The Anthony Hecht Lectures in the Humanities

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2 3
q P anaesthetics r
On the Unity and Diversity of the Arts

12 34
DANIEL ALBRIGHT

New Haven and London

This book was first presented as the Anthony Hecht Lectures in the Humanities given by
Daniel Albright at Bard College in 2012. The lectures have been revised for publication.

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip Hamilton
McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College.

Copyright © 2014 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be
reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that
copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by
reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Poetry credits can be found in the Poetry Credits at the back of the book.

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Set in Fournier type by IDS Infotech, Ltd. Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Albright, Daniel, 1945–

  Panaesthetics : on the unity and diversity of the arts / Daniel Albright.—1st [edition].
   pages cm.—(The Anthony Hecht lectures in the humanities)
  “This book was first presented as the Anthony Hecht Lectures in the Humanities
given by Daniel Albright at Bard College in 2012. The lectures have been revised for
publication.”  Includes bibliographical references and index.
  ISBN 978-0-300-18662-8 (alk. paper)    1.  Arts.  I. Title.    NX170.A45 2014
  700.1—dc23   2013034291
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Reproduction, including downloading, of the Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky,

Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, and Saul Steinberg works is prohibited by copyright
laws and international conventions without the express written permission of Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York.

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1
The Anthony Hecht Lectures in the Humanities, given biennially at
Bard College, were established to honor the memory of this preemi-
nent American poet by reflecting his lifelong interest in literature,
music, the visual arts, and cultural history. Through his poems, schol-
arship, and teaching, Anthony Hecht has become recognized as one of
the moral voices of his generation, and his works have had a profound
effect on contemporary American poetry. The books in this series will
keep alive the spirit of his work and life.
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To Marta, in the hope that this book will have something of the
loveliness of your name
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 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments  xi
Introduction: Mousike  1

Part One: Individual Media

1. What Is Literature?  13
2. What Is Painting?  46
3. What Is Music?  149

Part Two: Art Rampant

4. Nine Definitions  209
5. Wonder and the Sublime  219
6. Pseudomorphoses  234

7. Comparative Arts: Two Conclusions  277

Notes  287
Index  301
Poetry Credits  321
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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to give my warmest thanks to Bard College, since this book

grows out of the Anthony Hecht lectures I gave there in 2012;

and to Pamela Rosenberg and the American Academy in Berlin,

where I resided in Fall 2012—the final part of this book was written as
I watched the boats gliding out of the mists of the Wannsee like
thoughts coming into being;

and to Harvard University, for supporting my research over the

years and for providing me with a reliable source of income;

and to my research assistant, Benjamin Ory, and to Suzie Tibor,

who helped me find illustrations, and to three people at Yale University
Press, Jennifer Banks (whose confidence in this project has sustained
me), Heather Gold, and Susan Laity, the most sensitive and esemplasti-
cally gifted manuscript editor I’ve ever known;

I was also fortunate that the superb polymath Simon Morrison

read this book and thought along with some of the ideas in it;

and finally I thank my dear friend Marc Shell—he and I have been
co-­teaching a seminar on Comparative Arts for years, and this book
grew out of that seminar. I learned from him much of what I know
about Zwischenkunst—panaesthetics—

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 INTRODUCTION

3 Mousike 2

Music. Musik. Musique. Musica. Música. Mузыка.

These words mean the same thing, and pretty well cover Europe
and the Western hemisphere. All are derived from µουσική, mousike—
but this Greek word doesn’t mean “music.” It is related to the word for
Muse and means anything pertinent to the Muses; therefore it includes
not only music but dance, mime, epic poetry, lyric poetry, history, com-
edy, tragedy, even astronomy. In Roman times the nine Muses were
parceled out fairly neatly among these nine arts, one Muse to one art.
But earlier, the boundaries of the areas overseen by each Muse were
unclear and overlapping. Greek mythologizing tended to confuse and
unify the arts: an artistic medium was not a distinct thing but a kind of
proclivity within the general domain of Art.
On the other hand, the founding text of academic study of the
interrelations among the arts is Aristotle’s Poetics, a book with a strong
appetite for division. Aristotle isolates six distinct aspects of dramatic
art: plot (mythos), character (ethe), thought (dianoia), diction (lexis),
spectacle (opsis), and music (melos). Far from blurring these categories,
Aristotle ranks them in value, with plot as the most important, music
much less so, and spectacle least of all. For Aristotle, it seems that

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 INTRODUCTION

verbal art takes precedence over all others—and indeed the visual arts
seem so ancillary in Greek culture that neither painting nor sculpture is
dignified with a Muse of its own.
And yet the Poetics does not exalt the literary as much as it seems
to. Nowadays we hear the word plot and may think of a verbal sum-
mary of a story; but for Aristotle the plot is as much a matter of bodies
moving on a stage as a matter of words. In Greek thought, verbal art
spills out of the purely textual in all directions: into mime, into chant,
into elocution. The very word poetics refers to making, not to any spe-
cifically verbal craft: we might speak of the poetics of a sonnet, and we
might speak of the poetics of a sofa.
The purpose of this book is to provide an introduction to the study
of the comparative arts. And the proper place to begin is with the funda-
mental question of comparative arts: Are the arts one, or are they many?
This question vexed the Greeks, and continues to vex us today.1 Ringing
affirmations that the arts are one are easy to find throughout history: as
a summary of classical thought (written in the seventeenth century
by Franciscus Junius) put it: “ ‘All arts,’ sayth Tullie [Cicero] ‘that doe
belong to humanitie, have a common band, and are ally’d one to another,
as by a kind of parentage.’ Tertullian speaketh to the same effect, when he
sayth; ‘there is no Art, but shee is the mother of another Art, or at least
of a nigh kindred.’ ” And innumerable writers cite Horace’s dictum ut
pictura poesis: the poem should be like a picture. The Romantics were
particularly attracted to the notion that there is a single Art that refracts
itself into separate arts like light through a prism: “One man’s tongue is
set free, and he becomes a poet; in another’s soul everything takes shape
as colors and forms and he becomes a painter, the third involuntarily
hears, as his soul’s mood varies, melodies sounding deep inside him,
sometimes cheerful, sometimes serious or melancholy, and he becomes
a musician; in short, one might say that it is the same creative power that,
as through a prism, refracts in different ways” (Wilhelm von Schadow).2

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 Introduction

This German painter and novelist, himself extremely versatile, resolutely

states an intuition common throughout the centuries.
Strong assertions of the essential disunity of the arts are hard to find
before early modern times. But the discipline of comparative arts arises
from the work of just such a divider, Gotthold Lessing, who argued in
Laokoon (1766) that the temporal arts, such as music and literature, had
protocols wholly distinct from those of the spatial arts, such as sculpture
and painting. He began by asking himself a question that the great art
historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann had asked before him: In the
famous Roman statue (excavated in Michelangelo’s time), why isn’t
Laocoön screaming? Laocoön and his children are being squeezed to
death by an enormous snake; but Laocoön’s mouth is a tight stoic line.
Lessing argued that artworks in a sequential medium pertain to action
and should be loud, vigorous, expressive, so it’s appropriate that in the
Aeneid Virgil depicts Laocoön as raising a horrible clamor to the stars;
but artworks in a spatial medium pertain to stasis and should be deco-
rous, calm, poised, so it’s right that a statue should strive for balance and
beauty even if it depicts a man dying horribly. A work of visual art is an
immobile noun, or a collection of immobile nouns; a poem, a novel, a
piece of music is all verb. In this way the arts diversify, even show a
certain hostility to one another. Others who agreed with Lessing include
Irving Babbitt, Clement Greenberg, Theodor Adorno, and the Victo-
rian critic W. J. Courthope, who defined decadence in art as a quest for
originality achieved when one of the arts borrows some principle from
another. A famous example of a medial separatist is Marshall McLuhan,
who thought that the medium was the message; for an extreme unifier,
such as Wassily Kandinsky, the medium, far from being the message, is
pretty much irrelevant to it.
My own view is that the arts themselves have no power to aggre-
gate or to separate—they are neither one nor many but will gladly
assume the poses of unity or diversity according to the desire of the

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 INTRODUCTION

artist or the thinker. But the story of their comings together and split-
tings asunder is one of the great stories in the intellectual history of
the West; and in this book I will tell it as best I can. I begin by looking
at each artistic medium in isolation, always with reference to particular
works, in order to see how artists’ theories and practices reveal assump-
tions about the ultimate purpose of art. (I speak of artistic media in
isolation, but this can never be strictly true since my only resource here
is language: when I discourse on painting and music, I am already
transforming them into writing. I can’t really compare a painting and a
symphony and a poem—I can only compare words-­about-­a-­painting
and words-­about-­a-­symphony and words-­about-­a-­poem.) Then we
will look at the ways in which artistic media interact—sometimes
cooperating genially, sometimes poaching on one another’s territory,
sometimes dissonating, clashing.
I open with four theses.
1. Anything is an artwork to the extent that it looks made. The
Matterhorn is as much an artwork as the Mona Lisa, insofar as we
understand it as something intended, an act of will. It may be the
will of God; or, since we tend to ascribe a sort of impersonal will to
irresistible forces, it may be the buckling of tectonic plates. I think that
we are all animists to some degree, and when we perceive materializa-
tions of force (such as the rose that iron filings make around a magnet)
or patterns generated by collisions of forces (the splat of a bug against
a windshield, the whistling of wind, the impact crater of a meteorite),
we feel the presence of an agent making a design—even the atheist
who instantly dismisses the notion of a designer shivers faintly at the
discredited teleology that seems to have brought the thing into being.
As Friedrich Nietzsche says (repeatedly, in The Birth of Tragedy), the
world justifies itself as an aesthetic phenomenon.
Meaning is not merely something that the spectator imports into an
object, for meaning presupposes an intention to mean within the thing

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 Introduction

itself: meaning is generated from the interaction of our minds with

the intention that we imagine to have created the object we scrutinize.
(By meaning, I mean a sense of the object’s looming, its felt potential to
become part of your mind’s decor. Sometimes this impingement
or import terminates in a message, paraphrasable in words, or in an
emotion.) Any meaningful object given to the senses is an artwork, and
meaning exists when we perceive or intuit or feign the constitutive pro-
cesses that brought a thing into being, and therefore brought a thing
into relation with us—for we meet the whole physical universe on the
ground of our common origin, common originatedness. In Nabokov’s
The Gift, the hero thinks of revisiting the landscape of his childhood
and rejoicing in the intimacy of the old landmarks because, as he says,
“my eyes are, in the long run, made of the same stuff as the grayness,
the clarity, the dampness of those sites.”3 Our eyes are made of the
same water that rains on us, the same water in which we swim. And the
artwork flows easily or effortfully through our brain’s soft labyrinth
because it and our brains are part of a single hydrodynamic.
We are also free, by a focal adjustment of the mind’s eye, to aban-
don the quest for meaning in either the Matterhorn or the Mona Lisa.
This abandonment is always an unmaking. The unmade thing then
sinks flat and vain into wherever it happens to be located, outside the
domain of relation, dead to us, though full of phlogiston, of potential
meanings that wait to burn. By contrast, overmeaningful things tend to
feel somewhat drained of possibility—this exhaustion explains why a
postmodernist painter like Robert Rauschenberg would regard a print
of Botticelli’s Venus as a wildly neutral element in a collage.
2. An artwork is a voodoo doll. In old Hollywood movies, the
sorcerers of the voodoo religion of Haiti are shown, falsely, as making
dolls containing locks of hair or fingernail clippings from people whom
they wish to torment: if the doll is stabbed with a pin, the person it is
modeled on will feel a sharp pain. An artwork, any artwork, exercises

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 INTRODUCTION

influence on our minds and our bodies, whether we wish it to or not.

If we allow this to happen, or if the artwork seizes us against our will,
we will be deeply intimate with it.
Aestheticians have long asked themselves, Is the purpose of art to
express emotion? Is the purpose of art to offer chill examples of craft,
objects without emotional content? Is the purpose of art to represent
the world around us? Is the purpose of art to transcend representation,
transcend earthly things entirely? These don’t seem to be the right
questions: art is intrinsically neither expressive nor inexpressive, repre-
sentational nor nonrepresentational, though any of these may be part
of the artist’s intention. It would be better to describe an artwork as an
icon of a sensorium, a sensibility—as a manifesting of a time-­shape, a
space-­shape, that grows meaningful to me because the processes that
brought it into being seem congruent with the processes that brought
me into being. When I perceive an artwork, I know it and it knows
me because it springs from a mind that is my congener. The material
medium of the artwork (pigment, stone, sound, written word) becomes
transformed (James Joyce would say transubstantiated) into something
that feels human, yours, mine, ours, because anything arrayed by will is
an image of the will that arrays it. Neurologists speak of the sensory
homunculus, the little man or woman drawn by mapping the areas of
the cerebral cortex responsible for interpreting sensation from various
parts of our body: it has huge lips and hands, and spindly little legs
and torso. There is also a motor homunculus, drawn by mapping the
areas responsible for sending messages to the motor nerves. I mean to
understand any artwork as an occult version of a sensory/motor
homunculus, working our whole selves from deep within. In most cases
the homunculus is incomplete: I may see in the artwork nothing of me
but a fingernail clipping or a lock of hair, but that is enough: I am
altered as I behold it; its shape becomes, experimentally, my shape. You
must change your life, announces Apollo’s archaic torso according to

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 Introduction

Rainer Maria Rilke; but all artworks, if we open ourselves to them,

compel intimate transformation.
There may be some specific feeling (jealousy, rage, yearning) that
the artwork rouses in us by means of sympathetic magic; but more impor-
tant, the artwork rouses a sense of outthrust or indraw, balance or vertigo,
deep breath or gasp, clarity or darkening, sharpness or blunting—all
those deep humannesses that lie beneath our ideas and our feelings. In this
special sense, all art, even the most abstract, is representational, anthropo-
morphic, terraformed. D. H. Lawrence believed that dreams were images
of the sleeping body’s inner workings—if we dream of narrow passages,
it is simply the artery’s way of calling attention to itself.4 An artwork is
nothing but a reified dream, and it succeeds to the degree that it implicates
the widest extent of our bodies and minds. It pricks, and I bleed.
3. Art is about art, and art history, and history. I might put this in
Latin: Ars est ostendere artem. Ars celare artem—the art lies in the hiding
of art—according to the old summarizing of a passage from Ovid; but
even the best-­concealed artifice is also a manifesting of artfulness. In
every artistic medium, the artwork keeps reaching back to its coming-­
into-­being, so that originary myth is always an overt or occult aspect.
Therefore, insofar as every artwork gestures at the uninflected surface
(the blank page, the blank canvas, the field of silence or background
noise) on which it takes shape, literature and painting and music have
something strongly in common: a positive sense of the absence that
prevailed before its presence. Further, the artwork folds into itself not
only its own origin but also the deep origin of the entire body of work
in its medium, and the deeper origin of the world itself. There is no
painting, however abstract or random, that does not gesture toward the
Lascaux caves and toward the creation of the universe. In this sense
every artwork is a divine comedy.
Similarly, every artwork presupposes its own destruction and the
general disarticulation of the cosmos. In this sense it is tragic. The

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 INTRODUCTION

pathos of the artwork arises from the fact that its beauty in the present
moment is identical to the beauty of its passing away. William Butler
Yeats describes a stone carved into the shape of a mountain climbed by
Chinese scholars:

Every discolouration of the stone,

Every accidental crack or dent
Seems a water-­course or an avalanche,
Or lofty slope where it still snows. [“Lapis Lazuli”]

Would the Aphrodite of Milos move us as much if she still had her
arms? The sculptor’s plastic force at once consents to and resists the
entropy that will reduce the sculpture to something shapeless. The
intensity of Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà, as much raw rock as
finished statue, comes from the way that it seems complicit in its own
undoing since it was never done in the first place.
4. Art is both a language and a not-­language. If we ask an artwork
to have meaning, it will obey us by manifesting itself as speech or
writing, throwing itself open so that we can gaze into every secret
corner. This is what makes the discipline of Comparative Arts possible:
since the meaning (insofar as it can be conveyed to others) of the art-
work is always linguistic, every artwork can be located in the domain
of language, where everything is relatable to everything else. But every
artwork, even a poem, also exists in a different space, where it has no
meaning—indeed, where the concept of meaning has no meaning.
Insofar as it inhabits this space, this valley of unmaking, the artwork is
ineffable but not extraordinary. So: every artistic medium is a language,
but I can say this only because language understands everything as a
language.5
I know that this aesthetic philosophy has its contrarian aspects.
Hegel is extremely skillful at showing how the artist’s idea adjusts itself

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 Introduction

delicately, continually, to the physical medium in which it will be

realized, but I require no idea preliminary to the object itself, only
an intention to make that may have no precision whatever. The shape
generated by the blind furious whittling of a stick is art; in fact the stick
itself is art if we are sensitive to whatever process made it grow into its
particular shape. Hegel, like most of the older philosophers, believed
that only entities produced by human endeavor could be called art; and
even more recent, open-­hearted, open-­arted philosophers balk at the
notion that anything and everything might be understood as art. Arthur
Danto is almost as latitudinarian as I am, since he is happy to allow
Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol to call art certain mass-­produced
items bought in stores, but Danto still insists that “works of art consti-
tute a restricted set of objects.” Or, as he puts it elsewhere, “with quali-
fication, anything goes.”6 Danto regards this everything is permitted
attitude as the final chapter in the history of art. But there is a still later
chapter, if even more than everything can be permitted—if we can
remove the qualifications and restrictions he speaks of. One of Danto’s
books is called The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, but I see no
reason why the commonplace needs to be transfigured, though trans is
a fine place for a figure to go. The aesthetic is simply a mode of all sen-
sible reality, conceived under the rubric of the made. The world
becomes friendlier when it is seen as art. In Wilhelm Meisters Wander-
jahre, Goethe says that art is art because it is not nature; I would say that
nature is nature (in Spinoza’s sense of natura naturans, nature under-
stood as a making-­itself-­come-­into-­being) because it is art.

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3 Part One 2
Individual Media
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 CHAPTER ONE

3 What Is Literature? 2

In Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme, M. Jourdain is delighted

to discover that he has been speaking prose all his life without even
knowing it. Similarly, we might say that we have been writing literature
all our lives: since literature just means letters, even a shopping list or a
set of instructions for feeding the cat is in the largest sense literature.
But we usually reserve the term for something more portentous or
pretentious. The Odyssey and Joyce’s Ulysses are certainly literature; the
novels of Norman Mailer are probably literature; Harlequin romances
are possibly literature, at least according to advanced literary-­critical
thought; today’s edition of the New York Times is marginally literature.
The main criterion is, Will it continue to be read for a long time?
Textual longevity can arise from many sources, from urgency of
content to rhetorical splendor. When Ezra Pound defined literature as
news that stays news, he was creating a content-­based definition: what
Homer has to tell us about faithfulness, what Tolstoy has to tell us
about adultery, what Goethe has to tell us about intellectual presump-
tion, what the author of Job has to tell us about suffering are matters
that will engage our attention for the foreseeable future.1 The same is
true about certain works of nonfiction, such as Adam Smith’s and Karl

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 Individual Media

Marx’s analyses of the ways society is shaped not for the convenience
of human beings but for the convenience of money.
But importance is not a factor of insight-­content alone. Sometimes
even wearisome texts become literature by virtue of their influence on
unwearisome texts: Arthur Brooke’s The Tragicall Historye of Romeus
and Juliet will always be an object of (limited) scrutiny, courtesy of
William Shakespeare, who adapted Brooke’s long, long poem into an
excellent play. Brooke piggybacked himself into immortality.
Sometimes a text can ram itself into the cultural heritage, and
therefore into the canon of the literary, by brute force. Such is the case
with texts we are compelled to memorize, texts that may have no
particular charm of insight or grace of expression:

I plédge allégiance
Tó the flág
Of the Uníted Státes of América,
And tó the repúblic
For whích it stánds,
Óne nátion,
Únder Gód,
Índivísible
With líberty and jústice for áll.

But this is an interesting case: we promote this simple sentence (by the
socialist Francis Bellamy, as amended by a pious Congress) into litera-
ture by the way we chant it, in two-­beat lines, with the final passage of
each main clause expanding into a three-­beat line. It is a part of the
secular liturgy of being an American, along with the first sentence of
the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
We are now on the verge of another definition of literature: the
sacred text. Sacredness isn’t necessarily associated with verbal beauty, or

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 What Is Literature?

with helpful information, or with memorable utterance: as C. S. Lewis

pointed out, the Gospels are written in businessman’s Greek, far less
inspired (aesthetically speaking) than the English version of King
James’s translators. Because the sacred is immune from critique, we
sometimes leave it in a domain separate from the literary: if I hear about
a college course called “The Bible as Literature,” I assume that the
instructor’s motive is not to proselytize but to study narrative craft,
structures of metaphor, affiliations with other texts written in the ancient
Near East, and other scholarly matters. Indeed, cultures with a canonical
sacred text may be somewhat inhibited from further literary production:
if all I need to know in order to be righteous is found in the Talmud, or
the Qur’an, why should I bother to write, or to read, anything else?
Insofar as Western literature begins with the Greeks, we may spec-
ulate that the absence of a sacred text was a sort of precondition to a
certain kind of literary productivity. Homer’s epics were the closest
thing to sacred text that the Greeks had (at least according to Plato’s
Ion), but Socrates, according to Plato’s Republic (book 10), considered
Homer ignorant of statecraft and warfare, and so poor a poet that he
could not figure out how to stay in character when devising the speech
of an elderly priest; Aristotle, for all his admiration of Homer, had
no trouble finding absurdities in the Iliad; and Xenophanes attacked
Homer’s theology. To some extent, the happy features of literature—
insight, wit, grace, force—attempt to supply through aesthetics some
illusion of the sacredness that few texts, or no text, can possess. In this
sense literature is the domain of the pseudo-­sacred, the provisionally
sacred, the ironically sacred.

Literature That Changes You

Literature, as opposed to Holy Writ, is less a warehouse of achieved
cultural value than a machine for bringing cultural value into being.

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 Individual Media

Cultural values tend to be precarious: if I am a Roman, I might value

stoic implacable constructiveness; if I am an American, I might value
heroic assertions of personal liberty. But we are all of us lazy and shift-
less, and need to be reminded continually of our cultural values if they
are to have any force. In imperial Rome, Virgil’s Aeneid served as a
device to stamp out Romans of the proper mold:

Fair queen, you never can enough repeat

Your boundless favors, or I own my debt;
Nor can my mind forget Eliza’s name,
While vital breath inspires this mortal frame.
This only let me speak in my defense:
I never hop’d a secret flight from hence,
Much less pretended to the lawful claim
Of sacred nuptials, or a husband’s name.
For, if indulgent Heav’n would leave me free,
And not submit my life to fate’s decree,
My choice would lead me to the Trojan shore,
Those relics to review, their dust adore,
And Priam’s ruin’d palace to restore.
But now the Delphian oracle commands,
And fate invites me to the Latian lands.
That is the promis’d place to which I steer,
And all my vows are terminated there.
...............................
Anchises’ angry ghost in dreams appears,
Chides my delay, and fills my soul with fears. [4.483–507, trans.
John Dryden]

Pious Aeneas cannot rest in Carthaginian luxury with Queen Dido

(here called Eliza); he cannot return to Troy to restore the shattered
kingdom of his ancestors; the gods command him, his father’s ghost

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 What Is Literature?

commands him to go to a new land, Italy, and ultimately to establish

a new center of power, a second Troy: Rome. Not my will, but the
will of fate—the will of the state; this is what it means to be Roman.
The epic is a primary form of literature insofar as it is the clearest
enunciation of cultural origin, cultural value.
But cultural solidarity can be achieved by many different sorts
of literary methods. The epic proposes bald models of admirable
behavior; the novel proposes a subtler sort of networking:

It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight

in many Dutch paintings, which lofty-­minded people despise.
I find a source of delicious sympathy in these faithful pictures
of a monotonous homely existence, which has been the fate of
so many more among my fellow-­mortals than a life of pomp
or of absolute indigence, of tragic suffering or of world-­
stirring actions. I turn, without shrinking, from cloud-­borne
angels, from prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors, to an old
woman bending over her flower-­pot, or eating her solitary
dinner, while the noonday light, softened perhaps by a
screen of leaves, falls on her mob-­cap, and just touches the rim
of her spinning-­wheel, and her stone jug, and all those cheap
common things which are the precious necessities of life to
her;—or I turn to that village wedding, kept between four
brown walls, where an awkward bridegroom opens the dance
with a high-­shouldered, broad-­faced bride, while elderly and
middle-­aged friends look on, with very irregular noses and
lips and probably with quart-­pots in their hands, but with
an expression of unmistakeable contentment and goodwill.
“Foh!” says my idealistic friend, “what vulgar details! What
good is there in taking all these pains to give an exact likeness
of old women and clowns? What a low phase of life!—what
clumsy, ugly people!”

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But bless us, things may be lovable that are not altogether
handsome, I hope? I am not at all sure that the majority of
the human race have not been ugly, and even among those
“lords of their kind,” the British, squat figures, ill-­shapen
nostrils, and dingy complexions are not startling exceptions.
Yet there is a great deal of family love amongst us. . . . I have
seen many an excellent matron, who could never in her best
days have been handsome, and yet she had a packet of yellow
love-­letters in a private drawer, and sweet children showered
kisses on her sallow cheeks. And I believe there have been
plenty of young heroes, of middle stature and feeble beards,
who have felt quite sure they could never love anything more
insignificant than a Diana, and yet have found themselves in
middle life happily settled with a wife who waddles. Yes!
thank God; human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless
the earth: it does not wait for beauty—it flows with resistless
force and brings beauty with it. [Adam Bede 2.17]

George Eliot—the pseudonym of Mary Anne Evans—writing in Queen

Victoria’s England, renounces sibyls, warriors, and goddesses, the whole
epic paraphernalia, in order to embrace the stout, the meager, the stumpy.
It is not that she is taking the old woman at her spinning wheel as a hero
finer than Aeneas; it is that she is taking herself as a hero finer the Aeneas—
herself as Maximum Sympathizer, in love with the whole human race in
all its cherishable decrepitude, its bluster and stupor and occasional
finesse. The protagonists of Eliot’s fiction learn how to extend their
powers of tolerance and sympathy while refining the acuity of their
judgment. In this way her novels became strong instruments of commu-
nity and set a curriculum for future novelists to follow.
Even a novelist like Joseph Conrad—born in Poland, a profes-
sional sailor, a writer of adventure stories often set in exotic locales, in

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every way the opposite of George Eliot and her hempen homespuns—
speaks of the novelist’s mission in terms almost identical to Eliot’s. He
says that the novelist speaks “to the subtle but invincible, conviction of
solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts to the
solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in
hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together
all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn”
(Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” ). So Conrad’s novels, like
Eliot’s, are devices for transforming obtuse folks into sensitive modern
Europeans, full of the warm fellow-­feeling that is one of the high
virtues of the age.
Literature, then, is a tool for cultural assimilation: we read in order
to learn what our tribe expects of us and to measure ourselves against its
ideals—or to test its ideals against our inner light of proper conduct.
Our system of desire is partly innate and partly something to be shaped
by the cultural ambience: Bridget Jones’s diary, a Superman comic book,
Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury are
at once the product of wishes and the mold through which our wishes
take new forms. By means of reading, the boundaries of my field of
desire expand in certain directions and shrink in others, whether it is to
hanker after single-­malt Scotch instead of Diet Dr. Pepper, or to envy
the idiot’s modality of feeling over the Harvard student’s.
Literature is far more insidious than I can understand. If I read a
text, I can try to remain detached, and I can to some degree succeed—I
must succeed—but someone else’s sensibility, moral code, scheme for
organizing reality has been grafted onto me. I am prey to phantom
pains, phantom caresses from the undeveloped or absent limbs of my
being. An amputee feels sensations from a leg once possessed but now
missing; but the reader of a work of fiction feels ghost-­touches on flesh
never owned at all. In Plato’s Symposium (189c) Aristophanes says that
we were once two-­headed, four-­armed, four-­legged hermaphrodites,

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but Zeus, fearing rivals, took a hair and cut us each in half, so that we
run around helplessly trying to find our lost complement. Literature
remedies this, gives us an illusion of access to the nervous system of the
opposite-­sexed creature once conjoined. But literature can do much
more. Read enough, and you have a glimpse of the billion-­membered
creature that is the whole human race, a child in an African village, the
last emperor of China, the first emperor of Rome—the stem-­celled
mind-­tissue that can articulate itself into any human sentience. When
we hand over governance of ourselves to Virginia Woolf or Fyodor
Dostoyevsky we feel backward toward the origin of our own thought-­
patterns, our being’s melos, as we overlay the contour of our present
sensibility upon that of Mrs. Ramsay or Prince Myshkin or the book’s
narrator. This is what I mean when I say that the book is an icon of
a sensorium—a sort of sensory homunculus that exerts cybernetic
power over the reader’s mind.
I do not mean that reading can liberate me from the prison of self: I
can’t transfigure myself into Abraham Lincoln or Abraham Lincoln
Vampire Hunter or Madame Bovary (not that that notion of “becom-
ing” a fictitious character has much meaning in any case, though I have
read of a woman who hired surgeons to give her the physique of a Bar-
bie doll). I mean that I experiment with the person who I would be if I
thought the thoughts that Flaubert ascribes to his character or to himself.
And I experiment with the flushes and darkenings of body that Flaubert
and I co-­imagine for Madame Bovary, a body influenced by many things,
including lurid images from nineteenth-­century paintings, postures that
Flaubert devised for his Hérodias, and certain sensualities of mine that
seemed plausibly female in nature. Ultimately, as a result of months and
years of these experiments in alterity, I turn into someone else. The mot-
to of every reader is Arthur Rimbaud’s Je est un autre: “I” is an other.
But as a member of a group (and I belong to many groups, includ-
ing Americans, white males, professors at politically liberal universities,

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scuba divers, atheists, and clumsy oafs), I use these fictitious alternate
selves to explore both how to affiliate myself more deeply with my
group and how to challenge that affiliation. Any sentence I read is a
sentence I can imagine myself having invented, and so I become, for
a moment at least, its author. I make myself by authorizing some
sentences and refusing to authorize others; I don’t know whether I’m
more enriched by the body of what I submit to or the body of what I
reject. Each is part of my general machine à penser. Those who read
much tend to be amateurs of the human.

Literature That Affirms You

I have so far been speaking of the transforming qualities of literature.
But there is another aspect, equally important: we like to read books that
make us content with what we have, with what we are. Transformative
literature is often complacent on the level of culture, ambitious on the
level of the individual; but there is also a literature that promotes local
complacency as well.

My master had a journeyman named M. Verrat, whose house

was in our vicinity; far from the house there was a garden
in which very lovely asparagus grew. There came over
M. Verrat, who didn’t have much money, the desire to steal
from his mother some fine early asparagus, and to sell it for
some good meals. Since he didn’t want to get caught, and
since he wasn’t very nimble, he picked me for this raid. After
some preliminary coaxing, which won me over because I
didn’t see what he was getting at, he proposed this to me as if
it were an idea that had just come to him. I argued strongly; he
insisted. I have never been able to resist cajoling; I gave in.
Every morning I went to gather the most lovely stalks; I took

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them to Molard, where some good woman figured out that I

was stealing them and told me so, so that she could get them at
a better price. Greatly afraid, I took what she would give me;
I bore it to M. Verrat. It was quickly transformed into a meal,
a meal that I had provided, a meal that he shared with another
friend; I was very content to have a few scraps—I didn’t even
touch their wine.
This little exercise went on for several days, and the idea
still didn’t come into my head that I could steal from the thief,
and withhold from M. Verrat a percentage of the take. I
performed my heist with the greatest scrupulousness; my only
motive was to gain the favor of the man who made me do it.
If I had been surprised in the act, however, how many beat-
ings, how much invective, how much cruel treatment, I would
have received, while the wretch, the man who made me lose
my moral compass, would have been taken at his word, and I
would have been punished twice as much for having dared to
blame him, since he was a journeyman, and I was only an
apprentice! You see how in every situation the guilty save
themselves at the expense of the weak and innocent.
And so I learned that it wasn’t as terrible to steal as I had
thought; and from this knowledge I soon drew the lesson that
if I burned to possess something, I should take it.2

If you’re a bit hungry—not starving, but not well-­fed, either—and

you really like asparagus, and your neighbor has a lot more asparagus
than she really needs, why you owe it to yourself to steal some aspar-
agus. Your native scruples about theft may be hard to overcome, but
sooner or later some wise older boy will come along and introduce you
to the delights of taking things that aren’t yours. I’m translating here a
passage from the beginning of Jean-­Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions,
by some accounts the first modern autobiography; and it indeed

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differs from most of its precursors in that the author is astonishingly

tolerant of his own vices. He isn’t urging you to steal; he isn’t arguing
that theft can be virtuous in some circumstances (as, for example,
Victor Hugo might argue); he isn’t even making a particular effort to
get you to sympathize with his childhood predicament. But the mere act
of verbalizing his acts tends to exonerate them: to represent something
is to make it understandable, and to understand is to forgive. Most
autobiographies are like that: a strange amalgam of self-­accusation and
self-­defense in which the self-­accusation is the self-­defense, since if
I indict my own behavior I am also congratulating myself for having
attained the wisdom, the ethical enlightenment, to offer such a severe
judgment.
The Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges wrote a story called “The
Library of Babel” (1941), in which the universe is re-­imagined as a
honeycomb of hexagonal cells stretching endlessly in all directions,
each crammed from floor to ceiling with books. The books are
mostly nonsense—merely random combinations of the letters of the
alphabet—but every so often the librarians find a string of intelligible
words. Yet since every combination of the letters of the alphabet must
appear in an infinite library, every truth and every lie is pronounced by
some book, somewhere:

When it was announced that the Library comprised all books,

the first feeling was extravagant joy. All men felt themselves the
lords of a treasure intact and secret. There was no personal or
global problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some
hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly,
deceptively, took on the limitless dimensions of hope. During
that time much was said about Vindications: books of apology
and prophecy that once and for all vindicated the acts of every
man in the universe and guarded stupendous arcana for his

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future. Greed made thousands abandon the sweet hexagon of

their birth and throw themselves up stairways, driven by the
vain intent to find their Vindication. These wanderers fought in
the narrow corridors, shouted dark curses, strangled one
another in the divine stairways, hurled the misleading books
down to the bottom of the tunnels, fell to their death when men
of distant regions did the same to them. Others went mad. The
Vindications exist (I have seen two that referred to persons of
the future, persons perhaps not imaginary), but the treasure
hunters did not remember that the possibility that a man would
find his own, or some treacherous variation of his own, is
calculated as zero.3

But in fact, in our world, as opposed to Babel, it is quite easy to find

vindications of ourselves; our libraries can seem to contain nothing
else. Whatever our sore point, our specialty, our triumph, our failing
may be, other people have shared it and written about it. The lustful can
read Casanova’s memoirs, or Byron’s Don Juan, or Lawrence’s Lady
Chatterley’s Lover, or 2 Samuel in the Old Testament; those with a high
I.Q. can read Goethe’s Faust; the glutton can read the Falstaff scenes in
1 Henry IV; the angrily slothful can read Beckett’s Malone Dies.
Sometimes at the end the sinner is snatched down to Hell, but it is
usually a play-­Hell where the little devils’ pitchforks only add to the
piquancy: for the most part the rehearsal of the sin re-­creates its intrinsic
joy, rids it of opprobrium. Whatever I am is right that I be. For every
diet book, there is another book saying that it’s a fine thing to be fat.
Whether a literary work transforms us or makes us complacent or
seems to have no direct relevance to our state, it has a sensibility (or
pseudo-­sensibility) that co-­evolves with the reader’s own sensibility.
Insofar as we perceive it as art, every text, even a hermetic poem by
Mallarmé, is a Bildungsroman.

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The Literature of Origins

We like literature not only because it recounts who we are, but also
because it shows us how we got to be that way.

Mine eyes he clos’d, but op’n left the Cell

Of Fancie my internal sight, by which
Abstract as in a transe methought I saw,
Though sleeping, where I lay, and saw the shape
Still glorious before whom awake I stood;
Who stooping op’nd my left side, and took
From thence a Rib, with cordial spirits warme,
And Life-­blood streaming fresh; wide was the wound,
But suddenly with flesh fill’d up & heal’d:
The Rib he formd and fashond with his hands;
Under his forming hands a Creature grew,
Manlike, but different sex, so lovly faire,
That what seemd fair in all the World, seemd now
Mean, or in her summd up. [John Milton, Paradise Lost 8.460–73]

The boy enters the Oedipus phase; he begins to manipulate his

penis and simultaneously has phantasies of carrying out some
sort of activity with it in relation to his mother, till, owing to
the combined threat of castration and the sight of the absence
of a penis in females, he experiences the greatest trauma of his
life. [Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psycho-­Analysis]4

Milton’s account in Paradise Lost of the creation of the first woman and
Freud’s account of the first stirrings of sexuality in the boy are both
stories about manipulation and a wound. Much, perhaps most of what
we call literature consists of stories about origins—from the origin of
the human race to the origin of Nicole Richie ’s bulimia; and many

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origin stories share common features. The cosmos comes into being
from an intolerable discord that needs to resolve itself into a universe,
whether it is Empedocles’ account of the strife among the elements or
the physicist’s account of the Big Bang; the city originates in the
spilling of a brother’s innocent blood, whether Abel’s or Remus’s (as
W. H. Auden argues in “Memorial for the City”).
How something comes into being is a matter of perpetual fascina-
tion. One day when I was in fourth grade, after we recited the pledge of
allegiance, my teacher told us a story about how the leopard got its spots:

“Hi! Hi!” said the Ethiopian. “. . . You show up in this dark
place like a bar of soap in a coal-­scuttle.”
“Ho! Ho!” said the Leopard. “Would it surprise you very
much to know that you show up in this dark place like a
mustard-­plaster on a sack of coals?”
“Well, calling names won’t catch dinner,” said the
Ethiopian. “The long and the little of it is that we don’t match
our backgrounds. I’m going to take Baviaan’s [the baboon’s]
advice. He told me I ought to change: and as I’ve nothing to
change except my skin I’m going to change that.”
“What to?” said the Leopard, tremendously excited.
“To a nice working blackish-­brownish colour, with a little
purple in it, and touches of slaty-­blue. It will be the very thing
for hiding in hollows and behind trees.”
So he changed his skin then and there, and the Leopard
was more excited than ever: he had never seen a man change
his skin before.
“But what about me?” he said, when the Ethiopian had
worked his last little finger into his fine new black skin.
“You take Baviaan’s advice too. He told you to go into
spots.” . . .
“What’s the use of that?” said the Leopard.

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“Think of Giraffe,” said the Ethiopian. “Or if you prefer

stripes, think of Zebra. They find their spots and stripes give
them per-­feet satisfaction.”
“Umm,” said the Leopard. “I wouldn’t look like Zebra—
not for ever so.”
“Well, make up your mind,” said the Ethiopian, “because
I’d hate to go hunting without you, but I must if you insist on
looking like a sunflower against a tarred fence.”
“I’ll take spots, then,” said the Leopard; “but don’t
make ’em too vulgar-­big. I wouldn’t look like Giraffe—not
for ever so.”
“I’ll make ’em with the tips of my fingers,” said the
Ethiopian. “There’s plenty of black left on my skin still.
Stand over!”
Then the Ethiopian put his five fingers close together
(there was plenty of black left on his new skin still) and pressed
them all over the Leopard, and wherever the five fingers
touched they left five little black marks, all close together. You
can see them on any Leopard’s skin you like, Best Beloved.
Sometimes the fingers slipped and the marks got a little blurred;
but if you look closely at any Leopard now you will see that
there are always five spots—off five black finger-­tips.
“Now you are a beauty!” said the Ethiopian. ‘You can lie
out on the bare ground and look like a heap of pebbles. You
can lie out on the naked rocks and look like a piece of pudding-­
stone. You can lie out on a leafy branch and look like sunshine
sifting through the leaves; and you can lie right across the
centre of a path and look like nothing in particular. Think of
that and purr!”
“But if I’m all this,” said the Leopard, “why didn’t you go
spotty too?”
“Oh, plain black’s best,” said the Ethiopian. . . .

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So they went away and lived happily ever afterwards,

Best Beloved. That is all.
Oh, now and then you will hear grown-­ups say, “Can the
Ethiopian change his skin or the Leopard his spots?” I don’t
think even grown-­ups would keep on saying such a silly thing
if the Leopard and the Ethiopian hadn’t done it once—do
you? But they will never do it again, Best Beloved. They are
quite contented as they are.5

This fable is one of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories (1902), and more
self-­consciously jocular illustrations of the complacent motto Whatever
is, is right have rarely been found. Of course, the ticklish matter here
isn’t the account of how the leopard got its spots but the account of
how the Ethiopian got his black skin; I’m sure that it has been a great
many years since teachers in the Chicago public school system read this
story aloud, for reasons that you will understand without detailed
explanation. (But I have chosen these examples from Milton, Freud,
and Kipling because, though the texts all pertain to simplicity or inno-
cence, they are far from innocent: these striking fictions of gender and
race can be and have been used to inflict harm. Myths tend to have
sharp edges.) In order to find a term of comparison to Kipling’s little
tale, I consulted the Wikipedia article on human skin color:

Jablonski and Chaplin plotted the skin tone (W) of indige-

nous peoples who have stayed in the same geographical area
for the last 500 years versus the annual UV available for skin
exposure (AUV) for over 200 indigenous persons and found
that skin tone lightness W is related to the annual UV avail-
able for skin exposure AUV according to

W = 70 – AUV
10

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(Jablonski and Chaplin (2000), p. 67, formula coefficients

have been rounded to one-­figure accuracy) where the skin
tone lightness W is measured as the percentage of light
reflected from the upper inner arm at which location
on humans there should be minimal tanning of human
skin due to personal exposure to the sun; a lighter skinned
human would reflect more light and would have a higher W
number.
Jablonski and Chaplin proposed an explanation for the
observed variation of untanned human skin with annual UV
exposure. By Jablonski and Chaplin’s explanation, there are
two competing forces affecting human skin tone:
1. the melanin that produces the darker tones of human skin
serves as a light filter to protect against too much UV light
getting under the human skin where too much UV causes
sunburn and disrupts the synthesis of precursors necessary
to make human DNA; versus
2. humans need at least a minimum threshold of UV light to
get deep under human skin to produce vitamin D, which is
essential for building and maintaining the bones of the
human skeleton.
Jablonski and Chaplin note that when human indigenous
peoples have migrated, they have carried with them a suffi-
cient gene pool so that within a thousand years, the skin of
their descendants living today has turned dark or turned light
to adapt to fit the formula given above—with the notable
exception of dark-­skinned peoples moving north, such as to
populate the seacoast of Greenland, to live where they have a
year-­round supply of food rich in vitamin D, such as fish, so
that there was no necessity for their skin to lighten to let

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enough UV under their skin to synthesize the vitamin D that

humans need for healthy bones.
In considering the tone of human skin in the long span of
human evolution, Jablonski and Chaplin note that there is no
empirical evidence to suggest that the human ancestors six
million years ago had a skin tone different from the skin tone
of today’s chimpanzees—namely light-­skinned under black
hair. But as humans evolved to lose their body hair a parallel
evolution permitted human populations to turn their base skin
tone dark or light over a period of less than a thousand years
to adjust to the competing demands of 1) increasing eumelanin
to protect from UV that was too intense and 2) reducing
eumelanin so that enough UV would penetrate to synthesize
enough vitamin D. By this explanation, in the time that
humans lived only in Africa, humans had dark skin to the
extent that they lived for extended periods of time where the
sunlight is intense. As some humans migrated north, over
time they developed light skin.

It is noteworthy that Kipling and the (anonymous) author of the

Wikipedia entry agree on certain matters, such as the fact the light skin
tones precede dark ones—though the Wikipedia author explains the
darkening by appealing to evolutionary prevention of chromosomal
damage and Kipling explains the darkening by means of the theory of
camouflage. It is also interesting that the Wikipedia entry is in every
way an ill-­told tale: strenuously renouncing every grace of pacing and
phrasing in favor of a bland awkward judiciousness (“there was no
necessity”; “there is no empirical evidence to suggest”). In my college
chemistry class, the lab assistant firmly instructed us to use the passive
voice and avoid the pronoun I when writing lab reports; and science
often frames its discourse in aggressively anti-­literary form. Literature,

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it seems, deals in myths and flagrancies, metaphors difficult to distin-

guish from lies; science pinpoints the genes that control color variation
and quantifies the albedo of human skin with only a little bit of
rounding-­off. Virgil and Kipling alike find a Prime Originator, a single
person who wills the new thing into being: the first Roman, the first
black Ethiopian, the first spotted leopard; the scientist, on the other
hand, speaks of random statistical variations, some of which prosper.
This is not to say that a narrative constructed along Darwinian lines
lacks a hero: the successful mutant is the hero of every Darwinian tale.
The problem is that, if a Darwinian novel were to exist, it would have
to place its hero in the context of thousands of perfectly predictable
tales (the nonmutant phenotypes who led identical lives, reproduced,
and died) and hundreds of narrative abortions (the unsuccessful mutant
phenotypes who miscarried or died without reproducing) in order to
frame the hero’s faintly superior reproductive success.
It will be clear from Milton’s Eve and Kipling’s Ethiopian that
literature is not expected to deal in biological truth in its origin stories.
And yet I think that both literature and science are weakened by the
attempt to enforce a firm separation. Why do the heavenly bodies move
across the sky?

The Egyptian name for the dung-­beetle was hprr, “rising

from, come into being itself,” close to the word hpr, with the
meaning “to become, to change.” The word hprr later became
hpri, the divine name Khepri, given to the Creation god, who
represented the young rising sun.
The name Khepri was often included as one of the five
great names in the titulary of the king. Khepri was identified
with the sacred beetle, Kheper, in life style and in being self-­
created. Khepri is often shown as a man with a beetle head or
surmounted by a beetle or as a beetle. Kheper, the sacred beetle,

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was believed [to be] the reincarnation of Khepri, the sun-­god,

being reborn each morning as the young sun, newly emerged
out of the earth. Khepri, with the great sun-­disk before him,
would be energized in the other world each morning and roll
the sun-­disk onto the horizon at sunrise and across the sky, just
as the beetle rolled its dung ball over the horizon on the earth
and buried it in the sands. As the earthly symbol of an aspect
of the great life-­giving sun, Kheper was identified with sponta-
neous creation, regeneration, so closely associated with eternal
existence. [Elaine Altman Evans, “The Sacred Scarab”]6

So, if we may, we suppose that the matter of which the visible

world is composed was originally divided by God into parti-
cles which were approximately equal, and of a size which was
moderate, or intermediate when compared with those which
now make up the heavens and stars. We will also suppose that
the total amount of motion they possessed was equal to that
now found in the universe; and that their motions were of two
kinds, each of equal force. First, they moved individually and
separately about their own centers, so as to form a fluid body
such as we take the heavens to be; and secondly, they moved in
groups around certain other equidistant points corresponding
to the present centres of the fixed stars, and also around other
rather more numerous points equaling the number of the
planets. . . so as to make up as many different vortices as there
are now heavenly bodies in the universe. [René Descartes,
“Principles of Philosophy”]7

For the Egyptians, the sun was pushed from east to west by the mother
of all dung-­beetles; for Descartes, the planets swirl around in mad
eddies spinning in the ether soup (fig. 1). We appreciate that these
explanations were once the best science available, but we laugh at the

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Fig. 1. René Descartes, vortices, from Principia Philosophiae (1644).

Photo: Oxford Science Archive/HIP/Art Resource, NY.

naïveté of these attempts to analogize from the homely to the celestial.

As soon as a scientific theory is disproven it is immediately demot-
ed to literature. But all science proceeds by means of explanatory
metaphors—Einstein’s intuition of space as a sagging mattress, sinking
where stars and planets indent it, is no more and no less metaphorical
than the whirlpool-­ and whirligig-­ridden space of Descartes, full of
little hard bits growing smaller as their edges erode. (And Descartes’s
description of the trials and errors of light as it passes through the
vortices is not wholly different from the gravitational lenses of the
relativistic universe.) We tend to lose consciousness of the metaphori-
cality as long as we think that the science is correct. But it would

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be better if we could learn to think of scientific theory as a form of

literature, even if it has the inconvenience of being true. A few of the
world’s great books were written by scientists and are no less
compelling for being correct, or at least what was thought at the time of
their writing correct; for example, the biologist Jacques Monod’s
Chance and Necessity (1971) is one of the most beautiful and moving
texts ever written.
And yet, my old lab tutor had a point: truth is not a function of
charm. If I’m hiring an engineer to build a bridge, I care more about
the person’s expertise in tensor calculus than about the suavity of her or
his prose style. And insofar as literature is a search for origins, we are
in danger of outgrowing literature entirely: our present intellectual
climate is an Ice Age with respect to originary myth—nothing is more
universally derided. Monod speaks of the comfort of mythology: how
the divine hero and the inspired prophet provide a coherent account of
the sacred traditions of a social group and an explanation of origin
of the universe in which the human race has an important position in
creation’s scheme. Monod then turns to the austerities of science: the
scientist doesn’t relieve our anxiety but increases it by breaking the
animist compact between nature and ourselves and leaving us shivering
in a universe in which we mean nothing. Science devastates our
illusions so thoroughly, Monod says, that none of would pursue it for a
moment, were it not that it works so well.
A professor of symbology at Harvard might point out to the
French Nobel Laureate that the scientist’s proud objectivity itself has
its miraculous origins—for example, in the thinking of Monod’s
hero Democritus—and therefore can be mocked just as easily as reli-
gion. In the same year that Monod published Chance and Necessity,
Michel Foucault wrote an essay, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,”
which chided the scientific as well as the devout for their pretensions to
truthfulness:

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Why does Nietzsche challenge the pursuit of the origin . . .?

First, because it is an attempt to capture the exact essence of
things, their purest possibilities, and their carefully protected
identities; because this search assumes the existence of immo-
bile forms that precede the external world of accident and
succession. This search is directed to “that which was already
there,” the image of a primordial truth fully adequate to its
nature, and it necessitates the removal of every mask to ulti-
mately disclose an original identity. However, if the genealo-
gist refuses to extend his faith in metaphysics, if he listens to
history, he finds that there is “something altogether different”
behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret
that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated
in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms. Examining the
history of reason, he learns that it was born in an altogether
“reasonable” fashion—from chance; devotion to truth and
the precision of scientific methods arose from the passion of
scholars, their reciprocal hatred, their fanatical and unending
discussions, and their spirit of competition—the personal
conflicts that slowly forged the weapons of reason. . . .
History also teaches how to laugh at the solemnities of
the origin. The lofty origin is no more than “a metaphysical
extension which arises from the belief that things are most
precious and essential at the moment of birth” [Nietzsche,
The Wanderer §3]. We tend to think that this is the moment of
their greatest perfection, when they emerged dazzling from
the hands of a creator or in the shadowless light of a first
morning. The origin always precedes the Fall. It comes before
the body, before the world and time; it is associated with the
gods, and its story is always sung as a theogony. But historical
beginnings are lowly: not in the sense of modest or discreet
like the steps of a dove, but derisive and ironic, capable of

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undoing every infatuation. “We wished to awaken the feeling

of man’s sovereignty by showing his divine birth: this path is
now forbidden, since a monkey stands at the entrance”
[Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day §49].8

Myself, I wouldn’t be so hard on originary fables: let Virgil celebrate

Aeneas, let Kipling put his hand on the leopard. If we accept that
Nietzsche and Foucault are right in believing that the scientist and the
prophet are alike fools of dogma; if we accept Jean-­François Lyotard’s
assertion that the characteristic stance of our age is incredulity toward
metanarratives—that is, disbelief in stories that act as the ground for
cultural values—if we accept that there is nothing more rickety and
extravagant than a story about the origin of spider webs, or the hyacinth,
or Rome, or the universe; then the self-­conscious absurdity of originary
fictions becomes a secret acknowledgment of the constructedness of all
truth. The original sin: our need for lies about how things come into
being, lies that freely confess their status as lies.

The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning

The most liberating literature comes from the fiction section of the
library—a Department of English is basically a Department of Lies.
So are many other departments in the humanities, philosophy for
example. Borges once wrote of a strange country where philosophy
was considered a form of fantastic literature, but I suspect that most
of us, especially philosophers, always considered it exactly that: we
especially enjoy philosophy that challenges commonsense notions
of reality—“Plato thought nature but a spume that plays / Upon a
ghostly paradigm of things,” as Yeats put it. If literature has its tame
and taming aspects, it also has its subversive aspects: to assert is also to
call into question, and the more vigorous the assertion the more we

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wonder why the author needs to defend it so strongly. So one move-

ment in literature is to cultivate, transform, or affirm: to shape us as
members of a tribe. But there is a countermovement, in which litera-
ture provokes us to reject everything it alleges, everything it esteems.
In the domain of fiction we accept nothing at face value: a fiction is a
thought-­experiment, a playing with values in which we suspend belief
and disbelief alike.
It is remarkable how often we say yes when writers urge us to say
no, and vice versa. This is especially common in utopian and dystopian
fiction. If I describe my ideal city, the chances are excellent that
you won’t want to live there—maybe I wouldn’t enjoy living there
myself. Utopias tend to flatten variety: the progenitor of such fictions
is Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), which anticipates Kant’s categorical
imperative in that every piece of behavior, every detail of human life is
held to the following standard: it is virtuous only if it can be conceived
as a universal moral law. Houses are good houses only if one is just like
another; a dress is a good dress only if everybody wears it:

The houses be of fair and gorgeous building, and in the street

side they stand joined together in a long row through the
whole street without any partition or separation. The streets
be twenty feet broad. On the back side of the houses through
the whole length of the street, lie large gardens which be
closed in round about with the back part of the streets. Every
house hath two doors, one into the street, and a postern door
on the back side into the garden. These doors be made with
two leaves, never locked nor bolted, so easy to be opened, that
they will follow the least drawing of a finger, and shut again
by themselves. Every man that will, may go in, for there is
nothing within the houses that is private, or any man’s own.
And every tenth year they change their houses by lot. . . .

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For their garments, which throughout all the island be of

one fashion (saving that there is a difference between the
man’s garment and the woman’s, between the married and the
unmarried) and this one continueth for evermore unchanged,
seemly and comely to the eye, no let to the moving and
wielding of the body, also fit both for winter and summer: as
for these garments (I say) every family maketh their own.9

No one has secrets in Utopia, no one has guilty little habits or fetishes;
Jeremy Bentham’s scheme of a panoptical prison, where the inmates
are at every moment exposed to the scrutiny of the guards, has nothing
on Utopia, where everyone is guard and everyone is inmate. The
houses aren’t made of glass, but their doors swing open at the lightest
touch, and your neighbor is not only going to know your affairs but is
soon going to occupy your home.
The puritan character of Utopia expresses itself through extraor-
dinarily harsh rules concerning sexual behavior. The Utopians assume
that sex is so intensely pleasurable that if premarital relations were
permitted no one would bother to get married, to the detriment of a
well-­regulated state:

If either the man or the woman be proved to have bodily

offended before their marriage with another, he or she whether
it be is sharply punished. And both the offenders be forbidden
ever after in all their life to marry. . . . That offence is so sharply
punished, because they perceive, that unless they be diligently
kept from the liberty of this vice, few will join together in the
love of marriage, wherein all the life must be led with one, and
also all the griefs and displeasures that come therewith must
patiently be taken and borne. Furthermore in choosing wives
and husbands they observe earnestly and straitly a custom,

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which seemed to us very fond and foolish. For a sad and an

honest matron showeth the woman, be she maid or widow,
naked to the wooer. And likewise a sage and discreet man
exhibiteth the wooer naked to the woman. At this custom we
laughed and disallowed it as foolish. But they on the other part
do greatly wonder at the folly of all other nations, which in
buying a colt, whereas a little money is in hazard, be so chary
and circumspect, that though he be almost all bare, yet they
will not buy him, unless the saddle and all the harness be taken
off, lest under those coverings be hid some gall or sore.

Marriage is essentially grim, a long grief to be endured with patience;

but at least you get to see the horse before agreeing to own it, or to be
owned by it. The striptease sounds ironical or grotesque until we
realize that exposure is the key to Utopian society as More devises it; not
only do you have no right to privacy, but you also have a duty to publish
your whole being. In Utopia interchangeable residents bear identical
yokes and labor to pull the state toward—what? Being Utopia, it is
itself a goal, and therefore can have no purpose except perhaps to
display its perfection as a model for inferior states.
No one, then, actually wants to live in More ’s Utopia—or Plato’s
Republic, a place devoid of all poetry and all music except martial airs,
a gymnasium where cutouts of human beings are snipped into shape
through remorseless exercise. On the other hand, when I read such
books as Dante’s Inferno or George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), books that
describe places designed to repel, I sometimes say to myself, It doesn’t
seem as bad as all that. I might not like to be a damned soul enduring
Dante’s torments, but to be a minor devil might be exhilarating—
I could ride breathlessly on Geryon’s back and swoop over scenes
contrived to delight through a symmetry of pain. And even the damned
souls dwell in a state of unusual intensity of being. As for Orwell,

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the city of 1984 offers personal safety, a strong sense of community,

striking rituals for integrating private desires into the general will,
interesting and rewarding work, and inexpensive gin. Scott Fitzgerald
wrote in 1936 that “the test of a first-­rate intelligence is the ability to
hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the
ability to function,” and by this definition the slogans of 1984 make
geniuses of those who believe them:

War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.

Perhaps the attempt to limit the number of words in the residents’

vocabulary is ungood, but a strange elasticity of mind is a precondition
of life.
The book’s hero, Winston Smith, works for the Ministry of
Truth, an agency that revises all records of the past—photographs,
documents—in order to make the past conform with the vision of
the past expedient to the present political moment. I first read the novel
in high school, and I remember the elation that came over me at the
thought of the past as an infinitely revisable text—as if all unpleasant-
nesses could be edited into nonexistence. In George Bernard Shaw’s
Caesar and Cleopatra (1901), a panicking eunuch rushes in to tell Caesar
that the great library of Alexandria is on fire—“What is burning there
is the memory of mankind”; Caesar coolly replies, “A shameful mem-
ory. Let it burn.” But Orwell found a solution better than burning: to
regard all writing as an indeterminate shimmer of faint letters scarcely
visible against the whiteness, letter-­rêves, letter-­revenants, continually
unforming and reforming—writing that imitates the real operation of
human memory, vague and vagrant, with all harsh edges filed away by
rationalization, blurred by confabulation.

