistura no processo do
estudo da palavra, da imagem, e das suas formas de interagirem.
20 É de evidenciar que a retórica, tanto visual como linguística, de Narrative of a five years expedi-
tion, against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam in Guiana, foi encenada de forma exímia pelos
partidários da abolição da escravatura, conforme assinalam Richard e Sally Price na mesma
introdução a Stedman’s Surinam:
Johnson understood that the Narrative (with its numerous chilling eyewitness
accounts of barbaric tortures of slaves and its graphic accompanying illustrations) would,
even in its edited form, stand as one of the strongest indictments ever to appear against
plantation slavery. And public reaction bore him out (…)
(R. Price and S. Price 1992: lxi.)
144 Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa
Referências
Baptista, Maria Adriana da Costa (2005). «Para Uma Análise das Interacções entre a
Legenda e a Imagem». Dissertação de Doutoramento. Universidade de Lisboa.
Chang, Raymond (1994). Química. Trad. de Joaquim J. Moura Ramos, Mário Nuno
Berberan e Santos, Anabela C. Fernandes, Benilde Saramago, Eduardo J. Nunes
Pereira, João Filipe Mano. 5ª Edição. Lisboa, Madrid: McGraw-Hill.
Escher, M. C. (Dezembro de 1981 / Janeiro de 1982). Exposição Organizada pela
Embaixada dos Países-Baixos e Apresentada em Portugal pela Fundação Calouste
Gulbenkian. Porto / Lisboa: Fundação Eng.º António de Almeida / Fundação
Calouste Gulbenkian.
Faria, Isabel Hub (2003). «Uma Visão Interdisciplinar da Linguística, em Fim de
Milénio». In Diálogos Disciplinares. As Ciências e as Artes na Viragem do Milénio.
Ed. por Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa, Teresa de Ataíde Malafaia. Lisboa: IST Press,
pp. 108-110.
Faria, Isabel Hub, Adriana Baptista, Paula Luegi e Carla Taborda (2006). «Interaction
and Competition between Types of Representation. An Example from Eye-Tracking
While Processing Written Words and Images». In Questions on the Linguistic
Sign. Ed. by José Pinto de Lima, Maria Clotilde de Almeida, Bernd Sieberg.
Lisboa: Edições Colibri / Centro de Estudos Alemães e Europeus, pp. 115-129.
Gardner, Sebastian (1996). «Aesthetics». In The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy.
Ed. by Nicholas Bunnin and E. P. Tsui-James. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 229-256.
Gombrich, E. H. ([1950] 1984). The Story of Art. Fourteenth edition. Oxford: Phaidon.
Keller, Rudi (1994). On Language Change. The Invisible Hand in Language. Transl. by
Brigitte Nerlich. London: Routledge.
–––. (1998). A Theory of Linguistic Signs. Transl. by Kimberly Duenwald. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
–––. (2003). «The Natural Language: An Example of Spontaneous Order and its
Sociocultural Evolution». In Diálogos Disciplinares. As Ciências e as Artes na
Viragem do Milénio. Ed. por Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa, Teresa de Ataíde
Malafaia. Lisboa: IST Press, pp. 117-121.
Pinheiro de Sousa, Alcinda (2006). «De Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions às Questões de Diferença». In Volume de Homenagem à Professora
Doutora Júlia Dias Ferreira. Org. por Comissão Executiva do Departamento de
Estudos Anglísticos da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa. No prelo.
Pinto e Castro, João (2002). Comunicação de Marketing. Lisboa: Sílabo.
Pöppel, Ernst (1985). Grenzen des Bewußtseins. Über Wirklichkeit und Welterfahrung.
Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt.
146 Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa
1 Esta estratégia seria adaptada no século seguinte por vários autores, entre os quais aquele que mais
se identifica com Hogarth, Charles Dickens, ao publicar grande parte dos seus romances em
episódios (‘serialised’), em jornais e revistas.
Lendo Marriage A-La-Mode, de William Hogarth 151
2 Na sequência de uma união indesejada, Lady Fulbank queixa-se amargamente: ‘Oh, how fatal are
forc’d marriages, / How many Ruins one such match pulls on!’ (apud Stone 1977: 186).
152 Márcia Bessa Marques
3 A obra apela a um novo código moral e conjugal baseado no afecto e respeito, por oposição a um
casamento de conveniência: ‘whenever, for appearance-sake, they are obliged to be together,
every one sees, that the yawning husband, and the vapourish wife, are truly insupportable to each
other; but, separate, have freer spirits, and can be tolerable company’ (Richardson ([1740] 1985:
464). Esta imagem encontra-se literalmente espelhada na segunda, terceira e quarta imagens da
série de Hogarth.
4 A certa altura da peça, a personagem principal, Lord Chalkestone lamenta o seu destino: ‘I married
for a fortune; she for a title. When we had both got what we wanted, the sooner we parted the
better’. (apud Stone 1977: 186).
Lendo Marriage A-La-Mode, de William Hogarth 153
5 Apesar de Hogarth ter fixado para as gravuras um preço semelhante ao da primeira série, A
Harlot’s Progress (meio guinéu no momento da subscrição e igual quantia aquando da entrega), e
inferior ao da segunda, A Rake’s Progress, o pintor teria ficado desiludido com o reduzido sucesso
dos quadros originais, que só foram vendidos em 1751, pelo montante de 120 guinéus, em vez
dos desejados 500.