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We enjoy living in the world that Orwell anticipated with fear. I

am writing this on a computer, and until it leaves my hard drive I could
make the whole discussion of Orwell vanish into the cyber-­ether as if
it had never been and replace it with words that contradict everything
I’ve just said. And even after it leaves my hard drive, I could go back
into my correspondence file and unwrite a letter that I never should
have sent, replacing it with a less awkward and abrupt, more graceful
counterpart; I could even reshape the answer I received, in a way that
less appalls my vanity—mitigate an epithet, add a concessive clause.
You turd! can effortlessly become my word! in My Life: The Revised
Standard Edition. History today is written not only by the victors but
also by the vanquished, and even by the illiterate. But this is a better
representation of history than what Orwell wanted: a set of bound
immutable folios of the London Times, painstakingly corrected by a
scrupulous editor. I can understand truth more easily as a collection of
liquid documents rippling and wrinkling on the surface of time.
Winston toils at the Ministry of Truth; his illicit girlfriend Julia, on
the other hand, works in the Fiction Department. Near the beginning
of their relationship he notices that her arm is in a sling: “Probably
she had crushed her hand while swinging round one of the big kaleido-
scopes on which the plots of novels were ‘roughed in.’ It was a com-
mon accident in the Fiction Department” (part 2, chapter 1).10 This is a
smiling homage to the passage in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
(1727) describing the machine in the Academy of Lagado, a device for
cranking out books by the random generation of words:

He then led me to the Frame. . . . It was Twenty Foot square,

placed in the Middle of the Room. The Superficies was
composed of several Bits of Wood, about the Bigness of a
Dye, but some larger than others. They were all linked
together by slender Wires. These Bits of Wood were covered

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on every Square with Papers pasted on them; and on these

Papers were written all the Words of their Language in their
several Moods, Tenses, and Declensions, but without any
Order. [part 3, chapter 5]11

The limit of the unfixing of literature is the Library of Babel, gener-

ating by random procedures: the casting of dice, the turning of a
kaleidoscope, or the typing of an infinite number of monkeys. The
notion of a fixed canon of immortal masterpieces is gratifying; but
there is also an obscure sort of delight in the notion of savoring sheer
textual accidence, or of dismissing texts entirely.
The purpose of literature is partly to make a permanent record of
things that need recording; partly to help efface memory, even of
things that should be remembered. There is a marvelous moment in the
Aeneid: In Hell, the Cumaean Sibyl has provided Aeneas with a golden
branch that enables him to descend into the underworld, where he
meets his father, Anchises, by the shores of Lethe. Anchises shows
Aeneas a haze of souls, those who will be reborn as Aeneas’s children
and grandchildren and remote descendants:

     “The souls that throng the flood

Are those to whom, by fate, are other bodies ow’d:
In Lethe’s lake they long oblivion taste,
Of future life secure, forgetful of the past.
Long has my soul desir’d this time and place,
To set before your sight your glorious race,
That this presaging joy may fire your mind
To seek the shores by destiny design’d.”
.................................
“Survey,” pursued the sire, “this airy throng,
As, offer’d to thy view, they pass along.

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These are th’ Italian names, which fate will join

With ours, and graff upon the Trojan line.
Observe the youth who first appears in sight,
And holds the nearest station to the light,
Already seems to snuff the vital air,
And leans just forward, on a shining spear:
Silvius is he, thy last-­begotten race,
But first in order sent, to fill thy place.” [6.966–1034,
trans. Dryden]

The lineage eventually stretches as far as Virgil’s own imperial Rome.

But this thousand-­year-­long line of heroes comes into being only
through massive erasures of fate’s hard drive; in Hell, remembering
and forgetting are in a state of perfect equipoise. I take this as a parable
of the operation of literature itself: we forget to remember, we
remember to forget.
According to William Butler Yeats’s book of occult philosophy, A
Vision (1925), the souls of the dead have to purify themselves of their
past life by undergoing the Dreaming Back: “The Spirit is compelled to
live over and over again the events that had most moved it; there can be
nothing new, but the old events stand forth in a light that is dim or bright
according to the intensity of the passion that accompanied them. They
occur in the order of their intensity or luminosity, the more intense first,
and the painful are commonly the more intense, and repeat themselves
again and again.”12 The aim is exhaustion of self: after enough repetition,
the intensity diminishes to zero, leading to oblivion and rebirth. Yeats’s
work often describes dead souls caught in the Dreaming Back: in his play
Purgatory (1938) the Old Man—patricide, soon to be filicide—stares at a
gap in a wall and sees the ghosts of his parents reenacting their wedding
night: his drunken father climbs into bed with his lustful mother, although
the Old Man screams that she shouldn’t let him touch her. But he can’t

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prevent the sexual act that begot him: he can only watch in horror as it
repeats itself. All tragedy is reenactment of some primal scene, some
knot of passion that must be retied and untied over and over. But after we
have read or watched King Lear or Oedipus Rex fifty times, the rhythms
are so familiar that the denouement loses some of its earlier luster; if the
hair bristles a bit, it no longer stands straight up. Familiarity has its gifts:
the abyss is a little less frightening after we come to know it well, from
Sophocles’ plays, or from sitting at the edge of a bed in a hospital room
full of spiffy gadgets. And yet this regression to the mean is a cause for
regret, too. The unforgettable will also be forgotten.
Writers write in order to preserve experience, but also in order to
dismiss it. Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse (1927) was, by common
consent, an amazingly acute and vivid resurrection of her parents,
Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Duckworth Stephen—his rationalism,
his candor, his obtuseness, his stretch of mind; her compassion, her
myopia, her inaccessibility. But Woolf evidently wrote the book not as
an aide-­mémoire, but as an aide-­oubli:

Until I was in the forties . . . the presence of my mother

obsessed me. I could hear her voice, see her, imagine what she
would do or say as I went about my day’s doings. She was one
of the invisible presences who after all play so important a part
in every life. . . .
Then one day walking round Tavistock Square I made
up, as I sometimes make up my books, To the Lighthouse, in a
great, apparently involuntary, rush. One thing burst into
another. . . . I wrote the book very quickly; and when it was
written, I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer
hear her voice; I do not see her.
I suppose that I did for myself what psycho-­analysts do
for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply

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felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid

it to rest. But what is the meaning of “explained” it?13

The verb explain basically means flatten, and all the literary business of
explaining and defending and accusing and vindicating is, from one
point of view, an act of smoothing everything that juts out until there ’s
only an uninflected surface, about which nothing can be said. Why
does anyone write down anything?—in order not to have keep its
details in mind at all times: to have an external storage device, that is, a
book. We erect our libraries not far from dull Lethe ’s wharf.

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 CHAPTER TWO

3 What Is Painting? 2

I begin with two definitions of painting:

The Art of Painting, is the Art of Representing any Object by

Lines drawn upon a flat Superficies, which Lines are after-
wards covered with Colours, and those Colours applied with
a certain just distribution of Lights and Shades, with a regard
to the Rules of Symetry and Perspective; the whole producing
a Likeness or true Idæa of the Subject intended. [William
Aglionby, Painting in Three Dialogues, 1685]1

We should remember that a picture—before being a war

horse, a nude woman, a telling some other story—is essen-
tially a flat surface covered with colours arranged in a partic-
ular pattern [une surface plane recouverte de couleurs en un
certain ordre assemblées]. . . . Let us go to the Museum. . . . If it
is possible, through an effort of the will, to see “nature” in
these pictures, it is equally possible not to. [Maurice Denis,
“Définition du Néo-­traditionalisme,” 1890]2

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We note that, in the two centuries between these definitions, painting

has evolved by subtraction of rule: in the seventeenth century, a painter
has a lot of factors to take into consideration in the performance of his
or her art; in the nineteenth century, there seems to be much less that
has to be thought about. But in its way freedom is as stern a taskmaster
as the laws of representational truth, symmetry, and perspective.
Aglionby and Denis agree on one thing, flatness, but everything else is
turned around. For one, the natural object is both the origin and the
goal; for the other, any resemblance between the painting and a natural
object is a more or less happy accident—essentially the painting is
arranged pigment. For Aglionby, first there is line, then color; for
Denis, color is so important that line is scarcely worth mentioning—
and Denis’s contemporary Paul Gauguin states explicitly:

In the academies . . . colour is nothing but an accessory. “Sir,

you must draw properly before painting”—this said in a profes-
sorial manner; the great stupidities are always said that way.
Do you put on your shoes like your gloves? Can you
really make me believe that drawing does not derive from
colour and vice versa?3

Gauguin also insists on painting from memory so the actual appearance

of things will not distract the painter from the painting. For the seven-
teenth century, painting seems to be a set of procedures for tasteful
imitation; for the nineteenth, it seems to be a self-­enclosed aesthetic act,
unrelated to the world’s outsides. Nothing, we might think, could
reconcile these divergent definitions. But in fact the older painters were
less stolid, less thing-­ridden, than Aglionby might have us believe; and
the newer painters were more concerned with meaning beneath the
pictorial surface than Denis suggests. The goal of painting is not

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representation, nor is it the patterning of planes with color, though

both these modalities are important. The goal of painting is to say
something—at least from the point of view of language, which is
always a saying-­something—and in this chapter we will consider
painting as a form of speech.

The Speech of Space

When we think of the breakthroughs of Renaissance art, we may think
of the various toys that helped artists conceive Euclidian space, such as
the camera obscura, described here by Leonardo da Vinci: “An experi-
ment, showing how objects transmit their images or pictures, inter-
secting within the eye in the crystalline humour, is seen when by some
small round hole penetrate the images of illuminated objects into a
very dark chamber. Then, receive these images on a white paper placed
within this dark room and rather near to the hole and you will see all the
objects on the paper in their proper forms and colours, but much
smaller; and they will be upsidedown by reason of that very intersec-
tion.”4 Soon it was noted (by della Porta, for example) that if you could
not draw, you could still make a very creditable picture by tracing the
outline of such an image. This and similar devices, often provided with
lenses, have attracted the attention of artists ever since: Sir Joshua
Reynolds owned a portable camera obscura that could fold up to
resemble a book. And the contemporary painter David Hockney,
himself a great lover of optical gizmos, believes that Holbein, Ingres,
and many other painters used little helpers of this sort.
Another method for helping painters master the science of per-
spective was to paint on glass or on a mirror. Or you could study the
chief effect of perspective—the toeing-­in of parallel lines—by using
actual strings pulled taut between your eye and the object you were
painting (fig. 2). To draw a lute, you would restring it to play music for

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 What Is Painting?

Fig. 2. Albrecht Dürer, Unterweysung der Messung mit Zirckel und

Richtscheyt (1525).

the eye—the strings are the physical embodiments of rays of light. It

seems that by means of glass and string we can aspire to reproduce the
visual with fidelity.
And yet all this concern with perspective is more unnatural, even
seditious to nature, than it first appears. Perspective is less concerned
with objects than with space—it lavishes its resources on relations, not
on things. In some Renaissance paintings, the thing represented seems
arbitrary, chosen mostly for its usefulness for describing flamboyance
of space. The magnificent building in the center rear of Perugino’s
Christ Giving Peter the Keys to Heaven and Hell (fig. 3) is supposed to be
the Temple of Solomon, but it is conceived according to the model of
the baptisteries of Renaissance Italy; on either side are Roman trium-
phal arches, out of place in Christ’s Jerusalem. In fact there aren’t any

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Fig. 3. Perugino, Christ Giving Peter the Keys to Heaven and Hell (1482).

habitable buildings visible at all, only buildings symbolic of power and

glory. There is far too much empty space—it’s clear that Perugino was
little concerned with representing a city, and greatly concerned with
playing with the newly discovered science of perspective—your eyes
skid dizzily toward the vanishing point on the horizon, right behind the
door of the temple. The pavement seems preternaturally smooth, flat,
and open: in fact, some of the figures in the middle right seem to be
doing something like ice-­skating. Most cities in Renaissance art bear
some resemblance to the city of heaven, a theatrical artifice.
The representation of physical objects has always been a matter of
the greatest interest to painters, but it has rarely been understood as the
central purpose of painting. Painters in the West have often considered
the invisible more worthy of representation than the visible. Rousseau,
in his essay on the origin of language, posits that a language of gesture
precedes a language of speech. But the trouble with gesture is that you

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 What Is Painting?

Fig. 4. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Allegory of the Planets and the

Continents (1752).

can’t point at something that isn’t there. It’s easy to indicate a chicken
when it’s scratching in your front yard, but to indicate an absent chicken
you need some other strategy, a word that means chicken; indeed most
language acts are concerned with invisible things. Painting, then, is a
language insofar as it points to invisibilities, surrounds us with invisibili-
ties. A certain fringe of vertigo, like a halo instinct through the entire
picture, attends the Christ of Perugino, and later painters promoted

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giddiness almost to the exclusion of every other sensation. In Tiepolo’s

Allegory (fig. 4), the figures seem to exist in order to trace a funnel of sky.
It may seem strange to think of painting as an art devoted to wind,
space, and hovering sanctities; but in many ways the painters them-
selves understood their art as a limning of things they couldn’t see. By
the twentieth century, artists were speaking explicitly of their art as a
dialectic between the visible and the invisible. Here is an excerpt from
an interview with Richard Tuttle:

I was doing white paper octagonals on a wall at a museum in

Dallas. And the critic came along and made mock introduc-
tions, “Oh, this is Richard Tuttle. He’s interested in imperma-
nence in the arts.” And she said that to Betty Parsons, and
Betty just immediately snapped back, “What’s more perma-
nent than the invisible?” It fits in with the whole line that in
any art form there has to be an accounting of its opposite
condition. If you’re going to be a visual artist, then there has
to be something in the work that accounts for the possibility
of the invisible, the opposite of the visual experience. That’s
why it’s not like a table or a car or something.5

Behind every display of the visible, behind pigment and stone, there
lies something invisible, teasing, permanent, in some sense indestruc-
tible even though the work itself is always destructible: never quite
there in the artwork, never quite not there.
The prestige of the invisible has a history extending well before
the age of modernism. In 1649 there was published, posthumously, a
treatise called Arte de la pintura, by Francisco Pacheco, painter, poet, art
censor for the Inquisition, and father-­in-­law of Velázquez; he consid-
ered at some length the question of how to represent angels—not as
women, he insisted (to endow them with breasts would be “quite

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unworthy of their perfection”), but as male youths between the age of

ten and twenty or as children, even “new-­born babes . . . flying in a
decent and responsible manner . . . naked [or] dressed in tunics of silk
or variously colored cotton.” Pacheco thought it best to “depict gar-
ments and devices in strict accordance to the historical story”; so the
archangel Michael struggling against the devil should be “girt with
weapons and Roman armour,” not the armor of our own times. (He
does not seem to have questioned whether classical Roman armor was
appropriate for a being that had existed since the beginning of the
world.) More interesting than his stress on historical verisimilude is
Pacheco’s sense that angels should be painted with wings whether God
created them that way or not: “Ordinarily one should paint angels with
magnificent wings, diversely coloured in imitation of nature . . . not so
much because God has created them thus but rather to convey their
essentially ethereal character, the agility and speed with which they are
endowed, the manner in which they may swoop down from the heavens
quite unburdened with corporeal weight . . . moving amongst the
clouds because the heavens are indeed their proper abode and from
whence they may gently communicate to us that inaccessible light [luz
inaccesible] in which they rejoice.”6 What counts is not what an angel
really is—Pacheco is far from sure that the angels have iridescing
wings—but what can allude to superhuman speed, insubstantiality,
nimbleness. It is as if an angel should be shown as human figure so
thinned with turpentine that it is little more than a glide of ether—a
vestige of inaccessible light. But in a sense, all light is inaccessible to a
painter since a painting can only reflect, not shine—in the language of
the Renaissance, it may possess splendor, but never radiance. Some-
where above or before or behind the painting is the light it cannot emit.
Far from considering themselves bound to the heavy truth of
physical appearance, the older painters were fascinated by the airy, the
motile, the evanescent. Pacheco, in his instructions on how to paint the

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Immaculate Conception, noted that “although [the moon] is a solid

planet, I myself render it light and translucent.” For the spiritually
inclined artist, all that is solid melts into air. There is a much-­quoted
dictum of Michelangelo’s, reported by Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo in
Trattato dell’arte di pintura, scultura, ed architettura (1584); I give it here
as appears in a treatise by William Hogarth, on whom Michelangelo’s
idea made a lasting impression:

Lomazzo who wrote about the painting at that time [the

Renaissance] hath this remarkable passage: “. . . It is reported
then that Michael Angelo upon a time gave this observation to
the Painter Marcus de Sciena his scholler; that he should alwaies
make a figure Pyramidall, Serpentlike, and multiplied by one two
and three. In which precept (in mine opinion) the whole
mysterie of the arte consisteth. For the greatest grace and life
that a picture can have, is, that it expresse Motion: which the
Painters call the spirite [furia] of a picture: Nowe there is no
forme so fitte to expresse this motion, as that of the flame of
fire, which according to Aristotle and the other Philosophers,
is an elemente most active of all others: because the forme of
the flame thereof is most apt for motion: for it hath a Conus or
sharpe pointe wherewith it seemeth to divide the aire, that so
it may ascende to his proper sphere. So that a picture having
this forme will bee most beautiful.”7

Painting seems in many ways an earthbound sort of art, a smearing on

a wall of various kinds of mud; but for Michelangelo (via Lomazzo),
the only thing worth painting is fire: even a collection of human bodies,
such as the Holy Family, is nothing but a modality of flame. The very
word pyramid has sometimes been thought to be related to the
Greek word pyr, “fire,” on the theory that a pyramid looks like a stone
model of rays of light emanating from the sun. It is as if a painting

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 What Is Painting?

were always trying to supersede its own materiality, even its own
visibleness—trying to “ascende to his proper sphere” in a divine realm
of formal essences. By means of painting, the crystalline shells at the
limit of Ptolemy’s universe are made to speak.
Nothing could be farther from Aglionby’s definition. Painting is
not the art of static representation of physical objects, but the art of the
arrow shot straight up, beyond the pull of the earth. The whole passage
from Lomazzo anticipates Wassily Kandinsky’s 1911 defense of a purely
abstract art: “The life of the spirit may be fairly represented in diagram
as a large acute-­angled triangle divided horizontally into unequal parts
with the narrowest segment uppermost. . . . The whole triangle is mov-
ing slowly, almost invisibly forwards and upwards. Where the apex was
today the second segment is tomorrow.”8 The heavy world of matter
graduates continuously upward, into the nonmaterial, the nonrepresen-
tational. Kandinsky thought that Paul Cézanne was fond of triangular
composition for mystical reasons, since Cézanne was working toward
sheer abstraction; he reproduced Cézanne’s Large Bathers as an example
(fig. 5). Not only are the tree trunks and branches and the women’s bod-
ies inclining toward some point of convergence above the frame of the
painting, but the women are striding forward or hunching themselves
into intricately subdivided triangles; the squatter on the far left has so
abandoned herself to triangularity that her face has degenerated into a
smear. They yearn for the geometrical.
Kandinsky contrasts Cézanne’s triangular composition with a
Holy Family by Raphael, heavy and academic (he says), lifeless.
Raphael-­bashing was common in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries among those of advanced taste. The poet Ezra Pound once
laughed at Raphael for the ponderousness of his figures: he sardoni-
cally quoted a German scholar’s comment that through Raphael the
Madonna ideal has become flesh, and added, “The metamorphosis into
carnal tissue becomes frequent and general somewhere about 1527.

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 Individual Media

Fig. 5. Paul Cézanne, Large Bathers (1899–1906).

The people are corpus, corpuscular, but not in the strict sense ‘ani-
mate,’ it is no longer the body of air clothed in the body of fire; it no
longer radiates, light no longer moves from the eye, there is a great deal
of meat, shock absorbing, perhaps.”9 But I’m not sure that he ’s right
about that. Pound was influenced by the Pre-­Raphaelite Brotherhood
of the Victorian age, a group of painters who blamed Raphael for much
that had gone wrong with art. But I think that Raphael, like Michelan-
gelo, cared more for the fury of a painting than for its exactness of
representation. Some of Raphael’s figures lack all heaviness, seem
pregnant with upward motion, as in The Expulsion of Heliodorus from
the Temple (fig. 6).

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 What Is Painting?

Fig. 6.  Raphael, The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple

(1511–14).

According to the Apocrypha (2 Maccabees 3), the king of Syria

ordered Heliodorus to seize treasure from the Temple of Jerusalem;
but God sent a gold-­bridled horse to trample him and two youths to
flog him. In Raphael’s painting, the two youths are wingless angels:
their feet don’t touch the ground. But the force of gravity seems weak
everywhere: the half-­rearing horse seems slow in its topple, caught,
like the cloaks of his rider and the first youth, in some great updraft; the
oddly twisted woman in the center left seems to be rising from a kneel
by uncorkscrewing herself; one man has even levitated onto a column
base. In this mural and others in the Stanze di Raffaello in the Vatican,
Raphael was fond of triangular compositions with crowds of figures on
the right and left, with not much happening in the center: the picture

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seems to want to move inward and upward, in the manner of the clos-
ing of an inverted fan or book.
In the Odyssey, Penelope weaves a tapestry by day and unweaves it
at night to delay the moment of reckoning when she must choose a new
husband, and in the Renaissance there was a certain acknowledgment
that painting and unpainting were intimately related. Andrea Mantegna
painted three pictures of Saint Sebastian: one of them is now in Vienna
(fig. 7). In the right corner there is an extinguished candle with a little
ribbon wrapped around the base; on that banderol is a message: Nihil
nisi divinum stabile est. Coetera fumus (Nothing but the divine is stable;
the rest is smoke). The martyr Sebastian is carnally vivid—you’re
keenly aware of the pain the arrows must cause. On the other hand (as
in many paintings on this theme), the blood is mysteriously withheld:
he bleeds a bit, decorously, but so little that he might be threaded in a
labyrinth of light. Mantegna seems to be demonstrating that Sebastian
has attained such a state of spiritual elevation that his body has a spec-
tral penetrability: perhaps your hand would slide through him as easily
as the arrows do.
In an earlier painting of Sebastian, in Venice, Mantegna provides
the fumus, the smoke, in visible form (fig. 8). If you look carefully at
the upper left corner, you see that one of the clouds is a horseman. This
cloud-­rider has excited much speculation—I see him as something like
the traveler of the gravestone inscription Abi viator (“Horseman, pass
by!” as Yeats puts it). The cloud-­rider, and Sebastian, and the whole
visible world are all smoke—hazily lazily forming and deforming and
reforming as a camel or a whale or Hamlet. Paint is a runny glue in
which colored dust is suspended: and stained liquid is a fine medium for
presenting a liquid world. Painting is about the modalities of nonexis-
tence of the images on the canvases, and of the physical universe
itself. This is not a pipe, this is not a world, but the stuff that dreams are
made on.

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 Fig. 7. Andrea
Mantegna, Saint Sebastian
(c. 1490).
Fig. 8. Andrea Mantegna, Saint Sebastian (c. 1470).
 What Is Painting?

Speaking of Vanity
Northern Europe treated the cetera fumus theme in a more direct manner.
The paintings of the Flemish and Dutch baroque, with their lavish
flowers, lustrous helmets, and luscious translucencies of fruit, can appear
as the apotheosis of capitalism—as if they were extremely expensive
advertisements crying out, Eat me! Buy me! But often the paintings are
trying to dismiss the very objects they make so attractive: if they provoke
envy, it is only to declare that envy is a sin. The basic form of the still
life—nature morte, as it’s called in French—is the vanitas, a genre that
proclaims the emptiness of all things. Edwaert Collier’s Vanitas with a
globe, musical scores, and instruments (1692), for example, shows (as in
the Mantegna painting) an extinguished candle, signaling the transience
of all human light; in front of the candle we see the worthless treasures
on which we set so much store. Collier included in his painting the motto
Life is short, art is long, but this may be ironical, since nothing is briefer
than the sound produced by the violin or the recorder, conspicuously
displayed. Near the globe an English-­language book is opened to a page
that reads, “Description of the WORLD,” but the globe is hollow—
literally and figuratively hollow.
In Goethe’s Faust (1808), Mephistopheles takes Faust to a
witch’s kitchen, where he sees monkeys playing with a great globe; a
he-­monkey explains:

This is the world:

It rises and falls,
Constantly rolls;
It clinks like glass—
And then it cracks!
It’s hollow inside.
It shines just now,

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 Individual Media

Fig. 9. David Bailly, Vanitas Still Life with Portrait (c 1650). Gift of Mr. and
Mrs. Louis V. Keeler, Class of 1911, by exchange. Photography courtesy of the
Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University.

And now all’s dull.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
You’ll have to die!
It’s all made of clay,
These are the shards.10

The vanitas paintings are full of hollow things—not only globes but
lutes and skulls as well, as in David Bailly’s Vanitas Still Life with
Portrait (fig. 9). At about the same time that Bailly painted this vanitas,
in which the skull seems like a larger bubble in the rising spew of soap
bubbles, Richard Crashaw, a Catholic Englishman living in Rome,
wrote a Latin poem called Bulla, in which a talking bubble describes its
little life: “I am the genius of the gust / and the sure flower of air.” As
Goethe would put it at the end of Faust, everything transitory is but a
simile.

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 What Is Painting?

Fig. 10.  David Bailly, Vanitas drawing (1624). The Hague, Koninklijke
Bibliothek, KB: 75 J 48.

Another common element of the vanitas genre is the tobacco pipe,

visible in Bailly’s picture. An earlier Bailly vanitas shows the smoke as
well as the pipe: it is all going up in smoke, tobacco and flesh and hour-
glass alike—even the scroll that says Who escapes? will itself not be
able to escape (fig. 10).
Nor can paintings and drawings stand: painters are careful to
include their own products and implements in the bonfire of the vani-
ties. The young man in Bailly’s painting holds a miniature portrait; I
think the feeling of this image is like that of a poem by Rainer Maria
Rilke in which the poet stares at a photograph of his father:

You quickly fading daguerreotype

In my slowly fading hands. [“Jugend-­Bildnis meines Vaters”]

Nothing is more useless than to pretend that a perishing copy of a

perishing object has great value. At about the same time that Bailly was
painting his picture and Crashaw was composing his poem, the artist

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Pietro Testa was writing a treatise in which he ridiculed the lower class
of painters, those who are “the dirty and ridiculous apes of nature”;11
and in a preparatory study to his etching The Triumph of Painting,
Testa drew an ape painting at an easel. The ape struggles to make
images that ape the visible world, but for Testa painting must have a
higher purpose than mere verisimilitude: it must have a moral mission,
it must carry us to Parnassus (the theme of this series of etchings), or
to heaven. Far more important to draw a right angel than a right bird.

Painted Origins
Like literature, painting is often concerned with origins: the creation of
the sun and moon; the creation of Adam; the origin of the Christian
faith (the nativity of Christ, the crucifixion, the resurrection).
Often the study of originary images is serious; on occasion it is
frivolous, as in Tintoretto’s Origin of the Milky Way (fig. 11). Galaxy
comes from the Greek word for milk, and in Tintoretto’s painting the
stars of the Milky Way shoot from Juno’s breast like sparks from a
Fourth of July sparkler. The no-­man’s-­land between the uncreated and
the created, the there and the non-­there—what Wallace Stevens calls
form gulping after formlessness—is a prime subject of Western art. A
painting is a conjuring of form from a blank surface; and subjects that
pertain to shapechanging, the coming into being of shapes, are espe-
cially pleasing to painters.
One of the most forward-­looking passages in the notebooks of
Leonardo da Vinci is this:

I cannot refrain from mentioning among these precepts a new

device for study which, although it may seem but trivial and
almost ludicrous, is nevertheless very useful in arousing the
mind to various inventions. And this is, when you look at a

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 What Is Painting?

Fig. 11. Jacopo Tintoretto, The Origin of the Milky Way (c. 1575).

wall spotted with stains, or with a mixture of different kinds

of stones, if you have to invent some scene, you may discover
a similarity with different kinds of landscapes, embellished
with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys and
hills in varied arrangement; or, again, you may see battles and
figures in action or strange faces and costumes, and an endless
variety of objects which you could reduce to complete and
well-­drawn forms. It happens with this confused appearance
of walls as it does with the sound of bells in whose jangle you
may find any name or word you can imagine.12

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In 1933 André Breton quoted this paragraph and recommended its

strategy as good advice for the apprentice surrealist: chaos seethes with
unbegotten, uncomprehended forms. The quick of visual imagination
lies here, in the construing of pregnant nothings; as Coleridge says, the
highest operation of imagination is a hovering between images, not a
settling onto a single image. The American composer John Cage, who
thought that blind chance was the best of all musicians, used Leonardo’s
method for writing music: “When I said recently in Darmstadt that one
could write music by observing the imperfections in the paper upon
which one was writing, a student who did not understand because he
was full of musical ideas asked, “Would one piece of paper be better
than another: one for instance that had more imperfections?”13 You can
write notes on the faint marks generated by the faults in the papermaking
process, and soon you will have composed some music. For Cage, acqui-
escence to the random was a way of saying yes to the universe as it is.
Leonardo, of course, did not go as far as Cage, as we see in a pas-
sage in his Treatise on Painting:

By throwing a sponge impregnated with various colours

against a wall, it leaves some spots upon it, which may appear
like a landscape. . . . a variety of compositions may be seen in
such spots, according to the disposition of mind with which
they are considered. . . . It may be compared to the sound of
bells, which may seem to say whatever we choose to imagine.
In the same manner also, these spots may furnish hints for
compositions, though they do not tell us how to finish any
particular part; and the imitators of them are but sorry
landscape-­painters.14

For a Renaissance painter, chance proposes, man disposes. But

museums are full of old paintings that seem to allude to some state

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 What Is Painting?

prior to composition, some unrealizedness, some intra-­ocular tease. If

a painting is puzzling enough, we label it Allegory and hang it in a back
room, in the hope that someone, sometime, can wrestle its constella-
tions into coherence; for the interpreter of a painting is also, in a sense,
staring at marks on a wall and trying to spiff them into meaning. But
interpretation, like the rest of human life, is vanity. Even the most
heavily overt allegory, or the plainest narrative, can sustain itself for
only a little while before it sinks back into unmeaning.
A painting pulls its images or patterns or textures out of the invis-
ible, and then lets go, allows them to recede into the invisibility that
they never entirely left in the first place. This is one way in which a
painting co-­evolves with its spectator: human knowledge proceeds out
of ignorance, and to ignorance it will return.

The Speech of Physical Objects

During the nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, a
number of painters rethought their whole art, challenged all the old
assumptions. To some extent they were as radical as they thought they
were; but in other ways they obeyed the old canons under the aspect of
changing definitions of the primary terms. It is no use to follow the
rules for Euclidean space if we begin to understand space in non-­
Euclidean ways. And if the great origins are understood materialisti-
cally, not religiously, the painter will conceive the highest themes of
visual art in a strikingly differently manner. Consider the origin of the
heavenly bodies as conceived by Michelangelo and compare it to the
origin of the world as conceived by Gustave Courbet (figs. 12, 13):
instead of a magnificent old man, circumscribing sun and moon into
being with his finger-­compass, we have an anonymous vulva on a
tousled sheet. The title of Courbet’s painting seems huge and pompous,
but it is not altogether ironic.

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 Individual Media

Fig. 12. Michelangelo, The Creation of the Sun and Moon, Sistine Chapel
(1508–12).

Fig. 13.  Gustave Courbet, The Origin of the World (1866).

Courbet and like-­minded painters became known as realists. Real-

ism is an old word in philosophy: it refers to the belief that abstractions
or universals have an existence independent of the physical world. (The
opposite view is called nominalism, the belief that abstractions or

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 What Is Painting?

universals are mere names.) But we rarely use realism in that sense;
instead we use it to mean an art that claims to derive value from its close
approximation to what we can see, hear, touch, smell, taste. To under-
stand why this sort of art would attract Courbet, we can point to the rise
of positivist and empiricist philosophy (giving more prestige to induc-
tions from the senses than to deductions from transcendental forms);
and to the peculiar economics of art in nineteenth-­century France.
The mood of Italian painters circa 1500 was one of extraordinary
excitement over new discoveries concerning the representation of
space. The mood of (some) French painters circa 1850 was a chafing
against regimented education (consisting largely of copying certifiable
masterpieces) and a regimented market, in which acceptance by the
governmental Salon meant everything. Imagine an America in which
the National Endowment for the Humanities, under the control of the
vice president’s wife, Lynne Cheney (I’m going back some years), had
sole responsibility for determining your success or failure as a painter:
if your painting was considered obedient to the rules of art and fur-
thered the ethical goals of the Republican Party, your work would be
exhibited and in all probability sold at a high price; if you were reject-
ed, you could stand on a street corner holding your picture and hope
that it would catch the fancy of a passerby.
Now the situation is France wasn’t quite as bad as this: for one
thing, the aesthetic taste of the government was not monolithic—
Courbet once found himself in the odd position of having sold a paint-
ing to the French government that was later rejected for exhibition at
the Salon; and during Édouard Manet’s time, in the 1860s, Napoleon III
himself sponsored a Salon des Refusés, a state-­mandated exception to
the state’s authority. But the situation was exasperating to painters with
an ounce of originality. If the French government had deliberately set
out to foster revolution, it couldn’t have done a better job—its heavy
hand bred a race of radical objectors.

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If you were a painter eager for success in postrevolutionary

France, how would you go about conforming to the canon of accepted
taste? You would try your hand at large-­scale historical paintings on
grand themes—the rape of the Sabine women, the oath of the Horatii,
the death of Sardanapalus—such were the themes of the most admired
paintings of the age. Sometimes these paintings obliquely flattered
France as the present seat of the republican, or at least anti-­tyrannical,
values of early Rome.
But if you were a rebel by temperament, how could you defend
yourself? First, you would point out that the curriculum for training
artists was essentially sterile: in the academy you learned about art
from copying other works of art, not from studying nature. Objections
to this secondhand method, in which you ate stuff that had already
been eaten, were common in the thinking of Courbet, Manet, and many
others. Second, you would point out that historical set pieces were nec-
essarily fantastic and thin since no one knew what the scenes actually
looked like: in order to give a rich sense of actuality, a painter should
paint his or her own time and own place. In your search for old masters
sympathetic to this artistic goal, you would look not to Raphael or to
Poussin but to painters with little desire to idealize or extenuate—
painters who showed indifferently the beautiful and the ugly, who did
not flinch from the warts and scars of things. Such painters might
include Rembrandt and Brueghel—and in fact the term realism in its
modern sense was coined in the nineteenth century to describe Dutch
genre painting.
In 1861 Gustave Courbet wrote one of the strongest statements of
revolutionary realism:

No era or time can be reproduced but by its own artists, by the

artists living at that particular time. The artists of any given
century are thus totally incapable of reproducing people or

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 What Is Painting?

things from a past or future century . . . all history painting

must, in its essence, be contemporary. . . . I also hold that
painting is a quite concrete art, and can consist of nothing but
the representation of real, tangible things. It is a physical
language, whose words are visible objects. No abstract, invis-
ible, intangible object can ever be material for a painting.15

A work of art speaks because the things it depicts are themselves words.
The academic position is just the opposite: a work of art speaks because
it depicts a noble or morally charged or generically impressive event,
such as the assassination of Julius Caesar; the meaning lies not in the
furniture but in the ethical narrative of which the painting is a snap-
shot. But Courbet thought that the physical world itself had meaning,
and to show it accurately was enough to make significant art.
And yet Courbet is not saying that the representation of physical
objects is an end in itself. The goal of a word is what it says, and if
physical objects constitute a language, then that language must be say-
ing something beyond the objects in themselves. Courbet specifically
excludes invisible objects from the domain of paintings; yet his paint-
ings are full of invisible objects lurking behind the sharply focused,
almost palpable visibilities. If objects speak, they pertain to something
missing from the visual field.
What are the objects saying? In the previous chapter, we saw
George Eliot’s manifesto of realism in the novel: the purpose of writing
fiction is to bind us in sympathetic comity—we are connected to one
another because we are connected to the thing we all share, the physical
world. The message of Courbet’s realism may be similar. In his paint-
ings, objects often shout in loud voices. His Stone-­breakers (fig. 14), for
example, scandalized the Salon of 1850—it seemed so low, so cloddish,
so unworthy—and yet Courbet was trying to argue that this prosaic and
commonplace action was to be celebrated. For Courbet, heavy manual

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 Individual Media

Fig. 14. Gustave Courbet, The Stone-­breakers (1849).

labor was especially attractive in that it showed the most intimate possi-
ble relation between humans and the visible and tangible world—the
men are faceless, nameless, stony as the stone they break. Indeed the
men seem to be attacking the rock in the way Courbet attacks the rocki-
ness of things: trying to penetrate it, trying to see what lies beneath it.
Pigment itself is often made of crushed mineral; Courbet’s brush has, in
the light of this painting, a certain hammerlike aspect. The long-­handled
hammers allude to the highfalutin’ implements of history painting, such
as the superb asterisk of swords in Jacques-­Louis David’s Oath of the
Horatii (fig. 15). But in Courbet’s painting the stone-­breakers aren’t pos-
turers swearing all for one and one for all, pledging to fulfill a heroic
destiny: indeed the stone-­breakers seem to have no particular regard for
one another. Still, the camaraderie of labor is implicit. In a strange way
the stale virtues of the academy are revalidated by Courbet’s way of
playing with them. In art, undercutting, challenging, ironizing only tend
to confirm the importance of the thing undercut, challenged, ironized.

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 What Is Painting?

Fig. 15. Jacques-­Louis David, The Oath of the Horatii (1784).

Courbet’s contemporaries saw a strong political aspect to Cour-

bet’s art. One of Courbet’s close friends was the social reformer
Pierre-­Joseph Proudhon, whose famous motto Property is theft became
the rallying cry of the anarchist movement. Proudhon thought that
Courbet was trying to reform society by means of his language of the
visible—as Proudhon wrote,

It is against this degrading theory of art for art’s sake that

Courbet, and with him, the whole of the school currently
termed realist, ardently and energetically protest. “No,” he
says—I voice Courbet’s thoughts as they appear in his works
rather than in his writings—“No, it is not true that the sole
end of art is pleasure, for pleasure is not an end. . . . The goal

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of art is to lead us to a better knowledge of ourselves, by the

revelation of all our thoughts, even the most secret. . . . It is
not in our power to be nourished by chimeras, to intoxicate
ourselves with illusion . . . but to deliver ourselves from
pernicious illusions by denouncing them.”16

Courbet, by displaying the truth about hard work, was creating a sort
of painted manifesto of economics—Proudhon tried to put into words
that language of physical objects that the painting itself speaks.
Proudhon considered Courbet the first painter to behave as a “fair-
ground strongman,” striking blows against his irresponsible colleagues
who ignored present conditions in order to paint fantastical scenes of
no consequence to anyone.
So the objects in Courbet’s paintings, though commonplace, are
emblems, in the way that the dove or the lily or Saint Catherine ’s wheel
or the moon under Mary’s feet was an emblem in the Renaissance.
Courbet uses different words, and is trying to utter different truths; but
the grammar is roughly the same. Courbet’s stones aren’t as transpar-
ent as some of the angels and moons in Renaissance art, but if you look
hard you can see right through them, into a doctrine about how to lead
a meaningful life.

The Speech of Light

Painters have always been in thrall to the philosophy of light; and as
notions about light changed, so the look of paintings changed. In old
times light and matter were inextricable—in fact, it seemed probable
that matter was a sort of coagulated or secondhand form of light. As a
Suffolk bishop put it in the early thirteenth century: “The first corpo-
real form which some call corporeity is in my opinion light. For light of
its very nature diffuses itself in every direction in such a way that a

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 What Is Painting?

point of light will produce instantaneously a sphere of light of any size

whatsoever, unless some opaque object stands in the way. Now the
extension of matter in three dimensions is a necessary concomitant of
corporeity, and this despite the fact that both corporeity and matter are
in themselves simple substances lacking all dimension. . . . light is not
a form subsequent to corporeity, but it is corporeity itself.”17 Physicists
now speak of the decoupling of light from matter, which took place
some three hundred thousand years after the Big Bang—and the
aboriginal union of photons and the particles that now constitute atoms
is not far from Bishop Grosseteste’s notion that anything that possesses
dimension is derived from the primal predimensional entity, pure light.
Long before Grosseteste, the ninth-­century Irish philosopher Scotus
Erigena had put it more simply: omnia quia sunt, sunt lumina—all
things that are, are light. Michelangelo’s sense that painting ought to
aspire to the condition of flame, Pacheco’s search for the occult light,
the inaccessible light in which the angels rejoice, are related to this
phototheology.
But by the nineteenth century, light had become somewhat more
prosaic, and in the work of the impressionists we see secular light, light
understood less as an emanation of God than as a wave of energy.
Indeed, the intellectual world was starting to lose interest in the
Newtonian universe—a collection of solid objects in empty space,
all trying to fall into one another—in favor of the universe as
envisaged by Michael Faraday, Hans Christian Ørsted, and James
Clerk Maxwell, a buzzing field of interacting forces. The nineteenth
century had a materialistic character, as Courbet understood, but also a
dematerializing aspect, as Courbet did not understand.
To understand how a realism of important objects differs from a
realism of light, it is useful to compare Courbet’s painting of the cliffs
at Étretat, Normandy, with Claude Monet’s (figs. 16, 17). Courbet’s
cliff has, in places, a sharp outline; but in fact nature has no

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Fig. 16. Gustave Courbet, The Cliffs at Étretat After the Storm (1869).

Fig. 17. Claude Monet, The Cliffs at Étretat (1886). Photo: Scala/Art
Resource, NY.
 What Is Painting?

outlines—nature never begins with a drawing and then colors it in. If

I look at my arm, I see that it is not surrounded by a thin black line; my
arm is there and then it leaves off. Monet’s cliff is less a finite sharp
shape than a vague looming—the sunlight is so intense that the cliff
fails, turns filmy, almost translucent. Courbet’s painting is about bulk,
heft, solidity; Monet’s is about air and light—about the ways in which
solid objects deliquesce into sense data. In Courbet there is a language
of physical objects; in Monet there is a language of light impinging on
retinal nerves. The process of decomposition has perhaps a verbal
equivalent in Walt Whitman’s “There was a Child Went Forth” (1855):

The family usages, the language, the company, the furniture,

the yearning and swelling heart,
Affection that will not be gainsay’d, the sense of what is real,
the thought if after all it should prove unreal,
The doubts of day-­time and the doubts of night-­time, the
curious whether and how,
Whether that which appears so is so, or is it all flashes and
specks?
Men and women crowding fast in the streets, if they are not
flashes and specks what are they?
The streets themselves and the facades of houses, and goods
in the windows,
Vehicles, teams, the heavy-­plank’d wharves, the huge crossing
at the ferries,
The village on the highland seen from afar at sunset, the river
between,
Shadows, aureola and mist, the light falling on roofs and
gables of white or brown two miles off,
The schooner near by sleepily dropping down the tide, the
little boat slack-­tow’d astern,

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The hurrying tumbling waves, quick-­broken crests, slapping,

The strata of color’d clouds, the long bar of maroon-­tint
away solitary by itself, the spread of purity it lies motion-
less in,
The horizon’s edge, the flying sea-­crow, the fragrance of salt
marsh and shore mud,
These became part of that child who went forth every day,
and who now goes, and will always go forth every
day.18

The more closely you look at the solid world, the less solid it becomes—
it comes to us in the form of raw sense-­data, flashes and specks. It is this
faithfulness to the perceptual process that makes impressionist painting
a sort of literal realism of the eye.
The rhetoric of impressionism is closely related to that of the
advanced philosophy and science of its day. Here is Auguste Renoir in
1885, proposing a Society of Irregularists, devoted to the thesis that
“nature abhors regularity”:

Observers have noted in fact that, despite the apparent laws

which preside over their formation, the works of nature from
the most important to the most insignificant are infinitely
varied, no matter what type or species they belong to. The two
eyes of even the most beautiful face are never exactly alike; no
nose is ever situated immediately above the middle of the
mouth; the segments of an orange, the leaves of a tree, the
petals of a flower, are never exactly identical. It would seem
that every type of beauty derives its charm from its diversity.19

And here is Nietzsche from twelve years earlier, in his then-­unpublished

essay on truth and falsehood in the extramoral sense:

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 What Is Painting?

Every concept originates through equating the unequal.

Certainly one leaf is never exactly like another, and so the
concept “leaf ” is formed through an arbitrary abandonment
of these individual differences, through forgetting the dispar-
ities, and it awakens the idea—as if there existed in nature, in
addition to leaves, the “leaf,” a sort of primal form [Urform]
after which all leaves were woven, marked, precisely measured,
colored, curled, painted, but by unskilled hands, so that no
exemplar turned out correctly and reliably as a faithful image
of the primal form.20

Not the willow, a cue to think pensive thoughts, but this willow, painted
not because it signals a mood but because nature stuck it here,
right where I’m painting; not the general but the particular; not
Plato’s transcendental forms but local percepts; not quidditas, “what-
ness,” but haecceitas, “thisness,” to use the scholastic terms that
the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins borrowed from Duns
Scotus. Traditional painting had addressed itself to the mind, had
done everything it could to facilitate the sense of recognition—this
boy has a slingshot, so he must be David. But impressionist painting
addressed itself to the eye, and did everything it could to facilitate the
sense of shock prior to recognition: Monet told an American painter
that he tried “to see the world as a pattern of nameless colour patches—
as it might [look] to a man born blind who has suddenly regained his
sight.”21
Most of the impressionists knew something about recent scientific
discourse on light. Camille Pissarro closely studied the contemporary
physics of Hermann Helmholtz and James Clerk Maxwell (who taught
that electromagnetic lines of force could be understood through anal-
ogy with the motion of liquids, and who created the color photograph
by understanding that the eye has three kinds of color receptors); but

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the great scientific hero of the impressionists was Eugène Chevreul, a

chemist who worked for the Gobelin tapestry factory by investigating
the optics of dye-­stuffs. He discovered that nearby colors influenced
one another—this had been known since Leonardo’s time, but Chevreul
gave precision to this idea by publishing a color wheel that showed each
color 180 degrees from its opposite. A spot of any pigment swims in a
little halo of its own complementary color—a drop of red discolors the
surrounding field with blue-­green. As Pissarro wrote, the task of the
painter was “to seek a modern synthesis of methods based on science,
that is, based on M. Chevreul’s theory of colour and on the experi-
ments of Maxwell. . . . To substitute optical mixture [juxtaposed dabs
of unmixed colors] for mixture of pigments.”22 A fine example can be
found in Pissarro’s Haymakers Resting (1891), where the sky-­blue of
the haymaker’s dress seeps into the peach flesh of her arm and neck,
and vice versa: it is a strategy for intensifying the sheen, the vibrancy
of color.
Pissarro was himself born poor, and had leftist sympathies for the
working class. But his Haymakers, unlike Courbet’s Stone-­breakers,
could never be seen as propaganda for socialism: we see a calm chatty
break from the not-­too-­strenuous heaping of something pleasant to
rest against. The subject matter of impressionist painting is rarely the
main point. Partly this is for a technical reason: if you want to devise a
new representational method, you don’t paint bizarre, unrecognizable
things but the most familiar stuff you can find. The weather in impres-
sionist paintings is usually not too violent; the scenery, with the excep-
tion of Étretat, not too dramatic; the narrative content low; the activities
mildly festive (horse racing, roller-­skating, boating); the emotional
content somewhat restrained—scenes of wild weeping or laughter are
rare, and bemusement and idle strolling common.
But in addition to this technical reason, there is another reason: the
physical object has little symbolic or emotional import when too

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particularized or too disintegrated; light is everything, waves and

waves of light, shaded, stained, trembling, or simply white. The high-
est compliment ever given to an impressionist painter was Paul
Cézanne’s remark about Monet, “Monet is only an eye, but my God
what an eye!”23 The impressionist painter aspires to be a holy fool, inca-
pable of conceptualizing leaf from nature’s endless array of individual
leaves. It is often said, and to some extent correctly, that impressionism
arose as a revolt against photography, an affirmation of an optical truth
beyond what a machine could show. But the impressionist painters—
the blind suddenly given sight, the nothing-­but-­an-­eye—seem to have
aspired to the camera’s sublime brainlessness.
The poet Stéphane Mallarmé felt that the blank page had a certain
prestige that was compromised by writing letters on it, and interest in
the all-­white canvas was present even in the days of the impressionists:
in 1882 Alphonse Allais (a member of a group of pranksters called Les
Incohérents) exhibited just such a picture, titled Anemic Girls Have
Their First Communion As It Snows (in a later chapter I shall look more
closely at blankness as an aesthetic ideal).24 This was a joke, but there
are some serious paintings that come close to this ideal, such as Berthe
Morisot’s Lady at Her Toilette (fig. 18). In Tennyson’s poem “The
Lady of Shalott” (1832) the heroine famishes from unreality: she sits in
a tower weaving a tapestry, unable to look at the outside world except
by means of a mirror trained on a window:

But in her web she still delights

To weave the mirror’s magic sights,
For often thro’ the silent nights
A funeral, with plumes and lights
    And music, went to Camelot:
Or when the moon was overhead,
Came two young lovers lately wed;

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Fig. 18. Berthe Morisot, Lady at Her Toilette (1875).

“I am half sick of shadows,” said

       The Lady of Shalott. [ll. 64–72]

Morisot’s lady is herself almost a prisoner of her mirror, since the

whole room, including her glass vase and her wallpaper, is made of
vitreous bluish-­white. But unlike Tennyson’s lady, she doesn’t seem
“half sick of shadows”: she looks content to be so poorly discriminated
from her background, herself a standing wave in a room of water. The
painting is a study of flow-­patterns, floe-­patterns, of the color white:
helical white means a dress, ramifying white means a rear wall, a white
smudge means a flower. Morisot (the sister-­in-­law of Manet) used
some of the highest keys of any of the painters in the impressionist
movement—a soprano of paint.

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 What Is Painting?

If impressionist painting is a kind of speech, what are its words?

Clearly the represented objects are not words for two reasons: first,
because the objects are often poorly constituted: nameless color patches
that the until-­recently-­blind person cannot yet map onto the field of the
real; second, because, if we can manage to discern physical objects with
any confidence, there seems to be little or no way to gather them into
the domain of the thinkable—if, as Renoir says, one leaf is utterly
unlike any other leaf, then the concept leaf and therefore the word leaf
vanish, blow away in the wind. And yet there are few impressionist
paintings for which you could not hazard a title if none were supplied.
The dabs or blotches of pigment are like words in difficult poetry
(I think of Mallarmé’s Autre éventail), so stunningly miscontextualized
that they call attention to their individual sensuous properties while
nevertheless allowing themselves to be partly subsumed as elements in
a representation. But neither painting nor music constitutes itself as a
language (that is, as a system for erecting a virtual world, a sort of
phantom anthill inside of which human beings can interact) by means
of words; in the following sections we’ll continue to look at various
pseudo-­words, such as the symbol, that have attained a certain prestige
because artists and spectators tend to feel most at home in languages
made up of words.

The Speech of Touch

The pure wild eye of the impressionists was not quite so pure or wild
as their rhetoric suggests. There is something cerebral and tricky about
the whole school: the painting becomes a kind of tease, in which the
spectator has to work to figure out how the dabs and dapples constitute
a visual field. If you stand at the wrong distance from the painting, you
won’t be able to read it; the painting specifies a point of view as surely
as Renaissance perspective does. The painting is a recipe for concocting

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an image in your mind: it compels you to attend by introducing friction

into the perceptual act. In this sense impressionism is exactly like
cubism, despite the fact that cubism seems to be its opposite, in that
cubism is uninterested in optical verities—no impressionist would ever
say what Picasso said: “I paint objects as I think them, not as I see
them.” Indeed, when cubism first appeared, it struck many as the anti-
dote to impressionism, or the hangover after impressionist intoxication:
at the Salon d’Automne of 1910, Roger Allard noted (of Albert
Gleizes), “I had the very definite impression of a sobering up after an
Impressionist debauch.”25
Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso developed cubism together in
the years after 1907; Picasso used to address Braque as “mon cher
Vilbure”—Wilbur to his Orville Wright, the first painters who had
learned how to fly.26 Braque understood himself as a sort of researcher
into the feel of space: “There is in nature a tactile space, I might
almost say a manual space. . . . This is the kind of space that fascinated
me so much, because that is what early Cubist painting was, a research
into space.”27 Instead of optical verities, cubism tended to concern
itself with tactile verities: in Braque’s Little Harbor in Normandy
(fig. 19), the sky is divided into checks exactly like the rocks on the
bottom—indeed one rock on the right is colored the same blue
as the sky. The whole painting crinkles and bulges, as if the canvas had
been crumpled and then smoothed out but still retained folds that stick
out a bit, folds that your hand could feel if you rubbed the surface.
Cubism is, so to speak, painting for the blind, painting in braille; it
appeals to the mind’s finger to generate its sense of depth. Indeed,
Picasso hoped that spectators would feel able “to cut up” the canvas
and put it back together again “according to the color indications” and
find themselves “confronted with a sculpture.”28 The painting has half-­
disintegrated into small facets, with implicit instructions on how to fold
them into a hollow three-­dimensional object—origami for the eye.

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 What Is Painting?

Fig. 19.  Georges Braque, Little Harbor in Normandy (1909). © 2013

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

These facets may be conceived as the words of a new language of

painting.
Picasso and Braque used this language to speak the physical world
and the world of ideas, both at the same time, remarkably enough; I
think that the power of Cubism lies partly in this integration of the
ideal and the real.
First, the ideal. Those who first felt the shock of cubist art consid-
ered it an overwhelmingly mathematical method: André Salmon gazed
at Les demoiselles d’Avignon (fig. 20) and saw not ghastly images of
naked women but mathematical formulas expounded by a professor:
“These are stark problems, white equations on a black-­board. This is
the first appearance of painting as algebra.”29 Juan Gris made an intent
study of Henri Poincaré and Albert Einstein; and an amateur mathema-
tician named Maurice Princet, who was friendly with the cubists, once
posed a question to Picasso and Braque: “You represent by means of a

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Fig. 20. Pablo Picasso, Les demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). © 2013 Estate of
Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

trapezoid a table, just as you see it, distorted by perspective, but what
would happen if you decided to express the universal table [la table
type]? You would have to straighten it up onto the picture plane, and
from the trapezoid return to a true rectangle. If that table is covered
with objects equally distorted by perspective, the same straightening up
process would have to take place with each of them. Thus the oval of a
glass would become a perfect circle.”30 A cubist painting, of a certain
sort, looks like a reduction of a Platonic form to an equation of lines.
The painters themselves pondered their art in exactly this way. Braque
remarked in 1908, concerning a drawing of three nude women (fig. 21),
“It was necessary to draw three figures to portray every physical aspect

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 What Is Painting?

Fig. 21.  Georges Braque, Three Nudes (1907). © 2013 Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

of a woman, just as a house must be drawn in plan, elevation, and

section. . . . I want to expose the Absolute, and not merely the factitious
woman.”31
This then is the femme type in three different extensions, and the
problem of early cubism was to find a way of integrating this house
plan of a woman into a volumetric whole without recourse to perspec-
tive—that is, without making the table into a trapezoid. In Large Nude
(1908), Braque contrived to combine the three figures into a single fig-
ure: the woman’s head is taken from a frontal view, while her body is

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taken from a sideways or rear view. The leftmost of the three earlier
nudes contributes the general pose, but the painted nude ’s left leg
seems to extend a gesture that the rightmost figure in the drawing
began, while the painted nude’s breast is crooked in her armpit in a
manner similar to the center figure of the drawing—the big nude is a
conflation of all three naked women. Behind her there is a blanket or
something, and this surround is one of Braque’s greatest feats of imag-
ining. The shading suggests that it is a stiff husk or cocoon that cradles
or envelops the woman: the top segments seem generated by the flexes
of her arms, and the right middle segment repeats the curve of her but-
tocks, making her appear to be caught in an environment that is leggy,
buttocky, and breasty in the same way she is. How can you represent a
cube, if you don’t use slanty perspective lines running off a square?—
Well, you can draw six squares in the form of a cross and supply direc-
tions for cutting and folding them into a cube (this is, I think, what
Princet was getting at by insisting on a purely rectangular table).
Braque has a similar recipe for the Absolute Woman: supply a painting
that looks like a set of instructions for rolling and pinching the canvas
into the set of crimped cylinders that constitute a woman. The space
around the woman, so feminized in Braque’s construction, helps the
eye imagine just how to perform this trick.
Les demoiselles d’Avignon is algebraic for a similar reason: the
fourth woman, the squatting one, is obviously seen from the rear, yet
her face is frontal, as if she’d mastered Linda Blair’s neck trick in the
film The Exorcist; furthermore, she crooks her right arm—though it’s
hard to be positive it’s her right arm and not her left—which makes her
seem to be facing front. Behind the third figure Picasso chops up pieces
of sky—I think you can even see a fragment of sun—in forms that
rhyme with the figure’s elbow joint, nose, and breast cone: again,
the air behind the figures repeats the instructions for cutting out
and folding the paper dolls, though Picasso’s figures are flatter, less

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volumetrically intense, than Braque’s. Picasso evidently thought of

titling the painting Le bordel philosophique, and there is a strong sense
that this is Plato’s bordello, not a brothel but the brothel, the brothel
translated into some sort of perfect arithmetic of sex.
Second, the real. No one looks at Les demoiselles d’Avignon and
thinks chaste Platonic thoughts: there is something clawing about the
picture, something of stark terror; as Francis Frascina has noted, the
faces of the women can be compared not only to African or Iberian
masks but to photographs of faces eaten away by syphilis. For a basi-
cally cerebral sort of paint play, cubism was saturated in magic from
the beginning: Picasso called Les demoiselles d’Avignon an “exorcism
picture,” explaining, “For me the masks were not simply sculptures,
they were magical objects. . . . They were weapons—to keep people
from being ruled by spirits, to help free themselves.”32 Perhaps my ref-
erence to Linda Blair wasn’t so farfetched: if this is indeed the first
cubist painting, the movement begins with demonic possession. The
painting is an immanence of fetishes—objects so overcharged, so real,
that they make the rest of the physical world grow faint by contrast.
The cubists were to develop many ways of increasing the onto-
logical intensity of painting, of hauling a painted image from a mere
semblance to something equal in dignity with a physical object. Picasso
was the first cubist to glue an actual object onto the canvas, in Still Life
with Chair-­Caning (1912). The object is a bit of cloth printed to simu-
late chair caning—in other words a real object that fakes another real
object, introduced onto a canvas in such a way that it’s hard to tell
whether it is real or itself a painted fake, leading to a sort of delirium
that abolishes the distinction between artificial and real, genuine and
hoax. But it was Braque who did the most with introducing a sort of
materialism into cubist painting. Sometimes he mixed sand or sawdust
or some other substance into his pigments, giving the painting’s texture
something of the physical world’s grit. (Braque was the son of a

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housepainter and knew many tricks, such as raking a painted surface

with a comb, common in the domain of the useful arts but little known
in the world of the fine arts.) The idea that painting could improve its
status from imitation to a kind of dignity of being-­in-­its-­own-­right
was strong in Braque: as Braque’s first important critic, Waldemar
Georges, put it, “Anxious almost to excess to render not the ephemeral
effect produced by colour, but its very essence, Braque introduced into
his paintings extrapictorial substances. He thus produces ingenious
compositions, in which the parts . . . don’t represent reality but embody
it and become confounded with it.”33
So—the piece of printed cloth becomes a word meaning itself-­
outside-­the-­context-­of-­the-­painting, and, in a larger field of significa-
tion, the very realness of reality. The real texture of the weave and the
fake texture of the caning and the real texture of the canvas behind
the cloth all point toward a version of the world of experience in which
the real and the artificial are equal and inextricable. Cubist paintings are
often confusing, confusing to the fingertips as well as the eye: we are
sometimes in the position of the blind men in the story who grope at
various body parts of an elephant, and feel a rope, a pillar, a fan, a tree
branch.
This hope of finding a more haptically intense modality of art was
not confined to cubism. In 1896 the art critic Bernard Berenson advo-
cated what he called the “tactile values” of painting: in addition to reti-
nal sensations, he found in paintings that he liked “actual bodily
sensations as of good or bad air, heat or cold, nervous visceral and
muscular comfort or discomfort.”34 Berenson was describing the
voodoo-­doll aspect of art, its way of abrading our skin or disturbing
our inner ear or making us shiver.
Poets too sought to create tactile values. In the heyday of cubism,
Ezra Pound wrote that poetry concerned objects—what John Locke
called the primary qualities of objects (density, hardness, weight), as

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opposed to such secondary qualities as color. In this letter Pound pon-

dered the impressionist prose of Ford Madox Ford: “[Ford’s] flaw is the
flaw of impressionism, impressionism, that is, carried out of its due
medium. Impressionism belongs in paint, it is of the eye. The cinemat-
ograph records, for instance, the ‘impression’ of any given action or
place, far more exactly than the finest writing, it transmits the impres-
sion to its ‘audience’ with less work on their part. A ball of gold and a
gilded ball give the same ‘impression’ to the painter. Poetry is in some
odd way concerned with the specific gravity of things, with their
nature.”35 The images in a poem are, then, heft-­words, denoting mass
and volume, not appearance. And a cubist’s cubes are volume-­words,
little chunks of universe out of which bigger chunks of universe can be
assembled, polytroped.

The Speech of Symbols

In painting, physical objects can speak, as in Courbet; light can speak,
as in Monet; touch can speak, as in Braque. But the oldest painting-­
speak lies in the domain of the symbolic. Like impressionism,
symbolism represents a loss of prestige in the physical object, which
had to thin into transparency so that it could become a strangely shaped
window into some meaning greater than itself. Yeats thought hard
about the relation between well-­known symbols and more recondite
ones:

William Blake has written, “Vision or imagination”—

meaning symbolism by these words—“is a representation of
what actually exists, really or unchangeably. Fable or Allegory
is formed by the daughters of Memory.” The German [painter
who painted Yeats’s portrait] insisted with many determined
gestures, that Symbolism said things which could not be said

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so perfectly in any other way, and needed but a right instinct

for its understanding; while Allegory said things which could
be said as well, or better, in another way, and needed a right
knowledge for its understanding. The one gave dumb things
voices, and bodiless things bodies; while the other read a
meaning—which had never lacked its voice or its body—into
something heard or seen, and loved less for the meaning than
for its own sake. The only symbols he cared for were the
shapes and motions of the body; ears hidden by the hair, to
make one think of a mind busy with inner voices; and a head
so bent that back and neck made the one curve, as in Blake ’s
Vision of Blood-­thirstiness, to call up an emotion of bodily
strength; and he would not put even a lily, or a rose, or a poppy
into a picture to express purity, or love, or sleep, because he
thought such emblems were allegorical, and had their meaning
by a traditional and not by a natural right. I said that the rose,
and the lily, and the poppy were so married, by their colour
and their odour, and their use, to love and purity and sleep, or
to other symbols of love and purity and sleep, and had been so
long a part of the imagination of the world, that a symbolist
might use them to help out his meaning without becoming an
allegorist. I think I quoted the lily in the hand of the angel in
Rossetti’s Annunciation, and the lily in the jar in his Childhood
of Mary Virgin, and thought they made the more important
symbols, the women’s bodies, and the angels’ bodies, and the
clear morning light, take that place, in the great procession of
Christian symbols, where they can alone have all their
meaning and all their beauty.36

Yeats, then, could look at a painting and see every detail, not just the
obvious symbols, as symbolic. (Yeats also could look at his own poetry
and see nothing but symbols, as he said in “Upon a Dying Lady”: “I

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have no speech but symbol, the pagan speech I made / Amid the

dreams of youth.”) The symbolic, then, is a mode of looking that the
spectator can apply to any painting. But some paintings can invite such
a gaze by special procedures, such as (1) flatness (you can reduce the
image to an outline of itself, to be filled in with such meanings as the
spectator can import); (2) archaism (you can paint a symbol by crib-
bing your design from the obviously symbolic images of the Middle
Ages or by using medieval stylistic devices associated with old
symbols); (3) tenuity (you can make an image that is so faintly consti-
tuted it is hardly there at all); and (4) absence (if you paint in a nonrep-
resentational fashion, you can untether meaning: the discrete areas of
the painting are no longer tethered to the physical world, no longer
constricted in range of meaning).
As an example of the first two methods, we may turn to Dante
Gabriel Rossetti; as examples of the second two, to Wassily
Kandinsky.
Rossetti was one of the founders of the Pre-­Raphaelite Brother-
hood, a group that tried to revive the old medieval dictionary of
emblems. In Dantis Amor (fig. 22), Rossetti tried to be even more medi-
eval than the medievals themselves, by eliminating all that is not super-
significant: on one half of the depthless field we see banners of sunlight
flapping, and on the other half the stars throng in such profusion that
little of night’s darkness remains. King Sun and Queen Moon calmly
regard each other, while winged Love holds gigantic icons of Male and
Female—arrow and cup. Rossetti arrays these pictographs according
to a visual syntax: man and woman are strict opposites, one at the upper
left, the other at the lower right, with the whole heavens in between,
and yet by the power of the paraclete Love, the arrow can touch the
cup. The static tableau can be read as a parable about love ’s gravity:
love (as Dante put it) moves the sun and other stars. Rossetti meant the
images to iconicize, verbalize themselves, grow legible, even as they

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Fig. 22. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Dantis Amor (1860).

lose shading, lose depth, lose all superfluity, and become cards in a
divine tarot pack useful for prophecy.
Rossetti tried to spiritualize his paintings by reducing the field of
representation to the symbolic; Kandinsky tried to spiritualize his
paintings by attenuating or annihilating the field of representation. In
his 1911 treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky argued that
a nonrepresentational style was an advance in the art of painting in that
it liberated art from its dependence on the coarse and corrupt external
world and sensitized its medium to spiritual vibrations in the ether:

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 What Is Painting?

“The more abstract the form, the more clear and direct is its appeal. In
any composition the material side may be more or less omitted in pro-
portion as the forms used are more or less material, and for them sub-
stituted pure abstractions, or largely dematerialized objects. The more
an artist uses these abstracted forms, the deeper and more confidently
will he advance into the kingdom of the abstract.”37 Concerning the
Spiritual in Art is a brief both for an antirepresentational mode of paint-
ing, and for erasing the boundaries that separate the various media.
Behind both arguments there is a certain gnostic sense that the material
world is fallen, evil: the world apparent to our senses is a botched world
created by an ignorant demiurge, and only by attuning ourselves
to transcendental vibrations can we hope to attain salvation; as
Kandinsky’s friend the composer Arnold Schoenberg (also attracted to
this sort of mysticism) wrote in his Kol Nidre, “Myriads of sparks are
hidden in the world, but not all of us behold them.” To obey the rule of
representation is to compromise oneself with corruption. On the other
hand, not every sort of abstraction is good, either: Kandinsky had a
certain mild contempt for the sort of designs suitable for “neckties or
carpets”—the merely decorative. What he wanted was an abstraction
that had a certain creative power, a living abstraction.
One way—not the only way—that an abstraction could show its
essential strength was to hover on the brink of representation, as if it
were a depiction of the force that brought a physical form into being
instead of the physical form itself. In Improvisation “Klamm” (fig. 23),
you can make out two human beings, perhaps in Bavarian costume, and
a boat landing, and a waterfall, but they’re almost lost in the swirl of
colors—Kandinsky seems to be painting the geological energy that
tore apart the ravine. In other paintings the force seems as much
destructive as creative, as if the material world were simply falling
asunder. In Kandinsky’s Sketch for Deluge I (fig. 24), you can see
(possibly) a horseman blowing a horn in the far left center, perhaps

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Fig. 23. Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation “Klamm” (1914). akg-­images,

© 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

announcing the end of the world, as the mountains themselves seem to

be swept away in the deluge—a bit of prow in the far right center may
indicate Noah’s Ark. As Kandinsky wrote: “Technically, every work of
art comes into being in the same way as the cosmos—by means of
catastrophes, which ultimately create out of the cacophony of the vari-
ous instruments that symphony we call the music of the spheres. The
creation of the work of art is the creation of the world.”38 Every act of
destruction in the physical world seems to be an act of creation in the
spiritual world. I believe that all paintings, in a sense, gesture toward
their own origin and toward the origin of the universe; but in Kandin-
sky’s work, at the beginning of his maturity, the feeling is particularly
strong, the feeling of the undone that precedes, and follows, the done.

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 What Is Painting?

Fig. 24. Wassily Kandinsky, Sketch for Deluge I (1912). © 2013 Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

Kandinsky referred to another painting on the deluge theme as “a liv-

ing paean of praise, the hymn of that new creation that follows upon
the destruction of the world”: a painting is both music and language
pursued by other means.39
In Kandinsky’s first full abstraction—by some accounts the first
abstract painting in Western art, though there are other candidates—a
certain creative strength is felt (fig. 25). Like all Kandinsky’s early
abstractions this is a watercolor, and in the water paramecia and amoe-
bas and diatoms seem to swim—not the primitive organisms of the
physical world but the ones of the spirit. The blob, like the primal syl-
lable DA that the thunder says in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, becomes
a proto-­linguistic element of a speech tongued with fire.
As Kandinsky moved farther into the kingdom of the abstract, he
started to perceive vitality not in the biomorphs of the first abstract
watercolor but in the intrinsic motility of paint itself. In Concerning the
Spiritual in Art he draws a diagram in which the color blue is schema-
tized as a circle with curvy arrows inside, as if it were spinning, receding
into the picture plane, whereas the color yellow is schematized as a circle

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Fig. 25. Wassily Kandinsky, First Abstract Watercolor (1910). © 2013 Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: CNAC/MNAM/
Dist. RMN-­Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

with curvy arrows outside, whirling out toward the spectator’s eye. Pig-
ment doesn’t lie flat on the canvas; it burrows in, bulges out—it even
tends to determine form: “Keen colours are well suited by sharp forms
(e.g., a yellow triangle), and soft, deep colours by round forms (e.g., a
blue circle).” Furthermore, Kandinsky insists on the three-­dimensionality
of the picture plane: “The thinness or thickness of a line, the placing of
the form on the surface, the overlaying of one form on another may be
quoted as examples of artistic means that may be employed [to make a
three-­dimensional effect].”40 Every Kandinsky abstraction is a virtual
equivalent of an animated cartoon, in which lines swerve, swoop, tangle
themselves ecstatically—a painting is a kind of aerial ballet of geome-
try. This is how to paint energy instead of representational forms. Cub-
ist painters sometimes tried to enhance the realness of the image by a
sort of implied origami; Kandinsky tries to enhance the realness of his
nonimages by liberating them from the flat canvas.

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 What Is Painting?

As to the second large point of Kandinsky’s brief, the melting-­

away of the boundaries that separate one artistic medium from another,
this too is the result of an anti-­materialist perspective. If matter means
nothing, then it makes no difference whether you’re a painter or a
composer or a poet—what counts is the artistic impulse behind the
medium, not the material medium itself. An Aa and the color
green and the word love are all just vibrations: vibrations in air,
vibrations in ether. This is one reason for Kandinsky’s fondness for
Schoenberg: Kandinsky thought that Schoenberg’s abandonment
of tonality was not simply an analogy for his own abandonment of
representation but rather the same thing—one expressed in music, the
other in painting. And just as Schoenberg was not simply a musician,
but a painter himself, and Kandinsky was also a playwright, the artist
is not bounded by the medium of his first mastery. Kandinsky’s
play The Yellow Sound (1912) is a painting transmuted into a
theatrical piece: it is a play almost without dialogue, consisting of stage
directions:

The music is shrill and tempestuous, with oft-­repeated a and b

and b and a-­flat . . . the brilliant white light becomes progres-
sively grayer. On the left side of the hill a big yellow flower
suddenly becomes visible. It bears a distant resemblance to a
large, bent cucumber, and its color becomes more and more
intense. . . . Later, in complete silence, the flower begins to
sway very slowly from right to left.41

This is about as abstract as stage action can be, a vague flower-­cucumber

that suddenly appears and starts, for no reason, to move. In the intro-
duction to the play, Kandinsky states his theory of the equivalence of
the artistic media as clearly as possible:

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The means belonging to the different arts are externally quite

different. Sound, color, words!
In the last essentials, these means are wholly alike: the final
goal extinguishes the external dissimilarities and reveals the
inner identity.
This final goal (knowledge) is attained by the human soul
through finer vibrations of the same. These finer vibrations,
however, which are identical in their final goal, have in them-
selves different inner motions and are thereby distinguished
from one another. . . .
A certain complex of vibrations—the goal of a work
of art.42

To the general question Are the arts one or many? Kandinsky has a
clear answer: One. The painting-­word, the poem-­word, the music-­
word are all parts of speech in a single language.

The Quanta of Painting

The search for the right language—words of color, words of light—
led painters to science and mathematics as well as to the old book of
symbols. One eighteenth-­century painter who tried to find the elemen-
tary unit of his art, a sort of root word, was William Hogarth. I quoted
earlier Hogarth’s approval of the Renaissance notion that a painting
should be as motile as fire—a pyramid or a cone. Hogarth contem-
plated with great care the body of received wisdom concerning visual
grace: not just Michelangelo and Lomazzo but Charles-­Alphonse Du
Fresnoy, who declared that a “fine figure and its parts ought always to
have a serpent-­like and flaming form.” Hogarth, like Du Fresnoy, was
attracted to “large flowing, gliding outlines which are in waves,” but he
considered that it was not enough merely to state that painted lines

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 What Is Painting?

must be lambent or undulant, since “winding lines are as often the cause
of deformity as of grace.”43 He noted that the human body contains no
perfectly straight lines, so straightness must be incompatible with
beauty; the supreme grace must therefore lie in some sort of curved
line. Eventually he decided that a line that traces the contour of a wire
wrapped around a cone was the master key to composition—“the
precise serpentine line, or line of grace,” as he called it. Serpentine was
a vogue word in Hogarth’s time: the great landscape architect Lancelot
“Capability” Brown favored serpentine walks on gently undulating
land near serpentine lakes.
But Hogarth argued, in effect, that there was one and only one
right snake, the one that coiled around the cone, a line that by hinting
at a spiral has an irresistible charm, impetus. The line of grace appears
in both the right and the left drawings of figure 26 as number 4: by
contrast, numbers 1, 2, and 3 (he says) are timid, weak, and numbers 5,
6, and 7 are contorted and gross. Hogarth finds the line of grace not
only in correctly proportioned furniture but also in the thigh bone and
pelvis of the human skeleton—in every overt or occult way our bodies
seem to be trying to conform to this ideal of force and grace. As a spe-
cialist in scenes of moral corruption, Hogarth often had recourse to
lines of plod, but even in his satirical works the line of grace occasion-
ally appears in the back of a man’s coat, or in the legs and torso of a
slouching idler.
In this way, through the varying tensility of curves, Hogarth found
a language that could say much about ugliness and beauty—a language
that could accuse or applaud by purely visual means. But other painters
and theorists sought a more extensive and varied system of picture-­
words, and a better explanation of why these signs possessed meaning.
Humbert de Superville, in his remarkable Essay on Absolute Signs in Art
(1827–32), taught that images have power because they pertain to bio-
logical imperatives—there is an innate grammar of images, just as,

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Fig. 26. William Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty (1753), pl. 1 (detail). Private
Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library.

much later, Noam Chomsky hypothesized an innate grammar of spo-

ken language. White, said Superville, is an innocent peaceful color,
calming us in the way that pure snow or moonlight calms. Black implies
“silence and solitude, sadness, death, and oblivion”; red is “the hiero-
glyph of life and movement . . . the excess of luminous rays, just as the
colour black is its absorption and annihilation.”44 But this correlation of
color with emotional state is less original than Superville’s belief that
color and line are “the identical signs of one invariable language, and
the associations of the one automatically imply the associations of the
other”—every color corresponds to a linear pattern, every linear
pattern presupposes a certain color. Superville provides a diagram
to prove his point: red throws its arms into the air; black is stooped,
submissive; “white, an invariable, pure sign, like the horizontal line,
occupies the middle place between two extremes” (fig. 27). Even
such abstract figures as these are fraught with meaning, since we
read not just with our eyes but with our whole bodies—we transpose
ourselves kinesthetically into complex landscapes and simple scrawls
alike. As the poet-­painter William Blake put it, we become what we
behold.
In the 1860s Charles Blanc tried to codify Supervillean theory into
a more complete grammar of the pictorial. In his Grammar of the Arts
of Drawing, Blanc elaborates Superville’s little chevroned crosses into
faces: the red cross turns into a smiling face, sanguine, that is, bloody,

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 What Is Painting?

Fig. 27. Humbert de Superville, Linear equivalents to colors, from Essai sur les
signes inconditionnels dans l’art (Leiden: C. van der Hoek, 1827).

Fig. 28. Charles Blanc, Faces à la Superville, from Grammaire des arts du
dessin (Paris: Librairie-­Editeur, 1867).

according to the old theory of the four humors of the body; the black
cross turns into a sad face, atrabilious, full of black bile (fig. 28).45 A
drawing, then, is a voodoo doll—a means for subliminal control of our
bodies, our faces, our moods, even if it doesn’t depict faces or bodies.
Line and color suffice for speech.
To find a grammar for painting, you usually look either to physi-
ognomy or to Euclid—to the body or to the elementary forms of cog-
nition itself. Near the end of his life, in 1904, Paul Cézanne wrote a
letter in which he delivered a famous command to painters: “Treat

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nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything

brought into proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane
is directed towards a central point.” The art historian Theodore Reff
once said that he was disappointed with this dictum because it seemed
to be a backsliding into traditional Renaissance one-­point perspective
instead of an affirmation of the new kinds of volumetric wizardry that
Cézanne was helping to bring into being.46 But I think that Cézanne
was right (for his purposes) to insist that the Euclidean solids—the
simplicities from which every complex form can be built up—should
be shaded according to normal academic procedures.
Without perspective, a sphere is a circle and a cone is a triangle.
There is nothing wrong with constructing a painting out of circles and
triangles, but Cézanne had a special fascination with depth, as he often
said; and for giving an impression of depth spheres and cones are more
useful than their flat derivatives. In some of his paintings Cézanne
looked not to the cylinder, the sphere, or the cone, but to the cube. In
his Mountains in Provence (fig. 29), there is a continuum between the
tilted cubes in the foreground and the tilted squares in the distance, that
is, the fields on the side of the slope: it’s a semi-­digitized picture—we
almost feel that, if we look too closely at the long curve of the road or
the long curve of the hill, we might see that the smooth lines are rough-
ened by tiny pixels.
Just after Cézanne’s death, the cubists hammered down Cézanne ’s
great blocks of rock and roof and wall into smaller and smaller cubes—
volumetric elementals, units of universe. They still used the traditional
devices of shading and perspective in order to make sure that the indi-
vidual facets in the painting were seen as cubes and not flat rhomboids.
But they didn’t feel the need to fit these facets into a uniform spatial
scheme; they left the picture gaping, wrenched open, disarticulated into
scores of competing mini-­spaces. The painting is sinewless, undone,
prevented from collapse only by a sort of intellectual tension. As

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 What Is Painting?

Fig. 29. Paul Cézanne, Mountains in Provence (1886–90). © National Gallery,

London/Art Resource, NY.

Robert Delaunay exclaimed after seeing a cubist exhibition, “They

paint with cobwebs, these fellows!”47 In The Aficionado (fig. 30), what
kind of language is Picasso speaking? Since every diagonal is poten-
tially the edge of a paper fold sticking out at the spectator, there is a
single word uttered almost everywhere, cube; then there are little piece-
meal pictographs that identify the aficionado as a dashing fellow, a
sportsman, a southerner, a lover of bullfights: the mustache, the guitar,
and (a little below the canvas’s center) the picador’s dart; finally there
are actual words, appropriated from written language, such as Nimes
and le torero. Picture-­language is encroaching onto another lan-
guage’s territory, actual French—this is a phenomenon that occurs

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 Individual Media

Fig. 30. Pablo Picasso,

The Aficionado (1912).
© 2013 Estate of Pablo
Picasso/Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York.
Photo: Erich Lessing/Art
Resource, NY.

often, the refusal of an artistic medium to keep its speech confined to

the words that properly belong to it.
In 1923 the American writer Gertrude Stein wrote a pen-­portrait of
her friend Picasso called “If I Told Him”—here is a sample: “Would he
like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it. . . .
Shutters shut and open so do queens. Shutters shut and shutters and so
shutters shut and shutters and so and so shutters and so and so shutters
shut.”48 Proudhon tried to imagine what Courbet’s paintings would say
if they spoke French; if a Picasso painting could speak English it might

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 What Is Painting?

say something along the lines of “If I Told Him.” The shutters shutting
and opening seem to represent the constant background and foreground
noise of the cube-­facets; and Napoleon and queens and the other words
seem to represent those token signs interspersed among the cubes, such
as mustache and dart. Stein keeps stuttering on the words would and shut
just as Picasso keeps obsessively piling up his cubes, neutral and trivial
as individual elements, rhythmically tense in the aggregate.

Painting as Mathematics
We have now studied picture-­languages based on physical objects
(Courbet), based on emblems of invisible things (Pacheco and his
angels, Rossetti and his angelic Amor), based on hieroglyphs of
emotion (Hogarth, Superville), and based on units of volume (Cézanne,
Picasso). But there is another picture-­language I want to bring to your
attention: one based not on physical solids or geometrical solids or
symbolic semi-­solids but on figments of relation, often relation in the
absence of objects to be related.
In 1912 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the “caffeine of Europe,”
published his Technical Manifesto of Futurism, commanding the world
to stop using commas and periods in favor of “mathematical signs
(+ – × : =) to indicate movement and direction.” The great futurist
also had certain pictorial strategies for liberating language from the
tyranny of linear print, as in a typographical drawing of 1914, in which
the letters of the phrase turkish captive balloon are arranged in a cir-
cle, tied to earth by means of a vertical string of letters; but for the art
of painting what mattered was the new prestige of mathematical signs.
Plus signs, minus signs, times signs are simple operators: they tell
you what to do—how to transform two things into a third thing. The
simplicity of the procedure is reflected in the simplicity of the sign: all
five of Marinetti’s examples consist entirely of points and straight lines.

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When Superville drew crosses to show the basic elements of drawing

and painting, he appealed to psychophysiology: the spirits are lifted by
images of uplift. But when the painters of the early twentieth century
drew crosses, they were appealing (at times) to a dynamic of imper-
sonal cognition, of inhuman physical force.
The great master of the plus sign was, of course, Piet Mondrian,
whose mature paintings usually consist only of vertical and horizontal
lines. Mondrian thought that he had attained, or nearly attained, the
ultimate goal of art, as he explains to the educable philistine called “A.”
in his “Dialogue on the New Plastic” (1919):

A. Art will be much impoverished if the natural is eliminated.

B. How can its expression be impoverished if it conveys more
clearly what is important and essential to the work of art?
A. But the straight line can say so little.
B. The straight line tells the truth. . . . I see reality as a unity;
what is manifested in all its appearances is one and the same:
the immutable. We try to express this plastically as purely as
possible.
A. It seems reasonable to take the immutable as the basis: the
changeable provides nothing solid. But what do you call immu-
table?
B. The plastic expression of immutable relationship: the relation-
ship of two straight lines perpendicular to each other. . . .
A. So the New Plastic is the end of painting?
B. Insofar as there can be no purer plastic expression of equil-
ibrated relationships.49

The pre-­Socratic philosopher Parmenides held that reality was a

changeless sphere, and that all change—growth, decay, the whirling of
the planets—was illusory, the result of a defect in our sensory

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 What Is Painting?

apparatus. Mondrian might be called a neo-­Parmenidean. In his 1914

Pier and Ocean he stares out at the water and contemplates a sea of plus
signs—the image looks something like the designs on some manhole
covers, little crosshatches everywhere covering the whole surface. And
Mondrian’s pictures of trees from this period look rather similar,
though they retain a few of the diagonals that he would soon find weak
and hateful. As Mondrian grew older he experimented with still more
extreme reduction, until there wasn’t much left except the Big Plus—as
in his 1930 Composition with Yellow Patch, which consists almost entirely
of two bold black lines, one horizontal and one vertical, intersecting in
the middle of the white canvas, with a small yellow patch discreetly
manifest in the lower right quadrant.
For Mondrian, such paintings showed the inner truth of nature—
nature as it would look purged of all contingency, stripped to the abso-
lute. It is at once a schematic diagram of reality as God sees it—all
universal and no universe—and a statement of how things might be
related, positioned with respect to one another, if a thing or two ever
happened to appear in one of the white fields. It’s a Cartesian grid, an
x-­axis and a y-­axis erected in a world of ratios without visible
numbers.
It seems that Kandinsky had no great love for Mondrian, for he
thought that the “exclusive penchant for the horizontal-­vertical” arose
out of the “dead end” of modern life—we are so racked by preoccupa-
tion with external things that we seek to plunge ourselves into the
“inner silence” of simple things: black and white and horizontal and
vertical.50 And yet Kandinsky too sought to strip painting down
to its barest elements, and found himself at times not too far from
the position of Mondrian. In his book Point and Line to Plane (1926),
Kandinsky tried to derive all art—not just painting, but all art—from
the point and its various forms of mobilization. In writing, the point is
a full stop:

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Today I am going to the cinema.

Today I am going. To the cinema.
Today I. Am going to the cinema.

The goal of the sentence changes with the punctuation: where the
period is, there is the stress, the main event. In music, the point is the
note—Kandinsky even rewrites the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth
Symphony as a bold graphic of sets of three small points followed by
one big point.51 In dance, the point is the pointe, the tip of the dancer’s
foot, and the tips of the dancer’s spread fingers as well. In architecture,
the point is the limit of taper at the ends of (for example) the corners of
pagoda roofs. Roof and leg and symphonic development swell outward
from the point.
A straight line, then, is a point pushed steadily in one direction; a
zigzag line is a point pushed by two forces that “operate in sequence”;
a curve is a point pushed by two forces that “operate together” at the
same time. A plane, of course, is a pushed line. In the course of build-
ing up art from its rudiments, Kandinsky asks himself if there is a pri-
mal picture, a first image of pictorial expression: yes, he says, it is a
point at the center of a square—a perfect unison of point and plane.
Similarly, Kandinsky finds that “the archetypal image of linear expression
or linear construction” is a square crosshatched with a single horizontal
and a single vertical line—“a square divided into four squares, produc-
ing the most primitive form of division of a diagrammatic surface.”52
This is the form of maximum poise, maximum repose, balancing the
cold horizontal with the warm vertical. And so we are back to the large
plus sign, now conceived not as Mondrian conceives it, as the end of
painting, but as the origin of painting. It wasn’t enough for paintings to
gesture at their coming-­into-­being, as many of Kandinsky’s explicitly
do; a theory of painting, starting from the origin, from first elements,
had to be created as well.

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 What Is Painting?

At about the same time that Kandinsky was working on Point and
Line to Plane, Paul Klee, at the Bauhaus, was engaged in a startlingly
similar project, published in 1925 as Pedagogical Sketchbook. Klee was
struck by the dynamic aspects of lines, how they walk around and rico-
chet off points and swivel and twist around. (Oddly enough, the first
illustration in the book, depicting a walking line, shows a curved figure
much like Hogarth’s line of grace.) But Klee’s axiomatics of painting
differs from Kandinsky’s in one important way: Klee is a biometrician,
like Superville and Blanc, and tries to understand the elements of paint-
ing in terms of the human body. On one page he draws an oblique
angle and an acute angle, and outfits both figures with muscles and liga-
ments in order to illustrate the implied tension of the acute and relax-
ation of the oblique. And when he analyzes the simple cross—the
plus sign—he finds a meaning different from that of Mondrian or
Kandinsky precisely because he reads it corporeally, as if someone
were standing on the crossbar: “The tightrope-­walker is emphatically
concerned about his balance. He calculates the gravity on both ends.
He is the scale.” Far from being a diagram of repose, the cross is in
danger of tipping one way or another, unless it is somehow shored up.
In all his designs, Klee considers the role of gravity: an arch is the path
of a “bullet, fired at a steep angle”; a rising sequence of short horizon-
tals and verticals is a staircase.53 You read a painting according to the
muscular strain of inhabiting it. It is the voodoo doll once again:
you see something, and your body tenses in response to the painting’s
internal stresses. You look with your muscles.
Another form of upthrust resistant to gravity is the arrow, and
Klee liked arrows. To Lomazzo and Kandinsky, a triangle moving
upward represented the gradual ascent into a world of pure spirit; to
Klee, it is a schematic of a penis, as his painting Eros suggests (fig. 31).
Klee inherited this concern with arrows from the futurists.
The arrow, like the plus sign, denotes a relation: it means implies in

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 Individual Media

Fig. 31. Paul Klee, Eros (1923), akg-­images.

mathematics and symbolic logic. Indeed the arrow is a far more signifi-
cant entity in futurist painting than the signs that Marinetti recom-
mended as replacements for punctuation. In Luigi Russolo’s painting
of an automobile (fig. 32), scarcely any vestige of the automobile is
left: it has vanished into its own dynamism. The atmosphere seems to
consist of a series of vertical planes, each of which buckles, collapses
into an arrow form as the automobile passes through it. The car’s

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 What Is Painting?

Fig. 32. Luigi Russolo, Dynamism of an Automobile (1912–13).

Photo: Jean-­Claude Planchet, CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN-­Grand Palais/
Art Resource, NY.

sharpness promotes a general acuity of space itself. Here Kandinsky’s

spiritual triangle, or Michelangelo’s spiritual pyramid, is turned
90 degrees: the arrow does not lift us out of the physical world; it rep-
resents a transference of force within the physical world. But it is the
force that counts, not the object that imparted it or the object to which
it was imparted.
In a sense all Western painting is concerned with ways of under-
standing marks on a surface as expressions of force—since force is
invisible, this is another of the invisibilities that preoccupy painters: the
semantic force of symbols and emblems, the manual force of the hand
that pushes the brush or (in Jackson Pollock’s case) flings the paint,

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even the force of decay on the crumbling surface of Leonardo’s

Last Supper. The futurists only made such force a more explicit
subject. There is something at once sophisticated and primitive
about the arrow paintings of Klee, Russolo, and others: the arrow
resembles less a finite word than a preverbal utterance, a breath, a
whistling of air.

The Speech of Cinema

Paintings may imply force and motion, but when the futurists were
painting, they were competing with pictures that actually moved. The
cinema also has its languages, to some extent determined by a single
variable: the length of the take. A film shot with long takes, such as
Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), edited to seem like one continuous
take, or Alexander Sokurov’s preposterously virtuosic Russian Ark
(2002), which evidently is one continuous take, gives a strong impres-
sion of imitating the field of vision of a single human eyeball. The
movie develops meaning through our surrender (or failure to surrender)
to the camera’s chasing after or retreating from the objects of its curi-
osity: its boldness or timorousness defines a subject-­position, even
when we know nothing about the camera’s “character” other than its
way of moving through its environment. The first-­person shooter of
video games permits the player to take charge of the long take (demands
it, in fact): that the shooter can sometimes see his or her own arm
holding the pistol intensifies the kinesthetic identification of player and
avatar. But even in the cinema, the long take always creates an avatar
that we play with and that plays with us. Most contemporary directors
seem to dislike long takes except under unusual circumstances, and
they regularly chop up static scenes, not with any particular intent of
montage, but simply to deny the camera its own point of view, its own
personality.

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Cinema, of course, was originally silent, and had to create its lan-
guages through pictorial means, sometimes with a little help from an
accompanying pianist. And in a sense the ideal protagonist of a silent
movie is mute or nearly mute—someone whose expressive power lies
in gestural intensity, such as Quasimodo as played by Lon Chaney in
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) or the somnambulist killer Cesare
in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). After sound did come to movies,
in 1927, nonspeaking characters were often still prominent, as if a
certain sense persisted that cinema was, at the center of its being,
silent: the monster played by Boris Karloff in Frankenstein (1931), for
example, or the ape in King Kong (1933) or Harpo in any of the
Marx Brothers films. Most of these characters are figures of horror, as
if the cinematic sublime, its core astonishment, arises from the refusal
of the pure image to make articulate sound: the language of cinema
seems most fluently spoken by pictures, only pictures. One of the first
important movies, the Lumière brothers’ The Arrival of a Train at La
Ciotat Station (1896), caused panic in the audience according to a
reporter for Der Spiegel, for the train seemed about to run from the
screen into the theater: an overwhelm by purely visual means.
Maybe the director most sensitive to difference of cinema-­dialect
between silent and talking movies was Charlie Chaplin. His Modern
Times (1936) has a soundtrack, with the usual quantity of background
music. But the role of speech is odd: the factory boss can bark orders
through a kind of loudspeaker; a gramophone can utter a sales pitch;
but neither Chaplin himself nor the female lead, the gamine played by
Paulette Goddard, ever says a word—Chaplin does sing a song, but the
lyrics are gibberish. The dialogue between the lovers is handled by the
old silent-­movie device of intertitles, although often it’s easy to read
their lips: cinematic intimacy, it appears, requires silence, and speech is
a kind of harsh technological intrusion. In the film’s most famous scene
Chaplin is sucked into the gears of a huge machine, and only his

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slithery grace prevents him from being ground into hamburger. To

Chaplin, speech in movies feels invasive, abrasive, a threat to the dance
of light and shadow.
If sound is alien to the classical language of cinema, what is its
proper vocabulary? For Sergei Eisenstein, it is montage—a collage in
time, instead of space. Eisenstein was impressed by a famous experi-
ment in reaction shots: the director Lev Kuleshov prepared a series of
montages based on archival footage of a close-­up of the expressionless
face of the actor Ivan Mozhukhin: first Mozhukhin’s face was followed
by a bowl of soup on a table; then by an old woman’s corpse in a coffin;
then by a child playing with a teddy bear. The audience, it is said, was
impressed by Mozhukhin’s skill as an actor: how hungrily he stared at
the soup, how mournfully he regarded the corpse, how delicately he
smiled at the girl. Nonreactivity, then, is retrospectively interpreted as
reaction. Kuleshov was trying to make a point about emotional leakage
from one element of a montage into another: a montage makes an aes-
thetic whole that is not entirely predicable from its parts in isolation. If
a snippet of film is considered a word in the cinema-­language of the
short take, then it has little meaning in itself: exactly as in spoken lan-
guage, a cinema-­word acquires meaning from the context in which it
appears. One of Eisenstein’s most telling examples of what he called
“intellectual montage” occurs in his first full-­length movie, Strike
(1925): an attack on striking workers and the slaughter of a bull are
spliced together.
But in no visual medium is there an exact equivalent to a spoken
word, and Eisenstein himself (in his 1929 essay “Beyond the Shot”)
intelligently compared the two elements of a simple montage to
lexemes, not words: he noted that the pairing of one film bit with a
contrasting bit is like the pairing of two primitive “hieroglyphs” that
might combine to make a Chinese ideogram—a word in a language of
visual design but pronounceable in spoken language. Eisenstein’s way

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of signifying by sinicizing recalls the speculations of Ernest Fenollosa,

whose The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (1918, edit-
ed by Ezra Pound) describes, for example, how the Chinese character
míng (shine or bright) is made up of two radicals representing the sun
and the moon. Out of two juxtaposed symbols, each derived from a
pictogram, a meaning emerges. Eisenstein learned to speak a sort of
cinematic neo-­Chinese made up not of pictograms but of fluent images
of the world around us.
Before the era of digitalization, movies were filmed, and project-
ed, by winding a filmstrip from one reel onto another; so to think filmi-
cally was always to think in terms of spinning circles. Some of the
earliest movies were simple loops of action, just like the old optical toys
such as the zoetrope, which gave the spectator the visual impression of
(say) a horse endlessly jumping over a fence. Some silent movies found
ways of embodying the rotary motion of the medium into the film’s
theme: for example, Ballet mécanique (1923–24), by the painter Fernand
Léger and the cameraman Dudley Murphy, is a plotless exercise in
motion repetition, both human and mechanical. The film discovers
(or imposes) such uniform rhythms in the world of machines and the
world of human beings that it tends to flatten any distinction between
them. Attractive women and piston engines appear to be two species of
the same genus—or, as the futurist Marinetti put it, the heat of iron is
just as interesting as the laughter or tears of a woman. Both machines
and persons seem equally urbane, compelling, witty. The film’s first
episode shows a happy young woman on a swing; later episodes show
various clock pendula and swinging balls and an older woman climbing
up the same few stone steps over and over and locomotive-­like pistons
and other sorts of back and forth and in and out. The young woman on
the swing is perhaps the key episode, in that it contains both a human
being and a (very simple) machine, cohabiting amiably. In cinema-­
language, it’s easy to say the same thing over and over again.

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Painted Anthropology
Throughout this chapter we have been studying painting and other
visual arts in terms of what the artwork is saying. This approach works
well when there is a named artist whose intention is known or may be
adequately guessed, and when we know the cultural context in which
an artwork is found useless or useful, incomprehensible or possible to
interpret. It is idle to ask what a painting says if the painting is on the
wall of a cave in southern France, long predating the historical record.
But if we look at the art of painting from an anthropological perspec-
tive instead of a semantic perspective, it is possible to entertain some
thoughts about a cave dweller’s purpose in drawing fleet figures of wild
animals.
The anthropologist Claude Lévi-­Strauss considered that every
painting, every sculpture aspired to the condition of the miniature. In
The Savage Mind (1962) he argues that even the Last Judgment fresco in
the Sistine Chapel, even an over-­life-­size equestrian statue, is a minia-
ture because it represents a reduction of attribute: the figures in the
painting lack volume, the horse in the statue lacks color and smell and
the feel of pelt, and both are paralyzed in time, reduced to a single
instant. Lévi-­Strauss speculates that we make miniatures to gain power,
or the illusion of power, over their models: even the act of stopping
them in time and stripping them of some of their qualities is a kind of
assertion of mastery, and because miniatures are handmade, they rep-
resent an experiment in grasping in your fingers certain animate beings
that are not easy to grasp in real life.
In the eighteenth century, the orator and aesthetician Edmund
Burke devised a sort of realpolitik of art: the sublime (storm, tiger, the
infinite sea) is what has power over you; the beautiful (flower, scrim-
shaw, glass animal) is what you have power over. But for Lévi-­Strauss,
all visual representation is an attempt to master the world by cutting it

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down to size: whether I draw a boar or a mastodon or a stalk of wheat

or a fertile woman, I’m committing an act of voodoo, trying to seize
control by means of an image. In some sense, seizing control is the
default language of all representation since all representation is an
attempt to gain power over, or at least not to be the slave of, the thing
represented. This is true of spoken language as well as painting: if I
personify the weather as, say, Thor or Zeus, I may still be a victim of
floods and droughts, but I have created a locus of propitiation that I can
try to influence.
But the magic of visual representation has grown weaker over the
centuries: not only has the woolly rhinoceros died out, but also the
hope of being able to capture the animal by capturing its image. Art has
had to look to increasingly impalpable things in its search for a domain
in which it retains wisdom and power: angels, the theory of optics,
electrodynamics. Postmodernism in art is simply an acknowledgment
of magiclessness: an art at once lax and sensationalistic. To compare a
cave painting of an ox with Damien Hirst’s Mother and Child Divided
(1993) may show what I mean: Hirst provided a cow and a calf, each cut
in two down the backbone and arranged so that the spectator could
walk between the two half-­cows and half-­calves. The ancient ox image
is, plausibly, a thing of force and wonder; Hirst’s cow is not only
domesticated but immeasurably brought low. Inside the aurochs
there might be something like the energy that D. H. Lawrence once saw
in a horse: “Large, large seemed the bluish, incandescent flash of the
hoof-­iron, large as a halo of lightning round the knotted darkness
of the flanks. Like circles of lightning came the flash of hoofs from
out of the powerful flanks.”54 Inside Hirst’s cow we find nothing mar-
velous, nothing at all, just whatever is inside a cow. In the end some
contemporary artists try to evade both Aglionby’s and Denis’s defini-
tions of art by making something that is neither a representation nor a
colored plane.

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Ekphrasis
Of all problems in the field of comparative arts, ekphrasis, a literary
description of or commentary on a visual work of art, may be the most
thoroughly studied; but I think that there is more to be said. Since
every ekphrasis is also an intermedial translation—a pseudomor-
phosis—it might be thought better to postpone this discussion until
we turn to pseudomorphoses in the second part of this book. But
since almost every attempt to come to terms with a painting involves
translating that painting into language, it seems appropriate to
deal with ekphrasis in trying to answer the question What is painting?
One painting can be a critique of or commentary on another painting,
as in Francis Bacon’s mid-­twentieth-­century series of screaming
popes based on Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650), in which
Bacon amplifies the canniness, the suspiciousness, the inquisitorial
menace at which Velázquez hints into bald loud terror. But usually we
use words when trying to describe a particular painting, or painting in
general.
One form of such words is the ekphrastic poem. What does a
poet do in trying to translate an image into language? (I mean a real
painting or sculpture, not a fictitious one such as Achilles’ shield or
Keats’s Grecian urn.) There are many factors that the poet must consider,
but the chief is subject position: where does the poet stand in relation to
the image? A catalogue of stances might range from objective to
subjective.
1. Most objective is the poet as transcriber: The poet names some of
the items represented in the image, often with descriptors of color,
shape, and aspect. Since most paintings contain far more items than it
would be useful to name, the selection is itself a reshaping of the paint-
ing’s field of value into the new field of value of the poem. An example
can be found in W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” (1938), in

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Fig. 33. Pieter Brueghel the Elder (or copyist), Landscape with the Fall of
Icarus (c. 1560s).

which the poet, pondering Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
(fig. 33), makes much of the seemingly irrelevant details that occupy
most of the picture plane in order to moralize Brueghel as an artist
preoccupied with confining sacred or numinous matters to a narrow
space in human life:

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.55

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Fig. 34. Fra Filippo Lippi, The Coronation of the Virgin (1441–47).

2. The poet may also be a participant, in any of several modes.

a. The poet may identify with one of the visible characters. A spec-
tacular example of this can be found in Robert Browning’s “Fra Lippo
Lippi” (1855), in which the poet, speaking in the persona of the
fifteenth-­century painter, notes that he himself is one of the painted
figures in the charged heaven depicted in The Coronation of the Virgin
(fig. 34).

Mazed, motionless and moonstruck—I’m the man!

Back I shrink—what is this I see and hear?
I, caught up with my monk’s-­things by mistake,
My old serge gown and rope that goes all round,
I, in this presence, this pure company!
Where’s a hole, where’s a corner for escape?
Then steps a sweet angelic slip of a thing
Forward, puts out a soft palm—“Not so fast!”
—Addresses the celestial presence, “nay—

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He made you and devised you, after all,

Though he’s none of you! Could Saint John there draw—
His camel-­hair make up a painting-­brush?
We come to brother Lippo for all that,
Iste perfecit opus.” So, all smile—
I shuffle sideways with my blushing face
Under the cover of a hundred wings
Thrown like a spread of kirtles when you’re gay
And play hot cockles, all the doors being shut,
Till, wholly unexpected, in there pops
The hothead husband! [ll. 364–83]

Browning thought that Lippi was the gray-­headed kneeler in profile at

the lower right of the painting, though some posit that this was the
donor, not the painter. Browning/Lippi imagines that behind the calm
surfaces of the artwork, there is an invisible meta-­painting in which
angels’ wings become a huge skirt under which he diddles his adul-
terous lover—sexual vivacity is the occult theme of every one of
Lippi’s images, even the most pious. Elsewhere, Browning hinted that
hidden threads of erotic love were woven into much of his poetry.
b. Conversely, the poet’s sensibility might be transformed as the image
effects a kind of seizure. In the previous example the poet stepped into
the painting; here the painting assaults and partly conquers the poet.
Du musst dein Leben ändern, the archaic torso tells Rainier Maria
Rilke—You must change your life, you must make your life other. And
often in ekphrastic poems the image seems to take control of the poet’s
processes of thinking and feeling. In Percy Bysshe Shelley’s unfinished
“On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery”
(1819)—Leonardo did not in fact paint the anonymous picture (fig. 35)
in the Uffizi—Shelley petrifies as he contemplates the hideous face, and
his spirit, now made of stone, is gashed into a Gorgon’s shape:

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Fig. 35. Anonymous (Flemish), Medusa (c. 1600).

Yet it is less the horror than the grace

  Which turns the gazer’s spirit into stone;
Whereon the lineaments of that dead face
  Are graven, till the characters be grown
Into itself, and thought no more can trace;
  ’Tis the melodious hue of beauty thrown
Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain,
Which humanize and harmonize the strain.
And from its head as from one body grow,
  As [  ] grass out of a watery rock,
Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow
  And their long tangles in each other lock,
And with unending involutions shew
  Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock
The torture and the death within, and saw
The solid air with many a ragged jaw. [ll. 9–24]56

Even the “solid air” seems a form of stone—nothing is immune to

the transformative force of Medusa. The mind-­meld between the
painted image and the poet is so complete that the poet seems unable to
extricate himself from the weave of snakes—though maybe he lends a

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bit of his own humanity, melody, and grace to the Shelley-­Gorgon

complex, at once softening the horror and intensifying it.
Another, quite different, example of ekphrasis-­as-­seizure can be
found in William Carlos Williams’s “The Dance” (1944):

In Brueghel’s great picture, The Kermess,

the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-­
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling
about the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Brueghel’s great picture, The Kermess.57

This is a poem about turning: the dancers turn in the little space in front
of the musicians, and the painting itself seems to swivel on a central
vertical axis, since the foreground figures on the right are dispropor-
tionately large, and the foreground figures on the left disproportion-
ately small, as if the right side of the canvas were closer to our eye
(fig. 36). And this is a poem about contagion: the dancers strut and twirl
to the implied music of the bagpipes, the bugle, the fiddles (some of
these instruments Williams has seen fit to add to Brueghel’s little band);
the bellies catch the shape of the glass vessels, even catch the layer of
color applied over the glass (the “wash”—though technically this term
refers only to watercolors). But the central contagion is from the
Brueghel’s pictorial rhythm to the poet’s body: he sees the painting
kinesthetically, and the feet of the dancers are transposed into the

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Fig. 36.  Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Kermess (1568). Photo: Erich Lessing/
Art Resource, NY.

metrical feet of the poem, off-­kilter amphibrachs and dactyls and other
triplets, for Williams seems to hear the implied music as eccentric
waltzes. The rhymes come at the wrong places in these heavily
enjambed lines—a pattern of stumble is everywhere built into the
poem. Just as in “Danse Russe” (c. 1917), Williams leaves his sleeping
family to “dance naked, grotesquely / before my mirror,” the “happy
genius” of his household, so he here seems captured by the surge and
thrust and spin of the fairground dancers, though his own dancing is
immanent only in the rhythm of the words.
c. In the most subjective form of ekphrasis, the image itself speaks.
The limit of fusion between contemplator and contemplated image
occurs when the image is promoted into a subject in its own right,

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Fig. 37.  Michelangelo, Night (1526–31). Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

before which, or whom, the poet is effaced. An example is a poem that

Michelangelo wrote to be inscribed on his statue La notte (Night), in
the tomb of Lorenzo de’ Medici in the church of San Lorenzo in
Florence (fig. 37):

Grato m’è il sonno, e più l’esser di sasso.

Mentre che il danno e la vergogna dura,
Non veder, non sentir m’è gran ventura
Però non mi destar, deh’—parla basso!
[Glad to sleep, gladder to be of stone.
While the hurt lingers, and the shame as well,
Good luck is not to see and not to feel.
Oh do not wake me yet—speak low!]

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There are many other interpretive axes in ekphrasis beyond subject

position, such as content versus form: Is the poet trying to convey what the
form represents or the form itself? (In other words, am I going to talk
about the biblical account of the Last Supper or about an elongated trap-
ezoid?); and artwork versus artist: Is the poet trying to convey what is
objectively visible in the painting or the presumed state of mind and
intention of the painter? (Am I going to talk about what I see when I look
at the Last Supper or about the complex of private moods and cultural/
theological ideas that led Leonardo to paint what he painted?). But much
of the delight in criticizing ekphrastic poems lies in figuring out the
poet’s subject position, from cool poise to radical self-­surrender.
One of the most remarkable cases of ekphrasis in English poetry
can be found in Denise Riley’s “Lure 1963,” based on a painting, Lure,
by Gillian Ayres (fig. 38):

Navy near-­black cut in with lemon, fruity bright lime green.

I roam around around around around acidic yellows, globe
oranges burning, slashed cream, huge scarlet flowing
anemones, barbaric pink singing, radiant weeping When
will I be loved? Flood, drag to papery long brushes
of deep violet, that’s where it is, indigo, oh no, it’s in
his kiss. Lime brilliance. Obsessive song. Ink tongues.
Black cascades trail and spatter darkly orange pools
toward washed lakes, whose welling rose and milkberibboned
pillars melt and sag, I’m just a crimson
kid that you won’t date. Pear glow boys. Clean red.
Fluent grey green, pine, broad stinging blue rough
strips to make this floating space a burning place of
whitest shores, a wave out on the ocean could never
move that way, flower, swell, don’t ever make her blue.
Oh yes I’m the great pretender. Red lays a stripe of darkest

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Fig. 38. Gillian Ayres, Lure (1963). © Gillian Ayres. Courtesy Alan Cristea
Gallery. Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London.

green on dark. My need is such I pretend too much, I’m

wearing. And you’re not listening to a word I say.58

The poet’s subject position is extraordinarily complicated: sometimes

she seems to be describing the painting; sometimes she seems to be
circumambulating or penetrating the color lozenges, as if the painting
were a map of islands, “pools,” and “lakes,” and she were an ant
making its way across the implied topography; sometimes the painting
itself seems to address the reader directly, in the manner of Keats’s
Grecian urn:

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,

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“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—

And you’re not listening to a word I say.”

And yet none of these subject positions turns out to be quite tenable.
For one thing (as Thomas Butler has shown), the I-­statements are
quotations from the lyrics of pop songs: “The entrance of this first-­
person subject in the second line is caught up in the catchy refrain of
Dion’s ‘The Wanderer’ (1962): ‘I roam around around around around.’
The end of that sentence contorts into the ‘barbaric pink’ singing and
weeping ‘When will I be loved?’ which is the title of the Everly
Brothers’ 1960 hit song. Through the poem, lines of Betty Everett, The
Platters, and Bobby Vee all join in the movement of the colors.”59 The
jellybeany color scheme of Ayres’s painting conjures up proto-­
bubblegum words and tunes—the lyric I seems not to be Riley’s own
but that of some vast cultural blob, the whole AM radio spectrum circa
1963 personified, suitable for Ayres’s wavering, sluggishly motile,
garish-­pastel translucencies.
I read the poem first, and when I saw the painting I was consider-
ably surprised—so much so that I came to feel that Riley was deliber-
ately making a semi-­false ekphrasis (“I’m the great pretender . . . I
pretend too much”) by describing a half-­invented painting that bore
some similarity to Ayres’s Lure. Such words as acidic, slashed, radiant,
stinging, burning made me expect color riots beyond anything Ayres
tries to do. Ayres’s colors are striking, protuberant, but not highly satu-
rated; allusions to innocuous pop music seem more appropriate than
the scarred-­cornea adjectives cited above (though I’m far from sure
that Riley would agree with my characterization of the Everly
Brothers, the Platters, and the others as innocuous). Furthermore,
Riley’s descriptors sometimes seem wrong: the black-­blue areas in
Ayres’s painting do not appear to be true indigo, and Riley seems
to discover shapes (such as “milkberibboned pillars”) that aren’t

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in the painting—as if the landscape, with its floods and washes and
pools and lakes, needed to be decorated with a few fantastic bits of
architecture.
On the other hand, Riley does not precisely allege that there ’s
a field of indigo somewhere in the painting: she writes, “that’s
where it is, indigo, oh no, it’s in his kiss,” as if she were debating
whether to withdraw the indigo from the painting and plant it into
the kiss instead. There are a remarkable number of negatives in the
poem:

oh no, it’s in his kiss

I’m just a crimson kid that you won’t date
a wave out on the ocean could never move that way
don’t ever make her blue
And you’re not listening to a word I say

Maybe this poem is less an ekphrasis than a refusal of ekphrasis:

the painting, writhing in its impermeable pictorial space, keeps
saying no, no, no as it eludes the poet’s every attempt to haul it into
discursive space—the colors keep pasting themselves onto creatures
outside the canvas (“a crimson kid”; “don’t ever make her blue”).
Butler quotes a 1995 interview in which Romana Huk asked Riley
about her work’s relation to paintings by Ian McKeever and Gillian
Ayres:

Well, these are all painters of large, energetic, unbounded,

differently vigorous abstract work, which relies heavily on
brilliance of or density of colour, or the floating quality of
colour, as well as a roughness or visibility of brushwork. So
that you get a feeling of speed and heaviness and immediacy
just by being in the same room as those paintings. And is it

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possible to do it with poetry? My attempts are always going to

end in tears; black and white typography on the page is so
remorsefully different.60

The poet’s heavy, even desperate impasto self-­consciously fails to give

the quality of the thinly vivid paint on the canvas; the poet’s floatings-­off
into music quotations do a better job, I think, of giving a sense of the
buoyancy of the picture. Lure suggests seduction, and the poet, like
Odysseus, keeps her ears open to whatever siren songs the painting may
happen to sing. But Riley’s most effective ekphrasis may come from
kinesthesis: just as Williams finds clear verbal equivalents for Brueghel’s
drunken whirl, so Riley, roaming around around around around, traces
a sort of bodily elation of movement through prismatic spaces. Dante
conceived of the moon and the planets as frictionless blobs of light, and
Riley, for all her skitteriness of verbal texture, her weeping over the
monochrome aspect of print, seems to find her own Paradiso.