6 ‘MR. HOGARTH intends to publish by Subscription, SIX PRINTS […] engrav’d b the best Masters
in Paris, after his own Paintings (the Heads for the better Preservation of the Characters and
Expressions to be done by the Author); representing a Variety of Modern Occurrences in High-Life,
and call’d MARRIAGE À-LA-MODE.’ (The London Daily Post and General Advertiser, 29 October
1743, apud Hallett 2000: 167).
7 A subversão do modelo tradicional seria retomada por John Collett, em 1782, num quadro inti-
tulado Marital Discord (Stone 1977: figura 10), onde os cães acorrentados, mas virados um para
154 Márcia Bessa Marques
o outro, conduzem inevitavelmente o nosso olhar para o casal em questão, afastados literal e
figuradamente, mas tão presos quanto os seus animais.
Lendo Marriage A-La-Mode, de William Hogarth 155
8 Significativamente, o nariz era um dos órgãos desfigurados pela sífilis, facto que originou a criação
na Londres setecentista de uma associação invulgar, ‘No Nose’d Club’, reunindo os doentes assim
marcados (Peakman 2004: 20).
156 Márcia Bessa Marques
1 2 3
4 5 6
9 Além disso, os ventos predominantes da capital empurravam a sujidade urbana de oeste para leste,
tornando esta parte da cidade menos desejável para as classes mais abastadas.
Lendo Marriage A-La-Mode, de William Hogarth 159
2 5
1 3 4 6
10 No último ano, a forma de exibição foi alterada, tendo sido adoptada uma linha horizontal, com
o primeiro quadro à esquerda e o último à direita, existindo uma nota explicativa geral dos dois
lados (uma vez que a sala tem duas entradas) e notas individuais à direita de cada imagem. Como
se pode constatar, também as formas de exibição seleccionadas reflectem modos específicos de
leitura da série.
1 2 3 4 5 6
160 Márcia Bessa Marques
Referências
Bindman, David (1981). Hogarth. London: Thames and Hudson; rept. 1998.
Craske, Matthew (2000). William Hogarth. London: Tate Gallery.
Halifax, Marquis of (George Saville) (1688). The Lady’s New Year’s Gift: or, Advice to
a Daughter, In Vivien Jones (Ed.) (1990), Women in the Eighteenth Century:
Constructions of Femininity. London & New York: Routledge, 17-22.
Hallett, Mark (2000). Hogarth. London: Phaidon.
Hogarth, William ([1753] 1997). The Analysis of Beauty. Ed. Ronald Paulson. New
Haven & London: Yale University Press.
Hogarth, William (c. 1743). Marriage A-la-Mode. National Gallery, London. In Mark
Hallett (2000). Hogarth. London: Phaidon, 168-170, 172-173, 175-177.
Jones, Vivien, Ed. (1990). Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity.
London & New York: Routledge.
Mansfield, Katherine ([1922] 1951). ‘Marriage à la Mode’. The Garden Party and Other
Stories. London: Penguin.
Paulson, Ronald (1992a). Hogarth: The ‘Modern Moral Subject’ 1697-1732. Vol. 1.
Cambridge: Lutterworth.
_____ (1992b). Hogarth: High Art and Low 1732-1750. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Lutterworth.
Peakman, Julia (2004). Lascivious Bodies: A Sexual History of the Eighteenth Century.
London: Atlantic Books.
Lendo Marriage A-La-Mode, de William Hogarth 161
Rego, Paula (2000). After Hogarth. In T. G. Rosenthal (2003). Paula Rego: Obra Gráfica
Completa. Trad. Nuno Batalha. Lisboa: Cavalo de Ferro, 40-43.
Richardson, Samuel ([1740] 1985). Pamela; Or, Virtue Rewarded. Ed. Peter Sabor.
Introd. Margaret A. Doody. London: Penguin.
Stone, Lawrence (1977). The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800. London:
Penguin; rept. 1990.
Uglow, Jenny (1997). Hogarth: A Life and a World. London: Faber and Faber.
Dois Rossettis – Christina e Dante Gabriel:
“Is She Transcribing from his Lips?”1
1 Título sugerido por um dos versos do poema “In an Artist’s Studio” (1856) de Christina Rossetti, no
qual ela se refere à actividade do irmão Dante Gabriel como poeta-pintor, e que constitui aqui
objecto de análise.
2 Figura extraída de Marsh 1988: 31.
3 Figura extraída de Marsh 1988: 33.
4 Carolyn Hares-Stryker explica, deste modo, o início do que ficou conhecido como “the ‘Pre-
Raphaelite’ Brotherhood”:
To differentiate themselves from the Royal Academy, Millais, Hunt and Rossetti
juxtaposed its august tradition with their own mocking levity. They believed that those
paintings most favoured by the Academy were awash in false sentimentality, contrived,
murky and trivial. (...) The term [‘Pre-Raphaelite’] pinpointed well their belief that it was
after the great Renaissance master Raphael that art had begun to stagnate. Their time had
come and a gathering of like-minded comrades began, something that Rossetti was
particularly keen on. They had named their new society, but now it needed members and
Rossetti, putting to a motion that the word Brotherhood be added to the original
designation of Pre-Raphaelite, oversaw the induction of four additional members in the
winter of 1848. They included Rossetti’s own brother, William Michael Rossetti (...) Thomas
Woolner (...) James Collinson (...) F. G. Stephens (...). Soon two others would become
closely associated with the Brotherhood – Christina Rossetti (...) and Ford Madox Brown (...).