Narrating a Picture
How many dimensions does a painting have? I don’t know, but I know
that the answer is not two. Even in the spatial sense, an oil painting has
three dimensions: for even a painting with imperceptible brushstrokes
has faint undulations in its surface, regions of thicker and thinner
pigment. To generate an image on any physical surface requires either
adding matter or scraping it away, though the matter may be impal-
pable dust, like the stuff in toner cartridges.
According to string theory, the physical universe has ten or eleven
spatial dimensions, although the dimensions beyond the normal three
seem uncommodious, lacking much scope for play. Paintings, however,
have dimensions that are cheerfully unconstricted, open for experi-
ment. In order to study these dimensions, we narrate paintings: in the

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translation from the pictorial to the verbal, a painting’s field of specifi-

cations, its set of orthogonals, becomes lucid and pertinent. It may
even be true that the act of narrating a painting creates its extraspatial
dimensions: if the Forbidden Experiment were performed, and a group
of children were raised without hearing language, would they be
unusually reliant on pictures, or unusually indifferent to them?
Every axis of interpretation can be conceived of as a dimension: a
painting may arouse emotions or quiet them; it may constitute itself as
a representation of the outer world or it may decline to do so; it may
invite worship of the supernatural, or it may present itself as a material
object in a desecrated universe. But extra dimensions come into play
even in very simple descriptions, descriptions that seem prior to any
interpretive maneuver. Kandinsky, for example, argued that blue areas
seem to recede into the canvas, whereas yellow areas seem to bulge out;
if he’s right, then the simple comment “This part is blue” identifies an
inward-­burrowing movement in the painting, a virtual hole, a depres-
sion in the canvas that your finger could feel. To say anything about a
painting is to build around it a multi-­dimensional grid.
One can describe a painting according to strictly objective criteria:
in some sense a jpeg file is a narration of a painting in a language of
zeros and ones that allows the image’s full reconstruction, slightly
roughened by the coarseness of the pixel and the absence of infinite
gradients of color. It is also possible to use English to reconstruct a
painting, though English is such a poor medium for this kind of descrip-
tion that no one would think of trying to write a long letter to, say,
Lucian Freud, instructing him how to make an exact copy of a painting
that the artist himself had never seen. (When Lessing insisted that the
arts of space, such as painting, and the arts of time, such as writing,
were mutually exclusive, he relied on arguments along similar lines.)
And yet the notion of asking an artist to draw or paint the presumed
original image from a description of the image lends itself to

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experiment. An example: I might ask the artist to make an image of a

running woman, with her right femur perpendicular to her torso, and her
right lower leg perpendicular to her femur, while her left femur extends
straight from her torso; I might add that her arms are arranged so that
her arms and legs together form a sort of swastika—and her head is
shown full-­face with teeth bared and her wide tongue sticking out. This
is reasonably specific and objective, but I’ve already introduced a num-
ber of cultural dimensions that will cue the artist to think not of drawing
something suitable for advertising Nike sneakers but of making an icon
of terror: the expression on her face suggests ferocity and impudence;
the posture is effortful, grotesque; the word swastika, even when used
strictly as a shape-­descriptor for the positioning of limbs, has its own
strong connotations. What began as an attempt to map an image in
words, in order to allow its re-­creation as a picture, has turned into a map
of an affect—fear—of which the image is the proximate cause. The pic-
ture has become a means toward an end, rather than an end in itself; and
the description is less a description of the picture per se than of the inten-
tion (or presumed intention) of the original artist. If the other artist—
the one trying to replicate the image on the basis of the description—were
to decorate the running woman with a bonnet of snakes, it would be cor-
rect even though the verbal description made no mention of such things,
and not only because the old familiar image of Medusa lies behind this
whole example. It is hard (and probably useless) to purge affective
dimensions from descriptions of images: even an innocent description
(say, a term such as “crimped oval” to describe the face of a woman
painted by Modigliani) is full of odd kinesthetic sensations—in this case
responses to the edginess of Modigliani’s volupté.
Of course the more usual case is to proceed not from the descrip-
tion to the image but vice versa. The image-­maker seems somewhat
helpless, at the mercy of critics; but in fact he or she has means to push
the discourse of critics in congenial directions. The simplest one is the

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title. To assign a title is to assert power; even to refuse to assign a title

is to assert power. Such refusal springs (usually) from one of two cases:
either the image-­maker belongs to such a settled community of image
describers that a title is superfluous (as in the case of a medieval Euro-
pean artist who shows a dove with a halo); or the image-­maker belongs
to such an unsettled community of image describers that a title would
violate the transcendental autonomy of the artwork. In the first case the
artist asserts, “You know what this means without my telling you—I
have the power to make what you can recognize.” In the second case
the artist asserts, “I have titled my work ‘Untitled’ in order to sever
any connection to the world of conventional discourse concerning
images—describe it at your peril.” But I think that every artist wants
people to talk about his or her work—the untitling ploy exists only to
provide a certain stress of enigma.
Assigning a title is only the beginning of the artist’s control over
future description. To show how this works, I’ll attempt an analogy
with music. There are many musical compositions that begin in a state
of disguise: the key of the piece is troubled or falsified until some
maneuver finally establishes it. A famous example is Mozart’s so-­called
Dissonance Quartet in C major, K. 465 (1785), whose first movement
begins with an adagio in which ghostly chords slide through various
unstable configurations until the genial allegro takes up a clear C major.
In the domain of visual representation, every image—even the most
tranquil, poised, and static—creates an instability, an imbalance, a need
to fall into the intelligible. Sometimes this happens almost instanta-
neously, just as many musical compositions manifest their key boldly,
without preliminary fuss. But this fall into recognition does not exist in
the image itself. Mozart’s Dissonance Quartet contains (seems to con-
tain) its resolution within the music; but in the realm of painting and
sculpture, the resolution exists in the discourse that talks about it.
(Even the quartet, as a whole artwork, is not resolved until it is talked

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about—the satisfaction of the cadence exists only by grace of a long-­

standing cultural agreement, mediated by discourse.) Criticism is nec-
essary to all art, but the need is especially acute in the visual arts, where
an image is not even an image until someone construes it. The picture
demands a description in words, a response: as we have seen, the tech-
nical term for a description of a picture is ekphrasis, and I’m arguing
here the ekphrasis is part of the necessary rhythm of making images.
Representation is itself a generative instability. If I see a fusiform
white blob with bent triangles sticking out of the sides, it teeters in the
mind’s space for a fraction of a second until it comes to rest, and I say,
dove! The easier the recognition, the simpler and more direct the
cadence. But just as much of the art of tonal music is a matter of clev-
erly delaying the cadence, so much of the art of traditional painting is
making recognition problematic:

by enveloping objects in shadow or cloud, so that it’s hard to

discern what’s there;
by including distortion devices, such as convex mirrors, in the
visual field;
by putting recognizable objects in a context where they don’t fit;
by painting purely imaginary objects assembled out of bits and
pieces of familiar objects—bellows-­boys tootling away on the
flutes of their own noses, and so forth.

Some painters, such as Canaletto, have little interest in these obfus-

cating devices, but many painters like to complicate recognition. Every
difficulty imposed on recognition increases the tension level of the
critical response to the painting; if enough conventional meaning is
subtracted, a lot of unconventional meaning will have to be added. At
a certain point, the critic will be driven to allegory; beyond that, the
critic will have to call the painting an allegory of allegory, or something

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so completely resistant to interpretation that the criticism must billow

out on fancy’s wings. Of course, any painter who ventures into the
land of polysemy will find that this strategy does not guarantee success:
univocal Canaletto is a far greater artist than any number of puzzle
painters whose work adorns the back galleries of minor museums. But
whatever Canaletto’s excellence, it is the Hieronymus Bosches and
Jackson Pollocks who rouse critics to fill the art history shelves of the
library.
A representation that uses either perspectivist or cubist devices
creates an illusion of a third dimension: we learn when very young the
trick of perceiving a real diagonal as a virtual orthogonal jutting out
into an imaginary altitude. Certain painters and critics disparage these
tricks: Clement Greenberg, for one, advocated a purist modality of the
visual arts, utterly without illusion—painting should be a thrusting
forth of pigment and sculpture an extancy of metal or stone. But to
look at a sculpture and see a simple rock is also to become implicated
with the illusory, since it is not a simple rock—it’s a sculpture. The
multidimensional aspect of the artwork cannot easily be wished away.

Beyond representation in itself, images contain other moments of

instability. As soon as a pigmenting or an inflecting has stooped to
representation, a host of other things are hoisted up and (in one manner
or another) need to fall. Representations lack repose. A death mask or
a life-­size sculpture of a corpse reclining on a sepulcher is a fairly
stressless image, but even this is a provisional volume awaiting further
collapse: as the corpse itself will turn into dust, so the recumbent sculp-
ture is quietly looking forward to its own disintegration, a final cadence.
Most images, far from being static, are in a fury of movement. In
classical Greek sculpture, the simple contrapposto—the twisting of the
shoulders out of the plane of the hips in a kind of arrogant ease—
suggests the overwhelming fidgetiness of the human body, its constant

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shifting of weight, its need to sit, to walk, to yawn, to get the hell out
of here. Myron’s sculpture of the Discobolus shows a man as a vast
sling, stretched as far back as it will go, on the point of snap. Even non-
representational artifacts have their peculiar dynamisms: a clay pot, for
example, is an icon of the rotary, a study in the thumb’s friction—as
T. S. Eliot put it in “Burnt Norton”:

      Only by the form, the pattern,

Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-­existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning.61

Eliot is the anti-­Lessing: far from separating the arts of space from the
arts of time, Eliot suggests that the jar on the table is delirious with its
own spinning, while the Beethoven quartet never got past its first note.
Even buildings rarely give a sense of heavy sullen squat: they are so
penetrated by doors and windows that the restlessness of the outer
world keeps them in a state of motion. And even from a fixed point of
view, the space enclosed by a building keeps wildly swelling and
contracting: a notable example is the fifth-­century mausoleum of Galla
Placidia in Ravenna, which can feel small and claustrophobic at one
moment, while at the next instant the low dim vault can vanish, and
you are outside, standing on a strange planet looking up at huge
mosaic stars so profuse and complicated that there seem to be more
stars than sky.
Some paintings are so committed to unstable forms or situations
that they are, in effect, compressed-­file cinema. J. M. W. Turner’s Fall
of an Avalanche in the Grisons shows a great boulder a quarter-­second

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Fig. 39. J. M. W. Turner, The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons (1810).

away from crushing the Swiss hut (fig. 39). When Turner exhibited his
paintings, he often attached to them a few verses of his own:

The downward sun a parting sadness gleams,

Portenteous lurid thro’ the gathering storm;
Thick drifting snow on snow,
Till the vast weight bursts thro’ the rocky barrier;
Down at once, its pine clad forests,
And towering glaciers fall, the work of ages
Crashing through all! Extinction follows,
And the toil, the hope of man—o’erwhelms.

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These lines rewind the film, panning first to the sun before the storm,
then to the gradual accumulation of snow, then to the collapse of the
high rock. Turner experiments with inverted syntax, beginning
the third clause with “Down at once”—the great adverb provides the
impetus that pushes the sentence, just as the rock pushes its way down
the mountain. After he arrives at his freeze-­frame—the painting itself,
with the rocks suspended in midair—Turner lets time roll on a moment
longer, then the boulder squashes the hut. The postponing of the crush
verb o’erwhelms until the end heightens the sense that the critical event
is in a postponed state—in some sense the image on the canvas takes
place during the em-­dash between man and o’erwhelms.
The poem, then, makes actual two dimensions that are only virtual
in the painting itself: the temporal dimension and the moral intent—an
intent that lies behind much of Turner’s work. (Starting in 1812
Turner appended to many of his paintings lines from a long, unfin-
ished, unpublished poem called “The Fallacy of Hope”—a theme
given remarkably explicit shape in his avalanche painting of 1810.)
Of course, Turner’s lines about the avalanche add little to the
experience of the painting: we could figure out for ourselves most
of what it mentions, except perhaps for the luridness of the prestorm
sunlight and the flattening of the forest. Still, it testifies to the
strong urge to complete the experience of a painting by putting it into
words.
A poet more gifted than Turner, a low threshold to cross, also tried
his hand at landscapes related to this theme. In an 1807 revision of the
Simplon Pass episode of The Prelude, William Wordsworth inserted
lines about

Huge fragments of primaeval mountain spread

In powerless ruin, blocks as huge aloft
Impending, nor permitted yet to fall.

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 What Is Painting?

Wordsworth is describing a rockfall that hasn’t happened yet—and in a

strange way Turner too refuses to permit his huge block to fall, since it
is forever pasted a few feet above the Swiss hut. These verses suggest
that potential energy is every bit as awe-­making as kinetic energy—
even a quiet landscape is a locus of terror. The mountain, long ago
shattered into a ruin, vividly displays the energy that destroyed it.
Similarly, the deepest theme of Turner’s painting seems to be not the
vanity of human wishes, not the flimsiness of wood, but force—
gravity.

Counterpoint in Painting
The temporal dimension of a painting is sometimes simple, sometimes
complex. To continue the musical analogy, I might say that a painting
can exhibit either monophony or polyphony. Turner’s avalanche
painting, for example, is monophonic, in that it presents a single line of
movement, straight down: nothing resists the pull. But other paintings
contain several reference frames, with different vectors, different accel-
erations. These paintings might be called contrapuntal.
Counterpoint in painting can arise in several ways. An image can
grow contrapuntal through polystylism: Saul Steinberg called the
drawing in figure 40 Techniques at a Party, a title that might be under-
stood as meaning either the strategies of greeting, meeting, and con-
versing that we all use at get-­togethers or personifications of technical
artistic devices whooping it up at a shindig. Or maybe these two things
are one thing, and Steinberg is playing a game in which different
strategies of human interaction are imaged as different drawing styles.
Some of us present sharp outlines of ourselves (“Hello! I’m an aero-
space engineer from Utah!”); some of us present only oblique shadings
(“I’m nobody in particular—or—am I?”); some of us behave like
clowns with red-­rubber-­ball noses (“I went to the University of

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Fig. 40. Saul Steinberg, Techniques at a Party, 1953. Ink, colored pencil, and
watercolor, 14½ × 23 in. The Saul Steinberg Foundation, New York. © The Saul
Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Antarctica, where I majored in ice cream”); some of us are so recessive

in personality that scarcely a smudge or a faint broken outline can
be discerned; and one of us, probably the hostess, overwhelms the
whole gathering, with the tiara and great florid blowsy face of the
Queen of Hearts. There is also a man with a basketball head
wearing red-­and-­blue 3D glasses, but I can scarcely guess what his
conversational gambit might be (“If you punch me hard I spring right
back up”?)—he seems to have crashed the party from some realm of
abstract art.
But the most normal form of visual counterpoint is not polystyl-
ism, but polytemporality—different time schemes superimposed. The
simplest way to achieve this is by juxtaposing several panels, as in a
stained-­glass window showing different episodes from the life of Jesus
or a Batman comic book. But sometimes we find that a single panel
depicts the same person at two or more stages of a single narrative.
This is a more intimate form of fugue: there is a temporal overlay of a
single theme upon itself, a staggering. Simone Martini’s early Trecento
painting attests to the appetite in the commune of Siena for a lovable,
down-­to-­earth local holy man along the lines of Francis of Assisi: the

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 What Is Painting?

Fig. 41. Simone Martini, The Blessed Agostino Novello Heals a Child
Mauled by a Dog (c. 1328).

painter was enlisted to help spread the cult of Agostino Novello

(d. 1309), a popular politician, later an Augustinian monk—part of a
(failed) campaign to promote Agostino Novello as the patron saint of
Siena (fig. 41). On the left side, all is vehemence and horror: the dog
snaps at the child’s eye, the woman beats the dog with a stick; on top,
the blessed Augustine swoops down to rescue, his habit turning into a
comet-­tail emerging from a cloud; on the right, all is peaceful prayer, as
the family gives thanks for the child’s miraculous healing. The painting
juxtaposes not only earlier and later parts of the same tale but also dif-
ferent kinds of motion: whirl and stasis. The style is homogenous
throughout the painting—the violently agitated figures are as carefully

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Fig. 42. Simone Martini, The Blessed Agostino Novello Resurrects a Fallen
Child (c. 1328).

outlined as the quiet ones—but the image sets up areas ruled by clocks
moving at different speeds, like a musical composition in which differ-
ent meters are coordinated. In fact, I might call this a painted version of
a two-­part canon in augmentation: the theme is the same in both halves
of the painting, but the note-­values of the second entry are longer.
The figures on the right huddle together, pay so little attention to
the figures on the left—their prior selves—that they seem to have fully
dismissed the wretched event. But in a companion work (fig. 42), Sim-
one Martini creates a more complicated intermesh of the two time
schemes: here Agostino brings back to life a child killed after falling
from a balcony. The revivified child, however, instead of turning his
back on the calamity, studies it with care: this is a painting about mem-
ory, about trying to process one visual field from the vantage point of
another. The hideous fall is scrutinized from several points of view:
that of the saved child, a little farther back in space and a little farther

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 What Is Painting?

ahead in time than the child who falls; that of Agostino, so sympathetic
that he falls with the child and so thrifty that he even rescues the plank
of wood from the collapsing balcony; and of course that of the specta-
tor, who can study the whole complex process of fall and rebound.
(Sometimes, we learn from Christian iconography, hope is no fallacy,
and avalanches can roll back up.) You not only interpret, you interpret
various interpretations included within the picture frame. The right
side of the painting is a sort of visual ekphrasis of the left side: the child
(puzzled? fearful? at a loss?) is a commentary on his own plunge, his
own salvation. In perspectival space, the saved child should be smaller
than the falling child since he’s several feet farther back; but scientific
perspective did not exist in 1328, so Martini uses the medieval conven-
tion of making the more important element larger. The painting is at
once (to use Lessing’s terms for distinguishing the arts of time, such as
poetry and music, from the arts of space, such as painting) a nachein-
ander and a nebeneinander: sequential, in that a chronology can easily be
teased out of the figural repetitions; and juxtapositive, in that the total-
ity of the panel represents the operation of God’s mind, in which all
time coexists at once, and every figure in every state, from origin to
passing away, is instantly available to the divine random-­access
memory.
A painting can also be contrapuntal, polychronic, without spe-
cific narrative intent. A mosaic procession of saints and martyrs
might imply a single overarching forward movement, that of the
procession—though the only place where saints and martyrs can pro-
cess is heaven, and it is not clear where they might be headed, except
perhaps for a better glimpse of God. But in the midst of this central
rhythmic push we might see suggestions of other time frames: if a
woman with a wheel appears, she must be Saint Catherine of Alexan-
dria, who was tied to a spiked wheel for professing her Christian faith
in the days of the Roman emperor Maxentius (the torture device broke

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when she touched it, and the executioner had to resort to beheading). If
a man appears holding a grill, it is Saint Lawrence, who was roasted for
his religious conviction. These emblematic figures set off little whirli-
gigs of time within the mosaic: the icon that identifies the martyr also
serves to remind the spectator of the whole story of the martyr’s reso-
lution, imaginatively enriched with pain. There is a kind of spinning
firework called a Catherine wheel, and the religious image of the wheel
also acts as a firework, burrowing deep into the pictorial surface, incis-
ing terse narratives about the incision of flesh. The cross itself operates
in exactly this way: it is an icon of torture on which the four gospels are
invisibly inscribed—a static image with a huge kinetic portent.
Images of heaven are almost always richly contrapuntal, since
earthly life exists there only in the form of video files waiting to be
unspooled. Michelangelo’s Last Judgment places two martyrs directly
below Christ: Saint Lawrence, who cannot let go of his grill without los-
ing his identity, and Saint Bartholomew, flayed alive while spreading
Christianity in Armenia (fig. 43). These saints seem especially intimate
to the craft of the visual arts, since Lawrence’s grill looks a bit like the
scaffolds and ladders over which Michelangelo clambered for years
while painting the Sistine Chapel; and Bartholomew’s detached skin has
flattened into two dimensions, a painted image with no canvas to which
it can attach itself. The face on the skin of grief is thought to be that of
Michelangelo himself: the great image-­maker translated into a peculiarly
empty image, as if pronouncing on the vanity of art. Of the many time-­
schemes present in The Last Judgment, some of the most prominent con-
cern Michelangelo’s long, long labor in the chapel, his enslavement to
the craft of painting. Indeed The Last Judgment is as biographically
charged, as full of grim in-­jokes, as Dante’s Divine Comedy; the story of
the painter’s life is a necessary moment in its ekphrasis.
Catherine’s wheel and Lawrence’s grill are symbols; and symbol-
ism in painting is the art of digging visual tunnels through which

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 What Is Painting?

Fig. 43. Michelangelo, The Last Judgment (1537–41).

stories emerge. All symbolism depends to some degree on incongruity,

not-­belonging: women do not usually carry wheels around, particu-
larly large spiked ones, nor do men lug about frameworks of metal.
Once you know the hagiography, the story itself is simple, though the
ingenuity of the torture, the dissonance between the saint’s calm heav-
enly face and the implied pain, still imparts a certain fringe of the eerie.
But there is a kind of visual symbolism that teases by opening up story-­
clouds, vague heuristics—narratives that the spectators have to make
up for themselves. The image on the back of the dollar bill, a pyramid

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surmounted by an eye, suggests that the value of money springs from

an incomprehensible locus of antique power. I was a slave toiling in the
desert, hauling huge blocks of rock up wooden ramps by means of
ropes, and the pharaoh’s overseer pointed to the blinding sun over the
unfinished mountain of stone, and he said, That is Amon-­Ra, the god
of gods, whose smile makes the land to bear wheat; here, take this
papyrus on which His image is drawn, and it will entitle the bearer to
rations of bread and beer at a local restaurant, on demand. This is per-
haps not quite the story that the excellent Freemasons who designed the
dollar bill meant me to think, but it seems as good as any.
Symbolic art may hint at specific stories, but as the bandwidth of
the symbol’s radiance increases, the narrative grows more vague, until
all precision is lost in the excessive brilliance of the symbol. It is like
trying to read an inscription cut into a stone in the desert, in which the
individual glyphs are lost in the sheer dazzle of the sun. Indeed, this
movement from meaning to too great meaning to unmeaning is found
in every painting, whether expressly symbolic or not: ekphrasis is
always a provisional exercise and quickly reaches its limit. Every good
painting that offers itself up to the ekphrastic imagination must, at
some point in the interpretive process, refuse further ekphrasis. Ekph-
rasis and indescribability are both necessary moments, necessary points
of view. The problem with unappealing narrative paintings isn’t the
narrative but the absence of anything but narrative. We want our paint-
ings first to speak, then to shut up. Symbolist paintings differ from
other narrative paintings only in that the superseding of narrative is
more obviously built into the painting itself. There are counterpoints in
painting between the visible and the invisible, the descriptive and the
indescribable, the narrative and the inenarrable.

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 CHAPTER THREE

3 What Is Music? 2

There are many theories about the modus and goal of music that stress
music’s essentially expressive character. And there are others that
stress its essentially inexpressive character—the two most famous
are Eduard Hanslick’s formalist definition of music as motion-­form
perceptible through the ear (tönend bewegte Form) and Stravinsky’s
cool statement that “music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless
to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind,
a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc.”1 But just
as painting is neither essentially representational nor essentially
nonrepresentational, so music is neither expressive nor nonexpressive.
Expressiveness and inexpressiveness are two standard moments
in music’s development; neither is an essential property, but it is
usually convenient, when interpreting a particular piece of music, to
discuss the rhythm of expression—how it flaunts itself, then recedes
or vanishes.
We can locate expression in any of music’s elements: melody,
rhythm, harmony, timbre. But it is not always clear that the expression
naturally lurks there—maybe the composer has planted it in one of
these places artificially, by means of written directions to the

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performer: appassionato, dolente, morendo, spianato, con dolcezza, con

fuoco, and all those other Italian terms that figure in the published
scores. There is scarcely any sequence of notes that cannot be made to
assume the guise of rage or sorrow or joy by means of the performer’s
art. And yet the possibility of natural expression in music cannot be
strictly discounted—and I think it would be useful to review the ways
through which music attains expression before we try to descend to
some deeper level of what music is, some level beneath expression
itself.

1. Codes. A composer who wishes to manipulate you—to make you feel

something that you’re probably not feeling at the present instant—will
first of all have recourse to codes. Music has always tried to compile
dictionaries of itself, codebooks of emotional content. Since the days
of Plato, particular keys were associated with particular moods: in fact,
Plato’s treatise on the ideal republic forbids musicians from playing
music in the Lydian mode (not to be confused with the Lydian mode of
medieval music) on the grounds that its soft lax harmonies would
render the populace effeminate. Later, eighteenth-­century music theo-
rists compiled tables of the meanings of particular keys (for example,
B minor was associated with the bizarre, the mad, and even the
demonic). These tables of meaning codes were the subject of some
dispute: different theorists heard different emotions in the same key.
But it was agreed early on that the chromatic scale, which consists of all
the notes of the black keys of the piano as well as the white keys, was
encoded as appropriate for dark moods, for extreme torsion of soul—
for wit’s end. Even in the Middles Ages there was an Easter celebration
(Diastematica, from a thirteenth-­century English songbook) in which
the text commands, absit chromatica, Let chromaticism be absent
(during this time of harmonious rejoicing). Later, William Byrd wrote
a madrigal on the chroma-­code:

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Come, woeful Orpheus, with thy charming lyre,

And tune my voice unto thy skillful wire;
Some strange chromatic notes do you devise,
That best with mournful accents sympathize:
Of sourest sharps and uncouth flats make choice,
And I’ll thereto compassionate my voice. [Byrd, “Come woeful
Orpheus,” 1611]

Here the text and the music alike speak of chromatic misery.
One of the most influential and in some ways ambitious attempts
to codify the feeling content of music was Claudio Monteverdi’s pref-
ace to his Eighth Book of Madrigals (1638), which divided music into
three styles: the stile molle (soft style) and the stile temperato (calm
style) were the standard means of madrigal composers; but Monteverdi
claimed to have invented the third style, the stile concitato (excited
style), suitable for the rhetoric of war. This third style, a stutter of
sixteenth notes, was based on the pyrrhic foot (short-­short) of classical
prosody:

I have reflected that the principal passions or affections of our

mind are three, namely, anger, moderation, and humility or
supplication; so the best philosophers declare. . . . The art of
music also points clearly to these three in its terms “agitated,”
“soft,” and “moderate” [concitato, molle, and temperato]. In all
the works of former composers I have indeed found examples
of the “soft” and the “moderate,” but never of the “agitated,”
a genus nevertheless described by Plato in the third book of
his Rhetoric [399a] in these words: “Take that harmony that
would fittingly imitate the utterances and the accents of a
brave man who is engaged in warfare.” And since I was aware
that it is contraries which greatly move our mind, and that this

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is the purpose which all good music should have . . . I have
applied myself with no small diligence and toil to rediscover
this genus.
After reflecting that in the pyrrhic measure the tempo is
fast, and, according to all the best philosophers, used warlike,
agitated leaps, and in the spondaic, the tempo slow and the
opposite, I began, therefore, to consider the semibreve which
. . . should correspond to one stroke of a spondaic measure;
when this was divided into sixteen semicrome [sixteenth notes]
and restruck one after the other and combined with words
expressing anger and disdain, I recognized in this brief sample
a resemblance to the affect I sought.2

It is not quite clear what Monteverdi meant by stile molle except that it
seems to be the opposite of stile concitato and has something to do with
humility and supplication. It is possible that he meant simply some-
thing like relaxed; but the argument makes more sense if we assume it
has to do with states of abjection and misery, the subject of the great
lamentations, often chromatic and contorted, that were a specialty of
Monteverdi and his contemporaries. If so, Monteverdi’s codebook is
based on a simple tripartite scheme of the soul:

High Middle Low

mania reflective sobriety depression
elation neutrality abjection
inflicting pain calm suffering pain

He considered, quite justly, that he had written music that spanned the
whole gamut of feeling, from the heights to the depths. The notions of
high and low vary considerably from century to century: for Plato in
the Phaedrus, high means upward to the divine, and low downward to

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the clambering world of the senses; for Freud, high means obedient to
the internalized father who demands virtuous behavior (the superego),
and low obedient to the foul unspeakable desires of the unconscious
(the id); but across the span of Western culture a tripartite model of the
psyche—high, middle, low—has often held sway.
The preface to the Eighth Book goes on to say that the stile conci-
tato, the angry style, was first created for Il combattimento di Tancredi e
Clorinda (1624), a staged setting of some stanzas from Torquato
Tasso—a curious sort of narrated opera in which most of the singing
is done by a tenor testo (the text personified), with a few interjections in
direct dialogue by the warrior protagonists. The narrator describes the
clashing of swords, the quick ring of mighty blows, in an ecstatic vocal
drumming of sixteenth-­note figures. Monteverdi may have thought
that he had created the musical equivalent of virtus, maleness: a species
of heroic manly rhetoric opposed to the endless series of pitiful
women—Ariadne, Olympia, Mary, Queen of Scots—found in the
madrigals of d’India, Bertali, and many others, including Monteverdi
himself, who started the vogue in 1608 with his “Lamento d’Arianna.”
This last piece was the climactic aria from an otherwise lost opera; in
his Sixth Book of Madrigals (1614) Monteverdi published it in the form
of a five-­voice madrigal. Madrigal and early opera bleed into each oth-
er in odd ways, and the codes of affect seem completely interchange-
able between the two genres.
But today most of the codes that cue us to feel come from quota-
tion, either direct quotation of musical phrases or indirect quotation of
certain gestures we have learned to associate with certain emotions.
And we learn our codes not from madrigals or operas but from movies.
Indeed some of the most ambitious codebooks come from the domain
of silent films: for example, in 1924 Erno" Rapée published Motion Pic-
ture Moods for Pianists and Organists, which classifies a large number of
pieces under fifty-­two headings, such as Aëroplane (Mendelssohn’s

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Rondo capriccioso), Battle (the third movement of Beethoven’s Moon-

light Sonata), Horror (the bride’s abduction from Grieg’s Peer Gynt),
Railroad (the Spinning Song from Wagner’s Flying Dutchman),
Sadness (the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata)—and, “for use
in situations . . . where there is neither action, nor atmosphere, nor
the elements of human temperament,” Neutral (Schubert’s Moment
Musical, op. 94, no. 3). Rapée was imagining direct quotations, but
recent film composers tend to adapt gestures from preexisting film
music (especially that of Prokofiev), itself dependent on codes derived
from opera—to watch a movie is to enter a world where uneasiness is
disrupted rhythm, love is legato strings, and so forth. If you watch
television shows with the captions turned on, you notice that they
sometimes supply the intended mood of the music, even adding little
rave reviews at times: “R unbearably suspenseful music R,” for example.
If you didn’t know what unbearably suspenseful music sounded like
before, you certainly do after reading the caption. Musical cues tend to
work insofar as they observe a code—they tell you that hidden danger
is lurking, that something silly is about to happen, and so forth. If
movie music is generally forgettable, it is because in most cases it is
supposed to be ignored: viewers are supposed to hear not the music but
the code.
2. Kinesthesis. But when I say that you have to learn a music code,
I’m on treacherous ground. Am I really sure that there are no natural
codes, codes that you don’t have to learn because they are hard-­wired
into the human nervous system? By insisting that music codes are noth-
ing more than convention, arbitrary labels of love or rage pasted onto
neutral acoustic material, I’m using modernist linguistics along the
lines of the semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure, who taught that “the
arbitrary nature of the sign . . . dominates the whole of linguistic anal-
ysis.”3 In the realm of spoken language, the arbitrariness of the sign
(except perhaps in the case of such onomatopoeic signs as the word

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cuckoo) is perfectly arguable. And it is possible to devise a system

according to which music generates powerful meanings strictly out of
arbitrary signs. But fair-­mindedness requires us to inspect this principle
closely: is music a system of purely arbitrary and conventional ges-
tures, as Stravinsky (and many others) believed (or pretended to
believe)?
Not entirely. Let us begin with a look at a language of physical
gesture, such as American Sign Language: what are the meanings pos-
sible to the gesture of raised fist, trembling rapidly within a narrow com-
pass, with elbow crooked and biceps contracted? Surely many meanings
are possible, ranging from I want to kill you to Look how strong I am to
Let us unite against the tyrant. However, some meanings are not reason-
able, unless the sign system is constructed in an extremely willful man-
ner. This gesture would not mean Be kind to kittens—except perhaps in
the sense of Be kind to kittens, or else. This restriction of the arbitrari-
ness of the sign is not hard to understand: the gesture requires such
great muscular tension, and is so often accompanied by the emotion of
anger and the act of smiting, that it has a “natural” range of meanings
not easily trespassed. It is hard to imagine a human culture, or even a
baboon culture, in which some sort of fury or self-­insistence would not
be intended.
The same is true of certain musical gestures. The mere physiologi-
cal tension involved in making very loud and rapid strokes with a bow
or in hitting a very high note with a trumpet entails a certain urgency,
and will tend to specify a certain range of meanings—arousal, agita-
tion, assertion, and so forth. The opposite meanings tend to cluster
around gestures produced with little effort. To this extent, we read the
meaning of the music from the imputed physical exertion of the
musician.
To study music is to study the whole body. Music is not only a sign
system of gesture; it is a simulacrum of the body on which gesture is

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inscribed. In some distant sense, musical compositions can present

maps of the human nervous system. But a map is not a landscape, and
an analogy is not an identity. The hope of direct physiological manipu-
lation through music—Orpheus’s gift for making trees lift their roots
from the ground and dance—can never be realized, no matter how
keen the intelligence of the composer or how large the composer’s
claims. When Monteverdi claims to have discovered the exact musical
equivalent for anger, in his stutter of sixteenth notes; when Alexander
Goehr and Theodor Adorno claim that Schoenberg discovered the
exact musical electroencephalogram for emotion, we should be skepti-
cal. As painters and sculptors have always understood, human beings
are extremely susceptible to images of their bodies—every such image
is a potential voodoo doll, subject to manipulations by sympathetic
magic. Similarly, the images of the human nervous system presented in
musical compositions can provoke an assortment of shivers, fevers,
tremors in the listener; but that response is based on sophisticated anal-
ogies, corporeal interpretations, not the direct effect of a stimulus on
the body. If I hear a musical depiction of a frozen landscape, such as
Vivaldi’s, in the Winter concerto from The Four Seasons (1725), I do
not step into a refrigerator; instead I perform, with my whole body, a
sequence of tremblings and chatterings, a lucid imagination of ice.
Still, the voodoo power of musical images of the body must not be
underestimated. If you listen to the prelude to Verdi’s Rigoletto (1851),
you understand that it’s about suspense and terror. Why? Partly
because of a learned response: the music is in the minor mode, full of
diminished sevenths, and a thousand pieces of music have taught us to
shudder when we hear such chords. But partly we understand because
of a code that no one had to teach us because it’s built into our bodies:
sharp iambic rhythms are heartbeats, and to hear them is to hear sudden
contractions of our own heart: lubDUB. To hear a beating heart is to
attend to something biological, independent of culture—though the

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interpretive strategies through which we understand an iambic drum-

beat as a heartbeat are mediated by culture.
The great composers of dance music, such as Jean-­Philippe
Rameau and Sergei Prokofiev, are extremely canny about creating pre-
cise images of leg movements in music: hops, skips, jumps, glides,
twirls—you hear the music and your body understands how it’s
supposed to move. A good example can be found in the fat stepsister’s
dance in Prokofiev’s ballet Cinderella (1944): The music suggests a
dainty but uncertain movement—there’s a built-­in stumble. If you
hear this and think of an elephant in a tutu trying to dance gracefully
on tippytoes, you’re hearing what the composer intended. But when-
ever you hear music of any kind, whether intended for dancing or not,
try to listen to your body: sometimes the rhythms of your feet, your
heartbeat, even your breathing, will tell you what the music means.
Implied kinesthesia is everywhere in music.
3. Binary Thought. So I think it’s good to give Mother Nature her
due as an explicator of music. Nevertheless, most of the things we con-
sider natural in music aren’t natural at all. A good deal of musical
response is purely intellectual and discursive, and has to be realized
through mental effort, not kinesthetic intuition. Music is a kind of
thinking, and it operates according to procedures similar to other kinds
of thinking. The biologist Lewis Thomas once suggested that Bach’s
Art of the Fugue (1750) was about thinking, a kind of model of how
thinking works; it is easy to understand what he means but hard to
describe exactly how Bach’s manipulations of his fugal theme resemble
the problem-­solving processes of the brain. One species of musical
thinking relies on the principles of binary thought.
Much music can be analyzed profitably according to the intellec-
tual model proposed by French structuralism. The anthropologist
Claude Lévi-­Strauss, in The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a
Science of Mythology (1964), pondered mythological narratives

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gathered from many remote places, such as the rainforests of Brazil;

after breaking these narratives down to their basic elements, Lévi-­
Strauss proposed that the mythopoeia and thought processes of primi-
tive cultures were embodied in a complex network of simple binary
divisions, including human/animal, man/woman, mortal/immortal,
rock/flesh, water/fire, boiled/roasted, wholesome/rotten, raw/
cooked—all the binaries through which a hunter-­gatherer makes sense
of the world and of human presence in the world and of the origins of
the things that constitute the world. Lévi-­Strauss was careful not to say
that the thinking of “sophisticated” cultures was also governed by
binary divisions, but the possibility remains open. Might the analyst
not discover that any great intellectual feat—the philosophy of Plato,
for instance—can be reduced to a huge grid of polar oppositions:
form/copy, reason/appetite, and so on? Some cognitive scientists
speak of the brain as a kind of binary computer, in which decision mak-
ing is predicated on an infinitely intricate web of absurdly elementary
events: a neuron either fires across a synapse or it does not fire, it in
effect holds up a sign saying yes or no. The brain is not quite like a
computer—the threshold for a neuron’s firing is chemically variable,
whereas each element of a machine is fixed, inexorably indicating on or
off, one or zero—but the analogy is striking.
We see, then, that one can make a respectable argument that human
thought is essentially binary in character. Now as it happens, Western
music is extremely rich in binary possibilities. Music is soft or loud,
pitched or unpitched, high-­pitched or low-­pitched, legato or emphati-
cally rhythmic, minor or major, chromatic or diatonic, aleatory or sys-
tematic, in duple or triple meter. Out of these and many other polarities
the composer can construct a system of significant divisions, such as
female/male, chaos/order, dark/light, misery/joy, tyrant/victim.
Once an antithesis is established, the composer may alternate, com-
bine, vary, expand on, digress from, supersede, or otherwise compare,

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contrast, and entwine the two antithetical elements; in this manner the
composer prosecutes an argument, thinks in music.
In establishing these antitheses, we are once again largely in the
realm of the arbitrary. The historical assignation of meaning to certain
antitheses is often strong:

Major Minor
happy sad
direct oblique
day night
stern yielding
male female

(Not only was the minor mode considered feminine in character, but in
the eighteenth century it was even personified as a woman.)4 Tables
such as this may look impressive, but their semantic fixity is illusory.
Indeed, we might wonder how many of these meanings are conse-
quences not of the actual sound of the major or minor mode but of the
terms major and minor (as they are called in English, French, and Italian;
in German and Russian they are called hard and soft). The terms them-
selves impose such striking semantic obligations on the modes that they
can scarcely have been ignored by composers.
And yet it is easy to find conspicuous exceptions. It has often been
noted that the aria that became the very type of pathetic lamentation,
C. W. Gluck’s “Che farò senza Euridice” (from Orfeo ed Euridice,
1762), is in fact written in a clear C major; even in the eighteenth cen-
tury this mode choice caused such consternation that Gluck (or Gluck’s
librettist Calzabigi, writing under Gluck’s name) felt compelled to
defend the aria (in the preface to Paride ed Elena, 1770) against the
charge that it was too cheerful. But Gluck, in the act of reforming
opera from the dying conventions of the previous generation, was

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quite right to challenge the semantic convention of the major mode

itself—that too was an important operatic reform. One axiom of musi-
cal semantics is that as semantic conventions grow rigid they become,
paradoxically, less meaningful: when music grows too easy to interpret,
the ear hears the interpretation and not the music. This phenomenon
explains why much contemporary film music has (often intentionally)
almost no acoustic presence at all; if music is to be heard, it must at least
partly reinvent the system through which it is understood. The audac-
ity of Gluck’s choice of C major tended to restore the freshness, the
keenness of Orpheus’s grief at the loss of his wife.
Gluck’s aria is the canonical demonstration of semantic displace-
ment of the major mode. There is not, to my knowledge, an equally
famous instance of reversal of expected meaning in the minor
mode; but I have a candidate to propose. In Carl Maria von Weber’s
Der Freischütz (1821), the hero is in desperate danger of damnation, for
he has entered a compact with the powers of darkness in return for
magic bullets that strike whatever they are aimed at; yet at the end,
when all seems lost, a prayerful hermit-­ex-­machina comes onstage to
impose a happy ending. At the climax of the Hermit’s song-­speech, he
sings a melody decorated with a celestial flute accompaniment, “Doch
sonst stets rein und bieder war.” But although this flute tune is little
more than a B minor scale, it is sometimes hard even for trained music
students (as I have discovered by experiment) to recognize it as minor:
all the semantic cues of orchestration and dramatic function point to
major.
The semantic power of the opposition between major and minor
does not reside in the table of commonplace associations listed above;
instead, the commonplace associations (and many others) are generat-
ed by the musical power of the opposition between major and minor. In
other words: first sound, then meaning. Our brains are constructed so
as to regard every combination of sounds as, in potential, a language;

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when we listen, we seek to construe. One of the issues that preoccupies

linguists is the fact that human beings have so many languages, so
diverse in character. But the very fact of diversity proves our avidity
for language: in any stream of sound, our ear seeks Gestalten, patterns
of recurrence and differentiation, from which a vocabulary may be
drawn. Music’s wealth of binary oppositions provides the ear with
large words, sound-­gestures, which come to function as elements of
formal propositions, no less potent for their lack of referential content.
Music teases the linguistic areas of the brain without terminating in
language: it turns out that we derive as much pleasure from alinguistic
patterns as from linguistic ones.
A useful example of binary thinking can be found by comparing
the beginning of Wagner’s Tannhäuser overture (1845), marked Andan-
te maestoso, with a passage some four minutes into the piece, marked
Allegro. Both are in E major, so there’s no contrast of key, and yet they
obviously have different meanings. What does the first section mean?—
the rhythm is slow and steady; the kinesthetic value is pretty clear—it’s
a procession; you could get your diploma to such music with perfect
propriety. Furthermore, you might note, especially if you’ve ever spent
much time at Protestant church services of the sober-­sided sort, that
the music is somewhat like a Lutheran chorale—rhythmically staid, if
not dull, but with a good deal of harmonic movement within somewhat
narrow bounds. So if kinesthesia makes you think of a procession,
experience might make you think of a religious procession. As for the
second theme, what you chiefly notice is that whatever it is, it’s the
opposite of the first theme: giddy, flighty, erratic, full of odd spurts and
jerks, perhaps indicating some sort of feverish and hectic dance. So in
trying to think through this overture in terms of structuralist binaries,
you have a lot of material to work with. You might conceive of a dis-
mal beach versus dolphins playing in the waves; you might think of a
funeral on one hand, and Sylvester chasing Tweety Bird on the other

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(these are actual examples that my students have proposed to me);

you might even come upon something very like what the composer
intended—for the opening music represents a procession of pious pil-
grims repenting their sins, and the second music an orgy of nymphs
and satyrs presided over by the goddess Venus. So the theme of
Wagner’s music-­thinking here is quite simple: it’s a dialectic of
Chastity versus Sex. Most eighteenth-­ and nineteenth-­century over-
tures are written in sonata form—that is, they argue the relation of two
separate musical areas, distinguished by theme or by key or (typically)
by both, at last (after tense dissection) reconciling them. Most over-
tures prosecute their argument as abstract rhetorical structure, without
recourse to a finite debate; but some dramatic overtures, as in the case
of Tannhäuser, have a strange sort of forensic acuity.
Each of these three modes of semantic generation works for paint-
ing as well as music—maybe this schema has some use for generating
narratives in many different artistic media. (1) Instead of codes of
affect, painting has codes of symbols, often religious symbols in older
painting. (2) Instead of the kinesthetics of motion, painting has (to take
the simplest example) images of the human body in various contor-
tions, from German crucifixes that are all writhe and broken tendons to
Degas ballerinas forced into painfully unstable postures—these images
produce shadows of contraction in our muscles; a more complicated
example can be found in Klee’s notion that we can’t look at a horizontal
line without imagining a tightrope walker’s careful self-­balancing.
(3) Instead of binary thinking thought out over time, painting has its
own dialectics, sometimes formal, such as the diagonal division of a
rectangular canvas (often with distinctions of hue or saturation or
image density between the two sides), sometimes thematic, such as, in
Giotto’s La lamentazione, the division between the paralyzed human
beings in the lower half of the picture standing over the body of Christ
and the angels in the upper half, crazily twisting in an ecstasy of grief.

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Music’s Tongue
Music is speechlike. . . . But music is not speech. Its
speechlikeness points the way into the interior, but also into the
vague.
—Theodor Adorno, “Fragment on Language,” 1963

Earlier we saw that painting was not an art of representation or an art

of abstraction but an art of speech. Similarly I hope to show that music
is not an art of expression or an art of formal delight but an art of
speech—though, as with all speech, there is a shadow region of speech-
lessness on all sides of it.
We often think of music as a translation of emotional states: you
know that a violin playing droopy phrases means you’re supposed to
weep; you know that Sousa marches mean you’re supposed to feel
exhilarated. But these conventional mood settings seem pretty vague;
can music aspire to more precise kinds of translation? Can sentences,
stories, dramas be translated into music? If so, does the resulting music
have any of the properties of spoken or written language? Music—
instrumental music—has a linguistic character, as if it translated texts
(real or imaginary) into wordless sound; yet at the same time it resists
any linguistic character, even proposes itself as an anti-­language inca-
pable of translating anything. Just as ekphrasis in painting typically
terminates in storylessness, so the linguistic character of music must, at
some point or other, leave off.
Music as a language. According to this model, music is the one uni-
versal language, a sort of pentecostal tongue of fire, in that it behaves
as a language not learned systematically but understood intuitively by
everyone. This model is in some ways obviously untenable: how could
one say “The persimmons are mottled but unripe” without recourse to
spoken words? But it provides a powerful dream for activating certain

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potentialities of musical expression, even though it is most pervasive as

a trope of comedy, as (for example) when Harpo Marx (in Duck Soup)
carries on one end of a telephone conversation strictly by means of a
bicycle horn. Still, there is a case to be made for the thesis that music
can operate in its way as a complete language, since every formal prop-
erty of speech—formal in the sense of nondenotative—can, I believe,
be understood as a formal property of music. Insofar as music is a lan-
guage, it is scarcely even a pseudomorphosis to find the right words to
describe (narrate, dramatize) a purely instrumental phenomenon; and
yet it is good to be clear that all verbalizing of music is speculative and
idiosyncratic, though as we shall see there are some possibilities for
objectivity.
Among the schemes for classifying the formal properties of speech
are those based on small units, such as inflection and phoneme con-
struction; those based on middle-­sized units, such as syntax; and those
based on large units, such as the structures of rational persuasion that
we call rhetoric, or the structures of seduction that we call narrative
and drama. It is hard to exaggerate how profoundly we understand
music as a language. Or, to put it better, how profoundly language
understands music as a language, since language tends to understand
everything as a language.
The vocabulary of music analysis is amazingly dependent on
terms from linguistics, as the words phrase and theme quickly show; and
I suspect that the history of music has been strongly shaped by the
conscious or subconscious tendency of composers to literalize the
vocabulary of music analysis. Consider the term subject: the instant I
denote the main melodic entity in a composition as a subject, I have
thereby promoted that thing into a little person, or at least into a crucial
matter with as yet unexplained properties, and I compel a tacit gram-
matical search for a way of explaining the rest of the composition as a
predicate to that subject. The rest of the composition becomes a way of

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learning about the subject, of teasing out its attributes, of defining its
contours, its submissions to new harmonic contexts, its recalcitrances
against ill treatment. The term subject imparts a prestige, a centrality,
that the sequence of notes might not otherwise possess. Indeed, the
term subject has an implicit push toward narrative in that the vicissi-
tudes of the subject during the course of the composition start to
become heard as adventures. This process is sometimes explicit, as in
Nikolay Rimsky-­Korsakov’s Scheherazade (1888), in which the com-
poser used the same theme to represent (in the opening bars) the Sultan
listening to his new wife’s stories, and Sindbad navigating his boat
through sea-­sickening orchestral swell. A nice psychological touch:
the Sultan imagines himself as the hero of his wife ’s story, like a boy
reading a Superman comic book and imagining that Superman has his
own face.
Large musical structures can recall other sorts of large speech
structures. The opening of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Fourth
Piano Concerto (1807), in which the piano and the orchestra don’t
speak at the same time but are confined to separate acoustic and emo-
tional domains, impresses most listeners as a drama—not a narrative,
not a piece of rhetoric, but a drama. What is the story here? I once
heard a radio broadcast in which the pianist Krystian Zimerman was
reported as saying that the movement represented Christ before Pon-
tius Pilate. In 1859, A. B. Marx, in his biography of Beethoven, sketched
out an Orpheus scenario for the concerto. The novelist E. M. Forster
also heard Orpheus:

This famous little movement consists of a dialogue between

orchestra and piano, the orchestra rough, the piano plaintive,
the orchestra gradually calmer. It is very easy music; it strikes
or strokes immediately, and elderly gentlemen before myself
have called it “Beauty and the Beast.” What about Orpheus

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and the Furies, though? That is the idea that has slipped into
my mind to the detriment of the actual musical sounds, and
when the movement begins I always repair to the entrance of
Hell and descend under the guidance of Gluck [in the second
act of Orfeo ed Euridice] through diminishing opposition to
the Elysian Fields. There has been no word-­making, to be
sure, but there has been a big operatic import. . . . The piano
turns into Orpheus and via him into Miss Marie Brema, whom
I best remember in that rôle, and the strings and wind, waving
less and less their snaky locks, sink at last into acquiescence
with true love. Then the third movement starts. The parallel
breaks, and I am back in a world which seems four-­square and
self-­contained, the world of the opening.5

Forster felt sad when the concerto lost its linguistic character and disen-
chanted itself back into “mere” music—as if Beethoven’s imagination
had failed him at the instant the music failed to approximate some sort
of speech-­act. It is slightly disquieting, perhaps contrary to experience,
to think that music is less potent, in a sense less music, if it fails to
support clear story outlines.
Sometimes music addresses itself not to the imagination but to the
discerning intellect and attempts to ape the language of oratory. In his
1739 treatise Der vollkommene Capellmeister, Johann Mattheson under-
stands the art of musical composition as classical rhetoric transposed
into a language of tones, cleanly organized into inventio, dispositio
(articulation of the invented idea into parts), decoratio, and pronuntiato
(delivery)—Mattheson even plays with forensic models of musical
rhetoric, in which a composition is divided into exordium, narratio
(statement of facts), divisio (forecast of main points in the speaker’s
favor), confirmatio, confutatio (rebuttal), and peroratio. Mattheson and
other musical rhetoricians also provided tables of figures of speech

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complete with examples, so the reader could ponder the musical equiv-
alent of (say) exclamation, ellipsis, and pleonasm. Many of the tropes
in the tables pertain to insistence, and it is clear that music is quite han-
dy at repeating, ornamenting, developing, augmenting, or otherwise
waxing large upon an idea—in that sense music is much like spoken
oratory.
Let us look at an example of an easy translation of a figure of
speech from the domain of language to that of music. If you begin
every sentence with the same few words, you’re using the trope called
anaphora: “We shall fight in France, we shall fight in the seas and
oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in
the air, . . . we shall fight on the beaches,” in Churchill’s splendid
anaphora from 1940. The old musical theorists discovered anaphora in
musical compositions; one, Athanasius Kircher, defined it as a repeti-
tion of the same theme on different notes in different parts. Kircher’s
example of anaphora is taken from a motet by Heinrich Schütz, “Freut
euch des Herren,” from Symphoniae Sacrae, op. 10 (1647), in which the
words “Singet dem” keep staggering from one voice to another. It is
the rhetoric of “We shall fight . . . we shall fight” translated into music.
If the singers were replaced by violins, it would still be anaphora, utter-
ly without a text.6
You will note that many of the tropes mentioned by the old musi-
cologists (anaphora, pleonasm, and so forth) are somewhat exotic: lit-
erary rhetoric emphasizes a set of tropes different from that of musical
rhetoric. In speech and writing, most tropes pertain not to insistence
but to transposition: here the basic figures are metaphor and simile,
which alas seem not to exist in the world of music, or to exist only tan-
gentially: how can one sequence of notes take the place of, or allude to,
or hover alongside of, an absent sequence of notes? Furthermore, a
central oratorical device is contradiction: not only am I right, but you
are wrong. But music, while it may have many parts of speech, seems

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to lack a privative, an intelligible not: a musical event can’t easily be

annulled, or vitiated, or dismissed, by another musical event. To some
extent a strong contrast or a bar or two of silence may act as a negation,
but the listener may regard the subsequent material as a supplement to
the previous material instead of a denial of it. There are a few effective
acts of musical negation: the opening of the fourth movement of
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (1824), whose huge discord proceeds to
annihilate the themes of the preceding movements one by one; the
great shriek in the adagio of Mahler’s Tenth; a number of moments in
Alfred Schnittke’s work. But these can be seen as special stunts,
and their methods would be hard to promote into a general model of
contradiction via music.
So to evaluate music as a reasonable discourse becomes a frustrat-
ing matter: a musical composition may have many discursive aspects,
may even, like Charles Ives’s Second Quartet (1907–13), represent a
bunch of men screaming at each other about the American Civil War,
but it finally seems able to go only so far in mapping itself according to
oratorical form. In the second movement, the second violinist, whom
Ives called a “Rollo”—that is, a sissy—tries to calm the argument in a
passage that Ives marked Andante emasculata. This is perhaps the only
piece of homophobic chamber music in the whole repertoire. But Ives’s
jokes are often more easily understood by study of the score than by
listening to a performance, and the only way that the auditor can catch
the Civil War references is by recognizing the quoted tunes associated
with the Yanks and the Rebs.
Perhaps the most successful of all strategies for discursifying
music lies on the level of inflection. Here we have not only such stunts
as Harpo’s bicycle horn but also the hero’s wife in Richard Strauss’s Ein
Heldenleben (1899) who “speaks” so intelligibly through a violin that it
tempts the listener to imagine actual verbal dialogue, wheedling, cajol-
ing, pouting, vituperating, or, as Strauss indicates in one particularly

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challenging instruction to the violinist, heuchlerisch schmachtend—

hypocritically languishing.
Another example is “Bacchus at whose orgies is heard the noise of
gaggling women’s tattling tongues and shouting out of boys,” the
fourth of Benjamin Britten’s Six Metamorphoses After Ovid (1951), in
which a solo oboe tattles and shouts a language that the listener has
never been taught and yet understands quite clearly. By choosing
Bacchus as the god of speech-­music, Britten stresses the Dionysiac
character of this art: music seems to be nothing more than speech
grown so excited that only the excitement is intelligible, not the words.
Britten seems to appeal to old fantasies of an all-­compulsive archaic
language of sound-­gestures: Rousseau, for example, imagined that a
modern European, only faintly acquainted with Arabic, would pros-
trate himself, abandon his Christian beliefs, and march in the armies of
Islam if he had heard Muhammad preach, burning with the enthusiasm
of his prophecy.7
And yet even in these examples, where music seems ready to assert
itself as a language, as a modality of word-­inflection in the absence of
the word, there are certain counterpressures that threaten to destroy its
linguistic character. The first of Britten’s Six Metamorphoses After Ovid
is “Pan who played upon the reed pipe which was Syrinx, his beloved.”
This nobly poised cantilena makes the Bacchus movement seem by
contrast almost submusical, a kind of woodwind gargling. To intro-
duce musical speechifying into a composition usually means that the
composer thereby specifies other areas of a composition with higher
melodic contour and clearer harmonic articulation—in short, more like
music because less like speech. An old but effective example of this
tendency can be found in Marc-­Antoine Charpentier’s miniature opera
Les plaisirs de Versailles (early 1680s), in which La Musique and La
Conversation debate whether Louis XIV would be more delighted to
hear music or to engage in a lively chat: La Conversation argues in

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favor of talk by singing her lines in a langue frétillante (frisky), a gar-

rulous gabble above a hectoring bass viol; whereas La Musique preens
herself in accords charmants, a long slow ravishing legato. Though
Charpentier characterizes La Conversation by musical means, music
itself seems the exact opposite of talkiness.
Furthermore, there is a notable lack of coordination among the
various linguistic models possible to music. Britten’s Bacchus move-
ment is extremely talkative on the level of inflection, but not talkative
at all on the level of rhetoric or narrative: there is scarcely even the
ghost of a story or an argument, just a series of speech-­gestures. Simi-
larly, the examples of rhetoric that Mattheson cites don’t tend to have
any inflectional force behind them. In Strauss’s tone poems one can find
several examples of inflectional imitation, but it’s often oddly detached
from the story, indeed slowing down the momentum of the story:
Strauss’s hero’s wife is, from the point of view of the narrative, a
tedious digression, inhibiting the hero from getting on with his busi-
ness. Strauss’s chatterboxes, such as the monks in Don Quixote (1898),
provide comic relief—discursivity as a sort of local color or amuse-
ment pasted onto the music, instead of the crucial matter of music.
Even the narrative aspect of the tone poem can seem dangerously
extrinsic, which is why composers have often been so uneasy about
publishing them. Strauss is famous for narrative specificity, but the pro-
gram of Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche (Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry
Pranks—or Lusty Strokes, 1895) remained unpublished: it is known
only through a table of twenty-­three motives that exists in the manu-
script score and through some help he gave to Wilhelm Mauke when
Mauke was writing a guide to the work. The tone poem begins with a
“once upon a time” gesture, and soon we hear the “subject”—Till him-
self—in a theme that poises for a moment on a minor third before com-
pleting itself on the major third (the solo horn rises from GJ to A, in
the key of F). At the end of the horn theme we hear a bit of the endless

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sequence of orchestral titters, giggles, and razzes that Strauss has at his
command. At last, after many rascally tricks, Till is caught and hanged,
yet even on the gallows, as figures on the clarinet and other solo instru-
ments suggest above the drum roll, Till keeps joking. You hear that
drop of a major seventh—der Tod—just as Till falls and breaks his
neck. But let me return to an earlier episode, where Strauss offers some
extraordinarily precise notations of complicated events. At one point
Till disguises himself: as Strauss said, “Dressed as a priest he oozes
unction and morality.” At the end of this passage a clarinet plays a fig-
ure glossed by Strauss as follows: “But the rogue ’s big toe protrudes
beneath the cassock” (in the published score this moment is marked
schelmisch, “roguelike”). Strauss felt that he had reached such a pitch of
mastery of representation that the sudden emerging of a toe could be
depicted by purely orchestral means; whether it’s Till’s big right toe or
his big left toe, Strauss doesn’t say. On the other hand, there are also
episodes of utter vagueness (“On to new pranks”). Every tone poem I
know has episodes where a program is not only superfluous but impos-
sible to construct: Strauss in particular always inserts blurs, patches of
inenarrable confusion, like the gray blob that disturbs the center of
Manet’s painting Music in the Tuileries Garden (1862).
The more closely we examine the hypothesis that music is a lan-
guage, whether in theory or in practice, the less tenable it appears.
After exhaustive study of Mattheson’s tables of tropes and of many
other old treatises, the musicologist George J. Buelow—to whom I’m
much indebted—concludes, “Many of the musical figures . . . origi-
nated in attempts to explain or justify irregular, if not incorrect, contra-
puntal writing.”8 In other words, the rhetorical aspects of music seem
to be concentrated in various areas of deviance from accepted musical
practice; so we are left with the uncomfortable dilemma that music is a
kind of rhetoric, even while music is more rhetorical when it breaks
down than when it obeys the rules. I believe that similar paradoxes

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result from any attempt to impose a linguistic character on music.

Perhaps the finest of all recent students of musical narrative, Carolyn
Abbate, has announced, in effect, that the more she studies musical nar-
rative, the less she finds: “In my own interpretations . . . I will interpret
music as narrating only rarely. It is not narrative, but it possesses
moments of narration, moments that can be identified by their bizarre
and disruptive effect.”9
Jean-­Jacques Nattiez offered a still bleaker view, seeming to deny
even those rare moments of narration that Abbate found: “ ‘Music has
no past tense,’ as Carolyn Abbate rightly observes. It can evoke the past
by means of citations or stylistic borrowings, but it cannot narrate, can-
not speak what took place in time past. . . . Literary narrative is an
invention, a lie. Music cannot lie. The responsibility for joining
character-­phantoms with action-­shadows lies with me, the listener,
since it does not lie within music’s capacities to join subject and predi-
cate.”10 A musical narrative, then, is a confabulation of the listener or
of the composer, who is evidently merely another listener with no spe-
cial interpretive credentials. It seems that music behaves linguistically
only in a spasmodic, haphazard, and irregular manner. The search for
music’s tongue seems to render music mute.
Furthermore, from the beginning of theoretical discourse about
music, there are strong hints that there is something desperately wrong
with the attempt to understand music as a language. There exists a curi-
ous manual of advice for writing a bad opera, Il teatro alla moda
(c. 1720), in which Benedetto Marcello informs the apprentice hack
how to organize his arias:

Let [the composer] see to it that the arias, to the very end of
the opera, are alternatively a lively one and a pathetic one,
without regard to the words, the modes, or the proprieties of
the scene. If substantive nouns, e.g., padre, impero [empire]

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amore, arena, beltà [beauty], lena [vigor], core [heart], etc. . . .

should occur in the arias, the modern composer should base
upon them a long passage; e.g., pa . . . impeeee . . . amoooo . . .
areeee . . . reeee . . . beltàaaaa . . . lenaaaaa . . . The object is to
get away from the ancient style, which did not use passages on
substantive nouns or on adverbs, but only on words signifying
some passion or movement; e.g., tormento, affanno [breath-
lessness], canto, volar [to fly], cader [to fall], etc.11

Marcello is profoundly suspicious of static nouns: he would like to

banish solid objects from serious attention by musicians. This makes
sense, in that the denotative functions of language have always seemed
the least likely to translate into music. On the other hand, what hope is
there for creating a language without nouns? Jorge Luis Borges once
imagined a language consisting entirely of impersonal verbs:

For them the world is not a concurrence of objects in space; it

is a series of independent and incommensurable acts. It is
successive and temporal, not spatial. There are no nouns in
Tlön’s conjectural Ursprache, from which the “present”
languages and dialects proceed: there are impersonal verbs
qualified by monosyllabic suffixes (or prefixes) with an adver-
bial value. For example: there is no word that corresponds to
the word moon, but there is a verb that would be in Spanish
lunecer or lunar [“to moonrise,” “to moon”]. They would say
The moon rose over the river as Hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö . . .
Xul Solar translated it succinctly: . . . Upward, behind the
onstreaming it mooned. [“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” 1947;
ellipsis in the original]12

(The last phrase is in English in the original.) To understand the

behavior of the ocean in Debussy’s La mer (1905) in similar terms has

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a certain attraction—onward beneath the up-­diamonding it surged,

one might say of certain passages. And yet to accept music as a defec-
tive language is merely to call increasing attention to its defectiveness,
rather than its power.
Music as a nonlanguage. If music slips through our grasp if we try
to understand it as a language, the next step is to try to put together a
nonlinguistic theory of music. On this side of the divide there are dis-
tinguished historical precedents: Pythagoras, who heard music as a sort
of celestial arithmetic, a sound-­map of the starry sky; and Eduard
Hanslick, the Viennese music critic and champion of Brahms, who
defined music as tönend bewegte Form—a term that might be translated
literally as “soundingly moved form,” or less literally as “dynamic
sound-­form” or “form set into motion through sound” or (perhaps
best) “motion-­form perceptible through the ear.” It is no wonder that
Hanslick and Wagner detested each other—Wagner even toyed with
the idea of using the name Hanslick for the ignorant carping critic in
Die Meistersinger—for Hanslick’s asemantic theory of music is exactly
opposed to Wagner’s semantically overcharged notions of music. For
Hanslick, music is to the ear what Alexander Calder’s mobiles, in the
next century, would be to the eye: a shifting series of acoustic cross sec-
tions. To listen to a musical composition is not to hear a displacement
of speech but to attend to shapes opening through modulatory space
and then closing up at cadences.
In the twentieth century, such nonlinguistic models would contin-
ue to attract certain composers. Erik Satie wrote a piece of musique
d’ameublement—furniture music—which he titled Wallpaper in Forged
Iron; George Antheil considered his works to be paintings on a time-­
canvas; and Stravinsky audibly pieced together such works as Renard
by the method of collage, pasting short snippets into repetitive chains—
the scissors and the gluepot have replaced the rhetoric book as a means
of organization. Stravinsky’s distaste for expression—“I consider that

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music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at

all”—has of course strong anti-­linguistic tendencies. What Pythago-
ras, Hanslick, Satie, Antheil, and Stravinsky have in common is this: by
refusing the idea that music is a language, they embrace the idea that
music is a species of visual art realized in sound. When discourse seems
to evaporate, pictures fly in to occupy the empty space—for theory,
like nature, abhors a vacuum.
And yet it’s not clear that the opposition between discourse and
the visual arts can be sustained. From Apelles to Jackson Pollock and
beyond, pictures have seemed pregnant with stories, and have been
understood through rhetorical models. It is possible that music’s
attempt to flee from language through reliance on pictorial methods
will only lead back to language by means of an oblique route—we are
all so thickly imprisoned in verbal constructions of reality that every
escape tunnel we dig will lead us back to the same jail.
Of course, there are some composers whose methods seem to
exclude any possibility of contamination by language: John Cage, for
example, whose post-­1951 reliance on various sorts of aleatory con-
struction and indeterminate performance vitiates any standard notion
of the semantic, or the rhetorical, or the grammatical, or the speech-­
inflective. If Cage’s compositions are music, then music would seem to
be not only nonlinguistic but the antidote to language. But it is just
here, where music and speech seem to diverge utterly, that they start to
swerve together: for Cage treats speech simply as a form of nonsung
mouth music, by constructing discourse according to the same aleatory
procedures that he used to govern his music. In one well-­known exam-
ple, he wrote out a series of random statements and then, during the
question-­and-­answer session following a lecture, read the statements
one after another, without regard to the actual questions. A more thor-
ough deconstruction can be found in Solo for Voice 2 (1960), in which
Cage instructs the performer to write vowels and consonants on a

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transparent sheet and then, through certain manipulations of this

sheet over a piece of paper inscribed with lines, to devise an array of
phonemes that will be the text to be performed.
This sort of anti-­language can be dismissed as a special stunt with
no relevance to speech as we usually speak it. But the tendency of lin-
guistics from Saussure to Jacques Derrida has been to remove physical
objects from the domain of language, to understand language as chains
of endlessly deferred signifiers, never terminating in any actual thing.
Every attempt to dereferentialize language tends to turn what the TV
meteorologist says into an occult version of Solo for Voice 2, in which
the phonic aspects grow increasingly opaque, increasingly an occasion
for aesthetic delight in their heard immediacy. Wittgenstein’s later phi-
losophy repeatedly stresses the musical aspects of normal speech; as he
says in Philosophical Investigations (sect. 527), “Understanding a
sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than
one may think. What I mean is that understanding a sentence lies
nearer than one thinks to what is ordinarily called understanding
a musical theme.”13 It fascinates me that these two sentences are, in
effect, musical variations of the same sentence: Wittgenstein is proving
his point in the act of making it. For Wittgenstein, music is not like
speech; instead, speech is a special case of music. Some of the things
you say to me I understand in the way I understand Mozart; some of
the things in the way I understand Cage; some of the things in the way
I understand Britney Spears. But in all cases, speech is a game with
sounds, just as music is a game with sounds—neither strictly possesses
meaning or conviction, but meaning and conviction may glide around
either.
Recent rhetoricians, such as Andrzej Warminski and Paul de Man,
also describe a rhetoric that looks musical rather than discursive.
According to de Man, “Every text generates a referent that subverts the
grammatical principles to which it owed its constitution. . . . [There is]

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a fundamental incompatibility between grammar and referential mean-

ing.”14 But if the language is beset by the same problems of jarring and
incommensurable, un-­unifiable models that beset music, then music
and language are in exactly the same uncomfortable situation. Yes,
Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel lurches wildly from narrative to speech-­
inflection to exasperating tangles of unconstruables; but a written
chronicle of Till’s adventures would do the same. So we are left in par-
adox: the more we try to understand music as language, the more
strongly it resists that understanding; and the more we try to under-
stand music as the opposite of language, the more sweetly, strongly,
plainly it speaks to the ear. We understand the siren’s song only at the
moment when we stop trying to understand it.

Music’s Mythology: Origins and Endings

The artwork contains within itself the history of its medium. I shall
show how this works in music, but it might be plainer if I began with a
discussion of a painting—or, more exactly, a discussion of a discussion
of a painting.
Maybe the single most beautiful essay on aesthetics in the whole
history of philosophy is Martin Heidegger’s work on the origin of
the work of art—Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks (1935–36). Heidegger
argues that there are two modalities of being, which he calls world and
earth. Earth is the closed, undisclosable universe of physical objects,
stubbornly resisting every human attempt to confront or understand or
come to terms with it—you can shatter a stone, but each fragment
remains just as obdurate, as grimly unforthcoming as the original.
World, on the other hand, is never objective: it is the universe brought
into the domain of the human, configured by human decision, instinct
with human presence, not something alien but the shelter in which we all
huddle.

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Fig. 44.  Vincent van Gogh, A Pair of Shoes (1886).

Heidegger meditates at length on a painting of Vincent van

Gogh’s, A Pair of Shoes (fig. 44):

Out of the dark opening of the blown-­out insides of the

battered shoe there gapes the toil of the worker’s footsteps. In
the earthy-­massive heaviness of the battered shoe there is
stored up the doggedness of the slow going through the long-­
drawn-­out and always-­the-­same furrows of the field, over
which a raw wind blows. On the leather there lie the damp and
fullness of the ground. Under the sole there shifts the loneli-
ness of the field paths through the falling evening. In the

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battered shoe there pulses the hidden call of the earth, the
earth’s silent abounding of ripening grain and the earth’s
lightless self-­denial in the fallow waste of the winter field.
Through this beaten stuff there is drawn the uncomplaining
fear about the uncertainty of bread, the wordless joy at once
again surviving hardship, the quaking at the onset of birth and
the trembling at the threat of death.15

Elsewhere in this essay Heidegger notes that the world worlds—die

Welt weltet—and it seems that the world over-­fragrant with humanness
starts whirling, worlding itself, out of these splayed spavined shoes.
Human presence in the universe transubstantiates right here.
Out of the dark opening of Heidegger’s stunning paragraph there
has gaped a good deal of later philosophy, including a riff by Fredric
Jameson. But I want to play a slightly different shell game with this
shoe, by taking it not as a talisman or thumb drive into which the felt
reality of farm life has been uploaded, but as a talisman into which an
artistic medium has been compressed: the whole history of painting
lurks there. Under the sole there is stuck the mud with which the
cave dweller made the first intended mark on the wall; in the lacings
and unlacings there are all the disciplines and relinquishments of
craft; within the soft broken flapping tongue there is all the speech of
painting ready to be heard. Furthermore, I believe that the same
can be said of any painting: the beginning, the middle, and the end
of art history are all co-­present, waiting. In the greatest paintings
we often feel this immanence with unusual clarity. Heidegger was
wrong in thinking that van Gogh was painting a stray farmer’s
shoes: van Gogh was painting his own—they are a painter’s shoes,
and van Gogh had trudged a long way in them, over thousands
or millions of years, from East Africa to the caves of Lascaux to
Provence.

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In H. G. Wells’s Time Machine (1895) the hero leaves off at the end
of time, at the margin of an ocean made of dead seas, a post-­human,
almost post-­animate earth lit by a huge cold red sun:

Then like a red-­hot bow in the sky appeared the edge of the
sun. . . . As I stood sick and confused I saw again the moving
thing upon the shoal—there was no mistake now that it was a
moving thing—against the red water of the sea. It was a
round thing, the size of a football perhaps, or, it may be,
bigger, and tentacles trailed down from it; it seemed black
against the weltering blood-­red water, and it was hopping
fitfully about.

If this Portuguese-­man-­of-­war-­like thing is the endpoint of our evolu-

tion, the mark that its tentacle leaves on the sand, if made with the
intent to leave a mark, is latent in van Gogh’s painting of his shoe. You
can even see the tentacular waverings in the lower right-­hand corner.

But first mythologies of origin, then mythologies of the end.

One of the most striking characteristics of music as a language is
its predilection for originary myth—but the languages of music, paint-
ing, and literature each deal with originary myth in a slightly different
fashion. We have seen that much literature explicitly pertains to stories
about origin, and painting pertains to them as well, implicitly. Litera-
ture and painting differ, however, in that there is an important subset of
literary creation tales that concern the creation of language itself;
whereas there are few paintings in which the creation of the world is
imagined as a picture about the creation of paint. Michelangelo’s fresco
of God creating the sun and the moon shows the sun as a compass-­
ruled disk marked with yellow pigment applied as if combed in a circle
across the wet plaster, but you don’t see this and think to yourself, God

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creating the art of fresco. Some of Kandinsky’s catastrophe paintings,

such as The Flood, go farther toward embodying a rhythm of destruc-
tion and creation in terms of forms receding into and emerging from a
chaos of paint; but even so, they aren’t exactly meta-­paintings, except
in the sense (nontrivial, I think) that every painting is also a
meta-­painting.
In literature, however, stories about ultimate origins tend to
default into stories about the origin of speech:

17
But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt
not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt
surely die. 18And the Lord God said, It is not good that the
man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.
19
And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of
the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto
Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam
called every living creature, that was the name thereof. 20And
Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and
to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found
an help meet for him. 21And the Lord God caused a deep sleep
to fall upon Adam and he slept: and he took one of his ribs,
and closed up the flesh instead thereof; 22And the rib, which
the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and
brought her unto the man. 23And Adam said, This is now bone
of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man. [Gen. 2, KJV]

The naming of things occurs at an odd point in the creation story. First
comes a divine prohibition concerning a special tree—clearly God
created language along with Adam, because Adam could not have
known what God was prohibiting if the word tree didn’t already exist;

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on the other hand, God is happy to let Adam assist in filling out the
fauna chapters of the dictionary—his invention of their common
nouns confirms his dominion over them. God seems to create syntax
and basic Hebrew; Adam makes up the language of animate creation.
Language is a co-­creation of man and God, and God (as the King
James translators have it) seems to allow Adam to correct or supple-
ment God’s own vocabulary: God calls Adam’s as-­yet-­uncreated
companion help meet for him, whereas Adam grandly announces
that she shall be called Woman. (Adam will not name her Eve until after
the Fall.) So Adamic language comes into being between a divine
prohibition and a sort of scission that created a sexual partner for
Adam—that is, between a taboo and a seduction. And formations of
taboo and formations of seduction are still today the primary speech-­
acts: speech charges entities in the world around us with both kinds of
erotic power.
Like the author of Genesis, Socrates also asked himself how words
came into being but offered a far more prosaic account. His argument
is found in Plato’s Cratylus, where Hermogenes claims that the relation
between word and thing is conventional and arbitrary, while Cratylus
disagrees, arguing that things may be rightly or wrongly named.
Socrates, meanwhile, listens to a summary of their debate, taking no
firm position; he seems first to be on Cratylus’s side, then ambiguously
on Hermogenes’. Socrates argues that if a thing is to be rightly named,
there needs to be a fundamental resemblance between the name and
what it refers to, and he wonders whether a perfect correspondence
might be possible: “I should say . . . that the image, if expressing in
every point the entire reality, would no longer be an image” (432b,
trans. Benjamin Jowett). Socrates finally scoffs at the notion that a
word can be equivalent to an object: “But then how ridiculous would be
the effect of names on things, if they were exactly the same with them!
For they would be doubles of them, and no one would be able to

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determine which were the names and which were the realities” (432d).
Any real name, Socrates suggests, is a more or less faulty representa-
tion of its correspondent thing. He asks himself whether the original
“legislator”—the fellow who invented names and attached them to
things—was extraordinarily wise or knowledgeable; no, Socrates
decides, the legislator was more ignorant than we are today, so there is
no special prestige to be discovered in the origins of Greek or of any
other language. (Socrates’ cold eye toward origins foreshadows a simi-
lar attitude in Nietzsche and Michel Foucault.)
By involving the creation of language with the creation of the uni-
verse, the author of Genesis shows himself or herself to be a poet; by
carefully separating the creation of language from any sort of super-
natural potency, Socrates shows himself to be a philosopher. Cratylus
himself keeps trying to introduce poetry into the dialogue: “I believe,
Socrates, the true account of the matter to be, that a power more than
human gave things their first names, and that the names which are thus
given are necessarily their true names” (438c). But Socrates keeps chal-
lenging such lines of speculation, keeps reducing words to defective
human inventions. What Cratylus would charge with glamour (itself a
word etymologically related to grammar), Socrates would leave com-
monplace, stumpy. To write literature it helps to believe that the phonic
element of language contains some dim vestige of the huge voice of
God the Father, and that etymological relations among words are trac-
es of some primal unity of human speech, language ante-­Babel. In that
sense every poet is Judeo-­Christian—or Cratylian.

Music about music’s origin also falls into two categories: Judeo-­
Christian and Greek. Composers following the Judeo-­Christian tradi-
tion rarely pay much attention to the brief biblical mention of the first
musician (“And his brother’s name was Jubal: he was the father of all
such as handle the harp and organ,” Genesis 4:21); instead they seek

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ways of embodying in wordless sound the dark words with which the
Bible begins:

1
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2And
the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon
the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the
face of the waters. 3And God said, Let there be light: and there
was light.

This passage conceives creation as a theme appropriately grasped by

the eye. It is as if the eye exists even before the universe exists. The ear
also exists in that there seems to be someone to hear the words as well
as to see the images—unless God is simply talking to himself as he
utters the great command for light. But composers still face the task of
translating from the eye to the ear in order to produce creation music
based on the beginning of Genesis.
The void of Genesis 1:2 might suggest silence, but a musical com-
position that opens with silence is unlikely to be dramatic in the proper
way, so it is easier to interpret void as a something like a vague roaring,
a tohu-­bohu in which all sounds are mixed together before being care-
fully separated into finite notes. The universe, before it comes into
being, is pure depth: it is God’s task to create the shallows, to invent
surfaces and inflections, desinences. The dark waters seem to be a thick
slosh, all the elements co-­present, commingled, waiting for God to
qualify them.
In Western music the most famous account is Haydn’s oratorio
The Creation (1798), which opens with a flagrantly literal version of
chaos. Haydn was a Moses by temperament, a lawgiver who legislated
(not single-­handedly, not out of nothing) the sonata form of the sym-
phony, in ways that would stand for two hundred years or so. But he
was also Mosaic in that he was determined both to give laws and to

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break them. Sometimes I wonder whether his greatest delight might

have been the plaisir de rompre; and there is perhaps no passage in his
entire huge body of work that displays more of his singular energy
than the opening of The Creation. The notion of embodying originary
chaos in art is, as we shall see, far more attractive to composers than to
poets (and this is a principal way in which music about origins differs
from literature about origins): poets, philosophers, and scripture writ-
ers discuss chaos but don’t typically begin with a disordered agram-
matical string of words.
For the formalist Haydn, there was no greater challenge, no great-
er incentive, than the instruction “without form, and void”—wüst und
leer, “waste and empty,” as Luther’s Bible has it. Haydn conceived tran-
scendental waste as punctuationlessness, as he noted to his friend
Fredrik Samuel Silverstolpe: “You have certainly noticed how I avoid-
ed the resolutions that you would most readily expect. The reason is,
that there is no form in anything yet.”16 The prelude, marked “Repre-
sentation of Chaos,” opens as a somewhat undifferentiated loudness—
not quite an arrhythmia, not quite an anharmonia (God’s first creative
act is a thick C minor chord), but with tendencies in these directions. It
is a stately tumbling of various figures—dominant arpeggios, chro-
matic surges—we hear a slow seething of the deep, a stirring of a krak-
en, a blank aimless tumult, inexpressive, panexpressive. Everything is
happening and nothing is happening: Carl Friedrich Zelter, Goethe ’s
music adviser, caught this quality well: “One is astonished at the multi-
tude of small, playful figures that swarm round huge dark masses, like
clouds of insects against the great horizon.”17 But as Haydn said, the
chief effect arises from the absence of cadence; the ear loses its bear-
ings in an ungoverned harmonic space, until God creates light in a
great tingly blare of C major. Out of the undistinguished there comes
distinction. Ultimately, Haydn’s orchestra will make more and more
precise semantic divisions: Adam is a character in the oratorio,

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a cheerful bumpkin, but the Adamic role of the namer of things is

granted to the orchestra in collaboration with the archangel Raphael.
In the recitativo accompagnato “Straight opening her fertile womb”
they denominate the animals in Eden by pasting a word onto an imita-
tion of a sound or a motion-­pattern: several links in the great chain of
being are inspected with care, including the tawny lion, the flexible
tyger, the nimble stag, all the way down to the worm’s sinuous grace.
Other composers have found this template useful for creation
music. In his prelude to the Genesis Suite, op. 44 (1945), Arnold Schoen-
berg devised a chaos that embarks on phonic terror more doggedly
than Haydn’s: first an abrupt vibration, a stark chord crazed with a tam-­
tam blow, then a tuba groping desultorily after some melody that it
can’t find; but Schoenberg’s chaos, exactly like Haydn’s, ends on a clear
choral C, though its ecstasy seems more perplexed, inconclusive. Per-
haps Schoenberg made a more impressive Let there be light effect in his
Kol nidre, op. 38 (1939), in which a speaker intones the mighty fiat
while a flexatone (a piece of thin metal suspended in a frame) sounds an
eerie tremolo, a sort of fireburst in the ear. It is relevant that this noise
might also be appropriate for chaos: in the twentieth century the bound-
ary between chaos and cosmos was often shifty, queasy, and created
things often emerged dripping with a certain residual uncreatedness.
But as I said, this is another model for musical creation stories: the
Greek. The locus classicus for the Greek model is Handel’s Ode for
St. Cecilia’s Day (1739), to a celebrated poem written in 1687 by
John Dryden. Now Cecilia, the legendary inventor of the organ,
was a Christian saint; but in mythologizing creation Dryden pays little
attention to Genesis:

From harmony, from heav’nly harmony

This universal frame began:
When Nature underneath a heap

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Of jarring atoms lay,

And could not heave her head,
The tuneful voice was heard from high:
“Arise, ye more than dead.”
Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry,
In order to their stations leap,
And Music’s pow’r obey.
From harmony, from heav’nly harmony
This universal frame began:
From harmony to harmony
Thro’ all the compass of the notes it ran,
The diapason closing full in Man.

This cosmogony seems derived from Greek sources, particularly the

atomic theory of Democritus and the natural philosophy of Empedocles.
In his poem On Nature (mid-­fifth-­century b.c.e.) Empedocles wrote of
four elements: earth, air, water, and fire; according to Aristotle,
Empedocles was the first to distinguish these elements clearly. The
elements are governed by two conflicting forces, Love and Strife: Love
unites them, Strife makes them fly asunder; neither can finally conquer
the other, so the universe exists in a state of continual slow oscillation
between chaos and cosmos.

A twofold tale I shall tell: at one time it grew to be one alone

out of many, at another again it grew apart to be many out of
one. Double is the birth of mortal things and double their
failing; for one is brought to birth and destroyed by the
coming together of all things, the other is nurtured and flies
apart as they grow apart again. And these things never cease
their continual exchange, now through Love all coming
together into one, now again each carried apart by the hatred

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of Strife. So insofar as it has learned to grow one from many,

and again as the one grows apart [there] grow many, thus far
do they come into being and have no stable life; but insofar as
they never cease their continual interchange, thus far they
exist always changeless in the cycle.18

Dryden substitutes Music for Love—and in an act of great audacity of

imagination, he makes Music also play the role of Strife in the poem’s
final lines:

As from the pow’r of sacred lays

The spheres began to move,
And sung the great Creator’s praise
To all the bless’d above;
So when the last and dreadful hour
This crumbling pageant shall devour,
The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And music shall untune the sky.

Dryden squeezes the endless cycles of Empedocles into a single

Christian cycle, creation and uncreation, one governed by Music the
Organizer, the other governed by Music the Untuner. Even for Dryden
and Handel, a strange intimacy exists between cosmos and chaos.
Handel’s music is also informed more by Greek ideas than by Chris-
tian ones. When his narrator describes how nature underneath a heap of
jarring atoms lay, there is a certain solemnity, if not a biblical waste or
void; but soon we get diminished chords picked out in staccato strings,
or dissected into quick jags, almost finical in texture. There is nothing of
the abyss; all is scurry and exact pitch. The disordered elements sort
themselves out into more normal chord formations, more normal

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rhythms, as Music works her magic; eventually the notes run merrily
through the compass of a fine Mixolydian scale, and the diapason closing
full on man closes full on a deep, rich D-­major chord, as if humankind
were both the ultimate bass and the highest achievement of creation.
Handel was not the first composer to experiment with an Empedo-
clean version of a creation story. Two years earlier, in his ballet Les
élémens (1737), Jean-­Féry Rebel had explicitly attempted to portray
chaos as a heavy commingled condition: the elements slowly disentan-
gle themselves from a sort of musical mud, like the quicksandy chaos
through which Satan struggles in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1674), “With
head, hands, wings, or feet pursues his way, / And swims or sinks, or
wades, or creeps, or flyes” (2.947–48). Rebel explicitly noted that he
“dared to undertake to link the idea of the confusion of the elements
with that of confusion of harmony.”19 This opening symphony, Le
cahos, presents thick clots of unstructured laborious sound that the vio-
lins and flutes try to smooth into scales; seven times the chaos music
returns, with diminishing vehemence, as the rule of Love supersedes
the old anarchy. Each element has its own dance: dainty flute chirps for
air, for fire brisk rushes of violins within a stately chaconne, and so
forth; but we already heard these flutes and violins prominently in the
chaos music, as if the later dances were promotions out of the previous
mess.
Empedocles is not the only Greek source for musical creation
mythology: Pythagoras, the semi-­real sixth-­century b.c.e. philosopher,
has also provided a good deal of inspiration. Playing on his monochord
(a one-­stringed instrument) he noted that the octave was generated by
halving the length of the string, given a constant tension; and that the
other basic concords (the fifth, the fourth) were simple 3:2 or 4:3 ratios;
furthermore he described occult correlations between this phonic arith-
metic with the movement of the planets—the “music of the spheres”
that, according to Iamblichus, Pythagoras alone of all men could hear:

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World-­famous golden-­thighed Pythagoras

Fingered upon a fiddle-­stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard. [W. B. Yeats, “Among
School Children”]

There is no particular creation story associated with Pythagoras, but the

notion of chaos as some themeless musical pudding that resolves itself
first into pure consonant intervals and then into intelligible scales has a
strong Pythagorean aspect. Such a movement can be heard in the
previous musical chaoses we’ve studied; but there are several other
works in which Pythagoras is, in effect, the secret hero of the piece. The
twentieth century is particularly rich in Pythagorean music, probably
because the fundamentals of music were then being scrutinized with
such agony, such delight. Pythagoras smiles in certain compositions by
Harry Partch and La Monte Young written in just intonation, exact
numerical pitch ratios, instead of the usual well-­tempered system, with
its cunning compromises that permit (say) Da and CJ to be taken as the
same note—they are (mathematically speaking) not identical, but need
to be treated as identical to make most keyboard instruments possible.
But in any dramatic composition in which the Greek lyre is the central
stage prop, it is likely that Pythagoras invisibly presides.
Arthur Honegger’s ballet-­melodrama Amphion (1929) is a case in
point. Paul Valéry’s elegant text concerns not the creation of the world
but the creation of music and the creation of architecture: Amphion
was the son of Jupiter who built the city of Thebes by means of
music—the stones shaped themselves into buildings purely through
the lyre’s motive force. (As early as 1904 Valéry had tried to persuade
Debussy to collaborate on a version of the Orpheus legend, evidently
making some use of an 1891 essay on architecture.)20 Honegger’s piece
opens with a soft sustained chord made out of a pile of fourths; the cel-
los start to chitter out the same fourths as a rising melody; then the

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xylophone dares to experiment with another interval, a fifth. On one

hand we’re dwelling in Pythagoras’s dreamworld of perfect conso-
nances; on the other nothing seems yet to make sense. A tower of
fourths is an impressive construct, but hard for the ear to grasp. The
music illustrates Valéry’s stage direction, “The Harmony of the spheres
reigns, in monotone.” It is a sort of not-­yet-­music.
Amphion is lulled by a chorus of dreams, but the Muses come and
scatter them—“The silence is made of Muses.” The music grows more
and more ravishing, as if the Muses were the sirens of Odysseus, or
those other sirens that Plato placed on each of the crystalline spheres
on which the heavens rotate, sirens whose singing makes up the sphere-­
clang. They invoke Apollo; Apollo tells Amphion, “I place in you the
origin of order,” and grants him the gift of the lyre—“On its tense
strings you will seek and you will find the roads that the gods follow.”
But when Amphion grasps the lyre and tries to play it, the first sound
that emerges is one of terror and astonishment—Honegger illustrates
this with a loud bitonal chord, superimposing G minor and A minor.
Amphion, however, is a quick learner, and the second sound he makes
is a delicate, nonaggressive version of the same bitonal chord, around
which a flute plays a simple melody and a harp plays figures construct-
ed mostly out of thirds and sixths—“All nature is under a spell.” Both
in the discord and in the concord there is a certain sense that Amphion
has discovered that talisman of talismans, the third. Now Honegger’s
music has, to this point, availed itself of every resource of modern
harmony—we have heard a good deal of tonal music in thirds. But this
is the first moment in which the third has enjoyed special privilege, had
itself called attention to: the initial music of the spheres, and the great,
much-­repeated vocatives (“Apollon!” “Amphion!”) have been based
on fourths or fifths. To build the city of Thebes, Amphion will need
resources of violence and subtlety, not just the monotonously perfect
intervals that move the monotonously perfect heavens.

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Before long Amphion is preluding skillfully on his lyre, riffing on

his root noise, the G minor/A minor bitonal chord. Together they
sound most of the notes of the Mixolydian scale (the scale of the domi-
nant in tonal harmony, a major scale with a flatted seventh). And
according to the stage direction Amphion is indeed in the act of creat-
ing the scales—the labor preparatory to building the city. But Honeg-
ger never allows Amphion the satisfaction of playing a simple pure
scale. The music for scale invention is boisterous, complicated, a mix-
ture of many different scales, including quite odd ones, such as the
whole-­tone. Amphion exults in chromaticism, dissonance, exotic
timbres—his wild imagination refuses to obey any normal scalar pat-
tern, as he thrusts out his tone ladders in every direction. The gods
themselves seem a bit too tame for such bizarreries—it takes a mortal,
Amphion, to sin so madly, to erect such labyrinths and towers of sound.
And in a great fugue the stones lift themselves out of their sleep and
become a city—“What frightening life invades all nature!” The head
of the fugue tune is a simple octave drop, but as it grows excited it mis-
shapes itself into other intervals—the octave clonk may suffice for the
foundation stones, but the triglyphs and metopes and the temple ’s oth-
er ornaments will require more delicate work. Pythagoras himself
knew hammers as well as strings: there is an old story that he listened
to blacksmiths, and noted that two hammers, one twice as heavy as the
other, would sound an octave apart. This is a doubtful tale—for one
thing, hammers struck against anvils don’t vary their pitch in propor-
tion to the weight of the hammer—but it is oddly congruent with Hon-
egger’s lusty octaves for the building fugue.
The end of the work is sad. Having built the city, Amphion finds
that his usefulness is over—the Muses seek some other man to inspire,
and a “veiled woman, image of Love or Death” leads Amphion away.
The man has so identified himself with his frozen music, his melted
architecture, that he has become a superfluous thing, and must vanish.

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Honegger leads us directly to Stravinsky, another mythologist of

music’s coming-­into-­being. There are passages in Honegger’s Amphion
that have a strong savor of Stravinsky’s Apollon musagète of the previ-
ous year—a ballet about prosody, a ballet that attains its apotheosis in
the form of an iambic foot, suggesting that Apollo was born specifically
to give a fundamental rhythm to music and poetry: “The real subject of
Apollo . . . is versification, which implies something arbitrary and arti-
ficial to most people, though to me art is arbitrary and must be artificial.
The basic rhythmic patterns are iambic.”21 Stravinsky was obsessed
with writing music about the origin of music. This is true at all phases
in his career—even The Rite of Spring (1913) can be construed in this
fashion, since the high bassoon solo at the work’s beginning is in some
sense the work of a Russian Pan, cutting the first reed and making the
first music. The ballet Orpheus (1948) begins with descending Phrygian
scales, as if Orpheus were inventing the mode before our ears—the
most perfectly Pythagorean beginning imaginable. (I have a recording
by the Atrium Musicae de Madrid of the first Pythian Ode, as presum-
ably played and sung in ancient Greece; it is uncannily like the opening
of Stravinsky’s Orpheus, but the reconstruction of archaic music is so
speculative that it’s possible that Stravinsky’s Orpheus influenced the
producers of this recording.) Orpheus continues with a number of allu-
sions to Pythagorean rudiments: during the Dance of the Angel of
Death, a trumpet plays some open intervals in a manner that Stravinsky
himself compared to the bugle call “taps.” The trajectory of the whole
ballet is similar to that of The Rite of Spring: music’s basic elements are
first presented in a more or less simple way, then develop into savage
complexity, breathless heaves, lurches, paroxysms—the earlier ballet
terminates in the sacrifice of a virgin to the god of spring, the later in
the dismemberment of Orpheus by the Maenads.
Stravinsky’s most ambitious attempt to mythologize origins
occurred in his television mystery play The Flood (1962). I wonder

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whether Stravinsky knew Honegger’s Amphion, because there are a

number of points of similarity between the two works, even though
one is based on an urbane post-­symbolist poem recounting a Greek
myth, and the other on a medieval Christian play text (also, in its way,
highly sophisticated). Each moves from chaos toward architecture:
Honegger’s chaos begins with an elementary stack of fourths, Stravin-
sky’s (more excitingly) with a chord containing all twelve notes of the
chromatic scale, spread out over the whole span of the orchestra.
Amphion constructs the city of Thebes; Noah constructs the Ark—
Stravinsky imagined “builders (dancers) who carry invisible boards
and beams and who hammer non-­existent nails”—but the hammering,
though intended to be invisible on television, is perfectly audible in the
orchestra.22 Stravinsky conceived the builders as robots: “The dancers’
movements must be as mechanical as a watch, and the builders’ arms
should work like semaphores”—that is, as pure incarnations of music,
puppets who respond to the orchestra’s inexorable declarations of
rhythm.23 As in Orpheus, Stravinsky is deriving action from musical
fundamentals. The base elements of music haunted him through the
whole compositional process: he even thought of supplementing
Noah’s line “The earth is overflowed with flood” with “a pure noise,
like a sinus tone.”24 A sine-­wave generator, if brought into the sound
world of The Flood, would have been something like the wordless ulti-
mate voice of God, something beyond the pair of bass singers who
represent God elsewhere in the play.
Stravinsky was bemused by the task of representing chaos: “My
‘Representation of Chaos’ is not so different from Haydn’s. . . . My
‘material of Chaos’ is limited, however, and I couldn’t make my Chaos
last very long.”25 And indeed, after the sounding of the twelve-­note
chord and a few thick spasms, the chaos music tapers out into Jacob’s
Ladder, a cleanly stitched tracery of high woodwind notes;26 then we
hear a Te Deum, as God asserts his presence, unchaoses the universe.

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The important musical events come with astonishing speed in these

opening bars. In the chaos music (as in Haydn’s) there is little feeling
for rhythm; the Te Deum, by contrast, is highly active rhythmically:
God creates by imposing rhythmic shape on the void, the formlessness.
Stravinsky noted that he associated the Jacob’s Ladder effect with
Chaos at the play’s beginning, and with Sin at the play’s end. The
Ladder—even eighth notes in a 12 4
bar, giving the impression of a
meterless recitative—terminates with a piccolo monotonously alter-
nating between a high C and a very high Da, a minor ninth above.
Then comes the Te Deum—Stravinsky said it was “not Gregorian but
Igorian chant”—which begins with a tune that simply alternates,
with much metrical inflection, between CG and DG. There is a certain
subliminal sense here that a minor second is bad, and a major second
is good.
This impression becomes sharper later, when the Serpent comes to
tempt Eve. Stravinsky described his music as follows: “The Tarnhelm
music for two muted horns is likely to be my first and last attempt to
compose a belly dance.”27 It is the merest sketch of a belly dance, a
dance for the skeleton of a belly dancer. Once again it is all but rhythm-
less: one horn simply alternates between B and C, while the other plays
various desultory notes, beginning with GG. In Wagner’s Der Ring des
Nibelungen, the Tarnhelm motive—the motive of the shape-­shifting
helmet—appears initially as a GG minor chord that transforms itself
into an E minor chord, and then a B chord. It is a harmonic riddle that
poses the question, How many triads contain the note B?—B is the one
stable element as the motive creeps up and contracts and creeps up
again a little farther. (Similarly, Alberich is always Alberich, whether in
the form of dragon or toad—he is going nowhere, just as the motive is
going nowhere.) Stravinsky has oversimplified the Tarnhelm into the
emptiest possible oscillation of two notes separated by a minor second.
Chaos or Sin is little more than a vain mindless transit across a minor

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ninth—that is, a minor second at an octave’s remove; Satan is the same

thing.
In music drama it is usual for the Devil to get the best music;
Stravinsky is extraordinary in making Chaos and Satan bores—loud
bores, or insinuating bores—shapelessnesses—whereas God’s shaping
force is portrayed with the utmost musical vigor. In the twelfth century
the German abbess Hildegard von Bingen wrote a music drama called
Ordo virtutum in which the Devil is a speaking role: only the theologi-
cally pure possess the gift of song. Stravinsky called the Satan of The
Flood a “high, slightly pederastic tenor”—though it’s not a speaking
role, he cajoles or yelps in weak talky melodies.28 Perhaps Hildegard
and Stravinsky are among the most Christian of all composers: God is
the only musical presence worth attending to.
It may be that in the future, if the hold of both Genesis and
Empedocles on the artistic imagination starts to weaken, composers
will experiment with more scientific accounts of creation. The Big
Bang would be difficult to conceive in musical terms, though Iannis
Xenakis’s experiment (in Pithoprakta, 1956) with writing music based
on representations of the distribution of gas molecules in an enclosed
space (pizzicati and glissandi figure prominently) might suggest how a
cosmological music might come into being. Haydn himself may have
attended to scientists as well as preachers: he was astonished when he
looked though William Herschel’s telescope, and Donald Tovey has
suggested that the representation of Chaos in The Creation was inspired
by the nebular hypothesis of eighteenth-century astronomy.

Until fairly recent times, composers have tended to assume that listeners
have weak ears: that we need regular patient reminders of the tonic
note and the normal shape of the scale or mode. (Every so often I
become exasperated when composers seem to treat me like a child, and
I feel grateful to Johannes Ockeghem and Bach and Anton Webern for

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being grown-­ups writing for grown-­ups.) This is why so much music

seems to be about its own coming-­into-­being, about the creation of a
universe of musical discourse: the particular piece of music seems
never to stray from its rudiments. It is as if the earth and its
gravitational field have to be re-­created with each composition, and
Pythagoras hauled down from Elysium to affirm the right ratios of the
basic intervals.
But maybe music really is a precarious art and needs constant fin-
gering of its origins in order to prosper. And any work of art has to
re-­trace the whole history of its medium in order to take a strong posi-
tion in the chronicle of the world’s imagination.
The solidest work of art is in the end a flimsy thing, retaining a
foothold on existence by grace of a community of interpreters. And
works of art find ways of reminding us that all art is vain, all art not
only begins in chaos but ends in the void. Even apocalyptic composi-
tions, such as Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps (1941),
with its world-­rending Danse de la fureur, or Georg Philipp Tele-
mann’s Der Tag des Gerichts (1762), in which a singer describes graphi-
cally how the harmony of the spheres becomes sheer noise, and the
earth groans, and the moon whirls out of its orbit (Das sind sie, der
Verwüstung Zeichen), tend to move toward some transcendental calm—
the universe dissolves and leaves not a wrack behind.
In music there is the difference between cadence and cadenza. The
rules of tonality require that a piece, or an important section of a piece,
end with a cadence, an unequivocal return to the tonic note. This can
be understood in many ways, but sometimes has the feeling of a jack-­
in-­the-­box recoiling, latching his own lid, leaving you to wonder
whether anything happened at all. A cadenza has a more specialized
sense: it is usually a bit of vocal or instrumental virtuosity that delays
the actual cadence. In a concerto it is often left for the soloist to impro-
vise; marked in the score by a fermata, the cadenza seems outside the

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time scheme of the rest of the composition, a bubble in the text. Often
the cadenza has an unmetered feel, as if time had stopped and music
were expatiating on itself, free from the normal shackles of propriety,
even of meaning. Cadenzas tend toward rapture, fever, madness, as in
the great cadenza for flute and soprano in Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di
Lammermoor (1835), composed in 1888 by Mathilde Marchesi for Nellie
Melba. The music raves and then collapses, and this can be taken as a
sign that all music is a raving and a collapse. A cadenza is music’s
vanitas.
Sometimes a composer contrives to make you feel that the music
leaves off in a vacuum. A genial example is the thinning out of the
orchestral mass at the end of Haydn’s Farewell Symphony (1772): dur-
ing the finale, the musicians leave one by one, each snuffing out his
candle, until there are only two muted violins playing. This was intend-
ed as a friendly hint to Haydn’s employer that the musicians would like
to return home to their wives after a long summer in Eszterháza, but it
is possible to use Haydn’s technique to more somber ends: in the final
scene of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites (1957), the nuns go
to the guillotine one by one, singing a “Salve regina” that becomes
sparser and sparser.
Something of this shiver, this sense that the music is marching
toward its own nonexistence, can be achieved in purely instrumental
music. During the last minutes of Jean Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony
(1911), a chorale-­like theme, originally devised for an (abandoned)
orchestral setting of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,”29 experiments
with various constructions of itself, some highly chromatic, before it
simplifies, becoming increasingly stark and rigid, until finally it is no
theme at all, just the notes of an A minor chord repeated almost
rhythmlessly. The music has turned into catatonia.
Elsewhere in the twentieth-­century repertory we find symphonies
that end as if the music machine were breaking down, leaving only

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jammed gears and a strip of broken metal flapping back and forth—
Arthur Honegger’s Fifth Symphony (1950) is an example. And it is
possible to write music that erases itself, or simply gives itself over to
the empty space on which it is figured. Georg Friedrich Haas’s Torso
(1999–2000) is an orchestral realization of an unfinished C major piano
sonata by Schubert, D. 840 (1825). Schubert simply failed to complete
the music, but Haas’s Torso is as much about unfinishedness as it is
about Schubert. Toward the end of the last movement, Haas underlays
a Schubertian theme with a rapid ticking—then the theme ends, but the
ticking continues, a metronome furious that it has nothing left to mea-
sure; a sort of audible graph paper. Then the ticking stops. First music
ends, then time ends.
Composers in earlier centuries also made music that undoes itself.
In an oratorio written around 1650, Vanitas vanitatum II, attributed to
Giacomo Carissimi, pompous music depicting the pomp of royal life
suddenly collapses at the mention of the word vanity, like a balloon
pricked with a needle:

Scepters, crowns, purple pomp,

triumphs, laurels, honors, decorations,
glories, even games, and delights,
and feasts, and riches, all
is vanity and a shadow.

The simplest meaning of the word vanity is “emptiness.” This oratorio

is exactly equivalent to those seventeenth-­century still lifes in which a
skull and a housefly were somber signs of the transience of all things
mortal; Carissimi even builds long rests into the music, leaving the
listener to contemplate the fact that, of the things that pass away,
nothing passes away so quickly as music, which makes its little noise
and then is as if it never was. The French term for “still life” is nature

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morte, and the ticking in Haas’s Torso reappears, with much greater
orchestral variety, in his Natures mortes (2003), in which, according to
the composer’s own description, “In the middle section, the orchestra
pulses evenly in sixteenth notes, and the musical action dissolves into
points on a grid.”30 In many compositions by Haas and his contempo-
raries (Helmut Lachenmann, for example), the music overtly unmusics
itself; but I think that the music of every age constitutes itself through
the tension between sound’s self-­insistence and sound’s self-­extinction.
You can hear in a musical composition both the origin of music
and music’s vanishing. In 1907 Mahler told Sibelius that a symphony
must be like the world and embrace everything; but every musical com-
position, every artwork, embraces all time and all space:

If all things be in all,

As I thinke, since all, which were, are, and shall
Bee, be made of the same elements:
Each thing, each thing implies or represents. [John Donne, Satyre
5, c. 1599]

Nothing needs to be connected to anything else since they are not

separated irrevocably to begin with. [John Cage]31

Narrating a Piece of Music

Each of the arts contains its own narratology. Literature is good at
telling stories, and also good at explaining how it manages to tell stories.
Music is also good at telling stories, not only in tone poems but also in
movements constructed as a theme and variations. In Thomas Mann’s
Doktor Faustus, the hero’s music teacher Kretschmar plays the varia-
tions movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata op. 111 and narrates its
story as he goes along:

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The arietta theme, created for adventures and odd destinies,

though born so innocent and idyllic, appears at once and
pronounces itself in sixteen measures, a melody that can be
reduced to a short, soulful cry that steps forth at the end of
the first half: only three notes, an eighth, a sixteenth, and a
dotted quarter, which can only be scanned as something
like: “heav-­en’sblue” or “Sad-­inlove” or “Go-­withgrace” or
“one-­fineday” or “mea-­dowland”—and that is all. Now what
happens to this gentle statement, this thing made so quiet and
melancholy, as it undergoes rhythmic-­harmonic-­contrapuntal
transformation, all those consequences with which the master
blesses it or damns it—into what nights and what overglare,
crystalline spheres, where cold and heat, rest and ecstasy are
one and the same, he hurls it and lifts it up, you might call it
wide-­ranging, wondrous, strange, all too magnificent, without
giving it a name, because it is precisely nameless.32

The plot of a whole Faust novel, in fact the plot of the very Faust novel
we’re reading, lies hidden in Beethoven’s sonata. Unprogrammatic
music, like this Beethoven composition, deals in various nameless-
nesses, and yet half-­namable apparitions keep eerily coming into
being. Just as a dactylic musical figure might tentatively take verbal
shape as “heav-­en’sblue” or “sad-­inlove,” so the progress of a
single musical theme, as it is deconstructed into a mere trill, or
reconstructed by the addition of a fourth note in the middle of
the first three, might tentatively take on the form of a particular
narrative.
Any assignment of a particular narrative to a piece of music is
adventitious, indeed open to ridicule. Yet a refusal to allow music its
narrative moment is also, I believe, a mistake. Let me try to explain a
way out of this unpleasant situation.

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The most acute narratologists of music are often the most skepti-
cal of music’s possibilities of narrating. I might cite Jean-­Jacques
Nattiez:

Linguistic syntax, as we know, is grounded principally in a

subject and a predicate, and the predicate tells us what has
been stated concerning the former. There is a logical connec-
tion between the two.
In music, however, connections are situated within the
sonorous discourse, not on the level of a story that this
discourse is said to narrate. When I hear a march in Mahler’s
second symphony, I imagine that it’s got something to do with
a band of people, but I don’t know which people. The march
may come closer, or fade into the distance . . . but I don’t
know where they are coming from, or where they are going.
Hearing Till Eulenspiegel, I can (aided by the title) recognize
that it deals with the life and death of an individual. I can hear
how he runs, jumps . . . but what, exactly, is he doing? . . .
Literary narrative is an invention, a lie. Music cannot lie. The
responsibility for joining character-­phantoms with action-­
shadows lies with me, the listener, since it does not lie within
music’s semiological capacities to join subject and predi-
cate. . . . Music, to cite Adorno’s paradoxical comment on
Mahler, is “a narrative that narrates nothing.” . . .
Music is not a narrative, but an incitement to make a
narrative, to comment, to analyze. We could never overem-
phasize the difference between music, and music as the object
of metalanguages to which it gives rise. Only thus can we start
to outline its symbolic functioning.33

This lucid, beautifully written statement deserves much praise. And yet
I believe that Nattiez has exaggerated the difference between music and

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narrative. Music is, despite Adorno, a narrative that does narrate some-
thing; and what it narrates, despite Nattiez, is not strictly a whim of the
listener’s but something built into the music itself.
Let me slightly alter Nattiez’s example, from a march (which
march?) in Mahler’s Second Symphony (1895) to the cortège in the
third movement of Mahler’s First (1889). This movement, marked
Feierlich und gemessen, ohne zu schleppen (solemn and measured, with-
out dragging) is also, audibly, a procession—and whence it comes and
whither it goes, we know not. But would it be a better narrative, a more
telling narrative, a more narrative narrative if we somehow knew its
origin and its destination? If we had two German place names, or
(in the manner of old-­fashioned novels) two letters of the alphabet
(A Procession from B—— to H——), would the implied story be
much altered? Modern narratology has given the most intense scrutiny
to the chronological structure of written narrative, to the distinction
between singular and habitual action, to the language that specifies time
and place (then, here, now, usually); but perhaps what we need first is a
clear notion of what constitutes an event. One possible definition for an
event is a consequential impinging upon a subject’s body—a blow of
the fist, a long-­awaited kiss, a swallowing of poison, a rape—or a
displacement of an impinging, such as a curse, a love letter, or the
shocking news of someone’s death.
I propose that the event, the kernel of the narrative, can in some
cases be specified as exactly by music as by words. The jumping in
Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel, the salto mortale in Stravinsky’s Renard have
more kinesthetic immediacy than a verbal description of those leaps
could provide; and insofar as a narrative is a temporal coordination of
physical impingings—kicks, hops, caresses—music has tremendous
narrative power. The third movement of Mahler’s First Symphony
begins as slow, minor-­key version of the folk tune “Bruder Martin”
(also called “Frère Jacques”); its middle section expatiates on the tune

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that accompanies the words “Auf der Straße steht ein Lindenbaum / da
hab’ ich zum ersten Mal im Schlaf geruht!” (By the road stands a lime
tree; there for the first time I rested in sleep) from the fourth song (“Die
zwei blauen Augen”) from Mahler’s song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden
Gesellen (1883–85; 1896)—a song of difficult consolation after the
extremes of loneliness and abandonment. But the somber “Bruder
Martin” procession returns. It is not hard to reconstruct a number of
precise narratives that fit this emotional trajectory:

A child has died, and this death is imaged as a nightmare dead

march based on the child’s favorite song—but the nightmare
briefly yields to a deeper, more restful sleep.

A child mourns the loss of someone or something he loves—

though he is so young that his mourning is only a kind of trial
sketch of what grief is to an adult, and the composer is aware
of all that the child is ignorant of.

A grown man is mourning the death of his innocence, the

passing away of the child in him, but comes to a kind of accep-
tance of maturity—indeed, he pre-­dismisses his own senti-
mentality by his self-­conscious distortion of the nursery tune.

Now it may be difficult to choose among these various narrative

scenarios (the first of which is obviously indebted to Mahler’s 1905
Kindertotenlieder), but that difficulty of choice does not mean that the
music is vague: it only means that a verbal storyteller has to choose
among several equivalent plotlines in trying to achieve the desired nar-
rative effect, while the composer can operate at the narrative core of
things. As it happens, we know, more or less, what story Mahler had in
mind, since the original subtitle of the movement, “Funeral March in

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 What Is Music?

Fig. 45.  Moritz von Schwind, How the Beats Buried the Hunter (1850).

the Manner of Callot,” specifies a certain well-­known illustration

(though in fact by Moritz von Schwind, not Jacques Callot)—as Mahler
himself noted: “The composer received the immediate inspiration for
this piece from a pictorial parody well known to all children in South
Germany, Des Jägers Leichenbegängnis (The Hunter’s Funeral Proces-
sion).” So the “solution” to the quest for narrative is:

Weasels and foxes bawling into their handkerchiefs, rabbits

and badgers lighting the way with torches, deer carrying the
coffin, a duck contorting itself in midair like one of Giotto’s
grief-­stricken angels, cat musicians chanting the dirge in front,
all pretending to mourn the death of the hunter (fig. 45).

But any narrative in which Experience dresses itself in the distort-

ed garments of Innocence would be equally satisfactory. To be sure,
there are other strategies that the storyteller might use: either by
emphasizing different parts of Mahler’s movement (such as the klezmer-­
style, Jewish-­sounding music that precedes the quotation from Lieder
eines fahrenden Gesellen) or by citing Mahler’s rejected program from
Jean Paul’s Titan (1800–1803). This novel provides a number of

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possibilities for narratives, all of which are somewhat contrived. I will

mention three. (1) the hero, Albano, at one point attends a prince’s
funeral and hears muffled drums reverberating as if through cata-
combs—this can be linked to certain musical effects at the movement’s
beginning. (2) Jean Paul considered titling the novel Anti-­Titan, and a
certain convergence of opposites can be heard in Mahler’s music: turn-
ing the cheerful “Bruder Martin” round into a dirge is one of many.
(3) Bruno Walter thought that Mahler intended the funeral march on
the “Bruder Martin” theme to “bury” Roquairol, the scoffer—the spir-
it of self-­mockery, the internal critic that prevented a gifted man from
attaining mastery of his art.34
But I believe that there are elements that every plausible narrative
of Mahler’s movement would have in common: perhaps the pain that
arises out of the inevitable conflict of sacred and profane perspectives;
irony’s choking on itself. When Nattiez writes that “music is not a nar-
rative, but an incitement to make a narrative,” he is in a sense right; but
it could also be said that a written narrative is nothing but an incitement
to make a narrative, since written stories (as Wolfgang Iser and others
have shown) become significant to us only insofar as we fill in their
blanks, as we remap them onto private grids of thought and feeling.
Music and word narrative are equally true and equally fictitious: we
give music too much credit (or not enough) if we say that music cannot
lie. Indeed the funeral march in Mahler’s First Symphony pronounces
itself a kind of lie, insofar as it constructs itself out of melodic material
chosen precisely because it is unsatisfactory for a funeral march. Musi-
cal discourse is just as fallen, impure, thickly human, as written dis-
course. Our music is no better or worse than we are.

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 CHAPTER FOUR

3 Nine Definitions 2

1. Multimedial  A multimedial artwork comprises elements of two

or more media. An opera is strongly multimedial since it comprises
music, text, and decor, and often dance as well; a painting in which a
few stray musical notes are depicted is weakly multimedial.

2. Intermedial  An intermedial artwork is the imaginary artwork

generated by the spectator through the interplay of two or more
media—the transient, complex thing that is assembled in each specta-
tor’s mind through attention to the elements in different media. An
opera is intermedial because it is conceived not solely as its music or its
text or its decor, but rather as some virtual entity brought into being by
the superposition of these three components. The creator, or creators,
of the artwork may use various procedures to guide the spectator
toward a desired synthesis, but these procedures are heuristic and often
ineffective.
In some sense every visitor to the Louvre sees the same Mona Lisa,
even though every interpretation and judgment and point of view and
seizure of detail can and will differ. A painting can be fully quantified
according to size, pigment substance, gradation of saturation and hue,

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direction and pressure of brushstroke, and so forth. But each member

of the audience at a performance of Tosca experiences a different opera
because the opera exists only as an airy shimmer generated from com-
ponents each one of which bulges and recedes in a space uniquely
defined by, and for, a particular spectator. Each component is quantifi-
able, but the interaction of the various components is chaotic because
governed by innumerable variables, including shifts and losses of
attention, adjustments of focus, and sudden reprioritizations of the
components. A work in a single medium may have a limited there-­ness,
but it is still much more there than any intermedial work can hope to be.

3. Figures of Consonance and Dissonance  Intermedial figments in

which the spectator feels that the components of a multimedial artwork
glide together in a mutually reinforcing way, thereby creating a single
potent effect, are known as figures of consonance. These are opposed
to figures of dissonance, intermedial figments in which the spectator feels
that the component artworks fail to fuse, remain in a state of discord.
Richard Wagner’s music dramas offer spectacular examples in
which the music, the text, and the stage action all come together to pro-
duce an oceanic experience, as at the end of Götterdämmerung (1876),
where Brünnhilde rides into her funeral pyre and the Rhine overflows
its banks to delirious music that modulates like swelling waves and
flickers like flames. Bertolt Brecht noted that he and Kurt Weill wrote
music dramas specifically intended to produce in the audience a critical,
canny, anti-­Wagnerian, anti-­narcotic response—as in Die Dreigroschen­
oper (1928), where Mack the Knife and Jenny reminiscence about their
bygone days as pimp and whore to a swoony romantical tune. Here the
music and the text undercut one another.

4. Concinnity  What I call concinnity is the limit-­point of consonance

in figures of consonance, in which the spectator feels that the

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component artworks are perfectly congruent to one another. I intend

this word as a pun on the word consign, but with a meaning different
from its usual one: as a co-­sign, a signing-­together, the state in which
the signifiers of the component artworks all point to an identical signi-
fied. (If I were Derrida I would speak of consignity.)
Concinnity is always somewhat illusory because no sign in one
medium can mean exactly the same thing when translated into a differ-
ent medium. The image of a woman with many babies clinging to her
body is a Renaissance icon of charity, and an engraving of such a wom-
an captioned Charity is a simple and strong figure of consonance. The
correlation between the engraving and the one-­word text may possess
great conventional force, but the word charity is not the same thing
as an image of a woman with many babies, which may be simply a
photograph of a new mother of sextuplets who has been given a year’s
supply of diapers as a publicity stunt by the Pampers company.

5. Abrasion  As concinnity is the limit-­point of figures of consonance,

abrasion is the limit-­point of figures of dissonance, in which the
component artworks seem to clash incoherently, attack, erode, and
possibly destroy one another’s effects. Lacking any sense that the
component artworks add up to a satisfactory whole, the spectator may
be disappointed, teased, or exhilarated.
When Francis Ford Coppola used Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries in
Apocalypse Now (1979) to accompany helicopters strafing a Vietnamese
village, that was a plausible concinnity—possibly a more impressive
intermedial consonance than Wagner himself achieved; when Federico
Fellini used the same music in 8½ (1963) to accompany feeble old folks
stumbling around a spa, that was a plausible abrasion.

6. Counterpoint  In certain figures of dissonance the component

artworks seem to form interesting patterns from their friction against

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one another, without agreeing on a single effect, making what is known

as counterpoint. An example can be found in the aria “Le calme rentre
dans mon coeur,” from Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride (1779), where
Orestes sings that he has at last become calm again, while nervous
figures in the orchestra tell us that he’s deceiving himself.

7. Pseudomorphic  Pseudomorphosis occurs when, in a work in a

single artistic medium, the medium is asked to ape, or do the work of,
some alien medium. This typically involves a certain wrenching or
scraping against the grain of the original medium. This word was
introduced into musicology by Theodor Adorno to describe the way
Stravinsky’s music is constructed according to collage principles stolen
from visual art, and therefore, at bottom, remains static just as a painting
is static.
I don’t like this word, because the prefix pseudo-­ expresses
Adorno’s contempt for the whole notion of pseudomorphosis. But I
will use it, because the word exists and means what I want it to mean,
even though I have no prejudice against pseudomorphic art. I might
also note that Adorno took the word from Oswald Spengler, who used
it in The Decline of the West to describe certain structural elements
retained from an older culture, elements that had lost any relevance or
meaning in the new culture: decadence reified. (Spengler, in turn, bor-
rowed the term from geology, where it refers to a crystal structure in
one mineral that is more characteristic of some other mineral, a sort of
mineral disguise.)