They were never asked, however, to join the mystical seven, because for one thing Christina
could hardly be a ‘brother’ and, for another, because Rossetti liked the cabalistic quality of
the group seven and did not wish to extend the official membership further.
(Hares-Stryker 1997: 18-19)
Note-se que na obra aqui mencionada – An Anthology of Pre-Raphaelite Writings – Hares-
Stryker compila diversos escritos daquele grupo de artistas.
166 Ana Rosa Gonçalves
7 Tanto o desenho, como o fragmento da carta que lhe é alusivo foram extraídos da extensa
correspondência privada entre Dante Gabriel e Christina (cf. Rossetti, W. M. 1908: 20-22).
Dois Rossettis – Christina e Dante Gabriel: “Is she transcribing from his lips?” 169
escrevem os afasta, também aqui existe uma distinção significativa entre o que
os dois Rossettis fazem. Na perspectiva da ansiada sujeição de Christina ao
mestre ideal, a menos que ela repita o que ouve, a figura da irmã é dada como
destituída da capacidade de criar algo verdadeiramente seu. A única tarefa
que ele lhe concede – a do registo e subsequente reprodução do discurso
masculino – implica que, mesmo escrevendo, ela não possui nunca poder de
o contestar ou superar no espaço do mercado literário.
Coincidiria, porém, a verdadeira Christina com a figura feminina ideali-
zada do desenho? Por sua vez, ter-se-ia ela submetido às convenções e mode-
los da tradição literária masculina, reproduzindo-os? E, por que motivo
descreveu Dante Gabriel a irmã assim? Definindo-a através de um olhar
intelectualmente superior (logo, masculino), este mais não fez do que subtraí-
la a si própria. Dir-se-ia que naquela imagem de Mulher está implícita a
concepção da actividade literária feminina que foi autorizada, pelo para-
digma patriarcal, a Christina e a todas as outras Vitorianas como ela. Desde
que nas suas vozes se condensassem as normas e padrões estéticos instituí-
dos, era-lhes permitido escrever. Como John Berger refere a propósito das
diferenças culturalmente construídas entre os sexos:
(...) the social presence of woman is different in kind from that of a
man. A man’s presence is dependent upon the promise of power
which he embodies. If the promise is large and credible his presence
is striking. If it is small or incredible, he is found to have little presence.
(...) By contrast, a woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to
herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her. Her presence
is manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen
surroundings, taste (...). A woman must continually watch herself. (...)
She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because
how she appears to others, and ultimately, how she appears to men is
of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of
her life.
(Berger 1972: 45-46)
Deslocando a reflexão de Berger do contexto em que foi proferida para o
contexto do desenho aqui analisado, poder-se-á concluir que a construção
assimétrica das categorias de Homem e Mulher se reflecte na perspectiva
mediante a qual Dante Gabriel se dá a ver a ele próprio e à irmã. Também a
esfera de acção de Christina aparece condicionada por aquele de quem ela é
objecto de tutela literária. Note-se como a presença da figura feminina
cumpre unicamente o objectivo de o engrandecer. Mesmo que ela se aplique
muito como aprendiz, a mais nova dos Rossetti desempenha uma função
muito específica: a que serve à realização da glória de Dante Gabriel. A capa-
Dois Rossettis – Christina e Dante Gabriel: “Is she transcribing from his lips?” 171
próprio lhe impôs. Por muito que Dante Gabriel exercesse sobre a irmã o
poder e alcance que a tradição masculina lhe outorgava, a autoria literária no
feminino era potencialmente subversora. Quanto ao acto de a escritora lhe ir
resistindo por meio do que escreve – a ele, Dante Gabriel, e a muitos outros
homens-poetas e editores – relembram Andrew e Catherine Belsey: “Christina
Rossetti’s story, the record of her resistance to the limitations imposed on
women, and on women as writers illuminates the nature of oppression and
resistances to oppression.” (Belsey, Belsey 1988: 49).
Decidida a disputar a autoridade literária do mais ilustre dos Rossetti,
Christina haveria de escrever sozinha, opondo-se ao que ele lhe fora tutelan-
do, mas sem nunca se insurgir abertamente. De forma muito subtil, e levando-o
sempre a acreditar que aceitava as correcções dele, usa o estatuto de mais
nova para continuar a assistir de perto ao trabalho do poeta-pintor. É a irmã
que Dante Gabriel também incluiu, num desenho onde ele se referiu a si
próprio enquanto artista. Com o título de “Artist’s Studio” (Figura IV),8 Christina
aparece de pé, ligeiramente debruçada sobre a poltrona onde está sentado o
irmão. Com as mãos apoiadas no encosto da cadeira – configurando, impli-
citamente, tal gesto o apoio dela àquele que ali se estende – olha atenta para
a tela onde está retratada uma figura de mulher. Uma vez mais, aqui a sua
presença confirma apenas a grandeza do irmão: com as pernas esticadas, na
parte do cavalete onde se colocam os pincéis e as tintas, ele contempla-se a si
próprio, como artista, quase em êxtase. Para Dante Gabriel, à irmã resta apenas
observar, em silêncio, o que ele pintou, convertendo-a em sua cúmplice.