8. Pseudomorph  A spectator confronted with a pseudomorphic work

of art may construct a pseudomorph: an image of what the pseudomor-
phic artwork would be if it were actually in the medium that it seems to
aspire to be in. In 1902, Gustav Klimt painted a frieze in which he tried
to imagine Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in visual terms. When you

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enter the exhibition space, you do not actually hear Beethoven’s Ninth,
but you do conjure up auditory images of the symphony as you study
the frieze. This pseudomorph-­symphony does not play consecutively
in your head from the first bar to the last; instead your mind summons
up passages that seem relevant to the Klimt image. All spectators who
know Beethoven will listen to an inner Ninth Symphony as they view
Klimt’s frieze, but none will create the same pseudomorph, because
there is no determinate correspondence between a passage of the frieze
and a passage of the symphony, though there are places where the
image gestures toward a specific event in the symphony.
In another example, we have Stravinsky’s Circus Polka (1942). Any
listener who knows that the subtitle is “For a Young Elephant” will
visualize a pseudomorph of an elephant moving to polka rhythm,
probably with its forelegs in the air. But the dance will never be
the same for two auditors (except, perhaps, those who have seen
photographs of the fifty elephants in the Ringling Brothers circus
who danced to it in George Balanchine’s choreography of the polka—
and for those listeners, Circus Polka is not pseudomorphic but
multimedial).
Listeners who have no knowledge of the subtitle or compositional
history of the polka might have no visual impression beyond a general
sense of a picture of galumph. Stravinsky may have loved circuses, but
Adorno did not: he accused Stravinsky of debasing the art of music by
making his compositions into picture circuses: “The trick that defines
all of Stravinsky’s organizings of form: to let time stand in, as in a cir-
cus tableau, and to present time complexes as if spatial—this trick
wears off. It loses its power over the consciousness of duration.”1

9. Eidolon  A more general term for the phantoms generated by the

transposition of a work in one artistic medium into an alien one is
eidolon. A pseudomorph exists where there is some specific cue on how

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to perform the transposition (such as calling a work Beethoven-­Frieze).

An eidolon may be a more vagrant phenomenon, generated by (idle or
intent) speculation about what an artwork in one medium might look
like if translated to another. Synesthetes often find this easy, but anyone
can play.
I was once standing in the Musée de l’Orangerie, half-­drowning in
the depths beneath Monet’s water lilies, when my companion asked me
what sort of music would be the right accompaniment to this experi-
ence. I thought for a moment and said Brahms’s Intermezzo, op. 118,
no. 6—the subdued elation, the dark haunt, seemed right for Monet.
But Monet’s water lilies are in no obvious way pseudomorphic, so there
is no particular reason, besides contiguity of title or theme (I might
have thought of Saint-­Saëns’s Aquarium or Rachmaninov’s Lilies) or
similarity of mood, to choose one musical analogue rather than
another.
A final note: pseudomorphosis is a word I will often use to refer to an
invention by an artist, eidolon to a fancy of a spectator; but an artist
(while attempting to translate an existing work in medium A into a new
work in medium B) will have to have recourse to eidola in all circum-
stances where the original work in medium A has no specific cues on
how such a translation should be performed.

These definitions should prove useful. There is, however, a false

assumption built into this whole parsing-­out of the field of the compar-
ative arts: that there is such a thing as an artwork that exists in one
medium and one medium alone. There are those who insist that every
artwork is, or should be, confined to the medium in which it was
created—that an artwork that tries to wriggle free from the enclosure
of its subsistence is inherently flawed, incapacitated. G. E. Lessing,
Theodor Adorno, and Irving Babbitt make this argument, but its stron-
gest statement comes from the art historian Clement Greenberg:

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Shelley . . . exalted poetry above the other arts because its
medium came closest . . . to being no medium at all. In prac-
tice this aesthetic encouraged that particular widespread form
of artistic dishonesty which consists in the attempt to escape
from the problems of the medium of one art by taking refuge
in the effects of another. Painting is the most susceptible to
evasions of this sort . . .
Painting and sculpture in the hands of the lesser talents
. . . become nothing more than ghosts and “stooges” of litera-
ture.
To restore the identity of an art the opacity of its medium
must be emphasized.
The history of avant-­garde painting is that of a progres-
sive surrender to the resistance of its medium; which resis-
tance consists chiefly in the flat picture plane ’s denial of efforts
to “hole through” it for realistic perspectival space.2

But I believe that Greenberg’s argument is untenable.

An artwork has little power of resistance to description or inter-
pretation. A flat picture plane is in a poor position to deny anything
whatsoever, including efforts to hole through it. If I ask a sculpture to
be a ghost or stooge of literature, it has no choice but to comply. I will
go farther and propose that an artwork is an artwork precisely because
it is especially susceptible to translation into an alien medium, and
because those translations have a certain captivating aspect. If Green-
berg had been correct, he would have had to abandon his career as a
sculpture critic and become a specialist in metallurgy. Every act of art
criticism is a hauling of the criticized thing into the field of the verbal,
where, according to Greenberg, it has no home.
A urinal (to take a famous example) is not normally considered an
artwork, an adventure in ceramic. If someone asks me to describe or

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interpret a urinal, not that this request comes up every day, I can speak
of its half-­cylindrical aspect, its glazed white surface, the fragrant
hockey puck often thrown into it, its happy usefulness at catching
and disposing of urine. I have taken a material object and made a paral-
lel to it in another medium, language. I could even make a narrative: I
could speak of what little I know of the history of the urinal, from the
vespasienne to the present; I could speak of memorable urinals I’ve
used, from Tibet to Peru to New York. These are brief and boring
stories. But if I think of a urinal promoted into an art object, as in
Duchamp’s bold ploy in New York in 1917, suddenly I can say a great
deal more, indeed I can gabble about it for hours. Insofar as I see it as
art, a urinal becomes a figure of power. It compels me to think and
speak.
By decontextualizing it from the single context it once occupied, a
lavatory, Duchamp liberated the urinal to be recontextualized in a
thousand different contexts. It is now sculpture: and precisely because
it is sculpture it becomes the ghost or stooge of literature. Its title Foun-
tain permits, even demands, comparison with the fountain of Arethusa
or other classical fountains; the fact that a urinal is a kind of upside-­
down fountain, spraying into the earth, makes for speculation on the
ways art is a reversal of nature, a mirror image in which everything is
backward. The signature on the sculpture, “R. Mutt,” opens up vistas:
not only the urinal’s status as a mutt, a mongrel of high art and humble
call of nature, but also the German word Armut, “poverty,” and, still
further, the comic strip Mutt and Jeff, begun in 1907 and first titled
A. Mutt—Mutt was a gambler on horse races and Jeff a former inmate
of an insane asylum. These are only some of the more obvious stories
that can be scooped out of the urinal: stories concerning destitution,
insanity, games of chance, ironic cooptation, suddenly spurt out—just
as, in Heidegger’s essay on the origin of the work of art, a whole world
emerges from the splayed-­open boots in van Gogh’s painting.

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 Nine Definitions

One defining characteristic of the artwork is this ease of interme-

dial manipulation. (This is, of course, the exact opposite of Green-
berg’s definition.) This transit can go in any direction: music can open
itself to visual expression, as in Klimt’s Beethoven-­Frieze, and a sculp-
ture can open itself to musical expression, as in Liszt’s Il penseroso, and
and and. Creative work manifests its creativeness by inspiring creativ-
ity in others. An artwork from which no story or other homologue/
analogue/metalogue could be educed would not be an artwork, indeed
would have only the feeblest hold on existence.
By far the most common destination of intermedial thrust is lan-
guage. We are used to mapping artworks of every medium onto
language—indeed a sensuous object is an aesthetic object to the degree
that it demands to be interpreted, that is, talked about. A newly made
thing is only potentially an artwork; it realizes itself as art, not in the act
of its being painted or being composed, but in the act of submitting
itself as a subject for discursing. It needs to find word-­threads that tie it
to other works in its genre, to its possible use (even if its use consists
only of display in some appropriate venue), to the culture-­scape of
the objects the artist intends to represent (if it is representational in
character)—these threads reach to the most distant and tenuous regions
of the universe of discourse. The best art often has the most intricate
network of such strands; one might fear that a superlative artwork
might become buried under its own quotedness, but that seems not to
happen, even to Shakespeare. In The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe mocks
the mid-­twentieth-­century New York art scene as a set of meek
and tasteful illustrations to mightily self-­important art-­historical texts
written by Hilton Kramer, Clement Greenberg, and others; but paint-
ing and interpretation are in fact so deeply intertwined that a robust
criticism is a blessing to art.
Duchamp and Cage were right: every thing is art; every sound is
music. Even natural phenomena, such as shells or ravines, are aesthetic

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objects to the degree that they invite a play of contexts. The Grand
Canyon is aesthetic to me because the muscles around the small of my
back grow tense as I imagine falling into it; the banks of the Mississippi
are aesthetic to me because they hold the memory of Huck Finn drift-
ing at night. A conch shell is aesthetic to me in part because I can imag-
ine the brilliant blare that a conch shell trumpet would make. A cowrie
shell is aesthetic too, but in a different way, because I remember that
cowries were once used as money; and I remember that cowrie shells
are smooth because the mantle, the shell-­making organ, is outside the
shell instead of inside, so that a cowrie is a sort of everted gastropod;
and I remember Yeats’s idea that God toils more in making a little shell
than in making a thunderclap; and I toy with the notion that shells
might be readable because certain designs look like letters in some
unknown alphabet.

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 CHAPTER FIVE

3 Wonder and the Sublime 2

Anything can be lifted (lowered?) into the domain of art simply by the
effort of imagination—we live in a world where every object compels
imagining and reimagining, because nothing exists entirely where it
happens to be. Much of this wonder is preverbal; but wonder is a little
scary, and we need to relieve ourselves of wonder by verbalizing it,
whether in formal criticism or in subvocal comings to term.
Still, those who try to eliminate stories and other forms of interme-
dial translation from the universe of discourse have a point. The effort
of New Criticism to eliminate biography, parallel texts, and everything
else not contained in the poem itself could not go far, but it was an
homage to something real and important about poetry. In the original
artwork (any artwork, not just a poem) a residue of the untranslatable
is left behind after every act of translation. The translation is a
falsification—but a falsification without which art could not exist. By
residue I mean the x that critics and intermedial artists keep trying to
elucidate, to bring into the field of the comprehended, but that will
always remain untouched, or touched only glancingly, obliquely. We
can think of the history of the criticism of an artwork as a sort of dia-
lectics that reduces this residue to the least possible size; but the residue

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will always loom large because criticism is and ought to be intermina-

ble. This residue is where Greenberg is right: here the original medium
is everything; here the signifiers in the artwork point to signifieds that
can exist only in the original medium, indeed only in the original art-
work, triumphant in its autotelic solitude. The deepest art in the art-
work lies in this volute—in this closed whorl of signifier and signified
that cannot be pried apart, cannot be loosened for public inspection.
But any finite work of art also contains signs that are nothing like
this—signs that can be carried across, with more or less precision, into
other artistic media, including critical discourse. It is in the region of
such playful, extraverted, easy, and accommodating signs that the pos-
sibility for a discipline of comparative arts exists. I may marvel at how
richly an artwork compels a whole environment to take shape around
it, as iron filings take shape around a magnet. But there is something
else beneath this richness. In an artwork there is matter like dark matter
in the galaxies, unavailable to scrutiny because impossible to articulate
or paraphrase or in any way transpose, in the strictest sense ineffable.
So we can interpret a poem, but we can never crack its shell, extract the
poemness hidden in the words, let out the massed dark. The name we
give to this left-­behind is wonder, and through wonder we know it is
there. I remember listening to my mother reading “The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner” aloud to me before I even knew how to read, and I
remember that I felt the miracle inside it, and I know that no account or
interpretation, however subtle or penetrating or beautifully written,
has touched that first shiver.
This wonder, this convulsive beauty (as the surrealists called it),
has tempted artists to find out whether an artwork could aspire to be all
wonder, all residuum. In every age artists have attempted to purge art
of the prosaic or mundane—everything that was not miracle. The usu-
al term for such art is sublime. In 1757, Edmund Burke defined the effect
of the sublime as astonishment:

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The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when

those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment; and
astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions
are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the
mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain
any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which
employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that,
far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reason-
ings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force. Astonishment,
as I have said, is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree;
the inferior effects are admiration, reverence, and respect.1

A dentist’s drill touching a raw nerve is sublime: it so fills your mind

that there’s no space left to contemplate your overdue credit-­card
payment, or yesterday’s poor haircut, or Fermat’s last theorem.
The sublime abolishes the normal categories of experience: time
and space grow disoriented, confused; and even the sense of self van-
ishes. A sublime experience is without subject or object: you don’t
know where you stop and the rest of the universe begins. This
eerie sort of overwhelm is caused, Burke says, by sensory overload: the
eye is overstrained by the infinite expanse of the ocean, or a Gothic
colonnade receding into the distance, or the starry sky; the ear is
overstrained by huge sounds; perhaps even the tongue can be over-
strained by the far too bitter. In this reeling of the senses, the mind
loses its purchase, grows delirious. In the nice phrase of Immanuel
Kant, who studied Burke closely before writing his Critique of Judg-
ment in 1790, the sublime manages “to contravene the ends of our
power of judgment . . . and to be, as it were, an outrage on the imagina-
tion.”2 Lacking any faculty of judgment, lost in imagelessness, we are
no longer ourselves—we tend to dissipate into the experience that
drowns us.

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The imagination is most easily outraged by images that stubbornly

remain vague, incoherent, indistinct. Such images can be presented in
poetry in several ways—one useful strategy is self-­contradiction, an
outrage to reason as well as imagination. Burke cites as an example
Milton’s description of God, “Dark with excessive light thy skirts
appear” (Paradise Lost 3.380, slightly misquoted: Milton has bright, not
light). Opposites meet and become interchangeable—a fine example of
the abolishing of nominal categories. But the finest outrage on the
imagination that Burke knows is Milton’s description of Death. Before
quoting Milton, Burke talks about heathen idols:

Almost all the heathen temples were dark. Even in the barba-
rous temples of the Americans at this day, they keep their idol in
a dark part of the hut, which is consecrated to his worship. For
this purpose too the Druids performed all their ceremonies in
the bosom of the darkest woods, and in the shade of the oldest
and most spreading oaks. No person seems better to have
understood the secret of heightening, or of setting terrible
things, if I may use the expression, in their strongest light, by
the force of a judicious obscurity, than Milton. His description
of Death in the second book [of Paradise Lost] is admirably
studied; it is astonishing with what a gloomy pomp, with what a
significant and expressive uncertainty of strokes and colouring,
he has finished the portrait of the king of terrors:
The other shape,
If shape it might be call’d that shape had none
Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb,
Or substance might be call’d that shadow seem’d,
For each seemed either; black it stood as Night,
Fierce as ten Furies, terrible as Hell,
And shook a dreadful Dart; what seem’d his head
The likeness of a Kingly Crown had on. [2.666–73]

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 Wonder and the Sublime

In this description all is dark, uncertain, confused, terrible, and

sublime to the last degree.3

What does Death look like? A shapeless shape, an insubstantial

substance; hovering between contraries, it is a sort of blob outfitted
with dart and crown. All is oxymoron and paradox. Milton gives us a
vertigo, not an image.
Sublime painting—that is, painting meant to astonish—may be
dark, uncertain, confused, and terrible, as in Henry Fuseli’s Night-­hag
Visiting the Lapland Witches (fig. 46), based a passage in Paradise Lost
in which the hellhounds incorporated into Sin’s body are compared to
those that

Fig. 46. Henry Fuseli, The Night-­hag Visiting the Lapland Witches (1796).
Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art
Resource, NY.

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 Art Rampant

follow the night-­hag, when, called

In secret, riding through the air she comes,
Lured with the smell of infant blood, to dance
With Lapland witches, while the labouring moon
Eclipses at their charms. [2.622–26]

But this isn’t a pure delirium of wonder. It is full of contexts, full of

things to think about: not only its source in Milton, but other stories of
child-­murderesses, such as Medea, and other stories of witches, such as
Macbeth (another favorite theme of Fuseli’s).
I find more wonder in paintings that are evocative without being
narrative. When I look at Albert Pinkham Ryder’s Sailing by Moonlight
and J. M. W. Turner’s Moses Writing the Book of Genesis (figs. 47, 48),

Fig. 47. Albert Pinkham Ryder (formerly attrib.), Sailing by Moonlight (n.d.).

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 Wonder and the Sublime

Fig. 48. J. M. W. Turner, Moses Writing the Book of Genesis (1843).

especially if I can keep their titles out of consideration, I find a pure

immanence of wonder: no terror, no loneliness, no joy in the usual
sense of the word, no finite emotion at all, but a sense of some inarticu-
late stirring, some rapt, that might terminate in any emotion, all emo-
tion. I confront the work as if it had neither content nor context; I lose
culture, become horizonless.
How far is it possible to go in divesting the artwork of discursive
elements? Especially in recent times there have been attempts to

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enhance the prestige and self-­sufficiency of the artwork by ridding it of

all culturally vivid, user-­friendly signs, the little army of industrious
workers that pull the artwork into the domain of the speakable. If this
could be accomplished, the artwork would be pure residue, beyond
the reach of translation, beyond culture altogether. The easiest proce-
dure for such designification is to empty the artwork of all content,
on the theory that where there is nothing there cannot be any signs.
But that is impossible: no artwork can be residue and nothing but
residue.

White Canvases and Silent Music

The history of the blank will show what I mean. A blank ought to be
signless, meaningless—or so much-meaning that it is equivalent to
unmeaning. And yet a blank surface, as soon as its blankness becomes
an object of scrutiny, tends to provoke a lot of speculative discourse.
An early example is the Bellman’s map of the ocean, at the beginning
of Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark (1876), an empty page: this is a
spoof of the concept of a map and therefore asks to be compared to
other maps we have seen, especially those maps in which the ignorant
cartographer leaves open space. Here be dragons; there be a snark. At
about the same time (1883), Alphonse Allais exhibited at the Galerie
Vivienne a blank sheet of paper titled Anemic Girls Have Their First
Communion As It Snows (Première communion de jeunes filles chloro-
tiques par un temps de neige). (Allais also composed in 1897 what may
be the first silent musical composition, Funeral March for the Obsequies
of a Deaf Man, consisting of nine blank bars.) Allais was making a
joke, though it’s not easy to see whether the joke has a particular object;
he was probably not calling into question the whole art of painting.
Neither Carroll nor Allais particularly intended either absence or over-
fullness of meaning: each blank is carefully set into a context of signs,

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 Wonder and the Sublime

in which the blank itself signifies something in a teasing yet quite ordi-
nary way.
But elsewhere in late-­nineteenth-­century France blankness was
evolving toward a different set of meanings. In 1892 Mallarmé wrote:
“The poem’s intellectual armature hides and retains its hold—takes
place—in the space in which the stanzas are set like islands, and in the
midst of the paper’s white: significative silence that is just as beautiful
to compose as the verses themselves.”4 The structure of a poem, the
very integrity of a poem, lies not in the words but in the void around
the words. For a symbolist like Mallarmé, a state of absence is transcen-
dental and pure, and the marks of the pen are wisps designed to call
attention to the whiteness of the surrounding sheet of paper. Pushed a
little farther, Mallarmé’s logic leads to the conclusion that the poem lies
in the white space, not in the words. Floating, dissolving on the paper
they disfigure, the words efface and discredit themselves. In this way
the empty page starts to signify a nothing that distends with meaning, a
divine nihil.
The all-­white nonimage, then, can be frivolous or it can be an
object of awe. But cultural shifts provide different tenors. In 1918, near
the zenith of high modernism, the suprematist Kazimir Malevich paint-
ed his White on White—not quite a white canvas, since a large tilted
rectangle of darker white is imposed on a lighter white background.
Malevich believed that he had achieved something like the entelechy of
the whole art of painting, with White on White a kind of rocket ship
that had escaped earth’s gravitational field:

Our century is a huge boulder aimed with all its weight into
space. From this follows the collapse of all the foundations in
Art, as our consciousness is transferred onto completely
different ground. The field of color must be annihilated, that
is, it must transform itself into white . . . the development of

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 Art Rampant

white . . . points to my transformation in time. My imagining

of color stops being colorful, it merges into one color—
white.5

Conquered by the suprematist system, the sky’s blue has been

holed through and has penetrated into white—veritable
representation of the infinite . . . Comrade aviators, sail after
me into the abyss.6

Like Kandinsky, Malevich felt that abstract art was a form of spiritual
transcendence: “Geometrical forms constitute a portal to the perfectly
objectless, which no longer has any point of reference to external
reality.”7 So an all-­white painting means an absence of representation, an
adventure in dematerialized gnostic. But when Robert Rauschenberg,
at the beginning of his career as a postmodernist, painted a series of
white canvases in 1951, the war against representation was yesterday’s
news; now an all-­white canvas was exciting because it meant an absence
of signs. For Malevich, his experiments in white were explicitly adven-
tures in creating a new semiotics of color: “Suprematism, semaphore
of color, is found in its infinite abyss. . . . I have erected the semaphores
of suprematism.”8 I doubt that Rauschenberg regarded his all-­white
canvases as a waving of flags to deliver a message. A canvas painted
white differs from a blank sheet of paper (Allais exhibited a piece of
paper, and Mallarmé was also pondering the whiteness of paper): to
paint a canvas white is to make a more active, aggressive emptiness than
the emptiness created by merely not doing anything. Rauschenberg
did what he could to eliminate the presence of the artist as well as the
presence of the artwork: he painted with a roller, so that no trace of
brushstroke would give clues about the process of production.
Though Rauschenberg was not constructing a system of signs,
there is every reason to believe that he was, here and elsewhere,

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 Wonder and the Sublime

pondering the semiotics of art, the borders between sign and signless-
ness. When he presented his famous Rebus (fig. 49), a drippy smeary
“combine” onto which he stuck photos of runners, a print of Botticel-
li’s Birth of Venus, an election poster, a comic strip, and other cultural
bric-­a-­brac, he seemed to be demoting all visual signs to the same level
of significance. Maybe Rauschenberg was flattening signs into nonen-
tity, devaluing them to zero; but I’d prefer to phrase it another way:
that he was flattening signs into a state of exactly equivalent value. Bot-
ticelli’s Birth of Venus and the comic strip are equally precious, equally
easy to toss into the garbage; you can adore them, you can dispose of
them, Rauschenberg doesn’t care. There is a subtle gradation between
high art and low, and between images with detail and high finish, and
images that are hasty bare outlines (such as the faint drawing, in the
lower right, of Goldilocks and the three bears, perhaps taken from a
children’s coloring book, but turned upside-­down). The latter are
enclosed in careless rectangles, suggesting that neither the selected
image nor the act of framing it is worthy of particular fuss. The whole
painting, though the canvas is an exact rectangle, is similarly a void
framing a busier void. With its pattern of rectangles within a rectangle
it’s a comic strip itself, entropy’s splat. Or you can read the painting the
other way, as an ascent from undone images to magnificently done
images. But even so, a certain undoneness clings to everything, even, or
especially, to the Botticelli.
I think of Rebus as a culmination of Rauschenberg’s investigation
of the nonimage. In 1953, in Erased de Kooning, he took a drawing by
de Kooning and undrew it, leaving faint vestiges of the there there to
remind the spectator of the expanses of the not-there. Rebus contains
obvious images, but by making no comment on their consequentiality
or inconsequentiality Rauschenberg removes the sting or fever that
most images have, since most images goad us into thinking of the
things they represent, and of the huge contexts of those things. The

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 Art Rampant

Fig. 49. Robert Rauschenberg, Rebus (1955). Oil, synthetic polymer paint,
pencil, crayon, pastel, cut-­and-­pasted printed and painted papers, and fabric on
canvas mounted and stapled to fabric, three panels, 8 ft. × 10 ft. 11/18 in. (243.8 ×
333.1 cm). Partial and promised gift of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder and
purchase. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA. Digital Image ©
The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. Art ©
Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

images in Rebus don’t ask questions; in fact the point of Rebus may be
that it isn’t a rebus. The images in the painting are the burnt-­up rem-
nants of extinguished images, images that have lost their purchase in
the realm of the imaginary. Shorn, dumb, stunned, vulnerable, they lie
before us with no power to resist or redirect our gaze. But still, if we
stare at The Birth of Venus print, it can disengage itself from the slop

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 Wonder and the Sublime

around it, kindle once again. The image as image, and the image as
nonimage, are here held in a tense equipoise.
The all-­white paintings of 1951 are simpler attempts to thrust an
absence of images at the public. But here there seems to be no overt
playfulness, no games with semiosis. Still, to represent a surface on
which a sign might appear if it happened to exist is not necessarily an
asemiotic act. The painting may contain no signs, but is a sign, a sign
meaning signlessness. But the previous sentence is wrong, too: the all-­
white painting does contain signs, but vagrant signs generated by shad-
ows and the altering albedo—from glare to dullness—as you see it
from different angles. John Cage was sensitive to this property: “I have
come to the conclusion that there is nothing in these paintings that
could not be changed, that they can be seen in any light and are not
destroyed by the action of shadows. Hallelujah! the blind can see again;
the water’s fine.”9 The all-­white painting may aspire, seriously or
impudently, to a state of sublime referencelessness.
But just as every artwork has aspects that are esoteric,
unspeakable—what I have been calling residue—so every artwork
flaunts public signs, generous signs that open themselves to us. The all-­
white paintings of 1951 turn out to have some degree of narrative con-
tent. Even in a more or less effaced or erased or unbegun artwork, its
very state of unbeing has a certain power to thrust into other media.
You can invent stories about the shadows that drift across its surface;
stories about how in its sacral purity it has the Christlike gift to heal the
blind; stories about how you dive into it as you dive into water. And it
proved to be simple to make pseudomorphs of these all-­white canvases:
it is speculated, persuasively to my mind, that Cage ’s silent piece 4´33˝
(1952) came into being partly as a response to Rauschenberg—a pseu-
domorph from painting to music, just as Cage, in his newspaper com-
ment about Rauschenberg, gestured at possible pseudomorphs between
painting and literature.

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 Art Rampant

When you try to omit contextualizable elements from an artwork,

suddenly small, humble aspects of the artwork loom large, grow
inflamed with discursive possibility. The way that a painting is fastened
to a wall is not generally a matter that merits or receives much atten-
tion, but in the world of all-­white paintings it undergoes considerable
scrutiny: Robert Ryman designed for such works as Tract (1982) and
Journal (1988) special metal brackets to hold his paintings to the wall.
Ryman explicitly noted that he chose to use white pigment precisely for
the sake of making conspicuous the aspects of the art of painting easi-
est to ignore: “The white is just a means of emphasising other elements
of the painting: the surface, texture, edges, colour, the absorption and
reflection of light, and even the medium onto which the paint is
applied.”10 If you try to make your canvas mute, then its raveled edges,
its inner weave, your own shadow from the gallery’s fluorescent light,
will start to raise a clamor. Similarly, Cage’s 4´33˝ performed by an
oboist differs strongly from 4´33˝ performed by a pianist: the look of
an oboist holding his instrument in his lap, relaxed yet secure, is not the
look of a pianist hunched before her instrument, refusing to play.
We are left then with a paradox: art is not art unless capable of
being transposed; but the transposition is never comprehensive or even
correct, except with respect to a few contrived congruences. In the
1960s literary critics spoke much about the heresy of paraphrase; but
even an artwork that seems to eliminate all paraphrasable matter, such
as an all-­white painting, can be paraphrased, as Cage showed both in
his newspaper comments and in 4´33˝. I think that the notion of the
heresy of paraphrase has it exactly backward: a poem is not a poem
unless it can be paraphrased—even nonsense is usually not irreducible,
as Humpty Dumpty showed when he gave a prose version of the first
stanza of “Jabberwocky.” (Asemantic texts, collocations of phonemes,
are indeed not paraphrasable, but seem to me artistic in some dimen-
sion other than the poetic.) Meaning itself does not exist except insofar

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 Wonder and the Sublime

as the meaningful thing can be somehow restated. So we are left with

another version of the same paradox: nothing is meaningful unless it
can be paraphrased; but the paraphrase will always mean something
different from the paraphrased thing.
Art always exasperates. If I try to understand an artwork as a hard,
closed, self-­contained thing in which the aesthetic experience lies only
in the interrelations among its parts, it will dissipate under my gaze,
deconstruct into a cloud of endless cultural self-­interrogations. If I try
to understand an artwork as a point of intersection of lines of force
within the culture in which it was produced, in which unconscious dia-
lectics of dominance and subjection can be brought to light by close
analysis, it will recede before my eyes, clench itself into a tight closed
object. If I want the artwork to be absolute, a text severed from all
context, it diffuses into a swarm of mosquitoes; if I want the artwork to
be a specimen and manifestation of its surrounding culture, it becomes
an armadillo curling itself into a scaly ball.

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 CHAPTER SIX

3 Pseudomorphoses 2

The commonest pseudomorphic translations are from literature

to picture (as in the case of book illustration, ranging from heroic
paintings of biblical or Homeric themes to Gustave Doré’s illustrations
of Dante to the drawings published with Dickens novels) and from
picture to literature (as in the case of ekphrasis). Here I will treat four
of the less common cross-­medial thrusts among three important media:
from poetry to music; from music to poetry; from painting to music,
and from music to painting.

Pseudomorphoses from Poetry to Music

A song, when completed, is multimedial, since it comprises both words
and music. But the task of the composer is pseudomorphic, since he or
she has to find music for words that already exist. (I will not discuss the
rare cases in which a composer writes music for not-­yet-­written words,
to be filled in later by a poet.)
A composer writing a song may, of course, force onto the
words a tune that does not fit the poem’s meter or concord in any way
with the poem’s themes, thereby creating an effect of perfect abrasion.

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The “Ode to a Nightingale” could, in theory, be sung to any tune what-

soever, from “Happy Birthday to You” to the cello part of Beethoven’s
Grosse Fuge. But composers usually work to create an intelligible
pseudomorph of the poem, by attending to the metrical, structural,
and thematic cues provided by the text. Many poets wrote their
poems to preexisting melodies, some of which we know, as in the
case of Philip Sidney’s “Sleep baby mine”; many other poets, such
as William Blake and even the tone-­deaf William Butler Yeats,
wrote their poetry to fit some vague or extemporized melody.
Composers, then, can try to tease out the virtual tunes embedded in the
text. No two composers will find the same tune, but sometimes there
are fascinating congruences between different settings of a single
poem.
To illustrate a way in which a composer can feel through a poem, I
will start from an example of the reverse process, by which a poet feels
through some virtual music until the text of the poem comes into being.
Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote a small poem called “A Lament” (1821),
not a very good piece, but one with a remarkable composition history.
Shelley’s first draft was this little jotting:

Ah time, oh night, oh day,

Ni nal ni na, na ni
Ni na ni na, ni na
Oh life O death, O time
Time a di
Never Time
Ah time, a time  O-­time
Time!

You have the impression that Shelley wants to say something about
Time and is simply experimenting with rhythmic markers for some sort

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of stanza in which Time might be discussed. A little later Shelley came

up with another version of this stanza:

Na na, na na ná na
Nă nă na na na—nă nă
Nă nă nă nă nă nă
Na na nă nă nâ ă na

The theme has vanished entirely, and Shelley is doodling with patterns
of beats. In its final form the stanza reads as follows:

      O world! O life! O time!

On whose last steps I climb,
      Trembling at that where I had stood before;
When will return the glory of your prime?
      No more—Oh, never more!1

This is a vague stanza—the denotation of the words does not seem to

matter much. The first line could be “O world! O life! O time!”; or it
could be (with some adjustments to the rhyme scheme) “O fate! O
death! O night!”; or it could be “O woe! O me! O my!”; or simply “O
O! O O! O O!” What counts here is a mood of exclamatory misery: a
mood, and a rhythm. In the middle three lines Shelley ventures into
syntax, but at the end he returns to pure rhythmic ejaculation: “No
more—Oh, never more!” The scansion itself seems to possess meaning,
rather than the words of the poem.
In some sense Shelley is less a poet than a composer who uses
words instead of notes. I mention this poem because it’s easy to imag-
ine a composer using this same process backward: starting with the fin-
ished poem and groping toward some pure prosodic isolate on which a
tune could be constructed. Shelley, groping toward the final text, was

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not simply marking the meter and the stanza form: he was thinking
about the flow of the words toward a particularly strong stress, and
maybe also indicating the length of time a certain syllable should be
pronounced as well as the pattern of stress emphasis. The diacritical
marks could even be interpreted as faint but real melodic cues. The
poem withholds nothing; its intimate inside lies open, exposed to the
composer’s gaze. Finding a pseudomorph is almost too easy.
Languages like English and German tend to invite musical settings
in which the tonic accent occupies a privileged position, even the domi-
nating position, in the song. Every (good) poem written in meter has a
design of hesitations and accelerations, half-­emphases, over-­emphases,
extraneous syllables, puzzling absences—all those deviations that give
life to rhythm. Every (good) composer attends to these filigrees, these
gashes in time.
There are a number of English-­language songs that are little
more than a steady jumping back and forth between two notes, imitat-
ing the steady alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables in iambic
verse. Two examples from popular music are Louis Jordan’s “School
Days” (1950) and Bob Dylan’s “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”
(1964), both of which prefigure the extreme narrowing of melodic
amplitude in rap music. Music composed by poets may tend in this
direction: before Kurt Weill composed the “Alabama-­Song” for the
Mahogonny-­Songspiel (1927), the poet, Bertolt Brecht, wrote his
own melody, full of these two-­note oscillations. In these examples the
length of the note is not of first importance—what counts is the stress
on the note.
But it is also possible to let duration determine the importance of a
syllable. In Greek and Latin poetry, meter was determined by quantity:
a long syllable took twice as long to pronounce as a short syllable; tonic
accent had no metrical value. Music, of course, can specify both quan-
tity and accent, so an iambic rhythm can be marked by either or both

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means. So a composer may write prosodically intense songs by placing

a quantitative grid (such as, say, a dotted quarter note for stressed syl-
lables and an eighth note for unstressed ones) on top of an elementary
chunk of melody, such as a scale or an arpeggio: a sophisticated exam-
ple is Benjamin Britten’s 1937 Nocturne: at the climax of the song, in
which the dreamer rejects dreams of tractor, bull, or succubus, the
vocal line becomes a chill strict monotone, inexorably rhythmic, while
the piano supplies the nightmare described in Auden’s text.
The accompaniment to these songs in which the poem’s meter is
brought to the foreground tends to take one of two forms: either obedi-
ent or disobedient. In one of the coincidences of music history, Franz
Schubert wrote his song “Der Erlkönig” (1815), his opus 1, shortly before
Carl Loewe wrote his setting of “Der Erlkönig” (1817–18), also opus 1
(number 3). (There is also a magnificent torso of a setting by Beethoven,
difficult to date.) It is hard to know which is more stunning, the Schubert
or the Loewe; either will set a whirligig going in my head that lasts for
hours; but when I recite the poem to myself, the inner music I hear is usu-
ally Loewe’s. Except for the trills and flutters that may represent the rus-
tling of leaves in the wind, all is relentless iambs in Loewe’s piano
accompaniment, whipping the song forward. Schubert, by contrast,
begins his setting with a repeated figure in the piano, an urgent uprush of
a minor-­key scale followed by three sharply accented notes. The rhythm
is not iambic; and this potent figure keeps pushing against the iambs of
the rest of the song. It is drama achieved by rhythmic disparity: part of
the song follows Goethe’s text, part resists it. This prosodic theater
became a common feature of Schubert’s creative personality: in his late
Heine setting Die Stadt (1828) the salient feature of the piano part is a
shivery rhythmless frill (an arpeggiated diminished chord), which seems
to try to pull the iambic vocal lines into a sort of blurry nonentity.
To a rhythmically sensitive composer, German and English differ
in certain important ways. English has a great many short words, and

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monosyllables are liberating because they can often be placed in either

a stressed or an unstressed position:

Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks

In this pentameter line of Auden’s, the word plain first occupies an

unstressed position, then a stressed position, then an unstressed posi-
tion. But when read aloud (at least as I read it aloud), each plain has
roughly equal emphasis, so that both the first foot and the last hover in
some ambiguous prosodic space between an iamb and a spondee.
Monosyllables don’t bear strong markers of accent—their neuter aspect,
their plasticity imparts, in skilled hands, grace to a line of verse. In ages
with strict poetic rules, such as the early eighteenth century, the indeter-
minacy of monosyllables made them suspect, as we see in Pope’s verse:

And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line

The joke is that Pope censures monosyllables by writing a strictly

monosyllabic line. But I think that most subsequent poets have enjoyed
the free spaces that monosyllables open.
If monosyllables provide English poets with play room, German’s
wealth of unstressed syllables offers something similar. The inflection-
al terminations of German make it harder to write in strict iambs: a
word with two syllables will often pick up a third as it moves through
its declension or conjunction. The supernumerary syllables are some-
times so weak and so subject to elision that they vanish or nearly van-
ish, thus becoming prosodic ghosts. But they can also make themselves
felt in striking ways:

Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?

Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind;

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Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm,

Er faßt ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm.

[Through night and the wind who rides so wild?

It is a father, and with his child;
He holds the child secure in his arm,
His grasp is strong and he keeps him warm.]

This is the first stanza of “Der Erlkönig.” The meter is iambic tetram-
eter, but in each line one foot is an anapest, not an iamb; and Goethe
keeps varying the anapest’s position—the second foot in the first line,
the third foot in the second, the fourth foot in the third, the third foot in
the fourth. The effect is a slightly staggered gallop. When the Erlking
tempts the sick little boy with dreams of cloudy delight, the anapestic
effect grows stronger:

Meine Töchter führen den nächtlichen Reihn

Und wiegen und tanzen und singen dich ein.

[And my daughters lead you to revels and dance,

And whirl you and carol and coax and caress.]

Six of the eight feet in this couplet are anapests. A sort of waltz is
welling up in the text, and composers hear it—Loewe ’s setting grows
particularly fevered and frenetic at this point.
So when a composer concentrates on a poem, or daydreams about
it, a pseudomorph comes into being, a tentative pattern of durations
and emphases, a phantom of rhythm. The poem arrays itself with scan-
sion marks; and those acutenesses and gravities and circumflects and
inflects start to shape themselves into streaks of tunes. At the same time
the poem’s themes, the tendrils of feeling that grow out of the words,

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rouse memories of tunes and harmonies and structural patterns from

earlier works, memories that imagination may find useful in refining
and specifying the pseudomorph, as it arrests its vagrancies, starts to
assume a determinate form.
Of course I’m speaking of figures of consonance—the common
situation in which the composer is working toward a state of concinnity
between words and music. But composers have also been fascinated by
the edgy dynamism that can be created through intermedial disso-
nance. In Dido and Aeneas (1680s), Purcell set Nahum Tate ’s lines
“Fear no danger to ensue, / The Hero loves as well as you” to a melo-
dy with strange rhythmic displacements: the unstressed “o” of the
word Hero, and the second as, bear much of the weight of the musical
line—exactly the syllables one would consider among the least impor-
tant of the second line. Now, the Hero (Aeneas), as it turns out, does
not love as well as Queen Dido loves, and it seems possible that the
distorted rhythm is a clue that this is a false prophecy.
The greatest master of prosodic dissonance was Igor Stravinsky.
Stravinsky was eerily sensitive to verse movement: some of his finest
works are experiments in prosody, from the Three Japanese Songs
(1913) on—indeed, he considered the true subject of his ballet Apollon
musagète to be the iambic foot, even though the ballet contains no sing-
ing whatsoever. Nevertheless, Stravinsky never hesitated to write
music that obviously contradicts every metrical element of the text he
set. I feel that the most ravishing tune he ever wrote was his setting of
W. H. Auden’s lullaby “Gently, little boat,” in The Rake’s Progress
(1951), in which the main beat keeps falling on words like the. I don’t
think that the music is in any way ironic or parodic or aporetic; Stravin-
sky does not resist the tender text but intensifies the eerie beauty of the
situation—a lullaby sung in a madhouse to a dying lunatic.
When we turn to Italian—to how composers develop a pseudo-
morph from an Italian text—we find ourselves in a domain governed

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by entirely different laws of prosody. Italian meters are usually classi-

fied by syllable count, but in a slightly tricky way: you count the num-
ber of syllables from the beginning of the line to the last accented
syllable, then add one. So (to use as examples two meters common in
opera libretti), a quinario has its last stress on the fourth syllable; an
ottonario on the seventh syllable; and so on. This system reflects the fact
that the commonest landing point for an Italian phrase is the penult.
But an Italian phrase can also place the final stress on the ultima, in
which case a quinario has only four syllables—this is called verso tronco,
“truncated verse”; or the final stress might go on the antepenult, in
which case a quinario has six syllables—this is called verso sdrucciolo,
“sliding verse.” So there are three types of quinari (note that when you
count the syllables, a vowel at the end of one word can elide into the
vowel at the beginning of the next word; and note that the acute accents
here are not part of Italian orthography but stress indicators that I’ve
added to the text):

Di quella píra [normal, from Verdi’s Il trovatore, libretto by

Salvatore Cammarano]

Chi mai dell’Érebo

fra le calígini,
sull’orme d’Ércole
e di Pirítoo
conduce il piè? [four versi sdruccioli, then one verso tronco,
from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice (1762), libretto by Ranieri de ’
Calzabigi]

[Who through the depths of hell,

through all the darknesses,
retracing Hercules’

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path, and Pirithous’,

dares to set foot?]

Italian prosody is plastic, and the secondary stresses in a line of poetry

will often fall into something that feels like a German or English stress
pattern—iambic, trochaic, anapestic, or dactylic. The six-­syllable
quinari from the Orfeo ed Euridice chorus can be scanned—
pseudo-­scanned—as iambic trimeter or as dactylic dimeter: by setting
the words to a tune in three-­quarter time, Gluck imparted a certain
dactylic lilt.
Sometimes a musical setting of Italian will heighten this stress pat-
tern in remarkable ways: for example, Leporello’s opening aria in
Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787, libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte) begins

Nótte e giórno fáticár

[Working, working, night and day]

A truncated ottonario: Mozart set it with very heavy beats on the four
stressed syllables, producing an almost parodically trochaic effect—
you can hear the hammer pounding the overworked servant into the
ground. Mozart, of course, was (like Gluck) not a native speaker, and
sometimes thought Germanically when setting Italian.
Giuseppe Verdi conceived Italian differently: he was less interest-
ed in secondary accents than in the way the whole line steadily mounts
toward the final stressed syllable—the syllable that is key to the whole
scansion. Consider the Duke’s famous canzone in Rigoletto (1851,
libretto by Francesco Piave):

La donna è móbile
qual piuma al vénto,

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muta d’accénto
e di pensiéro.

[Woman is changeable,
a wind-­blown feather,
her mind has weather
forever changing.]

The first three syllables are set to a single nonchalant note; with the
fourth syllable (“mo-­”), the melody grows insistent, pungent. The first
line of the song is a textbook example of quinario sdrucciolo, in which
the last stressed syllable, the antepenult, bears all the prosodic weight.
Even in his most lyrical mode, Verdi shifts the center of gravity to the
end of the poetic line, the most prosodically intense area. To my mind,
the most haunting aria Verdi ever wrote comes from the second act of
Un ballo in maschera (1859, libretto by Antonio Somma), when Amelia
visits the site of a gallows to pluck a magic herb:

Ma dall’arido stelo divulsa

Come avrò di mia mano quell’erba

[Horrid places, a dry stalk uprooted,

for this herb is right here for my grasping]

These decasyllabic lines place a strong stress on the ninth syllable and a
secondary stress on the third and sixth syllables, and around these
points Verdi’s melody turns. There is little movement until the sixth
syllable, where there is a sudden quickening; and on the ninth syllable
the melody clinches, tightens into place. It is a tune that, despite its
poise, charges to the end of the line, like “La donna è mobile”—indeed,
the two tunes have certain points of resemblance, though one is

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plaintive and the other heady with joy: each begins with repeated
notes, filling up prosodically weak space; each ends with an emphatic
downward three-­note phrase, throwing into the highest relief the
line’s crucial syllable. In most of Verdi’s arias, the precompositional
materials—the pseudomorphs of the libretto’s meter—make them-
selves heard in the finished piece: you feel the deep prosodic shapes
below.
Poems in German, English, and Italian all provide some skeleton
useful to a composer seeking musical flesh. But French verse is far
more reticent: it offers few clues about proper melodic form. A line of
French poetry is classified simply according to syllabic count; it is pos-
sible to speak of stresses in French verse, but rarely does a stress pat-
tern have a particular prosodic value. There are, however, subtle
techniques for lengthening a diphthong into two beats and for squash-
ing two vowels into one—diérèse and synérèse, respectively—thereby
implying retardations and quickenings in the line. Also, the dip in vocal
energy that occurs when an unaccented “e” is pronounced creates cer-
tain difficult to quantify patterns. And the caesura is unusually impor-
tant in French: the basic meter of French drama, the twelve-­syllable
line called an alexandrine, should have a distinct break after the sixth
syllable.
This lack of stress has sometimes left some poets and musicians
wishing for more rigorous metrical principles. In the 1560s, the gifted
poets of the Pléiade (Jean-­Antoine de Baïf, Pierre de Ronsard, and
others) sought to revive the quantitative meters of Greek and Latin
poetry: a line of French verse was to be understood as a set of long syl-
lables and short ones, and the long syllables should take twice as much
time to pronounce as the short ones. This development of vers mésuré
encouraged composers, particularly Claude Lejeune, to experiment
with musique mésurée, a text-­setting procedure in which the time values
of the notes exactly matched the duration of the syllables.

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But musique mésurée in the strict sense didn’t catch on—though,

in an odd sequel to the movement, Camille Saint-­Saëns wrote Chant
saphique (1892) for cello and piano in which the durational pattern of
the melody matches the Greek scansion of the Sapphic ode. So, for
the most part, French composers of songs learned to live with near
anarchy—learned to provide texts with music that traced subtle phrase
contours in the absence of a prosodic scheme that could account for
the relationship of one syllable to another. In German, English, and
Italian poetry, pseudomorphs in music often come without too much
trouble—show me a poem written in a traditional meter, and I will sing
it to some feeble tune. In French poetry, however, pseudomorphs often
have to be teased or winkled out. But sometimes, through anaphora or
repetition or some similar device, a text would become so structurally
determinate that pseudomorphs easily presented themselves to a com-
poser. An example is Claude Debussy’s Chevaux de bois (1888), to a
poem by Paul Verlaine:

Tournez, tournez, bon chevaux de bois,

Tournez cent tours, tounez mille tours.
Tournez souvent et tournez toujours,
Tournez, tournez au son des hautbois.

[Turn and turn, wooden horses, turn,

Turn a hundred times, a thousand, turn,
Turn and keep turning, forever turn,
Turn, turn to the oboes’ turning sound.]

The “Tournez, tournez” phrase rises a fourth, then falls a fourth, a

recurrent little loop amid the general whirl of the merry-­go-­round:
Verlaine wrote the poem in unusual nine-­syllable lines, an eccentric
meter, as if to suggest that the carrousel has a slight wobble; and

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Debussy’s eccentric chromaticism in the second and third lines of this

stanza suggests a certain exhilaration or breathlessness. Here is a music
pattern generated almost irresistibly from a word pattern.
Phonemic repetition can sometimes perform a similar service. In
Jean-­Philippe Rameau’s opera Platée (1745, libretto by Le Valois
d’Orville), a hideous froglike nymph is the victim of a cruel prank: she
is made to think she’s the beautiful bride of Jupiter. Toward the end, La
Folie leads a (fake) wedding dance: “Chantez Platée, égayez-­vous”
(Oh praise Platée, grow gay, all you). This can easily be read as a four-­
beat line, with the accents of the first three beats falling on a single
sound, “é,” though the sound is represented by different spellings
(“-­tez,” “-­tée,” “-­gay-­”): the line scans as iambic tetrameter, even in a
language like French, where the concept of iamb isn’t strong. And
Rameau obligingly provides a spiky iambic pulse in his music.
But in many cases the rhythms of French poems are hard to con-
strue, providing an obligingly neutral phonic surface that could be fig-
ured with any rhythm the composer desired. Sometimes a vocal line
floats serenely over an intricate piano accompaniment, an accompani-
ment more melodically intense than the vocal line itself. Gabriel
Fauré’s Clair de lune (1887) sets a delicate Verlaine poem in which char-
acters from the Commedia dell’Arte, the stock zanies of the old pop
theater of Europe, dance a bergamask and sing and flirt and play the
lute, a little sadly because they don’t quite believe in their own happi-
ness. The poem posits a dance, but it doesn’t try to fit itself to any
particular dance rhythm; so Fauré provides a fragile dance-­lilt in the
piano, insistent until it starts to blur out toward the end of the song.
The vocal line sometimes conforms to the shape of the melody in the
piano, sometimes goes its own unobtrusive path. In the absence of the
piano, the vocal line wouldn’t mean much; but the piano part could
make an effective piece in the absence of the vocal line. In German and
English, the marked rhythm of the poem often leads to a marked

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rhythm in the song; but French, incapable of offering much resistance,

allows the composer to superimpose many sorts of simple or compli-
cated rhythms onto the text.
In French songs of the sort I’m describing here, it is hard to speak (in
terms of form) of figures of consonance or dissonance because the form
of the poem cannot specify much about the form of the music. Interme-
dial consonance or dissonance requires a certain robustness in both of the
component media; and here the poetry can do little to withstand the
music imposed upon it. So intermedial consonance or dissonance
becomes a property of thematic, or half-­thematic, half-­formal concerns.
For example: the long-­breathed, subtly inflected dance tune in Fauré’s
Clair de lune is not, as far as I can hear, the dance that Verlaine specifies in
his text, a bergamask; it doesn’t have the right clownish, clunking I-­IV-­
V-­I harmony. On the other hand it does sound appropriate to the special
bergamaskers in Verlaine’s poem, who are not lumpy clowns but come-
dians of ether, capering in some soulscape not quite of this earth. It
would be possible to devise a musical setting far more dissonant with the
text than Fauré’s, by providing, say, a rumba in the accompaniment: but
the dissonance would lie more in the content than in the form.

Pseudomorphoses from Music to Poetry

Many poems praise music and try to ape its powers of dejecting or
exalting the soul, such as Cecilian odes written by (among other poets)
John Dryden:

Now strike the golden lyre again;

A louder yet, and yet a louder strain.
Break his bands of sleep asunder,
And rouse him, like a rattling peal of thunder
Hark, hark! the horrid sound

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Has raised up his head;

As awaked from the dead,
And amazed, he stares around.
Revenge, revenge! Timotheus cries,
See the furies arise;
See the snakes, that they rear,
How they hiss in their hair,
And the sparkles that flash from their eyes! [“Alexander’s
Feast,” 1697]

And a few poems try to imitate certain formal properties of music, such
as Richard Steele’s “Lyric for Italian Music” (1720):

I.
So notwithstanding heretofore
Strait forwarde by and by
Now everlastingly therefore
Too low and eke too high.

II.
Then for almost and also why
Not thus when less so near
Oh! For hereafter quite so nigh
But greatly ever here.

This is a poem without nouns, in honor, or dishonor, of music’s

inability to denote anything concrete: it satirizes the emptiness of
Italian opera by creating a text of approximations (“almost,” “near,”
“nigh”) that never hit the thing being approached. The poem keeps
gliding up and down like the voice of a singer who goes flat or sharp
without ever finding the proper note.

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But neither of these poems is a pseudomorphosis because there is

no particular musical composition to which either refers. True pseudo-
morphoses from music to poetry are rare. The example that I’ll
discuss here is a poem by Amy Lowell, “Stravinsky’s Three Pieces
‘Grotesques,’ for String Quartet” (1916), based on Stravinsky’s Three
Pieces for String Quartet (1914)—Stravinsky originally called them
“Grotesques.” The second movement, titled “Excentrique” when
Stravinsky orchestrated these pieces in 1928, is of particular interest,
because Stravinsky said that he was inspired by a British music-­hall
comedian named Little Tich:

I had been fascinated by the movements of Little Tich whom

I had seen in London in 1914, and the jerky, spastic movement,
the ups and downs, the rhythm—even the mood or joke of the
music—which I later called Eccentric, was suggested by the art
of this great clown (and suggested seemed to me the right
word, for it does not try to approfondir the relationship, what-
ever it is).2

So the movement has an extramusical artistic origin (a clown show)

and an extramusical artistic terminus (Lowell’s poem):

   Second Movement
Pale violin music whiffs across the moon,
A pale smoke of violin music blows over the moon,
Cherry petals fall and flutter,
And the white Pierrot,
Wreathed in the smoke of the violins,
Splashed with cherry petals falling, falling,
Claws a grave for himself in the fresh earth
With his finger-­nails.3

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 Pseudomorphoses

Lowell caught the clown in the music, though Pierrot is the sad clown
of the Commedia dell’Arte, the clown that never gets the girl, while the
routines of Little Tich (Harry Relph) seem to have been more silly
than sad—drag spoofs of famous dancers such as Loie Fuller, for
example. His most famous number was called the Big Boot dance, in
which he wore twenty-­eight-­inch-­long wooden shoes, which were half
as long as he was tall (4'6")—in Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly
Walks skit, Michael Palin dresses in obvious imitation of the 1900
film in which Little Tich leans far forward on his huge shoes and then
sproings back up.
The opening figure in Stravinsky’s music, a repeated overstressed
iamb that sounds like a cog with missing teeth trying to turn a gear,
is Stravinsky’s kinesthetic equivalent to Little Tich’s jerks and
spasms; but between the clown’s clonic turns we hear poised and dainty
rhythmically even figures, as if Little Tich were interrupting his
goofing to do something delicate, even exquisite. I take it that
Lowell heard these latter figures as the pale smoke of violin music
blowing across the moon; as for the flutter of cherry petals—maybe
Stravinsky’s pizzicato effects sounded fluttery to her. The macabre
image of Pierrot clawing a grave with his fingernails sounds
right out of Albert Giraud’s collection of poems Pierrot Lunaire (1884),
in which Pierrot does many ugly things, including eating his own
heart in a mock eucharist. (Giraud’s poems are familiar now from
Schoenberg’s 1912 cabaret settings, which, oddly enough, were
the only material by Schoenberg that Stravinsky knew before writing
Three Pieces for String Quartet.) It is clear that Lowell heard far more
desperation in Stravinsky’s music than Stravinsky intended to put
there, but urgency can easily be heard as desperate, and Stravinsky’s
music, with its continual lurches of rhythm, can easily be understood as
urgent.

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Pseudomorphoses from Painting to Music

One of the topics of warm aesthetic debate in the Renaissance was
the paragone, or comparison: which is the queen of the arts? This is a
tricky question for many reasons, one of which is that the framing of
the question will tend to push the answer in a certain path. If I ask,
Which art most strongly moves the soul?, then a response concerning
an art of motion, such as music, might come more easily than one
involving an art of stasis, such as sculpture. If I ask, Which art pro-
vides the most complete picture of nature?, the question itself contains
the word picture, and so the art of painting wins the laurel.
Leonardo da Vinci pondered the paragone question with particular
intensity:

Painting represents its essence to you in one moment through

the power of sight by the same means as the receptor of impres-
sions receives natural forms, at the same time compounding the
proportional harmony of the parts of which the whole is
composed, and delighting the senses. Poetry transmits the
same thing but by a less noble means than the eye, carrying it
more confusedly to the receptor of impressions and describing
its configurations more slowly than is done by the eye. The eye
is the true medium between the object and the receptor, which
immediately transmits with highest fidelity the true surfaces
and the shapes of whatever is presented outside.4

What the difference is between painting and poetry.

Painting is mute Poetry, and Poetry is blind Painting, and
both aim at imitating nature as closely as their power
permits. . . . But since Painting serves the eye—the noblest
sense and nobler than the ear to which Poetry is addressed—
there arises from it [from Painting] harmony of proportions,

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just as many different voices [tones of different pitch] joined

together in the same instant [simultaneously] create a harmony
of proportions which gives so much pleasure to the sense of
hearing that the listeners remain struck with admiration. . . .
But if Poetry would attempt a representation of perfect beauty
by representing separately all particular parts [features] that in
Painting are joined together by the harmony described above,
the same graceful impact would result as . . . if [in Painting] a
face would be shown bit by bit, always covering up the parts
shown before, so that forgetfulness would prevent us from
composing [building up] any harmony of proportions because
the eye with its range of vision could not take them in all
together in the same instant—the same happens with the
beautiful features of any thing invented by the Poet because
they are all disclosed separately at separate [successive] times
[instants] so that memory does not receive from them any
harmony.
. . . The sense of hearing . . . again is less noble than the
eye, because there [in the sense of hearing] as soon as it is born,
it dies, and dies as fast as it was born. This cannot happen with
the sense of sight; for if you [as a painter] represent to the eye
a human beauty composed by the proportions of its beautiful
limbs, all this beauty is not as mortal and swiftly destructible as
music . . . it enthralls you and is the reason that all the senses,
together with the eye, want to possess it, so that it seems as if
they wanted to compete with the eye. [In fact] it seems as if the
mouth wants to swallow it bodily, as if the ear took pleasure to
hear about its attractions [the beauties of it], as if the sense of
touch wanted to penetrate it through all its pores, and as if
even the nose wanted to inhale the air exhaled continually by it
[by beauty]. . . . The same instant within which the compre-
hension of something beautiful rendered in Painting is confined

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cannot offer [give] something beautiful rendered by [verbal]

description, and he who wants to consign to the ear what
belongs to the eye, commits a sin against nature.5

How painting surpasses all human works by reason of the

subtle possibilities which it contains:
. . . Although the poet has as wide a choice of subjects as
the painter, his creations fail to afford as much satisfaction to
mankind as do paintings, for while poetry attempts to repre-
sent forms, actions and scenes with words, the painter employs
the exact images of these forms in order to reproduce them.
Consider, then, which is more fundamental to man, the name
of man or his image? The name changes with change of
country; the form is unchanged except by death.
. . . We may just speak of it [painting] as the grandchild
of nature and as related to God himself.6

Leonardo bases his argument on speed and completeness of apprehen-

sion: you take in a picture all at once and exult in your mastery. Lan-
guage and music enter your mind laboriously, in dribbles, and it’s hard
to seize the whole; a picture, on the other hand, gives itself as a form of
intuition, not as a form of discourse. In this sense we know a picture
exactly as we know the real world. Language is a construct, a human
work—words are unstable, varying from one language to another; but
pictures are accurate reflections of the work of God. Speech, it seems,
is little more than an ugly convenience for sharing data—for forcing
information (ocular in nature, since the most reliable information
comes from the eye) through an inferior orifice, the ear canal.
All science is in some sense painting: it is the eye that thinks.
In fact, the eye does not only the work of thinking but the work of
feeling: a painted image is a pan-­sensual facsimile of nature delivered

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to the whole sensorium—it is addressed first to the eye, but is then

savored by the mind’s tongue, the mind’s nose.
The word idea is derived from a Greek verb meaning “to see,” and
Leonardo seemed to imagine the mind as an art studio stocked with
concept-­pictures: thinking itself is pursued by means of visual play. In
some of his most triumphant passages, Leonardo imagines the painter’s
mind growing bright with a new universe, a nature recombinant:

A painter ought to study universal Nature, and reason much

within himself on all he sees, making use of the most excellent
parts that compose the species of every object before him. His
mind will by this method be like a mirror, reflecting truly
every object placed before it, and become, as it were, a second
Nature.7

You know that you cannot make any animal without it having
its limbs such that each bears some resemblance to that of
some one of the other animals. If therefore you wish to make
one of your imaginary animals appear natural—let us suppose
it to be a dragon—take for its head that of a mastiff or setter,
for its eyes those of a cat, for its ears those of a porcupine, for
its nose that of a greyhound, with the eyebrows of a lion, the
temples of an old cock and the neck of a water-­tortoise.8

I think that Leonardo may have dreamed of a complete visual rhetoric,

a speech of the eye, in which the whole work of language, from inven-
tion to persuasion to dialectic to symbolic logic, was accomplished
strictly through images. In picture-­language, every new idea is a
chimera, a recombination of the scattered limbs (manes, snouts, cocks’
combs) of old ideas—just as (many) Chinese ideograms recombine
radicals from other characters.