Christina interveio, contudo. E fê-lo ousadamente, em 1856, com o
poema “In an Artist’s Studio”, no qual interpela Dante Gabriel Rossetti da
seguinte forma:
One face looks out from all his canvasses,
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans;
We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
A nameless girl in freshest summer greens,
A saint, an angel; __ every canvass means
The same one meaning, neither more nor less.
He feeds upon her face by day and night,
…
Her face is made her shrine. Let all men note
That in all years (O Love, thy gift is this!)
They that would look on her must come to me.
(Rossetti, D. G. 2003: 132)
174 Ana Rosa Gonçalves
Referências
Belsey, Andrew, Catherine Belsey (1988). “Christina Rossetti: Sister to the
Brotherhood”, Textual Practice, vol. 2, no. 1 (Spring), pp. 30-50.
Berger, John (1972). Ways of Seeing, London: The British Broadcasting Corporation.
Cary, Elisabeth Luther (1974). The Rossettis: Dante Gabriel and Christina, New York:
Haskell House Publishers.
Chapman, Alison (1997). “Defining the Feminine Subject: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s
Manuscript Revisions to Christina Rossetti’s Poetry”, Victorian Poetry (Summer),
pp. 139-156.
Doughty, Oswald (1949). A Victorian Romantic: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, London:
Frederick Muller.
Foucault, Michel (1973). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences,
New York: Vintage.
Fredeman, William E. (1991). “A Portfolio of Drawings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti”, The
Journal of Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic Studies Special Issue: A Rossetti, Edited
by William E. Fredeman, vol. II, no. 2.
Hares-Stryker, Carolyn, Ed. (1997). An Anthology of Pre-Raphaelite Writings, Sheffield:
Sheffield Academic Press.
Marsh, Jan (1988). Pre-Raphaelite Women: Images of Femininity in Pre-Raphaelite Art,
London: Phoenix Illustrated.
______ (1999). Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter and Poet, London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson.
New Encyclopaedia Britannica, Micropaedia Ready Reference (The) (1998). Edited by
Jacob E. Safra, Constantine S. Yannias [et al.], vol. X, Chicago: Britannica, Inc.,
(1st ed. 1768-1771), pp. 192-195.
New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (The) (1993). Edited by Lesley Brown, vol. II,
Oxford: Clarendon Press (1st ed. 1933), p. 3367.
Peterson, Linda H. (1994). “‘Restoring the Book’: The Typological Hermeneutics of
Christina Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood”, Victorian Poetry 32
Dois Rossettis – Christina e Dante Gabriel: “Is she transcribing from his lips?” 175
1 Utz (1988).
180 Luísa Maria Rodrigues Flora
2 “Atonement (…) is less about a novelist harking back to the consoling uncertainties of the past than
it is about creatively extending and hauling a defining part of the British literary tradition into the
21st century.” (Dyer 8). Vide também citação Hermione Lee a p. 13 deste ensaio.
182 Luísa Maria Rodrigues Flora
3 Como também Levine, entre outros, sugere. Atente-se, por exemplo, nas seguintes palavras:
“Much of the power of nineteenth-century realist fiction derives from the integrity of its pursuit of
possibilities that would paradoxically deprive it of its authority and sever it from its responsibility
to reality and audience.” (Levine 9)
4 Cf. A Cortina, 2005. Nova caminhada por considerações antes desenvolvidas sobretudo em A Arte
do Romance (1986) e Os Testamentos Traídos (1993).
A Delicada Resistência de uma Porcelana ou 183
Fielding tenta definir essa arte, quer dizer, tenta determinar a sua razão
de ser e delimitar o domínio da realidade que o romance tem para
iluminar, para explorar e para discernir: “o alimento que nós propo-
mos aqui ao nosso leitor não é mais do que a natureza humana.” (…)
naquela altura (…) ninguém teria elevado o romance à categoria de
uma reflexão acerca do homem enquanto tal. (…) o espanto diante
daquilo que é “inexplicável nesta estranha criatura que é o homem”
é, para Fielding, o primeiro incitamento para escrever um romance, a
razão para o inventar. (…) Ao inventar o seu romance, o romancista
descobre um aspecto até essa altura desconhecido, escondido, da
“natureza humana”. (…) Para Fielding, o romance é definido (…) pela
184 Luísa Maria Rodrigues Flora
sua razão de ser e pela extensão da realidade que ele tem para
“descobrir”. A sua forma (…) releva de uma liberdade que ninguém
poderá limitar e cuja evolução será uma perpétua surpresa. (Kundera
14-5)5
Esta indagação de um território a desbravar que o novo género promove
é muito frequente em Kundera. Também McEwan comenta em 1999: ‘all
novels (…) have the quality of an investigation, and the investigation changes
as the material changes.’ (Moss §8). Interpelar a condição humana (que é
também a sua circunstância, que não existe fora da história), interrogar o acto
de viver é, também para McEwan, interpelar o próprio acto de escrever ficção.