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Leonardo insists that a painted image is better than a musical com-

position because it persists unchanged in time. This looks like a valuing
of the static over the dynamic. But that isn’t quite true: Leonardo’s
paintings, even the calm ones, disquiet us because they are tracings of
whirlwinds. Not much is solidly there. His portraits tend to show half-­
shut eyes and half-­smiles and inarticulate fingers half self-­caressing, or
articulate fingers arrayed into a pinwheel and describing a spin. Much
swaying cartilage, little fixed bone; a knowingness in the absence of a
known. The marshes or fluent rocks in the background are signs that
the faces and bodies in the foreground are themselves eddies, standing
waves, studies in inconclusive sentience.
Though Leonardo thought literature and music lesser arts, he had
some skill at both. His improvisations on the lira da braccia were
praised, and he was a superb writer—his descriptions of imaginary
paintings contain some extraordinarily cunning passages. His medita-
tion on battle painting would give a narratologist much to ponder:

The Way to Represent a Battle

  Show first the smoke of the artillery mingled in the air
with the dust stirred up by the movement of the horses and of
the combatants. This process you should express as follows:
the dust, since it is made up of earth and has weight, although
by reason of its fineness it may easily rise and mingle with the
air, will nevertheless readily fall down again, and the greatest
height will be attained by such part of it as is the finest, and
this will in consequence be the least visible and will seem
almost the colour of the air itself.
The smoke which is mingled with the dust-­laden air will
as it rises to a certain height have more and more the appear-
ance of a dark cloud, at the summit of which the smoke will be
more distinctly visible than the dust. The smoke will assume a

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bluish tinge, and the dust will keep its natural colour. From the
side whence the light comes this mixture of air and smoke and
dust will seem far brighter than on the opposite side.
As for the combatants the more they are in the midst of
this turmoil the less they will be visible, and the less will be the
contrast between their lights and shadows.
You should give a ruddy glow to the faces and the figures
and the air around them, and to the gunners and those near to
them, and this glow should grow fainter as it is farther away
from its cause. The figures which are between you and the
light, if far away, will appear dark against a light background,
and the nearer their limbs are to the ground the less will they
be visible, for there the dust is greater and thicker. And if you
make horses galloping away from the throng, make little
clouds of dust as far distant one from another as is the space
between the strides made by the horse, and that cloud which is
farthest away from the horse should be the least visible, for it
should be high and spread out and thin, while that which is
nearest should be most conspicuous and smallest and most
compact.
Let the air be full of arrows going in various directions,
some mounting upwards, others falling, others flying hori-
zontally; and let the balls shot from the guns have a train of
smoke following their course. Show the figures in the fore-
ground covered with dust on their hair and eyebrows and such
other level parts as afford the dust a space to lodge.
Make the conquerors running, with their hair and other
light things streaming in the wind, and with brows bent down;
and they should be thrusting forward opposite limbs, that is, if
a man advances the right foot, the left arm should also come
forward. If you represent anyone fallen you should show the
mark where he has been dragged through the dust which has

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become changed to blood-­stained mire, and round about in

the half-­liquid earth you should show the marks of the tram-
pling of men and horses who have passed over it.
Make a horse dragging the dead body of his master, and
leaving behind him in the dust and mud the track of where the
body was dragged along.
Make the beaten and conquered pallid, with brows raised
and knit together, and let the skin above the brows be all full
of lines of pain; at the sides of the nose show the furrows
going in an arch from the nostrils and ending where the eye
begins, and show the dilatation of the nostrils which is the
cause of these lines; and let the lips be arched displaying the
upper row of teeth, and let the teeth be parted after the manner
of such as cry in lamentation. Show someone using his hand
as a shield for his terrified eyes, turning the palm of it towards
the enemy, and having the other resting on the ground to
support the weight of his body; let others be crying out with
their mouths wide open, and fleeing away. Put all sorts of
armour lying between the feet of the combatants, such as
broken shields, lances, swords, and other things like these.
Make the dead, some half-­buried in dust, others with the dust
all mingled with the oozing blood and changing into crimson
mud; and let the line of the blood be discerned by its colour,
flowing in a sinuous stream from the corpse to the dust. Show
others in the death agony grinding their teeth and rolling their
eyes, with clenched fists grinding against their bodies and with
legs distorted. Then you might show one, disarmed and struck
down by the enemy, turning on him with teeth and nails to
take fierce and inhuman vengeance, and let a riderless horse be
seen galloping with mane streaming in the wind, charging
among the enemy and doing them great mischief with his
hoofs.

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You may see there one of the combatants, maimed and

fallen on the ground, protecting himself with his shield, and
the enemy bending down over him and striving to give him
the fatal stroke; there might also be seen many men fallen in a
heap on top of a dead horse; and you should show some of the
victors leaving the combat and retiring apart from the crowd,
and with both hands wiping away from eyes and cheeks the
thick layer of mud caused by the smarting of their eyes from
the dust.
And the squadrons of the reserves should be seen standing
full of hope but cautious, with eyebrows raised, and shading
their eyes with their hands, peering into the thick, heavy mist
in readiness for the commands of their captain; and so too the
captain with his staff raised, hurrying to the reserves and
pointing out to them the quarter of the field where they are
needed; and you should show a river, within which the horses
are galloping, stirring the water all around with a heaving
mass of waves and foam and broken water, leaping high into
the air and over the legs and bodies of the horses; but see that
you make no level spot of ground that is not trampled over
with blood.9

The prose is detailed and intent, and a novelist could quarry from it a
moving chapter in a book something like The Red Badge of Courage—
Stephen Crane, like Leonardo, is acutely sensitive to atmospherics. But
Leonardo’s battle scene is something you are invited to co-­create, not
to participate in: with the imperative verbs the passage feels like a set of
instructions from a master god to his subordinate demiurges. Among
the warriors there is suffering, and there is elation, but they exist only
as hypothetical emotions to generate a particular writhe of neck or
twist of cheek. But what is particularly strange is that it is not one battle

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but all battles, with a sky filled at once with a whoosh of arrows, and
with cannon smoke, and little puffs from the muskets—all the motives
of all battle paintings are co-­present, with concomitant inspissations
and rarefactions and anfractuosities and big boistures and little slithers.
Leonardo gives us a description not of a single painting but of the
universe of possible battle paintings—this is maybe as close as the
Renaissance comes to the sort of ekphrasis that Homer gives us in
the description of Achilles’ shield, a film spool on which all time is
wound and bound. You can push the image backward by attending to
the tracks of the fallen warriors pulled along the ground by their
horses; you can push the image forward by following the direction of
the shaded gaze of the cheerful horsemen in the reserve squadrons.
The image is complete, in time as well as space: not a spot is left untram-
pled over with blood. We know the battle in the way that God knows a
battle, conscious of creation’s inner craft.
If a composer were to try to turn a battle painting into a musical
composition, he or she would probably begin by creating a verbal or
subverbal account of the painting, in terms similar to Leonardo’s
advice given above. It is difficult or impossible, I think, to perform any
experiment in intermedial translation without recourse to words: the
composer has to try to understand the painting as a language, a set of
binary oppositions graduated between their extremes (triumphant
victors versus desolate or raving losers, with the cautiously sanguine
reserve squadrons in the middle; clear air versus heavy smoke, with
thin dust in the middle). It may be possible to accomplish this re-­
mapping directly from pigment to music, but that would seem a miracle
of intuition. A mediating eidolon in words is useful in stabilizing the
relation between the real painting and the music that is about to come
into being.
As it happens, Leonardo died just when a vogue for musical repre-
sentations of battles was beginning. Clément Janequin, thirty years

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younger than Leonardo, popularized the genre with a polyphonic chan-

son “La bataille (Escoutez tous gentilz),” usually thought to be a cele-
bration of the French victory over the Swiss Confederates at the Battle
of Marignano in 1515. The voices imitate cannons and staccato musket
fire, the shouts of triumph, the legato groans of the wounded: the tex-
ture thins and thickens, exactly like the gradations of smoke and dust
and sky in Leonardo’s description of the (the) battle painting. And of
course the temporal aspect of the chanson, a weakness, to Leonardo’s
way of thinking, of the whole art of music, makes the piece all the
more representationally accurate, since battles take place in time—
though Janequin foreshortens several hours into six minutes.
“La bataille” is representational but not ekphrastic, since there is
no reason to think that a painting figured anywhere in Janequin’s think-
ing. But there are battle pieces that are musical meditations on particu-
lar battle paintings: for example, Liszt’s eleventh Symphonic Poem,
Hunnenschlacht (Battle of the Huns, 1857). This is an ekphrasis of a
painting by Wilhelm von Kaulbach of the famous battle in 451 when
the Roman general Flavius Aëtius led a coalition against the forces of
Attila: Kaulbach’s painting follows a legend that the spirits of the dead
warriors kept fighting in the sky, in the tremendous struggle between
civilization and barbarism, the sacred and the profane (fig. 50).
Would Liszt’s composition have been the slightest bit different if
he had simply meditated directly on the legend, in the absence of the
finite painting? Is its status as ekphrasis at all significant? It is an open
question. A notation in the score says, concerning the opening of the
music, “Conductors: the entire colour should be kept very dark, and all
instruments must sound like ghosts.”10 It is possible that the colors of
the spirits in the painting encouraged something of the muted, faintly
eerie textures of the music—but Kaulbach’s ghosts aren’t at all dark,
and in any case there is little in color or shape to distinguish them from
the corporeal presences on the ground. But in determining other

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Fig. 50.  Wilhelm von Kaulbach, Battle of the Huns (1857).

aspects of Liszt’s musical thinking, Kaulbach may have been of distinct

help. The theme of the Christian warriors is the plainchant Crux fidelis:
the trombones cut through the battle music with this solemn motive, a
sound equivalent to the glowing cross held by the billowy wafted figure
on the upper left corner of the painting. The musical contrast is strong,
between simple serene Christian confidence and the blasts and bloats of
pagan fury. Liszt described this section of his music as “two opposing
streams of light in which the Huns and the Cross are moving,” and
Kaulbach’s painting is exactly that—the sky is filled with two great
diagonals of moving bodies, flowing upward, in the reverse gravity of
the kingdom of the spirit.11 On the other hand, any composer of a piece
depicting a particular battle would think dialectically—as Beethoven
does in Wellington’s Victory (1813), in which the British forces are

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represented by “God Save the King: and “Rule Britannia,” and the
French by “Marlbrough s’en va-­t-­en guerre.”
So I would say that, while Kaulbach’s painting may have inspired
Hunnenschlacht, the painting per se was, so to speak, only mildly indis-
pensable. The more interesting cases of this sort of musical ekphrasis
are the less representational ones. A musical representation of an image
of a battle is not likely to differ much from a musical representation of
a battle—unless the composer can take account of the aspects of the
painting that are specific to the art of painting, the varnish, the canvas
texture, the width of the brush, the use of turpentine. It is fascinating
to watch intermedial artists when they try to find equivalents for some
purely technical matter.
When Gloria Coates decided to write a symphonic piece based on
van Gogh’s Still Life with Quinces (fig. 51)—the piece is called The
Quinces Quandary (1993–94)—she faced a difficult problem in ekphra-
sis: as Coates remarked of her music, “[Still Life with Quinces is] not
really a still life inasmuch as all the objects were in motion. Van Gogh
painted it during the last year of his life. . . . I felt something of his own
fears and disappointments . . . and the quinces were beginning to move,
one was already falling. . . . The form which I selected corresponded to
the movement of my eye across the canvas from the upper left to the
lower right with the falling fruit. The brushstrokes were like my own
glissandi . . . but in another medium, creating musical forms similar to
those on the canvas.”12 The content resists any ordinary strategy for
representational musicalizing: even Richard Strauss might have had
trouble writing a quince-­flavored, as opposed to an apple-­ or peach-­
flavored symphonic movement. And the content resists any ordinary
strategy for musicalizing not only on the level of content but on the
level of form: Erik Satie wrote a set of pieces called Trois morceaux en
forme de poire (1903), but it is not easy to know what musical form
would actually correspond to that of a pear, or a quince.

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Fig. 51.  Vincent van Gogh, Still Life with Quinces (1888).

But in any case Coates seems less interested in the falling thing than
in the act of falling: for her the painting depicts a suspended tumbling,
and in her music we hear a sort of implacable lethargy of drop. But there
is something else as well. What Coates chose to imitate was not the
notion of quince but the notion of impasto: the thick smear of pigment
is imaged by overlapping glissandi and unstable rumblings in the bass.
The music seems at once heavy and glaring, just as van Gogh’s painting
is heavy and glaring. The subject matter has little importance; the form
(if by form you mean the bulgy roundness of the quinces and the design
that the little heap makes against the cloth) has little importance; the
important thing is the handling of the pigment—the way it abrades the
eye. Coates seems attentive to the implied kinesthetics of the painting,
the extreme gravitational field around the fruit, warping the air.

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In the twentieth century, composers worked to see how far they

could go in converting into music an image—not what an image repre-
sents, not some aspect of an image, but the entirety of an image. One
composer, Iannis Xenakis, devised a machine to help him achieve this
dream of intermedial perfection: the machine was called UPIC (Unité
Polyagogique Informatique du CEMAMu—the last term is another
acronym, standing for Centre d’Études de Mathématique et Automa-
tique Musicales). It is a tablet on which the composer draws lines with
an electromagnetic pen, thereby making a picture that the machine
interprets as a sound-­graph in which the x-­axis is time and the y-­axis is
pitch. (Ronald Squib has written a fascinating explanation of the inner
workings of UPIC.)13 The machine interprets a steady horizontal line
as a steady note (high if located near the top of the picture, low if
located near the bottom—though because the lines are hand-­drawn,
there is a slight vagrancy of pitch); a curved line as an irregular glis-
sando. Since each arc on the tablet represents a different line of sound,
it is easy to create extremely complex polyphony simply by drawing
lots of lines.
Xenakis called the first UPIC-­generated composition Mycenae-­
Alpha (1978). Mycenae is the site of powerfully archaic Greek ruins,
and possibly Xenakis assigned this name because he felt himself a kind
of archaeologist of music, excavating from pictorial space a primal
acoustic architecture, even a lost civilization of sound, just as Heinrich
Schliemann excavated from Mycenae the great golden mask known as
the Mask of Agamemnon. Because there are passages of silence, or of
pedal points that register visually only as a thick line at the bottom
of the graph, the sounding parts of the score are separated into
separate visual units: stalagmites made up of piles of short horizontal
lines, stacks of little clouds, a large central blob in which many glis-
sandi sprout and jag and ramify from a single pitch and then contract
again.

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Fig. 52.  Iannis Xenakis, Mycenae-­Alpha (1978), detail. Copyright © 1978

Éditions Salabert—Paris. All rights reserved. Reproduced by kind permission of
MGB Hal Leonard s.r.l.

When Xenakis drew the score onto UPIC, he was presumably

thinking less about visual aesthetics than about the sounds that the
image would yield; but the score is arresting to the eye, as a section may
show (fig. 52). The two most salient phrase-­icons remind me strongly
of mature surrealism, especially Max Ernst, in, for example, The Angel
of the Hearth; or, The Triumph of Surrealism (fig. 53), and something of
the gustiness, the stomp, the articulation of a hand with way too many
fingers can be heard in Xenakis’s music. Ernst’s painting has an explic-
itly political theme: “The [Angel of the Hearth] is a picture I painted

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 Pseudomorphoses

Fig. 53.  Max Ernst, The Angel of the Hearth; or, The Triumph of
Surrealism (1937). © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP,
Paris. Photo: Art Resource, NY.

after the defeat of the Republicans in Spain. . . . This is, of course, an

ironical title for a kind of clumsy oaf which destroys everything that
gets in the way. That was my impression in those days of the things that
might happen in the world. And I was right.”14
Xenakis considered the procedures that govern his musical com-
positions to be similar to those that govern natural processes, such as
the patter of raindrops or the chirping of cicadas, and also similar to
those that govern political catastrophe:

Everyone has observed the sonic phenomena of a political

crowd of dozens or hundreds of thousands of people. The
human river shouts a slogan in a uniform rhythm. Then
another slogan springs from the head of the demonstration; it
spreads toward the tail, replacing the first. A wave of transi-
tion thus passes from the head to the tail. The clamor fills the

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city, and the inhibiting force of voice and rhythm reaches a

climax. It is an event of great power and beauty in its ferocity.
Then the impact between the demonstrators and the enemy
occurs. The perfect rhythm of the last slogan breaks up in a
huge cluster of chaotic shouts, which also spreads to the tail.
Imagine, in addition, the reports of dozens of machine guns
and the whistle of bullets adding their punctuations to this
total disorder. The crowd is then rapidly dispersed, and after
sonic and visual hell follows a detonating calm, full of despair,
dust, and death. The statistical laws of these events, separated
from their political or moral context, are the same as those of
the cicadas or the rain. They are the laws of the passage from
complete order to total disorder in a continuous or explosive
manner. They are stochastic laws.15

I don’t know whether Mycenae-­Alpha was intended to have a political

subtext, but Xenakis was a passionately political man—he lost an eye
in the struggle against monarchy in Greece in 1944. And I want to take
Mycenae-­Alpha as a kind of battle piece in which the whoomps and
whistles and detonations and calms are generated from something like
a battle picture by Ernst, a visual surreality translated into a musical
one. It is possible to hear the battle as a sophisticated update of
Janequin’s “La bataille”; or it is possible to hear it as a sound-­picture of
the endless combat between order and disorder, figure and blur, being
and nonbeing.

Pseudomorphoses Between Music and Painting

Representational painting is always concerned with the not-­thereness
of the represented object, and a painting that represents music neces-
sarily deals with a particularly un-­present entity. But if sound can’t be

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 Pseudomorphoses

painted, it can be framed by all sorts of paramusical things pertinent to

its origin or circumstances of performance: the face of a composer, the
face of a musician, the face of a listener, the decor of an opera or ballet,
the beautiful shapes of musical instruments—any and all of these
things can suggest music in general or (to some degree) in particular;
even musical notation can have a certain crabbed visual charm. Painters
can manipulate the visual field to impart some specificity to the sugges-
tion of music. In The Orchestra of the Opera (fig. 54), Edgar Degas has
rearranged the orchestral layout to make the figure of his friend, Désiré
Dihau, prominent in a way that a bassoonist would never be in a French
orchestra pit. The effect is like that of a camera panning in on the
soloist in a concert: the bassoon, the flute, and the neck of the double
bass (perpendicular to bassoon and flute) form a striking shape, a tilted
rectangular, the visual equivalent of the leading-­lines in a passage from
the ballet music. I don’t hear a specific tune in my head when I study
this painting, but something of the melos of woodwind-­intensive
passages in Delibes or Adolphe Adam comes through. The absent
music looms in the strong wood of the instruments, in the rapt routine
of the players’ faces.
Music appears most forcefully in painting as a locus of attention, a
pricking-­up of the ears. Earlier in this book I argued that painting tends
to be a language for pondering invisibilities, and the audible is an espe-
cially impressive and significant form of the invisible. In medieval and
Renaissance pictures, angels are sometimes like wreaths or banners
wrapped around or streaming from the harps and flutes and trumpets
they carry, as if angels existed mostly as a half-­visualized form of music.
Even in more earthbound depictions of music, the sounds of the instru-
ments make themselves visible in the sheer intentness of the listener’s or
the player’s gaze. Walter Pater, an art critic who could hear with his eye,
wrote in 1873 of Titian’s Concert (fig. 55) and related concert paintings
by Giorgione or Titian: “In sketch or finished picture, in various

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Fig. 54. Edgar Degas, The Orchestra of the Opera (c. 1870).

collections, we may follow it through many intricate variations—men

fainting at music; music at the pool-­side while people fish, or mingled
with the sound of the pitcher in the well, or heard across running water,
or among the flocks; the tuning of instruments; people with intent faces,
as if listening . . . to detect the small interval of musical sound, the
smallest undulation in the air, or feeling for music in thought on a
stringless instrument.” The effort to hear what cannot be heard can be a
metaphor for the effort to see what cannot be seen. Pater went so far as
to assert that all painting is music carried on by other means: “All art
constantly aspires towards the condition of music.”16 You don’t need any

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 Pseudomorphoses

Fig. 55. Titian, Concert (c. 1510).

special faculty of synesthesia to hear painting: a good painting is already

constructed in ocular timbres, ocular harmonies. We don’t usually have
to strain to see an object a few feet from our face: but, according to
Pater, Giorgione teaches us to scan a painting for the unheard melodies
of pictorial craft, the subtleties that need to be teased out patiently from
the general mass of sensation. You should look at a painting in exactly
the way that the harpsichordist in the Concert stares with his ear at his
instrument.
The old masters themselves understood their art as music. Nicolas
Poussin was perhaps the most explicit on this theme:

Those fine old Greeks, who invented everything that is beau-

tiful, found several Modes by means of which they produced
marvelous effects. This word Mode means, properly, the ratio

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 Art Rampant

or the measure and the form that we employ to do anything. . . .

As the Modes of the ancients were composed of several things
put together, the variety produced certain differences of Mode
whereby one could understand that each of them retained in
itself a subtle distinction, particularly when all the things that
pertained to the composition were put together in proportions
that had the power to arouse the soul of the spectator to
diverse emotions.17

Poussin conceived, or came to interpret, his martial scenes as music in

the Phrygian mode, stern and serious; and some of his pastoral scenes,
such as Dance to the Music of Time (fig. 56), in the Ionian mode, cheer-
ful, bacchanalian. The baby on the right, with the hourglass, suggests
that the dance might end in an hour; the baby on the left, blowing bub-
bles, suggests that the dance might end in a second. In a great many of
Poussin’s paintings, even much less overtly musical ones than this, a
dance seems to be on the verge of breaking out, as if the human figures
were just about to catch the subliminal tune that guided the hand of
their painter.
But some artists have attempted to represent music not on the level
of visual phenomena that cause music (harps), not on the level of visu-
al phenomena inspired by music (dancing), but on a deeper level.
Gustav Klimt’s monumental frieze based on Beethoven’s Ninth Sym-
phony is a long, somewhat scroll-­like mural that, as it unspools, you
read over time just as you hear music over time: there are figures that
represent (among other things) the sorrow of weak humanity, the hos-
tile forces arrayed against us, the yearning for happiness (with a knight
in golden armor who has the face of Gustav Mahler), the arts, the
angels of paradise, the great kiss. All of this is closely, intensely related
to our experience in hearing the Ninth Symphony, though Klimt’s
imagination, and our imaginations, are considerably aided by the fact

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 Pseudomorphoses

Fig. 56. Nicolas Poussin, Dance to the Music of Time (1640).

that Beethoven’s fourth movement is a setting of a poem by Friedrich

Schiller, the Ode to Joy (1785), a vision of the universal brotherhood
of man. Klimt, then, has not made a pure eidolon of a musical compo-
sition, but one mediated by the much easier process of making an eido-
lon of a poem.
Still, as we study the painting to seek some pseudomorph specific
to a passage in the symphony, we can sometimes find that Klimt is
responding directly to Beethoven, not to Schiller. In the Hostile Forces
section are arrayed the forces that oppose Joy: on the right, Unchastity,
Voluptuousness, Immoderation, on the left the Gorgons, all in the
bosom of the great gorilla-­like monster Typhon (fig. 57). Schiller
understands that Joy is not yet absolute, but in its supernal elation the
poem sweeps away all unjoyous things, as time presses forward urgent-
ly to a world beyond sorrow, beyond anger, beyond monarchs, beyond

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 Art Rampant

Fig. 57.  Gustav Klimt, Beethoven-­Frieze (1902), detail: The Hostile Forces.

war. Beethoven, on the other hand, begins the fourth movement with a
huge dissonance, a fanfare of terror, and then reviews the symphony’s
earlier themes—it is as if some mighty hand were crossing out the first
three movements one by one. We hear the first stirrings of the familiar
and agreeable Ode to Joy theme, but, as if angered again, the Schreck-
ensfanfare shouts it down; finally a bass cries out, “O friends, not these
sounds”—and soon the movement settles into the great choral setting
of the Ode to Joy. When Klimt devotes a good deal of space to the
hostile forces, he is attending to terrors and twistednesses that exist far
more strongly in the music than in the poem.
The most remarkable effort I know to paint music-­as-­music, rather
than a particular composition or a particular response to music, came
from the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo, whose automobile we studied in
an earlier chapter. Russolo was a composer and music theoretician as
well as a painter—he devised a set of noisemakers (gurgler, hissers,

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Fig. 58. Luigi Russolo, Music (1911). © DeA Picture Library/Art Resource, NY.
 Art Rampant

rumblers, and so forth) and wrote music for them. In one of his best-­
known paintings, Music (fig. 58), he sets himself the task of painting
sound waves. Here the comet masks—grinning, or pensive, or aston-
ished, or resigned, or goofy, or quietly amused—give some account of
music’s expressive potentialities; but what chiefly interests Russolo is
the shape of energy. As it happens, waves come in two basic types:
transverse (in which the displacement of the medium is perpendicular
to the direction of propagation, as in the sine waves made by a shaken
string) and longitudinal (in which the displacement of the medium is
the same as the direction of propagation, as in a sound wave). A note
struck on a piano makes the air bulge and recede, in an out-­pulsing of
concentric shells. This is exactly what Russolo depicts here; but through
the shells of the longitudinal wave Russolo has threaded a transverse
wave, a blue snake. The two sets of waves, along with the facial vectors
pointing inward at the pianist’s head, constitute a remarkably effective
image of directed energies.
A still further stage in the visualization of music might be a fanci-
ful realizing of the tracing of an oscilloscope. Something like this
occurs in the intermission of Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940), where the
affable bore Deems Taylor talks with a cartoon representation of the
optical soundtrack affixed to the filmstrip in a nonsilent movie. Taylor
was himself a composer, and it is amusing to see a composer talking
nonchalantly with a visual image of Music herself.

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 CHAPTER SEVEN

3 Comparative Arts 2
Two Conclusions

1. Every Artistic Medium Is the Wrong Medium

There is a danger that intermedial exercises will expose the vanity
or uselessness of art. I believe that every attempt to interpret, to find
meaning, pushes the artwork into some medium other than the one
in which it states itself: a poem becomes known through the pictures
and the music it rouses in the critic’s imagination, a painting through
the words that attempt to describe it, to locate the sources of its power,
and so forth. Indeed, the aesthetic phenomenon is most strongly felt
when art is liberated from itself, a condition that can happen only
through the act of forcing it, more or less against its will, into an alien
medium.
Kant describes the condition of art as purposiveness in the
absence of a purpose, but I’m not sure that an artwork can even possess
purposiveness. An interpretation can be considered as a construction
of a tentative entelechy, but the infinite multiplication of interpreta-
tions tends to erode any viable sense of an objective telos. Further-
more, whatever integrity or consonance or radiance an artwork

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 Comparative Arts

may possess in its home medium tends to vanish with the rough
intermedial handling that the artwork must undergo in the process of
interpretation.
The clearest demonstration I know is Luciano Berio’s account of
the composition of his Ekphrasis:

Ekphrasis [Continuo II] is a reserved and reflective commen-

tary on an adagio which I wrote in 1990. It is a commentary on
a continuous and ever changing soundscape formed from a
lace of repeating patterns.
I had no intention of composing a musical metaphor for
architecture while I was working on Continuo. Nor did I
want to write a musical homage to the famous architects
from Chicago, such as Sullivan, Wright or Mies van der
Rohe. Neither did I want to engineer any direct reference to
the amusing yet reasonable constructions by Renzo Piano
whose work I greatly admire. During the course of composi-
tion, however, I realised that this was exactly what had
happened.
The music processes within the fabric of Continuo
do indeed have similarities to architectural principles, in
abstract form if not in static shape. The musical patterns result
in a completely impractical building with no door and path-
ways. Its expressive attraction, nonetheless, lies in the contra-
diction of being thus uninhabitable yet open at any one time
for alternative extensions by added new wings, rooms and
windows.1

Berio describes the architectural pseudomorph that his music erects in

his mind. Ekphrasis is in every way a remarkable composition, a piece
full of tense, bright calm—myself I hear in it liquid scrawls in the

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 Comparative Arts

fashion of Cy Twombly, music trying to construct graphemes to

reach out to some unknowable picture that was beyond its power to
grasp. But when Berio tries to imagine the building that his music
would be if it were a building, he finds only something without
doors or corridors, completely uninhabitable, beyond or beneath any
human purpose. Perhaps every artwork is like that: we imagine that it
is full of friendly doors through which we gain intimate access, but in
fact we are shut out. The artwork, like the monad, has no windows.
And if we do somehow manage to get inside an artwork, it may look
like this:

This palace is a fabrication of the gods, I thought at first. I

explored the uninhabited enclosures and corrected the
thought: The gods that built it have died. I noted its peculiari-
ties and said, The gods that built it were mad. . . . I had crossed
a labyrinth, but the shining City of the Immortals terrified and
disgusted me. A labyrinth is a house elaborated for the sake of
confusing those within it; its architecture, extravagant in
symmetries, is subordinated to that end. In the palace that I
imperfectly explored, the architecture lacked any end at all.
The place abounded in atrocity: the exitless corridor, the
window too high to reach, the ostentatious door that gave on
a cell or an empty shaft, incredible inverted stairways, with
steps and balustrades pointing down. Other stairways,
attached airily to the side of a monumental wall, died leading
nowhere, petering out after two or three turnings, in the
highest darkness of the cupolas. [Jorge Luis Borges, “El
Inmortal” (1947)]2

No artwork has a habitable form. I cannot even live in my own house

unless I concentrate on the ways in which it fails to be an artwork.

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 Comparative Arts

2. Every Artistic Medium Is the Right Medium

The phenomenon of synesthesia suggests that the choice of medium
does not particularly matter: every medium is intimate with every other
because the senses themselves are only weakly segregated. It is
improper to speak of rough handling in the translation of an artwork
to an alien medium because there are no alien media: each artwork
is already present in the mind as a painting, a poem, a piece of music,
no matter what the medium of its original presentation. All art is
inscribed on the brain, and what lights up the visual areas will also light
up the faculties of hearing and touching. Indeed, there is something
peculiarly seductive, warmly human, in the sidestep across media
boundaries:

Rafael made a century of sonnets,

Made and wrote them in a certain volume
Dinted with the silver-­pointed pencil
Else he only us’d to draw Madonnas:
These, the world might view—but One, the volume.
Who that one, you ask? Your heart instructs you.
Did she live and love it all her lifetime?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

Dante once prepar’d to paint an angel:

Whom to please? You whisper “Beatrice.”
While he mus’d and traced it and retraced it,
(Peradventure with a pen corroded
Still by drops of that hot ink he dipp’d for,
When, his left-­hand i’ the hair o’ the wicked,
Back he held the brow and prick’d its stigma,
Bit into the live man’s flesh for parchment,
Loos’d him, laugh’d to see the writing rankle,

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 Comparative Arts

Let the wretch go festering thro’ Florence). [Robert Browning,

“One Word More,” 1855]

Dante’s painting, Raphael’s sonnets—these were special acts of love,

not public performances. And when we, as critics, tease out the paint-
ings latent in the Commedia or the poem latent in La fornarina, we are
engaged in something like an act of love, because we usually bother to
interpret only the things we love.
All art is inscribed on the body. The corporeality of art may not
always be easy to see, but it is always there. It is easy to mock the critic
who notes, for example, that the composer Edvard Grieg may have
shied away from grandiose works in favor of musical miniatures
(sometimes concerning trolls) because he was five feet one inch tall. I
would mock him myself. On the other hand, would we still laugh at a
critic who connected the short-­breathed melodies common in Grieg’s
work with the fact that Grieg had only one lung? Maybe, maybe not—
but I am certain that something of Grieg’s experience with his own
body does inhere in his work.
The arts are easy to join because they were never strongly sepa-
rated in the first place. It isn’t always easy to describe the insights
gained from a corporealist view of the arts, but it’s easy to feel the body
beneath every aesthetic phenomenon: in dance the body’s motion-­
incises in air, in painting the way the arms and fingers make choreo-
graphs of their fine motor skills on a canvas stage, in architecture the
body’s soaring stamina, in music the body’s way of understanding its
emphases as forms of sound, in poetry the body’s attempt to articulate
its breathing presence in the world. I have had little to say about dance
in this book, partly because this project could not hope to comprehend
the whole range of the arts, but mostly because I understand each art
individually as a dance, and all the arts together as the aggregate dance
of the body of the whole human race. As Richard Wagner put it,

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 Comparative Arts

Of all the arts, the art of dance is the most real. The material
of its art is the actual bodily human being, and not just a part,
but the whole, from the foot sole to the top of the head, as
presented to the eye. Therefore the dance includes in itself the
conditions for the manifestation of all other arts. [The Artwork
of the Future, 1849]3

Wagner’s early days in Paris partly ruined for him the formal art of
ballet, but the one sustained dance project of his maturity, the Venusberg
scene added to Tannhäuser in 1861, suggests something of the possi-
bilities of carnality in dance. For Wagner, dance is one of the arts, but
it is also all the arts: elsewhere in this same essay he speaks of the inti-
mate minuet that Dance, Music, and Poetry perform together, breast to
breast and leg to leg.
In the course of this book, we have looked at a number of
creation myths in literature, painting, and music. But to my mind the
most compelling account of the origin of the human race is found in an
1801 ballet, Beethoven’s Creatures of Prometheus. According to
Beethoven, dance precedes speech, precedes thinking, precedes feeling
itself:

The two [statues] move slowly across the stage from the
background.—P[rometheus] . . . is pleased when he sees that
his plan is such a success; he is inexpressibly delighted, stands
up and beckons to the children to stop—They turn slowly
towards him in an expressionless manner . . . he explains to
them that they are his work, that they belong to him, that they
must be thankful to him, kisses and caresses them.—However,
still in an emotionless manner, they sometimes merely shake
their heads, are completely indifferent, and stand there,
groping in all directions.4

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 Comparative Arts

Prometheus has shaped clay into a man and a woman, and animated
them with the fire that he stole from heaven; but he is disappointed that
they are just zombies, brainless creatures capable only of blank uncer-
tain movement. The music that Beethoven wrote to accompany their
coming-­to-­life is startling: first we hear a vague rhythmless preluding,
then Prometheus’s temporary pleasure in his new creation. How are
these half-­baked gingerbread figures to be turned into a man and a
woman capable of reason and affection? Prometheus ponders the
problem, and decides to take them to Parnassus, where Apollo and the
Muses will instruct them in how to be human by means of music and
dance—as the scenario puts it,

Euterpe, assisted by Amphion, starts to play music, and at

the sound of their harmonies the two young people start
to show signs of understanding, of the power of reflection, of
an appreciation of the beauties of nature and of human
feeling.5

(The intelligent and moving scenario was devised by the great chore-
ographer Salvatore Viganò, who commissioned the music from
Beethoven and danced the role of the male Urmensch.) By means of
various dances from Terpsichore, the Graces, and Bacchus, the new
man and woman learn the arts of pleasure and the arts of war.
So far the ballet seems to have little drama, little conflict; but
Beethoven and Viganò have a surprise. Melpomene, the Muse of trag-
edy, takes a dagger and mimes the act of dying; overcome by her own
art, she denounces Prometheus for having created a new race born but
to die—and she kills Prometheus. But the ballet will end happily: Pan
and his fauns perform a grotesque dance that brings the dead Titan
back to life. At the beginning Prometheus gives life to the human race;
at the end the life-­giver is himself in need of resurrection. Beethoven

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 Comparative Arts

described that resurrection with a theme that came to obsess him: the
theme we know from the finale of the third symphony, the Eroica
(composed in 1804, three years after The Creatures of Prometheus).
Beethoven also used this theme for a contradanse and in a set of piano
variations from 1802: the piano piece begins with its naked bass line,
then slowly outfits it first with its true melody, and then with counter-
melodies: the drama is like that of a statue that gradually comes to life,
as if the variations were a miniature version of the ballet. In the Third
Symphony, the theme appears after a funeral march, another sugges-
tion of resurrection—the simple melody seems to represent for
Beethoven some cosmic vivacity, some primal dance that catches up
trees and rocks and humans in its irresistible toils of grace. The theme
begins delicately, but soon moves toward three heavy clumps—in the
Eroica finale these clonks undergo a remarkable development that could
be called the apotheosis of the stomp.
So a dance can embrace everything governed by the Muses, all
mousike; and death; and resurrection. A dance is a response to music,
and a making of its own music—figuratively, or even literally, as in the
case of tap dancing, or in the case of a dancer I once saw who strapped
transducers to her own joints, so that every swivel of hip or flexion of
wrist created a specific sound generated by a computer program. A
dance is also a set of moving statues, moving pictures; and dancers
often shape their bodies into architectural forms, such as a gated
gazebo in Filippo Taglioni’s 1832 La sylphide or a merry-­go-­round in
Balanchine’s 1929 The Prodigal Son. To some extent the aesthetic phe-
nomenon is a mode of understanding how the human body winds and
unwinds, sleeks itself, through the artwork. The artwork’s surface is
always, in a sense, skin.
The human race and its art are always co-­evolving. Maybe art is
helping us sprout new sense organs, as some artists have thought. Here
is Ezra Pound in 1921:

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 Comparative Arts

Let us suppose man capable of exteriorizing a new organ,

horn, halo, Eye of Horus. Given a brain of this power, comes
the question, what organ, and to what purpose?
Turning to folk-­lore, we have Frazer on horned gods, we
have Egyptian statues. . . . Now in a primitive community, a
man, a volontaire, might risk it. He might want prestige,
authority, want them enough to grow horns and claim a divine
heritage, or to grow a cat head . . . he would have been deified,
or crucified, or possibly both. Today he would be caught for a
circus. . . .
But man goes on making new faculties. . . . You have
every exploited “hyper-­æsthesia,” i.e., every new form of
genius, from the faculty of hearing four parts in a fugue
perfectly, to the ear for money.6

Pound’s ultimate hope for the Cantos might have been to hasten the
evolution of a new human race, as horns, whiskers, antennae poke out
of us, sensitive to divine tremblings in the ether.
And here is Marinetti. In a 1924 piece called “Tactilism,” Marinetti
imagined an art for the skin to complement and perhaps replace the arts
of the eye and ear (painting, sculpture, music, literature): the artist
would make poems for the fingertips, by juxtaposing (say) sponges,
sandpaper, wool, pig’s bristle, and wire bristle:

toward the discovery of new senses

Imagine the Sun leaving its orbit and forgetting the Earth!
Darkness. Men stumbling around. Terror. Then the birth of a
vague sense of security and adjustment. . . .
A visual sense is born in the fingertips.
X-­ray vision develops, and some people can already see
inside their bodies. Others dimly explore the insight of their
neighbors’ bodies . . . the epigastrium sees. The knees see.

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 Comparative Arts

The elbows see. . . . Perhaps there is more thought in the

fingertips and the iron than in the brain that prides itself on
observing the phenomenon.7

It seems that the artwork appeals not only to all the senses we already
have, but to senses as yet undiscovered. To learn to see with the epigas-
trium and to hear with the elbows is part of the mission of the artwork:
to read with the skin and all that is beneath the skin.

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 NOTES

Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.

Introduction

1. Are the arts one or many is a principal question that the philosopher
Jean-­Luc Nancy asks in Les muses (2001).
2. “Dem Einen ist die Zunge gelöst, und er wird Dichter, in eines Andern
Seele gestaltet sich Alles zu Farben und Formen und er wird ein bildender Künstler,
der Dritte hört unwillkürlich, gemäß der Verschiedenheit seiner Seelenstimmung,
bald heitre, bald ernst oder melancholische Melodien in seinem Innern erklingen,
und er wird Musiker; kurz, es ist dieselbe schöpferische Kraft, welche gleichsam,
wie durch ein Prisma, sich verschiedenartig bricht.” Wilhelm von Schadow, Der
moderne Vasari: Erinnerungen aus dem Künstlerleben. Eine Novelle (Berlin: Wilhelm
Hertz, 1854), p. 94.
3. Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift (New York: Capricorn, 1970), p. 37.
4. D. H. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the
Unconscious (New York: Viking, 1960), p. 195.
5. In formulating these theses I am deeply indebted to Martin Heidegger’s
great essay on the origin of the artwork, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (1935–36).
6. Arthur Danto, The Abuse of Beauty (Chicago: Open Court, 2003), p. 18;
Danto, After the End of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 47
(emphasis mine).

1.  What Is Literature?

1. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 2010), p. 29.
2. “Il y avait chez mon maître un compagnon appelé M. Verrat, dont la
maison, dans le voisinage, avait un jardin assez éloigné qui produisait de très belles

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 Notes to Page 24

asperges. Il prit envie à M. Verrat, qui n’avait pas beaucoup d’argent, de voler à sa
mère des asperges dans leur primeur, et de les vendre pour faire quelques bons
déjeuners. Comme il ne voulait pas s’exposer lui-­même, et qu’il n’était pas fort
ingambe, il me choisit pour cette expédition. Après quelques cajoleries prélimi-
naires, qui me gagnèrent d’autant mieux que je n’en voyais pas le but, il me la
proposa comme une idée qui lui venait sur-­le-­champ. Je disputai beaucoup; il
insista. Je n’ai jamais pu résister aux caresses; je me rendis. J’allais tous les matins
moissonner les plus belles asperges: je les portais au Molard, où quelque bonne
femme, qui voyait que je venais de les voler, me le disait pour les avoir à meilleur
compte. Dans ma frayeur, je prenais ce qu’elle voulait me donner; je le portais à
M. Verrat. Cela se changeait promptement en un déjeuner dont j’étais le pour-
voyeur, et qu’il partageait avec un autre camarade; car pour moi, très content d’en
avoir quelques bribes, je ne touchais pas même à leur vin.
“Ce petit manège dura plusieurs jours sans qu’il me vînt même à l’esprit de
voler le voleur, et de dîmer sur M. Verrat le produit de ses asperges. J’exécutais ma
friponnerie avec la plus grande fidélité; mon seul motif était de complaire à celui
qui me la faisait faire. Cependant si j’eusse été surpris, que de coups, que d’injures,
quels traitements cruels n’eussé-­je point essuyés, tandis que le misérable, en me
démentant, eut été cru sur sa parole, et moi doublement puni pour avoir osé le
charger, attendu qu’il était compagnon, et que je n’étais qu’apprenti! Voilà
comment en tout état le fort coupable se sauve aux dépens du faible innocent.
“J’appris ainsi qu’il n’était pas si terrible de voler que je l’avais cru;
et je tirai bientôt si bon parti de ma science, que rien de ce que je convoitais
n’était à ma portée en sûreté.” Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, Les confessions
(Paris: Launette, 1889), vol. 1, available at http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_
Confessions_%28Rousseau%29/Livre_I?match=en.
3. “Cuando se proclamó que la Biblioteca abarcaba todos los libros, la
primera impresión fue de extravagante felicidad. Todos los hombres se sintieron
señores de un tesoro intacto y secreto. No había problema personal o mundial cuya
elocuente solución no existiera: en algún hexágono. El universo estaba justificado,
el universo bruscamente usurpó las dimensiones ilimitadas de la esperanza. En
aquel tiempo se habló mucho de las Vindicaciones: libros de apología y de profecía,
que para siempre vindicaban los actos de cada hombre del universo y guardaban

v288f
 Notes to Pages 25–45

arcanos prodigiosos para su porvenir. Miles de codiciosos abandonaron el dulce

hexágono natal y se lanzaron escaleras arriba, urgidos por el vano propósito de
encontrar su Vindicación. Esos peregrinos disputaban en los corredores estrechos,
proferían oscuras maldiciones, se estrangulaban en las escaleras divinas, arrojaban
los libros engañosos al fondo de los túneles, morían despeñados por los hombres
de regiones remotas. Otros se enloquecieron . . . Las Vindicaciones existen (yo he
visto dos que se refieren a personas del porvenir, a personas acaso no imaginarias)
pero los buscadores no recordaban que la posibilidad de que un hombre encuentre
la suya, o alguna pérfida variación de la suya, es computable en cero.” Jorge Luis
Borges, “La biblioteca de Babel,” available at http://www.literaberinto.com/
vueltamundo/bibliotecaborges.htm.
4. Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psycho-­Analysis, trans. James Strachey
(Radford, Va.: Wilder, 2010), pp. 25–26.
5. Rudyard Kipling, “How the Leopard Got His Spots,” Just So Stories, avail-
able at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2781/2781-­h/2781-­h.htm.
6. Elaine Altman Evans, “The Sacred Scarab,” McClung Museum Occasional
Papers (posted January 1, 1998), at http://mcclungmuseum.utk.edu/sacred-­scarab/.
7. René Descartes, “Principles of Philosophy,” part 3, sect. 46, in The
Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff,
and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1:257.
8. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-­
Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald
F. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 142–43.
9. Thomas More, Utopia, Harvard Classics, vol. 36, part 3 (New York:
Collier, 1909–14), book 2, available at http://www.bartleby.com/36/3/3.html.
All subsequent references to Utopia are from this source.
10. George Orwell, 1984 (1949), available at The Memory Hole, http://tmh.
floonet.net/books/1984/1984Ch2.1.html.
11. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1727), available at http://www.
english.uga.edu/~nhilton/232/gulliver/chap3–5.html.
12. W. B. Yeats, A Vision (New York: Macmillan, 1961), p. 226.
13. Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” in Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne
Schulkind (New York: Mariner, 1985), pp. 80–81.

v289f
 Notes to Pages 46–62

2.  What Is Painting?

1. William Aglionby, Painting in Three Dialogues (1685), in Art in Theory,

1648–1815, ed. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger (Malden, Mass.:
Blackwell, 2000), pp. 42–43.
2. Maurice Denis, “Définition du Néo-­traditionalisme” (1890), trans. Peter
Collier, ibid., p. 863.
3. Paul Gauguin, “Notes on Painting” (c. 1889–90), trans. John Rewald,
ibid., p. 1024.
4. The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, trans. Jean Paul Richter (Seattle:
Pacific Publishing Studio, 2010), p. 14.
5. Richard Tuttle, interview, Art21, PBS, available at http://www.pbs.org/
art21/artists/tuttle/clip2.html.
6. Francisco Pacheco, Arte de la pintura (1649), in Art in Theory, p. 35.
7. William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (1753), ibid., p. 493.
8. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M. T. H. Sadler
(New York: Dover, 1977), p. 6.
9. Ezra Pound, Literary Essays (New York: New Directions, 1968),
p. 153.
10. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust. Der Tragödie erster Teil:
Das ist die Welt:
Sie steigt und fällt
Und rollt beständig;
Sie klingt wie Glas—
Wie bald bricht das!
Ist hohl inwendig.
Hier glänzt sie sehr,
Und hier noch mehr.
..............
Du musst sterben!
Sie ist von Ton,
Es gibt Scherben.
Available at http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2229/pg2229.html.

v290f
 Notes to Pages 64–84

11. Quoted in Ann Sutherland Harris and Carla Lord, “Pietro Testa and
Parnassus,” Burlington Magazine 803, vol. 112, no. 16 (January 1970).
12. Quoted in Emanuel Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 134.
13. John Cage, Silence (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), p. 70.
14. Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting, trans. John Francis Rigaud (New
York: Dover, 2005), sect. 349, pp. 149–50.
15. Gustave Courbet, “Letter to Young Artists” (1861), trans. Jonathan
Murphy, in Art in Theory, pp. 403–4.
16. Pierre Proudhon, Du principe de l’art et sa destination sociale (1865), trans.
Christopher Miller, ibid., p. 407.
17. Robert Grosseteste, On Light (De luce), trans. Clare C. Riedl (Milwaukee:
Marquette University Press, 1942), available at http://www.lumen.nu/rekveld/
wp/?page_id=175.
18. Walt Whitman, “There Was a Child Went Forth,” from Leaves of Grass
(Philadelphia: David McKay, [1900]), available at http://www.bartleby.
com/142/103.html/.
19. Quoted in Bernard Denvir, The Impressionists at First Hand (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1987), pp. 146–47.
20. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen
Sinne” (On Truth and Falsehood in the Extramoral Sense), Werke in Drei Bänden
(Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1966), 3:313.
21. Quoted in Phoebe Poole, Impressionism (London: Thames and Hudson,
1991), p. 224.
22. Lionel Abel, Camille Pissarro: Letters to His Son Lucien (New York:
Pantheon), p. 64.
23. Quoted in Poole, Impressionism, p. 61.
24. Denvir, Impressionists at First Hand, p. 136.
25. Both quoted in John Golding, Cubism: A History and an Analysis,
1907–1914 (Cambridge: Belknap, 1988), pp. 51, 5.
26. Douglas Cooper, The Cubist Epoch (London: Phaidon, 1970), p. 59.
27. Quoted in John Golding, Braque: The Late Works (London: Royal
Academy of the Arts, 1997), p. 4.

v291f
 Notes to Pages 84–106

28. Quoted in Cooper, Cubist Epoch, p. 33.

29. Quoted in Golding, Cubism, p. 34.
30. Quoted ibid., p. 106.
31. Quoted in Cooper, Cubist Epoch, pp. 27–28.
32. Francis Frascina, “Realism and Ideology: An Introduction to Semiotics
and Cubism,” in Charles Harrison, Francis Frascina, and Gill Perry, Cubism,
Abstraction: The Early Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1993), p. 128; quoted in Golding, Cubism, p. 49.
33. Quoted in Golding, Cubism, p. 116.
34. Bernard Berenson, “Aesthetic and History: Tactile Values” (1896), avail-
able at http://www.scribd.com/doc/39437229/Berenson-­B-­Aesthetic-­and-­
History-­Tactile-­Values.
35. Pound / Ford: The Story of a Literary Friendship, ed. Brita Lindberg-­
Seyested (New York: New Directions, 1982), p. 10.
36. W. B. Yeats, “Symbolism in Painting” (1898), from Yeats, Essays and
Introductions (New York: Collier, 1968), p. 147.
37. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, p. 32.
38. Wassily Kandinsky, Reminiscences (1913), quoted in Kandinsky: Complete
Writings on Art, ed. and trans. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (Boston: Da
Capo, 1994), p. 373.
39. Ibid., p. 388.
40. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, p. 44.
41. Kandinsky, The Yellow Sound (1912), in Complete Writings, pp. 275–76.
42. Ibid., p. 257.
43. Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty, pp. 493–94.
44. Humbert de Superville, Essai sur les signes inconditionnels dans l’art (Essay on
Absolute Signs in Art) (1827–32), trans. Jonathan Murphy, in Art in Theory, p. 227.
45. Charles Blanc, Grammaire des arts du dessin, 2nd ed. (1870), in Martin
Kemp, The Science of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 257.
46. Cézanne: The Late Work, ed. William Rubin (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1977), pp. 46, 202.
47. Quoted in Golding, Cubism, p. 157.
48. Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America (New York: Vintage, 1975), pp. 81–82.

v292f
 Notes to Pages 108–152

49. “Dialoog over de Nieuwe Beelding” (Dialogue on the New Plastic)

(1919), in The New Art—The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian,
ed. and trans. Harry Holtzman and Martin S. James (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986),
pp. 78–79.
50. Punkt und Linie zur Fläche (Point and Line to Plane) (1926), in Kandinsky:
Complete Writings, p. 579.
51. Ibid., pp. 540, 560.
52. Ibid., pp. 583, 551–52, 581–82.
53. Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook, trans. Sibyl Moholy-­Nagy (London:
Faber and Faber, 1968), pp. 28, 42, 48.
54. D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1969), p. 487.
55. “Musée des Beaux-­Arts,” in Collected Poems of W. H. Auden (New York:
Modern Library, 2007), p. 179.
56. “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery,” in
Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Mary W. Shelley (London: John
and Henry L. Hunt, 1854), 139–40, edited for online version by Melissa J. Sites and
Neil Fraistat and available at http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/shelley/medusa/
mforum.html. Brackets signify gaps in the lines of this unfinished poem.
57. “The Dance,” in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume 2,
1939–62, ed. Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1991), pp. 58–59.
58. Denise Riley, “Lure 1963,” in Selected Poems (Hastings, U.K.: Reality
Street, 2000), p. 50.
59. Thomas Butler, “Writing at the Edge of the Person: Lyric Subjectivity in
Cambridge Poetry, 1966–1993” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2005),
p. 210.
60. Quoted in Butler, “Writing at the Edge of the Person,” p. 202.
61. T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton” (1935), from Four Quartets, in Eliot, Collected
Poems, 1909–62 (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1991), p. 180.

3.  What Is Music?

1. Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (New York: Norton, 1962), p. 53.

2. Claudio Monteverdi, Preface to Madrigali guerrieri, ed amorosi (1638),

v293f
 Notes to Pages 154–176

trans. Oliver Strunk, in Source Readings in Music History, ed. Oliver Strunk, rev.
Leo Treitler (New York: Norton, 1998), pp. 665–66.
3. Quoted in Jonathan D. Culler, Ferdinand de Saussure (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1986), p. 29.
4. Gretchen Wheelock, “Schwarze Gretel and the Engendered Minor Mode
in Mozart’s Operas,” in Musicology and Difference, ed. Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995), pp. 201–21.
5. E. M. Forster, “Word-­Making and Sound-­Taking,” in Foster, Abinger
Harvest (Boston: Mariner, 1950), p. 105.
6. George J. Buelow, “Rhetoric and Music,” in New Grove Dictionary of
Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, 20 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Grove’s
Dictionaries of Music, 1980), vol. 15.
7. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, On the Origin of Language, trans. John Moran
(New York: Ungar, 1966), p. 49.
8. Buelow, “Rhetoric and Music,” p. 800.
9. Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the
Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 29.
10. Jean-­Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music,
trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 128.
11. Benedetto Marcello, Il teatro alla moda (c. 1720), trans. R. G. Pauly, in Source
Readings in Music History, ed. Oliver Strunk (New York: Norton, 1950), pp. 526–27.
12. “El mundo para ellos no es un concurso de objetos en el espacio; es una
serie heterogénea de actos independientes. Es sucesivo, temporal, no espacial. No
hay sustantivos en la conjetural Ursprache de Tlön, de la que proceden los idiomas
‘actuales’ y los dialectos: hay verbos impersonales, calificados por sufijos
(o prefijos) monosilábicos de valor adverbial. Por ejemplo: no hay palabra que
corresponda a la palabra luna, pero hay un verbo que sería en español lunecer o
lunar. Surgió la luna sobre el río se dice hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö . . . Xul Solar
traduce con brevedad:. . . Upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned.” Jorge Luis
Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1947), available at Ciudad Seva, http://
www.ciudadseva.com/textos/cuentos/esp/borges/tlon.htm.
13. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M.
Anscombe (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2007), p. 151.

v294f
 Notes to Pages 177–194

14. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1982), pp. 269–70.
15. “Aus der dunklen Öffnung des ausgetretenen Inwendigen des Schuhzeuges
starrt die Mühsal der Arbeitsschritte. In der derbgediegenen Schwere des
Schuhzeuges ist aufgestaut die Zähigkeit des langsamen Ganges durch die
weithin gestreckten und immer gleichen Furchen des Ackers, über dem ein
rauer Wind steht. Auf dem Leder liegt das Feuchte und Satte des Bodens.
Unter den Sohlen schiebt sich hin die Einsamkeit des Feldweges durch den sink-
enden Abend. In dem Schuhzeug schwingt der verschwiegene Zuruf der Erde, ihr
stilles Verschenken des reifenden Korns und ihr unerklärtes Sichversagen in der
öden Brache des winterlichen Feldes. Durch dieses Zeug zieht das klaglose Bangen
um die Sicherheit des Brotes, die wortlose Freude des Wiederüberstehens der Not,
das Beben in der Ankunft der Geburt und das Zittern in der Umdrohung des Todes.”
Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1950), p. 19.
16. Quoted in Nicholas Temperley, Haydn: The Creation (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 32.
17. Quoted ibid., p. 90.
18. Empedocles, On Nature B, Fragment 17, ll. 1–13, trans. G. S. Kirk,
J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, in The Presocratic Philosophers, 2nd ed. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983), revised by the editors of the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
19. Quoted in Nicholas McGegan and Simon Shaw, booklet accompanying
Handel, Ode for St. Cecila’s Day, L’Oiseau-­Lyre CD 421 6562–2 (1989), p. 3.
20. Maureen A. Carr, Multiple Masks (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2003), p. 5.
21. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Dialogues (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1982), p. 33.
22. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Expositions and Developments (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1981), p. 125.
23. Stravinsky and Craft, Dialogues, p. 76.
24. Ibid., p. 77.
25. Stravinsky and Craft, Expositions and Developments, p. 124.
26. Stravinsky and Craft, Dialogues, p. 72.

v295f
 Notes to Pages 195–213

27. Ibid., p. 75.

28. Stravinsky and Craft, Expositions and Developments, p. 124.
29. Erik Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, vol. 2: 1904–1914, trans. Robert Layton
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 196.
30. Georg Friedrich Haas, “Natures mortes, for Large Orchestra, Work
Introduction, Universal Edition, http://www.universaledition.com/Georg-­
Friedrich-­Haas/composers-­and-­works/composer/278/work/11014/work_
introduction.
31. John Cage, Silence (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), p. 229.
32. “Das Arietta-­Thema, zu Abenteuern und Schicksalen bestimmt, für die es
in seiner idyllischen Unschuld keineswegs geboren scheint, is ja sogleich auf dem
Plan und spricht sich in sechzehn Takten aus, auf ein Motiv reduzierbar, das am
Schluß seiner ersten Hälfte, einem kurzen, seelenvollen Rufe gleich, hervortritt,—
drei Töne nur, eine Achtel-­, eine Sechzehntel-­und eine punktierte Viertelnote,
nicht anders skandiert als etwa: ‘Himmelsblau’ oder: ‘Lie-­besleid’ oder: ‘Leb’-­mir
wohl’ oder: ‘Der-­maleinst’ oder: ‘Wie-­sengrund,’—und das ist alles. Was sich mit
dieser sanften Aussage, dieser schwermütig stillen Formung nun in der Folge
rhythmisch-­harmonisch-­kontrapunktisch begibt, womit ihr Meister sie segnet and
wozu er sie verdammt, in welche Nächte und Überhelligkeit, Kristallsphären,
worin Kälte und Hitze, Ruhe und Ekstase ein und dasselbe sind, er sie stürzt und
erhebt, das mag man wohl weitläufig, wohl wundersam, fremd und exzessiv
großartig nennen, ohne es doch damit namhaft zu machen, weil es recht eigentlich
namenlos ist.” Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch
Verlag, 1973), pp. 56–57. Mann here makes a joke by working the name of his
musical mentor Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno into the prosodic cues.
33. Nattiez, Music and Discourse, pp. 127–28.
34. Donald Mitchell, Gustav Mahler, The Wunderhorn Years: Chronicles and
Commentaries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 302.