As ‘humanas inadequações’ que McEwan descobria, em 1984, no cerne da arte
de Kundera adquirem em Atonement uma angustiante densidade e, também
neste texto, a forma é uma perpétua surpresa. Prosseguindo no reconhe-
cimento de uma linhagem para o romance, Kundera atribui um papel decisivo
a Flaubert e à sua incorporação na arte romanesca da banalidade quotidiana,6
para em seguida incluir Tolstói e o modo como inova, ao antecipar Joyce no
uso do monólogo interior. Não cabe neste ensaio examinar o longo caminho
revisitado por Kundera mas apenas sugerir que uma boa parte desta linhagem
romanesca (que ele traz até aos nossos dias e repetidamente valoriza) é, em
grande medida, partilhada por McEwan. E talvez a nenhum dos seus anterio-
res oito romances se aproprie, tanto quanto a Atonement, a pergunta retórica
que Kundera faz no ensaio já referido:
não será que a arte do romance, com o seu sentido da relatividade das
verdades humanas, exige que a opinião do autor permaneça escon-
dida e que qualquer reflexão deva ficar reservada unicamente para o
leitor? (Kundera, 62)
5 cf. ‘The Provision then which we have here made is no other than HUMAN NATURE.’, Fielding,
Tom Jones (Book I, Chapter I, 25), e também Preface to Joseph Andrews, 1742.
6 ‘Só o romance seria capaz de descobrir o imenso e misterioso poder do fútil.’ (Kundera, 25)
A Delicada Resistência de uma Porcelana ou 185
He looked into the water, then he looked back at her, and simply
shook his head as he raised his hand to cover his mouth. By this
gesture he assumed full responsibility, but, at that moment, she hated
him for the inadequacy of the response. He glanced towards the basin
and sighed. For a moment he thought she was about to step backwards
onto the vase, and he raised his hand and pointed (…). She kicked off
her sandals, unbuttoned her blouse and removed it, unfastened her
skirt and stepped out of it and went to the basin wall. He stood with
his hands on his hips and stared as she climbed into the water in her
underwear. Denying his help, any possibility of making amends, was
his punishment. (…) She held her breath, and sank, leaving her hair
fanned out across the surface. Drowning herself would be his
punishment. (Atonement 30)
186 Luísa Maria Rodrigues Flora
Referências
Chatwin, Bruce. Utz. London: Picador, 1988.
Dyer, Geoff. “Who’s afraid of influence?” The Guardian 22 Sept. 2001, 8.
Fielding, Henry. Preface to The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his
Friend Mr. Abraham Adams and An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela
Andrews. Ed. with an introduction by Douglas Brooks. London: Oxford
University, 1970. 3-9.
–––. Tom Jones. The authoritative text, contemporary reactions, criticism. Second ed.
Ed. Sheridan Baker. New York: Norton, 1995 (1973).
Kellaway, Kate. “At Home with his Worries”. The Observer. 16 Sept. 2001. <http://
observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,552417,00.html> 27 Sept.06.
Kundera, Milan. A Arte do Romance. Trad. Luísa Feijó e Maria João Delgado. Lisboa:
Publicações D. Quixote, 1988 (1987).
–––. Os Testamentos Traídos. Trad. Miguel Serras Pereira. Porto: Asa, 1994 (1993).
–––. A Cortina: Ensaio em sete partes. Trad. Pedro Sousa Pires. Porto: Asa, 2005.
Lee, Hermione. “If your memories serve you well…”. The Observer Review. 23 Sept.
2001.16.
Levine, George. The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady
Chatterley. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981.
McEwan, Ian. “An Interview with Milan Kundera”. Trans. Ian Patterson. Granta. 1984.
19-37.
–––. “Only love and then oblivion: Love was all they had to set against their
murderers.” The Guardian. 15 Sept. 2001.
<http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,4257871-99939,00.html> 27 Sept.06.
–––. Atonement. London: Vintage, 2001.
A Delicada Resistência de uma Porcelana ou 191
Moss, Stephen. “Forget about the plot, find a quiet place to think and buy an A4
notepad”, The Guardian. 23 Dec. 1999.
<http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,3944494-99930,00.html> 27 Sept.06.
Orwell, George. The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and English Genius (19 February
1941). The Complete Works of George Orwell, Ed. Peter Davison assisted by Ian
Angus and Sheila Davison. Vol.12. London: Secker & Warburg, 1998. 391-434.
Tallis, Raymond. In Defence of Realism. London: Edward Arnold, 1988.
“The Word that Says More than 1000 images”
LANDEG WHITE
(Universidade Aberta de Lisboa)
Romantic period was affirmed.1 It’s fair to note he had other sources of
personal distress, but the unbridgeable gap between his themes and his
readers was the prime reason for his choice of silence.
The Leeds-born poet Tony Harrison illustrates something similar. Born
into a working-class family, his father a baker, he won scholarships to Leeds
Grammar school and Oxford University, reading Classics. When he published
his first book of poetry, he showed a copy to his mother who, as he says,
turning the pages distastefully and wincing at some of the language,
commented ‘we didn’t bring you up to write mucky books’. Harrison has
always honoured his family and the class he was born in, but the gap was
always there, and in poems like ‘V’ has become a central theme.
For writers in English from former British colonies, this predicament is
even more acute. V.S. Naipaul began his career by writing about Trinidadians
for an audience in Britain. His situation was doubly complicated in that he
was of Indian origin and, until he went to India, always felt more Indian than
West Indian. Most of his life has been spent in Britain (he is too ‘British’ for
American readers), but he has always seemed far more of a Brahmin than an
Oxford man. Few of the characters he writes about would ever read novels,
and he cannot avoid being the interpreter of one group of people to another,
his audience – lacking any other touchstone – having to trust the integrity of
his narrative skills.
To compare great things with small, this is essentially my own situation,
writing about subjects that are here for an audience that is over there. This has
many ramifications, involving the tactics needed to gain the trust of one’s
readers, and among them is my topic, the subject of this presentation on ‘the
word that says more than a thousand images’. The point I want to emphasise
is essentially very simple; it is that images work best within cultures. They
don’t easily cross cultural boundaries, a culture perhaps being the particular
sphere where images resonate without requiring further explanation. Once an
image crosses a cultural boundary, however, you need words, often a awful lot
of them, to explain what’s going on.
Let me set you a challenge. Can you think of any image that is absolutely
universal, that is understood in the same way across all boundaries of race,
1 Definitively in the editions by E. Robinson and G. Summerfield of The Later Poems of John Clare
(Manchester, 1964), John Clare: the Shepherd’s Calendar (Oxford, 1964), and Selected Poems and
Prose of John Clare (Oxford, 1966). A bizarre consequence is this history, aided by equally bizarre
laws, is that Robinson claims copyright in Clare’s works.
198 Landeg White
culture and creed? I’ve been trying to answer this question for a couple of
years now, and so far have failed. The first I came up with was the image of a
mother nursing a baby. After all, babies are born in the same way in all parts
of the world, and despite bottle-feeding and cleavages and bra burning and so
on, everyone still knows what a woman’s breasts are really for. Leaving aside
its Christian implications (Madonna and the Holy Child), isn’t the image of
Mother-with-baby the ultimate image of human love and weakness,
recognisable everywhere without distinction? I’m afraid, the answer is no.
Throughout southern Africa, for example, the definitive image of maternal
tenderness is of a mother with a baby on her back and a hoe in her right hand,
working to support her family. In Mozambique in 1975, on murals every-
where, this was modified to the silhouette of a woman with a baby on her
back, a hoe in one hand and a Kalashnikov in the other. Of course, women
may be seen at any time suckling their babies, but the image that appeals is
not of a woman with the leisure to do this, while someone else is perhaps
working for her, but of the woman ready to produce food. I have at home a
rather lovely batik of an African woman with a child at breast. But it was
painted by an English artist called Phyllis McDowall, our close neighbour in
Lusaka. My European friends admire it; my African friends, even those used to
Christian art, are a little embarrassed. This is not an image to draw attention
to. And if we move north into the Muslim world of north Africa or the Middle
East, the image is completely taboo, both because it is an image and because
no women should expose her in such a manner to male gaze.
Next, I thought of the sun. ‘Look on the rising sun’, said Blake, ‘There
God does live / And gives His light and gives His heat away’. Isn’t some such
feeling, whatever gods may be invoked, recognised universally? We all
welcome the sun, banishing night and cold with the birth of a new day. Once
again, though, words became necessary to mediate meaning. In Blake’s poem,
the mother and child (again!) are sitting in the shade of a tree, deliberately
avoiding the sun’s heat, and it is this fact that supplies the mother with the
central metaphor of her lesson to her son – that his black skin enables him
better to bear the beams of God’s love. It’s not an argument that works in
northern Europe where (to change the song) we ‘leave our troubles on the
doorstep’ and just direct our feet ‘to the sunny side of the street’.
I could give other examples of this hitherto frustrated search, but I want
instead to illustrate my contention about ‘the word that says more than a
thousand images’ by discussing one of my own poems in which this theme is
prominent. When I first came to Portugal, I lived for a while in Alcabideche,
in the Conselho de Cascais, and I became fascinated by the figure of Abu
“The Word that Says More than 1000 images” 199
Zeide Mohamede Ibne Mucana, the Arab poet who lived there in the eleventh
century and who is al-Qabdaq’s first named inhabitant. There’s only a
smattering of his poetry available in English translation, but what there is
evokes a profoundly sympathetic figure, and certainly no fundamentalist
ayatollah. Here’s A.J. Arberry, for example, translating a poem called “Dawn”:
Pour the wine, and quickly, ere
Sounds the solemn call to prayer.2
What fascinated me about Mucana was to reflect on how different
Alcabideche was in his day. Geographically, for example, it lay on the
northern border of a polity that extended across the Straits of Gibraltar and as
far south as the Senegal River. (Watching those recent television pictures of
boat loads of immigrants setting out from the estuary of the Senegal to try to
make it to Europe, I reflected this would have been a normal journey in the
eleventh century). For Mucana, it was from the north the threats came, for
people he would have called Kaffirs, or unbelievers, those barbarian Christians
living beyond Coimbra. How did he think of the climate, the rotation of the
seasons? We are so used to the pattern of spring, summer, autumn and winter,
yet living in Alcabideche in the early 1990s, what I was seeing was a dry
season extending from May to October, a short rainy season, followed by the
verão do San Martinho, and then further rains until April. People’s activities
followed this pattern, going out with their hoes in October to plant their
legumes and cabbages, followed by a second planting season in February, and
fixing their houses and getting married in July and August – in short, an Africa
division of the year.