4.  Nine Definitions

1. Theodor Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik (Frankfurt: Europäische

Verlagsanstalt, 1966), p. 180.

v296f
 Notes to Pages 215–236

2. Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1, ed. John
O’Brien (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 25–34.

5.  Wonder and the Sublime

1. Edmund Burke, On the Sublime and Beautiful, vol. 24 of the Harvard

Classics, ed. Charles W. Eliot (New York: Collier, 1909–14), available at http://
www.bartleby.com/24/2/201.html.
2. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement (1790), trans. James Creed
Meredith, 1.2.23, available at http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/kant/immanuel/
k16j/book2.html.
3. Burke, On the Sublime and Beautiful.
4. “L’armature intellectuelle du poème se dissimule et tient—a lieu—dans
l’espace qui isole les strophes et parmi le blanc du papier: significatif silence qu’il
n’est pas moins beau de composer, que les vers.” Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres, ed.
Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Pléiade Gallimard, 1998, 2003), 2:659.
5. Kazimir Malevich, Preface to exhibition catalogue, in The Artist, Infinity,
Suprematism—Unpublished Writings, 1913–1933, trans. Xenia Hoffmann, ed.
Troels Andersen (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1978), p. 34.
6. Kazimir Malevich, Écrits, ed. Andréi Nakov (Paris: Éditions Gérard
Lébovici, 1986), pp. 226–27.
7. Malevich, Artist, Infinity, Suprematism, p. 35.
8. Malevich, Écrits, pp. 226–27.
9. John Cage, statement printed in Emily Genauer’s column in the New York
Herald Tribune, December 27, 1953, sect. 4, p. 6.
10. “Robert Ryman,” Bonnefantenmuseum Maastrich, http://www
.bonnefanten.nl/en/contemporary_art/collection/highlights/dossier/
artist/782/1568.

6.  Pseudomorphoses

1. Bennett Weaver, “Shelley Works Out the Rhythm of A Lament,” PMLA

47 (1932): 570–76.

v297f
 Notes to Pages 250–272

2. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Memories and Commentaries (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1981), p. 95.
3. “Stravinsky’s Three Pieces ‘Grotesques,’ for String Quartet” (1916), in
Selected Poems of Amy Lowell, ed. Melissa Bradshaw and Adrienne Munich (New
Branswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002), p. 61.
4. Quoted in Martin Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvelous Works of
Nature and Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 229.
5. Quoted in Emanuel Winternitz, Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 205–8.
6. The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, trans. Edward MacCurdy (Old
Saybrook, Conn.: Konecky and Konecky, n.d.), pp. 852, 854.
7. Leonardo da Vinci, A Treatise on Painting, sect. 360, trans. John Francis
Rigaud (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 2002), p. 264.
8. Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, pp. 890–91.
9. Ibid., 894–96.
10. Alan Walker, Liszt: The Weimar Years (New York: Knopf, 1989), p. 311.
11. Ibid., p. 312.
12. Gloria Coates, cited by Detlef Gojowy in booklet accompanying cpo cd
999 590–2, pp. 9–10.
13. Ronald Squibb, “Images of Sound in Xenakis’s Mycenae-­Alpha,” avail-
able at www.krablabbab.nl/docs/articlesquibbs.pdf.
14. Quoted in “A Max Ernst Retrospective Opens Today in NY,” Blouin
Artinfo, March 11, 2008, available at http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/117/
a-­max-­ernst-­retrospective-­opens-­today-­in-­ny/.
15. Iannis Xenakis, Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in
Composition, trans. Christopher Butchers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1971), p. 4.
16. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald L.
Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 103, 90.
17. Quoted in Anthony Blunt, Nicolas Poussin, 2 vols. (London: Pallas
Athene, 1967), 1:367–70.

v298f
 Notes to Pages 278–286

7.  Comparative Arts

1. Quoted in the booklet accompanying Col Legno WWE 20038 (2000),

pp. 5–6.
2. “Este palacio es fábrica de los dioses, pensé primeramente. Exploré los
inhabitados recintos y corregí: Los dioses que lo edificaron han muerto. Noté sus
peculiaridades y dije: Los dioses que lo edificaron estaban locos. . . . Yo había cruzado
un laberinto, pero la nítida Ciudad de los Inmortales me atemorizó y repugnó. Un
laberinto es una casa labrada para confundir a los hombres; su arquitectura,
pródiga en simetrías, está subordinada a ese fin. En el palacio que imperfectamente
exploré, la arquitectura carecía de fin. Abundaban el corredor sin salida, la alta
ventana inalcanzable, la aparatosa puerta que daba a una celda o a un pozo, las
increíbles escaleras inversas, con los peldaños y balaustrada hacia abajo. Otras,
adheridas aéreamente al costado de un muro monumental, morían sin llegar a
ninguna parte, al cabo de dos o tres giros,en la tiniebla superior de las cúpulas.”
Jorge Luis Borges, “El Inmortal” (1947), available at Apocatastasis, http://www.
apocatastasis.com/el-­inmortal-­jorge-­luis-­borges-­carthapilus.php.
3. “Der realste aller Kunstarten ist die Tanzkunst. Ihr künstlerischer Stoff ist
der wirkliche leibliche Mensch, und zwar nicht ein Theil desselben, sondern der
ganze, von der Fußsohle bis zum Scheitel, wie er dem Auge sich darstellt. Sie schließt
daher in sich die Bedingungen für die Kundgebung aller übrigen Kunstarten ein.”
Richard Wagner, Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1850), p. 51.
4. Beethoven’s holograph of choreographic notes for the scenario for #1,
from the Berlin “Landsberg 7” sketchbook, as cited in Rainer Cadenbach’s essay
in the booklet accompanying Beethoven: Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus, Teldec
4509–90876–2 (1995), p. 4.
5. Ibid., p. 7.
6. Ezra Pound, “Postscript to The Natural Philosophy of Love,” in Pavanes
and Divagations (New York: New Directions, 1958), p. 210.
7. F. T. Marinetti, “Tactilism” (1924), in Selected Writings (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), pp. 111–12.

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This page intentionally left blank
 INDEX

Page numbers in italic type indicate illustrations.

Abbate, Carolyn, 174 Allard, Roger, 84

abrasion, definition of, 211 allegory, 67, 91, 92, 136–37
abstractions (universals), 68–69 all-white paintings, 81, 226–33
abstract painting, 55, 94–100; first, 97–98, American Sign Language, 155
98; Kandinsky defense of, 55, 93–94, Amon-Ra (deity), 148
228 Amphion, 190–92, 194
Adam, 181–82, 185–86 anapest, 240
Adorno, Theodor, 3, 156, 202, 203; anaphora, 167, 246
“Fragment on Language,” 163; pseu- anarchist movement, 73
domorphosis and, 212, 213, 214 Anchises, 42
Aeneas, 16–17, 42–43, 241 angels, 75, 119; painting representation
aesthetics, 7–8; blankness ideal and, 81, of, 52–53, 107, 269
226–33; Heidegger essay on, 177–79 animism, 5
Aëtius, Flavius, 262 Antheil, George, 174, 175
Aglionby, William, 119; Painting in Three anthropology, 118–19, 157–58
Dialogues, 46, 47, 55 Aphrodite of Milos, 8
Agostino Novello, 143, 143–45, 144 Apocalypse Now (film), 211
aleatory construction, 175 Apocrypha, 57
alexandrine, 245 Apollo, 6–7, 191, 193, 283
Allais, Alphonse, 81, 226; Anemic Girls archaism, 93
Have Their First Communion As It architecture: creation of, 190; point in,
Snows (Première communion de 110; pseudomorph of, 278–79
jeunes filles chlorotiques par un temps Aristophanes, 19–20
de neige), 81, 226; Funeral March Aristotle, 15, 187; Poetics, 1–2
for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man, Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station
226–27 (film), 115

v301f
 index

arrow, 111–12, 112, 113, 114 Bacon, Francis, 120

art criticism, 134, 136–37, 215, 219–20, 277 Baïf, Jean-Antoine de, 245
art for art’s sake, 73 Bailly, David, Vanitas Still Life with Por-
arts, 1–8; as all encompassing, 4, 217–18; trait, 62, 62; Vanitas drawing, 63, 63
bases of speech of, 71; coming-into- Balanchine, George, 213; The Prodigal
being of, 7–8, 9; corporealist view Son, 284
of, 281–86; decomposition process ballet. See dance
and, 7–8, 77–78; designification of, Ballet mécanique (film), 117
225–26; diversity of, 3–4; ekphra- Bartholomew, Saint, 146
sis and, 120–32; intention and, 4–5, battle painting, 256–62, 268
9; interpretation of, 278; meaning Bauhaus, 111
and, 4–5, 8, 71, 100, 232–33; me- beats, in poetry, 236
dium choice and, 277–86 (see also Beckett, Samuel, Malone Dies, 24
intermedial translation); origins and Beethoven, Ludwig van, 138, 238; Crea-
(see creation accounts); paragone tures of Prometheus, 282–84; Fifth
question about, 252–53; residue of Symphony, 110; Fourth Piano Concer-
unstranslatable, 219–20; senses and, 6, to, slow movement, 165–66; Moonlight
221, 280, 284–85; transposition of, 232; Sonata, 154; Ninth Symphony, 212–13,
ultimate fate of, 7–8; ultimate purpose 217, 272–74; Ninth Symphony, fourth
of, 4; unity of, 3–4, 7, 99–100; won- movement, 168, 273; Piano Sonata
der and sublime and, 118–26. See also op. 111, 200–201; piano variations
comparative arts; medium; specific arts (1802), 284; Third Symphony (Eroi-
Atrium Musicae de Madrid, 193 ca), finale, 284; Wellington’s Victory,
Attila the Hun, 262 262–63
Auden, W. H., 239; “Gently, little boat,” Bellamy, Francis, 14
241; “Memorial for the City,” 26; “Mu- Bellman’s map, 226
sée des Beaux Arts,” 120–21; “Noc- Bentham, Jeremy, 38
turne,” 238 Berenson, Bernard, 90
autobiography, 22–23, 24 Berio, Luciano, Ekphrasis, 278–79
Ayres, Gillian, Lure, 128–32, 129 Bible, 15, 24, 181–87, 234
Big Bang, 26, 75, 196
Babbitt, Irving, 3, 214 Bildungsroman, 24
Bacchus (Dionysus), 169, 170 binary division, 157–62
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 196–97; Art of biometrics, 111
the Fugue, 157 Blair, Linda, 88, 89

v302f
 Index

Blake, William, 91–92, 102, 235; Vision Butler, Thomas, 130, 131
of Blood-thirstiness, 92 Byrd, William, “Come woeful Orpheus,”
Blanc, Charles, 102–3, 111; Grammar of 150–51
the Arts of Drawing, 102–3, 103 Byron, Lord, Don Juan, 24
blankness, 81, 226–33
body. See human body Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (film), 115
Borges, Jorge Luis, 36; “El Immortal,” cadence vs. cadenza, 197–98
279; “The Library of Babel,” 23–24; caesura, 245
“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis, Tertius,” 173 Caetera fumus theme, 58, 61
Bosch, Hieronymus, 137 Cage, John, 200, 217; chance and, 66;
Botticelli, Sandro, Birth of Venus, 5, 4'33", 231, 232; music and language
229–30 and, 175–76; pseudomorphs and, 231;
Brahms, Johannes, 174; Intermezzo, op. Solo for Voice 2, 175–76
118, no. 6, 214 Calder, Alexander, mobiles of, 174
Braque, Georges: cubism and, 84, 85–88, Callot, Jacques, 205
89–90, 91; Large Nude, 87–88; Little Calzabigi, Ranieri de’, 159; Orfeo ed
Harbor in Normandy, 84–86, 85; Three Euridice, 242–43; Paride ed Elena, 159
Nudes, 86–87, 87 camera obscura, 48
Brecht, Bertolt, 210; “Alabama-Song,” Cammarano, Salvatore, 242
237; Die Dreigroschenoper 210 Canaletto, 136, 137
Breton, André, 66 canon, two-part, 144
Britten, Benjamin: Nocturne, 238; Six Carissimi, Giacomo, Vanitas vanitatum
Metamorphoses After Ovid, 169, 170 II, 199
Brooke, Arthur, The Tragicall Historye of Carroll, Lewis: The Hunting of the Snark,
Romaeus and Juliet, 14 226–27; “Jabberwocky,” 232
Brown, Lancelot (“Capability”), 202 Casanaova, Giacomo, memoirs of, 24
Browning, Robert: ekphrasis and, 122– categorical imperative, 37, 277
23; “Fra Lippo Lippi,” 122–23; “One Catherine of Alexandria, Saint, 145–46
Word More,” 280–81 Catherine wheel, 74, 146
“Bruder Martin” (folk song), 203, 204, 206 cave paintings, 7, 118, 119, 179
Brueghel, Pieter the Elder: The Kermess, Cecilia, Saint, 186
125–26, 126, 132; Landscape with the Cecilian odes, 186–87, 188–89, 248–49
Fall of Icarus, 121, 121 Cézanne, Paul, 55, 81; Large Bathers, 55,
Buelow, George J., 171 56; Mountains in Provence, 104, 105;
Burke, Edmund, 118, 222; on the sublime, volumetric perspective and, 103–4
220–21 chance, 66

v303f
 index

Chaney, Lon, 115 color photograph, 79

chaos, musical representation of, 184, color wheel, 80
185, 189, 190, 194–95, 196, 197 comedy, 164
Chaplin, Charlie, 115–16; Modern Times, comic strips, 216, 229
115–16 comparative arts, 1–9, 220, 277–79;
Charpentier, Marc-Antoine, Les plaisirs Aristotle ’s poetics and, 1–2; four
de Versailles, 169–70 theses of, 4–9; fundamental question
Chevreul, Eugène, 80 of, 2–4; nine definitions and, 209–14;
Chinese ideogram, 116–17, 255 two conclusions about, 277–86. See
Chomsky, Noam, 102 also ekphrasis; intermedial translation;
Christianity: biblical origin story and, pseudomorphoses
180–86, 194–95; sacred text and, 15; composers. See music; individual composers
symbols of, 74, 92, 145–47, 162, 196 concerto, cadenza and, 197–98
chromaticism, 150–51, 247 concinnity, 241; definition of, 210–11
Churchill, Winston, 167 cone, 104
Cicero, 2 Conrad, Joseph, 18–19; The Nigger of the
cinema, 114–17; music and, 153–54, 160; “Narcissus,” 19
vocabulary of, 116–17 consonance, figures of, 210–11, 241, 248
Cliffs at Étretat, Courbet vs. Monet paint- contrapposto, 137–38
ing of, 75, 76, 77, 80 contrapuntal. See counterpoint
Coates, Gloria, The Quinces Quandary, Coppola, Francis Ford, Apocalypse Now,
263–64 211
codes, musical, 150–54, 162 copying, of recognized artworks, 69, 70
codes, visual. See symbols corporeality: arts and, 281–86; light and,
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 66; “The 74–75
Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” 220 counterpoint: definition of, 211–12; musi-
collage, 5, 174, 212 cal fugue and, 192; visual, 141–48, 171
Collier, Edwaert, Vanitas with a globe, Courbet, Gustave, 91, 106, 107; The Cliffs
musical scores, and instruments, 61 at Étretat After the Storm, 75, 76, 77;
color, 46, 47, 48, 79, 80, 91, 100, 130; abstract The Origin of the World, 67–68, 68;
painting and, 95, 97–98, 133; all-white realism and, 69, 70–74, 107; Stone-
canvases and, 228–29; complementary, breakers, 71, 72, 80
80; cubist depth and, 84; emotional state Courthope, W. J., 3
and, 102–3, 103; impressionist patches Crane, Stephen, The Red Badge of
of, 83; line and, 102–3, 103 Courage, 259

v304f
 Index

Crashaw, Richard, Bulla, 62, 63 Degas, Edgar, The Orchestra of the

Cratylus, 182–83 Opera, 269, 270
creation accounts, 7–8; human origins de Kooning, Willem, 229
and, 181–82, 185–86, 282–84; lit- Delaunay, Robert, 105
erature and, 7, 25–36, 180, 181, 185; della Porta, G., 48
music and, 7, 180, 183–200, 282–84; deluge theme, 96, 97, 181, 194
painting and, 7, 64–67, 96–97, 177–81, de Man, Paul, 176–77
216 Democritus, 34, 187
criticism. See art criticism Denis, Maurice, 119; “Définition du
cross: Christian iconography of, 146. See Néo-traditionalisme,” 46, 47
also plus sign Derrida, Jacques, 176, 211
Crux fidelis (plainchant), 262 Descartes, René, “Principles of Philoso-
cube, 104, 105, 107 phy,” 32, 33, 33
cubism, 84–91, 104–5, 137; ideal and, designification, 225–26, 228, 229, 231
85–86; implied origami of, 84–85, 98; diagonal, 137
impressionism vs., 84 dialectic, 162, 219–20, 233, 255, 262–
cultural values, 15–21, 36 63; between visible and invisible,
cylinder, 104 52–54
Dickens, Charles, 234
dance, 110, 157, 193, 194, 281–84 Dihau, Désiré, 269
Dante, 132, 234, 280–81; Divine Comedy, dimensions, 84–85, 98, 104, 132–48. See
146, 281; Inferno, 39 also three-dimensionality
Danto, Arthur, 9; The Transfiguration of diminished sevenths, 156
the Commonplace, 9 Dion, “The Wanderer,” 130
Darwinian evolution, 30, 31 Dionysus (Bacchus), 169, 170
David, Jacques-Louis, Oath of the Discobolus, Myron’s sculpture of, 138
Horatii, 72, 73 Disney, Walt, Fantasia, 276
death, Milton’s description of, 222–23 dissonance, figures of, 141, 210–12, 248
Debussy, Claude, 190; Chevaux de bois, dollar bill, pictorial imagery of, 147–
246–47, 248; La mer, 173–74 48
decadence in art, 3 Donizetti, Gaetano, Lucia di Lammer-
decasyllabic lines, 244 moor, 198
Declaration of Independence, 14 Donne, John, Satyre 5, 200
decomposition process, 7–8, 77–78 Doré, Gustave, 234
decontextualization, 216 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 20

v305f
 index

drama, 164, 165, 210; abstraction and, 99; Waste Land, 97

Aristotelian divisions of, 1–2; tragedy emblems, 74, 92, 93, 107, 113; of martyrs
and, 44 and saints, 146
Dryden, John, 43; “Alexander’s Feast,” emotions: artistic expression of, 6; color
248–49, 250; and Handel’s Ode for St. and, 102–3, 103; music and, 156
Cecilia’s Day, 186–87, 188 Empedocles, 26; On Nature, 187–88,
Duchamp, Marcel, 9, 217; Fountain, 216 189
Duck Soup (film), 164 empiricism, 69
Du Fresnoy, Charles-Alphonse, 100–101 energy, painting of, 98
Duns Scotus, John, 79 English language, 133, 238–39; musical
Dürer, Albrecht, Unterweysung der Mes- settings for, 237, 241, 243, 245, 246,
sung mit Zirckel und Richtscheyt, 49 247–48
Dutch genre painting, 17–18, 61, 70 entropy, 8
Dylan, Bob, “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only epic, 15, 16–17
Bleeding),” 237 Erigena, John Scotus, 75
dystopian fiction, 37, 39–41 Ernst, Max, The Angel of the Hearth; or,
The Triumph of Surrealism, 266–67,
eidolon, 213–14 267, 268
8½ (film), 211 Euclidean solids, 103, 104
Einstein, Albert, 33, 85 Euclidean space, 48, 67
Eisenstein, Sergei, 116–17; Strike, 116 Evans, Elaine Altman, “The Sacred
ekphrasis, 120–32, 145, 163, 234; artwork Scarab,” 31–32
vs. artist and, 128; Berio musical com- Evans, Mary Ann. See Eliot, George
position and, 278–79; Browning and, Eve, 31, 182, 194
122–23; content vs. form and, 128; Everett, Betty, 130
definition of, 120, 136; dimensions of, Everly Brothers, “When will I be loved?”
132–33; Homer and, 260; indescrib- 130
ability and, 148; “Lure” poem/Lure Exorcist (film), 88
painting and, 128–32; most subjective
form of, 126–28; musical works and, fables, 26–28, 30, 31, 36, 91. See also
260–64, 278–79; painter’s life and, 146; mythology
Riley and, 128–32; as seizure, 123–26 familiarity, 44
electromagnetic force, 79, 119 Fantasia (film), 276
Eliot, George, 18, 19, 71; Adam Bede, Faraday, Michael, 75
17–18 Faulkner, William, The Sound and the
Eliot, T. S.: “Burnt Norton,” 138; The Fury, 19

v306f
 Index

Fauré, Gabriel, Clair de lune, 247, 248 futurism, 107–8, 111, 112, 114, 274
Faust legend, 24, 201, 61–62
Fellini, Federico, 8½, 211 Galerie Vivienne, 226
Fenollosa, Ernest, The Chinese Written Galla Placidia mausoleum (Ravenna), 138
Character as a Medium for Poetry, 117 Gauguin, Paul, 47
fetishes, 89 Genesis, 181–82; creation music based
fiction. See novel on, 184–87, 195, 196
figures of speech, 166–67 geologic pseudomorph, 212
films. See cinema Georges, Waldemar, 90
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 40 German language, 238, 239–40; musical
flatness, 93, 98 settings for, 237, 243, 245, 246, 247–48
Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary, 20 gesture, 50–51, 117, 155–56
Fleming, Ian, Goldfinger, 19 Giorgione, 269, 271
Flemish painting, 61; Medusa, 124 Giotto, La lamentazione, 162–63
flood. See deluge theme Giraud, Albert, Pierre Lunaire, 251
force, 101 Gleizes, Albert, 84
Ford, Ford Madox, 91 globe, 61, 62
Forster, E. M., 165–66 Gluck, C. W.: Iphigénie en Tauride, “Le
Foucault, Michel, “Nietzsche, Geneal- calme rentre dans mon coeur,” 212;
ogy, History,” 34–35, 36, 183 Italian prosody and, 242–43; Orfeo ed
four elements, 187 Euridice, 166; Orfeo ed Euridice, “Che
Francis of Assisi, Saint, 142–43 farò senza Euridice,” 159–60; Orfeo ed
Frankenstein (film), 115 Euridice, “Chi mai dell’Erebo,” 242–43
Frascina, Francis, 89 Goddard, Paulette, 115
French art: blankness and, 226–27; nine- Goehr, Alexander, 156
teenth-century official regulation of, Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 13; “Der
69–71 Erlkönig,” 238, 239–40; Faust, 24, 61–
French structuralism, 157–58 62; Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, 9
French verse, musical settings for, 245–48 Gogh, Vincent van. See van Gogh,
Freud, Lucian, 132 Vincent
Freud, Sigmund, 153; An Outline of Psy- Gospels, 15
cho-Analysis, 25, 28 grace, 101; line of, 101, 111
fugue, 192 grammar: of images, 101–4, 103; of
Fuller, Loie, 251 speech, 102
Fuseli, Henry, Night-hag Visiting the Grand Canyon, 218
Lapland Witches, 223–24, 223 gravity, 111, 141

v307f
 index

Greece, ancient: arts and, 1–2; creation Hockney, David, 48

myths and, 182–83, 186–93; music and, Hogarth, William, 54, 100–101, 105, 111;
150, 151, 152–53; poetry and, 237, 245, Analysis of Beauty, 101, 102
246; sacred text and, 15; sculpture and, Holbein, Hans, 48
137–38 Homer, 13, 234, 260; Illiad, 15; Odyssey, 58
Greenberg, Clement, 3, 137, 214–15, Honegger, Arthur: Amphion, 190–93,
217, 220 194; Fifth Symphony, 199
Grieg, Edvard, Peer Gynt, 154 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 79
Gris, Juan, 85–86 Horace, ut pictura poesis dictum, 2
Grosseteste, Robert, Bishop, 75 Hugo, Victor, 23
Huk, Romana, 131
Haas, Georg Friedrich: Natures mortes, human body, 111, 137–38, 162; arts
200; Torso, 199–200 and, 281–86; creation accounts and,
Handel, George Frideric, Ode for St. 181–82, 185–86; music and, 155–57,
Cecilia’s Day, 186–87, 188–89 281; senses and, 6, 221, 284–86
Hanslick, Eduard, 149, 174, 175 Hunchback of Notre Dame (film), 115
“harmony of the spheres,” 189–90, 191, 197
Haydn, Joseph: The Creation, 184–86, iambic meter, 156–57, 193, 237–38, 240,
194, 195, 196; Farewell Symphony, 198 241
hearing, 280 Iamblichus, 189
heaven, images of, 146 iconography, 145–47. See also symbols
Hegel, G. W. F., 8–9 ideal, 85–86
Heidegger, Martin, 216; Der Ursprung des ideas, 85
Kunstwerks, 177–79, 216 illustration, 234
Heine, Heinrich, “Die Stadt,” 238 images: musical, 155–57, 265–66; nonim-
Heliodorus, 57 ages and, 229–30; pictorial, 101–2, 119,
Helmholtz, Hermann, 79 135–38, 145, 147–48; pictorial tran-
Herschel, William, 196 scription of poetic, 120–21, 126–28;
hieroglyphs, 116–17 poetic, 91, 222
Hildegard von Bingen, Ordo virtutum, 196 imagination, 66, 222
Hirst, Damien, Mother and Child Divided, impressionism, 75–84; cubism compared
119 with, 84; light and, 75, 79–81, 91; po-
history, 35–36, 41 etry and, 91; science of, 78–80; subject
history painting, 71, 72; battle scenes, matter of, 80–81; words of, 83
256–62, 268 Incohérents, Les, 81
Hitchcock, Alfred, Rope, 114 inflection, 168–69, 170

v308f
 Index

Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique, 48 94–95, 97–99; First Abstract Watercolor,

intermedial translation, 209–18, 219, 97–98, 98; The Flood, 181; Improvisa-
220, 232–33, 277–86; boundaries and, tion “Klamm,” 95, 96; Point and Line to
95, 98–100, 214–15; consonance and, Plane, 109–10, 111; Sketch for Deluge I,
210–11; definition of, 209–10; ease of 95–96, 97; The Yellow Sound, 99
manipulation of, 216–17, 233; residue Kant, Immanuel: categorical imperative,
of untranslatable and, 219–20; words 37, 277; Critique of Judgment, 221;
and, 260; Xenakis UPIC machine and, sublime, 221
265, 266. See also ekphrasis; pseudo- Karloff, Boris, 115
morphoses Kaulbach, Wilhelm von, Battle of the
interpretation, 133, 136–37, 160, 278 Huns, 261–62, 262, 263
invisibilities, 50–54, 58, 107, 269 Keats, John: “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 120,
Ionian mode, 272 129–30; “Ode to a Nightingale,” 235
Iser, Wolfgang, 206 Khepri (creation god), 31–32
Italian art, 69; medieval painting, 142–45, kinesthesis, 154–57, 161, 162, 203
269. See also Renaissance King James Bible, 15, 182
Italian language, musical settings for, King Kong (film), 115
241–45, 246 Kipling, Rudyard, “How the Leopard
Ives, Charles, Second Quartet, 168 Got Its Spots,” 26–28, 30, 31, 36
Kircher, Athanasius, 167
Jacob’s Ladder effect, 195 Klee, Paul, 111–12, 162; Eros, 111, 112,
Jameson, Fredric, 179 114; Pedagogical Sketchbook, 111
Janequin, Clément, “La bataille (Escout- Klimt, Gustav, Beethoven-Frieze, 212–13,
ez tous gentilz),” 260–61, 268 214, 217, 272–74, 274
Jean Paul, Titan, 205–6 Kramer, Hilton, 217
Job, 13 Kuleshov, Lev, 116
Jordan, Louis, “School Days,” 237
Jowett, Benjamin, 182–83 Lachenmann, Helmut, 200
Joyce, James, 6 landscapes, 140–41; musical depiction of,
Jubal, 183 156
Judeo-Christian tradition, 180–86, 194–95 language: of cinema, 114–17; of cubism,
Junius, Franciscus, 2 85; dereferentializing of, 176; every
artistic medium as, 8, 100; figures of
Kandinsky, Wassily, 3, 93, 94–100, 109–10, speech and, 166–67; formal properties
111, 113, 133; abstract art and, 55, 94– of speech and, 164; of gesture, 50–51,
95, 228; Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 155–56; grammar of spoken, 102; of

v309f
 index

language (continued) light, 74–83, 100; corporeality and,

impressionism, 83; intermedial trans- 74–75; impressionism and, 75, 79–81,
lation and, 217, 260; of light, 74–83; 91; scientific discourse on, 79–80
linguistics and, 154–55, 176; musical Lincoln, Abraham, Gettysburg Address, 14
settings for, 234–51; music as, 83, 163– line, 46, 47, 101, 107–12, 162; archetypal
74; music as opposite of, 174–77; ori- image of, 110; color correlation with,
gin stories on, 180, 181–83, 186; about 102–3, 103; mathematical signs and,
painting (see ek­phrasis); painting as, 107–8; straight vs. zigzag, 110
48–58, 67–107, 162, 175, 269; rhetori- linguistic theory, 154–55, 176–77
cal models and, 13, 17, 255–56; speed Lippi, Fra Filippo: Browning poem
of apprehension of, 254, 255; of sym- about, 122–23; The Coronation of the
bols (see symbols); of touch, 83–91; Virgin, 122–23, 122
written punctuation and, 110, 112. See Liszt, Franz: Hunnenschlacht (Symphonic
also literature; specific languages Poem), 261–62, 263; Il penseroso, 217
Laocoön, 3 literature, 2, 3, 13–45; definitions of, 13–15;
Lascaux caves. See cave paintings familiarity and, 44; illustrations for, 234;
Latin poetry, 237, 245 main criterion for, 13; narrative and, 15,
Lawrence, D. H., 119; Lady Chatterley’s 200, 202, 203; about origins, 7, 25–36,
Lover, 24 180, 181, 185; paraphrase and, 232; as
Lawrence, Saint, 146, 147 permanent record, 42; pseudomorpho-
Léger, Fernand, Ballet mécanique, 117 sis and, 231, 234; remembering and
Lejeune, Claude, 245 forgetting and, 44–45; scientific theory
Leonardo da Vinci, 80, 123–25, 252–61; as form of, 34; as self-affirming, 21–24,
on battle painting, 256–61; camera 37; subversive aspects of, 36–45; textual
obscura and, 48; The Last Supper, 114, longevity of, 14–15; as transforming,
128; Mona Lisa, 4, 5, 209; notebooks 15–21, 37. See also novel; poetry
of, 64–66; on paragone question, 252– Little Tich (Harry Relph), 250, 251
56; Treatise on Painting, 66 Locke, John, 90
Lessing, G. E., 132, 138, 145, 214; Loewe, Carl, “Der Erlkönig,” 238, 240
Laokoon, 3 Lomazzo, Giovanni Paolo, 100, 111;
Lethe, 42 Trattato dell’arte di pintura, scultura, ed
Le Valois d’Orville, Adrien-Joseph, 247 architettura, 54, 55
Lévi-Strauss, Claude: The Raw and the Lowell, Amy, “Stravinsky’s Three Pieces
Cooked, 157–58; The Savage Mind, 118 ‘Grotesques,’ for String Quartet,”
Library of Babel, 42; Borges story, 23–24 250–51

v310f
 Index

Lumière brothers, 115 Marx, A. B., 165

Lydian mode, 150 Marx, Harpo, 115, 164, 168
Lyotard, Jean-François, 36 Marx, Karl, 13–14
Mask of Agamemnon, 265
madrigal, 150–51, 153 materialism, 89–91; anti-materialist per-
Mahler, Gustav, 200, 202, 203–6, 272; spective and, 95, 99
First Symphony, third movement mathematics, 85, 88, 100; music and,
funeral march, 203–6; Kindertoten- 189–90, 191, 197; painting as, 107–14
lieder, 204; Lieder eines fahrenden matter, 74, 75, 99
Gesellen, 204, 205; Second Symphony, Matterhorn, 4, 5
202, 203; Tenth Symphony, adagio, Mattheson, Johann, Der vollkommene
168; “Die zwei blauen Augen,” 204 Capellmeister, 166–67, 170, 171
major mode, 159, 160–61, 192 Mauke, Wilhelm, 170
Malevich, Kazimir, White on White, 227– Maxwell, James Clerk, 75, 79, 80
28 McKeever, Ian, 131–32
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 24, 81, 227; Autre McLuhan, Marshall, 3
éventail, 83 meaning, 4–5, 8, 100, 232–33; antitheses
Manet, Édouard, 69, 70, 82; Music in the and, 159; speech of artwork and, 71
Tuileries Garden, 171 Medea, 224
Mann, Thomas, Doktor Faustus, 200–201 Medici, Lorenzo de’, 127
Mantegna, Andrea, Saint Sebastian, 58, medieval emblems, 74, 92, 93
59, 60, 61 medieval music, 150
Marachesi, Mathilde, 198 medieval painting, 142–45, 269
Marcello, Benedetto, Il teatro alla moda, medium, 6, 8, 9, 277–86; boundaries of,
172–73 95, 98–100, 214–15, 280; nine defini-
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 112, 117; tions and, 209–18; as right choice,
“Tactilism,” 85–86; Technical Mani- 280–86; as wrong choice, 277–79. See
festo of Futurism, 107–8 also intermedial translation; pseudo-
marriage, 38–39 morphoses; specific media
Martini, Simone, 142–45; The Blessed Medusa, 123–25, 124, 134
Agostino Novello Heals a Child Mauled Melba, Nellie, 198
by a Dog, 142–44, 143; The Blessed Melpomene, 283
Agostino Novello Resurrects a Fallen memory, 42
Child, 144–45, 144 Mendelssohn, Felix, Rondo capriccioso,
martyrs, 145–46 153–54

v311f
 index

Messiaen, Olivier, Quatuor pour la fin du d’Arianna,” 153; Sixth Book of Mad-
temps, 197 rigals, 153
metalanguages, 202 Monty Python, 251
metanarratives, 36 morality: behavior and, 24, 37–39; intent
metapainting, 123, 181 and, 140
metaphor, 15, 31, 33–34, 167 More, Thomas, Utopia, 37–39
meter, 156–57, 193, 237–42, 245–46 Morisot, Berthe, Lady at Her Toilette, 81,
Michelangelo, 3, 54, 56, 75, 100, 113; 82, 82
The Creation of the Sun and Moon, 67, movies. See cinema
68, 180–81; The Last Judgment, 118, Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 176; Dis­
146, 147; Night, 127, 127; and Sistine sonance Quartet in C major, 135–36;
Chapel, 118, 146 Don Giovanni, 243
Milton, John, Paradise Lost, 25, 28, 31, Mozhukhin, Ivan, 116
189, 222–23, 224 multimedial, 210, 213, 234–35; definition
miniatures, 118 of, 209
minor mode, 135, 156, 159, 160–61 Murphy, Dudley, Ballet mécanique, 117
Mississippi River, 218 Muses, 1, 2, 191, 192, 283, 284
Mixolydian scale, 192 music, 3, 4, 99, 100, 149–206; battle rep-
Modern Times (film), 115–16 resentation and, 260–63; binary op-
Modigliani, Amedeo, 134 positions and, 158–62; blankness and,
Molière, Le bourgeois gentilhomme, 13 226–27; body and, 155–57, 281; Cage’s
Mondrian, Piet, 108–9, 110, 111; Com- chance and, 66; codes and, 150–54; com-
position with Yellow Patch, 109; posed by poets, 237; derivation of word,
“Dialogue on the New Plastic,” 108; 1; expressive means of, 149–62; for-
Pier and Ocean, 109 malist definition of, 149; gestures and,
Monet, Claude, 81, 91; The Cliffs at 155–56; inexpressiveness and, 149, 155,
Étretat, 75, 76, 77, 80; water lilies, 214 174, 175; inflection and, 168–69, 170; in-
Monod, Jacques, Chance and Necessity, termediality and, 217; interpretation of,
34 160; as language, 83, 163–74; meanings
monophony, 141 of keys and, 150–51; narrative and, 164,
monosyllables, 239 165–66, 170–73, 177, 201–6; as nonlan-
montage, film, 116–17 guage, 174–77; origin accounts and, 7,
Monteverdi, Claudio: Il combattimento di 180, 183–200, 282–84; painting analo-
Tancredi e Clorinda, 153; Eighth Book gies with, 135–36, 141, 144; poetry and
of Madrigals, 151–53, 156; “Lamento (see song); point (note) in, 110; pseu-

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 Index

domorphoses and, 209–14 (see also un- nonimage, 229–30

der pseudomorphoses); representation nonrepresentational art. See abstract
and, 260–64; speed of apprehension of, painting
254; structuralist analysis of, 157–58; nouns, 173, 182
unprogrammatic, 201; visual images of, novel, 3, 17–19; illustration of, 234; real-
276; vocabulary of analysis of, 164–65 ism and, 17–18, 71; remembering/for-
music drama, 210 getting and, 44–45; subversive aspects
musique mésurée, 245–46 of, 36–42
Mutt, R., 216
Mutt and Jeff (comic strip), 216 objects. See physical objects
Mycenae, 265 occult light, 75
Myron of Eleutherae, 138 Ockeghem, Johannes, 196–97
mysticism, 95 octave, 189
mythology, 28, 31–32, 34, 157–58. See old masters, copying of, 69, 70
also creation accounts opera, 153, 154, 156, 161–62, 172–73;
French prosody and, 247; Gluck re-
Nabokov, Vladimir, The Gift, 5 forms and, 159–60; as intermedial,
Napoleon III, emperor of France, 69 209, 210; Italian prosody and, 242–44;
narrative, 31, 36; blankness and, 231–32; as multimedial, 209
decontextualization and, 216; litera- optics, 81, 84, 117, 119; color and, 79, 80
ture and, 15, 200, 202, 203; music and, origami, 84–85, 98
164, 165–66, 170–73, 177, 201–6; paint- originality, 3
ing and, 67, 71–72, 80, 142–48, 216; originary myths. See creation accounts
semantic generation and, 162; symbol- Orpheus, 151, 156, 160, 165–66, 190,
ism and, 147–48 193
Nattiez, Jean-Jacques, 174, 202–3, 206 Ørsted, Hans Christian, 75
nature, 4, 5, 9, 217–18 Orwell, George, 1984, 39–42
negation, musical, 168 oscilloscope, 276
nervous system, 156 overture, 162
New Criticism, 219 Ovid, 7
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 34, 35, 36, 78–79,
183; The Birth of Tragedy, 4; The Dawn Pacheco, Francisco, 75; Arte de la pintura,
of Day, 35–36; The Wanderer, 35 52–54
Noah, 194 painting, 3, 4, 46–148; artist’s control over,
nominalism, 68–69 135; of battles, 256–62, 268; as being-
nonfiction, 13–15 in-own-right, 90; blankness and, 81,

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painting (continued) paraphrase, 232, 233

226–33; body and, 162, 281; commen- Parmenides, 108–9
tary on another painting, 120; counter- Partch, Harry, 190
point and, 141–48, 178; decomposition Pater, Walter, 269–71
process and, 7–8, 77–78; definitions of, pentameter, 239
46–48; dialectics of, 52–54, 162–63, period (punctuation), 109–10
233, 262–63; dimensions of, 132–41; perspective, 48–49, 50, 83, 137; Cézanne
evocative, 224–26; as form of speech and, 103–4; cubism and, 86, 87–88
(see under language); goal of, 47–48; Perugino, Pietro, Christ Giving Peter
indescribability and, 148; interpretation the Keys to Heaven and Hell, 49–50,
of, 133, 136–37, 148; invisibilities and, 50, 51
50–54, 58, 107, 269; Leonardo’s views philosophy, 36, 68–69, 78–79, 179, 183,
on, 252–60; light and, 74–83; literary 189
description of (see ekphrasis); mathe- photography, 81; color, 79
matics and, 107–14; music and musicians Phrygian mode, 193, 272
as subject of, 269–76; narrative and, 67, physical objects: primary qualities
71–72, 80, 142–48, 216; nineteenth- and of, 90–91; representation of, 50–51,
twentieth-century views of, 67; nonim- 70–74, 75, 77, 80–81, 84, 89, 91,
age and, 229–31; nonrepresentational 107
(see abstract painting); origin accounts Piano, Renzo, 278
and, 7, 64–67, 96–97, 177–81, 216; par- Piave, Francesco, 243–44
ticularity and, 79; poetry compared Picasso, Pablo: The Aficionado, 105–6,
with, 252–53; pseudomorphoses and 106; cubism and, 84–86, 105; Les dem-
(see under pseudomorphoses); quantifi- oiselles d’Avignon, 85, 86, 88–89; Stein
cation of, 100–107, 209–10; realism and, pen-portrait of, 106, 107; Still Life with
68–74, 107; seventeenth-century vs. Chair-Caning, 89
nineteenth-century view of, 47; speed picture-words, 101–2, 117–18
of apprehension of, 254–55; sublime Pissarro, Camille, 79, 80; Haymakers
and, 223–26; as surpassing other arts, Resting, 80
252–57; symbols and (see symbols); tac- plainchant, 262
tile values of, 90–91; temporal dimen- plane, 110, 119
sion of, 140, 141–48; “thereness” of, Plato, 36, 79, 89, 158, 191, 255; Cratylus,
209–10; title assignment for, 135; vani- 182–83; Ion, 15; Phaedrus, 152–53;
tas genre of, 61–64; wonder and, 224–25 Republic, 15, 39, 150; Rhetoric, 151;
Palin, Michael, 251 Symposium, 19–20
paragone question, 252–60 Platonic form, 86

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 Index

Platters, the, 130 primordial truth, 35

Pledge of Allegiance, 14 Princet, Maurice, 85, 88
Pléiade, 245 Prokofiev, Sergei, 154, 157; Cinderella, 157
pleonasm, 167 Prometheus, 282–84
plot, 1, 2 prosody, 151–52, 237–48
plus sign, 108, 109, 110, 111 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 73–74, 106–7
Poe, Edgar Allan, “The Raven,” 198 pseudomorphoses, 120, 164, 231, 234–76;
poetry, 3, 4, 100, 183; body and, 281; definition of, 212; eidolon and, 213–14;
ekphrasis and, 120–32; images of, 91, between literature and pictures, 234;
222; New Criticism and, 219; by paint- medium and, 277–79; between music
ers, 139–40; painting compared with, and painting, 212–13, 217, 231, 260–
252–53; paraphrase and, 232; pseudo- 76; from music to poetry, 248–51; from
morphoses and, 234–51; rhythm and, poetry to music, 234–48
236, 237, 238, 247; song and, 234–41; pseudo-words, 83. See also symbols
symbols and, 92–93; tactile values and, psyche, tripartite model of, 153
90–91; white space and, 227 psychophysiology, 108
Poincaré, Henri, 85 punctuation, 110, 112
point, 107, 109–10 Purcell, Henry, Dido and Aeneas, 241
Pollock, Jackson, 113, 137 pyrrhic foot, 151–52
polyphony, 141 Pythagoras, 174, 175, 189–90, 191, 192,
polystylism, 141–42, 142 193, 197
Ponte, Lorenzo da, 243 Pythian Ode, 193
Pope, Alexander, 239
popular music, 5, 130, 237 quinario sdrucciolo, 244
positivism, 69
postmodernism, 119, 228 Rachmaninoff, Sergei, Lilies, 214
Poulenc, Francis, Dialogues des Carmé- Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 157; Platée, 247
lites, 198 Rapée, Ernö, Motion Picture Moods for
Pound, Ezra, 55–56, 90–91, 117, 284–85; Pianists and Organists, 153–54
Cantos, 285; definition of literature of, Raphael, 55–58, 280, 281; The Expulsion
13 of Heliodorus from the Temple, 56–58,
Poussin, Nicolas, 271–72; Dance to the 57; La fornarina, 281
Music of Time, 272, 273 rap music, 237
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 56, 93 Rauschenberg, Robert, 5, 228–30; Erased
primal picture, 110 de Kooning, 229; Rebus, 229–30, 230
Prime Originator, 31 reading, 19–21

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 index

realism: novel and, 17–18, 71; of objects Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 93–94, 105;
vs. light, 75, 76, 77, 91; painting and, Annunciation, 92; Childhood of Mary
68–74, 107 Virgin, 92; Dantis Amor, 93, 94
Rebel, John-Féry, 189 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 169; Confessions,
Reff, Theodore, 104 21–23, 50
regression to the mean, 44 Russian Ark (film), 114
Rembrandt, 70 Russolo, Luigi, 114, 274, 276; Dynamism
Renaissance: art, 49–67, 80, 100, 104, 269; of an Automobile, 112–13, 113; Music,
paragone question, 252–60 275, 276
Renoir, Auguste, 78, 83 Ryder, Albert Pinkham, Sailing by Moon-
representation, 7, 48, 56, 119, 260–69; ab- light, 224–25, 224
sence of, 228, 229–30 (see also abstract Ryman, Robert: Journal, 232; Tract, 232
painting); abstraction vs., 95; compli-
cation of, 136–37; control and, 119; sacred texts, 14–15. See also Bible
dimensions and, 132–33, 137; of light, saints, 58, 59, 60, 145–46, 147
74–83; musical, 260–64; of physical Saint-Saëns, Camille: Aquarium, 214;
objects, 50–51, 70–74, 75, 77, 80–81, Chant saphique, 246
84, 89, 91, 107; of space, 69, 138. See Salmon, André, 85
also symbols Salon, 69
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 48 Salon d’Automne (1910), 84
rhetoric, 13, 17, 255–56; of impres- Salon des Refusés, 69
sionism, 78, 83; of music, 151, 162, Salon of 1850, 71
164, 166–68, 170, 171–72, 175, Satan, 189, 196
176–77 Satie, Erik, 175; Trois morceaux en forme
rhythm, poetic, 236, 237, 238, 247 de poire, 263–64; Wallpaper in Forged
Riley, Denise, “Lure 1963,” 128–32 Iron, 174
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 7, 123; “Jugend- Saussure, Ferdinand de, 154–55, 176
Bildnis meines Vaters,” 63 Schadow, Wilhelm von, 2–3
Rimbaud, Arthur, “Je est un autre,” 20 Schiller, Friedrich, “Ode to Joy,” 273, 274
Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolay, Scheherazade, Schliemann, Heinrich, 265
165 Schnittke, Alfred, 168
Ringling Brothers circus elephants, 213 Schoenberg, Arnold, 95, 156, 251; ato-
Romans, 1, 16, 43, 138, 262 nality and, 99; Genesis Suite, 186; Kol
Romanticism, 2–3 Nidre, 95, 186
Ronsard, Pierre de, 245 Schubert, Franz: “Der Erlkönig,” 238;
Rope (film), 114 Moment Musical, op. 94, no. 3, 154;

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 Index

piano sonata in C major (unfinished), 229, 231; intermedial, 220; linguistic,

199; Die Stadt, 238 154–55, 176; mathematical, 107–14
Schütz, Heinrich, “Freut euch des Her- silent movies, 115–16, 117; musical code-
ren” (Symphoniae Sacrae), 167 books and, 153–54
Schwind, Moritz von, How the Beasts Silverstolpe, Fredrik Samuel, 185
Buried the Hunter, 205; Des Jägers simile, 167
Leichenbegängnis, 205 sirens, 191
science, 30–34, 36, 78–80, 100, 196 Sistine Chapel, 146; Michelangelo’s
Scotus. See Duns Scotus, John; Erigena, Creation of the Sun and the Moon, 68;
John Scotus Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, 118, 146,
sculpture, 3, 216, 217; classical Greece 147
and, 137–38; entropy and, 8; Michel- skin color, origin of, 26–30, 31
angelo and, 127, 127 Smith, Adam, 13
Sebastian, Saint, 58, 59, 60 Society of Irregularists, 78
secular liturgy, 14 Socrates, 15, 182–83
semiotics, 154–55, 202; of art, 228, 229, Sokurov, Alexander, Russian Ark, 114
231 Somma, Antonio, 244
senses, 6, 280, 284–86; overload of, 221 sonata form, 162, 184
serpentine line, 101, 102 song, 234–51; madrigal, 150–51, 153; as
sexual behavior, 24, 38–39, 44 multimedial, 234–35
shading, 104 space: cubism and, 84–85, 88; dimensions
Shakespeare, William, 217; Henry IV, of, 132–33, 138; representation of, 69,
Part 1, 24; Macbeth, 224; Romeo and 138; speech of, 48–58
Juliet, 14 spatial arts, 3, 132–33, 138, 145. See also
Shaw, George Bernard, Caesar and painting; sculpture
Cleopatra, 40 Spears, Britney, 176
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 215; “A Lament,” speech. See language
235–37; “On the Medusa of Leonardo Spengler, Oswald, The Decline of the
da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery,” West, 212
123–25 sphere, 104, 212
shells, 218 Spinoza, Baruch, 9
Sibelius, Jean, 200; Fourth Symphony, 198 Squib, Ronald, 265
Sidney, Philip, “Sleep baby mine,” 235 stanza, 237
Siena, 142–43 Steele, Richard, “Lyric for Italian Mu-
signs, 101–2, 112, 220; concinnity and, sic,” 249, 250
211; designification of, 225–26, 228, Stein, Gertrude, “If I Told Him,” 106, 107

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 index

Steinberg, Saul, 141–42; Techniques at a suprematicism, 227–28

Party, 141–42, 142 surrealism, 266
Stephen, Sir Leslie and Julia Duckworth, Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver’s Travels, 41–42
44–45 syllables, stressed and unstressed,
Stevens, Wallace, 64 237–38, 239–40, 242, 244–45
stile concitato, 151–52, 153, 156 symbols: Christian, 74, 92, 145–47, 162;
stile molle, 151, 152 painting and, 74, 83, 91–100, 113, 117,
stile temperato, 151 145–48, 162; poetry and, 92–93
still life, 61 symphony, 184, 198–99, 200
straight line, 107, 110 synesthesia, 214, 280
Strauss, Richard, 261; Don Quixote, 170;
Ein Heldenleben, 168–69, 170–71; Till tactile values. See touch
Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, 170–71, Taglioni, Filippo, La sylphide, 284
176, 202, 203 Tarnhelm motive, 195–96
Stravinsky, Igor: Apollon musagète, 193, Tasso, Torquato, Il combattimento di
241; Circus Polka, 213; collage and, Tancredi e Clorinda, 153
174, 212; The Flood, 193–94, 196; Tate, Nahum, 241
inexpressiveness and, 149, 155, 174– Taylor, Deems, 276
75; music about music’s origins and, Telemann, Georg Philipp, Der Tag des
193–96; Orpheus, 193, 194; prosody Gerichts, 197
experiments of, 241; The Rake’s Prog- temporal dimension, 140, 141–48. See
ress, “Gently, little boat,” 241; Renard, also time, arts of
174, 203; The Rite of Spring, 193; Three Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, “The Lady of
Japanese Songs, 241; Three Pieces for Shalott,” 81–82
String Quartets, “Excentrique” (sec- Tertullian, 2
ond movement), 250–51 Testa, Pietro, The Triumph of Painting, 64
stress patterns, 237–38, 239–40, 242–43; theme and variations, 200–201
lack in French verse of, 245 Thomas, Lewis, 157
Strike (film), 116 thought, 1, 157–62; binary nature of,
string theory, 132 158–59
structuralism, 157–58 three-dimensionality, 84–85, 98, 104, 132,
subject (musical composition), 164–65 137
sublime, 118, 220–26; Burke definition of, Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista, Allegory of
220–21 the Planets and the Continents, 51, 52
Superville, Humbert de, 105, 108, 111; Es- time, arts of, 3, 133, 145. See also litera-
say on Absolute Signs in Art, 101–2, 103 ture; music; poetry

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 Index

Tintoretto, Jacopo, Origin of the Milky Velázquez, Diego, 52; Portrait of Pope
Way, 64, 65 Innocent X, 120
Titian, Concert, 269, 271, 271 Verdi, Giuseppe: Un ballo in maschera, “Ma
Tolstoy, Lev, 13 dall’arido stelo divulsa,” 244–45; Italian
tonality, 197–98; atonality and, 99 prosody and, 242, 243–45; Rigoletto,
tone poem, 170–71, 200 “La donna è mobile,” 243–45; Rigoletto,
tonic (music), 196, 197, 237 prelude, 156; Il trovatore, “Di quella
touch, 83–91, 280, 285–86 pira,” 242
Tovey, Donald, 196 Verlaine, Paul: “Chevaux de bois,” 246;
tragedy, 44 “Clair de lune,” 247, 248
transcendental vibrations, 95 verse. See poetry
triangle, 111, 113 vers mésuré, 245
Turner, J. M. W.: “The Fallacy of Hope” verso tronco, 242
(poem), 140; The Fall of an Avalanche vibrations, 99, 100
in the Grisons, 138–40, 139, 141; Moses video games, 114
Writing the Book of Genesis, 224–25, Viganò, Salvatore, 283
225 Virgil, 31; Aeneid, 3, 16–17, 42–43
Twombly, Cy, 279 virtus (maleness), 153
typographical drawing, 107 visual arts. See cinema; painting; sculpture
Vivaldi, Antonio, 156
universal moral law, 37–38 volume, units of, 103–4, 105
universals, 68–69 voodoo doll, 5–7, 90, 103, 111, 119, 156
universe, origin of, 7, 34, 67, 96–97, 180–
82, 183–84, 194 Wagner, Richard, 156, 174; The Artwork
UPIC (intermedial translation machine), of the Future, 281–82; The Flying
265, 266 Dutchman, Spinning Song, 154; Göt-
urinal, 215–16 terdämerung, 210; Die Meistersinger von
utopian fiction, 37–39 Nürnberg, 174; music drama and, 210;
ut pictura poesis dictum, 2 Ride of the Valkyries, 211; Der Ring
des Nibelungen, 195; Tannhäuser, over-
Valéry, Paul, 190, 191 ture, 161–62; Tannhäuser, Venusberg
van Gogh, Vincent, 216; A Pair of Shoes, scene, 282
178–80, 178; Still Life with Quinces, Walter, Bruno, 206
263, 264 warfare, 151; battle painting and, 256–62,
vanitas genre, 61–64 268
Vee, Bobby, 130 Warhol, Andy, 9

v319f
 index

Warminski, Andrzej, 176 Wordsworth, William, The Prelude, Sim-

watercolor painting, 97 plon Pass, 140–41
Weber, Carl Maria von, Der Freischütz, 160 world, creation of. See universe, origin
Webern, Anton, 196–97 of
Weill, Kurt, 210; Die Dreigroschenoper, Wright, Wilbur and Orville, 84
210; Mahogonny-Songspiel, “Alabama-
Song,” 237 Xenakis, Iannis, 265–66, 267–68; Myce-
Wells, H. G., Time Machine, 180 nae-Alpha, 265, 266, 268; Pithoprakta,
white canvases. See all-white paintings 196; UPIC intermedial machine of,
Whitman, Walt, “There Was a Child 265, 266
Went Forth,” 77–78 Xenophanes, 15
Wikipedia, skin color article, 28–30, 31
Williams, William Carlos: “The Dance,” Yeats, William Butler, 36, 91–93, 218,
125–26, 132; “Danse Russe,” 126; 235; “Among School Children,” 190;
ekphrasis and, 125–26, 132 “Lapis Lazuli,” 8; Purgatory, 43–44;
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 3 “Upon a Dying Lady,” 92–93; A Vi-
witches, 224 sion, 43–44
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical In- Young, La Monte, 190
vestigations, 176
wonder, 219, 220, 224–25 Zelter, Carl Friedrich, 185
Woolf, Virginia, 20; To the Lighthouse, zigzag line, 110
44–45 Zimerman, Krystian, 165
words. See language zoetrope, 117

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 POETRY CREDITS

W. H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” Copyright © 1940 by W. H. Auden.

Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.; copyright 1940 and renewed
1968 by W. H. Auden, from Collected Poems of W. H. Auden, by W. H. Auden.
Used by permission of Random House, Inc. Any third party use of this material,
outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to
Random House, Inc. for permission.

Denise Riley, “Lure 1963,” from Selected Poems by Denise Riley (Reality Street,
2000). Used with permission.

William Carlos Williams, “The Dance” (“In Breughel’s”), from The Collected
Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume II: 1939–1962, ed. Christopher
MacGowan (New Directions, 1991; Carcanet Press, 2000), copyright © 1944 by
William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions
Publishing Corp. and Carcanet Press Limited.

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