So what, then, did something like the swallows’ departure signal to
Mucana? In English literature, it is one of the most profoundly evocative
images, signaling the end of summer and the slow decline to darkness and
cold. Presumably, for him, they signaled the end of the dry season. Or those
crocuses that spring up everywhere on roadside embankments round
Alcabideche, are they spring or autumn crocuses, or do we need another
language to describe them, connecting them with the impending rains? I think
you take my point. For me, as a poet writing in English, images of swallows
and crocuses send one kind of signal. To explore what they might mean in
another culture takes an imaginative leap only to be expressed in words.
2 A.J. Arberry, Moorish Poetry: a Translation of The Pennants, an anthology compiled in 1243 by the
Andalusian Ibn Sa’id (Cambridge University Press, 1953), p. 47.
200 Landeg White
In the poem that follows, the introduction and the first part are
translated from the French of Henri Peres.3 Aby Bakr al-Muzaffar, Prince of
Badajoz, died in 1068.
1.
‘Dwellers at al-Qabdaq, husband well your seeds
whether of onions or pumpkins.
A man of purpose needs a windmill turning
with the clouds, not with water.
Al-Qabdaq doesn’t produce, even in a good year,
more than twenty sacks of corn.
Any more than that, the wild pigs come down
from the forest in regular armies.
She is meagre with anything good or useful,
just like me, as you know, I have a poor ear.
I abandoned the kings in their finery, I refused
to attend their processions and parted from them.
Here you find me at al-Qabdaq, harvesting thorns
with my sharp and agile sickle.
If someone said, ‘Is it worth this trouble?’
3 Henri Peres, La Poésie Andalouse, en Arabe Classique, au Xie Siècle (Paris, 1953), pp. 200-201.
4 The first part of the poem appeared in The View from the Stockade (Dangaroo Press. 1981), then
both parts in South (CEMAR, F. da Foz, 1999) and, more accessibly in Where the Angolans are
Playing Football: Selected and New Poetry (Parthian Books, 2003).
“The Word that Says More than 1000 images” 201
2.
We meet the old deaf poet with a sickle, crofting
The northern border of a country whose south
Is the River Senegal. He has turned his back on
Kings in their finery, comparing men of purpose
With windmills, circling with the clouds, not
Water – though we may be sure these rains, after
The scorched weeks of house-repairs and weddings,
This season of the pumpkin and onion seeds he
Celebrates in his poem, when olives ripen and lamplike
Oranges burnish the quick dusk at the Call to Prayers,
We may be sure October’s crocuses are a sign.
Poucas são as suas personagens que lêem romances, e ele não consegue
deixar de ser o interprépete entre as pessoas dos dois lados.
A questão que quero aqui sublinhar é o facto de as imagens funcionarem
melhor no interior das suas próprias culturas. Não lhes é fácil atravessar as
fronteiras culturais, podendo talvez definir-se uma cultura como sendo aquele
determinado mundo onde as imagens falam por si, sem precisarem de expli-
cação. Contudo, quando uma imagem atravessa uma fronteira cultural, temos
de nos socorrer de palavras, às vezes até de muitas, para explicar o que
queremos dizer.
Haverá alguma imagem que seja entendida do mesmo modo por raças,
culturas e credos diferentes? Tomemos como exemplo uma mãe amamen-
tando um bébé. Não será esta imagem da ‘Mãe e seu filho’ a imagem universal
do amor humano e da fragilidade, que todos identificam sem distinções? A
reposta é: “Não”.
Em toda as regiões do sul do continente africano, a imagem por
excelência da ternura maternal é dada por uma mãe transportando uma
criança às costas e um sacho na mão direita – não por uma mãe que dá
calmamente de mamar ao filho enquanto outros trabalham, mas uma mãe
que trabalha para alimentar a sua família. Se formos mais para norte e
entrarmos no mundo muçulmano da África do Norte e do Médio Oriente, a
imagem é tabú, não só como imagem, mas porque nenhuma mulher se pode
assim expor aos olhares masculinos.
Consideremos o sol. “Olhai o sol nascente / Aí habita Deus / Que nos dá
a Sua luz e o Seu calor”, diz Blake. Não será tal sentimento, quaisquer que
sejam os deuses invocados, universalmente identificado? A verdade é que é
preciso de novo recorrer a palavras como mediadoras do sentido. No poema
de Blake, a mãe e a criança estão sentadas à sombra, protegidas do calor do
sol, mas no norte da Europa (num outro poema),”dirigimos os nossos passos...
para o lado soalheiro da rua”.
Há alguns anos, deixei-me fascinar por Abu Zeide Mohamede Ibne
Mucana, poeta árabe do século XI que viveu em Alcabideche, o primeiro
habitante conhecido pelo nome em al-Qabdaq. Quão diferente era
Alcabidche no seu tempo! Geograficamente, situava-se na fronteira norte de
um estado que se estendia para sul até ao rio Senegal. Para Mucana, a ameaça
vinha do norte, daqueles cristãos bárbaros que viviam para lá de Coimba.
Que ideia tinha ele do clima, da rotação das estações? Nós estamos habitua-
dos à sucessão da primavera, verão, outono e inverno, mas Alcabideche é
caracterizada por uma estação seca, que vai de Maio a Outubro, uma breve
estação de chuvas, seguida pelo “verão de S. Martinho”, e mais chuvas até
Resumo em português 205
Abril. As pessoas pautavam as suas actividades por este ritmo: semeavam hor-
taliças e couves em Outubro; faziam um segunda semeadura em Fevereiro;
em Julho e Agosto arranjavam as casas e casavam-se – em resumo, dividiam
o ano à maneira africana.
Que significado tem para Mucana o sinal a que as andorinhas obedecem
para emigrarem? Na literatura inglesa, esta é uma das imagens mais ricas para
evocar o fim do verão e a chegada das noites escuras e do frio. Presumi-
velmente, para ele, tal imagem assinalava o fim da estação seca. Ou então,
aquelas flores de açafrão que nascem por todo o lado nos taludes em redor
de Alcabideche, serão elas flores de primavera ou de outono, ou precisamos
de as descrever, associando-as ao avizinhar-se das chuvas? Para um poeta de
língua inglesa, as imagens de andorinhas e do açafão enviam um determinado
sinal, mas para perceber até ao fundo o significado que elas podem ter numa
outra cultura, é preciso uma certa agilidade de imaginação, que só as palavras
conseguem exprimir.
No poema que se segue, a introdução e a primeira parte foram traduzi-
dos a partir de uma versão francesa de Henri Peres1. Aby Bark al-Muzaffar,
Príncipe de Badajoz, morreu em 1068.
1 Henri Peres, La Poésie Andalouse, en Arabe Classique, au Xe Siècle (Paris, 1953), pp. 200-2001
Estratégias de Exibição. Frida Kahlo em Lisboa
1 Cf. “(…) Imperialism means the practice, theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan
centre ruling a distant territory.” (…) “Colonialism, which is almost always a consequence of
imperialism, is the implanting of settlements on a distant territory.” (Said 1993: 8).
210 Ana Daniela Coelho / Teresa de Ataíde Malafaia
Os ateliês pedagógicos
Na exposição de Frida Kahlo patente em Lisboa havia ainda a possibili-
dade de efectuar uma visita guiada, em que, sempre com um enquadramento
biográfico, se propunha a análise tanto do universo plástico da artista como
dos motivos recorrentes na sua obra. A estas mesmas visitas guiadas, desti-
nadas ao público geral, juntavam-se outras destinadas ao público escolar, ao
qual eram também oferecidos vários ateliês.
Para esta exposição em particular, o Serviço Educativo do Centro Cultu-
ral de Belém propunha três ateliês: Máscaras para um rosto (destinado ao 1º
4 Veja-se, a título de exemplo, a exposição Gothic Nightmares. Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic
Imagination, Tate Britain (15 de Fevereiro a 1 de Maio 2006), onde a perspectiva cronológica foi
igualmente favorecida.
5 Cf. “Over the last ten years, artists and cultural managers have relied on the institution as the bearer
of the legitimising discourse.” (Deliss 1996: 277).
Estratégias de Exibição. Frida Kahlo em Lisboa 213
6 Esta actividade deu origem a resultados interessantes e variados, com algumas frases a aproximarem-
-se de um cadavre exquis, enquanto outras demonstram um esforço para lhes incutir sentido.
Vejam-se alguns exemplos:
“A festa com o pincel a tinta com o pintor branco.”
“Ela é vaidosa, pequena e pinta com os pincéis.”
“A sua natureza era limitada pela dor.”
“A beleza de um líquido de Verão doce e amarelo é a moldura de um mistério.”
“O olhar, o olhar…em todos os quadros, o seu olhar parece que desafia o público a tentar
compreender aquilo que ela sente.”
“A artista pinta líquidos doces no mistério do círculo redondo.”
“No cone da morte prendeu a sua dor como acessório.”
“Frida Kahlo expressava a sua dor através da pintura e retratava ainda os acessórios típicos da
sua região.”
214 Ana Daniela Coelho / Teresa de Ataíde Malafaia
***
9 Cf., a título de exemplo, o Musée du Louvre, o British Museum, a National Gallery com a Sainsbury
Wing, inaugurada em 1991.
Estratégias de Exibição. Frida Kahlo em Lisboa 219
Referências
Barker, Emma, Ed. (1999). Contemporary Cultures of Display. New Haven, London:
Yale University Press, The Open University.
Bennett, Tony (1995). The Birth of the Museum. History, theory, politics. London, New
York: Routledge.
Caderno do Docente: Frida Kahlo – Vida e Obra (2006). Lisboa: Serviço Educativo do
Centro Cultural de Belém.
Deliss, Clémentine (1996). “Free Fall – Freeze Fame. Africa, exhibitions, artists”. In
Greenberg, Reesa, Bruce W. Ferguson, Sandy Nairne, Eds. (1996). Thinking
About Exhibitions. London, New York: Routledge. 275-294.
Lidchi, Henrietta (1997). “The Poetics and Politics of Exhibiting Other Cultures”. In
Stuart Hall (1997). Representation. Culture Representations and Signifying
Practices. London: Sage.
Mitchell, W. J. T. (2002). “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture”. In Nicholas
Mirzoeff, Ed. The Visual Culture Reader. London, New York, 86-101.
Said, Edward (1993). Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage.
Thomas, Trevor (1940). “Artists, Africans and Installation”. Parnassus. 12/4. 24.
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